The Allure of Things: Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy

Roland Faber, Andrew Goffey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472533685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The Allure of Things: Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy contests the view that metaphysics is something to be overcome. By focusing on process and object oriented ontology (OOO) and rejecting the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects, this collection explores philosophy's concern with things themselves. Interest in Latour, Stengers, Whitehead, Harman and Meillassoux has prompted a resurgence of ontological questions outside the traditional subject-object framework of modern critical thought. This new collection consequently proposes a pragmatic and pluralist approach to 'modes of existence'. Drawing together an international range of leading scholars, The Allure of Things fully covers the similarities between OOO and process philosophy, and is an essential addition to the literature on metaphysics.

Part One

Crossings: Connection, Disconnection, Vibration

1

Atomicity, Conformation, Enduring Objects, and “Things”: Science and Science Studies after the Whiteheadian Turn

James J. Bono

In offering his philosophy of organism to us in sharp and explicit contrast with dominant Western traditions of an ontology of discrete and self-contained substances—what we might refer to colloquially as “things”—Alfred North Whitehead attends to the concreteness of experience itself as disclosing a world of process: a world of “inter-relat[ion],” of connectedness, of spatial and temporal extensiveness. This is the familiar Whiteheadian world of “actual occasions”¹: of actual entities as events exhibiting an incessant “buzzing” of active processes of gathering together or—in the words of the Whiteheadian developmental biologist C. H. Waddington—the “tying together of universal references into knots with individual character.”²

Whitehead proposes his actual occasions as solutions to the paralyzing limitations presented by traditional accounts of a “real particular thing in the physical world.”³ Indeed, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism beckons us to reimagine “things” as simultaneously diffuse—imbricated in/with other things—yet folding back upon themselves; and as complex layerings of emergent webs of experience. As a diagnostician and speculative cosmologist, Whitehead takes traditional ontology—that is to say, the account of things found in Aristotle—as both originative and symptomatic of the problem, where the “answer” concerning the stuff of the universe “is expressed in terms of a set of . . . abstract characteristics . . . united into an individualized togetherness which is the real thing in question.”⁴ Whitehead’s discussion of this foundational idea captures the tenor of his critique of the notions of substance and of “things”:

This answer is beautifully simple. But it entirely leaves out of account the interconnections between real things. Each substantial thing is thus conceived as complete in itself, without reference to any other substantial thing. Such an account of the ultimate atoms, or the ultimate monads, or the ultimate subjects enjoying experience, renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing.⁵

It is this calling of the multiplicity of things unto one another that Whitehead seeks to place at the center of his ontology. The “atoms,” the “monads” that congeal as concrescences in his account of the world, are never windowless: instead, they arise as dynamic events in a process of taking account of and drawing selectively “from relevant objects.” In so doing, an actual entity expresses “at the decisive moment” that “stands between its birth and its perishing” a “unity” in which it “stands alone as for itself.” A moment and an “atomic” unity that an emergent actual occasion in the mutuality of its calling unto or communicating with other objects strives for “in its immediacy of self-attainment” achieved “with its own affective self-enjoyment.”⁶ It is of precisely such a moment—the achievement of an atomistic actual occasion—that Whitehead declares the “creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact.”⁷

The creativity of the “buzzing” world of concrete experience here contrasts with the stasis of a world populated by mere Aristotelian substances, those “private bundle[s] of abstract characters” Whitehead finds so wanting. As he declares near the end of Process and Reality,

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publically pervades the world.⁸

In contrast to an Aristotelian “continuity of becoming,” Whitehead as an “anti-philosopher”⁹ avant la lettre decisively turns his back on such magisterial assertions of confidence in the predictable unfolding of an orderly universe, insisting instead on the concrete and unpredictable emergence of the new as an occasion of experience: what he presciently, even provocatively, terms the “becoming of continuity.”¹⁰ Whitehead’s “becoming of continuity,” I would suggest, is the result of rethinking “things” as events, and events as arising from what we might call poiesis: that is, as flowing from subjective gathering together of the “data” of the world through the soon-to-be actual occasion’s affective “interest” in the world. This poiesis/affective interest is also one key to Whitehead’s rethinking of “purpose” in a way that avoids the charge of a preprogrammed and deterministic end, or telos.

