relationism, continued

Here LEVI RESPONDS to Adrian Ivakhiv and Chris Vitale. I’ll stay out for now, having little more to add.

My regrets at the moment are:

(a) that people continue to assume that belief in objects detachable from their relations somehow entails stasis. It’s really quite simple: a horse is the same horse in different contexts, but the horse can still be born, grow, develop, and die, as well as be affected by some (some, not all) of the things that happen around it. The choice is not between an eternal horse-essence and a horse that becomes a new horse every time a hair falls on the floor or every time the horse rotates 10 degrees to the west. But that is the choice that relationism offers us. (Adrian claims no one has ever said this, but I would point to Whitehead, Latour, and the Bergson of Matter and Memory as all having said this.)

(b) that some people (Chris belongs to this group) don’t see the problem with having a “virtual” or some other subterranean reality that is not articulated in advance into distinct pieces. The fact that we cannot directly envisage the qualities of Paris apart from us does not entail that we cannot deduce the existence of a unified Paris outside us.

The main problem, I insist, is that the continental philosophy Zeitgeist still thinks: “Rock-hard substance, bad. Silky-smooth contexts and processes, good. Essence, bad and oppressive. Identity as performance, good and liberating.”

I feel your pain. I was there once too. Up until 1997, I was pretty much on board with the Heideggerian version of this world-view: the total system of equipment comes first, and the individual items of equipment come later as derivative byproducts broken out of the system by the abstracting human mind. I’ve been on the inside of that philosophy and know exactly what it feels like.

Problem: it doesn’t work. There comes a moment when you experience a Gestalt shift, and the need for withdrawn, non-relational objects appears before your mind like a revelation. The recent “conversion experiences” of people like Tim Morton don’t surprise me too much, because I had the exact same conversion experience (on a Christmas morning, perversely enough). The world has never looked the same to me since, and Levi had a similar experience in the course of our email debate, to which he refers in another post today.

But the conversion experience becomes much easier if you realize that “individual objects” does not mean “reactionary, oppressive essences.”

As I said in my Helsinki conference paper in 2005, and elsewhere, it is a mistake to try to identify one particular ontology with one particular political orientation. The recent tendency was to view realism as a patriarchal doctrine of timeless natural essences, and to oppose it with a sense of identity as fluid and shifting and publicly performed.

But traditionally, social construction was more of a conservative doctrine than a progressive one. Just think of Edmund Burke’s reaction to the French Revolution. Indeed, the typical conservative gesture is to uphold the gradually evolved power relations that exist today over against any abstract appeal to the rights of reality.

I’m saying these things because I think many people are still attached to process and relation on an ontological level because they think these concepts have a progressive, socialistic, ecologically sensitive ring. But in fact there is another way of looking at it: from another angle, the appeal to process and relation could be said to effectively ratify what has de facto emerged.