{"id":7055,"date":"2013-11-30T07:18:34","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T12:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=7055"},"modified":"2013-11-30T07:18:34","modified_gmt":"2013-11-30T12:18:34","slug":"lava-lampy-whitehead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/11\/30\/lava-lampy-whitehead\/","title":{"rendered":"Lava lampy Whitehead?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I find much to admire in Tim Morton’s writings (and in him personally, as I’ve recently related<\/a>), I’m sure he knows that his writing on what he calls “lava lampy materialism” leaves me unconvinced. (I’ve discussed that topic here,<\/a> here<\/a>, and elsewhere.)<\/p>\n

I haven’t read his Realist Magic<\/a><\/em> yet, so I can’t comment on the book’s arguments as a whole. But I’ve read some sections of it, including those which reiterate Morton’s critique of Whitehead’s “lava lampy” process philosophy. And, as before, I have trouble following these arguments. I would have eventually articulated a response to them, but Nathan Brown has spared me that trouble with his review (pdf warning) <\/a>of Realist Magic<\/em> in the latest Parrhesia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both Morton and Ian Bogost have reiterated the argument — originally, I believe, Graham Harman’s — that Whitehead’s philosophy entails a static notion of time, with processes taking place within a fixed temporal frame that is itself not processual in nature. (Bogost referred in this context to Whitehead’s “firehose metaphysics<\/a>.” My response was here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Brown points out — accurately, I believe — that this is simply wrong. His discussion of this disagreement is found on pages 66-67 of his review, and his footnote 13 is worth reproducing in full. That note reads (I’m breaking it up into paragraphs for readability’s sake):<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Time is not, for Whitehead, a uniform static frame in which processes take place; the attribution of such a position to him is flatly incorrect. In the chapter on \u201cTime\u201d in The Concept of Nature,<\/em> he writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have first to make up our minds whether time is to be found in nature or nature is to be found in time. The difficulty of the latter alternative\u2014namely of making time prior to nature\u2014is that time then becomes a metaphysical enigma. What sort of entities are its instants or periods? The dissociation of time from events discloses to our immediate inspection that the attempt to set up time as an independent terminus for knowledge is like the effort to find substance in a shadow. There is time because there are happenings, and apart from happenings there is nothing\u201d (66).<\/p>\n

It is integral to Whitehead\u2019s philosophy that time is constituted by particular durations, and<\/p>\n

\u201ca duration is discriminated as a complex of partial events, and the natural entities which are components of this complex are thereby said to be \u2018simultaneous with this duration.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitehead specifically corrects the sort of misunderstanding promulgated by Morton:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word \u2018duration\u2019 is perhaps unfortunate in so far as it suggests a mere abstract stretch of time. This is not what I mean. A duration is a concrete slab of nature.\u201d (53).<\/p>\n

Morton suggests that \u201cif you really want to do an Einstein, time has to emanate from the object itself\u201d (167). Whitehead\u2019s philosophy meets just this criterion: time is not a static frame in which processes occur; as the passage above states: time is composed of durations, durations are complexes of partial events, and natural entities are the components of these complexes. Moreover, Whitehead holds that there is more than one time series in nature (70-73) while specifically criticizing modern materialism for viewing nature as an aggregate of material that exists at successive extensionless instants of time (71).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitehead’s critique of static ontologies, including static notions of time, makes more or less the very case that OOO-ists seem to be wanting to make, while avoiding OOO’s ontological rift between static and unchanging things (called “objects”) and relations between them. That makes it, to my mind, much more interesting and productive an ontological starting point.<\/p>\n

All that said, I like Morton’s idea that “The aesthetic dimension is<\/em> the causal dimension,” because this is very much Whitehead’s argument as well — though I think there are differences in what they mean by that. And I love the multiplicity of references — to Buddhism, to various artistic works, and so on — that Morton weaves into his writing. I will give Realist Magic<\/em> more of a chance than Brown’s (rather caustic) review suggests I should.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I find much to admire in Tim Morton’s writings (and in him personally, as I’ve recently related), I’m sure he knows that his writing on what he calls “lava lampy materialism” leaves me unconvinced. (I’ve discussed that topic here, here, and elsewhere.) I haven’t read his Realist Magic yet, so I can’t comment on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977,4422],"tags":[58932,58931,17807,16806,423],"class_list":["post-7055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","category-process-relational-thought","tag-bogost","tag-lava-lampy-materialism","tag-morton","tag-object-oriented-philosophy","tag-whitehead"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-1PN","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5182,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/08\/17\/life-outside-the-lava-lamp\/","url_meta":{"origin":7055,"position":0},"title":"Life outside the lava lamp","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"August 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Over at Naught Thought, Ben Woodard (sorry, Ben, for the earlier misspell) wants \"to know what the Process\/Relational folks think\" of his thoughts about philosophies of process versus philosophies of objects or substances (or something like that). What follows is one quick and dirty way of thinking of a certain\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1366,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/05\/process-relational-theory-primer\/","url_meta":{"origin":7055,"position":1},"title":"Process-relational theory primer","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call \u201cprocess-relational.\u201d This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2291,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/14\/reply-to-harman\/","url_meta":{"origin":7055,"position":2},"title":"Reply to Harman","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"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.\"\u00a0I thought it worth pointing out that nowhere in that post did I mention OOO, or Graham's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2258,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/01\/11\/2-cheers-for-lava-lamps-lego-blocks\/","url_meta":{"origin":7055,"position":3},"title":"2 cheers for lava lamps & Lego blocks","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 11, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Tim Morton seems not to have liked my comment suggesting that reality is a mix of stability and instability, and that stability is an achievement rather than a default position. The universe, I would say, is an achievement as well. His much-loved (?) lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music & soundscape"","block_context":{"text":"Music & soundscape","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/music-soundscape\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6398,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/07\/13\/the-conceptual-machine\/","url_meta":{"origin":7055,"position":4},"title":"The conceptual machine","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I've always been more of an improviser than a long-range planner, but my job requires that I occasionally dabble in long-range projections of my work. Here's one. While a number of concerns have framed my scholarship over the years -- ethical, political, cultural, ecological, and theoretical concerns -- the philosophical\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1415,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/12\/05\/conversions-convertibilities\/","url_meta":{"origin":7055,"position":5},"title":"conversions & convertibles","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"(I try not to edit things once they're published, but I couldn't resist adding a Chevy Impala to this blog.) It may not quite be Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus, as Graham Harman's blog post title suggests, but Chris Vitale has clearly had a change of heart, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2010\/12\/image002-240x147.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7055"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7065,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7055\/revisions\/7065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}