Category: Theory

More on (or against) biopolitics

This is something of a followup to what I wrote here, and also here. It is abstracted from an email interview currently in progress. It is pretty rough and undeveloped, but I hope it makes a certain amount of sense.

I both agree and disagree with Hardt and Negri in profound ways. I find their account of the predominance of “affective labor” in the current globalized economy to be incredibly useful. It’s not that such labor didn’t exist before, or that older forms of labor (like industrial labor) have somehow disappeared; but rather that our current social and economic formation is characterized by the hegemony of affective labor processes (together with the hegemony of finance capital over industrial capital, and the importance of continued “primitive accumulation,” or expropriation of formerly public resources, alongside the appropriation and accumulation of surplus value). I think that Hardt and Negri are correct in their observations about “empire” replacing the older forms of imperialism, now that capitalism has truly become global; under this regime, nation-states do not cease to exist, but they play a different role (vis-a-vis an international “market” that they cannot control) than they did formerly. And Hardt and Negri are also right to assert that the extraction of a surplus — which is to say, ultimately, of profit — has now extended well beyond the factory, to encompass all areas of social life, and that this means an increasing appropriation, not only of surplus labor-power, but also of what Marx called “general intellect,” or the accumulated knowledges and capacities of human life as a whole —  including things like habits, everyday practices, forms of know-how, and other potentialities of human (and not just human) “life” in general.

So in this sense I appreciate many aspects of what Hardt and Negri mean by biopolitical power, or the appropriation of the laboring activity of bodies and affects, not just in places of work, but in the overall compass of “life” as a whole. Yet this is also the point at which Hardt and Negri become disturbingly unsatisfactory to me. For what they are describing, under the rubric of biopolitics, affective labor, and the “real subsumption” of all aspects of social existence — and indeed of “life itself” — under capital, is a living nightmare, or a situation of unmitigated horror. For what it means is that we (meaning, by this “we”, everybody who works, whether in an office, a school, a factory, or some other institution, as well as everybody who is unemployed or underemployed, i.e. who does not even get the opportunity to work) — that we, so described, are not just being exploited nine-to-five, but rather all the time, 24/7: in our leisure as well as our work, when we are not being paid as well as when we are being paid, indeed even when we are asleep. This is what it means for capital to appropriate general intellect, and to capture, commodify, and sell not only quantifiable goods and services, but also such impalpable things as atmospheres, feelings, ways of being, or forms of life.

What I find inexplicable in Hardt and Negri is that they describe this situation of hyper-oppression and hyper-exploitation as one in which we are closer than ever to liberation, so that the self-determination of the multitude, as an active, affirmative, constitutive power, is somehow just around the corner — or is even, somehow, already in effect. This sounds suspiciously to me like the old-fashioned Marxist belief (never held, as far as I can tell, by Marx and Engels themselves) that “objective” economic conditions will somehow produce a transition from capitalism to socialism all by themselves, without the need for any sort of political action.

The view that economic processes will lead to revolutionary change all by themselves is precisely what used to be criticized, in many Marxist circles, as “economism.” And yet, I think that the problem with Hardt and Negri’s position is actually the result of their taking “biopolitics” too seriously, instead of subordinating it to economics. The reason for their unearned optimism is because they think that what capital is today exploiting can be designated, all too simply and holistically, as “life.” Where Marx saw labor being expropriated in the commodified form of labor-power, they see “life” as being expropriated directly. But I think this is wrong. There has been no shift from labor to life as a whole. Rather, leisure activities, and even mere sleeping, have been themselves transformed into new particular forms of labor. This allows them to be purchased in the form of labor-power, so that a surplus may be extracted from them.

To appeal to “life” beyond such specific forms of labor is an empty gesture. Indeed, the very idea of “life” in Western thought and culture is an exceedingly problematic one, as Eugene Thacker demonstrates in his brilliant recent book After Life. I am inclined to suggest that “life,” as posited in various discourses (not only those of Hardt and Negri) on biopolitics and biopower, does not exist. It is just an empty hypostatization, a transformation of forces and processes into a supposed essence. If we posit that such an essence has been alienated by practices of governmentality embodied in biopolitics, then it becomes all too easy to fantasize a disalienation that will return “life” to its essence. But this obscures the various forms of production and expropriation that are actually taking place, and puts the focus on tactics of “governmentality,” instead of examining the more basic processes of surplus value extraction and  capital accumulation.

