on Ivakhiv’s latest

I’m partly disconnected from the blogosphere these days, and hence I don’t always notice interesting posts as quickly as I used to. Only a few minutes ago did I notice ADRIAN IVAKHIV’S FOLLOW-UP to our earlier brief exchange. I wish I could devote a bit more time to his posts, but I’m sure he’d forgive me if he were here and could see how much I’m up against at the moment, work-wise.

I’m starting to find that rapid blog debates can be quite exhausting (Levi is superhuman in this respect, and I don’t know how he does it). Perhaps only a metaphor can explain what I mean. Imagine that you are trying to observe the construction (or slow demolition) of a building. In one sense, coming to observe the site every day would give you the maximal amount of information. But in fact, it wouldn’t. If you go every day to look, all of the states of the building would start to bleed together, and you would begin to lose a sense of the critical stages in the process. Perhaps once per week would give the maximal understanding of the process, or once every two weeks, or every month. You’d have to figure it out by trial and error for any given building.

The problem with blogosphere debates is that they’re like going to look at the building every 5 minutes. This, and not trolls (whose messages can always be censored) is the main reason I turned off comments on this blog: too many good questions were coming in every night, and after a couple of weeks of answering those, there was no time left for anything else. The questions were valuable, but tended to be repetitions of debates already undertaken with others. If you’ve tried your best to argue for something somewhere, you can’t also take the time to try persuade each person individually on a message-by-message basis. All you can do is try to absorb the next wave of objections, wherever they come from, try to break them down into basic features and choose the most important ones, and deal with them in the next incarnation of your project, hoping that in this way you will eventually confront most of the best objections adequately.

And this is the one and only thing I do like about traditional publishing. The slow speed of publication means that someone’s work appears in a series of disconnected states months or years apart, and at that speed you can definitely determine advances or failures to advance that have been made. The nice thing about Gibbon’s rapid pace is that you can get a sense of the main lines of late Roman history without worrying about the ebb and flow from week to week in the Empire’s history. General trends can be determined.

But I like Ivakhiv and his blog, and hope he will commit his relational objections into some discrete form to which I can then respond (as Shaviro just did in his critical lecture on my reading of Latour and Whitehead). Then I’ll have a bit of time to respond in kind, sort through the objections and pick out the three or four most important, and try to figure out which ones differ from ones I’ve already addressed.

Generally speaking, I find that there are equivocations in all the relationist arguments I see. One of them is the claim that, if I say that objects withdraw behind all of their relations, then this somehow amounts to a denial of process and history. How? I am fully committed to historical objects that emerge over time. But they are only objects because they are irreducible upward to their current interactions with other things, and irreducible downward to the sum total of processes that gave rise to them.

It is simply not true that all of the past is preserved in the present– a lovely Bergsonian trope that is completely at odds with how things are. Each of us emerges from our parents, but it would be absurd to claim that each and every detail of the life history and courtship of our parents, grandparents, ad infinitum, is somehow inscribed into our current realities. Some of those details certainly affect us, but it is purely arbitrary to say that all of them do… Through speaking with my mother I am aware of some of the pure contingencies in her life from Kindergarten onward that eventually led to my receiving the name “Graham” (a rare name in America in my generation), but it would seem ridiculous to think that the exact color of clothing worn by both of my parents on January 10, 1950, or the exact nature of the breakfast they ate on that day in their early childhood, is somehow inscribed in my reality right now. It might be, if they ate something harmful that led to a genetic mutation that was passed on to me and will eventually give me cancer. But it’s not necessarily true that everything they did was of any importance at all in my future life.

When reading Gibbon, it is obvious that he leaves much out. And it is obvious that the tragic death of three people in a Constantinople boating accident in 457 A.D. may have been a tragedy for dozens of individuals and may have made a minuscule dent in the Byzantine economy, but I don’t see that this accident need be relevant to the object known as the Byzantine Empire. There are cases where it may be, but why say that the shift of grains of dust on the palace floor must always be preserved in the state of the Empire as a whole? Everything does not affect everything else.

To say that a thing emerges from is past history is a valid claim. To say that it dissolves into that history, and into all aspects of that history, seems about five bridges too far.

“Similarly, Harman doesn’t, to my satisfaction, define what his non-relational essence is. If it’s non-relational, is that because it’s never been related to anything? In that case, where does it come from? Obviously, it can’t be that – so what is it? Where is it? And how does it relate with the relational?”

It comes from relations. But that doesn’t mean that it is reducible to those relations, and certainly doesn’t mean that it is reducible to all other entities with which it relates here and now.

In some of these cases I feel that I’ve addressed the objections adequately in print, in other cases I think I have not yet answered them adequately. But I can’t respond on each and every occasion the objections arise, and to repeat, this is one of my frustrations with the blogosphere. There seems to be an expectation that a quick and detailed response will be forthcoming upon demand. Levi seems able to work in that fashion; I can’t. I’d rather absorb and digest the objections, try to figure out where I have and haven’t been clear enough, and try to write a new version of my system every time I have to write an article, lecture, or book, and over time hope that I become better at articulating my ideas. Adrian’s a gracious person and I’m sure he understands.