Harman responds to my last post at generous length here. I realize I should have thought this through better before I sent it off, since I don’t really have time to work on a response or an involved dialogue with him at the moment. (And neither does he, as he has said a few times, so I’m grateful he’s taken the time he has to deal with the substance of my complaint.) But I’m of course not the only one pursuing the resonances between Whitehead and Deleuze: Shaviro, Stengers, Keith Robinson, James Williams, and Michael Halewood (and to some extent, at least, Eric Alliez and Jeffrey Bell) are among the others doing that. Not that that makes any of us right — and to the extent that Harman is correct about all this, his arguments should interest the others.
My hunch remains that there are different ways of approaching both thinkers, and that these different ways reveal somewhat different figures. Deleuze himself saw significant affinities between his thinking and Whitehead’s, and I (and the others mentioned) think those affinities are worth pursuing. These affinities have something to do with seeing the world as more dynamic and less static, more processual and relational — seeing objects “as actions, acts, or events,” as Levi Bryant put it in a wonderful post this morning — with the dynamism both ethically and aesthetically imbued (a case Shaviro makes well). Somehow, for me, this locates us, as ethically and aesthetically positioned subjects, in the midst of a more dynamic and creative world and it makes it easier to conceive of the ripples of resonance between us and the others we encounter (people, trees, vampyroteuthises, et al).
But I’ll take Harman’s arguments to heart, and I look forward to his chapter in The Speculative Turn. As I mentioned on Levi’s blog, I appreciate Harman’s writing and his thinking very much, especially the way he pushes Heidegger (in fact the things I like most about Heidegger) beyond any kind of anthropocentrism, as well as the way he has brought Latour into the center of philosophical discussion. I have much to learn from him, and I suspect that, in the end, there will be much more commonality here than difference.
“Somehow, for me, this locates us, as ethically and aesthetically positioned subjects,”
I think that this is really the key. Harman’s approach really is that of the theological “soul” (the ever retreating essence lock away behind all the accidents of the world) taken out from its citizenship in God’s State. An entity looking for a explanation. As he has said many times, his objects suffer from the problem of Occasionalism without the God.
But I think that it is precisely the way that the ontology positions the subject in the world, the way in which the ethical and the aesthetic (two things missing from Harman’s thinking) as determinative, that give value to processual understandings of objects. This is no small thing at stake. Harman has said in the past that his politics is “boring”. It is more than that, his ontology is political in an unconscious sense, without owning its consequences.
Yes, to me it seems that his objects are separate from the ethics or aesthetics they may elect take up, while for a relational approach that separation isn’t there; any agency is always already ethically/aesthetically positioned and imbued (in multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory ways, of course).
Just to sneak in a bit more of a response to his latest post: his assumption that the mammalian nature of bats (how they reproduce) is essential or primary, while their winged nature (how they move about the world) is secondary, is very unLatourian and unphenomenological, not to mention being scientistic. It’s a moment where Latour’s/Stengers’cosmopolitics – which to me is what’s most attractive about them – flies out the window…
GH concludes: “To say that “creation” unites [Deleuze and Whitehead] is like saying that flying unites birds and bats: quite possibly true, but not yet at the bottom of things.”
“Creation” unites Deleuze and Whitehead because their philosophies are about doing and acting in & upon the world, not simply about conceptually abstracting from the world (though this is a little less obvious with Whitehead than with Deleuze). They enable certain kinds of movement or action, just as bats and birds have wings, which are things that enable a certain kind of movement (through the air). That their mothers’ fertilized eggs hatch outside their bodies or grow inside their bodies is a strategy as well, but no closer to the “bottom” of things, since, in a relational world, there is no such bottom.