Contemporary Philosophy

The Allure of Things
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship in all the

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Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy, Owen Hulatt
Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, Rajiv Kaushik
Between Hegel and Spinoza, edited by Hasana Sharp and Jason E. Smith
Difficult Freedom and Radical Evil in Kant, Joël Madore
Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, Devin Zane Shaw
Hegel’s Rabble, Frank Ruda
Kant: The Art of Judgment in Aesthetic Education, Pradeep Dhillon
Kant’s Concept of Genius, Paul W. Bruno
Kant on Spontaneity, Marco Sgarbi
Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation, W. Glenn Kirkconnell
Languages of Intentionality, Paul S. MacDonald
Nietzsche as a Scholar of Antiquity, edited by
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Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition, Tiziana Andina
Reconceiving Medical Ethics, edited by Christopher Cowley
Re-Thinking the Cogito, Christopher Norris
The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction, Jukka Mikkonen
The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency, Ayon Maharaj
The Science of Right in Leibniz’s Moral and Political Philosophy,
Christopher Johns
The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy, edited by
Scott M. Campbell and Paul W. Bruno
The Virtue of Feminist Rationality, Deborah K. Heikes
The Unity of Content and Form in Philosophical Writing, Jon Stewart
The Allure of Things
Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy
Edited by
Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey
Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy
LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii

Preface ix
Introduction: Thinking Things Thinking Things, or Some Themes

in Philosophy After Correlationism Andrew Goffey 1
Part 1 Crossings: Connection, Disconnection, Vibration
1 Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and “Things”:

Science and Science Studies after the Whiteheadian Turn
James J. Bono 13
2 Another Response to Shaviro Graham Harman 36
3 Touch: A Philosophic Meditation Roland Faber 47
Part 2 Things: Substances, Individuals, and Creatures
4 The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann, and the Processual

Nature of Substances Levi R. Bryant 71
5 Conatus and Concrescence: Stearns and Whitehead on
Individuation Judith Jones 92
6 Creaturely Things: Living Matter, Dead Matter, and the Resonance
of Actual Entities Beatrice Marovich 109
7 Facts as Social Things Michael Halewood 123
Part 3 Dramatizations: Situating, Abstracting, Experimenting
8 Between Realism and Antirealism: Deleuzian Metaphysics

in the Style of Whitehead Jeffrey Bell 145
9 A Situated Metaphysics: Things, History, and Pragmatic
Speculation in A. N. Whitehead Melanie Sehgal 162
vi Contents
10 Speculative Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization

Isabelle Stengers 188
11 Philosophical Experimentation Between Deleuze and

Guattari Andrew Goffey 218
References 237
Index 247
Notes on Contributors
Jeffrey Bell is professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University

in Hammond, Louisiana. He is the author and co-editor of several books and
numerous articles, including Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos and Deleuze’s Hume.
He is currently at work on a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?
and preparing for a manuscript on metaphysics in contemporary analytic and
continental philosophy.
James J. Bono is (chair, Department of History, University at Buffalo, SUNY;

School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences) past-president of the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts, founding editor of Configurations, and recipient
of numerous fellowships. He is also author of The Word of God and the Languages
of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, [vol. 2 near
completion]. Projects on metaphor, narrative, and science; on technologies of
the literal and early modern science; and on Whitehead are in progress. He has
(co-) edited a number of books, most recently, of A Time for the Humanities:
Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy (2008).
Levi R. Bryant is a professor of philosophy at Collin College outside of Dallas,

Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental
Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, The Democracy of Objects, Onto-
Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media, and is co-editor of The
Speculative Turn: Continental Realism and Materialism along with Nick Srnicek
and Graham Harman. He has written widely on speculative realism and
contemporary French thought.
Roland Faber is Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb Jr Professor of Process Studies at

Claremont School of Theology, professor of religion and philosophy at Claremont
Graduate University, USA and executive director of the Whitehead Research
Project. He is the author of God as Poet of the World and The Divine Manifold
and most recently co-edited Secretes of Becoming, Butler on Whitehead, Beyond
Superlatives, and Theopoetic Folds.
viii Notes on Contributors
Andrew Goffey is associate professor of critical theory and cultural studies at

the University of Nottingham, UK.
Graham Harman is distinguished university professor at the American

University in Cairo. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Bells and
Whistles: More Speculative Realism (2013).
Jude Jones studied Whitehead with Elizabeth Kraus as an impressionable

undergraduate, and has never recovered. With sensibilities framed fundamentally
in the process vein, he is interested in the metaphysical, ethical, and practical
life of process-relational thought. He has explored the various dimensions of
Whitehead’s notion of “intensity” that grounds the aesthetic orientation of his
axiological metaphysics. As part of a lifelong commitment to the philosophical
status of literary texts, he is currently beginning work on a manuscript on Harry
Potter and Philosophy, tapping into a process approach that is usually absent
from philosophical discussion of Rowling’s series and its impact on a generation
(or two) of readers.
Beatrice Marovich recently finished her PhD in theology and philosophy at

Drew University’s Graduate Division of Religion. She teaches in the Philosophy
and Religion Department at Montclair State University.
Melanie Sehgal is professor of Literature, Science and Media Studies at the

European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. She received her PhD
in philosophy from the Technical University of Darmstadt with a dissertation
on William James and Alfred North Whitehead (“A Situated Metaphysics.
Empiricism and Speculation in William James and Alfred North Whitehead”).
Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her

interests centered first on the adventure of modern sciences and the association
of this adventure with claims to rational authority. She is working now on the
crucial challenge, both political and cultural, of an ecology that would embed
our many diverging practices in a democratic and demanding environment.
Among her books are Order out of Chaos (with I. Prigogine), The Invention
of Modern Science, Capitalist Sorcery (with Philippe Pignarre), Cosmopolitics
(I and II) and Thinking with Whitehead.
Preface
Aiming at the exploration of the depth and relevance of current modes of

thought in light of Whitehead’s vision of a universe in which physical and
mental entanglements, the intertwining and interfering of regions, localities and
perspectives, is not the exception, but of the most fundamental character, the
Whitehead Research Project has hosted, and goes on to facilitate, a series of
conferences, one of which has laid the groundwork for the collection of articles
forming this book: The Allure of Things.
With this series of conversations, the Whitehead Research Project celebrates
the confluences, diversities, and unexpected novelties of philosophies in the
endeavor to follow Whitehead’s conviction that “the use of philosophy is to
maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system,”
and his prediction that without it society would fall into a “slow descent of
accepted thought,” thereby diminishing “towards the inactive commonplace”
(Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 174).
Whitehead’s philosophy traverses the fields of mathematics and logics,
philosophy of science and metaphysics, cultural theory and religion, physics
and aesthetics. As the influence of Whitehead’s thought can appear in surprising
places in the wide spectrum of disciplines extending from quantum mechanics
to theology and including such fields as biology, political theory, economics,
psychology, and education, so does this book on the encounter between
Whiteheadian relationalism and Object Oriented Ontology demonstrate
philosophy’s undiminished attraction of being unexhausted of its potentials. It
is hoped that the contributions of this book may, in their own way, further the
“Adventure” of thought that “belongs to the essence of civilization” (Whitehead,
Adventure of Ideas, p. 295).
Roland Faber
Founder and Executive Director of the Whitehead Research Project
Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb, Jr. Professor of Process Studies
Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Lincoln University
x
Introduction
Thinking Things Thinking Things, or Some Themes
in Philosophy After Correlationism
Andrew Goffey
The present collection of essays is the material trace of a conference held at

Claremont College in California in December 2010 under the auspices of
the Whitehead Project. The conference itself, “Metaphysics and Things. New
Forms of Speculative Thought,” brought a number of Whiteheadian, process-
oriented philosophers and scholars together with key figures in the increasingly
visible branch of speculative realist thinking known now as object-oriented
ontology. The aim of the conference was to explore some of the congruencies
and tensions between various attempts to return to speculative thought and to
reorient the concept of the thing (or object), an aim that addressed—in part at
least—the occasional sallies and maneuvers already being carried out by object-
oriented and process-oriented thinkers as a result of the growing prominence of
speculative realism.
Some of the protagonists at the event had been expecting something like the
intellectual equivalent of a bloodbath, not least because key tenets of object-
oriented ontology and process-oriented, relational ontologies stand in such
stark contrast to each other. But as it happened the event was largely cordial,
well mannered, and thought-provoking all round. The work presented in this
collection reflects well the variety that was present at the conference, and so this
collection is not just a good record of the parameters of debate at Metaphysics
and Things, but also a representative account of key issues in these different
directions in contemporary speculative thought.
Metaphysics has, in some respects, acquired new respectability in recent
years. While a good many continental philosophers might still be fighting over
the legacy of the three Hs—Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—this is far from
being always and everywhere the case. Indeed, the popularity of the work of
2 The Allure of Things
Gilles Deleuze is itself testament to a growing taste for new forms of speculative
philosophy. Deleuze’s—and to a lesser extent Badiou’s—endeavors to shake
off the excessive pathos of subject-centered philosophies (what Harman calls
“philosophies of access,” or Meillassoux’s “correlationism”), with their concerns
about the post-this, or the end of that, have perhaps been a key vector in this
development, at least with regard to philosophers of a broadly “continental”
inspiration. It is noteworthy in this regard that many of the early speculative realist
writings are marked by an engagement with and against Deleuze. Heidegger’s
strictures against metaphysics and the importance of its “overcoming” are
well known,1 but so too are various currents in analytic philosophy: Rudolf
Carnap’s notorious essay “On the elimination of metaphysics through the logical
analysis of language” (1932) is perhaps the clearest and bluntest expression of
the hopes vested in modern formal logic and the analysis that it proposed. And
while the directions that “continental” and “analytic” philosophy took across
the twentieth century might have differed quite remarkably in many respects
(and with it their respective interpretations of the tradition of thinking out of
which they emerged), both arguably remained, at least to some extent, bound by
the terms of the “critical” settlement in philosophy laid down by Kant. Claude
Imbert has argued that both the phenomenological attempt to ground formal
languages in the transcendental and the analytic project of eliminating any
kind of categorical thinking inhering in the subject-predicate syntax of natural
language (through quantification) reflect each other fatally in the mirror of the
same problem. Phenomenology, she argues, could not ground formal logic and
its claims to absoluteness without denying that absoluteness, and analysis, which
could cope with the claims of formal logic, could not join back up with “the
objectuality of the everyday without postulating it.”2 With the issue of how to
capture “experience” in all its manifold complexities being a major stake in these
movements in twentieth-century philosophy (for Husserl, it was the experience
at work within scientific rationality; for analysis, it was that articulated within
natural language), perhaps the apparently anomalous and explicitly vindicated
turn to metaphysics exemplified by the work of Alfred North Whitehead is
less odd and much more acutely diagnostic of the ills of his philosophical time
than one might have imagined. It is perhaps testament to the importance of his
displacement of the Kantian critical problematic that a number of philosophers
from the analytic tradition are developing conceptual systems that converge
with either Whitehead’s work or that of the speculative realists in unusual and
perhaps unforeseen ways. Much of the debate around analytic metaphysics
of the kinds devised by, say, David Lewis or George Wolnar, in relation to the
Introduction 3
concerns of process- and object-oriented ontologies develops in lively exchanges

across the blogosphere, a virtual space for a new kind of selection from among
rivalrous pretenders claiming to be the friend of wisdom.
The relationship between metaphysics and things that were questioned at
the conference at Claremont, and are explored in the essays in this book, is
informed by conscious awareness that both Whiteheadian process philosophy
and speculative realist, object-oriented ontology pose, in their different
ways, challenges to the critical settlement. Yet, the exploration of new forms
of speculative thought evinced here is not, or at least is not entirely, devoted
simply to sketching out a new set of philosophical positions. This is, in part,
due to the fact that there are other fields of enquiry within which the kinds of
speculative issues raised in recent philosophical metaphysics properly so-called
have also found significant purchase. This is particularly the case with science
and technology studies, for example, regardless of whether those studies are of
the Parisian, actor-network theory variety or of the more combative semiotic-
material kind for which Donna Haraway has gained many admirers. It is perhaps
not surprising in this regard that the thinking of both Bruno Latour and Haraway
has been significantly shaped by an engagement with Whitehead. But more
importantly perhaps, the study of science and technology has brought home the
great importance of a consideration of the materiality of the practices involved
in the generation and study of the processes, objects, or things of science. While
a hardened epistemologist might still seek to downplay the importance of these
webs of practice—at least in relation to scientific truth (such practices frequently
return when accounting for the illusions and opinions that humans seem so
stubbornly to stick to)—it is difficult to avoid a consideration of the complex
forms of materiality, whether thingified or processual, out of which the pristine
abstractions of epistemology emerge. In different ways, object- and process-
oriented approaches to philosophy offer more conceptually focused accounts
of precisely these forms of materiality, and in doing so, they draw our attention
to the value of the kinds of “metaphysical” engagement evinced in the study of
science and technology.
The title of this collection of essays, The Allure of Things could be understood
in a number of ways. “Thing” might be taken as a somewhat colloquial rendering
of the historically well-sedimented metaphysics of individual substances
bequeathed to Western culture for posterity by the Aristotelian tradition. In
Whitehead’s critical description of such substances as sufficient unto themselves,
it might be tempting also to find a reason to read the “thing” as the entity that
is socialized, economized, and historicized in Marx’s commodities, perhaps. As
he says, the commodity is “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical

subtleties and theological niceties” (italics added). On the basis of these readings,
“allure” would refer precisely to the ongoing attractiveness of precisely that
metaphysical abstraction within the enduring habits and customs of Western
philosophy and to the structuring illusions of a capitalist society. However,
these would be interpretations that do not have much ground in etymology,
are problematic in their readings of the philosophical tradition, and miss the
nuances of the term “thing” across the broad panoply of knowledge and other
practices. There are other readings, of course. One might insist on understanding
the “things” of the title in terms of the “Ding an sich,” the noumenon, of Kantian
philosophy—that to which access was so firmly and effectively prohibited in
the Copernican revolution. In this instance, “allure” becomes something like
the seduction to which reason succumbs, almost inevitably over-reaching itself,
taking its desires for reality, as it were, and overstepping the bounds of what
Kantian critique said we “can” know. However, this reading leads in at least
two other directions. One, parsed through the humorous subversion of Kant
practiced by Gilles Deleuze, might see the “allure of things” as something like an
affirmation of the desire to think outside of the framework of representation that
has been so important to much epistemology- or subject-centered philosophy.
Another might see the inaccessible noumenon of Kant as a prototypical
withdrawn object of the kind theorized by speculative realism. With these two
readings, we perhaps get a little closer to the concerns of this collection of essays.
We get even closer if we consider that allure is a technical term in Graham
Harman’s object-oriented ontology—a concept that, contrasted with “sincerity,”
allows him to account for the way in which objects break free of their sensual
qualities.3 Equally, shorn of the adverbial vestiges it acquired from Latin, allure
gives us “lure”—a term that Whiteheadian scholars will be familiar with, because
of the way that it helps Whitehead characterize the functioning of propositions in
Process and Reality as a “lure for feeling.” It is precisely this aspect of propositions
as a lure for feeling that is so central to the work of Isabelle Stengers, whose
presence in this collection—particularly as a reader of Whitehead—extends well
beyond the chapter she has contributed. It is in terms of this idea of the lure for
feeling that we must, Stengers argues, understand the very particular efficacy
of propositions.4 Although lure and allure take us in very different speculative
directions, these resonances bring us back to some of the central concerns of
the collection.
In often very different ways, the essays gathered in this book develop their
trajectories through a set of debates and issues opened up by both the object- and
Introduction 5
process-oriented philosophies, and they revisit and rework some fundamental

issues in the history of philosophy more generally. The organization of the book as
a whole reflects these concerns. The first section explores both the general interest
and challenge of thinking in terms of objects and processes. Reminding us of
some of the key ways in which Whitehead challenges the Aristotelian tradition,
through an exploration of his unusual conceptualization of atomicity, James
Bono opens up the difficult question of what Whitehead meant with his reversal
of the traditional metaphysical understanding of a continuity of becoming, in
thinking about time, movement, and change, into the idea of a becoming of
continuity. It is a difficult idea in Whitehead’s work and one that has perplexed
more than one commentator. However, for Bono, Whiteheadian atomicity
speaks to an understanding of things as events, to the affective involvement,
indeed the mutual immanence of these things in each other, “calling unto or
communicating with” each other. This understanding, which Bono characterizes
as “living the vibratory life,” then informs his discussion of science studies. The
link between science studies and Whitehead has already been mentioned in this
Introduction. Bono offers a more explicit account here of what it might mean to
think science studies with Whitehead, and, finishing with a brief discussion of
C. H. Waddington, the theoretical biologist, he shows us how fruitful such an
approach is in understanding issues that some forms of contemporary science,
such as genetics, with their overly Aristotelian ideas about substances and their
potentials, are unable to understand properly.
In many respects, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology formed the
starting point for the Claremont conference. Here, in his inimitable style, he
focuses on a series of key points of contrast between an ontology of objects that
in essence withdraw from all relation, and a thoroughly relational ontology of
a Whiteheadian kind. His chapter is framed as a response to the work of Steven
Shaviro, his “nemesis and tormentor,” a philosopher who has done a great deal
to explore the convergences and divergences between object and process in
contemporary philosophy, frequently in direct conversation/contestation—with
Harman. The chapter sets out a clear account of these differences and responds
directly to some of the key challenges that Shaviro addresses to speculative realist
philosophies of objects. The two issues in particular that Harman discusses
here are the object-oriented insistence on being anti-relational and its refusal
of “smallism,” the practice of reducing facts to the ontologically lowest level of
entities, the “smallest.” For Harman, the charges made against object orientation
just don’t stack up. Key to his account is the issue of the extent to which objects
can or do completely withdraw from relation, and his essay offers a nuanced
discussion of what the withdrawnness of objects might mean, in the face of an

ontology that insists that one cannot escape relationality.
Picking up on the way in which Harman alludes to, or touches on, occasion
alism in his account of vicarious causation, an idea that is essential to the
conceptual development of the object-oriented stance, Roland Faber opens up
the question of just how mutually exclusive the object- and process-oriented
positions in recent philosophy actually are. In a densely argued account, in which
he characterizes Harman’s reworking of the theory of occasional causation as a
“‘democratisation’ of its theological inaccessibility, placed into the interiority of
all real objects,” Faber argues for a resonance with Whitehead’s own theorization
of the actual occasion, seen here as a “divine release of, and dissociation from,
any occasion of becoming.” Whitehead’s atomicity, its “becoming of continuity”
(as opposed to a more traditional “continuity of becoming”) necessitating the
“irrelational” beginning of any actual occasion, suggests a much greater degree
of proximity between the object- and process-oriented positions.
The second section of the book delves into an array of conceptual problems
associated with the history of metaphysics. How, exactly, should we understand
the things of metaphysics? Levi Bryant offers us a closely argued account
in this regard, drawing—unusually—on Derrida, to develop an account of
Aristotelian substance as itself implying an object-oriented position in which
every substance necessarily withdraws both from other substances and from
itself. Derrida’s conceptualization of time in terms of différance gives Bryant the
means of developing this argument, and it also allows him to offer a theorization
of processuality from within an object-oriented position. Further distinguishing
the virtual proper being of objects and their local manifestations, Bryant then
develops a fourfold categorization of objects that develops the consequences of
his revising of what it is that makes a substance substantial. Finally, Bryant revisits
autopoiesis and systems theory (in the guise of the work of Nikolas Luhmann)
to consider the dynamic and productive nature of substances. Identity—which
has of course been an historically central aspect of the role of substance within
philosophy—is, in Bryant’s view “a perpetual work objects must do in order to
maintain themselves as that object.”
It is also to Derrida—but his much later work on the category “animal” —and
to Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant materiality, that Beatrice Marovich refers us in
her reconsideration of the limits of the “creaturely.” Given the current academic
popularity of thinking about the hazy dividing line between the human and
the animal, Marovich’s use of Whitehead here offers an account that chimes
interestingly with contemporary discussions about the “anthropocene,” in
Introduction 7
addition to proposing a constructive account of the “inhuman.” Of course, the

register of the “creature” or the “creaturely” links us directly to the theological,
a considerable element in the history of metaphysics, and Marovich’s account
takes Whitehead’s complexification of “creaturely cosmos,” as she puts it, in
directions that are perhaps not really open to deconstructive accounts of the
human/animal dyad.
Continuing the engagement with Whitehead in relation to issues arising
from traditional metaphysics, Judith Jones offers a detailed consideration of
Isabel Scribner Stearns, whose engagement with Whitehead followed on from
her having once been his student. While a discussion of the differences attendant
on the accounts of individuation offered by Stearns and Whitehead might strike
some readers (unjustly) as an obscure footnote in the history of philosophy,
it is important to recall just how significant the question of individuation has
been in more recent philosophy. Deleuze, with his interest in the work of Gilbert
Simondon, might serve as a useful point of reference in this regard, if anyone
needed persuading of the importance of a coherent account of individuation.
It is noteworthy perhaps that it is partly in terms of Stearns’s reworking of the
Spinozan term “conatus” that Jones’s argument unfolds, not least because in the
modal universe of Spinoza’s Ethics, conatus has a critical role to play in ensuring
the endurance of concrete individuals. However, Jones’s account very clearly
marks out the shifts in Stearns’s reading of the individual here and brings it into
productive contrast with Whitehead, addressing the former’s concern with what
she sees as the “episodic” nature of the becoming of individuals in the latter’s
philosophy. This is a different way into those questions about atomicity that are
explored in the first section of the book, and Jones draws out key aspects of a
Whiteheadian account of individuality here in response to Stearns, and ultimately
makes a pragmatic move to try to address the dual challenge of conatus and
concrescence.
The last contributor to the second section of the book, Michael Halewood,
demonstrates a particular sensitiveness not just to the differences between talk
of objects and talk of things, but also—following Whitehead’s central emphasis
on societies—to what he calls the “sociality of things.” Halewood addresses a
major problem in philosophical accounts of things: their oscillation between an
exploration of the abstracted general properties predicated of them and their
specific, individual particularity, their very “thingness” (or, perhaps, “thisness”).
Within the philosophical tradition, Hegel’s account of sensuous experience, in his
Phenomenology, might count as an exemplar of this problem—and his dialectics
as an exemplary solution that explains away the problem rather than tackling
it head on. For Halewood, it is by turning to sociology, a discipline that, in a

different way, addresses a similar problem, that we can explore the possibilities
of developing a positive response to the metaphysical dilemma. Taking us
through Durkheim’s account of social facts as things, and Marx’s account of
the commodity, Halewood leads us, via Whitehead, to a consideration of the
enduring presence of the theological within Western thought and proposes
to turn this presence into something of a resource for thinking, an active and
productive secularization of the functions of the theological within philosophy.
“Religiosity” here becomes a fruitful way of exploring the relations between
things.
Following on from these four provocative and imaginative reworkings of
central themes within metaphysics and its account of things, the final section of
the book offers something of a shift of focus, exploring more directly different
aspects of the activity of doing philosophy. Jeffrey Bell’s essay on Deleuze,
realism, and antirealism opens this section. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s early
account of the “method of dramatization” and the debate that followed after his
presentation of that account to the Société Française de Philosophie, Bell explores
the question of what a hyper-realist Deleuzian metaphysics might be. Such a
metaphysics, developed, as Deleuze once put it, “in the style of Whitehead,”
entails the negotiation of a difficult relationship with science—as the objections
made to Deleuze after his talk (objections that in many respects repeat those
leveled against Bergson) suggest. Bell draws on Hume here to develop his
account of what he sees as the experimental qualities of Deleuze’s monistic
ontology of events. His chapter takes us through a detailed consideration of
some contemporary analytic considerations of realism and antirealism to help
in reconsidering Meillassoux’s account of correlationism and more particularly
the place of Hume in that account. What Bell draws from contemporary analytic
concerns about realism is a way to refigure a distinction that Deleuze makes
between axiomatics and problematics in his account of minor science (In A
Thousand Plateaus), a distinction that he further uses to consider Deleuze’s
reading of Spinoza. By taking us through some of the more technical aspects of
Deleuze’s writings, in conjunction with the David Lewis’s notion of “Humean
Supervenience,” Bell offers a considered reading of aspects of the account of
philosophy in terms of drama and experiment that one can find in Deleuze, to
tell us what it might mean to do metaphysics “in the style of Whitehead.”
Melanie Sehgal’s reading of Whitehead’s conceptualization of history in
his Modes of Thought allows her to develop a detailed account of the logic of
situating metaphysics in relation to its history. Her essay should perhaps be read
Introduction 9
both with some of the early essays of Donna Haraway on “situated knowledges”
and Foucault’s accounts of the “episteme” firmly in mind. However, for Sehgal,
it is Latour with whom Whitehead should be read here, not least for his
insistence on exploring the historicity of things themselves. How, she asks, can
we draw this together with the more specific, and less metaphysical, issue of
recounting history? What Sehgal calls “situated metaphysics” “a metaphysics
that is inherently related and hopes to be relevant to its epoch” emerges out of
her account. The negotiation that Sehgal makes, using Whitehead, is between
the generic metaphysical trait of “having a history,” which is true for everything,
and the specificity of every history as a situated form of knowledge. It is the
second chapter of Modes of Thought, where Whitehead develops an account of
expression, in conjunction with a more detailed consideration of Whitehead’s
understanding of propositions, those “lures for feeling” mentioned earlier, that
provides Sehgal with the resources for negotiating this difference.
Isabelle Stengers, to whom Whitehead scholars, and a great many researchers
in the field of science and technology studies, will need no special introduction,
returns the collection, albeit indirectly, to the confrontation between object-
and process-oriented approaches to contemporary philosophy. Like Bell,
albeit in a rather different way, she too draws on Deleuze’s understanding of
“dramatization” in philosophy to help her explore the way in which creations
in philosophy operate. On this count, a philosophical creation is “the act of
giving to an imperative question the power to claim the concepts it needs in
order to obtain its most dramatic, forceful necessity, in order to force thinking
in such a way that the philosopher can no longer say ‘I think’, can no longer
be a thinking subject.” Dramatization here is always a singular process, and it
bears in particular on the relation between problems and the solutions—the
concepts—to which they give rise. For Stengers, dramatization offers a way to
approach the question of correlationism, which is central to many of the chapters
in this book. Approaching correlationism in these terms allows Stengers to
question the idea that there is any philosophical challenge that “subsists of its
own accord.” Developing in this regard the notion of “matters of concern” that
is crucial to her work and that of Latour, she contests the idea that the staging
of a problem in terms of a generic subject facing a generic object (against which
correlationism fights) is sufficient for understanding this. For Stengers, what is
crucial about the art of dramatization in philosophy is that it helps us avoid
the professionalized positing of general problems that are valid for all. Here it
is the singular production of a “rapport” which matters. Stengers leads us back
through some crucial elements of Whitehead’s philosophy and finally to some
fascinating hypotheses about what was happening in his final writings, dealing
with the issue of aim and life as a vital process. Stengers offers here a detailed
exploration of the practical art of doing philosophy viewed through the lens of
Deleuze–Whitehead.
The final contribution to the book also turns to Deleuze, and more
specifically to Deleuze’s scattered but increasingly important considerations of
experimentation in philosophy. Focusing in part on Deleuze’s encounter with
Félix Guattari and exploring the question of what the impact of Guattari’s own
innovations on his approach to philosophy as a practice might have been, my
own chapter sketches out a side of Deleuze’s work that has perhaps not been
given as much attention by commentators as it should. Experimentation, a term
Deleuze consistently contrasts with interpretation, here provides me with a
thread to draw together Deleuze’s concern with the nature of the philosophical
oeuvre, the shifts he makes in his reading of Spinoza, the encounter with
Guattari and the exorbitant style of their first collaboration, Anti-Oedipus. With
philosophy as experimentation, the construction of a plane of immanence is
about the soliciting of an experience of thought that demands an activation of
the reader and the practices of which he or she is a part.
Introductions to edited collections have inevitably to be selective and the
accounts that they propose of the work that they introduce are always somewhat
partial. We hope here that such partiality doesn’t obscure the richness of the
contributions gathered together in this book. In any event, regardless of how
one chooses to understand the allure of things that have provided the impetus
for this collection of essays, the contributions within offer a thought-provoking
exploration of the myriad directions in which philosophy that takes its bearings
from contemporary object- or process-oriented can go. All the authors are to
be thanked for their work and for their patience with the drawn-out process of
putting this collection together.
Notes
1 See, for example, his essay “Overcoming Metaphysics” in Heidegger, The End of
Philosophy.
2 Imbert, Phénoménologies et langues formulaires, p. 31.
3 See Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics for a detailed investigation of allure, especially
ch. 11.
4 An argument that she develops in the latter chapters of her work on Whitehead.
See Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead.
Part One
Crossings: Connection,
Disconnection, Vibration
12
1
Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects,

and “Things”: Science and Science Studies
after the Whiteheadian Turn
James J. Bono
In offering his philosophy of organism to us in sharp and explicit contrast with

dominant Western traditions of an ontology of discrete and self-contained
substances—what we might refer to colloquially as “things”—Alfred North
Whitehead attends to the concreteness of experience itself as disclosing a world
of process: a world of “inter-relat[ion],” of connectedness, of spatial and temporal
extensiveness. This is the familiar Whiteheadian world of “actual occasions”1: of
actual entities as events exhibiting an incessant “buzzing” of active processes
of gathering together or—in the words of the Whiteheadian developmental
biologist C. H. Waddington—the “tying together of universal references into
knots with individual character.”2
Whitehead proposes his actual occasions as solutions to the paralyzing
limitations presented by traditional accounts of a “real particular thing in
the physical world.”3 Indeed, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism beckons
us to reimagine “things” as simultaneously diffuse—imbricated in/with
other things—yet folding back upon themselves; and as complex layerings of
emergent webs of experience. As a diagnostician and speculative cosmologist,
Whitehead takes traditional ontology—that is to say, the account of things
found in Aristotle—as both originative and symptomatic of the problem,
where the “answer” concerning the stuff of the universe “is expressed in
terms of a set of . . . abstract characteristics . . . united into an individualized
togetherness which is the real thing in question.”4 Whitehead’s discussion
of this foundational idea captures the tenor of his critique of the notions of
substance and of “things”:
This answer is beautifully simple. But it entirely leaves out of account the
interconnections between real things. Each substantial thing is thus conceived
as complete in itself, without reference to any other substantial thing. Such an
account of the ultimate atoms, or the ultimate monads, or the ultimate subjects
enjoying experience, renders an interconnected world of real individuals
unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected
substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of
abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial
individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing.5
It is this calling of the multiplicity of things unto one another that Whitehead
seeks to place at the center of his ontology. The “atoms,” the “monads” that congeal
as concrescences in his account of the world, are never windowless: instead,
they arise as dynamic events in a process of taking account of and drawing
selectively “from relevant objects.” In so doing, an actual entity expresses “at the
decisive moment” that “stands between its birth and its perishing” a “unity” in
which it “stands alone as for itself.” A moment and an “atomic” unity that an
emergent actual occasion in the mutuality of its calling unto or communicating
with other objects strives for “in its immediacy of self-attainment” achieved
“with its own affective self-enjoyment.”6 It is of precisely such a moment—the
achievement of an atomistic actual occasion—that Whitehead declares the
“creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a
new transcendent fact.”7
The creativity of the “buzzing” world of concrete experience here contrasts
with the stasis of a world populated by mere Aristotelian substances, those
“private bundle[s] of abstract characters” Whitehead finds so wanting. As he
declares near the end of Process and Reality,
There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality
is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing
which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All
origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publically pervades
the world.8
In contrast to an Aristotelian “continuity of becoming,” Whitehead as an “anti-

philosopher”9 avant la lettre decisively turns his back on such magisterial
assertions of confidence in the predictable unfolding of an orderly universe,
insisting instead on the concrete and unpredictable emergence of the new as
Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and “Things” 15
an occasion of experience: what he presciently, even provocatively, terms the

“becoming of continuity.”10 Whitehead’s “becoming of continuity,” I would
suggest, is the result of rethinking “things” as events, and events as arising from
what we might call poiesis: that is, as flowing from subjective gathering together
of the “data” of the world through the soon-to-be actual occasion’s affective
“interest” in the world. This poiesis/affective interest is also one key to Whitehead’s
rethinking of “purpose” in a way that avoids the charge of a preprogrammed and
deterministic end, or telos.
Before turning to this issue and its strong connection with the sometimes
puzzling notion of the atomicity of actual occasions, it will prove important
to propose a second way of approaching “things” in thinking about the
usefulness of Whitehead’s philosophy to contemporary critical discourses.
More specifically, I would like to resurrect an argument for a Whiteheadian
turn in science studies, a subject that I first approached in an article published
in the special issue of Configurations devoted to Whitehead.11 On the one hand,
science, and science studies, have in their own way, been obsessed with “things”:
with establishing “matters of fact”; with the representation of phenomena in
the world as resulting from the orderly operations of discrete and distinct
things in space; with the “truth” of things rather than the “interest” and
affective creativity indissociable from concrete experience itself.12 Rethinking
science studies from the perspective of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism
therefore entails rethinking and redescribing the role of “things” in science
and especially in the making of science through the scientist’s engagements
with nature.13
On the other hand, science studies has for some time now marked its territory
through the turn to practice. With this turn, the tropes informing stories told
about science also changed: from that of intellectual mastery of the underlying
structures and laws shaping and ordering matter—to which Whitehead’s
contestation of the “bifurcation of nature” serves as a corrective—to that of
hands-on engagement with the contingencies of experimental protocols and
material practices. Yet, despite such changes, one dimension of the Western
adventure of exploring nature has remained stubbornly resistant to change:
namely, the assumption that hidden within nature and waiting to be revealed by
science is what Isabelle Stengers has called a “universal neutral key.”14 The belief
that universalizing order and coherence are originative and persistent features of
the regime of “things” that we call Nature remains deeply ingrained in Western
thought, sustained by an old Christian trope, that of the Book of Nature. Whether
we read nature as a text shaped by eternal, divine ideas that can and must be
grasped through the sheer power of intellect—of ideas—or, alternatively, as a

book shaped by the Hand of God (often secularized in the twentieth century and
stripped of its explicit theistic genealogy) and filled with material things to be
labored over, manipulated, and forced to reveal their innermost secrets, in the
end our goal has typically been the same: to find that one key, that one code or
cypher, that makes all order transparent to human agency.
The turn to practice—to the sheer messiness and multiplicity of things—in
science studies is itself an important move, a game-changer. Yet, the lure of
universalizing order, of a unity that belies multiplicity and effaces all trace of
experience in the drive toward abstraction with its apotheosis of abstract order
as the ultimate, stable reality beyond experience of the flux and flow of things,
can prove an occupational hazard for science studies (and not just scientists).
What’s needed to complete the turn toward practice—to cast one’s eyes
unwaveringly on the flow and flux of experience in order to avoid being seduced
by the lure of the static and abstract—is a good dose of those Jamesian “drops
of experience” that imbricate us in our messy and entangled world. These drops
of experience are, of course, Whitehead’s “complex and interdependent” actual
occasions, understanding of which proves so central to his characterization of
science as an aesthetic achievement. Engagement with Whitehead—thinking
with Whitehead—should enable science studies to better understand and draw
out the implications of the recalibration of things as “agencies” and “actants”
that science as practice—or, “science in the making”—has installed as of major
significance to science studies. To take such notions seriously is to ask what
things are, how they exhibit agency, and what their relationship is to the flux
and flow of experience. Two strategies that continually tempt us evoke either the
way in which things are subsumed into a holistic unity of harmonizing forces,
or, quite oppositely, the way in which things can be deconstructed—analyzed—
into the reductive bits and pieces that “really” constitute them as things and
agents.15 By contrast, thinking things with Whitehead means to think things as
societies. Such a rethinking and redescribing of things as societies—and thus
of the holistic-reductionist binary as well as the scientist’s engagements with
nature—ought to prove noteworthy achievements of a Whiteheadian turn in
science studies.
In what follows, I shall turn first to Whitehead’s notion of “things as events,”
and thus to actual occasions as arising from affective interest in the world. As
already suggested, this account of the ontology of the world bears implications
not only for questions of atomicity and purpose, but also for rethinking
traditional understandings of “things” that have their historical roots in
Aristotelian notions of discrete substances. In the last part of this discussion,

I will return to exploring and revisiting the role of “things” in science and
science studies.
“Things” as events
Tellingly, for Whitehead, actual occasions as atomic are never anything less
than events: as such, far from being isolated bits of a fragmented world, they are
extensive, connected, and creative “knots” fashioned out of the emergent actual
occasion’s situated and subjective gathering together of its experience.16 While
this somewhat hermetic description serves to suggest the utter difference of the
Whiteheadian atomic occasion from the classical atom,17 it barely glimpses the
distinctiveness of atomicity and its significance in Whitehead’s philosophy of
organism. Why does Whitehead insist on atomicity? What work does atomicity
do in exposing the poverty of traditional Western substance ontology while
recuperating the richness and concreteness of experience as process? In following
ever so briefly the threads of atomicity in Whitehead’s disentanglement of
experience, I hope to suggest their connection to his reworking of traditional
notions of potentiality, actuality, and the real and to his rethinking of life and
purpose. These connections may, in turn, help us think about Whitehead in
relation to figures like Deleuze.
From the perspective enunciated earlier—that of the “becoming of continuity”
and thus of “things” as events caught up and gathered together through affective
interest in the world—I would like to gesture toward a set of arguments linking
atomicity, the virtual, life, and organism. To begin, Whitehead’s atoms—the very
notion of atomicity—is an attempt to rework the classical potentiality/actuality
distinction in an effort to move decisively away from traditional Aristotelian
meanings. That is to say, that which comes to be actualized is not, for Whitehead,
contained in and determined by a potentiality inherent in and essential to
a substance—or natural kind—considered as the immediate antecedent of
that which comes to be actualized. To put the matter differently, the reading
of Aristotle’s form that likens it to a program—even, indeed to a precursor of
the notion of a genetic program—suggests that the potentiality implicit in the
form of a substance that later comes to be actualized determines the outcome.
All becoming is then nothing but the mere unfolding of that which is already
present in the antecedent state of a substance.18 This is the continuity of becoming
that Whitehead denies. For Whitehead, a given actuality—namely, his actual
occasion—does not determine subsequent states of matter, or subsequent events.

Instead, there is a different relationship between the possible and the actual. As
he writes, “The potential scheme does not determine its own atomization by
actual entities. It is divisible; but its real division by actual entities depends upon
more particular characteristics of the actual entities constituting the antecedent
environment.”19
Thus, rather than linking “potentiality” to a substance ontology that regards
actualization as the inevitable expression of an entity’s innermost “essence,” for
Whitehead, “potentiality” is not a property of actual entities, but rather of what
he calls the “extensive continuum”: “This continuum,” he states, “is in itself
merely the potentiality for division.” What is more, according to Whitehead
it is always the case that an “actual entity effects this division.”20 That is to say,
the concreteness of an actual entity derives from the selective experience in
which it comes to be: an experience constituted by the subjective prehensions
of the innumerable potentialities present in the extensive continuum. “With
the becoming of any actual entity,” Whitehead suggests, “what was previously
potential in the space-time continuum is now the primary real phase in
something actual. For each process of concrescence a regional standpoint
in the world, defining a limited potentiality for objectifications, has been
adopted.”21 This relationship between the real, the potential, and the actual
allows Whitehead to argue vigorously that there is therefore nothing in the
“potential” that determines—let alone actualizes—entities in the world, that
is, his actual occasions. He can then conclude that “In the mere extensive
continuum there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall
be atomized, so as to form the real perspective standpoint for the primary
data constituting the basic phase in the concrescence of an actual entity.”
Instead, “The factors in the actual world whereby this determination is
effected . . . constitute the initial phase of the ‘subjective aim’.”22 To translate
this point into perhaps more familiar Deleuzian terms, the virtual does not,
cannot, determine the actual, but instead the actual in relation to the virtual
ascribes a vectorial dimension to temporality that opens onto potentialities for
change, for the new.23
Thus, the extensive continuum, though real, may be considered to be more like
a matrix of potentialities out of which actual occasions become actual through
a process of selective, or subjective, prehension. One should also note that for
Whitehead the extensive continuum as a matrix is in some sense continually
reconstituted by the history of actual entities emerging from the continuum,
altering the potentialities—the matrix of potential relations—for newly emerging

actual occasions.
Here, there is another argument that in my view stands behind, so to speak,
Whitehead’s insistence on the atomicity of actual occasions. In addition to his
critique of traditional notions of potentiality and actuality, another reason for
Whitehead’s talk of the atomicity of actual occasions is precisely to avoid the
“vitalist” trap of claiming that such features of life as wholeness, systematicity,
and “organicism” depend upon an essentialist notion of a perduring “principle”
that guides the becoming of an entity and ensures its “teleological” properties.
Whitehead, instead, wants to insist that all relations—including all “unity” and
“coherence” founded on such relations—are the result of subjective prehensions
of experience (his “drops of experience,” following James).24 That is to say,
“purpose” and “ends” are not programmed, but rather are the creative product
of contingent, though vectorial, responses of emergent actual occasions to
their temporal and spatial environments, including those “societies” to which
they and their predecessors belong. Thus, characteristics we associate with Life
are immanent aspects of a process: that of the active making and remaking
of actual entities (including the history of prehensions and actual occasions)
as they emerge, through concrescence, from the continuum. No perduring
principle, no eternal essence or unchanging substance exists, for Whitehead.
Instead, we have actual occasions as atomizations of the extensive continuum
coming-into-being and perishing. That is, we have a continual flow of
occasions—Whitehead’s “becoming of continuity”—that captures his explicit
translation of Heraclitus’s saying, “All things flow,” into the language of the
philosophy of organism: “All things are vectors.”25 Here it is worth repeating
Whitehead’s view that:
Extension is the most general scheme of real potentiality, providing the back
ground for all other organic relations. The potential scheme does not determine
its own atomization by actual entities. It is divisible: but its real division by actual
entities depends upon more particular characteristics of the actual entities
constituting the antecedent environment.26
In sum, then, the atomicity of actual occasions in Whitehead’s philosophy

of organism serves to undermine the foundational notion, in traditional
metaphysics, of a private, substantial thing that is complete in itself and therefore,
in a crucial sense, “inert.” Instead, Whitehead’s is an alternative cosmology: a
“buzzing world” of active processes in which actual entities call unto each other
and gather themselves together in the unity of an emergent actual entity. This
Whiteheadian world is a world pulsing with creativity: a “pluralistic universe in
which ‘change’ means the diversities among the actual occasions which belong
to some one society of a definite type.”27 Here the reference to “societies” and the
linking of change to the pluralism—indeed, the multiplicity—of such “societies”
constituted by actual occasions provides a key to understanding Whitehead
and the contrast between his cosmology and traditional metaphysics such as
those readings of Aristotle’s “forms” as “programs” noted earlier. A universe in
which all becoming is a mere unfolding of that which is already present in the
antecedent state of a substance, is a “monistic universe” that harbors no more than
the “illusion of change”28: a world of abstraction that fails to attend to, let alone
account for, the concreteness of experience and the “creativity of the world.”
Whitehead’s pluralistic universe—a cosmology marked by the multiplicity of
actual occasions, societies, and organisms—harbors no such static, inert, and
disconnected substances: no forms understood as deterministic programs, as
infinitely replicable and virtually unchanging patterns.
In contrast, then, to the abstract language of substances, forms, and perduring,
prescripted and prescriptive, programs—or replicable “patterns”—we find in
Whitehead’s works the basis for an alternative account of organisms and of life
linked to his analysis of concrete experience. At the center of that account is his
notion of a “society” and its relationship to actual occasions. For Whitehead, life
is not equated with an actual occasion: instead, he states, “no single occasion can
be called living. Life is the coordination of mental spontaneities throughout the
occasions of a society.”29 What does Whitehead mean, and how does his view of
actual occasions, societies, life, and feelings as vectors involve consideration of
rhythm and vibration? In his Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead tells us that “The very
essence of life . . . is conformation of purpose.”30 What does the “conformation” he
refers to in this pithy passage entail? It is, first of all, a conformation that occurs
between and among actual entities. Yet, conformation of purpose only occurs
in so far as those entities themselves come to constitute a “society” that is itself
marked by its continual remaking. Thus, conformation occurs in the context
of a continual remaking and reemergence of a living thing as a temporal entity
bearing the traces of its own past—its history, so to speak—in what Whitehead,
as we’ve seen, calls the “becoming of continuity.” Yet, such continuity is never at
the expense of a mere unfolding, a predictive and predictable state of organic
wholeness. Quite to the contrary, Whitehead’s account of life, of purpose, and of
the conformation of actual entities in the making of societies and of organisms
as societies never departs from the concrete experience of the world as itself
creative. The reason for this fact, of course, is the very nature of actual occasions
as atomistic unities constituted by the subjective aims that gather together
prehensions of the world into fundamentally new occasions, or events: the
“creativity of the world” that is a manifestation of the “throbbing emotion of the
past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact.”31
Notice, here, the juxtaposition of the “becoming of continuity” with the
gathering of the past “into a new transcendent fact”: rather than incompatible
notions, Whitehead finds in them a tension that is creative, and perhaps, even,
the mark of the world’s creativity. In fact, for him, the simultaneity of and relation
“between inheritance and novel effect” remains a concrete and fundamental
feature of experience.32
Whitehead’s account of “Life,” which, as we’ve seen, requires “conformation
of purpose,” hinges on his analysis of the way “inheritance and novel effect”
themselves involve vibration and rhythm.
As he tells us in Process and Reality, “vibration and rhythm have a dominating
importance in the physical world.”33 Alluding to earlier passages in the same text
where he extends his critique of traditional scientific materialism by reframing
the notion of the atom in physics, he argues that “the atom is only explicable as
a society with activities involving rhythms with their definite periods.” He then
immediately goes on to speak of the “mysterious quanta of energy”34 associating
them with the “periodic rhythms which we detect in the molecules.” Moreover,
these “quanta are . . . in their own nature, somehow vibratory.”35 Significantly,
these musings about rhythms, vibrations, and the physical world lead directly to
his criticism of Aristotelian notions of “an enduring substance” on the same and
subsequent pages.
Returning again much later in Process and Reality to life, inheritance, and
novel effect, Whitehead revisits the “dominating importance in the physical
world” of vibration and rhythm in order to provide his own account of
“enduring objects.” Enduring objects, for Whitehead, are societies composed,
of course, of actual occasions: a cell, for instance. These actual occasions—in
their atomicity as events—continually become the “data,” the “objects,” for
new occasions: indeed, for “successive occasions.” Thus, in the making and
remaking of successive actual occasions, the enduring objects—again, think
of the biological cell—are themselves continually remade: enduring objects
become, if you will, the “superjects” of inheritance of generations of actual
occasions.36 As Whitehead declares: “Along the route of the life-history there
is a chain of contrasts in the physical feelings of the successive occasions.
This chain is inherited as a vivid contrast of physical feelings.”37 Rather than
unpacking this dense formulation in its entirety here, I will note, instead, a
number of key points:
1. In the continual remaking of atomistic units of experience—the actual

occasions—the “succession” (a term I use guardedly) from one to another
involves both inheritance of “its” past—the past as (in part) “physical
feeling” bearing the trace of its own history, and its own temporality—and
the effects of prehensions of both the compatibilities and the contrasts
of those actual occasions that (having now become “data” and “objects”
for others) make up the immediate environment of the “original” actual
occasion: namely, those occasions that, together, also constitute the
enduring object with which it associates.
2. For Whitehead, it is the “contrasts” that exist in the relations between an
actual occasion and its neighbors that become occasions of novelty
(E.g., see “conceptual contrast of physical incompatibles”38).
3. The novelty so generated is the novelty of “appetition,” that is, of subjective
aim or feeling, which leads the emergent actual occasion(s) to prehend and
creatively allows the new to congeal in the concrescence of its newly made
atomistic unity.39
4. Such contrasts lead to intensity of feeling that, in turn, underwrites the
trajectory of an enduring object toward greater complexity: a complexity
born of the conformation of “purposes” among the variety of actual entities
that comprise a society, again, such as a cell.40
5. The route described by the “life history” of actual occasions within a society
serves either to enhance the specialization and coordination of an enduring
object through the cumulative effects of such contrasts and intensifications;
or, to provoke its decay and dissolution in cases where incompatibilities
among actual occasions prove greater than mere contrasts.
6. The process—one Whitehead associates with the term, “reversion”—
through which contrasts lead to creative novelty, complexity, and
conformation of purpose—in short, to “novel effects”—is one that links,
connects, and positively associates together the myriad actual occasions
comprising an enduring object through the dynamism of the physical
vibrations and rhythms that flow through and gather together the diverse,
contrastive actual occasions into a unity of purpose.41
As Whitehead himself asserts:
Thus an enduring object gains the enhanced intensity of feeling arising from
contrast between inheritance and novel effect, and also gains the enhanced
intensity arising from the combined inheritance of its stable rhythmic character
throughout its life history. It has the weight of repetition, the intensity of
contrast, and the balance between the two factors of the contrast. In this way the
association of endurance with rhythm and physical vibration are to be explained.
They arise out of the conditions for intensity and stability.42
These are the very conditions and the processes that underwrite “conformation
of purpose” and thus what Whitehead calls “life.”43
So, what, in sum, does this mean for a Whiteheadian redescription of “things”
as features within and of the world of concrete experience? However we parse
the world in our day-to-day efforts to negotiate in practice (or even to “master”)
our world—and it must be said that our use of the colloquial language of “things”
is nothing if not a rough and ready tool for such parsing of the world, whether in
“common-sense” or “scientific” modalities of knowing contested by Whitehead’s
protest against the “bifurcation of nature”—“things” for the Whiteheadian must
always remain extensive. “Things” are thus imbricated within an extensive
network of occasions calling unto each other in the very constitution of enduring
objects as structured societies. Things, so to speak, live the vibratory life.44 Never
simply “private bundles of abstract characters”—or, abstract entities abstracted
from experience and thus (fallaciously) assumed to be simply the conventionally
familiar concrete furniture of the world—“things” are never truly isolated.
Rather, they always remain rhythmically entangled in a world of flux and flows,
in the buzzing world of actual occasions and enduring objects.
“Things,” science, and science studies
I begin this final section of my chapter with a quotation from Robert Cooper’s
essay, “Assemblage Notes”45:
We are not good at thinking movement. Our institutional skills favour the fixed
and static, the separate and self-contained. Taxonomies, hierarchies, systems and
structure represent the instinctive vocabulary of institutionalised thought in its
subordinating of movement and transformation. The philosopher Whitehead
(1925) called this the principle of simple location in which clear-cut, definite things
occupy clear-cut, definite places in space and time. There is movement—of a kind:
the simple movement of definite things from one definite place to another. But it’s
a form of movement which denies the restlessness of transformation, deformation
and reformation. Simple location reconstituted a world of finished subjects and
objects from the flux and flow of unfinished, heteromorphic “organisms.”
Cooper evokes a number of themes that intersect with my own desire to think
science studies with Whitehead. More immediately, however, a confession
is in order. For my encounter with Cooper’s testimony to Whitehead’s
contemporary significance did not come from reading his essay directly.
Instead, it came through an intermediary: a recent book with the mischievous
title, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research.46 The quotation appears as
an epigraph to Chapter 6; as far as I can tell, this happenstance represents the
only citation of Whitehead and his thought in the entire book. Why bother
to note this curious bit of academic trivia? Chiefly, because of its author: a
one-time colleague of Cooper’s, John Law. Law is one of science studies’ most
theoretically astute and pluralistic thinkers. After Method, as so much else of
Law’s work, evinces a deep-rooted concern for process and transformation
over fixed structures and stable entities. Yet, despite the lure of Whitehead’s
own concepts bobbing enticingly before him in the pages of his own book or in
an office just down the hallowed halls of academia from his own, Law manages
to ignore perhaps the single most important thinker of process, multiplicity,
and the entangled world of flux and flows. His former colleague Cooper’s own
work on organizational theory recurs over and over to Whitehead, whom he
reads and uses in tandem with other theorists from Heidegger to Derrida, and
from Foucault to Deleuze.47
The revival of Whitehead’s thought outside of a select group of long-time
followers is much overdue in a field such as science studies, where, happily, we
now have the inspiring work of Isabelle Stengers, championed by no less a figure
than Bruno Latour.48 Having returned to Whitehead myself after many years, I
find myself continually struck by his relevance to and anticipation of so many
important questions that we have come to formulate and perspectives we have
only begun to sketch out.
Why, then, think science studies with Whitehead? Certainly not to debunk
science. Rather, I would argue that we should think with him in order—in
good Whiteheadian fashion—to understand science as a kind of poiesis, as
itself a consequence of our “taking account of ” the world we experience: that
is, to understand science as an activity of taking that always entails making.49
For, as Whitehead reminds us, science could not be other than an aesthetic
accomplishment. Rooted in adventures of ideas, nurtured by poetic processes,
science is an aesthetic achievement wrested from the rich, messy, thickly
entangled world of experience.50
What advantages, then, does thinking science studies with Whitehead afford
us?51 The answer—and it is not a simple one—has to do with holding onto
both the poetic—the active and positively constructive—activity that we call

science, and the messy and entangled world from which “drops of experience,”
the passionate engagement of the scientist wrests its achievement.52 Whitehead’s
formidably idiosyncratic vocabulary serves to lure our focused attention back
to that entangled world, an immanent world pulsing with dynamic relations,
constantly being made and remade, a world of process rather than of static,
isolatable objects and settled order. Not that science does not legitimately
seek order and coherence. It does. Yet, like Sir Francis Bacon who, in the
seventeenth century, railed against the over-hasty generalizations of scholastic
natural philosophers (emanating from what he saw as the fallen intellect’s all
too evident inclination toward abstractions that constantly threatened to raise
false mirrors to nature),53 Whitehead’s attention to the immanent and tangled
world of experience, his inclination toward a radical empiricism, bracingly
thrusts cold water onto the face of just those claims to order and coherence.
Such claims fail to see their own limits, fail to see abstractions for what they
are—tools, necessary and powerful tools, tools without which science, indeed
thinking itself, is not possible. As tools, abstractions have their work to do, as
what Whitehead poetically and profoundly calls “lures for feeling” that draw us
into creative and understanding-making relations with the concrete world of
experience. Failure to see them as such, and as no more, can lead, Bacon-like,
to mistaking abstractions for the entangled web of experience, to Whitehead’s
famous fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Here, Whitehead might well prompt
us to endorse the prescription proffered by Gilles Deleuze: “Think with AND
instead of IS, instead of thinking for IS: empiricism never had another secret.”54
A secret whose telling perhaps reminds us, as does Whitehead, that “there is no
parting from your own shadow.”55
Whitehead’s ontology provides grounds for understanding the power and
value of science studies’ turn to the material-semiotic practices of science,
practices that do aim to construct—poetically, I would also add—order and
coherence, and thus to capture the work and agency of objects: of actants in
the world.56 His ontology also gives us grounds to think through the difficulties
and traps opened up by just such a desire for order and coherence. For the will
to order, and with it, the desire for the clarity and transparency of abstractions
wrested from the entangled web of experience, captured in concepts, theories,
and laws has a long history. It is, moreover, a history written in the shadow of
“disorder,” as Michel de Certeau has shrewdly noted.57 Bacon and his followers
in the seventeenth century exemplify both awareness of the lure of such a will to
order as a positive inducement to wonder, adventure, and knowledge, and as a
yawning trap set to capture the unwary. He, and they, also testify to the difficulty,
perhaps even impossibility, of fully escaping such a trap.58
Other stories present themselves. Darwin’s achievement, for example, was to
bring new order to the world of organic forms, while nonetheless insisting that
we turn our gaze, however fleetingly and forgetfully, upon the profusion—the
bewildering variety—of living things. Nature, for Darwin, is figured less as a
Great Chain of Being (most assuredly not the relentlessly hierarchical, fixed, and
linear chain of earlier Christian cosmology), than, famously, as an “entangled
bank.” If Darwin’s discovery was of a temporal and contingent world in which
material life-forms were “out of sequence” with respect to a now “broken”—or,
at the very least, disarticulated—chain of being, his invention was, powerfully,
to redescribe the order of nature as the agonistic and messy product of “natural
selection.” No longer figured as an epic quest to return to the unity of the
(Neoplatonic or divine Christian) One, the dynamism of living things described
instead “nature red in tooth and claw”: a domestic tragicomedy ultimately
revealing the immanent laws of organic evolution.
In another context, it would be tempting to ruminate, if you will, upon the
prehistory of attempts to fashion order in the shadow of disorder as a necessary
context for appreciating Darwin’s turn to a nature uncompromising, at once,
in its immanence and its sheer multiplicity. Where does such a turn—however
incomplete and haunted by the powerful desire for clarity and transparency—
to an ontology stressing immanent processes and multiplicity over unity come
from? Here we would look to the emergence in early modern Europe of a new
experience of spatiality as multiple and fragmented and as requiring a toolkit
of techniques to tame—to bring order to—the multiplicity of objects found
in the proliferating microcosms uncovered by the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The work of mapping such new spaces, of making inventories of
their contents, arraying and categorizing them, and of displaying their hidden
orders engaged early modern students of such microcosmic spaces as the body,
the celestial spheres, plants and animals, chemical and physical mechanisms,
and the earth itself. Embracing, on the one hand, the sheer variety and richness
of natural spaces and the things they contain, the desire to reinscribe a unitary
order gave rise to various efforts to uncover the immanent principles and laws
governing each distinct domain. While such efforts enshrined multiplicity,
particularity, and immanent processes, they also recuperated the enduring
notion of a single and unitary Book of Nature whose divine author ensures
that, with hard work and perseverance, the light of order will dispel the shadow
of disorder.59
With Darwin this familiar story reaches its climax. Evolutionary theory
rewrites Nature as a Book in which its author’s hand acts, at best, at a distance,
delegating to the immanent processes of nature the power of making and
multiplying new forms: the origin of the species. While bringing a kind of order
to the opaque messiness of nature—consequently transforming seemingly
aberrant difference from monstrous joke of nature to (arguably) productive
mutation, the very engine of change—Darwin does so at a considerable price.
By tipping the balance toward immanent processes, temporality, multiplicity,
and becoming, Darwin authorizes a search for order that forever parts company
with traditional renditions of the Book of Nature: a search for order that can
never escape the shadow of disorder. In good Whiteheadian fashion, the “unity
of the universe requires its multiplicity”: understanding nature, listening to it in
its multiplicity, means that “there is no parting from your own shadow.”60
Finally, let us return to Whitehead, “objects,” and science studies. The lessons
Whitehead takes from Darwin apply, of course, to “things” generally: they are
not restricted to any special case of what we traditionally term biological entities.
Science, it may be said, exhibits modalities of knowing nature through attentive
focus61 on objects and events in nature that frequently entail their isolation from
other things and events. Such acts of knowing involve as well our “forgetting” of
such abstractions.62 Science studies must somehow learn both to attend to such
objects—to such “things”—and to remember how they are, at root, abstractions
and “compressions” standing in for enduring objects: that is, for objects that take
account of and call unto other objects/actual entities.63
This last statement, as a form of conclusion, remains incomplete. It calls out
for examples: for exemplifications of “things” in science as abstractions and
compressions and for examples of how, alternatively, science studies might
rethink things as simultaneously useful abstractions and as societies continually
made and remade through concrete vectorial webs of experience in which things
communicate with other things. Such example could be given: in fact, they
are abundant. Among numerous cases of scientific work in which thinking of
“things” as interconnected and calling unto other things has proven productive,
let me gesture very briefly in conclusion to one example: the Whiteheadian
theoretical and developmental biologist, C. H. Waddington.
C. H. Waddington (1905–75) was a renowned developmental biologist who
resisted the rising tide of genetic thinking in the mid-twentieth century that saw
in the gene the promise of a singular, discrete, and independent object whose
action in the cell and organism orchestrated the development of the embryo.
An unrepentant epigeneticist, Waddington borrowed the term “canalization”
from his undergraduate hero, Whitehead, as a significant basis for his own
theoretical modeling of biological development as arising out of “complex
epigenetic interactions and transformations of matter that are not contained
in, prescribed by, or in any sense preprogrammed and thus exhaustively
determined by the genetic material.”64 More specifically, as Evelyn Fox-Keller
explains,
An explanation of “developmental canalization,” he wrote, requires supplement

ing conventional gene theory with an “epigenetic theory”—one in which discrete
and separate entities of classical genetics would be displaced by collections of
genes which could “lock in” development through their interactions. In other
words, an account of developmental stability needs to be sought in the complex
system of reactions that make up the developmental process.65
For Waddington, these “complex systems of reactions” were the result of what we
might call systems of relations that transform the very notion of the gene—and the
model of gene action—from a discrete object directing developmental pathways
to a nexus of relations. In effect, the gene for Waddington becomes a complex
society that both interacts with and is part of other complex societies (the cell;
tissues; organs and organ systems; the organism; the organism’s environment) in
constant communication and dynamic interaction with each other. Canalization
occurs precisely as a result of such communication and interaction—as a result
of the contextual situation of genes within a conformal environment—that
leads to favoring specific pathways that are neither prescribed in advance nor
in any manner predictable, but which, once selected tend to become routinized.
Clearly, the gene as abstraction has had an important shelf-life among scientists,
constituting a useful conceptual tool for selective interrogation of the material
flows and interactions of cells on a molecular level. As abstraction, that is, the
idea and the articulated model of the gene carries with it certain affordances
for constructing both the tools for interrogating gene action and biological
development, and biological knowledge itself. Yet, those very affordances can
prove—and in the course of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries
have proven—limiting. At such junctures, then, remembering the gene as
“thing,” as a Whiteheadian society within other societies—as C. H. Waddington
clearly did in the decades after the war—affords both scientist and science
studies scholar opportunities to construct different knowledges and narratives.66
Pondering—and rigorously analyzing—such examples can, I believe, prove the
worth of a Whiteheadian turn in science studies and of a Whiteheadian account
of “things.”
Notes
1 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 18 and passim.

