WHITEHEAD Now - Configurations

Configurations
Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2005

Special Issue: Whitehead Now
Guest Editor: Steven Meyer and Elizabeth Wilson
CONTENTS
Articles
Meyer, Steven, 1959-

Introduction
[Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]
Subject Headings:
Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861-1947.
Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Creative ability.
Perception (Philosophy)
Stengers, Isabelle.
Whitehead's Account of the Sixth Day
Subject Headings:
Creation.
Metaphysics.
Entity (Philosophy)
Halewood, Michael.
On Whitehead and Deleuze: The Process of Materiality
Subject Headings:
Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995.
Materialism.
Subjectivity.
Ontology.
Sha, Xin Wei.

Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics
Subject Headings:
Process philosophy.
Philosophy and science.
Byrd, Don, 1944-

The Emergence of the Cyborg and the End of the Classical Tradition: The
Crisis of Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality
Subject Headings:
Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861-1947. Process and reality.
Paradox.
Abstraction.
Philosophy, Modern -- 20th century.
Richardson, Joan, 1946-

Recombinant ANW: Appetites of Words
Subject Headings:
James, William, 1842-1910.
Language and languages -- Philosophy.
Philosophy, Modern -- 20th century.
Bono, James J. (James Joseph)

Perception, Living Matter, Cognitive Systems, Immune Networks: A
Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies
Subject Headings:
Philosophy and science.
Science -- Philosophy.
Ontology.
Contributors
Contributors
Select a Volume
----------------
Introduction
Steven Meyer
Washington University
I. The Invention of Creativity

The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into
a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled be-
yond the bounds of the world.
Alfred North Whitehead1
As Isabelle Stengers has observed, for Whitehead creativity is not

identical with novelty or innovation—not even with “relevant nov-
elty,” or originality.2 This is what she presumes, for instance, in re-
marking of his “ontological principle” (“there is nothing which
floats into the world from nowhere”3) that it “prohibits any easy ap-
peal to creativity as explaining novelty.”4 Such an appeal would pro-
vide the sort of “natural ad hoc explanation” that Whitehead resists:
for example, the just-so stories favored by much contemporary evo-
lutionary psychology. “The question of originality,” Stengers explains,
is instead “generalised” by Whitehead into an inquiry concerning
1. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 227.
2. Isabelle Stengers, “A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality,” p. 10 (paper de-
livered at workshop “Whitehead, Invention and Social Process,” 18 June 2004, Centre
for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths College, London;
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/source/papers.html ).
3. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed.,
ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 244.
4. Stengers, “Constructivist Reading” (above, n. 2), p. 11.
Configurations, 2005, 13: 1–33 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University

Press and the Society for Literature and Science.
1
2 Configurations
what is “taken for granted or explained away by [such] explana-

tions.”5 This he terms “creativity”; and if creativity is not innovation,
they are certainly related, as Whitehead’s own term provocatively
demonstrates.
In characterizing creativity this way, as Whitehead’s term, I imply
something that I found surprisingly difficult to grasp when I became
aware of it several years ago, namely, that Whitehead actually coined
the term—our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among
literature, science, and the arts.6 Whitehead is notorious for the ar-
cane quality of his terminology (concrescence, prehension, ingression,
5. Ibid.
6. There are nay-sayers, to be sure. “I confess I find ‘creativity’ as useless as the term
‘imagination’ and almost as repellent as ‘self-fulfillment,’” Morse Peckham writes in
“Two Ways of Using ‘Creativity,’” in Romanticism and Ideology (Hanover, Ct.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1995), p. 180. More moderately, Kenneth Burke offers “On ‘Creativ-
ity’—A Partial Retraction” (1971), now reprinted in On Human Nature: A Gathering
While Everything Flows, 1967–1984, ed. William H. Rueckert and Angelo Bonadonna
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 35-53. Lukas Foss no doubt speaks
for many when he opens an essay titled “About the Creative Process” with the obser-
vation that “the word creative creates trouble”: “Let’s say I’m composing something
and someone enters my room unexpectedly. What do I say? ‘I am working.’ Work is
what we do. Who creates? Women as they give birth? God, when he created the world?
How presumptuous to apply that word to writing music” (Yale Review 94:3 [2006]: 115).
Foss is alluding here to the paradigmatic setting for the disturbance of artistic creativ-
ity: the interruption of Coleridge as he was composing the fragment he later titled
“Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream,” by “a person on business from Porlock” (quo-
tation from an 1816 account cited in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Poetry, ed.
William Empson and David Pirie [Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989], p. 248). Neither
giving birth, however, nor creating the world ex nihilo pertains to creativity as White-
head understood it. Foss is much closer when he says of a “minimalist piece” of music
he once performed, that when it was over, “I woke up from feeling good. It is like a
drug. When the drug wears off, you’re as miserable as you were before, whereas a true
work of art leaves you enriched. One has been introduced to a new meaning. One un-
derstands something that one didn’t understand before” (p. 120). And then—to switch
registers—there is the wonderful spoof of the economics of creativity (as in “creativity
is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has
the most compelling ‘architecture of participation’” and “America’s competitive ad-
vantage in the global economy has long rested on our ability to generate intellectual
property—patents and other expressions of creativity”) in Lucy Kellaway’s Who Moved
My Blackberry? The novel’s protagonist and coauthor, Martin Lukes, “thinking about
the behaviors matrix” while showering one morning, comes up with the neologism
“creovation”—“half creativity and half innovation!”—and promptly trademarks it
(Lucy Kellaway, Who Moved My Blackberry? [New York: Hyperion, 2006], p. 130. The
preceding quotations are from William C. Taylor, “Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have
Ideas,” New York Times, 26 March 2006, Business section; and Erich E. Kunhardt, “Ne-
cessity as the Mother of Tenure?” ibid., 14 December 2004, p. A31). There is nothing
inherently good or bad about Whiteheadian creativity, unlike creovationTM!
Meyer / Introduction 3
transmutation, etc.), an opacity compounded by his resistance to the

dictionary model of meaning: he will not let his terms alone, refus-
ing to permit their meanings to congeal. Yet none of these technical
terms are words he invented—the way, say, his fellow logician
Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) invented “galumph” or, rather
more momentously, “chortle.” Whitehead did invent “creativity,”
however, a term that quickly became so popular, so omnipresent,
that its invention within living memory, and by Alfred North White-
head of all people, quickly became occluded.
Two caveats: first, there is nothing new to any of this. In a 1987
essay on “Creativity in a Future Key,” Lewis Ford starts off as follows:
“Alfred North Whitehead introduced the term ‘creativity’ to desig-
nate that activity whereby actualities (conceived as individual in-
stances of self-creation) come into being. Creativity is Whitehead’s
word for that generic activity intrinsic to every instance of becom-
ing.” Ford then adds: “He appears to have coined this neologism,
which has been adopted into common parlance.”7 Nor did Ford start
the ball rolling, for he cites an essay on “‘Creativity’ and ‘Tradition’”
by the intellectual historian Paul Oskar Kristeller, which appeared
four years before his own. “Although I am not an ‘ordinary lan-
guage’ philosopher,” Kristeller happily admits in his opening para-
graph, “I am often inclined to start from a definition supplied from
a standard dictionary. When I tried to do that in this case, I was
greatly surprised to discover that the word ‘creativity’ does not ap-
pear in the Oxford English Dictionary [neither the 1933 corrected reis-
sue nor the 1971 Compact edition that Kristeller consulted] or in the
fifth edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,” based on the 1934
New International Dictionary. To his relief, he eventually did locate
the word in the Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, which derives in its
turn from the Third New International Dictionary, of 1961. Here is
Kristeller’s careful conclusion:
we are led to infer that the word became an accepted part of the standard Eng-
lish vocabulary only between 1934 and 1961. We may even go back a few
more years. The great philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead used “creativity”
in his Religion in the Making (1927 [sic!]) and in his major work, Process and Re-
ality (1929), and in view of the great influence of this last work, we may very
well conjecture that he either coined the term or at least gave it wide currency.8
7. Lewis S. Ford, “Creativity in a Future Key,” in New Essays in Metaphysics, ed. Robert
C. Neville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 179.
8. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “‘Creativity’ and ‘Tradition,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 44:1
(1983): 105.
4 Configurations
Incidentally, it was another philosopher, Paul Kurtz, who directed

Kristeller to Whitehead. So, originality is rather hard to fix here. In
fact, as Ford points out, two of the relevant passages in Religion in the
Making are already cited in the 1972 Supplement to the OED; these are
then imported into the 1989 second edition, where the term finally
does appear.9
I have said that credit is difficult to assign in circumstances such
as these, which leads to my second caveat: namely, that, as Ford ob-
serves, the Supplement (and, now, the more recent OED) “does list
one stray citation for 1875”:10 A.W. Ward (Sir Adolphus William
Ward), speaking of Shakespeare in his standard History of English Dra-
matic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, remarks on “the sponta-
neous flow of his poetic creativity.”11 Several comments are in order.
First, Ford charmingly calls this a “stray” citation. The characteriza-
tion suggests that the term did not yet have “wide currency” (to use
Kristeller’s phrase), or, to come back to Stengers, although it may
have been novel, it was not yet felt to be relevant. On this reasoning,
the “birth at the [right] season” did not occur until Whitehead rein-
troduced the term fifty years later.12
Second, Ward’s phrase “spontaneous flow,” especially juxtaposed
with “poetic creativity,” is neither spontaneous nor original—allud-
ing as it does to Wordsworth’s celebrated definition of poetry in the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “all good poetry is the spontaneous over-
9. The passages in question are “The creativity whereby the actual world has its char-
acter of temporal passage to novelty” and “Unlimited possibility and abstract creativ-
ity can procure nothing” (Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making [New York:
Fordham University Press, 1996], pp. 90, 152).
10. Ford, “Creativity in a Future Key” (above, n. 7), p. 195.
11. Adolphus William Ward, A History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of
Queen Anne (London: Macmillan, 1875), 1: 506; cited in the Oxford English Dictionary,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 3: 1135 (hereafter OED). Interestingly, when
Ward published a new edition of the History, in 1899, he revised this passage, remov-
ing “creativity.” The sentence now reads: “That, notwithstanding all this, the verse of
Shakespeare’s dramas remains as a whole unrivalled, is due to the spontaneous flow of
the well of poetry which was in him” (Adolphus William Ward, A History of English Dra-
matic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, rev. ed. [London: Macmillan, 1899], 2: 288).
12. Stengers, “Constructivist Reading” (above, n. 2), p. 12, quoting from Whitehead.
See Process and Reality (above, n. 3), p. 223: “Insistence on birth at the wrong season is
the trick of evil. In other words, the novel fact may throw back, inhibit, and delay. But
the advance, when it does arrive, will be richer in content, more fully conditioned, and
more stable. For in its objective efficacy an actual entity can only inhibit by reason of
its alternative positive contribution.”
flow of powerful feelings.”13 (And just in case you missed it, twenty
pages later Wordsworth repeats the definition, with an equally cele-
brated addendum: “I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous over-
flow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected
in tranquillity.”14) Certainly the compilers of the OED were cog-
nizant of this. The fourth and final citation for “creativity” stems
from a 1950 issue of the British journal Radio Times: “He [Robert
Burns, on this occasion] was a man of overflowing creativity—in so
far as the phrase applies to his poetry.”15 This is good fun; but there
is also a very good reason for bringing poetry into the mix, which I
will return to presently.16
13. Wiliam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed., ed. by
R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 246. Ward’s association of the
Wordsworthian “spontaneous flow” with creativity was hardly idiosyncratic. The 1989
OED adds a full column to the meager entry for creative that the 1933 edition had af-
forded—the new material starting with the second definition, 1. b.: “Spec. of literature
and art, thus also of a writer or artist: inventive (cf. INVENTION 3b), imaginative; ex-
hibiting imagination as well as intellect, and thus differentiated from the merely criti-
cal, ‘academic,’ journalistic, professional, mechanical, etc.” The initial example is from
Wordsworth’s 1816 “Thanksgiving Ode”: “Creative Art . . . Demands the service of a
mind and heart . . . Heroically fashioned.” The editors could just as well have gone to
the second book of Wordsworth’s Prelude, where in the 1850 version one finds the
lines, “But let this / Be not forgotten, that I still retained / My first creative sensibility .
. . Nor should this, perchance, / Pass unrecorded, that I still had loved / The exercise
and produce of a toil, / Than analytic industry to me / More pleasing, and whose char-
acter I deem / Is more poetic as resembling more / Creative agency”— virtually un-
changed from the 1799 version: “But let this at least / Be not forgotten, that I still re-
tained / My first creative sensibility . . . Nor should this, perchance, / Pass unrecorded,
that I still had loved / The exercise and produce of a toil / Than analytic industry to me
/ More pleasing, and whose character I deem / Is more poetic, as resembling more /
Creative agency” (William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan
Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill [New York: Norton, 1979], pp. 85, 87,
24–25). More famous are the lines in the twelfth book of the 1850 version, only
slightly revised from the five-book version of 1804: “I had felt / Too forcibly, too early
in my life, / Visitings of imaginative power / For this to last: I shook the habit off / En-
tirely and for ever, and again / In Nature’s presence stood, as I stand now, / A sensitive,
and a creative soul” (p. 428; emphasis in original). Examples can be multiplied indefi-
nitely, and not just from Wordsworth’s hand, for “creative” (though not “creativity”)
was a characteristic “romantic word.” See Logan Pearsall Smith, “Four Romantic
Words,” in Words and Idioms: Studies in the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1925), pp. 66–134.
14. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, p. 266.
15. OED, 3: 1135.
16. One more observation concerning the Ward quotation: surely, it is at least con-
ceivable that Whitehead acquired the term from Ward, directly or indirectly, given that
6 Configurations
Whitehead himself conceived of the term as novel in his usage of

it. That at least is how I am inclined to read the following passage,
two-thirds into Process and Reality, where he is discussing what he
rather playfully terms “the principle of relativity.” (This “states that
it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘be-
coming.’”17) “In physical science,” Whitehead explains, the principle
takes the form which should never be lost sight of in fundamental specula-
tion, that scalar quantities are constructs derivative from vector quantities. In
more familiar language, this principle can be expressed by the statement that
the notion of “passing on” is more fundamental than that of a private indi-
vidual fact. In the abstract language here adopted for metaphysical statement,
“passing on” becomes “creativity,” in the dictionary sense of the verb creare,
“to bring forth, beget, produce.” Thus, according to [the principle of relativ-
ity], no entity can be divorced from the notion of creativity.18
Note the express progression here from the language of physical sci-
ence (“scalar,” “vector”), to more familiar language (“passing on”),
to abstract language adopted for metaphysical statement.
Yes, Whitehead does go to the dictionary for “creativity,” only it is
to his Latin dictionary. This is not to say that the term was not in the
air, was not everywhere in “the interstices,” as Stengers puts it, “where
lurk possibilities of new lures for feeling,” “possibilities of relevant
novelty.”19 Indeed, the phrase “creative writing” first appears in print
in 1925.20 Religion in the Making was published in 1926. Some years
earlier, in 1917, the volume Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Prag-
matic Attitude led off with John Dewey’s important essay “The Need
for a Recovery of Philosophy.” The same collection contains an essay
by George Herbert Mead, Dewey’s former colleague at Chicago; and
the term “creativity” appears in several chapter headings in Mead’s
classic Mind, Self and Society: from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist,
Ward, for many years at Manchester, was elected master of Peterhouse at Cambridge in
1900. In other words, Whitehead might have read the word somewhere, or heard it,
and promptly forgotten it. The right season for its birth had not yet arrived.
17. Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 3), p. 166.
18. Ibid., pp. 212–213.
19. Stengers, “Constructivist Reading” (above, n. 2), pp. 12, 10.
20. It is used in a volume entitled Creative Youth: How a School Environment Set Free the
Creative Spirit, by William Hughes Mearns, who for the past five years had been in
“charge of the secondary English curriculum at the Lincoln School, a progressive labo-
ratory school run by [Columbia University’s] Teachers College” (D. G. Myers, The Ele-
phants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006],
p. 102).
published posthumously in 1934 and assembled from students’ lec-

ture notes dating from 1927 and 1930. Does this mean that Mead was
already using the term? It has been reported that he read Process and
Reality through before he died in 1931—but what about 1927? Do the
chapter headings supply evidence for the term’s actual usage or its in-
terstitial, lurking existence? Well, the Introduction clears things up:
“All titles have been added by the editor,” Charles W. Morris, who
concludes his remarks by observing that Mead’s
genius expressed itself best in the lecture room. Perhaps a volume like this
one—suggestive, penetrating, incomplete, conversational in tone—is the most
fitting form for his thoughts; the form most able to carry to a wider audience
in time and space the adventures of ideas (to use Mr. Whitehead’s phrase)
which made notable to smaller audiences for over thirty years Mr. Mead’s lec-
tures on social psychology.21
Certainly, this description of the genius-in-the-lecture-room is

particularly suggestive in light of the reported discrepancy between
“hearing the angels sing” when Whitehead lectured, and his stu-
dents’ discomfiture, left alone with Process and Reality. In her “con-
structivist reading of Process and Reality,” Stengers cites from White-
head’s biographer, Victor Lowe, to the effect that after his first
lecture at Harvard, “the students were ‘in despair about the course,’
but ‘all [were] in love with Whitehead as a person for somehow the
overwhelming magic of his being had shown through.’”22 Yet,
Stengers adds, “when reading Process and Reality angels are not
singing. Instead of this immediate enjoyment, the reader [experi-
ences] constant perplexity. Is this sentence to be taken seriously, is it
rather badly written poetry, is it sheer non-sense?”23
In the paper by Stengers I have been referring to, and throughout
her superb elucidation of his mature thought in the 2002 Penser avec
Whitehead [Thinking with Whitehead], she describes Whitehead’s
“zigzag” writing-process in the composition of Process and Reality.24
21. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society; from the Standpoint of a Social Behav-
iorist, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. vi–vii.
22. Stengers, “Constructivist Reading” (above, n. 2), p. 7. The cited remarks are by
James Wilkinson Miller, a graduate student in the audience, and the phrase “the angels
were singing” is the recollection of Raphael Demos, who had been assigned by the Har-
vard philosophy department to be Whitehead’s assistant. See Victor Lowe, Alfred North
Whitehead: The Man and His Work, vol. 2, 1910–1947, ed. J. B. Schneewind (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 142.
23. Stengers, “Constructivist Reading” (above, n. 2), p.7.
24. Ibid., p. 13.
8 Configurations
It is this quality that his writing shares with poetry. In inventing cre-
ativity, Whitehead was doing what poets are best known for doing:
naming things that do not already have names, or—what comes to
the same thing—giving a new name to something and thereby trans-
forming it. In point of fact, there was already a word that might be
thought to possess the identical meaning—“creativeness”25—and as
it happens Whitehead used it prominently in the February 1925
Lowell Lectures that formed the basis of the work published later
that year as Science and the Modern World. By February 1926, when he
delivered a second set of Lowell Lectures, Religion in the Making in the
making, he had seen fit to introduce the term “creativity.”
The important thing to recognize is that, for Whitehead, creative-
ness and creativity are not at all the same. (In this respect his use of
“creativity” differs thoroughly from Ward’s, for Ward’s remark on
Shakespeare’s poetic creativity echoes Coleridge as well as
Wordsworth, in particular the famous description of Shakespeare as
“the Spinosistic deity—an omnipresent creativeness.”26 Although
there is a good deal of Whiteheadian creativity in this Coleridgean
creativeness, it is absent from Ward, who simply does not display the
speculative tendencies that Coleridge and Whitehead shared.) Here,
then, is Whitehead’s creativeness:
There are . . . two sides to the machinery involved in the development of na-
ture. On the one side, there is a given environment with organisms adapting
themselves to it. . . . The givenness of the environment dominates everything.
Accordingly, the last words of science appeared to be the Struggle for Existence,
25. Their presumed semantic near-equivalence is demonstrated in the OED’s defini-

tions for the two contiguous terms: “creative quality or faculty” (creativeness), “creative
power or faculty; ability to create” (creativity): OED, 3: 1135. The overlap of these two
definitions—“creative faculty”—points to a risk that one takes in using either term, al-
though I would argue that when Whitehead invented creativity, he designed it so as to
minimize this risk. Other partisans of the term have not been so careful. The risk, of
course, is the one Molière satirized, and immortalized, in his play The Imaginary Invalid.
One of the characters in the play, Terrence Deacon explains, “is asked by his physician-
examiners to explain the means by which opium induces sleep. He replies that it in-
duces sleep because it contains a ‘soporific factor.’ This answer is applauded by the doc-
tors”; medical knowledge is thereby exposed as “no more than sophistry. The answer
is a nonexplanation. It merely takes what is in need of explanation and gives it a name,
as though it were some physical object. Like phlogiston, the substance once hypothe-
sized by pre-atomic chemistry to be the essence that determined flammability, the ‘so-
porific factor’ fails to reduce the phenomenon in need of explanation to any more ba-
sic causal mechanisms” (Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of
Language and the Brain [New York: Norton, 1998], p. 37).
26. Henry N. Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London:
Murray, 1837), p. 70.
and Natural Selection. . . . The other side of the evolutionary machinery, the
neglected side, is expressed by the word creativeness. The organisms can create
their own environment. For this purpose, the single organism is almost help-
less. The adequate forces require societies of cooperating organisms. But with
such cooperation and in proportion to the effort put forward, the environ-
ment has a plasticity which alters the whole ethical aspect of evolution.27
This is a rich passage, and I will limit myself to observing that in it

creativeness is characterized in thoroughly social terms. It is the so-
ciety of cooperating organisms that exhibits the relevant creative-
ness, not the individual organism. Creativeness, in other words, is
an attribute that societies may possess, including presumably White-
head’s subsequent redescription of the individual organism as itself
a society (composed of what he termed actual entities or occasions).
Creativity, by contrast, is something that actual entities possess as
such. It is nonsocial, though not necessarily antisocial.
I will say a bit more about actual entities further on—and there is
a good deal more about them in the essays that follow—but I would
like to return now to the poetic aspect of Whitehead’s writing, its
zigs and zags, and to the relation I have already hinted at between
creativity and poetry. In Process and Reality, Whitehead famously ob-
serves that “in the real world [as distinct from the world of logicians]
it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be
true.”28 He then adds: “The importance of truth is that it adds to in-
terest.” This is a reformulation of the pragmatist conception of truth,
and at the same time expresses what one might term a poetic con-
ception of the cosmos.29 “Interest,” of course, derives from the Latin
27. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967),
pp. 111–112.
28. Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 3), p. 259. Whitehead found this propo-
sition of sufficient interest that he repeated it in Adventures of Ideas: “It is more impor-
tant that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. This statement is almost a
tautology. For the energy of operation of a proposition in an occasion of experience is
its interest, and is its importance. But of course a true proposition is more apt to be in-
teresting than a false one. Also action in accordance with the emotional lure of a
proposition is more apt to be successful if the proposition be true. And apart from ac-
tion, the contemplation of truth has an interest of its own. But, after all this explana-
tion and qualification, it remains true that the importance of a proposition lies in its
interest” (Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas [above, n. 1], p. 244).
29. Whitehead may well have derived his fondness for the term “interest” from
William James, who observes, for instance, in the “Stream of Thought” chapter in Prin-
ciples of Psychology, that consciousness is “always interested more in one part of its ob-
ject than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks” (The
Principles of Psychology [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983], p. 273). Six
10 Configurations
intersum, interesse (meaning “to be between, to differ, to make a dif-

ference, to take part in, to concern, to be of importance”)30 and
Whitehead, like the poets, and like William James seeking “the re-in-
statement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life,”31 fo-
cuses on betweenness and between-states as a means of more fully
grasping and understanding the range of our experiences.
There is a wonderful moment in Samuel Beckett’s “Dante . . .
Bruno . Vico . . Joyce,” published the same year as Process and Reality,
when the twenty-three-year-old Beckett ponders how to characterize
a “general aesthetic vigilance without which we cannot hope to
snare the sense which is for ever rising to the surface of the form and
becoming the form itself.” St. Augustine “puts us on the track of a
word with his ‘intendere,’” although, Beckett observes, this “suggests
a strictly intellectual observation.” By contrast, “when an Italian says
today ‘Ho inteso,’ he means something” more along the lines of “a
sensuous untidy art of intellection.” “Perhaps ‘apprehension’ is the
most satisfactory English word.”32 It is this sensuous, untidy art of
intellection that Whitehead also seeks to address with his investiga-
tions of the “real internal constitution” of acts of experience.33 In
this as in so many respects he follows the poets who, as Angus
Fletcher has put it, “wished to subtilize, to dissolve, to fragment, to
blur the hard material edge, because poetry hunts down the soul”—
anima understood as animal—“with its obscure passions, feelings,
hundred pages later James adds that “that theory [for Whitehead, a synonym for
“proposition”] will be most generally believed which, besides offering us objects able
to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most
interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our aesthetic, emotional, and active
needs” (p. 940). Interestingly, the earliest citations the OED provides for “interest” and
“interesting” in the senses James used come respectively from Mackenzie’s Man of Feel-
ing (1771)—“There are certain interests, which the world supposes every man to
have”—and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768): “It was a face of about six and twenty .
. . it was not critically handsome, but there was that in it, which . . . attached me much
more to it—it was interesting” (OED, 8: 394–395).
30. D. P. Simpson, Cassell’s Latin Dictionary (New York: Macmillan, 1979), p. 322.
31. James, Principles of Psychology (above, n. 29), p. 246.
32. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby
Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), pp. 27–29. Thanks to Erin Finneran for bringing
this passage to my attention.
33. “The phrase ‘real internal constitution,’” Whitehead writes, “is to be found in
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (III, III, 15): ‘And thus the real internal
(but generally in substances unknown) constitution of things, whereon their discover-
able qualities depend, may be called their “essence”’” (Process and Reality [above, n. 3],
p. 25).
other-than-cognitive symbolic forms.”34 It is more important that a

proposition be interesting than that it be true.
Creativity, Whitehead proposes, “is that ultimate principle by
which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the
one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively.” It—cre-
ativity—“is the principle of novelty,” and “an actual occasion is a
novel entity diverse from any entity in the ‘many’ which it unifies.
Thus ‘creativity’ introduces novelty into the content of the many.”
The novel entity thus formed “is at once the togetherness of the
‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive
‘many’ which it leaves.” As a result, “the many become one, and are
increased by one.”35 How this all happens, in detail, is the burden of
Process and Reality, and on a smaller scale, and to varying degrees, of
the essays that follow. Suffice it to say, that the creation of novelty,
in Whitehead’s account, is always the creation of new contrasts; and
the transformation of a given opposition into a new contrast—
thereby opening up and entering the space between, creating and
expressing inter-est—is the mark of creativity-in-action.
II. Six Ways of Looking at Whitehead Creatively

Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint
upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations.
Whitehead36
Let us start, then, in medias res, with a seventh way:

This photograph sometimes initiates shock. Some observers [start to] laugh
when first confronting the image, as if in uncontrolled mimicry of the man’s
lips. . . . In the photograph, the man is about to weep and the woman is not.
. . . The man’s straight, stiffened posture and his “French” face suggest Gallic
pride, which can become a context for the intense grief that I read into the
trembling mouth and eyes. . . . The dominant impression, or closure, of the
crying Frenchman is formed by cross-referencing the cues given by the man’s
34. Angus Fletcher, “Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge,” in Colors

of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1991), p. 169. See Stengers’s essay in the present issue for a superb explication of
this Whiteheadian soul—Wordsworth’s “creative soul,” although she does not make
the connection.
35. Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 3), p. 21. Whitehead here describes a uni-
verse organic through and through: the whole is always greater than the sum of the
parts. Organic in this respect is the same as rhythmic. This does not mean, however,
that at levels of description less concrete (more abstract) than that of actual entities (or
acts of experience) the universe need display an organic character. It may do so; then
again, it may not.
36. Ibid., p. 17.
12 Configurations
Figure 1. Standing among other residents of Marseille, a Frenchman weeps as he watches

flags of France’s historic regiments depart into exile in Algeria, on February 19, 1941,
during the German occupation in World War II. (Photo courtesy of AP)
face, his posture, business suit, the woman, and background architecture, all
informing and directing one another. . . . Clues are selected from the given
data and are processed in synthesis and in parallel. . . . That the man weeps
and the woman does not inverts our habitual assumptions about the emo-
tional expressions of the sexes. The woman’s face is set off by dark clothing.
She is spatially receding from the man. He is posed almost frontally, but is
turned enough to continue the sense of receding space and emphasize an up-
thrusting posture. . . .We respond physically to this orchestration of move-
ment. We follow the movement until we are stopped by the frame that freezes
the event for our attention. The moving camera, of which we are unaware, has
injected a dynamic that also contradicts and surprises our habitual assump-
tions that the man and woman should be more frontally posed. These sur-
prises—the receding spatial dynamic with its implication of movement in
space-time and the poignant face of the man—help place the event beyond
stereotypes of patriotism or posing. We process them to feel a sense of reality
that no painting of this event could have established.37
37. Herb Greene, Painting the Mental Continuum: Perception and Meaning in the Making
(Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2003), pp. 101–104.
Process and Reality Whitehead titled his magnum opus, and here the
architect and painter Herb Greene demonstrates how process and re-
ality are truly inseparable: the-sensing-of-reality-without-which-
there-is-no-sense-of-reality is every bit as processual as the reality
(verb, not just noun) that is first sensed, then grasped.
Greene’s recent book, Painting the Mental Continuum, applies
Whiteheadian concepts to “the analysis of [painted and collage] im-
ages.”38 The description I have just cited is of a photograph that ap-
peared prominently in a “large format Picture History of World War
Two”39 assembled by the editors of Life magazine—a photograph
that, as Greene later discovered, was in fact not a still shot at all but
“edited from a filmstrip showing the surrender of French flags at
Marseilles after capitulation to the Nazis.”40 In this particular de-
scription, Greene (and I) have edited out explicit references to
Whiteheadian conceptual “tools,” as Greene puts it, for “breaking
down complex experience for analysis and communication,” which
“assist us in knowing what we are talking about”41—but, believe me,
they are still there in the background.
Greene also cites a passage from Kenneth Clark’s Moments of Vi-
sion apropos of the photo, which applies equally well to Whitehead’s
distinctive vision of the world:
It is the sudden awareness of the inexplicable. The flow of accepted associa-
tions in which the mind, like a manatee, maintains a healthy torpor—what
we gratuitously call the law of nature—is sometimes interrupted and we are
shocked to recognize, for a second, how odd things really are.42
In the case of this photograph that is not one, “the surprising angle
of the camera”—due, as it turns out, to the fact that the instrument
actually processing the data is a motion camera—“suggests that
physical events exist in geometrical relationships beyond our habit-
ual assumptions.”43 This same recognition is the heart and soul of
Whitehead’s radical empiricist account, interweaving perception and
the cosmos in what another recent commentator speaks of as “the
38. Ibid., p. 29.

39. Ibid., p. 103.
40. Ibid., p. 101.
41. Ibid., pp. 192–193.
42. Kenneth Clark, Moments of Vision (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 10; cited
in Greene, Painting the Mental Continuum (above, n. 37), p. 101.
43. Greene, Painting the Mental Continuum, p. 101.
14 Configurations
stream of experience, forerunner of the stream of consciousness”44—

no surprise really, coming from a man who early in his career im-
mersed himself in the study of non-Euclidean geometries.
“The idea that more than one position in space-time is required to
comprehend objects”45 is hardly original to Whitehead—as he often
noted, he was just trying to develop a scheme that accounted for the
deepest intuitions of his contemporaries and of himself—but the
thoroughness with which he approached the idea is exceptional,
and surely warrants comparison, for instance, with the Wallace
Stevens of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or the Picasso
of Portrait of Dora Maar, which, as Greene observes, “suggests that
there is a world of causality transferring information from extensive
space to the figure, and from the figure to extensive space.”46 The
idea, then, is to enable us to see how odd things really are all the
time, at any number of levels and from any number of angles, not
just during those discrete moments when we consciously grasp
this—realizing it more or less fully, as the whirring machinery typi-
cally submerged in the depths of our body-minds rises to the surface;
among other things, grasping how truly odd Whitehead really is—
and how truly interesting. It is in this spirit that I recommend we
read the six essays that follow, which together form a composite por-
trait of Whitehead as a natural historian of the soul, a quasi-Deleuz-
ian radical empiricist of social relation, a mathematician-poet-maker,
the Moses of a postrationalist information age, a Stevensian-James-
ian-Emersonian quester, and an inescapable theorist for STS.47
44. Ralph Pred, Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2005), p. 264.
45. Greene, Painting the Mental Continuum (above, n. 37), p. 49.
46. Ibid. Speaking of J. M. W. Turner’s “development” in his paintings of “a principle of
abstraction” that serves as an “important precursor of abstract modern art,” Greene re-
marks on a more recent shift in Western culture, with “sets, groupings, non-Euclidean
geometry, indeterminacy, the concept of immanence and other ideas from cosmology
and mathematics . . . entering into our criteria of critical judgment in the discipline of
imaginative enjoyment” (p. 260). The essays below by Byrd and Sha address this change.
47. The essays collected in this special issue of Configurations have themselves been “in
the making” for several years now. In the fall of 2003 and early summer of 2004 I was
privileged to organize four panels on Whitehead at annual and biennial meetings of
the Society for Literature and Science (as it was then known) in Austin and Paris. At the
Austin meeting, Elizabeth Wilson suggested that the papers could readily form the ba-
sis for a special issue; and with the encouragement of the editors of Configurations, she
and I agreed to coedit this issue. It has been an invigorating experience, and a real plea-
sure to work so closely with Elizabeth—as well as testimony to the efficacy of the new
technologies that I couldn’t blame delays on the not inconsiderable distance between
III. The Neural Substrate of Creativity

Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain.
Whitehead48
In his highly original account of symbolism, Whitehead offers a

way around the obvious verifiability issues that plague the dynamic
unconscious. He does this by proposing an alternative mechanism,
more in line with what William James understood the subconscious
to be: dynamic, but not strictly—that is to say, completely and nec-
essarily—unconscious. For Whitehead, perception does not just reg-
ister sense data but also occurs in a mode that prehends an entirely
different sort of object, really a nonobject, a much vaguer and more
primitive form of perception that concerns something he refers to—
and of course the phrase is hardly unique to him—as “causal effi-
cacy.”49 The distinction can perhaps be most readily conveyed in
St. Louis and Sydney. Five of the essays in this issue resulted from the SLS panels, the
flip side being that for various reasons we were unable to include the papers of the re-
maining panelists. Warm thanks, then, to Hugh Crawford, Mark Hansen, John John-
ston, Bruno Latour, and Brian Massumi for their valuable, and diverse, contributions.
Thanks also to the anonymous reader for the issue, a model of the kind. The sixth es-
say, by Mick Halewood, was solicited following exposure to his work and that of other
European scholars of Whitehead and Deleuze at conferences in London and Brussels.
Some readers will be aware that three of the essayists experienced a prepublication taste
of what the afterlife of their essays might feel like when the essays served as the basis
for additional panels forming the inaugural event of the Distributed Whitehead Net-
work, organized by Tim Lenoir and myself. Tim is an angel, and many other angels
contributed time and funds for the conference, Whitehead Today, which took place
this past April at Stanford, Duke, and the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Thanks espe-
cially to the speakers and respondents: Isabelle Stengers, Richard Rorty, Donna Har-
away; Sha Xin Wei, Arkady Plotnitsky, Henry Stapp; Jim Bono, Haun Saussy, Hugh
Crawford, and Joan Richardson. Interested parties will find video recordings and re-
lated material at the DWN website: http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/jenkins/whitehead. I also
wish to express my gratitude to Mariam Fraser and Andrew Barry at Goldsmiths Col-
lege, London, and Nathan Kravis of the Richardson History of Psychiatry Research
Seminar, at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, for inviting me to present
early drafts of material included in this introduction. Finally, I would like to single out,
again, for a simple thank you, the three individuals whose passionate interest in
Whitehead has compelled my own: Jim, Joan, and Isabelle, in no particular order.
48. Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 3), pp. 105–106.
49. James explains that “the attempt to treat ‘cause,’ for conceptual purposes, as a sep-
arable link, has failed historically, and has led to the denial of efficient causation, and to
the substitution for it of the bare descriptive notion of uniform sequence among
events. Thus intellectualist philosophy once more has had to butcher our perceptual
life in order to make it ‘comprehensible.’ Meanwhile the concrete perceptual flux,
taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible
instances of causal agency,” or what Whitehead would call perception in the mode of
16 Configurations
terms of the contrast between the “clear and distinct ideas” that
have been a staple of philosophical discourse since Descartes, and
the vast quantities of impressions that hover at the edge of ordinary
waking consciousness. Often the latter are impressive and weighty,
yet by contrast with sense data they remain nonspecific. White-
head’s innovation, at least within the various streams of thought
that together make up Western philosophy, was, first, not to regard
such vague impressions as in some sense faulty versions of clearer,
hence more accurate, sense impressions, but instead to see them as
different in kind (as well as being, in certain respects, primary); and
second, to provide a thorough account of how these two “pure”
modalities of perception, which as such remain unconscious or mar-
ginally conscious, are combined in a third, highly dynamic mode of
perception he calls “symbolic reference.”
Neither perception in the mode of causal efficacy nor perception
in the mode of symbolic reference is the least bit mystical—no
Bergsonian life-force need apply—and ultimately they require neu-
rophysiological evidence for confirmation or refutation. Unlike the
self-refuting, self-confirming scenarios that afflict the dynamic un-
conscious (and its apologists), such investigation is at least in princi-
ple possible.50 Although, to my knowledge, nobody is currently
causal efficacy (William James, Some Problems of Philosophy, in Writings 1902–1910 [New
York: Library of America, 1987], p. 1093, emphasis added; also cited in Pred, Onflow
[above, n. 44], p. 48). “The transitive causation” in these instances, James continues,
“does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on. Rather
does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field be-
cause it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causal-
ity-at-work flavors the entire concrete sequence as salt flavors the water in which it is
dissolved”—although, to be sure, with a less clearly distinguishable taste than that of
salt water. This flavor or feeling of causality-at-work is, again, perception in the mode
of causal efficacy, which is not so much a matter of perceiving causes per se as of per-
ceiving the overlap between cause and effect. Below I present a fuller account of the
Humean “denial of efficient causation” and “substitution for it of the bare descriptive
notion of uniform sequence among events.”
50. To be sure, just in time for the sesquicentennial celebrations of Freud’s birth, neu-
ropsychoanalysis has acquired considerable public visibility, with one oft-stated goal
being a new, neuro-, respectability for the Freudian unconscious and the unconscious
drives that drive it. I will not address here the arguments made, for instance, by Mark
Solms, or François Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, other than to observe that they of-
ten involve complementary and equally faulty assumptions: on one hand, the dy-
namic unconscious may be assumed to exist until some other better explanation for
compelling phenomena such as repression emerges; on the other (side of the) hand, no
adequate alternate explanations exist. This is sheer sleight of hand, since quite adequate
non- and even anti-Freudian explanations do exist—those of Gerald Edelman and J. Al-
lan Hobson, for instance, within the neurosciences proper, and the Jamesian-Whitehea-
dian framework that I am describing here. See Mark Solms, “Freud Returns,” Scientific
probing the brain for organic mechanisms that can be said to con-
tribute to such perception, this does not mean they are not there. If
the argument that follows is correct, taking perception in the mode
of causal efficacy (and, by implication, perception in the mode of
symbolic reference) fully into account changes, and considerably
deepens, our understanding of neural mechanics.
Before I can present even a brief description of what I will be call-
ing the invisible brain, I will need to provide a more detailed
overview of Whitehead’s theory of perception. It is quite possible to
discuss Whitehead with great subtlety without mentioning this the-
ory, so it is not surprising that none of the essays that follow does
so.51 Nonetheless, insofar as they prehend it negatively (if variously),
as Whitehead might say, it plays a signficant role in each. For in-
stance, it is precisely the Whiteheadian account of perception in the
mode of causal efficacy that, I would argue, Byrd and Sha still need
to address and, conversely, that both Deleuze and Stevens do, albeit
with terminologies (and ways of using them) that do not entirely
correspond to Whitehead’s own. In effect, then, Halewood and
Richardson discuss important aspects of the Whiteheadian account
of symbolism without, however, doing so explicitly. The account is
also at the core of Stengers’s (and Whitehead’s) understanding of the
soul, and is the fundamental intuition of the tradition of nonvitalist
organicism elucidated by Bono.
With what one might term (in homage to Oliver Sacks) the case of
the blinking man, Whitehead utilizes his symbolic machinery to il-
lustrate an impasse he locates in the philosophy of David Hume. For
Whitehead, the problem with Hume’s influential account of percep-
tion lies in the inadequacy of the corresponding account of causa-
tion; the problem, to put it bluntly, is that Hume insists on the de-
rivative nature of causal attribution. And the problem with this is
that it accords neither with scientific explanation nor with ordinary
American Mind 17:2 (2006): 28–34; François Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, “L’incon-
scient au crible des neurosciences,” La recherche: L’actualité des sciences 397 (2006): 36–39.
51. This is not at all unusual. As Granville C. Henry and Robert J. Valenza have ob-
served, “the distinction between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy is cen-
tral to process thought but virtually absent from the broader public discussion—an ab-
sence that makes communication of many process ideas difficult outside Whiteheadian
circles” (Granville C. Henry and Robert J. Valenza, “The Preprojective and the Postpro-
jective: A New Perspective on Causal Efficacy and Presentational Immediacy,” Process
Studies 26:1–2 [1997]: 33). Thankfully, recent excellent book-length studies like those
of Herb Greene and Ralph Pred dive into Whitehead’s theory of perception with the
appropriate mixture of exuberance and care: see Greene, Painting the Mental Continuum
(above, n. 37); Pred, Onflow (above, n. 44).
18 Configurations
experience. “According to Hume,” Whitehead observes, “our behav-

iour presupposing causation”—for even Hume does not doubt that
we act, and regard our activity, as if causation were operative in the
world, or worlds, we inhabit—
is due to the repetition of associated presentational experiences. Thus the
vivid presentment of the antecedent percepts should vividly generate the be-
haviour, in action or thought, towards the associated consequent. The clear,
distinct, overwhelming perception of the one [the antecedent percept] is the
overwhelming reason for the subjective transition to the other [the associated
consequent].52
“The word ‘association’ explains it all, according to Hume.”53 The

argument here is quite compacted, I am afraid, but Whitehead help-
fully spells it out, taking his lead from the following “trifling inci-
dent,” as he calls it: “In the dark, the electric light is suddenly turned
on and the man’s eyes blink.”54 Now do you see?
In the first place, there is the physiological explanation of the
blink, which as it happens is “couched wholly in terms of causal ef-
ficacy.”55 There is nothing surprising about this, for, as Whitehead
notes, “all scientific explanations” are stated in such terms; that is
just what it means to explain something scientifically.56 “The expla-
nation does not involve any appeal” to what Whitehead calls presen-
tational immediacy—that is to say, “perception which merely, by
means of a sensum [or sense-data], rescues from vagueness a con-
temporary spatial region, in respect to its spatial shape and its spatial
perspective from the percipient.”57 In other words, presentational
immediacy is what enables you to see me, here, and me to see you,
there (supposing us to be in the same room, within eyesight, and
not blind). By the same token it prevents me, over here, with all my
accoutrements, from somehow being confused with you, over there,
with all of yours. What Whitehead is getting at when he observes
that the physiological explanation of the blinking man “does not in-
volve any appeal to presentational immediacy” is that it does not re-
quire any reference to how the blinking strikes the blinker; it is, af-
ter all, a reflex action, “a spasm of excitement” merely traveling

53. Ibid., p. 175.
54. Ibid., p. 174.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., p. 169.
57. Ibid., pp. 174, 121.
“along nerves to some nodal centre,” with a “return spasm of con-

traction” subsequently traveling “back to the eyelids.” “At the
most,” Whitehead adds, “there is a tacit supposition as to what a
physiologist, who in fact was not there, might have seen if he had
been there, and if he could have vivisected the man without affect-
ing these occurrences, and if he could have observed with a micro-
scope which also in fact was absent.”58 Here, in his counterfactual
phrasing, Whitehead articulates the magic of contemporary imaging
techniques. Causation is caught out, as it were, witnessed in the
mode of presentational immediacy—or so it seems.
In this manner, noninvasive imaging techniques encourage the
very possibly false hope that causal explanation can be rescued from
Hume’s withering skepticism without requiring one to give up
Hume’s explanatory framework. If “from the point of view of
Hume’s philosophy,” as Whitehead puts it, “the physiological expla-
nation remains . . . a tissue of irrelevancies”59—after all, the physiol-
ogist is not there, the man cannot be vivisected without affecting the
state of his blinking, an absent microscope cannot be used to observe
anything—the hope from this point of view is that the new imaging
techniques will provide the data, that is to say, the sense-data, that
might finally convince the skeptic that the physiological account is
actually woven from a tissue of relevancies. This is, I should add, a
purely philosophical hope; clinically speaking, the philosophical
concern is quite properly irrrelevant. The operative concern is sim-
ply: does it work? The solution at hand is also painfully naïve, for it
leaves one’s explanation still subject to Hume’s single-minded ac-
count of causation, with its claim that causation is really nothing
more than a fancy term for association.
I will not detail Whitehead’s critique of the “sleight of hand” that
enables Hume to promote this argument—other than to say that in
demonstrating that even Hume cannot stick to his “dogma that all
percepts are in the mode of presentational immediacy,” Whitehead
opens the door for his own alternative account, which instead fully
accepts the blinking man’s assertion (if asked) that “The flash made
me blink.” The feeling of causal efficacy articulated by Blinking Man
is no less a direct perception on his part than is “the sequence of per-
ceptions, in the mode of presentational immediacy”: the “flash of
light, feeling of eye-closure, instant of darkness.”60 Any impression
of causation that accompanies this sequence is not, for Whitehead,
58. Ibid., p. 174.

59. Ibid., p. 175.
60. Ibid.
20 Configurations
merely due to some sort of mechanical association. (Surely, a deus ex

machina if ever there was one!) Instead, he proposes that direct per-
ception occurs in the two distinguishable modes ordinarily com-
bined in human experience:61 perception in the mode of causal effi-
cacy, and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.
Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality, consists of three
hundred and fifty densely argued pages (or five hundred and thirty,
if you happen to be reading the 1929 edition), detailing the implica-
tions of this two-, or three-, pronged account of perception within
his astonishingly fertile and broad-ranging cosmology. Here I am
just going to list several of the myriad implications, in order to pre-
pare the reader for the hypothesis concerning the neural substrate of
perception in the modes of causal efficacy and symbolic reference
with which I will close.
1. Causal efficacy is primary with respect to presentational immedi-

acy. This inverts the Humean epistemology. In Whitehead’s
phrasing, “perception in its primary form is consciousness of the
causal efficacy of the external world[,] perception of the settled
world in the past as constituted by its feeling-tones, and as effi-
cacious by reason of those feeling-tones.”62 It is characterized by
“extreme vagueness.”63 Presentational immediacy, on the other
hand, “lift[s] into distinct, prominent, relevance . . . the faint in-
direct relevance” of one’s present location—the faint relevance,
that is, of the “contemporary spatial region,” which in the mode
of causal efficacy is “vague[ly] confus[ed] with other regions.”64 It
is “the perceptive mode in which there is clear, distinct con-
sciousness of the ‘extensive’ relations of the [contemporary]
world.”65
61. “When human experience is in question, ‘perception’ almost always means ‘per-
ception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference’” (ibid., p. 168).
62. Ibid., p. 120. Things are already rather more complicated than they might at first
appear. For instance, it is not that we emit feeling-tones, where we are construed either
as subjects or as objects. Rather, it is what Whitehead calls actual entities or actual oc-
casions that do so; and we (like all other objects, or subjects, no less equally objectifi-
cations) individually comprise societies of actualities. The reader will recall that, simi-
larly, it is only actual entities that exhibit creativity, although societies undoubtedly
possess their own manner of being creative.
63. Ibid., p. 176.
64. Ibid., p. 121.
65. Ibid., p. 61.
2. Whitehead distinguishes visceral from visual feelings, with the

visceral feelings (the sense of embodiment derived from internal
organs) displaying perception more purely in the mode of causal
efficacy; and with the emphasis falling correspondingly on the
side of presentational efficacy in the case of visual feeling. “It is
evident,” he notes, “that ‘perception in the mode of causal effi-
cacy’ is not that sort of perception which has received chief at-
tention in the philosophical tradition. Philosophers have dis-
dained the information about the universe obtained through
their visceral feelings, and have concentrated on visual feel-
ings.”66 So, you may wonder, what does Whitehead have in mind
with respect to this non-garden-variety form of feeling? “An in-
hibition of familiar sensa,” he tells us, “is very apt to leave us a
prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal
operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully
feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature
presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects
in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings
from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim conscious-
ness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we
are left with the vague feelings of influences from vague things
about us.”67
3. Causal efficacy is not all vagueness, though. “Bodily experiences,

in the mode of causal efficacy,” are distinguished principally
from “causal influences [derived] from the external world . . . by
their comparative accuracy of spatial definition.”68 Whitehead
refers to this as the withness of the body, as in: we see with our
eyes, feel with our hands, hear with our ears.
4. I have already mentioned that Whitehead insists that in human

experience the two modes of perception almost always occur in
some combination, which he terms the mixed mode of symbolic
reference. Interpretation and therefore error—or perhaps one
should say error and therefore interpretation, one mode inter-
preted in terms of the other—emerge at this stage. “In fact,”
Whitehead proposes, “error is the mark of the higher organisms,
and is the schoolmaster by whose agency there is upward evolu-
66. Ibid., p. 121.

67. Ibid., p. 176.
68. Ibid.
22 Configurations
tion.”69 He also observes that “there can be symbolic reference

between two species in the same perceptive mode”—by which I
take him to be referring, principally, to synesthesia, or any so-
called confusion of the senses—“but the chief example of the
symbolism, upon which is based a great portion of the lives of all
high-grade animals, is that between the two perceptive modes.”70
The numbers are relative, of course, so there may still be an aw-
ful lot of intersensory symbolic reference in the lesser portion.
Many poems suggest that there is.
5. Picking up on this last point: “We find ourselves,” Whitehead re-

marks, “in a buzzing world amid a democracy of fellow crea-
tures,” and the philosophy of organism, as he referred to his
speculative philosophy, is “mainly devoted to the task of making
clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity.’”71 With his
“buzzing world,” Whitehead alludes directly to James’s seminal
characterization in Principles of Psychology of “the baby, assailed
by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once,” who “feels it all as
one great, blooming, buzzing confusion.”72 James, as I have al-
ready suggested, and as Ralph Pred conclusively demonstrates,
was the true starting point for Whitehead.73 Perhaps more ex-
actly, James provided a continuing reference point, as Whitehead
worked out the implications of this notion of being present in.
Like so many prepositions, yet even more so, in can mean many
different things, and one of them is invisible: not visible, because in-
side something else. No doubt we find neuroimaging so appealing in
part because the brain normally—and thankfully—is just that,
wrapped up within the skull, which too is invisible, if less fully so. At
the same time, the brave new world opened up by neuroimaging
does not interpret itself, and here our intuitions are only as good as
our training, which may or may not be appropriate for the task at
hand. The point was hit home for me some years ago when I realized
that foundational evidence for the efficacy of neuroimaging, derived
69. Ibid., p. 168.

70. Ibid., p. 181.
71. Ibid., p. 50.
72. James, Principles of Psychology (above, n. 29), p. 462.
73. See Pred, Onflow (above, n. 44), passim; Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude
Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001), pp. 24, 214, 317–318.
from experiments conducted by Michael Posner and Mark Raichle at

Washington University starting in 1985, was significantly (perhaps
fatally) flawed, as a result of naïve assumptions about language per-
ception. Because I have made this argument elsewhere, I will not re-
hash it now.74 I should be clear, however, that I was not arguing
then, and certainly would not today, that the use of PET scans to in-
vestigate correlations between neuroanatomy and mental function-
ing involves some sort of PET scam. The problem, as everyone who
has worked with positron emission tomography and comparable
imaging techniques knows, is that the interpretation of results is of-
ten less certain than the claims made for them may suggest. And er-
rors may ensue that are neither true nor especially interesting. It is in
74. Still, here is the problem in brief. In one particularly elegant experiment (the hier-
archical design of which has subsequently become “standard in laboratories doing this
type of research”), changes in blood flow in the cerebral cortex were measured for four
(or five) discrete states or, as Posner and Raichle term them, “levels”: “fix[ing one’s]
gaze . . . in the middle of a small crosshair”; “continu[ing] to gaze at the crosshair” but
now with “common English nouns appear[ing] below,” or heard over earphones; re-
peating aloud the words viewed or heard; and, finally, being “asked to say aloud a use
appropriate for the noun either viewed or heard” (Michael I. Posner and Marcus E.
Raichle, Images of Mind [New York: Freeman, 1994], pp. 113–114). “The nouns were
presented to the subjects at the rate of 40 words per minute,” and by “subtracting the
first level from the second,” the experimenters were able to “isolate the brain areas con-
cerned with visual and auditory word perception. Subtracting the second level from
the third isolated those areas of the brain concerned with speech production. And, fi-
nally, subtracting the third level from the fourth level isolated those areas concerned
with selecting the appropriate use” (pp. 113–114). As a result, Posner and Raichle claim
to have isolated, and localized, the “discrete neural areas” where “elementary opera-
tions . . . of auditory and visual word processing” occur (pp. 241–242). The problem is
that what are actually being measured in this particular experimental setting are not el-
ementary operations at all, but rather abstractions from them. In the first place, ordi-
nary reading practices are always to some extent cross-modal (combining subvocaliza-
tion with the recognition of word-shapes and what William James termed “bare images
of logical movement”) rather than separated out into discrete modalities, as the exper-
iment’s design requires; see James, Principles of Psychology (above, n. 29), p. 244. More
significantly, Posner and Raichle have most certainly not localized the ordinary experi-
ence of “passively viewing words,” as they claim to have done, nor of passively “lis-
tening to words” (Images of Mind, p. 115); at best, the measurements localize processes
of abstraction from customary reading habits. As I have already mentioned, the sub-
jects were instructed either to listen to, or look at, a set of discontinuous words stream-
ing by at a rate of forty a minute, with no rereading or overlap (holding in mind) per-
mitted. By implication, they were expected to ignore any possible relations among the
words. This is bound to take a good deal of work and is hardly a passive process, how-
ever immobilizing it may prove. Whether such unnatural, dishabituated behavior has
much to do with ordinary reading and listening—that is to say, with sentence com-
prehension—remains an open question. For a related critique, see Joseph Dumit, Pic-
turing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004). See also Meyer, Irresistible Dictation (above, n. 73), pp. 320–323.
24 Configurations
this respect that questionable assumptions about language—ques-

tionable, though widespread—may prevent one from seeing what is
actually before one.
When I mentioned above that I would be speaking about the in-
visible brain, this is what I meant: not a form of invisibility that in
one way or another is inevitable, as if the failure of perception were
due either to some built-in and therefore unavoidable blindspot or
to the machinations of a dynamic unconscious. Instead, the culprit
is mistake-prone habits of thought, the sort of thing that one of my
graduate students calls bad eye training, which renders the brain
“known but unimaginable” (to appropriate a phrase of John Ash-
bery’s).75 The brain is known in the sense of its being the one or ones
with which we have become acquainted—the brain we think with,
and as such perceived in the mode of causal efficacy rather than that
of presentational immediacy; yet the very same brain is quite literally
unimaginable due to bad habits that Locke, in the name of diagnosis
(and association), engendered.76 Of course, what is unimaginable
under one regime may prove eminently imaginable under another;
and this leads us, a bit abruptly perhaps, to the heart of the human
brain, the misnamed “association cortex.”
75. John Ashbery, “Sunrise in Suburbia,” in The Double Dream of Spring (New York:
Ecco Press, 1976), p. 50; here is the immediate Jamesian-Whiteheadian context of Ash-
bery’s words: “Decisions for a proper ramble into known but unimaginable, dense /
Fringe expecting night, / A light wilderness of spoken words not / Unkind for all their
aimlessness, / A blank chart of each day moving into the premise of difficult visibility.”
76. In Principles of Psychology, James famously observes that “the first fact for us, . . . as
psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on. . . . If we could say in English, ‘it
thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be stating the fact most simply and
with the minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes
on” (James, Principles of Psychology [above, n. 29], pp. 219–220; emphasis in original).
The first fact of neuropsychology is thus the brain we think with—not “sensations,” far
too commonly supposed to be “the simplest mental facts.” “It is astonishing,” James
notes, “what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently in-
nocent presuppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop
themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of
the work”; he then adds: “The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the
first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions” (p. 219). Thanks to
Joan Richardson for alerting me to the consonance between James’s remarks at the start
of the “Stream of Thought” chapter and the contrast I draw here. There is first-person
acquaintance with third-person brain function (“it thinks”)—perception in the mode
of causal efficacy, the “withness” of the body being, in this case, that of the brain—and
then there is sensation, perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, which we
seem to know so much about. Indeed, we know too much about it, and too little, in
finding ourselves unable to imagine what does not conform with it.
In turning now to my chief exhibit of the invisible brain, I had

better make sure the reader and I are on the same page. Here, for
starters, are two characterizations of association cortex. The first is
from Gordon Shepherd’s Neurobiology:
The areas of each [cortical] lobe that are not directly related to a specific sen-
sory or motor function have traditionally been termed association areas. Since
these are the areas that have undergone greatest expansion in the human
brain, it has been commonly assumed that they have a large role to play in the
attributes that are distinctly human. Three main functions have been ascribed
to these association areas. First, a surprisingly large expanse of what appeared
to be “association” cortex is actually given over to multiple representations of
sensory or motor fields. . . . Second, increasingly complex processing takes
place within these multiple sensory areas; this is seen clearly, for example, in
the abstraction of visual information in the occipital lobe. Third, the higher
association areas are increasingly concerned with multimodal integration of
information from other lobes. The capacity to integrate higher-order sensory
information and use it to control different kinds of motor outputs lies at the
heart of many of our higher cognitive functions.77
And here is how Michael Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George

R. Mangun describe association cortex in their 1998 textbook Cogni-
tive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind:
The volume of cortex that is not sensory or motor has traditionally been
termed the association cortex, which is composed of regions that receive in-
puts from one or more modalities. These regions have specific functional roles
that are not exclusively sensory or motor. For example, take the visual associ-
ation cortex. Though the primary visual cortex is necessary for the conscious
sensation of vision, neither it nor the extrastriate cortex are the sole loci of vi-
sual perception. Regions of visual association cortex in the parietal and tem-
poral lobes are important for correct perception of the visual world.
Moreover,
the frontal association cortex plans and calculates the long-term outcomes of
a certain act. Finally, the association areas of the parietal-temporal-occipital
junction have a prominent role in language processing. Thus, higher mental
processes are the domain of the association cortical areas, in interaction with
sensory and motor areas of cortex.78
77. Gordon M. Shepherd, Neurobiology, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), p. 671.
78. Michael Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George R. Mangun, Cognitive Neuroscience:
The Biology of the Mind (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 54-55.
26 Configurations
(A much more extensive account of the structure and functioning of

association cortex can be found in Principles of Neural Science, edited
by Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell, where
an entire chapter is devoted to “integration of sensory and motor
function: the association areas of the cerebral cortex and the cogni-
tive capabilities of the brain.”79 Still, the gist is similar.)
Unlike creativity, association cortex was found, not invented—but
what exactly it was that had been discovered remains unclear: “The
functions of the association areas are not known with certainty, but
they are believed to integrate inputs from other cortical areas, includ-
ing the limbic cortex, and modulate activity in other cortical areas.
The vagueness of this description is indicative of our poor under-
standing of these areas.”80 One of the primary reasons for the uncer-
tainty, I would like to suggest, derives from the name that its discoverer,
Paul Flechsig, bestowed upon these perplexing regions of the cerebral
cortex.81 Here is a description by Flechsig of his association areas:
79. Clifford B. Saper, Susan Iversen, and Richard Frackowiak, “Integration of Sensory
and Motor Function: The Association Areas of the Cerebral Cortex and the Cognitive
Capabilities of the Brain,” in Principles of Neural Science, 4th ed., ed. by Eric R. Kandel,
James H. Schwartz, and Thomas M. Jessell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), pp.
349–380.
80. Ben Greenstein and Adam Greenstein, Color Atlas of Neuroscience: Neuroanatomy
and Neurophysiology (Stuttgart: Thieme, 2000), p. 340. The pathologies expressed due to
lesions in association areas are legion. For example, in the parietal association areas—
Brodmann areas 5 and 7—“lesions may impair understanding of the meaning of sen-
sory inputs, a condition called agnosia” (p. 352). Or patients may exhibit apraxia, an in-
ability to manipulate objects. By contrast, lesions to the prefontal association cortex,
Brodmann areas 9 and 10, may result in mood and personality change, loss of restraint,
loss of anxiety, relief from pain, reduced levels of performance, and apathy (p. 354). Le-
sions to Brodmann areas 20, 21, and 22, which make up the temporal association cor-
tex, express yet another set of characteristics, variously involving “memory, auditory
learning, and the learning of visual tasks”; included among these are amnesia, atten-
tion deficit, visual agnosia, a lower learning rate, and decreased verbal memory, as well
as a decreased ability to recall patterns (pp. 356–357). See also Table 15-1, “Agnosias,
Aphasias, and Other Disorders of the Association Cortex,” in Barr’s The Human Nervous
System: An Anatomical Viewpoint, 8th ed., ed. John A. Kiernan (Philadelphia: Lippincott
Williams & Wilkins, 2005), pp. 271–272.
81. Prior to Flechsig, the cortical regions we now refer to as association areas were typ-
ically denominated the “silent areas of the brain”: see Lewellys F. Barker, The Nervous
System and Its Constituent Neurones (New York: Appleton, 1899), p. 1071. Barker, who in-
troduced “the researches of Flechsig” (p. 1070) to his American colleagues in a pair of
articles published in 1897, concluded his influential account of the nervous system
with a chapter on “Flechsig’s doctrine of association centres” (p. 1070); see Lewellys F.
Barker, “The Phrenology of Gall and Flechsig’s Doctrine of Association Centres in the
Cerebrum,” Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin 8 (1897): 7–14; idem, “The Sense-Areas and
Association-Centres in the Brain as Described by Flechsig,” Journal of Nervous and Men-

tal Disease 24 (1897): 325–356, 363–368. Barker had attended Flechsig’s lectures on
brain-anatomy at Leipzig in the spring of 1895 and credited Flechsig with “arous[ing
his] interest in the structure of the nervous system”—observing in his 1942 autobiog-
raphy that, at the time, “Flechsig had recently done important work on the sense areas
and association centers of the human brain, work that threw a flood of light upon the
localization of function in that organ” (Lewellys F. Barker, Time and the Physician [New
York: G. P. Putnam, 1942], pp. 60, 57). (In 1905, Barker’s former student and future col-
league, Florence Sabin, published an account of a recent paper by Flechsig, which she
characterized as “mark[ing] an epoch in the history of the nervous system, . . . lay[ing]
the foundation of our knowledge of the paths in the brain and their relation to the
basal ganglia” [Sabin, “On Flechsig’s Investigations on the Brain,” Johns Hopkins Hospi-
tal Bulletin 16 (1905): 45]. I mention this because of the close ties between Barker,
Sabin, and Gertrude Stein during Stein’s years at Johns Hopkins; see Meyer, Irresistible
Dictation [above, n. 73], pp. 75–104, 346–350, for a detailed discussion of Stein’s neu-
roanatomical work with Barker, and similar work performed rather more successfully
by Sabin.) Here, then, is a summary by Barker in The Nervous System and Its Constituent
Neurones of Flechsig’s findings: “In between the different sense areas[, large] portions of
the cortex [are] entirely devoid of projection fibres, or at most provided with extremely
few of such fibres. At the periphery of each sense area is a marginal zone in which pro-
jection fibres are less thickly distributed. The white matter corresponding to all the cor-
tical regions between the sense areas, with the exception, perhaps, of that beneath the
angular gyrus, becomes medullated considerably later than that of the sense centres, so
that, even in children three months old, the former are sharply distinguishable from
the latter by their poverty in myelin. Flechsig finds, however, that medullated paths
gradually grow out from the sense centres into these non-medullated regions. Further,
between the individual gyri of the non-medullated regions, bands of association fibres
gradually ripen, connecting the individual gyri with others near them and also with
gyri at a distance. By means of the corpus callosum the gyri in one hemisphere are con-
nected with those of the opposite hemisphere. Flechsig, on account of the marked pre-
dominance of association systems in these areas, has designated them ‘association cen-
tres [Assoziationszentren] of the cerebral cortex’” (pp. 1072–73). Word spread quickly,
and one already finds William James remarking in his Ingersoll Lecture on “Human
Immortality” (1898) that “what the laboratories and hospitals have lately been teach-
ing us is not only that thought in general is one of the brain’s functions, but that the
various special forms of thinking are functions of special portions of the brain. When
we are thinking of things seen, it is our occipital convolutions that are active; when of
things heard, it is a certain portion of our temporal lobes; when of things to be spoken,
it is one of our frontal convolutions. Professor Flechsig of Leipzig (who perhaps more
than anyone may claim to have made the subject his own) considers that in other spe-
cial convolutions those processes of association go on which permit the more abstract
processes of thought to take place” (James, “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Ob-
jections to the Doctrine,” in Writings 1878–1899 [New York: Library of America, 1992],
p. 1103). In a footnote James adds that “the gaps between the centers first recognized
as motor and sensory—gaps which form in man two-thirds of the surface of the hemi-
sphere—are thus positively interpreted by Flechsig as intellectual centers strictly so
called. . . . They have, he considers, a common type of microscopic structure, and the
fibers connected with them are a month later in gaining their medullary sheath than
are the fibers connected with the other centers. When disordered, they are the starting-
point of the insanities, properly so called” (p. 1103).
28 Configurations
The central regions of the association areas are centers which are in more or
less direct relation, each with several sensory areas, but some with all of them;
they probably combine the activities in themselves (association). Following
their bilateral destruction, the intellect appears to be diminished; the associa-
tion of ideas is especially disturbed. Therefore, the central areas, based upon
their appearance, are of the utmost importance for the exercise of intellectual
activities, for the formation of mental images composed of several qualities,
for the performance of acts such as the naming of objects, reading, etc.82
The debt to associationist psychology is patent. Still, Flechsig’s ac-

count is clearly an improvement on other models, like that proposed
by the anatomist Theodor Meynert. As one contemporary (Lewellys
Barker) explained:
He does not, as did Meynert, believe that the individual sense centres are con-
nected directly with one another, but thinks that, on the contrary, they are
connected rather indirectly by means of the association centres. The latter, re-
ceiving conduction fibres from adjacent sense centres and from adjacent as
well as distant association centres, furnish an anatomical mechanism which
makes possible the working up into higher units of simple sense impressions
and of combinations of sense impressions of the same quality and of different
qualities.83
Again, the Lockean empiricism leaps off the page. I am not propos-
ing that this interpretation is wrong, just that it may not be the
whole story. For there may be more going on in these silent areas, as
the association centers—the junk DNA of the day—had formerly
been called, than Flechsig dreamed of.
Last year Nancy Andreasen published a volume titled The Creating
Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius. Andreasen, the Woods Chair of Psy-
chiatry and Director of the Mental Health Clinical Research Center
at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, author of Brave
New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome (2001),
and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry since 1994,
distinguishes herself from most of her colleagues in the neuro-
sciences by the fact that she began her career in the Iowa English de-
partment, teaching Renaissance literature before she enrolled in
82. Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 309; cited from C. D. O’Malley and E.
Clarke, The Human Brain and Spinal Cord (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968), pp. 551–552, where these remarks are translated from P. E. Flechsig, “Les centres
de projection et d’association du cerveau humain,” in XIIIe Congrès International de
Médecine, Paris. Section de Neurologie (1900), pp. 115–121.
83. Barker, Nervous System (above, n. 81), pp. 1073–1074.
medical school. Andreasen’s literary background—her study John

Donne: Conservative Revolutionary came out from Princeton almost
forty years ago—is prominent in the construction of her latest book,
with one chapter even called “In Search of Xanadu: Understanding
the Creative Person and the Creative Process” and beginning, as one
might expect, with an account of that old chestnut, Coleridge’s “Kubla
Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream.”84 The next chapter, “Reaching
Xanadu,” offers a neurological account of “how the brain creates.”85
“For most serious neuroscientists,” Andreasen admits, “attempt-
ing to study the neural basis” of free association—that is to say,
“connect[ing] apparently unlinked things without conscious effort”
—is “‘over the edge.’ It is too difficult to examine experimentally
and scientifically.” “Always an adventurer myself,” she continues, “I
decided several years ago to take the plunge over the precipice and
to study the neural basis of free association using neuroimaging
technology to obtain measurements of cerebral blood flow to deter-
mine which regions of the brain became activated. This was the first
(and to my knowledge, so far the only) effort to examine how and
where the brain generates unconscious thoughts.”86 The experiment
she set up was excellently designed, with two “experimental tasks”:
focused episodic memory, and what she called “(a bit tongue-in-cheek,
to make my point) random episodic silent thought, which created the
acronym REST.” “For me, this too was an experimental task, not an
idle control state. But it was one that no one had ever recognized as
such or studied. The ‘control task’ for my study was instead bland,
84. Margaret A. Boden, for instance, in her important study The Creative Mind, treats
Coleridge as an exemplary figure, and focuses in particular on John Livingston Lowes’s
classic account of the composition of “Kubla Khan” and “The Ancient Mariner”: see
Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004).
“Suppose a subliminal reservoir thronged,” Lowes writes, “as Coleridge’s was thronged,
with images which had flashed on the inner eye from the pages of innumerable books.
Suppose these images to be fitted, as it were, with links which render possible indefi-
nite combination. Suppose some powerful suggestion in the field of consciousness
strikes down into this mass of images thus capable of all manner of conjunctions. And
suppose that this time, when in response to the summons the sleeping images flock up,
with their potential associations, from the deeps—suppose that this time all conscious
imaginative control is for some reason in abeyance. What, if all this were so, would hap-
pen? That hypothetical question fairly covers, I think, the case of ‘Kubla Khan’” (John
Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination [Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1930], p. 343, emphasis in original). Enter Person from Porlock,
stage right.
85. The chapter subtitle is “How Does the Brain Create?”
86. Nancy C. Andreasen, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (New York:
Dana Press, 2005), p. 70.
30 Configurations
boring semantic memory.”87 Although one might dispute whether

semantic memory is as bland as all that, this is a small quibble. The
research design, Andreasen explains, “would permit me to probe the
brain regions used for conscious episodic memory as compared with
unconscious episodic memory, or REST. Most importantly, it would
give me a window into the neural basis of the unconscious.”88
Although I do not at all agree with this characterization of what
Andreasen was seeing, I do think she was seeing something no less
remarkable—something she did not even know she was seeing! “Can
you guess what I found?” she asks. (Can you guess what it is I think
she has found? For I have primed you to know the answer, just as
she primes her reader.) “Which brain regions,” Andreasen inquires,
“would you predict to be active during randomly wandering uncon-
scious free association? Not surprisingly, it was almost all association
cortex.”89 “Presumably,” she goes on to speculate, “this organization
87. Ibid., pp. 72–73.

88. Ibid., p. 73. Here Andreasen quite unself-consciously equates unconsciousness
(lack of awareness) with something she calls the unconscious. Why? Boden writes: “The
origin of creativity is the unconscious mind—not the Freudian unconscious of re-
pressed instinct, but what Coleridge himself called ‘that state of nascent existence in
the twilight of imagination and just on the vestibule of consciousness’” (Boden, Cre-
ative Mind [above, n. 84], p. 130, emphasis added). If it is not the Freudian unconscious
of repressed instinct, is there any particular reason to call it the unconscious mind in-
stead of the subconscious, or even, with James, mind on the margins of consciousness?
What militates against speaking of “the unconscious-liminal-conscious gradient” or “a
subconscious-conscious continuum” (Greene, Painting the Mental Continuum [above, n.
37], pp. 15, 232)? Within a Whiteheadian context, it becomes imperative to think
(again) in this fashion because Whitehead’s theory of perception calls for a continuum
between (1) primitive experience (sense reception rather than sense perception); (2)
primitive perception—perception in the pure mode of causal efficacy, a higher form of
experience though still (typically) unconscious; and (3) various grades of conscious-
ness, comparable to Gerald Edelman’s distinction between primary consciousnes and
higher-order consciousness. (See Pred, Onflow [above, n. 44], pp. 282–300, for a pene-
trating discussion of various equivalencies between Whitehead and Edelman.) There is
nothing wholly different about consciousness, nothing miraculous; it does not “float
into the world from nowhere” (Whitehead, Process and Reality [above, n. 3], p. 244).
Rather, it is “the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary
base” (p. 267). It is “how we [happen to] feel the affirmation-negation contrast,” the
“contrast between ‘in fact’ and ‘might be,’ in respect to particular instances in this actual
world” (pp. 243, 267; emphasis in original). There are hard problems, but this is not
one of them. Still, the Unconscious habit is hard to break.
89. Andreasen, Creating Brain (above, n. 86), p. 73. Although Andreasen does not say,
in The Creating Brain, which association areas are involved, in the study under discus-
sion, published a decade earlier, the following details are provided: “The REST condi-
tion produces activations of regions that are primarily late-myelinating association cor-
tices: very large right and left frontal regions (right greater than left and more intense
is used to permit the brain’s owner to integrate the information he

or she receives or possesses and to produce much of the activity that
we refer to as ‘the unconscious mind.’”90 The reader will not be sur-
prised that I do not regard these findings in the same light; instead,
I would like to propose an alternative interpretation.
Building on Andreasen but seeking to answer a different question
(What is the neural substrate for perception in the mode of causal efficacy,
and beyond that, for perception in the mode of symbolic reference?),91 my
hypothesis—or if you prefer, my hunch—goes like this:
in inferior than superior regions), large right and left parietal regions, the precuneus
and retrosplenial cingulate, and the right angular/supramarginal gyrus. Small areas of
activity are also seen in the right insula and a region that may represent right motor
cortex. Greater activity is seen in the right than the left hemisphere” (Nancy C. An-
dreasen, Daniel S. O’Leary, Ted Cizadlo, Stephan Arndt, Karim Rezai, G. Leonard
Watkins, Laura L. Boles Ponto, and Richard D. Hichwa, “Remembering the Past: Two
Facets of Episodic Memory Explored with Positron Emission Tomography,” American
Journal of Psychiatry 152:11 [1995]: 1579–1580).
90. Andreasen, Creating Brain (above, n. 86), p. 73.
91. Where Andreasen answers her question by proposing that association cortex is re-
sponsible for “much of the activity that we refer to as ‘the unconscious mind’” (ibid.),
I answer mine by proposing that the same regions are responsible for much of what we
experience in the way of consciousness. This is so not because consciousness somehow
unaccountably exists due to activity in these regions and not elsewhere, but because the
neural substrates of certain nonconscious forms of perception (in the modes of causal
efficacy and of presentational immediacy) project onto association cortex; moreover,
diverse areas of association cortex, which serve as the neural substrate for additional
forms of perception in modes of unconscious or dimly conscious causal efficacy as well
as more fully conscious symbolic reference, project onto one another. Andreasen is
thus correct insofar as what she calls the unconscious mind is in fact the neural sub-
strate of various forms of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, including projec-
tions between these. (To the extent that it does not engage outright with the various
substrates of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, the mentation ef-
fected through such perception in the mode of causal efficacy remains unconscious, or
subconscious, even as it actively continues our thoughts—and without the distraction
threatened by every fresh onslaught of presentational immediacy. Oh no, it’s that Per-
son from Porlock intruding again!) James would, I believe, have been quite comfortable
with this line of reasoning, for it remains consistent with what he termed in Principles
of Psychology the “general law of perception.” This law, which directly anticipates
Whitehead’s distinction between two “pure” modes of perception, takes the following
form: “that whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before
us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes . . . out of our own head”
(James, Principles of Psychology [above, n. 29], p. 747; emphasis in original). “At bot-
tom,” James explains, “this is only one case (and that the simplest case) of the general
fact that our nerve-centres are an organ reacting on sense-impressions, and that our
hemispheres, in particular, are given us in order that records of our private past expe-
rience”—that is to say, our experience of causal efficacy—“may co-operate in the reac-
tion” (ibid.).
32 Configurations
If Whitehead is right that we feel something he calls causal efficacy, feel it

vaguely, in a manner that cannot adequately be described in terms of discrete
sense-data—something that corresponds, I would argue, to synesthetic experi-
ence, feeling one sense when you feel another—then it is reasonable to sup-
pose that the principal substrate for such perception, at least in humans, is as-
sociation cortex: understood not merely as a sort of secondary processing
center for associating differing senses, but also as a primary center for regis-
tering perception in the mode of causal efficacy,92 and as the primary center for
combining such perception with perception in the mode of presentational im-
mediacy, resulting in the mixed mode of symbolic reference.93 In other words,
symbolism—and, I would add, all forms of suggestiveness—involves reentry to
these same areas of the brain.94
Another way of putting this is that association cortex (as I have al-
ready adumbrated) is the key neural substrate for experiencing sug-
gestiveness. This fact has been especially difficult to see (and think)
because of the very name, “association cortex,” remnant of eigh-
teenth-century associationist psychology; and in order for the name
actually to signify what it refers to, the substrate in question ought
more properly be called “cortices of association and suggestion”—or
“suggestion-association cortex” (SAC).
92. I am not proposing that association cortex is the exclusive neural substrate of per-
ception in the mode of causal efficacy. Ralph Pred, for instance, makes a compelling
case for regarding the mid-brain value systems that Edelman puts great emphasis on as
being active in perception in the mode of causal efficacy, and ultimately, when com-
bined with what Edelman calls perceptual categorization (equivalent to perception in
the mode of presentational immediacy), as producing primary, fairly low-grade con-
sciousness; see Pred, Onflow (above, n.44), pp. 258–266, 298–299. The only thing is
that Pred never actually speaks of perception in the mode of causal efficacy in this con-
text. In any case, with the integration of language centers into perception in the mode
of symbolic reference (and with the concomitant emergence of what Edelman terms
higher-order consciousness), association cortex comes fully into play, and perception
in the mode of causal efficacy comes to rely no less on neural pathways passing
through association centers than on others that pass through various subcortical re-
gions.
93. I suppose I should make it crystal clear that although “symbolic reference” is often
used in non-Whiteheadian contexts as a synonym for symbolic representation, within
Whitehead’s theory of perception it can mean no such thing, for it is always experi-
enced dynamically, as dynamic form.
94. In more general terms, the hypothesis takes the following form: An infant is born
with a degree of primary consciousness, all of it in a mixed modality approximating
what James termed pure experience, “one great, blooming, buzzing confusion” because
the senses are not yet fully differentiated. Gradually, this initial phase of perception in
the mode of symbolic reference gets subtler, acquiring greater discriminatory func-
tions; and with the onset of language, the symbolic transference among perceptual
modalities enters a new phase, and further development of association cortex ensues.
Here we find ourselves at the heart of the Whiteheadian revision

of Hume: for not only are suggestion and association intimately re-
lated, they are inextricably intertwined, in acts of experience involv-
ing consciousness no less than in actual entities that remain fully
unconscious.95 Yet these are also thoroughly distinguishable
processes. Suggestion and association are linked, but deep down sug-
gestion is always (though it is not always been taken to be) more
than just another form of association. And association is free not be-
cause it is groundless, but because it is grounded in a principle or
principles of suggestion and suggestiveness. “The primitive form of
physical experience,” Whitehead writes, describing an experience of
interest more disinterested than any deliberate act of disinterest can
be, “is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in an-
other occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion.
In the language appropriate to higher stages of experience, the prim-
itive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and
feeling conformally with another.”96 Blind emotion, sure; but no dy-
namic unconscious, thank you.
95. Whitehead has often been called a panpsychist—erroneously, I believe—because

he modeled his cosmology on Jamesian psychology. (Stengers implicitly makes the
same point when she observes that James’s concept of the specious present serves as
the “prototype” for Whitehead’s notion of an actual entity: see Isabelle Stengers, Penser
avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts [Paris: Seuil, 2002], pp. 228, 230.
For relevant discussion of the specious present, see Pred, Onflow [above, n. 44], pp. 141,
284; Meyer, Irresistible Dictation [above, n.73], pp. 38–39, 59, 341.) If the formation of
what James characterized as a bud or drop of consciousness exhibits the same sort of
creativity that the formation of an actual entity does, this is because a bud of con-
sciousness is a kind of actual entity, just not the only kind. What it is is the variety we
happen to perceive in the mode of symbolic reference most fully, that is to say, with
the greatest degree of richness. Hence, although for us it may be exemplary, it is cer-
tainly not universal. Put more bluntly still: the process of becoming-conscious com-
prises an actual entity or occasion, yet an actual entity need not entail a process of be-
coming-conscious.
Whitehead’s Account of the
Sixth Day
Isabelle Stengers,
Université Libre de Bruxelles
The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech and they
became souls.
Alfred North Whitehead1
This sentence, concluding the chapter “Expression” in White-

head’s Modes of Thought, is typical of the kind which made him what
has been characterized as one of the most often quoted, and the
least often read, among twentieth-century philosophers. If you
quote such a sentence, it may give your text a poetic touch, as if a
breath of fresh air entered the closed room of your argumentation.
Somebody else is authorizing you to make present, in a suggestive
nutshell, what you never would dare write, or even think, in your
own name. But usually, you would not be able to defend the quote:
you just felt the need to transmit it, to transmit the refreshing effect
it produced on you when you read it, most of the time as already
quoted by somebody else. If asked, maybe you would protect your-
self behind the protest that it is only a beautiful metaphor for your
own serious, responsible ideas.
My point here will be that there is never ever any metaphor in
such Whiteheadian sentences, and that the poetic touch, the experi-
ence of fresh air, owes nothing to free inspiration and everything to
hard technical construction. The verbs “to give” and “to become,” as
well as the nouns “speech” and “souls,” may well produce the im-
pression of immediate understanding, their particular articulation
1. Alfred N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 41.

