Remarks on

Whitehead
ric Alliez

With the clarity and radicality of thought that we have come to expect from her, Isabelle Stengers,
in the intervention written for the symposium which brings us together today, sets the principal
stakes of Whiteheadian philosophy under the name of constructivism.

By doing so, the relation between this philosophy of becoming whose first, anti-substantialist
principle, is called the principle of process (PR, 23) and the philosophies of vitalist intuition as
auto-expression of the world is posed as eminently problematic from the very outset. Thus,
Whiteheads own declaration about Bergson, James and Dewey is already put to good use, a
declaration according to which we need to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-
intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it (PR, xii); and in a more
direct mode: we must not stop with this anti-intellectualism of Nietzsche and Bergson, [that]
tinges American Pragmatism, considered as a far too automatic reaction against the dogmatic
fallacy (AI, 223).

But this problematic entry into Whitehead,1 which forces one to think in a consequent manner the
constructivist nature of his concepts in their irreducibility to the expression of facts of experience
(from which they would be intuitively abstracted in order to match the creativity of the world
from the point of view of language) since they must well and truly function qua machinic
articulation (engineering, to use the Whiteheadian term taken up by Isabelle) of the how it
becomes implied in the ontological principle of reason (referred back to the actual entities alone
and not to a sui generis principle of creativity) poses by the same token at the heart of the
analysis the question of the alterity of Whiteheadian constructivism. An alterity, of course, with
respect to the anti-metaphysical, anti-speculative concepts of transcendental construction (Kant)
and logical construction (Russell), which have in common a claim to determine at the level of
their conditions of possibility the representation of the identical structures of experience related
back to the knowing subject or the known object. What must on the contrary be engaged with,
apprehended, and shown at work in its conditions of reality and Whiteheadian philosophy,
truth be told, has no other imperative of adventures (Deleuze) when it presents itself as a
speculative construction (PR, 5) is that construction is process (PR, 151), once one dares
to project oneself abstractly and practically in a dimension anterior to the bifurcation of nature
into subject versus object, in order to invert its course in accordance with a critique of sensation
freed from impressionist sensualist pre-comprehensions (Hume). (As I wrote in The Signature
of the World: This amounts to putting sensation in the world, and the world in the subject
emerging from the world a superject rather than a subject [PR, 88].) In order to set aside
any form of re-presentational perception and to situate oneself from the start in the mode of a
causal efficacy freed from the dualist model of consciousness, Whitehead will make use of the
notion of prehension, in order to qualify the constituting activity of an actual entity qua
grasping, or constructivist appropriation of other entities becoming the components of its
concrescence. So that the subject constitutes and constructs itself in the interrelation of
concrescent prehensions without data or objects (inasmuch as they are potentials for feelings
and not things) needing to formally pre-exist prehensions, understood as the most concrete
elements in the nature of actual entities (PR, 19). It is not that sensory data are clarified or
constructed by the one who perceives (according to the transcendental-idealist concept of
construction); on the contrary, they are instructed, by including in the datum their own
interconnections (PR, 113), in the process of becoming whose analysis supposes the removal of
the tacit identification of perception with sense-perception (a fatal error barring the advance of
systematic metaphysics, as Whitehead insists) (AI, 180). Conversely, A feeling is the agency by
which other things are built into the constitution of its one subject in process of concrescence
(PR, 231). The systematic analysis of feeling will thus serve as the genetic description of these
operations (or constructions) through which a unity of experience (an actual occasion) grasps the
entire universe under a molecular unity of apperception in order to express it differentially. That
is the properly microphysical level of Whiteheadian constructivism, in which each prehension is,
through its physico-sensory pole, a concrete vector with a hold on others, in order to include some
among them as data (positive prehensions) or exclude others (negative prehensions), and the
world is a flux of vectors, vectorial connections actualised in the events through which it pluralizes
itself by expressing its own energetic activity in variable configurations.2 But this Whiteheadian
microphysics is, as we know, in the most immanent manner possible (because immanent to the
process of constitution of the actual entity), ontologically indissociable from a micrometaphysics
which doubles the physical pole of the actual entity with a mental pole or a micro-brain, the
seat of initiatives inherent to the occasion (Jean-Claude Dumoncel) constituted by the sum of
conceptual prehensions (or conceptual feelings) which apply themselves to the eternal objects
that ingress in the event as pure Virtualities actualising themselves in the prehensions by
determining the definiteness of the acting of an actual entity; a definiteness without which there
could be no activity of self-creation felt with a novel emphasis of subjective form in a terminal
satisfaction. Note here that one will have to hold, at one and the same time, that these
conceptual prehensions (which do not necessarily imply a form of consciousness) derive from
physical prehensions (qua surface of recording, conceptual valuation) and that the physical []
feelings originate as steps towards realizing this conceptual aim through their treatment of initial
data. The important point, effectively, is that The doctrine of the inherence of the subject in the
process of its production requires that in the primary phase of the subjective process there be a
conceptual feeling of subjective aim (PR, 224). The second phase is dominated by conceptual
reversion as the category through which novelty enters by way of contrast into the world. As
Whitehead concludes: This aim at contrast is the expression of the ultimate creative purpose
that each unification shall achieve some maximum depth of intensity of feeling, subject to its
conditions of concrescence (PR, 249).

