Shaviro on The Prince and the Wolf

HERE.

Unsurprisingly, Steven sides with the Latour/Whitehead relationism against my critiques of that position. But it’s a well-written and thoughtful response to the book, also unsurprisingly.

The most important point that I think he gets wrong is when he downplays the very strong element of mediation in both Latour and Whitehead. Granted, neither of the two openly proclaims that there are any problematic gaps or disjunctions between entities, as an occasionalist or Hume would do.

Nonetheless, we have the “Joliot” phenomenon in Latour– two entities can be linked only by a third (and Steven does say that he accepts my “secular occasionalist” reading of Latour, so presumably he doesn’t deny this). Latour certainly wants direct relations between actors, but my point is simply that he cannot have them, given the initial conditions of his philosophy. It’s true that Latour is backing away these days from the punctualism of Irreductions, but that doesn’t mean he succeeds in doing so. With the “plasma” he ends up with an unformatted world-lump as the source of all novelty, which is too heavy a price to pay in addressing the genuine paradoxes that arise from Irreductions.

As for Whitehead, I’m not sure I know what Steven means when he says the eternal objects are there as a source of novelty rather than a source of connection. The point is, prehension is always mediated by the eternal objects, and the eternal objects are in God. It’s hard to be more of an occasionalist than to say that God is the mediator of all relations and that entities exist only as occasions. It’s textbook occasionalism, in fact. Like many other readers of Whitehead, I find that Steven is projecting a dynamism into his instants that is there in only the feeblest sense, and is perhaps over-reacting to the connotations of the word “process.” I find this to be especially the case among readers of Whitehead who are inspired by Deleuze. But there’s simply no comparison between the two thinkers, however much people want there to be. In all the important senses they are polar opposites, for the same reason that Whitehead and Bergson are polar opposites.