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Bohm’s vision is remarkably congruent with that of Whitehead. They share in criticizing ‘simple location.’ What is in one respect localized is in another respect "enfolded throughout the whole of space (and time)" (above, p. 40). For both thinkers the physical is characterized by dominant inheritance from the past, the mental by appropriation of the new (above, p. 41). Still, there are significant differences. Bohm interprets the implications of his theory as close to that of Spinoza (above, p. 41), whereas Whitehead consciously differentiated himself from Spinozistic monism. For Whitehead each entity or momentary event is a holomovement enfolding in some measure, however trivial, its entire given universe, but the universe in its entirety is made up of innumerable past individual holomovements. They resemble one another through their enfolding of much the same universe of events, but they differ because no two have identical perspectives. Bohm, after developing the notions of implicate order and holomovement in relation to particular entities or events, attributes this order to the universe as a whole rather than to its individual parts. What Bohm calls ‘the implicate depths of the holomovement’ corresponds with what Whitehead calls the ‘primordial nature of God.’ But for Whitehead this principle of novelty and concretion by itself is abstract and does not include or subordinate to itself the events of nature to which it provides ordered novelty and novel order. Thus Whitehead is pluralistic where Bohm tends toward monism in his stress on the underlying unity.

John B. Cobb, Jr. on the similarities and differences between Bohm's "implicate order" and Whitehead's thought. From the book Mind in Nature. I am trying to think through how Whitehead rejects the extremes, both of an underlying monism on the one hand, and of an anti-relationalism on the other hand. Graham Harman tends to argue that any ontology that doesn't maintain separate objects ends up "undermining" objects by dissolving them into an universal goo or flux. I think that this is true in some cases, but not all. I would exempt Simondon from Harman's criticism, as well as Whitehead; and perhaps Iain Hamilton Grant as well (cf. Grant's response to Harman's critique in The Speculative Turn). This is precisely where Whitehead differs from Spinoza, and allows for a thought of "nonlocality" (which Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics might help us to think more fully) that is, however, not total or holistic in manner of Bohm.

Contemporary social and political theory is characterized by an opposition between what might be called, on the one hand, Spinozists, and on the other hand, Kantians. On the Spinozist side we have thinkers like Foucault, perhaps Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser, McLuhan, certain variants of Marx, and so on that emphasize the determination of collectives by impersonal forces that exceed the intentions of agents. On the Kantian side we have theorists such as Badiou, Ranciere, and Zizek that defend a sort of volunterism that subtracts itself from any sort of contextual determination. The Kantians correctly pose the question by asking how self-directing praxis of collectives are possible, but too often end up completely underdetermining context or situations, showing little or no interest in their organization and how they overdetermine action in a variety of ways. As a result, they’re too often left with any nuanced or well developed analysis of what needs to be addressed in situations. Their position remains abstract. The Spinozists correctly pose the question by emphasizing how regimes of attraction structure our possibilities of action and engagement, transforming us into puppets beyond our control, but too often leave unaddressed the question of how any sort of agency or self-direction is possible within a field where we are products of these fields. I am not suggesting that Sartre has the answer, but that he has properly posed the question by asking how self-directing collectives can emerge within a field of antipraxis governed by its own intentionality. This is the squaring of the circle that needs to be worked out: one that is capable of doing justice to the structuration of the contextual or regimes of attraction, while theorizing the emergence of subject-groups capable of acting on situations rather than simply being puppets of forces beyond their intentions. How can we simultaneously think humans making history but not in conditions of their own making?

Levi Bryant on The Critique of Dialectical Reason. I find this dichotomy between Spinozans and Kantians in social/political theory very suggestive. I would link this comment with Jameson's comment that the Sartre of the Critique is one of the very few philosophers (along with Fourier) who actually tries to think about the nature of groups larger than a romantic couple or nuclear family, but smaller than a social class, a nation, or an entire society. (Perhaps we should add Simondon to this very short list, and some of the recent discussions that are influenced by Simondon, e.g. Stiegler. This is also something that I would like to put into connection with Whitehead on societies).

societies/affectivities

DeLanda is right to propose assemblages as opposed both to isolated individuals and to internally determined totalities. But he doesn't say anything useful about the genesis of these assemblages. I think they need to be understood affectively, and the question of how they are able to endure needs to be posed instead of just assumed. I think that Whitehead's much-criticized (or all-too-easily-ignored, as I have been guilty of in the past) distinction between actual entities/occasions, on the one hand, and the societies or enduring objects composed of these entities, on the other, would be a good way to address these issues. The question of genesis via affective ties might also be addressed with the help of Tarde, on the one hand, and of Simondon's ideas of individuation and the transpersonal on the other. (Individuation as opposed to conatus; and transversal connections between individuals and groups as opposed to either isolated substances or differences without positive terms). The question of transpersonal individuation also leads to the question of intermediate-level affective groups (intermediate between individuals/couples and large social forms) which Jameson only sees addressed by Fourier and Sartre. This might also provide a link between my focus on Whitehead, and my interest in "communism" in Eastern European film (the porno gang, for instance) and in questions of "economy" (as opposed to politics) (e.g. in The Age of Aesthetics).

