Shaviro on processes and powers

Steven has another post up on his differences from OOO, which can be read HERE. I agree with much of it and find other parts completely off target. But I wasn’t planning to say anything, partly because this is a busy week for me, and partly because Steven and I have gone around in circles about issues a number of times and I’m not sure the time is ripe to do it again with different results.

However, since Levi just RESPONDED to Steven’s post, I wanted to add one point of my own concerning a passage from Steven that is quoted by Levi:

“But I think that Whitehead lines up with Bergson and Simondon and Deleuze, and against Harman and OOO, in that all these ‘process’ thinkers seek to account for how things come into existence, and how they endure; whereas OOO just seems to me to assume that its objects are already there.”

As Levi notes, this is simply false. I already made this point in my response to Steven in The Speculative Turn: for all his talk about “process,” he is actually the one, not I, who cannot account for change, since he is committed to punctiform actual occasions. Simply positing that they have some sort of internal drive or conatus is no better than saying “entities change by virtue of a changing faculty,” the old vis dormitiva.

But more importantly, the Simondon-induced fantasy that “OOO just seems to me to assume that its objects are already there” misses the really crucial point. The point, namely, is whether or not the entire genetic history of a thing is inscribed in it. OOO does not “assume its objects are already there,” it simply does not agree that the entire history of a thing is retained in its current state. There are a number of different causal histories that could have led to any given thing, and conversely, some of the things that happen to any entity along the route to its current state turn out to be utterly irrelevant. That’s the OOO position, anyway. The process/flux people generally hold the opposite, and we’d be better off arguing that point instead of continuing to hear the false claim that OOO “assumes its objects are already there.” Everyone knows that everything has a genetic history. The question is simply how much of that history is retained.

And here, one of the most interesting authors is DeLanda, since he is torn in opposite directions on this point. On the one hand, he’s a solid member of the process team, saying that genetic history is the only principle of individuation for, say, different hydrogen atoms in comparison with one another. But on the other hand, there is his important discussion in A New Philosophy of Society of “redundant causation” (which he means in a sense different or even opposite from that of analytic philosophy, just as his sense of “flat ontology” is the opposite of Bhaskar’s).”Redundant causation” in DeLanda’s sense means that numerous different causal routes could have achieved the same result– in other words, it means the very opposite of his frequent claim elsewhere that an entity is defined by its genetic history. This tension in DeLanda is fascinating, and seems to me to be a surefire sign that he’s onto something.

As for Steven Shaviro, I continue to deny his claims that OOO is about stasis and that process philosophy is about change. On the contrary! According to OOO, objects can be born, change, develop, and finally be destroyed by any number of methods. But for a philosophy of “actual occasions” of the sort defended by Steven, there is only perishing. It is a sham movement much like that obtained by shuffling through many cinematic frames per second, which taken individually all happen to be still photos. There is no “conatus” in one cinematic frame leading naturally to the next, and neither is there any conatus in an actual entity.

There are a number of very good points in his post, as well as a few others that I find to be completely false, but things can be left there for now, at least by me.