one addendum

There’s one other point that I should have briefly addressed in Ivakhiv’s interesting post, because it comes up in many objections, including in Shaviro’s most recent lecture (not yet published, though I’ve read it). This is the supposed alliance between Deleuze and Whitehead. I’ll probably have to discuss this again at further length elsewhere, but for now I want to register the strongest possible objection to that link, plausible though it seems to many.

It is possible to link virtually any two philosophers through some shared common feature. For instance, a few people have tried to link Deleuze with Latour through the network/rhizome pair. But it’s important to focus on what is really central to a philosopher to determine who their true allies and opponents are. And the thing about both Latour and Whitehead is that both are clearly philosophers of actual individuals. In Whitehead, the “ontological principle” makes it very clear that the reason for anything must be found in the constitution of some definite actual entity. Actual entities do not change in the manner of substances; they perish when they change. The same is true of Latour, as seen in the maxim in Irreductions that a thing happens in one time and place only. There is nothing that endures from one moment to the next. Time is produced by individual actors, it does not drive them along through some sort of “becoming” that cannot be pinned down in any given moment.

The problem is that the term “process philosophy” is often employed to mix together two different kinds of philosophies. For in a sense, any philosophy can be called a “process philosophy” if we want to use the phrase loosely enough. Processes do occur in the world, and hence almost every philosopher tries to account for them (even Parmenides has to say something about them). The world is not ultimately just a series of disconnected instants. But there is a big difference between authors such as Whitehead and Latour, for whom processes are produced by the work of actual individuals, and authors such as Bergson and Deleuze, for whom actual individuals are not the scene of the major action in philosophy. In the end, these are two utterly opposed schools of thought on the most central question one can imagine. I greatly regret that the Deleuze/Whitehead link is becoming so ensconced, because this softens their fascinating opposition on a key problem of philosophy. But enough people seem to favor that link that it’s obviously going to take some more writing to argue the contrary.

Latour is the Anti-Bergson. Read Irreductions even loosely, and you’ll see what I mean. Time does not exist in its own right, but is produced by individual actors. I can’t imagine a less Bergsonian thesis.

The same holds, on this point, for Heidegger, but I’ve already argued that in Tool-Being. The ecstatic analysis of temporality works perfectly well for a cinematic frame of time, and nowhere does Heidegger account for the “flow” of time. He is a philosopher of threefold ambiguous instants, not of a time irreducible to instants.