I do not want to sound too harsh here. In fact, Hardt and Negri pay considerably more attention to economic expropriation and exploitation than most other contemporary theorists do. (It is important to note that they do focus on these processes, whereas other radical thinkers — Alain Badiou is the most notable example — programatically bracket and ignore them). But I still think that there is a certain imbalance that comes from their overvaluation of what they call biopolitics.

Also, I’m aware that what has today come to be called “neo-vitalism,” in various configurations, is concerned precisely to emphasize force and affect, rather than essence, in its understanding of how the world works. Evidently, I am largely in accord with this impulse. But I still think that it is dangerously confusing to hypostasize “life” per se in any way. The nineteenth century vitalists wrongly claimed that there was some sort of basic distinction between life and nonlife. They imagined some special process that drove living things, in contrast to the merely mechanistic forces that were supposedly all there was to the inanimate world. Today, this dualism is inadmissible. We should rather say, following Whitehead — and also Latour, Bennett, and the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant — that all materiality, or all of existence, nonliving as well as living, is intrinsically active and agential. It might be better to say, not that everything is alive, but that everything thinks in one way or another. This is the thesis, not of vitalism, but of panpsychism.

Abstract: consciousness and sensation

Here’s the abstract I wrote for a paper I propose to give (if it is accepted) at the SLSA conference this coming September:

In this talk, I would like to take a speculative (Whiteheadian and cosmopolitical) look at recent scientific and philosophical debates about the nature and function of consciousness. Cognitive science and philosophy are haunted by the figure of the philosophical zombie: a being who would be outwardly indistinguishable from other sentient beings, but who would not be conscious (would not feel pain, experience qualia, etc). Though thinkers like David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett have argued about the logical possibility, and the implications, of this figure, arguably the most adventurous appearances of the philosophical zombie have come in recent science fiction. Peter Watts’ Blindsight (2006) is a “first contact” novel that posits humanity’s encounter with alien beings who are technologically superior to us, but devoid of consciousness. Project Itoh’s Harmony (2009, translated 2010) presents an oppressively utopian future world in which the complete extinguishing of consciousness becomes the final solution to human suffering and dissatisfaction. Tricia Sullivan’s Lightborn (2010) presents an alternative history in which human and animal consciousness can be directly manipulated by the biological equivalent of computer viruses. Scott Bakker’s Neuropath (2008) explores the disturbing consequences of the argument, proposed by Thomas Metzinger and other thinkers, that consciousness is entirely delusional and has no causal powers. All these novels explicitly present consciousness as merely epiphenomenal; and yet they all suggest (perhaps in spite of themselves) a certain affective intensity and efficacy of nonconscious, noncognitive thought.

George Molnar, Powers

I just finished reading George Molnar’s extraordinary book Powers. Reading an analytic philosophy book like this one reminds me, once again, that I am not a philosopher, even though I frequently write about philosophical texts. Good analytic philosophy tries to provide basic logical grounds or arguments for all of its assertions — something that I am incapable of doing. And it almost totally ignores what is interesting about classical philosophical texts: which is the implications of the metaphysical assertions. The point is that I am sure that any good analytic philosopher could point to the logical errors or ungrounded assertions in great speculative metaphysicians such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and William James. But such errors do not negate what is genuinely challenging and thought-provoking about these thinkers. (I am crudely echoing, here, some of the remarks that Graham Harman has made many times on his blog. But then, Harman really is a philosopher, albeit of the continental rather than analytic kind — which means that he is doing the kind of thing the aforementioned great speculative philosophers do, rather than what the analytics do. I, in contrast, am doing something that is closer to speculative fiction than to speculative metaphysics. I respind to philosophy texts in the same way that I do to science fiction novels). 

Nonetheless, although his book is mostly concerned with the usually analytic statement of the particular arguments needed to establish his assertions, Molnar’s metaphysical assertions are themselves fascinating and suggestive, and contribute a lot to current debates in “speculative realism.” (Indeed, I came upon Molnar in the first place because he was mentioned in the context of SR by Ben Woodard). (Molnar is also footnoted in the introduction of The Speculative Turn, in connection with Iain Hamilton Grant’s attempt to produce a “powers” metaphysics; but Grant himself doesn’t seem to mention Molnar, either in his essays in that volume or in his own book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling).

