a recent Alex Reid post

I missed THIS until now. Interesting post, but a couple of things are puzzling.

“Generally speaking, OOO’s discussion of rhetoric focuses on the rhetorical analysis of existing texts and media… However, the part of rhetoric that interests me the most is the process of composition.”

Man, what can I do to convince Alex that I have something to say about the process of composition? There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of posts on this blog on that topic.

“I look at a theory of the virtual as not being incommensurable with the withdrawn nature of objects. I.e. objects withdraw toward an absolute virtual state… I see a fair amount of potential (sorry) in the intersections between an object-oriented procedure and how DeLanda builds upon Deleuze.”

I like DeLanda too. The part that I don’t like can be summed up in his claim that the virtual is “heterogeneous yet continuous” (a phrase that I believe Bergson was the first to use) which is nothing more than wish fulfillment by fiat. The dispute between the discrete and the continuous is a serious traditional philosophical problem, and you can’t just claim to unify both in a single stroke, any more than you can claim to be “beyond realism and idealism.”

Actually, remember Rorty’s joke? “Every decade or so, someone writes a book with a title something like: ‘Beyond Realism and Idealism.’ And it always turns out that what’s beyond realism and idealism is– idealism!”

The joke could be transmuted into this: “Everyone these days writes a book saying that they can unify the heterogeneous with the continuous. And it always turns out that what unifies the heterogeneous and the continuous is– the continuous!”

Stated differently, it’s not enough to say that the virtual has features in common with the withdrawn (it certainly does; that’s never been disputed). The question is whether the various segments of the virtual withdraw from each other as well. I’ve never seen anyone working in the Deleuzian tradition (and on this issue it’s a Bergsonian tradition) make that claim.

Stated still differently: why aren’t Deleuzians signing up in droves to defend vicarious causation? Answer: because they think the notion of individual entities cut off from one another is an artificial problem. There’s no communication problem in Deleuze, unlike in mainstream Kantian continental philosophy which at least preserves such a problem between humans and world, if nowhere else.

This links to a more general frustration that won’t go away for awhile. Namely, people often tell me that figure X already knew what I’m saying, because figure X already knew that reality withdraws beyond human access. But that’s just a start. The question is whether parts of reality withdraw from each other no less than they withdraw from us. That’s the heart of OOO. The failure to see this is what leads to claims such as that Jean-Luc Marion already anticipated OOO. No, he didn’t. Marion is concerned with an excess of reality beyond accessibility, not with an excess of stones and flames for one another.