35
36 Configurations
then producing the poetic touch. But they are first of all technical
Whiteheadian terms, the very conceptual role of which entails the
imaginative jump produced by their articulation. And, as with all
Whiteheadian concepts, their meaning cannot be elucidated right
away, just as an animal cannot be approached right away: in both
cases, you need some slowing down and learning what they demand
and how they behave.
I will thus propose such an approach to Whitehead’s account of
the sixth day. A rather involved approach, since each step will try to
slow down the on rush of predictable interpretations. I will try to
have the reader feel what it takes to approach Whitehead, which is
also how he challenges our habits of thought.
There is a first point, however, which I wish to make utterly and di-
rectly clear. Correcting the biblical account of the sixth day, White-
head accepts that we humans, gifted with speech, may be thought of
as “creatures”; but the “He” who gave us speech is not to be identified
with God as the author, master, and creator, or even as the One who
would have been able to give us the capacity for speech as some-
thing ready-made. In Modes of Thought, we deal with modes of
thought indeed, that is, for Whitehead, with the way important ex-
periences have found historical expression: “History is the record of
the expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity.”2 The peculiar feel-
ing that is expressed by any account of the sixth day is our feeling of
ourselves as creatures among creatures, but also as separated in some
peculiar way from our fellow creatures. God may or may not be in-
volved, but the historical record delivers one word to characterize this
peculiarity, which Whitehead accepts: this is the word “soul.” We will
thus have to understand the difference between the Whiteheadian
and Christian souls: our souls were not given, we “became” souls.
Yet as soon as we free Whitehead’s sentence from ready-made reli-
gious interpretations, we risk falling into another trap, today a much
more powerful one. And here begins the hard work, against the readi-
ness of many in the human sciences to endorse forgetting about a
“substantial” soul, and to confirm instead that human subjectivity
and culture can indeed be defined as conditioned by language.
Something very important has happened as a result of this substi-
tution. To be created as well as to be given refers to a problem of ex-
istence, while to be conditioned refers to a problem of explanation,
that is, of knowledge. More precisely, it refers to an “objective”
knowledge, deducing what exists, including our claims to “have a
soul,” from conditions that will explain away those claims.
2. Ibid., p. 27.
Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 37
The power of this trap is such that before addressing the singular-
ity of Whitehead’s answer to the question of the sixth day, I need to
comment on what may appear as a rather strange, if usual today,
conflation of knowledge and existence—knowledge deciding what
exists (here, the power of language) and what does not (our souls).
In order to avoid the heavy generalities distinguishing epistemology
and ontology, I will instead address the distinction between “neces-
sary conditions” and “necessary and sufficient” conditions.
I choose such an approach because it is a quite technical distinc-
tion, devoid of any suggestive poetic touch, while for Whitehead, as
a mathematician (as for any mathematician), it was nevertheless a
crucial one, even a dramatic one. Indeed, the fate of a mathematical
demonstration, its scope, its success or failure, depends on it. Math-
ematics is a case where the very existence of a mathematical being as
well constructed depends on its definition in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions.
But this distinction was also a dramatic one for Christian theol-
ogy, when the salvation of the Christian soul is concerned. Divine
grace, for most theologians before Augustine, was necessary, but not
sufficient, for salvation: salvation would need man’s first move,
which grace would amplify and stabilize—or, at least, it needed
man’s own acceptance of the divine offer. For Augustine, however,
acceptance is also produced by grace, which thus acquired the status
of a necessary and sufficient condition for salvation.
In a certain way, in both mathematics and Augustinian theology,
we deal with becoming: becoming a mathematical being, or becom-
ing able to escape damnation. But in both cases, becoming is con-
flated with being gifted with a sufficient condition. Since becoming
relates to the question of “what is it to exist?” and sufficient condi-
tion to “what is it we can define?” we may speak in both cases of a
realized conflation of existence and knowledge.
Now, outside mathematical thought and theology, no condition
is ever sufficient: the power of any condition always implies other
conditions. This is why the claim that something explains some
other thing usually entails the distinction between what is felt to
need explanation and what we feel allowed to take for granted. This
was dramatized by Leibniz, the thinker of the principle of sufficient
reason, who wrote that the whole universe is expressed by the least,
most insignificant, most self-explanatory of our actions as well as by
the fateful choice of Adam eating the fateful apple. The universe is
the only necessary and sufficient condition. For finite knowledge
there will always be a gap between what comes into existence and
what we can define.
38 Configurations
Leibniz’s solution sends the conflation of existence and knowledge

up to God’s infinity. But it gives no room to a positive distinction, in-
stead verifying that as soon as we think in terms of “conditions,” we
are led to think of the difference between “necessary” and “necessary
and sufficient” as a “gap,” as what remains when everything we could
explain has been explained. Such a gap may be explained away as a
matter of contingency, or as the result of the finite character of our
knowledge. But the same gap may also be dramatized as designating
what has the power to transcend conditioning or reduction, what
can and should be purified from everything that can be explained
away in terms of something else. You may think here about existen-
tial freedom as defined against all social conditioning.
These conflicting interpretations provide the setting for the very
question that turned Whitehead into a speculative philosopher; the
radical, proudly exhibited, incoherence that he saw as plaguing
modern thought. Such a conflict pervades all domains where some
kind of “objective explanation”—be it neuronal, linguistic, cultural,
political, or social, or economic—may parade as a “nearly sufficient”
condition, arousing vigorous protests in the name of what would es-
cape, or transcend, so-called objective explanations.
Here indeed we have to slow down, because we have to resist gen-
eral ideas about scientific knowledge and what would eventually
transcend it. The example of scientific experimental demonstration
certainly played a role in the power claimed by objective explana-
tion. However, experimental objectivity is not something you can
generalize. It is not related to the satisfaction of a general right of
reason but to an event, “experimental success.” For an experiment to
be a success, an operation of disentanglement must be achieved, as
distinguished from a unilateral arbitrary methodological cut. This
possibility of disentanglement from the entangled world we are
given is the condition for a framing that will enact a distinction be-
tween some so-called general conditions, which may be taken for
granted, and what will be the matter of experimental demonstra-
tion, when it becomes possible to demonstrate how something
changes as a function of something else. In other words, only in the
case of experimental success is an entangled world, lacking a neces-
sary and sufficient condition, actively disentangled and framed in
such a way that one of its aspects acquires the power to verify what
will then be called an objective definition—that is, the definition of
the specific closed, functionally articulated set of conditions that
“objectively” explains what is observed.
If the specificity of modern thought consists in its having neces-
sary conditions parading as nearly sufficient ones, there is absolutely
no surprise in the way the event of experimental success was ex-

plained away by general antagonistic interpretations. From the sci-
entists’ point of view, the event that they depend upon may be for-
gotten in favor of the explanation it made possible. From the critical
point of view, be it that of Kant or that of modern sociology of sci-
ence, there is no event: be it transcendentally or socially condi-
tioned, human understanding is the only true author of the objec-
tive explanation, while reality remains mute.
But listen now to how Whitehead celebrates, in Science and the
Modern World, the growth of modern science, and the faith in the or-
der of nature without which it would not have been possible:
There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is . . . to
know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that
they should find themselves in a system of things; to know that this system
includes the harmony of logical rationality and the harmony of aesthetic
achievement; to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe
as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal
moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues.3
Here is what I would call a Whiteheadian dramatization of the

event of experimental success. Such a success indeed exhibits the
iron logical necessity ruling a well-framed system of things—but it
also means an aesthetic achievement, since, in order to become pos-
sible, the successful framing of a “detail” requires the living ideal of
the working scientist. Whitehead’s dramatization thus asks those
who have faith in the power either of knowledge to discover the or-
der of nature, or of human ideals to obtain their satisfaction, not to
part from their own shadow—that is, not to part from what each
faith requires in order to be fulfilled, and cannot provide by itself. As
soon as we take into account the passionate knower—for whom
what matters is the aesthetic achievement of having detached details
become themselves—not some anonymous “knowing subject,”
there may be no conflation of knowledge and existence but a double
dramatization, of both the knower and the known. Furthermore,
Whitehead’s dramatization also puts into a rather crude light the
generalization that led, for instance, to the claims of a neurophysi-
ologist objectively explaining the human so-called soul by some
blind but functional interplay among neurons. In this case we see
neither the harmony of logic, nor the aesthetic harmony. Rather, we
may well conclude that if this scientist’s claims are taken seriously it
3. Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Free Press,
1967), p. 18.
40 Configurations
is because they confirm the general ambition to have what does not feel
objectively explaining, somehow, what does feel. More generally, it
seems nowadays that if you can refer to language, to culture, to biolog-
ical selection, to states of the central nervous system, to society, to the
market, you will be able to claim the heritage of Galileo or Newton.
There may be many explanations for this strange generalization,
as is always the case with history; but if we take history to be, as
Whitehead proposes, “the record of the expressions of feelings pecu-
liar to humanity,” it may be preferable not to criticize such a gener-
alization (for instance, as a matter of misplaced belief, or of the mis-
placed authority of physics). We may rather wonder about the
peculiar feeling recorded by the celebration of experimental success
as exemplifying the very fulfillment of the aspiration of human ra-
tionality. I would propose that such a celebration has to do not so
much with the many questions that nature or mankind may inspire,
but rather with the possibility of explaining away such questions,
leaving a rather depopulated scene organized around the conflict be-
tween objective explanation and what would transcend it.
My proposition entails that at the center of this scene stand a
much older question, the question, “who is responsible for what?”
What would have been generalized would indeed be the possibility,
when we deal with experimental facts, to claim that scientists are
not responsible for their interpretation, that such an interpretation
was indeed demanded by the fact itself. The proliferation of nearly
sufficient conditions would then feature a rather strange soul, whose
first question is about responsibility, and who demands that there is
an objective nature to bear the full responsibility for the way its or-
der is characterized.
Here, with the overwhelming importance of the question “who is
responsible for what?” we may come back to the sixth-day account
—the day, the Bible tells us, when Adam and Eve were created, as the
ones who would be responsible for the sin of eating the apple and
for the subsequent fate of humanity. The tale is that on the sixth
day, when God gave souls to Adam and Eve, He also gave them the
freedom to sin, and the responsibility to choose between obedience
and disobedience. The easy modern acceptance of any so-called ob-
jective explanation, which would explain away this freedom and re-
sponsibility, does not so much amount to a rejection of this tale as
to the claim that only science, not the Bible, may assign responsibil-
ity. In other words, the modern account of the sixth day would be
“He created the scientist”—triumphantly demonstrating the power
of scientific objectivity, explaining away gregarious beliefs, identify-
ing superstitious mankind as part of the previous day’s creation.
I am now able to address the singularity of Whitehead’s answer to

the question of the sixth day—that is, his proposition that we think
of ourselves as creatures indeed, but not as creatures gifted with a
soul: as creatures that, being given speech, became souls. White-
head’s contrast between “to be given” and “to become” is intended
to lead us away from the modern meeting place crowded with the
obsessive question of what is responsible for what. Whitehead tried
to change the problem.
In order to introduce the meaning and scope of this change, I will
adduce Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? For
Deleuze and Guattari, both Blaise Pascal and Sören Kierkegaard (who
meditated about the Christian soul) and Jean Paul Sartre (who did
not need God) belong to one and the same plane, characterized by a
negative movement that enacts transcendent values against the con-
ditioning by immediate interests. I personally would add to Pascal,
Kierkegaard, and Sartre figures such as Jacques Monod and Richard
Dawkins for whom science is salvation, the only route we have
against the way natural selection has shaped us. Here are Deleuze
and Guattari:
The problem would change if it were another plane of immanence. It is not
that the person who does not believe God exists would gain the upper hand,
since he would still belong to the old plane as negative movement. But, on the
new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes
in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities
of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of
existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world,
in this life, becomes our most difficult task. . . . This is the empiricist conver-
sion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have
lost the world, worse than a fiancée or a God). The problem has indeed
changed.4
Empiricist conversion—believing in this world, in this life—may

mean many things. Since my point of entry here is the account of
the sixth day, I will concentrate on the reclaiming of the many ques-
tions and aspirations that were expelled from the scene, as it was de-
populated both by the biblical account and by modern so-called ob-
jectivity. Because it all began with the Bible, when the very
interesting differences related to the five first days—that is to say, the
respective modes of existence of the rocks and of the animals—were
overshadowed by the importance of the sixth day, when He created
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. G. Burchell and H.
Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 74–75.
42 Configurations
mankind in His own image, giving to Adam governance over every-

thing that had been created before. Without details. In bulk.
If indeed the problem has changed—or, in Whiteheadian terms, if
indeed we belong to another epoch—it is not so astonishing that
speculative philosophy, as the first victim of modern thought, de-
prived of authority by both science and critique, may be with us
again. Not as the bearer of some new truth, but as experimenting in
order to find out how to escape the previous accounts of the sixth
day. What is required is not to criticize them, which is easy enough,
but to forge a new expression for the feelings of a creature whose
soul does not demand any longer to know first who is responsible.
To give you a taste of the risk required by this most strange and
adventurous task of trying to believe in this world and in this life,
our life, I would ask that you again listen to Whitehead, and feel the
contrast between this dramatization and the previous one, what we
knew when we entertained the faith that there was a nature the log-
ical necessity of which we could identify:
We require to understand how the unity of the universe requires its multiplic-
ity. We require to understand how infinitude requires the finite. We require to
understand how each immediately present existence requires its past, an-
tecedent to itself; and requires its future, an essential factor in its own exis-
tence. . . . And we require to understand how mere matter of fact refuses to be
deprived of its relevance to potentialities beyond its own actuality of realiza-
tion. . . . The discussion of present fact apart from reference to the past, to
concurrent present, and to future, and from reference to the preservation or
destruction of forms of creation is to rob the universe of essential importance.
In the absence of perspective there is triviality.5
We no longer know, but we require to understand. Understanding is

not knowing. Knowing is about closed facts, facts we are able to de-
fine. As long as the supposedly closed order of nature was concerned,
we knew, or did not, or hesitated, or discussed. The problem changes
when it is no longer a matter of definition (the importance being
then that it be the right one), but a matter of understanding. Under-
standing entails for Whitehead an experience of transformative dis-
closure, not the possibility of a definition, valid or invalid.
As a consequence, do not ask me to define understanding; in-
stead, understand it from the experience of disclosure elicited by
Whitehead’s “And we require to understand how mere matter of fact
refuses to be deprived of its relevance to potentialities beyond its
own actuality of realization.” This requirement also concerns rocks
5. Whitehead, Modes (above, n. 1), pp. 83–84.

and animals. We do not require the proof that their modes of exis-
tence cannot be reduced to mere matters of fact, we require the ca-
pacity never to reduce anything to a mere matter of fact, or matter
of proof—to become able to feel its relevance to unrealized poten-
tialities. This is the very cry of the Whiteheadian soul, the soul we
became on the sixth day. At the end of the chapter on “Understand-
ing” in Modes of Thought, Whitehead indeed writes: “As we lose this
sense of disclosure, we are shedding that mode of functioning which
is the soul.”6
“In the absence of perspective there is triviality.” Even when physi-
cists approach the so-called great problem of the origins of the uni-
verse, the possibility of triviality is present. When Stephen Weinberg
famously remarked that the more the universe seems comprehensible,
the more it also seems pointless, he witnessed the problem of a com-
prehension that produces triviality. And it is then of no use to add
some God behind the Big Bang, tuning the first instants in order to
accommodate the possibility of mankind, and of no use to speculate
about the means needed to provide for the immortality of mankind
when the universe will be populated by black holes only. What is the
point, really, in the grandiose dream of mankind surviving in the
guise of a giant cosmic computer recording and computing data, data,
data, which is the dream of some contemporary physicists? The
deadly touch of triviality marks whatever connection we may seek to
establish between the universe as defined by contemporary physics
and the way the question of the universe matters for us as souls re-
quiring understanding. I could, but will not, write the same about
other grandiose hypotheses, such as an Intelligent Design being su-
perimposed on Darwinian evolution. It is of no use since it does not
save the adventure of life from triviality but turns it into the mani-
festation of a design, which still deprives living beings of their rele-
vance to potentialities beyond their own actuality of realization.
How, then, should we understand the Whiteheadian version of the
sixth day?
We already know the kind of temptation we should resist. We
should beware of any claim linking this understanding with the
heroic discovery of the pointless character of what mattered for
mankind before us—for instance, the Freudian epic story of the suc-
cessive discovery that Man does not inhabit the center of the world,
is not the crowning piece of the animal kingdom, and is not even,
by the grace of Freud himself, master of his own consciousness. But
we should be wary also of any heroic affirmation of the human free
6. Ibid., p. 62.
44 Configurations
soul: I am not a rock, a root, or an animal; I am not my past, I am

not asking for any particular future, I am my decision, now. The
Whiteheadian answer would be: your own future and past, you may
well trivialize, if it does helps you to affirm that your present mat-
ters, but what do you understand about rocks or roots, little man!
However, to go further, we meet a typical Whiteheadian difficulty.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead’s “technical” book, we get no tech-
nical approach to the question of the soul. Instead, we get a most de-
finitive rejection of any substantial definition of the soul as an en-
during entity: “The problem of the enduring soul with its permanent
characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem life
presents. That problem is, How can there be originality? And the an-
swer explains how the soul need be no more original than a stone.”7
For Whitehead, endurance is never an attribute, always an achieve-
ment: throughout its adventures, something—I will come back to
the characterization of this “something”—succeeds in maintaining
some thread of conformity between past and present. Such an
achievement is certainly required for us to become souls, it is a nec-
essary condition if you wish, but now the problem has changed. The
question associated with the soul, “how can there be originality?”
demands a positive answer. The distinction between “to be given”
and “to become” will not be framed any longer in terms of condi-
tions, be they sufficient or not.
But in Process and Reality, the word “soul” is never positively used
outside comments on quotations from Hume. There is only one
technical, rather offhand, remark, but it is quite an extraordinary
one: In his own philosophy, Whitehead writes “‘the soul’ as it ap-
pears in Hume, and ‘the mind’ as it appears in Locke and Hume are
replaced by the phrases ‘the actual entity’, and ‘the actual occasion’,
these phrases being synonymous.”8 Since I will not be able to pre-
sent Whitehead’s God here, let me just emphasize that this “syn-
onymous” remark is very important from that point of view. Indeed,
in Whitehead’s philosophy, the only actual entity that is not an ac-
tual occasion is God. Thus, the whole theological tradition about
mankind being created in the image of God— and more precisely, of
God conceived as starting from whatever image we produce about
ourselves—is repudiated in just four words. In Whitehead’s meta-
physics, God is the only actual entity that cannot be characterized in
terms related to what Hume and Locke call “mind” or “soul.”
7. Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed.
David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 104.
8. Ibid., p. 141.
We are very far, however, from an account of the sixth day. Actual
entities are indeed the metaphysical concept for what Whitehead de-
fines as res verae, the true things, the only things that may be said, in
metaphysical terms, to really exist. And it can be said that one of the
metaphysical functions of actual entities is to state that, whatever
did happen on the sixth day, it does not require a new kind of meta-
physical definition of what it means to “exist.”
Indeed, the strong singularity of Whitehead’s definition of what ex-
ists is that it avoids any possible conflation of the categories of exis-
tence and the kind of differences we would wish to explain—for in-
stance, the difference between what we call an electron, a rock, a
rabbit, and ourselves. Actual entities are indeed meant to produce dis-
connection between two versions of what it is “to explain.” Whatever
truly exists, whatever is a res vera, will be described as explaining it-
self, causa sui; while whatever we are able to explain is not a res vera.
The point is not to wonder about the legitimacy of Whitehead’s
speculative definition of what truly exists, as if Process and Reality un-
folded some kind of ultimate perspective. A perspective is certainly
produced, but it cannot be separated from an experience of disclo-
sure; and this experience does not concern actual entities as such,
but the very possibility of changing the problem, to escape the
oppositions our modern definitions induce. For Whitehead there
can be no ultimate, or right, perspective, because perspective cannot
be separated from importance. As soon as we define a perspective as
a settled position of knowledge about something out there, we get
“the dead abstraction of mere fact from the living importance of
things felt. The concrete truth is the variation of interest.”9 What
matters for Whitehead is to induce such a variation of interest—“a”
variation, never “the” variation that would get you to the right, fi-
nal, perspective.
Process and Reality was written by a creature of the sixth day, who
aimed at a change in our “modes of thought,” enabling us to resist
all perspectives that involve shedding that mode of functioning
which is our soul. But you never resist in general. You may resist as a
poet, as a teacher, as an activist for animal rights. Whitehead’s mode
of resistance was that of a philosopher, directly working with the
powerful abstractions that dominate our modes of thought, not try-
ing to bypass or denounce them, but endeavoring to produce a vari-
ation in the interest they induce. More precisely, Whitehead’s mode
of resistance implied fully experimenting with a demand for coher-
ence and accepting its consequences, including the most adventurous
9. Whitehead, Modes (above, n. 1), p. 11.

46 Configurations
ones. Such a demand has as one of its consequences that we resist

the idea that it is for mankind, and mankind only, that the distinc-
tion between “to be given” and “to become” is relevant; that we re-
sist the perspective that mankind is the only point in a pointless uni-
verse; and also that we resist being the ones who would distribute
what is pointless—the mode of existence of a rock, for instance—
and what is not: ourselves and maybe some selected animals. The
distinction between “to be given” and “to become” must then con-
cern whatever exists—that is, for Whitehead, whatever comes into
being, that which he names “actual entities.”
Here I may finally quote Whitehead’s metaphysical definition of
“becoming”: “In the becoming of an actual entity, the potential
unity of many entities in disjunctive diversity acquires the real unity
of an actual entity.”10 What is initially given is always a “many,” a
disjunction the unity of which is potential, that is, must be pro-
duced. Becoming thus means acquiring real unity, not to be con-
fused with the unfolding of some kind of unity that would be po-
tentially there. The functioning of the actual entity in its process of
unification, of becoming one, is the crucial theme of the hundreds
of pages of Process and Reality, and the stake of those pages is to pro-
duce the concept of a subject deciding for itself how it will be ex-
plained by what was given for its becoming—that is, how it will
both feel it and become the subject of this feeling. As the “principle
of process” states, “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what an
actual entity is.”11 And when the many that are what is felt, the feel-
ing, and the feeler have come together into a real unity, the actual
entity that now “is” no longer feels, no longer is a subject: it has at-
tained what Whitehead calls “objective immortality,” and is added
to the many that will have to be felt by other subsequent entities.
The many have become one, and are increased by one.
Do not ask how Whitehead demonstrates that unification cannot
be reduced to something that would explain away becoming. Such a
demonstration would mean that we situate ourselves before the
sixth day, or even before the first one, starting with the hypothesis
of a world devoid of becoming and wondering if such a world is not
sufficient to define ours. This is sheer incoherence, since what we de-
fine as devoid of becoming presupposes becoming, that is, “us” be-
coming able to form such a definition. Again, “there is no parting
from your own shadow.” Becoming is not to be demonstrated, it is a
matter of sheer disclosure.
10. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 7), p. 22.

11. Ibid., p. 23.
In contrast, the question of “how an entity becomes” is the one

for which a demand for coherence may be positively put to work.
Becoming is not to be demonstrated, but it must be characterized in
such a way that it does not blindly solve all questions, as something
that would transcend all reasons. If Whitehead needed so many
pages, it is because he had accepted what he called the “ontological
principle,” which states that “there is nothing which floats into the
world from nowhere,”12 thereby accepting the old rationalist claim
that everything has a reason, just adding that “actual entities are the
only reasons.”13 Again, there must be no conflation. No reason as we
may define reasons, no reason as a matter of knowledge, may ever pa-
rade as the reason for the existence of anything.
We may now come back to the problem of the six days of cre-
ation, wondering about the difference between a rock or a root and
a writer in the process of writing—a writer stating, for instance, his
reasons for affirming that we have intentions or freedom while the
rock has none of that, or that the rock obeys the laws of nature while
we do not. We know now that this writer is not talking in meta-
physical terms, because the reasons, however we define them, that
we give for those differences are not actual entities. As soon as we
deal with rocks, roots, or the writer, we deal with what Whitehead
calls “societies,” and our characterizations of their contrasts are all
“social explanations.” They are social because they address societies,
but they are also social because the very problem of the relevant
characterization is a social problem, as determined by settled per-
spectives on ourselves as well as on rocks and roots.
Whatever we are able to characterize—rocks, roots, or ourselves as
we feel endowed with a continuing life of our own—are never actual
entities, because the temporality of actual entities is atomic, “the
many become one, and are increased by one.”14 They cannot endure,
even for a fraction of a second. Whatever endures is a society of ac-
tual entities and not a res vera. Thus whatever endures is never a rea-
son, even for its own endurance. “Actual entities are the only rea-
sons.” Societies depend on the fact that some actual entities accept
in their own becoming to conform to a common feature that other
entities they have to feel, also accepted, also conformed to. For each
of them, to be part of a society is to ratify in a positive manner, as
part of their self-definition, a way of feeling that was provided by
their social environment. No particular society endures because of a
12. Ibid., p. 244.

13. Ibid., p. 24.
14. Ibid., p. 21.
48 Configurations
power of its own; it endures just as long as the corresponding thread

of conformity is not broken by actual entities.
It would be a sad mistake to conclude that since societies are not
res vera, Whitehead, one way or another, downgrades them as if they
were illusions only. Endurance is, for better or worse, an achieve-
ment, the achievement of a feature that goes on mattering. The
point with societies not being res vera is that nothing is endowed
with the right to go on mattering. Whenever we address something,
be it ourselves or whatever we are able to empirically describe and
characterize, Whitehead asks that we refrain from giving to the
words we use the power to produce justifications for what matters,
transcending the empirical fact that it so matters. The relevance of
all justifications is correlated with a mode of endurance, and will be
lost if the conformity they depend upon is lost. No settled perspec-
tive may claim authority. Weighty predicates, claiming both the
power to describe and the power to explain, such as intention, free-
dom, or obedience to the laws of nature, produce poor descriptions
and transform what happens to be the case into what has to be the
case. “The concrete truth is variation of interest,” and Whiteheadian
societies, which designate the whole of our knowledge as a form of
sociology, demand that any interesting definition be put at risk—
that what matters be relevance, not the power to define and deduce.
As far as a society is stable, Whitehead’s concepts do not make a
great difference where functional descriptions are concerned. Physics
provides a relevant sociology for societies characterized by the kind
of conformity that experimental success depends upon. The inter-
esting difference arises because with Whiteheadian societies you
need no special explanation for what escapes continuity, or for what
challenges the very relevance of continuity. It happens in physics,
but is quite dramatically the case with “that mode of functioning
which is the soul.” There is nothing mystical when writers claim
that, in the process of writing something that matters, they are not
just hesitating, that the situation cannot be described in terms of
possible choices and of an “I” as an enduring being, who would hes-
itate between them. Indeed, the decisions that must be produced are
also decisions about who they are. It is a perfectly relevant charac-
terization of an adventure whose mode of existence Whitehead’s
concepts are meant not to oppose to other modes—even to those of
what we call an electron, and certainly not to those which that ap-
pear to be dominated by the search for reasons against any idea that
something could be said to be causa sui.
We are creatures of the sixth day, and what makes us rather par-
ticular is that we are asking for reasons. The very fact that actual en-
tities, as the only reasons from a metaphysical point of view, may

matter for us, may elicit disclosure, is in itself a witness that reasons
matter in our very life. The efficacy of metaphysics is thus not to de-
construct our reasons, but to divorce them from the obsession with
judgment assigning responsibility. The diverging ways in which rea-
sons matter may well entail polemics, but insofar as we are dealing
with the account of the sixth day, we should state only that reasons
then came to matter.
Whitehead’s version of Deleuze and Guattari’s empiricist conver-
sion would thus emphasize that empiricism is not against reason,
but asks us to feel how intensely reasons matter. We share with other
living beings the high feat of being able to digest food—but we do
not usually attribute worth to the fact that we manage to digest, or
even manage to walk on two feet without falling down, whatever
the importance of such successes for our survival. “The life of a hu-
man being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in which
unrealized ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions. The dis-
tinction between men and animals is in one sense only a difference
in degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The
Rubicon has been crossed.”15
For Whitehead, the experiences that came to matter on the sixth
day are those which may be associated with the intense feeling of al-
ternative, unrealized possibilities: what we could have done and did
not do, what we could have chosen and decided not to. “Men are
the children of the Universe with foolish enterprises and irrational
hopes. A tree sticks to its business of mere survival, and so does an
oyster with some minor divergencies. In this way, the life aim at sur-
vival is modified into the human aim at survival for diversified,
worthwhile experience.”16
We may be tempted to stop here. Speech, as a social (in White-
head’s meaning of the term) characterization of the sixth day, would
not be “responsible,” since the only causes are actual entities. But
the feeling of unrealized ideals that created the contrast between
sticking to our habitual business, whatever it is, and entertaining
strange ideas about what might be possible—foolish enterprises such
as explaining the world, irrational hopes such as understanding it—
would mark the way our experience is framed by its linguistic envi-
ronment. This may lead rather directly to what may be called an
“anti-intellectualist stance.” We are prisoners of illusions induced by
language, by the capacity of language to abstract possibilities in the

16. Ibid., p. 30.
50 Configurations
concrete flux of situations, and to confront them with other abstract

possibilities, what could have happened and did not. Such a stance
may be favored by the academic “linguistic turn” that, since
Wittgenstein, has sought to cure us, leading us back to the business
of being alive that we are told we should stick to. Back to the fifth
day! More seriously, it is also cultivated by wisdom traditions like
Buddhism.
However, in making language the social condition for the feeling
of “unrealized possibilities,” we have just missed the problem of the
soul. This problem is not that of the “human soul,” explaining the
importance of unrealized ideals; more generally, the problem is not
humanity, as it crossed the Rubicon; instead, the metaphysical prob-
lem is what this Rubicon, which we happened to cross, metaphysi-
cally requires. We require to understand, not to be led back to the
maze of language.
When we make language our creator, enticing the important feel-
ing that our acts and choices not only decide what will be, but also
make untrue what could have been and never will be, we explain
away this importance and stick again to the usual business of find-
ing an explanation for human experience. And in so doing we also
downgrade this human experience, describing it in terms of intel-
lects dominated by linguistic abstractions, in contrast to the tree or
the oyster sticking to the concrete business of survival. What we
have forgotten is that if there are societies dominated by abstractions
it is the ones we name trees and oysters, rather than ourselves. Stick-
ing to their business of survival is sticking to abstractions, making a
definite and rather stable difference between what this business de-
fines as relevant and what does not matter. Instead, explaining away
the sense of unrealized possibility in terms of linguistic artifacts, ex-
perimenting with the contrast between our statements and what we
feel, dreaming of escaping the prison of our judgments, are all ad-
ventures of souls—what we became when we were given speech, not
what was given to us by speech.
Again, there is no parting from our own shadow. Even when we
wander in the dreary landscape of modern abstractions, we are still
witnesses testifying for what Whitehead called, in Science and the
Modern World, the “power of wandering”: “Mankind has wandered
from the trees to the plains, from the plains to the seacoast, from cli-
mate to climate, from continent to continent, and from habit of life
to habit of life. When man ceases to wander, he will cease to ascend
in the scale of being.”17
17. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 3), p. 207.

