Author: Steven Shaviro

Panpsychism, Whitehead, and OOO

I am still working, up to the last minute, on my paper for the Whitehead Research Project’s Metaphysics and Things conference next week. My paper is called “Consequences of Panpsychism,” and it argues that we should take the panpsychist aspect of Whitehead seriously. Whitehead is not a vitalist — he doesn’t believe everything is alive. But he does argue that everything has mentality, at least incipiently. Mentality, rather than aliveness, is the requisite for things having agential force. Indeed, mentality is a requisite for aliveness, rather than the reverse. Theorizations about agentiality, or mentality,ought to replace the current mania for theorizing “life.” Also, mentality should be defined in terms of affect — or, what Whitehead calls “feeling,” specifically “conceptual feeling” — rather than in terms of computation or cognition, since feeling is a prior requisite for any sort of computation or cognition.

In the course of writing this, however, I cannot help coming back to my agreements and disagreements with OOO (object-oriented ontology). Just this morning, Levi, responding to a post from notes for a later time, endorsed “agential realism” as an aspect of OOO. The point of OOO is not that everything is passive, or “just” an object, but that (as Latour also says) everything is active and agential. To this extent, I am entirely in accord with OOO. The parts of OOO that I reject are the claims 1) that objects are “substances,” and that they are somehow “withdrawn,” and 2) that (in Graham’s version, if not in Levi’s) causality is problematic, and can only be conceived “vacariously,” through a version of occasionalism.

Another way to put this is to say that what I find valuable and inspiring about OOO are the questions it asks, which I think are necessary and important ones; rather than its particular answers to these questions, which I don’t accept. And this has become one motif of my talk in preparation. I reproduce the relevant paragraphs here:

OOO offers four challenges to contemporary philosophy, four rejections of commonly held post-Kantian doctrines:

1.In the first place, OOO rejects what Quentin Meillassoux calls correlationism. This is the idea that, as Harman puts it, “we cannot think of humans without world, nor world without humans, but only of a primal rapport or correlation between the two. For the correlationist, it is impossible to speak of a world that pre-existed humans in itself, but only of a world pre-existing humans for humans.” To reject correlationism is to accept the meaningfulness of a world that exists, in and for itself, independently of human beings. We need to get away from the sophism that, as Harman sarcastically summarizes it, “what is thought is thereby converted entirely into thought, and that what lies outside thought must always remain unthinkable.” For the whole point of philosophical speculation is to point thought outside itself, to orient thought to that which it cannot grasp or comprehend, to reach outside what Meillassoux calls “the correlationist circle.”

2.In the second place, OOO rejects what Harman calls the philosophy of human access. This is not quite the same thing as correlationism, though it is closely related. In this philosophy, which has dominated Western thought at least since Hume and Kant, “everything is reduced to a question of human access to the world, and non-human relations are abandoned to the natural sciences.” To reject the priority of human access is to recognize that non-human entities are active in themselves, and that they affect one another, even in the absence of human input or observation. All encounters between entities happen on the same ontological level. As Harman puts it, rightly attributing this position to Whitehead, “we can speak in the same way of the relation between humans and what they see and that between hailstones and tar.” Human understanding has no special ontological privilege. We must reject the binary opposition between human subjectivity, intellect, and initiative, on the one hand, and the supposed passivity and inertness of objects, or of mere matter, on the other. Rather, we must join Bruno Latour in seeing a world of nonhuman, as well as human, actants.

3.In the third place, OOO rejects relationalism, or the idea that every entity is entirely determined by, and can be completely described in terms of, its relations to other entities. For relationist thought, “there are no things; structure is all there is.” A structure in this sense is founded upon what Manuel Delanda calls “relations of interiority: the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole. A part detached from such a whole ceases to be what it is, since being this particular part is one of its constitutive properties.” To reject this notion of structure, as Harman and Delanda both do, is to recognize that, as Harman puts it, “there can be no relations without relata.” For Delanda, as for Deleuze, “relations are external to their terms. . . a relation may change without the terms changing.” Similarly, for Harman, “objects are irreducible to their relations with other things, and always hold something in reserve from these relations.” 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.

