on a comment by Levi

First, it’s exasperating when people claim that you’re just saying things without making arguments, and then admit that they haven’t even read your books! There’s nothing to be done about that but hope that others say “please read his books first,” which is just what Levi does in the thread to which I will now point.

Anyway, I just wanted to agree with THIS PART OF LEVI’S COMMENT AT COMPLETE LIES:

“Here, I think, is perhaps a major difference between the ontology I am proposing and the ontology Harman proposes. Where Harman is a strict actualist holding that objects are completely concrete, I argue that objects have potentialities and capacities that differ from the actualized acts.”

This is accurate. Like Latour, I don’t believe in the concept of potentiality. Potential or power seem to me like relational concepts: capacity for a new future relation with something else. But for me this dodges the question of where in the actual the potential is inscribed (“matter” doesn’t quite do it for me, despite my admiration for Aristotle).

And that is where I differ from Latour on this point. We are both “actualists,” but I (unlike all other actualists that come to mind) do not identify the actual with the relational. In other words, the actuality of a thing recedes from all current expression of it, not just the potentiality.

And there is still the other difference between me and Levi, mentioned on this blog a few days ago. I don’t quite understand how he can accept that the relation between any two entities is a translation and still not see a metaphysical problem with causal relations. For it cannot be the case, as I see it, that two things make direct and unproblematic contact and only then translate each other into something rather different. The initial contact will also be with a translation. But there will be plenty of time to do a pre-Atlanta Auseinandersetzung on this point.