Things are withdrawn objects. OOO is proclaiming this, NOT that we should favor solids over liquids. To accede to some nice compromise (“Things are kind of melty but also kind of solid”) is still to believe in reductionism, eliminationism and so on. Lava lamps are precisely somewhere “between” melty and solid.I believe Graham and I are definitely rooting for at least a fresh look at stasis, but because we do this, it doesn't mean that we think things “really are” static or that we prefer solids or whatever. That would be a childish misinterpretation, along the lines of “You prefer blue but I know purple is better.” Or more precisely, “I prefer electrons to be orbiting quite a lot faster than you do, and that's a good thing.” (The premise being that we are all talking about different kinds of the same thing, which isn't the case.)
Quite the contrary: it's the lava lamp argument that suffers from superficial aestheticism. An aestheticism that it denies at a more fundamental level, since what really runs the show are machine-like processes, not colors and grooviness. (This is one reason, by the way, why lava lampers can't have Buddhism to themselves.)
If you want an ontology where aesthetics really does run the show, you need OOO. And that brings me to my final point. As I'm arguing in my book on causality, it's the lava lamp school that suffers from a static notion of time as a container—the lamp in which the lava gloops, as it were. OOO sees time as a feature of the sensuality of objects themselves. If you want stasis, go with the lava lamps!
Meanwhile, this theme :Why is it that doing everything twice keeps recurring as a theme: the Recurring Around Mimesis occurs here.
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