Levi responds

Here’s LEVI’S RESPONSE to my post of yesterday.

The last thing I want to do is get Levi involved in a blog exchange with me while he is hard at work on The Democracy of Objects. His post clears up a couple of things for me, and I think the remaining disagreement or misunderstanding (I’m not sure which) can be found in the following passage at the end of his post:

“Thus I’m not sure how to respond when Graham asks, ‘…when Levi speaks of powers or potentials, I want to ask him where those powers or potentials are located. What is the actuality in which those powers or potentials are stored?’ For me they are right there in the withdrawn dimension of any object. This thesis strikes me as no more odd than the thesis that real qualities and real objects are completely withdrawn and never present to any other objects in the world. In fact, I believe it does much the same work. It’s only if we begin from the premise that these powers or potentials are themselves qualities that the thesis seems to be strange and seems to place qualities in the object already (e.g. that they seem to claim that the acorn is already an oak tree). But a power is not a quality. It is a condition for qualities, but the production of qualities requires a whole series of translations, movements, and mediations to take place and is a new event in the world whenever it takes place. And here, admittedly, I can only allude to the powers of objects without being able to say what these powers are because whenever we say what something is we end up referring to qualities.”

The key point of dispute/misunderstanding can probably be found in the following words:

“It’s only if we begin from the premise that these powers or potentials are themselves qualities that the thesis seems to be strange and seems to place qualities in the object already (e.g. that they seem to claim that the acorn is already an oak tree). But a power is not a quality. It is a condition for qualities…”

But I do think there are qualities in the object already: they are simply real qualities rather than sensual ones. Contra what Levi implies above, however, I don’t think that acorn already has oak-qualities. I think it has acorn-qualities.

So, the remaining question is whether there is merely a terminological clash here (in which my real qualities and Levi’s powers are two terms for the same thing) or whether Levi’s calling them powers does in fact disembody them in a way to which my position would be opposed.

However, I’m sure this will be clearer once The Democracy of Objects is in print.