Before turning to this issue and its strong connection with the sometimes puzzling notion of the atomicity of actual occasions, it will prove important to propose a second way of approaching “things” in thinking about the usefulness of Whitehead’s philosophy to contemporary critical discourses. More specifically, I would like to resurrect an argument for a Whiteheadian turn in science studies, a subject that I first approached in an article published in the special issue of Configurations devoted to Whitehead.¹¹ On the one hand, science, and science studies, have in their own way, been obsessed with “things”: with establishing “matters of fact”; with the representation of phenomena in the world as resulting from the orderly operations of discrete and distinct things in space; with the “truth” of things rather than the “interest” and affective creativity indissociable from concrete experience itself.¹² Rethinking science studies from the perspective of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism therefore entails rethinking and redescribing the role of “things” in science and especially in the making of science through the scientist’s engagements with nature.¹³

On the other hand, science studies has for some time now marked its territory through the turn to practice. With this turn, the tropes informing stories told about science also changed: from that of intellectual mastery of the underlying structures and laws shaping and ordering matter—to which Whitehead’s contestation of the “bifurcation of nature” serves as a corrective—to that of hands-on engagement with the contingencies of experimental protocols and material practices. Yet, despite such changes, one dimension of the Western adventure of exploring nature has remained stubbornly resistant to change: namely, the assumption that hidden within nature and waiting to be revealed by science is what Isabelle Stengers has called a “universal neutral key.”¹⁴ The belief that universalizing order and coherence are originative and persistent features of the regime of “things” that we call Nature remains deeply ingrained in Western thought, sustained by an old Christian trope, that of the Book of Nature. Whether we read nature as a text shaped by eternal, divine ideas that can and must be grasped through the sheer power of intellect—of ideas—or, alternatively, as a book shaped by the Hand of God (often secularized in the twentieth century and stripped of its explicit theistic genealogy) and filled with material things to be labored over, manipulated, and forced to reveal their innermost secrets, in the end our goal has typically been the same: to find that one key, that one code or cypher, that makes all order transparent to human agency.

The turn to practice—to the sheer messiness and multiplicity of things—in science studies is itself an important move, a game-changer. Yet, the lure of universalizing order, of a unity that belies multiplicity and effaces all trace of experience in the drive toward abstraction with its apotheosis of abstract order as the ultimate, stable reality beyond experience of the flux and flow of things, can prove an occupational hazard for science studies (and not just scientists). What’s needed to complete the turn toward practice—to cast one’s eyes unwaveringly on the flow and flux of experience in order to avoid being seduced by the lure of the static and abstract—is a good dose of those Jamesian “drops of experience” that imbricate us in our messy and entangled world. These drops of experience are, of course, Whitehead’s “complex and interdependent” actual occasions, understanding of which proves so central to his characterization of science as an aesthetic achievement. Engagement with Whitehead—thinking with Whitehead—should enable science studies to better understand and draw out the implications of the recalibration of things as “agencies” and “actants” that science as practice—or, “science in the making”—has installed as of major significance to science studies. To take such notions seriously is to ask what things are, how they exhibit agency, and what their relationship is to the flux and flow of experience. Two strategies that continually tempt us evoke either the way in which things are subsumed into a holistic unity of harmonizing forces, or, quite oppositely, the way in which things can be deconstructed—analyzed—into the reductive bits and pieces that “really” constitute them as things and agents.¹⁵ By contrast, thinking things with Whitehead means to think things as societies. Such a rethinking and redescribing of things as societies—and thus of the holistic-reductionist binary as well as the scientist’s engagements with nature—ought to prove noteworthy achievements of a Whiteheadian turn in science studies.

In what follows, I shall turn first to Whitehead’s notion of “things as events,” and thus to actual occasions as arising from affective interest in the world. As already suggested, this account of the ontology of the world bears implications not only for questions of atomicity and purpose, but also for rethinking traditional understandings of “things” that have their historical roots in Aristotelian notions of discrete substances. In the last part of this discussion, I will return to exploring and revisiting the role of “things” in science and science studies.

“Things” as events

Tellingly, for Whitehead, actual occasions as atomic are never anything less than events: as such, far from being isolated bits of a fragmented world, they are extensive, connected, and creative “knots” fashioned out of the emergent actual occasion’s situated and subjective gathering together of its experience.¹⁶ While this somewhat hermetic description serves to suggest the utter difference of the Whiteheadian atomic occasion from the classical atom,¹⁷ it barely glimpses the dist...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Thinking Things Thinking Things, or Some Themes in Philosophy After Correlationism
• Part 1 Crossings: Connection, Disconnection, Vibration
• Part 2 Things: Substances, Individuals, and Creatures
• Part 3 Dramatizations: Situating, Abstracting, Experimenting
• References
• Index
• Copyright