another response to Shaviro

Steven has A LONG POST UP dealing mostly with Whitehead, Spinoza, and Deleuze on the virtual (as the very title of the post indicates).

He says the following in conclusion:

“My biggest objection to Harman has long been that he doesn’t give a sufficiently satisfying account of the genesis and perishing of objects, precisely because he rejects the very notion of the virtual, seeing it as something that ‘undermines’ the existence of objects. Whitehead to my mind splits the difference between Deleuze and Harman, in a way that is preferable to either.”

Yes, for the most part I tend to view “the virtual” as the most systematically overrated concept of our time, so Steven depicts my views correctly. But as he says next:

“(Note: I cannot end this discussion without an apology to Levi Bryant, who offers a version of “object-oriented ontology” that includes the virtual. I think that Whitehead represents a preferable alternative to Bryant’s position as well, in the sense that he obviates the need to see objects as somehow being ‘withdrawn.’ But I do not have the space or the energy to pursue this argument here).”

Once The Democracy of Objects is out, Levi and I should have the chance to give a public accounting of our philosophical differences. I already know what I’m going to say, but don’t want to do a pre-emptive treatment before his book is out and has had a chance to soak into the public mind a bit. Maybe some time in 2011 we can have an interesting printed debate about our disagreements.

As for Steven’s claim that I don’t “give a sufficiently satisfying account of the genesis and perishing of objects,” I give a response to it in The Speculative Turn. As he knows, I happen to think that both Deleuze and Whitehead especially Whitehead) are not at their best on this theme.

What he says about his alternative to “allure” earlier in the post… I don’t think I get it, except that whenever someone tries to replace things with activities or process, I “reach for my revolver,” as they say. This is a mental rut of the past 100 years: “Things and substances and nouns, bad! Processes and events and verbs, good!”

In Tool-Being I quote Theodor Nelson, the witty author on computers. he has a wonderful concept called “ideas once but no longer liberating.” We need to import this concept into philosophy.

Back in the days when there was a boring, reactionary, fossilized academic doctrine of substances, then it was a very good thing to critique those. What we have today instead is the boring, reflexive, faux rebellious idea that we are surrounded by armies of old fogies defending substances and hence bohemia must rally around processes and events. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that about 30,000,000 are saying this these days, and that hence the idea has probably done its work.

There is often talk in various fields about whether avant gardism is dead. I happen to think it is. But not because there are merely perennial truths and we should ignore trendy fashions to discover those truths. And not because we’ve entered in age in which modernist progress must be replaced by pastiche and collage from all the ideas of the past.

No, it’s because we’ve already reversed all the fogies and their nouns and substantives and innocent little rules just about as much as it’s possible to do. We’ve already shocked the bourgeoisie to the point where you can’t shock them anymore without doing stupid and obscene things like spreading feces on a portrait of the pope or showing video footage of gynecological exams, none of which is much worth doing in aesthetic terms.

In short, I think we’ve reached a point where the avant garde in many fields is becoming the force of conservatism, and I see continental philosophy as being another case of that. Instead of continuing to beat the dead horse of replacing substances with events and processes, what’s left is to see that substances were always a lot more strange than its defenders even realized.

And that’s why, as I’ve put it before, what we most need in philosophy now is a weird version of Aristotle, not the usual anti-Aristotelian constellation of principles.

No, this is not an “argument” for why we need substances— you can see that argument in my books. The point is that people often accept arguments for non-argumentative reasons: for example, due to a general atmospheric feeling that events and processes are more intellectual than individual things.

(And by the way, I’m speaking here in the usual jocular way in which we speak to one another, and I’m sure he’ll take it in the right spirit. I think we have a good exchange in The Speculative Turn, which should be out before too much more time has passed.)