Graham Harman has written a post about me in which he says that I was trying to “refute” OOO in my “2 cheers” post, and that I “claim[ed] quite frankly that OOO is wrong.” I thought it worth pointing out that nowhere in that post did I mention OOO, or Graham’s philosophy under any other name. Those three magical letters appear in a quote from Tim, but I don’t take that part of the quote up in my comments afterward, which are about music. My entire post was a reply to Tim Morton’s 11-paragraph rejoinder to four short sentences I wrote in a comment on Tim’s blog. Those sentences concerned stability and instability, stability being an achievement, and the role of his “lava-lampism” notion in OOO.
I’m surprised that Graham took those comments as being a critique of him or his philosophy, since I’m aware that his ontology acknowledges the importance of change (as does Levi Bryant’s). Since I haven’t read enough of Tim’s work after his OOO “conversion,” I was dismayed that he seemed to be going so far over to the “other side,” i.e. dismissing change, fluidity, achievement, and process in favor of what appeared to be a singular focus on the stability of objects; ergo my brief comment on his blog followed by my post responding to his. Had my post been about OOO, I would have tagged it “object-oriented philosophy,” “OOO,” or something like that. Instead I tagged it “lava lamps, minimalism, music, ontology.” I enjoy talking to Tim about music — he’s one of the two or three most musically astute ecocritics I know (and I know a lot of them) — and I hope those particular tags might see further dialogue between our different styles of thinking on music and aesthetics. But I hate getting into unnecessary arguments.
Moral of the story: Write carefully, but be prepared for reactions you didn’t expect. Moral #2: The more personally you take things other people write about you, and all the more so when they’re not writing about you, the more frustrated you will get with them. I can never be sure where the boundaries are between the various object-oriented ontologists, and so I get taken aback when something I say to one of them is taken so personally by another. But maybe that’s the nature of the beast (the beast being the philosophical blogosphere, with the particular kinds of group dynamics that form in and around new and emerging schools of thought, like OOO). Live and learn.
Note also the conversations between Michael (of Archive Fire) and Tim here and between Michael and Joseph Goodson here. Goodson raises an interesting question to me (on Tim’s blog) about Whitehead, which I’ll try to answer when I have a chance. My next little while will be occupied with some rather pressing off-line life events.
[…] “Moral of the story: Write carefully, but be prepared for reactions you didn’t expect. Moral… […]
Quick comment to Graham’s reply (see “Pingback” below):
“There was no “personal” reaction, Adrian. As you know, we had a perfectly civil exchange of 2 or 3 emails afterward. The disagreement was purely philosophical, as was my frustration at the way this disagreement is going in circles with no progress being made.”
Fair enough. I thought our exchange, while civil, didn’t result in any greater understanding of my perspective on your part (nor of a retraction of your post). So I posted the above “reply to Harman” just to clarify things at my end (for readers).
“While denying that your post referred to me in any way, you also fail to provide any link to it so that readers might decide for themselves.”
The link is there – click on the words “2 cheers” in the first sentence. (Unless you mean a link to something else?) It’s also easy to find in the list of “Recent posts” to the right.
“And finally, were the scare quotes around the word “conversion” when referring to Tim Morton really necessary?”
They weren’t necessary, but since we’re talking philosophy and not religion, I see the word as being used somewhat metaphorically. (Perhaps I’m wrong about that.) I used the word in my response to Tim’s post here, which to my mind used the kind of language one hears in accounts of religious conversions. But I don’t want to judge whether it is a genuine conversion (with all the religious/faith-filled baggage that implies) or just a philosophical turning point, so I put it in quote marks. It wasn’t intended to sound derogatory.
“It was abundantly clear from your post to which I referred that you think there’s an opposition between “achievement” and “substance.” This is a very basic point in the debate, and no, I don’t believe you’ve grasped it yet. I think you’re simply trying to change the subject.”
Not at all. I’m happy to talk about it some more, if and when I have time for that (and the energy to deal with misunderstandings like these). I would continue to argue that stability is an achievement. Since I’m interested in how thigns come to be the way that they are, and in how things come to be different, I’m interested in the efforts – the work, the action, the practices – that bring about stability and change. Whether a stable entity qualifies as “substance” or not is a separate question, dependent on one’s definition of “substance” (a word I don’t use in this philosophical sense very often), and frankly I don’t see why it shouldn’t qualify. It’s just not the question I’m most interested in.
Cheers,
Adrian
… one more thing:
Perhaps there is a key difference here between object-oriented and process-relational ontologies, but I’ll only speak for the latter.