2 Waddington, “The Practical Consequences,” p. 4. For a discussion of Waddington
in the broad context of developmental biology, see Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and
Fields.
3 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 132.
4 Ibid., p. 132.
5 Ibid., pp. 132–3.
6 Ibid., p. 177.
7 Ibid.
8 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 310.
9 I borrow the term, “antiphilosopher,” from Bosteels, “Borges as Antiphilosopher.”
See also, Bosteels, After Borges.
11 Bono, “A Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies.”
12 On facts, matters of fact, and the representation of things, see, for example, Shapin
and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Shapiro, A Culture of Fact; Daston,
Biographies of Scientific Objects; idem, Things that Talk; Daston and Galison,
Objectivity; and Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Whitehead,
of course, famously remarked that “It is more important that a proposition be
interesting than that it is true,” Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas, p. 244.
13 See Bono, “Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies.” For such rethinking of
the making of science, see especially the work of Stengers, Cosmopolitics I,
Cosmopolitics II, and “A Cosmopolitical Proposal.” See also, Stengers, Thinking
with Whitehead.
14 Stengers, “A Cosmopolitical Proposal,” p. 995.
15 For important discussions of many of the problems and conundrums faced by
science and science studies noted in this paragraph, see especially Stengers,
Cosmopolitics.
16 Note the following characterization of the atomic that extends to an
understanding of its place in societies, and therefore creatures: “Thus the ultimate
metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic . . . extensive continuity
is a special condition arising from the society of creatures which constitute our
immediate epoch. But atomism does not exclude complexity, and universal
relativity. Each atom is a system of all things. . . . The proper balance between
atomism and continuity is of importance to physical science.” Whitehead, Process
and Reality, pp. 35–6. At this juncture, it is worth noting not only that Whitehead’s
view avoids charges of either holism or reductionism, but that his philosophy of
organism also insists upon the simultaneous operation of actual occasions that
are complete and contained in themselves, while also imbricated in an extensive

continuum and extensive relations from which they have emerged and for which
they now serve as “data.” Despite Graham Harman’s assertions to the contrary,
such interactions do not entail or require “holism.” I find myself sympathizing,
instead, with Jane Bennett against what strikes both Bennett and me as Harman’s
unnecessary distinctions. As Bennett suggests, “perhaps there is no need to
choose between objects or their relations. Since everyday, earthly experience
routinely identifies some effects as coming from individual objects and some
from larger systems . . . why not aim for a theory that toggles between both kinds
or magnitudes of ‘unit’? One would then understand ‘objects’ to be those swirls
of matter, energy, and incipience that hold themselves together long enough to
vie with the strivings of other objects, including the indeterminate momentum
of the throbbing whole.” Bennett, “Systems and Things,” p. 227. We shall see that
Whitehead provides a rich vocabulary of concepts surrounding and enabling
understanding of objects or things.
17 John Cobb, Jr. notes how “atomic ‘occasions of experience’ . . . are very different
from material atoms.” In Whitehead’s philosophy, Cobb explains: “They are four-
dimensional, whereas material atoms are conceived to be three-dimensional.
That is, the classical atom did not require any lapse of time in order to be what it
is. It endured through time, but its locus and extent in time did not enter into its
definition or affect in any way. It was supposed to exist fully in an instant or in
any infinitesimal period. The Whiteheadian atomic event, on the other hand, is
necessarily located exactly where it is in space and time. Further, its extensiveness
builds up temporal duration just as it provides the basis for spatial spread.” Cobb,
“Alfred North Whitehead,” p. 172.
18 Of course, this reading of Aristotle’s notions of generation and development of
the animal organism as akin to a “genetic program” is both wildly anachronistic
and inaccurate. For the purposes of this chapter, we need not address these or
related difficulties here. The larger issue of “traditional” Aristotelian views in
which actualization is determined by the potentialities inherent in substance
or form remains a legitimate concern that Whitehead’s philosophy of organism
seeks to undermine and redress. For an intelligent critique of twentieth-century
readings of Aristotle that ascribe something like a proto-genetic program to his
scheme of biological development, see the important article by Vinci and Robert,
“Aristotle and Modern Genetics.” Vinci and Robert’s article also provide an
overview of contemporary biological and philosophical alternatives to the genetic
program account of development and living things. For a contemporary biologist’s
critique of genetic programs, see Atlan, La fin du “tout génétique”? For a more
nuanced view of Aristotle and Aristotelianism in relation to Whitehead, see Bono,
“A Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies,” pp. 140–50.
19 Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 67–8.

20 Ibid.
21 This passage has powerful implications for an ontological analysis of gene action—
of genetic agency itself—as understood in recent biology. See Vinci and Robert,
“Aristotle and Modern Genetics”; Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?; Oyama, The
Ontogeny of Information; Keller, The Century of the Gene. Of course, Waddington
had much earlier insisted upon a view of genes and gene action that anticipates
much later critiques and, indeed, laid the foundations for them. See, Waddington,
“Canalization of Development”; “The Genetic Control of Development”;
The Strategy of the Genes; “The Process Theory of Evolution and Notes on the
Evolution of Mind”; and “Whitehead and Modern Science.”
23 Here I am indebted to Michael Halewood’s thoughtful comparison and discussion
in his article, “On Whitehead and Deleuze.” Related to discussion of the virtual
in relation to the actual, and also to discussions of potentiality more broadly,
is the question of novelty or the “new” in Deleuze and Whitehead. Here again,
for brevity’s sake, the reader is referred to an essay by Marrati, “Life and Event.”
Deleuze, she argues, opposes the assumption implicit in most accounts of “life”
that all that unfolds is in some sense already given: “All is given!” And, instead, she
cites Deleuze’s claim that “the reality of time is finally the affirmation of a virtuality
that is actualized, and for which to be actualized is to invent,” p. 18. The spirit of
Whitehead, I believe, lives on in such claims!
25 Ibid., p. 309.
26 Ibid., pp. 67–8.
27 Ibid., p. 79.
28 Ibid.
29 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 207.
30 Ibid., p. 208.
31 Ibid., p. 177.
33 Ibid., p. 277.
34 Ibid., p. 78.
35 Ibid., p. 79.
36 For more on enduring objects, see especially ibid., pp. 99–109.
37 Ibid., p. 279.
38 Ibid., p. 249.
39 In speaking about “structured” societies, Whitehead notes a relationship between
level of complexity and “survival value.” Complexity, it turns out, is related
to the existence of contrasts and to the “intensity” that marks the subjective
satisfaction that produces a new actual occasion. As Whitehead states, “Thus

in general an unspecialized society does not secure conditions favourable for
intensity of satisfaction among its members. Whereas a structured society with a
high grade of complexity will in general be deficient in survival value.” He then
goes on to suggest that the “problems for Nature is the production of societies
which are ‘structured’ with a high ‘complexity,’ and which are at the same time
‘unspecialized.’ In this way, intensity is mated with survival,” ibid., p. 101.
The solutions to this problem get to the heart of the issues we have been
discussing in this paper. In one category of solution (the “Category of
Transmutation”), the “diversity”—and therefore the “contrasts”—“of detail”
existing within the environment of a structured society are simply “ignored” in
favor of an overwhelming “congenial uniformity” within the stable structured
society. Yet, this “solution” works only as long as those details of diversity in
the environment “can be ignored.” Where “transmutation” essentially couples
“survival” with the avoidance of “contrast” and “intensity,” another category of
solutions (the “Category of Reversion”) embraces the contrasts presented by
the immediate environment of a structured society through “an initiative in
conceptual prehensions.” That is, rather than ignoring them (likely impossible)
the contrasts become the objects of “appetition” that reach out as an initiative
“to receive the novel elements of the environment into explicit feelings with
such subjective forms as conciliate them with the complex experience proper
to members of the structured society. Thus in each concrescent occasion its
subjective aim originates novelty to match the novelty of the environment.
In the case of the higher organisms, this conceptual initiative amounts to
thinking about the diverse experiences; in the case of lower organisms this
conceptual initiative merely amounts to thoughtless adjustment of aesthetic
emphasis in obedience to an ideal of harmony,” ibid., pp. 101–2.
40 Whitehead asserts: “In accordance with this doctrine of ‘life,’ the primary
meaning of ‘life’ is the origination of conceptual novelty—novelty of appetition.
Such origination can only occur in accordance with the Category of Reversion,”
ibid. Thus, life is linked with the conjunction of “novelty” and “complexity.”
But, as we’ve seen, life is also concerned with the “conformation of purpose”
among the actual occasions (and societies) comprising a structured society. How
do conformation, purpose, contrast, and novelty come together in appetitive
initiatives productive of conscresences? See also, Jones, Intensity.
41 Several quotations may serve to suggest contexts and links: (1) “The primitive
form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt
elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective
passion . . . the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in
another and feeling conformally with another,” Whitehead, Process and Reality,
p. 162. (2) “Feeling, and reference to an exterior world pass into appetition,
which is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be. In the

phraseology of physics, this primitive experience is ‘vector feeling,’ that is to say,
feeling from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is
to be determined. But the feeling is subjectively rooted in the immediacy of the
present occasion: it is what the occasion feels for itself, as derived from the past
and as merging into the future. In this vector transmission of primitive feeling
the primitive provision of width for contrast is secured by pulses of emotion,
which in the coordinate division of occasions appear as wave-lengths and
vibrations,” ibid., p. 163. (3) “In so far as the mental spontaneities of occasions
do not thwart each other, but are directed to a common objective amid varying
circumstances, there is life. The essence of life is the teleological introduction of
novelty, with some conformation of objectives. Thus, novelty of circumstances is
met with novelty of functioning adapted to steadiness of purpose,” Whitehead,
Adventures of Ideas, p. 207. (4) “The common element of purpose . . . must be
reckoned as one element of the determining characteristic of the society. It is
evident that according to this definition no single occasion can be called living.
Life is the coordination of mental spontaneities throughout the occasions of a
society,” ibid., p. 207.
43 Note also, with respect to actual occasions that form enduring objects as societies,
what Whitehead says about “conformation”: “Another point emerges in this
explanation, namely, the doctrine of the continuity of nature. This doctrine
balances and limits the doctrine of the absolute individuality of each occasion of
experience. There is a continuity between the subjective form of the immediate
past occasion and the subjective form of its primary prehension in the origination
of the new occasion. In the process of synthesis of the many basic prehensions
modifications enter. But the subjective forms of the immediate past are continuous
with those of the present. I will term this doctrine of continuity, the Doctrine
of Conformation of Feeling,” ibid., p. 183. Continuity, then, is made—not
predetermined or programmed—and arises from continuities of subjective form
or feeling within the environmental constellation of actual occasions most closely
forming the data for the emergence of the new occasion. Thus, we have the
becoming of continuity, and not the continuity of becoming.
44 Compare Deleuze’s echoing of Whitehead: “The event is a vibration with an
infinity of harmonics or submultiples,” Deleuze, The Fold, p. 77. The notion of a
“vibratory organism,” as historian of science Robert Michael Brain masterfully
recounts, enjoyed a moment of exuberant prominence in the decades leading up
to Whitehead’s mature philosophy in Process and Reality. One example is provided
by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel who built upon contemporary “fascination
with protoplasm as the primordial medium of life” (p. 8) to articulate a vision of
life and organic evolution as built upon the role of protoplasm in capturing and
transmitting “active vibrations” (p. 10)! See Brain, “Memory, Synesthesia, and

the Vibratory Organism.”
45 Cooper, “Assemblage Notes,” p. 108.
46 Law, After Method. The quotation from Cooper’s essay (above) is on p. 104.
47 See the interesting essay by Cooper, “Assemblage Notes.” One characteristic
quotation may suggest Cooper’s linkages to Whitehead, and also resonate with
Whitehead’s concepts of the atomicity of actual occasions, societies, and things
(or enduring objects) analyzed in this chapter: “Systems are now no longer to be
viewed as integrated structures. The human body, for example, is never just an
organic whole but a collection of parts in the continuous pursuit of re-collecting
itself. It is this idea of collection-dispersion-recollection that lies at the heart of
assemblage. Assemblage, therefore, must be understood as partial, dispersed,
fragile, tentative. Assemblage is simultaneously a part of and apart from”
(p. 110; emphasis in original). See also in the same volume, Chia and Kallinikos,
“Epilogue.”
48 Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead. For Latour, see for example: “Why Has
Critique Run Out of Steam?” and his Foreword to the English translation of
Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead, “What Is Given in Experience?” which is
excerpted from his earlier essay review just cited.
49 I allude here to Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, p. 108 where
he refers to a phrase of Nelson Goodman’s to make a point about representation in
science: namely, that it is “to ‘take and make.’ ”
50 Stengers, in “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day,” notes that a “Whiteheadian
dramatization of the event of experimental success . . . also means an aesthetic
achievement” (p. 39). Whitehead himself insists that “an actual fact is a fact
of aesthetic experience,” which, of course, conforms with the final stage in the
making of an actual occasion in which “the many feelings, derivatively felt as alien,
are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation” in Whitehead, Process and
Reality, pp. 212, 280.
51 This question and a partial attempt to answer it remains the burden of my essay,
“A Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies.”
52 On the importance of such passionate engagement—in contrast to traditional
mythoi of the dispassionate, disinterested scientist—see Stengers’ Cosmopolitics,
especially chapter 1, “Scientific Passions” (I, pp. 1–13). This notion resonates with
Whitehead’s emphasis on feeling, on aesthetic achievement, and on the notion
that “it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it is true”
(quoted above).
53 For Bacon and this entire concern with abstractions, see chapter 7 in Bono,
The Word of God and the Languages of Man, pp. 199–246.
54 Deleuze, Dialogues, p. 57. Quoted in the “Introduction” by John Rajchman to
Deleuze, Pure Immanence, p. 11.
55 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 18.

56 Here, of course, the entire corpus of Bruno Latour’s work must be noted,
beginning with his Science in Action. See also Latour’s own account, Reassembling
the Social.
57 De Certeau, “Mystic Speech,” esp. pp. 87–8.
58 I have recounted just such adventures and misadventures in my earlier work
on early modern science: Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man;
“The Two Books and Adamic Knowledge.” I have in my Configurations article
also noted Whitehead’s strategic understanding of seventeenth-century
mechanistic interpretations of nature as exemplars of such tendencies in science:
59 For these early modern developments, see: Bono, “The Two Books and
Adamic Knowledge”; and Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man,
vol. 2 (in progress).
60 Ibid.; Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 83.
61 Lorraine Daston has noted the striking manner in which early modern students
of nature—those who attempted to read the Book of Nature—developed habits
of attentive focus on highly selective features of natural particulars: things and
phenomena. These very habits of attentive focus mark the subsequent history
of modern science. For “The Cult of Attention,” see Daston, “Attention and the
Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” pp. 100–26; idem, “Taking Notes.”
62 See Stengers, Cosmopolitics, and “A Cosmopolitical Proposal”; and Bono,
63 I borrow the term, compression, from Turner and Fauconnier, “Compression and
Global Insight.” For notions of compressive systems and “compressive cognitive
acts,” see Stafford, Echo Objects, esp. ch. 2. I have suggested that we think of the
“literal”—and so-called literal knowledge of nature—as a “form of metaphoric
compression” in Bono, “The Reform of Language and Science: Sir Francis
Bacon’s Adamic Instauration and the Alphabet of Nature,” p. 332, and pursue
this argument more fully in The Word of God and the Languages of Man, vol. 2.
64 Bono, “Perception, Living Matter,” p. 151
65 Keller, The Century of the Gene, p. 118. Whitehead’s impact on a number of
important developmental biologists, who as a group included Waddington,
is discussed by Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields; Haraway also discusses
Waddington’s concept of canalization (pp. 59–61).
66 For fuller treatment of Waddington as Whiteheadian and his biological ideas, see
Bono, “A Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies,” pp. 150–9.
2
Another Response to Shaviro

Graham Harman
In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” the title character is stalked
and haunted by another character of exactly the same name, who undermines
his efforts wherever he travels. Though we see only a few direct examples of this
behavior, the narrator alludes to a host of others in rapid succession, speaking of
the other Wilson as follows:
Scarcely had I set foot in Paris ere I had fresh evidence of the detestable interest
taken by this Wilson in my concerns . . . Villain! – at Rome . . . [he stepped] in
between me and my ambition! At Vienna, too, at Berlin, and at Moscow! Where,
in truth, had I not bitter cause to curse him within my heart? . . . my admonisher
at Eton . . . the destroyer of my honor at Oxford . . . [he] who thwarted my
ambition at Rome, my revenge in Paris, my passionate love in Naples, or what he
falsely termed my avarice in Egypt . . .1
In my own life, a similar role is played by Steven Shaviro. While my activities in

Egypt have so far been unobstructed by Shaviro’s interference, he has already
thwarted my ambition to various degrees in Berkeley, in Atlanta, in the potential
utopia of the blogosphere, and at last in Claremont, California. This article will
surely do nothing to end our friendly quarrel stretching across the years, but will
merely serve as the latest installment in a tale whose dramatic climax may lie a
decade or more in the future, if ever. Although I did not see Shaviro’s current
paper at the time of writing this one, he signaled most of its contents ahead of
time in an interesting blog post of 25 November 2010.2 The thoughts that follow
are formed in response both to his explicit words in that post and to related
notions “not openly given, but hinted or insinuated”3 by Shaviro at various other
times. As he puts it, “in the course of writing [my lecture for Claremont] I cannot
help coming back to my agreements and disagreements with OOO (object-
oriented ontology) . . . what I find valuable and inspiring about OOO are the
Another Response to Shaviro 37
questions it asks, which I think are necessary and important ones; rather than
its particular answers to these questions, which I don’t accept.”4 Here Steven is
speaking about object-oriented ontology. But at the December 2010 conference
in Claremont, there was also more extensive discussion of speculative realism
than expected, and object-oriented ontology can be viewed as a subspecies of
speculative realism. In order that no newcomers to these topics feel excluded
from the discussion, allow me to give a brief explanation of both speculative
realism and OOO before returning to Steven’s mixed appreciation and critique
of OOO, which stalks me across the globe.
Speculative realism was born from a frustration with the reigning discourse
in continental philosophy, which was excessively focused on the human–world
correlate from the time of Kant, long before the rise of postmodernism. Realist
positions have always been a plausible option in analytic philosophy. But in
the continental tradition, the dispute between realism and antirealism has
been viewed, ever since Husserl and Heidegger, as a “pseudo-problem” more
deserving of a dismissive sneer than of being posed. To my knowledge, it was not
until 20025 that we saw any continental philosophers say “I am a realist” without
self-reflexive irony, sarcastic smirks, fingers crossed behind backs, or such an
extensive redefinition of the term “realism” that it loses its simple and literal
meaning: the existence of realities independently of the mind.
The traditional opposite of realism is “idealism,” which in its strictest form
entails that nothing at all exists independently of the mind. But almost no one
openly defends full-blown idealism these days; the disciples of Berkeley are
few in number, even if every student is fascinated and amused by his claims.
The more socially acceptable maneuver in philosophy is to say that the choice
between realism and idealism is a false problem. There is neither subject nor
object in isolation from the other, but only a primordial correlation or rapport
between the two. The subject intends objects outside itself; human beings are
“always already immersed in a world,” or “embodied in a rich texture of lived
experience,” or “inextricably intertwined in material conditions,” or something
along those lines. In many circles, this is still viewed as a major philosophical
advance over the supposedly crusty, reactionary question as to whether or not
there is a world autonomous from the mind.
Enter Après la finitude, the 2006 debut book of young French philosopher
Quentin Meillassoux.6 Although none of the other speculative realists accepted
the whole or even most of Meillassoux’s book, speculative realism can be viewed
as a philosophical movement joined in admiration of his chief polemical term:
correlationism. It was a term whose time had clearly come. As stated, almost no
one admits to being a full-blown Berkeleyan idealist. Instead, one says that what
is primary is not the mind, but the correlation between mind and world, their
complete inseparability from one another. But this solution is not as neutral
as it sounds. As Richard Rorty sarcastically put it, in remarks buried deep in
the archives of UC-Irvine, “Every decade or so, someone writes a book with
a title something like: ‘Beyond Realism and Idealism’. And it always turns out
that what’s beyond realism and idealism is – idealism!”7 Rather than persecuting
my enemies among dead correlationists, allow me to point the finger at two of
my favorite philosophers. Husserl’s intentional objects never free us from the
prison of consciousness: intentionality means immanent objectivity for both
Brentano and Husserl, after all. As for Heidegger, however deep and hidden Sein
is in comparison with Dasein, it is always a drama in which Sein and Dasein
are the two principal characters. The causal interaction between mountains and
raindrops would be viewed by Heidegger as a laughable theme—a topic fit only
for sciences that do not think.
The four original speculative realist philosophies, and their various offshoots,
have little in common aside from this critique of correlationism and the related
endorsement of some kind of reality autonomous from humans. Speculative
realism was realism insofar as it endorsed this autonomy of things outside the
correlational circle. It was speculative realism insofar as it did not ratify the biases
of common sense, since all four original members ended up with rather strange
theories of the real. The usual view is that realism is a boring, unimaginative,
dull, middle-aged philosophy that warns wild speculative children that they
are stumbling into rocks and chairs. If mainstream realism is from Saturn,
speculative realism is from Jupiter, and wishes to encourage the most wildly
speculative theses about the cosmos. But this is still a very broad mandate, and
that is why the speculative realism group broke into fragments in approximately
2 years, despite a considerable degree of early success.
But let’s also look briefly at object-oriented philosophy, which not only still
exists, but even held its second conference on 1 December 2011 at UCLA,
watched by thousands around the world via streaming video. OOO, as the group
is now known thanks to Levi Bryant, is both the offshoot and the older brother
of speculative realism, which it predated by nearly a decade. For 10 years,
from the ages of 19 to 29, I resided in the philosophy of Heidegger as if in a
prison. Of the two authors who freed me from this prison (and neither of them
is the wonderful Bruno Latour, whom I first read shortly thereafter), one was
Whitehead, and the other was the neglected Spanish Basque philosopher, the
former Heidegger student Xavier Zubíri, whose major book On Essence has been
available in English for 30 years.8 Each of these authors departs from Heidegger
in one radical way that allowed the object-oriented position to emerge. Before
I say what these radical departures are, let’s go back to correlationism for a
moment. If we compare the object-oriented position with that of Meillassoux,
we find that the two do not even agree about what is wrong with correlationism.
This was already reflected in the question period during the very useful Donna
Haraway/Isabelle Stengers session of the Claremont conference when Nathan
Brown identified speculative realism with a claim to absolute knowledge and
Levi Bryant quickly rejected this definition. For if we look at Kantian philosophy
as the root of correlationism, we find that this familiar philosophy has at least
two distinct central features. First, Kant places the human–world relation at the
center of philosophy, such that any relation between two inanimate things is
meaningful only insofar as it is manifest to humans (or to “rational beings” more
generally, whatever the non-human ones might be). And second, Kant says that
the things-in-themselves can only be thought, not known. In short, the two central
features of correlationism are (a) the priority of the human–world relation over
all others and (b) the finitude of human knowledge. What is interesting is that
Meillassoux rejects (b) but preserves (a), while object-oriented ontology rejects
(a) but preserves (b).9 That is to say, Meillassoux’s obsession is with finding some
way to bring back absolute knowledge, the ability to know a thing exhaustively.
Meillassoux does not mind it a bit if the human–world relation retains priority
in philosophy; in fact, he praises the correlationist argument as brilliant, as very
difficult to overcome. “If we attempt to think something outside thought, we are
thinking it, and it thereby becomes a thought.” Meillassoux finds this argument
powerful to the same degree that I find it feeble.
Unlike Meillassoux, the object-oriented position rejects the idea that the
human–world relation has some special privilege over all others. This is the
Whiteheadian element in object-oriented philosophy, and Whitehead was in
fact the impetus for this departure from Heidegger. Philosophy is no longer just
a matter of Sein and Dasein, but of all entities and all prehensions whatsoever.
Instead of a dithering meditation on the internal conditions of human cognitive
and practical access to the world, we have a full-blown speculative philosophy
in which all entities are superstars, not just the slaves and serfs of a pampered
human subject. And I am happy to say that Steven Shaviro is with me to this
extent. He fully appreciates the Whiteheadian side of OOO, which is presumably
the side that earned all of us invitations to the Claremont conference in the
first place. This is something we share in common with most of the people in
this room: a concern to reverse the part of Kant’s Copernican Revolution that
removes all relations from philosophy other than monotonous human–world

relations forever enslaved to the same recurring space, time, and categories.
But the other side of OOO is the Zubíri-inspired side, and in the eyes of Steven
Shaviro, this is our dark side—our menacing criminal nightlife that may make
us look like a threat to speculative philosophy. Let’s briefly consider Heidegger’s
famous tool-analysis, which against all odds is what made me a realist in the
first place. Against Husserl’s injunction to describe entities solely as they appear,
Heidegger notes that for the most part entities do not appear. Usually, they are
silently taken for granted: the floor and oxygen in the room, the English grammar
that we skillfully grasp while writing or reading this article. For the most part,
these things are noticed only if they fail in some way. Conscious perceptual or
theoretical access to things is a fairly rare form of our dealings with them. This
is often read as meaning that Heidegger elevates praxis over theory, so that all
explicit awareness emerges from a hidden background of unthematized social
practices. But this pragmatist interpretation of Heidegger is false, since practices
do not exhaust the things any more than theory does. Whether I make theories
about hammers or simply use them, in both cases there is a lot more to the
hammer than my interaction with it. The hammer is withdrawn from praxis no
less than from theory. All of the fashionable “philosophies of immanence,” which
universally ignore this fact of withdrawal, are therefore a bad idea. All objects
withdraw from explicit human consciousness and from unconscious human
praxis; some might even concede that they are veiled from animals as well. But
we must go a step further and say that this happens in the sphere of inanimate
reality as well. When fire burns cotton, the fire does not make contact with the
full reality of that cotton. The exact hue and odor of the cotton, perhaps even its
exact granular texture, are of no significance at all to the fire. In principle, fans
of Whitehead ought to appreciate this globalization of relations in comparison
with the cramped Heideggerian district where Dasein alone meets Sein. But in
practice, there will be much skepticism toward the notion of realities deeper
than any possible relations, despite Shaviro’s frequent claims to the contrary. We
will shift our attention back to Shaviro in a moment. But the two aforementioned
brands of speculative realism differ as follows. Meillassoux continues to utilize
the human–world correlate as the starting point of philosophy, but he rejects
Kantian finitude in favor of an absolute, mathematized knowledge of things-
in-themselves. By contrast, the object-oriented position views the human–
world relation as just one among trillions of others. It retains Kantian finitude
but splinters it into trillions of pieces, so that all entities can now enjoy the
inaccessibility of the Ding an sich. We warmly welcome trees, chairs, neutrons,
armies, diamonds, and microbes to the world of unfulfillable desire, where

humans have long labored in miserable solitude.
Which brings us again to Shaviro, my eternal nemesis and tormentor.
In the aforementioned blog post,10 he summarizes four challenges made by
OOO to “commonly held post-Kantian doctrines.” The point of his summary
is to claim that Whitehead has already addressed all four. While the object-
oriented theorists are half-satisfied with Whitehead (and enthusiastically so),
Shaviro thinks we should be entirely satisfied. If he is correct, then we ought
to close up shop and reformulate our views as variants of process philosophy.
Far worse fates are imaginable, but I happen to think he is wrong on this
point.
Shaviro sees the four basic challenges posed by OOO as follows:
1. We reject what Meillassoux calls “correlationism.”

2. We reject what I have called “the philosophy of access.”
3. We reject relationalism, which Steven clearly defines as “the idea that every
entity is entirely determined by, and can be completely described in terms
of, its relations to other entities.”
4. We reject what Sam Coleman beautifully terms “smallism,”11 or “the view
that all facts are determined by the facts about the smallest things, those
existing at the lowest ‘level’ of ontology, so that facts about the microphysical
determine facts about the chemical, the biological, and so on.”
Let me begin by simplifying this list, reducing the four points to three. Although
Shaviro is generous in claiming that my term “philosophy of access” is somewhat
different from Meillassoux’s “correlationism,” I see my own, older phrase as
an inferior version of Meillassoux’s term. It is true that most post-Kantian
continental philosophy remains obsessed with human access to the world rather
than the world itself, but the term “philosophy of access” still leaves open the
door for, say, a Husserlian to respond that: “I’m not just concerned about access,
since we are always already outside ourselves in a rich world of phenomena.”
And while I still love Husserl, this sort of lukewarm idealism is not one of the
things I love about him. By contrast, Meillassoux’s term “correlationism” is far
superior, because it is not only crisp, snappy, and memorable, but also leaves its
target no escape. It fully grants that the correlationist is not an idealist in the
strict sense, but is obsessed instead with a correlation that includes a world-pole
no less than a mind-pole. And it holds that such a correlate is still not good
enough to do justice to reality. So, unless I am being absentmindedly unfair to
myself, I think Meillassoux’s term “correlationism” can simply replace my own
“philosophy of access,” which I traded in for “correlationism” immediately after

reading Meillassoux’s book for the first time in April 2006.
That still leaves us with three challenges posed by OOO: (1) anti-correlatio
nism, (2) anti-relationism, (3) anti-smallism. As Shaviro notes, we all agree that
Whitehead is an anti-correlationist; this is the most obviously refreshing feature
of his philosophy for anyone used to the bleak humanoid landscape of post-
Kantian philosophy. Thus, there is no debate over point 1, because Shaviro and
Whitehead and I all agree on it.
That leaves us with two possible points of dispute: anti-relationism and anti-
smallism. And here Shaviro and I do have disagreements, but the reason for
them is different in each case. Let’s begin with anti-relationism.
All of the object-oriented theorists insist that the object must have autonomous
reality apart from all its relations, and we remain suspicious of both Whitehead
and Bruno Latour (who is generally one of our heroes) for analyzing things into
their relations. For reasons given in connection with Heidegger’s tool-analysis,
I have already said that entities must be non-relational. However unfashionable
this view may now seem, it is the trademark doctrine of the object-oriented
branch of speculative realism. In response, Shaviro tries a mixed strategy that is
not even as faithful to Whitehead as he seems to think.
In the matter of relations, Shaviro quotes me, accurately, as saying that “objects
are irreducible to their relations with other things, and always hold something in
reserve from these relations.” As he correctly comments, this means that “there
is always more to this particular tree, for instance, than is ever captured in my
perception of the tree—or even in the sum total of all the perceptions of the tree
by all the other entities that encounter it. This means that the tree must have an
inside as well as an outside, an intrinsic nature as well as relational properties.”
Steven’s unique approach to the problem is as follows. He now holds (and this
seems different from his earlier position) that entities must be autonomous from
internal relations, but must nonetheless always be involved in external relations.
As he puts it: “It seems to me that Graham’s and Levi’s anti-relationalism is
entirely correct when it is a question of what [Manuel] DeLanda calls ‘relations
of interiority,’ in which a closed totality absolutely determines all its parts . . .”
Although I welcome the first half of this sentence, I do not see how Shaviro can
ground it in Whitehead’s own views. Page 59 of Process and Reality, which is
so relentless that my marginal notes give it the nickname “The Anti-Substance
Page,” begins with the following remark: “[John] Locke misses one essential
doctrine, namely, that the doctrine of internal relations makes it impossible to
attribute ‘change’ to any actual entity. Every actual entity is what it is, and is with
its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other
actual entities.”12 In other words, it is clear as can be that Whitehead is a theorist
of internal relations, and for this reason it is irrelevant when Shaviro insists that
the interiority of any entity is constituted by the “privacy” of “subjective aim.”
This is not privacy enough to satisfy me, at least, because along with saying that
every actual entity is determined by its internal relations to other actual entities,
Whitehead makes many related statements to reinforce this position. For
example, he tells us that “the continuum is present in each actual entity, and each
actual entity pervades the continuum.”13 Furthermore, he defines satisfaction as
“an evaporation of indetermination,”14 so that there is nothing left to an actual
entity’s privacy over and above its prehensions; otherwise, it would be a so-called
“vacuous actuality.”
If Shaviro wants to say that an entity is free from internal relations but still
enmeshed in a constant efflorescence of external relations, this is not quite a
Whiteheadian position. It may be compatible with James and Deleuze, as he
rightly adds, but it would also be compatible with object-oriented philosophies
less extreme than my own. For while Steven says that “no term can ever
disentangle itself from all relations . . . [this] is simply impossible,” I hold that
it is not only possible, but common. Certainly no entity can be free of internal
composition, and in this sense it emerges from the misty wastes of its component
pieces. Yet these “domestic” relations (as I call them) are not the same thing as
the “foreign” relations from which a thing is always withdrawn. The point is
not only that an entity can never be identified with its sum total of external
relations here and now, as Shaviro apparently concedes, but that many objects
may exist without being in relation to anything at all, whether now or in the
future. Shaviro’s objection to this runs as follows: “Deprive me of my relation
to oxygen and I die; but my body persists as a thing, and interacts with bacteria
that dissolve and eat it. Send my dead body into outer space so that it escapes
the bacteria, and other phenomena of interstellar space.” His point seems to be
that whatever fills the cosmos, it will always have to be involved in some sort of
external relations, some efflorescence of networks with other things. But here
I think he is wrong. The fact that some kinds of objects—living creatures and
perhaps physical things more generally—require a symbiotic network to remain
in existence does not entail that nothing is real apart from such symbiosis. For if
there is one sense in which entities are real because they are produced, there is
another sense in which the reverse is true: they are produced because they are
real. There is time for just one example: the speculative realist group itself. This
group originally consisted of four members, and it could be said to have been
born with the emailed invitations to the two members who were not involved
in hatching the original plan. Certainly, all four of us existed as individuals
prior to that moment, and certainly speculative realism was both solidified and
transformed once it was given a name and began to interact more intensely
with other entities. But let’s not forget that one of the reasons for the relative
success of the group is that we were not simply grasping at straws with that
specific list of four members. We weren’t imposing an arbitrary dictate on the
cosmos and creating a group purely ex nihilo like a Badiouian extensive set
or Borgesian catalog or Latour litany of random entities: dolphins, snakes,
copper coins, bags of rice, and the Dutch East India Company. Rather, we were
responding vaguely to something that pre-existed its name, just as a painter
knows when the lines and colors aren’t yet right because the object is already
somehow there before it is actually there. To summarize, a thing is not real
because it is involved in external relations, but the contrary: it can engage in
external relations only because it is real. It is wrong to say that a thing exists
only from the moment when it still has an effect. The cosmos is filled with
sleeping or dormant object, a very large but finite number of them: and here we
are not talking about abstract possibilities, but about real objects that simply
have not yet made their influence felt.
Now let’s turn briefly to “anti-smallism.” Shaviro and I agree that smallism is
a bad idea, because entities at all levels of scale can be equally real. And despite
the claims of Kant’s famous antinomy that we can never prove that there are
either final atoms of the world or an infinite regress of smaller and smaller parts,
I hold that we can prove it in favor of the infinite regress. If everything must have
internal composition, then we must defend an infinite regress rather than a finite
regress (like atomism) or no regress at all (as in idealism, in which everything lies
at the surface and things have no compositional depth). Shaviro takes a slightly
different approach to the problem. Rather than defending an infinite regress
of smaller and smaller entities, he seems to concede that Whitehead’s actual
entities are the smallest things, but he then asserts that the larger “societies” are
not dependent on these smaller things.
My question here is to the Whitehead scholars: why exactly is it so often
held that actual entities are “microscopic” and societies are “macroscopic”?
All that is clear to me from the texts themselves is that actual entities perish
rather than change, while societies are able to endure. But this does not entail
that the perishing entities, totally defined by their prehensions, must also be
the smallest things. At the beginning of the chapter on The Categoreal Scheme,
Whitehead introduces actual entities as follows: “ ‘Actual entities’—also termed
‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There
is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among
themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in
far-off empty space.”15 Note that the talk here is not of electrons, but of God and
trivial puffs of existence in empty space. If Whitehead had truly intended actual
entities to be the ultra-tiny things, he could surely choose a better example than
God, who is not “microscopic” in the least. Neither are “trivial puffs of existence”
even microscopic; a “puff ” of anything has a certain complex and definite form,
however chaotic, and we know that faint puffs of smoke are highly macroscopic
in comparison with the various microphysical heroes of physics. And as for
the passage about God and trivial puffs of existence, I find nothing in the latter
portions of Process and Reality to modify this statement except for Whitehead’s
caveat that while we can usually use “actual entity” and “actual occasion”
interchangeably, God should never be called an “actual occasion.” But this hardly
means that God becomes “microscopic” later in the book. We might also note
the ancestry that Whitehead gives for his term “actual entity”: the res verae of
Descartes and the substantial “powers” of John Locke, neither of which have
anything microscopic about them. In the absence of compelling reasons to gloss
“actual entity” and “society” as “microscopic” and “macroscopic,” I will continue
to interpret them respectively as (1) perishing occasions totally deployed in an
instant of satisfaction, and (2) a relatively durable sequence of slightly different
actual entities united by a particular set of eternal objects. Moreover, I find no
textual basis in Whitehead not to view everything of every size as susceptible to
being characterized in both ways. In sum, I think Shaviro is wrong to combat
smallism only by saying that the tiny does not fully determine the macroscopic.
He should also add that there is no absolute scale of tininess in the first place, but
merely a spiraling regress of objects wrapped in objects.
For some reason, the phrase “turtles all the way down” is generally taken to
be a crushing objection to any theory of infinite regress of objects. It is seldom
noted that those who ridicule this model must themselves be guilty either of
worshipping a final almighty micro-turtle (reductionism) or of holding that the
world is merely a gigantic shell without a turtle (idealism, and to some extent
correlationism). Given that the other alternatives are even more absurd, I would
like to call not only for a theory of turtles all the way down, but even an anti-
relational theory of turtles withdrawn from their interactions with one another,
and therefore incapable of direct contact. But this would open up another
front in my ongoing struggle with Steven Shaviro, and is best left for a different
occasion.
Notes
1 Poe, “William Wilson,” In Poetry and Tales, p. 354.

2 Shaviro, “Panpsychism, Whitehead, and OOO.”
3 Poe, “William Wilson,” p. 345.
5 See De Landa, Intensive Science and my own Harman, Tool-Being.
6 Available in English as Meillassoux, After Finitude.
7 Ian Bogost, personal communication.
8 Zubíri, On Essence.
9 For a more detailed discussion of the differences between the positions of
Meillassoux and OOO, see my forthcoming book Quentin Meillassoux.
11 Ibid.
12 Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 58–9. Emphasis added.
13 Ibid., p. 67.
14 Ibid., p. 45.
15 Ibid., p. 18.
3
Touch: A Philosophic Meditation

Roland Faber
Graham Harman’s “On Vicarious Causation” explores an object-oriented

philosophy in nascendi that, to the exact correlations, mirrors Whitehead’s
understanding of the “touch” of real things (and there are only real things, and
besides that, things as sensed) in his organic refutation of mechanicism with
“prehensive” connectivity. Although this connection only exists vicariously in
my mind and in contiguous independence, that is, in mutual incompleteness,
the sensibility of resonance it insinuates may give rise to certain (real) objects
such that they can be meditated on and which are as “strange” as Haman defines
his realism. Since “allusions” in Haman suggests such connections, I could not
resist following their “tunneling” through the very “blasphemy” that Harman’s
buries by his non-theological recapitulation of the occasionalism of Malebranche
and al-Ghazali. Hence, in relation to Whitehead’s secular divine, my “object” of
meditation will finally flow into the question of the status of the intentional/
prehensive “space” in which the constitution of Self might point to its internal
“molten core” as an allusion to that in the midst of its intentional constitution as
real object, which it must always “really” exclude in order to touch, be touched,
and vicariously facilitate the touch of real things.
Crash
“It’s the sense of touch. Any real cities you walk, you know, you brush past
people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re are always
behind this metal and glass.”1 Such is the beginning of the 2004 movie Crash:
touch and the impossibility of touch—on a local basis. You are in the “center” of
non-touch! The “metal and glass” not only hints at life in a non-space of isolated
buildings along with their missing “in-between” of common places of touch,

but points at the very medium of this non-relationality in form of isolating cars,
bound only by their common streams of highways, freeways, or neighborhood
labyrinths—the “rhizomes” of non-tough, together alone, disentangled in one’s
own path, “out of tough” with the distanced sojourners. If you touch them, you
create a crash. In fact, the only contact, the break-through into, and of, reality,
is a crash—and its consequences: an awakening to real isolation dismantled,
connected in insurmountable distance.
Yet, touched we are not in a crash, not even when slowed down to eye’s
sight. When we must leave our shells, we only become a new crust of
disentanglement and retreat. Touched we are only when we don’t crash. But
how? Touched we are when we do not touch. But how? Touched we are only
from within, in what Graham Harman poetically names the “molten core”2 of
the hidden other, beneath the crust of infinite distance, and without resolving
it. But how?
Meditation
I am profoundly “touched” by Harman’s “On Vicarious Causation”—as it is

a meditation on the “touch” of things, that is, really every-thing. This world
of Harman’s is a world of objects, in fact, two mutually exclusive, but related
kinds of objects: real objects and sensible objects. In their interplay, Harman
explores a general “ontology” of our world in which touch happens without the
elevation of any special “metaphysical” entities—such as God—as exceptions
or exceptional causes or initiators of touch. Moreover, while alluding to, but
avoiding, a theological highjacking of connectivity, Harman also disputes the
other extreme, the secularism in form of naturalism, materialism, mechanicism,
and skepticism.
In viewing the connectivity of real things without any presupposed scheme
of necessary, effective causality—instead seeking “something closer to what is
called formal cause”3—Harman reclaims not only philosophy from science, but
also a philosophical approach that profoundly transcends an analytic reduction
of philosophy to arguments and proofs of the obvious. Instead of a “procedure
[that] does no justice to a world where objects are always more than they
literally state,” he seeks the allusions of depth unspoken. Since those “who care
only to generate arguments almost never generate objects,” I will use the form
of a meditation in order to appreciate Harman’s intention to seek the release
Touch: A Philosophic Meditation 49
of, or allure to, the life, ineffability, and creativity hidden in the world’s objects.
When Harman muses that new objects “are the sole and sacred fruit of writers,
thinkers, politicians, travellers, lovers, and inventors,”4 I will forego “analysis” for
a “sympathy” with the internal infinity of objects to which we, at best, can only
allude.
As “meditation” is already philosophically claimed—for instance, by
Descartes’s Meditations and Badiou’s Being and Event5—my use of the term
will not be independent from their implicit, but conscious, theological or
anti-theological ruminations—such as the ones invoked by Harman: the
occasionalism of Malebranche and al-Ghazali.6 We might say, as Harman puts
it, that meditation seeks the “soul animating . . . from within.”7 This anima of
things cannot be analyzed without initiating their retreat into an internality that
is inaccessible. While the objects “nature can never be grasped,”8 we can allude
to it “by brushing its surface in such a manner as to bring its inner life into
play.”9 This may be the very meaning of “speculation.” “There is no speculation
in those eyes,” Whitehead quotes Shakespeare, alluding to the very soul of the
retreated object, the very “it” that refuses to give itself away in a push or crash.
By “ ‘speculative’ demonstration,”10 Whitehead wants us not to witness a forced
“description” of stubbornly withdrawn interiority, but to experience our retreat
in which we might become witnesses of the anima of things—but only by
becoming ourselves as a new contrast of real connection of real objects.
In adopting this approach, I want to aim at three goals at once. First, in
leveling Harman and Whitehead, I consider both of them (with one of
Harman’s modes of relationality) as “contiguous.”11 Distinct, but related in my
intentional space, they come together without a reigning scheme of superiority
or preordained structure of composition. Rather, much like a Deleuzian “plane
of immanence,”12 they swirl around and over one another with their own
internal, infinite movements within my intentional space, as a by-product of
my “real object I.”
Second, I consider each approach profoundly absorbed with a speculative
demonstration of the touch of real objects, but in somewhat complimentary
ways. Hence, giving both Harman and Whitehead the advantage of the judicial
in dubito pro reo, I judge neither philosopher as right or wrong, or more wrong
than my own contrast of them. Rather, their modes of addressing the depth of
objects and the mystery of connectivity strike me as mutually incomplete and,
hence, enriching such that their respectively more temporal or spatial approach
seems to allow certain aspects of objects to become more convincingly to the forth
than others. While I am not seeking a “synthesis”13 of both, without any doubt
in my mind both together seem to me more deeply “in touch” with things, yet in
somehow fortunately underdetermined ways.
Third, like a child’s strange preoccupation with certain objects rather than
others and details rather than the big picture, I will attempt to draw out a
too-little and a too-much in their demonstrative gestures. Their respective
“occasionalism,” or their secularized versions of it, retains or hides certain
theological impulses, still shining through. While I don’t want to take anything
away from the grand proposal of such a secular, but not naturalistic, sacred,
but not religiously motivated, occasionalism of their creative pen, I think these
theological roots must be openly witnessed. The respective too-little or too-much
of their respective secularization may not yet reveal how in a universe of only
“occasions” of connectivity14 we should designate any ontological status of real
objects. Instead of following a line of thought that prejudices the invocation of a
“divine” as but another “metaphysical” misconception of an exceptional entity
“out there,” physically causing all touch,15 I will treat the enveloped theological
allusions of both thinkers—Harman’s secularized allure and Whitehead’s divine
“a-lure” within the “real I”16—as constitutive of touch.
Realism(s)
Before I further explore Harman’s ingenuous concept of “vicarious causation”

as maybe the real content of an “object-oriented philosophy”17—to the extent it
resonates with Whitehead in releasing touch from causality—let me demonstrate
the obvious synergies or shared sympathies of Harman’s and Whitehead’s
version of “speculative realism”18 or “organicism.”19 If speculative realism, in
fact, privileges realism, it must be asked: against what? The answer, deceivingly
simple, is: against idealism and materialism alike.20
Idealism—such as Heidegger’s and Husserl’s on which Harman bases his
objectivist reorientation—has done little to engage objects from the perspective
of their integrity as objects besides making them function as moments of human
presence, use, or means of acting out—as in Heidegger21—or mental products
of states of intentionality, by which they become “phenomena [rather than] real
objects”—as in Husserl. Realism, instead, refuses any elevated station of cognition,
mentality, or human subjectivity. Yet, in the midst of this phenomenalism
Harman finds another layer, a hidden22 “novel concern with specific, concrete
objects such as “hammers, cigarettes, and silk garments”23 that, against idealistic
reductions, abandons the “gap between humans and the world.”24
In the same way, Harman disposes of the materialistic reduction of objects

by refusing to accept the age-old atomism of Democritus, Empedocles, and
Lucretius, collapsing real objects into a “dull realism of mindless atoms and
billiard balls that is usually invoked to spoil all the fun in philosophy.” Instead,
Harman defends a “weird realism”25 that doubts “the power of [any] scientific
explanation, which employs nothing but naturalistic theories,”26 by refusing
its underlying “naturalism” as again privileging “human access to the world,”
by treating “human consciousness” as excluded from being brought on “the
same footing as the duel between canaries, microbes, earthquakes, atoms,
and tar.”27
Whitehead’s realism is strikingly congruent with such considerations. In
the poetic chapter V of Science and the Modern World, Whitehead expounds
his “organic mechanism”28 as evading both naïve vitalism and scientific
mechanicism in humanization or reduction of every “thing” to a dull bundle
of dead bodies. “The only way of mitigating mechanism,” Whitehead muses, “is
by the discovery that it is not mechanism.”29 His organic view, instead, builds on
a fresh presupposition, namely: a “mysterious presence of surrounding things,
which imposes itself on”30 us from beyond. The exception of human perceptivity
and consciousness is precisely avoided by “including . . . our acts of cognition” as
“in themselves the elements of a common world.”31
Whitehead squares his distinction of idealism and realism with that of
subjectivism and objectivism, and adopts a position of objectivist realism. While
for the subjectivist—idealist or realist—“the things experienced only indirectly
enter into the common world by reason of their dependence on the subject who
is cognizing,” Whitehead’s “objectivist holds,” like Harman’s, “that the things
experienced and the cognizant subject enter into the common world on equal
terms.”32 While for subjectivist idealists all things are mere phenomena within the
human or divine mind, objectivists—idealists or realists—“agree that the world
disclosed in sense-perception is a common world, transcending the individual
recipient.” While the objectivist idealist “finds that cognitive mentality is in some
way inextricably concerned in every detail,” this is precisely “the position the
realist denies.”33 Hence, the objectivist realist treats all things as objects, their
interiority as all-pervading, and their mentality as emergent, and being in the
world as real object. Similar to Harman’s “speculative realism,” Whitehead calls
this “a position of provisional realism.”34
So far, this comparison signals agreement. Yet, precisely at this point, a disturb
ing, surprising, ingenious departure from this seemingly “common realism” arises
by which Harman not only reveals one of its yet undisclosed presuppositions,
but differs from Whitehead. This presupposition is relationalism.35 In Harman’s

somewhat surprising denial of the view that real objects are “naturally” connected
and, hence, are constituted by relations, he distances himself not only from all
subjectivist and idealist positions of connectivity, which abandon real objective
connection among things for mental ones, but also from all objectivist and realist
positions that expand relationality to physical realities and their perception,
including Whitehead’s. Hence, what is called for in Harman’s objective realism
is not causation from relation, but vicarious causation without touch—a “touch
without touching.”36 To say it in even stronger terms: The very condition of
Whitehead’s objective realism—universal relationalism37—is at the very center
of Harman’s denial—this denial being the very condition of his definition of
speculative realism.
For a moment—this gives one a pause—or, at least, it should!
Whitehead’s relationalism is meant to pose a “warrant of universality through
out all experience.” That which “does not so communicate is unknowable, and the
unknowable is unknown.” If, in fact, only a “universality defined by ‘communica-
tion’ can suffice,” any connection, causation and touch must express “an essence
[of] the universe which forbids relationships beyond itself.” “Speculative philo
sophy,” Whitehead affirms, “seeks” nothing but “that essence.”38
Not so for Harman! Not only does Harman not seek such a relational “essence”;
rather, he explicitly avoids it and thereby establishes real connectivity! That
which Whitehead excludes is, in fact, precisely what Harman affirms: that real
objects are unknown and, hence, unknowable. Hence, real objects only connect
occasionally, but by no means or in any sense necessarily. It is because things are
not in touch, or, at least, not “naturally,” that they are real objects. While Whitehead
relationalism reconstructs the solipsism of isolated substances as interconnected
events of change and limited permanence,39 Harman courageously readopts the
notion of substance as that which expresses real disconnection.
Object(s)
To get to the root of this profound opposition, we must first seek to exclude
potential simplifications that might release the forces of antinomy too early and
from the wrong places. Obviously, Harman’s and Whitehead’s terminologies are
not the same—how could they be, since both philosophers strive for novelty
through a reconfiguration of traditional philosophical concepts. Hence, we must
test whether their ontological antinomy is not based on a loss of translatability.
In order to exclude premature places of departure, I will only name some of

the most obvious conceptual transferences, leaving the more obscure and
subtle elements to further confirmative or inhibiting clarification.
For Harman, real objects have no relations and, for the most part, do not seek
them. If sought, these relations seem to be only apparent, that is, they do not
give rise to a direct physical or mental grasping of the interiority of the reality of
real objects. Rather, utilizing Heidegger’s tool-analysis, real objects retreat under
pressure, refuse to be grasped, withdraw from any presupposed, imposed, or
desired relation. Real objects are hidden in their own internal infinity.40 They
are—and hereby Harman begins to use the classical terminology—inaccessible
“substances” with their essential attributes and accidents of change. Hence, if
there is any connection between real objects, it can be established neither by
direct physical contact nor direct clairvoyance of an object’s inner core. Rather,
such connection exists occasionally, mediated by something else, which is not a
real object. Harman finds this vicarious connection in a different kind of objects,
the sensible object, situated within the interior of the perceptive real object.
Would Whitehead disagree? Of course, when we take Whitehead’s explicit
abandonment of the substance/attribute/accident-scheme as a starting point—
but then we would only state the obvious, namely the very opposition we want
to understand. Moreover, Whitehead agrees that “substances” are isolated
instances of solipsism.41 Yet, while this is part of Harman’s explanatory scheme,
the fact that Whitehead abandons this does not imply that he adopts a position
of universal relationalism that would eo ipso fall into the trap of Harman’s
“fanatic mirror holism”42 by which he might have counted out Leibnitz.
Whitehead does not hold the view of a panoptic holism in which everything is
a mirror of everything, unobstructed, in mutual public view and control. Yet,
he does also not hold the view that any “contact” is purely external, a crash of
steel, glass, and meat. When Whitehead expresses relationality by hinting at
physical field-theory—after all, he did work on Maxwell’s field-equations for
his dissertation—for which any particle is somehow distributed throughout the
whole field,43 he immediately counters this incomplete picture with allusions to
quantum-physical discreteness and atomicity.44 Indeed, Whitehead contrasts
atomism, but not in form of a digital seriality of purely external relation (the
crash), with organicism, but not in form of a universal continuity through
purely internal relationality (the mirror).45
In fact, then, like Harman, Whitehead asks the profound question, how
a substance can be in another substance.46 He concurs with Harman that
connection between real objects can neither be a crash nor a mirror; that touch
cannot be a point of shock or a reflection. Instead, touch—and with it the notion

of causation—must name some kind of mediation between disconnection and
convergence. Real connection must be engaged in mediating between externality
and internality. It must translate the disjunction of mutually external real objects,
disconnected among themselves, into a conjunction that is internal to the
constitution of another real object, the “real object I.” This is, of course, a rendition
of Whitehead’s vision of the fundamental creative relationship of events in the
production of novelty as condensed in his Category of the Ultimate,47 technically
unfolded with the neologism of “prehension.”48
Harman extracts the distinction between real and sensible objects from
the idealist and empiricist tradition, that is, a milieu in which always some
doubts as to the reality of causal efficacy of material objects prevailed. It is
remarkable, how under Harman’s wizard rod their descendants—Heidegger
and Husserl—transform into veritable realists! While Heidegger’s Dasein is
frustrated by the withdrawal of real objects, which accounts for Harman’s
view of disconnection,49 Husserl’s subjective intentionality of the human “I”
becomes the very place in which sensible objects appear on the inside of a
real object, the “real I.”50 At the same time, Harman’s anti-anthropocentric
enthusiasm diffuses Dasein’s infinite internality among all real objects as their
“molten core”51 and claims intentionality as the very structure of its internal
perception of externality.
This double expansion is crucial for Harman. It is an expansion because it
infuses withdrawal, internal infinity, and perceptivity into all possible real
objects, only including, not elevating human beings. It is a double expansion
because of the real objects’ independence from the sensible objects’ population of
an intentional interior, by which the latter remains distinct from the externality
of the former. It is crucial because, now, Harman has a way to connect the outside
of disconnected real objects per mediation of sensible perception with the inside
of another real object, the “I”—both without the crash of mutually external
billiard balls, and without the mirror of a mutually internal arrest within an all-
controlling mind.52 In other words, this complex connectivity between objects
has reached ontological universality, while discarding metaphysical—human or
divine—exceptionality.
Again, this does not establish any essential bifurcation from Whitehead. In
fact, Harman’s double expansion circumscribes rather exactly both outlook and
intention of Whitehead’s “prehension.”53 Like Harman, Whitehead retrieves
its directional (external–internal) structure from the idealism and empiricism
of the likes of Hume, Berkeley, Locke, and Leibnitz by transforming their
anthropocentric inclination into a realistic outlook with universal reach.54 In

avoiding the models of crash and mirror, “prehension” envisions a connectivity
of real objects as a modal concern of an internal standpoint with a perspective on
external objects.55 As for Harman, connection is threefold: it is an objectification
of a real object’s internal, inaccessible becoming via a modal transfer to another
object-in-becoming.56
Like Harman, Whitehead does not view this “democratization” of perception
among all “fellow creatures”57 as vitalism, but as a recognition of internality
and sensitivity in all things.58 Using Francis Bacon of all sources, Whitehead
affirms that “all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have
perception. . . .”59
Like Harman, Whitehead transforms “causal efficacy” from an external
necessity into a kind of formal causality.60 In Symbolism, he states that we must
inquire how in “any one individual . . . other individuals . . . enter ‘objectively’
into the unity of its own experience”—the “unity of its own experience” being
“that individual existing formally”—and, conversely, “how it enters into the
‘formal’ existence of other things . . . objectively, that is to say—existing abstractly,
exemplifying only some elements in its formal content.”61 The inaccessible,
formal interiority of a real object remains disconnected from its objectification
in other real objects. Yet, in its objectification it is perceived modally, that is,
through a “subjective form,”62 in the formal constitution of the becoming-itself
of a new real object.
Like Harman, Whitehead differentiates the external real objects prehended,
which remains always external, from the internal process of prehension. The
prehending entity cannot recover the formal wholeness of the prehended real
object, but only reinterpret its physicality by mentally abstracting a fragmented
modal form of this real object, internalizing and projecting it, so to say, as its
“sensible” object—which in a prehension appears as a complex of form and
feeling.63
So far, we may say that the respective differentiation between objects as well
as their relations and contrasts do not give rise to the profound opposition that
we were seeking to understand. On the contrary, Whitehead and Harman seem,
although through different terminologies, to say that there is a connection
between real objects despite various forms of disconnection; that the overcoming
of disconnection does neither discard the inaccessibility of real objects nor the
internal infinity of their core; and that any overcoming of causal isolation is not
of efficacious necessity, but somehow of formal nature, and hence, vicariously
stimulated. So, then, where does their divergence come from?
Allure/A-lure
A hint lies in the yet-undisclosed mystery of the initiation of connectivity.64 The

center-piece of Harman’s move toward the overcoming of the disconnection of
real objects among themselves—since their obvious, undisputed connection must
be explained somehow65—via the vicarious presence of sensible objects in the
“real object I” is enfolded in the question, how the skepticism of disconnection
(as in Hume) and the premature reintroduction of God as agent of connectivity
(as in Malebranche) can be avoided.66 Harman’s answer is not yet complete
with the introduction of the mediation of vicarious sensible causes because the
vicarious presence of real objects per sensible objects leaves the door wide open
for internal solipsism. Maybe, there are no real objects at all—only projections of
the only immediate real object, the “I”? Descartes ego cogito still lingers, raising
the still open question of realitas objectiva.67
Harman tries to escape this calamity with this fourfold disentanglement:
between the function of vicariousness and the two kinds of objects; between
relation and connection; between the “real object I” and all real objects; and
between the hidden substantiality of real objects and their substantial qualities.
First, as real objects are vicariously connected by sensible objects, so are sensible
objects vicariously connected through the “real object I.”68 Second, as there
are many different kinds of relation—the intentional space of sensible objects
and the “real I,” the contiguity of sensible objects in this space, the sincerity of
the occupation of the “real I” with sensible objects, real connection, and no
connection69—it is only through “sincerity” by which the “real I” in its intentional
space that transforms a sensible into a real object and connection occurs.70
Third, the question of the production of real connections elevates the “real I”71
over all other assumed real objects since it is the exceptional experienced place in
which sensible objects are converted into real objects72—still only assuming the
others’ own “molten core.” Fourth, the transformation in both directions and,
hence, the differentiation between real and sensible objects in the sincerity of the
“real object I” happens by a procedure of “coupling and uncoupling,”73 namely:
by allure.
While Harman’s original intention for the introduction of the disconnection
of real objects may have been his insistence on the inviolable reality and infinite
interiority of things against the possessiveness of human subjectivity, power,
and manipulation,74 the introduction of substantiality as expressive of this
independence becomes necessary only for solving another problem, namely:
the purely internal production of real objects by the “real object I”75—the
counter-piece of Descartes’s ego cogito, Heidegger’s Dasein, and Husserl’s

intentional Ego. However, the Aristotelian and Western congruence of essence
and essential qualities does only answer to the former, but not to the latter
intention. Why? Because as long as the essence of a sensible object is identical
with its sensed essential qualities,76 its “reality” is still stuck in a potential
solipsism of the “real object I” of which it might still represent an imagination
(a unicorn).77
It is in this context and with this latter intention that Harman takes the
audacious move to leave Aristotelian substance, instead establishing a disasso
ciation between the “essential qualities”78—even the unity-quality to be an
essence79—as being part of the sensorium of the “real object I” and the “essence”
of the real object itself, which is inherently withdrawn, hidden, unknown,
and unknowable, only leaving a subtle trace of its real exteriority beyond any
interior projection. This is the function of “allure”: in an “analogous event”80 of
transference, this dissociation becomes a trace for how real objects connect in
their hidden interiority. Hence, only by metaphorically alluring81 to the infinite
depth of objects as such,82 beyond signification (qualification),83 somehow
“brushing its surface,”84 we come somehow, je ne sais quoi,85 in touch with its
anima, the internal life of its “molten core.”
Whitehead, who completely abandons the category of substance, instead
builds on the interplay of events and objects.86 First, instead of the mutual
vicariousness of real and sensible objects, Whitehead establishes the interplay
of real objects (objectified events) and abstract objects (forms), in which both
mediate their respective function—the inaccessibility of the formal interiority
of real objects and their accessibility through (subjective) “forms” (pure objects)
of objectified events (facts). Second, relation is a mere abstraction of contrast,
which is the very becoming of connections of actual events per prehensions. Third,
prehensions, in their own turn, constitute the internalization of objectified
events in actual events, which are the very becoming of the “real I.” Fourth, the
differentiation between real and sensible objects in a process of becoming a real
object reflects the difference between real and abstract objects in physical and
mental prehensions as they are synthesizing their own “real object I” (the subject-
superject).87
Yet, while Harman’s “allure,” built on a transformed category of “substance,”
addresses the je ne sais quoi of disconnection as well as connection, Whitehead’s
conceptual counterpart—“symbolism”—is but an interference of two pure
modes of prehension, a causal and presentational objectification—partly
reconstructing Harman’s claim of the feeling of reality in the distinction between
real and sensible objects and their mutual inaccessibility and inherence.88 Hence,
in Whitehead’s paradigm of events and objects, “symbolism” or “allure” does not
yet point at the mystery of the je ne sais quoi. Is it missing then, missing because
of presupposed relationalism that—as Harman seems to imply—explains its
mystery away?
Not at all! For Whitehead, because of the event and object–structure, the
je ne sais quoi appears from another place, namely the process of becoming a
“real object I” itself in which the modes of prehension (the interplay of real
and sensible objects) are creatively connected. Since, for Whitehead, the “real
object I” is not a “given”—as it is for Harman—the question of the inexhaustible
“depth of objects”89 is transferred from the “occasions” of the vicarious interplay
of real and sensible objects in the intentional space of the “real object I” to
the sundering of all relationality in the becoming of such an “occasion” from
its real and sensible objects, that is, in the very appearance of its unprecedented
novelty.90 This—Whitehead calls the “initial aim” of an event yet-to-become from
objects. It names the je ne sais quoi of real connection. And it is at this point
that Whitehead’s occasionalism introduces God91 in the “thundering depth”92 of
things, “a-luring” to the becoming of real connections and objects.93
Occasionalism(s)
The theological turn of Whitehead’s occasionalism must not surprise.94 Or it will

only surprise if we forget that it was the obvious basis for Harman’s secularization
all along. Yet, instead of posing “God’s power as the shared space of all entities”
as in Malebranche—thereby either presupposing “God as a real object” among
real objects or as a substitute of the “intentional agent as the vicarious case
of otherwise separate phenomena”95—Whitehead’s God does not substitute
any object, but becomes that vicarious cause of otherwise separate, divergent
phenomena that causes nothing, touches nothing, substitutes nothing—but is
the “nothing” of becoming itself, the je ne sais quoi of the self-creative occasion
of connectivity.96 Whitehead’s divine answers the question from where, if the real
objects are the outcome of creative connections,97 the “real object I,” which holds
the mystery of such novelty, is itself arising. Whitehead’s occasional God does not
address any transcendent physical force or universal mental space of relationality,
but the sundering novelty of the very Self of becoming in its becoming as Self of
connectivity by which it is self-immanent.98
Whitehead’s occasional God names the same “thundering depth” of the