Molnar’s basic argument is that things (or OOO’s objects) possess causal powers that are ontologically real, and not just confined to the instances in which they are manifested. Salt contains the power of being soluble (dissolveable) in water; this power is a veritable property of the salt, even if it never encounters water and never actually gets dissolved. In insisting that powers are actual independently of their manifestation (even if they can only be described in terms of their manifestation), Molnar rejects the skeptical (empiricist, and especially Humean) hypothesis that talk of powers has no meaning apart from the conditional statement that, e.g., if the salt is put into water, then it will dissolve. The classic Early Modern reproach to medieval philosophy was to ridicule the latter for allegedly saying, for instance, that opium puts people to sleep because it has a dormative power — and to claim that this sort of explanation is utterly meaningless. Molnar is arguing, in effect, that opium really does have something like a “dormative power.” This is not to deny that such a power can be analyzed, e.g., in terms of particular neurochemical events that take place in the brain of somebody who has smoked opium. But such an analysis of the “dormative power” does not get away from the attribution of powers, since it simply replaces the power of opium per se with a more detailed account of the powers possessed by particular molecules in the composition of opium. 

In this way, Molnar asserts a realist ontology, one that is directed against the skeptical empiricism of the whole tradition derived from Hume (and one still adhered to by a large number of analytic philosophers today). The parallels with speculative realism go further; Molnar insists, as much as Graham Harman does, that a thing, or an object, is not just a bundle of properties or characteristics, but exists in its own right apart from and in addition to these. (Although Molnar, unlike Harman, endorses the basic scientistic move of reducing objects to their ultimate subatomic constituents, he doesn’t make the claim that this somehow renders objects of the sort that we can see and touch illusory). 

In this way, Molnar offers something like the actualism, and the “flat ontology,” insisted upon by Delanda, by Latour, and by OOO (in contrast to the eliminativist impulses, both of many analytical philosophers, and of Ray Brassier or other more scientistically-inclined speculative realists). But there’s a difference. Molnar writes: “While ontologically there is nothing over and above individuals and their properties (actions), causally there is.” (George Molnar). The insistence on actual causality, and on actual relations (causality being one form of relation), makes for a significant difference between Molnar and Harman. Contra Harman, Molnar rejects any sort of “occasionalism”; he insists that causality is direct — and not merely “vicarious.” Like Harman and against Deleuze, Molnar claims that powers, even when they are not being exercised, are entirely actual qualities of things — they cannot be regarded as “virtual” or “potential.” They fully exist even when they are not manifested in particular events, as a result of particular relational encounters. But against Harman, Molnar insists that relations are as primary an ontological category as things or objects are. 

To put this another way: Harman, in his critique of Latour, opposes the Deleuzian notion of the virtual (together with related notions of the potential) to what he sees as Latour’s “Megarian” actualism. Although he applauds this actualism, he rejects what he claims is Latour’s relationalism, or denial that his discrete entities have any nonrelational substance. But Molnar adds another option to this picture. For Molnar, things do have a substantial reality that is outside of, and anterior to, relations — but this substantial actuality is largely composed of “powers,” or of causal abilities to do things (and thereby to interact relationally with other substances). There is nothing besides individuals and their properties; but since many of these properties of individual things are powers, they make direct causality possible, i.e. when they do contingently encounter other things or substances, they produce real effects.

Molnar asserts that “laws of nature” are supervenient upon the powers of actually-existing things. Against post-Humean skepticism, “laws of nature” are objective features of the world, not mental impositions. This thesis is therefore, once again, realist and anti-correlationist; it affirms that reality is mind-independent and human-independent.  But, in opposing Hume, Molnar also implicitly opposes Quentin Meillassoux’s return to, and alleged solution of, “Hume’s problem.” Something like Leibniz’s law of sufficient reason, or Whitehead’s ontological principle, is preserved against Meillassoux’s all-too-Humean insistence that anything can happen with no reason whatsoever. This is because, for Molnar, it is not that things obey pre-existing laws of nature (which is the thesis that Meillassoux rejects), but rather that “laws of nature” are themselves the consequence of the actual powers actually possessed by individual entities. We might say therefore, that Molnar’s powers are like Spinozian/Deleuzian abilities to affect, and to be affected by, other things. (The Spinozian part of Deleuze, unlike the Bergsonian part, does not involve virtuality). 

In addition to all this, Molnar claims that powers need not be grounded, and indeed that the ultimate powers of things are ungrounded. He argues this on an empirical, rather than a priori basis: the subatomic particles of which, according to contemporary physics, the universe is composed, do not seem to possess any grounding. An electron or a photon is nothing over and above its powers. If the powers of “composite” or everyday objects are themselves grounded (e.g. in physical, non-dispositional properties of these objects), the grounding does not continue downwards infinitely, but ultimately meets the ungroundedness of the powers of elementary particles.