4.In the fourth place, OOO rejects what Sam Coleman calls smallism, 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.” Smallism maintains that (in Harman’s summary of it) “all physical things can be reduced to microparticles – so that a table would be nothing over and above the quarks and electrons of which it is made.” Such a doctrine is upheld, not just by hardcore physical reductionists, but by nearly all analytic philosophers, including those, like Coleman, who are inclined towards panpsychism. To reject smallism is to insist upon the integrity, and the actuality, of entities of all sizes. It is to recognize that a table is every bit as real as the microparticles of which it is composed. Harman argues this point by citing Delanda’s multi-level “assemblage theory.” Actual concrete things are always “assemblages: real units made up of subpersonal components.” Instead of tortuously parsing out the alleged differences between ultimate and derived entities, or between mere “aggregates” and “true individuals,” we should accept the actuality of assemblages of all sizes.

I go on to argue that Whitehead already meets all four of these requisites. The first two are pretty obvious, but the third and fourth might seem surprising. It seems to me that Graham’s and Levi’s anti-relationalism is entirely correct when it is a question of what Delanda calls “relations of interiority,” in which a closed totality absolutely determines all its parts (as is the case in Hegel’s dialectic, and Saussure’s theorization of the synchronic structure of language). I do not accept the anti-relationalist argument, however, when it comes to what Delanda calls external relations; rather, I think we should follow William James and Deleuze in seeing a continual florescence of external relations, and of seeing these relations as in themselves perfectly real, as being just as real as the terms they connect are real. Of course terms are never entirely defined by their relations; and terms can disentangle themselves from some relations, and enter into others instead. But at the same time (and here I explicitly disagree with Graham) no term can ever disentangle itself from all relations. That is simply impossible. 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 it will still be altered by cosmic radiation and other phenomena of interstellar space. Every change in relations turns the term into something different: at times, the change is minor enough (Whitehead would say it is “negligible”) that we speak of the continuity of the term — my trip next week from Detroit to Claremont will only make a negligible difference in who/what I am — but at other times, the change is greater, and we speak of either metamorphosis or breakdown (the caterpillar becomes a butterfly), my dead body is a thing, but a different sort of thing than I was when alive).

Whitehead asserts that the interiority of any entity is a matter of its “privacy,” in which it pursues its “subjective aim.” This is always more than, and other than, its existence for others, its publicity, as a datum once it has perished and thereby achieved what Whitehead calls “objective immortality.” On account of this privacy, an “actual entity” always exists in complete independence of all the other entities with which it is contemporaneous; indeed, this independence is for Whitehead the very definition of contemporaneity. (Relations, to the contrary, are always spread across time; they derive from the past and push into the future, on both sides exceeding the boundaries of the “specious present” of experiential duration). To my mind, Whitehead’s understanding of privacy and subjective aim is sufficient to meet the requirements of OOO’s critique of relationalism — without the need to posit objects as somehow mysteriously and totally “withdrawn.” And this interiority or privacy is precisely what panpsychism identifies as the “mentality” exerted to a greater or lesser degree by all entities. A thing is perfectly publically accessible to other things; but at the same time it retains a certain privacy. It is very possible for other people to get a sense of what I am thinking by observing my interactions with them and with the rest of the world; at the same time, of course, my inner feelings are not experientially available to other people, and they might not even be experientially available to myself. (I think that both the indubitabilty or “incorrigeability” of a feeling of pain, and the hypothesis of an unconscious, are comprehended within the notion of privacy). I find this sort of understanding (things have both an inside and an outside, they couldn’t have one without the other) more plausible than the thesis that objects are entirely “withdrawn,” or that the “intentional object” is radically sundered from the “real object.” A membrane separates inside from outside, while selectively allowing things to cross between inside and outside; but this doesn’t mean that inside and outside are somehow definitively sundered. And a membrane is a better metaphor for this situation, I think, than Graham’s “firewall.”

And if all this is true for me, and for other human beings, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be true for other entities, all the way down, that is to say — as panpsychism argues — for trees and rocks and neutrinos.