When humans cease to wander, they will cease to require to under-

stand. Metaphysical understanding has thus to avoid giving language
the power to make us wander, or entertain the feeling for “unrealized
possibilities,”even if this feeling came to crucially matter on the sixth
day, when we were given speech. To be given, since we can name what
was given, refers to a social environment, a real potentiality for be-
coming—in this case, for becoming a soul—but it will not explain
“how there can be originality,” how we became able to entertain
possibility as such, that is, also able to tell tales about what could
have been but never will be. Here is the metaphysical requirement
imposed by the Rubicon we crossed: language must require, indeed
presuppose, the feeling of those tales that may be told; it must not
create them. Human experience must testify to the existence of such
tales, not explain them.
These tales, to be distinguished from any verbal statement and
from any conscious experience, are what Whitehead called “propo-
sitions.” Propositions are members of the short metaphysical list of
what can be said to exist, what is required by the description of ac-
tual entities as such. In other words: while what we call space, time
or matter, what we recognize as an objective explanation, are all so-
cially constructed, depending on the endurance of societies, propo-
sitions are not. The coming into existence of new propositions may
need, and does need, a social environment, but it will not be ex-
plained in social terms. The event of this coming into existence
marks the opening of a full range of new diverging possibilities for
becoming, and as such generally signifies a break in continuity, what
can be called a social upheaval. “The concrete truth is the variation
of interest.”
Propositions are thus Whitehead’s metaphysical answer to the de-
mand that we not part from our own shadows, from the disclosure
that what we say or think may matter. Even the author of the most
radical deconstructivist critique cannot but hope that his or her
statement will break continuity, make a difference, at least if he or
she is not just sticking to the mere business of academic survival,
thereby “shedding that mode of functioning which is the soul.” But
the efficacy of propositions is not restricted to us, as creatures of the
sixth day. As metaphysical existents, propositions are needed in or-
der to give irreducible reasons not only for the experience of words
inducing disclosure, a world felt in a different manner, but also for
the disruption, or variation of interest, that a rabbit or a dog may ex-
perience; and finally, for the possibility of the kind of disruption of
social continuity that we may observe when even oysters or trees
seem to forget about survival. “When a non-conformal proposition
52 Configurations
is admitted into feeling . . . a novelty has emerged into creation. The

novelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad. But it
is new, a new type of individual, and not merely a new intensity of
individual feeling.”18
Consequently, propositions should not be confused with linguis-
tic sentences. Instead they turn what linguists took as their object
into a full Whiteheadian sociological field. Sentences have no iden-
tity of their own. If I address somebody with “how are you?” or “the
salt, please,” we may speak of a stable society enacting a conformal
proposition that is already part of the social environment. But utter-
ing a sentence may also be a social adventure, when I do not quite
know at the beginning how it will end, when I am not the same at
the beginning as at the end. A text also has no identity of its own,
for its composition or reading may provide an opportunity for seem-
ingly innocuous sentences to suddenly collide, to introduce unan-
ticipated new possibilities. And some utterances, be they written or
verbal, may be felt as “epoch-making,” when the extent of the dif-
ference they make between past and present belongs to a future re-
taining some memory of its own novelty.
The kind of sentences usually selected as exemplary by philoso-
phers and linguists, like “the cat is on the mat” or “the session is
closed,” may have impact if the cat was considered lost, or the ses-
sion was in full turmoil, but they are usually selected for their social
conformity—that is, for occulting or taming the efficacy of proposi-
tions. “The interest in logic, dominating overintellectualized
philosophers, has obscured the main function of propositions in the
nature of things. They are not primarily for belief. . . . The primary
mode of realization of a proposition in an actual entity is not by
judgement, but by entertainment. . . . Horror, relief, purpose, are pri-
mary feelings involving the entertainment of propositions.”19
For Whitehead—here commenting on a “thought”—we may de-
scribe a proposition’s efficacy as “a tremendous mode of excitement.
Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole surface of our
being. But this image is inadequate. For we should conceive the rip-
ples as effective in the creation of the plunge of the stone into the
water. The ripples release the thought, and the thought augments
and distorts the ripples.”20 Any new proposition, as it impacts, has a
disruptive power that may have the consequence of the rabbit’s run-

19. Ibid., pp. 186–188.
ning away, suddenly aware of what we would call “a wolf!” In deal-

ing with a thought, we may feel that the meaning does not belong
to the proposition, but to the full event rippling down. But this is
true even when the object of a nonverbal perception seems fully to
explain a rabbitlike reaction. To ask for the meaning of a proposition
is to confuse the creation of the stone-plus-ripples event with a de-
duction of the ripples from the stone’s impact, or with a stone’s free-
fall motion, which may indeed be defined by a set of differential
equations.
If, on the sixth day, being given speech, we became souls, it is
thus not because we entertain propositions: so does a rabbit, or an
oyster, or a living cell—even if, in the case of an oyster or a cell, our
imagination is limited, and we find it difficult to feel like an oyster
or a cell. We became souls because of the difference that language
makes in the rippling consequences of a proposition’s impact. Being
given language means that when a proposition is entertained it is
given a social environment such that its impact may be amplified
into many divergent, entangled consequences, activating that mode
of functioning which is the soul.
The “crossing of the Rubicon” that Whitehead attributes to
mankind cannot be equated with a defining break, the precise iden-
tification of which would allow a definition of all the differences we
care for, all that matter for us. It rather causes us to wander and won-
der. Just think about the historical, epoch-making, crossing of the
Rubicon: how do we identify the differences it made for Caesar, for
his soldiers, for the Roman Senate, and still makes now even for
those who have never heard about this river and the special role it
played in Roman laws and traditions? Such a crossing was not a
break, since it entailed the continuity of the Roman historical, polit-
ical environment. For Caesar’s horse it was probably an experience
of wetness like many others. But it started a number of diverging so-
cial adventures that we cannot begin to enumerate, it gave their rel-
evance to a novel, open set of propositions, including Whitehead’s
use of it, my own comment about this use, and your own associa-
tions elicited by this comment. All this is still rippling down, and
will go on rippling as long as “Crossing the Rubicon” impinges on
our experience.
However, as Whitehead loved to repeat, “we should not exagger-
ate.” In this case we should not exaggerate our difference from a
rabbit. Sometimes we feel the ripple, sometimes we do not, as when
we hear “the salt, please” and do not feel that it was meant to inter-
rupt us, to express indifference to or annoyance against the so very
interesting things we were talking about. Soul is a mode of func-
54 Configurations
tioning that occasionally happens, not the ultimate truth of our ex-
perience.
But we could then ask, and it will be my last question, whether
Whitehead himself did not exaggerate when he chose to give the
same name, “soul,” both to that mode of functioning that speech
enhanced, and to actual occasions (remember his reading of Hume,
substituting the actual occasion for the Humean soul). Would this
mean that, for Whitehead, in being given speech, we also became
able to escape our own social, historical, epochal adventure, and
reach toward a metaphysical truth that transcends any epoch?
The question should rather be: why did Whitehead use such a
“human” term as “soul” to characterize actual occasions? And this
question can then extend to many other speculative names he used
(including “God”). I would propose that the answer is that philoso-
phy aims at “sheer disclosure,”21 and not at an intellectual intuition
transcending any epoch. Whitehead designed his naming strategy in
order to arouse a “sense of disclosure” whose aim was to “change the
problem,” to pay attention and believe in this world, not to judge it
in terms of generalities. But he knew that no one is able to drain the
pond upon which new propositions impact. Whatever the proposi-
tions, it is this epochal pond, the modern dense entanglement of
settled perspectives and preoccupations, that they will impact. The
naming strategy, then, has for its aim to produce thoughts the pri-
mary value of which should be to induce the experience of both the
ripples and the pond, to induce a mode of excitement disclosing the
possibility of affirming both what modern habits of thought denied,
and what they took for granted.
Whitehead’s speculative philosophy makes full use of language
not as an expression of claims, to be evaluated, accepted or rejected
as such, but rather as providing a social environment for the specu-
lative reception of propositions. Speculative language should be able
to induce not the reaction of the rabbit becoming aware that this
grey shade is what we call a wolf, that is, a convinced “it matters!”
but a speculative adventure entailing questions such as “how does it
matter?” “does it really matter?” “what if I accepted that it does not
matter?” “how did it come to matter?”—unrealized ideals then shap-
ing our experiences. Such questions, which turn what is socially
given, the empirical fact that something matters, into a potential for
many diverging adventures, are the ones we cannot explain because
they are presupposed by any particular explanation.
21. Ibid., p. 49.

It is thus because philosophers cannot part from their own shad-

ows that Whitehead, as a philosopher, gave the same name, “soul,”
to that speculative mode of functioning we may become, occasion-
ally, since we have been given speech, and to those speculative ac-
tual occasions the very reason of which is to affirm that what is
given is always a potential for becoming. The mode of excitement
that Whitehead’s philosophy is designed to induce is not how it feels
to become a soul in general, but how it feels to become a soul that re-
quires to understand.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Didier Debaise and Steven Meyer for their careful
reading and relevant suggestions.
And a very deep gratitude to Donna Haraway, who pointed out that
in the Biblical account of the sixth day, God created not only hu-
mans but also “the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle
after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its
kind.” This was quite a busy day indeed, and Whitehead’s account is
quite a partial one, perhaps expressing the feeling that we “humans”
deserved our own special creation day. Furthermore, it is striking
that, while Adam and Eve were created as individuals, the beasts,
cattle, and creeping creatures are defined by their “kind,” as if a gen-
eral definition was sufficient where they are concerned. This is not
an “erudite only” remark at all, but an enlightening one, luring at-
tention to an important point left aside in this text, that is, the chal-
lenge of bridging the Rubicon that we claim to have crossed. We
need propositions that would reconsider the long and many-faceted
history of our cohabitation with the other creatures of this busy
sixth day, and would activate the importance of new modes of
thinking and feeling the togetherness of our lives.
On Whitehead and Deleuze:
The Process of Materiality
Michael Halewood
Goldsmiths, University of London
Newton’s methodology for physics was an overwhelming success. But the forces
which he introduced left Nature still without meaning or value. . . . A dead nature
aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the in-
trinsic reaping of value.
A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought1
Introduction
In his long career, Alfred North Whitehead was, variously, a math-
ematician, a speculative physicist, a historian of science, a philoso-
pher of science, and a philosopher in his own right. He thus occu-
pies a perhaps unique place within recent Western thought. Not
only did he advance scientific thought, he also developed a novel,
systematic philosophical understanding of science based on a deep
historical appreciation of both its theoretical premises and its practi-
cal procedures. Whitehead did not dismiss science, he did not see it
as divorced from philosophy—nor did he accept the premises that,
he maintained, still inform much of modern science. One of his
great achievements, which will be taken up later in this paper, is his
insistence that science, philosophy, the humanities, and social the-
ory all require a renewed conception of nature (in the broadest sense
of the word), one that goes beyond strict scientific limitations, be-
yond any form of biological essentialism or reliance upon some no-
1. Alfred N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1938), p. 183.

57
58 Configurations
tion of the ultimate laws of physics or nature. Through his philoso-

phy of organism, Whitehead aims to develop a concept of nature
that is able to incorporate all existence, thereby bringing together
the empirical, the material, the social, the aesthetic, and thinking
beings.
Gilles Deleuze shares with Whitehead the desire to develop a new
ontological approach, one that goes beyond simplistic divisions or
categorizations of the world into subject/object, natural/social, dead/
alive, and so on. Like Whitehead, he was also keenly aware of the
need to situate such philosophical endeavors within a full apprecia-
tion of the history of philosophy. Furthermore, he was acutely aware
of the need to uncover and develop the inextricable links, which have
often remained hidden, between this history and other realms of
thought and practice, such as the political, the social, and the aesthetic.
To attempt to outline all the similarities and dissimilarities, con-
junctions and disjunctions between Whitehead and Deleuze is be-
yond the scope of this paper.2 Yet it would seem clear that their in-
terrelations and dual attempts to develop what might be termed a
nonessentialist ontology is of both relevance and importance across
a range of fields at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of
academic uncertainty and renewal—with the increasing focus on in-
terdisciplinarity and the increasing recognition of the need to re-
consider the apparently unbridgeable dichotomy between the nat-
ural and the social, the need to move beyond overly culturalist or
Foucauldian accounts of subjectivity, the need to renew and develop
the interrelations of science and philosophy—Whitehead and
Deleuze offer striking interventions which may prove fruitful for re-
searchers thinking through a range of problems. One concrete ex-
ample of this is the recent conference (May 2005) devoted solely to
Whitehead and Deleuze, organized by the University of Leuven (Bel-
gium) and held at the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Science in
Brussels. This brought together an eclectic group of scholars from all
over the world who were working on Whitehead and Deleuze, and it
demonstrated both the extent and the depth of their current impact
across philosophy, cultural theory, literature and literary criticism,
mathematics, and sociology and social theory. While this paper will
not be able to do justice to all such ramifications, I hope that it will
operate as an introduction to some of the more significant aspects of
the perspective that Whitehead and Deleuze share. In particular,
2. A good introduction to the similarities of the philosophical approaches of White-

head and Deleuze can be found in Arnaud Villani, “Deleuze et Whitehead,” Revue de
métaphysique et de morale 101:2 (1996): 245-265.
Halewood / On Whitehead and Deleuze: The Process of Materiality 59
I will focus on their understanding of the processual character of ma-

teriality or physicality, and the challenge they pose to customary sci-
entific conceptions of these. I will also consider the status of subjec-
tivity within their work (in relation to their understanding of
materiality), and will conclude with a brief example of how their
work might be applied within social theory to provide a forceful ac-
count of the interrelatedness of materiality and subjectivity in the
world.
The Bifurcation of Nature

Throughout his philosophical career, Whitehead was intent on ar-
guing against what he described as the bifurcation of nature. He de-
scribes this position as follows:
[One] way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate
nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness
and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is in fact ap-
prehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of
the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of
the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured sys-
tem of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the
awareness of apparent nature.3
Whitehead views the tacit acceptance of such a theory as having se-

vere consequences for our understanding of nature. Furthermore, it
has led to the division of academic inquiry into discrete realms that
deal with subject matters so diverse, so different, that they are un-
able to communicate—indeed, they might as well be talking about
different universes. For example, the material (natural) world has
been set out as the province of science, while subjectivity and the ex-
periences and interrelations of thinking subjects (humans) have
been given over to social theory or the humanities. This has led to
problems for both fields of inquiry.
Within science, the world has become (epistemologically speak-
ing) an inert, external entity divorced from the experiences of think-
ing subjects. Nature, in its broadest sense, has been reduced to a life-
less realm, devoid of feeling and value; the position and status of
thinking subjects within such a scheme has become unexplainable.
A conceptual wedge has been driven between a supposedly objective
world without meaning upon which science reports, and the “mean-
ingful” realms of human existence with which social theory or the
3. Alfred North Whitehead, Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1964), pp. 30—31.
60 Configurations
humanities deal. This has also produced both epistemological and

practical problems for the latter disciplines in their attempts to ac-
count for the physicality and actuality of subjects and subjectivity.
For example, sociologists may have succeeded in the important task
of uncovering the political and ideological dimensions of gender,
but, as has recently been pointed out, this still seems to leave bio-
logical “sex” firmly in the control of the “real” sciences.4 I shall re-
turn to this in my conclusion. For the moment, put simply, there is
still a tendency among many to feel that, despite the best and most
sophisticated efforts of literary theorists, philosophers, sociologists,
anthropologists, and so on, science (and scientists) still maintain
some kind of a direct access to the “real reality” (be it in terms of
genes, illness, or whatever). And, this direct access is somehow tied
to the priority that modern science has given to describing the very
physicality of the world and indeed life.
It is this tension between the very physicality of existence (to
which it would seem only science has full claim) and the experiences
of subjects (which thereby become the purview of the humanities
and social theory) that, I will claim, Whitehead and Deleuze may en-
able us to move beyond. In the remainder of the paper I will there-
fore analyze how both Whitehead and Deleuze reject the division of
the complexity of existence into oversimplified categories such as
the natural and the social. They invite science, social theory, and the
humanities to reconsider the ontological assumptions that subtend
their epistemological positions. One important consequence of their
work, which will be drawn out in the concluding section, is the need
for a dramatic reconsideration of the status of both social and phys-
ical existence by going beyond any simple distinction between the
realms of the natural and the social. In short, in this paper I will ul-
timately contend that it is the ongoing and eventful process of exis-
tence that is social, and it is within this that the subjects and objects
of nature come to be (and are passed beyond).
Whitehead’s Actual Entities

While it is, perhaps, well known that Deleuze develops an ontol-
ogy that avoids foundationalism or essentialism by prioritizing be-
coming over being, some have held that such a prioritization is
evoked at the expense of notions of materiality or physicality. In
4. Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Re-
ality,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10:2 (1998): 87-128; Mariam
Fraser, “What Is the Matter of Feminist Criticism?” Economy and Society 31:4 (2002): 606-
625; Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (London: Routledge, 1997).
these readings, flux and flight are figured as the mainstays of

Deleuze’s ontological position. Such readings tend to concentrate on
passages like the following:
We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it means to make an af-
firmation of becoming. In the first place it is doubtless to say that there is only
becoming. . . . But we must also affirm the being of becoming, we say that be-
coming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming.5
The overemphasis on such statements has led many to miss the

point that while the focus on becoming is an integral element of
Deleuze’s philosophy, he also develops a robust account of the very
physicality of existence. I will show that Whitehead’s less-well-
known ontology also prioritizes becoming over being, but is, per-
haps, clearer in advocating a notion of physicality. His emphasis on
“stubborn fact” is always brought to the fore;6 this may not only
serve as a helpful counterbalance to those who focus on what might
be termed the “joy of flux,” but also point to the importance of ma-
teriality and physicality within Deleuze’s ontology. This is not, ulti-
mately, to dismiss scientific accounts, but to enable both science and
other forms of theory to investigate the processual character of all
existence.
For Whitehead, stubborn fact is comprised of “actual entities,”
“the final real things of which the world is made up.”7 Hence, he
holds, analysis must start with this stubborn fact, with the very stuff
of the universe considered as individuated items of matter or mate-
riality. “Thus the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. . . . But
atomism does not exclude complexity and universal relativity.”8
However, such statements are merely the first stage in his argument.
The role of actual entities, in Whitehead’s work, is to establish a
form of materiality that does not rely on the traditional scientific-
philosophical rendering of physicality in terms of discrete, self-iden-
tical objects: “the notion of the self-contained particle of matter,
self-sufficient within its local habitation is an abstraction.”9 Actual
entities have the role of explaining the process of materiality.
5. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 1983), p. 23.
6. Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay In Cosmology, corrected ed., ed.
David Ray Griffin D., and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. xiv and
passim.
7. Ibid., p. 18.
8. Ibid., pp. 25-26.
62 Configurations
Whitehead refers to his overall system as a philosophy of organ-

ism, and for him all actual entities can be considered as “creatures”
that have both materiality and subjectivity:
The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a da-
tum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a
datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a sub-
ject. But with this doctrine, “superject” would be a better term than “subject.”10
In order to avoid the split between the world viewed as a physical

given (hence under the purview of science) and, distinct from this,
the analytical arena of thinking, perceiving subjects (under the
purview of the humanities), Whitehead offers a reconfigured con-
ception of subjectivity. Subjectivity is the “past hurling itself into a
new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart . . . hurled beyond the
bounds of the world.”11 It is the act of being thrown from the past
into the future that constitutes being: the being of becoming. This
will entail that at the human level, subjectivity12 is not so much a
question of what something or someone is, but what they are be-
coming and, concomitantly, what they are “ceasing to be.”13 And,
such subjectivity is not limited to humans: it is an integral element
within the universe. This, therefore, widens the grasp of what it
means to be a creature.
However, it should be noted that Whitehead’s granting of subjec-
tivity to all items of materiality does not entail some kind of panpsy-
chism. As will be discussed in more detail shortly, his extended con-
cept of subjectivity is designed to provide a consistent philosophical
approach that views neither objects nor subjects as primary or origi-
nary. Instead, experience and experiences become his ontological
fulcrum. It should also be noted that Whitehead wants to avoid any
concept of an enduring subjectivity that subtends different experi-
ences; each subject must be created anew on each occasion:14

11. Alfred N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 177.
12. It should be noted that, technically speaking, Whitehead does not view human
subjectivity as directly describable in terms of superjectivity. However, the process by
which different human subjects come to be is analgous to it, though he would prefer
to situate such becomings within his theory of propositions. Whitehead, Process
(above, n. 6), pp. 256-82. Whitehead’s theory of propositions has not been introduced
in this paper for simplicity’s sake.
13. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. G. Burchell and H
Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), p. 112.
14. Whitehead does provide an account of endurance but it is not premised on tradi-
tional conceptions of subjectivity.
“Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating

the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the or-
der, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the cre-
ation of the occasional thinker.”15
Actual Entities: How They Come To Be

To summarize: Whitehead’s ontological position focuses upon
process and becoming as the ultimate characterization of being and
of materiality. It aims to avoid a positing of subjects or objects as the
starting point for meaning or existence; instead, it emphasizes flux
(i.e., becoming), but moves quickly to an account of the enduring
status of materiality. In this way, it attempts to circumvent the tradi-
tional distinction between the fixed objects analyzed by science and
the thinking or thought of human subjects as analyzed by the hu-
manities. Given that an actual entity is not a thing, as commonly
conceived, and (to further complicate matters) is to be defined in
terms of its process, Whitehead faces the task of offering a way into
thinking about the status of such entities. His response is to state
that “experience involves a becoming, that becoming means that some-
thing becomes, and that what becomes involves repetition transformed
into novel immediacy.”16 For him, the emphasis is upon the “how” of
becoming. Being is located neither in the object itself nor in the sub-
ject that perceives it. This leaves becoming as primary. But this is not
an inert becoming: it is not the mere passage of matter in flux. The
key to Whitehead’s concept of becoming is that each becoming oc-
curs in a specific environment and in a specific fashion. That which
both enables becoming and differentiates this becoming from any
other is the way in which the becoming unfolds.
In order to account for this prioritization of the how of becoming,
Whitehead introduces the notion of “prehensions.” Literally, this
term refers to how an actual entity grasps its environment. Prehen-
sions are a crucial element within the Whiteheadian framework:
they are the means by which he explains the utterly relational char-
acter of existence; they describe the passage by which all entities are
related. “I use the term ‘prehension’ for the general way in which
the occasion of experience can include, as part of its own essence,
any other entity.”17 Prehensions enable Whitehead to move beyond
simplistic descriptions of a world divided into subjects and objects,
and they serve as the basis for his description of the process whereby

16. Ibid., pp. 136-137 (emphasis in original).
17. Whitehead, Adventures (above, n. 11), p. 234.
64 Configurations
materiality and physicality come to be. They enable the description

of the complexity of the process whereby subjects are both created
and create themselves through the assimilation of previously diverse
elements. It is in this respect that he states that every superject con-
sists of three factors: (a) the “subject” that is prehending, namely,
the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b)
the “datum” that is prehended; (c) the “subjective form,” which is
how that subject prehends that datum.18
Hence, Whitehead’s theory of the divisibility of actual entities into
prehensions might be characterized as follows:19 “Someone is listen-
ing to some music produced through a CD player.” The main prehen-
sions here, according to Whitehead’s schema described above, are:
(a) the person listening to the music;
(b) the music that is being listened to;
(c) the manner in which the music is being listened to.
None of these elements is either an object or a subject, for they
are elements within the process that goes to make up an actual en-
tity. So it is not a person (or a someone) in terms of a subject who is
listening: the music that is being listened to is an integral element
within the formation of that subject.20 Further, it is not simply an
admixture of the music and the person that makes up the subject:
the crucial element is the way in which the music is received. For ex-
ample, the listener is receiving the music in an inattentive way, and
is becoming bored. Or, the listener is receiving the music in a relaxed
manner, and is becoming tired.
There is also an emphasis on the materiality of such prehensions.
This follows from Whitehead’s denial of the preexistence of a listen-
ing subject, and his emphasis on the music as an integral element
within the process of the real constitution of that subject. He also
stresses the manner in which these elements are combined or inte-
grated. None of the elements of the process is separate, nor do they
have any ontological priority; they all go together to create the spe-
18. See Whitehead, Process (above, n. 6), pp. 221-2.

19. See Whitehead’s discussion of the process of the hearing of music: ibid., pp. 233-
235.
20. With regard to my use of “subject” here, it should be noted that, I follow White-
head when he states: “The term ‘subject’ has been retained because in this sense it is fa-
miliar in philosophy. But it is misleading. The term ‘superject’ would be better” (ibid.,
p. 222). Hence, “subject” will be used intermittently and interchangeably with “super-
ject” in order to avoid overuse of terminology; for the most part, however “subject”
should be read as “superject”.
cific subject—for example, a bored listener. Of course, this is to

greatly oversimplify (and to leap from the metaphysical to the hu-
man rather too quickly, perhaps) in order to make an explanatory
point. It is envisaged as the barest sketch of Whitehead’s ideas. For
example, what if the person is sitting in an uncomfortable chair, or
can smell fresh coffee, or is eating bitter chocolate, or the light is too
bright? These will all influence not only the manner in which the
music is received, but the range of prehensions available—which in
turn will both limit and extend the range of potential outcomes
(subjects/superjects). However, what is crucial in this example is the
utter integration of the prehension and the subject, and their indis-
solubility in terms of their actual existence.
At the same time, Whitehead is not interested in simply describ-
ing the coming into existence of single entities, of one subject or su-
perject. His ontology is one that emphasizes the individuality of all
becoming, but only insofar as each becoming is situated within and
emerges from a wider complex of becoming. This wider complex is
termed, by Whitehead, “the extensive continuum.”
The Extensive Continuum

“This extensive continuum is one relational complex. . . . It un-
derlies the whole world, past, present and future.”21 Such a state-
ment may seem to express a foundationalist or essentialist perspec-
tive, in that it appears to characterize the extensive continuum as a
ground subtending all existence. This might seem to run the danger
of positing a fixed, external, inert ground replete with objects, simi-
lar to that presumed by much of conventional science. However,
such is certainly not Whitehead’s position, as indicated by the term
“relational.” He also states: “It [the extensive continuum] is not a
fact prior to the world.”22 For Whitehead, this extensive continuum
is infinite, in that it is not bounded or determined by any other ele-
ment. It is “‘real’ because it expresses a fact derived from the actual
world and concerning the actual contemporary world. All actual en-
tities are related according to the determinations of this contin-
uum.”23 It might be said that the concept of the extensive contin-
uum is part of Whitehead’s ongoing development of his earlier work
on relativity within a wider philosophical scheme.24
21. Ibid., p. 66.

22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Alfred N. Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922).
66 Configurations
The facticity of this reality results from the extensive continuum’s

being comprised wholly of actual entities: “Actual entities atomize
the extensive continuum.”25 However, the extensive continuum
considered as an agglomeration of actual entities refers to actual en-
tities not in terms of process, in terms of their becoming, but in
terms of their already having become. In his initial summary of his
philosophy of organism, Whitehead states that “actual entities ‘per-
petually perish’26 subjectively, but are immortal objectively.”27 An ac-
tual entity’s being lasts only as long as its becoming. When it has be-
come it dies; insofar as it is no longer becoming, it no longer has any
being. But this does not mean that it disappears: on the contrary, it
then becomes an element in the potential creation of new entities, it
is established as an element that new becomings may use as the data
for their own becoming. In this way it passes from being a subject to
being an object; “thus subject and object are relative terms.”28 It is in
this latter sense that an actual entity acquires objective immortality
and as such constitutes an element within the extensive continuum.
Following his explicit attempt to prioritize “stubborn fact,”
Whitehead returns to the becoming of actual entities. In this respect
the extensive continuum operates as a field of potential for the be-
coming of an actual entity: “In the mere continuum there are con-
trary potentialities; in the actual world there are definite atomic ac-
tualities determining one coherent system of real divisions
throughout the region of actuality.”29 Thus, a distinction must be
made between the abstract notion of potentiality, as that which in-
forms the process and creativity of the universe (i.e., the mere con-
tinuum), and the region of actuality. For it is the latter that com-
prises the contemporary actualizations of such potentiality within
which the creation of actual entities occurs. This means that al-
though Whitehead posits an unlimited potentiality throughout the
universe, the real actualizations of such potentiality occur in refer-
ence to a world that is in some way bounded. This is Whitehead’s re-
newed conception of nature, which is intended to replace that
which predominates within much of science, social theory, and the
humanities. The whole of nature has now become the realm of in-
terrelated experiences of subjects (superjects). However, Whitehead

26. This is a term that Whitehead borrows from Locke: ibid., pp. 51-60.
27. Ibid.,p. 29.
makes it clear that his position is not some simple refusal or denial
of science: “I assume as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale.”30
Instead, his ontology (and that of Deleuze) emphasizes the need to
develop theoretical approaches that can describe the complex inter-
relations of reality and the process by which materiality is attained.
A further discussion of this will be developed later through an analy-
sis of the virtual and the actual.
My analysis so far has outlined Whitehead’s ontological position:
his attempts to balance facticity and becoming, individuality and ex-
tensivity, materiality and subjectivity. In the remainder of the paper
I will attempt to develop these themes through a comparison of his
work with that of Deleuze. I will commence by outlining Deleuze’s
usage of the term “singularities,” with a view to considering their
similarity to Whitehead’s “actual entities.” This will establish the role
that each plays in the development of a nonessentialist ontology.
Introducing Singularities
As stated previously, it has often been the case that commentators
have stressed the status of flux, flow, and becoming in the work of
Deleuze. However, I hold that such an overemphasis is mistaken. In
order to substantiate that claim and to outline the status of materi-
ality/physicality within Deleuze’s texts, and also as a first move in
delineating the similarities between his work and that of Whitehead,
it is necessary to focus on his notion of singularities.
In an introductory reference, Deleuze states: “Beneath the general
operation of laws . . . there always remains the play of singulari-
ties.”31 This asserts the status of singularities as that which is not cap-
tured or explainable by customary descriptions of the world as a gen-
erally well-ordered place. It also hints at their metaphysical priority.
This is developed when Deleuze obliquely argues that they cannot be
contained or described by concepts, and that they differ among
themselves—indeed, they are harbingers of difference. “Specific dif-
ference . . . in no way represents a universal concept (that is to say, an
Idea) encompassing all the singularities and turnings of difference.”32
This is a negative definition, in that it says that singularities are
not immediately linked to concepts but does not positively describe
the relation between concepts and singularities. This negative form
of definition continues when Deleuze states that “singularity is be-
yond particular propositions no less than universality is beyond gen-
30. Whitehead, Concept of Nature (above, n. 3), p. 40.

31. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p. 21.
32. Ibid., pp. 31-32.
68 Configurations
eral propositions.”33 Yet, singularities play a crucial role within

Deleuze’s work: they account for differential distribution within what
he terms the “virtual,” which is not actualized as different, is not yet
individuated. Thus: “the distribution of singularities belongs entirely
to the conditions of the problem, while their specification already
refers to solutions constructed under these conditions. . . . The prob-
lem is at once transcendent and immanent in relation to these solu-
tions.”34 Materiality is something that is attained through actualiza-
tion and in relation to the set of “real” conditions within which and
from which it arises. In Whiteheadian terms, there is no indifferent
relation between the extensive continuum and the actual entities
that arise out of it. Thus, in a short passage that echoes the work of
Whitehead: “This is how, in the case of the organic, the process of
actualisation appears simultaneously as the local differenciation of
parts, the global formation of an internal milieu, and the solution of
a problem posed within the field of constitution of an organism.”35
Once again, there is no strict definition of singularities; it is not
possible to work out what they are. Just as actual entities play a pre-
cise role in Whitehead’s theory, so singularities play a specific role in
Deleuze’s36—for, as with Whitehead’s actual entities, they are never
encountered as such.37 Singularities are that which becomes prob-
lematized and consequently constitutes individuality; in themselves
they are not individuals in the usual sense, for such individuals are
resultants.
Singularities do not express the solidity of objects, they do not ex-
hibit the reality of Newtonian self-identical things. Rather, they ex-
press reality as qualitative difference: “Singularity and intensity are
terms used to articulate a thought robbed of the organizing principle
of the individual.”38 In the same vein as Whitehead’s characteriza-
tion of his “epochal theory of time” in terms of quanta—literally
packages or pulses of time, superseding each other—the reality of
33. Ibid., p. 163.

34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 211
36. I am grateful to Eric Alliez for confirming, to me, the similarity between White-
head’s actual entities and Deleuze’s singularities and their importance for establishing
a nonessentialist ontology.
37. Although, in one of his final texts, Deleuze does give the following, intriguing ex-
ample: “very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individual-
ity, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face” (Gilles Deleuze, Pure
Immanence: Essays on a Life [New York: Zone Books], p. 30).
38. Nick Millett, “The Trick of Singularity,” Theory, Culture and Society 14:2 (1997): 54.
such singularities does not rely upon quantitative distinctions; in-

stead, singularities are different and distinguishable in terms of their
intensity—they are quanta.39 The role of singularities is to provide “a
prior metastable state . . . the existence of a ‘disparateness’ . . . be-
tween which potentials are distributed.”40 This is not yet a descrip-
tion of singularities; rather, it is a description of an intensive field, a
plane of immanence, an extensive continuum. For, like Whitehead’s
extensive continuum, such a field is not a flat, uniform or passive ex-
panse—there are specificities here, but they are not individual, they
are singularities: ”Such a pre-individual state nevertheless does not
lack singularities: the distinctive or singular points are defined by the
existence and distribution of potentials. An ‘objective’ problematic
field thus appears.”41 Reality is an undulating plane, and this applies
no less to that reality to which science devotes itself. A recognition
of this (by science) might lead, not to a disbarring of science, but to
better, fuller scientific accounts—though this may involve develop-
ing a different understanding and practice of science.42
Deleuze’s objective problematic field describes the relations be-
tween elements that are not yet actual (although for Whitehead they
would once have been actual); they are still real, but not in the sense
of being thinglike. This does not mean that such a field is an inert
substrate upon which actuality bases itself, for this field is consti-
tuted through the interrelation of potentials. Just as Whitehead at-
tempts to dispel the notion of indifferent matter that awaits percep-
tion or constitution, Deleuze posits a field of differentiated but
interrelated, intensive singulars that express potentiality.
For Whitehead, that which permeates and explains this proces-
sual relation of the extensive continuum to the actual entities that
arise out of it is the concept of creativity:
Creativity is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity di-
verse from any entity in the “many” that it unifies. It is that ultimate princi-
ple by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one
actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. The “creative advance”
is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situa-
tion which it originates.43

40. Deleuze, Difference (above, n. 31), p. 246.
41. Ibid.
42. Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum
Press, 2002); Isabelle Stengers, Penser Avec Whitehead (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
43. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 6), p. 21 (emphasis in original).
70 Configurations
However, Whitehead also stresses the importance of repetition

within this more general scheme. That is to say, this novelty is not
entirely new, for within each becoming novel there is a dual repeti-
tion: the first repetition is the repetition of becoming itself; the sec-
ond is that what becomes, in itself, repeats the universe in a novel
way. As seen earlier, Whitehead puts it as follows: “These various as-
pects can be summed up in the statement that experience involves a
becoming, that becoming means that something becomes, and that what
becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy.”44 So,
novelty expresses difference; the category of creativity encapsulates
difference—it gives it its own concept.
For Deleuze, Nietzsche rather than Whitehead is the writer who has
done most to further this idea through his notion of eternal return.
Yet it is notable that this reading of Nietzsche fits closely with the pre-
vious analysis of Whitehead. Hence: “Returning is being, but only the
being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same’,
but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Re-
turning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself.”45 So, returning
has the same role for Deleuze as creativity has for Whitehead: “The
wheel in the eternal return is at once both production of repetition
on the basis of difference and selection of difference on the basis of
repetition.”46 However, this is not some simple, serial becoming that
dissipates the universe into a Heraclitean flux. Consistent instead with
Whitehead’s “epochal theory of time,” Deleuze manages to avoid such
dissipation through his introduction of the distinction between the
virtual and the actual. These concepts play a vital role within his work,
and will be addressed throughout the remainder of this paper.
The Virtual and the Actual
The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real
in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be
said of the virtual: “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”;
and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as
strictly a part of the real object—as though the object had one part of itself in
the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension.47
It would seem that the work of Whitehead could be helpful in refut-

ing Alain Badiou’s claim that either the actual or the virtual must be
44. Ibid., pp. 136-137.