As Deleuze clearly saw in The Fold (p. 111 of the French edition), this processually divergent world
can no longer be included in expressive unities (Leibniz); it constructs itself in prehensive
unities whose categorial description transduces ontology into a pragmatics of being in which
relation could not be constituent without engaging forces that are both physical and
conceptual which can now only inter-express themselves in a generalised constructivism that
God himself (?) cannot escape. (This is the very inverse of Leibnizian Monadology in which the
monad, like the soul, is like its own world, which has no relation of dependence, except to God;
for since a created monad could not have a physical influence on the interior of another, it is only
through this means that one can have dependence on the other. This forbids any real and not
merely phenomenal constitutive and not merely expressive relation between monads.)

Whence, in the guise of a reanimation of the Leibnizian revolution so magnificently defined by

Deleuze as the marriage of the concept and singularity (The Fold, French edition, 91),
Whiteheads invention of the most anti-Bergsonian notion imaginable, that of conceptual feeling.
Its deployment within Whiteheadian philosophy shows (in actu) that becoming-subject does not
pass through the constructivist-hybridising power of the concept as the singularising prehension
of the Multiple without leading every natural phenomenology of the auto-expression of the world
to be excluded together with the very principle of pure interiority. And vice versa.

Whence also the necessity, for Whitehead, of deconstructing the anti-intellectualism of Nietzsche
and Bergson, [that] tinges American Pragmatism by proposing, with regard to this point, the
most radical alternative, inasmuch as it is historically determined at the level of (the concept of)
the empirical world which is an assemblage designating both the oceans of facts and the
evaluative interests [] intrinsic to any historical period, as well as for the categorial schema that
analyses it (cf. MT) by the necessities of the present time. (Note here the historical impetus of
the chapter on the Romantic reaction in SMW.)
(It is perhaps not otiose to spare a word here about the Bergsonism, of a very Whiteheadian
inspiration, at work in Deleuzes Difference and Repetition. Knowing that it is Deleuze himself
who exemplifies his method of decentrings, shifts, breaks, secret emissions by citing his own
work on Bergson [see Pourparlers, 14-5]. In effect, Deleuze engages in an operation of the
Bergson beyond Bergson variety by displacing the duality of the concept (static, solid,
geometric or tool-like) and of intuition (fluid and alive) on the basis of this difference of
degree between the sensible and the intelligible which allows him to posit the reality of the
virtual as objective definition of the Problem qua Idea. It is effectively a major motif in Difference
and Repetition to explode within the Idea reduced by Bergson to a stable view on the
instability of things the extrinsicism of concept and intuition. Now if it is in What is
Philosophy? that Deleuze and Guattari will specifically develop the question of a vitalism of the
concept, it is also in that book, as Isabelle clearly perceived, that Whitehead is most intensely
present We can expand on this last point, taking into consideration Mick Halewoods reply, in
our discussion.)

Panpsychic in a cosmogenetic sense, the philosophy of Whitehead can be rigorously characterized

as a panexperientialism, or even better as a panexperimentalism, in order to underline that the
constructivism of physico-mental prehensions is the condition of the expression of the
constitutive relations of the world in its creative process (creative advance). And this is not
simply because the datum is always a construct (Kant), but more fundamentally because the
relational processes relocate every datum (this is the thesis of the connexity of the real) in a world
in which is exercised only functional activity, confirming the reality of prehension as power-
being. Now, if being is power in the sense that it exerts power and is subjected to the exertion of
power, according to Whiteheads reading of Platos Sophist in the Adventures of Ideas (AI, 120),
by privileging immanence-law, it is always an intensive co-ordination allowing for a
supplemental phase in which contrasts will be synthesised into a higher unity which counts as
novelty.

We could advance here, less to conclude than to open up the debate, that Whiteheadian
sociology acquires here its character of necessity according to the principle of a
micrometaphysical institution of the social which has no other precedent than Tardean neo-
monadology, inasmuch as the latter exemplifies a social cosmology of force-being.

Translated by Alberto Toscano

Notes

1 With regard to his inscription in the philosophical field qua pre-Kantian realist metaphysician, or his image
as a metaphysician of flux
2 Whitehead relates this vectorial microphysics to the theory of quanta (SMW, Ch. VIII), which he opposes

to the domination of the scalar in Newtonian physics. The presence of feeling throughout the actual
world is deduced from this.