As for OOO’s fourth challenge or requisite, I think it is one that Whiteheadians can easily endorse as well. Whitehead says that “actual entities,” or “actual occasions,” are “the completely real things” which ultimately make up the universe. At the same time, he refers to societies (his equivalent of Delanda’s, and Deleuze/Guattari’s assemblages) as “the real actual things that endure.” The point of the difference between occasions and societies is that occasions are needed to explain the development and persistence of societies (or actual things), but societies or things cannot be reduced to the occasions that make them up in the way that physicalist analytic philosophers claim that things can be reduced to the subatomic particles or fields of which they are composed. Things or societies, of all sizes, are entirely real and irreducible. This is where I feel I need to do a lot more work — on the question of societies in Whitehead.

I hope this posting (together with my talk next week, upon which it is based)  doesn’t come of as another polemic about OOO. The point is rather that the encounter with OOO has done a lot to make me think through and sharpen my own claims and distinctions. I need OOO, because it has so powerfully contributed to my own process of working through ideas from Whitehead. My conclusions are different from those of OOO; but I hope they don’t come off as being primarily critiques of OOO. The aim, as it always should be in these exchanges, is to develop my own ideas, not trash the ideas of others.

Affective Mapping

It’s come to my attention that, in my already-published article, and soon-to-be-published book, Post-Cinematic Affect, I appropriated my colleague Jonathan Flatley’s notion of “affective mapping” (which is indeed even the title of his fine book) without citing him. Now, my entire method of writing is based upon appropriating and hijacking textual material as widely as possible. But I always try to acknowledge my sources and points of indebtedness. And in this instance, I egregiously failed to do so. So let me offer my profound apologies to Jonathan, and alert my own readers to the deep extent to which my own work has been informed and affected by his.

Whitehead and Levinas

An essay of mine, “Self-enjoyment and Concern: On Whitehead and Levinas,” has just been published in the new volume Beyond Metaphysics?: Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead s Late Thought, edited by Roland Faber, Brian G. Henning, and Clinton Combs. Since the price of the volume is beyond ridiculous (US$101 list and at Amazon, or marked down to US$67.68 at Barnes and Noble), I am making my own essay available here (pdf).

There’s lots of good stuff in the volume aside from my essay, I wish it were all available at a more reasonable price.

I feel that my own essay is a bit underdeveloped; there is much more to be said about Levinas than the brief and cursory discussion I offer here; but, for what it’s worth, I stand by my basic argument.

Jean Renoir, La Chienne (1931)

The latest issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video contains a section on films that ought to be on DVD, but currently are not. Many authors contributed short articles; I wrote about Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931). Since the whole issue is behind a paywall, and if you don’t have access to the journal through a university library or some such, you must pay the ridiculous fee of US$30 to get access to a single 1000-word article, I have made my contribution available for free here.

Survival of the Dead

George Romero’s latest zombie film, Survival of the Dead (2009), is cogent and powerful, and fully worthy of Romero’s life work. It’s a sequel to Diary of the Dead (2007), and it bears something of the same relation to its predecessor that the much-underrated Day of the Dead (1985) bore to its predecessors (Night, from 1968, and Dawn, from 1978) in Romero’s first zombie series. Stylistically, Survival makes no concessions to the 21st century: it is defiantly old school in its editing, in its characterizations, and even in the (relative) crudity of its special effects. It is exactly the same sort of film that Romero was making thirty years ago; and I loved every minute of it. 

What makes Survival of the Dead seem relevant and contemporary, rather than merely retro, is (surprisingly, perhaps) the way it conveys a sense of exhaustion. The filmmaking doesn’t seem to me to be in the least exhausted, but the content of the film is a very pronounced sense of exhaustion and entropy. Where Diary of the Dead was a highly remediated film, commenting on 21st century networked media, Survival suggests that the communications media themselves are over and done with. In the first few minutes, we see a laptop and (woo!) an iPhone, but these disappear, or are forgotten, as the movie proceeds. Indeed, in those first few minutes, the soldiers-gone-rogue whose Sergeant leader (Alan Van Sprang) narrates the film capture and (apparently) eliminate the Net-connected filmmakers who struggled to bear witness throughout Diary. A teenage geek boy (Devon Bostick), the owner of the aforementioned iPhone, who has more or less joined the band of rogue soldiers, finds himself reduced to last-century analog technologies (like a vinyl record player).  So much for mediation and remediation; the WiFi networks have finally broken down, and we are now stuck in an interminable endgame that is no longer being televised, an ending (of the world) that itself refuses to end.

