follow-up

On rereading the last post I worry it may have sounded more harsh than intended. Rest assured, I enjoy Ivakhiv’s blog quite a lot.

Here’s another way to look at the problem…

Latour, for instance, says that time is produced by the work of individual actors.

Now, can you imagine Bergson saying that? Can you imagine Deleuze saying that? Individual actors are simply not key philosophical personae for Bergson or Deleuze. Yet they are the absolute center of the philosophies of both Latour and Whitehead. That’s what the “ontological principle” means. One cannot possibly ascribe the ontological principle to Bergson or Deleuze (or Simondon).

That’s why it is a mistake to lump large groups of these people together as philosophers of process or becoming. (Which I don’t even regard as synonyms– Whitehead’s “process philosophy” means the opposite of what many people think it means. What it means is a continual perishing of instantaneous actual entities. There really isn’t any becoming in Whitehead at all. Entities vanish and are replaced by others that vanish just as rapidly. Ditto for Latour.)

It is very important that this be seen clearly, or our conception of the various philosophical options now available will become cloudy. That’s what I meant to say in the last post.