quick response to a critic

Glen at event mechanics doesn’t seem to be liking Prince of Networks very much, and says he is preparing a critical review. I’d expect it to be quite critical indeed, considering the following paragraph:

“Philosophy blog wars are a little bit lol and a little bit sad. I have little professional investment in some arguments/critiques over others as I am not a philosopher by profession. The political economy of the academic blogosphere in relation to the academy needs to be accounted for in these stoushes. Some academic have ‘professional’ blogs, others couldn’t think of anything worse. My interest in all this is purely on the level of interest: I am an enthusiast. Even though I have a PhD, I have had no formal training in philosophy at all except for some introductory units 12 years ago. I did not pass through the US grad system, which seems to produce eaither a certain kind of intellectual paranoia or a counter-movement against this paranoia. I pick up and read ideas to figure out if they seem to work. If they work then I run with them. If not, then they are mere folly.”

He never clarifies whether my and Levi’s responses to his objections were “lol” or merely “sad,” nor whether we are motivated by “paranoia” or instead by a “counter-movement” against such paranoia. He simply drops this opening tone, and moves on to actual debate. Which is a good thing, because I was actually enjoying the occasional interchange with Glen and had no idea he was so disappointed with it.

A few quick points in response…

1. Glen says the Deleuze presented in Prince of Networks is “a straw person.” But Deleuze barely appears in the book at all. All I say about him is that for Deleuze as for Bergson, it makes sense to speak of becoming or flux or whatever you wish to call it. The notion of a cinematic instant is not one that makes much sense for either of them. By contrast, one can and must speak of punctiform instants for Latour and Whitehead (and even for Heidegger, somewhat surprisingly as I argued in Tool-Being). In another post Glen then feints at a scientific discussion of how it’s impossible for there to be an isolated moment, but we’re not talking about physics here, we’re talking about the ontologies of Latour and Whitehead. There is a reason why Whitehead also gives his actual entities the alternate name of actual occasions.

I’ve found through experience that no one ever wants to concede that any philosopher could possibly believe in isolated instants of time. But obviously there are many examples of philosophers who think this. It’s out of keeping with our current Zeitgeist, which identifies any theory of isolated moments or substances with reactionary stupidity, but many adherents of substance and cinematic time-frames were neither reactionary nor stupid.

2. Glen pulls “conceptual prehension” from Whitehead’s Process and Reality to argue that Whitehead does in fact make humans very different from non-humans. This does not prove his point. Conceptual prehensions are still prehensions. They are varieties of prehension. Whitehead is quite clear that he aims to return to the pre-Kantian period in philosophy. That’s the whole point. There is no concept resembling prehension in Kant, at least not in the Critical period. Which leads me to my next point…

3. “I have a feeling that the so-called realists are far too preoccupied with discounting Kant’s philosophy than anything else!”
What’s so surprising about this? Kant is the greatest philosopher of the modern period, with the unfortunate side-effect that it is now more or less taken for granted that the human-world relation is of central philosophical importance whereas other relations are derivative of this one. This is highly problematic and counter-intuitive, and we’ve all been professionally schooled simply to assume it.

I’ve found more defensiveness about Kant than about any other philosopher, including Heidegger. Sometimes I wonder why this is so, given that Kant’s canonical status has never been seriously doubted by anyone I can think of other than Ayn Rand.

My theory about Kant-defensiveness is that the human-world dual monarchy in the Copernican position is viewed as the only bulwark against rampant scientism. In other words, if the relations between cotton and fire or raindrops and wood are placed on the same level as the relation between human and world, I think people are afraid that everything is going to turn into atoms and neurons and the precious human sphere will be annihilated. Hence, the odd remarks (already discounted here) about speculative realism being a form of “positivism.” All misuse of that term aside, what people mean is that the speculative realists are going to turn philosophy into natural science. But only in Brassier’s case would such a worry be even remotely relevant.

I’m sorry that Glen had such a negative reaction to our last exchange, which I found neither “lol,” nor “sad,” nor “paranoid,” nor “counter-paranoid,” but useful and clarifying.