After a few misadventures, the soldiers reach an island off the Delaware coast, and therefore sheltered from the massive “unknown unknowns” of life on the mainland. Instead, they stumble into a crazy war between two patriarchs, the leaders of opposing (Irish? judging from the names and accents) families. The patriarchs have been enemies ever since childhood, we are told. They have come to blows now because one of them  — Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Walsh) — wants to exterminate the zombies, even if they were once family members; while the other one — Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) — wants to keep them around (suitably chained and restrained) in the hopes of ultimately finding a cure, or at least training them to eat animal instead of human flesh. 

 

Despite (or because of) these disagreements, the patriarchs are really mirror images of one another. They are both egomaniacal despots, bitter, stubborn, and self-willed, lording it over their families, followers, and flunkies. They have both responded to the collapse of our high-tech, globalized society by reinventing an archaic social order, one that owes more to the movies than it does to the actual everyday life of pre-zombie, pre-catastrophic modern society. O’Flynn gets a bit too much pleasure out of his fights with his identical twin daughters, one of whom lives (and is sensible where he is crazy), while the other has become a zombie (both played by Kathleen Munroe); while Muldoon has chained up his zombified wife in the kitchen, where she continues to perform a simulation of the duties that she had when alive. The oppressed women of both clans contrast with the one woman in the soldier group, referred to only as “Tomboy” (Athena Karkanis), who has the same toughness, intelligence, and clear-headedness that we’ve seen in previous Romero heroines.

A recent review of the movie’s DVD and BluRay release complains that “the O’Flynns and the Muldoons are barely convincing as modern families because they dress and act in a way that feels like an awkward mix of Lorna Doone and old-school Western.” But this archaism is not a flaw in the movie; rather, it is precisely Romero’s point. He’s taking aim, precisely, at the survivalism that is a prominent strain in contemporary American ideology and culture. Think of the Tea Party today, or of Ron Paul’s Presidential run a couple of years ago. Behind the current frothing at the mouth over the alleged “socialism” of Obama’s exceedingly cautious and right-of-center reforms, there’s a hatred of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, and the fantasy of an earlier, white-settler America. We live in an age of “capitalist realism,” where the only alternative to neoliberal capitalism that we can imagine is outright catastrophe. But the nativist, survivalist strain in American culture actually welcomes the prospect of such catastrophe, because it fantasizes the post-catastrophic landscape as one in which “individualism” and “self-reliance” could actually flourish

Survival of the Dead actually gives us this post-catastrophic landscape. In the real world we live in, today, neoliberalism’s scorched-earth policies are in process of exterminating all forms of sociality, association,meaningfulness, and hope, leaving us only with a “marketplace” of private families and individuals locked in eternal Malthusian competition in order to survive and to consume. It isn’t too difficult to foresee the prospect that, sooner or later, these policies will end by destroying the neoliberal order itself, leaving us with nothing at all. Such is Romero’s world of the (un)dead: everything has collapsed, only we don’t realize it yet, so we continue on in our zombified state, crying out with desires for destruction and consumption that will never be satisfied, no matter how many of the still-living we consume. From the point of view of, say, Goldman Sachs, such a collapse would be the “unintended consequence” (oops!) of policies that they engaged in with no other motive than to enrich themselves. But from the point of view of the Tea Partiers and Ron Paul-style Libertarians, such a consummation is devoutly to be wished. Social implosion clears the ground for the survivalists to live their dreams.  

Survival of the Dead takes a close look at the Real behind this American fantasy: it’s monomaniacal, paranoid, autocratic, misogynistic, and utterly self-deluded in its belief that it is possible to be independent of the burdens and obligations of otherness. What the survivalists fail to understand is that they themselves are already zombies while they are still alive; because their own form of life is itself a dead archaism, which continues only because they are unable to recognize that it is, already, long dead. This is the source of the sense of exhaustion that I mentioned earlier.