46. Ibid., p. 42.
47. Ibid., pp. 208-209.
granted precedence in terms of their claims to reality.48 It is White-

head’s notion of the extensive continuum that most closely corre-
sponds to that of the virtual. Most especially, it is his discussion of
the process of the creation of actual entities out of such a contin-
uum—and the return of these entities into the continuum—as con-
stituting the being of becoming, that will help elucidate how the vir-
tual and the actual can be equally real and yet separate. Whitehead
clearly states that the extensive continuum, in itself, is real but not
actual, and that the extensive continuum does not correspond to,
nor is it exhausted by, its actualization by actual entities; though
once the extensive continuum (or the virtual) is actualized, it ceases
to be virtual: “Thus though everything is real, it is not necessarily re-
alized in some particular set of actual occasions.”49 So, although
Whitehead does not use the term “virtual,” this extensive contin-
uum could be said to be virtual in the sense that “virtualities exist in
such a way that they actualize themselves in splitting up and being
divided.”50 And, although Deleuze does not use the term “extensive
continuum,” it would seem that his notion of the actualization of
the virtual (or virtuality) could be better understood by approximat-
ing it to Whitehead’s ontology.
For example, Deleuze conceives of the relationship between the
virtual and the actual as follows:
When the virtual content of an Idea is actualised, the varieties of relation are
incarnated in distinct species while the singular points which correspond to
the values of one variety are incarnated in the distinct parts characteristic of
this or that species. The Idea of colour, for example, is like white light which
perplicates itself in the genetic elements and the relations of all the colours,
but is actualised in the diverse colours with their respective spaces. . . . There
is even a white society and a white language, the latter being that which con-
tains in its virtuality all the phonemes and relations destined to be actualised
in diverse languages and in the distinctive parts of a given language.51
Perhaps approaching this somewhat difficult passage from a White-

headian perspective will both produce clarity and demonstrate the
importance of reading Deleuze through Whitehead (and vice versa).
48. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), pp. 48-53.
49. Whitehead, Adventures (above, n. 11), p. 197. Deleuze would substitute “virtual”
for “real” here.
50. Constantin Boundas, ”Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual,” in Deleuze: A
Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 91.
72 Configurations
However, before doing so, it remains necessary to introduce one of

Whitehead’s more difficult technical terms, namely, “eternal ob-
jects.” Although eternal objects play a complex and somewhat dis-
puted role in his work, it is clear that he intends the term to describe
the relation that the utter potentiality of the universe bears to the
facticity of actual entities: “The eternal objects are the pure poten-
tials of the universe; and the actual entities differ from each other in
their realization of potentials.”52 Hence (and to return to the long
Deleuze quote above), colors, as eternal objects, express the poten-
tiality that informs nascent items of matter (actual entities). Eternal
objects are complex and relational, and are always associated with
the conceptual aspect of becoming (they are therefore closely related
to the Deleuzean concept of Idea). They are real but do not exist un-
til they ingress into particular becomings (until they are actualized,
hence moving from virtual to actual through the process of incar-
nating matter). Such actualization is not random, it is affected by the
environment and the past of the actual entities into which the eter-
nal objects ingress. Colors are always prehended in a certain way,
which depends upon the structuring of the organism in question;
thus, although whiteness itself exhibits a continuity (there is a white
society), the manner in which it is felt will differ from organism to
organism.
All subjects are alive, in that they all receive and reformulate the
extensive continuum and communicate with each other within the
extensive continuum, yet they are also all different—so any descrip-
tion of how they feel and assimilate eternal objects cannot be lim-
ited to human language. That is to say, although human language is
clearly, in itself, communicatory, both Whitehead and Deleuze insist
that there are other forms of communication that are integral to ex-
istence. This is the role of prehensions, as discussed earlier; they keep
what might appear as discrete in touch with other elements in the
extensive continuum. “Each atom is a system of all things.”53 There-
fore language is one form of communication among many. Hence,
Deleuze asserts that whiteness comprises, in its virtuality, all the po-
tential of being white, which will always be actualized differently ac-
cording to the individual that incarnates whiteness. Language is not
to be distrusted, but is itself to be seen as diverse.
Therefore, there will be different languages for different entities or
assemblages of entities. Also, within any language there will be dis-

53. Ibid., p. 36.
tinctions and divisions that enable singularities to pass into individ-

uals. It is at this point that the work of Whitehead and Deleuze be-
comes especially pertinent for analyses of the relations between ma-
teriality and subjectivity, and for developing a nonessentialist
ontology. Now individuation becomes a matter of division. And this
division is not merely physical (biological division into categories
such as species, genus, anatomical difference) but conceptual, in the
Whiteheadian and Deleuzean sense. That is, it is not simple social
constructionism (the way different societies or cultures grant differ-
ent meanings to certain given factors—Margaret Mead’s work, for ex-
ample). Nor is it complex social constructionism (where matter is
denigrated or made inaccessible through the priority of a signifying
system or cultural intelligibility).54 Whitehead and Deleuze manage
to establish a nonessentialist ontology by insisting upon the reality
of both the extensive continuum (or the virtual) and the actuality of
contemporary existence. Neither the extensive continuum nor the
virtual provides an absolute ground for existence; they express a lim-
ited yet infinite potentiality that is neither fully exhausted nor real-
ized by those individuals that arise out of it. As stated above, this ap-
plies not only to philosophy but also to science; for surely science
has always been resolutely ontological.
Hence, matter, meaning, subjectivity, and sense all happen at
once. They are neither social nor material, nor are they ultimately re-
ducible to either one or the other; the two sides are needed together.
Hence social divisions are material divisions, and vice versa. They
cannot be separated. Even this is too simplistic, however, for within
such a scheme, neither the material nor the social retain their usual
sense. This is both the demand and the difficulty that Whitehead
and Deleuze offer contemporary theory. I shall take up this demand
with a “concrete” example in my conclusion.
Conclusion
Just as Whitehead’s philosophy is imbued with the idea of process
(of the going beyond each actual occasion), for Deleuze, actualiza-
tion is never a complete rendering of the virtual:
events of the surface are actualized in the present of bodies . . . by imprison-
ing first their singularities within the limits of worlds, individuals and persons.
There is also another movement wherein the event implies something exces-
sive in relation to its actualization, something that overthrows worlds, indi-
54. For example; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”
(New York/London: Routledge, 1993).
74 Configurations
viduals and persons, and leaves them to the depth of the ground which works
and dissolves them.55
As has been seen, process, or the move from the virtual to the actual,
never exhausts the creativity, force, or power that characterizes the
total implication of matter and subjectivity in each other. Over and
beyond immediate actualizations of events in contemporary bodies,
there remains the force of the eventfulness of the universe which
creates the future and the past in distinction to the present. (This is
akin to Whitehead’s notion of creativity as discussed earlier.)
Moving away from the problem posed by scientific accounts that
suppose a fixed, external world, I now turn to the problem of the sta-
tus of the human subject that is often taken to survey such a world.
This is not a problem for Whitehead and Deleuze, insofar as they
view the world as neither flat nor given; hence, the subject does not
exist prior to its orientation and instantiation in relation to its wider
environment. With regard to the status of subjectivity within such a
process (see above, notes 12 and 20), both Whitehead and Deleuze
would deny any absolute interiority to such subjectivity; however,
they would still make a distinction between the inside and the out-
side: “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated
by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up
an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but pre-
cisely the inside of the outside.”56 In this sense, the outside works in
a similar way to Whitehead’s extensive continuum: it is out of this
that subjects are created. This does not mean that such subjects have
an inside that is of a different kind from the rest of being. These are
not subjects as opposed to objects. The foldings that constitute sub-
jectivity are temporary renderings of an outside. They are the public
made private only insofar as this privacy will become public again.57
Subjectivity is a moment and a place within the ongoing movement
of a wider field—namely, the virtual or the extensive continuum. For
Deleuze, such subjectivity is characterized in terms of a fold.58 Thus,
each subject or fold is a social, physical, and historical rendering: so-
cial, in that it incorporates elements of the public into a singular en-
tity; physical, in that it is an actual rendering of elements of the uni-
55. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Athlone Press, 1990), pp. 167-168.
56. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp.
96-97.
57. See Whitehead, Process (above, n. 6), pp. 289-290.
58. See Deleuze, Foucault (above, n. 56), pp. 93-123; Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque (London: Athlone Press, 1993).
verse; historical, in that its formation arises from the prior and par-
ticular arrangement of previous folds, and problems within which it
is situated. As Whitehead also puts it, the world comprises a “cir-
cumambient space of social physical activity.”59 There is hence no
genuine distinction between the material and the social, between
subjects and objects; all existence is a complex combination of the
two. The gulf between nature as the province of science and the in-
terrelation of subjects as the province of social theory (and the hu-
manities) has been overcome. I shall conclude with a tentative ex-
ample of how the work of Whitehead and Deleuze could be
deployed within sociology.
Just as some commentators present a Deleuzean analysis limited
to tracing flows, flights, and deterritorialization, and reveling in flu-
idity, there is the parallel danger of focusing exclusively on White-
head’s emphasis on process. But it is clear that, contrary to any such
readings, both philosophers simply view the universe as eventful.
Subjects and objects do appear within this eventfulness, but they are
neither primary nor originary. Hence, Whitehead and Deleuze’s em-
phasis on becoming and process could be used to investigate con-
temporary forms of actualization, not just the distinctive mobility of
contemporary society.
For example, within current sociology and anthropology, the so-
cial is often considered to be some form of a flow.60 Arjun Appadurai,
in particular, presents migration as one of a series of disjunctive
spaces of flow, which together constitute the global cultural econ-
omy.61 But this is only half the story; it remains at the level of the
virtual. It is possible to utilize the work of Whitehead and Deleuze to
broaden the scope of such analyses. For viewing migration as an
event within the process of existence is equivalent to regarding it as
a resultant of the interrelation of a variety of singularities—but mi-
gration is always actualized in states of affairs and bodies. Contem-
porary analyses should examine the actualizations of such becom-
ings in terms of the fixing of the virtual into the present, and the
actualization of the event into concrete states of affairs and bodies.
These actualizations will take the form of classifying and discrimi-
nating singularities into individual bodies; so that they are physi-
cally rendered, for instance, as either a tourist, a refugee, or an asy-

60. For example; John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Cen-
tury (London: Routledge, 2000).
61. For example, Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy,” Theory, Culture and Society 7:2–3 (1990): 295–310.
76 Configurations
lum seeker. These are not just labels or categories: they are the hard,
physical, manifestation in individualized bodies. The event is
thereby actualized in such a manner that singularities are individu-
ated and ordered into groups in which they are deemed to be the
same—thereby disavowing the difference within and between them,
the difference that constitutes them in their becomings. That is to
say, a major aspect of the present in the United Kingdom of the early
twenty-first century is the necessity to be physically actualized as a
citizen, visitor, genuine applicant for residency, or illegal entrant.
These are not the only actualizations; there are others that cut across
the space and time of the same individuated body and yet are actu-
alized within a different body. However, it will be possible to trace
the history that links such different actualizations to the previously
individuated body.
On this view, individual subjectivity must be regarded as a twist-
ing of a social, physical environment. The physicality in question
does not limit the body to its own immediacy—its genes, molecules,
cells, and so on—but opens it up, through the reconceptualization of
the physical; that is to say, the conceptual is to be seen as an integral
element of the physical. “It is even this twisting which defines
‘Flesh’, beyond the body proper and its objects”;62 “we cannot tell
with what molecules the body ends and the external world be-
gins.”63 But this is not a dispersal of the body, to the extent that in-
dividual renderings of it become lost in a wider universe of flux. In-
stead, it is a question of eliciting both the dispersion and the
sedimentation of the body, as well as of subjectivity, with regard to
the wider social and physical environment. Such elicitings are not
simply cultural descriptions of an already existent physical field.
Rather, they would constitute the description and redescription of
the folds that constitute contemporary subjectivity.
Clearly descriptions of this sort would require a subtle account of
the interrelation of materiality and subjectivity, if they are to engage
fully with the physicality of the body. However, in order not to fall
back into some form of essentialism, it is necessary that they utilize
a nonessentialist ontology. I hope that by focusing in this paper on
the interrelation of Whitehead and Deleuze, I have provided a way
of furthering such analyses—that Whitehead and Deleuze may be
seen as providing a way of approaching the process of attending ma-
teriality/physicality in a social environment that is neither counter-
posed to a natural environment nor reducible to any strict scientific
conception of a fixed, external, object-filled universe.
62. Deleuze, Foucault (above, n. 56), p. 110.
Whitehead’s Poetical Mathematics
Sha Xin Wei
(The earth melts into the sea as the sea sinks into the earth).
Heraclitus1
In this essay, I trace a set of math-poetic figures from Whitehead’s

Process and Reality in order to understand how he constructs a theory
of the world that prehends, feels, and becomes social. My essay cen-
ters on two principal questions: How does Whitehead construct a
philosophy of process and organism on mathematical intuitions
that retains nonetheless all the living qualities of the unbifurcated
world? And to what degree and in what manner does he construct
his pata-mathematical concepts the way a mathematician constructs
and fabricates concepts? Given his philosophical and theological in-
heritance, Whitehead responds simply and remarkably to some of
the most provocative mathematics and mathematical physics of his
day: Bertrand Russell’s and David Cantor’s set theory, and Einstein’s
general relativity. But if he seems to respond too bluntly in some re-
spects, to what philosophical purposes—not scientific or mathemat-
ical—does he set his speculation? In the latter part of this essay, I will
try to extend Whitehead’s speculation using “lures for feeling” made
from measure theory and topological dynamical systems, and will
1. Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans. Brooks Haxton (New
York: Viking, 2001), Fragment 23.

77
78 Configurations
outline a notion of process that does not appeal to objects.2 I argue

that elaborating Whitehead’s speculation a few steps beyond his art-
fully blunted set theory and general relativity theory yields a way
out of the static and atomistic aspects of his metaphysics. Indeed,
my amicus curiae should substantially enrich a plenist and process-
oriented concept of unbifurcated nature that more readily accom-
modates local novelty.
I came to Whitehead after thinking with Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s multiplicity, Deleuze’s appropriation of Riemannian man-
ifolds, and the a-signifying semiology of Guattari’s chaosmosis. I as-
sure you that my reading is not some truth-seeking missile, but a
speculative and poetic exercise in thinking through Whitehead’s
philosophy of process—with the alchemical accompaniment of all
those nonhuman, mathematical objects, like the monsters of set the-
ory (pace Alain Badiou), and the point-free topologies of René Thom
and Alexander Grothendieck, whose more fertile philosophical con-
sequences have hardly been adequately developed, I believe.
In their Heraclitus seminar, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Fink
tried to steer a middle course between a close, closed hermeneutic
study of Heraclitus’s Fragments and a free-associative “philosophiz-
ing” with the putative sense of the Greek text.3 With their fellow
readers, they used the texts to develop a process theory that honored
what they found in Heraclitus but also extended their phenomeno-
logical investigation. It seems worthwhile to read Whitehead in an
analogous constructive and productive spirit to develop a topologi-
cal approach to a process world.
First let me rapidly rehearse Whitehead’s ontology as he develops
it. In retracing Process and Reality’s argument, we can detect, albeit
faintly, what a mathematician might recognize as the rhetoric of
proof. These features include preliminary motivations established as
2. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected ed.,
ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 85. I
borrow the expression in sympathy with a “propositional, (and not conversational)”
approach to a processual mode of discourse proposed by Isabelle Stengers, who writes:
“I take words to be ’lures for feeling,’ not denouncing them because they would de-
marcate, . . . but demanding that those words would be constructed with the aims of
‘clothing the dry bones,’ . . . of our demarcations with the vivid feeling of the presence
of those [who are not able to speak to the conversation because they are not inside the
privileged domain of discourse] our demarcations cannot help but push away. Away
but not against” (Isabelle Stengers, “Beyond Conversation,” in Process and Difference:
Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms, ed. Catherine Keller and
Anne Danielle [Albany: State University of New York, 2002], p. 238).
3. Martin Heidegger, and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1993), p. 6.
Sha / Whitehead’s Poetical Mathematics 79
definitional “assumptions,” paradigmatic examples, and a network

of lemmas, theorems, and corollaries. He uses such labels almost
nowhere because he supplies almost no arguments with the robust-
ness and precision of a mathematical proof.4 (There is no call for ac-
tual mathematical argument, of course; and in fact, despite the for-
mal precedents of Spinoza’s Ethics, Newton’s Principia, and Russell
and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, such rigor probably would
sink the speculative enterprise.) Whitehead deploys a surfeit of as-
sumptions, rather than finding a minimal model. One can see a par-
adigmatic example of this in his extravagant development of ab-
stractive sets, about which his assumptions run into the dozens.5
One difficulty is that his conceptual edifice is a floating circle of co-
constructive notions: actual entity, prehension, concrescence, nexus
(society)—and later on, apparently still more abstractly, ovate sets,
abstractive sets, strain, duration. But to an archaeologist of mathe-
matics, elements of the mathematical physics of that era figure promi-
nently in Whitehead’s construction, and it seems fruitful to under-
stand what philosophical juice he extracts from those elements.
Whitehead begins with the ontological principle: everything
comes from somewhere; nothing comes from nowhere. Philosophy
must start with the concrete, and explain abstraction, not the re-
verse. One cannot derive the concrete from the abstract or the ideal.
And the concrete does not come to us already split into symbolic
and material categories. Indeed, nature is unbifurcated: it is a single,
plenist ontology in which matter, matters of fact, feelings, subjective
experience, the experiencing subject, and experienced entities are
deeply entangled. (One wonders whether they could be fused in a
molecular if not fieldlike way.) Bifurcation would split the world into
causal, objective nature and a perceived nature.6 However, White-
head insists that our experience of matter comes as actual entities,7
because, as he put it, “continuity concerns what is potential;
whereas actuality is incurably atomic.”8 The heart of his argument
rests on an appeal to intuition and first impressions:
4. It would be interesting to compare Whitehead’s speculative project with those of

Edmund Husserl, Alain Badiou, René Thom, and Alain Connes that, however diverse,
exhibit the same flair of mathematical, constructive imagination. Each of these was
schooled in mathematics to a professional level; Thom and Connes contributed at the
top level of their disciplines over a lifetime of sustained mathematical practice.
5. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 2), pp. 297–333.
6. Isabelle Stengers, “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day,” in this issue
8. Ibid., p. 61.
80 Configurations
In their most primitive form of functioning, a sensum is felt physically with

emotional enjoyment of its sheer individual essence. For example, red is felt
with emotional enjoyment of its sheer redness. In this primitive prehension
we have aboriginal physical feeling in which the subject feels itself as enjoy-
ing redness.9
Contra Hume, Whitehead posits that these aboriginal feelings spring

up not from unknown causes but from actual occasions transmitting
or conducting feelings vectorially to one another. And about the dy-
namics of actual occasions, he writes: “The sole appeal is to intu-
ition.”10 He motivates the direct apprehension of actual entities as
whole objects rather than as composites with his amusing observa-
tion that one dances with a whole human partner, not with a cloud
of flickering sense data:
A young man does not initiate his experience by dancing with impressions of
sensation, and then proceed to conjecture a partner. His experience takes the
converse route. . . . The true physical doctrine is that physical feelings are in
their origin vectors.11
But this microversion of the anthropic principle, for that is what

it is, gives the object-oriented argument a whiff of the tautological.12
Concrescence
For Whitehead, the becoming of an actual entity, akin to Heideg-
ger’s anwesen, is actually constitutive of that entity, so process,
change, and even duration are intrinsically part of the raw material
of his ontology. Indeed, this process of becoming is a basic, primitive
element of his ontology: “[it] cannot be explained from higher order
abstraction nor be broken into constituents.”13 Rather than a meta-
physics or a theory of knowledge predicated on sense data, this is an
account of a phenomenology based on embodied experience:
For the organic theory, the most primitive perception is “feeling the body as
functioning.” This is a feeling of the world in the past; it is the inheritance of the
world as a complex of feeling; namely, it is the feeling of derived feelings. The
9. Ibid., pp. 314–315 (emphases added).

10. More precisely, it is the concrescence of actual occasions that he has in mind when
he writes: “The sole appeal is to intuition” (ibid., p. 22). But this comes to the same
thing. See the discussion of concrescence below.
11. Ibid., pp. 315–316.
12. In answer to the question, why is the universe the way it is, the anthropic principle
states: if the universe were much different, we would not be here to ask this question.
body, however, is only a peculiarly intimate bit of the world. Just as Descartes
said, “this body is mine”; so he should have said, “this actual world is mine.”14
Whitehead prepares the ground for an ontology that does not bi-
furcate between body and unfeeling world, or between local and
global. His unbifurcated ontology is composed of occasionally infi-
nite hierarchies of nested entities vivified by relations of feeling and
sensing in time. This is materially where all the action lies. Using the
notions of collectivity, “nexus,” and “society,” Whitehead tries to
generate rich structure in the world in an unbifurcated way—but
whether they are set-theoretic, or perhaps in a richer sense, category-
theoretic notions, in any event they are built out of discrete entities,
on points, rather than continua. Even in the limited (but infinite)
world of mathematical logic and set theory, logicians face the essen-
tially unavoidable technical difficulty of producing the continuum
from a set of points.
Whitehead speaks of all actual entities (not just live vs. nonlive
organisms) as having their concrete properties and characteristics re-
produced in what he calls prehensions. Every character is reproduced
in a prehension, and, most importantly, there is an indefinite num-
ber of prehensions. This indefiniteness yields a radically open meta-
physics. A prehension is directional, hence has a “vector character,”
and, unlike raw sense data, it “involves emotion, and purpose, and
valuation, and causation.”15 Via these prehensions, sensing, feeling,
and pulling, the actual entities are engaged in the “production of
novel togetherness,” the coming together of many actual occasions
into the novel actual occasion, a process that he calls concrescence.16
He constructs a theory of time to suit this dynamic of the world us-
ing a notion of past, present, and future that does not rely on
metrized, geometrized clock time, but on more elementary, topolog-
ical notions of causal past, causal future, and the acausal comple-
ment in space-time. The acausal complement to an event is that part
of the world whose occasions cannot affect or be affected by the
event. Whitehead’s causality is infinitely richer than the physicist’s
test of accessibility by light (along the geodesics with respect to the
space-time manifold), but it formally parallels the logic of general
relativity. This should be familiar to readers of Stephen Hawking and
G. F. Ellis’s classic Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, in which they
demonstrated the expressive and explanatory power of Hawking’s
14. Ibid., p. 81.

15. Ibid., p. 19.
16. Ibid., p. 21.
82 Configurations
topological approach to space-time, accommodating even places of

material infinity where the space-time metric and curvature become
singular, infinite.17 Topology articulates what exceeds number and
metrized geometry.
I pass silently over Whitehead’s construction of the “immediate”
present, although it is one of the most important aspects of his treat-
ment of time, and fold the discussion of time into a consideration of
the larger dynamics of organism on which he rests his process the-
ory. For the moment, we note that he tries to maintain his unbifur-
cated ontology by describing prehensions as feelings in time, and by
associating groups of entities (nexu-s) with societies—making the
multiple social by propositional fiat. The atomicity of his actual oc-
casions yields, in his concept of the world, a notion of time that is
correspondingly atomic. However, any atomistic conception of the
world that purports to account for the richer structures evident in
our experience inevitably needs to posit dyadic and more generally
n-adic relations between these atoms. So it is not surprising that
Whitehead concludes that actual entities’ concrete experience must
be vectorial—that is, directed. We are not very far from Leibniz, ex-
cept that Whitehead’s monads are changeless and Whitehead’s
places are themselves immovable. This is a profound difference. If,
by the ontological principle, everything actual is made of atomic,
changeless, actual entities, how then can we account for change,
and the potential for novelty and creativity?
In one of his most significant coercive neologisms, Whitehead
makes actual entity synonymous with actual occasion.18 It is impor-
tant to recognize here, as Isabelle Stengers does, that Whitehead is
making a propositional, conceptual identification, not a metaphori-
cal one.19 There are arguable and even demonstrable consequences
17. Stephen W. Hawking and George Francis Rayner Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of
Space-Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Here, topology refers to the
notion of domains as connected, open subsets of general (3,1) dimensional space-time,
not graphs but open sets. I do not see on what philosophical grounds Whitehead
claims that the past and future causal domains relative to an actual occasion must be
disjoint. Indeed, early in the history of general relativity, Kurt Gödel discovered a cylin-
drical solution to the Einstein field equations that forced reconsideration of global vs.
local causality: Kurt Gödel, “An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions of
Einstein’s Field Equations of Gravitation,” Reviews of Modern Physics 21 (1949):
447–450.
19. Remarking on Whitehead and Leibniz’s method, Stengers writes: “the possibility
of [what] . . . they wanted to construct, exhibits the creativity of mathematicians who
to such an identification. Stengers would say, rightly, that this is not

a “merely” metaphorical identity, but it does seem that Whitehead
deploys the term “occasion” to infuse temporality by connotation as
well as fiat.
That being said, nonetheless, we can ask whether an equation like
Whitehead’s “actual entity = actual occasion” derives from and ex-
erts different conceptual forces upon those who think it than does
an identification like the tensor equation
G=8πT
Figure 1. Einstein’s equivalence between the metric tensor G and the stress-energy ten-
sor T.
that articulates Einstein’s equivalence principle. The tensor equation

encodes and implies a large, conceptually definite set of algebraic
symmetries and conditions that on one hand are invariant over mul-
tiple subjectivities, and on the other hand express a certain belief
about ontology: that the geometrical structure of the world is identi-
cal with the dynamic distribution of matter-energy of the world, and
that this identity works at the level of dynamics. By the way, the
geometry encoded by the curvature tensor G in Einstein’s equivalence
is not the geometry of space, but the geometry of space+time, which
includes the temporal in a single, unbifurcated, manifold. This sort
of geometrization is not the geometry of Bergson’s critique of
geometrized time. (We will see later that Whitehead’s measurement
reverts to the geometry of spatial Euclidean space.) Whitehead’s
blunted version of Einstein’s equivalence principle forgets this dy-
namics, I believe.
Whitehead uses the distribution of strain acting on what he calls
flat loci to provide the dynamic for the world. We see the strong par-
allel between his technical description of strain and geometry in the
latter part of Process and Reality, and the account of concrescence
with which he starts the book. But this attempt to provide a dy-
namic is predicated on a curious reappropriation of force. Force is
vectorial, and as such aptly traces the directional modes of con-
sciousness, but it is not coherent to glue vectors of force to particu-
do not seek the solution to, but rather construct the possibility of, a solution to a
problem. . . . When a mathematician produces a strange hypothesis, . . . it is not a mat-
ter of opinion [or description]. He or she has been constrained by the problem. . . .
Concepts are required in the construction not of an opinion but of the possibility of a
solution to a problem” (“Beyond Conversation” [above, n. 2, p. 242).
84 Configurations
lar geometrical objects such as flat loci because generally they oper-
ate in different modalities of the plenum world.20 To use a concrete
example: the vectorial difference between a dog and a cat, however
it is measured, is not a dog, or a cat, or any actual mammal. More-
over, a vectorial theory does not account for modes of consciousness
that are not so directed as to be easily subsumed by a vectorial ac-
count of prehension and of concrescence. Whitehead himself de-
scribes this as the gradual objectification of vectorial experience into
a “scalar” form, which is an inspired way to gloss what in phenom-
enological terms would be nonperspectival apperception.21
Dynamics
A strain yields movement resolving the strain. Whitehead identi-
fies duration with strain (duration being a complete set of mutually
contemporary actual occasions).22 But this Aristotelian, or in terms
of mathematical physics, zero-order23 equivalencing introduces two
mysteries, the first of which is mismatched physical dimensions: en-
ergy is force × distance or, more finely, the integral of force along a tra-
jectory; and conversely, force is spatial difference of potential energy.
On the other hand, however, duration is measured in time, which is
not commensurate with the units (i.e., “dimensions”) of force at all.
This seems nonsensical, and so needs an argument at least as con-
vincing as Einstein’s argument for the equivalence principle.24
20. Using the more precise language of differential geometry, vectors live in the tan-
gent space to the manifold in which Whitehead’s flat loci live.
21. But prior to that, even at the stage of apperceiving the actual, concrete world, I
would counterpose Walter Benjamin’s or a poet’s mode of distracted, undirected con-
sciousness to the sort of directional consciousness that Whitehead takes as exemplary
in constituting a vectorial dynamic in the world.
22. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 2), pp. 322–323. But Whitehead’s use of complete-
ness raises the specter of sets that, although their completion is by definition tamed by
inclusion of the accumulation limits of all infinite sequences, are themselves sparse
and pathological. For a thorough introduction to the relevant notions of completeness,
accumulation, and limit, see Halsey L. Royden, Real Analysis, 3rd ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1988).
23. By order, I mean the degree of differencing, how many times a difference operator
has been applied. Newton’s force, for example, is proportional to the acceleration,
which is the second difference—the difference of the difference of the displacement;
therefore it is second order.
24. So long as we avoid formalism, a philosophical argument should attend to the
philosophical consequences of some mathematical condition, theorem, or theory.
Whitehead himself uses the calculus of limits to dismantle the philosophical force of
Zeno’s putative paradoxes. In this case, the physicists’ “dimensional arguments” are a
basic technique by which physicists code ontological consistency claims and check on-
tological consistency.
γ [s] ∫ γ
ds
γ [0]
Figure 2. Integral along an arc γ parametrized by s.
The second mystery is that Whitehead gives no reason why such

an equivalence should obtain, and he makes no observation about
what that would afford the world. In fact, general relativity can be
articulated in the same way via the language of differential geome-
try—that is, any local coordinate region in a space-time manifold is
always automatically “fixed” and invariant with respect to time be-
cause, by definition, it carries itself. This is by definition a feature of
all space-time geometries, Whiteheadian, Einsteinian, or otherwise.
To elaborate, a space-time manifold is a topological space that locally
has the geometry of a four-dimensional space with three spatial di-
mensions and a fourth dimension with the opposite signature. This
is a local condition, so that what constitutes the “temporal direc-
tion” can vary continuously as we pass from event to event. This
negative signature means that there is a qualitative difference be-
tween trajectories that flow temporally, and those that flow spatially,
and those along which there is zero space-time metric displacement.
The last sort of trajectory is exactly the set of geodesic paths tra-
versed by light. The immotility of place characterizes any locus—any
neighborhood of an event—on any such manifold, so Whitehead’s
argument for the fixity of actual occasions does not select his ac-
count over Einstein’s general relativity.
Somewhat surprisingly, given his concern with process, White-
head does not appeal to the calculus, in particular the differential,
until very late in Process and Reality. There is a key moment where he
argues against a purely geometric interpretation of a line element ds
integrable to distance s along a curve, and proposes impetus (or im-
pulse), which would intertwine matter and momentum.25

86 Configurations
This intertwining echoes his 1922 book on relativity, in which he

writes about “adjectival particles.”26 In an essay comparing White-
head’s and Einstein’s theories of general relativity, Yutaka Tanaka
perceptively says that Whitehead makes matter an “adjective” to
spacetime.27 While this is quite a suggestive expression, in more pre-
cise terms, Whitehead’s most striking contribution is to insert a fac-
tor J(s) into the line integral to form what one could interpret as an
“impulse density” J(s) ds along a trajectory. What if J were not a con-
stant like “3” or “green,” but a function varying according to the
space-time locus and disposition?
∫ γ
J [s]ds
Figure 3. Integral with impulse density.
But what we need is some insight into why this integral is impor-
tant for Whitehead’s project at all. That motivation comes from the
variational, least-energy principle of dynamics. So what we should
expect is some discussion of the philosophical adequacy of appeal-
ing to any variational principle whatsoever, because this underlies
much of physics, and in this case the metaphysics.28 I expect that
Whitehead should disallow an apparently transcendentalist appeal
to the principle of least action because it would contradict the onto-
logical principle’s injunction to start with the “concrete,” which ac-
cording to Whitehead is denominated in atomic, unchanging actual
entities.29 So, in order to intuit his derivation of dynamics we would
need to comprehend the intuition behind getting kinetics (and more
26. A. N. Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 34. I thank my reviewer for this reference.
27. Yutaka Tanaka, “Einstein and Whitehead: The Principle of Relativity Reconsid-
ered,” Historia Scientiarum, no. 32 (1987), pp. 45–61; http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~sn2y-
tnk/tanaka_4_0.htm .
28. In fact, David Hilbert used Emmy Noether’s fundamental theorem to help derive
the Einstein field equations from an action integral of the curvature of space-time.
29. For the same reason, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would avoid any such ap-
peal as a motor to stir the magma of a thousand plateaus—as well as because of the
principle’s teleological nature. Localizing could partially address the latter concern in-
sofar as local teleology does not imply global teleology.
generally, dynamics) from a potential field.30 Force, which is direc-

tional, can be thought of as a spatial difference of potential energy,
a field that to each position associates a directionless number. This is
a scalar magnitude with no associated direction—in both White-
head’s and conventional mathematical usage. But since energy fields
can be a function not only of locus but also of directional entities,
that is, vectors (think of how much easier it is to swim with a pre-
vailing wind than against it), we need some sort of measuring device
that would yield a potential energy field from positional loci and di-
rectional entities. The simplest such machines are abstract algebraic
functions called tensors, which provide a linear response to vectorial
parameters. (And here I use “abstract” in the same sense as Deleuze
and Guattari when they write about the abstract linguistic machine
of language.) Analogically, linear response implies that doubling the
prevailing wind doubles the energy expended to swim against it, and
so forth.31 We can obtain a nonlinear behavior by making nonlinear
functions of the components of tensors. So, evaluating tensors on
vector arguments at various loci yields a field of numerical values, a
scalar potential field. If we imagine the states of a quasi-physical sys-
tem evolving in time as particles on a scalar potential field, the least-
energy variational principle derives change by having the particles
sliding “downhill,” from higher to lower states of scalar potential.
Measurement
Now, Whitehead needs to be able to measure his changeless, un-
moving actual entities/occasions in order to feed them into his dy-
namical apparatus—his zero-order dynamics. And his Newtonian ab-
soluteness will not allow him to resort to Einstein’s moving clocks
and meter sticks. In lieu of moving measuring devices, Whitehead
offers a limiting process of fixed entities, traced by abstractive sets.
But since what he wants to measure is any entity or res vera, he needs
a more general sort of measure, and for that he appeals to a con-
struction on sets that does not assume anything special about the
metric, size, or geometry of what is being measured; in fact, he con-
30. The heart of Newton’s calculus, captured in fact by the fundamental theorem of
calculus, relates speed—the derivative of a function F(x)—with distance, the integral of
a function G(x). The derivation of dynamics from the spatial difference (called a gradi-
ent) of a potential field generalizes this fundamental relation between dynamics and
potential field.
31. An operator T mapping a vector space to a vector space is said to be linear if it acts
as follows on a linear combination of elements in its domain: for any x and y that are
vectors in a vector space, and any scalar numbers a and b, T[a*x + b*y] = a*T[x] + b*T[y].
88 Configurations
structs flat loci that are defined prior even to the “spatial” and “tem-
poral” categories. Whitehead’s flat loci are generalizations of lines,
more precisely of simplicial complexes, analogous to the vectors and
multivectors that serve as arguments to ordinary tensors. Whitehead
constructs his blunt version of lines from a simpler notion of exten-
sion, which for him is captured by the union and intersection of
sets. To this end, he tries to build up “lines” as abstractive set limits
of generalizations of planar ovals.
But if they are to measure any entity in the world, why should
these model sets be two-dimensional? It is notorious how properties
for ordinary shapes in two-dimensional Euclidean geometry can fail
to extend to general sets in higher dimensions. For example, a con-
tinuous, closed loop in the plane separates the plane into two sim-
ply connected components, an inside and an outside. Finding a
mathematically credible proof is surprisingly nontrivial, but perhaps
not too surprisingly after one considers the topology of a Pollock.
However, a continuous image of a two-dimensional sphere32 may fail
to separate three-dimensional Euclidean space into two simply con-
nected components. Whitehead tries to generalize from ovals to
“ovate sets” with analyzable intersection properties, from which he
can build any linelike set as a limit of intersections (on the way back
to vectorial experience). But why ovals? The intersection of two
ovals is usually not an oval; so the set of ovals is not closed under
the natural topological operation of intersection, and his attempt to
generalize to “ovate” sets seems rather awkward and confusing.33
The concept he is groping for is convexity, because the intersection
of two convex sets is convex. The difficulties ensue from trying to
force ovals and ovate sets into serving the general “measuring” pur-
poses of a topological basis.
32. A sphere, for example—the locus of points given by S = {(x,y,z), x2 + y2 + z2 = 1}, in

three-dimensional Euclidean space, R3—is a two-dimensional surface. The locus of
points S happens to be a submanifold of R3, but at any point on S, its neighborhood in
S looks like (strictly speaking, is diffeomorphic to) a piece of the two-dimensional
plane. Therefore it is a two-dimensional surface.
33. These flat loci anticipated topologies defined by embedded simplicial complexes.
These topologies were proven in the 1950s, using category theory, to be functorially
equivalent to topologies arising from cell complexes, and CW complexes. See, for ex-
ample, William S. Massey, A Basic Course in Algebraic Topology (New York: Springer,
1997).Whitehead’s nephew, John Henry Whitehead (1904–1960), was one of the most
eminent founders of homotopy theory in topology and differential geometry. It would
be interesting to discover what the elder Whitehead may have acquired from the
younger, if anything. In fact, there is yet another mathematician-Whitehead: George
Whitehead (1918–2004), who also worked in the field of algebraic topology, and who
systematized algebraic topology via category theory.
With hindsight, we can see that Whitehead’s project is weakened

by an insistence on Euclid’s ideal geometry of three-dimensional
space. Topology would be more apt for his project because it articu-
lates notions such as containment, boundary, point, density, inter-
section, union, and limit without appealing to number, measure, or
even dimension. It is not geometry but topology that is “the investi-
gation of the morphology of nexus.”34 Why limit the discussion to
three-dimensional Euclidean space? In Process and Reality, entities are
so general that there is no call for measuring them by three-dimen-
sional sets at all. (Consider the set of all trajectories taken by the set
of all people on Earth this year.) Aside from the reliance on Euclid-
ean 3-space, there are three other challenges to Whitehead’s ap-
proach to measurement.
Figure 4. An unbounded video stream is an example of a nonconvergent sequence.
The first challenge is a fundamental “linearity” in Whitehead’s

thinking about limits. In the Concept of Nature, where he tries to get
at the points and linear subsets of (Euclidean) space as limits, as con-
vergence to an “absolute minimum of intrinsic character”35 via his
abstractive sets, Whitehead makes an unexamined relation between
geometric limits and analytic limits. Here I am using “analysis” in its
technical mathematical sense.36 Considering a sequence e1, e2, e3,...,
with associated qualities q(e1), q(e2), q(e3),…, Whitehead claims that
the associated values converge to a definite limit37—but this is in
general not true, except for trivial sequences, like
α, α, α, α, . . . .
In fact, the convergence of a sequence of elements in a topological
space depends on the topological, not metric, properties of that am-

35. Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books,
2004), pp. 85–86.
36. Throughout this essay, unless otherwise stated, I use “analysis” and “analytic” to
refer to the mathematical study of the set of real numbers R, and of functions of a real
variable. In this context, I also use “real” in its technical sense referring to the number
system R, not as an adjective about ontological status.
37. Whitehead, Concept of Nature (above n. 35), p. 81.
90 Configurations
bient space; for example, whether the ambient space is compact or

sequentially compact. Therefore the integers, and metric geometry—
in particular Euclidean, geometry—do not provide an adequate ar-
ticulation of measure for Whitehead’s dynamics.38
A second challenge is that Whitehead relies on sequential com-
pactness where he could use a notion of compactness that does not
rely on enumerable series, subject to the general, post-Pythagorean
fixation with counting and countability. Roughly, sequential compact-
ness is the phenomenon where an infinite sequence of elements or
points in a topological space contains a limit point: an element near
which an infinite number of its peers can be found, no matter how
tightly one forms a neighborhood containing it. Quite understand-
ably, Whitehead indexes infinite sequences of sets using the integers
whereas by the transfinite Axiom of Choice it is also possible to in-
dex a sequence of sets from an arbitrary and uncountable index set.39
But this a subtle fact. A topology includes countable unions and ar-
bitrary, possibly uncountable, intersections. Countability is impor-
tant because it makes a difference as to whether the intersection of a
nontrivial descending chain of sets is null or not.40 Whitehead char-
acteristically overpowers the problem by piling on assumptions to
define it away.41
Still a third challenge is that the construction of abstractive sets is
a road mined with confusion, where in fact a lattice—not a graph-
theoretic lattice, but the set-theoretic notion—could serve as a radi-
cally fertile alternative.42 Lattice theory provides a way to work with
38. These discoveries were made in the same period that Whitehead turned to general
relativity, but did not attract the same level of attention that Einstein’s work did.
39. The Axiom of Choice is the following: Suppose A is a family of nonempty sets.
Then there is always a function P defined on A such that for every set C belonging to
the family A, P(C) is an element of C. Note that the sets can be uncountably infinite,
and the collection A can be arbitrary.
40. Counting figures largely also for another philosopher, Alain Badiou, who has made
much use of contemporary set theory as a philosophical alternative to symbolic logic.
In Badiou’s theory, count-for-one, a process of identity formation that creates unity out
of multiplicity, is an absolutely central act.
41. My assessment is a propositional and poetic remark, not a finding of matters of
fact. In mathematics there are indeed no matters of fact.
42. Lattice set theory is not a pictorial theory of meshes, but a structural theory about
sets and relations among sets built out of basic properties such as an order relation be-
tween sets. The most powerful aspect of this theory, for philosophical purposes, is that
it is built entirely without referring to points or elements in sets. For example, subset
and intersection are taken as basic operations without requiring us to “check” them by
testing elements drawn from the sets. No “countable or uncountable” sequences of vir-
tual moves are required, so in one stroke we eliminate the exhausting attempt to attain
sets without any reference to constituent points, starting only with

the notion of partially ordering on sets A < – B, and the binary opera-
tions “meet” and “join.” These operations generalize the intersec-
tion and union of geometric subsets of Euclidean space. The most
promising aspect of this approach to what mathematicians some-
times humorously call “pointless topology”—that is, the rigorous
but nonrigid (or anexact, as Deleuze would put it) way to describe
extended sets and substances without starting with atomic or point-
like elements.
I trace Whitehead’s process at this level of detail in order to show
how he blunts mathematical process to serve his philosophical pur-
pose, with artful but confusing results. Given all these challenges,
what could a repotting of measurement in different mathematical
soil offer Whitehead’s account of process? Can we salvage measure-
ment? Mathematical analysis’s measure theory provides an alternative
to understanding limits not merely as sequential limits, but as points
of accumulation, or as intersections of infinite families of open sets
indexed on some countable, or even more general transfinite, index
set (like the field of ordered pairs of real numbers, or the set of square-
integrable functions on the real line, which is infinite-dimensional).43
Geometric measure theory approaches classical geometric entities
like geodesics (locally length-minimizing curves in space-time) and
tangent planes as limits of infinite processes in much larger, wilder,
even monstrous spaces of mathematical structures.
Plenum and Process

