I hate to do this Steven, but…

Steven Shaviro, I’m afraid I can’t accept your apparent concession:

“So I think I’ll just confine myself to this. At our exchange in Claremont the week before last, Graham made one point that I very much took to heart. He disputed the idea, implicit in what I wrote and said, that ‘actual entities’ in Whitehead are small. And he is right. Whitehead says that actual entities are ‘the final real things of which the world is made up,’ — but this emphatically does not mean that they are somehow the equvialent of quarks or quantum fields or subatomic particles. In fact, they cannot be – since they are not located in spacetime at all, but are somehow involved in its production. They answer to a different question than the one the physicists are asking when they wonder if, for instance, spacetime is quantized at the Planck scale. It may be that events at the Planck scale are ‘actual entities’ in Whitehead’s definition, but so are my own experiences of the ‘specious present,’ and so is Whitehead’s God (as Graham pointed out).

I don’t think, however, that this in any way vitiates what I was arguing overall at Clarement — which is precisely that the relation of actual entities to what Whitehead calls ‘societies’ (which are all the things or objects in the world around us) is NOT equivalent to the scientific reductionists’ argument that somehow chairs and cats are less ‘real’ than the subatomic fields of which they are ultimately composed. Chairs and cats are as real for Whitehead as they are for OOO.”

If not for the fact that I’m sure Steven is being sincere here, I would be tempted to think he was being deliberately perverse.

As Steven well knows, the nature of my objection to the “actual entities are small” claim is not such that it can be answered by his supposed concession here, which is along the lines of “actual entities can’t be small, because they are involved in the very generation of the difference betwen small and big.”

No, he knows full well what I mean: namely, I don’t think we should recognize a difference between actual entities and societies in Whitehead in the first place. Not because actual entities are ‘beyond the very distinction between large and tiny,’ but because both the large and the tiny meet the spirit of what actual entities are for Whitehead. And yes, I realize that view is going to be an outlier among readers of Whitehead, but this point was discussed two weeks ago, and fruitfully so.

On this point, Steven knows that I told him and others the following in Claremont (and there were dozens of witnesses to this, because we were speaking from a table with microphones at the time):

1. God is mentioned as one of the two initial examples of actual entities, while the other is an “insignificant puff of existence” (or something of that sort; book not in front of me now) and neither God nor a “puff” are micro. For Steven to say that actual entities are beyond macro and micro is, at the very least, guilty of pretending not to have heard what I directly said on this topic. I made a very different claim there, which in his recent post he pretends did not exist.

2. Steven also knows that in Claremont I told him (again in front of a big audience) that Whitehead’s phrase ‘the final real things of which the world is made up’ does not necessarily mean what he takes it to mean. Namely, it means neither micro nor “beyond micro and macro,” but can explicitly include the macro. The point I made in Claremont is that Aristotle’s primary substances could also be called ‘the final real things of which the world is made up’, even though they are the very embodiment of the dreaded ‘mid-sized everyday objects’. Final need not mean the ultimate compositional ingredients of the cosmos, which is what Steven means when he uses the phrase here. In other words, the phrase in question does not constitute ammunition of any sort for Steven’s viewpoint.

3. Finally, Steven knows that the primary point of interest to me was understood and clearly addressed by Judith Jones from the audience following my and his discussion. Namely, that the reading I advocate has already been defended by one or more others in the Whitehead community, though it remains (as is obvious) vastly in the minority.

In short, though Steven has always been one of my favorite debate partners, I do not in any way share Levi’s admiration for his most recent post, and hence I am not going to join any spontaneous parade of mea culpas.

Though I’m sure Steven means well, the post seems to me unbearable in several respects. He first strikes an “above it all” pose with respect to the recent disagreements involving me and others, and then proceeds to share supposed revelations on his disagreements with me that completely ignore the basic points I made about these very issues in Claremont, all while bizarrely thanking me for helping him to see the light.

To summarize, I have never in my life seen a more frustrating or less directly relevant series of paragraphs from Steven Shaviro. First he complains about others engaging in repetitive squabbles (while letting us know that he resisted the temptation himself), and then he proceeds to behave as if my side of the discussion in Claremont never occurred.

My question is: how does this produce anything new, Steven?

[ADDENDUM: And I hope everyone realizes that I’m quite fond of Steven both intellectually and personally, and I believe he knows this too. Our intellectual tensions have been quite valuable to me over the past 18 months, and I think everyone will enjoy our forthcoming dispute in The Speculative Turn.]