Romero’s zombie films have always been more about what the stress of catastrophe and danger reveals about the living, would-be survivors, than they have been about the state of being of the zombies themselves. This tendency is pushed to an extreme in Survival. For in this movie, the zombies themselves are scarcely even a menace. Anybody with a gun and ammunition (and there seems to be no scarcity of these) is well protected, and has little or nothing to worry about. The menace comes from the living, not from the dead. Most of the people who get killed in the course of the movie are murdered by other living human beings; even the genre-requisite zombie swarm, unleashing an orgy of destruction at the end, is only the result of living-human stupidity and pointless rivalry.

Survival of the Dead has many small pleasures, and moments of affective ambivalence and intensity, that are reminiscent of Romero’s earlier zombie movies. I am thinking of the moments of hesitation, of suspension between living and dying and coming back from the dead; and the tension involved in killing oneself, or somebody else one cares for, in order to avert such a return. There’s the insuppressible longing that the undead might retain something of what they were before, and the disappointment (and often, mortal danger) when it becomes clear that, inevitably, they do not. (I am thinking, especially, of the moment when O’Flynn’s daughter is bitten by her undead identical twin, as well as of the moment when Tomboy kills the other soldier with whom she has been bantering throughout, in order to spare him zombification). What’s new in Survival is only the context in which these events occur. There is no longer anything like the well-stocked shopping malls or Dawn, or the military bunker of Day, or even the yuppie enclave of Land of the Dead; and, as I’ve already noted, the network that seemed to have survived its human users in Diary has also, for the most part, gone down. 

In retrospective comparison, Romero’s earlier zombie films had a perverse hopefulness, noticeable only in contrast to its absence here. We are left with a group of three survivors: the Sergeant, the tough woman soldier, and the teenaged nerd. They themselves concede that the prospects for any sort of affective bond or positive sociality, even among the three of them, is pretty slim. This may be contrasted to the island paradise to which the survivors escape at the end of Day of the Dead (a utopian moment, even though a heavily ironized and thoroughly precarious one), or even to the filmmakers-in-a-van collective at the end of Diary. The film ends, not with the escape of the three, but with a final long shot in which the two patriarchs, who have not exhausted their idiotic rivalry even by killing one another, shamble as zombies to yet another shootout; they ineffectually fire their empty pistols at one another, against the backdrop of an outrageously enormous (rising or setting?) moon. 

Life and Death of a Porno Gang

I’ve submitted my proposal for the SCMS conference next March. It’s part of a panel that Zoran and I have organized on post-war Serbian film.

After Hope: Life and Death of a Porno Gang
Mladen Djordjevic’s Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Serbia, 2009) contains explicit depictions of sex and violence, including scenes of rape, murder, the making of “snuff films,” and suicide. In its extremity, the film shares many characteristics with the transgressive art cinema of Western Europe and East Asia that has received so much critical attention in recent years (e.g. Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Takashi Miike’s Audition, Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy). However, Life and Death of a Porno Gang differs greatly from these other films for reasons that have much to do with its particular geographical and historical location (in post-socialist and post-civil-war Serbia), and with the types of economic and political investments that it explores. Djordjevic’s protagonists (an aspiring young film director, and the group of actors and sex-industry performers with whom he works) find themselves caught between the corrupt gangster capitalism of the new social order and the repressive traditionalism of the old peasant Serbia. In such conditions, what starts out as a voyage toward potential sexual and social liberation (implicitly referencing Dusan Makavejev’s great 1972 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism) turns into a nightmarish, nihilistic flight towards oblivion. But if Life and Death of a Porno Gang is not a liberatory film, it is also not a transgressive one. In contrast to the extreme cinema of Western Europe, it does not accord any aesthetic or moral efficacy to the excesses that it depicts. There is no self-congratulation at the rupturing of taboos. Rather, Life and Death of a Porno Gang portrays, and embodies, the aesthetic and moral impasse that results from a social atmosphere of cynicism and demoralization. This atmosphere is the result, not just of the horror of the nationalist wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, but also of the general process under which the formerly socialist nations entered, upon unequal terms, into the world of Western capitalism. All this becomes apparent both in the narrative content of the film and in its stylistics (which combine a pseudo-documentary, hand-held-camera look and feel with an oddly elliptical editing strategy). Life and Death of a Porno Gang speaks of, and to, a time when hope has been exhausted, and when it seems that There Is No Alternative (what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism”). If it does nonetheless suggest a way out from the universal rule of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, this is only because it speaks so marginally and so obliquely, from a position of humiliation and opprobrium.