P-R theory is interested in what it takes to *do* one thing or another. It assumes that for something “to be” means for that thing to be *doing* something, even if it’s just persisting, maintaining itself and its essential relations, breathing, resting, sleeping, etc. (Sleeping is not just doing *nothing*; it is, e.g., refreshing oneself and one’s energy reserves and capacities, allowing what’s occurred over the course of the day to “sink in,” etc.) For a thing to remain what it is, that thing has to maintain itself as it is. It doesn’t do that without some kind of effort (though it’s possible for it to do it with more or less effort, so that one can speak of ‘effortlessness’ as opposed to the overexpenditure of energy in some specific activity).
All of that is why I consider stability an achievement. To put it another way, stability requires overcoming the tendency toward entropy (‘entropy’ being another word for what happens when things don’t hold together, i.e. when there is no holding-together going on). That’s what living things do. Whether other things do that (from rocks to quarks) is an interesting question, and the answer, for me, requires identifying the appropriate level of process at which they do.
There’s nothing, to my mind, that’s insubstantial about any of that. Substance *is* process (in my P-R view). A complex substance, such as a human being, is a great multitude of processes which are coordinated in ways that maintain a certain complex unity over time. So I don’t see ‘achievement’ and ‘substance’ as opposed to each other. If there are ‘relationalists’ (your term, not mine) who see them as opposed, I can’t speak for them.
All that said, I’ve just written the above very quickly and don’t want to go over it to ensure it has the logical coherence it should. So feel free to tear it apart if you wish, but (for civility’s sake) please include this caveat if you do .
[…] few observations on the recent discussions (Graham, Tim, Adrian, myself, Gary, mostly on lavalamps) regarding OOO and relations. Graham Harman has recently spoken […]
Your words about entropy remind me of Levi’s forthcoming work, which deals extensively with this problem — I think you will find it very, very interesting!
I think at this level, when you talk about entity reproducing its unity to resist entropy, that sounds much more object-oriented than saying that a thing is its act of experience, which is subtly different statement. I think an object can experience, but that is a property or quality that it has because it is a unity or system which is organizing that property or quality. Still, again, Levi’s autopoietic objects see this in very dynamic terms, and I think you will be pleased with his conclusions on these points. It will be an exciting year for philosophy, 2011!
Incidentally, I love this background picture. Is that watercolor or…? It’s beautiful.
Hi Joe – I’m not sure if there’s anyone who would say that a thing *is* its act of experience, unless we’re talking about the most microscopic level (the ‘actual occasion’). Real-world entities, in a Whiteheadian framework, are all ‘societies’ or ‘nexus’ of one kind or another, which means that they are particular sets of iterative and coordinated ‘acts of experience’ (if you want to use that terminology) that collectively reproduce or maintain the entity (society/nexus) over a series of such ‘acts.’ Each act introduces (usually) minute amounts of change into the entity, so that there’s never a 100% correspondence between a society at one moment and the ‘same’ society at another moment. This doesn’t mean (as Graham has often suggested) that the society will be entirely different from one moment to the next; but it won’t be entirely the same either.
One of the things that has repeatedly frustrated me about Graham’s characterization of any processual-relational account is that he wants to always portray it as an all-or-nothing thing: either an object simply *is* *all* its relations and therefore it gets washed out into the entirety of the universe, with nothing persisting that is ‘its own’, or it is something that fully withdraws from all its relations. The world isn’t black and white like this; it’s evolved some very complex and patterned sets of relations that give it a profound kind of structure. Every object is a complexity of relational processes interlaced in very specific ways, and its the specificity of the interlacings that give things their persistence and stability. These are achievements, products of effort. Where there is an ‘its own’-ness to some particular entity, it’s a result of effort that occurs within the creativity of the moments that make up an entity.
I’ve tried to make these points repeatedly in these debates (and Vitale is making some of them again), but, as you’ve seen, whenever one of us tries to point any of it out, the OOOists shoot it down in (often) patronizing fashion. The best for us now, in my view, is to just work on our own philosophical programs and let OOO work on theirs. But I agree there are exciting things happening, and that Levi’s book will be a good one (he’s sent me a working version of it).
Thanks for the comment about the blog background. It’s a photo I took on Graham Island in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, a.k.a., Haida Gwaii (in the Pacific, south of the Alaskan Panhandle) digitized and ‘remixed’ to look like one of the Group of Seven paintings of the Canadian wilderness.
Take care,
Adrian
Great brilliant post, very helpful, Thanks.
I love this background picture. Can I use it in my website: http://portal.bu.edu.eg
Thanks