A mess is not a pile, which is neatly organized even if situated in an inconvenient place underfoot. A mess is not an elegant thing of a higher order. It is not an intellectual project to be evaluated and risk-managed by waistcoat-clad underwriters. A mess is a strew of inconvenient and sometimes repellent things. It is less an imbroglio of the sort one finds in a painting of Pollock or Picasso, and more the mess one finds in a sculpture of Keinholz. A mess is an accident. A mess is a thing that you find where you don’t want it. A mess is the cascade of broken glass on the floor when you miss the alarm clock and catch the water glass. A mess is the heap of hot, unseen dog shit on the stoop, and then on the stoop and the bootsole. A mess is inelegant, a clutter, a shamble, a terror. We recoil at it, yet there it is, and we must deal with it.

I’m reminded of Feynman and his “fuzzy logic” in the sense that at the moment Object-Oriented though, SR, and Process oriented philosophies are search for vocabularies to describe things in inventive ways, ways that will help us break free of the last two hundred years of post-Kantian speculation and into something else… what that something else will be is as much up to the quality of speculation as it to the speculations themselves.

Undermining is that operation by which the thinker attempts to dissolve the object in something deeper of which the object is said to be an unreal effect. Consequently, the minimal operation of undermining lies in 1) the assertion of a fundamental strata of reality that constitutes the “really real”, and 2) the dissolution of the object in and through that stratum.

Harman’s concept of overmining is a bit more difficult to follow. Where undermining treats the object as a false appearance produced as an effect of what is alleged to be really real being such as atoms, overmining charges objects with being “falsely deep” and dissolves them in a more superficial strata of phenomena. What does this mean? First, when we describe an object as being “deep” we’re talking about the way in which no description or set of relations ever exhausts the being of the object. Objects, as Adorno liked to say, are never identical to their concept. There’s always something about the object that eludes any description or experience of the object. Thus, properly speaking, objects are one and all infinite in their depths. They can never be exhausted.

Most of this can be gleaned from both Harman and Levi’s work… hope this helps. I get a little long winded at times…

I’m trying to think of some of the issues where SR folks might split or be nuanced enough so as to rightly possess their own “camps.” By “versus” I don’t mean to perpetrate division per se, but only to identify the idea that these philosophers may have a different or nuanced enough take on traditionally opposed terms in metaphysics so as to have a unique view – each has a way pf reconciling the terms or fitting one or the other, or both, into their projects.

From what I’ve seen so far, here is where I can see some definite differences. Not sure that any one is more important than the other.

1. process versus object
2. immanent versus transcendent(al)
3. abstract versus concrete/sensible/material
4. scientific or mathematizable property/power versus withdrawing power/essence
5. form versus object
6. absolute versus relative relation (internal versus external relation)
7. pluralism versus monism (this one is a stretch, but admitting a ground,
general type, transcendental unitary feature would place you one step towards a type of monism)
8. Epistemological (scientific) realist versus Metaphysical-ontological (scholastic) realist of the general / Metaphysical (immanentist) realist of the particular – this one breaks down to particularism versus someone friendly to a theory of types
9. Correlationism traditionally understood is opposed, though some may return to it in a modified form.
10. anthropocentrism versus non-anthropocentrism

Probably missing a few here.

AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies).

Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1987) [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Bryant’s focus is on motion, on doing and acting in the world. Bryant came to the sudden realization that the “concept of potentiality, of potency, is the theme of all of my philosophical work” (Potentiality and Onticology, 5/26/2011).

Levi tells us “Potentiality, power, potency is pure capacity, pure “can-do”, pure ability. As such, it tells us nothing of the form that the actualized power will take when it becomes a quality or what I call a local manifestation. These potentialities are what I call, following Spinoza, “affects”, or the capacity to affect and be affected. They are structures of the object, they aren’t featureless, yet they do not embody any determinate qualities. In this regard, it is completely misleading to suggest that the power of an acorn contains an oak tree. No, acorns contain the possibility of all sorts of unique and aleatory movements (under specific conditions) that might become an oak tree.” Ultimately the potentiality of an Object exists sometimes as active or at-work, and sometimes as inactive, latent, or withdrawn from all work/relation.

Hope that clears things up, no?