Levi responds to Ivakhiv

I’m too tired to get into this in full, but I want to say two things in agreement with LEVI’S RESPONSE TO IVAKHIV, and in reverse order.

1. Levi: “And indeed, Ivakhiv has repeatedly emphasized that he sees the differences between OOO and process philosophy as a difference between terminologies… However, I do believe that the differences are more substantial than that, for if you hold that entities are constituted by their relations then you lose that excess by which it is possible to account for how anything new can enter the world.”

The first thing I can never quite understand is why, if Ivakhiv thinks it’s merely a difference in terminologies, that he gets so annoyed at the OOO position. I think on some level Adrian knows that OOO is a full facial challenge to the sort of position he defends, and that’s why he’s occasionally quite bothered by OOO. And furthermore, where are the withdrawn objects in Ivakhiv’s relationism or any other form thereof? There is no such concept in any relationist philosophy.

Withdrawn objects being the very core of OOO, it follows immediately that the difference between OOO and relationism is not merely terminological.

2. Ivakhiv, as quoted by Levi, speaking of OOO: “While this may not be equivalent to a Newtonian world-picture — of objects in space moving around and bumping into each other, setting off or redistributing lawful causal effects as they do that — it is, in its overall contours, highly consonant with such a world-picture (minus perhaps the space, and plus a kind of space-time curvature at each node for indicating where the objects might be withdrawing to).”

Hardly. My writings are loaded with mockery of such concepts as “billiard balls slapping each other around on a numbered Cartesian grid.” In Prince of Networks I refer to this as a metaphysics fir for tiny children: “da wed ball pusht da gween ball an da gween ball fell on da fwoooorrr.” Hardly the sort of thing a Newtonian mechanist would appreciate hearing.

This suggests that Ivakhiv hasn’t actually read my books. Fair enough. No one has to read my books; I haven’t read everyone else’s books either. But I don’t see how much traction I can get in an argument with someone who makes me re-argue my already printed writings every time I take the field.

If there is any grain of truth in Ivakhiv’s “Newtonian” passage, it is when he says this: “setting off or redistributing lawful causal effects as they do that.”

Yes, I do hold that individuals are the locus of causal powers, and that by means of these powers they influence one another. Indeed, I think the sacrifice of this model is one of the major weaknesses of relationist philosophy, of world-lump monisms, and of philosophies of the virtual and the pre-individual, and you may as well add in so-called structural realism as well, which pats itself repeatedly on the back for replacing real individuals with something called mathematical structure that it never really gets around to defining.

I’ve spoken before of trumpery: the method of crowing over the supposedly naive corpse of an opponent who was never naive to begin with and may not even be dead. The leading target of trumpery in our time, from every possible quarter, is the model of a cosmos populated with real individuals. If you don’t believe me, notice that the Aristotle is the one great philosopher whose stock price is currently far too low.

And to repeat, the talk of stock prices is meant not to valorize the hot stocks of the moment, but precisely the reverse: to point to the value lurking beneath all trivial fluctuations in price. Aristotle has that value, and it’s currently untapped in our circles, because everyone is busy crowing over the supposed naiveté or manifest-imageness of individuals and trumping up some alternative that crumbles as soon as you look at it closely enough.