Bristol echoes

Just finished revising my Bristol paper so that I could send it to Iain Grant again (he’s planning a short response to it in the anthology). The style of the paper seems too dense, and there is too much exposition. That said, I like several features of it, and think they will be a permanent addition to my toolbox.

One of them was my realization, while writing the article, that the realism/anti-realism divide might not be so important… NOT (!) for reasons of the kind stated by people like Davidson. No, I do indeed think there’s a big difference between realism and anti-realism. But the fact is, the anti-realists do take something to be real, and that something can be grouped and/or contrasted with what the realists take to be real.

I’ll be a bit more specific… For me it is individual objects that are real. And what’s becoming more important to me is this question: for all those positions that call objects a useless fiction, what are they granting reality in its place?

On the one hand there is what I called, in Bristol, the “undermining” approach to objects. In other words, objects are superficial encrustations or actualizations. What is real is either a boundless apeiron, or a churning matter laced with cryptic forms, or a primordial flux, or a topological pre-individual realm.

On the other hand there is what we could call, by analogy, the “overmining” positions. For such positions, the object is not a superficial encrustation, but a pseudo-deep and spooky fiction that explains nothing, since reality is much more evident. Reality is how it manifests itself to us. Or it is a thing’s relational involvements with other things. Or it is just a bundle of qualities. And so forth.

What’s interesting is that, on the overmining side at least, you can find both “realists” and “anti-realists.” But I’m starting to doubt the usefulness of that venerable and very real distinction, because the fact is, both Whitehead’s relationism (which is realist) and classic correlationism (which is anti-realist) are in fact guilty of the same error as I see it. Both reduce the object upward, seeing it as nothing more than its relations. (With the one important difference being that the relations can be purely inanimate for Whitehead, with no humans anywhere on the scene.)

This is actually sort of similar to what I was getting at three years ago in some drafts on what I whimsically called “School X” and “School XXX”. There is a mistaken tendency to group people together who in my view really don’t go together much at all. For instance, you can obviously throw Deleuze and Bergson in the same basket without too much violence, but then Whitehead often gets thrown in with them under some such rubric as “the philosophy of the event,” completely forgetting that individual entities are at the core of Whitehead’s philosophy in a way that is not at all true for Bergson and Deleuze. Latour should actually go in the “X” basket with Whitehead, probably Serres, and a couple of others, while it would make more sense to group Bergson, Deleuze, Simondon, and James together.

Anyway, so much for historical groupings for the moment… I think the undermining/overmining distinction is crucial when it comes to rejections of objects. “Overmining” is as slightly annoying as all neologisms, admittedly, but I’m already getting used to it.