Shaviro post

Shaviro has AN INTERESTING POST UP, on the eve of critiquing my position in Atlanta (which continues to shape up as OOO Ground Zero even though I have never set foot there in my life, unless you count a 20-minute dash between planes in the airport one time).

And yes, I do agree with Levi in this dispute. Shaviro’s points are fair. My only regret is his claim not to be able to “make sense” of the OOO position, and his claim to struggle even to make it “coherent”. That’s unnecessary. He should just say he disagrees, that he doesn’t find the OOO position plausible. But it’s perfectly coherent, as is evident from the fact that he was able to make a clear counter-argument to my position in the lecture he’s about to deliver. What he really means when he questions the “coherence” of my position, I think, is that he finds it obviously wrong. But in his recent post there is more assertion than explanation as to why.

“I do not see how it is possible, or conceivable, for anything to exist independently of everything else. For it is only due to other things that any particular thing can exist in the first place. I am not reducible to the particles and atoms that compose my body, just as I am not reducible to the oxygen I breathe, the food I eat, the language I speak, the clothes I wear, and the money that sustains my existence in this society; just as the tree is not reducible, either to the atoms that compose it, or to the sunlight and atmosphere that sustain it, the animals that help to fertilize its seeds, etc. But it seems to me to be incoherent to essentialize this ‘not reducible to’ by equating it with some sort of absolute existence, in and of itself.”

The second sentence in this passage confuses conflates [I hate the use of the word “confused” in philosophical disagreement –see below– and shouldn’t have slipped into using it here] causal with ontological dependence. The fact that something cannot come about without the help of other entities does not imply that the thing is defined by its relationality. This is clear even from common sense: I could not exist without my parents, yet by no means do I exist solely as a function of my relations with them. (In fact, I strongly doubt that I am what they expected to end up with in the first place.)

Furthermore, there is what is called “redundant causation” (pioneered by analytic philosophers, but nicely utilized by DeLanda). Numerous different causal series can bring about the same entity, unless you start from the purely arbitrary postulate that each thing is inscribed with its entire history (as even DeLanda sometimes claims, despite his allegiance to redundant causation).

The final sentence in Shaviro’s passage: “But it seems to me to be incoherent…” is disappointingly vague. I have little idea of what Shaviro means in this passage by “absolute existence, in and of itself.”

Things do affect one another. The question is whether you believe, as I do, that the tension between identity and relationality entails a central paradox that needs to be addressed and wondered about. Or whether you prefer to do what Shaviro does in this post, and simply posit everything as being in relation from the start and call the other positions “incoherent,” while failing to solve the problems that arise in all ontologies that think they are avant garde merely by smearing all identities into a big relational continuum. That’s the more fashionable position now. My wager (as Badiou would say) is that this will be seen in 15-20 years as the period piece ontology that it is. People are still trying to cash in by beating up naive realisms and reactionary theories of essence, and while beating those dead horses they are swallowing intellectual poisons.

I also deny outright Shaviro’s claim to occupy the high ground in explaining becoming. I’m going through Aristotle’s Physics right now, and there (in Book V) it is made clear enough why we can only speak of change when there is something capable of bearing opposite qualities at different times or in different respects. I realize that Aristotle is not viewed as especially interesting by today’s continental avant garde, but that’s no concern of mine. When you relationize everything, you lose change. What you have instead is generation, with new things generated in each instant.

Shaviro claims that his position explains change, but all it really gives us is the illusion of change: like those card decks with stationary cartoons which, when flipped through in rapid succession, give the illusory impression of a dynamic event.

Objects in my philosophy, like primary substances in Aristotle’s, are perfectly changeable and perfectly destructible. The fact that both Aristotle and I contend that things can withstand changes to some extent while still remaining what they are does not make us the oppressive Philosophers of Stasis that Shaviro contrasts so negatively with Whitehead and Deleuze (who, incidentally, have much less to do with one another than current fashion holds– Whitehead is a philosopher of occasions, and Deleuze definitely not; the truth is this: Whitehead and Latour vs. Bergson and Deleuze, and the sooner that is seen, the better).

There is nothing “static” about my philosophy. I allow objects to be crushed by bulldozers and trucks, melted in furnaces, generated from forebears, heated and cooled by central air systems, and so forth. But Shaviro has the odd notion that if anything is allowed a non-relational sort of reality, and is allowed to last even for 3 to 5 seconds, let alone a few decades, that somehow we have fallen into a “static” ontology.

Why? What’s so “static” about allowing someone to live for 80 or 90 years, saying that they are the same person despite many changes over that period, and that they then die?

Steven, you may think that the approach to non-relational objects leads to contradiction, just as I think your ultra-relationized ontology leads both to contradiction and, ironically, to stasis. But I worry about “incoherent” becoming the same easy and unearned dig in continental thought that “confused” has long since become in analytic thought.

But Shaviro is not, of course, a troll. He always takes risks and definite stands. That’s why it is a pleasure to respond to him even when mildly annoyed. That’s the way dispute ought to be.