Whitehead vs Spinoza & Deleuze on the virtual

Jeffrey Bell, in another one of his superb readings of Spinoza (or, more precisely, perhaps, of Deleuze’s Spinoza), discusses “Eternity and Duration”, by which he also means the difference between the virtual/problematic (which he associates with Spinoza’s substance) and the actual/determinate (which he associates with Spinoza’s modes). Bell says that, in Spinoza,

the human Mind that is eternal is not the determinate, identifiable mind, but rather the immanent condition for the possibility of such a determinate identification; it is, in short, the infinite power of self-ordering becoming (the ‘infinite enjoyment of existing’) that allows for the possibility of determinate, singular bodies, and for the determinate singular minds that are the ideas of these bodies.

This means — to give a crude reduction of Bell’s argument — that Spinoza’s mind/substance/God is equivalent to Deleuze’s virtual; it is an immanent potentiality. Any actual mind/body is a particular finite determination or actualization of that potentiality (a “solution” to that problematic). There is a continual movement from the problematic — “what can a body do?” — to particular actualizations, or to “modifications and affections of determinate bodies and minds,” that in effect instantiate or realize this problematic. And conversely, there is a counter-movement from the actual back to the virtual, due to the fact that “our determinate bodies and minds require the problematic as the ‘infinite enjoyment of existing’.” The ethical movement in Spinoza, and implicitly in Deleuze as well, is this countervailing movement “from the actual and determinate, from what this body is actually doing or has done, to the problematic and the virtual, the body as an eternity that is not to be confused with the determinate and which is indeed subject to many variations and which we can never fully possess.” This is how we attain Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, or more generally the freedom that is the subject of Book 5 of The Ethics. Bell’s reformulation clarifies for me both how this works in Spinoza (against the initial impression that Book 5 is merely a retreat to conventional morality after the bold metaphysics and psychology of Books 1-4), and how central this all is to Deleuze’s own vision of the virtual, and indeed of liberation.

But I want to add an important point to this, by adding Whitehead to the discussion. For Whitehead never offers us such a movement back to the virtual as we find in Spinoza and in Deleuze. Indeed, Whitehead specifically declares himself to be inverting Spinoza in this crucial regard. In Whitehead’s own philosophy, “Spinoza’s ‘modes’ now become the sheer actualities; so that, though analysis of them increases our understanding, it does not lead us to the discovery of any higher grade of reality… In such monistic schemes [as Spinoza’s], the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ’eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents” (PR 7). In Whitehead’s resolutely pluralistic ontology, on the other hand, there are only modes or affections, the actual occasions. There is no substance, nothing behind the modes or affections, for them to be modes or affections of. This is because of Whitehead’s effort to get us away from “subject-predicate forms of thought.”

Nearly all the Spinozists and Deleuzians I know would reject Whitehead’s account as a misreading of Spinoza, a claim that Spinozian substance, or God (Deus sive Natura) is somehow transcendent, when in fact it is entirely immanent. (Bell promises to explain in a subsequent post how Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, or his ascent from the actual back to the virtual, can “be understood in a way that doesn’t reintroduce transcendence”). However, I want to suggest that Whitehead is right. Even if it escapes transcendence, Spinozian substance is still a subject for all the predicates, a monism behind the pluralism. Whitehead, by his own admission, offers a philosophy that “is closely allied to Spinoza’s scheme of thought.” But if Whitehead does not quite set Spinoza on his feet (as Marx claimed to set Hegel on his feet, and as Deleuze claimed that Nietzsche had set Kant on his feet), he does unhinge Spinoza (in the way that, according again to Deleuze, Kant unhinges the classical notion of time, or casts it, in Shakespearean parlance, out of joint). He does this by dethroning substance, or — to put the matter back into Bell’s formulations with which I started this posting — by in a certain sense deprivileging the virtual, or at least rejecting the ethical priority of the virtual in Spinoza (and in Deleuze as well).