Now, this might well be the place where OOO thinkers would argue that Molnar reveals himself to be a scientistic reductionist after all, but I think that such a criticism would not be entirely fair. This can best be understood, perhaps, by looking at the role that ungrounded powers play in Iain Hamilton Grant’s metaphysics (see Grant’s response to Harman in The Speculative Turn; this is also the place where Ben Woodard, as cited above, associates Molnar with Schelling and Grant). The crucial point we can take from Molnar is that powers need not be grounded in order to be real; and this makes for a crucial step in Grant’s argument, against Harman, that one can trace the anteriority of forces that generate objects, without thereby “undermining” objects and reducing everything to some sort of undifferentiated blob. From another direction, Molnar’s sense of ungrounded powers might also be used to defend Latour’s ontology against Harman’s criticisms. When objects are understood as possessing intrinsic powers, they can be separate and actual without being “withdrawn” in Harman’s sense. Objects possess real forces, which they exert against other, equally real forces being deployed by other objects. Without going so far as to make the difficult claim that Latour and Grant can be reconciled with one another, I think that they both can be defended against Harman’s various criticisms of them on the basis of an appeal to something like Molnar’s insistence upon the actuality, and not-needing-to-be-groundedness, of causal powers.

There’s also another, weirder direction in which one could take all this. For Molnar, subatomic entities like electrons and photons have intrinsic powers, but they don’t have any intrinsic qualities other than their powers. Indeed, this is precisely what he means when he asserts that their powers are ungrounded. If the powers of salt and opium and human beings and (to use Harman’s examples) tar and hailstones are grounded, this is because such entities have intrinsic qualities that are not powers, in addition to their intrinsic powers. I think, however, we can reduce the difference between subatomic entities and the sorts of entites that we can apprehend directly by adopting some form of panpsychism (as I have argued before — of course, Molnar would have hated this). That is to say, I want to argue for a thesis that Molnar explicitly rejects, but which is not incompatible with his main points. The thesis is what Molnar calls “dual-sided theory”: “all properties [of objects] have something about them that is irreducibly and ineliminably dispositional [i.e. is a power], and something (else) about them that is irreducibly and ineliminably non-dispositional or ‘qualitative’… A power is only a face/facet/side of a property that also has a qualitative face/facet/side.” Molnar rejects this thesis primarily because he doesn’t think that subatomic particles (or “field-densities”) have a qualitative side: they are only dispositional (they only have powers without any “grounding” or innerness). But a major argument of 20th century panpsychists, from Russell on to Strawson, is precisely that all entities must have an inner as well as an outer side, even if physics only gives us the latter. For panpsychism, there is a qualitative or experiential dimension to everything, including electrons and photons; just as there is a “dispositional” dimension, or the intrinsic possession of powers, to everything. Such a dual-aspect theory would grant interiority to subatomic particles, while also suggesting that the interiority of mesocosmic and macrocosmic entities need not be thought of as the “ground” of these entities’ powers, but as coextensive with them. Such an account both rescues Molnar’s overall argument from the vestiges of “smallism,” while at the same time preserving the intrinsicality and independence of objects without asserting that they are “withdrawn,” and without asserting that their causal relations are merely “occasional” or “vicarious.” For me, this is a way of taking Harman’s questions seriously, while at the same time giving more credence to the assertions of Latour (on the one hand) and Grant (on the other hand) than he is willing to; and of taking Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism seriously, without accepting his claims that mathematics = the absolute, and that things can and do happen for no reason. The occasionalism of both Harman and Meillassoux is rejected in favor of a Whiteheadian duality of determination and decision.

 

 

The Speculative Turn

The Speculative Turn, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, has now been published. This volume gives the fullest account to date of (so-called) “speculative realism” in all its varieties. There are articles by the four initial speculative realists (Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier), together with work by other thinkers who have influenced them (Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, Delanda, etc) essays by later contributors to speculative realist trends (Bryant, Srnicek, Reza Negarestani), brief interviews with Badiou and Zizek, and more. The volume contains my own article/critique of Harman, “The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations,” together with Harman’s response.

The Speculative Turn can be purchased in hardcopy, or downloaded as a free pdf, here. It doesn’t seem to have made it to Amazon.com yet, but I am told it will be there shortly.

Fruit Flies and Slime Molds

Two recent scientific articles help to illuminate the notion of decision, which for Whitehead is constitutive of all actual entities.