“real object I” that, for Harman, is the very ground on which he builds his
substantialism—saving the independence of real objects and the ineffability
of their interiority from any (human) “presence” of manipulation or (scientific
mechanicism of) causal power. Admittedly, Harman’s “substance” as inaccessible
essence, dissociated from its essential qualities and any claimed attributive unity,
is itself based on such a theological presupposition. While Malebranche would
not have yielded the concept of “allure” as the felt unknowability of real objects
other than the “real object I,” the invocation of the Ash’arite substantialism does
the trick.99 Yet, here, Harman follows al-Ghazali’s refutation of Aristotelism and
his exploration of the Islamic concept of tawhid—God’s oneness as absolutely
unknowable essence.100
Two peculiarities differentiate al-Ghazali’s occasionalism from Male-
branche’s. First, Malebranche, firmly in the Aristotelian, Western, and Christian
tradition of the identity of God’s essence and attributes, formulates occasion-
alism under the perspective of God’s omnipotence and, hence, God’s activity
as substitution of physical causality. Al-Ghazali, while teaching the absolute
dissociation of God’s inaccessible essence from its attributes as part of crea-
tion, understands his occasionalism under the perspective not of power, but
of divine emanation, compassion, and beauty. For both Sufi metaphysics and
the official Islamic doctrine, the beginning of creation is, as Henry Corbin has
demonstrated, enveloped in the bismilah ar-rahman ar-rahim, in the name of
God as compassion and all-pervasive love.101 Second, while for Malebranche all
existence is lacking power and hence, in ontological need of God, al-Ghazali is
an early representative of the doctrine of whadat-al-wujud, as developed by Ibn
Arabi after him, which states that, because of God’s unity, nothing exists except
God. Not that nothing really exists, since the attributes and names of God exist,
but nothing is something besides or independently from God’s unity with eve-
rything. Hence, God does not replace, but initiates connectivity by empowering
inexplicable interiority.102
In light of this background, it is not only meaningful that Harman finds his
understanding of substance through al-Ghazali rather than Malebranche, but its
very heart, the “democratization” of its theological inaccessibility, placed into the
interiority of all real objects, begins to resonate with Whitehead’s divine release
of, and dissociation from, any occasion of becoming. An occasion “is constituted
by its living aim at its own self-constitution” that in its “initial stage . . . is rooted
in the nature of God,” while “its completion depends on the self-causation of the
subject-superject.”103 While Harman expresses infinite depth of real objects with

an “allure” that both hides and reveals the inaccessible essence of real objects in
any real connection, Whitehead seeks the irretrievable immediacy of events in
their very becoming as a real object, in their irrelational beginning.104
Both the “allure” of the hidden essence of the event (or real object) and the
“a-lure” of the hidden beginning of the becoming of its Self may be necessary
or at least complimentary in their expression of an ontological occasionalism.
Moreover, both apophatic moves might not only address this same intention,
but, in fact, be of the same nature. Maybe “allure” alludes to the very reason for
the infinite depth of the becoming of events (or real objects) in themselves and the
hidden essence of objects in other events (or “real objects I”) because it alludes to
the “a-lure” of the infinite depth and hidden essence of the becoming Self in its
very “conception.”
This sundering of relationalism may not just point at the hidden interiority
of real objects, which, therefore, is vicariously mediated through sensible objects
and itself vicariously mediating them, but it might also already name a sundering
within the Self of the becoming “real object I.” Whitehead’s occasionalism
indicates that the becoming Self at the “molten core” of any real object may be
like a heart with two chambers, that is, released into its own becoming by being
detached from its own infinity. The “essence” or “realm internal constitution”105
of real objects may even be inaccessible because of their Self being inaccessible to
themselves. And they become relational, connective, and Self as new real objects
by becoming disconnected from their own infinite depth. The mystery of the Self
of real objects is, indeed, their hiddenness from themselves.106
Here, Harman and Whitehead cross over into one another’s conceptuality.
While Harman’s concept of “substance” occupies the place of an initial
independence and non-relationality of real objects, he finally poses real
objects as the result of connections.107 Does this not mean that all connectivity
creates objects? But from where, then, is relationality sundered, if not from
the je ne sais quoi of the becoming of the interiority of the “real object I”?
Conversely, Whitehead’s all-relationality—in the form of universal “mutual
immanence”108—is not caught up in efficient causality, and only seems to exclude
the inaccessibility of the unknown and the unknowable as impossibility,109
because it is based on a “creativity [that] transcends the world already actual”110
in the very becoming of the Self of a new event (or “real object I”). Does this
not mean that any event or real object is in its Self irrelational, sundered from
the “ontological principle” of connectivity,111 unknown in its “conception” and
unknowable in its becoming Self?
Gnothi seauton
The inscription at the Apollonian Temple of Delphi might not be obsolete,

after all. If we take the question of “touch” as that of a connection in any actual
event’s or any real object’s interior subjectivity and this subjectivity as that
of the mystery that “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing,
nothing, nothing, bare nothingness”112—the “Know thyself!” may well be its
hidden essence. Maybe the opposition between the occasionalism of Harman
and Whitehead is, then, one of a too-little and a too-much, of an unnecessarily
“pure” muting or articulating of its respective theological initiation. When
Juvenal, the poet, alluded to its prescription as coming de cealo, he might well
have struck a middle way: We may only be able to allude to the very apophasis
of the Self, in which we touch the other, when we desist from explaining its self-
exclusion, its hiddenness to itself, away, but also desist from understanding it
as already explained by merely naming its infinite interiority “God.”113 If the
two chambers of the heart of things becomes porous, it might well be poisoned
and become insane.
For me, at this point of my meditation, this has four implications—with
which I will end. First and foremost, in the question of “touch” the hidden
depth of the Self is unavoidable; it is irreplaceable. It is it that is touched and
that touches—in me and the other. Far from indicating an external crash of
efficient causes or the purely internal mirrors of human or divine minds, it
finds otherness only in the intensity of recognizing its inward and outward
dynamics of intimation and detachment—as the same move toward the mystery
of its creative core of connectivity and, in it, that from a receptiveness for
otherness. If one enters this—what Meister Eckhart calls—Abgeschiedenheit
(detachment), one may intimately encounter one’s Self in the sphere of touch,
the nameless, the unspeakable, the void, khora, or—in Whitehead’s words—
the “common function exhibited by any group of actual occasions,” namely
“that of mutual immanence.”114
Contemplating this intimacy with every “thing” in the exploration of the
infinite interiority of detachment, its “molten core” may strike us as an encounter
of the “appearances as they really are, neither upside down, nor moving, nor
receding, nor turning, just like space, of the nature of nothing, cut off from the
course of all words and expressions, unborn, not coming forth, not arising,
nameless, formless, really without existence, unimpeded, infinite, boundless,
unrestrained, only existing by causation and produced through the perversion
of thought,” as the Shaddharma-pundarika Sutra (the Sutra of the Lotus Flower)
says.115 Or one may become absorbed into al-Ghazali’s experience of fana, the
annihilation of the released Self, and baqa, the paradoxical subsistence in the
oneness of God with everything.116
Maybe Feuerbach was right that this “God” is only a projection of the
infinite interiority of Self—wrong only in his restriction to humanity—because
“everyone believes in a god according to what he has subjectively posited in his
mind. God . . . is dependent on the subjective act of positing. . . . Thus a man of
this kind sees (in the form of God) only his own self and what he has posited
in his mind.”117 Yet, these words are not from Feuerbach, but from Ibn Arabi,
addressing the inexpressible nature of the “hidden treasure” of Self.
Second, enfolded in the first implication is another one, namely, that of a
universal relativism. I fear that, as long as we confine ourselves to Descartes and
Hume, Malebranche and Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, we drag with us a certain
unspoken claim of the superiority of Western philosophy—conditioned by
Greek origin and Christian mediation. Have we forgotten that Ibn Arabi was
a European thinker, an Andalusian, who may seem so far away, temporally
and culturally, because he was not in the Christian realm of things? Have we
forgotten that Derrida was of African descent, a Sephardic Jew, culturally situated
in Arabian Islam? I fear that as long as we, in general, take our inspiration only
from the likes of Heidegger and Husserl, we might forget that we also transmit
a particular and particularly restricted view of the superiority of the Greek and
German tradition. And we know where this has led Heidegger.
Hence, I value highly the fact that Harman has chosen to desist from only
claiming the occasionalism of Malebranche, but also to at least hint at the Ash’ari
school. And I understand Whitehead’s insistence to seek approximations of his
“philosophy of organism” more within “some strains of Indian, or Chinese,
thought, than . . . western Asiatic, or European, thought”118 as prescription to
embrace otherness without the exclusion of 4/5th of human thought. What other
traditions contribute to the other, objects, the Self, intimacy, and detachment is
legion, indeed. It might reach from the Zen meditation on the “original face”119—
the infinite interiority of Self before it was procreated—to the Sufi meditation on
the “Face of God”120—as the only thing that remains, or maybe just as the last
illusion. In any case, the understanding of “touch” may implicate the multiplicity
of all of these others.
Third, again as an implication of the antecedent point we may want to
expand this relativity of the “touch” of inaccessible objects even further.
Consider this: Why is it that we might implicitly think that the “molten
core” of all objects is anything like our Self, our “real object I”? The infinite
interior of our Self guarantees only that we cannot name its hidden essence.
Moreover, its infinite imaginary activity might rather point toward a rigorous
unknowability of the very character of other Selves of objects. Have we not
already, in our meditation on Harman and Whitehead, presupposed that
this otherness is only one of “other subjectivity” like ours, like mine, thereby
ironically remaining caught in an anthropic paradigm? What is the common
feature of the otherness of non-human objects, non-living objects, maybe
even non-human-like minds?
Terms like panpsychism, animism, or pan-subjectivity may not really be
helpful to overcome the paradox of such generalities that only restrict our
perceptibility and imagination of such otherness.121 Maybe—to use Harman’s
differentiation here—there is not any common “ontology,” but—to use
Deleuzian terminology122—only a plethora of metaphysics of singularities
and their universality? The paradox may well be that we must—as Whitehead
says—want to face a “universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual
thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it.”123 It may be
our obligation to release this infinitely diverse mystery of multiplicity from any
schemes of generality to get to the “molten core” in our Selves—with radical
openness for the unprecedented that it hides from and with which it touches
every other thing.
Fourth and finally, I am aware that my meditation has led me “off track,”
so to say, far away from its initial figures and their thoughts, yet not without
unfolding their own impulses. One might level the allegation that philosophy is
not mysticism—suspect as it seems. And hasn’t Whitehead so eloquently drawn
the line between both by, indeed, not excluding mysticism, but, nevertheless, by
giving philosophy a direction away from it? While he affirms—and I claim that
for my philosophic meditation—that “philosophy is mystical,” he also defines that
“the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism.”124 Yet, Whitehead also
warns us from “sterilizing philosophic thought”125 and views its “adventure”126 as
the care for a “wonder” in which philosophy “begins” and that, “at the end, when
philosophic thought has done its best, . . . remains.”127
In this sense, the character of the philosophic meditation, that I have
employed here, might best be circumscribed with Nicolas of Cusa’s docta
ignorantia, as learned unlearning. I now know less that when I began, but I know
its unknowability as surrender to the world’s “creativeness,”128 as capitulation in
the face of what Whitehead calls “depths as yet unspoken.”129 In fact, “touch”
might not be accessed as crash or mirror, reduced by our limited imagination of

the human or divine. Yet, it might be vicariously facilitated in the depth of Self
and the other, and the other of any Self and its other; not as “given,” but as always
unprecedented; as an apophatic living of creative uncertainty in the face of sheer
multiplicity.130
Notes
1 Opening lines of the movie Crash, directed. by Paul Haggis (2004).

2 Harman, “On vicarious causation,” p. 210.
3 Ibid., p. 190.
4 Ibid., p. 212.
5 Cf. Badiou, Being and Event, p. 18.
6 Cf. Frank, Al-Ghazali and the Asharite School.
8 Ibid., p. 208.
9 Ibid., p. 220.
10 Whitehead, Concept of Nature, p. 6.
12 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 21.
13 Cf. Faber, “Immanence and Incompleteness,” pp. 91–107.
15 Cf. Harman, “On vicarious causation,” p. 204.
16 Cf. Ibid., p. 219.
17 Ibid., p. 202.
18 Cf. Harman, Towards Speculative Realism.
19 Cf. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience, pp. 41–6.
20 Cf. Harman, Prince of Networks, p. 101.
22 Cf. Ibid., p. 194.
23 Ibid., p. 192.
24 Ibid., p. 188.
25 Ibid., p. 187.
26 Ibid., p. 194.
27 Ibid., p. 195.
29 Ibid., p. 76.
30 Ibid., p. 83.
31 Ibid., p. 88.
32 Ibid., p. 89.
33 Ibid., p. 90.
34 Ibid., p. 91.
35 Cf. Shaviro, “Whitehead, Harman and the Problem of Relations,” pp. 279–90.
37 Cf. Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism, ch. 4.
39 Cf. Leclerc, Whitehead’s Metaphysics.
41 Cf. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 152.
43 Cf. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 125.
45 Cf. Ibid., p. 36.
46 Cf. Ibid., p. 50.
47 Cf. Ibid., p. 21.
50 Ibid., p. 194.
51 Ibid., p. 210.
52 Cf. Ibid., p. 187.
53 Cf. Rose, On Whitehead, ch. 2.
55 Cf. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 64.
57 Ibid., p. 50.
58 Cf. R. Faber, “Amid a Democracy of fellow Creatures,” pp. 192–237.
61 Whitehead, Symbolism, pp. 26–7.
63 Cf. Ibid., p. 88.
65 Cf. Ibid., p. 199.
66 Cf. Ibid., p. 219.
69 Cf. Ibid., pp. 199–200.
70 Cf. Ibid., p. 210.
71 Ibid., p. 198.
72 Cf. Ibid.
73 Ibid., p. 213.
74 Cf. Ibid., p. 211.
75 Ibid., pp. 209–10.
76 Cf. Ibid., p. 214.
77 Cf. Ibid., p. 215.
78 Ibid., p. 213.
79 Cf. Ibid., p. 214.
80 Ibid., p. 215.
81 Cf. Ibid., p. 212.
82 Cf. Ibid., p. 211.
83 Cf. Ibid., p. 215.
84 Ibid., p. 220.
85 Cf. Ibid., p. 214.
86 Cf. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, p. 143.
87 Cf. Faber, God as Poet of the World, part 2 and 3.
88 Cf. Faber, “Introduction: Negotiating Becoming,” in Secrets of Becoming, pp. 1–49.
90 Cf. Faber, “Programmatic Dysfunction in the Chaosmos of Deleuze and
Whitehead,” pp. 117–28.
91 Cf. Faber, God as Poet of the World, part 3.
92 Ibid., p. 193.
94 Cf. Faber, “Surrationality and Chaosmos,” pp. 157–77.
96 Cf. Faber, Prozeßtheologie, §33.
98 Cf. Faber, God as Poet of the World, §17.
100 Cf. Corbin, Alone with the Alone.
101 Cf. Ibid., ch. 3.
102 The intricacies of the debate between the orthodox and Sufi schools and, partly,
between them (especially between Ash’arties and Mi’tazilites, is far beyond this
article, and, hence, the “being with” of God reflects my own understanding of
their differences as an inherent potential for this philosophical conundrum).
Cf. Rahman, Islam, pp. 85–99.
1 03 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 244.
104 Cf. Faber, God as Poet of the Worlds, §20.
106 Cf. Faber, God as Poet of the World, §48.
1 08 Cf. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 201.

110 Ibid., p. 237.
111 Cf. Ibid., p. 244.
112 Ibid., p. 167.
113 Cf. Faber, “Tears of God,” pp. 57–103.
114 Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas, p. 201.
115 Lotus Sutra, ch. 14 (A Happy Life).
116 Cf. Momen, The Phenomenon of Religion, p. 236.
117 Ibn al-Arabi, Fusus-al-Hikam; quoted in T. Izutsu, Sufism and Taosim, p. 254.
119 Cf. Cleary, The Original Face.
120 Cf. Corbin, Face de Dieu, face de l’homme.
121 Cf. Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism.
122 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 3.
123 Whitehead, Symbolism, p. 39.
124 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 174.
125 Ibid., p. 173.
126 Ibid.
127 Ibid., p. 168.
130 Cf. Faber, “Polyphilia and Theoplicity,” pp. 200–23.
68
Part Two
Things: Substances, Individuals,

and Creatures
70
4
The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann,

and the Processual Nature of Substances
Levi R. Bryant
The onto-temporal grounds of withdrawal
In “Ousia and Gramme” Derrida writes,
The now is given simultaneously as that which is no longer and as that which
is not yet. It is what it is not, and is not what it is. . . . Thereby time is composed
of non-beings. Now, that which bears within it a certain no-thing, that which
accommodates nonbeingness, cannot participate in presence, in substance, in
beingness itself (ousia).1
In a remark that is put forward almost as a casual aside, Derrida immediately

assimilates substances, things, to presence. Henceforth, substance will be treated
as a synonym for presence, such that to speak of substance is to speak of presence
and to speak of presence is to speak of substance. Yet can we speak so obviously
and self-evidently of substance in terms of presence? In Aristotle, at least, what
is present is not substance, but rather qualities of substance. As a consequence,
Aristotle will ensnare himself in all sorts of aporia as he simultaneously
attempts to think substance as presence and as that which is nowhere and never
present.2 Elsewhere, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke will
make these aporia explicit, arguing that substance always disappears behind
qualities, suggesting that we should therefore abandon the concept of substance
altogether.3 For if qualities are what individuate substance, yet substance is that
which remains when all qualities are stripped away, it would seem that substance
is nothing at all.
Far from being characterized by presence, substance seems to be that which
withdraws from presence, or that which is nowhere and never present. It is for
this reason that Graham Harman argues that the very being of the substance
of objects lies in withdrawal.4 To be a substance or an object is to be radically
withdrawn from all other entities and, above all, from presence. Or, put
differently, to be a substance is to be anterior to and at odds with all presence. The
substantiality of substance perpetually disappears behind qualities, withdrawing
from presence.
However, here we must proceed with caution, for in suggesting that
substances are anterior to presence, we invite the possibility of a sort of “negative
theology” of objects, where, like God, substances are withdrawn from other
objects, non-present and inaccessible to other objects, while remaining fully
present to themselves and in themselves. If withdrawal is truly to capture the
substantiality of substance without falling into a metaphysics of presence, then
it is necessary that withdrawal not only be a relational predicate describing
how one substance encounters another substance, but also that withdrawal
characterize the very substantiality of substance itself, regardless of whether
any substance relates to another substance, such that substances are withdrawn
even from themselves and in themselves.
Yet how are we to argue for this radical withdrawal of substances from both
each other and from themselves? What sort of philosophical demonstration can
we muster to prove that substances are withdrawn in this way? It is in relation
to these questions that my reference to Derrida is not idle. For despite his
hostility to the “philosopheme” of substance, Derrida provides the resources
for demonstrating the radical withdrawal of substance. This demonstration
requires the concept of substance to be indexed to the nature of time conceived
as différance. As a consequence, one of the further surprises substance holds
in store for us is that it turns out to be essentially temporal and processual.
Substance is not that which is opposed to temporality and process, nor is it an
abiding identity that persists beneath changing qualities, but rather it is temporal
through and through. As such, substance must produce itself from moment to
moment and perpetually face the threat of entropy or dissolution from both
within and without. Substances are negentropic unities whose identity consists
in the operations through which they produce themselves across time. As such,
they evolve, change, and mutate in all sorts of ways. The terms “substance,”
“process,” and “dynamic systems” are all synonyms within the framework of my
onticology.5
The core of Derrida’s critique of presence revolves around the nature of time
and what must be the case in order for succession to occur. Articulated in terms
The Time of the Object 73
of his critique of Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics, Book 4, sections

10–14,6 Derrida asks us to,
. . . consider the sequence of nows. The preceding now, it is said, must be destroyed
by the following now. But, Aristotle then points out, it cannot be destroyed “in
itself ” . . ., that is, as the moment when it is (now, in act). No more can it be
destroyed in an other now . . .: for then it would not be destroyed as now, itself;
and, as a now which has been, it is (remains) inaccessible to the action of the
following now.7
If time is to be capable of succession, then the now cannot be a pure and

indivisible present, but must instead be fissured from within. As summarized by
Martin Hägglund,
. . . as long as one holds on to the idea of an indivisible now—or more

succinctly: as long as one holds on to the concept of identity as presence in
itself – it is impossible to think succession. The now cannot first be present in
itself and then be affected by its own disappearance, since this would require
that the now begin to pass away after it had ceased to be. Rather, the now must
disappear in its very event. The succession of time requires not only that each
now is superseded by another now, but also that this alteration is at work from
the beginning.8
Driving this point home, Hägglund concludes, “[t]he crux is that even the
slightest temporal moment must be divided in its becoming: separating before
from after, past from future. Without this interval there would be no time, only
a presence forever remaining the same.”9 We thus begin with a fact—that time
passes—and raise the conditions under which this passage is possible. If the now
first existed as an individual unit and then was constituted as past through its
destruction, it would be impossible to think succession because, as Hägglund
puts it, the past would have to be constituted after the now or present has
already been destroyed. As a consequence, the now must be internally fissured
between passing away and being present, such that the now necessarily contains
a dimension that was never present.
Repeating a line of thought that can already be found in Bergson’s Matter and
Memory,10 and that receives substantial development by Deleuze,11 Derrida thus
argues that the passage of the now necessarily requires a split within presence,
such that presence is never purely present but is always already “contaminated”
from within by absence. The crucial point is that this forked fissure within
presence, composed of one fork directed toward the past, another the present,
and a third passing over into the future refers, as Derrida elsewhere puts it
repeating Bergson and Deleuze, to “. . . a past that was never [my emphasis]
present . . .”12 In short, this past is not a past constituted after the present (in
which case we would fall back into the aporia outlined by Hägglund), but rather
it is a past that is necessarily always already past. Put differently, this past is an
a priori past haunting every present. Consequently, even if time were to have
an evental beginning as the Christian Creationists would have it, this first now
would not be a pure presence that then unfolds producing a past as it passes, but
rather would already be fissured by the past in order to be now. In other words,
this first would necessarily and paradoxically be second.
The split-being of substances, powers, and withdrawal
With Derrida’s resolution of the aporia of succession—or rather with his thesis
that presence is aporetic in itself, such that it is simultaneously withdrawn and
present—we thus get the beginnings of an account of the ontological grounds of
withdrawal. If substances are necessarily withdrawn, if they cannot be treated as
synonymous with presence, then this is precisely because they are fissured from
within by time, such that one face of the substance or object shows itself to the
world in presencing or manifesting itself and another face of the object faces
toward this pure past that was never present. As I have argued in The Democracy
of Objects and elsewhere, we must thus conceive objects as necessarily split.13
There is, on the one hand, that side of the object pointed toward presence or
what I call “local manifestation,” and, on the other hand, that side of the object
that is radically withdrawn, which I call “virtual proper being.”
In speaking of that dimension of the object that presents itself, we must
conceive presencing or local manifestation not as givenness to a subject, body,
mind, or perceiver, but rather as appearingness to the earth. In other words, just as
Badiou calls for a being-there, an appearance, to a world without this appearance
being indexed to a subject,14 we must conceive local manifestation as actuality or
presence in the world without this manifestation necessarily being givenness to a
subject. Local manifestations occasionally take place regardless of whether or not
there is any entity to perceive them. To manifest is not to be perceived, but rather
to become actual. More importantly, if local manifestations are occasional, then
this is because they need not take place at all. An object or substance can exist, be
entirely real, without manifesting or actualizing itself whatsoever.
It is for this reason that local manifestations are local manifestations. On

the one hand, local manifestations are manifestations because, when they take
place, they are actualizations or instances of becoming-present of some power
of an object. On the other hand, local manifestations are local, because the
manner in which an object actualizes or manifests itself is a function of the local
conditions or circumstances in which the object currently exists. Generally local
manifestations are the result of exo-relations between objects. “Exo-relations” is
shorthand for “external relations” or contingent relations that take place between
substances. The key feature of exo-relations is that substances can be severed or
detached from these relations. In other words, these relations are not internal
such that an object is its relations to other substances, but are rather shifting and
external relations that take place as the object undergoes its adventure in time
throughout the earth.
When objects enter into exo-relations with other objects, new qualities or
local manifestations generally occur. Take the example of fire. On the planet
earth, fire rises toward the sky seeking to escape its terrestrial imprisonment,
creating dancing and forked tongues of flame. This actualization of fire is a local
manifestation. Here the exo-relations would consist in the relation the fire shares
to the planet Earth, oxygen, the wood, and so on. I call these relations among
substances a “regime of attraction” because they preside over how the substance
manifests itself. However, it would be a mistake to conflate the withdrawn
substantiality of fire with these qualities or local manifestations. When fire occurs
on the International Space Station, it no longer manifests itself as forked tongues
of flame, but now manifests itself in, paradoxically, a liquid form, creating waves
that flow everywhere. De-sutured from its exo-relation to the planet Earth, fire
actualizes very different qualities.
The variability of local manifestation is ubiquitous throughout the world.
When I walk into a cold room, my skin contracts and get goose bumps. When
I walk out into the intense Texas heat, it becomes slightly swollen. These are a
result of the external relations in a regime of attraction that I have entered. Water
transitions between ice, a smooth placid liquid state, and a violent boiling state
as it enters into different regimes of attraction. These regimes of attraction do
not merely consist of heat, but also altitude or pressure as well. Water will boil at
different temperatures depending on the altitude at which it is heated. It will be
said that some substances like mice cannot be separated from their exo-relations
without ceasing to exist. For example, if a mouse is placed in one of Boyle’s
vacuum pumps it will die due to lack of oxygen. However, to say this is to confuse
local manifestations or qualities with the substantiality of substances. Being alive
is not the substantiality of the mouse, but rather is a local manifestation of the
mouse. Proof of this is found in the fact that the mouse can be revived under
certain conditions. While that regime of attraction in which the mouse is able to
locally manifest itself is certainly important, it is nonetheless distinct from the
substantiality of the mouse.
As a consequence of this variability, local manifestations are not identical to
the substantiality of substance. If, then, local manifestations are not identical to
the substantiality of substance, what, then, does the substantiality of substance
consist in? While something of a substance occasionally manifests itself,
substance is necessarily withdrawn by virtue of how it is fissured or split by
time. If local manifestations are variable, then two things are required to render
substance thinkable. First, there must be something of objects that exists even
where the object does not locally manifest itself. When I turn out the lights, the
color of my coffee mug disappears. It no longer produces the local manifestation
of blueness. Even in the absence of this local manifestation, something of the
object must exist. Second, objects must be capable of producing the various local
manifestations. Even though local manifestations are always creative events
insofar as they entail the intertwining of many different things in exo-relations,
nonetheless, entities must possess powers that render them capable of acting at
all. Qualities are acts on the part of substances because they are manifestations.
In order to be capable of these acts, objects must have powers enabling them to
act under requisite conditions.
The power of an object is never identical to the qualities or local manifestations
of an object. The powers of an object always have an extension greater than any
of the local manifestations it happens to embody. Take my coffee mug. My coffee
mug clearly has a “coloring power.” Ontologically, it is not that the coffee mug
is blue, but rather that it does blue. Blue is an act on the part of the coffee mug.
When the lights are turned out, the blueness of the mug, as an event or activity
on the part of the mug, ceases. Likewise, the mug is not just a particular shade
of blue, but rather the color of the mug is variable depending on the regime
of attraction, the exo-relations, or the conditions under which it acts, that is,
the wavelengths of light the mug interacts with. In bright sunlight, the mug is
a brilliant blue. Under the light of my lamp, the mug is a deep, rich blue. In
candlelight a variety of different shades of blue will dance across the mug. If the
light is colored like a red light or neon lights, the shade of blue will take on the
hue of different colors. The power of the mug to produce various colors both
never manifests itself and is infinitely inexhaustible—even for God—such that
any color the mug “does” is an effect of the mug’s withdrawn powers.
As a consequence, the withdrawn dimension of objects, the pure past, or

virtual proper being of substances must be thought as potency or the potentiality
to be actualized otherwise or differently under different conditions. These powers
deserve to be called affects because they refer to capacities to act and be acted
upon by objects. Of affects, Deleuze writes,
. . . from the viewpoint of an ethology . . ., one needs first to distinction between

two sorts of affections: actions, which are explained by the nature of the affected
individual, and which spring from the individual’s essence; and passions, which
are explained by something else, and which originate outside the individual.
Hence the capacity for being affected is manifested as a power of acting insofar as
it is assumed to be filled by active affections, but as a power of being acted upon,
insofar as it is filled by passions.15
Ordinarily we conceive affects as feelings or emotions. Yet within Deleuze’s

Spinozist framework, “feelings” are local manifestations of something more
basic and withdrawn: passive and active affects or powers. Active affects refer
to the various capacities of an entity to act or initiate action. Passive affects, by
contrast, refer to the various ways in which an entity is open to other entities or
substances. Not every entity can affect another entity. Rather, for one entity to
affect another entity it must have the right passive affects. I am unable to sense
ultraviolet light or the electric impulses of other entities in the way that a shark
is. A rock lacks the requisite structure of passive affects to be affected by speech.
Neutrinos, due to their neutral electric charge, are unable to affect or be affected
by most other types of matter.
At the level of its virtual proper being, substances are related and fluctuating
systems of affects or powers. If these powers or affects are fluctuating, then,
this is because they can gain and lose powers, and because the power of a
substance’s powers can diminish and intensify in their strength. The power of
the great white shark to sense other organisms through their electromagnetic
fields can diminish as the shark ages. Iron heated, cooled, and pounded gains
significantly in strength. When we are ill or in the throes of depression, our
powers of perception diminish, as does our capacity to open ourselves to
others. The affects of a substance are not fixed, but fluctuate in all sorts of
ways as a result of processes within the substance and encounters with other
substances.
Yet what does all of this have to do with temporality and Derrida’s différance?
On the one hand, actualization is a temporal process. The process by which
an affect or power actualizes itself is a process that unfolds in time, where the
substance undergoes a “becoming-other” in the actualized local manifestation,

such that power withdraws or disappears behind the local manifestation. As
Deleuze elsewhere observes in a very similar vein, “[i]ntensity is difference, but
this difference tends to deny or to cancel itself out in extensity and underneath
quality.”16 “Intensity,” in this context, can—with a little liberty—be thought as
the powers or affects of which an entity is capable.17 “Extensity,” by contrast, can
be understood as the local manifestations or qualities that an object comes to
embody in its actualization. The bright blue of my mug in sunlight is an extensive
quality resulting from an intensive difference (wavelengths of light), actualizing
the powers or passive affects of which the mug is capable. The affects or powers
of the mug become-other in the extensive quality it comes to embody, and this
process is a temporal process. This process necessarily involves a withdrawal
of the substantiality of the object because, on the one hand, powers disappear
behind the qualities that they actualize and extensity, and, on the other hand,
other potential local manifestations of the object tend to be foreclosed. As a
result, there is a tendency for objects to be confused with their qualities, with
their local manifestations in extensity, by virtue of how powers become invisible.
Substances, in their actualized state, still harbor volcanic powers within them,
yet these powers are clothed or disguised until the substance is perturbed by
new sets of exo-relations. There is always a pure past consisting of powers or
affects—the two are synonymous in onticology—of which local manifestations
are effects.
Derrida’s neologism “différance” is designed to (1) capture the two senses of
difference, and (2) the manner in which all presence harbors absence within
itself. Différance is a non-concept that both makes an argument and performs
the argument it is making. Thus, as Derrida points out, the difference between
the term “difference” and “différance” is inaudible within the French language.
From the standpoint of audible language (presence) the two sound identical,
while nonetheless embodying very different meanings. The difference that
makes the difference between these two terms is thus absent or withdrawn from
the standpoint of audible speech or presence. It is in this regard that the very
term “différance” performs or enacts the argument Derrida is making.
The neologism différance captures the two senses of difference as deferral and
difference. That is, the neologism captures the difference between difference as
act or activity, becoming, as in the case of the verb “to differ” or “to produce a
difference,” and the noun “difference” which might denote “difference between.”
Of these two senses of differences, Derrida seems to prefer the sense of difference
as a verb, seeing “difference between” as an effect of the activity of différance.
Thus, Derrida will remark, for example, that différance is “. . . the becoming-time
of space and the becoming-space of time . . .”18 As Hegel observes in the Science of
Logic, diversity, difference-between, or “spatialized difference,” is a “relation” in
which each entity belongs to a plurality without internal relations among those
entities. Entities within a diversity are, as Hegel says, “reflected-into-themselves,”
self-related, without being “reflected-into-others,” or “other-related.”19 Such
is spatialized difference, where space exists “partes extra partes” or in a field
where all parts are external to one another. Claiming there is a becoming-
space of time, Derrida’s point is that external difference, externality, diversity,
is a form of difference that must be produced through a temporal process, not
a form of difference that is “already” there. Hence, difference as a verb, as an
activity, is the primal “nature” of difference. Substances and their differences
from and in opposition to other substances are therefore like blooming flowers.
Their extended nature is something that must be produced in an extending or
extensionalizing activity akin to that described by Whitehead in Process and
Reality in his theory of extension.20
Derrida’s choice of the term “deferral” to capture one sense of différance
is perhaps unfortunate, as the term “deferral” tends to evoke connotations
of futurity, covering over the historicity of the object as a sort of extended
space–time worm. Deferral denotes not only that substance is not yet, that its
actuality or presence is deferred, that more actualizations or presencings lay
in wait for the object, but also that the object already is, that it is past, that it
contains within itself a reserve that is not present. For example, we might think
of Freud’s logic of Nachträglichkeit where a past trace comes to function in the
production of a symptom later, in a delayed fashion, retroactively, despite the
fact that it did not produce a trauma and accompanying symptom at the time
of its inscription. It is in this respect that substance or objects are necessarily
withdrawn from themselves. As deferred both with respect to the pure past that
has never been present and a future that is yet to come, objects or substances
are never fully present, even to themselves, and are thus withdrawn with
respect to themselves. Substances necessarily harbor a volcanic core such that
they never manage to attain identity or self-sameness within themselves. They
are haunted by a reserve of potentiality that always contains surprises for the
world and themselves.
Différance as deferral names the split-nature of substances as withdrawn in
the dimension of their virtual proper being and as presencing themselves in
their local manifestations. The powers or potentials of an object themselves
never become present, nor are they ever static, but rather they fluctuate in
terms of their degree of power and the power they possess. Moreover, the local
manifestations an object undergoes never exhaust the local manifestations of
which it is capable.
Four types of objects
Based on the foregoing analysis of the split between the virtual proper being
and local manifestation of objects, it is now possible to distinguish between four
different types of objects: dark objects, dim objects, bright objects, and rogue
objects. Insofar as objects are not identical to their local manifestations, insofar
as the substantiality of substance consists not in its qualities but in its powers or
affects, we can conceive of an object so thoroughly withdrawn that it does not
manifest itself at all. These would be dark objects. Like ghosts in a room that
produce no effects on anything else whatsoever, dark objects would exist and
be entirely real without actualizing any qualities or producing any effects on
other objects. These objects can come to produce local manifestations under
appropriate exo-relations or circumstances, yet for the time being, qua dark
object, they are entirely dormant. Here it must be emphasized that dark objects
are an ontological possibility that cannot be proven. Onticology entails that dark
objects might exist, but there is no way to demonstrate that they do exist insofar
as they are thoroughly withdrawn without a trace at the level of the actual.
Dim objects, by contrast, refer to objects that exist on the earth but that
cannot be registered by another object insofar as that other object lacks the
affects necessary for the object to affect it. Neutrinos are a good example of dim
objects. Neutrinos are constantly streaming down on the earth, produced by
the sun and other stars, yet they produce little or no effect on the matter most
of us are familiar with. The reason for this is that their neutral electric charge
prevents them from interacting with other forms of matter. As a consequence,
neutrinos pass through most other matter with greater facility than a hot knife
through butter. Another example of dim objects might be illegal immigrants in
the United States. They work here and they live here, yet from the standpoint of
the United States government, they are largely invisible such that they are not
registered as existing. Much politics revolves around dim objects.21
Bright objects are objects that brightly manifest themselves in a regime of
attraction or field of exo-relations with other substances or objects. These are
objects that are deeply entangled with a variety of other objects, such that they
have a fairly stable and invariant set of local manifestations. Take the example of
my body. As an entity I am deeply entangled with the planet earth, the atmosphere
and altitude about me, the sun and its light that shines upon me, and a range of
temperatures. Because of my entanglement in this regime of attraction, the local
manifestations of my body tend to be fairly regular. My weight is more or less
constant due to the gravitation of the planet. The shape of my body remains
fairly regular due to the atmospheric pressures that surround me. The color of
my skin stays more or less constant because I tend to get a fairly regular exposure
to sunlight. By contrast, were I to go to Mars, my weight would change; were I to
dive deep in the ocean I would implode; and were I to be locked in a basement
without sunlight I would become very pale and perhaps malformed due to lack
of vitamin D.
The morphogenetic constancy of bright objects produced by their existence in
fairly stable and reliable regimes of attraction creates the illusion that the object
can be reduced to their presence or local manifestations. The constancy of the
regime of attraction creates the illusion that the object is its qualities. Yet every
object is defined not by its qualities, but by its powers. Bright objects still harbor
volcanic powers within themselves, yet these powers are dormant by virtue of
lacking the opportunity to defer themselves or actualize themselves in new local
manifestations. Change the regime of attraction for bright objects and its local
manifestations will generally change as well.
Finally, rogue objects are objects that are not moored to any particular regime
of attraction but which move in and out various constellations of exo-relations.
Astronomers have recently discovered rogue planets that are not tied to any
particular solar system, but which wander throughout the galaxy moving in and
out of other systems. This provides a nice example of a rogue object. It often
happens that regimes of attraction or fields of exo-relations severely limit the
local manifestations of which an object is capable and the movement possible
for that object. In these circumstances, common to bright objects, it is as if the
object were ensnared within a spider web, such that the more it struggles to
free itself the more deeply entrenched it becomes. Rogue objects, by contrast, are
objects that seem to exceed all their exo-relations, moving in and out of various
regimes of attractions and perpetually modifying the local manifestations of
the substances populating the regime of attraction they temporarily encounter.
Rogue objects allow us to think the element of chance that haunts any particular
regime of attraction, such as the sudden appearance of the asteroid that likely
destroyed the dinosaurs.
Identity and process: Objects as dynamic systems
Because différance is that which defines the being of a substance as

simultaneously withdrawn and self-othering in local manifestations, it follows
that the identity of a substance is not a fixed and abiding given that persists
beneath change, but a perpetual activity on the part of substances. Within
the Aristotlean framework, identity was conceived as an abiding sameness
that persists beneath changing qualities. My cat might lose the hair on her
stomach, yet she still remains this cat. The thisness that persists as the same
would be, in this framework, that which constitutes the identity of the cat.
However, within the framework of onticology, because objects are structured
by différance it follows that the identity of an object is not an abiding sameness,
but a perpetual activity or process wherein the object constitutes itself as that
object across time and space. Identity is a perpetual work objects must do in
order to maintain themselves as that object.
Autopoietic systems theory—especially in its Luhmannian formulation22—
provides the theoretical resources for thinking substances in these dynamic
and productive terms. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela distinguish
between allopoietic machines and autopoietic machines.23 Roughly, allopoietic
machines are machines that are constituted by something else and which do not
strive to reproduce themselves or maintain a unity across time. For example,
an asteroid is produced by the gravitational forces that pull particles together
constituting the asteroid. Although it possesses a unity, it does not strive to
maintain this unity across time. If it is hit by another asteroid under sufficient
conditions of force, it will simply be destroyed. By contrast,
An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network

of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components
that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and
transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes
(relations) that produce them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete
unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the
topological domain of its relation as such a network.24
Where allopoietic machines are largely indifferent to maintaining their unity

across time, autopoietic machines both strive to maintain a particular sort of
unity and are perpetually producing that unity through the interaction of their
components. Not only is that unity produced through the interaction of its
components, but those components are also produced by each other and produce
each other. Thus, for example, where the asteroid simply flies apart when hit by
another object with sufficient force, when I am cut my body will try to heal the
wound, returning me to the form I once possessed. The identity of a substance
thus consists in the elements that compose the substance, how they are related,
and the process by which either (a) these elements are produced (autopoietic
machines), or (b) these relations between elements are maintained (allopoietic
machines).
Considerations of unity and identity naturally give rise to issues revolving
around entropy. Entropy is the measure of disorder within a system. The greater
the probability that a component of a system can appear or be located at any
particular place in a system, the higher the degree of entropy that system possess.
Thus, for example, gaseous clouds are highly entropic because any particular
element of oxygen or carbon dioxide can appear at any particular place in a system.
Systems in which the appearance of an element or component at a particular
place or in a particular set of relations is highly improbable are systems with a
low degree of improbability. My body has a low degree of entropy, for example,
because my liver cells tend to only appear at a particular place and relate to other
cells in highly specific ways. Systems that strive to maintain relations among
their components in a particular way are “negentropic.” Substances or objects
are negentropic systems.
Because objects are structured by différance, they perpetually face the
problem of entropy and the question of how to surmount entropy. The
problem of entropy arises because systems must reproduce themselves in
the order of time to continue to exist. With each moment of reproduction,
the system threatens to dissolve or lose its organization, thereby returning to
a highly entropic state. Allopoietic and autopoietic systems solve the problem
of entropy in two different ways. In the case of allopoietic machines, the unity
of their components and the specific way in which they are related occurs
through forces. Gravity and electromagnetism, for example, hold the asteroid
together in this or that specific way and also create the resistance that prevents
it from being infiltrated by other objects (electromagnetic forces repel each
other when I place my hand on the asteroid). Autopoietic machines, by
contrast, maintain their unity by re-creating their elements or components
from moment to moment. The components of a system or object should
thus not be thought as pre-existent entities, but rather as “. . . events because
systems are composed of events and can transform themselves only through
them.”25 A moment is the smallest and largest possible units a system or object
can register in the production of events or elements. The events of which a
substance is composed are perpetually perishing, such that new events or

components must be produced. As Luhmann remarks,
All elements pass away. They cannot endure as elements in time, and thus they
must be constantly produced on the basis of whatever constellation of elements
is actual at any given moment. Reproduction thus does not mean simply
repeatedly producing the same, but rather reflexive production, production out
of products.26
It is this process by which components and their relations are constituted that
defines the identity of the system. Identity is not something in addition to the
changing qualities of the substance, but is rather the activity of the substance
itself.
Luhmann argues that every system constitutes itself through a distinction
between itself and its environment.27 The environment of a system is always more
complex than the system itself, and therefore it is necessary for the substance to
distinguish itself to maintain themselves.28 Systems “. . . constitute and maintain
themselves by creating and maintaining a difference from their environment,
and they use their boundary to regulate this difference.”29 It would be a mistake,
however, to conceive the environment from which a system distinguishes itself
as being a “container” that is already there. As he observes, “[t]he environment
receives its unity through the system and only in relation to the system. . . . It
is different for every system, because every system excludes only itself from its
environment.”30 All that exists are substances and relations between substances.
There is not, over and above this, a container in which these substances and their
relations exist.
The environment for each substance or system will thus be different by
virtue of the other substances it relates to and how it constitutes its openness
to its environment. The environment of an electric eel, for example, differs
from my environment not only because it moves in the milieu of water in the
Amazonian rain forests, but also because of the manner in which it is open to
its world. The electric eel senses other substances in its environment through
their electromagnetic fields, whereas I do so through scent, vision, and taste.
Substances are thus operationally closed while being structurally open. The
claim that they are operationally closed is the claim that they have no direct
relationship to their environment. As Maturana and Varela put it, “. . . their
identity is specified by a network of dynamic processes whose effects do not
leave that network.”31 Events in the environment can trigger operations within
the substance, but they do not determine the manner in which the substance will
operate on those perturbations. For example, in a recent conversation with my

4-year-old daughter, I asked her if she wants to be a scientist when she grows up.
She exclaimed, “No way! I want to be an artist and scientists only draw signs!”
The terms “sign” and “scientist” are homonyms for one another. I triggered
events that unfolded in her as a psychobiological system, but the result of that
triggering was unpredictable and unexpected. She processes meaning in her
own system-specific way.
Luhmann contends that systems use distinctions to relate to their environ
ment.32 In order for a substance to interact with its environment or observe its
environment, there must be a prior distinction that opens the possibility of these
indications or interactions. Every distinction contains both a marked and an
unmarked space. The marked space is what falls into relief with the distinction,
allowing for the possibility of indication, while the unmarked space is that which
becomes invisible. Thus, for example, if I cover a sheet of paper with Xs and
then draw a circle about the middle of the paper, the distinction is the circle that
now allows me to indicate what is inside the circle. Two points follow from the
nature of distinction. On the one hand, every distinction necessarily contains
a blind spot. In cleaving a space wherein indications might become possible,
the unmarked space becomes invisible. On the other hand, the distinction(s)
a system or substance employs to interact with and observe its world is self-
referential and paradoxical. The distinction does not exist in the environment of
the system, but is drawn by the system itself.
Take the example of a distinction one might draw between how they interpret
the utterance of another person and what the person might have intended by that
utterance. This distinction is a distinction the person herself uses to distinguish
between interpretation and intention. As such, it is possible that any attributions
she makes about intention can nonetheless turn out to be interpretations. There is
no way of getting outside herself as an operationally closed system to determine
whether she has accurately distinguished between her interpretation and the
speaker’s intention. Likewise, we distinguish between waking and sleeping, yet
this is a distinction that we ourselves draw. Insofar as this is the case, there is
no way to determine whether, in waking, we have escaped from our dreams
into the “real environment,” or whether the distinction we are using is itself an
operation or event in our dream. Systems or substances never directly relate to
their environment, but are always operationally closed.
In light of the foregoing, we encounter three additional forms of withdrawal.
First, we encounter that form of withdrawal produced as a result of différance and
the way différance necessitates the reproduction of the object and its elements
in time. What is withdrawn here are the constantly disintegrating components

necessitating the production of new components in the activity of maintaining
identity. My past thoughts differ substantially from my present thoughts, and
I use the disintegration of my past thoughts to construct present thoughts. Yet
if I return to this detritus in the form of, say, a written document, I think that
I always thought as I did then as I metabolize this trace of my past in terms
of my present. My past self becomes withdrawn from me, and so it is with all
substances. Second, objects are withdrawn from one another because they can
never directly encounter one another, but rather always only encounter one
another behind the film of their membranes that define their mode of openness
to their environment. Third and finally, objects are withdrawn from one another
for in relating to the world through their distinctions there is always a blind spot
of that which becomes invisible in opening itself to the environment.
The autonomy of substances
Historically substance has referred to that which is autonomous. As Aristotle

remarks,
A substance—that which is called a substance most strictly, primarily, and

most of all – is that which is neither said of a subject nor in a subject, e.g. the
individual man or the individual horse. The species in which the things primarily
called substances are, are called secondary substances, as are the genera of these
species.33
Substances are individual things that exist in their own right. Aristotle continues,
“it is a characteristic common to every substance not to be in a subject. For
a primary substance is neither said of a subject nor in a subject.”34 Substance
is not something predicated of a subject, nor is it something in a subject, but
rather substance is the subject. A primary substance is that of which things are
predicated, but that substance is not in and of itself predicated of anything else.
Rather, substance is that which exists in and through itself. Where qualities only
ever exist in something else, substances are that which exist in nothing else.
Yet in light of our analysis of différance in Section 2, it would seem
that substance lacks independent existence. There we saw that the local
manifestations of substance are a product of deferral that is generally produced
as a result of the exo-relations the substance enters into with other substances.
The substances we know of only ever seem to exist in regimes of attraction or
exo-relations to other substances, leading to the suspicion that substances are

constituted by their relations, such that they have no autonomous existence
from their relations. If this is the case, then it would follow that substances are
not that which are predicated of nothing else and that which exist in nothing
else, but rather substances would be that which are predicated of their relations
and that which exist only in and through their relations. The question that
then follows is this: must we abandon the thesis that substance is characterized
by autonomous existence?
However, we must proceed with caution. It will be recalled that Derrida’s
différance has not one dimension (the becoming-other of substances in local
manifestations or deferral), but two dimensions. Derrida refers to this second
dimension of différance as “spacing,” whereby entities are individuated from
one another. In this second dimension of différance do we find evidence for the
autonomy of substances from one another? The withdrawal of objects from one
another is to be found in the process by which difference with an “e” is produced.
In “Différance” Derrida will write,
. . . the word différance (with an e) can never refer either to différer as

temporization or to différends as polemos. Thus the word différance (with an a)
is to compensate—economically—this loss of meaning, for différance can refer
simultaneously to the entire configuration of its meaning. . . . In a conceptuality
adhering to classical strictures “différance” would be said to designate a
constitutive, productive, and originary causality, the process of scission and
division which would produce or constitute different things or differences.35
Différance thus does refer to the process of “becoming-other” or deferral of

substances in which they actualize their powers in local manifestations; it also
refers to the emergence of scissions and divisions between entities whereby
they become independent entities. In other words, the play of différance is
constitutive of oppositions between entities in the form of polemos. In this
differing of entities, in this polemos among entities, there is withdrawal of
entities from one another, for in polemos every entity encounters other entities,
its others, as other, as withdrawn, becoming what Timothy Morton calls “strange
strangers.”36 Substances, as strange strangers, are not the familiar, but are an
abyss that marks its autonomy or difference from our encounter with it, such
that we are never able to reduce the strange stranger to its local manifestations,
our interpretations, or the meaning we find in it. There will always be more
that eludes our grasp. The “Other” in polemos is encountered as withdrawn or
unfathomable, and this is not just for human relations to other substances, but
for any object encountering another object. The word we most commonly use
for this withdrawal is “resistance.” There is always something in the object that
refuses or resists complete integration by the other object.
Yet what is it that entitles us to refer to these “properties” of différance as
division and scission as “substance”? How do we leap from scission and division
to autonomy and independence? After all, in distinguishing myself from
something—as Fichte noted long ago—I am still relating to it, thereby suggesting
that every division or scission is, in fact, an internal relation, such that the
divided entities are not independent of one another. Does not Derrida’s concept
of différance spell the ruin of substance? Indeed, Derrida writes approvingly
of Saussure, remarking that, “. . . in language there are only differences. Even
more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which
the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive
terms.”37 The claim that in language there are only differences without positive
terms is the claim that differences only exist as internally related, such that the
terms related have no autonomous existence from one another. If the concept of
“value” or the diacritical conception of difference as derived from Saussure is the
paradigm of all difference, then it would follow that there are not autonomous
substances, as terms here would only have being in relation to other terms. The
phonemes /b/ and /p/, for example, would have no existence in their own right,
but only in relation to each other.
Are not substances here dissolved insofar as there are no positive terms but
only internally related differential relations. Substance here would turn out to be
an illusion. However, matters are not so straightforward. For as Derrida observes
in “Signature Event Context,”
. . . a written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context, that is, the set
of presences which organize the moment of its inscription. This force of breaking
is not an accidental predicate, but the very structure of the written. . . . [T]here
is no less a force of breaking by virtue of [the] essential iterability [of the sign];
one can always lift a written syntagma from the interlocking chain in which it
is caught or given without making it lose every possibility of functioning, if not
every possibility of “communicating,” precisely. Eventually, one may recognize
other such possibilities in it by inscribing or grafting it into other chains. No
context can enclose it. Nor can any code, the code being here both the possibility
and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability (repetition/alterity).38
Derrida’s thesis is thus that every “sign” contains within it the possibility of
breaking with the context in which it emerged, such that it can fall into other and
different contexts. The question that we must ask is “What are the conditions for
the possibility of signs—and other entities—breaking with context in this way?”
If all difference is, as Saussure suggests, diacritical, if there are only internally
related terms without positive entities, then how is it possible for entities to break
with context in this way and be “grafted” onto other chains and to fall into other
contexts?
The answer is that it is not possible. It is only where entities are autonomous
and independent substances that they can exceed and escape their context. What
Derrida articulates in this passage is a variation of Aristotle’s concept of primary
substances; for the very being of primary substance is to exceed and be detachable
from every context. Hence, in the case of New Historicism which strives to reduce
an articulation to its context, we encounter a sort of transcendental illusion where
the historicist is not discovering the contexture of relations that gave the work
meaning, but rather creating a contexture, a regime of attraction, that generates
meaning as an effect. It is for this reason that I refer to substance under the
title of presence as local manifestation, for the manifestation of any substance
is a function of its contingent context, such that every substance, in principle,
harbors the power of falling into other contexts and thereby of manifesting itself
otherwise than it does in this context. There is no reason, therefore, to restrict
this property of iterability to signs. Iterability or the ability to break with all and
any context, is an essential feature of every entity such that every entity harbors
a volcanic excess over every context. This excess over regimes of attraction is the
core feature of any and all substances. As a consequence, substance cannot be
dissolved in a play of internally related differences, but, rather, within any weave
of relations there must be some minimal excess and iterability that contains the
possibility of breaking with its relations.
Harman’s concept of substance as withdrawn therefore renders legible
a whole series of ontological aporia. Insofar as substances are necessarily
withdrawn, we now understand why it is so difficult to specify just what
substance is, for substance, containing a withdrawn dimension of powers or
potentials in which the substantiality of substance is always in excess of any
of its local manifestations or that which is present, never comes to presence in
any of its qualities, thereby entailing that the substantiality of substance must
be something radically other than its qualities. By the same token, however, we
only ever encounter substances in and through their local manifestations as
worldly testament to a ghostly and subterranean substantiality that forever slips
between our fingers. Derrida’s account of time and différance gives us one way
of providing a formal ontological demonstration for the thesis that substances
are withdrawn. What remains is to account for the ongoing life of the object.
In Speech and Phenomena, Derrida argues that we must abandon the thesis that
the synthesis of time is accomplished by a preexistent transcendental identity
or unity that affects the synthesis of traces of the past.39 Rather, we must see
the unity and identity of the substance as arising from the interplay of these
traces and differences themselves. The substantiality of substance must, like
Whitehead’s “societies,” be seen as that which perpetually produces itself from
itself without a homunculus presiding over the synthesis of these differences.
In this regard, the substantiality of substance, its identity and unity, would not
be an identity and unity that precedes this synthesis, but would be the very
activity of synthesis itself. It is precisely an account of a decentralized process
of synthesis in autopoietic and allopoietic machines that Luhmann gives us.
Notes
1 Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme,” pp. 39–40.