Whitehead tries to honor a plenist spirit—explicitly acknowledg-
ing his debt to Spinoza—but I think he still commits in the end to
an atomism: “Continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actu-
ality is incurably atomic.”44 His ontology is dogged by a lack of ac-
cess to the point-free topology constructible, for example, from lat-
tice theory, measure theory, and differential geometry, some of
which was developed after Concept of Nature and Process and Reality
were published. On the other hand, Bernhard Riemann’s fundamen-
tal invention of differentiable manifolds and Henri Poincaré’s work
continuity or infinity by counting. A simple application of this is a foundation for a

point-free (colloquially, “pointless”) topology.
43. For introductions to square-integrable functions, to Hilbert spaces, and to real
analysis—the study of the properties of the real line, of functions mapping the real line
to itself, and extensions to sets in general—see Royden, Real Analysis (above, n. 22). For
an introduction to geometric measure theory, see Frank Morgan, Geometric Measure
Theory: A Beginner’s Guide, 3rd ed. (San Diego: Academic Press, 2000).
44. Whitehead, Process, (above, n. 2) p. 61.
92 Configurations
with dynamical systems had already been circulating for decades.45

Of course, every such observation about a philosopher’s conceptual
(not metaphorical) use of mathematics should be tempered by the
sympathetic understanding that speculation or improvisation re-
quires a trellis, not a carapace, in order to sustain the imaginary.
Therefore, alternative, nonaxiomatic constructions of ontology such
as Whitehead’s appropriation and blunting of the stress-energy ten-
sor, and attempted invention of what later was systematized under
point-free topology, light the way for further poetic exercises in the
philosophy of process.
Whitehead also tries to honor the instinct toward process that
characterizes an understanding of the world alternative to that of
atoms and synchronic taxonomy. He is concerned, as he puts it,
with the creativity “by which the many…become the one actual oc-
casion” in a “production of novel togetherness” that he terms “con-
crescence.”46 But the basic dynamic, concrescence—this process in
which many unities become integrated into a novel unity—being it-
self predicated on a discrete topology, is fundamentally as ideologi-
cal a commitment as any metaphysics. It would be worthwhile see-
ing what ego-free phenomenology and languaging (instead of “I see a
green tree,” “the tree greens”)47 would be articulated by a topology
that requires no points: it may be difficult to imagine, after decades
of war declared by the logicians and engineers of graph theory, but
far richer patterns than enumerated sets and graphs are ready to
hand, such as Alexander Grothendieck’s topos theory.48 In any case,
even short of such high-octane mathematics, Riemannian differen-
45. See, for example, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, “Habilitationsschrift: Ueber
die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen” [1854], in Gesammelte math-
ematische Werke und wissenschaftlicher, ed. Heinrich Martin Weber, Nachlass, 2nd ed.,
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1892, Nendeln: Sändig Reprint, 1978).
46. Whitehead, Process, (above, n. 2) p. 21..
47. I thank Mick Halewood for inspiring this example in his talk “Becoming Actual—
Whitehead and Deleuze on Subjectivity and Materiality,” delivered at the Deleuze,
Whitehead, and the Transformations of Metaphysics Symposium on May 24, 2005, at
the Royal Flemish Academy in Brussels, Belgium.
48. Alexander Grothendieck’s main work was published in Éléments de géométrie al-
gébrique (Bures-sur-Yvette: Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, 1960-67). See also
http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~leila/mathtexts.php. For a light introduction just to topos, see
John Baez’s web article “Topos Theory in a Nutshell,” http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/
topos.html (January 27, 2004); and F. William Lawvere and Stephen H. Schanuel, Con-
ceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
tial geometry and Poincaré’s dynamical systems, and topological

dynamics from the perspective of geometry, furnish rich and sugges-
tive handles for emergence, morphogenesis, and becoming that
need no appeal to a differencing of discrete entities, or to discrete,
computable algorithms.49 (I have in mind the Russian geometric an-
alyst of dynamical systems Vladimir Igorevich Arnold.)
Whitehead considers Heraclitus’s “All things flow” (Fragment 41)
and converts it to the vectorial impact of feelings of past entities
upon an actual occasion being transformed into “scalar” feelings.50
Mapping “All things flow” to “All things are vectors,”51 he comes
close to a process theory adequate to life, but not quite. Let me elab-
orate this process philosophy by taking three more speculative steps,
just to see what might unfold. First, topology offers a way to articu-
late openness, neighborhood, and, most deeply, continuity without
committing in advance to dimension, coordinate, degree of free-
dom, metric, or even finiteness. Who articulates this topological dy-
namic? I would say, with Deleuze, that it is not any subject or Sub-
ject, but rather, the world that articulates. Second, in a deep sense,
acting in the mode of topology of continua obviates the recourse to
counting, which is twin to number and discreteness. Articulations of
continuity, and continuous articulations as developed by L.E.J.
Brouwer in topology,52 Heinz Hopf in global differential geometry,
John Milnor in topology and analysis of manifolds, and William
Meeks in minimal surfaces, exemplify some of these rich modes of
material discourse.53
49. The consequences for this could be quite large. For example, we might still develop
as rich an ontology as Whitehead’s for Deleuze and Guattari’s a-signifying semiology
in chaosmosis without appealing to Deleuze’s difference in itself. See Gilles Deleuze,
Logic of Sense, p. 174, and as cited in Tim Clark’s essay, “A Whiteheadian Chaosmosis?”
in Keller and Daniell, Process and Difference (above, n. 2), p. 196.
50. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 2) p. 212.
51. Ibid., p. 309.
52. Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Collected Works: Geometry, Analysis, Topology and Me-
chanics, ed. H. Freudenthal, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1975).
53. For a flavor of this sort of geometrical vs. analytic or algebraic modes of differential
geometric reasoning, see, for example, the following canonical accounts: Heinz Hopf,
Differential Geometry in the Large: Seminar Lectures, New York University, 1946 and Stan-
ford University, 1956 (Berlin New York: Springer, 1983); John Willard Milnor, Topology
from the Differentiable Viewpoint (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); and
the article by William H. Meeks III, “Geometric Results in Classical Minimal Surface
Theory,” in Surveys in Differential Geometry, vol. 8 (Boston, Mass.: International Press,
2002), pp. 269–306.
94 Configurations
Figure 5. Real-time, video resynthesis based on Navier-Strokes simulation of vorticular

flow parametrized by live gesture.
Heraclitus wrote also,
(the earth melts into the sea as the sea sinks into the earth). This
field-based process of the world is topological as I have traced it in its
simplest mode, that is, nonmetric and continuous. It is a poetic-
philosophical figure of the earth and sea that neither reduces to
counting points, nor inflates to complexity and chaos, but articu-
lates richness. As I see it, and this is my third speculative step, mea-
sure theory’s monsters and “pathologies” hint at an infinitely richer
mathematical ontology ever more prolific than the present imagi-
nary. The monstrous, in fact, occupies a region between the impos-
sible and the potential real more fertile than that which Whitehead
explicitly articulated, but that he, with Heraclitus, may have imag-
ined.
Acknowledgments
I thank Isabelle Stengers and my reviewers for invaluable critical
comments. I am grateful to Niklas Damiris and Tim Lenoir for entic-
ing references to Whitehead over the years, and am indebted to
Steven Meyer for much-appreciated scholarly encouragement
throughout the project.
The Emergence of the Cyborg and
the End of the Classical Tradition:
The Crisis of Alfred North
Whitehead’s Process and Reality
Don Byrd
Logic fell into a Hegelian funk in the nineteenth century. Even the
most fundamental notions could not be consistently distinguished:
truth and falsity and life and death flipped like the rabbit and the
duck in the optical illusion. Nihilism was the inevitable product of
this theoretical subroutine, which Nietzsche brought to a brilliant
conclusion. Toward the end of the century, however, Georg Cantor
and Gottlob Frege led a brilliant recovery of formal logic. They con-
structed a logic that took abstract collectivities or sets, rather than
simple distinctions, as its primitive form. Thus, logic addressed not
the unit of the natural-language sentence but the unit of the logical
or mathematical function. Frege’s Begriffsschrift or concept writing
was not only clearer, it was more abstract. William and Martha
Kneale, in their magisterial Development of Logic, noted:
Frege says that the relation of the script to ordinary speech is like that of the
microscope to the eye and claims for it the merits which had been predicted
by Leibniz and others in the seventeenth century for a calculus philosophicus
et ratiocinator. It is one of the tasks of philosophy, he tells us, to break the do-
minion of the word over the human mind, and his invention has already
done something towards this by freeing logic from too close attachment to
the grammar of ordinary language.1
The Begriffsschrift set forth clearly the axioms of set theory. For the
first time, it was possible to specify the deep forms of post-Cartesian
1. William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), p. 436.
Configurations, 2005, 13: 95–116 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins

University Press and the Society for Literature and Science.
95
96 Configurations
logic. The clarity of the symbolism, however, also made it possible

for Bertrand Russell to see a fatal flaw in the system. It had been
known since the Greeks that certain abstractions or essences—such
as the essence of the consistent liar—were paradoxical, but they had
seemed only logical curiosities. When, in the seventeenth century,
the essences were emptied out, however, and signs took their values
not from concrete instances of distinguished objects but from rela-
tions with other signs in the formal calculus, the self-referential ob-
jects covertly appeared in the very foundations of logic. Russell
noted a difference between ordinary collections, such as the collec-
tion of all lions, and a relatively rare but, as it turned out, crucial or-
der of collections, such as the collection of all collections. The col-
lection of all lions is unproblematic. The collection of all collections,
however, is perplexing: the collection is itself a collection. It is not
possible to determine whether it includes itself: if it does, it does not,
and so forth. On June 16, 1902, Russell wrote to Frege just as he was
about to complete his major work, pointing out that the set of all
sets, which was fundamental to Frege’s formalism, was paradoxical.
The Greek liar had his revenge at last.
Despite the setback, it was assumed that mathematics could still
be successfully formalized and completed: the Russell paradox was a
mere linguistic statement that belonged not to mathematics but to
metamathematics; it seemed to be a problem because it interpreted
the formal signs in relation to an extraneous grammar. Russell and
Alfred North Whitehead, on the one hand (in their jointly authored
Principia Mathematica), and David Hilbert, on the other (in a series of
important texts, culminating in Grundlagen der Mathematik), devel-
oped philosophically distinct ways to address the problem and, they
believed, to inoculate the formalism against viciously self-referential
propositions.
Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica2 and Whitehead’s
Process and Reality3 were profoundly conservative works—the former
a powerful, if somewhat ungainly, reconstruction of the Platonic for-
mal universe, using a version of Frege’s concept writing; the latter an
allegorical interpretation of the abstract system of Principia by way of
a patchwork of concepts and phrases from Plato, Aristotle, and the
pre-Kantian modern philosophers, most notably Locke. Although
2. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols.

(1910–13; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (1929: New York /London: Free Press,
1978).
Byrd / The Crisis of Process and Reality 97
Hilbert’s formalism finally fell to the same argument as Russell and

Whitehead’s Platonism, his proposal of mechanical proof procedures
proved in the long run to be more useful.
At the outset of Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead of-
fered a technical solution to the problem of the self-referential paradox:
An analysis of the paradoxes to be avoided shows that they all result from a
certain kind of vicious circle. The vicious circles in question arise from sup-
posing that a collection of objects may contain members which can only be
defined by means of the collection as a whole. Thus, for example, the collec-
tion of propositions will be supposed to contain a proposition stating that “all
propositions are either true or false.” It would seem, however, that such a
statement could not be legitimate unless “all propositions” referred to some
already definite collection, which it cannot do if new propositions are created
by statements about “all propositions.” We shall, therefore, have to say that
statements about “all propositions” are meaningless.4
It was not a satisfactory solution—all statements [propositions]

about all propositions, including this one, are meaningless—but there
was no nice way around the problem. The “theory of logical types”
with which Russell and Whitehead proposed to combat the problem
legislated against sets of which the set itself was a member. It was a
legalistic rather than a logical solution. The proposition that was in-
clusively abstract was disallowed in the local logical neighborhood
and removed to a neighborhood of a higher abstract order. Sets,
thus, belonged to ramified hierarchies: sets could be collected into
more-inclusive sets, but when a set verged upon including itself (if it
began to feel itself, in Whitehead’s terms), it was sent packing into
the ramified structure (implicitly to a future when the problem
would be solved): thus, sets, sets of sets, sets of sets of sets, and so
forth ascended majestically, removing incompleteness from the
foundations of mathematics and letting its ramifications play out at
mathematical endtime.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead developed the implications of
Principia Mathematica for cosmology, or provided cosmological terri-
tory into which unruly abstractions could be shunted for their future
realization: “This is the conception of God, according to which he is
considered [not as the creator of the eternal objects but] as the out-
come of creativity, as the foundation of order, and as the goad to-
ward novelty.”5 It was a mysterious and fateful shuffle: the “out-
come” was the “foundation.” Like the set of all sets in Principia, God,
4. Whitehead and Russell, Principia (above, n. 2), vol. 1, p. 37.

98 Configurations
at the very moment he was about to return viciously on himself, as-

cended to a higher order of abstraction, and reappeared as the cre-
ator of new abstract spaces in which higher orders of abstraction
could be warehoused.
Logical propositions were also, like God, subject to qualifications
that set them outside the vicious circle. The feeling expressed by a
proposition belonged to a lower logical type than the proposition itself.
It is an essential doctrine in the philosophy of organism that the primary
function of a proposition is to be relevant as a lure for feeling. For example,
some propositions are the data of feelings with subjective forms such as to
constitute those feelings to be the enjoyment of a joke. Other propositions are
felt with feelings whose subjective forms are horror, disgust, or indignation.6
The proposition was a lure of feeling precisely of the order of the

fisherman’s rubber worm. The laws of feeling and the laws of logical
proposition—the world and its representation—were radically dif-
ferent kinds of things. Propositions could draw feeling; they could
perhaps trick and capture feeling; they could even be the reference
or vector of feeling as the data of the feeling itself. They could not,
however, refer to feeling; they could relate only to other propositions
or something more abstract.
The most abstract of things, the eternal objects themselves, the
objects of mathematics, also were beyond the present order of cos-
mological completion: “There is not . . . one entity which is merely
the class of all eternal objects,” and thus the class of all eternal ob-
jects, like all logical propositions, cannot be invoked; “for if we con-
ceive any class of eternal objects, there are additional eternal objects
which presuppose that class but do not belong to it.”7 Thus, White-
head referred to “the multiplicity of Platonic forms” rather than “the
class of Platonic forms,” and he further noted that “a multiplicity is
a type of complex thing which has the unity derivative from some
qualification that participates in each of its components severally;
but a multiplicity has no unity derivative merely from its various
components.”8 This constituted a translation of the theory of logical
types into the language of metaphysics. From Principia: “The princi-
ple which enables us to avoid illegitimate totalities may be stated as
follows: ‘Whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of the
collection’; or, conversely: ‘If, provided a certain collection had a
6. Ibid., p. 25
7. Ibid., p. 46.
8. Ibid.
total, it would have members only definable in terms of that total,

then the said collection has no total.”9 The arbitrary character of the
theory of logical types—whether applied to God, classes, or proposi-
tions—seemed clear: all actual entities existed with respect to the
givenness of the forms, but all forms did not exist with respect to the
givenness of actual entities. One can appreciate this rule as a kind of
legislative sanity, but not as a logical necessity.
Whitehead diagnosed modernist cosmology as suffering the fal-
lacy of misplaced concreteness; that is, it was mistaken about logical
types: it mistook the lure for the fish that it was trying to catch. It is
true: modern, inertial abstraction and mathematical analysis were
especially incommodious. The world that the Newtonian formulas
described consisted of matter and energy in meaningless motion; it
was a dull and lifeless world without the secondary qualities—color,
touch, taste, smell, and so forth. As Willard Quine noted, “To be is to
be the value of a variable.”10 The glorious being of Platonism,
grounded in sexual attraction and the love of beauty and totality,
was more compelling, but there was no place for such concreteness
to be.
The poets, Whitehead believed, rather than the post-Kantian
philosophers, had it right:
Both Shelley and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot
be divorced from its aesthetic values; and that these values arise from the cu-
mulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole on its various
parts. Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a philosophy of nature
must concern itself at least with these six notions: change, value, eternal ob-
jects, endurance, organism, interfusion.”11
These notions did not constitute an obvious harmony: change was

at odds with endurance, for example, and upon consideration, na-
ture in its complexity was a high-tension form. If it was “brood-
ing”—in the various senses of sitting on its eggs, of quiet worry, and
so forth—it was also (though Whitehead does not pay much atten-
tion to this fact) violently conflicted. Nature was the ultimate set of
all sets, and human history was, one could say, nature’s story of
paradox.
9. Russsell and Whitehead, Principia (above, n. 2), vol. 1, p. 37.

10. Willard Van Ormand Quine, “Ontological Relativity” and Other Essays (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 36.
11. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Free Press,
1967), pp. 87–88.
100 Configurations
This takes us to the very center of Whitehead’s philosophic strategy:

The history of philosophy discloses two cosmologies which at different peri-
ods have dominated European thought, Plato’s Timaeus, and the cosmology of
the seventeenth century, whose chief authors were Galileo, Descartes, New-
ton, and Locke. In attempting an enterprise of the same kind, it is wise to fol-
low the clue that perhaps the true solution consists in a fusion of the two pre-
vious schemes, with modification demanded by self-consistency and the
advance of knowledge.12
Thus, he was able to bring unprecedented logical clarity to modern

cosmology. He produced a free-wheeling organicism, cogently—and
prudently—Platonistic in its general assumptions and emotional res-
onance, that accommodated, more or less successfully, the theory of
evolution, modern logic, relativity, and the emerging, statistical
physics of the 1920s. It was an immense advance.
Plato was responding to the crisis in Pythagorean cosmology that
followed upon the Parmenides paradoxes; Whitehead was respond-
ing to the crisis in modern cosmology that followed upon the Rus-
sell paradoxes—the paradox of the negation of being, and the para-
dox of the self-negating relation. In Whitehead’s terms, Plato knew
only “actual entities and pure potentials (eternal objects),” things
and their essences; it was necessary also to account for the higher or-
der of abstraction revealed by modernism, the “hybrid” forms or re-
lations that were consequences of mathematical analysis and gener-
alized mathematical logic: “feelings and propositions (theories)”
—that is, not things, but experienced relations and their potential for
being known13. These together were the objective and subjective
terms of process (actual entities and feelings) and reality (pure po-
tentials and propositions); that is, both process and reality compre-
hend the movement from object to subject. It was necessary, in ef-
fect, to rewrite Timaeus to account for modernist mathematical
analysis. The theory of logical types allowed Whitehead to see the re-
lation of classical or essential abstraction and modern or inertial ab-
straction not as an opposition, but as a contrast. As a category of ex-
istence, contrast “includes an indifferent progression of categories,
as we proceed from ‘contrasts’ to ‘contrasts of contrasts,’ and so on
indefinitely to higher grades of contrast.”14 Thus, the opposition im-
plicit in self-reference is transferred to higher orders of abstraction.
12. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 3), p. xiv.

13. Ibid., pp.188–189.
The cosmological task has been, at least since Plato, profoundly

rhetorical—beyond logic, though not utterly beyond logic. Plato, in
Timaeus: “For this world came into being from a mixture and com-
bination of necessity and intelligence. Intelligence controlled neces-
sity by persuading it for the most part to bring about the best results,
and it was by this subordination of necessity to reasonable persua-
sion that the universe was originally constituted as it is.”15 White-
head’s task was to persuade necessity of the rightness of the theory
of logical types. The abstraction of the present was resolved, not in
relation to the present concretion, but in relation to higher, still un-
revealed abstractions. The present paid its debt to the past in suffer-
ing causality; it incurred a debt to the future in the exhilaration of its
knowledge.
Whitehead summarized the Timaean requirement thus: “it be-
longs to the nature of ‘being’ that it is potential for every becom-
ing.”16 Being had to be persuaded that its potential could be realized
in the things of time and space. Things with their allegiance to be-
ing had to be persuaded to enter into relations of time and space and
to cavort there, producing a world. The classical cosmos was a fam-
ily, always on the edge of dysfunction: Father was logic; Mother was
matter and matrix (all three terms from the root mater); we were
rhetors before the cosmological court, arguing for the felicitous real-
ization of our physicality, which in classical metaphysics was under-
written only by the theory of logical types. The outcome, as is always
the case with family, was tragic, and the European tradition itself
was tragic. On this front, Whitehead made no advance: he was the
philosophically good son, and, thus, left philosophy in its adoles-
cent crisis.
The modern question, the Kantian and implicitly Cartesian ques-
tion, of how knowledge was possible, as Whitehead noted, was rela-
tively trivial compared to the Pythagorean question of how abstrac-
tion was possible.17 How was it possible to abstract the system of
arithmetic from particular things, without losing arithmetic’s rele-
vance to things at large? How was it possible to abstract the system
of musical harmony from the playing of the lyre? And so forth. For
15. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Classics, 1977),
p. 66.
17. See Alfred North Whitehead, “The Harvard Lectures, for 1924–25,” Appendix 1 to
Lewis S. Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1925–1929, lecture edited by
Jennifer Hamlin von der Luft (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p.
299.
102 Configurations
Whitehead and his philosophic generation, the question took the

urgent form of understanding the powerful abstractions that had
proliferated since the middle of the nineteenth century, beginning
with the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and the consequent
failure of the fundamental Kantian doctrine of space as a synthetic,
a priori form. Kant’s importance to the history of philosophy is that
he based a central doctrine on a clear mathematical premise that
could be mathematically disproved. We now know that it is not pos-
sible to have an a priori intuition of the forms of space. How could
all of the abstract geometries—themselves complex abstract ob-
jects—be anything other than the fantasies of geometricians? White-
head addressed the ancient quandary, restoring it to its proper pri-
macy, and for this reason his work is crucial to our ongoing effort to
find our way beyond his modernism and to be, ourselves, contem-
porary with our own modishness and, more significantly, contem-
porary with our own information and energy. I have been using
“modern” and “modernist” in the technical sense of cultural histo-
rians to refer to the post-Newtonian world. Let me use it here in the
common sense: we are modern again, at last.
Whitehead: “it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in
complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and . . . it is
the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth.”18 This
presupposition is a requirement of the theory of types. To shuffle a
set off to its ramifications was not to remove it from the logical uni-
verse, even though its precise consequences were not known; it be-
longed to the system of the universe, and would sooner or later have
to be reckoned with. It required this profession of faith: the final
ramification of the set of sets . . . of all sets still belongs to the system
of the universe. Whitehead: “That we fail to find in experience any
elements intrinsically incapable of exhibition as examples of general
theory is the hope of rationalism. This hope is not a metaphysical
premise. It is the faith that forms the motive for the pursuit of all sci-
ences alike, including metaphysics.”19
This faith for Whitehead was grounded on an analysis of feeling.
Feeling and propositions about feeling belonged to different logical
types, and it was necessary to sort them out from the beginning—
otherwise, the abstract potential of the first set would be swallowed
in the feeling for its material inscription. “The philosophy of organ-
ism aspires to construct a critique [not of pure reason or knowledge

19. Ibid., p. 42.
as such, like Kant, and implicitly like Descartes, but] of pure feeling.”20
It aspired to go deeper than phenomenology, deeper even than the ex-
istence of things themselves: it sought the very hinge of experience,
where experience and the world were not distinct from one another,
and, thus, where experience and the world were unmistakably distinct
from propositions about them. It was a radical empiricism that
stemmed from Locke and James, for whom the Idea was both the
thing known and the thing itself. The first, world-making distinction
was concretely both a process and an atomic actuality. Whitehead
went behind truth to being, and behind being to empty abstract
forms that came forth from nothing or the nothingness of sheer cos-
mic potentiality. Their eternity was not in their origin but in their
conclusion. The attraction of set theory, if it could be preserved, was
that it snatched something from nothing and ended producing
everything. The great final abstraction, which will have manifested
equally as God and the world, will have been the origin of the cos-
mos and the formal necessity of its growth from the beginning.
If, as Weston La Barre forcefully argued (1970), Platonism was a
crisis cult or ghost dance that revived Orphic shamanism and
Pythagorean mysticism against the first manifestations of Greek hu-
manism, empiricism, and democracy, Whitehead’s Platonism was
the ghost of a ghost dance; Jacques Derrida’s redaction of Timaeus in
his 1993 “Khōra” was perhaps a ghost dance at still a further re-
move.21 There is no question that Plato was a reactionary, but classi-
cal rationalism also was harsh and unattractive. The alternatives—
the relentless necessity or “Godless, heartless anangke” (La Barre’s
phrase) of physis, on the one hand, and the organicism of “a well-
composed logos [that looks] like a living body” (a phrase Derrida
gleans from Phaedrus), on the other—are bleak.22 For twenty-five
centuries, the European tradition wore classical logic, the logic of
distinction, like an ill-fitting suit. It provided only two value-
places—positive and negative, being and non-being, true and false,
and so forth—but there were always more values that needed to be
distinguished than there were places for.
In perfect distinction, there is no discrimination. Theories of pure
difference can produce only pure sameness. Thus, classical logic as
well as the critical philosophies that recurred to it (which included
20. Ibid., p. 113.

21. Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” in On the Name, ed. Thomas DuTroit, trans. Ian McLeod
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89–127.
22 Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (London: Allen and Unwin,
1970), p. 499; Derrida, “Khōra” (above, n. 21), p. 127.
104 Configurations
all of the post-Kantian organicist and vitalist philosophies), provided

only two, empty sides of a distinction without names. It was possi-
ble to draw distinctions within the distinctions and create more
places, and the places could be interpreted by any name or its oppo-
site. The interpretation of the places was beyond logic—a matter not
or truth and falsity, but of hygiene. Keeping track of the places with
a medium as grossly imprecise as natural language, however, was not
possible: the interpretations spun out infinitely and could not arrive
at peace short of infinity. Sooner or later, hygiene failed. The inter-
pretations flipped. The sense of good and evil, joy and sorrow, life
and death were confused.
The organicists, from Plato to the organicist poststructuralists,
generally appealed to a mysterious third place—a kind of twilight be-
ing or medium that escaped the dichotomous rigors of logic: the Pla-
tonic khy- ra or matrix of becoming, the lekton of stoic logic, the Au-
gustinian trinity, the Cartesian pineal gland, the dialectical third of
Hegel and Marx, the threesome of the Freudian romance, the ab-
stract triunity of Peirce and early cybernetics, the “text” of the
postructuralists, and even the prolific multiplicities of current vital-
ist and biopolitical philosophies of language. The deepest site of con-
flict in the classical tradition was not defined by the philosophic
doctrines but by the question of how much slack to cut the third in
relation to the logical places themselves.
Plato began with the Pythagorean knowledge that certain aspects
of the universe were irrational and inharmonious: the square roots
of certain natural numbers were intractable; the lyre sounded better
if the absolute ratios of the pitches were fudged; the polis itself re-
quired a certain tuning, rigorously enforced by educational and so-
cial disciplines, in order to avoid dangerous conflicts of class and in-
dividual interests. Russell had discovered that the set of all sets
problematically was a member of itself. Form and matter were disso-
nant. There was an inordinate howling in the longed-for concord of
what is and what appears, of God and the world. Metaphysics was
from the beginning a matter not of origins but of outcomes.
Whitehead knew that any scheme of cosmological categories, in-
cluding the one he proposed at the outset of Process and Reality,
when considered from the strict point of view of classical logic was
inherently incomplete. The matter of the third was not immediately
resolvable: “We do not yet know how to recast the scheme into a
logical truth. But the scheme is a matrix from which true proposi-
tions applicable to particular circumstances can be derived.”23 The
word “matrix” was, of course, a translation of a key word in Timaeus.
Whitehead concluded Process and Reality by appealing to a justifi-

cation of craving, “the insistent craving that zest for existence be re-
freshed by the ever-present, unfading importance of our immediate
actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”24 As the philoso-
pher of craving, he was the philosopher of a nascent consumer soci-
ety, of desire at the point of turning ravenous. His relevance to the
present, thus, is immense. He was also, however, the philosopher of
environment. More daringly perhaps than any other organicist
philosopher, Whitehead addressed the complexity of organic devel-
opment. The cravings are cast in a process that is creative on every
scale; not only are they located in physicality, but they also produce
physical form. “The principle of the graduated ‘intensive relevance’
of eternal objects to the primary physical data of experience ex-
presses a real fact as to the preferential adaptation of selected eternal
objects to novel occasions originating from an assigned environ-
ment.” 25 This is the extension that organicist cosmology allows to
the theory of natural selection. It addresses the question of preadap-
tation, of which Darwin was well aware and for which he had no
good answer. How do creatures select for the components of eyes
without having sight, or for the components of wings without hav-
ing flight? Whitehead adds: “There will be nothing statistical” in the
suitability of the preference; “it depends upon the fundamental
graduation of appetitions which lies at the base of things, and which
solves all indeterminations of transition.”26 Process cosmology was
both an immense advance for the Platonic tradition and, though it
remained inside it, the completion of the Platonic tradition, beyond
which was only its discovery of its own superfluousness. The reno-
vation of abstraction that began with the appearance of non-Euclid-
ean geometry, and continues to the present, passed significantly
through Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Between the initial incom-
pleteness and the final craving, Whitehead articulated a new alle-
gory of logic that provided viable sites for the representation of both
living and knowing creatures and the laws of physics.
Whitehead only occasionally mentioned the philosopher after
Plato to whom he was most indebted, William James. From others—
notably, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant—he took the
tesserae of which he made the mosaic of cosmology, doctrinal points
that were generally stated in short, quotable passages and that often
amounted to no more than a radiant phrase, such as Locke’s refer-
24. Ibid., p. 351.

25. Ibid., p. 207.
26. Ibid.
106 Configurations
ence to time as “perpetual perishing.” From James, however, White-

head took a sense of the world, the entirely prephilosophic sense of
how things are. The classical tradition, in Whitehead’s redaction, was
right about most of the details—or at least one or the other of the
great philosophers had captured this or that facet of things ade-
quately—but everyone in that tradition before James (except perhaps
Plato) had failed to understand the nature of experience as such.
Whitehead never revealed the Jamesian influence in his work
more definitely than when he wrote, “We find ourselves in a buzzing
world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures,”27 or when he referred
to “each actual entity . . . [as] a throb of experience, including the ac-
tual world within its scope.”28 The Jamesian world, where there was
knowing but no knowers or known, where there were actions but no
actors or objects acted upon, where there was communication but
no language, buzzed and throbbed. Whitehead, however, could not
both credit the final vitality and adequacy of the earthly mess and
harness it at the end of time by the God of European reason.
Whitehead resisted fundamental distinction in the beginning.
First things will have been first things at the end of time, but he was,
as James was not, in the end a true Pythagorean. The precisions of
formal logic made it possible for him to accomplish the complex
bookkeeping. In the closing section of Process and Reality, the long-
ing for the great final concord, God or death, prevailed. Whitehead
announced six symmetries, which in the end will have been the ori-
gin of cosmos. This is the Platonic apocalypse toward which creativ-
ity aspires. The first symmetry: “It is as true to say God is permanent
and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is flu-
ent.” The other propositions were grammatically parallel and com-
parably paradoxical. An understanding of this dictum will serve our
purposes. “God” and “World” were interpretations of a single logical
value-place; the only other available place provided by classical logic
was negativity or nonbeing. “In each antithesis there is a shift of
meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast. . . . God and
the World stand over against each other, expressing the final meta-
physical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have
equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn
apart: each is all in all.”29
A key modernist analogy allowed the substitution of self for God,
or subject for God and object for World (or the reverse). All primal
27. Ibid., p. 50.
28. Ibid., p. 190.
29. Ibid., p. 348.
actualities—all possible individually “self-attained” things—be-

longed to a creatureliness that was internally unique, self-sufficient,
and converted from self-opposition to self-contrast (different from
itself): “All the ‘opposites’ are elements in the nature of things and
are incorrigibly there. The concept of ‘God’ is the way in which we
understand this incredible fact—that which cannot be, yet is.”30 This
incredible fact was neither a peculiarity of Whitehead’s system nor
open to serious criticism in terms of the two value-places that classi-
cal logic allowed. It was necessary to account for both God and
World, subject and object, actor and act, as the same (being and true)
thing, “all in all,” yet different. God and the world belonged to dif-
ferent logical types.
“For the philosophy of organism, the primary data are always ac-
tual entities absorbed into feeling in virtue of certain universals
shared alike by the objectified actuality and the experient subject.”31
The question of how one entity is present in another entity—espe-
cially how an abstract entity, such as a mind or a word, is in a con-
crete entity, such as a body or a mark on a page, thus not behaving
according to the theory of logical types—was the central mystery of
the philosophy of organism. The entities of the cosmological organ-
ism were required by the classical interpretation of logic to compre-
hend and to take into themselves that which they related to. All re-
lations were presences. The object was both exterior—and remained
radically exterior—and absolutely intimate, not merely taken in, but
produced in a closure for which lesion was madness or death. It was
the distinction in which there was no difference—the grounds of the
organism’s participation in the universe. How is stoniness present in
the stone? The organicist world was a world of angelic interpenetra-
tions. The entire universe was in some sense alive. Whitehead saw
that every entity was required to function cognitively—the stone
prehended, if it did not comprehend. There were other, even more
troublesome questions, in which none of the terms were concrete.
How were words present in propositions? How were propositions
present in concepts? How were concepts present in themselves? Was
the concept of concepts present in itself? The problem of represen-
tation represented itself and multiplied. Despite the sophistication
of its logic and its science, the process cosmos was animistic, atavis-
tic, a meditative source that pinned primitive humans to the excit-
ing buzz of their own abstract nonbeing.
30. Ibid., p. 350.