In the first place, Bjorn Brembs, who was one of the co-authors of a 2007 paper that suggested that fruit flies are able to generate spontaneous behavior that is not determined in advance either by genetic pre-programming or by environmental cues, has released a new paper in which he generalizes his argument. Brembs cites research by himself and others that points to the “common ability of most if not all brains is to choose among different behavioural options even in the absence of differences in the environment and perform genuinely novel acts.” That is to say, fruit files and other animals possess a sort of “free will.” Brembs dismisses, of course, what he calls “the metaphysical concept of free will,” i.e. the traditional Cartesian notion that is “inextricably linked with one variant or another of dualism.” But he also rejects strict determinism, both on account of quantum indeterminacy, and — more directly in biological terms — on the basis of the idea that, for animals, complete predictability of behavior is not viable. Any organism that reacted to stimuli in a completely predictable manner could all too easily be wiped out by predators who were able to anticipate these responses. Therefore, “predictability can never be an evolutionarily stable strategy. Instead, animals need to balance the effectiveness and efficiency of their behaviours with just enough variability to spare them from being predictable… Competitive success and evolutionary fitness of all ambulatory organisms depend critically on intact behavioural variability as an adaptive function. Behavioural variability is an adaptive trait and not ‘noise’.” All this suggests that motile animals, at the very least, have evolved mechanisms to generate behavioraly variability — action that is not pre-determined, and hence not predictable. Moreover, organisms are able to control the extent of this variability. In many circumstances, routine, habit, and “instinct” are the best strategies; but “faced with novel situations, humans and most animals spontaneously increase their behavioural variability.”

Brembs cites many examples of “self-initiated actions” (behaviors that are spontaneously and endogenously generated) in all sorts of animal organisms, and not just among vertebrates. He suggests that neural mechanisms have evolved which exhibit and exploit an “unstable nonlinearity.” These brain mechanisms are “exquisitely sensitive to small perturbations,” and they are irreducible to any binary alternative between “complete (or quantum) randomness and pure, Laplacian determinism.” This provides the basis for what Brembs calls a scientific concept of free will: one that is not an absolute, dualistic concept, but an immanent and relative one: “The question is not any more ‘do we have free will?’; the question is now: ‘how much free will do we have?’; ‘how much does this or that animal have?’. Free will becomes a quantitative trait.”

Brembs rightly draws philosophical conclusions from his argument, even though he disclaims being a philosopher. “Analogous to mutation and selection in evolution, the biological process underlying free will can be conceptualized as a creative, spontaneous, indeterministic process followed by an adequately determined process, selecting from the options generated by the first process. Freedom arises from the creative and indeterministic generation of alternative possibilities, which present themselves to the will for evaluation and selection. The will is adequately determined by our reasons, desires and motives—by our character—but it is not pre-determined.” From this point of view, free will requires something like a “self,” which is able to determine its own action; we may infer such self-willed action whenever “no sufficient causes for this activity to occur are coming from outside the organism.”

Free will does not, however, necessitate consciousness in the human sense. Fruit flies make decisions — they determine and generate their own behavior, to the limits that external constraints allow them to — without necessarily being “conscious” of making these decisions. Even among human beings, this is most likely the case. Brembs cites, in passing, Benjamin Libet’s experiments, which suggested, by means of testing neural responses, that human beings make decisions prior to being conscious of their decisions. Libet’s results have often been cited as disproving the existence of “free will”; but Brembs rightly says that, although these results discredit the “metaphysical” (dualist) notion of free will, they “are not relevant for the concept proposed here.” For what Libet showed was not that I do not make spontaneous or uncaused decisions, but rather that my “mind” makes these decisions, or my brain generates them, prior to my becoming consciously aware of them. Brembs’ empirically grounded notion of free will is entirely consonant with the argument — one metaphysically beyond the scope of Brembs’ paper, but which I would want to make on Whiteheadian grounds — that things like consciousness and responsibility are not the grounds or preconditions for decision or the exercise of free will, but rather the consequences (in some, but not necessarily all, cases) of making decisions and (thereby) exercising free will.

Brembs suggests that free will is an evolutionary adaptation of the nervous system; it would thereby be restricted to animal organisms. But what about biological entities that don’t have nervous systems (including plants, fungi, protists, and bacteria)? All these organisms have been shown to engage in various sorts of cognitive activities. “Plant cognition and behavior” has come to be a recognized biological subfield; bacterial “quorum sensing” is widely recognized and experimented upon; and slime molds (in particular, the model organism Physarum polycephalum) have been shown to exhibit “smart behavior” in solving a maze, and to solve “combinatorial optimization problems.” But most of this research has focused on cognition and problem-solving, not on the issue of free will that Brembs raises in connection with fruit flies and other invertebrates.