[O]bjects are neither autonomous realities that are independent of all their relations, nor are objects reducible to being nothing other than their relations. If one follows the first approach then one accepts the appearance/reality distinction. There are appearances of objects, their phenomenal noematic correlates as Husserl puts it, or the illusions of maya as the Buddhists would understand it, and then there is the object itself that exceeds and is irreducible to each of these correlates and illusions. If one accepts, by contrast, that objects are nothing other than their relations, their causal dependencies, then an object is indeed undermined and cast asunder by the proliferation of depenencies. Nagarjuna’s middle path of emptiness steers a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of realism and nihilism.

Jeffrey Bell, "Some Thoughts on Emptiness"

Open/closed

For Luhmann, the concept of “operational closure” marks a radical break with the tradition “that supposed that something from the environment enters into the one who cognizes and that the environment is represented, mirrored, imitated, or simulated within a cognizing system.” But these two claims need not go together. For Whitehead, it is precisely because something from the “environment” (though this is not the word he uses) actually enters into the entity that prehends it, that the prehending entity does not internally “represent” what it prehends. Whitehead opposes both representationalism and “closure.”

More on Conatus

Jeffrey Bell on Spinoza's conatus:

[A] key function or effect of our appetites is to select against objects, to select against excessive differences and determinations, for these differences and determinate objects may undermine the ratio of motion and rest and hence undermine (kill) the very durational existence of the body itself. God, on the other hand, as absolutely indeterminate and self-caused substance is the infinite enjoyment of existing that affirms all differences. God, however, is absolutely indeterminate substancein actu rather than in potentia and thus God does not have to select against difference. God is the absolute affirmation of difference rather than the limited affirmation of difference that characterizes bodies like us.

This is related to the way that Whitehead's God, too, affirms all differences, or rather all potentialities (he envisages all eternal objects, indiscriminately).

For Spinoza, as summarized by Bell, our finite, limited appetites "select against difference" and for self-continuation; however, "our ultimate appetite is not... simply to persevere within the fixed proportion of motion and rest that is the formal essence of our body, but rather it is to affirm the absolutely indeterminate condition that does not select against difference, that does not act towards a particular end or goal," i.e. the ultimate conatus is that of Deus sive Natura, with which we identify in the third kind of knowledge: "a conatus that is endless, that is absolutely indeterminate and not to be confused with any determinate ends or goals."

For Whitehead, in contrast, there is no third kind of knowledge; individual entities can never identify (I am not sure if this is the accurate word) with God, and the "appetite" of those individual entites is not directed towards self-preservation but towards difference and change (which indeed means, that the entity "perishes," but thereby leaves behind an inheritance for subsequent entities).

If you're doing something really experiential -- I think of it more as experiential than action, even though these are probably just semantics -- you have to maintain geography. Geography is really, really key. The minute you lose geography and just have kinetic shooting or kinetic cutting, I check out of it. I need to have a really rhythmic sense of the emotion on the actor, the details on the actor, and where the actor lives in that physical universe... It's not arbitrarily constructed for sheer kineticism; there really is an innate physicality that reveals itself.

Kathryn Bigelow, interviewed in Cinemascope 37 (Winter 2009), page 35.

I really really love this. This is the key to Bigelow's aesthetic as an action director (or, as she would prefer it, experiential director). The care she takes over geography and physicality is what unites her with Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and John Woo, and separates her absolutely from the likes of Michael Bay, whose films are full of kineticism but utterly devoid of physicality and emotion.

Relations and Novelty, once again

I think that this gets to the heart of my disagreement with my OOO friends.

