Morton's "explosive holism"(21)
the "default characteristic" of a "ruling-class [...] thought mode" (a "concentric circle" model)
it is the sense that "the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts," which Morton contrast against his own "symbiotic real," which hinges on "uncanny affiliations that can never be stabilized [or] bundled"(23) (though I'm not clear on how the "symbiotic real" is not "holistic")
One attempt, on 26: "No matter how different and disparate my parts are, as a whole I am Tim all the way through and all the way down. Such a belief is deeply at odds with the symbolic real."
on 70 we get an attempt at a more favorable "implosive holism," which helps [somewhat] to clarify Morton's relationship to holism ... on 103: "We need holism, but a special, weak holism" ... and on 122: "[W]e've decided to be holists but to reject the explosive concept of the whole"
includes the sense that "Nature gets to mean something pristine and pure, an endlessly exploitable resource or majestic backdrop" (not sure how Morton thinks of this as "holistic")
"Capitalist ideology has relied strongly on explosive holism. The invisible hand concept is emergent and teleological."
Neoliberalism, though, has an "anti-holist reductionism" (103) that Morton also wants to avoid ("There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals," he offers up as an example of the thinking)
"The second obvious contemporary instance of explosive holism is fascism. The Latin term fascis means a bundle of sticks, expressing the bundling of the folk in a whole that transcends its parts and gives it a firm, constantly present depth. Note the agricultural provenance of this image: it's not an accident [...] [It is] the ideology of agricultural social space as such"
could also take the form of a "sentimental reductionism" ("We're all in this together"; "We are the world") (125)
"The explosive concept of the human is a form of alienation." (125)
solidarity, by contrast, has no "inside-outside model"