Slime molds are particularly interesting organisms, because they are neither unicellular nor multicellular, but something in between. They exist for most of their lives as blobs of protoplasm with many nuclei. Meiosis occurs at the end of the life cycle, when the slime mold develops “fruiting bodies” composed of haploid spores. These spores are widely dispersed, and begin their lives as haploid, single-celled organisms. Two of these unicellular organisms mate, forming a larger cell with a diploid nucleus. But from that point on, mitosis, or the separation and replication of nuclear DNA, is not accompanied by cell division. Rather the entire blob grows in size as it comes to contain multiple nuclei. The blob moves around, sending out filaments of protoplasm in various directions as it searches for food. It is in the course of this process, which seems not to be centrally coordinated, but to involve internal communication among different parts of the organism, that slime molds have succeeded in threading mazes and solving combinatorial problems. [I am referring here to myxomycetes, or “true” slime molds; as opposed to the also interesting, but vastly different, cellular slime molds].

[One might also note that Gilbert Simondon ponders at great length on the question of whether animals that live in colonies, like coral, are truely individuated or not. Is each organism an individual? Or is it only the colony that is an individual? Obviously, the same question could apply to the notion of ant or bee colonies as superorganisms. But the case of slime molds is even stranger; as far as I can recall, Simondon never mentions them (please, somebody, correct me if I am wrong). Slime molds are more than individual cells, but less than differentiated multicellular organisms. Not only don’t they divide into separate cells, but they don’t differentiate into separate tissues or organs, except when they form fruiting bodies at the point of sporulation. And, as mentioned above, this differentiation takes place, and the spores become separate entities, only via meiosis. This question is related to the fact, discussed below, that slime molds do not make decisions as unified “individuals,” but only as loose, decentralized collectivities — although, again, the members of this “collective” are not separate from one another, as they are in the cases of corals and of ants.]

This brings me to the second recent article I mentioned above. It concerns “irrational decision-making” processes in slime molds. This article, by Tanja Latty and Madeleine Beekman, is of much narrower scope than Brembs’ essay; and its explicit focus is entirely cognitive. Nevertheless, I think it is relevant to the questions that, following Brembs, I am raising. Latty and Beekman created situaitons in which slime molds were allowed to choose between different food sources, which varied both as to how nutritious they were, and as to how illuminated they were. Slime molds prefer richer food sources to poorer ones, but they also prefer darkness to light (since they are easily harmed by exposure to bright light and ultraviolet radiation). What “preferences” would the slime molds establish, when confronted by the alternative between a rich, but brightly-lit food source, and a poorer, but dimly-lit and therefore much safer one?

With multiple trials, and the insertion of additional alternatives, the scientists determined that slime molds, like human beings and other animals, do not operate in accordance with the dictates of what has been called (in the human social sciences) “rational choice” theory. That is to say, they do not make “economically rational” choices “based on the absolute value of items” they are choosing among, but rather “use comparative valuation rules.” There are many problems with rational choice theory, and even with the amended version, “behavioral economics,” which acknowledges that people (and other organisms that make decisions) often make use of “comparative valuation rules” and other, not-strictly-rational, cognitive shortcuts. I will not go into these problems here (that would require an entire separate essay, or several); suffice it to note that these approaches have an impoverished notion of “decision,” since they regard it not as spontaneously-generated activity, but merely as an ordered selection among items on a pre-determined menu or list.

Letty and Beekman don’t address Brembs’ question of free will, because they remain within an entirely cognitivist and behavioural-economic context. But two aspects of their experiments are nonetheless relevant here. In the first place, they suggest that the presence, among slime molds, of the same limited rationality and behavioral strategies that one finds among animals with nervous systems suggest that such strategies of choice are not just  “a consequence of the way brains process information,” but rather indicate “an intrinsic feature of biological decision-making,” even when brains and neurons are not involved. Although they (wrongly, in my opinion) regard decision in exclusively cognitive terms, as a form of information processing, they do not see this “processing” as an exclusively animal-based, or neurally-based activity, but give it a much wider provenance. We know that it is taking place in slime molds and other brainless organisms, even though we do not yet understand how this happens. This suggests that the biological basis of free will is not necessarily tied to neurons and nervous systems in the way that Brembs suggests; it is a broader, or more basic, evolved feature of organisms.