Levi Bryant quotes Bruno Latour as follows:

…what should appear extraordinarily bizarre is, on the contrary, the invention of inanimate entities which would do nothing more than carry one step further the cause that makes them act to generate the n + 1 consequence which in turn are nothing but the causes of the n + 2 consequences. This conceit has the strange result of composing the world with long concatenations of causes and effects where (this is what is so odd) nothing is supposed to happen, except, probably at the beginning– but since there is no God in those staunchly secular versions, there is not even a beginning… The disappearance of agency in the so called “materialist world view” is a stunning invention especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the old resistance of reality: every consequence adds slightly to the cause. Thus, it has to have some sort of agency. There is a supplement. A gap between the two. (10)

Then Levi goes on to remark:

What is interesting in these remarks are Latour’s references to a gap or a supplement in interactions between objects. This characterization of objects as entities capable of producing effects in excess of whatever perturbs them stands in stark contrast to Latour’s relationismwhere actants just are their relations. Indeed, here Latour sounds like a subtractive object-oriented ontologist. Perhaps he’s beginning to come around and recognize that you can’t simultaneously get novelty in the universe and reduce objects to their relations.

But here I think that Levi is wrong. It is not the case for Latour (or for Whitehead) that according to their relationism, "actants just are their relations." It is rather the case that actants constitute themselves by how they respond to (or how they manage, or how they "translate") their relations. The actants do not precede their relations, but neither are they reducible to their relations. So when Latour speaks of a gap or supplement in which there must be some sort of agency, he is not contradicting his relationism, but precisely expounding its consequences. Nothing exists except insofar as it has relations or defines itself in terms of its relations; but this has never meant, for Latour or for Whitehead, that anything is "nothing more than" its relations.

I'm not sure about Latour, but Whitehead pretty much says (rightly, in my opinion) the opposite of Levi (and of Graham). If objects actually existed withdrawn into isolation, then there would be no way to account for them ever changing, and novelty would be impossible. It is only because of relational encounters that change and novelty are possible. The argument that if things are defined by their relations then they are predetermined and cannot change is only true of what Manuel Delanda calls "internal relations," which are the kinds of relations one finds in Hegel. Change arises neither from internal relations nor from isolated objects, but only from what Delanda calls "external relations," which are the sorts of relations James, Whitehead, and Deleuze, among others, are talking about. (See the opening chapter of Delanda's A New Theory of Society, and my commentary on it here).

The trick about external relations is that things cannot exist except insofar as they arise out of their relations, and yet at the same time these things are not simply defined by their relations, because they are creative (Whitehead says) in their responses to these relations (or, in Latour's terms, because they have a certain degree of agency in how they entertain, or respond to, these relations). The whole thing doesn't work if you add, as Levi proposes, a subject-as-substance as fourth term to Whitehead's triad of prehending subject, prehended datum, and "subjective form, which is how that subject prehends that datum." It's precisely the insistence that some substance has to be behind the subjective form, that the deed needs a doer that transcends it, that a noun is needed in order to ground a verb (an action) and an adverb (a how or manner of action), that I don't accept from OOO.

But any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff, founded upon vague phrases whose sole merit is a comforting familiarity. We should either admit dualism at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.

Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas pp. 184-185.

This is Whitehead's justification for a certain type of anthropomorphism, i.e. for attributing desires and satisfactions, and experience in general, to all organisms. Either we are dualist and anthropocentric, saying that human beings alone have subjectivity, desires, etc., or we accept that the distinctions between us and other entities are only relative -- in this latter case, anthropomorphism is the only alternative to reductionism and eliminativism.

If anything, The Eagle Path, announced as "un drame psychologique," is a lunatic variation onThe Shanghai Gesture(1941), played out in full Eighties action trash mode (replete with peculiar postdubbing, further enhancing the Sternberg-artificiality of its underwater atmosphere), edited—by none other than the auteur—in a manner that evokes Alain Resnais on a really crazy binge, and culminating in a jaw-dropping montage that is some kind of inverted Bruce Conner explosion for YouTube times, while the auteur, also acting, furiously, in the part of—and we kid you not—Frenchy, emerges as some incomprehensible saviour-mixture of Jesus, Mary and Jean-Claude himself, sacrificing himself to save the world (sic). "I have a complicated mind," the auteur announced helpully before the screening to prepare for the assault of this cri de coeur. We have to agree. The evidence is overwhelming. Since, unlike JCVD, this blunt confession will not carry any hip cachet with the so-called smart crowd, The Eagle Path may be doomed to a shadowy existence as a strange, spiritual exorcism-experience foisted at very unsuspecting viewers. But we still hope the eagle will sprout its wings and soar. After all, this was the most mind-blowing film shot in Thailand, or, for that matter, anywhere, to screen in Cannes this year.

