Lava Lamps Aren't Just Deleuzian

...but since Gary Williams has posted on the subject, perhaps I can address why I find Deleuze lacking compared with OOO, a little.

Here's an exemplary piece of Williams, in a post that compares Deleuze favorably with OOO. This is for its descriptive, predictive power:

Take the example of crystallization. First, you have a supersaturated solution. Then you have the process of nucleation and the subsequent crystal growth which actualizes out of the potentiality of the supersaturated solution. We can explain this in terms of Deleuze’s metaphysics. The supersaturated solution is undifferentiated yet its Virtual field contains the possibility of crystal actualization. When a singularity crosses a threshold, the Virtual possibility of crystallization actualizes and a process of stratification/actualization occurs wherein a line of flight is selected out of the virtual phasespace and novel strata/organizations are formed through immanent processes of organization.

Sure, maybe, though I'm pretty sure a chemist or a physicist might have trouble with the “virtual” stuff. And a reductionist empiricist of any stripe would have trouble with "potentiality." It's just too teleological. "Phasespace"? Its use here would make an engineer laugh. Why do humanists roll over and play dead when they hear this lingo? What is Deleuze adding to a scientific understanding of crystallization, apart from some terms that are now living rent free in my head?

And I'm pretty sure that the way Williams is using actualization and potential derives, in the end, from good old Aristotle, possibly by way of self-help seminars. It's not quite cricket to assume that the copper sulfate solution or whatever is "copper sulfate crystals waiting to happen." Pulling a Deleuzian rabbit from this hat isn't too hard. This is just aestheticism masquerading as science. Am I a corpse just waiting to be actualized? It's like saying that cheese is milk's leap towards immortality. Someone really did say this, not a scientist, and it was witty, and that was all.

"Its Virtual field contains the possibility of crystal actualization"? Yet I and my chemistry professor uncle have a simpler explanation. Water begins to evaporate from the solution because of heat in the surrounding environment. Which one is true? The monist one or the chemistry one? Why the latter, of course. Why bother with the former, then, if all you want to do is do science and predict stuff?

And “immanent processes of organization” means that everything is made of goo. Sorry Gary. It doesn't bother OOO that Deleuze has breaks as well as flow. Glue has phases of hardness as well as phases of liquidity. Bits of lava in a lava lamp occasionally break off from other bits while they flow around. So what? We are SO NOT SAYING (to lapse into the Californian vernacular) that objects are hard and solid, and solidity is better than liquidity. We SO ARE saying that Deleuze et al. are kind of monistic materialists for whom matter is lavalampy. So far Williams has proved my point. He just doesn't like the term lavalampy. Chacun a son gout I guess.

But the bigger question is, what does the Deleuzian description add that I can't simply see with my own eyes, aided by a decent chemistry textbook?

Think about Deleuze's machines. If my finger machines are writing this sentence machine so that your eye machines can machinically read them and your brain machine can machinically think about them, creating opinion-machines of my writing-machines, then...can't I say the same thing, and more efficiently, if I eliminate the word "machine" from that sentence?

Lava lampism goes way beyond Deleuze but he does sometimes exemplify it well.

And now for the really big picture:

We don't need philosophy to ape science. Science will ALWAYS do better than philosophy on that score. It's science, after all. What we need is for philosophy to start being philosophy again.

And, for a kickoff: give us a chance mate! We've only just started.