The researchers state that “acellular slime moulds, like insect colonies, are collective decision makers, where the behaviour of the collective is a result of the behaviour of its underlying parts. Each slime mould is made up of many tiny pieces of slime mould, each oscillating at a frequency determined partly by the local environment, and partly by interactions with adjacent oscillators such that each oscillator can entrain those close to it.”  Given this situation, and “owing to the slimy nature of acellular slime moulds, it was not possible to test [rationality] in individuals, and instead, we relied upon population-level preferences.” But there is still a weird difficulty here. The authors note that “recent work on rationality in ants,” in which each organism in a colony makes individual decisions, and the colony’s behavior as a whole is the sum of these decisions, “has led to the suggestion that organisms using collective decision-making processes may be immune to irrational decisions.” However, even if thisis the case with ants in a colony, it turns out not to be the case for slime molds. Is this perhaps because a slime mold is neither a unity, nor a collection of entirely separate individual units, but something strangely in between?

Another problem with rational choice theory and behavioral economic theory is that they assume separate individual “preferences” which are only summed secondarily and extrinsically. But in actuality,this is never the case. Every individual’s decisions are influenced by (even if not reducible to) the decisions of others, plus all sorts of supplemental contextual factors. As Whitehead says, in every process of decision “whatever is determinable is determined” by the situation in which the individual finds itself, the “stubborn fact” that it cannot evade; although at the same time “there is always a remainder for the decision” to be made by the actual entity itself (PR 27-28). This mixture of self-determination and dependence is a matter of degree, just like the balance between externally determined and internally self-generated action that Brembs describes. Slime molds represent an extreme ontological case, in which the contrast between internal and external definition, as well as between individual and collective determination, is pushed to its most intensely ambiguous point. This is why slime molds seem to slip in between the logic of separate individual decisions, and that of collective, but extrnisically-summed, decisions. Reducible to neither, they embody the point at which the logic of preferences-among-a-menu-of-items breaks down. And this is why Latty and Beekman’s focus on limited choice expands into something more like the indeterminacy of free will as defined by Brembs.

The second point I’d like to note from Latty and Beekman’s article is their finding that “even within a treatment group, slime moulds varied in their choices. This is particularly surprising as we controlled for weight, nutritional state and genetic differences.” In other words, even the slime molds’ compliance with “irrational” comparative valuation rules is not absolute. It is a statistical result, rather than something observed in every instance. This again suggests that there is a margin, or remainder, of indeterminacy that allows for unconstrained, spontaneous decision. The authors suggest that “some of the variability we observed arises from slight differences in the experiments’ initial conditions… These small differences in initial condition, combined with feedback via biomass recruitment mechanisms, could ultimately result in the observed variability.” This is undoubtably the case; but I would add that, as sensitivity to initial conditions approaches a point of indiscernibility, we get closer to Brembs’ claim that “determinism versus indeterminism is a false dichotomy,” which he bases in part on observing situations of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. As Brembs puts it, “stochasticity is not a nuisance, or a side effect of our reality. Evolution has shaped our brains to implement ‘stochasticity’ in a controlled way, injecting variability ‘at will’.” The only amendment to this that we need to cover the case of slime molds is that this evolved ability to inject variability at will is not just a property of brains, but “an intrinsic feature” (as Letty and Beekman put it) of all biological entities.

I’ll end my own discussion here with a speculative epilogue that makes claims I cannot presently defend (although I am hopefully working towards them). It may be noted that research into biological free will and biological decision-making is not entirely unrelated to the questions about panpsychism raised by such analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, and Sam Coleman, and which I have discussed previously in this blog. For Strawson, the emergence of mentality from non-mentality is a serious problem, even though the emergence of life from non-life is not. He argues, therefore, that an incipient mentality must already exist on the level of subatomic particles. I suggest that it helps to make sense of this claim if we understand mentality in terms of “decision,” rather than in terms of consciousness or “qualia.” The evolution of biological decision making, and biological free will, might well depend upon, and make use of, an implicit potential of all matter. If decision were not already possible, then living things that actually do make decisions could not have come into existence. Rather than decision being a power of life, then, life would be a consequence of the potentiality of decision.

More Debates

I really worry that one tendency of the blogosphere is towards endless reiterations of the same arguments — because the temptation to instant reply and counter-reply is just too great. This is why I am generally not inclined — even aside from how ridiculously busy I have been recently — to jump into the current discussions/debates between OOO (Graham, Levi) and relationalism (Adrian, Chris — and also me, to the extent that I do jump in). 

I feel energized when I read postings that develop new concepts:  as Levi does when he thinks about techno-assemblages as Mortonian hyperobjects, or as Graham does when, as reported by Levi, he goes into greater depth on how to define objects and differentiate them from mere random sets. It doesn’t matter here that I might not agree with Levi’s and Graham’s conceptualizations; its the working out of their conceptualizations in more detail, and with further (previously unseen, at least by me) ramifications that is important to me. 