One can see this most clearly, I believe, by contrasting Whitehead’s God with Spinoza’s God. Whitehead secularizes God (PR 207) more radically and extensively than Spinoza does; Whitehead’s God, like Spinoza’s — and also like Deleuze/Guattari’s “body without organs,” as I argued in my book — is indeed associated with the virtual rather than the actual; but for this reason, God in Whitehead is curiously marginalized (as Substance in Spinoza is not). God operates for Whitehead as a sort of repository of the virtual, in that he envisages all “eternal objects” or potentialities indiscriminately (this is the “primordial” nature of God). God also functions as a sort of Bergsonian memory, in which all the past is preserved (this is the “consequent” nature of God). But by decentering God, and by splitting him up in this manner, Whitehead disallows anything like a return (a re-ascent?) back to the virtual from the actual. In this way, Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge is for Whitehead a kind of idealist illusion that needs to be rejected: the point being that it is still idealist, even if it is entirely immanent and doesn’t imply any recourse to transcendence. (A similar criticism is implied of Bergson, or at least of that side of Bergson that Deleuze also draws upon in his account of returning from the actual to the virtual. The primordial nature of God is Whitehead’s revision of Spinoza, and the consequent nature of God is Whitehead’s revision of Bergson; in both cases, Whitehead brings us further than Deleuze ever dares to).

If we speak of the virtual, instead of God, then the point is that Whitehead’s often-rejected (even by his admirers) theory of potentialities as “eternal objects” should be seen as a secularization of theories of the virtual such as we find in Deleuze (with its roots in both Spinoza and Bergson). To put the matter very quickly (there is a more extended discussion in my book; but doubtless this is also something that I will need to work out more fully  andcarefully): Every actual entity constitutes itself by a decision that accepts certain eternal objects, while rejecting others. The eternal objects that “ingress” into any actual entity are something like its predicates or qualities; except that no entity can be defined as just the sum of its predicates or qualities, because it is not just a collocation of characteristics (which would be to return to “subject-predicate forms of thought”). Rather, no list of an actual entity’s qualities can give us the entity, because such a list excludes a crucial dimension: the entity as process, or the way in which it selects, and then organizes or “harmonizes”, those qualities. This added dimension is a process or an action, rather than anything substantial (this is where I diverge somewhat from Graham Harman’s admirable notion of “allure,” as the dimension of an object that is withdrawn from, and in excess of, all its qualities).

For Whitehead, therefore, in consonance with Deleuze and Spinoza, something like the virtual or the potential needs to be determined or actualized. This actualization is the process of an actual entity (or, as Whitehead also calls it, an actual occasion) terminating in something absolutely determinate. But there is no movement back from the determinate to the virtual. Rather, once something is determinate, it perishes; and what has perished subsists as a “datum” for new determinations, which themselves, in taking up the data that precede them, must once again actualize potentiality.. and so on, ad infinitum. The movement from the virtual (potentiality, eternal objects) to the actual is involved with and necessary to, but it is also somewhat lateral or oblique to, the most crucial movement in Whitehead’s cosmology, which goes from perished entities (“data”) to new entities, which perish in their own term and thus provide data to new entities, etc.

In this way, I think, Whitehead avoids the Deleuzian suggestion (which one also finds in Bergson, and — in Bell’s reading — already in Spinoza, and currently in the wonderful neo-Schellingism of Iain Hamilton Grant) that the actual must always (with this “must” being something of an ethical imperative) return to the flux of virtuality whence it came. In this way, Whitehead is in accordance with Graham Harman (who rejects the association of Whitehead with Deleuze and Bergson precisely on these grounds). But, to the extent that Whitehead does nonetheless retain the importance of the virtual, he also stands apart from Harman’s actualism. My biggest objection to Harman has long been that he doesn’t give a sufficiently satisfying account of the genesis and perishing of objects, precisely because he rejects the very notion of the virtual, seeing it as something that “undermines” the existence of objects. Whitehead to my mind splits the difference between Deleuze and Harman, in a way that is preferable to either. (Note: I cannot end this discussion without an apology to Levi Bryant, who offers a version of “object-oriented ontology” that includes the virtual. I think that Whitehead represents a preferable alternative to Bryant’s position as well, in the sense that he obviates the need to see objects as somehow being “withdrawn.” But I do not have the space or the energy to pursue this argument here).