2 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Z.
3 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 295–7.
4 Cf. Harman, Tool-Being.
5 Onticology is the name for my variant of object-oriented ontology. “Object-
oriented ontology” refers to any ontology that affirms the existence of substances
or objects. “Object-oriented philosophy” refers to the ontology of Graham
Harman. For a brief discussion of the basic claims of onticology, cf. Bryant, “The
Ontic Principle,” pp. 261–78. For a detailed discussion of onticology along with
arguments for the existence of objects, cf. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects.
6 Aristotle, Physics, pp. 269–378.
7 Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme,” p. 57.
8 Hägglund, Radical Atheism, p. 16.
9 Ibid., p. 17.
10 Bergson, Matter and Memory, ch. 3.
11 Cf. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, ch. 2. For a detailed analysis of Deleuze and
Bergson’s “past that has never been present,” cf. Bryant, Difference and Givenness,
ch. 5.
12 Derrida, “Différance,” p. 21.
13 Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, chs 2–3.
14 Badiou, Logics of Worlds.
15 Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 27.
17 This is not quite accurate. Within the framework Deleuze develops in Difference
and Repetition, powers, affects, or virtual proper being correspond to the
singularities and their relations that he refers to as “multiplicities” and that inhabit
the virtual half of objects. Intensive differences, by character, refer to inequalities
in the order of being such as differences in temperature, pressure, speed, etc. that
play a role in activating the actualization of powers in local manifestations or
qualities.
18 Derrida, “Différance,” p. 8.
19 Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 418.
20 Whitehead, Process and Reality, part IV.
21 For a discussion of the relationship between politics and dim objects, cf. Bryant,
“Of Parts and Politics,” pp. 13–28.
22 Luhmann, Social Systems.
23 Maturana and Varela “Autopoiesis,” p. 80.
24 Ibid., pp. 78–9.
25 Luhmann, Social Systems, pp. 352–3.
26 Ibid., p. 49.
27 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
28 Ibid., p. 25.
29 Ibid., p. 17.
30 Ibid.
31 Maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, p. 89.
32 Cf. Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism,” pp. 128–54.
33 Aristotle, Categories, 2a13–17.
34 Ibid., 3a8–9.
35 Derrida, “Différance,” pp. 8–9.
36 Morton, The Ecological Thought.
37 Derrida, “Différance,” pp. 10–11.
38 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” p. 317.
39 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, ch. 6.
5
Conatus and Concrescence: Stearns and

Whitehead on Individuation
Judith Jones
Introduction
I would like to begin with a quote:
Wherever we find it, thought is conative, moving, an effort. It is an activity which

even in a certain sense creates its own object. On the other hand it is impossible
in the last analysis meaningfully to divorce action from thought. We can, it is
true, isolate happenings or changes that merely occur and are cognized as such,
but by action we mean something more: namely, that which realizes an end.
Wherever we find such activity in our experience, we find also the direction and
influence of thought.1
This is a snippet from the mature vision of the labor of thinking in a 1952 essay
called “Reason and Value” by Isabel Scribner Stearns. In this essay Stearns
presents a picture of the relationship between Reason and Value, including the
manner in which Reason is a creator of value even as it struggles to discern and
cognize already-existing natural, aesthetic, moral, and other values. I begin with
this quote because it attests to the lasting and fundamental role that “Conatus”
plays in Stearns’ thought, and because the description of the “moving . . . effort”
that marks thought itself is an apt stepping off point for the real introduction
I hope to make in this essay, which is to share the until recently unavailable
model of “individuality” offered by Stearns, in her previously unpublished
manuscript of 1938, The Nature of the Individual.2 In presenting some of Stearns’
treatment of individuals, I will bring her contentions into dialog with the model
of individuation met in Alfred North Whitehead, who was Stearns’s teacher at
Radcliffe and who is alleged to have later called Stearns “the most talented female
philosopher in America.”3
Conatus and Concrescence: Stearns and Whitehead on Individuation 93
Since I have made some tantalizing biographical allusions, let’s begin our
introduction to Stearns there: Isabel did her graduate study in philosophy in the
department at Bryn Mawr chaired by Grace de Laguna, and her dissertation on
individuals was directed by Paul Weiss, who was at the same time writing his
epic work on Reality.4 Before that, she had studied at Radcliffe with Whitehead
and C. I. Lewis, spending at least one year rooming with Suzanne Langer. She
taught at Smith College (1936–44, a period encompassing the completion of
her dissertation on Individuals, with an AAUW Fellowship at Berkeley 1939–
40), and from 1944 until retirement in 1979 she taught at Bryn Mawr. Having
allegedly most admired Whitehead among her many teachers, Stearns herself
taught tirelessly and demanded a daunting rigor of her students, pursuing the
labors of thought uncomplainingly amidst severe and permanent health issues
that plagued her last years of teaching and brought them to an end.5
Well-situated in her studies and teaching to be in dialog with important heirs
to the Classical American tradition as well as scrupulously keeping abreast of
developments in the wider sphere of philosophy and manifesting a lifelong
commitment to the history of philosophy as the ongoing labor of thought itself,
Stearns was one of the earliest presidents of the C. S. Peirce Society. Peirce’s
thought is never far in the background of Stearns’ work (she was one of the
readers of his manuscripts leading to the publication of the Collected Papers, after
all), and I expect that the current international interest in Peirce and a redoubled
global appreciation of Whitehead and process philosophy will be fueled by the
discovery of this new monograph for philosophy’s current laborers to work over
from a great variety of perspectives.
My limited task in this essay will be to present a brief picture of certain key
aspects of Stearns’s view of Individuality.6 In order to highlight certain aspects
of Stearns’s view of individuals, it will be useful to contrast her view with that
of Whitehead. Whitehead was formative and perennially influential for Stearns,
and yet she was no mere follower or devotee of his particular system. Working
out from the synergistic contrast between the two thinkers, I will unfold some
practical reflections regarding the task of sorting and disposing of the “things”
that a life leaves behind for others to contemplate and dispose of.
Stearns on the individual
The Nature of the Individual is a terse, dialectical study of what is required of

an adequate philosophical conception of “Individuality.” Stearns is unflinching
in her demand that such a conception not only square with the demands of
philosophy and its logic, but also with the lived experience of “individual things”
with which common sense and even inchoate feeling may be said to be familiar,
but over which they do not command authority. The work is divided into four
parts: Part I is a “Prolegomenon” in which the general parameters of the inquiry
are laid out, and in which the questions of the difference between individuals and
the “qualities” that may be said to constitute their “characters” are encountered;
Part II is the central section called “The Dialectic of the Individual” in which
the ontology of individuals is made manifest as fundamental, relational, limited
and limiting, processive, changing beings; Part III explores “Some Problems
Suggested by the Dialectic” and includes treatments of causality, composition,
and mediation while introducing the notion of “comprobability”7 among
individuals; and a “Conclusion” which lays out some thoughts—historical and
novel—about the conceptions of “Degree and Limit” as they should take their
places in the theory of individuality. I cannot hope in a short essay to undertake
the dialectic dialectically, and so will present Stearns’s views in the manner of
her conclusions, exploring only those arguments essential to the comparison
with Whitehead that will, I hope, give a taste of the conceptual force of Stearns’s
approach.
It must be noted at the outset that to Stearns, metaphysics is a labor of thinking
that is philosophically necessary but which does not—and should not—yield
“necessary truths.” Because experience always remains more fecund than its
cognition and expression in limited discourses, and because those discourses
retain the fallibilism that accompanies their generation by situated “individuals”
that happen to be philosophers, metaphysics is, despite the considerable power
of dialectic, not an exact science. But its inexactness is not its downfall: “It is not
the belief of the writer that because a metaphysical system is not an exact map of
the existential world, it is therefore useless. It must have some sort of relevance
to it, just as poetry or music have their own sorts of relevance to it, and the
kind and degree of this relevance can be considered only when the system itself
has been developed.” Applicability and adequacy of a model, to borrow some
of Whitehead’s criteria for the evaluation of metaphysics, involve a stepping
back from the completed task of speculation, even as speculation itself involves
something of a stepping back from complex and incomplete historical experience
itself, despite the fact that we are at the same time aware that the speculator is
herself an instance of the individuation she seeks to model: “When one comes
to inquire into the justice of the application of these principles one may discover
that reason has led the way where cruder experience could not hope to find it.
It is necessary, not only to be in the field but to place oneself somehow or other
above it. In thus taking the hazard and placing oneself above it, one runs the risk
of losing it entirely. But perverse speculation can soon be righted by others; it is
far more willful never to speculate at all.”8 Thus, the inexactness of metaphysics
necessitates a deepening of its speculative orientation, but we are reminded
by the effectiveness of our generalizations to guard against letting them spiral
out of control. The hazard of metaphysics must never overcome the urgency of
speculation—indeed it seems to be one of its main engines.
With this fallible, hazardous, and yet committedly logical and metaphysical
sense of her task, Stearns quickly notes that “the conception of an individual is
indeed a regulative ideal of reason”—something that experience mightily points
to or suggests and for which an explanation of its possibility is demanded, but
which will never—and should never—be fully cognized or completed.9 Like
Whitehead, she does not suppose that individuation maps with the “things” that
seem to be “individuals” in our experience, and yet whatever our concept of
individuation winds up being, it must be responsive to our encounter with those
“things” normally met in experience, including human beings as both objects
and subjects of philosophy. At the very least, if our metaphysics yields something
that explicitly grinds against experientially identified “individual things,” it
will undermine its own enterprise by severing the important tie that thought
must retain to the domain of the empirical, the domain of action and the real
immersion of the thinker in the world from which some of Stearns’s own sense
of “true” individuality is derived.
The observation of the ordinary thing or object, met on the level of common
sense, whether it be a manufactured article, such as a fountain pen, or a natural
object, such as a rock or a mountain, can never by itself give us either the
true metaphysical understanding of true separateness or of a true source of
action. If we are to pursue these notions further, we must turn to experience
of another sort, namely our experience of persons, and in particular, the
experience of the one person we know with a unique intimacy, even if by no
means completely—the self.10
In being a self in a world that the self discovers may be divided in many ways,11
we discover in ourselves the fundamental clues to the nature of individuality,
according to Stearns. In action we find our own conatus or endeavor, with its
tendency toward an end and yet—qua conatus—never achieving full closure
with that end, in relationships with other entities that to us have characters akin
to ourselves, in being potential centers of their own activity.
The very nature of “acting” as an internally recognized existential process

for an individual subject entails (in Stearns’s dialectic) the meeting between an
unfinished moving dynamic of a given being, and the moving dynamics of other
beings through time and in space. The fundamental “secondness” of the things
in the world in which the self finds itself gives testimony to the nature of the
internal individual and of the external individuals with which it is in relationship
in a given “situation”:
As a matter of fact we discover different degrees of resistance in the external

world and this resistance varies with the nature of our activity on the external
world. Such differences in resistance may be interpreted as an indication that
that on which we act has a positive nature of its own. It must be active as we are
active, and capable of changing us as we are capable of changing it. We cannot
act as individuals unless there are individuals on which to act.12
In action itself we find the contours of individuation; this notion tracks with
the assertion from “Reason and Value” with which we began, where Stearns,
as we recall, asserts that action is an indication of the presence and nature of
thinking as conatus or endeavor toward some end that must lack determinacy
in order to be an end. In other words, while an end may have some determinacy,
and the conatus that informs individuated existential movement has identifiable
tendencies, the “end” cannot be a determinate telos but must remain open and
truly potential in order that the activity of being remain distinctively conative
and not merely a stage-play about a determinate or determined arc of process.
Also, this is why for Stearns the individual conatus is not only patient of
the intervention of other individuals but actually requires it in order to be the
processive, developing thing in time that it is. If an individual contained within
itself all of its own sources of change, all means of processing toward an end,
it would either be (a) an unrelatable windowless monad of the Leibnizian sort,
or (b) always already actualizing its full reality, and therefore like Spinozistic
substance—not really in time and again never really related to (in the manner
of interaction or causal reciprocity) other things. What for Spinoza is a mark of
the non-existence of modes as true individuals—that their conatus, as Deleuze
notes, must always be in a state of some degree of passivity to the conatus of
other finite modes13—is for Stearns a central requisite of true individuality.
The resistances of the world to our doing, the resistances in the world to the
doing of any existing thing, are marks that the world is a scene of actually
related individuals, rather than dreamscapes of relationship in the pseudo-
life of a super-monad. Resistant to monistic systems as voiding the pluralism
of the world in favor of a seamless but unrecognizable “One,” Stearns notes
that her model is probably most akin to that of William James in A Pluralistic
Universe.14
. . . the notion of the “one” breeds foreignness and that of the “many” breeds
intimacy. . . . Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many
means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related. Everything
you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely
“external” environment of some sort or amount. Things are “with” one another in
many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The
word “and” trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. . . . For
pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what
we ourselves find empirically realized in every minimum of finite life. Briefly it
is this, that nothing real is absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience
is a multum in parvo plurally related, that each relation is one aspect, character,
or function, way of its being taken, or way of its taking something else; and that
a bit of reality when actively engaged in one of these relations is not by that very
fact engaged in all the other relations simultaneously. The relations are not all
what the French call solidaires with one another. Without losing its identity a
thing can either take up or drop another thing.15
The capacity for genuinely “external” relationship and “extensive” connection

is critical in a genuine pluralism for Stearns, in her Jamesian, anti-rationalist
moments. Merely “intensive” character or internal force of existence is inadequate
to define the conative thrust of being that must belong to true individuality.16
Short of multifarious and always potentially changing plural relations there is no
individuality as such, for the hazard of the other is requisite for “every minimum
of finite life.”
Stearns’ relation to Whiteheadian individuation
If the history of the individual were constituted merely by the addition of

quanta it would be totally analyzable into a series of ‘drops,’ or actual occasions,
as is the case in the system of Whitehead. But the corresponding synthesis of
these quanta into the whole which we mean by the individual, could never be
accomplished. Any arrangement of the quanta into a so-called history of the
individual would be purely arbitrary.17
With this surprisingly truncated rendering of Whitehead’s atomism, Stearns

sets aside the microscopic model of becoming offered in Process and Reality.
Throughout The Nature of the Individual, the atomistic option in philosophy
receives repeated critique. From its origins in classical Greek thought, through
the associationism of British empiricism, to Whitehead and beyond, atomism’s

way of handling or making exclusive the “discreteness” of fundamental
“things”—perhaps too much hazard of the other—is found wanting by Stearns.
We can thus imagine that her dismissal of Whiteheadian epochal becoming is
part of a broader, perhaps legitimate, impatience with atomism in general. It is
clear that atomism’s inability to adequately explain the relations between “atoms”
of a metaphysical or psychological sort, or to actually account for processes of
change, movement, and identity as Stearns wants to conceive them, is more or less
irredeemable in her eyes. And yet, one would at least hope that a direct student of
Whitehead might be a bit more patiently experimental with Whitehead’s rather
unusual sort of relational atomism. Nonetheless, the quickness of the dismissal
is evidence of a sharp break, at least at the time of the thesis, between Stearns’s
own thinking and that of her revered professor.
Stearns is aware that the kind of “individual” that she is looking for would
correspond in Whitehead’s system to a “personally ordered society.” But she
dismisses this too, in a footnote, as subject to the same objections she has to
his model of actual occasions, without spelling out exactly how that is the case.
Neither the generative18 relationships that are alleged to hold among occasions
in the kind of processive succession Whitehead lays out as metaphysically
most basic, nor the kind of “enduring objects” with the persistent identity of
“personally ordered societies” is a defensible model of “individuality” as Stearns
sees it. It will help us appreciate the contours of Stearns’s thought and to advance
the contrast with Whitehead if we examine each of these in turn.
While recognizing a parallel between her own answers to Zeno’s paradoxes of
motion and those of Whitehead and James—that is, their common recognition
that motion must be “integrated in order to be actual”19—Stearns’s rejection
of the Whiteheadian model of becoming is, as we may judge from the broad
outlines of her work, due to its commitment to the completeness of entities,
which issues in their “perishing.”20 In Stearns’s view, a true individual is one that
undergoes relationships of unification with other individuals in events called
“situations” and emerges from them the same individual it was before, though
changed. Whiteheadian events, as actual occasions which “perish but do not
change”21—are so integrated, so integral, so bounded, so finished qua actual, as
to yield only sham relationships to other genuine individuals. While her own
“situations” must also have ends, such that change can be said to have actually
happened to an individual rather than always remaining indeterminate as an
indefinite process of encounter with the resistant other, the kind of self-limiting
individual Stearns envisions must remain conative as itself in order to continue
being viewed as ever having been individual at all.
The merely episodic becoming she sees in Whiteheadian processes of

actualization cannot have the “overflowing of the continuous”—the conative
reaching beyond itself—that Stearns insists characterizes individuality.
It is the central thesis of the present discussion that quantification is not an
absolute, but a relative metaphysical notion. It does not occur by itself, but only
with reference to a substance which overflows its quantifications. The discrete has
significance only for that continuity which is made discrete. It is not ultimate.
If we must admit that the illimitable must be limited in order to exist, we must
also admit that it is more than its limitations, since it can never lose its original
character of limitlessness. This is not merely a necessity of definition. If there
were not such a constant overflowing of the continuous, nothing which was
discrete could occur.22
While it is of course obvious that a fundamental difference between
Stearns and Whitehead on individuality is the issue of temporal extensiveness
(Whitehead’s events being extended once complete but unextended in their
internal processes of becoming, Stearns’s individuals being spatiotemporally
extensive or continuous in themselves), the question seems to be not simply
one of the formal conditions of extensiveness but of the qualitative character
of what is being spread out as a “continuant.” So, it’s not just that Stearnsian
individuals are spatiotemporally thicker for not being microscopic, but that the
type and manner of finding continuity in the world is radically different, such
that personal order will not do to provide for individual “things” for Stearns.
The question is this one of “self-transcendence”—of the conative spilling over
into the future in virtue of which a determinate, limited past comes into shape
and becomes cognizable, and in virtue of which the real connections to other
individuals may be made so as to increasingly bring determinacy to the ongoing,
elastic being of the individual in question.23
Before turning to what I think is the natural Whiteheadian response to this,
it is important to grant that the “self-transcendence” of Stearnsian individuals
is not absolute self-transcendence. “Individuals must go beyond themselves in
order to change [change being necessary if the conatus is to be meaningful],
yet they cannot completely transcend themselves and still remain individuals,
since this would be self-contradictory. If all their effort were exhausted in one
situation, they would completely transcend themselves in the relations with other
entities. In such an event they would be destroyed; they could no longer retreat
and return to themselves.”24 Return to self in the continuing, intensive endeavor
of existence toward an end is requisite to cap the determinacy of the character
produced in the individual by virtue of its connection to other individuals.
The resistance and causality of the latter help limit and thus shape the subject
individual25 and their own individuality requires the real difference of the
individual retreating from causal, non-monistic union with them. Return to the
one, as still the one, elastic and ongoing, is requisite for the meaningfulness—the
making determinate of the indeterminacy of potentiality of self and other—of
the transcendence of self.
Having stipulated this proviso regarding self-transcendence as a moment
but not the epitome of individuation, we can move directly to the heart of a
Whiteheadian contrast with and response to Stearns’s position. There is no doubt
that Whitehead’s system postulates entities that in some sense genuinely “perish”
and which exist in various forms of real succession of one another. The sorts
of enduring, changing beings-in-the-macro-world with persistent yet flexible
character and “personality” that Stearns would designate proper “individuals”
are the socially organized “strands of ‘enduring objects’ ”26; the fundamental
beings—actual entities—“perish, but do not change.”27 However, this perishing
is not disappearance—it is in fact one way of labeling the transition to the self-
transcendence and repetitious self-insertion of objective immortality. On my
reading of the nature of Whiteheadian individuation, the intensive activity of
the subject-superject remains alive, though no longer directed at its own self-
construction, as something to which becoming must conform somehow in
the self-construction of subsequent events. Whiteheadian atoms are relational
precisely in virtue of the fact—and in my own reading ONLY in virtue of the
fact, if accepted—that the activity of subjectivity does not “dry up” or “evaporate”
with the perishing of “immediacy,” but is reinstantiated in subsequent moments
of realization. As the real potentials introduced into the world by superjects
are actualized, those superjects impose themselves on and inscribe themselves
in the world. Superjection of the dynamic activity of contrast—of evocative
and valuative patterns of eternal objects in their relevance to actuality—is a
quickening of the entire order of possibilities so as to provoke new instances
of actualization. In including the possibility-quickening superjects of the
already actual, these instances manifest the repetition (albeit with modification
through new contrast) of the already actualized intensive contrast, not their
disappearance.
If I read her oblique commentary correctly, it seems to be Stearns’s view that
this generative relationship between past and future events is impossible on
the Whiteheadian model because of the disappearance of the true individual
of the microscopic event. Something that is not itself spread out in time and
space qua its fundamental individuality as guided by the activity and labor
of its own conatus—of its own aspiration to continue to become self—cannot
actually be in relationship in the broader contours of space–time. Being an active

potential, even as intensive and dynamic pattern, by way of “inclusion in” the
other fails the test of separation and self-subsistent conative existence requisite
of genuine individuals, according to Stearns. In no longer acting toward its own
concrescence, an actual entity is no longer conative and therefore an aborted
individual. So even if we grant, as my reading does, a lingering and somewhat
“ecstatic” agency to atomic actualities as repeated dynamics of contrast, this
repetition in another is not an adequate basis for genuine “individuality” as
sought by Stearns.
One of several available Whiteheadian counters to Stearnsian critique would
be to demand a fuller explanation of how determinacy can ever be achieved
without a more resolute form of “closure” than that enjoyed by temporally thick
individuals whose conative direction remains always in some state of potency.
For Stearns, remaining to some degree potential is of the very essence of being
a conative individual, as being fully actual would mean the end of any need for
dynamic self-projection toward a determinacy that is inclusive of the conatus
itself. But determinacy in Whitehead’s model appears to require a more final
resolution of the questions of potency: “Each monadic creature is a mode of
the process of ‘feeling’ the world, of housing the world in one unit of completed
feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an ‘actual occasion’; it is the
ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.”28 The “pragmatic use”
of such creatures by future creatures speaks to the sense in which determinacy
requires closure and demands acceptance of an ontology where a thing “never
really is”29 in order that it be, potentially, everywhere. Completed determinacy
and closed up immediacy (though not agentive death) are the conditions of
bringing forth a “creature” that nonetheless can never be said to be “this” without
undermining its superjective character in other “things” that are also not merely
“this.” But for Stearns the identification of “this” is paramount.
While Stearns asserts a central role for “the contingent”30 as a necessary
feature of the coming to be of some but not other patterns of union among
individuals and thereby the characters of the individuals themselves as limited
by one another in real (as opposed to unreal) time, it would appear that she is
less comfortable with, or philosophically satisfied by, a model of individuality
that cedes to contingent process the non-concrescent life of the entity beyond its
own quantum integration. In Whitehead the “individuality” of enduring objects
is a quasi-ephemeral maintenance of pattern which, despite the tremendous
forces of intensive repetition embedded in things like personal order, physical
purposes, and simple provocative objective immortality, is not centrally directed
by an integral conatus of its own aside from the presence of the repeated patterns
of activity of constituent concrescent teloi. For Stearns, a whole that is integral
only in virtue of the integrating activities of its parts is ontologically defective. For
Whitehead, an integral activity at a level beyond the microscopic event voids the
objectification requisite for meaningful appropriation in a new pattern aimed at
determinacy; new determinacies cannot emerge from incomplete determinacies
in the Whiteheadian option, nor can they aspire to a future self-transcendence
that can really be projected from the present standpoint of determination in
subjective aim.
I think the contrast here—and the choice for students of these two thinkers—
comes down to this, the question of what is taken to be metaphysically ultimate
or most satisfying: the vibratory intensive repetition of concrescence, where
individuals are the demand for complete determination of the indeterminate
in each instance of process, or the continuous but flexible conative becoming
of individuals which remain both determinate and indeterminate as mutual
conditions of what is meant by process. And on the level of the response to
the world as lived, the world of “things” in which reason labors, we can
articulate the choice thus: Is a vibratory universe of forcefully self-assertive
pattern ontologically acceptable as an account of enduring things that can enjoy
adventures of change while remaining meaningfully individuated so as to serve
as change-agents for self and others, where the metaphysically ultimate agency
rests somewhat ephemerally with the constituent events of the vibratory pattern?
Or should our model of the fundamental individuals themselves be more
integral than this model of vibratory repetition? Both Whitehead and Stearns
begin from the facts of self-experience on the part of human agent-thinkers. But
Whitehead’s rationalization of “things” leads him to a more or less analogical
relation between human experience and the ultimate conditions of becoming
as the concrescence of feeling, whereas Stearns’s ontology refuses the reduction
of the familiar “continuants” of the lived world, and the experience of self is
taken to be exemplary (without imputing “consciousness” to things in general).
For Stearns the cost of Whitehead’s rationalism in regard to the demands of
individual determinacy is that the system is, like those of Leibniz and Spinoza on
whom she spends considerably more time, a monism of either unrelated Ones,
complete in themselves with sham unity, or a single One, complete in itself with
sham diversity.31
What tempts me in the direction of Stearns’s Jamesian pluralism is something
which the attentive reader of Whitehead will recognize: the twin challenge of
embracing radical closure of the concrescence for each One that is added to
the many on the one hand, and embracing certain conditions of overarching
monism in the form of a fully complete, unchanging and scaled system of forms
of definiteness (eternal objects)—a scaling (or envisioning) accounted for by
appeal to the primordial nature of God. These posits which might appear to
be in tension with one another are mutually requisite for the processive model
whereby each One achieves a standpoint on the whole and becomes part of that
whole for subsequent concrescences.32 For Stearns, no entity can add itself to a
genuine whole, nor could such a whole countenance addition; for Whitehead this
is the uncanny solution that reason unearths in the alleged simplicity of a single
fact. In a world where immediacy is genuinely lost and individual achievement
beholden to the vicissitudes of transcendent process, does monism lurk as
a cosmic mockery of the real pain of grief and the sometimes overwhelming
burden of responsibility as we traverse the hazardous world (both of which I
think were phenomenologically motivating issues for Whitehead)? Stearns’s
pluralism of enduring individuals whose ephemerality belongs to their events
along the way but not to their conative substantiality offers softer griefs and
thicker histories, as well as more obviously accommodating the demands of how
human agents tend to conceive of themselves, as not being parceled out in or
reducible to (especially in analysis) the doings of microscopia.
Ever the good pragmatist (or perhaps a metaphysical cheat), it would satisfy
me most to be able to embrace both—to claim the two perspectives as moments
of a dialectic of individuality that faces all of the demands of determinacy rather
than shirking some of them as each of the two views does in its own way. In
this endeavor, Stearns has already set us methodologically on course to think
this dialectic, to undertake its labors, in an effortful meeting of its resistances,
and to produce those values it seeks to denote. I have found one opportunity
to meet the twin challenge in an experiential dialectic to have been offered me
in the form of the project of disposing of many thousands of “things” upon
the occasion of my parents’ deaths. This exercise in grief and real loss poses
questions of individuality as lasting identity or as more ephemeral or inconstant
repetition in a rather piercing voice. A dialectic of concrescence and conatus has
much to recommend it as a way of thinking through this process. As executor of
my parents’ estate, I shouldered the responsibility for determining the value of
the accumulated material memory of around a dozen now departed family and
friends, not just my parents’ “things.” The bits and pieces of these immigrants
and children of immigrants (a tea-set here, some ladies handkerchiefs there, an
alarming number of St Christopher medals just about everywhere) awaited my
disposition. The real importance of the relic of Pope Pius to whomever it belonged
is to some extent really gone; I can hypothesize that the anguish I experienced
regarding what to do with it evidences its lasting impress in the domain of the
living, the traces of its abiding and self-inscribing superject (intensive contrast).
I can wish for its preservation somewhere in the fabric of the family or me as
individual, but the fact remains of the loss of its meaning-in-the-world in the
most intensive sense (especially since I don’t know to whom it belonged and
therefore cannot even undertake a labor of memory to preserve its import).
Somewhere between the possibility of repetition of its original valuation via
re-inscribing intensity of contrast, and a hearkening to its prior “overflowing
of the continuous”—between a concrescent preservation of what is gone and a
continuous recognizable conative individuality—lies the relic as memory would
like to construct it but cannot. But in the dialectic between these possibilities
lies the ground of its status as question to my present valuation-process; the
dialectic of concrescence and conatus is a model for the emotionally informed
hypothesis regarding what the relic might still be, based on what it might have
been to someone now long gone. But as a dialectic it lacks decisive intensive
determinacy that can be taken in an integral concrescent sweep of valuation or
in the encounter with a genuinely conative individuality permissive of genuine
recognition retrospectively. In the dialectic is the grief of loss, and the anguished
traces of now-unlocatable meaning in the “thing” before me.
The real importance of my mother’s wedding dress or my father’s favorite
harmonica are things to which I can assign great meaning and which offer
more possibilities for a project of responsible remembrance that would make
them actual, temporally thick histories as Stearns would have them; but neither
garment nor instrument nor parent are really any longer what they were, and
their determinacy is both much greater and much less than Stearns’s model
affords.33 In other words the continuingly resonant values that were the dress-to-
mother and harmonica-to-father are easier to reinscribe in present experience
of the “things,” but this ease carries with it an even sharper recognition of the
absence of the original valuers, whose emotional investment in the thing I can
recollect and feel anew in myself. The presence—either via intensive repetition
or conative continuity—of the real individuality of these “things” is rendered all
the more hazardous for my own individual encounter just because their original
agents of valuation are determinately gone and this absence is the underlying
condition of my present valuation.
Thus, while the heart might yearn for the thick continuities of Stearnsian
individuals, it may also find a just, if fierce, mercy in the Whiteheadian realism
that grants that in some sense, mother, father, dress, and harmonica “never
really were.” There is, in this realism, the simultaneous recognition of present
grief and past relationship, neither of which is destined to be absolute or
insoluable in the hazards of history. Dialectically, the two moments of the
actual—the historical and the ephemeral—may yield what we need if not what
we want: a pragmatically workable model of loss and mitigated preservation that
affords us harbor in neither a frozen rationalism of permanent remembrance
nor a gaseous irrationalism of unmitigated loss. In comparing the models
of persistent individuality in Whitehead and Stearns, we may find our best
solace in the recognition that neither model alone is sufficiently realistic vis à
vis the exquisite dimensions of experience when selfhood is challenged most
strenuously by the otherness—in death—of the intimately relational individuals
we loved. Both together present a dialectical possibility that is at once liberating
and bracing regarding the remainders of our loved ones that may or may not be
in the “things” they left behind.
At the end of her manuscript Stearns asks a question:
What, however, will enable us to obtain that one which we seek, which for
knowledge is the denotation of an existent object? On the theory that all our
knowledge of existence is probable only, such a one can never be obtained. And,
as we held with regard to metaphysics, if no one is ever given, the intermediate
probable itself loses significance. It is the belief of this writer, however, a belief
outside the scope of the present thesis, that as there must be quanta of action if
there are to be tendencies toward action, so also there must be quanta of belief
based upon the probability for existence of the object, but leap beyond it. This,
which we consider to be a one given for knowledge, may not actually be a one;
there might in reality be only plain zero, but there is at least a chance that we are
right. We take that chance and jump.34
The metaphysical appropriation of the deceased loved one—perhaps the most

strikingly “one” of individuals we can ever encounter in their completed conative
life-arc—is at best a jump, and a jump that lacks the present possibilities of
relationship and change that concrescent or conative life might afford. There is
“a chance that we are right” in our valuative reconstruction of the “things” pre
viously valued by others, and only a chance. The bitter reality of grief is that these
reconstructions are a leaping beyond “probable” existence into, in this instance,
the void left by death, which is simultaneously a call to preservationist memory
projects or, if impossible, an unburdening disposal of the unreconstructable
values of a “thing” for which the chance of being right is too slim and the hazard
not worth our emotional time. In either case it is my hypothesis that the project
of disposing of the individual “things” that were valued by lost “individuals”

to whom our selves were richly related either directly or indirectly in a family
history illustrates the fact that individuality perhaps “never really is,” and that in
dialectically accepting (even if it involves some anguish) that it “never really is”
we come closest to a realistic apprehension of what it really is or was on the part
of present intensive or conative experience.
Notes
1 Stearns, “Reason and Value,” p. 3.

2 The very notion of publication of the thesis seemed to rather embarrass or at least
deeply humble her, according to her former student Eric von der Luft. See, Eric
v.d. Luft, Editor’s Introduction to The Nature of the Individual.
3 Ibid.
4 Paul Weiss, Reality (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967).
5 Eric v. d. Luft, Editors Introduction in Stearns, The Nature of the Individual,
pp. 13–18.
6 I think it might be fair to say that in her dissertation on Individuals, Stearns was
coming to terms with the objects of her own thought’s life-labors; and that, as may
be the case for many a thinker, her struggle with “individuals” is fundamentally
a skirmish in the everlasting philosophical campaign, of struggling with the
problem of the “Many and the One.” Plato, Parmenides, Spinoza, and Leibniz
haunting her work as they do, I think Stearns would likely agree. We see in an
essay like “Reason and Value” (1952) many of the same structural maneuvers in
thinking that frame the treatment of “individuals” in the dissertation, while the
central focus is sharply different, and these maneuvers center around the challenge
of conceiving something focal amidst a background or history from which it is
different and yet inherently related.
7 By “comprobable” Stearns means the manner of tending toward concerted
existence among individuals, or the idea that things become in an environment
in which some rather than other individuals will be ones with which it has causal
union or influence. She is altering Leibniz’s “compossibility” to highlight that in
her view probability is prior to possibility because without the tendency toward
determinate existence made more or less likely by the scope of the actual, nothing
would be just barely “possible” in the more formal way. See Stearns, The Nature of
the Individual, ch. 2, passim.
8 Ibid., p. 23.
9 Ibid., p. 24.
10 Ibid., p. 47.
11 Ibid., p. 48.
12 Ibid., p. 50.
13 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, pp. 98–104.
14 James, A Pluralistic Universe, p. 22.
15 Ibid., pp. 321–3.
16 One of the final discussions in The Nature of the Individual is the adequacy and
inadequacy of concepts of “degree” in meeting the explanatory needs of conceiving
existent things. Here Stearns takes on the treatment of “intensive quantity” in Kant
(ibid., p. 111), a subject to which Whitehead too gave some attention at a curiously
important moment of articulating his own theory of extension in Process and
Reality (Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 332). A full treatment of Stearns’s views,
and a full contrast of them with Whitehead, would unpack this common historical
root for their projects and trace it to the diverse conclusions of teacher and
student about just what Kant’s mistake may or may not have been or meant. But
that is a project for another day. I have explored Whitehead’s attention to intensive
quantity in Kant in my book, Intensity.
17 Stearns, The Nature of the Individual, p. 66.
18 Ibid., p. 67.
19 Ibid., p. 66.
20 Ibid., pp. 79–80.
22 Stearns, The Nature of the Individual, pp. 79–80.
23 Ibid., p. 64.
24 Ibid.
25 Though the term “subject” is not one Stearns uses, I use it simply to distinguish
an individual from its “others.” Stearns use of the term “self ” in regard to all
individuals seems to warrant this generic use of the term “subject” on occasion.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 80.
29 Ibid., p. 82.
30 Ibid., pp. 57–8.
31 Borrowing the “sham” language here from Whitehead (Whitehead, Process and
Reality, p. 227) though the critique of rationalism’s monistic crutch runs through
Stearns’s own manuscript.
32 “The many become one and are increased by one” (ibid., p. 21).
33 While the continuity of the thick histories Stearns depicts her “individuals” to be is
not such that everything is always preserved in full and constant self-apprehension
(such an entity could not be said to change, after all), there is nonetheless little
sense of radical loss in the ontological sense in The Nature of the Individual. In the
later essay on Reason and Value, one finds a move in the direction of a reality that
may “never really be” when Stearns reiterates the structures of individuation now
as structures of moments of discernment of value. Even as she insists on a phase
of “contemplative” regard as essential to value-discernment, she nevertheless notes
at one point in the essay, “The individual who participates in value situations
stores inwardly the effects of these situations. He frees their universal attributes
from fixity at a certain place or locus and becomes able to see these timelessly,
or sub specie aeternitatis. Yet this process is not an end in itself: to rest in the
contemplation of these ideal forms is finally to become aware of a peculiar
emphasis in one’s scrutiny of them as though the value that one thought one had
captured forever had at last flown out of the hand” (Stearns, The Nature of the
Individual, p. 10).
34 Ibid., p. 116. Stearns here notes that her allusion is to both Kierkegaard and James
with the choice to make a leap of faith. But the “jump” is also a reflexive reference
to a discussion just before her conclusion, regarding the “saltus,” the “leaping
of this void” that exists between any two objects due to the real and necessary
distinctness of their conati. The void in question is not physical but metaphysical,
denoting only the factual non-presence of a specific relationship between two
objects, which may in fact come to be in their causal unification (ibid., p. 114).
Stearns, unlike Whitehead in his model of intensive satisfaction imposing itself
as a condition for all concrescence in the transcendent future, provides less of a
model of how that saltus occurs, making Whitehead’s vibratory conception of
determinacy more attractive on this score. But for both, there is an abruptness
to the dynamic of becoming, toward the understanding of which we can at best,
taking Stearns as our clue, proceed dialectically.
6
Creaturely Things: Living Matter, Dead Matter,

and the Resonance of Actual Entities
Beatrice Marovich
Like a rock
To be a rock is rarely an enviable state—not even for the mythic figures alleged
to have created them. In a collection of fables he named Stories of God, Rainer
Maria Rilke’s character God watches Michelangelo from a perch in the heavens.
God is confounded by the fact that Michelangelo is listening—with rapt
attention—to a stone. “ ‘Michelangelo,’ cried God with dread, ‘who is in that
stone?’ ” Michelangelo, slowly and not without trepidation answers in a muffled
voice: “ ‘Thou my God, who else?” God is hardly flattered by this particular
devotion, as Rilke puts it, he “sensed that he was indeed in the stone and he felt
fearful and confined.”1
The rock is, in much Western mythology, a symbol of dead matter. When an
animated, fleshy, mammalian body dies, its corpse becomes a skeleton—a dense
concatenation of rock-like minerals. The rock is the end—a termination of life.
In William Blake’s mythical account, the primeval figure of Albion is stuck in
a sleep of death. It is intimacy with a rock that illustrates the calamity of his
condition. Albion leans “his faded head upon the oozy rock enwrapped with the
weeds of death,” Blake writes. “His eyes sink hollow in his head, his flesh covered
with slime and shrunk up to the bones. Alas! That man should come to this!”2
Alas indeed—that the human should become a rock, or be tied to a rock with the
weeds of death, before her time!
There are other instances, however, in which rocks have been elevated to
the status of kin—where they have been afforded a kind of fellowship with
humankind. Art historian Carolyn Dean has studied ancient Inka relationships
with rocks and claims to have evidence that they fed, clothed, and spoke to
select rocks in their midst—often foregoing the clever tropes of decoration

and figuration that have made rocks more humanoid, or simply alluring, for
Western eyes. These kinds of intimacies protected specific rocks—communities
were required to give them a kind of sacred breach, and village dwellings were
not allowed to encroach upon the rock’s geography.3 In other words, these rocks
did not have to look or smell like a human body before they were extended an
invitation into the animate realms of life in the world—or, at least, afforded some
of the privileges enjoyed by those who dwell there.
The situation of the Inkas provides a telling contrast to the ecological
problems we confront in the rock–human relation as currently configured in,
say, the twenty-first century United States. Rocks—being, as they are, brute dead
matter—are treated with a kind of brutality as well. For the most part, people
have few qualms about blasting away the crumbly vertebrate of a spiny mountain
ridge in order to secure the resources that lie deep within it. Our alienation from
rock matter is a political concern—the rock, being inanimate, is not a political
actor to whom we have any particular obligations. But it is also, by the same
token, an ontological problem—the rock’s exclusion from the ontological realm
of animacy shapes our political relation to it.
Have rocks been rendered conceptually inanimate in order to desensitize
ourselves to them, ecologically? Political theorist Jane Bennett suggests that
this sort of desensitization has led to a systemic lack of “vibrant materiality” in
human politics. Political divisions of life, into living and dead matter, she says
“encourage us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material
formation.”4 It becomes easier to forget, for example, that the waste we deposit
into landfills is consistently reshaping life (matter, environment, ozone) in the
place where it resides. In an effort to shift political and ecological alliances,
Bennett calls for a re-framing of affects and sensibilities—such that we might
“cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open
to it.”5 The purpose, she suggests, is to explore how this vibrant materiality, “that
runs alongside and inside humans” might actually begin to shift the shape of our
politics, “if we gave the force of things more due.”6
Rather than understanding human being, Bennett says, as the physical force
that occupies prime real estate in the ontology of being, she suggests we begin
to read human being itself differently—more in the manner that Jean-François
Lyotard reads the human body in his Postmodern Fables. Attempting to narrate
the human relationship with physical systems in a materialist manner, Lyotard
argues that the human is first and foremost, “matter as a state of energy.” That
is, “humankind is taken for a complex material system: consciousness, for an
Creaturely Things 111
effect of language: and language, for a highly complex material system.”7 Bennett
suggests that conceptualizing the human as, at base, such a physical system would
not be a downgrade but, rather, would “raise the status of the materiality of which
we are composed.” Hierarchical distinctions between animate and inanimate
would be troubled, she suggests, as “all bodies become more than mere objects,
as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper
relief.” In our ethics, Bennett says, the aim would then become, “to distribute
value more generously, to bodies as such” so that “in a knotted world of vibrant
matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself.”8 This
might be the sort of political ethic, then, that could implicate radically different
entities—like the human and rock—in a re-configured set of relations. The rock
might be understood as more than a stand-in for dead matter—the end of life
itself. The rock would become a body that we (as humans) engage in a more
mutual and dynamic relation—a kind of life partner.
Whiteheadian creatures
To call the rock a “fellow creature” might seem absurd. Although the creaturely
is a relic of a monotheistic creation theology, and although precise ontological
descriptions of creaturely life are few and far between (even in theology),
there is something about the creaturely that seems to require animacy. Fellow
creatures are often, it is thought, animals or insects. They, like us, live intensely
into their animacy. Popular use of the term “creature” often makes reference to
monsters and monstrosities. Creatures, in such accounts, are bodies we come
into contact with. Yet these culturally pervasive assumptions don’t exhaust what
we might productively understand of the creaturely. Particularly important in
this regard is Alfred North Whitehead’s ontology of “the creature,” which marks
a departure from, for example, the notion of “fellow creatures” as strictly our
animal counterparts. Whitehead’s creaturely ontology carries something of a
non-human, or inhuman, drift. In Whitehead’s ontology, creatureliness is more
than a kind of species animation that describes a variant of human animality,
or even some form of life shared by organisms we classify as living. Instead,
creatureliness becomes a physical phenomenon that occurs, in resonances,
between bodies of all kinds—a “lure for feeling” through and across material
and actual differences. It is perhaps the sort of ontology that begins to make a
rock look more like a fellow creature—with us beginning, in turn, to look (and
feel, perhaps) more like rocks.
In Whitehead’s view, the figure of the creature was radically generic, that is
to say, of broad metaphysical scope. It was the “actual entity” as he called it or,
at turns (describing it as an object in process, created anew each fraction of an
instant as an event), the “actual occasion.” As an “actual entity” the creature has
“significance for itself.” It functions only “in respect to its own determination.”9
In other words, there is no secret essence behind the creature: no creator who
manages, manipulates, or directs it. The creature, the actual entity, is. To call it
an entity means, more or less, that it has become an irreducible element in the
process of becoming. It emerges, it is, “an element contributory to the process
of becoming.”10 It does not emerge into static existence, as a defined substance,
but into a temporal process. Moreover, this concrete actuality is not a figure,
distillation, or representation of anything else. Whitehead’s ontological principle
charges that “actual entities are the only reasons, so that to search for a reason
is to search for one or more actual entities.”11 The only matters of fact are actual
entities.
Scandalously, for Whitehead even God is (according to one aspect of
divinity’s dipolar nature) a creature. That is, God is an actual entity—although
not an actual occasion. Although Whitehead did refer to God as “the primordial
creature” of creativity, he qualified this by arguing that God belonged to the
non-temporal realm. God was not an event, or occasion. The primordial nature
of God encapsulated and contained the multiplicity of eternal objects—the
aspects of reality that have not yet been actualized. Steven Shaviro likens this
primordial nature of God to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual—“the realm
of effects separated from their causes.”12 As the virtual can be actualized, God’s
primordiality (and the primordiality of the eternal objects that God contains)
demands actualization through other creatures—other actual entities. By virtue
of this distinction, divinity then becomes the only actual entity that is “always in
concrescence and never in the past.”13 Divinity is a kind of non-temporal creature
who emerges (in a particular style, distinctive of its character) into actuality. This
is what Whitehead called the “consequent nature” of God—more or less, God’s
creaturely nature.
Whitehead’s ontology of the creature makes creatureliness peculiar and
complex. God is a strange creature who is radically distinct from the living
society of creatures that coalesce into my own creaturely human body. And
each of these creaturely complexes is composed of elements that are very
different from a rock. But there is a creaturely aspect that congeals or stirs,
mutually, in each of us nonetheless. Whitehead’s creatures are strange—not
like the multi-cellular organisms of evolutionary biology. Excluding God
(who, again, does not bear the aspect of an occasion), all other creatures are
instants, not necessarily available to my visual perception. I, for instance, could
not in all earnestness call myself a creature but would instead be something
more like a “living society” or an “enduring creature” made up of a shifting
multiplicity of creatures, folds of creatures, reaching out toward one another,
coming into contact, animating the collective that addresses you through the
technological apparatus of my text. The rock, like the human, like the divine,
has creaturely aspects. The figure of the creature has rarely been deployed with
such ontological capaciousness.
To be a creature, in the context of theological doctrine, has often meant
no more than to be mortal, or finite, in contradistinction to the immortal or
infinite creator figure. But Whitehead complexifies the creaturely cosmos. The
infinite, the immortal, the eternal, do not stand outside of time and space,
conditioning creaturely life. Rather, for Whitehead “eternal objects” (what he
calls God’s “primordial nature,”14 which stirs just outside of actuality as such)
are fully engaged with the process of becoming. Shaviro acknowledges that
Whitehead’s very deployment of the term “eternal” is odd in this regard, but
suggests that he retains such language precisely because he seeks “to reject
the Platonic separation between eternity and time, the binary opposition that
sets a higher world of permanence and perfection (‘a static, spiritual heaven’)
against an imperfect lower world of flux.”15 Rather than disposing of the eternal,
Whitehead blends it into the actual, the temporal. Whitehead’s cosmological
complication works, then, by co-implicating the divine—along with all other
creatures—into a world that is conditioned by creativity. There is not a hierarchy
of creatures who gradually (as they move up the scale) begin to take on the
likeness, or image, of a transcendent creator figure. There is no top dog, so to
speak. Instead, all actual entities (including God) are mutually engaged in a
host of creaturely collisions.
Why, then, does Whitehead retain the potentially problematic language of
creatureliness? I would wager that to some degree the creaturely is alluring, at
least in part, because of its poetic efficacy. It resonates with the deep history of
creatures, the genealogies of creaturely life. To name an actual entity a creature
is to do poetic work. It is—if you choose to serve it this way—a term with
scriptural, theological efficacy. In this sense, then, it allies Whitehead—to some
extent—with the Christian tradition, while also facilitating a subtle subversion
of it. What Whitehead does with the figure of the creature is not entirely unlike
what he does, speculatively, with the figure of God. Isabelle Stengers suggests
that the God of Whitehead’s Process and Reality “constitutes just as much an
attempt to save God himself from the role assigned to him by the theological
propositions.”16 Decoupled from the absolute, like William James’s favored form
of divinity,17 Whitehead’s God is not an omnipotent judge but instead, as Stengers
puts it, “an idea, derived from the adventures of Ideas, and its non-power, its
functional character that excludes all coercion.”18 God is still, perhaps, God. But
saved from God. The creature, however, is also “saved,” in a sense. The creature,
for Whitehead, is no longer simply a stand in for radical finitude—God, too, is a
creature. The creature is, after some fashion, a kind of infinite. God and creatures
appear in Whitehead’s speculative cosmology as a link to theological history.
And, yet, they also facilitate a kind of sea change in that conceptual schema, they
are “saved” from the limits of their ancient roles by becoming strangely resonant
with one another, overlapping with one another, or folding into one another.
The language of creatureliness, if crucial to a Christian theological worldview,
might seem less relevant to other contemporary theory. If Whitehead felt a
certain attraction to the Christian theological tradition, such an attraction is not
necessarily endemic to pursuits loosely allied with the “posthumanities” today.
And, yet, the language of creatureliness does find itself sneaking in the discursive
back door when theorists, attempting to deconstruct the figure of the human, find
themselves at the limits of language or ontology. In The Animal That Therefore
I Am, Jacques Derrida underscores the absurdity of our human category, “the
animal.” The term itself, he argues, is a “chimera” in every sense of the word—a
kind of monstrosity, a figment of the human imagination, it is (as the term is used
in genetics) an organism that is actually composed of distinct multiple parts and
is not effectively singular. The animal, says Derrida, “is a word, it is an appellation
that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the
authority to give to the living other.”19 In his critique of this category, Derrida
makes recourse to the creaturely. “There is no animal in the general singular,
separated from man by a single, invisible limit,” he writes. “We have to envisage
the existence of ‘living creatures’, whose plurality cannot be assembled within
the single figure of animality that is simply opposed to humanity.”20 Although
Derrida places “living creatures” in scare quotes here, marking the phrase off as
strange, awkward, or synthetic, he does not deconstruct it. He lets it stand as a
place marker that simply highlights the maligned simplicity, or violence, of “the
animal.” The implied plurality of these “living creatures” seems to set in sharp
relief the reductive nature of “the animal” as a category. The creaturely seems to
anchor some resident potential to acknowledge the differences it harbors.
Might there be, then, something conceptually or discursively potent about the
figure of the creature? Something that can contribute to nascent conversations
around animal studies, or the posthumanities more generally? Whitehead’s

creature—specifically—might offer a unique invitation into the wilderness
of the non-humanized. The strange specifics of creatureliness in Whitehead’s
ontology are undeniably complex. But what is opened in the Whiteheadian
metaphysic of the creature, is a distinct way of speaking about creatureliness,
and the creaturely—one that works across and alongside (otherwise important)
categorical species distinctions. In this sense, the creaturely articulates a form of
connectivity that does not require categorical, or species likeness. Whitehead’s
creatures are so fleeting, so caught up in the process of becoming, that they
are never clear enough to identify or pin down. A human body (as a society
of creatures) is still a human body. In that sense, it remains distinct from a
horse body (which is an entirely different society of creatures), not to mention
a rock (socially comprised of a host of other creatures). Each of these societies
of creatures is mutually comprised of a shifting set of creatures, challenging our
ability to discern where the society itself begins and ends. The creatureliness
of these societies, the creatureliness that moves within and without them, that
undergirds them, creates a kind of resonance between these social structures.
Creaturely resonance
The challenge may be, then, how to articulate or explore this Whiteheadian
metaphysic of the creature. What do we make of creaturely life if it’s no longer
a term that discusses fleshy, animal, bodies? How can we know the creaturely,
if it is not distinguished by the vital animation of cellular organisms? To think
of the creaturely as something eventive and relational may be too abstract, too
alien, too cold. Does such an ontology of creatureliness risk abstracting all of the
strange, connective tenderness between living, creaturely bodies?
Or perhaps this is precisely where Whitehead’s ontology tests us most? Does it
stand as a challenge to learn, recognize, or come to know creaturely connections
with those bodies who cannot charm us with their wide-eyed, infantile neoteny?
To discern a creaturely connection between rocks, machines, atoms, or insects,
when instinct and sense might seduce us to induce otherwise? Such an ontology
of the creaturely confronts us with strange creatures (eventive, each of them
perishing as each new instant passes) that the senses within the great societies
of our human bodies are not receptive enough to see, or touch. But I do not
think this means creatureliness, as such, becomes something merely abstract or
theoretical—hostile to our sense of smell, or touch. The relational connectivity
of creatureliness happens through a register that is often just below our human
senses, but which also impinges upon them: through a kind of resonance. To
speak of creatureliness, the creaturely, or creaturely life with Whitehead is to
speak of a particular form of resonance. This resonance acts as a kind of fabric,
or tissue, that connects creaturely bodies—whether they be miniscule, grand
and societal, living, dead, animate, inanimate.
Derrida described the potency of what he called a “resonating system of
relations.” He is addressing, broadly, a “pure differential vibration”—the form of
pure difference. One may get the impression, he suggests, that such differential
vibration is nothing more than the dissolution of all identity, presence, fullness,
or content. That it is, in other words, nothing but pure lack, annihilation. But in
jouissance, he notes, we see the resonance emerging from differential vibration
actively at work in the construction of embodied experience. In the image of
a person who experiences jouissance, we see a body encountering pain in the
midst of her bliss. Her pleasure is tinged with an ache, and is not simple. It is,
instead, complicated by a difference. This kind of differential vibration, within
this resonating system of relations, is an impure sense of bliss (marked by what is
inimical to it). But it is, says Derrida, “the only possible form of response to desire,
the only form of bliss.” It is a bliss, he says, that is “plural” or “differential,” “a bliss
in which the other is called.” It is a bliss that recognizes a differential vibration that
goes all the way down. “A breath, a syllable is already a differential vibration,” he
writes. “In a certain way, there is no atom.”21
Derrida expresses, here, what becomes apparent in Whitehead’s ontology. To
say that there is no atom is to recognize a constitutive difference that comprises
even the most miniscule entity—nothing is simple, nothing is self-same. In other
words—in a more ontological register that Derrida would have rejected—even
the smallest society of entities (such as the atom) is comprised of creatures who
resonate with one another, in difference.
In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead wrote of a kind of vibrational
differentiation at the node of embodied life. He describes what he called
“vibrational entities”—those miniscule “corpuscular organisms at the base of
the physical field” which, he says, some studies in modern physics suggest that
we require for our own, basic, animation.22 What comprises the physical field,
in other words, is not even something as concrete as atoms. Instead, Whitehead
makes reference to creatures—here naming them “entities” (and vibrational
ones, at that). For Whitehead, this vibrational relation was constitutive of feeling
as such. Elsewhere, he pointed to the “vibratory character” of all entities,23 and
recognized vibration as something that held discrete entities together—through
the wave length transmission of “primitive feeling”24 (the most basic and primary
feeling, the simple “feeling of the body as functioning” or the “inheritance of
the world as a complex of feeling.”25) At the base of our physical field, in other
words, at the inception of feeling, stir a series of vibrations between distinct
(differentiated) actual entities—differential vibrations between creatures.
I am likening, in other words, the resonating system of relations that Derrida
calls “differential vibration” to the relational vibrations between Whitehead’s
actual entities, between creatures. Creatureliness might be, in a sense, nothing
more than the physics of this relational, differential, vibration. Far from being
abstract, these differential vibrations are, for Derrida, constitutive of bliss. For
Whitehead, the vibrations at the base of our physical field are what combine
to incite feeling as such. The differential, relational, vibrations that occur in
creaturely resonance are—ultimately—not neutral, disembodied, or annihilating.
They are affectively consequential. The vibrations of creaturely resonance impact
(and help to comprise) feeling and emotion.
What, however, is the relation between the creaturely and the sensations we
know and experience in the organismic human body? If creaturely resonance
plays a role in affect, in emotion, in feeling, does this resonance affect sensation
(life in the organismic body) itself? Is there a sense which we can understand
creatureliness not only affectively, but sensually? Can we, in the organic body,
develop a sense of what it means to be (or how it feels to be) relationally
and eventively creaturely? Creaturely resonance, I want to suggest, affects
the becoming of sensation. It is a kind of force that gives shape to sense and
sensation.
Political theorist William Connolly argues that we must think just beyond
sensation in order to understand the range of relations and connections that
we (as human bodies) develop with the rest of the world. We are sensitive to
the world, he suggests, in a way that “may thus exceed the range of ‘sensory
perception’ as that phrase is commonly interpreted.” So to cultivate a different
kind of sensibility, or sensitivity, to the world is “to come to terms more richly
with multiple modes and degrees of agency that compose the world.” To think
and cultivate these “enhanced relations with modes of agency that exceed our
current powers in this way” can, Connolly argues, “contribute new powers to
thinking in a world that exceeds the myth of the masterful human agent.”26 We
begin to understand our relation to the wild range of non-human creatures in
a different manner when we reach just below the level of perception, querying
what shapes our very sense of the networked web of relations that we call the
world, itself.
Connolly describes, for example, our resonant, vibrational, relation to

the yeast cell—a unicellular organism that “generates vibrations that both
express its inner states and are potentially discernable to us to some degree.”
Its rate of vibration, however, “falls within the range audible to humans, but its
amplitude falls below our sensory capacity.” We have the ability to hear it, in
other words, but typically we cannot. Connolly references a project, however,
in which biochemist Jim Gimzewski records and amplifies the vibrations of
yeast so that their sounds become audible to human ears. Connolly describes
the sound of the yeast as “calming at first” but, “upon pouring alcohol on a
yeast culture, the vibrations and resulting soundscape acquire a new intensity.
We, as human listeners, become more deeply attuned to the vibrations of the
yeast cells and perceive what sound like emotions. We begin to develop the
sense that “the yeast ‘feels’ and ‘responds’ ” and so, Connolly, suggests, “a new
inter-agency relation is disclosed through a creative experiment.”27 There are
forms of resonance between the human and the yeast cell exists whether we
perceive them, or not. But when we train our senses to perceive this resonance,
we sense a shift in our relation to the yeast cell. The creaturely resonance is
amplified and we begin to perceive a distinct and vibrant creaturely life at work
in the cell—a life that stirs us. Its creaturely life might make us feel, and the
sense and sensibility of our inter-creaturely connections shift. The differential
vibrations between the yeast cell and the human listener amplify, strengthen,
broaden, or substantiate the creaturely connection in a manner that makes
sense to our senses.
It is through a particular set of thinkers (Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and
Deleuze)—but especially through Whitehead—that Connolly finds the resources
for amplifying what he calls the “fugitive dimensions” of experience. “Whitehead
loosened and redistributed common sense ideas of feeling, interpretation,
perception, experience, and agency,” says Connolly. For Connolly, Whitehead
does this precisely by pointing toward the vibrations and resonances that
constitute the process of becoming.28 Connolly finds, in this, a way out of organic
holism and a way into what he names “connectionism”—a form of becoming that
is “replete with loose and partial connections” which “provide premonitions and
anticipations from which connections in other domains can also be pursued.”29
This connectionism, which works to articulate a “world of becoming,” pays
close attention to a radical plurality of elements such as “vibrations, bits of
noise, and litter in each system that do not fit perfectly into it.”30 These are the
connections—sensible and non-sensible—that build up and layer into temporal
processes of becoming. Among other things, it is a Whiteheadian vibrational
ontology that helps Connolly imagine this relational connectionism in a world

of becoming. I would like to suggest that the vibrations of creaturely resonance
similarly layer into the process of becoming to become—at points—coherent to
the life of the senses.
Connolly also points to a possible delimitation of this resonant creaturely
ontology. When resonance is applied across a broad and distributed range of
actors, this comprises an assemblage that Connolly calls a “resonance machine.”
Connolly develops this category in relation to the “abstract machines” of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari and describes it as “a cluster of energized elements
of multiple types that enter into loose, re-enforcing conjugations as the whole
complex both consolidates and continues to morph.” It is a machine “rather than a
mechanism or stable configuration because of the element of instability between
its interacting elements, its tendency to move fast, and its periodic capacity to
morph.”31 For Connolly, the resonance machine works globally, politically, to
affectively “absorb” and “shape agents of various sorts.”32
What I have been seeking to delineate, however, with Whitehead’s creature is
a kind of connection that is more tender and intimate—a resonant connection
between creaturely bodies. I have not been seeking to explore the creaturely
as a machine that is connected, a priori, to a set of relations already plugged
into a mobile assemblage—a kind of machine that captures our affects,
emotions, and sensibilities, shaping them in conjunction with the terms of
sensation produced within the machine. And I have been seeking to articulate
the relational ontology of Whitehead’s creaturely in terms that make sense to
sensation because I believe that, if such a concept is to be intimately coherent,
it can only become convincing to those with a human body if it begins to
impinge upon sensation.
What I would suggest is that the creaturely resonance I have been delineating
might develop less along the lines of the resonance we see at work in Connolly’s
global, political machines and more along those of the kind of resonance that
occurs through what Deleuze called “coupling.” In his book on Francis Bacon,
Deleuze distinguishes the phenomenon of resonance from that of simple
vibration as a kind of communication, even combat, between “two sensations,
each having their own level or zone.” This is resonance as “the coupling of
sensation.” In Bacon’s painting, such resonance emerges as the entanglement of
figures who “do not merge with each other, but are rendered indiscernible by the
extreme precision of the lines, which require a kind of autonomy in relation to the
body, like a diagram whose lines would bring together nothing but sensation.”33
The figures are entangled, they resonate, they are functionally indiscernible.
And, yet, they are not the same. They are rendered indeterminate by the very
resonance that occurs between them, in coupling. Vibration produces resonance,
but in coupling this resonance occurs as the sensation of two vibrations seizes
one another, “like the sensation of the violin and the sensation of the piano in
the sonata.”34 Deleuze evokes the image of wrestlers coming together, or of a
“ ‘combat of energies,’ even if it is a disembodied combat, from which is extracted
an ineffable essence, a resonance, an epiphany erected within a closed world.”35
This resonance is not a machinic entity that approaches a creaturely body from
the outside, usurping it with a series of proliferating affects. Instead, this is an
encounter between two singular points of sensation, two bodies, who encounter
one another with the force of their differential vibrations.
When Whitehead describes the physical phenomenon of resonance, in An
Introduction to Mathematics, it is as a force (as it is in coupling) that occurs
between two bodies in space. “Resonance arises when two sets of connected
circumstances have the same periodicities,” he writes. And resonance is, in
essence, the kind of violent excitation in one body that arises when it meets
or matches the periodicity in another body. Whitehead suggests that when the
“free period” of vibration in one entity matches the periodicity of another body,
resonance occurs. This “coincidence of periodicities” can produce a “steady
phenomen[on] when there is a constant association of the two periodic events, or
it may produce violent and sudden outbursts when the association is fortuitous
and temporary.”36 This resonance between bodies can, in other words, work both
to attract and to repel. But resonance, in any sense, occurs as a kind of coupling
between bodies.
Interestingly, to exemplify how a human might tune itself into other entities,
Whitehead uses the example of a rock. If we want to disrupt the path of a
rocking stone, he suggests, we “tune” our own movements to the oscillations
of the stone. This allows us to most effectively understand the movement, the
action. We must begin to resonate with the boulder, on some crucial level (to
attune ourselves to a creaturely resonance) in order for its path of travel (its
periodicity) to come into contact with the one we intend for it—thus creating
another path entirely, one shaped from the resonance of our connection. This is
similar to Deleuze’s image of coupling as a kind of battle, or combat, of forces.
But what Whitehead distills, in his mathematical description of resonance,
is the very physics of resonance—he constructs resonance as a basic relation
between two bodies. The resonance of creaturely connections can be steady and
prolonged, when the periodicities continue to match. Or it can be short and
fortuitous, like a sudden explosion. The result of a creaturely resonance may be
a sense of attraction. Or it may be one of repulsion. To speak of resonance in

creaturely life is not to sweeten creaturely connections with saccharine forms
of sentimental harmony. It may, perhaps, only be the acknowledgment of a
generic form of ontological relation, where historical traces of these actual
relations have long been erased or effaced.
Notes
1 Rilke, “Of One Who Listened to the Stones,” in Stories of God, p. 76.
2 Blake, “From the Story of Albion and Jerusalem,” in Symbolical Poems of William
Blake, p. 60.
3 See Dean, A Culture of Stone.
4 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. vii.
5 Ibid., p. 14.
6 Ibid., p. viii.
7 Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, p. 98.
8 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 13.
10 Ibid., p. 28.
11 Ibid., p. 24.
12 Shaviro, Without Criteria, p. 36.
14 Ibid.
15 Shaviro, Without Criteria, p. 38.
16 Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead, p. 479.
17 See, particularly, James’s tirade against absolute idealism and British Hegelianism
in A Pluralistic Universe.
19 Derrida, The Animal that Therefore, p. 47.
20 Ibid.
21 Derrida, “Dialanguages,” in Points, p. 137.
24 Ibid., p. 163.
25 Ibid., p. 81.
26 Connolly, A World of Becoming, p. 31.
27 Ibid., p. 28.
28 Ibid., p. 29.
29 Ibid., p. 36.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 135.
32 Ibid., p. 142.
33 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 46.
34 Ibid., p. 48.
35 Ibid.
36 Whitehead, Mathematics, p. 126.
7
Facts as Social Things