But I’m less sanguine about the continual round of debates that have also been going on. I can’t help feel tempted to jump in and join in the polemics — but when I do so I just feel irritated with myself afterwards, as if I had eaten too much candy or popcorn. I wrote one long answer to some of Levi’s and Graham’s recent posts, but then I decided not to post it — I just felt like I was muddying the water with no good reason. (Excuse me here for my mixed metaphors). (And I also hope Levi, Graham, Chris, and Adrian aren’t put off, or offended, by my saying this. For any blogger, you gotta write what you gotta write. Which is why I am putting my negative feelings about arguments & counter-arguments that go in a circle in terms of my own writing impulses first of all). 

So I think I’ll just confine myself to this. At our exchange in Claremont the week before last, Graham made one point that I very much took to heart. He disputed the idea, implicit in what I wrote and said, that “actual entities” in Whitehead are small. And he is right. Whitehead says that actual entities are  “the final real things of which the world is made up,” — but this emphatically does not mean that they are somehow the equvialent of quarks or quantum fields or subatomic particles. In fact, they cannot be — since they are not located in spacetime at all, but are somehow involved in its production. They answer to a different question than the one the physicists are asking when they wonder if, for instance, spacetime is quantized at the Planck scale. It may be that events at the Planck scale are “actual entities” in Whitehead’s definition, but so are my own experiences of the “specious present,” and so is Whitehead’s God (as Graham pointed out). 

I don’t think, however, that this in any way vitiates what I was arguing overall at Clarement — which is precisely that the relation of actual entities to what Whitehead calls “societies” (which are all the things or objects in the world around us) is NOT equivalent to the scientific reductionists’ argument that somehow chairs and cats are less “real” than the subatomic fields of which they are ultimately composed. Chairs and cats are as real for Whitehead as they are for OOO. 

This is crucial, precisely for my way of reading Whitehead on relations (in which reading I closely follow Isabelle Stengers — hopefully her great book on Whitehead will come out in English translation in the next year or so). Graham at Claremont, and Levi on his blog, have both quoted Whitehead on “internal relations” in order to argue for conclusions about Whitehead’s relationalism that I don’t agree with — but that, for reasons stated above, I don’t want to get into an argument about here. Basically, I don’t think that Whitehead means by “internal relations” what Graham and Levi mean by “internal relations.” But demonstrating this depends on a larger argument on, precisely, the reason that Whitehead distinguishes between actual entities and societies, with the latter being “the real actual things that endure,” i.e. that have an extent in spacetime — what OOO calls objects and what I prefer to call things.

There’s a beginning to this argument in the talk I gave at Claremont, and which I linked to in my previous post. The important thing, for me, is not the idea that objects are”withdrawn,” which I cannot make cohesive with any of my own metaphysical intuitions, but rather Whitehead’s notion of privacy (or “elbow-room,” in one of the passages I cited at Claremont). For me, following Whitehead, things are never free of relations; but they are underdetermined by these relations, which is what preserves us from the utter suffocation of being, and allows room for what Meillassoux calls “the great outdoors.” But I still haven’t worked all this through to my own satisfaction. And my sense is that, putting the argument in the negative terms that a reply or riposte to Graham and Levi would require would not be helpful to this working-through; if anything, it would be a hindrance to my working it through in the positive terms that I’d like. I promise that, when I am more satisfied with my own formulations, I will post them here. 

Metaphysics and Things

Last week’s “Metaphysics and Things” conference, sponsored by the Whitehead Research Project, was one of the most intellectually intense conferences that I have ever been to. The keynote address was delivered by Isabelle Stengers, with a response by Donna Haraway. This was followed by a day and a half of presentations by several of my fellow Whiteheadians (Michael Halewood, Andrew Goffey, Jude Jones, James Bono, and the conference organizer, Roland Faber), by other theorists whose work I greatly admire (Jeff Bell, Nathan Brown, James Bradley), by some brilliant graduate students whom I had not met before (Michael Austin, Beatrice Marovich, Melanie Sehgal), and by 3/4 of the OOO crew (Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost). Graham Harman and I were paired in what some characterized (here and here) as a grudge match (OK, I’m kidding), but it was a friendly rather than acrimonious argument, and I think we both agreed that the session went well. 

In any case, my own paper for the conference is available here (pdf) — though I regard it as a work in progress rather than a polished essay. Though it contains a continuation of my interchange with OOO, the real focus of the paper is on panpsychism, and what it might bring to current debates regarding “objects,” “things,” and “life” (sorry for the scare quotes, but they seem necessary in this context, to connote particular areas of contemporary discussion). 

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.

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.

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).