“Aesthetics All the Way Down”: Three Ways of Avoiding OOO

There seem to be two main ways of avoiding OOO:

1) Undermining. Things are reducible to smaller entities such as particles. Or things are only instantiations of deeper processes.

2) Overmining. This has to do with the tendency to view objects as blank lumps with their appearances glued to their superfices, or added by some "perceiver."

This means that objects are basically blah until they interact with other objects.

Instead I would rather locate a rift between appearance and essence within the object itself. This means we have to accept some kind of paraconsistent, possibly dialetheic logic that allows things to be what they seem, and not what they seem, simultaneously. Otherwise we are back to default substances-plastered-with-accidents.

Now we can discern a third way of avoiding OOO. This would be to claim the inverse of (2):

(3) There are no substances, and it's all appearance-for, all aesthetics all the way down. I believe this might be Steven Shaviro's position.

Now I want to preserve the rift between appearance and essence. Why? Because this preserves, paradoxically, the very aesthetic-ness of the aesthetic dimension.

Look at it this way. If reality was “aesthetics all the way down” (which is Shaviro's view of Whitehead) then we would KNOW it was “just” an illusion: so it wouldn’t be an illusion. We would know that it was pretense—so it wouldn’t be pretense. We would have a kind of inverted onto-theology of pure affects without substances.

“What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not” (Lacan). True dat.

Until thinking is ready to accept that objects can be intrinsically unstable, both essential and aesthetic at the same time, we are stuck with options (1)–(3), all of which are ways of avoiding OOO.

Once we accept this inherent instability, the rift between essence and appearance, we don't need to have objects pushed around by processes or particles, or others' perceptions of them. They can do just fine on their own. This seems to be the case with a single quantum, as various posts of mine have made clear (this one for instance).