Michael Halewood
Metaphysics, when discussing the nature of things, searches for fixed, abstract,
eternal, prior explanations of their status and considers them as distinct
from the specific occurrence or location of any particular thing. In doing so,
it rids them of that which makes them interesting as individual things—this
pencil, this penicillin, this beetle, this transport system, this university, this
substance, this concept, this particular thing. There is a prima facie but resolute
tension between the possibility of providing a metaphysics that is able to
account for the thingness of things, which develops some kind system that
includes all possible things, and the seemingly irreducible specificity of the
actual and individual things of this world. The challenge that I want to take
up in this chapter is to develop a way of thinking the thingness of real things
in the real world, rather than in terms of categories of things or as derivative
exempla of more general principles.
Alfred North Whitehead points out that there are two elements to this
problem and its “solution.” One is the problem of thinking the reality of things
in terms of their “transcendence”:
An “object” is a transcendent element characterizing that definiteness to which

our “experience” has to conform.1
At first sight, this might suggest some kind of priority to the objectness of the
object, in that it compels the mind. At the foot of the page from which this
quotation is taken, Whitehead enunciates the similarity between his position
and that of Kant (or Kemp Smith’s commentary on the status of the object
in Kant):
The function here ascribed to an “object” is in general agreement with a paragraph

(p. 249, 2nd edition) in Professor Kemp Smith’s Commentary on Kant’s Critique,
where he is considering Kant’s ‘Objective Deduction’ as in the first edition of the

Critique: “When we examine the objective, we find that the primary characteristic
distinguishing it from the subjective is that it lays a compulsion upon our minds,
constraining us to think about it in a certain way. By an object is meant something
which will not allow us to think at haphazard.”
There is of course the vital difference, among others, that where Kemp Smith,
expounding Kant, writes “thinking,” the philosophy of organism substitutes
experiencing.2
In his usual, understated, style, Whitehead slips in the vital and major difference
between his position and that of Kant right at the end after emphasizing the
similarities between his concept and that of Kant. This major difference is that
he replaces the notion of thinking with that of experience. In this way, as Shaviro
(2009) and Stengers (2002) have pointed out, experience enables objects to
transcend themselves, insofar as they become a real element in the experiences
of other things (and, hence, such operations are not limited to human subjects).
None of these authors wants to deny the objectness of objects, to dissolve
them into constructions of the mind or to make objects reliant upon human
perception. Nevertheless, this focus upon the uniqueness of objects does not
necessarily imply that such objects retain a secret or hidden aspect which is
divorced from the potential experiences of other objects.
The important point to note here is Whitehead’s use of the term
“conformation” which Kemp Smith refers to in terms of “compulsion.”3 The
latter term has unfortunate connotations which suggest a causal authority
and precedence to the object, one which compels the object to be thought or
experienced in certain and specific ways, irrespective of the constitution of
that which experiences or thinks it. This supposed priority of the object, which
compels our thought and experience, can quite quickly lead to a conception of
objectness as having its own, internal power, essence, or secret. Such a power
is then thought, in and of itself, to determine (in the bad sense of the word)
thoughts or experiences while also keeping something of itself in reserve, so
that it is not exhausted or dissolved by such thoughts or experiences of it. It
thus has a hidden, unknowable kernel.
In opposition to such a line of argument, Whitehead’s concept of confor
mation retains some of the productive elements of the notion of compulsion
but avoids the destructive and deterministic aspects. For Whitehead, confor-
mation is not a matter of acquiescence in the face of the prior object. Instead,
he emphasizes that it is always a matter of conformation: that which is formed
with. For example:
Facts as Social Things 125
The philosophy of organism holds that, in order to understand “power,” we must

have a correct notion of how each individual actual entity contributes to the
datum from which its successors arise and to which they must conform.4
The pragmatic use of the actual entity, constituting its static life, lies in the
future. The creature perishes and is immortal. The actual entities beyond it can
say, “It is mine.” But the possession imposes conformation.5
Time in the concrete is the conformation of state to state.6
That there must be an element of conformation is not to have recourse to a

unilinear passing on of data or information. It is to stress that for perception
(in Whitehead’s specific sense and in the more general sense of the term) to
occur, there must be a passing on of data, which presupposes a commonality
between those elements involved in this passing on. If these elements were
different in kind then there could be no such integral sharing. Moreover, the
notion of conformation grants that the reality, the “definiteness” of the object,
will be taken into account (literally) while also allowing for a novel reaction to
that object and data:
The breath of feeling which creates a new individual fact has an origination not
wholly traceable to the mere data. It conforms to the data, in that it feels the data.
But the how of feeling, though it is germane to the data, is not fully determined
by the data.7
The preceding sketch of Whitehead’s discussion of objects and the associated

notion of conformation is intended as a preliminary step, one which traces
the metaphysical side of the question of metaphysics and things. And it will,
perhaps, have been noted, that the discussion has been about objects, rather
than things (although this latter term has been invoked in the discussion). In
the passages selected here, Whitehead is making some specific and technical
points. He is tackling the objectness of objects rather than the thingness of
things, viewing this specific notion of “object-ivity” as a legacy of “our” way of
thinking about the world, or at least the way of thinking which haunts Western
thought.
Whitehead’s granting of experience to objects, so that they can transcend
themselves, is only one part of his argument. He has other things to say about
“things.”
Here I am using the word “thing” in its most general sense, which can include
activities, colours and other sensa, and values. In this sense, “thing” is whatever
we can talk about.8
The distinction between objects and things is an important one. To make it is

not to suggest that there are different kinds of entities—objects and things—
but rather that we must be careful with our language. The very term “object”
has a history and a pragmatic efficacy which tends to lead us in specific
directions of thought. The same applies to the term “thing.” It is not that there
is a more real reality behind such objects and things; the invitation is, instead,
to track the contours of our thought when we attempt to account for objects
and things.
In order to track such contours, I will take the risk of turning not just to the
work of Latour and Whitehead but also that of Durkheim and Marx. Some might,
at this point, ask: “What can Durkheim, with his brusque but limiting notion
of the social, with its associated conception of humanly social construction,
tell us about this topic?” It may well be that both Durkheim and Marx have
been treated by many sociologists and social theorists as only being interested
in questions about the humanly social. However, in this chapter, I hope to
elicit those passages and concepts in their writings which might provide help
in reconsidering the sociality of things. This will not involve a deconstruction
of their thoughts or concepts. I do not want to suggest that previous readings
have missed what Durkheim and Marx really meant and that the answer was
there all along waiting for someone to unearth it. Rather, my aim is to use their
texts to construct an approach, a way of thinking, which will allow for a greater
understanding of the sociality of things.
Facts as social things
It is often claimed that it was Durkheim who established the ontological and
epistemological ground of sociology in the nineteenth century, by adopting a
staunchly “naturalistic” approach to sociology, which stated that sociology has
its own objects just as science did. Hence, the same (positivist) techniques of
science could equally be applied to analyses of the social realm. Durkheim
named these objects of sociology “social facts.” Establishing that such social facts
“have a nature of their own” is a first move toward envisaging them as proper
scientific objects.9 But, more importantly, Durkheim also states:
This science [sociology] . . . could be brought into existence only with the
realization that social phenomena [social facts], although immaterial, are
nevertheless real things, the proper objects of scientific study.10
This is a somewhat peculiar statement. But it would seem that this peculiarity
has been diluted through repetition, within sociological circles at least. The
objects of scientific sociological study are supposedly immaterial, un-sensible,
and only to be inferred by their effects, yet causes and laws can be drawn from
them as they are utterly real; they are “proper objects.”
Such statements are at the heart of the kind of sociology that Latour (and
Stengers) utterly rejects. And although Whitehead rarely addressed humanly
sociological questions directly, he did have a very specific understanding of the
concepts of society, the social and sociology. In this sense, there is an affinity
between the concepts and problems of Whitehead’s 1926 text Religion in the
Making and Durkheim’s 1915 work The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.11
Nevertheless, Whitehead only uses the term “social fact” once when he writes that
“religion is primarily a social fact.”12 This resonates with Durkheim’s claims that
religion is a social fact, indeed, perhaps the social fact par excellence. Religion,
Durkheim argues, forms the basis of the possibility of society and, more than
this, is also at the basis of the development of knowledge and epistemology
insofar as knowledge is a public, social, affair which is generated by the very
conditions which humans both generate and find themselves within. Again, this
sort of claim might provoke the worst kind of sociologistic and universalizing
of concepts which suppose that only sociology can provide accurate accounts
of any aspect of our knowledge or acquaintance with the world. “Society had to
produce everything arbitrarily including the cosmic order, biology, chemistry,
and the laws of physics!”13
It is clear from the context in which he uses it that Whitehead intends
something very different to Durkheim in his deployment of the term “social
fact.” The brief citation given previously continues as follows:
Social facts are of great importance to religion, because there is no such thing
as absolutely independent existence. You cannot abstract society from man
[sic] . . . But all collective emotions leave touched the awful ultimate fact, which
is the human being, consciously alone with itself, for its own sake.14
The first half of this statement, with its stress on the lack of “absolutely
independent existence,” is a hallmark of Whitehead’s important insistence upon
relationality as the key to existence. As is made clear in his later works (especially
Symbolism. Its Meaning and Effect and Process and Reality), societies and the
social are non-human-centered modes of explaining the coming together and
maintaining-together of actual entities to form enduring entities (societies).
At this point, it is worth reminding ourselves of the problem that I set out
at the start. One problem for a metaphysics of things is that of abstract rules
versus concrete and specific individuals. To have a theory or account of both
at the same time seems problematic; one aspect will always seem to gain
logical or ontological priority. Hence, I have turned to a related field, sociology,
which has wrestled with the problem of individuality and sociality, admittedly
unsuccessfully, in order to see what can be recovered from such discussions
and help us move toward a positive response to the metaphysical dilemma over
things. Again, this is not a deconstructive or a reconstructive move. It is simply
an attempt to use whatever tools are available to provide the clearest response.
It is the possible irruptions in Durkheim’s account of an unseen explication of
the sociality of things, and the possibility of a coherent theory thereof, which is
of interest. For the remainder of this chapter, I will be exploring this possibility
in Durkheim’s work, and will follow this with an attempt to read Marx’s account
of the commodity as an example of the sociality of things which is also a
“metaphysical” but situated account of such things.
Durkheim (and Latour) and The Elementary Forms

of the Religious Life
“The totem of any man [sic],” say Spencer and Gillen, “is regarded as the same
thing as himself; a native once said to us when we were discussing the matter
with him, ‘That one,’ pointing to his photograph which we had taken, ‘is the
same things as me: so is a kangaroo’ (his totem).” So each individual has a double
nature: two beings coexist within him, a man and an animal.15
This notion of a “double nature” might not appear so new, or important.

But it is a first indication that priority is not to be given to the human as an
independent entity comprising the basis of the religious life and hence of
sociality. Nor are objects primary. Instead, it is the relation between the two
which is originary. The totem, which binds together the members of a clan,
and instantiates sociality, is, therefore, not a simple human fabrication. The
totem is not simply an object upon which a special or specific status (that of
being sacred) is conferred. Instead, it is only through the assembling of the
object (totem) and the human that the moment of the specificity of the human,
considered as a social (or cultural) being, is possible.16 The totemic object is
the same kind of thing as the human (prior to its social individuality). There
is no hierarchy granting humans a particular or specific status above that of
objects. The coalition of objects and humans leads to the ability to conceive of
and talk of humans as real (that is societal) humans.
The role of theory, in the sense of an attempt to make sense of such a world
is, according to Durkheim, taken up in “totemic societies” by myths. The
point of myths which are “all constructed on the same plan . . . is to establish
genealogical connections between the man and the totemic animal.”17 Insofar
as myths refer to the mode of theoretical thinking extant in such societies, they
become a question of tracing the associations between things18 and humans.
Knowledge and theory (and hence metaphysics, when it comes along) are not
predicated either on humans or on objects but on the connections between
them.19 Durkheim continues:
All the beings arranged in a single clan, whether men, animals, plants or
inanimate objects, are merely forms of the totemic being . . . all are really of the
same flesh . . . they are its intimates, its associates, its friends . . . these are very
closely related things.20
This seems even clearer. The possibility of sociality, humanness, and human
thought is based on the same democratic, non-hierarchical status of all things.
Their very flesh is the same. It is the intimate association of different kinds of
things; their relatedness is the core of the particular form of existence which
we refer to as human and human societies and in terms of human thought.
But, in reality, any privilege that is granted to such human forms is mistaken
as it actually originates from the utter imbrication of the fleshy things of
the world.
This analysis might seem to demand the question as to why, if Durkheim
has produced such a democratic, non-human-based ontology and epistemology,
Latour (and Tarde) is (are) so keen for us to reject his approach? The answer,
as is probably clear from the way that this argument has been set up, is that
such statements of Durkheim’s would seem to be aberrations or to go against
the general thrust of his text. This does not make my reading of Durkheim a
deconstructive or psychoanalytic one. Rather, the argument being made is
that in his refusal of philosophy and metaphysics as able to describe either
the individuality or sociality of humans (or things), Durkheim is engaged in
a serious, if flawed, attempt to develop both a coherent, adequate, and logical
framework of thought and an account of the particularity and individuality of
things (considered as social facts and human individuals). The real difficulty
comes when he moves from his discussions of the hybridity of humans and
things to the formalization of his notion of religion as the institution through
which the nascent religiosity implicit in the association of humans with the
non-human is sedimented. Religion “translates21 everything essential in the
relations which are to be explained: for it is an eternal truth that outside of us
there exists something greater than us, with which we enter into communion.”22
Instead of remaining at the level of associations, Durkheim substantiates such
relations into Religion, which furnishes the social and moral bonds that then
provide the solid base of human society: “the men of the clan and the things
which are classified in it form by their union a solid system, all of whose parts
are united and vibrate sympathetically.”23 While there is still a recognition of
the vibration between parts that exhibits the importance of relationality, there
is an emphasis on the solidity and identity of the clan. Religiosity is reduced to
religion. The relational, the associations, the vibrations are given a substantive
base which explains, ontologically and epistemologically, all things and thoughts
which later arise upon such a base. This is problematic.
The benefits of religiosity
The peculiar character of religious truth is that it explicitly deals with values. It
brings into our consciousness that permanent side of the universe which we can
care for. It thereby provides a meaning, in terms of value, for our own existence,
a meaning which flows from the nature of things.24
Taken on its own, this statement of Whitehead’s might appear to be a rather

wishy-washy attempt to justify religion; this would certainly be the case if it were
seen as claiming that religious truth is that additional realm of life which enables
humans to grant value to an otherwise meaningless world and thus attain a
degree of existential solace or succor. But the final phrase should warn us against
this. Religious truth “flows from the nature of things”. This is not a simple form of
pantheism or animism. It is a sharp philosophical point, related to Whitehead’s
re-appropriation of Kant and to his refusal to allow nature to bifurcate and for
fact to be divorced from value as the neo- and post-Kantians would wish.
The metaphysical doctrine, here expounded, finds the foundations of the world
in the aesthetic experience, rather than – as with Kant – in the cognitive and
conceptive experience. All order is therefore aesthetic order, and the moral
order is merely certain aspects of aesthetic order.25
As Shaviro has pointed out, we underestimate the role of the aesthetic in both
Whitehead and Kant at our peril.26 Aesthetic feeling and experience are, for
Whitehead, integral aspects of all existence. Human, non-human, “factual,” and

actual. These are not add-ons or derivatives. They are expressed in the manner
of existence, the way it comes to be: “how an actual entity becomes constitutes
what that actual entity is. . . . Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’. This is the
‘principle of process’. ”27 Religious feeling or religiosity (as opposed to Religion
or the Church) is one mode of the expression of the aesthetic or qualitative
aspect of existence. As Whitehead puts it: “The secularization of the concept of
God’s functions in the world is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the
secularization of other elements in experience.”28
God may be dead, but the role that the concept of God played in our thought
lingers on. To completely deny or reject the role that religiosity still plays in
our thoughts and actions is to misunderstand the status of our concepts, be
they philosophical, scientific, or cultural. We do not need to find a substitute
for God, in some hazy kind of spirituality or aesthetic realm, but we do need
to secularize the role that was previously played by God. A simple rejection of
God might seem to some as the only route open to a serious, sensible, liberal,
inheritor of the Enlightenment. Yet it is the move of one insufficiently aware of
the history and legacy of our concepts. We should, perhaps, stick with religiosity
(not Religion or the Church) precisely insofar as it seems a fruitful, if dangerous,
way to express that element of existence which constitutes more than an inert
factual realm.
In order to flesh out these points, I will now develop a re-reading of the
numerous occasions that Marx has recourse to religious imagery in his
description of the commodity. I want to argue that in his attempts to describe
the facticity and the “value” of those objects considered as commodities (under
capitalism) he finds himself required to adopt but almost mangle the language
of theology. Most commentators view the religious allusions, concepts, and
examples that Marx uses as examples of his literary and metaphorical writing-
style. They are taken as evidence of his committed but occasionally hyperbolic
mode of arguing. As opposed to such interpretations, I would claim that
Marx is aware that the language and concepts of religion are the only way
that he can express his point about the duality of commodities (considered
as things) and to derive a theory (metaphysics) thereof, without falling back
into scientistic, positivist categories which assert the separation of the realm
of an inert facticity from a realm of values and meanings created by humans
and society. The dual existence of the commodity29 requires that we think it
as comporting both thingness and quality. This peculiarity is best explained
via religiosity.
Marx’s religious commodity
As has already been discussed, for Durkheim, social facts are the basis and
explanation of all sociological explanations of the world. Religion is a social fact.
Religion (as the social, moral bond) is the ultimate guarantor of religiosity.
For Whitehead too, religion is a social fact. But, for him it is religiosity (in
Religion in the Making at least) that explains the more than factual quality of
actuality and individuality.
For Marx, it is the religiosity inherent in the commodity that is key.
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its
analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties.30
This phrase is often cited. But usually it is taken as an indication of Marx’s

attempt to indicate the intricacies of his argument. The theological aspect is then
not taken seriously. Such a serious reading is what is being undertaken here.
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists . . . simply in the

fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour
as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-
natural properties of these things.31
The first half of this quotation would seem to suggest that the mystery of the
commodity arises solely from the social realm, from the granting of human
meaning to those objects that have been produced by that society. This is the
reading taken up by most interpreters. But the more interesting element comes
right at the end, where he speaks of the “socio-natural properties of these things.”
Already, Marx is refusing to accept that the commodity is solely a human affair,
solely the creation of human society. It is always more and less than that. In
this way, he chimes with Latour. The commodity is a unity, it is one thing, but
it is also dual. The properties of it as a thing (its “use-value”) are not isolated
or primary but nor are they unnecessary. While the individual properties of a
thing are unimportant for understanding the commodity, in abstract, some such
properties must inhere (those of a bottle, lollipop, coat, or linen). Such properties
take on a specific form when combined with the social elements exhibited
through exchange. But, in reality these are not divided—hence the commodity
is a socio-natural unity. Marx is therefore operating at the very heart of the
problem of the tension between metaphysics and things. Some might object that
Marx is not talking about things as such, nor about objects, but rather about
commodities, which are only a specific kind of thing or object within a specific
kind of society. This is clearly the case, and it should be noted that I am not
claiming that Marx provides the only possible account of the thingness of things,
or that he provides a complete and indisputable metaphysical system. Rather, he
has identified one possible avenue of thought that might be helpful, namely: that
there is always a form of existence and a form of thought and that these are inter-
related. This is not to reduce thought or things to social productions, and this is
why his insistence on the duality of the commodity is so important. What Marx
identifies is the need to be aware of the form of our own form of thought and
to refuse to see metaphysics as an innocent or abstract practice but as a manner
of thinking and a way of doing things. Equally, this is not to deny the accuracy
of such thoughts or of metaphysics, but it is to insist that it will always exhibit a
mode of operation, a “tone of thought.”32
In each period there is a general form of the forms of thought; and, like the air
we breathe, such a form is so translucent, and so pervading, and so seemingly
necessary, that only by extreme effort can we become aware of it.33
To return to Marx and his use of the theological in order to think the thingness
of things:
In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of
religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures
endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other
and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the product
of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of
labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable
from the production of commodities.34
All things are fetishistic and not just in their relation to humans but also in their
inter-relations and inter-actions with each other. It is therefore possible to take
the following quotation literally:
[A commodity] . . . not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation
to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden
brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its
own free will.35
According to Marx, it is necessary to delve into the terms, words, and concepts
of the theological and the speculative, in order to describe the fantastic and
peculiar character of such commodities. In this way, he adheres to Whitehead’s
suggestion regarding the secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the

world. One of the functions of the concept of God was to enable speculative
thought. Theology (whether there be a God or not) has always been an important
stanchion of speculative thought, in “the West” at least. It is, therefore, only
through such speculative theology, but one not premised on God’s existence,
that the duality of the commodity (as a real and whole thing) can be understood.
Commodities are extremely strange entities, which are not natural but nor are
they unnatural. There is an objectivity to the commodity considered as a thing
produced out of nature, and there is an objectivity to the “social” attitudes of
humans confronted by these commodities. This dual objectivity produces
the fetishism of the commodity insofar as it appears as, and is, two things at
once. The only way to accurately describe this duality is through the concepts
of theology, because these are the only sufficiently peculiar concepts that we
have to describe this unity in duality. To nostalgically return to the pure state of
nature where things were simply things is to misrecognize the status of reality.
It is to wish to return to some innocent Garden of Eden before the Fall, a fall
from grace enacted by the creation of human knowledge of objects and things.
This creation constitutes the Original Sin of epistemology. However, to fully
understand the commodity form it is necessary to confront it on its own bizarre
and metaphysical ground: as that which has a consistently dual character—that
of the natural-social, which invokes and relies upon a concept of value as a
natural-social equivalence.
The theological aspect is even more pronounced in Marx’s description of
how the shift from the simple equivalence of commodities, in terms of their
equivalence to one another, is mediated through the adoption of one specific
commodity, namely silver or gold, as the universal expression of equivalence
which, taking the money form, enables the expansion of commodification and
equivalence.
In order, therefore, that a commodity may in practice operate effectively as

exchange-value, it must divest itself of its natural physical body and become
transformed from merely imaginary into real gold, although this act of
transubstantiation may be more ‘troublesome’ for it than the transition from
necessity to freedom for the Hegelian ‘concept’, the casting of his shell for a
lobster, of the putting-off of the old Adam for Saint Jerome.36
Here Marx has moved from a conception of things as equivalent, to the actual
purchase and sale of things—the circulation of commodities. This circulation is
one of the fundamental processes of capitalism. If everyone merely sat around
naming the magnitude of value (price) of all the things in the world, the things
would not move. In order for commodities to move, they must jump into the
world of exchange, be sold, and thereby become money (or gold). Literally. The
term that Marx uses to explain this process is that of “transubstantiation,” which
is a hoary and thorny concept replete with peculiar but productive connotations.
It is a concept steeped in scholastic philosophy (and theology) which is usually
deployed to express the manner in which, in certain religious circles, the bread
and wine which is offered at mass are claimed to actually become, under the
vicarious ordinances of the presiding priest, the body and blood of Christ. The
philosophical maneuver enabling such claims is the contention that there is a
distinction between the essence and accidents of substance. The former comprise
what it really is; the latter make up its incidental and changing properties. That
is to say, when wax melts, its essence remains the same and it remains the same
substance, but its accidents change, so it becomes warm and viscous instead
of cold and hard. The opposite applies in terms of transubstantiation. During
the Eucharist, the accidents remain the same but the essence changes. The
things on the altar have the form of appearance of bread and wine but they are,
substantially, the body and blood of Christ, or so some theologians maintain.
Hence while it is perfectly possible to say that iron (or lead) has, speculatively,
a certain price, under the money-form where gold (or some such) is taken as a
universal equivalent, iron and lead do not operate as money and, as such, are
not directly exchangeable with bottles or lollipops. In order to realize its value, it
is not simply a question of the iron or lead being exchanged for money. It must
become money. The exchange of money is merely an outward sign. The iron and
lead are no longer iron and lead. Their accidents may appear the same, they may
be gray and of a certain density and so on. But their essence has changed. Lead
has been transformed into gold.
The above discussion is in no way intended as some kind of advocacy of
Catholicism. However, the very worry or fear surrounding any recourse to
theology is instructive, in that it indicates more than a simple academic concern
over the legitimacy of the argument; it might seem like a betrayal of a secular,
well-informed, discussion of the relationship between metaphysics and things.
This assumption of a generally accepted starting-place for such a discussion is
what I am denying. Whitehead and Marx both insist that we pay attention to the
form of our thought. And metaphysics would seem to be such a form. To assume
that within such a form the answers are already provided would be further
evidence of, as Stengers puts it, “Critical thought not being critical enough.”37 To
argue, as Quentin Meillassoux seems to, that the answers lie within the realm of
philosophical thought or metaphysical thought as it stands, would equally seem

to be mistaken; it precludes the openness of thinking which is required.38 But
such openness is also a constraint. As Stengers puts it:
Keeping the doors and windows open is a constraint on thinking. It does

not only demand that the thinker leave the solid ground of agreed human
conventions, which affirm the legitimacy of certain possibilities and condemn
others. In order to leave this ground, it also demands that the thinker not
aim at what would transcend the conventions that give its consistency to this
ground.39
The recognition and utilization of the irruption of the theological within our
thought, and the taking seriously of this kind of argumentation, would seem
to me to be a dangerous but important demand. To attempt to completely
eradicate the role of concepts tainted by the theological runs the risk of
allowing the function of such concepts to maintain their power surreptitiously
or by other means. Facing this danger head-on involves both an openness and
a constraint. It is these themes and points that I will now try to outline in my
conclusion.40
Conclusion
Whitehead is clear that we must take seriously the way in which aspects of
metaphysics have relied upon or invoked some of the functions of the role of
God in establishing or supporting their frameworks. There is a resonance here
with Derrida’s identification of the “metaphysico-theological roots” of Western
metaphysics.41 Unlike Derrida, Whitehead does not take the deconstructive line
but insists that we must actively and productively secularize these functions.
This detour through the theological is not, however, the same as advocating
a belief in God. This for two reasons. First, the concept of God’s functions is
only one of the elements of thought that needs to be secularized. Second, while
religious feeling must involve God, God’s function does not necessarily involve
religious feeling: “the concept of religious feeling is not an essential element in
the concept of God’s function in the universe.”42
Whitehead thereby distinguishes between two elements. One is the kind of
religious feeling which is akin to that invoked by Durkheim in his “incorrect”
passages, namely those where religious feeling becomes the core of human society
and human knowledge. Here, there is an essential link between such religious
feeling and God. The second, more interesting element is that our frames of
thought are replete with the non-religious maneuvering of God’s function in the
world. This is, to my mind, the approach that Marx takes in his account of the
fetishism of commodities.
The question now arises of quite what it would mean to secularize God’s
function in the world. One answer would be that it is not to deny but to point up
the non-religious theological aspects.
One way for us to overcome the apparent secrecy of things, their hidden
lives, their unknowness to us when they are considered as and of themselves,
is to allow them to enjoy their own life and inter-relations. One model for this
might be in terms of religiosity (of religious feeling rather than religion itself).
The model for such religiosity, as espoused by Durkeheim, is that of a humanly
religious capacity, but this is too narrow a frame. It prejudges the evidence
and posits the human as the fount of the divine and therefore makes it hard to
envisage a religiosity between things considered in themselves. This does not
entail that the only other available position is to assert that things are divine in
and among themselves (in either pantheistic or Spinozist terms). It is, rather, to
allow ourselves to adopt the secularized concept of religious feeling as applying
to and explicating the thingness of things. This would lead to the interesting
position where:
Things are religious amongst themselves. But they have no religion.
The question that now arises is: what would constitute such a religious feeling
between things (and objects)?
The stubborn reality of the absolute self-attainment of each individual is bound

up with a relativity which it issues from and issues into. The analysis of the various
strands of relativity is the analysis of the social structure of the Universe.43
The experience of this relativity by all individuals, the experience of the otherness
of existence, might be an example of this religiosity; the individual is constituted
beyond itself. To return to the first citation from Whitehead in this chapter
regarding objects, transcendence, conformation, compulsion, and experience,
the next sentences are as follows:
In this sense, the future has objective reality in the present, but no formal actuality.
For it is inherent in the constitution of the immediate, present actuality that a
future will supersede it.44
In Modes of Thought, he states:
There must be value beyond ourselves. Otherwise everything experienced

would be merely a barren detail in our own solipsist mode of existence. We
owe to the sense of Deity the obviousness of the many actualities of the world,
and the obviousness of the unity of the world for the preservation of the values
realized and for the transition to ideals beyond realized fact.45
The experience of the future in the present, of the process of existence, that
there is more to fact than facticity, the emplacement of value as integral, is best
described, according to Whitehead, with reference to a “sense of Deity.” Note
that this does not rely on the existence of a Deity but only the sense of such
operations. To impugn Whitehead for invoking God as a fix-it-all concept is to
miss the point. The task is to dip into the secularized concepts of God’s function
in the world as this is the clearest way of explicating the value-ridden status of
existence. This might involve conceiving things as religious within and between
themselves. Again, this is not to lazily rely upon extra devices or concepts to
shore up a metaphysical system but to take seriously the legacy and history of our
thoughts and concepts and the constraints they lay upon us and opportunities
that they offer us.
As has been argued throughout this piece, this is what Marx is also
attempting to do. By insisting on the very duality of the commodity, he brings
to the fore the thingness and the inter-relation of things. Commodities only
operate insofar as they have a dual individuality—that of their use, and that of
their exchange. They measure themselves up against each other and transform
themselves into gold (money) and back again in the process of (capitalist)
circulation. They act as themselves (in terms of use-value), but this is integrally
linked to their inter-relation (exchange) with other commodities. Marx invokes
the theological to explain this form of being and the movement of such beings
precisely in order to secularize it, in Whitehead’s sense of the term. Whitehead
himself invokes the notions of emotion and feeling and the aesthetic to effect
the same outcome. For him, it is these that express the secularized function of
the concept of God in the world.
Again, it may be objected that the reading of Marx offered here is overly
metaphysical and goes against his wishes. Marx refused to do metaphysics
precisely because it is an unwarranted abstraction from the status and movement
of capitalism, an explanation of which was his prime concern. Such an objection
leads to my final point.
The presupposition that there is metaphysics and that there are things and
that we must bring these back together, somehow, turns out to be a bad place
to start. Metaphysics is a way of thinking, it is a mode of abstraction. Insofar as
metaphysics is a way of thinking, it is also a way of doing something. We always
do it in a specific way and in a specific locale, surrounded and supported by a
wide array of things (conceptual, material, enduring, and fleeting). This is not
to reduce metaphysics merely to another practical activity or praxis (as some
Marxists might want us to do) as this would be to explain away rather than
explain. Instead, the point is that thinking about things and attempting to form
a generalized account of these is, in some sense, metaphysical. Whitehead puts
it thus:
A metaphysics is a description. . . . A metaphysical description takes its origin

from one select field of interest. It receives its confirmation by establishing
itself as adequate and exemplified in other fields of interest.46
In Process and Reality, Whitehead took the route of attempting to generalize as

much as possible and to make his account as adequate as possible. Marx starts
with commodities as a kind of thing and discovers that they are only explainable
through the kind of generalized concepts which had previously been deployed by
theology. In this sense, and despite himself, Marx was, perhaps, an “involuntary
Whiteheadian,” in that he moved quickly from the thingness of commodities to
their peculiar mode of inter-relation which is an integral aspect of their being.
The point might be then to generalize such statements and to enable a shocking
level of religiosity (albeit a secularized one) to inhabit the things of the world
and of metaphysics, precisely in order to develop a better metaphysics and a
better account of things.
Notes

2 Ibid.
3 Whitehead’s term “conformation” is closely related to that of “causal efficacy”
and to explanations of the ongoing, genuine perception of the world which is
not limited to the data provided by the senses (the realm of “presentational
immediacy”). However, these terms will not be fully addressed here.
4 Ibid., p. 56.
5 Ibid., p. 82.
6 Whitehead, Symbolism, p. 35.

9 Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p. lviii.
10 Ibid., p. lvii.
11 It is, of course, difficult to tell whether Whitehead had read Durkheim
and ultimately it might not matter at all. But there is another interesting
correspondence between two of their statements regarding the character of
symbolism. Durkheim states: “Thus social life, in all its aspect and in every period
of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism” (2008: 231. Emphasis
added). Whitehead states: “Now, when we examine how a society bends its
individual members to function in a conformity with its needs, we discover
that one important operative agency is our vast system of inherited symbolism”
(Whitehead, Symbolism, p. 86. Emphasis added).
12 Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 6.
13 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 55.
15 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 135.
16 It is in the work of Lévi-Strauss that the concept of the cultural will replace that
of the social as making up the dualism between the natural (object ridden) realm
and the cultural (rational-based human) realm.
17 Ibid.
18 In this quotation, Durkheim speaks not of “things” but of “the totemic animal.”
However, elsewhere and usually, he is clear that the totem can be an animal or a
plant or an inanimate object (see, e.g., Ibid., pp. 103–4).
19 It may seem at this point that, even though I am arguing that the human is not
acting alone in the instantiation of the social and of thought, the position I am
outlining is still susceptible to the charge of what has been termed “correlationism”
and the “correlationist circle” (see Meillassoux, After Finitude) for, ultimately, it
would seem that human thought is granted an a posteriori priority in that it is
still only humans that think such relations. Worse, such a thinking of relations is
unable, it would seem, to escape the bounds of its own thinking to return to the
relationality of such relations in themselves. I am aware of this problem and I hope
to provide an alternative way of approaching this below. Briefly, my point is that
the very positing of the problem in this way is part of the problem. Only by sailing
close to the correlationist wind and taking seriously questions of sociality and
knowledge, indeed religiosity, sociality, thought and being, will it be possible to
develop alternative modes of thought.
20 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 150.
21 It should be notice that the concept of “translation” is an important one for Latour.
See, for example, Latour, The Pasteurization of France.
22 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 225–6.

23 Ibid., p. 150.
25 Ibid., p. 91.
26 See Shaviro, Without Criteria.
27 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 23. Emphasis in original.
28 Ibid., p. 207.
29 I have discussed Marx’s dual concept of the commodity in more detail elsewhere
(Halewood 2005).
30 Marx, Capital Volume 1, p. 163.
31 Ibid., pp. 164–5.
34 Marx, Capital Volume 1, p. 165.
35 Ibid., pp. 163–4.
36 Ibid., p. 197.
37 Stengers, Penser Avec Whitehead, p. 74.
38 See Meillassoux, After Finitude.
39 Stengers, “William James: An Ethics of Thought,” p. 18.
40 I am grateful to Donna Haraway for pointing out to me that some might not see
arguments about the relevance of theology as any kind of danger at all. Indeed,
they might welcome them as helping support some neo-liberal, conservative
political placement of Christianity as the well-spring of all true knowledge. To
support such a position is definitely not my aim. Though this is a broad point to
make, it may be that there is an important difference between European and the
US sensibilities on such a point as they inhabit different political lifeworlds. I have
not been able to come to a satisfactory position with regard to this problem, as yet.
But I am grateful to Donna Haraway for posing this question and problem to me.
41 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 13.
43 Ibid., p. 376.
44 Ibid., p. 215.
45 Ibid., p. 140.
46 Ibid., p. 76.
142
Part Three
Dramatizations: Situating,
Abstracting, Experimenting
144
8
Between Realism and Antirealism: Deleuzian

Metaphysics in the Style of Whitehead
Jeffrey Bell
In this chapter, I would like to situate Deleuze’s thought relative to realism

and antirealism and, more particularly, to understand what it means to do
metaphysics “in the style of Whitehead.”
To begin to do this, we can address two questions Deleuze received after he
gave his “Method of Dramatization” talk to the Société Française de Philosophie
on 28 January 1967. The first is from Ferdinand Alquié, who expressed the
following concern upon hearing Deleuze use examples from science and
psychology to make philosophical points:
I understand that M. Deleuze criticizes philosophy for making the Idea a

conception that is not adaptable, as he would like, to scientific, psychological,
and historical problems. But I think that alongside these problems there remain
classical philosophical problems, namely problems having to do with essence.
In any event, I don’t believe, as Deleuze does, that the great philosophers have
never posed such questions.1
Coming from the man who was overseeing Deleuze’s work on Spinoza at the
time, Alquié’s criticism caught his attention. The second question is from
Alexis Philonenko, a Kant and Fichte scholar, who sought clarification of
Deleuze’s argument concerning the relationship between the representational
and the subrepresentational. Philonenko compared these arguments to those
of Salomon Maïmon, noting that Maïmon’s differential elements compare to
Deleuze’s subrepresentational elements, and the representational compares to
the integration of these differentials. One consequence of this approach for
Philonenko is skepticism, as it leaves us without a criterion whereby we can
discern “what we produce and what the object produces . . . [and] what is
produced logically and what is not . . .” This leads in turn to his question:
So this is what I want to know: what part does illusion (or the illusory) have in
the movement of differential elements?2
Before addressing Deleuze’s response to these two questions, I want to set forth
the way in which these questions give rise to issues concerning realism. We will
then be better able to place Deleuze’s thought into the constellation of debates
that surround realism, antirealism, and speculative realism.
Alquié’s concern with Deleuze’s talk was that the distinctiveness of philosophy
was being supplanted by science. Is philosophy merely a midwife for the sciences?
For Deleuze the answer is clearly no. When asked, for example, whether the
topological model Deleuze and Guattari put forth in the conclusion to A
Thousand Plateaus is “transposable into mathematics [and] biology,” Deleuze
says, “it is the other way around,” and to clarify this point he adds: “I feel that
I am Bergsonian—when Bergson says that modern science has not found its
metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs. It is that metaphysics that interests me.”3
This metaphysics should not, Deleuze stresses, be “in the style of Kant,” but
rather “in the style of Whitehead.”4
To understand what it means for Deleuze to do metaphysics “in the style of
Whitehead,” we can begin with Hume, and more particularly with Whitehead’s
critique of Hume. For Whitehead the chief problem with Hume is that he
introduces the world “as a secondary conjecture,” a world that is constituted on the
basis of a multiplicity of discrete impressions and ideas. Whitehead, by contrast,
argues that discrimination itself is exercised on the basis of an “experienced
world,” an experience that “starts,” Whitehead claims, “with a sense of power, and
proceeds to the discrimination of individualities and their qualities.”5 In other
words, we do not begin with “the many data” and then construct an experiential
unity of the world; we begin, Whitehead argues, with an experiential unity and
power, which he characterizes as the “compulsion of composition,” or the process
whereby a felt unity discerns and discriminates (or prehends to use Whitehead’s
term) novelties that perpetuate the process of composition. It is therefore not—
in contrast to Hume—that which is discriminated that is most real, nor—in
contrast to the rationalists—is it a completed, self-sustaining composition but it
is instead the compulsion of composition itself that is most real for Whitehead.
Despite his criticism of Hume, however, Whitehead nonetheless finds him
indispensable, namely
Between Realism and Antirealism 147
[Hume’s] conclusion that pure sense perception does not provide the data for its
own interpretation was the greatest discovery embodied in Hume’s philosophy.
This discovery is the reason why Hume’s Treatise will remain as the irrefutable
basis for all subsequent philosophic thought.6
In other words, the data of sense perception do not, of themselves, account for
their becoming absorbed by a unifying interpretation. As Whitehead extends
Hume’s irrefutable conclusion, he argues that there are no sense data or data
of any kind that exists independently of an interpretive process. What there is,
for Whitehead, is a monism of actual entities—“apart from the things that are
actual, there is nothing.”7 The actual entities that constitute actuality are to be
“conceived,” according to Whitehead, as an act of experience arising out of data.
It is a process—namely an interpretive process—of “feeling” the many data, so
as to “absorb them into the unity of one individual satisfaction.” But these data
are nothing less than other actual entities. Thus each actual entity is an event, a
process, whereby it is simultaneously both a subject that prehends other actual
entities and “absorb[s] them into the unity of one individual satisfaction” and a
unity that can be taken up within the prehensions of other actual entities, and so
on. Actual entities are thus both subject and superject as Whitehead puts it.
By adopting a monistic ontology of events, it is no longer a question for
Whitehead of having to construct, amidst a multiplicity of already identified
and identifiable entities, the necessary relation between them such as cause and
effect, a subject’s belief about the world and the way the world is. Rather, for
him an event develops amidst a flat field of actual entities, and it is through
a process of composition and screening that there is the becoming of a stable
world or cosmos. Consequently, it is the very identifiable, determinate, and
stable nature of the entities that are which marks for Whitehead the end of actual
entities, the end of the screening process. Only as determinate facts after the
end of process do entities then embody certain relationships—such as cause and
effect, subjective or objective. The screening that stabilizes events is nothing less
than the self-organization of actual entities themselves and reflects the fact that
events, as processes and becomings, already exceed themselves and are assured
of becoming other.
To return to Deleuze’s point regarding the metaphysics he believes science
needs, we can use Hume as our mediator, for there are indeed many Humes
out there. There is Hume the epistemologist, or more exactly the epistemologist
(according to many in the analytic tradition) whose project failed because he
lacked the philosophical resources of the twentieth century—namely, either a
Fregean or (late) Wittgensteinian theory of meaning and language. There is Hume

the skeptic. Then there is the Hume who is held up as the darling of free market,
laissez-faire capitalism. And there are probably others I have overlooked. I prefer,
however, to think of Hume as a realist, or—and this may express the matter
even better—a hyper-realist. Yes Hume is a skeptic, but his is not a skepticism
that leads to an antirealist position. It is certainly the case that for Hume habit
and custom are integral to what it is possible for us to know, or to even having
knowledge at all. Recall how lost, for Hume, one would be if they were “of a
sudden transported” to our world with no established habits or expectations.
On my first trip to England, for example, I quickly gave up trying to follow the
action in a cricket match, for without established habits and customs, and this is
Hume’s point, I was lost. But does this mean that only that which can be identified
by, or correlated with, habit and custom is real? This would be an antirealist
conclusion, but it is not the one Hume draws. To the contrary, for Hume, as
for Latour and Deleuze, what is important is the experimental approach, and
what this entails is that an experiment, as an event, necessarily involves the
unforeseen and unexpected. We need simply to recall the subtitle of Hume’s
Treatise: “Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning
into Moral Subjects.” It is for this reason as well that I am not inclined simply to
label Hume a realist; rather, reality always exceeds what we know, always entails
an implied multiplicity that may further support or undermine what we know.
This is one of the reasons why I think Hume was unbothered by the missing
shade of blue—to identify blue as a real, identifiable color entails a multiplicity
that exceeds this identification, a non-denumerable reality inseparable from the
denumerable, identifiable reality—hence a hyper-realism inseparable from the
already known shades of blue.8
One consequence of Hume’s hyper-realism is the impossibility of a complete,
total system, synthesis, or cosmos. This is precisely the conclusion Deleuze
stresses in his reading of Hume. “From the point of view of philosophy,” he
argues, “the mind is no longer anything but delirium and madness. There is no
complete system, synthesis, or cosmology that is not imaginary.”9 For Deleuze,
therefore, the real is to be associated with processes that constitute the givenness
of objects rather than with the constituted, identifiable objects and categories
themselves. It is for this reason that Deleuze identifies the style of metaphysics
he is interested in with Whitehead instead of Kant. Rather than base an
understanding of reality upon identifiable categories and forms of judgment,
Deleuze argues that our scientific, representational understanding of reality
presupposes a sub-representational field of processes, or a hyper-realism, that
is not to be confused or identified with that which is identifiable as a result of

these processes.
To clarify further the issues surrounding realism and antirealism, and to
relate this in turn to a metaphysics in the style of Whitehead, I will turn next
to Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, which, as he puts it, is
ultimately a radical critique of any “contemporary opponent of any realism.”10 Put
briefly, correlationism is the position which holds that we cannot know reality
as it is in-itself but only as it is for-us, as a correlate of consciousness, language,
culture, conceptual scheme, etc. Meillassoux notes that Fichte’s Principles of
Scientific Knowledge is the “chef d’oeuvre of such a correlationism” in that it
shows how any attempt to posit a reality as independent of any positing is still a
reality that is posited as such.11 However, correlationism is not committed to a
subject–object dualism but more importantly rejects any attempt to hypostatize
a reality that would be independent and autonomous. This is why Meillassoux
understands correlationism not as “an anti-realism but [as] an anti-absolutism,”
for it is invoked “to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an
object of knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of
itself.”12 Whether these autonomous beings are ideas or objects, correlationism,
for our purposes, is antirealist in that it holds that any reality in-itself is always
from the start an in-itself correlated with something else.
Let us turn now to more traditional understandings of antirealism—namely,
those of the analytic tradition. The term “anti-realism” itself was first used by
Michael Dummett to characterize those positions that argue that reality is what
is necessary in order to state meaningful, true sentences.13 Dummett refers to
this as semantic realism, and others will call it deflationary realism, but it is clear
that it is a form of correlationism or antirealism in that the real is accounted
for not as it is in-itself but only insofar as it is necessary to the utterance of
meaningful, true sentences. As Quine famously put it, “To be assumed as an
entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable. In terms of
categories of traditional grammar, this amounts roughly to saying that to be is
to be in the range of reference of a pronoun.”14 Donald Davidson, one of Quine’s
most prominent students, will break with what he sees as Quine’s continuing
adherence to the “third” dogma of empiricism. What Davidson means by this
is the scheme–content dualism whereby a pure content (“sensory firings” in
Quine’s case) is forged and translated by a conceptual scheme into the content of
our knowledge of reality.15 In rejecting this “third” dogma Davidson may appear
to be a realist—he does, after all, claim to uphold a form of monism which asserts
that there is nothing but objects and events. Yet when he argues for the reality of
these objects and events, his argument in the end largely follows Quine, claiming
that objects and events (especially events) are real only because we could not
utter the meaningful sentences we do without them.16 And finally—though we
could go on—there is David Lewis’s modal realism, which is a realism that goes
well beyond common sense naïve realism. Lewis accepts the reality of possible
worlds, and argues for the reality of these possible worlds by showing that they
are necessary if our everyday counterfactual claims are to be meaningful and
true.17 In all these cases and in others we could list, the real is not considered as
it is in-itself but only as it is necessary to some other process (namely, a linguistic
and semantic process). Correlationism and antirealism are thus alive and well
within the analytic tradition.
To move beyond correlationism, Meillassoux draws support from an
important ontological claim that he derives from it, even though he admits
that correlationism “is not an ontology, strictly speaking.” He argues that
“[a]ccording to the correlationist, if I remove myself from the world, I can’t
know the residue. But this reasoning supposes that we have access to an absolute
possibility: the possibility that the in-itself could be different from the for-us.
And this absolute possibility is grounded in turn on the absolute facticity of the
correlation.”18 In other words, following from the epistemological claim that
one cannot “know the residue” of what would be independent of what is for-us,
Meillassoux draws the ontological conclusion that the world could be other
than it is for-us, a conclusion which in turn entails the possibility of a world
without correlation, a world without givenness. From here it is a simple step
to the undermining of correlationism since if the real, X, can only be known
as a posited X, then it follows from the ontological conclusion concerning the
facticity of the correlation itself that there is the possibility of an X that is not
posited, a world without givenness for-us.
One of the challenges that attends Meillassoux’s conclusion, and one that
is central to what has been called speculative realism (but which has not been
ignored within the analytic tradition as well), is to account, in a noncircular
manner, for the facticity of thought itself—especially the normative patterns of
thought—and hence for the relationship between thought and the structure of
reality from which thought emerges. It would lead us too far astray to begin
to detail these debates, but it should be noted that Meillassoux’s own concerns
regarding realism and the facticity of thought are widely shared and are being
addressed from a number of different perspectives.19
To begin to return this discussion back to the relationship between philo
sophy and science—and clearly science has a lot to say about the origins of
thought—we will be aided by discussing necessary laws. We can begin with

David Lewis’s Humean understanding of necessity, what he calls Humean
Supervenience. On Lewis’s reading, any claims we make regarding the world
supervene upon a given distribution of particular facts. Given any two worlds,
for example, if they are identical in every way and share the same laws of nature
then they will remain identical at any and all later times. There cannot be a change
in the distribution of particular facts, or a divergence between the two worlds,
without a simultaneous change in the laws that supervene upon these worlds and
facts. Given the laws of probability, the chance a single throw of the dice will give
me a six is one in six. Three or four sixes may show up in a row, but given a large
enough number of throws the number of times I throw a six approaches one
in six. These laws of probability therefore supervene upon a given distribution
of particular facts (rolls of the dice) in the world up to and including time t1.
If there is a nonzero chance, however, that after t1 sixes come up every time
then that would effect the chance distribution at W at t1—it would be something
higher than one in six, but this contradicts Humean supervenience for the world
at t1 would both be and not be in accordance with the laws of probability up to
and including t1. Lewis refers to this as an undermining future.20 However, in
his analysis of Hume, Meillassoux argues that what makes his understanding
of necessity possible is that there be a totality relative to which the particular
facts are compared, and hence upon which the necessary laws supervene. It
is the totality of throws at t1 combined with the throws after t1 that gives rise
to undermining futures. But following Badiou and Cantor Meillassoux argues
for the non-All that cannot be totalized and which therefore undermines the
necessary laws that would supervene upon a given totality. The notion of an
undermining future would not even arise on this reading. This is not to say that
there are no particular facts or regularities between facts. Within a large set of
observations the odds of sixes appearing may be one in six, or there may be
countless other regularities, but the “laws” that supervene upon these regularities
are, Meillassoux argues, “contingent. They are not necessary. As Hume said, we
are unable to demonstrate any such necessity.”21
Turning now to Deleuze, to the distinction he makes between axiomatics and
problematics in A Thousand Plateaus, we have what one might call Deleuzian
supervenience, whereby the axiomatic supervenes upon the problematic, but
the problematic forever exceeds the axiomatic: the “power of the continuum,
tied to the axiomatic but exceeding it.” Axiomatics, or what Deleuze also calls
major or royal science, draws from problematics the necessity of inventing and
innovating, and problematics, or minor or nomad science, calls upon axiomatics
to actualize solutions to the problems it lays out. Deleuze and Guattari are clear
on this point: “Major science has a perpetual need for the inspiration of the
minor; but the minor would be nothing if it did not confront and conform to the
highest scientific requirements.”22 To clarify this point we can start by turning
to Spinoza, and to Deleuze’s review essay of Martial Gueroult’s first volume
on Spinoza’s Ethics. In this essay, Deleuze argues that what is important about
Gueroult’s approach is that he stresses the fact that Spinoza doesn’t begin with
the idea of God (God enters the scene with the sixth definition and the ninth
proposition). Does this mean that the first six definitions and eight propositions
are inessential to Spinoza’s project—mere preliminary work Spinoza had to get
out of the way before the real work began? For Gueroult and for Deleuze the
answer is “no.” When the answer is yes, Deleuze argues, we get
. . . two misreadings of the attribute: 1) the Kantian illusion that makes attributes
forms or concepts of the understanding, and 2) the neo-Platonic vertigo that
makes attributes already degraded emanations or manifestations.23
With this claim we come to the central feature of Spinozism as Deleuze

understands it—namely, its relentless tracking down of transcendence in all
its forms. And here we have two misreadings of Spinoza that do call upon
transcendence. There is the Kantian illusion that turns attributes into concepts
that, applying to substance, transcend substance (this is also Badiou’s misreading
of Spinoza24); and then there is the neo-Platonic misreading of Spinoza that sees
substance as a pure One and the attributes as degraded emanations of this One
(Hegel and Bertrand Russell are guilty of this reading). Substance, however, is
neither One nor multiple, but is rather a multiplicity, a substantive multiplicity.
The attributes, therefore, are fully real and are really distinct from one another,
but they are not numerically distinct and they do not transcend substance, nor
are they the degraded emanations of substance—they constitute, to repeat, what
Deleuze will call a substantive multiplicity:
The logic of real distinction is a logic of purely affirmative difference and without
negation. Attributes indeed constitute an irreducible multiplicity, but the whole
question is what type of multiplicity. The problem is erased if the substantive
‘multiplicity’ is transformed into two opposed adjectives (multiple attributes
and one substance).25
For Deleuze, therefore, Spinoza does not begin with God but with the
problematic, with substantive multiplicity. To understand Spinoza adequately,
therefore, it is essential to clarify what is meant by substance, and in what way
it is not to be confused with either God or the modes and attributes. By far the
most common interpretation of substance is to understand it as a being, albeit
an absolute, infinite being, which is in some way parceled up by the modes and
attributes. At the risk of slipping into an illegitimate anachronism, we could
apply Heidegger’s ontological difference and say that substance is typically
understood onto-theo-logically, as being, in contrast to Being. Although I will
not, as some do, assert that substance is to be understood as Being, as no-thing
in Heidegger’s sense of the term, I do think that substance is not to be conceived
as a being either. It is precisely this latter reading of substance that lends itself to
the two misreadings of the attributes that Deleuze noted. A reading of Spinoza’s
theory of substance that avoids interpreting substance as being can be found
in H. F. Hallett’s works.26 For Hallett, substance is “absolutely indeterminate,”
or in-determinate as I have argued elsewhere.27 Hallett’s interpretation is by
no means the consensus view, but it does have important textual support. For
example, since God is defined in the Ethics as absolutely infinite (1D6), God
can in no way be limited or be in any way determinate, for to be determinate
entails being related to another that it is not. As Spinoza argues in his letter to
Jelles, “all determination is negation,”28 and hence if substance is to be absolutely
infinite and affirmative, it cannot be determinate. This is precisely how Spinoza
understands it, as he makes clear in a letter to Lodewijk Meyer, where he claims
substance is the “infinite enjoyment of existing.”29 This also accounts for why
God is absolutely infinite rather than infinite in its own kind, as the attributes
are, since this would require being a determinate form of infinite and hence a
form that could, when understood conceptually by way of the understanding—
namely the infinite mode of understanding—be related to what it is not, to what
is other than it. Yet another reason for adopting Hallett’s reading follows from a
related claim Spinoza makes in his letter to Jelles that anyone who “calls God one
or single has no true idea of God” because—as already noted—all determination
is negation and God, as substance, is the “infinite enjoyment of existing,” or the
“absolutely infinite power of existing” as Spinoza will also put it in the Ethics.30
To clarify Spinoza’s position further, and the Spinozist context within which
Deleuze’s thought navigates, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim, in A
Thousand Plateaus, that God is a lobster, a double articulation. It is all too easy to
underestimate the philosophical importance of this claim, but we see it at work
in Deleuze’s essay on Gueroult, where the first eight propositions correspond
to the first articulation; or, as Deleuze puts it, “the first eight propositions
represent a first series through which we ascend to the differential constitutive
elements”—the attributes. As Deleuze had stressed earlier in the essay, there is
“no ascension from attributes to substance . . . to absolutely infinite substance”;

rather, there is an ascension through a “regressive analytic process” to the
“differential constitutive elements” themselves, to the substantive multiplicity.31
Then there is the second articulation, the second series found in the 9th–11th
propositions “through which,” Deleuze argues, “the idea of God integrates
these elements and makes clear it can be constituted only by all these elements
together.” As a multiplicity of incommensurable and really distinct entities, the
attributes come to be integrated by the power of causa sui whereby “essence is
the cause of the existence of substance and the cause of the other things that
derive from it.”32 Understood in this way, God as causa sui is both the condition
that enables the regressive analytic process that leads to a multiplicity of really
distinct attributes—first articulation—and the conditioned that is the integration
of this multiplicity—second articulation. God is self-caused, or God is a lobster,
a double articulation.
We can now return both to Alquié’s question and Deleuze’s response to it,
and in turn situate Deleuze relative to realism and antirealism. As discussed
earlier, Alquié was troubled by the use of examples from science in Deleuze’s
talk, as if philosophy were for Deleuze a mere expository tool in the service
of science. In response to Alquié’s question, Deleuze stresses that he does
“believe in the specificity of philosophy, and furthermore, this belief of mine
derives from you yourself.”33 He immediately adds, “Even the concepts such as
singular and regular, or remarkable and ordinary [i.e., philosophical concepts
for Deleuze], are not exhausted by mathematics. I want to call on Lautman’s
theses: a theory of systems must show how the movement of scientific concepts
participates in a dialectic that surpasses them.”34 In other words, and to state
this in terms used above, royal science and axiomatics develop concepts that
participate in, or supervene upon, nomadic and problematic philosophical
concepts, and the latter are not exhausted by the former. There is thus not, in
contrast to Lewis, a one-to-one structural supervenience between that which
supervenes (axiomatics) and that which is supervened upon (problematics),
but rather this is a supervenience that entails a non-causal relationship between
the actualized and structured and that which exceeds these structures, such as
philosophical concepts. Deleuze’s seconding of Alquié’s belief in the specificity
of philosophy should thus not be underestimated, especially in light of recent
calls among philosophers to return to realism. Roughly speaking, there have
been two distinct approaches adopted in the efforts to answer this call. In
the first it is argued that the way to do justice to reality in-itself is through
mathematics. For Badiou “mathematics is ontology,”35 and Meillassoux tracks
Badiou’s approach quite faithfully, arguing that “what is mathematizable cannot

be reduced to a correlate of thought.”36 The second approach accounts for the
reality and nature of objects themselves by drawing from science, and dynamic
systems theory in particular (DeLanda’s and Protevi’s work loom large here).
There is tremendous work being done in each of these two approaches, but the
concern,—and this is precisely what prompted Alquié’s question—is that these
approaches may reduce philosophy to being a simple adjunct to mathematics
and/or science. What is lost in these approaches is the distinctiveness of
philosophy itself.
To clarify what it is that makes philosophy distinctive for Deleuze, we can
turn to how Deleuze’s understanding of the principle of sufficient reason—a
good philosophical principle if ever there was one—differs from the positions
of Lewis and Meillassoux. Since laws for Lewis supervene, in the structured
manner discussed above, upon the particular facts of the world, and since
worlds, both actual and possible, constitute a totality, then the claims of
science can adequately represent the necessary distributions and regularities
of each world. The distribution of particular facts in each world thus provides
a sufficient reason for the laws and claims that supervene upon these worlds.
For Meillassoux, by contrast, the non-All undermines any necessity other
than the necessity of contingency, and hence Meillassoux rejects the principle
of sufficient reason. We cannot state why things are the way they are rather
than another way. The arguments Meillassoux uses to justify this claim rely
heavily upon the force of negation and contradiction (Hegel lurks behind the
scenes here). Meillassoux will thus argue, for example, “that to be contingent
you must not be contradictory, because if you are contradictory you are
everything and you can’t change.”37 A similar claim is made in After Finitude
where it is argued that a philosophy of becoming will have to do away with
contradictory entities for they cannot change and become what they are not—
they already are what they are not.38 And in his critique of correlationism itself,
Meillassoux calls upon Fichte’s strategy, what Meillassoux calls “pragmatico-
genetic contradiction,” to show that the content of a claim is contradicted by
the very way in which this claim is put forward. The content of the claim “X
is not posited” is contradicted by the very fact that it is posited as not posited.
Similarly, the content of correlationism’s claim that all reality in-itself is a
correlate for-us is contradicted by the absolutization of contingency that goes
along with this claim and which results in the facticity of the correlation itself.
It is on the basis of these arguments, and the binary logic of contradiction they
presuppose, that Meillassoux rejects the principle of sufficient reason. “If you
want to speak about what exists,” Meillassoux argues, “you can only describe,
as phenomenology does,”39 but the fact that what exists is something rather
than nothing “cannot be described.”40 Despite the obvious differences between
Lewis and Meillassoux—one accepts the principle of sufficient reason and
accepts that worlds, both actual and possible, constitute totalities, while the
other does not—they each share a commitment to a logic of representation,
an “it is or it isn’t” logic that Deleuze identifies with the actualization of the
actual world. In short, the logic of representation presupposes the bifurcations
of actuality, the fact, as Deleuze argued in an early essay on Bergson, that
“virtuality exists in such a way that it actualizes itself as it dissociates itself;
it must dissociate itself to actualize itself.”41 As dissociated and actualized, we
have mutually exclusive differences, either/or contradictions, and the logic of
representation presupposes these differences in order to represent that which
the representation is not.
Deleuze attempts, by contrast, and following from his Spinozism, to construct
philosophical concepts that presuppose a logic of expression and sense rather
than a logic of representation. Rather than building upon mutually exclusive
differences and contradictions, Deleuze attempts to draw from difference-in-
itself a Spinozist substantive multiplicity that presupposes “a logic of purely
affirmative difference and without negation.”42 It is this logic that accounts for
the fact for Deleuze that philosophical concepts are not exhausted by scientific
or mathematical concepts. Nearly 30 years after his “Method of Dramatization”
talk, Deleuze continued to make much the same point. As he argues with
Guattari in What Is Philosophy? science sets out to map functions that represent
the actualization of the actual, or that accurately describe the regularities
of the world.43 Philosophy, by contrast, creates concepts that counter-actualize
the actual and involve the problematic upon which the actual supervenes.
Understood in this way, Deleuze, unlike Meillassoux, will continue to adhere
to the principle of sufficient reason. As he argues in his book on Leibniz, the
principle of sufficient reason does not imply that every actuality—Adam’s eating
of the apple for example—was determinately detailed and sketched in advance
such that the actualization itself was a foregone conclusion to anyone with
complete knowledge (such as God). On the contrary, for Deleuze the principle
of sufficient reason is the substantive multiplicity, in the Spinozist sense sketched
above—that is, the sufficient reason for the determinate.44 As Deleuze will argue
in numerous places, this substantive multiplicity is real but not actual—it is what
he will also call the virtual. Deleuze’s logic of expression, however, does not entail
a rejection of the actual world, an attempt to get out of this world and the logic
of representation. It is, rather, an attempt to intensify the actual world, including

its representations, to problematize it, and to do so while remaining fully within
the actual world. To argue otherwise would entail allowing for transcendence to
sneak in through the back door, and Deleuze, like Spinoza, is keen to hunt down
transcendence in all its forms.
From this perspective, therefore, Deleuze is neither a correlationist anti-
realist, nor is he a straightforward realist. Deleuze is not a correlationist for
there is no binary logic being followed, no for-us distinct from an in-itself;
rather, Deleuze is a monist developing philosophical concepts that follow a
logic of expression or sense rather than a binary logic of contradiction, a logic
of representation. Each actual entity, or each mode for Spinoza, is thus to be
understood as an expression of substance, a substance that is only identifiable
as such when expressed in a mode. Substance, therefore, does indeed turn
around its modes, as Deleuze had said.45 Each actual entity is hence a real,
determinate expression of substance, of substance as substantive multiplicity,
or it is the expression of the non-denumerable, which Deleuze and Guattari
define as being “neither the set nor its elements [the one or the multiple];
rather, it is the connection, the ‘and’ produced between elements, between
sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of
flight.”46 Between the elements of the correlation, therefore, between the for-us
and the in-itself, there is the “and,” and it is this “and” that “constitutes a line
of flight” that escapes and eludes every correlation, every attempt to reduce
reality to a correlation. Similarly, Deleuze is not an antirealist in the analytic
sense of the term, for he soundly rejects the view that the real can only be
accounted for insofar as it is necessary for meaningful, true sentences. Rather,
he asserts that the real, as problematic, substantive multiplicities, exceeds these
representations and is irreducible to them, and thus the logic of representation
presupposes the nonsense and non-denumerable upon which it supervenes.
Deleuzian supervenience is thus not like Lewis’s Humean supervenience,
since Lewis follows the logic of representation whereby the necessary laws
supervene upon the particular facts of the world, and a change in the latter
entails a change in the former. These laws therefore re-present the particular
facts of the world. For Meillassoux there is no supervenience since there is no
correlation between a totalized world and that which represents this world, even
though Meillassoux continues, as we saw, to adhere to a logic of representation.
Deleuzian supervenience, by contrast, follows a logic of sense, and thus the
actual, the axiomatic, supervenes upon the problematic which is not a correlate
it represents, but is rather the expressiveness and power of the actual itself.
Deleuzian supervenience, to recall our earlier comments, does not involve a

structured relationship between the axiomatic and the problematic that it is
not, but instead Deleuzian supervenience conveys the relationship between the
actual and the in-determinate, de-structuring power that problematizes the
actual.
But Deleuze is also not a straightforward realist either, if by realism one
affirms an autonomous reality with properties and features that are independent
of anyone’s beliefs, linguistic practices, conceptual schemes, etc. The very idea
of an autonomous reality in-itself presupposes, as Bruno Latour has argued, a
stabilization of events, events that are indeed real but are neither autonomous
nor heteronomous. It shares with Deleuze’s metaphysics the view that it is only
when substantive multiplicity has become actualized and stabilized that it
becomes consonant with the logic of representation, and hence when one can
say of it that it consists of being a determinate duality between an autonomous,
objective in-itself and a heteronomous, correlationist in-itself-for-us, between
facts and artifacts, between realism and antirealism.
This theory of events has been a consistent and dominant theme in Latour’s
work, and it is a theme that Latour admits draws much from Whitehead and
Deleuze, and like the latter, it brings to the fore how metaphysics in the style
of Whitehead might be done. Events and autonomous objects and facts are
not to be confused with one another even though they are not fundamentally
distinct, much less are they different in kind. Rather, objects and autonomous
facts are stabilized events; or, adopting Latour’s own metaphor, objects and
autonomous facts are “the cooled down continents of plate tectonics.”47 As
Latour understands it, autonomous in-itself objects and facts are inseparable
from their unstable networks; or, as Latour argues this point in Laboratory Life,
what accounts for “the solidity of [an] object” is that it is “constituted by the
steady accumulation of techniques,” which is what keeps it “from becoming
subjective or artefactual.”48 An object or thing may become particularly stable
and even become lionized as a textbook fact or entity, as an integral element
of what Latour refers to as ready-made science, but it may lose allies to other
objects and through a “steady accumulation of techniques” and alliances give
way to new textbook facts.49 A Latourian ontology is monistic in that there is
nothing but objects and events, or substantive multiplicities as Deleuze puts
it, and this is not a stable monism of autonomous objects and lawful events;
rather, it is an aberrant monism that continually moves between stable natures
and unstable, aberrant, problematizing events.
From the perspective of a metaphysics in the style of Whitehead, therefore,

and it is this metaphysics that we find in Latour and Deleuze, it is only when
substantive multiplicity has become actualized and stabilized that it becomes
consonant with the logic of representation, and hence when one can say of it
that it consists of being a determinate duality between an autonomous, objective
in-itself and a heteronomous, correlationist in-itself-for-us, between facts and
artifacts, between realism and antirealism. Between realism and antirealism,
therefore, there is the “and,” the substantive multiplicity that is tracked by
the metaphysics done in the style of Whitehead, and it is the pursuit of this
metaphysics that is the distinctive task of philosophy.
Notes
1 Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 106.