The Ferroni Brigade on Van Damme's Eagle Way

Attention and "freedom"

William James, in the chapter on "Attention" of his Principles of Psychology, is very interesting on the question of whether paying attention to something is a free act or an entirely (physiologically) determined one:

If feeling is an inert accompaniment [to neural activity], then of course the brain-cell can be played upon only by other brain-cells, and the attention which we give at any time to any subject... is the fatally predetermined effect of exclusively material laws. If, on the other hand, the feeling which co-exists with the brain-cells' activity reacts dynamically upon that activity, furthering or checking it, then the attention is in part, at least, a cause. It does not necessarily follow, of course, that this reactive feeling should be 'free' in the sense of having its amount and direction undetermined in advance, for it might very well be predetermined in all these particulars. If it were so, our attention would not be materially determined, nor yet would it be 'free' in the sense of being spontaneous or unpredictable in advance. (page 424)

Translating this into contemporary terms, James' point is that one can reject eliminativism without thereby buying into some sort of idealism or mind/matter dualism. Even if "feelings" are impossible in the absence of a physical correlate, and even if can indeed be correlated with specific physiological states, this need not entail that they have no causal impact and are merely epiphenomenal. My feelings may indeed have an impact on what I think and do, without this being translated into necessary causal relations among the physical states correlated with these feelings, thoughts, and actions.

James immediately goes on to note that, as to the choice between eliminativism/determinism and the causal efficacy of feelings, "the question is of course a purely speculative one, for we have no means of objectively ascertaining whether our feelings react on our nerve-processes or not." He does not pretend to offer an answer. However, several pages later he warns us against "the strange arrogance with which the wildest materialistic speculations persist in calling themselves 'science'" (page 429). This is because the eliminativist view is no better than "an argument from analogy... The consciousness doesn't count, these reasoners say; it doesn't exist for science, it is nil; you mustn't think about it at all'' (pages 429-430). Eliminativism solves the problem of consciousness by ruling it out a priori. "Such conduct may conceivably be wise," James says; "but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical, it cannot seriously be called" (page 430). This is not to reject science, but to remind us that, even as we rely on it, we cannot thereby eliminate metaphysical considerations as well.

Though irony is mother’s milk to him, Waters’s quest for genuine communication inside bullshit-free zones propels him toward worlds with and without irony. Sincerely insincere, insincerely sincere, authentically inauthentic, inauthentically authentic, his work vexes the normative and all the usual binaries. Oppositional terms can’t tell the stories he wants to tell. The mash-up of in-betweenness sparks Waters’s imagination, where insincerity can be sincere, sincerity ironic. Waters prodigiously exaggerates the deficiencies of false dichotomies: Each side of the aisle is desperately wanting. All this ongoing worry about “authenticity” in art and life, his oeuvre suggests, is moot, since human beings may be incapable of inauthenticity. Con artist Bernie Madoff’s commission of fraud doesn’t make Madoff a fraud: He’s absolutely Madoff.

Lynne Tillman on John Waters. This reminds me of Graham Harman on sincerity: "Everyday life is laced with sincerity through and through, in the sense that I really am doing whatever it is that I am doing..." (Guerrilla Metaphysics, pp. 135ff)

Harman’s insistence on the non-relational kernel of objects, their resilient or self-concealing withdrawal from relation, actually distances him from pansychism. Harman’s account of “vacuum-sealed” objects suggests that the global order of things is more a kind of universal unconscious: objects are deeply unconscious of each other, and deeply inaccessible to any kind of consciousness, such that the “translations” or prehensions that obtain between objects are a kind of flickering of sensuous interaction in the midst of a dark and nameless void of incomprehension – like an orgy during a blackout, if I can put it that way. Another way to put this might be to say that the ways in which objects make sense together and of each other, drawing each other into networks of mutual comprehension, constitute a shifting, ultimately contingent pattern of sense against a background of fathomless non-sense. The strange thing is that this is not so different from a position that Harman explicitly rejects: the position that says that objects are a second-order phenomenon which only exist insofar as they are coalesced – whether by an observing consciousness or by some autopoetic mode of creative individuation – out of a primal flux. Harman is adamant that objects are what there is – that our ontology must be an ontology of beings, or an “onticology” (to use Levi Bryant’s useful term) – and yet his position on the withdrawing of objects from relationship means that the way in which objects are never fully coincides with the way they are together – the “network” composed by actants moving in concert or conflict is always subject to a lack or insufficiency owing to the subtraction of objects themselves from the lattice of relationships in which they participate. At the level of sensuous interaction, then, the opposition between meaningless primal chaos and second-order meaningful structure returns – even if objects remain the indissoluble support of both sides of this divide.

