Levi has a new post up about temporality and objects. He writes this:
However, while I am deeply sympathetic to the processualists and consider myself a process ontologist– which I don’t take as being synonymous with being a Whiteheadian –this argument only follows if substances are three-dimensional as articulated above. If, in addition to spatial parts, objects also have temporal parts it follows that objects are not brute clods that simply sit still, but that in their endurance through time they are activities or processes.
The obvious point to make is that processes produce objects at various singular points of concrescence (eg condensation, etc). The process is not *of* an object, ie the duration is of relations in these processes and not parts of an object. It also follows if substances are not *in* objects, but in events, with objects being local manifestations of events. The only reason we even think in terms of objects at all is because this is the innate correlationism of human perception.
I agree to a certain extent with your reading of Derrida, but Derrida does not restrict deferral to objects and instead is concerned with the event that is forever actualised through differral (eg ‘to come’ etc.). Reading Derrida in terms of objects is a reduction.
From the physical sciences, water boiled in a closed environment, so all H20 molecules of the water turn into steam, is a version of the Ship of Theseus (SoT) argument. Is it the ‘same’ set of H2O molecules before and after boiling? Yes. So what has changed and for whom? There is no in-itself here. Maybe you don’t think water in such an experiment is an object?
The SoT is an event involving the ship, concept of a ship and a proper name ‘Ship of Theseus’. The comparable singular points for the SoT are predominately *social* in character, just as the examples of your own identity and the physiological seven year cycle. Singular points for identity include complex actualisations across socio-physiological assemblages, such as marriage, sex-change, civil rights changes to legislation, and death. Non-human assemblages are produced around the affective affordances that give them consistency as a kind of non-conscious pan-affectivism (as compared to a pan-psychism), such as the affective character of a planet’s geology and events of tectonic movement.
I’d be interested to see how you deal with creation, Levi. Is ‘creation’ possible in OOO? Is ‘creation’ for you a local manifestation of an object that doesn’t exist yet (ie quasi cause, and belonging to a parent event)? Or is it the local manifestation of a series of lower order objects that combine into a new object? If so, what is the temporality of ‘newness’ for this ‘new’ object then? If anything is useful out of After Finitude, which QM frames in terms of the question of temporality of being out of non-being, it is this question.