2 Ibid., p. 114.
3 Collapse Vol. II, p. 41.
4 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 133.
8 I discuss these arguments in much greater detail in Bell, Deleuze’s Hume.
9 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 83. Deleuze reiterates this point in his
short essay, “Hume,” where he argues again that Hume understands “the essence of
the mind as delirium or fiction . . .,” in Desert Islands, p. 166.
10 Collapse Vol. II, p. 408.
11 Ibid.
12 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 11.
13 See Dummett’s essay, “Realism,” reprinted in Truth and Other Enigmas.
14 Quine, Logical Point of View, p. 13.
15 See Donald Davidson’s essay, “Conceptual Scheme.”
16 See Donald Davidson’s essays “Mental Events” and “Events as Particulars.”
17 See Lewis, Plurality of Worlds.
18 Collapse, p. 431.
19 See, to give just a few examples, Millikan, New Foundations for Realism; Tomasello,
Origins of Human Communications; and Varela, The Embodied Mind.
20 See Lewis, “A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance,” and his “Introduction.”
21 Collapse, p. 441. For Meillassoux’s discussion of the non-All, see After Finitude,
pp. 127–8.
22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 486.

23 Deleuze, Desert Islands, “Gueroult’s General Method for Spinoza,” p. 149.
24 For my arguments to support this claim, see “Charting the Road of Inquiry:
Deleuze and the Challenge of Badiou,” pp. 399–425.
26 See, for example, Hallett’s essay “Essence and the distinction of attributes,” and
Aeternitas.
27 See Chapter 2, “Ironing out the Differences: Nietzsche and Deleuze as Spinozists,”
in my Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos.
28 Spinoza, Letters, p. 260, Letter 50: “So since figure is nothing but determination,
and determination is negation, figure can be nothing other than negation, as has
been said.”
29 Ibid., p. 102, Letter 12.
30 Spinoza, Ethics IP11.
31 The previous quotes are from Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 150.
32 Ibid., p. 153.
33 “Method of Dramatization,” in Ibid., p. 106.
34 Ibid., p. 107.
35 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 19.
36 Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 117.
38 Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 69–71.
40 Ibid., p. 392.
42 Ibid., p. 150.
43 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 118: “Now philosophy wants to
know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency, by giving the virtual
a consistency specific to it”—in other words, philosophy creates concepts that
express a logic of sense, a logic of substantive multiplicities—“Science approaches
chaos in a completely different, almost opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite,
infinite speed, in order to gain a reference able to actualize the virtual”—or,
science tracks the actualization of the virtual in accordance with the logic of
representation.
44 See Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 41–58.
47 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 87.
48 Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 127.
49 Latour gives the example of how prior to Watson chemists preferred, and
textbooks stated as an established fact, that the four DNA bases were in the
enol form. This made it much more difficult for Watson to cast doubt upon this
fact and put forth the case that the bases were actually in the keto form (Ibid.,
pp. 171–2). Watson was eventually able to problematize the established textbook
fact concerning the enol form and this problematizing process, what Latour calls
science in the making, in the end led to the new textbook facts that now credit
Watson with discovering the structure of DNA.
9
A Situated Metaphysics: Things, History, and

Pragmatic Speculation in A. N. Whitehead
Melanie Sehgal
Things, history, and thought
In the context of his search for a symmetrical history of science, in other

words, a history that doesn’t accord agency to humans alone, Bruno Latour
raises the question as to whether objects also have a history.1 He argues that
in order for things to be actors, they need to be conceived of as having a
history—not merely a history of human uses, or human conceptions of them,
but an intrinsic history of their own that makes their past part of what they
are. What they—scientific objects in an experimental setup in Latour’s case—
are is made up of how they became. Being is becoming. Latour states that
if we are to think of things as having a history of their own, they need to
be granted the status of being causa sui, of being their own cause, at least
in part, and of having an inherent potentiality to transcend their actual
state of being. Things are actors, entangled with other actors, among them
humans, but not exclusively. Things are caught up in processes of becoming
and co-constitution that leaves no part, whether human or not, unchanged.
Latour’s concern for a history of things is thus not just about granting things
a position that has been formerly denied to them. It shifts the concern for
history from the epistemological to the metaphysical and leads to a radically
non-anthropocentric conception of history. Thus, Latour’s question not only
concerns the way that we think of things but also touches upon how we think
of historicity in a fundamental sense. It challenges both philosophy and
history. As he remarks, including things in the making of history implies a
conception of history that both involves metaphysics and necessitates having
commerce with it.
A Situated Metaphysics 163
In the context of these reflections, Latour turns to the thinking of Alfred

North Whitehead, who, against the grain of his century, definitely wasn’t
afraid to have commerce with metaphysics.2 However, in Whitehead’s Modes
of Thought there is a sentence that seems curiously at odds with Latour’s
concern for a metaphysical, non-anthropocentric approach to history. He
writes “history is the record of the expressions of feeling peculiar to humanity,”
apparently turning history into an entirely human affair again.3 Whitehead
then seems to continue in this vein by distinguishing history “from the
narrative of animal behaviours” (idem). Isn’t this a downright anthropocentric
conception of history, excluding things and professing, in Haraway’s words,
“human exceptionalism”? In what follows here, I would like to argue that
the problem I am alluding to doesn’t indicate a divergence between a non-
anthropocentric view of history in Latour’s formulation and an anthropocentric
one in Whitehead’s. This wouldn’t just be a simple misreading of Whitehead’s
characterization of history, as I will explain shortly. It would also be intensely
problematic, because an anthropocentric vision of history would be an
instance of what it mattered most for Whitehead to protest against: the modern
conception of a bifurcated nature, in which humanity is endowed with history,
freedom, and the capability to accord values to things on the one hand, with
things conceived of as passive, blindly following a mechanistic course on the
other.4 Nevertheless, there does seem to be a contrast implied between the
two propositions I have been discussing, between, first, Latour’s insistence that
everything has a history, in the strong sense of also contributing to the making
of history, and secondly, the phrase from Modes of Thought that “history is the
record of the expressions of feeling peculiar to humanity.” I will explore this
contrast in order to investigate how Whitehead’s metaphysics, for which having
a history is indeed a generic trait, can nevertheless account for the specificity,
the situatedness, of every history as a form of knowledge. Even if Whitehead’s
cosmology allows every being to have a history for its own sake (and not just
living beings but also things), he is nevertheless interested in the specificity
of human history, of humans recounting histories. In order to understand this
specificity, I will follow Whitehead in the second chapter of Modes of Thought
on “Expression” and start not with what makes human history specific or
distinct from animal or vegetable life as well as from non-living things, but
with what doesn’t. In this way, I hope to avoid any hasty conclusions that the
concatenation of the words “history – mankind – peculiarity – expression –
feeling” could easily suggest. I also hope to show how Whitehead at once
constructs a metaphysics that grants things the status of having a history—or,
better, histories—for their own sake, without leveling out differences between
different kinds of histories. My aim is to sketch out how the framework of his
metaphysics allows Whitehead to account for the specificity of the histories
that humans recount to one another—and ultimately also to account for the
specificity of his very own account.
Reading Latour and Whitehead together in this way thus points toward a
broader question, implicit in the current debates around a reaffirmation of
metaphysics and speculation, one that concerns the way that the relation
between epistemology and metaphysics is negotiated. How does a post-
Kantian metaphysics position itself toward its heritage, that is not only
toward the modern “subjectivist bias” but also toward the insistence on the
historicity of thought, so fundamental to contemporary debates within
philosophy, cultural studies and, of course, politics?5 In my reading, Whitehead
negotiates this relation by not only taking into account the historicity of
thought but also incorporating it into his very own practice of expression.
In this way, he entirely reworks the understanding of metaphysics as well as
that of speculation. Including the question of history and expression within
metaphysical speculation therefore entails an understanding of the speculative
character of Whitehead’s philosophy itself: Philosophy in a Whiteheadian
vein is not speculative, as in a classical and currently revived understanding,
because of its particular objects (e.g., reaching for “the absolute” or “things in
themselves”), nor is it per se speculative because it is metaphysical.6 Rather it
is speculative by virtue of the particular mode of functioning and efficacy of
its practice and its always situated character. Because of this emphasis on the
practice of knowledge production—whether such knowledge is historical or
metaphysical or (as I will show in Whitehead’s case) both—I will be developing
my reading of Whitehead with Donna Haraway, and more specifically, through
her notion of situated knowledges. In this reading, rather than reverting to
an old or unproblematized understanding of speculative thought, Whitehead
shares Haraway’s problem, of “how to have simultaneously an account of
radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects,
a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making
meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’
world.”7 For Whitehead as for Haraway, this is the problem that set them to
work but which for both also pertained to “our epoch.” Thus both also share—in
a pragmatist vein—the hope for a possible transformation of modern systems
of knowledge.8
A metaphysics of expression and feeling
Whitehead constructs a metaphysics in which everything that exists becomes and

thereby has a history for its own sake. “No actuality is a static fact. The historic
character of the universe belongs to its essence.”9 Actual entities—Whitehead’s
term for all that exists in the full sense of what it means to exist—are constituted
by how they become. Being is becoming. It is important to note that “things”—
whether we are referring to scientific objects, as Latour does, or to objects
that become the subject of cultural analysis—wouldn’t be actual entities in the
Whiteheadian sense, but societies.10 But as these societies, being associations
of actual entities, nevertheless depend on this fundamental feature of being,
which is becoming for its own sake, and because the meaning of situatedness
is precisely anchored in an understanding of actual entities, it is important to
dwell on this concept for a moment. “For its own sake” is a phrase that frequently
recurs in Whitehead’s description of actual entities, and Whitehead, like Latour,
also uses the term “causa sui” to point to the individual perspective by which
each actual entity grasps—“prehends”—the universe and incorporates it into
its singular constitution. It designates the private dimension of becoming, but
not in the sense that there would be a hidden quality in every entity, to which
there would be no “access.”11 “For its own sake” rather points to the temporal
order of experience and becoming that forms the heart of Whitehead’s inversion
of Kantianism. Following William James’s characterization of the “stream of
thought” in the Principles of Psychology, experience is a process of emphasis
and selection that does not start with a clear-cut world of sense data, but a “big
blooming buzzing confusion” as Whitehead states, quoting William James.12
Subjectivity is thus the result, not the starting point, of the stream of experience.
Further, what “we” experience are not actual entities as they are “for their own
sake,” but societies, associations of actual entities due to common features and
specific modes of attention and senses of importance.13
Importantly when thinking about history, “for its own sake” points to a
dimension of value, purpose, and the ideal inherent in the nature of things.
Value, purpose, and the ideal are concepts that have mainly been associated with
specifically human endeavors constitutive of history—they seem to be what turns
human histories into History with a capital ‘H’ and thereby excludes nonhuman
actors from the making of history in the first place. However, for Whitehead
value and purpose do not merely belong to the realm of the human. They are
metaphysical traits, which therefore belong to all beings.
Also, neither “expression” nor “feeling,” to come back to Whitehead’s phrase

from Modes of Thought, are characterizations “peculiar to humanity”; they
too describe actual entities, that is, operate on a metaphysical level. “Feeling,”
as Whitehead insists in Process and Reality, “is a mere technical term.”14 It
designates precisely that process through which the concrescent actuality, the
actual entity in becoming, appropriates its data so as to make them its own.
Every actual entity is a process of feeling, it feels the manifold data—and for
Whitehead, in a Leibnizian vein, these data comprise all that there is, the world
in its entirety—and turns it into the unity of one—its—individual “satisfaction.”15
It is important to underline that despite the use of terminology stemming from
descriptions of human experience such as “feeling,” “drops of experience,” or
“prehension” (with the usual prefixes—ap- or comp- removed), actual entities
are decidedly not limited to human subjectivity nor do they exhibit some kind of
anthropomorphism on Whitehead’s part. On the contrary, Whitehead uses and
stretches this former psychological terminology precisely because it provides a
vocabulary that has been forged in order to describe processes. More specifically,
it describes processes of synthesis, or in Whitehead’s terms: of concrescence.
This vocabulary enables him to point to the most important feature of actual
entities: they are constituted by how they become. The purpose of using “feeling”
as “a mere technical term” is thus precisely a metaphysical and a monist one: to
create a concept that can, in its generic quality, account for all existence and all
kinds of existence.
In Modes of Thought, Whitehead further states that, “it is the nature of
feeling to pass into expression.”16 Feeling and expression are the two sides of
experience: expressions are the data for feeling, and to feel means to receive
expressions. Expression is the diffusion of a feeling into the environment. This
impulse to diffuse presupposes that the feeling is felt to be important, so as
to have the urge to spread it beyond the present here and now. Expression
therefore presupposes importance. The notion of importance will be
explored later, as it is crucial to developing my understanding of Whitehead’s
metaphysics as a situated one. What matters here is the way that by being set
in contrast to one another, expression and importance are inherently related
to each other. Importance is described as “interest, involving that intensity
of individual feeling which leads to publicity of expression.”17 It is therefore
due to a feeling of importance that there is an urge to transcend the present
moment (the finite occasion), toward the infinite. Conversely, the expression
of an important feeling is always the activity of a finite occasion. Expression
is always situated and singular. Due to the inherent sense of importance it is
selective too. Only what matters is expressed. A feeling of importance thus

effects a perspective upon the possible infinity of matter-of-fact and grades it
in terms of relevance.
For the question of the specificity of historical accounts within process
metaphysics—as indeed of any form of expression—it is important to emphasize
the relation between the notions of situatedness and expression by pointing
out where and how expression is situated. Expression for Whitehead is not
situated in a body, or a “thing” for that matter (or societies in Whiteheadian
terms as pointed out above), but in an occasion. It is not the body, human,
animate or inanimate, as a whole that expresses—rather a body is composed
of a multiplicity of entities that mutually express and feel.18 Also, expression
is not confined to the living, and thus potentially includes things of all kinds.
Even if there is indeed a close connection between expression and life, a
connection that could at first glance make Whitehead’s conceptualization
seem close to the way expression and life have been conceptualized within
anthropological frameworks, the contrast between these two stances is
nevertheless substantial and can help to bring to the fore the specific way in
which Whitehead treats the question of human or non-human specificity:
life, or human life, is not defined by its capacity for expression which would
then be exclusive to it.19 Rather a living body is (“just” one is tempted to add)
a very close adjustment of feeling and expression in centers of experience.
There are distinctions between vegetable, animal, and human life, but those
distinctions are not a question of having or not having the capacity for feeling
or expression. It is a question of how feeling and expression are related.
Whitehead describes the variation between the non-living and vegetable life
to animal and human life-forms according to how closely, or in the case of
the non-living: if, expression and feeling are adjusted in centers of experience.
Life, in contrast to non-living nature, is described as those parts of nature that
are themselves the “primary field(s) of the expressions issuing from each of
its part.”20 For example, the different organs in an animal body impose their
expressions on one another and thereby form a kind of conglomeration—the
expression of one organ is data for the feeling of the other. It is clear therefore,
that consciousness isn’t necessarily involved in expression, “only the impulse
to diffuse.”21 This is evidently in stark contrast to any anthropological account,
for which expression and feeling are central to what makes humans human.
Even the inorganic realm expresses and feels, though its expressions are not
reciprocally adjusted in centers of experience as in the case of animal or human
bodies. Its expressions therefore lack the individuality that might make it
important, they are mostly average expressions. Nevertheless, expression and

feeling for Whitehead are neither confined to the human, nor to the living;
they are generic, that is, metaphysical traits.
Peculiar feelings, peculiar expressions, and

the importance of propositions
The fact that, for Whitehead, neither expression nor feeling are specific to any
kind of being and definitely not “peculiar to humanity,” but are, on the contrary,
metaphysical traits that pertain to all entities insofar as they are actual, does not,
however, mean that there are no specific, peculiar feelings or expressions. Again,
what differs is the ways and fields of expression; it is the how, not the if. The
distinction between the inorganic, vegetable, animal, and human life “like others,
refuses to be pushed to meticulous exactness,”—it doesn’t mark a difference in
kind, but a difference in degree.22 But, “when we come to mankind, nature seems
to have burst through another of its boundaries,” Whitehead writes.23 There is
only a difference in degree, but one that matters, at least for the question that
I am following here. What then are the “feelings peculiar to humanity” which
history records?
Whitehead describes the variation from the non-living to the human (animal)
as the increasing ability to react to novel situations. The animal body, thanks to
its one primary center of experience, which can act as a kind of “overlord” to the
others, is able to find new ways of reacting to new situations. But, “analogous
to a feudal society” as Whitehead says, it also tends to be conservative, mostly
governed by the conventionality of routine that the other organs impose.24 But
novelty there is and it is this aspect of the central activity of experience that
has been further developed in mankind. Finding new ways of reacting to new
situations requires imagination, the imagination of alternatives, of different
possible outcomes according to different actions. Thought is led away from the
immediate situation and its necessities into a realm of the imaginary and the
speculative. Novelty depends on what Whitehead terms “conceptual feeling,”
which is precisely the entertainment of alternatives just described, “the sense of
what might be and of what might have been.”25 This is why as a practice and in its
mode of functioning thought is necessarily speculative, “speculation” precisely
denoting this mode of functioning that is neither self-assured deduction
nor induction. Anchored in the here and now, it necessarily transcends the
given, and creatively so. However, conceptual feeling is also, for Whitehead, not
“peculiar to mankind.” It too is a generic metaphysical trait, which pertains to

all being. Again, between mankind and other beings there is only a difference in
degree. “But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The Rubicon has
been crossed.”26 In human mentality, the conceptual entertainment of unrealized
possibility ceases to be occasional, mostly negligible; it becomes a major factor.
It is these feelings of alternative, of unrealized potentialities, that, as Stengers
points out in “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day,” came to matter for the
“creatures of the sixth day” that humans are—that is: creatures to whom such an
account matters. One of their peculiar feelings precisely finds an expression in
any such account of the sixth day: that of human specificity, of being created in
continuity and discontinuity to the creation of God’s previous days.27
But even if this detachment from what is immediately experienced toward
alternatives not yet given is a major achievement for Whitehead and marks
the emergence of thought proper, it is crucial to note that conceptual feeling is
not to be confused with a classical notion of rationality or abstraction. Rather,
or even, to the contrary: “Men are the children of the Universe, with foolish
enterprises and irrational hopes. A tree sticks to its business of mere survival;
and so does an oyster with some minor divergences. In this way, the life-aim at
survival is modified into the human aim at survival of diversified worth-while
experience.”28 What is peculiar to humanity is not the kind of rationality whose
goal is survival (a tree or an oyster are much more coherent than humanity in a
life-aim defined by mere survival), nor is it a kind of rationality that the figure
of the homo oeconomicus or a rationalist philosopher would propose. “Sticking
to the business of mere survival” is indeed governed by abstraction; it means
sticking to certain abstractions. But what is peculiar to humanity is the aim for
“diversified worth-while experience,” and this aim is necessarily at odds with
coherently sticking to routines. Therein thus lies an essential “foolishness”—it
implies holding onto the belief that something that is so could also have been
otherwise or could be otherwise in the future.29 It implies letting go of abstractions
as they are embodied in routines, even if they are well established and functional.
If humanity were to be defined by rationality, it would be the rationality of hope,
of the belief in the “reality of the unseen” as one might say with William James
again.30 And hope, for Whitehead, was essentially an adventure, a risk that
requires a leap of thought and imagination.31
This is where the importance of propositions comes in, as they are essential
to such an understanding of rational endeavors as an—always situated and
speculative—adventure of hope. As I will propose in what follows, it is by
thinking Whitehead’s metaphysics through his theory of propositions that the
situated character of this undertaking becomes apparent. By being attentive to

the metaphors Whitehead uses in characterizing propositions, the connection
I wish to make between metaphysics as a form of history and indeed of
storytelling can become evident. Although one can translate propositions as
“theories,” Whitehead repeatedly describes them as “tales.” At the same time
propositions point to the described and necessarily foolish dimension of
thought, even in its most elaborate philosophical forms. Thus, precisely because
of its speculative character philosophy is tied to an essential foolishness. This
in no way undermines philosophy’s validity and possible importance. On the
contrary—it enables it.32
Propositions, in contrast to explanations, are part of Whitehead’s list of
metaphysical categories, that is, they are required to describe actual entities. It
is because there are propositions that thought is not adequately described by
the procedures of deduction or induction. Rather it is “a tremendous mode of
excitement. Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole surface of our
being.”33 In its process of concrescence, an actual entity can prehend four kinds of
entities as its data: other actual entities (all other actual entities, in fact), eternal
objects, societies or nexus (associations of actual entities), and propositions. In
order to specify what propositions are—or rather, in the pragmatic vein, what
they do, the “splash” they produce—it is thus necessary to distinguish them from
eternal objects and societies.
While the prehension of all other actual entities assures the continuity of
the universe (by means of the conformation of each new actual entity with
aspects of the ones it inherits), novelty in Whitehead’s metaphysics depends
on what he terms “conceptual feeling”—the prehension of eternal objects.
Eternal objects designate the realm of pure potentiality; they are the “pure
potentials for the specific determination of fact.”34 By means of selection from
these forms the actual entity decides how it inherits its past. It is important that
it is the actual entity that decides—the realm of potentiality has no potential to
act: eternal objects are neutral as to how they are prehended, or in Whitehead’s
words: they “tell no tales about their ingressions.”35 Eternal objects are thus
not to be confused with abstractions, theories, or concepts, precisely because
they are “entirely neutral, devoid of all suggestiveness” as to how they might be
entertained in experience.36 When an actual entity selects from these eternal
forms, it in fact prehends all of them, but it grades them in terms of relevance.37
Thus negative prehension—the discarding of possibility—is crucial: the real
is not consumed within the actual. Whatever exists is tinged by what might
have been.38
Whereas eternal objects “tell no tales” about how they are incorporated in
experience, having no efficacy of their own, propositions do exhibit such efficacy:
they are “a lure for feeling.”39 Nevertheless, even propositions cannot determine,
decide on the way they are taken up, their efficacy is a suggestive one: they elicit
interest, divert attention, and propose a way for how something might be taken
into account and what might be eliminated. Depending on actual entities to
prehend it, a proposition “is a datum for feeling, awaiting a subject to feel it.”40
But as such a datum it has a “relevance to the actual world [. . . that] makes
it a lure for feeling.”41 Propositions thus stand somewhat between the entirely
abstract nature of eternal objects and the realm of the concrete actual entities.
In contrast to eternal objects, which can be prehended by any actual entity, the
reach of a proposition is already limited to specific actual entities. They decide
on the relevance of a proposition. In that sense, propositions have an empiricist
bias; they have a particular relation to a particular environment and situation, no
matter its scope. This relevance is not to be construed entirely in terms of truth
or falsehood. Propositions can be true or false, but not in the sense that their
truthfulness would be inherent to themselves: even a “proposition . . . tells no
tale about itself.”42 It rather acquires its truthfulness from the determinate actual
entities from which it is an incomplete abstraction. Whitehead thus concludes,
continuing the metaphor of the tale, that propositions are “the tales that perhaps
might be told about particular actualities.”43
In order to specify the particular relevance or efficacy of propositions in
relation to human mentality, it is necessary to come back to the question of
actual entities and experience. Actual entities, as was argued above, are what
is given and fully exist in the most concrete sense but they are not experienced
as such. What we in fact experience are societies, associations of actual entities
that share common features and thus form a pattern. The major difference
between actual entities and societies—and this is crucial for the particular
efficacy of propositions—is their temporality. While Whitehead insists on the
fact that actual entities are atomic, that is, do not endure, but become—and
perish—societies have a duration, and thus form a continuity.44 In contrast to
explanations that are always social, in the sense that they presuppose a society
that endures,45 propositions, as pointed out above, are a metaphysical category,
implying they refer to the actual entity. Due to the atomic temporality of the
actual entity, they thus introduce a break within the continuity of enduring
societies. The fact that propositions refer to actual entities and not to societies
is the reason why Whitehead describes a “thought as a tremendous mode of
excitement. Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole surface of our
being.”46 A proposition introduces novelty, variation, and, “as a lure for feeling,”
encourages a leap of thought. However, Whitehead corrects his use of this
metaphor here in a way that is significant, because it underlines his inversion
of the Kantian scheme: “But this image is inadequate. For we should conceive
the ripples as effective in the creation of the plunge of the stone into the water.
The ripples release the thought, and the thought augments and distort the
ripples.”47 That propositions operate on the level of actual entities implies that
they operate on the pre-conscious level of feeling. It is the excitement on this
preconscious level—the ripples—that then leads to, releases or better: might lead,
might release a conscious, explicit thought. A Whiteheadian proposition is thus
not to be confused with a fully spelled-out theory. Rather, it is that which is
presupposed by any such theory in a conventional sense and it is not limited
to them alone. Nevertheless, Whitehead’s metaphysical account of propositions
has repercussions for the way we think about theories and thought, indeed
any form of knowledge. An explicit thought or theory is the outcome of the
tremendous excitement that propositions induce—if they are successful in being
a lure for feeling. This is why Whitehead emphasizes that it “is more important
that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is,
that it adds to interest.”48 Despite (or one might say even because of) his lifelong
practice as a mathematician, Whitehead regrets that under the influence of logic,
propositions have mainly been considered in view of their truth and falsehood
and their function thus reduced to being judged. For Whitehead the primary
function of a proposition is not judgment, but entertainment: “A proposition is
entertained when it is admitted into feeling. Horror, relief, purpose, are primarily
feelings involving the entertainment of propositions.”49 To sum these thoughts
up in Haraway’s words: theory is “diffractive,” it diverts the route/ine, the social
continuity of actual entities, it aims at making a difference.50
A history of propositions
But if even propositions, despite being essential to the adventure of hope, are
not specific, peculiar to mankind but are a metaphysical category, it seems
safe now to conclude that the specificity to which Whitehead’s description of
history refers will not be of an ontological kind at all. Whitehead’s concern is not
about “human nature,” distinguishing his approach from any anthropological
approach. How then should the peculiarity that Whitehead speaks of be
understood?
It is time to come back to the initial quote from Modes of Thought and repeat
it in its context: “Also it is the nature of feeling to pass into expression. Thus
the expression of these various feelings produces the history of mankind as
distinct from the narrative of animal behaviours. History is the record of the
expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity.”51 “These feelings” refers to the
various conceptual feelings that Whitehead had just sketched. Their expressions
fill the historical records of mankind because the men and women who record
and write history feel that these feelings are important, that is, they are worth
expressing and diffusing. There are other feelings that would be much more
constitutive of what mankind is, feelings of bodily functioning, for example, that
we usually pay little attention to and that are certainly not peculiar to mankind.52
It is thus not having or contributing to the making of history that is peculiar to
mankind, nor is it even certain feelings that are peculiar to mankind. Certain
feelings might be more prominent in the human animal than in others, but they
are not exclusive to them and one could even argue whether they are not rather
rare occurrences, even within the human realm. But what does seem specific is
the way in which these—conceptual—feelings, are expressed, recorded, and told,
for example, in the form of historical narratives. Not having a history but rather
ways of recounting histories, the selection of what is important to remember
and transmit, diffuse, seems “peculiar to humanity.” It is here, when considering
the question of specific expressions and their linguistic and material “recording”
that Whitehead effects a move from a general, or better: metaphysical theory
of propositions to the specific realm of human narratives and knowledge
production, tied to the experience and efficacy of language.53 In rewriting the
biblical account of the sixth day (thus inheriting the question of the human and
its diversity amid continuity), Whitehead, in a pragmatic vein, shifts the concern
from an ontological one to a question of practice. Rather than an ontological
claim, Whitehead seems to make a statement about the specific practice and
cultural efficacy of writing and telling (hi)stories—and the situatedness thereof. It
is here, at the end of the chapter on “Expression,” that his reflections on language,
that is, with different ways of transmitting the expressions of feeling peculiar to
mankind, become relevant. Investigating the impact of language on the creation
of human mentality, Whitehead points out that “the mentality of mankind and
the language of mankind created each other,” and he explores the differences
between speech and writing therein.54 Even if the distinction between speech
and writing has become increasingly blurred throughout history, as Whitehead
contends, speech is characterized by its reference to the immediate situation, to
the particularity of a specific environment that it has never entirely lost. Written
language increasingly abstracts from the immediate situation and thus permits
wider diffusion into a larger environment of certain expressions of feeling. Such
abstraction, inherent in spoken as well as in written language, is for Whitehead
responsible for the “uprise of civilization.”55 Language thus amplifies the impact
of propositions, enlaring their capacity to be “a lure for feeling.” New feelings and
thoughts may thereby be generated and the course of things, routines, altered
or disrupted on a wider cultural scale. But the kind of abstraction inherent to
language also has its dangers. In abstracting from a particular situation, the
danger is to forget that every account is, at base, an expression due to finite
occasions. One could speculate that this explains how history could come to
be thought of as a single narrative, as capitalized History, how it was possible
to forget that recounting history is always a situated activity. Be it in the form
of speech or writing, giving historical accounts retains all of the features that
characterize expression as outlined above: it presupposes importance and a
perspective; it is selective and always pertains to a finite occasion.
Coming back to the contrast between Latour’s concern for a history of things
and Whitehead’s question of specificity, it is now possible to see that their positions
do not really contradict one another. As has become evident, Whitehead does not
have an anthropocentric vision of history. Things have a history for Whitehead,
as they do for Latour and the former’s metaphysics can help to clarify the latter’s
position. On the basis of the discussion here, one might be inclined to say that
for both Latour and Whitehead things have a history, but they don’t record and
express it. However, that would not be entirely correct and risks reintroducing a
metaphysical distinction that Whitehead’s notion of expression explicitly wished
to avoid. The point is rather that things don’t record and express their histories in
the same way. Karen Barad’s work can be quoted in support: drawing on quantum
physics she succinctly shows how matter and meaning cannot be separated, how
matter itself is meaning, generated in its course of becoming and subsequently
is inscribed in what an entity is.56 So, to sum up, by making distinctions between
kinds of expressions rather than categorical ontological distinctions between
familiar kinds of entities, differences can be preserved. They become differences
not of metaphysics but of practices. If there is a contrast to be made between
Latour and Whitehead, it lies in the use of the word “history” as well as in the
problem they address: While Latour is interested in a generalized, metaphysical
notion of history in the sense of becoming or process that includes all beings—
things, humans, or animals alike—“history” is used by Whitehead in a more
narrow sense: history, for him, refers to the (as far as “we” know) human practice
of recounting and writing history or rather histories. This is why Whitehead can
distinguish the “history of mankind . . . from the narrative of animal behaviours,”

without implying anthropocentrism.57 History in this narrow sense is a selective
history of certain expressions, tied to the experience of language. It is a history
of propositions.
A situated metaphysics
I would like to conclude with reversing the question and asking what
repercussions these reflections on history, on the historicity of thought, have
for an understanding of Whitehead’s own speculative undertaking. In circling
around the relation between metaphysics and history in the way proposed
above, it is important to note that Whitehead himself began the construction
of his speculative metaphysics within what, at least at first glance, seems a
historical book. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead traces the genesis
and ingredients of the idea of an order of nature, an idea that is so fundamental
to the pursuit of science that even its open negation by Hume and his successors
has not succeeded in destroying its practical efficacy.58 The pursuit of science
practically presupposes the belief in an ordered nature, that is, in the fact that
things are related, that cause and effect are not, as Hume put it, “entirely arbitrary.”
Whitehead thus traces the components of this belief, through medieval theology,
back to Roman law and the origins of mathematics. But, passages that at least
formally can be read as a classical narrative of the history of modern science
or a history of ideas (even if its contents are at times rather unusual) are quite
harshly interrupted by systematic passages in which Whitehead sketches an
alternative position to the one he discerns in modernity. Contrasting the modern
conception of a bifurcated nature that is based on the notion of an entity being
simply located, Whitehead outlines his “philosophy of organism.” What matters
here is not the details of Whitehead’s diagnosis of modernity, nor the complexity
of his own philosophical stance as it begins to unfold in Science and the Modern
World.59 What matters here is that in this book, as already to some degree in
The Concept of Nature, the description or diagnosis of a historical constellation
seems to serve as the background or starting point for his own philosophical
construction. As Stengers has shown in detail in Thinking with Whitehead, it
was the diagnosis of a fundamental incoherence at the basis of modern thought,
the bifurcation of nature, that turned Whitehead into a speculative philosopher,
accepting as his philosophical task first the construction of a concept of nature,
then of an entire cosmology which were not to be plagued by this modern
incoherence.60 Thus, the problem that set Whitehead to work constructing a

most audacious metaphysics and cosmology is not a problem that at its base is
internal or proper to philosophy or science. Rather, it is the historical situation
to which Whitehead belonged, the modern epoch that was his heritage and that
he was part of, which posed the problem and thereby set the initial spark for
his philosophical adventure. That the fundamental incoherence of modernity
is not merely a problem of philosophy or science—even if it overtly manifests
itself there—is clearly stated in Science and the Modern World: “This radical
inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-
hearted and wavering in our civilization. It would not be going too far to say that
it distracts thought. It enfeebles it, by reason of the inconsistency lurking in the
background.”61 The problem concerns the “entire civilization” and that is what
makes it important.
That philosophy is inseparable from its historical epoch becomes even more
explicit in the first chapter of Modes of Thought. Here Whitehead sets himself the
task of “a free examination of some ultimate notions, as they occur naturally in
daily life, . . . generalities which are inherent in literature, in social organization,
in the effort towards understanding physical occurrences.”62 Philosophy
presupposes such ultimate notions, which is why Whitehead—despite his faith
in the necessity and efficacy of systematized thought—insists that philosophy
should never start with systematizing. Philosophy, rather, needs to start with an
attentiveness to the present, its present. In a process of reading its own historical
context, philosophy gathers and extracts these ultimate notions that are at work
in it, a process that Whitehead calls “assemblage.” As these ultimate notions do
not originate in philosophical construction, it is clear that there cannot be nor
should there be any definition of them. They can only be illuminated by mutual
reference toward one another and this is what Whitehead attempts with the three
concepts he discerns: importance, expression, and understanding.63 In relation
to these three notions, Whitehead then unfolds a whole set of interrelated
concepts: perspective, interest, matter-of-fact, feeling.
Importance, however, seems to stand out for Whitehead among these ultimate
notions. “All classification,” that is, all effort at philosophical systematization,
“depends on the current character of importance.”64 There is a sense of importance
which is current in the thought of each age and thus not every age has the same
sense of importance. Further, Whitehead does not only describe the modern
epoch in terms of the incoherence exhibited in the bifurcation of nature, modern
thought is also “remarkable for its concentration of attention upon history.”65 In
Science and the Modern World, Whitehead had already described modernity in
terms of a “historical revolt.” Against the exaggerated rationalism of the Middle

Ages the moderns emphasize the importance of “irreducible and stubborn
facts,” Whitehead says, again quoting William James.66 Here Whitehead uses
the term “historical” in a very broad sense and in a sense that aligns him with
Latour’s concern for a history of things: The “revolt” can be termed “historical”
because of the shift in the concept of causality implied. The appeal to final causes
is substituted by an emphasis on efficient causes.67 This shifts the focus from the
end of a movement, from its telos, to its beginning—which is of course essential
for any form of historical narrative.68
But concentration upon history implies the notion of importance—only
within a frame of thought that can distinguish between different senses of
importance is it possible to juxtapose different epochs. Modernity is therefore
that epoch in which the sense of importance is importance. Thus, for White-
head the interest in history is itself a situated one—it pertains to a certain
epoch, to modernity. By characterizing modernity in terms of its attention to
history, by an importance of importance, and by constructing a metaphysics
of becoming that places the notion of importance at its center, Whitehead thus
doesn’t reject modernity, but instead situates himself within a modern heritage.
The movement is obviously circular and it is by means of this circularity that
Whitehead situates himself as a child of his time, the modern epoch. White-
head thus undermines the well-established distinction between history and
supposedly timeless philosophical construction. This tight relation between
Whitehead’s historical outlook, his interest in modes of thought, and his effort
toward a systematic philosophy seems to be confirmed by his statement that
Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas are
part of one project, supplementing each other.69 Both, the systematic attempt
to frame a cosmology based on the notion of process as well as his historical
concern for modes of thought, cultural habits of thought that form, as one
could say, an implicit metaphysics, are part of the one and same endeavor to
construct a situated metaphysics.
Whitehead’s proposition
If, as Latour says, a conception of history which includes things in its making,
so important for a symmetrical, that is, non-anthropocentrical history of
science and even more so for a new “politics of nature,” necessitates “having
commerce with metaphysics” on the one hand, then on the other it seems
that for Whitehead, metaphysics must have commerce with history too. Just
as any expression, as developed above, is always the expression of a finite
occasion, always situated and specific, Whitehead seems to conceive of his
own speculative project as a situated one. This situatedness, for Whitehead,
is a specifically modern one: it responds to a problem that was posed by this
epoch—the bifurcation of nature—and at the same time is indebted to the
sense of importance which is importance—history—that characterizes this
epoch.70 Whitehead therefore never criticized modernity, not even when he
was pointing out the incoherence of its fundamental presuppositions. The
seventeenth century, which brought about the bifurcation of nature, is at the
same time celebrated as “The Century of Genius” in Science and the Modern
World for the incredible productiveness of its propositions within science.71
One could say that it is precisely Whitehead’s framing of history as “a record
of expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity,” which enables him to avoid a
posture of critique, understood as judgment and presupposing a position of
truth from which it would be possible to judge. It makes little sense to critique
a feeling, especially ones belonging to a past. Thinking of history as a record of
expressions of feelings thus prevents Whitehead from devaluing the “peculiar
feelings” that preceded his own and which he inherits, but which he however
no longer fully seems to share. He rather seems to wonder about the feelings
that have found expression in modern accounts. Whitehead’s use of the word
“peculiar”—meaning not only “specific” as previous reflections have suggested
so far, but also “strange, odd”—seems to point to this essential dimension of
wonder in Whitehead’s own account.
History, then, highly informs Whitehead’s philosophical practice, but, he is
not, of course, a traditional historian in any usual sense of the term. Neither
is he a mere witness, detached from the situation he describes. One could say
that Whitehead is more like Haraway’s “modified,” modest witness, who can
never afford to be “simply oppositional. Rather, s/he is suspicious, implicated,
knowing, ignorant, worried, and hopeful.”72 Like the figures who populate
Haraway’s work—the cyborg, the modest witness, companion species such as
dogs—Whitehead inherits a world, a decidedly modern one, and this heritage
doesn’t allow for a simple or innocent position. However, this does not imply
that he takes an entirely “uncritical” stance toward it. The construction of his
speculative metaphysics was indeed nourished by a hope: the hope that the
modern epoch with its fatal incoherencies would come to an end. Whether
Whitehead believed that the modern epoch was indeed coming to a close or
not, or whether he was justified in this belief, matters less than the fact that
he wanted it to come to a close. It was his ideal and with his means, the means
of a philosopher, Whitehead’s hope was to contribute to this change. It was
Whitehead’s “foolishness,” one may be inclined to say today, as the epoch does
not seem to have changed really: but Whitehead’s hope is inherently linked to the
way he conceives of thinking as speculative adventure. Whitehead’s philosophico-
historical adventure embodies a proposition—in the sense that has been sketched
above: it is a “tale that perhaps might be told” about our actuality, our epoch—a
tale, not the tale. Its claim is not to be true as a historian (or a metaphysician)
might claim, but to be one possible rendering. It is, however, not “just” one
possible rendering, because its hope is that of every proposition: to be relevant,
that is, able to act as a “lure for feeling” in a specific, historical (or “epochal”),
context. Whitehead, as Stengers has emphasized throughout, tried to produce
a “variation of interest,” an imaginative jump, destabilizing modern modes of
thought. Whitehead’s cosmology thus appears as a kind of history or even story:
even though a book like Process and Reality is hardly narrative, it implies the
retelling of the hi/story of the modern epoch in a way that might contribute
to its change. It implies imagination and a certain level of fictionality—what
would happen if . . . ‘for example’ things were thought of as having and actively
shaping their history and as containing values for their own sake, how would
that change the way “we” relate to them? Thus Whitehead’s metaphysics is not
to be understood as a “conception of the world,” a theory about what factually
exists. Propositions rather point to the dimension of adventure in thought, so
crucial for Whitehead. They indeed mark the speculative and imaginary aspect
of thought—the imaginative jump a concept, a metaphor induces, but never
fully embodies in itself. This is where Whitehead’s essential pragmatism comes
in, his pragmatic understanding of speculation and his belief in the power of
concepts as habits and their power to change habits. To change an epoch implies
a change in habits of thought—and Whitehead was fully aware of the fact that
ideas work slowly. He certainly did not believe that he could change his epoch,
but he may have believed that his epoch was in the process of changing and that
philosophy could contribute to that change.73 Thus Whitehead’s metaphysics is a
situated one, not only because it thinks itself in relation and response to its own
epoch, but because it incorporates this reflection on the level of its own practice,
its own mode of expression. It is in this sense that Whitehead could describe
speculative philosophy as a “method productive of important knowledge,” as an
attempt to forge new expressions, new hi/stories that matter.
Notes
1 Latour, “Do Scientific Objects Have a History?”

2 “In order to be sure of escaping these three perils—being trapped in society, in
language, or in nature— . . . we must dare, like Whitehead, to have commerce with
metaphysics despite the embargo declared against it,” ibid., p. 80.
4 Whitehead, Concept of Nature, ch. 2.
5 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 159. Whitehead’s reading of Descartes clearly
shows that—even if he describes the Philosophy of Organism as drawing on
pre-Kantian modes of thought—it is by no means a simple reversion to them:
“[Descartes] laid down the principle, that those substances which are the
subjects enjoying conscious experiences provide the primary data for philosophy,
namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience. This is the famous
subjectivist bias which entered into modern philosophy through Descartes. In
this doctrine Descartes undoubtedly made the greatest philosophical discovery
since the age of Plato and Aristotle. For his doctrine directly traversed the notion
that the proposition, ‘This stone is‚ grey’, expresses a primary form of known
fact from which metaphysics can start its generalizations. If we are to go back
to the subjective enjoyment of experience, the type of primary starting point is‚
my perception of this stone as grey” (ibid.). The celebratory tone of this passage
emphasizes the fact that in re-affirming metaphysics Whitehead does not call into
question the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy in toto; rather he claims that
this shift has not been fully effected yet. Notably it would entail reconsidering the
notion of experience from which philosophy thus starts. This is where nineteenth-
century psychology and physiology, notably that of William James, becomes
important for Whitehead. James’s importance for the construction of Whitehead’s
cosmology cannot be overestimated as I argue elsewhere Cf. Sehgal, Eine situierte
Metaphysik (work in progress).
6 It could even be said that Whitehead detaches metaphysics and speculation. At
least he loosens or entirely redefines the tight relation as it has largely been taken
for granted in past as well as present day philosophy.
7 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” p. 579.
8 This paper will (apart from two footnotes) not explicitly engage in a discussion
with the thinkers that have been recently discussed under the heading of
“Speculative Realism,” mainly because it seems to me that the divergences
outweigh convergences in concepts and vocabulary or historical, discursive
diagnosis. Interestingly, these divergences in my view concern first and foremost
the understanding of speculation itself. Not only are neither the concepts of
metaphysics nor of speculation reworked or even problematized in Speculative
Realism, it is also precisely situatedness that is lost in these debates.

10 It seems to me that the difference between actual entities and societies would
be a crucial one—and one curiously lacking—to be taken into account in the
discussions within “Speculative Realism,” especially when such discussions
center around “things.” When Harman takes “a dog, the moon, the sea, and a
pencil” as examples for actual entities, what is at stake does not only seem to be
the interpretation of Whiteheadian phraseology but precisely the speculative
dimension of Whitehead’s philosophical adventure, for which the difference
between actual entities and societies is of core importance (Harman, “Response
to Shaviro,” in The Speculative Turn, p. 296). This lack of distinction seems to
me to point to more than a difference or disagreement on a conceptual level (as
they have been marked out, for example, by Steven Shaviro) but to concern, in
Deleuzian terms, the “image of thought,” the understanding of what “speculative
thinking” means at all (for a consideration of the distinction between actual
entities and societies, cf. footnote 12).
11 “(T)he unknowable is unknown” Whiteheads comments laconically (Whitehead,
Process and Reality, p. 4), thereby calling the very modern question of “access”
itself into question.
12 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 50. James, Principles of Psychology, pp. 219ff.
James, “Essays in Radical Empiricism,” p. 13.
13 One could say that actual entities, echoing James’s notion of “pure experience,”
are thus not what we experience, but from which we experience. Pure experience,
an equally much misunderstood term in James, doesn’t denote a particular kind
of experience. “Pure experience” is never experienced as such precisely because
every act of experience presupposes its existence, as a starting point for the chain
of referencing, capturing, interpreting as it constitutes, for example, human
experience. It is a methodological and pragmatic postulate that is necessarily
speculative, that is, it is a postulate that can only be evaluated in a pragmatic sense:
by tracing its consequences. Reading Whitehead’s actual entities through William
James’s notion of pure experience therefore enables to clarify the point only posited
above, namely the thesis that the difference between societies and actual entities
is crucial to understanding the speculative character of Whitehead’s metaphysics.
In the same way as James’s “pure experience,” the realm of actual entities forms
a speculative starting point for experience and thought. The pragmatic function
of this concept lies in the fact that as a starting point it importantly differs
from a Cartesian one: instead of a dualism of mind and body and its inherent
anthropocentrism, Whitehead proposes a monist and pluralist starting point, a
world of actualities, mutually related. (For James’s notion of pure experience, cf. his
“Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” in James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 3ff.)
15 Ibid., p. 83.

17 Ibid., p. 11.
18 Not only thinking Whitehead with Haraway but also Haraway with Whitehead
(to whom she explicitly refers) the emphasis to be made with Whitehead on
the fact that situatedness is a matter of occasion—thus “located” on the level of
actual entities and not of societies—seems important in respect to the discussion
within feminist epistemology, in which Haraway’s text “Situated Knowledges” is
inscribed. It corroborates Haraway’s point to think of situatedness not in terms
of a stable identity or standpoint, but as differential and situational. “ ‘Being’ is
much more problematic and contingent. . . . We are not immediately present to
ourselves.” (Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” p. 585). To think of situatedness on
the level of occasion thus helps to avoid conceiving of pre-established entities as
promising starting point for politics and/or knowledge production.
19 One could think, for example, of Helmut Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology
and its concern for expression in relation to life and human nature. Cf. Plessner,
Ausdruck und menschliche Natur.
20 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 31. “Also, if we are fussily exact, we cannot define
where a body begins and where external nature ends,” Nature, p. 30.
21 Ibid., p. 29.
22 Ibid., p. 32.
23 Ibid., p. 36.
24 Ibid., p. 35.
25 Ibid., p. 37.
26 Ibid., p. 38.
27 “The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech and they
became souls,” ibid., p. 57, is the last phrase of the chapter on “Expression” in
Modes of Thought and the starting point for Stengers’s reflections on the efficacy of
Whitehead’s “correction” of the biblical account: “we” were not given souls—but
speech, that is, a mode of expression—and thus we became souls. Stengers’s
text evolves around the Whiteheadian use of the term “soul” and explores the
peculiarity of the modern soul, whose primary question seems to be “who is
responsible for what?”, the question of responsibility thereby directly relating the
biblical account with modern science: “The tale is that on the sixth day, when
God gave souls to Adam and Eve, He also gave them the freedom to sin, and the
responsibility to choose between obedience and disobedience. The easy modern
acceptance of any so-called objective explanation, which would explain away this
freedom and responsibility, does not so much amount to a rejection of this tale
as to the claim that only science, not the Bible, may assign responsibility. In other
words, the modern account of the sixth day would be “He created the scientist”—
triumphantly demonstrating the power of scientiﬁc objectivity, explaining away
gregarious beliefs, identifying superstitious mankind as part of the previous day’s
creation” (Stengers, “Whiteheads Account of the Sixth Day,” p. 40). Stengers reads
Whitehead’s account of the sixth day as “reclaiming of the many questions and
aspirations that were expelled from the scene, as it was depopulated both by the
biblical account and by modern so-called objectivity,” (ibid., p. 41).
28 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, pp. 42ff.
29 For Stengers’s elaboration of the notion of foolishness, cf. her article in this book.
30 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 3.
32 The understanding of propositions, as it is developed in the following, is
particularly indebted to: Stengers, “Achieving Coherence,” pp. 59–79.
35 Ibid., p. 256.
36 Ibid., p. 33.
37 Ibid., p. 69.
38 “A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; it recollects as a subjective
emotion its struggle for existence; it retains the impress of what it might have
been, but is not. It is for this reason that what an actual entity has avoided as
a datum for feeling may yet be an important part of its equipment. The actual
cannot be reduced to mere matter of fact in divorce from the potential,” ibid.,
pp. 226ff.
39 Ibid., p. 259.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., p. 257.
43 Ibid., p. 256. Emphasis mine.
44 While in many aspects Whitehead’s thought is close to Bergson’s and his insistence
on the continuity of time as given, for Whitehead “there is a becoming of
continuity, but no continuity of becoming,” ibid., p. 35. Thinking becoming (actual
entities) as atomic makes it possible to describe continuity as achievement, as
something that has to be made and produced rather than something that is given
and needs to be attained.
45 Positive knowledge, for example, in the sciences, refers to societies, because
knowledge presupposes the endurance of the things which it describes. Any form
of explanation or description is thus social, in the double sense that both the
object of knowledge to be explained as well as the subject that wishes to explain
and cannot but employ its own perspective on what is wants to explain are social
entities in a Whiteheadian sense. This, Stengers states, “designate(s) the whole
of our knowledge as a form of sociology” (and of course, this is obviously not
to be confused with sociology in the disciplinary sense). Stengers, “Whitehead’s
Account of the Sixth Day,” pp. 47–8.