Dominic Fox (Poetix) on Graham Harman. I find this helpful and suggestive; the assertion of objects' withdrawal is how Harman avoids panpsychism. (And indeed, in Harman's article on panpsychism in the Skrbina anthology, he says that not all objects are conscious because objects not involved in relations are asleep).

I reject the idea that objects are ever apart in a vacuum or without relation, as I think that the withdrawn-objects thesis is an unnecessary extension of Harman's prior observation (which I accept) that no object is ever exhausted or fully grasped by all the other objects that prehend it. Even in sleep, one's withdrawal from the world is not total. And this goes together with the Whiteheadian claim that all entities have experiences, and mentality -- a version of panpsychism, I think, but one where mentality does not necessarily imply consciousness.

But what I find most useful about Fox's analysis is the suggestion that withdrawn objects perform for Harman the role that flux does for Bergson or Deleuze, and that (somewhat differently) actual entities, as opposed to the enduring entities that are societies, do for Whitehead. We get two levels in all these thinkers, as follows:

--Harman: real objects vs. sensual objects

--Deleuze: potential (flux) vs. actual (fixed objects)

--Whitehead: actual entities vs. societies of enduring objects.

This helps my argument in two ways. First, because it gives more specificity to my claim that Harman doesn't take temporality, or becoming, or the processes by which objects come into being and fall out of being, seriously enough. And second, because it suggests a different distribution of terms than the one I made in my book (where I equated Deleuze's virtual vs. actual with Whitehead's eternal objects vs. actual entities).

In order to more fully conform to white bourgeois patriarchal ideals, hipsters attempt to disassociate themselves with the very white bourgeois patriarchy that underwrites the privilege accorded to this sort of innovative rebel. “Hipsters”, in their claims to alienation from white bourgeois patriarchy, are really only attempting to one-up the white bourgeois patriarchy at its own game (by being more macho, more white)....Simultaneously read as white but not-quite white, non-white but not quite non-white, hipsters “embody” non-white corporeal styles for the express purpose of asserting their white, masculine, bourgeois privilege.

Robin James, "In, But Not Of, Of But Not In: On Taste, Hipness, and White Embodiment"

Eagle Way (Jean-Claude Van Damme, Thailand/HK/USA): Examples of a Bicameral Mind Little did I know this gem would be the next entry in the Cannes 2010 next actor/director/actor ouevre. And what to choose in this insane medley from the market, about which Van Damme said, before the film, that it expressed his desire to bring equilibrium to the world. Frankly, I thought of Alain Resnais throughout the film—though Christoph Huber made a cryptic reference to Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture before pointing out the finale's similarity to Bruce Conner. My favorite thing about this film which Van Damme wrote, directed, starred in, and edited, was, aside from the occasional searing image (for instance the yellow smeared freeze frames of the titular eagle, so far the most raw image of the festival), was the Resnais-by-way-of-giallo character Van Damme plays. This psychopath lays out a mental reality, a flashback-ridden traumatic schizophrenia, over our natural reality (or perhaps the film's straight-to-video action movie world). This forces the man to re-live and re-stage the world he sees through his insanity—continually torturing his mind—in the real, or sane world. All with notably manic, bloody, and self-destructive results, of course. Could Philip K. Dick have done any better?

Cannes 2010 reporting by Daniel Kasman from mubi.com I must say, this sounds totally great.

Societies (Whitehead)

Adventures of Ideas, page 204: Whitehead distinguishes (as always) between entities or occasions, and societies. But his language here is interesting. On the one hand, there are "the completely real things which are the actual occasions." On the other hand, "the real actual things that endure are all societies." So, although Whitehead's distinction violates Levi Bryant's flat ontology, and opens him to Harman's charge of "undermining" objects, nonetheless he insists that the enduring objects, or societies, are in their own way entirely real. He doesn't dissolve them into the actual entities or actual occasions of which they are composed. What is the force (if any) of the distinction between "real actual things" and "completely real things"? Societies endure and have histories, whereas actual occasions don't. It is the agglomeration of occasions in both time and space that gives rise to societies, but this should not be taken to undermine the societies (the redness of the sunset is as real as the photons that scientists reduce it to -- this Whitehead's version of what Latour later calls the "principle of irreduction").

Afro-Futurist robo-diva R&B can be understood as reverse-engineering the body, using music to rewire the way whiteness and patriarchy are programmed into our bodies and structures of feeling.

Robin James, “Robo-Diva R&B”: Aesthetics, Politics, and Black Female Robots in Contemporary Popular Music

--Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 20, Issue 4 (2008) Pages 402–423

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