useful new Shaviro post

Steven is back (hat tip, Joe Flintham) with A NEW POST ON OOO. The occasion for Steven’s latest thoughts is that he and I are paired up as a two-person panel at the Whitehead conference in Claremont on December 3.

Steven and I had loosely agreed not to go after each other there (even though that seems to have been precisely what the organizers wanted). Then he emailed me a few days ago to say sorry, he couldn’t avoid disagreeing with OOO in his paper no matter how much he tried. I responded that this was OK, because I was having a similar problem in the other direction with my paper. Steven and I are simply natural-born debating partners: we care about the same issues, come at them from completely different directions, and also have an easy way of disagreeing sharply with each other without pissing each other off. Steven is able to reject my ideas without any trace of self-congratulatory haughtiness, and I’ve always appreciated that. Apparently I’m able to do the same in reverse, at least with him.

In that sense, his closing qualifications aren’t even necessary:

“I hope this posting (together with my talk next week, upon which it is based) doesn’t come of as another polemic about OOO. The point is rather that the encounter with OOO has done a lot to make me think through and sharpen my own claims and distinctions. I need OOO, because it has so powerfully contributed to my own process of working through ideas from Whitehead. My conclusions are different from those of OOO; but I hope they don’t come off as being primarily critiques of OOO. The aim, as it always should be in these exchanges, is to develop my own ideas, not trash the ideas of others.”

Steven’s “polemics” against OOO are never that polemical, and I always find them useful.

A few quick points in passing:

1. “In the first place, OOO rejects what Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism.” Yes. And as my Edinburgh book will clarify even further, I don’t think Meillassoux ever escapes correlationism (nor does Badiou, but let’s leave that for 2011 when I plan to do some more writing about Badiou, whom I regard, along with Zizek, as absolutely the wrong savior for continental philosophy right now; what we need in our blood for the next 50 years is less German Idealism and more Aristotle, the most underrated and most unfashionable giant of our time).

It is clear as day that Meillassoux begins by praising the rigor of the correlational circle, in a way that none of the other original speculative realists would ever dream of doing. But supposedly Meillassoux does this only as an initial gesture, and then quickly escapes the correlate by his supposed proof that things in themselves do exist.

However, his things in themselves exist “in themselves” only in the sense that they would still be here even if all humans died. And this is only one aspect of the things in themselves. The other aspect is that even when we are alive, we don’t grasp them.

Of course, Meillassoux rejects that there can be anything in the world that we are in principle unable to grasp. Yet he never offers any proof of this. The decision in favor of “immanence” is simply a temperamental decision on his part, one based in his horror that the opposite view will lead to pious obscurantism and superstitious fideism. (Which, in turn, is his based on his assumption that our only choice is between absolute knowledge and total ignorance, an assumption also known as “Meno’s Paradox” and knocked to the ground by Socrates, who is not a “philosopher of immanence”, and this is very much to his credit.)

The real reason that the things in themselves are not knowable is because…

2. Knowledge of a tree is not itself a tree. No amount of tree-facts in the head of a botanist will themselves take root and begin to grow leaves. Some people persist in calling this a “silly” objection, but in fact it’s one of the profoundest philosophical points there are.

More concretely, some people have called this objection a “straw man”, since no one is actually claiming that knowledge of a tree can take root and grow just like a real tree. But that’s not the point. Of course no one openly makes that claim. The point is that you are tacitly committed to this claim once you make the decision for “immanence” or “absolute knowledge.”

In other words, you have to answer this question: what is the difference between perfect knowledge of a tree, and the tree itself? If you deny that they are the same (as you must) then you have to come up with some sort of theory as to how they differ. And your unstated theory is probably going to be a bland traditional one that the tree itself is stamped in “matter”, whereas our knowledge of the tree is not.

The better alternative is my model, in which knowledge is never absolute because it is only a translation, so that knowledge is always metaphorical and never exhaustive. This horrifies some people as entailing a Heideggero-Hölderlinian free-for-all of arbitrary poetic declarations, but that’s their problem, not mine. They’re too committed to the way that the mathematized natural sciences know, and don’t seem to care what good literary criticism or historical or biographical writing accomplish.

This applies as well to Steven’s objection to my view that “in Graham’s version, if not in Levi’s causality is problematic, and can only be conceived ‘vacariously,’ through a version of occasionalism.”

I’m still not sure why this bothers him so much. If realities themselves are imperfectly translatable into knowledge, they are imperfectly translatable into relations of any sort. This is why vicarious causation is needed. Moreover, this is a battle I will eventually win, because strange though the idea sounds, it is absolutely compelling once you see the problem clearly; I think I’ve simply failed to make a game-ending presentation of the point so far, and as a result have only convinced a certain number of people. This is due to my own limitations, but to some extent it is possible to outgrow one’s limitations.

3. “But at the same time (and here I explicitly disagree with Graham) no term can ever disentangle itself from all relations. That is simply impossible.”

Why?

And furthermore: “rather, I think we should follow William James and Deleuze in seeing a continual florescence of external relations, and of seeing these relations as in themselves perfectly real, as being just as real as the terms they connect are real.”

But I also see them as perfectly real. They simply don’t affect their terms (at least not automatically).

For example, the external relations among parts of a bicycle are perfectly real for me. They form an object: a bicycle.

But the point is that the new entity known as the bicycle need not affect the internal constitution of its parts. In fact it often does, but this is a special case that needs to be explained, not an automatic influence.

***

I think we’re getting close to the point where OOO will be engaged in a more explicit settling of accounts with several groups of opponents.

One of them is Steven Shaviro’s sorts of preferred theories: relational theories of process, flux, and dynamism. This is the Deleuzian axis of contemporary philosophy, along with an (inappropriate) linking of Whitehead and sometimes Latour with the Deleuzian project.

The other is the Badiouian sort of model, also found to a large extent in Meillassoux, based on a call to absolute knowledge against Heideggerian withdrawal, and also connected in my view with an overly axiomatic and mathematized version of politics, which is precisely the appeal of Badiou to many readers.

I’ll never be fully convinced about Badiou until we see the emergence of Right Badiouians just as we’ve seen Left Heideggerians and Left Nietzscheans. (And I’m afraid my “wager” is that it’s not going to happen. Too many people are drawn to Badiou because they find his explicit political content appealing. Which is fine, but it’s not a strictly philosophical commitment. It’s Badiou as use-value.)

Until the other side of the political aisle finds some use for you, I’m not yet convinced that what you’ve done is entirely philosophical. Philosophy is not the handmaid of Leftism (or Conservatism) any more than of theology– or of natural science. You know you’ve reached a philosophical insight when you stumble across an idea that flatters no discipline and no Party.