47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p. 259. It is important to note that Whitehead’s emphasis on novelty doesn’t
imply that novelty, disruption is necessarily good. “When a nonconformal
proposition is admitted into feeling, the reaction to the datum has resulted in
the synthesis of fact with the alternative potentiality of the complex predicate.
A novelty has emerged into creation. The novelty may promote or destroy order;
it may be good or bad. But it is new, a new type of individual, and not merely a
new intensity of individual feeling,” ibid., p. 187. As Stengers also insists, “from
a cosmological standpoint the eventual betrayal of social conformity is not to be
celebrated as such. As we all know ‘Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the
trick of evil. In other words, the novel fact may throw back, inhibit, and delay’,
ibid., p. 223. It may indeed happen that not agreeing with the social, conformal
interpretation, entering into conflict with a social tradition, contributes to this
tradition becoming more rigid. But it may also happen that a new contrast is
introduced that eventually may be accepted without contradicting what did
previously matter, for instance by making more interesting ‘how’ it did matter.
This is the very privilege of non conformal propositions, that they may enhance
the creative advance through the introduction of relevant novelty.” Stengers,
“Achieving Coherence,” p. 71f.
50 Haraway and Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, pp. 101ff.
52 “There is a baseless notion that we consciously observe those activities of nature
which are dominant in our neighbourhood. The exact opposite is the case. The
animal consciousness does not easily discriminate its dependence on detailed
bodily functioning. Such discrimination is usually a sign of illness. When we
observe the functioning’s of our viscera, something has gone wrong. We take the
infinite complexity of our bodies for granted,” ibid., pp. 40ff.
53 This distinction between propositions and language is implicit in Whitehead’s
repeated precautions concerning language, more precisely concerning an
exaggerated trust in language. Whitehead’s Process and Reality testifies of
an immense trust in efficacy of linguistic practices, but “we must remember
the warning–Nothing too much,” (Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 54). For
Whitehead “no language can be anything but elliptical, requiring a leap of the
imagination to understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience”
(PR 13). That this statement, quoted from the introductory chapter of Process and
Reality on “Speculative Philosophy” also implies an understanding of his own
metaphysical experimentation is clearly exhibited in the following phrase: “The
position of metaphysics in the development of culture cannot be understood
without remembering that no verbal statement is the adequate expression of a

proposition” (idem).
55 Ibid., p. 55. Whitehead uses the term “civilization” in a technical sense, referring
to the entertainment of notions of large generality. It is important to note
that “entertainment” does not imply conscious employment of these notions.
Whitehead rather thinks of civilization as habits of thought, entrenched in a
language. Whitehead’s notion of civilization is therefore inherently linked to the
question of metaphysics, one could say it refers to an implicit metaphysics (see
below). It is equally important to note that there is no judgment of value implied
as the term might suggest. Whitehead humorously notes: “Of course, we are much
more civilized than our ancestors who could merely think of green in reference
to some particular spring morning. There can be no doubt about our increased
powers of thought, of analysis, of recollection, and of conjecture. We cannot
congratulate ourselves too warmly on the fact that we are born among people who
can talk about green in abstraction from springtime. But at this point we must
remember the warning–Nothing too much,” ibid., p. 54. The (only) difference
between “us” and our ancestors is that we inherit a longer (their) tradition of
language. “Our increased powers of thought” are thus not due to an evolution,
say, of the brain, but only to the continued expression and diffusion of language.
Importantly, there is no necessary drift toward the better, certainly not in a moral
sense, implied in the notion of civilization. Even if moral judgment is not part of
Whitehead’s concern altogether, one would rather have to say with Whitehead that
it is modern civilization which is uncivilized, as modern thought, shaped by the
bifurcation of nature, indulges in “brilliant feats of explaining away” (Whitehead,
Process and Reality, p. 17). Modern concepts are not sufficiently wide to include
experience in its entirety—and worse so, they even make a virtue out of it.
56 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Cf. also Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies.
58 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World.
59 For a detailed account of Whitehead’s “becoming-metaphysician,” see Ford, The
Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics and Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead.
60 Ibid.
61 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 76. Whitehead continues: “After
all, the men of the Middle Ages were in pursuit of an excellency of which we
have nearly forgotten the existence. They set before themselves the ideal of the
attainment of a harmony of the understanding. We are content with superficial
orderings from diverse arbitrary starting points. For instance, the enterprises
produced by the individualistic energy of the European peoples presuppose
physical actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in
their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical causation

is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the final end. It is not
popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here involved. It is the fact,
however you gloze it over with phrases” (ibid.).
63 Even beyond these ultimate concepts that have a specific status as explained above,
Whitehead doesn’t tire to emphasize that there can generally be no certainty in
philosophy as definitions might suggest: “The merest hint of dogmatic certainty
as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly”; “however such elements of
language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing
for an imaginative leap” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. xiv, 4).
65 Ibid., p. 23.
67 “The appeal to the origins of Christianity, and Francis Bacon’s appeal to efficient
causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of thought,” ibid.,
p. 8. Obviously, it is precisely this shift in the concept of causality, so essential
to the birth of modern science, that makes it difficult to conceive of things as
also having a history. As Latour points out, considering things as profoundly
historical necessitates reconsidering the modern concept of causality: “as long as
one made nature the kingdom of causes, to speak of a historicity of things seemed
improbable: inventiveness, flexibility, hesitation, could only come from humans
and their painful history. . . . What a difference it would make if all entities left
behind, transcended, exceeded to some degree their causes, their histories, their
ancestries! The objects of nature no longer offer as their only ontological model
the stubborn, obstinate, headstrong, silent demand of substance. . . . Nature
shares with society the same historicity.” Latour, “Do Scientific Objects Have a
History?” p. 89.
68 In saying “revolt” Whitehead also refuses to describe the move toward modernity
as a reaction in the name of reason. It was certainly a reasonable reaction, but in
its essence it was anti-intellectualist, directed against the rationalism of the middle
ages. Describing the initial spark of modernity in terms of a revolt, a “turning
against” accounts for the exaggeration, often inherent in counter-movements.
In the case of modernity, it explains the anti-rationalism inherent in the silent
toleration of its fundamental incoherence.
69 “The three books—Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and
Adventures of Ideas—are an endeavor to express a way of understanding the
nature of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illustrated by
a survey of the mutations of human experience. Each book can be read separately;
but they supplement each other’s omissions or compressions.” (Whitehead,
Adventure of Ideas).
70 Stengers, “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day,” p. 40. The following reflections
are particularly indebted to Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead. Cf. in particular
ch. 9: “A new epoch?” pp. 123ff.
71 Thus, not the scientific findings of the century per se are problematic for
Whitehead, but their excessive application to other domains, thereby committing
a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” The bifurcation of nature is primarily a
problem for and of philosophy, not of science (though the scientific materialism
that gave rise to the bifurcation of nature also caused problems within the sciences
themselves, especially for biology and psychology).
72 Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 3.
73 This hope accounts for Whitehead’s at times rather peculiar reading of the history
of philosophy (cf. Sehgal, Eine situierte Metaphysik).
10
Speculative Philosophy and the Art

of Dramatization
Isabelle Stengers
Philosophy as creation
Philosophy, wrote Whitehead, never reverts to its old position after the shock of a
great philosopher.1 Addressing the future of speculative philosophy, we are not
gathered to envisage reverting to Descartes or Leibniz, all the less so as they
themselves did not know that, as a consequence of the shock of Kant, they would
be classified in the category of speculative philosophers.
And we should not be gathered either to enjoy speculation as a freedom
to engage in some sort of mythical–mystical enthusiasm giving in to a poetic
license with the power to break away from what would be seen as old-fashioned
rationalism. If philosophy still exists, if it is still alive—despite its death having
been proclaimed again and again—it may well be inasmuch as it has avoided
the dual temptations of either assuming the role of guardian of rationality or
escaping rationality through the pathos of inspiration or emotion. Its survival
would then depend on the continuing creation of what produces philosophers,
of what is able to transform what we call thinking into an adventure, because it
acts as an imperative, with a necessity of its own.
It might be objected that speculative philosophy is part of a greater
adventure, one that dissolves the old boundaries and allows new connections,
a new kind of nomadic freedom. Are not contemporary physicists, for
instance, playing with the strangest questions, not only appropriating what
philosophers claimed as their own—the question “why is there something
rather than nothing?” for instance—but also playing with such fantastic
ideas as that of an infinity of distinct universes or with revitalized ancient
ideas such as the strong anthropic principle. However (most), physicists
Speculative Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization 189
(still) care for the specificity of their own adventure. They are keen not to
confuse questions that may be associated with the creation of consequences
liable to make an experimental difference, and questions that they would call
“speculative.” As an individual, a physicist may indulge in such questions, but,
however broadly publicized those questions are, they will not be a matter for
the kind of demanding interest that makes physics a passionate, collective
adventure.
If physics as a creative science exists through the very special constraints that
are left aside in physicists’ speculation, the revival of speculative philosophy
also needs specific constraints, “specific means”2 in order to dare to create
concepts that break free from the prohibition against speculation—“thou
shall not . . .”—promoted by Kant, that is to say, from the prohibition against
philosophers honoring ideas of their own making.
I will experiment here with Gilles Deleuze’s proposition that the specific
means mobilized by the creation of concepts indeed do not refer to their use
by the philosopher as the author of the problem that is constructed alongside
the concepts that serve as its solutions. The creation is a co-creation, creating
the philosopher himself as a “means.” In chapter IV of Deleuze’s Difference
and Repetition, this co-creation was characterized in terms of “dramatization,”
when thinking is produced under the imperative of an Idea whose primary
power is to dissolve any stable representation, any consensual reference. The act
of philosophical creation would be the act of giving to an imperative question
the power to claim the concepts it needs in order to obtain its most dramatic,
forceful necessity, in order to force thinking in such a way that the philosopher
can no longer say “I think,” can no longer be a thinking subject. If there is a
subject, it is the unfolding of the drama itself, the demands of which turns
the thinker into a “larva,” or a prey. And the very answer that Deleuze gave to
the question “What is philosophy?” at the end of his life may well be the best
example of the unfolding of a Deleuzian operation of dramatization. In this
case, the imperative cannot be disentangled from the contemporary “disaster of
thought” that may well make philosophy one of its victims. And the answer—in
terms of plane of immanence to be laid out, conceptual personae to be invented
and brought to life and concepts to be created—makes it felt that philosophy can
indeed be destroyed, because the dramatization creates a concept of philosophy
that has nothing to do with the general ideals of reflection, contemplation, or
communication. Philosophy is, rather, a “dangerous exercise” implying “a sort
of groping experimentation,” resorting “to measures that are not very rational,
respectable or reasonable.”3
Needless to say, Deleuze’s proposition is not a neutral one. It exemplifies

Whitehead’s idea that after the shock of a great philosopher, philosophy never
reverts to its old position. For Deleuze, Kant’s condemnation of speculative
philosophy is part of the Kantian drama, part of the creation of a new image
of thought: a dramatic creation indeed since it features the subject as inhabited
by three invincible Ideas, or Illusions of Reason—a subject in need of perpetual
critical surveillance against idolatry. What matters then is not to oppose another
definition of speculative philosophy to Kant’s definition, but to go on to do
philosophy, to create concepts and images of thought.
Doing philosophy, in Deleuze’s sense, means creating concepts. And I
would claim that the creation of concepts, as he characterizes it, is intrinsically
speculative. Concepts answer problems, which are not defined in reference
to a state of affairs, whose mode of existence is rather that of a task to be
accomplished, an answer to be given, a work to be done. But speculation, then,
is not the name for a knowledge that would claim authority over experience,
and it could be said that the truth of concepts is instead related to the interest
of the problem that requires them. This is both a pragmatist proposition,
and a proposition that saves pragmatism from any reduction to pre-existing
interests. First of all, then, not reverting to an old position means abandoning,
without the slightest nostalgia, the idea of philosophy as attaining a Truth that
would be independent of its own specific means. This has nothing to do with
postmodern irony. It immediately derives from the positive dramatization of
philosophy as creation. “Every thought is a Fiat, expressing a throw of the dice:
constructivism.”4
Dramatizing the correlationist question?
Because of the circumstances of the conference where this paper was first
presented, I will begin by developing the idea of dramatization and the casting
of the dice using the example of contemporary “speculative realism” or “objected
oriented ontology” as defined by the refusal of the so-called correlationist
position. My question will be: is such a refusal sufficient to give objects, or things,
the positive power to orient their own dramatization?
Certainly the meditative question “what is a thing?”, or the evocation of the
“thingness of things” have an enticing philosophical flavor. Happily though,
OOO philosophers do not stop and meditate. Indeed the flavor of this question
is a modern one because “a” thing or “an” object has meaning only in reference
to the meditative subject—a very modern subject as he (unmistakably he) stands

as unmarked, the pure locus of a question which transcends what matters for us,
for people, which transcends, for instance, the important difference between a
burning coal and a glowing jewel and the cry “do not touch it!” of the anxious
mother who knows about the danger, who knows that the glowing coal causes
awful pain, and knows it in a way which might not be so very different from the
way a dog or a cat knows it.
When you ask the meditative question “what is a thing?” it seems that you
have to forget about what, together with cats and dogs, you know. You also have
to forget that both things and the Latin res were, as Bruno Latour has forcefully
reminded us, “matters of concern,”5 that with which the power to gather concerned
people is to be associated. You are asking a question that only a human—or more
precisely some very select humans called philosophers—can ask on this Earth, a
question that seems to relegate other concerns to the blind hustle that separates
us people from true thinking, the privilege of philosophers.
It may be interesting that I have just used the same (easy) argument as
Whitehead did when commenting on Hume’s critical claim that impressions
arise in the soul from unknown causes. “The causes are not a bit ‘unknown,’
and among them there is usually to be found the efficacy of the eyes. If Hume
had stopped to investigate the alternative causes for the occurrence of visual
sensations, for example, eye-sight, or excessive consumption of alcohol he
might have hesitated in his profession of ignorance. If the causes be indeed
unknown, it is absurd to bother about eye-sight and intoxication. The reason
for the existence of oculists and prohibitionists is that various causes are
known.”6 What is at stake here is not the authority of common experience
but the solidarity of the critical or the meditative philosopher with the way
philosophy has come to replace the question, what do we know? by the question
what can we know?7 As we will see when I turn to Whitehead’s operations of
dramatization, when the question “what do we know” is not muted by the
ambition to produce a theory of valid knowledge, it may receive the power to
require the creation of concepts.
But let us first return to the OOO philosophers. My argument about the
inability of things or objects as such to orient their own dramatization is verified
by these philosophers’ positive divergences about what speculative realism
should dramatize. They become philosophers, in Deleuze’s sense, not when they
join in a common refusal of correlationism, but when each is required in his
own way to refuse it. And objects are then no longer defined by a silent question
transcending the passionate diverse and interested ways “us people” have of
relating to them. They are activated by each philosopher’s “Fiat,” creating the
problem that will require him.
No creation is to be compared to another creation and no creation should
judge another. When creative philosophers seem to judge the creation of
another philosopher, their judgment should be taken to be inseparable from
their commitment to the problem that made them philosophers. Whitehead was
deliberately unfair with Hume and many others when he quietly dismembered
their problem in terms of his own. But he did so in such a humorous way
that it makes the reader smile. He really put into action his own concept of
inheritance—relating to Hume and Kant as a Whiteheadian subject relates to
what has obtained objective immortality, that is pragmatically turning them
into ingredients of this subject’s own satisfaction. Among OOO philosophers,
Graham Harman has certainly most creatively contrasted his philosophy with
other philosophical propositions. As unfairly as Whitehead, indeed, but perhaps
with a little less humor. Here again though, we may understand the philosopher
as both the creator and the creature of his own passionate construction. Harman’s
own Fiat affirms the object as withdrawn, that is, “refusing access,” or at least
“giving no access.” It is no surprise that Harman’s interest for other philosophers
may be characterized in the terms he himself created in order to think a world of
withdrawn objects—vicarious causality, plate-tectonic encounter, confrontation
by proxy, touching without touching.
The point is obviously not to describe philosophers as sleepwalkers, blindly
reading other philosophers through their own conceptual glasses. It is rather
to emphasize that the way philosophers read other philosophers must be
appreciated in the way we appreciate creation, as an achievement or as a failure,
in terms of the interesting new dimensions or contrasts that the reading brings
to our understanding. But such an appreciation may never claim the authority of
a judgment. What is appreciated is rather an affinity or a lack of affinity between
problems, determining if and how one philosopher “thinks with” another.
I myself fall within this characterization. The brief presentation I proposed
of Deleuze’s creation of an answer to the question “what is philosophy?” is the
manifestation of a felt affinity rather than a concern for accuracy. Connoisseurs
may have remarked that the importance given to the necessity of conferring on
problems the power to make philosophers think as philosophers perhaps refers
more directly to Bruno Latour’s factishes8 than to the efficacy of the Deleuzian
plane of immanence. And it also refers to my own characterization of the
experimental achievement, when the scientist is allowed to withdraw because
what has been produced is able to testify “by itself ”9: we are then dealing with
“the invention of the power to confer on things the power of conferring on the
experimenter the power to speak in their name.”10 By contrast, my encounter
with the OOO philosophers is probably marked by a lack of affinity. As a result,
the thread of affinity that I am spinning—thinking with Deleuze and Latour as
a line of escape from correlationism—will be felt as an evasion of “the” question
by those who take it as “the” challenge. But the proposition that philosophy
is a matter of creation already marked a determinate lack of affinity for the
perspective that would define any question as “the” question.
A different staging
Philosophy as creation implies that there is no challenge that subsists of its own
accord, by reason of some ultimate or incontrovertible legitimacy. Any challenge
depends upon a creative act of problematization. The problem associated with
correlationism requires the staging of a subject reflecting about the knowledge he
has about objects and concluding that he cannot untangle the seamless relational
fabric in order to attribute the responsibility of knowledge either to the subject
or to the object. Such a staging is general and is indifferent to the kind of matter
of concern that produced the fabric. What matters is responsibility.
To break away from that staging is to break away from the question of
responsibility, or rather to define it as a very specific matter of concern. It may
be a matter of concern for the judge who has to produce a verdict, and also—
but in a very different way—for experimenters, as what makes them imagine,
object, manipulate, and hope that they may eventually be able to succeed, to
“demonstrate” that the object is responsible for the “representation” given of it.
Typically Kant never dared to discuss how and why eighteenth- century
astronomers came to accept Newtonian theory in spite of their initial misgivings
about attraction at a distance. It is because of these misgivings that they
welcomed the news that the observed Moon contradicted the theory. But they
had finally to admit that the contradiction between theoretical calculation and
observation did not sound the death-knell of the theory, for the good reason
that this contradiction was due to mistakes in the calculations. Newton’s theory
had been vindicated by “the Moon itself,” or, more precisely, by the observed
positions of the Moon to which the theory gave the power of deciding its own
fate. Newtonian force could no longer simply be expelled: it was imposed by
the Moon first, then by the discovery of Neptune, then by the ever-increasing
accuracy of astronomical predictions. Reading Kant, astronomers could have
accepted that they do not know the Moon “in itself ” but this was not their concern
anyway. Their concern entailed rather that the Moon be taken as responsible
for their observations because it was as such that it was able to intervene as a
witness, forcing their agreement about Newtonian theory.
Experimental sciences are thus intensely concerned with the attribution of
responsibility.11 For other practices this question simply lacks relevance. The
hunter who needed years of initiation and experience to learn how to “see” what
we call a trail, would be very surprised indeed if she was asked to untangle the
fabric of her experience in terms of responsibility. As for philosophers, the very
point of creation, of being turned into a philosopher by the dramatization of
a problem, is that the question “who is responsible” for the answer becomes
irrelevant.
The correlationist indeterminacy about responsibility is relevant when we
stage a subject, any subject, together with an object, any object, he claims to
“know.” What does this staging refer to? Perhaps to the great initial scenario,
when Socrates asks Athenian citizens strange questions, and makes their answers
become synonymous with the “opinion” which philosophy has to transcend?
Incidentally, this is still the scenario of the “opinion poll,” when an interviewer
confronts people with questions they have no reason to entertain any specific
interest in. Asking anyone about anything will provide answers (people are
polite and will try to give you what they are being asked to give) that are the
very food of correlationism—indeed the aim of such surveys is to correlate
people’s answers with general determinants (age, sex, social position, education
level, political position, and so on). By contrast, interviewers will typically avoid
addressing people who are effectively concerned by the problem the survey is
about, as they will be annoyingly prone to discussing the meaning and scope of
the questions they are asked to answer.
Insisting on the crucial importance of concerns is not to give up “reality” in
the name of some sad relativism. The more a human differs from an anonymous
subject, the more the reality she addresses differs from its relativist namesake.
In contrast to the correlationist staging, what I am trying to dramatize is the
question of the creation of “rapport.” The word rapport, in French, means a
“relation which matters.” As such it may designate both the Greek “logos” in its
mathematical sense and the rapport amoureux. When Lacan concluded “there
is no sexual relation” [il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel], he was defining possessive
passion as haunted by an ideal of access to the truth of the other, realized by the
mathematical logos, and also characterizing the anxiety of such a passion, when
one feels that some “remainder” escapes appropriation, and one comes to feel
that whatever one is embracing is only a shadow, that whatever escapes is the
“real” object. However, rapport is not restricted to appropriation. More generally
it may be associated with the idea of connection. Everything may be related,
but a connection is created and is a matter of concern, to be maintained and
evaluated in terms not of its “effects” (another term that is too general) but of its
consequences. Each new connection is an event, and biologists tell us that such
events, be they the appearance of aerobic bacteria, which were able to connect
with oxygen as a resource, or the symbiosis between plants and insects, were of
primordial importance in the history of life.
Connections matter and, as such, they challenge the generality of correlationist
judgment. If the correlationist judge addresses neither weak (because indifferent)
claims (those of the Athenian citizens), nor claims that are already dismembered
by controversy or are part of the outdated past of a science, but rather a knowledge
the relevance of which matters in a crucial and demanding way for the one who
is entertaining it, be she a scientist or a hunter, he will meet resistance that is
hard to defeat.
I am perfectly aware that this argument will be deemed quite insufficient,
or even mean-spirited. Resistance may be a fact but the correlationist question
is one of “right.” Whatever the Moon’s role, Newtonian force was defeated by
Einstein. Which claim is able to present the credentials that guarantee that it will
not meet the same fate? However, the disagreement, now, is no longer about the
correlationist question, but rather about the question of philosophy itself, and
about the position of critical, postmodern, or even speculative philosophers. Are
they the representatives of some abstract absolute standard, which transcends the
mere contingency of particular cases and the “specific means” that correspond
to the diverging matters of concern singularizing different practices? For my
part, I learned that I would become a philosopher when reading Deleuze and
I experienced that philosophy is worth existing only if it accepts the risk of
existing in the teeth of other practices, producing its own demanding concerns
without needing to weaken theirs. Again in this case it was a question of
“connection” as a creative operation. To dramatize is to connect, to respond to
the insistent imperative of what Deleuze called an “idea,” and to engage with the
adventurous, problematic exploration of what this idea demands.
This is why my own concern as a philosopher is not primordially to escape
correlationism but to escape the sad, ritualized, war between experimental science
and philosophers who have, since Kant, proposed correlationism as a means
to critically restrict the scope and meaning of supposedly objective scientific
claims. It could be said that philosophical correlationism was invented “against”
scientists. My concern, when I emphasize the experimenter’s achievement as a

very selective event—the creation of an (always partial) connection authorizing
them to agree about what then becomes their object and not a further step in the
progressive conquest of the objective understanding of reality—is to characterize
experimental science as an adventure and, in so doing, to free the space for
other adventures, including that of philosophy. But this choice has demanding
consequences for philosophy. It entails that philosophers resist the temptation to
claim that philosophy must reach beyond the plurality of adventures and accept
being situated by its own way of adventuring.
This is a testing challenge indeed. If I learned what it feels to become a
philosopher with Deleuze, it is with Whitehead that I learned what it means
to answer this challenge by practicing philosophy as an openly speculative
adventure.
Thinking with Whitehead?
The very great importance I am giving to the reference to “adventure”—and to

the plurality of adventures against the rivalry between claimants—is something
I learned through “thinking with Whitehead,” that is, with him as belonging to
our own epoch, with new problems being added to the ones which had turned
him into a philosopher and which are themselves still with us.
As we know, the absurdity against which Whitehead rebelled, the bifurcation
of nature into two rival abstractions—nature as it “objectively is” and nature
as we “subjectively” relate to it—still rules today, begetting new absurdities or
reproducing old ones under the guise of new big questions, such as the emergence
of feeling or value from a blind interconnection between blind and indifferent
processes. The very resilience of the bifurcation of nature creates a new problem,
that of understanding the awesome capacity that what Whitehead diagnosed
as absurd had of infecting its environment, again and again producing a divide
between what should matter and what we do not need to pay attention to.
Another new problem is that the modern rivalry between science and
philosophy can no longer simply ignore that it entails and presupposes the
continued silencing of “others” as it claims to occupy all the room, to be the nec
plus ultra problem for any anonymous rational subject. This was to me the very
touchstone when “thinking with Whitehead.” How did this thinking situate me?
Did it ratify the position which our very strange adventure has put us in again
and again, the classical position which, since Plato, has consisted in getting
access to a truth, whatever it may be, that would permit the guiding of “others”
out of the cave of illusions? Or does it instead help us to present ourselves in a
way that is civilized at last, that is, without insulting those we present ourselves
to? Even if I know that the option for civilization is not what will turn the self-
hate, mistrust, and resentment that have been induced into gracious forgiving,
I take this option as a task to be done. And it needs “doing.” No half-way
compromises, such as can be associated today with emergence or complexity,
are sufficient: our ideas do indeed have fangs, they are armed with destructive
either/or disjunctions that are made so as to put opponents up against the wall,
to resurrect dramatic alternatives against nice compromises. Also, the adventure
of “civilizing” our ideas has nothing to do with a taming operation, with pulling
their fangs out and asking them to participate in a polite conversation. If they
must be civilized, it is not through giving up, but through the “specific means”
that armed their polemical power.
The civilizing option has immediate consequences. For instance, it forbids
understanding the power of the abstractions that make nature bifurcate in
anthropological terms, as was the case with Bergson, for instance. We, the
bifurcators, are not the brain of humanity, authorized to speak about Man
or to diagnose what Whitehead called the “fallacy of simple location” as
characterizing “human mind.” But such a fallacy cannot even be attributed to
“us.” Rather, it was, and still is, forced onto those whose “beliefs” are derided
by those who “know.” Here I would like to pay a special homage to the neo-
pagan witches who have helped me to realize that the colonial enterprise began
in Europe, with witch hunting and the brutal destruction of old and resilient
rural traditions. The narrative they craft helps repopulate our past and our
imagination, and helps us disentangle the power of our ideas from the violence
committed in their name.
Whitehead also crafted such a narrative when he defined as the great and
dangerous innovation of the nineteenth century the discovery of the method of
training professionals.12 The training of “minds in a groove,” paying no attention
to what lies outside was not new in itself, what was new was that such training
henceforth coupled professionalism with what has been called progress.13 The
method produces not routine minds but inventive, entrepreneurial, conquering
ones. We know them well and they still, more than ever before, demand that
no further attention be paid to what their groove ignores: climate change may
threaten us, for instance, but whatever is done about it should obey the rule of
the market and contribute to economic growth. However, we need to craft other
narratives in order to dramatize the formidable resilience of the professional
definition of progress. Surely, the easy way would be to incriminate “power,”

more precisely the economic power called capitalism. But I believe that we, as
philosophers, also need to dramatize what capitalism took advantage of—that
is, our relative lack of resistance, our tolerance to the professional definition of
what should, or should not, be allowed to matter. And here, “our” designates
“us,” who still have to learn how to address “others” in a civilized way. What was
it that infected both professionals and their environment, including “the best
men” who accepted, and still accept, with a “stone-blind eye”14 the price that
must unfortunately be paid for progress?
An interesting hypothesis is that both the power that has been conferred on
some abstractions, giving them misplaced concreteness, and the always recurring
critical question “what can we know?,” may be related to what Bruno Latour has
described as “flying backward.”15 The Moderns would turn their back on the
future to which their actions eventually lead, because they do not run toward
it, rather run away from the past, an imaginary, mobile, and frightening past
which they cannot distance, which will engulf them if they do not run, if they
slow down and let themselves be affected by what their abstraction make them
blind to. “You want us back in the cave!” has sounded like a sufficient answer to
protests against our very unsustainable development. And the cave is not only
that of prehistory, but Plato’s cave, the realm of irrational beliefs, always ready to
conquer the present. Because of the menace of the cave, it would be our duty not
to slow down. Paying attention to the consequences of our actions for the future
would produce fatal hesitation, empowering irrationality.
The interest of Latour’s hypothesis from the point of view of the task of
civilizing our abstractions is that it relates modern progress not to trust but to
fright. Such a fright is not to be dramatized in anthropological terms—those of
psychoanalysis, for example, for which the cave would then be a figure for the
devouring mother. If it was so, the Moderns would again be confirmed in their
pride of place. They would still be the ones who disclose in a purified manner
what a human invariant would be, even if it spells destruction and not glory.
Rather, the establishing of such a fright is to be narrated and many narratives
are probably needed as no one narrative as such would “explain” the fright by
something which would indeed be frightening. What will again and again be
narrated, I suspect, is fright as the justification for the imperative of separating
“people” from their irrational attachments and beliefs, “for their own good.”
Such an imperative makes me wonder if there ever was an “us,” The Moderns.
It may indeed be possible to speak of a spell—or of a “proposition,” in Whitehead’s
sense, which turns its logical subjects into a food for possibility16—infecting
experience at all scales, infecting scientists17 but also those who are frightened
when they feel that the authority of science is contested, creating an authentic
mentality of crusaders against Infidels who resist the knowledge that saves. The
power given to our abstractions would be characterized by the fact that it leaves
no room between “conversion” and “irrational resistance.”18
Thus it may well be that the relation between modernity and the invention of
professionals runs deep, deeper than Whitehead’s image of the groove suggests,
when “abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is
paid.”19 The groove may well be characterized as what protects against what
roams outside, with its power to seduce and corrupt. It is thus sufficient to read
Whitehead’s “no attention is paid” as “no attention must be paid” to link the
professional ethos with the theme of salvation and the fright of the “mob” whose
intrusion would spell the unleashing of “irrationality.”
The interpretation I have proposed is not an explanation as it calls for other
interpretations, for instance, about the power conferred on illusions to seduce
and corrupt. Its interest may be that it offers what William James, in The Will
to Believe, called a genuine philosophical option. What I suggest has indeed
for one of its consequences that “common sense” gets the status of the famous
“terra nullius,” which nobody can legitimately defend against appropriation,
a status which was also used as a legal weapon in colonization. Further, in
both cases, to appropriate terra nullius means progress: the more scientific
theories defy common sense, the more rational and legitimate they sound.
The option, however, is not between “appropriating common sense,” that is,
freely producing some version of common sense that will justify progress as an
escape from its clutches, and “defending common sense” as the unfairly vilified
ground of our specialized abstractions. To argue for a “return” to common
sense would put philosophers in a position that is also an appropriative one,
selecting and defining what should be legitimately defended and promoted.
The option concerns what it means to “civilize” our abstractions. This is the
way I inherited from Whitehead’s philosophy: his attempt to dramatize “what
we do know” against the imperative of defining “what we can know” was also
an attempt to “empower” common sense.
Welding imagination and common sense
Referring to common sense as dispossessed of any legitimacy to protest

when dismembered by professional attacks does not mean empowering some
philosophical concept of common sense as a universal anthropological consensus

or as some innate wisdom everyone on this Earth would share, allowing projects
of peace and mutual understanding. My experience, when teaching Whitehead,
is rather that of the incredulous, joyful surprise of students, discovering that
they are allowed to escape prohibitions and critical skepticism without betraying
the demands of the philosophical tradition. Such experience corresponds rather
precisely to the aim Whitehead assigned to philosophy in Process and Reality: “the
welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists.”20
And remarkably enough, this experience of welding is not restricted to his openly
speculative work. Already with Concept of Nature, the strange experience occurs
of the possibility of dealing pragmatically, imaginatively and without confusion,
with the many things we know, and the many modes of abstraction that are
relevant for knowing them.
Common sense is not usually associated with joyful experiences of disclosure.
But the Whiteheadian proposition I have quoted is indeed unusual. It implies
that common sense is what can be welded with imagination. This is not such a
bizarre conception, however. When authors of science fiction or ethnographers
write about different worlds, they trust their readers’ ability to be interested in
the many intricate differences they explore, to accept that there are radically
different ways of having the world matter, to have no special trouble accepting
the situated character of any knowledge, rather enjoying the discovery of the
situated character of their own categories. Just as our ancestors did when they
welcomed travelers coming from faraway regions, exchanging with them stories,
recipes, ritual narratives.
“Common sense,” then, would not refer to some knowledge content. What
may be common instead is an interest for the way others make their world matter,
including animal others, for tales about different ways of life, for experimenting
with what may be possible. For wandering and wondering. “Men are the children
of the Universe with foolish enterprises and irrational hopes. A tree sticks to its
business of mere survival, and so does an oyster with some minor divergences.
In this way, the life aim at survival is modified into the human aim at survival for
diversified, worthwhile experience.”21
Some foolish enterprises are dangerously foolish. Entertaining insuperable
dilemmas and sticking to the business of promoting abstractions that turn
their users into educators of humanity, destroyers of what they denounce as the
other’s foolish dreams, is dangerously foolish. But foolish also is Whitehead’s
demand, as addressed to our philosophical tradition: “We have no right to
deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe.”22 This
demand challenges philosophy to refrain from indulging in its favorite sport,

catching commonsensical positions in the clutches of “either . . . or” alternatives.
Let us imagine Socrates accepting that the Athenian citizens he questioned
were each affirming the value experience associated with their practice, and
that the philosophical task was not to go beyond their particular truth but to
experiment with the best way to have them all rejoicing in their situated, that is,
non-contradictory character!
It may be because Whitehead was a mathematician that he felt no qualms
about accepting truth as always situated. Since the Greek, mathematicians have
honored disclosure, the self-evidence and beauty of demonstrated mathematical
truth. But they would never deny or downplay the adventurous character of
the construction of the demonstrative path, which creates the possibility of
the answer. Mathematics, for Whitehead, was the epitome of rationalism as a
(foolish) adventure of hope.
But the mathematicians’ craft was certainly not his only inspiring reference.
In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead proposed that the speech of Pericles to the
Athenians should replace the book of Apocalyptic Revelation as the final book
in the Christian Bible. Pericles’s speech to the Athenians produced a contrasted
unity among them, weaving together and not denying their diversity. And the
fragile, collective experience he activated is the very possibility Socrates ignored,
the possibility of addressing the partial, conflicting, commonsense truths of the
inhabitants of the city in such a way that they be enabled to embed these truths
in the wider experience of their need of each other in order for each to rejoice in
the value experience of being an Athenian.
Whitehead’s proposition, to make Pericles part of the Holy Scriptures of
civilization, is not, I am convinced, the conclusion of a philosopher. It is rather a
deep-felt conviction that contributed to turning Whitehead into a philosopher.
He was no Pericles. And he was not a Quaker either, even if he paid homage to
the Quaker spirituality when he characterized the way each occasion, as engaged
in its own immediate self-realization, is also concerned with the universe,
emphasizing that he was using the word “concern” in the Quaker sense of the
term.23 Instead we should perhaps take seriously Whitehead’s remark that two
philosophers are needed for a philosophical school to perform its full service
to philosophy.24 He may have felt called to be the one who came after William
James, the one whose task would be to reduce to “rigid consistency” James’s
exploration of experience.
As a mathematician, Whitehead knew that trust, the crucial Jamesian theme,
is the very blood enabling mathematicians’ creative work. It is also required for
Pericles to weave Athenians into contrasted unity, or by the Quakers’s silent

worship. In all these cases, what is at work is James’s pluriverse in the making,
the fragile but cosmic achievement of the felt experience of contradictions being
turned into contrasts, the adventure, without guarantee, of the creation of always
partial connections, producing new relevant possibilities. Furthermore, James
defined such a creation as “congruous with human nature25”: “We can and we
may, as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards a world of
which we trust the other parts to meet our jump and only so can the making of
a perfected world of the pluralistic pattern ever take place. Only through our
precursive trust in it can it come into being.”26 We can and do jump each time we
precursively trust in the possibility of connecting, or enter into a (partial) rapport
that cannot be derived from the ground of our current, dominant premises. In
so doing, “we can create the conclusion.”27
For James, only mistrust, with its demands for guarantees against what is felt
as offensive or foolish conclusions, explains the veto against what we do each
time we trust in what may be possible, and in so doing contribute to creating
it. Only mistrust explains that the pragmatist affirmation that the engagement
for a possibility contributes to have it come into being is rejected, that we are
asked instead to stick to the ground of settled facts. But we are also plagued
by this mistrust each time we reduce Jamesian trust or belief to some kind of
psychological aid or prosthesis, which may help the weak but which the mature,
rational Man must do without as his pride is to be able to accept a world which
is what it is, whatever our beliefs.
My conviction is that Whitehead’s common sense is akin to the “we can
and we may,” which James defined as congruous with human nature. Just like
ethnographers or science fiction writers, I would not be able to write a text like
this one if I did not trust in a possibility of connection with readers—always
a partial connection, to be sure, but do I not myself entertain only partial
connections with what I endeavor to formulate? What I know is that trying to
craft such a formulation is itself a process of creation, jumping into or toward
what can only be encountered, never made my own (ideas are never one’s ideas,
only what make one think).
However, there is a distinction between familiar experiences, congruous with
human nature, which we should not deface by taking them for granted, and the
trust of the mathematician, of Pericles, of the Quakers, or of Whitehead trusting
in the possibility of turning the unruly crowd of our conflicting abstractions into
a pattern of contrasts. In these last cases, the risk of failure and the importance
of the achievement are vividly felt. In contrast, when a teacher, for instance,
introduces children to the world and adventure of numbers, she is in fact trusting
in a jump but she may well experience what she has to teach year after year as
involving no jump at all, a “normal” path of learning the child just has to follow.
Worse, she may then attribute the responsibility for failure to the child, “who
does not pay attention.” Habit may lead to dangerous routine. It is only when
no habit veils the risk of failure that we feel the jump to be a “speculative one,”
dramatizing that it speculates about a possibility that has no stable illustration
in the world.
The image of the jump “with both feet off the ground” may well dramatize
this dimension of risk a bit too much, separating the jumper from the ground
of common concerns and habits. This is why I feel it necessary to complement
James’s characterization of the jump with what Whitehead, as a mathematician,
knew and what Deleuze’s dramatization affirms: that the jump is not only
toward, that it cannot be dissociated from the ground it leaves. You never
trust in general and you never jump in general. Any jump is situated, and
situatedness here is not limitation. If a jump is always situated, it is because its
aim is not to escape the ground in order to get access to a higher realm. The
jump, connecting this ground, always this ground, with what it was alien to,
has the necessity of a response. In other words, the ground must have been
given the power to make itself felt as calling for new dimensions. Such a call is
not a “public” one, however, for everybody to hear while some would try and
answer. And it is not even telling about what it demands. It has the insistence
of a question to be answered.
When he wrote Universal Algebra, that is, at a time when he emphatically
emphasized that he was not a philosopher (in contrast with Russell, who
named philosophy whatever general idea he had) Whitehead may well have
already heard the ground calling. His originality, Ronny Desmet has shown,
was to restrain the importance of the specialists’ debate about the foundation
of the definitions of pure mathematics, arguing that, in contradistinction
to definitions that are relevant in applied mathematics, “a conventional
mathematical definition has no existential import. It sets before the mind by
an act of imagination a set of things with fully defined self-consistent types of
relations” (UA vii).28 This should be contrasted with the philosophical scheme,
where “fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each
other,” and its applicability, with the demand that “some items of experience”
be interpretable in its terms. As Didier Debaise has suggested (personal
communication), those “some items” may well be those whose “existential
import” call out for the jump.
Empowering common sense, welding common sense and imagination in

order to dramatize the existential import of what it is so easy to dismember—
because it cannot resist the demand of abstract, non-situated, definition—is an
act of creation. Coming back to the elementary mathematics teacher I alluded
to, the empowerment of her common sense would mean the creation of a new
“rapport” to her job, a “rapport” affirming the existential import of her own role,
which is not to “transmit knowledge” but to activate the coming into existence
of a “ground” calling out for the child’s jump, to induce a feeling of “existential
import” to the mathematical situation which needs this jump. To the critical
question “how to warrant existential import?,” there is no general answer, only
the felt call of the need for a restraint upon specialists’ modes of abstraction, the
felt importance of resisting the way they select what matters and what may be
ignored. The dice is thrown each time, and speculative philosophy can provide
no short-cut, only trust in the welding of common sense and imagination.
Indeed, as I will briefly show now, Whitehead himself threw the dice at least
three times, each time empowering something we do know and which is under
attack by theory. Each time answering a distinct call, dramatizing it into a cry
and creating the answer demanded by this cry.
In the same boat!
It is in Concept of Nature that the first cry that I am able to hear as committing
Whitehead as a philosopher resounds. The bifurcation of nature may be a
public problem, but the way he will confront it, demanding that “all we know
of nature is in the same boat, to sink or swim together,”29 implies that there will
be no half-way house, no psychic addition that unifies the beauty of the sunset
and its objective interpretation in terms of electro-magnetic waves. This cry
commits Whitehead to a dramatization that will make perceptible the radical
consequences of the apparently innocuous definition he has initially given of
nature, as “what we are aware of in perception.”30 In other words, awareness is
the ground that calls for a jump, but mutely so, as it is the free-for-all scapegoat
of theoretical attacks. It is only when the constraint defining the “towards” of the
jump is made explicit by the cry that the distinction between “what we are aware
of ” and “what we perceive” will be empowered to dramatically unfold.
Already the operation Whitehead attempts, and will ask his readers to
accompany, is a speculative one, challenging all settled distinctions, allying itself
with the “worst” commonsense realism—the claim, for instance, that sunsets
are “truly” beautiful. Already also, as a reader, I learned the need to think “with”
Whitehead in order to understand that Whitehead is taking the beauty of the
sunset as an active constraint, as an experience whose existential import should
not be defaced, but also should not be permitted to deface the import of electro-
magnetic waves. Awareness is not to be endowed with the power to evaluate and
judge perception, or the knowledge that is associated with perception. Nature,
as what we are aware of in perception, is a concept, the answer created to the cry
“in the same boat!”
This is why we should resist the temptation of understanding the central
distinction that Concept of Nature proposes, between “objects” that may be “here
again” and events—which, when they are gone, are gone—as a phenomenological
rendering of our experience. Again they are concepts, very carefully crafted in
order to disentangle awareness and perception in order to empower awareness,
to enable it to resist the abstractions that derive from perception, without
denouncing them. Objects and events are concepts created to activate and
answer the call of what we are aware of against bifurcation and to do it so in a
way that satisfies Whitehead’s realist commitment.
This commitment itself is what I hear in the deceptively simple remark: “We
are instinctively willing to believe that by due attention, more can be found in
nature than that which is observed at first sight. But we will not be content with
less.”31 Whitehead is not asking the question “what can we know?” He is not
demanding guarantees ascertaining the validity of particular knowledge. He
demands that nature be approached as liable to reward due attention. He does
not specify how we will discriminate the kind of attention that is due in different
situations. He rather commits himself at the very point Kant took the inverse
commitment, writing as he did that we do not learn from nature but impose on
it our questions as a judge does with a convict.
To be sure, when a mountain climber envisages a rock-face in terms of the
foothold it offers, she pays attention to the mountain in terms of anticipated
possibilities of climbing. But the climber is not crazy; she knows that the
mountain offers other opportunities, other footholds for many other kinds of
beings, from birds to grass, moss and fungi. As a speculative realist, Whitehead
will demand that nature be such that it offer footholds that do not privilege the
anticipations authorized by our intellectual abstractions. Our perceptive organs
are also concerned, and more generally the various equipments of any living
being, as they all affirm that a lack of discrimination may exact a death penalty.
That nature must be such that the way we pay attention to it makes a difference is
thus not a definition of nature as knowable. Knowability is precisely what denies
the gist of Whitehead’s realist commitment, that is, the need to pay attention and
the risk associated with the question of the “due” attention to be paid.
Very often philosophers’ initial commitment strangely enough results in
the production of some master-key, as is the case for instance with the famous
cogito ergo sum. Descartes took the cogito as his only ground for certainty and
it finally gave him the means to escape all uncertainty and proceed to the finally
rational conquest of everything that is to be known. In contrast, Whitehead’s
generalities, as organized around the concept of nature, are crafted in order
not to conquer anything, but rather to resist any demand that we define reality
independently of how it matters for us, of the kind of attention we pay to it. More
generally, Whiteheadian realism aims at constraining our abstract definitions
never to deny what they require. If any natural knowledge is situated by the
kind of attention we pay, by how we discriminate what matters and what does
not, it must never authorize abstractions that would deny the importance of
such attention or discrimination, that is, which would erase situatedness and
claim anonymous validity. I would propose that this is an ethical point that
characterizes all Whiteheadian abstractions.
The craft of Whitehead’s answer as opposed to the Cartesian conquest—give
me a hold and I will define the world, God included—makes the difference
between jumping off the ground and mysteriously acquiring speculative wings
and the power of surveying the whole landscape. Jumping is not made for the
thinker to fly over, but rather—as with his famous image of the airplane flight—
to land again with renewed attention and imaginative questions. And this also
means that the ground itself, upon which the airplane lands, has gained the
power to call for a new flight. In Concept of Nature, Whitehead insisted that he
would stop right at the point where questions become interesting—which is also
where the question of the attention due to nature, the question of “the order of
nature” as we try to understand it, begins.
The order of nature is what scientists put faith in when they do not just proceed
by generalization from observed facts but struggle to have these facts testify to
a more general functioning that would characterize nature. That is, when they
are realist. “Commonsensical” realists, the critic sniggers, insisting that this
order and the abstractions it authorizes are what we impose on a mute reality.
However, empowering common sense should not mean taking the side of the
scientists as they themselves claim to get exclusive access to the order of nature.
It rather means empowering common sense to resist the fallacy of “misplaced
concreteness” which gives scientific abstractions their authority and forgets that
the order of nature is not primordially a matter of knowledge, but also what the
maintaining of bodily life requires and what interpretive perception trusts, for
better and worse. The ground for the new flight has gained the power to demand
that any abstraction be situated by what we have learned to pay due attention to. It
demands that we take care of our “modes of abstractions.”32 Another Fiat, another
throw of the dice, a very different jump are needed.
For its own sake!
Organisms are, as we know, the answer proposed in Science and the Modern
World to the question of the order of nature, this follows, once again, from an
operation of dramatization. A new cry has resounded: “value is the intrinsic
reality of an event.” Events are no longer what we are aware of as “passing,”
and as gone when they are gone. “Events are the emergence into actuality of
something,”33 a “realization” which is in itself “the attainment of value.”34 But
having value means “being something that exists for its own sake.”35 The term
“event,” and the inherent transitoriness it conveys, now affirms—against the
abstractions derived from physics—the difference between an attainment and
something that would subsist by itself. Value as the intrinsic reality of what
participates in the order of nature demands that no self-sustaining continuity
be taken for granted. As Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen said “it takes all the running
you can do, to keep in the same place.”
Organism is the generic name given to “that which endures.” Value, as it
corresponds to the mode of achievement of what endures, means first of all
partiality, the drawing together in its own selected mode of the larger whole
in which each enduring being is situated. Each such being is thus “limited,
obstructive, intolerant, infecting its environment with its own aspects.”36
What does an organism require in order to endure? Will the larger whole be
“patient” with regard to the obstinate and intolerant way an organism infects
it by its requirements, to the partial, selected role an organism assigns to it?
As they make continuing endurance an achievement, organisms promote such
irreducibly pragmatic questions as primordial, determining which kind of
attention is relevant.
Whitehead’s proposing of organisms as a unifying concept may be correlated
to the task he assigned to philosophy—to take care of our modes of abstraction.
The choice of terms such as attainment, infection, or patience is deliberately
crafted to call for intuition, against the authority of explanation. The fact of
endurance (or lack of endurance) comes first as any explanation or justification
requires the endurance of what they claim to explain: not only the explanation
but the very characterization of what is to be explained are indeed relative to
what endurance makes matter. Explanation is thus one type of concern among
others, relevant only (as is the case in physics) when endurance may be taken
for granted. The general case is that addressing some being as real is a matter of
speculative concern. What does this being require so as to be itself? What might
disrupt its way of enduring?
Each science confronts distinct contrasts between patience and impatience.
Such a contrast is dominant in historical, psychological, and social sciences,
while trust in endurance shapes the abstractions and explanations of physics.
But organisms were named to indicate the now privileged position of biology,
where endurance is exhibited as an achievement, where mutual infection is
the rule and the patience/impatience contrast is transformed into entangled
patterns of mutually “intra-actions,” to borrow Karen Barad’s term.37 When the
developing embryo is concerned, this contrast is even woven into a dramatic
plot, the unfolding of which contemporary biologists are just beginning to
discover.
Scientists’ claim for realism is thus verified, but not as a generality, only
inasmuch as they are concerned about learning from the organism “as such,” not
when they proceed for the sake of objective knowledge, imposing upon what
they address demands and operations that disrupt its own way of existing for
its own sake. However, the knowledge of how to disrupt is also precious, even
an end in itself for the police inquirer interrogating a suspect, for the marketing
man wishing people to buy what they do not need, for political activists trying
to activate citizens’ impatience, or for the therapists helping somebody to escape
an enduring sufferance. Organisms do not privilege our concern for “realist
knowledge,” but rather groping, speculative experimentation, such as when one
gets acquainted with somebody, with her zones of robustness and her zones of
fragility. Whatever the practical concern, however, attention, and learning the
kind of attention which is due are required.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead still occasionally named his philosophy the
“philosophy of organism.” This is sufficient testimony to the fact that the new,
openly speculative, flight he was attempting there is called for by the renewed
attention and imaginative questions organisms elicit but cannot provide.
However, whatever the occasional attempts Whitehead will make to extend
the use of “organism,” the answer to this call will result in the divorce of what
the organism of Science and the Modern World bound together: endurance and
value. Endurance will now designate societies, a derivative notion only because
it characterizes a nexus, that is, a gathering, and not a real togetherness. Real
togetherness and value concern now the only res verae, the only beings that
function “for their own sake”: actual entities. And actual entities, including God,
are very precisely what cannot be characterized as obstructive or intolerant. The
dice have been thrown again.
I am aware that some Whitehead scholars consider Whitehead’s speculative
proposition defective. Not only would his speculative philosophy be incurably
atomic, but even less able than physics to account for the enduring and obstinate
thingness of things. Indeed actual occasions are essentially transient. Certainly,
when they perish as subjects they are not gone, as are the events of Concept of
Nature. But once they have passed into objective immortality, they are available
to appropriation, that is, they are at the mercy of new occasions, which will have
to take them into account, but will be free to determine how they will do so. This
seems a direct denial of common sense.
Or rather it would be if philosophical concepts were meant to satisfy some
version of common sense knowledge, promoting it to the status of nec plus ultra
authority after it has been nicely purified. But for Whitehead, philosophical
concepts have no authority. Their justification is the way they activate the
welding of common sense and imagination.
The introduction of the new name, “society,” for what endures may well
be indicative of how this welding is now to be activated. Endurance and the
order of nature are no longer the focus, even if they are required, giving their
“social environment” to occasions. What matters now, as it matters for moral,
social, and historical inquiries, is rather exhibited by conflicts, hope and despair,
rebellion and repression, claims and doubts, propagation of new ideas and
justifications of their silencing by the need to defend society. And a new cry
resounds, dramatizing what has become Whitehead’s speculative commitment:
“No reason, internal to history can be assigned why that flux of forms, rather than
another flux, should have been illustrated. . . . The ultimate freedom of things,
lying beyond all determinations, was whispered by Galileo – E pur si muove –
freedom for the inquisitors to think wrongly, for Galileo to think rightly, and for
the world to move in despite of Galileo and inquisitors.”38
The ultimate freedom of things, the definition of each res vera as causa sui,
is not a matter of knowledge. It is rather our “experience of responsibility,
of approbation or of disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of
freedom, of emphasis”39 which is the ground calling for a new dramatization.
And again the point will not be to empower some commonsense claim that “we”
are ultimately free. Such a claim is a philosophical one, turning an important
experience into the foundation for a judgment. Kant made this perfectly clear
when he argued that the subject must be postulated as free in order to be
addressed in terms of the indictment “You should not have. . . .” The equivalent
scene in our culture, whatever its promotion of freedom and responsibility,
turns the Kantian “postulates” into a matter of concern, as witnessed by the
messy evaluation of responsibility and “mitigating circumstances” during a
judicial trial. Empowering common sense, here, is to resist any purification
of what is messy, any explaining away either by those scientists whose favorite
sport is the denial of freedom or by philosophers who mobilize it as leverage
for moral judgment (you should not have done this . . .). Despite scientists, the
way our immediate experience appropriates the past it inherits is for itself to
decide, for its own sake. Despite the moral inquisitors, the existential import
of (enduring) individual freedom or responsibility is not constitutive but
circumstantial, depending on the manner of this appropriation—Hands off!
as William James wrote.40
The metaphysical standpoint
When, in his final additions to Science and the Modern World, Whitehead
presented the operation of dramatization he was initiating and which Process
and Reality would complete, he defined it in terms of a constraint that would
transform what are for us matters of concern—organisms and the order of
nature, for instance—into particular applications. Adopting what he called the
“metaphysical standpoint” in the two new chapters “Abstraction” and “God,” he
wrote: “we will forget the peculiar problems of modern science, and will put
ourselves at the standpoint of a dispassionate consideration of the nature of
things.”41 Dispassionate consideration does not refer to a vision of truth beyond
the illusions produced by passion or partiality at all. It does not demand a
disavowal of passion, accepting in a dispassionate way what Whitehead called
“the multifariousness of the world,” a world where “the fairies dance, and Christ
is nailed to the cross,”42 and where philosophers claim we are prisoners of
Plato’s cave. Whatever our many ways to access what we call reality, they are all
passionate as they all imply learning how to pay due attention, and accessing
metaphysical reality is no different. The cry of Whitehead claiming freedom for
Galileo, the inquisitors and the world passionately and partially commits him
to “forgetting” peculiar problems that would otherwise require due attention. It
commits him to the mode of dramatization he will call “speculative.”
The very fact that it is already in the first chapter of Process and Reality,
where he made explicit the speculative character of his “essay in cosmology,”
that Whitehead attributed the aim of welding common sense and imagination
to philosophy as such is also indicative that here the welding operation will
not aim only at restraining “modern” theories, marked by the repudiation of
common sense and the objective/subjective bifurcation. What is at stake with
the ultimate freedom of things is the passionate adventure of philosophy itself,
leading us back to Plato, who defined philosophy against sophists, and reason
as what should entitle philosophers to rule the city (or at least to educate and
counsel the ruler).
But if Whitehead wrote that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato,43 including
his own, it means that for him this first polemical definition of philosophy is
not what defines Plato’s text. In Adventure of Ideas Plato appears as the one who
defined human soul by “the enjoyment of its creative function, arising from its
entertaining of ideas”.44 We could even say that for Whitehead, footnotes to Plato
are footnotes to the first philosophical creation, both and inseparably the creation
of the concept of Idea and of the concept of soul (Platonic soul) as made alive by
the erotic power of Ideas. But then comes a caveat. Whitehead remarks that after
The Symposium Plato should have written “a companion dialogue which might
have been named The Furies, dwelling on the horrors lurking within imperfect
realization.”45 In other words, together with philosophy came the “weary” task
of civilizing philosophy, and of also civilizing those other children of Ideas,
scientists, or theologians for instance, who were also turned by the “imperfect
realization” of an Idea into crusaders and prosecutors of what they despised as
fetishes or illusions. In this sense the method of training professionals was the
institution of the “furious” character of progress.
Adopting what he called a “metaphysical standpoint” in order to dare to
embark on an openly speculative adventure, Whitehead did not dream the usual
philosophical dream of converting everybody to philosophical ideas. Rather,
he designed a “system” that would civilize philosophy itself: that would enable
philosophers to learn the craft of welding ideas with common sense, engaging
common sense in the adventure of a world in the making. If any word is “mutely
appealing for an imaginative leap,”46 Process and Reality’s concepts do so loudly,
as none has meaning as such, but only as part of the conceptual system, which
Whitehead characterizes as a matrix. Matrix should not be understood in a
generative sense, but rather in a sense that is both mathematical and pragmatic.
The matrix is in itself devoid of meaning, it is crafted in particular not to be
normative. Consequences are associated with its use only in the welding it brings
about. And this time the welding concerns what may be called philosophers’
common sense, activating the experience of the “erotic,” passionate adventure
of ideas all too often stymied by the image of philosophy as the road to some
transcendent truth beyond human illusions, that is also, of philosophers as the
spokespersons of universality.
This is why the derivative character of the obstinate endurance of organisms
is not to be identified with the result of a jump toward some hidden reality, the
res verae, behind the scene. The first definition of res verae is that they are the
creatures of creativity, while the first definition of creativity is that it is what must
be equally and without privilege exemplified by any of its creatures. “Any” is the
challenge to be dramatized by the metaphysical standpoint, and this challenge
requires from us philosophers the highest degree of partiality, resisting our most
cherished habits of thought, leaving no stone unturned, particularly those which
would verify some of our peculiar interests.
This may be related to what Bruno Latour called “irreduction”: from the
metaphysical standpoint, nothing can ever be explained in terms of a more
general cause or principle. All our “thuses” and our “therefores” are productions,
exemplifying creativity. No general reason will ever be invoked which would
legitimate, justify, or explain “the course of things” or introduce a short-cut
which would typically result in giving peculiar privilege to some selected idea,
that is, in its dangerously imperfect realization. Such a commitment finds its
expression in the ontological principle: “no actual entity, then no reason”47
and the exacting character of this principle is verified by the major revisions
it imposed in the writing of Process and Reality, resulting in the concept of a
God as a creature of creativity carefully, craftily separated from any power to
encroach upon the “ultimate freedom of things” but required by what keeps
its importance from the metaphysical standpoint because without it to adopt
such a standpoint would have been meaningless. It is not so as to skip over the
peculiarity of our passionate interests that Whitehead adopted it, but rather to
answer the call for a civilized realization of ideas. God is then part of the answer.
What Whitehead named God is in itself an example of civilized realization of
an Idea that unleashed countless furies. And his functioning as the “organ of
novelty”48 calls for a process of civilization that requires the welding of common
sense with imagination, not consensus about some unifying common good.
What Whitehead’s God makes possible in metaphysical terms is also what the
realization of Whitehead’s idea of God induces: the trust that contradictions can
be turned into contrasts, the appetite for a way to realize ideas that does justify
subtraction or eradication, rather adds relevant novelty to the world.
An unfinished task?
The flight of the aeroplane is an open adventure. The characterization of the

three successive operations of dramatization I have sketched is itself a highly
simplified version of a much more intricate story, reconstructed by Lewis Ford,
but they emphasize the irreducible plurality of the Fiat that inseparably makes
itself the respondent to a call and dramatizes it into a cry demanding an answer
which is also a creation. And each Whiteheadian Fiat, as I have interpreted
them, dramatizes a call muttered by common sense under the attack of theory.
Muttered, not proclaimed, as the point is not to “take sides” with particular
common sense convictions, but to empower common sense to resist the
injunction that “attention must not be paid” to some aspects of experience.
Did Whitehead achieve the task I attribute him? I long thought that at the
end of his life Whitehead enjoyed the “wonder that remains” after he had “done
his best.”49 In Modes of Thought, indeed one does not “feel” the operation of
dramatization, the demanding commitment following a Fiat. One rather enjoys
the unfolding of a “mode of thought.” And one may hypothesize that this explains
the blurring of strict conceptual distinctions, such as the one between Life and
societies, in favor of a deeply poetic rendering that celebrates life as “absolute self-
enjoyment, creative activity, aim,”50 all characteristics that previously belonged
to actual entities.
However, I have recently come to consider a particular passage at the end
of “Nature Alive,” the text of a lecture delivered 4 years before the ones which
compose the major part of Modes of Thought. In this passage, we meet a quasi-
programmatic statement, in terms of three successive “if we stress” bearing on
the process shaping a wealth of material that are so many subjective reactions to
the environment into unity, which is individual enjoyment. The first “if we stress”
may refer to the order of nature; the second, to the metaphysical standpoint as
actualized in Process and Reality. But it is the third one which suddenly made me
wonder: “If we stress the role of the conceptual anticipation of the future whose
existence is a necessity in the nature of the present, this process is the teleological
aim at some ideal in the future.”51
The three appearances of “if we stress” are meant to be complementary, not
contradictory. Actual occasions do not contradict organism and it is easy to
argue that in some way an anticipation of the future belongs to the concept
of actual entities. This is all the less surprising given that the importance of
the future was never absent from Whitehead’s writing, and he used every
opportunity to give it a place.52 But the third, and distinct, “if we stress” seems
to imply that stressing the process as “self-creation,” as is the case in Process of

Reality, precludes stressing it as teleological aim.
The point is “stressing,” that is “dramatizing.” Whitehead remarks that “the
aim at the future is an enjoyment in the present,” that is, at first sight, that the
actual entity’s self-enjoyment as characterized in Process and Reality perfectly fits
the bill. But the triple “if we stress” led me to realize that anticipation is “saved,”
not “dramatized” in Process and Reality. Indeed the ultimate freedom of things,
the fact that no reason can be assigned to a particular “flux of forms” (which,
Whitehead notes, follows from the ontological principle) rather disqualify most
versions of teleological aims. Whitehead’s conceptual construction “saves” the
future at the price of its “privatization,” assigning it to the private becoming of
the subject aiming at its own self-determination. Even the characterization of
the aim of God does not stress the future but intensity in the present. God is
never gifted with any kind of long-term vision.
It can be hypothesized that Whitehead first thought that he would be able to
give conceptual anticipation of the future its own rightful role in his metaphysical
construction. But when the ontological principle claimed all its consequences
and the Category of Reversion was abolished, the relevant character of novelty
came to depend upon God. But any association of God with a teleological aim
would have endangered the stress on self-creation. It would have introduced the
possibility of a normative perspective whereby this self-creation may be judged
in the terms of the aim it cooperated, or failed to cooperate, with. The direct
association of God and teleology would have been like “throwing a match into
the powder magazine.”53
When Whitehead wrote about the necessity of the anticipation of the
future in the present, I would thus suspect that he was hearing common sense
muttering about, calling for, a new flight that would dramatize what has only
been “saved” in Process and Reality. A new Fiat, a new throw of the dice was
necessary. A new task was awaiting Whitehead, the civilization of an adventure
which would no longer be that of metaphysics, but perhaps rather that of
romance, directly speaking to the heart and imagination of the reader.
I have thus come to read the Preface to Modes of Thought—where Whitehead
evokes a book “such as the present one,” which he meant to publish 4 years
earlier but never did because of various circumstances—in a new light. If we
take into account the previous Whiteheadian story of the transition from a
collection of conferences to a book, we may well ask if a rather different book
than Modes of Thought as it was finally published was not then in the first stages
of its conception.
“It is true that we cannot imagine a great philosopher of whom it could not
be said that he has changed what it means to think; he has ‘thought differently’
(as Foucault put it). When we find several philosophies in the same author, is it
not because they have changed plane and once more found a new image? We
cannot be unaware of Biran’s complaint when he was near to death: ‘I feel a
bit too old to start the construction again’. ”54 My last, unverified, hypothesis—
that Whitehead felt a bit too old or weary to be able to start the construction
again—entails a dramatic distinction between the philosopher’s conviction and
the art of dramatization. As he had written, “value is the outcome of limitation”:
a construction does not submit to the idea of its author but has demands of its
own, heard only in the very process of realization of this idea. I would personally
guess that some keys to the new articulation to be constructed between aim and
life as a creative process reside in such elliptic, concentrated formulas as “the aim
is at the enjoyment belonging to the process,”55 but the dramatization of the many
consequences demanded by such formulae is undeveloped. In Modes of Thought,
the ground gets full power to call out for a new jump, and the orientation of the
jump is rather clearly perceptible, but what Deleuze calls a witch’s flight,56 the
effective creation of the concepts that answer the call, remained in the domain
of real potentialities.
If I am right our task is probably not to try and do it “as he would have done
it”—what a creator left unfinished will never be finished. Maybe we should
remember instead what made Whitehead such a particular philosopher, one
whose career is a living testimony to the erotic power of ideas—let us remember
he never presented himself as a philosopher before becoming one because
the problems he encountered demanded it. Presenting himself together with
the problems the dramatization of which empowered him to create concepts
is what Whitehead never stopped doing, and in so doing, he was both true
to the ingrained claim of philosophical concepts to universality, and able to
explicitly situate them as belonging to an adventure, all the more demanding
as it does not pretend to transcend its status of “footnotes to Plato.” This may
be the best way to civilize philosophy as, since Plato, it has been oscillating
between The Symposium and the Furies who surround it – to “realize” ideas
in a manner that does not demand warring agains illusion. This at least, in
a time of disarray bordering on despair, is a way to continue philosophy as
a perhaps foolish “adventure of hope”—a hope referring not to philosophy’s
own lights but to its possible participation in reclaiming the trust we lack in
the capacity of common sense to enjoy belonging to the process Whitehead
called civilization.
Notes

3 Ibid., p. 41.
4 Ibid., p. 75.
5 Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.”
8 See Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods.
9 Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, p. 84.
10 Ibid., p. 99.
11 Even in quantum theory, responsibility is decidable, but the responsibility for
the answer is complemented by the scientists’ responsibility for the question, as
mediated by the experimental device.
13 Ibid., p. 205.
14 Ibid., p. 203.
15 Latour, “ Steps Toward the Writing of a Compositionist Manifesto,” pp. 471–90.
17 See for instance Mary Midgley’s incisive analysis in Science as Salvation.
18 The case of biological evolution is a good example—instead of telling about
the grandeur of the adventure of Life on Earth, marked, as any adventure, by
contingency, we are confronted with a polemical tale of blind chance and selfish
competing interests. Only connoisseurs know that this sad and monotonous tale
is also a partial one, meant first of all to contradict any possibility of escaping the
“science or religion: you have to choose” challenge.
22 Ibid., p. 11.
23 Ibid., p. 167.
25 James, Some Problems in Philosophy, p. 231.
26 Ibid., p. 230.
27 Ibid.
28 Ronny Desmet, “Principia Mathematica Centenary,” pp. 225–63.
29 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, p. 148.
30 Ibid., p. 28.
31 Ibid., p. 29.

