ANT and capitalism

Steven Shaviro has AN INTERESTING POST about actor-network theory’s distrust of the concept “capitalism,” a response to NICK’S JULY 26 POST at Speculative Heresy.

He also makes the following provisional critique of my position:

“I think that Harman’s greatest weakness (I am less sure about Latour) has to do with his exclusive focus on entities (objects) rather than on processes, and, in consequence of this, of his underestimation or excessive rigidity in how to understand relations. [I cannot justify this comment at present; it is part of what I am currently trying to work out. Whitehead sees the world as being composed of processes rather than substances; on this basis, he gives an account of ‘enduring objects’ that is irreducible either to Bergsonian total flux, or to Harmanian substance ontology. I think that Whitehead’s understanding of processes and relations is compatible with a sense of the long-term systematicity of something like ‘capitalism,’ in a way that Harman’s and Latour’s formulations are not. But this is all something To Be Continued].”

I look forward to Shaviro’s full-scale model. My provisional response is as follows:

*The phrase “process philosophy” can be misleading. It might suggest that one is focused not on the identity of single things or single points in time and space, but on a more sweeping dynamism that renders all ontic and spatio-temporal identities mere abstractions. Much of this attitude can be found in Bergson, but I don’t see it at all in Whitehead. As I read him, Whitehead is a philosopher of utterly concrete occasions. Societies can be formed from these occasions, and those societies can have a certain endurance through time, but that’s a byproduct of what happens at the level of his actual entities, which are also called “actual occasions” precisely because they have the punctiform, totally determinate reality that one finds in occasionalists and their remote sympathizers, such as Latour. (The whole point of Latour is that an actor simply is what it is; it can’t borrow anything in advance without paying for it– hence Latour’s disdain for the concept of potentiality, and his consequent vulnerability to the sorts of critiques of actualism that Aristotle makes against the Megarians in the Metaphysics.)

*I think it’s a misunderstanding to say that my position can’t account for process. My only point is that objects pre-exist whatever process they enter, and do not exhaust themselves in their relations with anything else. By no means does it follow that I’m an “essentialist” in the other, bad sense, which implies that everyone and everything has a pre-ordained mission rather than being able to invent themselves through history or through exchanges with otherness. My essentialism is an essentialism of the present: right now, I am real, and something more than my current set of deployments in relations with other things. This does not entail an essentialism of what I might be able to make of myself. Indeed, only because objects have essences are they able to reinvent themselves, precisely because they have a surplus energy of reality that is not entirely exhausted by their current states of affairs. Relationizing everything, paradoxically enough, leads to stasis, because if I am only my relations then there is no reason why I would ever slip out of those relations; there would be nothing more to me than those relations. (It follows from Aristotle’s point that if no man is a house-builder unless currently building a house, then a sleeping expert house-builder has the same status as someone who has no clue how to build a house.)

But I don’t want to give a response that’s more complicated than Shaviro’s very clear post, and hence will stop here.