33 Ibid., p. 93.
34 Ibid., p. 94.
35 Ibid., p. 93.
36 Ibid., p. 94.
37 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
39 Ibid., p. 47.
40 See for instance James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Will to Believe.
43 Ibid., p. 39.
45 Ibid., p. 148.
47 Ibid., p. 19.
48 Ibid., p. 67.
50 Ibid., p. 152.
51 Ibid., p. 166.
52 See the rather elliptic “by the addition of the future” which is required by
realization in Science and the Modern World’s famous insertion, p. 105.
53 Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, p. 29.
54 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 51.
56 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, op. cit., p. 41.
11
Philosophical Experimentation Between

Deleuze and Guattari
Andrew Goffey
And if thought searches, it is less in the manner of someone who possesses a

method than that of a dog that seems to be making uncoordinated leaps . . .1
Experimentation was a recurrent motif in the writings of Gilles Deleuze, as of his

fellow writer Félix Guattari, and it pointed toward a conception of philosophy
that was as much practical as it was speculative. Thematized in terms of an
exhortatory contrast with interpretation “substitute . . . experimentation for
interpretation,”2 experimentation became for Deleuze the defining feature of the
activity of doing philosophy and the marker of its implication within and against
the present. As he puts it in What Is Philosophy? “to think is to experiment,
but experimentation is always what is in the making – the new, remarkable
and interesting, that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding
than it.”3 The contrast that Deleuze establishes between experimentation and
interpretation marks an important shift in his own philosophical practice—
it coincides in many respects with the start of his collaboration with Félix
Guattari—and it sets the experimental approach to philosophy apart from the
kind of historical framing of the activity of thinking that one can find, albeit
in very different ways, in the work of Hegel and Heidegger. While Deleuze
never clearly specifies how interpretation is to be understood, it is difficult
not to see here both a reference to Heideggerian hermeneutics (Dasein as
unavoidably consigned to interpretation of the world) and to Freudian analysis,
the interpretative dimension of which Paul Ricoeur has discussed in depth.4 The
contrast of experimentation with interpretation in this regard, is connected to
Deleuze’s vindication of a certain kind of “innocence” in the activity of doing
philosophy. A reading of interpretation in either Freudian or Heideggerian
Philosophical Experimentation Between Deleuze and Guattari 219
terms hints at philosophical activity as linked with culpability—a shaking off of

the sins of the philosophical past. And while the naïvety that Deleuze sometimes
vindicates in this regard might not be the same thing as innocence, Deleuze’s
self-characterization as perhaps the most naïve philosopher of his generation
(not interested in the end of this or that, the death of philosophy, and so on)
must certainly be understood in relationship to this refusal of the pathos that
arises out of the link of philosophical thinking with history, or historicity.
But in what, exactly, might experimentation in philosophy consist? Con
trasting experimentation with interpretation does not, in and of itself, provide
us with any positive determination. To the extent that experimentation marks
a refusal of the determining significance of the finitude of the subject that
Heidegger, for one and in the wake of Kant, thought constitutive, we might
want to speak of an experimental metaphysics. But if so, in what sense would
that metaphysics be experimental? References to the experimental are not
exactly new in philosophy. We can trace something of it out in Hume and
perhaps too in Spinoza, whose statement “we feel and know by experience that
we are eternal” in the Ethics5 offers a somewhat more enigmatic and ambiguous
sign to be unfolded, suggesting a crucial connection to an empiricism that
Deleuze himself often qualified as transcendental. But one can also find the
motif of the experimental in philosophies that are closer to us than the early
modern, pre-Kantian era. American pragmatism, for example, offers a rich set
of examples.6 One thinks of Dewey’s essays on experimental logic, the entire
“second empiricism” that Bruno Latour invokes in his own development of an
experimental metaphysics, and of course the work of Alfred North Whitehead,
whom Deleuze called upon on numerous occasions. However, citing
antecedents doesn’t really address the question of what is entailed in Deleuze’s
experimental metaphysics. In this chapter then, I will address some of the
issues that arise from approaching philosophy as a kind of experimentation.
More particularly, I will explore the question of experimentation in Deleuze’s
philosophy with the aim of making the issue of practice, the issue of what
philosophers do when they experiment central.
Practice
We have just noted the importance for Deleuze of the question of what it is that
philosophers do. Indeed, from a very early point—his essay on Hume Empiricism
and Subjectivity—through his reading of Nietzsche (with its emphasis on the
indissolubly speculative and practical qualities of Nietzsche’s consequential

development of critique), his discussions of Spinoza and the emphasis he
there places on the latter’s concept of the “common notions,” right up to the
collaboration with Guattari and beyond (“it is not enough to say ‘long live the
multiple,’ difficult as it is to raise that cry. . . . The multiple must be made”7),
practice and the question of what philosophers do returns throughout his work
as something of a refrain.
Deleuze’s ongoing interest in this issue, of course, can be read in purely
theoretical terms, as something that could be considered as being broadly
consequent on a speculative interest in univocity and expressive immanence
(to avoid the incoherence arising from performative contradiction, a fully
affirmative conceptual system must itself be an instance expressive of
difference—hence it must do what it says, etc.). Considered in this way, a
more detailed exploration of his practice might thus be safely ignored, on the
assumption that a discussion of the content of his theoretical claims would
suffice to capture the essentials of that practice. But such a stance precludes
getting a better appreciation of the peculiar efficacy of Deleuze’s writings, the
role of style, and the specificity of what his writing practice seeks to do, and
for this reason tends to comfort a well-entrenched way of doing philosophy. It
also means specific, important elements of what Deleuze says are overlooked,
as well as ignoring the significance of collaborative writing processes for him
and the specific role that interviews and other circumstantial writings have
for him. More pointedly, ignoring Deleuze’s interest in practice precludes an
appreciation of some of the complexities of his challenge to the institutional
position of philosophy in relation to other practices, and in particular to social
and political issues, and what might be construed as his growing resistance to
the position often occupied by intellectuals in relationship to them. Deleuze’s
exercising of an experimental practice of philosophy is, I will argue, inseparable
from a concern with these issues.
Deleuze’s interest in what philosophers do is not simply one of a concern
with practical reason, as if he was merely interested in constructing a set of
concepts about practice, as part of, say, a second-order discourse about ethics.
Indeed, Difference and Repetition notably seeks to dissolve critical distinctions
between theoretical and practical reason, ethics and aesthetics, in a way that
complicates the matter somewhat. Deleuze’s interest bears more directly on
the pragmatic qualities of philosophical discourse, on the specific exercise of
thought, and on the nature of intellectual practice. This becomes particularly
evident in the well-known conversation between Deleuze and Foucault
“Intellectuals and Power,” which was published in the journal L’Arc on the eve
of the publication of Deleuze’s first book with Guattari Anti-Oedipus. What
people usually remember about this conversation with Foucault is Deleuze’s
notion of the toolbox or Foucault’s notion of the specific intellectual. However,
there are other aspects of the conversation that are worth recalling too. From
the point of view of the present discussion, the way in which Deleuze connects
his understanding of the changing nature of the philosopher or the intellectual
to a particular kind of pragmatics of the oeuvre is interesting here. This
pragmatics is introduced through his assertion that, as he puts it, “there is no
representation. There is only action, the action of theory, the action of practice
in a relay or network relation.”8 While this assertion about representation
is entirely consistent with the critical analysis of the image of thought that
Deleuze had previously undertaken in Difference and Repetition and, to a
lesser extent, The Logic of Sense, it is important to understand that as part of
a conception of philosophy as a toolbox of concepts, it is equally an assertion
about the pragmatic level on which philosophy operates: it does something and
is a component of what others do. The difficulty, here, is in understanding the
nature of that action.
What more clearly differentiates the view that Deleuze develops in his
conversation with Foucault from texts such as Difference and Repetition is the
way in which an otherwise rather abstracted philosophical critique becomes
situated more directly in relation to the social field and the struggles that take
place within it. Much of the discussion between Deleuze and Foucault concerns
the question of power—something that is singularly absent from Difference
and Repetition and The Logic of Sense—and issues such as prison reform and
the GIP set up by Foucault. Somewhat surprisingly perhaps—given the general
tenor of the discussion—Deleuze turns to Marcel Proust to elaborate on his
ideas here about the nature of this relationship between theory and practice.
“It is strange that Proust, who passes for pure intellectual, should articulate it
so clearly: use my book, he says, like a pair of glasses to view the outside – and
if it isn’t to your liking, find another pair, or invent your own, and your device
will inevitably be a device you can fight with.”9 Deleuze’s reference to Proust
here is important, for a number of reasons; however, most significantly, it tells
us something about a very concrete conception of the writing practice of the
work, or oeuvre in its relation to other practices. What Deleuze’s reference
to Proust helps us understand is that it is not specific ideas or arguments or
propositions that matter here, but a kind of active functioning which directly
relates to the construction of the oeuvre.
The oeuvre and experimenting with

the inscription of what is said
A better appreciation of what Deleuze is getting at can be had by considering

his book on Proust, the second edition of which had been published a year
previously. The new edition of Proust and Signs finds Deleuze making significant
use of his collaborator Guattari’s ideas about transversality for the first time.
Indeed, Deleuze’s use of the concept of transversality in this book enables him
to consider the unity of Proust’s oeuvre in purely immanent terms, as a way
of escaping ideas about unification and totalization that rely on an object or a
subject. As he puts it, in 1971, in the chapter on ‘Style’ in Proust and Signs
[I]f a work of art communicates with a public and even gives rise to that public,
if it communicates with the other works of the same artist and gives rise to them,
if it communicates with other works of other artists and gives rise to works to
come, it is always within this dimension of transversality, in which unity and
totality are established for themselves, without unifying or totalising objects or
subjects.10
This thinking about transversal unity calls on an immanently productive

conception of meaning, which Deleuze had already started to develop in his
earlier writings on sense. Drawing on a comment by Malcolm Lowry (which
had itself already appeared in The Logic of Sense), he remarks “[t]o the logos,
organ and organon whose meaning must be discovered in the whole to which
it belongs, is opposed the antilogos, machine and machinery whose meaning
(anything you like) depends solely on its functioning, which, in turn, depends
on its separate parts.”11
Proust, of course, was not, or at least not primarily, a philosopher, and one
might want to argue that Deleuze’s considerations of the way in which a literary
oeuvre functions cannot be extended without qualification to the nature and
organization of philosophical writings, whatever the nature of the theoretical
claims they develop. However, Deleuze’s interest in Proust’s writing practice in
its relation to other practices, to the social, to the generation of a public, is not
an isolated example. It is notable in the conversation with Foucault that Deleuze
refers to Proust as an intellectual—a term that encompasses both literary and
philosophical writers—as this is already suggestive of what he thinks a discussion
of a literary writer can tell us about other kinds of intellectual practice. Deleuze’s
discussion of Proust’s oeuvre in relation to the functioning of non-totalizable parts
clearly connects to the theme of the specific intellectual addressed by Foucault,
and to the refusal to accept the idea that the practice of philosophy, particularly
where it draws on the theoretical privileges accorded to universality, might have
an undue privilege in the interpretation of events, whether that privilege accrues
to a philosophy of history or, indeed, a philosophy of historicity.
There is a rather recurrent thematization of the oeuvre throughout Deleuze’s
writings more generally, and while that thematization becomes particularly
explicit in his discussion of literature, it is broader than that and merits further
consideration. A concern to consider the oeuvre as a whole, for example, clearly
informs the use that Deleuze makes of Lewis Carroll’s writings—not as an idle,
recreational use of logic but as a serious exploration of its paradoxes that sits
alongside the more obviously academic work of Charles Dodgson. Reading
Nietzsche’s “madness letters” alongside his published books (in Anti-Oedipus),
considering Foucault’s interviews as an integral part of the oeuvre, exploring
Leibniz’s letters for the way in which they launch into problems: all exemplify
the importance of a more expansive view of what one must take into account
when one is developing philosophical analysis. What Deleuze says of the
“concrete method” of Foucault, about the way in which one is forced to “start out
from words, phrases, and propositions,” but then organize these in terms of the
“function” that they exercise in an ensemble, serves here to indicate something
important about why it is the oeuvre that matters. It allows us to stick to the
“simple inscription” of what is said “without having recourse to formalisation
or interpretation.”12 In this regard, then, focus on the oeuvre implies something
about the way in which one should situate and understand the ideas, the
concepts, the themes that a philosopher develops. There is no self-sufficiency of
propositions or arguments.13
However, there is a more explicit connection to be made here between
the oeuvre and experimentation, and it can be found in the first instance in
Difference and Repetition. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s exploration of the “open
work,” Deleuze develops a view of the work of art as a “problematic” work, in
which the “identity of the object read really dissolves into esoteric series defined
by esoteric words, just as the identity of the reading subject is dissolved into the
decentred circles of possible multiple readings.”14 Reference to the dissolution
of the object and the subject here clearly links Deleuze’s view on the oeuvre to
key themes of his account of difference—the theme of the larval subject, for
example—which in turn suggests, without directly stating, that part of the
function of the experimental oeuvre is to force thought, to accomplish its genesis,
where philosophies of representation and their legacy failed. There is, he tells us,
a “crucial experience of difference, and a corresponding experiment.”15 The theme
of the open work, in fact, was one that Deleuze had already drawn on in his
book on Proust, and it is a theme that addresses the possibility of generating a
plurality of readings of texts, a theme that was of course closely associated with
the semiotic turn and Tel Quel in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet
if that theme brings us closer to the connection that we need to make between
the work and experimentation, it doesn’t quite capture the practical aspect
of this link. We are still, as the reference to reading suggests, thinking in terms
of texts.
Central in this regard is the account that Deleuze provides of Spinoza. In some
respects, Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza exemplifies the importance of considering
philosophy in terms of the oeuvre, because it draws particular attention to the
specific functioning of different parts of Spinoza’s writing—Expressionism in
Philosophy, for example, had already insisted on the different roles played by
the development of propositions from one part of the Ethics to the next and
that played by the scholia in the same text. Indeed, it is precisely in relation to
Spinoza that Deleuze raises the issue of sticking to the letter of the text, to the
“simple inscription of what is said,” as he put it in his book on Foucault, even if
this is at first couched in terms of a question of philosophical structures.16
However, it is in his second book on Spinoza, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
that the theme of experimentation comes to the fore. Critical here is the account
that Deleuze offers of the “common notions,” pointing out their importance in
“the beginning of philosophy, the scope of the geometric method, the practical
function of the Ethics etc.” Common notions are “practical ideas,” an “art, the
art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations,
forming powers, experimenting.”17 What is of particular interest in Deleuze’s
account of the common notions is the way in which for him they trouble any
simple distinction between the speculative and the practical. Deleuze’s work on
Spinoza more generally is noteworthy for the very close attention that it pays to
the development of its central speculative propositions (the broader significance
of which has been noted by Bell, in this volume). But it is equally important for
its attention to a more practical dimension of the work. In Spinoza: Practical
Philosophy, Deleuze is concerned to point out that much of the Ethics is written
from the point of view of the common notions as practical ideas, and that as a
consequence the crucial speculative propositions developed at the start of the
Ethics [not starting from God] cannot be read solely from a theoretical point
of view.18 Indeed, in the revised edition of the book published a year after
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze insists quite categorically that it is not enough
merely to think Spinoza’s propositions theoretically: “if, as he puts it, one installs
oneself in the midst of these propositions, if one lives them, things are much more
complicated.”19 The practice of experimentation is critical to Deleuze’s reading of
Spinoza, and it is indissociable from the new theme of the construction of a
plane of immanence that Deleuze finds in his work and which will come to have
so much importance to him in What Is Philosophy?
Much could be said here also about the importance of Spinoza in the
construction of a pantheon of philosophers who for Deleuze escape the history
of philosophy in one respect or another. Deleuze says as much himself: “there is
no living corpse who raises the lid of his coffin so powerfully, crying so loudly ‘I
am not one of yours.’ ”20 Escaping the history of philosophy, following thinkers
whose work escaped the image of thought it constructed was, for Deleuze, an
important constituent in his experimental practice of philosophy, for reasons
that will be considered in more detail later in this chapter. We might just note
here that if Spinoza has a determining importance for Deleuze in this regard
it is not so much because he is, to use Negri’s expression, a “savage anomaly,”
although that is clearly significant. It is because in his own experimental approach
to thinking he reveals the existence of the immanence that allows Deleuze to
reconsider and re-evaluate the entirety of the history of philosophy. It was not
so much the concepts that Spinoza developed that impressed Deleuze, it seems,
but the way in which those concepts were related to the plane of immanence.
As he puts it—in rather grandiose terms—“Perhaps this is the supreme act of
philosophy: not so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is
there, unthought in every plane . . . that which cannot be thought and yet must
be thought, which was thought once, as Christ was incarnated once, in order to
show that one time, the possibility of the impossible. Thus Spinoza is the Christ of
philosophers. . . .”21 Spinoza, of course, is a philosopher who has been dealt with
particularly badly by philosophers such as Hegel and Heidegger, and there may
be some connection here with their insistence on finding an internal necessity
to philosophy, to what Deleuze sees as the cult of origins and the refusal of the
contingent qualities of reason. In any case, what starts to become important for
Deleuze in Spinoza’s work is this practical art, this doing of philosophy that is
manifested, in part, by the construction of a plane of immanence.
Transversality and the institutional analysis of philosophy
As was seen earlier in Deleuze’s discussion of Proust, it is clear that the practical
function of the oeuvre has to be understood in relation to questions of power,
to social and political struggle. This is equally, albeit in a rather different way, an
issue that Deleuze’s work on Spinoza also tries to address. It is also a theme that
is particularly explicit in Deleuze’s work with Guattari on Kafka, where the issue
of experimentation comes to the fore: “How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This
work is a rhizome, a burrow . . . only the principle of multiple entrances prevents
the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a
work that is only open to experimentation.”22 The reference to the rhizome here
of course makes rather obvious the connection with the slightly later publication
A Thousand Plateaus where one finds perhaps the most emphatic insistence on
the connection between the experimental work and the doing of philosophy
“the multiple must be made. . . . Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to
be constituted, write at n-1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a
rhizome . . .”23
However, rather than focusing on the slightly later concept of the rhizome, it
is perhaps more fruitful to turn back to Deleuze’s encounter with Félix Guattari,
because if there are clear connections in his work between doing philosophy,
even doing metaphysics, and social and political struggles, this is in part because
of his lengthy collaboration with his friend. Éric Alliez has argued that Deleuze’s
shift toward an understanding of the practice of philosophy as experimentation
is inseparable from his encounter with Guattari.24 Indeed, in his conversation
with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Deleuze quite explicitly acknowledges the role
that Guattari had for him. “In my earlier books, I tried to describe a certain
exercise of thought; but describing it was not yet exercising thought in that
way. . . . With Félix, all that became possible.”25 In this regard, it is noteworthy
that it is Guattari’s concept of transversality, which Deleuze employs directly in
his reading of Proust, that allows him to elaborate his understanding of the link
between the intellectual field of philosophy and social and political realities in
his conversation with Foucault. It is therefore well worth exploring this concept
in a little more depth here, as it will make some of the more concrete, practical
aspects of the idea of experimentation more evident.
Guattari developed the concept and the practice of transversality in the
context of his therapeutic work. Initially considered as a kind of institutional
“transference,” it was proposed as a way to understand and work with the
peculiar libidinal investments of patients with particular forms of psychosis.
It emerges as a result of the need to tackle psychosis through an “oblique”
approach to the space in which it takes hold,26 and it entailed a practical calling
into question of the tacit hierarchies that shape the underlying dynamics of the
treatment of psychosis. While the concept itself undergoes many mutations in
the course of Guattari’s work, it is initially proposed with the aim of determining
“the conditions allowing an institution to play an analytic role in the Freudian
sense.”27
For Guattari, the psychoanalytic idea of the transference arising from the dual
analytic relationship doesn’t adequately capture the dynamics of relationships
in an institution. Institutional dynamics entail different relationships to
hierarchy, to prestige and power, and these dynamics have a crucial, and
typically deleterious, effect on the possibilities of helping psychotic patients out
of their troubles. In his work at the La Borde clinic, Guattari started to realize
that “anything” within the institution could form the starting point for the
development of treatment—borrowing from Gisela Pankow, he suggests that the
institution is like a modeling clay that offers the possibility of “transferential
grafts,” possible points of intervention for the treatment of patients. In practice
this meant calling into question the privileges of speech and of the enunciative
situation this depended on, and on bringing other agents within the institution
into the position of generating analysis. Indeed, by treating the institution itself
as a subject, Guattari contends, one is led to the “introduction of a principle of
an ‘ordering’ of non-sense beyond individual symptomatology,”28 that is to say, of
the development of collective practices that might have therapeutic value.
The relationship of transversality that analysis discerns in the institution
discloses relations of force between different agents—doctors and nurses,
patients, administrators, the institution and the agencies of the state, and so on
that give shape to a collective unconscious, and it is these relations of force that
are dissimulated in the enunciative situation of dual analysis. Making language
sufficient unto itself as the vector of understanding in analysis is intensely
problematic in this regard, because it tacitly prescribes a kind of methodological
individualism in approaching the cure, focusing language on the “personological”
enunciation of the I/You relation. By reckoning institutional factors into the
dynamics of the unconscious, one gets beyond the methodological individualism
of psychoanalysis and introduces broader social determinants and power
relations into the intimate space of mental health. More pointedly, one is led to
an approach in which one must begin from what Guattari was already calling
the “collective agent of enunciation” so as to avoid thingifying the institution as
a structure.29
In this respect, then, transversality opens up a region for investigation that
is trans-individual, as much social as individual, it is shaped institutionally and
points toward the need to begin from group practice and from the “collective
agent of enunciation.” It is this idea of transversality that is at work in Deleuze’s
discussion with Foucault, where he insists on the strange relays that can link
the writings of “pure” intellectuals and social and political struggles, and it is
transversality that informs the rhizomatic view of the oeuvre that we see in
his reading of Kafka as much as his reading of Proust. But more significantly
perhaps, in this context, it might be argued that it is this encounter with Guattari
and the collective practices that his work developed that starts to shape Deleuze’s
views on the institutions of philosophy as such. When, for example, Deleuze
discusses the history of philosophy, in his work with Claire Parnet in 1977, it
is in terms of the “represser’s” role that it plays. “The history of philosophy has
always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought . . . an image
of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops
people from thinking.”30 If the encounter with Guattari becomes so important
for Deleuze, it is perhaps because it introduces the possibility of a treatment of
the language of philosophy that allows one to avoid the hierarchical relationship
that is characteristic of analysis, when viewed from the vantage point of
transversality. Guattari’s practice is addressed to ways of addressing unconscious
dynamics that open out onto other practices, other elements of an institution,
the connection of situations within an institution with their outside. It offers
the possibility of putting patients in the position of generating an analysis of the
institution—a critical clinic, as it were. Deleuze’s insistence in the early 1970s on
the importance of the common notions in Spinoza’s work finds its institutional,
practical correlate in his encounter with Guattari. “When we encounter a body
that agrees with ours, and has the effect of affecting us with joy, this joy (increase
in our power of acting) induces us to form the common notion of these two
bodies, that is, to compound their relations and to conceive their unity of
composition.”31
With Guattari, the emphasis on the importance of describing structures—
whether in philosophy or elsewhere—comes to an end. Transversality, I would
suggest, crystallizes Deleuze’s concern with the image of thought and the
possibility of an exercise of thinking that avoids its implication in more or less
codified structures of power. Deleuze’s interest in structuralism here thus comes
in for extensive self-criticism. In this regard, and given the interest he had hitherto
displayed in exploring structure in philosophical systems, one might choose to
read Deleuze’s first book with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, precisely as an attempt
at developing an experimental approach to thinking outside the abstracted
institutional codes of philosophy, as much it is a critique of psychoanalysis.
Anti-Oedipus in some respects exemplifies a Deleuzean metaphysics—a point
Jean-François Lyotard once made when describing Deleuze’s work in terms of
its construction of an “other” metaphysics.32 But his is a description that tends to

leave “metaphysics,” as a metonym for the institution of philosophy, completely
unexplored. From the point of view of this chapter, however, Anti-Oedipus is
more interesting for the kind of enunciation it develops, rather than the specific
concepts that it proposes.
Anti-Oedipus and the question of style
The extravagantly energetic style of Anti-Oedipus is a long way from the

decidedly more measured qualities of traditional philosophical discourse. And
yet, as Foucault pointed out in his preface to the English-language translation
of the text, that style has a very definite aim: “it could even be said that Deleuze
and Guattari care so little for power that they have tried to neutralise the effects
of power linked to their own discourse. Hence the games and snares scattered
throughout the book. . . . But these are not the familiar traps of rhetoric . . . the
traps of Anti-Oedipus are those of humour: so many invitations to let oneself
be put out, to take one’s leave of the text and slam the door shut.”33 The text is
a long way away from the more sober and temperate stylistic qualities that one
usually associates with philosophical discourse and one might be tempted to
argue its extravagance away as the hubristic fruit of the ferment and upheaval
that the events of 1968 catalyzed within French culture. However, the stylistic
traits of Anti-Oedipus have a very definite function within that work in its critical
struggle against the ways in which power operates within psychoanalytic and
Marxist theory. By challenging what they see as the linguistic supports of that
power within analytic discourse, in part for reasons that Guattari’s conception
of transversality made clear, Deleuze and Guattari aim to bring the reader into
a region within that discourse that escapes the coded and codified functioning
of language, the region of multiplicity. From a clinical point of view, this is
entirely consistent with a view of psychosis that situates the latter in regions
of the unconscious that are far removed from those areas subject to repression
“properly so-called,” and so it is not for nothing that the reader’s experience
of this text is somewhat maddening. But if the text infuriates it also provokes
laughter, and in its garrulous flow it is difficult to find too much that can be
captured within the institutional codes of philosophy.34
In traditional analytic terms, one can understand the authority that a text
acquires as deriving from a process of transference onto the author, who is
supposed to know—a process which, in any case, presumes a dimension, that
of the subject of enunciation—that transcends or, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s

term “overcodes” what is said. Yet with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus that assignation
cannot so easily be made, and the jokey humor of the text, its scabrous assaults
on the figure of the analyst, its refusal to hide behind the erstwhile scientificity
of structure, are the necessary complement to the effort to disclose unconscious
investments in the immanent dimension of transversality, cutting across the
institution, connecting to other practices. Although Anti-Oedipus was frequently
read as lionizing schizophrenia, its extravagantly maddening style might more
charitably be seen as an enacting of the transversal relationship in which patient
and doctor both find themselves exploring a domain of the unconscious over
which neither has proprietary control.
Non-style, rhythm, and the experience of thought
The very particular style of Anti-Oedipus might seem to today’s reader a little
superannuated, yet it aims a particular kind of functioning of the written text
which has a broader import. The style here is not so much about textual play,
the perpetual slippage of signifiers and so on, which formed the bread and
butter of so much literary critical appropriation of French theory, and it does
not aim at disclosing the constitutively aporetic nature of Freud’s discoveries,
an approach that would be characteristic of deconstruction. Indeed, while
Deleuze is clear that he “admires” “the method of deconstruction of texts”
“a great deal,” it has nothing to do with his method. As he puts it, “for me
a text is nothing but a cog in an extratextual practice. It is not a matter of
commenting on the text by the method of deconstruction, or by a method of
textual practice, or by other methods, it is a matter of seeing how it might serve
in the extratextual practice that prolongs the text.”35 In this instance there is a
very definite connection with the social and the political—the energetic style
of the writing which evokes precisely the mobility, the “fugitive” qualities of
that “other” metaphysics to which Lyotard refers and which Freud was, despite
himself, unable to fix in “binding” arguments36 becomes for Deleuze and
Guattari a crucial factor in the elaboration of the social and political struggles
against power.
It is not, then, the specific claims it makes about psychoanalysis that makes
Anti-Oedipus important in this regard—and for this reason we should take
Lyotard’s reading of the “other” metaphysics in exclusively psychoanalytic
terms here with a pinch of salt. It is what the text tries to do in relation to
philosophical discourse that matters. Understanding what Deleuze is doing in

relation to an idea of experimental practice here requires us to consider, at least
in part, other elements of his work from the same period, not least because
what Anti-Oedipus attempts to do through the writing practice developed by
Deleuze with Guattari is continued in other writings in more or less the same
period. There is a broader challenge in his work to the enunciative position
of the author, an issue that in some respects extends the critique of analysis
and the authority of interpretation that derives from the transference, and it is
something Deleuze both thematizes and practices in his 1977 interview with
Claire Parnet, for example.
However, having made these critical points, if we were to seek to extract from
Anti-Oedipus what makes it exemplary of the experimental practice of philosophy
on Deleuze’s part, it would not be in terms of that negative movement away from
the author function, even if that is a significant aspect of what constitutes the
particular exercise of thought Deleuze was aiming at there. Rather, it is what
that shift enables by way of a more constructive expression of a specific kind of
mobility in thought, which Deleuze associates with thinking more generally that
matters. Thematized as “nomad thought” it is a particular kind of functioning of
the philosophical text that Deleuze sought to practice.
Movement, of course, is key to Deleuze’s philosophy more generally, and it
is perhaps to the particular kinds of rhythms of language use in Anti-Oedipus
that one might turn to understand the positive role of style for Deleuze in the
practice of philosophy. But, while more poetic considerations of this kind are
indeed significant in this regard, it is important not to ignore the point that for
Deleuze style is never just style, for just the same reason that language is never
just language. If the rhythms of a text cannot be thought without language,
this does not mean they are necessarily linguistic, and if it is the style of a
writer that is central to a work’s construction, it is crucial to understand that
the movements of a text operate in a different dimension to that which we can
codify in terms of historically, institutionally, culturally, or linguistically specific
regularities. Rhythm, Deleuze reminds us in A Thousand Plateaus, is “never on
the same plane as that which has rhythm.” It is something that always happens
between.37 In this respect, being “between,” “in the middle,” “rhythm” are terms
that not only help us understand the kind of relationship that Deleuze wants
others to establish in relationship to his text, they also help us understand how
it is that philosophical style acts, what it does, how it can become “non-style.”
If Deleuze accords such importance to style, even in the work of a philosopher
like Spinoza who, he suggests, appears not to have any style, this is because it
offers us a way to follow the movements of thought that are constitutive of the
plane of immanence. Rhythms are a response to chaos, “rhythm-chaos or the
chaosmos,”38 and it is in terms of rhythm that Deleuze thematizes the plane of
immanence that is constructed in Spinoza’s Ethics “one never commences; one
never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays
down rhythms.”39
Of course, it is important not to overstate the importance of style here, but
with a text like Anti-Oedipus, this is difficult to ignore. However, the important
point is that what Deleuze and Guattari are doing in this text, the shift that
it marks in Deleuze’s understanding of philosophy, has to do with a wholly
serious endeavor to construct a plane of immanence on which thinking might
be effectively generated. This is what the immanent functioning of the oeuvre,
which Deleuze had discussed in relation to Proust, is about. The confusing,
maddening nature of a series of texts with Guattari presents an attempt to
construct a “plane” that, as What Is Philosophy? puts it “give[s] consistency
without losing anything of the infinite,” a “sectioning” of chaos.40 It is a matter
of “extracting” diagrammatic movements from the chaos in which we are not
yet thinking, a process that itself requires “a sort of groping experimentation”
that “resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational or reasonable.”41
If working with Guattari was essential to Deleuze’s philosophy, it is because it
yielded a practice of thought that contested the kinds of enunciative position
that confer an underhanded power on the thinker (as Foucault points out), and
which results in the rendering of immanence as immanent to a subject: it opened
up a movement that took place between Deleuze and Guattari42 that is relayed,
or that they sought to relay, through their writings.
Conclusion: Experimental metaphysics
Considerably more could be said about the trajectory that Deleuze’s work
takes with Guattari and what this means for his refinement of an experimental
practice of philosophy. More in particular would need to be said about his
references to how and why he thinks that he failed in this endeavor.43 The
focus here has been on a singular moment of transition in Deleuze’s work and
what a closer investigation of aspects of this can tell us about his interest in
what philosophers do. Next to nothing has been said in this chapter regarding
substantive claims about metaphysics or of a metaphysical nature per se.
Deleuze himself does not say a great deal about metaphysics as such, even
though, in response to a series of questions addressed to him by Arnaud

Villani, he once remarked, in a rather lapidary way, “I feel myself to be a pure
metaphysician,” without further elaboration. There are numerous indicators
in Deleuze’s work of how he understands metaphysics, and these have been
commented on elsewhere very ably. However, it is easy, when commenting on
a philosopher’s metaphysics to settle into the customary framing of philosophy
in terms of the adoption of particular positions, specific arguments and
concepts. With regard to a philosopher like Deleuze, the risk is that one then
loses sight of this other aspect of his work, and it is not an aspect of his work
that is particularly hidden or tacit. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze remarks
that, by contrast with the Ancient Greeks, “we have concepts, or believe we
have concepts, after so many centuries of Western thought, but we don’t know
what to do with them or where to put them, because we are lacking a genuine
plane.” The plane of immanence, and Deleuze’s approach to it, as outlined
here, offers a cautionary reminder of the risk of reducing philosophy simply to
theoretical positions.
This chapter has suggested that there is a specific practical element to the
doing of philosophy for Deleuze, whether metaphysical or not, that revolves
around the matter of experimentation. It has argued for the importance of a
more serious consideration of Guattari’s role in Deleuze’s work, particularly
with regard to the shift toward experimentation. With Guattari—and this has
been the concern of the chapter—it is the question of the doing of philosophy
that comes to the fore for Deleuze. However, even while it can sometimes
look like it, philosophical experimentation for Deleuze is not just a matter of
style. There is something like a specific experience of thought, the “vertigo of
immanence,” that Deleuze’s writings seek to articulate, but it is an experience
that doesn’t really “belong” to anyone. His suggestive remark that the plane of
immanence is “perhaps that of a radical empiricism” points toward the pure
experience explored by William James, which, as Stengers has put it, “does not
authorize anything. . . . Pure experience is “plain” that is, mute with regard to
what it will retroactively signify.”44 In this respect, Deleuze’s struggle against
the image of thought, against presuppositions about what thinking is or might
become, and his engagement in constructing a plane of immanence calls out
for other practices: if the theme of pure immanence says something about the
impossibility of knowing what thinking is, and if that is why experimentation
is the practice that is adequate to pure immanence, then the way in which
philosophy is taken up by other practices is an irreducible element in the
becoming of thinking.
Notes

3 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 111. The translation is slightly
modified—the French “se faisant” here follows standard translations of variants on
the expression in Bergson’s work, as “in the making.”
4 Of course, it might also be read in relation to Deleuze’s own vindication of
interpretation, construed in Nietzsche and Philosophy in terms of the forces that
seize hold of a thing. See the first chapter of Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy.
5 Spinoza, Ethics, Part 5, Proposition 23, Scholium. The French verb for
“to experience” used in the translations of Spinoza is “experimenter,” which
can also translate as “to experiment.”
6 Experimentation is the key theme on a collection of papers on pragmatism edited
by Didier Debaise. See Debaise, Vie et expérimentation. It includes a paper by
Latour on the “second” empiricism.
8 Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” p. 208.
9 Ibid.
10 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 168.
11 Ibid., p. 146.
12 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 113 fn. 21. Deleuze is referring here not just to Foucault
but to Martial Guéroult, whose importance for Deleuze has generally been
overlooked, albeit with some exceptions.
13 The importance of considering the nature of an oeuvre has been explored, albeit in
a rather different way, in Milner, L’Oeuvre claire, pp. 13–32.
15 Ibid., p. 50 (my italics).
16 A point Deleuze makes in his essay on Martial Guéroult, which is also interesting
in this regard because of the link it suggests between Deleuze’s interest in
structuralism and his growing hostility toward interpretation. See “Guéroult’s
general method for Spinoza,” in The Desert Island and other essays, pp. 146–55.
18 In this respect, I would argue that Deleuze is offering a significant qualification of
the discussion of structures of philosophical systems provided in his short text on
Guéroult’s work.
20 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 15.
22 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 3.

24 See Eric Alliez, “Conclusion: The Guattari-Deleuze Effect.”
25 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, pp. 16–17.
26 On this issue see in particular the work of Polack and Sivadon, Intimate Utopia.
27 Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité, p. 89.
28 Ibid., p. 90.
29 Ibid., p. 47.
30 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 13.
31 Deleuze, Spinoza, pp. 118–19.
32 Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the Jews,’ p. 12.
33 Foucault, “Preface,” p. xiv.
34 It is noteworthy in this regard that this is a text that often gets ignored in accounts
of Deleuze’s philosophy.
35 Deleuze, “Nomad Thoughts,” p. 260, translation modified. One could say a lot
here about the characterization of deconstruction as a method, which is perhaps
somewhat erroneous. The key point though, it seems to me, is that from Deleuze’s
point of view, to frame one’s approach to a text in terms of its aporia might indeed
be interesting, but it is a way of avoiding its implication in extratextual practices.
36 See in this regard Bersani, The Freudian Body.
37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 313–14.
38 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 41.
42 See Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers (New York and Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2006) for some aspects of this movement.
43 There is a comment to this effect in his conversation with Claire Parnet. See
Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 17.
236
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Index
Abstract 7, 13–14, 16, 20, 23, 25, 44, 55, Becoming, Continuity of 5–6, 14, 17,
57, 115, 117, 119, 123, 127–8, 132–3, 33, 183
171, 174, 195, 199, 204, 206, 221, 228 Becoming, Process of 57–8, 99,
Abstraction 3–4, 16, 19–20, 25, 27–8, 112–13, 115, 118–19, 162
57, 138–9, 169–171, 174, 196–200, Being 6, 19, 26, 43, 51, 66, 71–2, 74–5,
202–7 77, 79–80, 82, 88–91, 94–7, 99–100,
Access, philosophy of 2, 39–42 110, 128, 131, 138–40, 153, 162 165,
Actuality, Vacuous 43 168–70, 172, 182, 202, 207–8
Adventure 15, 24–5, 63, 75, 102, 114, 169, Bell, Jeffrey 8–9, 149, 159, 224
172, 176, 179, 181, 196–7, 201–3, Bennett, Jane 6, 30, 110–11
211–16 Berkeley, George 37–8, 54
Aim, Subjective 18, 21–2, 32, 43, 102 Blake, William 109
Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Mohammad Bogost, Ian 46
ibn Mohammad 59, 62 Bono, James 5, 13, 34–5
Allure 3–4, 10, 49–50, 56–60 Borges, Jorge Luis 29, 44
Alquié, Fernand 145–6, 154–5 Brown, Nathan 39
Analysis 2, 40, 42, 49, 53, 103, 165, 218, Bryant, Levi 6, 38–9, 71, 90–1
223, 227–8, 231
Analysis, Institutional 225 Canalization 27–8, 31, 35
Anthropocentrism 54–5, 181–2, 197–200 Care 48, 63, 130, 189, 207
Antinomy 44, 52 Causality 38, 48, 50, 54–5, 57, 59–60, 87,
Antirealism 8, 37, 145–6, 149–50, 154, 94, 96, 100, 106, 124, 139, 154, 177,
158–9 191–2
Apophatic 60–1, 64 Causality, Formal 48
Aristotelian 3, 5–6, 14, 17, 21, 30, 57, 59 Causation 6, 50, 52, 54, 59
Aristotle 13, 17, 20, 30–1, 71, 73, 82, 86, Causation, Vicarious 6, 47, 56,
89–90 58, 61
Assemblage 23, 34, 119, 176 Cause 48, 50, 58, 61, 112, 127, 147, 154,
Atom 14, 17, 21, 29–30, 44, 51, 100–1, 162, 175, 177, 185–6, 191, 212
115–16, 171, 183, 209 Certeau, Michel de 25
Atomicity 5–7, 14–19, 21, 29–30, 34, 53 Change 5, 15, 18, 20, 27, 42, 44, 52–3, 72,
Atomism 14, 21–2, 44, 29–30, 51, 81–2, 92, 96, 98–100, 102, 105, 107,
53, 97–8 135, 155, 157
Autopoiesis 6, 82–3, 90 Christianity 15, 26, 59, 62, 74, 113–14,
141, 186, 201
Bacon, Francis 25, 35–6, 55, 119, 186 Cogito, Ego 56–7
Badiou, Alain 2, 44, 49, 74, 151–2, 154–5 Coleman, Sam 41
Becoming 5–7, 17–20, 27, 55, 57–60, Commodities 3, 131, 133–5, 137–9
73, 75, 78–9, 87, 97–100, 102, 114, Communication 28, 52, 119, 189, 203
117–19, 131, 147–55, 162, 165–6, Composition 43–4, 49, 94, 146–7, 228
174, 177, 183–5, 214–15, 233 Conatus 7, 92, 95–6, 99–104
248 Index
Concepts 9, 25, 127, 131, 134, 136, 138–9, Derrida, Jacques 6, 24, 62, 71–90, 114,
152, 154, 156–7, 160, 170, 179, 116–17, 136
185–6, 205, 209, 215, 189–91, 220–1, Descartes, René 45, 180, 188, 206
225, 229, 233 Detachment 61–2, 169
Concrescence 7, 14, 18–19, 22, 92, 101–4, Determinacy 18–20, 33, 43, 96, 98–106,
108, 112, 166, 170 120, 147, 153, 156–60, 170–1,
Conformation 13, 20–4, 32–3, 124–5, 193–4, 227
137, 139, 170 Différance 6, 72, 77–9, 82–3, 85–8
Connection 11, 14, 47, 49, 52–8, 60–1, Difference 17, 27–8, 78–9, 84, 87–9, 91,
97, 99, 115, 117, 119, 121, 129, 157, 111, 116, 189, 215, 223
188, 195–6, 202 Disconnection 11, 52, 54–7
Connectionism 118 Durkheim, Émile 8, 126–40
Connectivity 47–50, 52, 54–6,
58–61, 115 Ego 57
Connolly, William 117–19 Emanation 59, 152
Contact 40, 45, 48, 53, 111, 113, 120 Empedocles 51
Contiguity 47, 49, 56 Entities, Vibrational 116, 118
Contingent 19, 25, 76, 89, 101, 129, 151, Entity, Actual 13–14, 18–20, 22, 27, 42–5,
155, 182, 225 100–1, 109, 111–12, 117, 125, 127,
Continuity, Becoming of 5–6, 15, 17, 19, 131, 147, 157, 165–6, 170–2, 209,
20–1, 33, 183 213–14
Continuous 99, 104 Enunciation 227, 229–30
Continuum, Extensive 18–19 Epigenetic 27–8
Contrast 21–3, 31–3, 55, 57, 101–2, 104, Essence 18–19, 52, 57, 59–63, 77, 112,
201–2 120, 124, 135, 145, 154, 165
Cooper, Robert 23–4 Event 5, 8, 13–18, 21, 27, 57–8, 60–1,
Corbin, Henry 59 73–4, 76, 83–5, 98–100, 112, 115,
Core, Molten 47–8, 54, 56–7, 60–1, 63 117, 120, 147–50, 158, 195, 205, 207
Correlationism 1–2, 8–9, 37–9, 41–2, Experience 2, 7, 10, 13–30, 37, 51,
140, 149–50, 155, 191, 193–5 55, 61–2, 94–5, 97, 102, 105, 116,
Coupling 56, 119–20 118, 123–4, 130–1, 138, 146–7,
Creativity 14–25, 49, 54, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 165–75, 194, 199, 201, 205, 210,
101, 112–13, 118, 168, 189, 192–3, 223, 233
201, 211–15 Experimentation 8, 15, 98, 143, 148, 162,
Creature 6–7, 29, 55, 69, 101, 109–20, 182, 193–6, 200–1, 208, 218–20,
125, 169, 192, 212 222–6, 228, 231–4
Creature, God as 112–14, 212 Expression 9, 156–7, 163–79
Creatureliness 6–7, 109–20 Externality 53–5, 79, 96–7
Cusa, Nicolas of 63
Faber, Roland 6, 47
Darwin, Charles 26–7 Facts, Social 8, 126–7, 129, 132
Dasein 38–40, 54, 57, 218 Feeling 14, 20, 21–2, 32–4, 55, 57, 77, 94,
Deferral 78–9, 86–7 101–2, 116–17, 147, 183, 196, 204
DeLanda, Manuel 42 Feeling, Lure for 4, 9, 25, 111, 179
Deleuze, Gilles 2–10, 17, 24–5, 33, Fetishism 133–4, 137
43, 73–4, 77–8, 96, 112, 118–20, Feuerbach, Ludwig 62
145–60, 189–90, 192–6, 203, 215, Form 17, 20, 26, 32–3, 48, 55, 57, 61,
218–5 209, 214
Democritus 51 Form, Modal 55
Index 249
Foucault, Michel 9, 215, 220–4, 226, Intensity 22–3, 31–2, 61, 76, 166, 184, 214
228, 232 Interaction, Causal 38, 96
Fox-Keller, Evelyn 28 Interiority 6, 42–3, 49, 51, 53, 55–7, 59–62
Internality 49, 54–5
God 16, 48, 58–9, 61–2, 72, 76, 103, 109,
112–14, 131, 134–8, 152–6, 169, 182, James, William 16, 19, 43, 97–8, 102, 114,
206, 209–10, 212, 214, 224 165, 169, 177, 180–1, 199, 201–3,
God, Unknowability of 59, 72 210, 233
Goffey, Andrew 1, 218 Jones, Jude 7, 92
Guattari, Felix 10, 119, 153, 156–7, 218, Jouissance 116
221–2, 226–33 Juvenal 61
Halewood, Michael 7–8, 31, 123 Kant, Immanuel 2, 4, 37, 39–44, 62,
Harman, Graham 2, 4–6, 30, 36, 47–64, 107, 123–4, 130, 145–6, 148, 152,
72, 89, 181, 192 164–5, 172, 188–90, 192–3, 195, 205,
Harraway, Donna 3, 9, 35, 39, 141, 172, 178 210, 219
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1, 7, 62, Khora 61
79, 121, 134, 152, 155, 218, 225 Knowledge, Absolute 39–40
Heidegger, Martin 1–2, 24, 37–40, 42, 50,
53–4, 57, 62, 153, 218–19, 225 Language 2, 78, 88, 11, 113–14, 126, 131,
Hiddenness 60–1 173–5, 184–5, 227, 229, 231
History 8–9, 97, 105, 162–79, 219 Latour, Bruno 3, 9, 24, 35, 38, 42, 44,
Human 6–7, 37–42, 50–1, 54, 56, 59, 126–32, 148, 158, 160–5, 174, 177,
61–4, 95, 102, 109–19, 126–37, 191–3, 198, 212, 219
162–78, 197, 191, 200, 202 Law, John 24
Hume, David 8, 54, 56, 62, 146–51, 157, Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm 53–4
175, 191–2, 219 Lewis, David 2, 8, 150–1, 154–7
Husserl, Edmund 1–2, 38, 40–1, 50, 54, Life 5, 10, 19–23, 26, 31, 110–11, 113,
57, 62 115, 118, 121, 167, 195, 213, 215
Locke, John 42, 45, 54, 71
I, Real Object 56–64 Lotus Flower, Sutra of the 61
Ibn al-Arabi, Muhyiddin 59, 62 Lucretius 51
Idealism 37–8, 41, 44–5, 50–1, 54 Luhmann, Niklas 6, 82, 84–5, 90
Idealism, Subjectivist 51–2 Lyotard, Jean-François 110, 228, 230
Ignorantia, Docta 63
Immanence 26, 40, 220, 225, 232–3 Macroscopic 44–5
Immanence, Mutual 5, 60–1 Maïmon, Solomon 143
Immanence, Plane of 10, 49, 192, 225, Malebranche, Nicolas 47, 49, 56, 58–9, 62
232–3 Marovich, Beatrice 6–7, 109
Importance 103–4, 165–6, 168–78 Marx, Karl 3, 8, 126, 128, 131–5, 137–9,
Incompleteness, Mutual 47 141, 229
Independence 47, 54, 56, 59–60, 88 Materialism 21, 48, 50
Individual 7, 14, 55, 69, 92–108, 123, 125, Matter, Vibrant 6, 110–11
128–9, 132, 137–8, 146 Mechanism 51, 119
Individuation 7, 71, 77, 86, 92, 94–7, Meditation 47–9, 61, 63
100, 102 Meillassoux, Quentin 2, 8, 37, 39–42,
Inheritance 21–3, 117, 192 135, 140, 149–51, 155–7
Institution 23, 220, 225–31 Meister Eckhart 161
Integration 88, 101, 145, 154 Mental 20, 33, 50, 52–3, 58
250 Index
Mentality 50–1, 169, 171, 173 Pattern 20, 100–2, 171, 202, 208,
Metaphor 170–2, 179, 186 Periodicities, Coincidence of 120
Metaphysics 1–3, 6–10, 19–20, 59, 63, 72, Perishing 14, 19, 44–5, 84, 98, 100, 115
94–5, 105, 123, 125, 128–9, 131–6, Permanence 52, 113
138–9, 162–70, 174–9, 214, 219, 226, Philosophy 6–10, 39–41, 51, 62–3, 93,
228–30, 232–3 129, 135, 145–50, 155–6, 176, 188,
Microscopic 44–5, 97, 95, 100, 102 190, 192–3, 195–6, 199, 211, 218–21,
Modernity 175–8, 186, 199 224, 228, 230–3
Monad 14, 96, 101 Philosophy, Analytic 37
Morton, Timothy 87 Philosophy, Continental 37, 41
Multiplicity 14, 16, 19–20, 24, 26–7, Philosophy, Object Oriented 38–9,
62–4, 112–13, 146–8, 152, 154, 41, 50, 90
156–9, 167, 226, 229 Philosophy, Speculative 38–40, 52,
Mysticism 63 170, 179, 188, 190, 204, 209
Physical 19, 21–3, 26, 29, 43, 50,
Nature, Bifurcation of 175–8, 185, 196, 52–3, 58–9, 101, 108, 111, 116–17,
204–5 134, 176
Nature, Book of 15, 26–7, 35 Poe, Edgar Allen 36
Necessity, Contingency vs. 155 Poiesis 15, 24
Novelty 22, 31–2, 52, 54, 58, 168, 170, Posthumanities 114–15
172, 174, 212, 214 Potentiality 17–19, 31, 77, 79, 100, 162,
170, 184
Object 7, 9, 14, 22–3, 24–8, 37–8, 40, Power 27, 45, 51, 56, 58–9, 74–8, 81, 87,
42–3, 52–64, 72, 74–83, 86–7, 90, 92, 89, 110–11, 113, 117, 124–5, 146,
95, 123–9, 131–7, 140, 155–9, 162, 151, 157–8, 179, 182, 185, 188–93,
164, 179, 223 197–9, 205–7, 211–12, 215, 221, 225,
Objects, Enduring 13, 21–3, 98, 227–32
100–1, 111–13 Practice 3, 15–16, 40, 133, 166, 169, 173,
Objects, Real 44, 52–64, 195 219, 232
Objects, Unknowability of 40, 60, 192 Pragmatic 7, 40, 101, 125–6, 162, 170,
Objectification 18, 55, 57, 102 181, 192, 200, 220–1
Occasion 15–23, 45, 50, 58–60, 98, 101, Pragmatism 103, 155, 179, 190,
166, 174, 178, 209 201, 219
Occasion, Actual 6, 13–23, 29–30, 45, Prehension 18–22, 32–3, 39, 43–4, 54–5,
61, 97–8, 112, 209 57–8, 147, 166, 170
Occasionalism 6, 47, 49–50, 58–61 Process 3–10, 13, 19, 24–5, 72, 96, 131
Oeuvre 10, 223–5, 228, 232 Program 17–20, 213
One 26, 102–3, 105–6, 152–3, 166 Propositions 4, 9, 152–4, 168–75, 179,
Oneness 59, 62 224–5
Ontology 1, 3–8, 13–14, 16–18, 25–6, 48, Proust, Marcel 221–8
63, 94, 101–2, 110–12, 114–16, 119, Purpose 15–20, 165, 172
129, 147, 150, 159 Purpose, Conformation of 20–3
Ontology, Object-Oriented 36–7, 39,
41, 90, 190 Quality 78
Organic 19–20, 26, 33–4, 47, 51, 53,
117–18 Rationalism 97, 102, 105, 146, 169, 177,
Organicism 19, 50, 53 188, 201
Organism, Philosophy of 19–20, 62, Rationality 2, 169, 188
124–5, 175, 180 Rationalization 63, 102
Index 251
Realism 1, 37–40, 50–2, 104–5 145–59, 208 Shakespeare, William 49

Realism, Objectivist 51 Shaviro, Steven 5, 36–45, 112–13,
Realism, Speculative 4, 8, 37–40, 42, 124, 130
44, 50–1, 147–50, 180–1, 190–1 Situatedness 163–82
Relation 5–6, 19, 25, 39, 52–3, 56–60, Smallism 5, 42, 44–5
88–91, 97, 116–21, 127, 130, 194 Society 20–33, 45, 112–16,
Relationalism 41–2, 52–3, 58 127, 209
Relations, Domestic 43 Solipsism 52–3, 56–7
Relations, External 42–5, 78, 80–2, Spinoza, Benedict 7, 96, 102, 152–3, 157,
86–7, 97 219–20
Relations, Foreign 43 Stearns, Isabel 7, 92–108
Relations, Internal 42–4, 79, 88 Stengers, Isabelle 4, 6–7, 15, 24, 39,
Relevance 33, 94, 167, 171 113–14, 127, 135, 169, 175
Resonance 4, 6, 111, 116–21 Studies, Science 13–28
Resonance, Creaturely 115, 117, Subjectivism 51
119–21 Sufficient Reason, Principle of 155–6
Reversion 22, 32, 214 Superjects 21, 100
Rhizome 48, 226 Supervenience 8, 151, 154, 157–8
Rhythm 21–3, 33, 230–2 Symbiosis 43, 195
Rilke, Rainer Maria 109
Rorty, Richard 38 Telos 15, 96, 117
Thought, Habits of 179–85
Scheme, Potential 18–19 Touch 47–64
School, Ash’ari 62 Transversality 222–30
Science 3, 5, 8, 13–28, 126, 146–7,
150, 178 Vector 18–20, 33, 37
Seauton, Gnothi 61
Sehgal, Melanie 8–9, 162 Waddington, C. H. 5, 24, 27–8
Sein 38–40 Whitehead, Alfred North 7–10, 13–28,
Self 47, 58, 61–3 38–45, 49–55, 79, 92–105, 111–25,
Self, Construction of 47, 58, 214 145–59, 190–214, 219
252

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The Allure of Things

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy presents cutting-edge scholarship in all the

Some other titles in the series

Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2014

© Roland Faber, Andrew Goffey and Contributors, 2014

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Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction: Thinking Things Thinking Things, or Some Themes

Part 1 Crossings: Connection, Disconnection, Vibration

1 Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and “Things”:

Part 2 Things: Substances, Individuals, and Creatures

4 The Time of the Object: Derrida, Luhmann, and the Processual

Part 3 Dramatizations: Situating, Abstracting, Experimenting

8 Between Realism and Antirealism: Deleuzian Metaphysics

10 Speculative Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization

11 Philosophical Experimentation Between Deleuze and

Jeffrey Bell is professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University

James J. Bono is (chair, Department of History, University at Buffalo, SUNY;

Levi R. Bryant is a professor of philosophy at Collin College outside of Dallas,

Roland Faber is Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb Jr Professor of Process Studies at

Andrew Goffey is associate professor of critical theory and cultural studies at

Graham Harman is distinguished university professor at the American

Jude Jones studied Whitehead with Elizabeth Kraus as an impressionable

Beatrice Marovich recently finished her PhD in theology and philosophy at

Melanie Sehgal is professor of Literature, Science and Media Studies at the

Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her

Aiming at the exploration of the depth and relevance of current modes of

The present collection of essays is the material trace of a conference held at

concerns of process- and object-oriented ontologies develops in lively exchanges

he says, the commodity is “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical

process-oriented philosophies, and they revisit and rework some fundamental

discussion of what the withdrawnness of objects might mean, in the face of an

addition to proposing a constructive account of the “inhuman.” Of course, the

it head on. For Halewood, it is by turning to sociology, a discipline that, in a

Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects,

In offering his philosophy of organism to us in sharp and explicit contrast with

In contrast to an Aristotelian “continuity of becoming,” Whitehead as an “anti-

an occasion of experience: what he presciently, even provocatively, terms the

grasped through the sheer power of intellect—of ideas—or, alternatively, as a

Aristotelian notions of discrete substances. In the last part of this discussion,

occasion—does not determine subsequent states of matter, or subsequent events.

altering the potentialities—the matrix of potential relations—for newly emerging

In sum, then, the atomicity of actual occasions in Whitehead’s philosophy

1. In the continual remaking of atomistic units of experience—the actual

As Whitehead himself asserts:

“Things,” science, and science studies

both the poetic—the active and positively constructive—activity that we call

An explanation of “developmental canalization,” he wrote, requires supplement­

1 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 18 and passim.

are complete and contained in themselves, while also imbricated in an extensive

19 Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 67–8.

satisfaction that produces a new actual occasion. As Whitehead states, “Thus

which is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be. In the

An explanation of “developmental canalization,” he wrote, requires supplement