31. Ibid., p. 49.
108 Configurations
In a graduate seminar, probably in 1969, the poet Ed Dorn said of

the title Process and Reality, “It is the ‘and’ that is the heavy shit.”
Dope language was the proper register. By 1969, it was clear that
logic was pyschedelic and paratactical.
The change from opposition to contrast was the movement of the
theory of logical types. The world ramifies as God, and so forth. We
are fortunate to have Whitehead’s monumental articulation of cos-
mology at almost the exact moment when the possibility of cosmos
faded, and an information environment in which viable, au-
tonomous agency appeared on earth. Whitehead represented a mo-
ment of clarity of a kind that has been rare in history. He produced
a sense of scale and a point of differentiation.
In 1931, two years after the publication of Process and Reality, Kurt
Gödel published “On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia
Mathematica.” Of course, in some sense, Russell and Whitehead had
conceded in Principia that it was necessary for mathematics to be in-
complete in order to avoid inconsistency. Gödel, however, disproved
the cosmological imperative: there are true things that do not be-
long to the system of the mathematical universe. “For any specific
given formalism there are mathematical questions that will tran-
scend it.”32 In 1966, Gregory Chaitin carried the proof of incom-
pleteness a step further: not only are there, in any given formalism,
truths that cannot be proven, but some of these truths are random—
true for no reason; that is, the mechanical process for producing the
result is no more compact or understandable than the result itself.
This seems intuitively to include a great many of the data one en-
counters in life, but, of course, that is beyond the mathematical
point. Chaitin summarizes the matter thus:
The sets of axioms that mathematicians normally use are fairly concise, oth-
erwise no one would believe in them. In practice, there’s this vast world of
mathematical truth out there—an infinite amount of information—but any
given set of axioms only captures a tiny, finite amount of this information.
That, in a nutshell, is why Gödel incompleteness is natural and inevitable
rather than mysterious and complicated.33
Concluding the Introduction to Analytic Art, François Vieta, the

great algebraist and forerunner of Descartes, proposed to address
32. Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (New
York/London: Norton, 2000), p. 124.
33. Gregory Chaitin, “Meta Math!” http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/
omega.html (accessed October 27, 2003); this file is no longer available. See also idem,
Meta Math! The Quest for Omega (New York: Pantheon, 2005).
“the proud problem of problems, which is: TO LEAVE NO PROBLEM UN-

SOLVED.”34 After Gödel and Chaitin, it was known that some problems
are unsolvable. The modernist reservoir of abstraction was used up;
it could prove nothing further. Modernist formalism, interpreted ei-
ther realistically as by Whitehead and Russell or formalistically as by
Hilbert, had reached an impasse. The universal truth table failed as a
universe. Process was not conjoined to Reality as a whole, but to spe-
cific occasions of knowing—and, perhaps more significantly for
evolving creatures in times of profound environmental change, to
specific occasions of predicting, estimating, and guessing. Knowing
was freed from the limitations of primitive and unsupportable meta-
physics. Formal studies were freed from the constriction of totality.
Alan Turing and Alonzo Church, faced with the proof of unde-
cidable propositions in classical mathematics, set out to determine,
each in his own temperamentally and strategically different way,
what could and could not be decided, and they both obtained spec-
tacular results. It is not the mathematics as such that concerns us—
in fact, what concerns us probably concerned Turing and Church
relatively little. They were philosophers only by a stretch of the def-
inition; both of them, however, produced calculable quantities by
way of methods so abstract that they escaped the general system of
the universe. Unlike Turing, Church said nothing of machines: his
calculations, as far as he was concerned, were carried out by humans.
As it turned out, however, Universal Calculating Machines and
mathematicians were the same kinds of things as their calculations,
and both, despite differences in assumptions and methods, found
the same class of functions to be calculable.
The point for the present is not to comprehend the full mathe-
matical drama, but to witness the appearance of forms so abstract
that they belong to specific acts of knowing and not to the system of
the universe. Abstraction from incommensurable forms, such as the
incommensurable relation of the logical proposition and the struc-
ture of Earth, produced a domain of comparability. There was some-
thing in this event that arouses a shudder of excitement even in
nonspecialists who comprehend only the barest outlines of the new
forms that appeared. The crucial point does not require understand-
ing even all of the technical terms in the following passages; it is the
moment of abstraction itself that is to be grasped. As abstractions
from both mathematical processes and physical processes, these new
34. François Vieta in Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra,
with an Appendix Containing Vieta’s Introduction to the Analytic Art, trans. Eva Brann
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), p. 353.
110 Configurations
forms cannot be understood as belonging to mind alone or Earth

alone; they are something new—the quantity that has come to be
called “information.”
Church wrote: “We now define the notion . . . of an effectively cal-
culable function of positive integers by identifying it with the notion
of a recursive function of positive integers.”35
And Turing wrote: “The computable numbers may be described as
the real numbers whose expressions as decimals are calculable by fi-
nite means. . . . According to my definition, a number is computable
if its decimal can be written down by a machine.”36
Precisely where is the moment of abstraction in Church’s defini-
tion? It is not necessary to know even exactly what a recursive func-
tion is, only to know that it is a purely cognitive and mathematic
operation that operates on its own results. Effective calculation,
however, is not a mathematical concept; it is not a concept at all; it
is a physical action in a nonmathematical realm. Pencils, paper,
hands, and so forth are involved. Emil Post noted shortly after the
publication of Church’s paper that the hypothesis would not be, if it
should succeed, a definition or axiom, but a natural law—and it is, it
seems, something of that order, but involving objects of a higher de-
gree of abstraction than the laws of physics.37 It is the physical uni-
verse constituted not of matter and energy alone but of matter, en-
ergy, and information. In his cosmology, Whitehead missed fully a
third of the cosmos.
Post would have given, no doubt, a similar assessment of Turing’s
hypothesis. Like human calculation, the calculating machine that
Turing proposed cannot be defined in terms of mathematical opera-
tions; it is purely mechanical and implicitly physical. An abstract
process does not require an abstract foundational support, which is
necessarily infinitely regressive and falls sooner or later into meta-
physics. Abstract objects do not need the sponsorship of a logical
universe. Not only are there concepts that are so abstract that they
escape the general system of the universe, these concepts are impli-
cated in the physical structure of the world. Thus, in Whitehead’s
own terms, the hope of rationalism and premise of metaphysics
failed. The formal systems that are available for our use are not only
35. Alonzo Church, “An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory,” Ameri-
can Journal of Mathematics 58 (1936): p.361 (italics in original).
36. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidung-
sproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, 42 (1936–37): 545.
37. Emil Post, “Finite Combinatory Process—Formulation I,” Journal of Symbolic Logic
1 (1936): 105.
not “intrinsically incapable of exhibition as examples of general the-

ory,” to recall Whitehead’s profession of rationalist faith, they are
richer than general theory: they sum to many fragmentary systems.
They are not systems of origins, but systems of potential. It freed the
engineers and artists to investigate what these new forms might be
used for.
Consider a generalized case in which calculation does not depend
upon the formalism resting upon a known and proven foundation.38
Consider any thing, the ontological wonder itself, the abstract thing,
any thing that can be represented by the symbol X. Without know-
ing what the thing itself is, it is possible to perform operations upon
the symbol. The symbol can be multiplied by itself, for example: X2.
The value of X2 cannot be calculated unless the value of X is deter-
mined, but something of X and its structure, perhaps enough to be
useful, can be known. We know that X, consisting of two equal
parts, is complex; it is different in its self-sameness. Thus, X and X as
factors of X2 are like subject and object and the other unified, paired
opposites of dialectical logic: differentiable, yet the same, and com-
binable to produce a greater thing. Tautology was sufficient abstrac-
tion to produce modernism: XX = X2. It was the blankness of this ab-
straction that rightly troubled Whitehead. The quiet desperation of
Process and Reality is to find a source of concrete values for X.
With more or less success, the modernist disciplines devoted
themselves to discovering empirically the constants that related tau-
tologies of this and more complex orders to the material world.
Physics has been remarkably successful in this regard, but for the hu-
manistic and social-scientific disciplines, the constants, if there are
such, are not reliable. It has proved difficult for the nontechnical dis-
ciplines to get beyond this point, Giorgio Agamben (1993), repairing
once again to the Platonic origins, writes: “According to a Platonic
tautology, which we are still far from understanding, the idea of a
thing is the thing itself; the name, insofar as it names a thing, is noth-
ing but the thing insofar as it is named by the name.”39 Derrida’s Plato
(also 1993) issues not in the tautological proposition but the am-
biguous proposition, the proposition in which the values are unde-
cided and undecidable. They arrive at the opposite sides of the faulty
modern coin. The theory of types had failed. Agamben and Derrida
38. This example derives from David Berlinski’s explanation of Church’s lambda cal-
culus in The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World (New York/San
Diego/London: Harcourt, 2000), pp. 163–165.
39. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis/
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 77 (emphasis in orginal).
112 Configurations
both lack the necessary formal resources to get beyond the paradox
of the tautology that is ambiguous.
The data site is the formal environment that remains when ab-
straction exceeds the generality of the universal system. Its use, ex-
cept as the target of abject wonder and meditation, depends now
upon higher orders of abstraction. It is possible to examine formally
the nature of X2, as we have seen, but it is not possible to calculate
its value without supplemental empirical data. The expression X2 +
1, however, may enter into certain calculations even though the
value of X is unknown. X2 +1, for example, is greater than X2, and X2
+ 2 is greater than X2 + 1. The possibility of counting and calculation
without concrete foundations appears. These are abstractions with-
out generality. They belong to a particular environment.
Something disconcerting, as far as classical mathematics is con-
cerned, thus happens: There is a difference between X2 as an expres-
sion in itself and X2 as an element in a more complex expression
that includes itself. The formal system lacks normality: the signs
change meanings between one iteration and the next. This is the na-
ture of recursion: it takes itself, rather than a universal origin, as the
starting place. Thus, it is possible to think of Earth in its dark, mys-
terious givenness, and of operations performed upon the given
Earth, as being the same kinds of things as Earth itself. It is not nec-
essary to know what the given is; it is necessary only to know its
consequences.
On the data site the potential goes directly to its consequence; it
does not return to the beginning of the world with every event of
knowing. The tedious, almost imperceptible creep of history has al-
ways been a compensation for the inadequacies of information tech-
nology. On the data site things happen quickly. X2 + 1, X2 + 2, X2 + 3
are tenuous countings of the comings and goings of things in an en-
vironment. The X is a threshold that has been crossed and does not
figure in the calculations. The metrical forms of Earth are local—
capriciously local, or grandly local, but not universal. What counts
depends upon what is being counted, or what Daniel Hillis calls
functional abstraction: “Functional abstraction is what decouples
the ideas from the technology”; it decouples the data from the com-
puter and from writing and its aggressively inclusive grammatical
mechanism.
Naming the two signals in computer logic 0 and 1 is an example of functional
abstraction. It lets us manipulate information without worrying about the de-
tail of its underlying representation. Once we figure out how to accomplish a
given function, we can put the mechanism inside a “black box” or “building
block” and stop thinking about it.40
This is the solution to epistemological neurosis. It is finally possible

to quit worrying about the tools.
The absolute question of Western philosophy concerning the re-
lationship of God and world, mind and body, and so forth, was not
answered but rendered meaningless. Abstraction, matter, and energy
are the same kinds of things to an extent that allows them previ-
ously unimaginable interaction. The question of whether or not a
function is calculable is determined by calculating it (or determining
that it can be calculated). It depends not upon the relationships
within a formal system, but upon the discovery of some actual pro-
cedure or algorithm. The algorithm is a freestanding abstraction,
bringing along with it all that is necessary to be what it is and to do
what it does; it does not belong to the system of the universe. Ab-
straction is not metaphysical, but physical. A stone and an algorithm
represent different orders of abstraction, but they are what they are
because of what they are in themselves and in their local environ-
ments, not because of their reference to the system of universe, the
Platonic realm of essences, or a universal axiom set. Abstract form is
not a description of the world of matter and energy but a state of
matter and energy, neither separate from them nor reducible to
them. This is abstraction of a new order in relationship to which
modernist administrative forms are inappropriate or worse.
In the aftermath of Turing’s and Church’s discoveries, the formal
sciences flourished. More abstract potential has been discovered in
the last seventy years than in the whole of prior history. The damage
done to classical philosophy, the tradition that runs unbroken from
Plato to Whitehead, however, was fatal. Life on earth is not organic
but cyborganic. Cyborgs are not machines or hybrids of machines
and animals: they belong to an order of abstraction at which ma-
chines and animals are the same kinds of things. Knowing turns out
to be not a representation of the world—not a proposition, not an
image, not a theory—but a physical state of Earth. Earth knows itself
by way of its autonomous, physical agents. The structure of their
knowledge, like the structure of the genomic strain to which they
belong, is a structure of physicality. The genome sustains the reliable
habits of cyborganic structures that are, in turn, questioned and ex-
tended by the cyborgs’ daily research into their multiple relations
40. Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work
(New York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 18–19.
114 Configurations
with the data site and its potential for the production of further com-
plexity. They do not “have” images, propositions, and theories about
the data site; they are themselves (we are ourselves) dynamic states of
the data site—images, propositions, and theories ourselves—and, in
turn, the data site is a state of our community of knowing.
The intellectual protocols of this environment are still largely to
be understood. There are those, particularly those who are persuaded
by organicism and practice its pieties, who will cry “Reductionism!
Reductionism!” as if a horrible disease has broken out. The discovery
that knowledge is a state of the physical environment, and not a rep-
resentation of it, however, does not constitute a reduction but an in-
conceivable expansion of potential for living creatures. The structure
of physicality is far richer, more various, and of immensely greater
potential than the structure of classical logic, even in Whitehead’s
generous interpretation of it. It belongs not to cosmic generality but
to the particular abstractions of its own machines, its own produc-
tion of complexity, and the values of its evolutionary niche.
The ancient philosophers had the intellectual means to distin-
guish essences; the modern philosophers had the means to put dif-
ferences—the results of systematic distinction—into relations in dif-
ferential equations and formal, logical axioms. We now know, also,
and this sets us definitively apart from the classical tradition, how to
inform Earth and process its information in return. We are cyborgs
truly, finite living machines, autonomous and effective in ways that
are severely limited in comparison with the megalomaniac creatures
of the classical tradition but that may be, with a little luck, adequate.
It allows at least a realistic assessment of our possibilities.
The logic of cosmos, representation in all of its forms, was a data
cancer that grew on Earth. Its errant growth, totalitarian self-promo-
tion, and inevitable breakdown was the way, perhaps the only way,
that complexity as such could be conceived. At any rate, humans
and their reductive propositions about cosmos and the data site did
not survive. They were expelled by Earth’s immune system at last.
Earth is polluted with the outgassings of its representations. Reli-
gions, governments, and the institutions of consumer culture are in-
vested in these dangerous virtualities. Cyborganic survival now de-
pends upon overcoming the reactionary multitudes that long for the
old tumor and are satisfied by its image, long after its logic has dis-
appeared.
Like Timaeus, Process and Reality was awash in abstract music,
largely unheard and unhearable:
The atom is only explicable as a society with activities involving rhythms with
their definite periods. . . . The mysterious quanta of energy have made their
appearance, derived, as it would seem, from the recesses of the protons, or of

electrons. Still worse for the concept, these quanta seem to dissolve into vi-
brations of light. Also the material of the stars seems to be wasting itself in the
production of vibrations.”41
In “Final Interpretation,” Whitehead wrote: “Selection is at once the

measure of evil, and the process of its evasion. No element in fact is
ineffectual; thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a
mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements intro-
ducing a complex structure of harmony.”42 At crucial points in the ar-
gument, he invoked Protestant hymns, most tellingly in Process,
where “Abide With Me” is invoked to justify blatant contradiction.43
Whitehead’s most significant influence has been among liberal,
Protestant theologians for whom the theory of logical types is a reve-
lation: God and the world were not oppositions but slippery contrasts.
Since Turing and Church, an entirely new music has been possi-
ble.44 Form now is secular. The new music is profoundly noncosmo-
logical, not because we fail cosmology but because the logic of our
situation is formally far richer than cosmos in its singularity can
comprehend. This new music and the earthly institutions to which
it belongs are new. Its forms are abstractions that are self-contained
and carry all of the instructions they need in order to complete
themselves. We process information and are processed by informa-
tion. For the first time, we have the formal possibility of producing a
viable living on Earth.
Philosophy was an allegory of logic. Now form is vernacular and
available for use.
Take the architecture of Arakawa and Gins, who announced in a
retrospective of their work at the Soho Guggenheim in 1997, WE HAVE
DECIDED NOT TO DIE. Even the architects’ friends and supporters were
baffled and made nervous by the claim. The exhibition catalog in-
cludes a letter from Jean-François Lyotard, and the philosopher,
struggling to make domestic sense of his friends’ decision, writes:
“The three children playing hide-and-seek in this house as I ask you
these questions reverse the destinies of the beds, the tables, the

42. Ibid., p. 340.
43. Ibid., p. 209.
44. I mean this quite literally. Examples are the music of John Cage, Ornette Coleman,
Matthew Shipp, DJ Spooky, and Spring Heel Jack; and on different registers, the drip
paintings of Jackson Pollock and the poetry of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, both
of whom explicitly took Whitehead’s overcoming of Kantian subjectivism as a first step
to overcoming his formalism.
116 Configurations
rooms, ignoring the assigned purposes of each. Laughter, shouts, si-

lences, vehemence, foot-stamping, breathlessness—is this, in fact,
similar to the task your architecture expects of us, dear Madeline,
dear Arakawa?”45
But no, they reply, not at all. Their reversible destiny involves nei-
ther childish play nor horrible metaphysics. Arakawa and Gins are
logicians, who propose to implement the forms that appear when
logic tilts, as it undeniably has, into asymmetry. Death entered the
present from the future, which had been logically foreclosed. Death
now is not required by logic. It can be contested like any other for-
mal potential. Any act of living—as opposed to life committed to
death—maintains and cooperates with the disorder or entropy, as
Robert Smithson said. (Smithson’s work is also profoundly relevant
in this context.)
Somewhere buried deeply in Arakawa-Gins architecture there is a
somatic memory of cubist-futurist fascination and play with n-di-
mensional geometries and their metaphysical interpretations, but it
is not New Age goofiness. They produce architecture for the not-al-
ready-dead. It is not an art of completion or satisfaction, but an art
of research. In their response to Lyotard, they write: “We are not
concerned with reversing time, but rather with adding a measure of
reversibility to the moral condition by squaring off against it. . . .
Can you accept the following definition of ‘growing young’: becom-
ing increasingly able to field an ever growing number of possibili-
ties.”46 The war of the world at present is between the narrowing of
possibilities and the opening of possibilities. Arakawa and Gins pro-
pose architectural sites that are exercise grounds for knowing sys-
tems to get in shape, to grow young not just as bodies but as know-
ing systems. They do not have a blueprint for the reversal of destiny,
but they design environments in which all life becomes research ad-
dressed to the reversal of destiny. Their goal is to build cities without
cemeteries. It is a reasonable project—and a project that takes on the
full responsibility of the conjunction in Process and Reality.
45. Arakawa/Gins, Reversible Destiny (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications,

1997), p. 11.
46. ibid.
Recombinant ANW:
Appetites of Words
Joan Richardson
In opening Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead in-
vokes “that adorable genius, William James” as a prime instance of
the “modern mind,” citing an observation James made to his
brother Henry while, Whitehead notes, “he was finishing his great
treatise on the Principles of Psychology”: “I have to forge every sen-
tence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts,” James wrote.
Whitehead, repeating, splicing James’s phrase into one of his own
sentences, continues:
This new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the
relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. . . . It is a union
of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract gen-
eralisation which forms the novelty in our present society. . . . This balance of
mind has now become part of the tradition which infects cultivated thought.
“My theme,” he concludes, “is the energising of a state of mind in

the modern world, its broad generalisations, and its impact upon
other spiritual forces.”1
Whitehead’s setting out of his theme within the frame of James’s
description of struggling with facts to find words and to shape sen-
tences is especially useful in thinking about the particular accidents
of time and space occasioning the moves in the American language
game that, as I demonstrate in a volume just out, evolve into the
pp. 2–3.

117
118 Configurations
habit of mind we know as pragmatism. My subjects are Jonathan Ed-

wards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry James, Wallace
Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom shared two important char-
acteristics: a ministerial function in wanting to provide in their lan-
guage a vehicle adequate to belief of some kind—“spiritual force”—
and an active interest in understanding, insofar as possible, the
natural-historical and scientific facts of their moments, and in using
that information in shaping the “more than rational distortion[s]”
of their styles, their thinking.2
My working title for this volume, The Fact of Feeling: A Natural His-
tory of Pragmatism,3 points to why I would have been sent back to
Whitehead with the profound attention he gave, in describing his
organism, both to the connection between scientific information and
the contours of civilizations, and to that between “the environment
of electromagnetic occasions” and “each” individual “occasion”
which “takes its initial form from the character of its [immediate, lo-
cal] environment.”4 In addition, Whitehead continued, centrally, to
theorize the perception of language articulated by James, most
specifically in his seminal chapter “The Stream of Thought” in The
Principles of Psychology (1890; retitled “The Stream of Consciousness”
for the later teaching text, Psychology: Briefer Course [1892]), a per-
ception that James himself derived from his deep immersion in the
work of Emerson and Darwin, both of whom had realized language
in its reciprocal relation to thinking, to consciousness, as a life form,
an organism like any other, active and changing in response to “the
exquisite environment of fact.”5 In the course of demonstrating the
reciprocal relation of language and thinking in Symbolism: Its Mean-
ing and Effect (1927), Whitehead observes: “why do we say that the
word ‘tree’—spoken or written—is a symbol to us for trees? Both the
word itself and trees themselves enter into our experience on equal
terms; and it would be just as sensible, viewing the question ab-
stractedly, for trees to symbolize the word ‘tree’ as for the word to
2. Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” in idem, Collected Poetry and
Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), p.
351.
3. The published volume bears a reversed and more specific title: Joan Richardson, A
Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)—thereby facilitating cataloguing in
placing the key word, “Pragmatism,” before the colon.
4. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 41.
5. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (above, n. 2), p. 904.
Richardson / Recombinant ANW 119
symbolize the trees.”6 Notably, as I shall discuss in the following

pages, Whitehead’s development of James’s work in elaborating the
relation between language and thinking provides, in turn, a frame-
work for considering the most recent investigations into the nature
and behavior of thinking and consciousness offered by, among oth-
ers, the neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, Giulio Tononi, Antonio
Damasio, Francis Crick, and Christof Koch, each of whom equally
acknowledges his debt to James.7
My title for this essay means to direct attention to two aspects of
Whitehead’s signal contribution that serve well to underpin the
habit of mind of James’s pragmatism, to tailor the fit of its occasion
to the body of its environment of fact, fully articulated as it is in
Principles. First is Whitehead’s conceptualization of and focus on the
motive force of thinking as “appetition,” following James’s earlier fo-
cus in Principles on what he called “interest.” In renaming “interest”
as “appetition,” Whitehead grounded the most abstract of human
activities in the most basic and sensual. He thereby gently opened,
once again, the place of pleasure, the aesthetic, regarded feelingly, in
its firstness, as it were, undressed—stripped of the pejorative frills
with which it had been covered up in late nineteenth-century Eng-
land and France as “aestheticism,” much in the same way that Bot-
ticelli’s flowery, pastel rendering of Venus on the half-shell, bor-
rowed from the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod, covered the fact (albeit
mythological) of the birth of the goddess of love from the foam up-
pouring when Cronus’s bloody member, hacked off by Zeus, fell into
the sea. Secondly, I would like to call attention to the manner in
which Whitehead’s thinking replicated, in satisfying his own hunger
for understanding, the pleasure he felt as he incorporated words and
ideas that nourished him and enabled his thinking to survive and it-
self replicate most successfully.
6. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 1985), pp. 11–12.
7. Representative works include Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Mat-
ter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992); idem, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neu-
ronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987); idem, “Naturalizing Consciousness:
A Theoretical Framework,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 100
(2003): 5520–5524; idem, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe
of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Anto-
nio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam,
1994); idem, The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1999); Francis
Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Scribners,
1994); Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “A Framework for Consciousness,” Nature Neu-
120 Configurations
In Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead rephrases the problem

that James had voiced to his brother, and observes:
Every science must devise its own instruments. The tool required for philoso-
phy is language. Thus philosophy redesigns language in the same way that, in
a physical science, pre-existing appliances are re-designed. It is exactly at this
point that the appeal to facts is a difficult operation. This appeal is not solely
to the expression of the facts in current verbal statements. The adequacy of
such sentences is the main question at issue. It is true that the general agree-
ment of mankind as to experienced facts is best expressed in language. But the
language of literature breaks down precisely at the task of expressing in ex-
plicit form the larger generalities—the very generalities which metaphysics
seeks to express.8
The adequacy of such sentences is the main question at issue, or, as

Wallace Stevens expressed the same notion, “Where shall I find /
Bravura adequate to this great hymn?”9 or Emerson—who, intent,
like Stevens, to formulate a language that would align “the axis of vi-
sion” with “the axis of things,”10 was one of the first to alert us to the
need for continual recalibration, even though the measurements de-
rived from our most crucial instrument will ever be imperfect, fol-
lowing, necessarily, what Emerson identified as “the method of na-
ture,” ecstasy.11 (Emerson’s terminological choice of “ecstasy” to
describe nature’s method was not simply a “poetic” figure, but a
word chosen precisely and deliberately: fully informed by all he had
come to know about points of force and electromagnetic fields
through the work of Roger Boscovich and Michael Faraday, and
about speciation through his having read, following his famous visit
to the Jardin des Plantes, the same texts that Darwin was at the same
roscience 6 (2003): 119–126 [especially important]; Christof Koch, The Quest for Con-
sciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood, Colo.: Roberts, 2004).
ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 11.
9. Wallace Stevens, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” in Collected Poetry (above, n. 2), p. 13.
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of
America, 1983), p. 47; the phrases are taken from the “Prospects” chapter of Nature
(1836): “The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.
The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not
transparent but opake.” Later, in “Swedenborg; or, The Mystic,” from Representative
Men, the idea is rephrased: “the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the
world” (p. 674).
11. Emerson delivered “The Method of Nature” before the Society of the Adelphi, at
Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841; ibid., pp. 115–132.
time diligently studying, including the work of Augustin de Can-

dolle, who had already described natural selection, without drawing
the conclusions that Darwin would later draw.)12 Here, then, Emer-
son in 1844, from “Experience”:
It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that
we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect
our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately,
and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorted lenses
which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these sub-
ject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived
in what we saw; now the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to
absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions,—objects
successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas.13
Whitehead recognized that the challenge posed by what he called

the “quiet growth of science”—“the quiet commencement of the
most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet en-
countered,”14 the discoveries of the seventeenth century into those
of the twentieth—created new appetites for words that might begin
to satisfy, in their descriptive power, in what he termed their “con-
crescence,” the yearning to imagine at least that “momentary exis-
tence on an exquisite plane”15 enjoyed by scientists as they plotted
their figures and balanced their formulas. As he noted: “The new
mentality is more important even than the new science and the new
technology. It has altered the metaphysical presuppositions and the
imaginative contents of our minds; so that now the old stimuli pro-
voke a new response.”16 Following James’s calling attention to the
12. Other important common sources for Emerson and Darwin include the work of
Charles Bell, Charles Lyell, Adam Sedgwick, John Herschel, Humphry Davy, Alexander
von Humboldt, Baron Cuvier, A. J. Quetelet, Hensleigh Wedgwood, John Horne Tooke,
Thomas Carlyle, Robert Malthus, Robert Owen, and Robert Chambers, as well as other
older texts such as Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, John Locke’s Essay concerning Hu-
man Understanding, Dugald Stewart’s Philosophy of Mind, William Paley’s Natural Theol-
ogy, and portions of the work of David Hume, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William
Wordsworth, and significantly, John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The listing here is not
comprehensive. A full discussion is presented in “Emerson’s Moving Pictures,” the
third chapter of Richardson, Natural History of Pragmatism (above, n. 3).
13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays and Lectures (above, n. 10), p. 487.
15. Wallace Stevens, “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” in Collected Poetry (above, n.
2), p. 786.
122 Configurations
necessity of focusing on the “transitive” parts of speech in addition

to, or rather than, the “substantive” forms especially preponderant
in English and German—and given that the “new tinge” or inflec-
tion would still be phrased in the linear and sequential limitations
inherent in any human language—Whitehead understood that ex-
periences like these of the sublime real would have to be generated
in the time and space between words, as much as, if not more than, in
denotative functions or conventional grammatical arrangements.17
Out of this realization, Whitehead captured, or crystallized, his beau-
tiful notion of “prehension” or “event.”18 In this formulation, he be-
stowed on the ephemeral act of imagining the full weight of empir-
ical fact. The actuality of so regarding imaginative products is
paradigmatically exemplified in Charles Lyell’s projected synoptic
flight through aeons of our planet’s life before landing on the argu-
ment that would propel Darwin into his revolution. His argument
was a hypothesis rather than a proven or testable account; yet the
hundreds of thousands of years he described as necessary for the ex-
istence of the geological strata he observed provided Darwin the ex-
tended frame in which to imagine the evolution of “endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful.”19 As Whitehead made explicit,
“putting aside the difficulties of language, deficiency in imaginative
penetration forbids progress in any form.”20 Imaginative space is
necessary in order to experience what James described as the “over-
tones” of thought, the range of probabilities, superpositions. White-
head underlined the necessity that James adumbrated:
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general
for its existing language. Such ideas cannot be grasped singly, one by one in
isolation. They require that mankind advances in its apprehension of the gen-
17. William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983), esp. pp. 236–240.
18. I am using “prehension” and “event” synonymously here, following Whitehead in
Science and the Modern World (above, n. 1), where he observes: “This term [prehension]
was introduced to signify the essential unity of an event, namely, the event as one en-
tity, and not as a mere assemblage of parts or of ingredients. . . . But [since] the word
event just means one of these spatio-temporal unities. . . it may be used instead of the
term prehension as meaning the thing prehended” (p. 72). It should be added that
while Whitehead equates the terms in Science and the Modern World, “event” is hardly
mentioned in Process and Reality. I am grateful to Steven Meyer for reminding me to
note this difference.
19. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1964), p. 490.
eral nature of things, so as to conceive systems of ideas elucidating each other.

But the growth of generality of apprehension is the slowest of all evolutionary
changes. It is the task of philosophy to promote this growth in mentality.21
The time and space between words expressed in Whitehead’s no-

tion of prehension/event is directly connected to his “theme” in Sci-
ence and the Modern World, “the energising of a state of mind,” con-
ceiving of mind in its work with words as yet another activity of the
spatiotemporal field in which we participate. (“In the language of
physics, the aspects of a primate are merely its contributions to the
electro-magnetic field. This is in fact exactly what we know of elec-
trons and protons. An electron for us is merely the pattern of its as-
pects in its environment, so far as those aspects are relevant to the
electromagnetic field.”)22 In this conceptualization, “mind, the gap”
(recalling the signs to this effect in the London Underground) means
that mind is the gap where words stimulate not a one-to-one atomic
correspondence or denotation to a fact or idea, but a “probability
amplitude” in the neuronal network, the product of which will be,
given the complexity of an individual’s “receptive field,” representa-
tions of the statistically most effective/efficient response that will
permit action of some kind.23
As James observed in the chapter “The Functions of the Brain” in
Principles, “only after arousing the mental sound of words” do we be-
gin to entertain the possible “ideas” from among which the fittest,
in the particular context of a present occasion, will be selected to
“innervate” the “motor centres.”24 Here it is apt to recall, as well, an-
other example from “The Stream of Thought”:
The state of our consciousness is peculiar. . . . [T]he gap of one word does not
feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessar-
ily to be when described as gaps. . . . [O]ur psychological vocabulary is wholly
inadequate to name the differences that exist. . . . There are innumerable con-
sciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name, but all
different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume that they are all
emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state. But the feeling of an

23. I have borrowed the term “probability amplitude” from the vocabulary of quan-
tum mechanics where it denotes the range, expressed as a wave function, of possible
behaviors for a particle. “Receptive field” I borrow from the work of Francis Crick and
Christof Koch; a passage in which it is described is quoted below.
24. James, Principles (above, n. 17), p. 63.
124 Configurations
absence is toto coelo other than the absence of a feeling: it is an intense feeling
. . . dancing in one’s mind, striving to be filled with words.
“What then,” James asks, “is the meaning of the words which we
think we understand as we read? What makes that meaning differ-
ent in one phrase from what it is in the other? . . . [I]s it not known
and understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it,
though so impalpable to direct examination?”25
It is to this aspect of the “affection of consciousness” that the
neuroscientists mentioned above, as well as others similarly follow-
ing James’s pointings, have recently directed close attention, thereby
reflexively illuminating Whitehead’s concept of the “appetition of
thought” as itself a prehension of their findings. It is helpful here to
consider the following description from one of the last articles coau-
thored by Crick and Koch before Crick’s death in 2004:
The main function of the sensory cortex is to construct and use highly specific
feature detectors. . . . The features to which any cortical neuron responds are
usually highly specific but multidimensional. That is, one neuron does not re-
spond to a single feature but to a family of related features. Such features are
sometimes called the “receptive field” of that neuron.
Crick and Koch continue: “An important but neglected aspect of the
firing of a neuron (or a small group of associated neurons) is its ‘pro-
jective field’. . . . Both the receptive field and the projective field are
dynamic, not merely static, and both can be modified by experi-
ence.”26 Such is the form that a present-day “framework for con-
sciousness” takes.
Whitehead couched his own descriptions of the momentous shift
in mentality—from conceiving of consciousness and ideas in Lock-
ean terms to conceiving of them as organic electromagnetic occa-
sions—in the inherited language of philosophy, but he masterfully
redeployed that language, his own terms designed to be elements
that could be selected out and recombined, as he had, for example,
selected James’s “stubborn facts” and used the phrase repeatedly and
variously in several of his works. In so periodically interpolating the
phrase—which for him synecdochically expressed an “affection of
consciousness,” what he had feelingly responded to in James’s pro-
ject—into a received discourse, stretching the shape of philosophy’s
language with his musical restatement of a theme, he implicitly
25. Ibid., pp. 243–244 (emphasis added).

26. Crick and Koch, “Framework for Consciousness” (above, n. 7), pp. 119–120.
legitimized the work of poets, used to stretching, inverting, and dis-

torting the syntactic and grammatical categories of linear language
and logic. Understood in the original and properly reenunciated
Emersonian sense as the “makers” on whom we most depend to pro-
vide “what will suffice,” poets, indulging and trusting imagination,
disclose, feeling their way in words and their arrangements, “things
as they are.”
(The phrases just cited are from Wallace Stevens. The first, from
“Of Modern Poetry”:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.27
The second, from “The Man with the Blue Guitar”—I quote here
Stanza VI for its pertinence to the present discussion, but the phrase
runs rather more like a mantra than as a refrain throughout the poem:
A tune beyond us as we are,

Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.28)
27. Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry,” in Collected Poetry (above, n. 2), pp. 218–219.
28. Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” ibid., p. 137.
126 Configurations
As Whitehead noted:
Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first prin-
ciples. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way in-
exorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to
their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as
technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative
leap.29
Whitehead’s gesture, of course, included retrospective acknowl-

edgment of the poets of the past who provided and continue to pro-
vide such sustenance—poets like Lucretius, in whose De rerum natura
Niels Bohr found descriptive analogues for the quantum behavior of
atoms; like Dante, whose spiraling circles up to heaven and down to
hell prefigure the Fibonacci series; like Milton, whose inverted syn-
tax and tumbling grammar in describing the chaos of Pandemonium
provided Darwin and Emerson the pattern for accidental speciation,
the process of “imperfect replication” that is itself the motive force
of evolution.30 Whitehead pointed, as well, to “some strains of In-
dian, or Chinese, thought [rather] than to western Asiatic, or Euro-
pean thought” which make “process” rather than “fact ultimate.”31
“The organ of language,” embodying, in its recombinations, the mu-
tations of thinking in relation to an ever-changing environment
was, Whitehead realized, part and particle of nature’s process.32
And so, to instance a more contemporary poet, we have Stevens,
who, reading in The Concept of Nature (1920), Science and the Modern
World (1925), and Adventures of Ideas (1933), spliced into his verbal
genetic code Whitehead’s “occasion.” “The poem is the cry of its oc-
casion,” Stevens offered, repeatedly performing his understanding of
Whitehead’s “occasion” as process within the formal structure of the
component parts of the body of his work.33 “Occasion” functioned
for Stevens in the way “stubborn facts” did for Whitehead, as a

30. “Imperfect replication” is the term currently in use by evolutionary biologists, the-
orists of systematics, molecular biologists, linguists, and others studying the manner of
natural change and growth. This aspect in relation to Emerson and Darwin’s internal-
ization of the perceptual model offered by Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is explored in
Richardson, “Emerson’s Moving Pictures,” as indicated in n. 12 above.
32. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics,” in Essays and Lectures (above, n. 10), p.
106.
33. Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” in Collected Poetry (above,
n. 2), p. 404.
“receptive field” stimulating further projective operations. Here,

Whitehead:
An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular in-
stance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the “real
internal constitution” of the actual occasion in question. The analysis of the
formal constitution of an actual entity has given three stages in the process of
feeling: (i) the responsive phase, (ii) the supplemental stage, and (iii) the satis-
faction.34
An occasion, to put it another way, is an embodiment in words

that in and for a particular moment satisfy the appetition of think-
ing, a translation of perception into a platform for possible action.
“The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for
any thought; and the starting point for thought is the analytic ob-
servation of components of this experience.”35 The stages that in
Whitehead’s analysis here culminate in an occasion correspond both
to C. S. Peirce’s “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness” and to
Stevens’s tripartite directions for creating what he calls the “Supreme
Fiction,” the “highest poetry”: It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change, It
Must Give Pleasure.36 The condition of “firstness” is undifferentiated
and unmediated sensation, pure “reponsiveness”—in Stevens’s ex-
ample, “The sun / Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the
difficulty of what it is to be.”37 It is abstract because not particular-
ized in individual perception and expression: “The major abstraction
is the commonal, / The inanimate, difficult visage.”38 In “second-
ness,” the individual announces itself in experiencing its relation to
whatever happens to be stimulating the sensation, thus animating
and changing the commonal abstract with its “supplemental” partic-
ularization. This is the stage that Martin Buber would elaborate in I
and Thou, and that Stevens exemplifies in “Bethou me, said sparrow,
to the crackled blade, / And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, /
When in my coppice you behold me be.”39 “Thirdness” gives plea-
sure, “satisfaction” because it is the stage that effects, translates into
“concrescence,” the experience of relation in “secondness,” where,
as Whitehead describes below, “the many feelings, derivatively felt

35. Ibid., p. 4.
36. Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (above, n. 2), pp. 329–352.
37. Ibid., p. 330.
38. Ibid., p. 336.
39. Ibid., p. 340.
128 Configurations
as alien, are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation im-

mediately felt as private.”40 In the third stage, then, “the incoming
of ‘appetition,’ which in its higher exemplifications we term ‘vi-
sion,’” is fixed in some form, “the fiction that results from feeling,”
as Stevens describes it, a “momentary stay against reality.”41
While this “fiction” is, in the inherited philosophical vocabulary,
“ideal,” in belonging to an individual “private” prehension, it is,
nonetheless, a required platform for action, for affecting the “ac-
tual,” and thus, in the Aristotelian terms that Whitehead uses in the
passage cited more fully below, “the final cause” of the concrescence:
a matter of finding the words, shaping the form, to satisfy the appe-
tition of thought. In pragmatist terms, “the fiction that results from
feeling” redefines “truth” as what “happens to an idea.”42 The “‘idea’
idea” mutates into its Jamesian and Whiteheadian “ecstatic” proces-
sual and plural possibilities. 43 Here, then, again, is Whitehead:
The satisfaction is merely the culmination marking the evaporation of all in-
determination; so that, in respect to all modes of feeling and to all entities in
the universe, the satisfied actual entity embodies a determinate attitude of
“yes” or “no.” Thus the satisfaction is the attainment of the private ideal
which is the final cause of the concrescence. [We can see here, clearly, the plat-
form of pragmatism, where the function of thinking is to arrive at the “deter-
minate yes” that permits belief and, so, action.] But the process itself lies in
the two former phases. The first phase is the phase of pure reception of the ac-
tual world in its guise of objective datum for aesthetic synthesis. In this phase
there is the mere reception of the actual world as a multiplicity of private cen-
tres of feeling, implicated in a nexus of mutual presupposition. The feelings
are felt as belonging to the external centres, and are not absorbed into the pri-
40. While Peirce’s triadic logic informs the greater part of his work, he presented the
ideas of firstness, secondness, and thirdness most clearly in “The Architecture of Theo-
ries,” first published in The Monist 1 (January 1891): 161–176; it is reprinted in various
edited collections and in volume 6 of The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed.
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass..: Harvard University Press,
1935). For an extraordinarily lucid extended discussion of these concepts, and, indeed,
of Peirce and his work generally, see Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
41. Stevens “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (above, n. 2), p. 351.
42. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), in
idem, Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), p.
574 (emphasis in the original).
43. As Whitehead observes in discussing James’s denying that consciousness is an en-
tity and insisting most emphatically that it is a function: “James clears the stage of the
old paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting” (Science [above, n. 1], p. 143).
vate immediacy. The second stage is governed by the private ideal, gradually
shaped in the process itself, whereby the many feelings, derivatively felt as
alien, are transformed into a unity of aesthetic appreciation immediately felt
as private. This is the incoming of “appetition,” which in its higher exempli-
fications we term “vision.” In the language of physical science, the “scalar”
form overwhelms the original “vector” form: the origins become subordinate
to the individual experience. The vector form is not lost, but is submerged as
the foundation of the scalar superstructure.
Whitehead adds, importantly: “In this second stage the feelings as-
sume an emotional character by reason of the influx of conceptual
feelings. But the reason why the origins are not lost in the private
emotion is that there is no element in the universe capable of pure
privacy.”44
And here is Stevens, as though illustrating, in an “imperfect repli-
cation,” Whitehead’s description:
“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.45
As this poem exemplifies and as Stevens abundantly illustrates in his

performances with words, not only can it, here, the mind, never be
satisfied, but its activity gives pleasure. He felt, in the full sense in
45. Wallace Stevens, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,” in Collected Poetry (above,
n. 2), p. 224.
130 Configurations
which Whitehead uses “felt” and “feeling” above, that the ongoing
seeking and satisfaction of pleasure are the index and indicator of
“an original relation to the universe,”46 the occasions when we ac-
curately perceive our “bond to all that dust.”47 The persistent
rhythm of hunger and satisfactions, indetermination and determi-
nation, sets up a psychic polarity that keeps the mind turning to-
ward light, toward understanding, repeatedly seeking for at least
temporary balance, for the homeostasis on which all systems de-
pend, Whitehead’s “balance of mind.” (“Achieving survival coin-
cides with the ultimate reduction of unpleasant body states and the
attainment of homeostatic ones, i.e., functionally balanced biologi-
cal states.”)48 As Plato indicated in the Phaedrus, and as Darwin reit-
erated in his Notebooks, the private and public, the particular and
universal collapse into one on and at and in this point, pleasure, the
satisfaction of “appetition”—particularly, for our species, the plea-
sure of “a speech / Of the self that must sustain itself on speech.” (It
should be noted that Darwin revised On the Origin of Species five
times, not only to get rid of, as much as possible, the teleological de-
sign built into conventional definitions and usages, but to ensure
the successful survival of his text by making it pleasurable—having
observed, as counterexample, of Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos,
that though it had monumental significance, it would not survive
because Humboldt had not attended to the pleasure of the text.) Fur-
ther, in the Cratylus, Plato plotted the line connecting the nostalgic
searching of the hero—for return to his place of origin—to the
querying of all sounds, all words by the philosopher intent on find-
ing forms of expression adequate to describe the relation between
the human and the universe he inhabits. This search Plato describes
as informed by pleasure, what he names precisely as the erotic, eros
having its etymological root in the word for “questioning.”
Whitehead observed the pattern of this search and sustenance, il-
lustrating at the same time why “there is no element in the universe
capable of pure privacy”:
All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such re-
latedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the liv-
ing—that is to say, with “objective immortality” whereby what is divested of
its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living imme-
46. The phrase appears in the opening of Nature (1836): Emerson, Essays and Lectures
(above, n. 10), p. 7.
47. Stevens, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (above, n. 9), p. 12.
48. Damasio, Descartes’ Error (above, n. 7), p. 179.
diacies of becoming. This is the doctrine that the creative advance of the
world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those
things which jointly constitute stubborn fact.49
This “appropriation of the dead by the living” manifests itself bio-

logically in the ongoing “imperfect replication” of the coded infor-
mation for protein synthesis on the genome. It manifests itself,
equally and analogically—as Whitehead realized and exemplified in
his thinking and writing—in the work of cultural production where
the ideas that have worked toward successful survival are passed on,
rephrased and interpolated in varying idioms, as in a conceptual cal-
culus with words behaving as actual “wave packets,” through textual
reproduction.50 Of his own intention, Whitehead noted: “The three
books—Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of
Ideas—are an endeavor to express a way of understanding the nature
of things, and to point out how that way of understanding is illus-
trated by survey of the mutations of human experience.”51 We recall
Emerson’s observation, “Genius . . . is itself a mutation of the thing
it describes.”52 Whitehead’s appropriation of William James’s phrase,
stubborn fact, and Stevens’s of Whitehead’s own occasion serve as il-
lustrations.
Just before quoting the sentence from James’s letter to his brother
cited at the opening of this paper, Whitehead commented, in calling
attention to the appetite for new words to express the new relation
to the universe in which human beings found themselves after the
quietly momentous discoveries of the seventeenth century: “What I
mean is just that slightest change of tone which yet makes all the
difference.”53 Whitehead seized on the phrase “stubborn facts,” re-
peating it, as quoted above and elsewhere in Process and Reality and
in his other works, to indicate what he had taken into account but
what, as he noted, the greater part of nineteenth-century philosophy
had excluded from relevance.54 In engaging the real work of provid-
49. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 8), pp. 212 xiii–xiv (emphasis in original).
50. “Wave packet” is another term belonging to the vocabulary of quantum mechan-
ics and describes the range of frequencies belonging to a particle. The term was first
used, as far as I can determine, by Max Born in 1926, and the concept it denotes is car-
ried and expressed by Fourier transforms.
51. Whitehead, Adventures (above, n. 4), p. vii (emphasis added).
52. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Method of Nature,” in Essays and Lectures (above, n.
10), p. 129.
54. See Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 8), p. xiii.
132 Configurations
ing an instrument recalibrated to the exigencies of what had newly

been apprehended, it is necessary, he understood, to describe fact
caught in the making, the fact of fiction (from the Latin fingere, to
form or shape) and of poetry (from the Greek poiein, to create)—to
value imaginative experience as “concrescence,” the “intellect con-
structive,”55 as Emerson put it, in relation to the shape of the uni-
verse, exhibiting “thought . . . passing into realization.”56 Whitehead
recognized William James’s “adorable genius” in his having located
in language the site of these “mutations of human experience” and
in having pointed to precisely that portion of the code into which
the reconfigured elements should, in fully taking account of the Dar-
winian information, be spliced. Observing, in his “Stream of
Thought” chapter, that sensationalist philosophers, “unable to lay
their hands on any coarse feelings corresponding to the innumer-
able relations and forms of connection between the facts of the
world, finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such re-
lations, . . . have for the most part denied that feelings of relation ex-
ist,” and that intellectualists have made the opposing mistake, that
relations must be known in something that is not feeling, James goes
on:
If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects
exist in rerum natura, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these re-
lations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an
adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that
does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment
actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. . . . the rela-
tions are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to
all their shades.
Famously, James then concludes:

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling
of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do
not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the
substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other
use [as, for instance, thinking of “nature” and “nurture” as substantives in
contrast to Whitehead’s focus on the transitive in “process” and “appetition”].
. . . All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error been cooly
suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive per-
55. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Intellect,” in Essays and Lectures (above, n. 10), p. 422.
56. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Natural History of the Intellect,” in Natural History of the
Intellect and Other Papers (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1909), p. 40.
ception they led to, as thought “about” this object or “about” that, the stolid
word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous
sound. Thus the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the sub-
stantive parts have continually gone on.57
Whitehead, acutely sympathetic to the defining characteristic of

mathematical thinking’s persistent activity of tending to the “in be-
tween”—“imaginative penetration forbids progress in any form
other than that of an asymptotic approach”—recognized that
James’s “interest” (literally, inter-esse), his focus on attending to “be-
ing in between” thinking and words, mimics, in the manner of the
number system, the process of organic life, growing, developing
from within, in a simultaneous recursive and progressive process, go-
ing back to the model, incorporating structural procedures, and
opening into a new space.58 Again, Emerson had prepared the
ground:
All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an in-
stinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and
fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain
to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth, and you shall
know why you believe.59
Understanding what William James offered because himself

moved by James’s expression as much as by his insight, Whitehead
embodied that feeling response—the aesthetic—showing it to be
thinking’s manner of feedback, the recognition of his own percep-
tion in another’s phrasing, what Emerson had early on called atten-
tion to: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected
thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”60
In so doing, Whitehead revealed the process of thinking itself as a re-
cursive, self-reflexive gesture, the “occasion” characterizing the mod-
ernist “event.” And, more specifically, in underlining the recursive-
generative activity of thought becoming aware of itself, he
demonstrated the identity of that process with that of organic form,
continuing the work of “that adorable genius” and of “the sage of
Concord” before him: naturalizing spirit, embodying mind.
57. James, Principles, (above, n. 17), pp. 237–239 (emphasis in original).

59. Emerson, “Intellect” (above, n. 55), p. 419.
60. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays and Lecttures (above, n. 10) p. 259.
Perception, Living Matter,
Cognitive Systems, Immune
Networks: A Whiteheadian Future
for Science Studies
James J. Bono
University at Buffalo
Unlike Athena, science studies did not emerge fully armed from the
head of Zeus. Its eruption from the very loins of its disciplinary prog-
enitors—history of science, sociology of science, philosophy of sci-
ence—represents more than simple refashioning of well-worn prob-
lems, analytic approaches, and models dressed up in bright new,
cosmetically retouched, form. Something profoundly more interest-
ing happened on the way to science studies: rather than frictionless
reproduction of the same, repetition gave issue to difference. Traces
of such difference within the familiar analytics of the historical, the
social, and the philosophical (one might add: the anthropological,
the literary) abound in science studies, nowhere perhaps as strongly
as in the so-called turn toward “practice.”1 Despite attempts to con-
tain practice within traditional disciplinary regimes, attention to
practice has proven time and again deeply disruptive. Not only has
it caused science studies—I mean, of course, individual historians,
sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists of science—to attend
to the materialities and contingencies of engagement with and com-
1. On the turn toward practice, see Timothy Lenoir, “Practice, Reason, Context: The
Dialogue between Theory and Experiment,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 3–22; Jan
Golinski, “The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory: Sociological Approaches
in the History of Science,” Isis 81 (1990): 492–505; idem, Making Natural Knowledge:
Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); idem, “Kuhn and Scientific Practices,” Configura-
tions 6 (1998): 33–50; idem, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Nat-
uralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

135
136 Configurations
munication about nature and natural objects,2 but, most signifi-

cantly, attention to practice has, in addition, slowly (one resists the
temptation to add, inevitably) shifted attention from epistemology
to ontology, from matters of fact to matter as richly entwined and
situated in a world of agencies.3
This turn toward ontology in science studies, though slow and far
from complete, nonetheless has deep roots that are only gradually
beginning to be exposed, tended, and nurtured. Its genealogy in-
cludes Martin Heidegger as well as Gilles Deleuze4 and Félix Guattari,
and has been extended back to the likes of Henri Bergson and
Charles Darwin. This essay, arguing through the examples of seven-
teenth-century theories of living—or working—matter, the mid-twen-
tieth-century developmental biologist and epigeneticist C. H.
Waddington, and late-twentieth-century reconfigurations of the im-
mune system as a cognitive network in the work of Francisco Varela
and his colleagues, will insist upon the significance of Alfred North
Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to science studies and to its
possible future.
I. Reexamining Seventeenth-Century Notions of Matter

In Science and the Modern World (1925), Alfred North Whitehead
sketches out terrain that subsequently will give rise to his fully de-
2. See, for example, many of the essays included in Timothy Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Sci-
ence: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), including the overview provided by Lenoir, “Inscription Practices
and the Materialities of Communication,” pp. 1–19.
3. For example, see the recent essays by Bruno Latour: “The Promises of Construc-
tivism,” in Chasing Technology: Matrix of Materiality, ed. Don Ihde (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 2003), pp. 27–46; “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From
Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–248. The latter,
in particular, gives indication of Latour’s turn toward Whitehead via Isabelle Stengers
(see also Bruno Latour, “What Is Given in Experience?” boundary 2 32 [2005]: 223–237,
where Latour reviews Stengers’s recent book on Whitehead: Isabelle Stengers, Penser
avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts [Paris: Seuil, 2002]). Latour’s ef-
forts in these recent works at debunking deconstruction and his desire to stake out a
position seemingly opposed to Heidegger strike me as unnecessary, targeting impover-
ished readings of these critical practices rather than richly productive ones. (See the ex-
ample of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger—who incidentally stresses Latour’s affinities with Der-
rida—later in this essay.) Indeed, the turn he takes toward revisioning science studies
ontologically resonates in many respects with such a Heideggerian tradition. In my
view Whitehead and Heidegger have much in common, despite formidably different
styles and idioms. For a recent essay noting this turn to ontology in science studies, see
Casper Brunn Jensen, “A Nonhumanist Disposition: On Performativity, Practical On-
tology, and Intervention,” Configurations 12 (2004): 229–261.
Bono / A Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies 137
veloped philosophy of “organism.” While his philosophy drew upon

developments in mathematics and the sciences of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, Whitehead turned in Science
and the Modern World to the foundations of modern Western science
in the seventeenth century—his “Century of Genius”—to reveal the
assumptions that shaped the very ontological and metaphysical be-
liefs to which the modern world had become enthralled and against
which he would offer an alternative philosophical cosmology. Yet,
for Whitehead, however misplaced was the confidence exhibited by
the “New Science” in such fundamental assumptions, its shining
achievements in physics and mathematics nonetheless paved the
way for subsequent intellectual developments that formed the im-
mediate context for his own thought. More provocatively, he also
glimpsed in the seventeenth century the seeds of potentially coun-
tervailing tendencies. I would like to suggest that such countervail-
ing tendencies were stronger, more fully developed, and far more
substantially in evidence than Whitehead, and the Whiggish histo-
riography of the “scientific revolution” of his day, could possibly
have imagined.5
What Whitehead glimpsed is tellingly suggested by his brief re-
sponse to a passage from Sir Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) Silva sil-
varum. “It is certain,” Bacon claims, “that all bodies whatsoever,
though they have no sense, yet they have perception; for when one
body is applied to another, there is a kind of election to embrace that
which is agreeable, and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate;
and whether the body be alterant or altered, evermore a perception
4. Deleuze, in fact, appropriates and deploys Whitehead’s thought at a critical junc-

ture, which happens also to be focused upon a rereading of the seventeenth century
through a rereading of Leibniz and the Baroque. See “What Is an Event?” chap. 6 of
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 76–82. I am indebted to Bruno Bosteels for re-
minding me of Deleuze’s reliance on Whitehead. As I suggest below, Whitehead may
be considered with the likes of Darwin, Bergson, Deleuze, and Varela as a philosopher
of immanence. On Deleuze, see Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence
and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” in Between Deleuze and
Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), pp.
46–66.
5. The very idea of a “scientific revolution” has a complex twentieth-century history.
See in particular the essay by Roy Porter, “The Scientific Revolution: A Spoke in the
Wheel?” in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1986), pp. 290–316. The literature on the scientific revolution
is vast, and I shall not attempt to review it in this essay; see, however, H. Floris Cohen,
The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
138 Configurations
precedeth operation.”6 Bacon’s passing attribution of “perception”—

“taking account of”7 in Whitehead’s gloss—to ordinary bodies con-
tains the seeds of an alternative ontology to the emerging orthodoxy
enforced by the New Science of the seventeenth century. Thus,
Whitehead further remarks:
Bacon is outside the physical line of thought which finally dominated the
century. Later on, people thought of passive matter which was operated on ex-
ternally by forces. I believe Bacon’s line of thought to have expressed a more
fundamental truth than do the materialistic concepts which were then being
shaped as adequate for physics. We are now so used to the materialistic way of
looking at things, which has been rooted in our literature by the genius of the
seventeenth century, that it is with some difficulty that we understand the
possibility of another mode of approach to the problem of nature.8
We shall come back to alternative modes of understanding the

“problem of nature.” Whitehead’s chapter instead scrutinizes the
dominant mode of approaching nature championed by the new sci-
ence of the seventeenth century, in which Bacon’s fleeting voice was
all but lost. This dominant mode, Whitehead notes, regarded the
world as “a succession of instantaneous configurations of matter,” and it
is this disposition of matter—passive, inert matter—that so thor-
oughly characterizes for Whitehead “the famous mechanistic theory
of nature”: 9 what in the parlance of the more recent historiography
of the scientific revolution is called the “Mechanical Philosophy.”
Such passive, inert matter has indeed been a hallmark of the Me-
chanical Philosophy in the work of historians of science. We have
come to learn, since Whitehead’s day, precisely how imbricated that
view of matter was in emerging views of God’s power and sover-
p. 41 (emphasis added). This aspect of Bacon’s thought has, until recently, been almost
entirely neglected in favor of the common misreading of him as a mechanist and pre-
cursor of the likes of Robert Boyle. For an important reassessment of Bacon in the con-
text of the seventeenth-century tradition of living or working matter culminating in
William Harvey and Francis Glisson, see Guido Giglioni, “Matter and Appetite: Francis
Bacon as a Hylozoistic Thinker,” and idem, “The Darkness of Matter and the Light of
Nature: Notions of Matter in Bacon and Comenius and Their Theological Implica-
tions”; I thank Dr. Giglioni, who is preparing a new book on Bacon (“Francis Bacon’s
Metaphysics of Appetite”), for sharing these forthcoming essays with me. This tradi-
tion of vital materialism has been central to my own work on Harvey and the seven-
teenth century.
7. Whitehead, Science, p. 42.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 50 (emphasis added).
eignty in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic

Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Revisionist historians, opposing triumphalist narratives of the rise of
modern science as the product of (typically masculine and inher-
ently European) genius and its exercise of pure and objective reason,
have teased out not only the religious ideologies inherent in the
emerging orthodoxy of passive matter, but tellingly the social and
political discourses and implications associated with such views of
matter and attendant notions of God’s sovereignty and human
agency. Thus, for example, in the hands of revisionist historians of
science, acceptance of the new orthodoxy of passive matter (and
with it God’s independence from Nature) became the cornerstone of
the new sociopolitical order established by moderate, “latitudinar-
ian,” thinkers and gentlemen in Restoration England. This modern
settlement was regarded as the only viable antidote to the excesses of
radical Protestant sects of the preceding Puritan Revolution and
Commonwealth era. The latter had dared to claim religious and po-
litical autonomy—often leading, in practice or in the perfervid imag-
ination of their elite opponents, to antinomian social iconoclasm.
Such claims and behaviors were based upon the dual and inter-
meshing assertions of an active, divine-like matter that only the pi-
ous and divinely illumined followers of God’s true Word could come
to grasp and use for the benefit of humankind, and the legitimate
dominion of the elect over nature and society.10
10. Here, too, there is a large literature on the mechanical philosophy and its intellec-
tual, religious, and sociopolitical contexts, including waves of revisionist historiogra-
phy. I mention here but a handful of older and recent work as staring points for further
investigation: James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Na-
ture in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1995); Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way
in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gary B. Deason,
“Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God and Na-
ture: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lind-
berg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp.
167–191; Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Keith Hutchison, “Supernaturalism and the
Mechanical Philosophy,” History of Science 21 (1983): 297–333; J. E. McGuire, “Boyle’s
Conception of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 523–542; Margaret
Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency
and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Charles Webster, From
Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982).
140 Configurations
Without contesting the main lines of this revisionist account of

the religious, social, and cultural roots of changing views of nature
and natural philosophy, other historians—myself included—have
insisted upon the need for a more capacious and nuanced under-
standing of theories of matter during the scientific revolution.11 This
effort is of more than antiquarian interest. In the context of our un-
derstanding of Whitehead and the potential utility of his philosophy
for science studies today, a more complicated narrative suggests, I be-
lieve, both a broader context for Whitehead’s philosophy of organ-
ism and a set of discursive resources that may, alternatively, comple-
ment, supplement, and/or contest his claims.
More specifically, in the matter-theory of the seventeenth-century
physician, anatomist, and natural philosopher William Harvey
(1578–1657), we find an alternative to the mechanistic materialism
whose limits Whitehead seeks to reveal and overcome. While Har-
vey, typically noted as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood,
was the model used by Descartes for articulating his famously mech-
anistic account of the human body, Harvey’s own views were in fact
opposed to Descartes’s assumption of passive, inert matter. Harvey
was, rather, a pivotal figure in the emergence of what I call “vital ma-
terialism”—a term I use interchangeably with the more contempo-
raneous “actors’” categories of working or living matter, and by way
of contrast to the anachronistic term “vitalism,” a product of a later
period that has typically carried decidedly pejorative implications
since at least the nineteenth century.12
11. For example, Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10); Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus
Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991); John Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy:
Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory,” History of Science 24 (1986):
335–381; idem, “Robert Hooke, The Incongruous Mechanist,” in Robert Hooke: New
Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), pp.
149–180; Margaret J. Osler, “Whose Ends? Teleology in Early Modern Natural Philoso-
phy,” in Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions, ed. John Hedley Brooke, Mar-
garet J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, Osiris 16 (2001): 151–168. See also some of the
essays in Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, eds., Late Me-
dieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2001). As
noted earlier, Guido Giglioni has been working on theories of matter and life in the
work of such key figures as Francis Bacon, Francis Glisson, Johannes Baptista van Hel-
mont, Robert Boyle, and Leibniz.
12. See Don Bates, “Machina ex Deo: William Harvey and the Meaning of Instrument,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 577–593; Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10);
James J. Bono, “Reform and the Languages of Renaissance Theoretical Medicine: Har-
vey versus Fernel,” Journal of the History of Biology 23 (1990): 341–387; Walter Pagel,
William Harvey’s Biological Thought (Basel: Karger, 1967); idem, “William Harvey Revis-
ited” History of Science 8 (1969): 1–31 and 9 (1970): 1–41.
Harvey’s physiological and medical thought broke decisively from

ancient traditions, yet he adopted a view of Nature that ran counter
to the mechanistic worldview of his day. Despite speaking of the
heart as analogous to a pump, he did not think of it as a passive, in-
active mechanism. Rather, he viewed living organisms from a van-
tage point poised between two extreme and mutually opposing con-
ceptions: traditional animism and modern mechanism.
Animists thought of the body as a collection of organs—literally
instruments—that an immaterial soul activated and harmonized,
making use of such intermediary entities as faculties and spirits. By
contrast, mechanists like Descartes regarded the body as a machine
that needed no immaterial soul to run it.13 Both animism and mech-
anism agree, however, in regarding matter itself as passive. Thus, for
both, the body was devoid of any inherent activity immanent to
matter itself.
By contrast, Harvey argues for a view of matter as active. His fa-
mous book De motu cordis (1628) contends that the heart’s beating—
its pulsation—is not a phenomenon that the heart passively en-
dures, but rather a response that it actively produces.14 The heart
perceives and reacts to the “irritation” of the inrushing blood by ac-
tively contracting its muscle fibers to expel the blood. For Harvey,
living matter was inherently active, sentient, and reactive to what he
called irritation.15 Late in his life, he further articulated his belief in
active matter by criticizing the view that blood sustains life only be-
cause it has spirits added to it. Belief in such medical spirits was a
central part of Galenic medicine from antiquity through the Renais-
sance; with the sixteenth-century French physician Jean Fernel, it
became explicitly embedded in an animistic framework. Harvey’s
last book, On the Generation of Animals (De generatione animalium,
1651), ends with a devastating critique of Fernel.16 For Harvey, the
blood’s vitality and movement are inherent properties not due to ex-
ternal spirits added to it. Blood—together with the organic, living
13. René Descartes, Treatise on Man, French text with trans. by Thomas Steele Hall
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).
14. William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus
(Frankfurt: Fitzer, 1628).
15. Harvey refers to irritations and the active response to them by living matter in a
number of different passages in his works. For more details, see some of the works cited
in the notes below.
16. William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (London: Pulleyn, 1651).
On medical spirits, see James J. Bono, “Medical Spirits and the Medieval Language of
Life,” Traditio 40 (1984): 91–130; Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10). See the latter also
for the French physician Jean Fernel.
142 Configurations
matter it forms—is manifestly active: in Harvey’s famous formulation,

the blood “acts with a power superior to that of the elements.”17
The active nature of living matter—its ability, for example, to
sense (in Bacon and Whitehead’s terminology, “perceive”) and react
to irritation, as in the case of the heart’s active contraction, its pulse-
producing systole—is an innate characteristic of such matter. A char-
acteristic, in short, that is not imposed upon or added to it from out-
side. Moreover, this active nature of living matter is the result
precisely of the “originary matter’s” (i.e., blood’s) ability to “act with
a power superior to that of the elements.”
Whitehead had himself noted the constraints that traditional
mechanism had imposed on the understanding of “living organ-
isms,” going so far as to label such views “very unsuited to biology”
and thus precipitating “an insoluble problem of matter and life and
organism, with which biologists are now wrestling.”18 With Harvey
we encounter not so much an answer to the mechanist’s conception
of life—to which he was profoundly indifferent—as an alternative
tradition of framing questions of life and matter. Within this tradi-
tion, the organism was not an artifact, or epiphenomenon, of “a suc-
cession of instantaneous configurations of matter” that, for White-
head, marked seventeenth-century mechanism in both senses: as its
salient characteristic, and as its hubristic, and fatal, limitation.19
Rather, for this Harveian tradition of vital or working matter, living
matter was itself characterized by its temporal duration and dynamism:
vital, working matter was living matter only insofar as it exhibited
the various cyclical patterns—the circulation of the blood; the cycli-
cal patterns associated with generation—that sustain such matter as
organic and vital. Rather than a succession of temporally discrete—
passive and independent—individual states of matter, the living
organism was an inter- and intradependent pattern-producing whole
continually transforming itself20 in response to vital matter’s
17. Harvey, De generatione animalium (above, n. 16), p. 251: “Ad eundem pariter
modum, si sub fabulae involucro sanguinem alicui depingerem, lapidisque Philo-
sophici titulo insignirem, atque omnes ejus singulares dotes, operationes, ac facultates
aenigmatice proponerem; illum procul dubio pluris aestimaret; supra vires elemento-
rum agere facile crederet, corpusque illi aliud ac divinius non illibenter attribueret.”
19. Ibid., p. 50.
20. Key here is recognizing that, for Aristotle as for Harvey the Aristotelian, pattern—
or what Aristotle calls form—is in the case of living things not simply a configuration,
but in addition an active and transformative power (dynamis) that operates both to
produce/reproduce the essential pattern of a specific living thing (a kind, or species)
perception of itself and its immediate surrounds: in response, that is,

to internal and external irritation.21
This Harveian tradition of vital, working matter continued and
was extended through the work of his colleague and protégé, the
physician Francis Glisson (1598/99–1677)22, and culminates in such
late-eighteenth-century figures as the great physiologist Albrecht
von Haller (1708–1777), who advanced a theory of the irritability of
animal tissues; Denis Diderot; Julien Offray de la Mettrie; and the
great post-Revolutionary Parisian anatomist, Xavier Bichat, who for-
mulated a theory of vital tissues.
and to maintain it as a temporally emergent entity in face of change, the flux of its im-
mediate environment. [The key example Aristotle uses of form as dynamis is that of the
male semen and its role in generation. In Books 1 and 2 of his De generatio animalium,
Aristotle carefully analyzes the way in which generation occurs through the operation
of semen. He describes the operation of semen in numerous passages: e.g., the male
“begets the young animal simply by means of the dynamis residing in the semen”
(730a2–3); or again, “the semen of the male acts otherwise; in virtue of the dynamis
which it contains it causes the material and nourishment in the female to take on a
particular character” (730a13–16). (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. A. L.
Peck [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963], emphasis in original).] Thus,
by pattern I am assuming here not a fixed mold that can be conceived (as it was by a
number of seventeenth-century mechanists) as a sort of unchanging template that
might become the basis for passive, mechanical reproduction of a kind, but rather
what might be thought of as patterned activity that is inherently temporal and thus re-
sponsive to the temporal flux of things. Of course, for Aristotle and many of the
Greeks, form and patterned activity serve to define and identify precisely that which
perdures through changes, that which engages and yet domesticates the very flux of
things. Harvey’s notion of irritation (see following note) captures and extends such an
Aristotelian emphasis, wedding Aristotelian dynamism and the inherent power of pat-
terned transformation to the inherent ability of living matter to sense (without the me-
diation of nerves) and respond to direct irritation. For an illuminating discussion of
pattern and rhythm in both the ancient Greek and the ancient Chinese medical tradi-
tions, see Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek
and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), esp. chap. 2; Kuriyama cites Aris-
totle’s comment that “’rhythm is form’ (rhythmos schēma estin)” (p. 88).
21. For Harvey, irritation, and living matter see Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10), chap.
4, which is based upon idem, “Reform and the Languages of Renaissance Theoretical
Medicine” (above, n. 12). For the concepts of irritation and irritability, see Owsei
Temkin, “The Classical Roots of Glisson’s Doctrine of Irritation,” Bulletin of the History
of Medicine 38 (1964): 297–328; reprinted in idem, The Double Face of Janus (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 290–316.
22. See esp., Francis Glisson, Anatomia hepatis (London, 1654); idem, De ventriculo et in-
testinis (London/Amsterdam, 1677); and idem, De natura substantiae energetica (London,
1672). In addition to Temkin’s essay cited in the previous note, see Guido Giglioni,
“Anatomist Atheist? The ‘Hylozoistic’ Foundations of Francis Glisson’s Anatomical Re-
search,” in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole
Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 113–135.
144 Configurations
But such notions of irritable and perceptive matter also found

their way into some unexpected places. Perhaps most telling are the
echoes of this Harveian tradition of vital matter in the work of cer-
tain physicians and natural philosophers of mid-seventeenth-cen-
tury England usually identified as adherents to atomism and the me-
chanical philosophy: Henry Power, Nathaniel Highmore, and, most
strikingly, Walter Charleton.23 Indeed, a prime example is the well-
known Charleton, from whom Newton first learned about ancient
atomism and its affinity with seventeenth-century mechanism. As
we shall see later, the twentieth century, too, provides examples of
the action and agency of living matter—from developmental biol-
ogy to theories of immune networks—that suggest the value of ana-
lytic understanding of the production of scientific knowledge emerg-
ing from a radical (among others, Whiteheadian) rethinking of the
ontology of living systems.
Back to Whitehead, and Beyond

Whitehead contrasts the seventeenth-century “theory of materi-
alistic mechanism” with his own “theory of organic mechanism.”24
Without committing the historian’s mortal sin of reading the past as
inevitable precursor to the present, one can simply note that certain
features of the Harveian tradition of vital working matter are sharply
opposed to mechanistic materialism and, by contrast, exhibit preoc-
cupations that Whitehead, Bergson, and other twentieth-century
philosophical critics of traditional mechanism share to a greater or
lesser extent.25 Two points in Whitehead’s critique are worth noting
here. First, he regards the “spatialization” of matter26—of things in
the world—as an error (at least in the form that such spatialization
took in purely mechanistic accounts). More specifically, he regards
the assumption that nature is made of “stuff” that has “the property
of simple location in space”27 as problematic, leading to the “con-
23. Walter Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion (London,
1659); Nathaniel Highmore, The History of Generation (London, 1651); Henry Power, Ex-
perimental Philosophy (London, 1664). I am working on a monograph, “Instrument or
Mechanism? William Harvey, Industrious Bodies, and Vital Materialism in Seven-
teenth-Century England,” that will discuss the work of these and other figures.
24. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), pp. 50, 80.
25. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998); idem, Matter and
Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone
Books, 1991).
27. Ibid., p. 49.
clusion that the lapse of time is an accident, rather than of the

essence of the material.”28 Whitehead further teases out the implica-
tions of this conclusion:
The material is fully itself in any sub-period however short. Thus the transi-
tion of time has nothing to do with the character of the material. The mater-
ial is equally itself at an instant of time. Here an instant of time is conceived
as in itself without transition, since the temporal transition is the succession
of instants.29
The resulting notion of matter stemming from seventeenth-century

mechanistic materialism is guilty of “mistaking the abstract for the
concrete”:30 that is, of mistaking the abstract concept of “instanta-
neous material configurations”31 as the very definition of that most
concrete of the world’s furnishing, matter itself! Whitehead not only
regards this fundamental modern assumption as dubious, he further
suggests that its purely pragmatic value as a potentially useful ab-
straction has its limits—and serious ones at that:
It is at once evident that the concept of simple location is going to make great
difficulties for induction. For, if in the location of configurations of matter
throughout a stretch of time there is no inherent reference to any other times,
past or future, it immediately follows that nature within any period does not
refer to nature at any other period. . . . In other words, the order of nature can-
not be justified by the mere observation of nature. For there is nothing in the pre-
sent fact which inherently refers either to the past or to the future.32
This, at least, is what the concept of simple location implies.

The second point in Whitehead’s critique takes us back to his ear-
lier invocation of Bacon—a Bacon out of step with what was to be-
come the dominant viewpoint in this “century of genius.” In their
spatiality—receiving only external mechanical impulses from other
local configurations of matter—things, or events, in the world are,
within this horizon of the “theory of materialistic mechanism,” iso-
lated and without connection. This understanding of matter and
event suggests a static, if stable, order, and an unusually flattened
and monochromatic account of the world. What is missing is pre-
cisely an alternative mode of understanding the problem of nature
28. Ibid., p. 50.

29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 51.
31. Ibid., p. 50.
32. Ibid., p. 51 (emphasis added).
146 Configurations
that makes room for the connectedness, dynamism, and hence tem-
porality of things and events in the world.33 For Whitehead, I would
suggest, this is precisely an account in which bodies—as in Bacon—
take account of other bodies: that is to say, where bodies/matter ex-
hibit the property of “perception” and therefore the ability to be af-
fected by other bodies.
Four points regarding the discussion of Whitehead and seven-
teenth-century notions of matter are especially worth highlighting
at this stage in my argument:
· First: The Harveian tradition of vital, working matter resists any

simple reduction of living organisms to a horizon of spatiality: vi-
tal, working matter is neither passive nor determined by its “sim-
ple location in space” but rather, acting “with a power superior to
that of the elements,” it inscribes, and inhabits, a temporal mode
of relating—of being—in the world. Rather than a succession of
“instantaneous material configurations,” organisms are objects
whose stuff—vital matter—operates in patterned response to its
surrounds, both internal and external, to perdure, endure, and
project the present into a future.
33. For Whitehead, an event is a nexus of those most basic ontological units of the
world—what he calls “actual occasions” or “actual entities”—in which such actual oc-
casions are “inter-related in some determinate fashion” (Alfred North Whitehead,
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Don-
ald W. Sherburne [New York: Free Press, 1978], p. 80). Importantly, Whitehead’s actual
occasions constitute themselves, like events, as gatherings or relations and not as clas-
sical discrete and isolated objects. Hence, he adds to his definition of “event” the fol-
lowing: “An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member” (p.
73). Deleuze’s gloss on Whitehead is suggestive: “The event is a vibration with an in-
finity of harmonics or submultiples”; or again, emphasizing events as “infinite series”
in which “intrinsic properties” come to “now converg[e] toward limits, with the rela-
tion among limits establishing a conjunction” (Deleuze, The Fold [above, n. 4], p. 77).
This dynamism and connectedness of things and events in the world leads Whitehead
to emphasize, correspondingly, the active and thoroughly embodied nature of what
we, today, might call cognition in his important notion of the “withness” of the body:
“It is this withness that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of the cir-
cumambient world” (p. 81). Whitehead then goes on to explain that “for the organic
theory, the most primitive perception is ‘feeling the body as functioning.’ This is a feel-
ing of the world in the past; it is the inheritance of the world as a complex of feeling;
namely, it is the feeling of derived feelings”; even “the later, sophisticated perception”
that he terms presentational immediacy “begins with sense-presentation of the contem-
porary body. The body, however, is only a peculiarly intimate bit of the world. Just as
Descartes said, ‘this body is mine’; so he should have said, ‘this actual world is mine.’
My process of ‘being myself’ is my origination from my possession of the world” (p.
81). Here Whitehead’s thought converges with recent emphasis upon the gestural,
· Second: This characteristic of living things suggests that they are

conceived within the Harveian tradition not as isolated and static
entities within nature, but as inherently connected and dy-
namic—responsive to multiple objects and events. Harvey’s in-
cipient theory of irritation required a kind of living, working mat-
ter that was, therefore, able to take account of other bodies,
objects, events: vital matter capable of perception, or, in the
words of Walter Charleton (himself dependent upon Harvey’s
protégé Francis Glisson), having “a certain natural sense of feel-
ing, distinct from the animal [i.e., conscious sensation], and
wholly independent upon the brain.”34
· Third: With respect to the duration of living organisms and their

ability to take account of their world through a kind of noncog-
nitive perception, the Harveian tradition of vital matter provides
an alternative mode for understanding the problem of nature in
contradistinction to the “theory of materialistic mechanism”—an
alternative that stresses interdependence and relation and that
serves as a fitting resource and analog for a Whiteheadian “theory
of organic mechanism.”
· This discussion anticipates a direction that I shall return to below

in our consideration of Whitehead’s relevance for a contemporary
science studies: namely, that we consider carefully possible affini-
ties between his critique of mechanistic ontologies and those as-
pects of the cultural studies of science that base themselves on a
thoroughgoing challenge to traditional ontologies of scientific
practice—as, for example, in Andy Pickering’s insistence that “sci-
ence is not just about representation,” but rather that “the world
is filled not, in the first instance, with facts and observations, but
with agency.”35
Time, now, to begin our journey beyond the seventeenth century,
redirecting our attention to a different set of phenomena and con-
structs as aids to thinking about Whitehead, ontology, and science
studies.
embodied, and performative in science and mathematics in the work of Gilles

Châtelet, Brian Rotman, Kenneth Knoespel, and Sha Xin Wei, and in my own work on
performative and material metaphors.
34. Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition (above, n. 23), p. 124.
35. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6 (emphasis in original).
148 Configurations
II. The Road from Harvey to Varela

Having argued that the seventeenth century provides examples,
like William Harvey’s, of alternative ontologies stressing the tempo-
rality of bodies and their ability to be affected by others, I want to
explore certain implications of such ontologies first by touching
briefly upon Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy, and ulti-
mately by engaging more fully the cognitive network theory of im-
munology advanced by Francisco Varela and others during the
1980s and 1990s. On the way to Varela and immunology, however,
we shall first pause over the work of a key follower of Whitehead, C.
H. Waddington, whose exemplary work in theoretical biology sug-
gests a possible link between Whitehead’s perspective and that of
Varela. I take such a route in order to suggest both affinities with
Whitehead’s philosophy and ways in which Whitehead can help us
think about the very problems—the very limits of traditional frame-
works—provoked by ontologies like those of Cavendish and Varela
in their own different ways, contexts, and centuries.
Largely ignored until recently, we find in Cavendish echoes of
Harvey wedded to a generalized view of matter as perceptive. To re-
cap briefly, Harvey’s biological work on the blood, the heart, the
generation of animals, or, more broadly, living or working matter,
insists on retaining as fundamental Aristotle’s notion that the form
or substance of a living organism—that which defines what it is—is
identical with the very activity of that matter out of which the or-
ganism emerges and by which it is itself constituted. This activity,
Aristotle insists, is potentially, and then actually, that of a being con-
taining organs: in Greek, “instruments” (organoi). As such, the activ-
ity of an organism—what Aristotle calls the form or “entelechy” of
the body—is patterned, or purposeful, activity. Aristotle does NOT
mean to suggest that the organic body is purposeful in the sense that
it is directed and controlled by some external, nonmaterial, force or
goal. Rather, it is patterned activity to which organic matter—matter
of a certain sort—gives rise that is intrinsically, or inherently, purpo-
sive in the sense that such patterned activity always tends to gener-
ate configurations of form and function of a certain general, even
predictable, kind.
To this essentially Aristotelian perspective, Harvey adds his own
insight that, for living matter to exhibit such purposive, patterned
activity sustaining and promoting the very life of an individual or-
ganism and, ultimately, its continuation through the generation of
new offspring, such living matter must be endowed with the inher-
ent ability to react, or respond, to both internal and external provo-
cations. The term he uses—and may well have coined—is irritation:

living or working matter is uniquely capable of being irritated and re-
acting to such irritation. Indeed, for Harvey, much of the most signif-
icant activity of the organic body is generated in reaction to irritation
—for example, the flow of blood from the heart, which he redefined
as the expulsion of the blood from the irritated heart by its active sys-
tolic contraction. For Harvey, the ability to be irritated that he associ-
ated with living matter reveals an essential property of working mat-
ter itself: its inherent sensitivity, or more aptly, the ability of living,
organic matter to sense, or perceive, independently of the nerves—that
is, independently of what we would call the perceptual and cognitive
apparatus of the central nervous system, and what premodern Aris-
totelians would call the animal or psychic soul, or faculty of the soul.
Among those who embraced some notion of matter as perceptive,
or sensitive, was an early, forthright opponent of strict mechanism:
Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, at one time a coex-
ile with Charleton, Sir Kenelm Digby, and others in France. For
Cavendish, all of nature is self-knowing. Without such a property,
“there could be neither Order, nor Method, in Ignorant motion; nei-
ther would there be distinct kinds or sorts of Creatures.” Indeed, she
claims that “Nature being so exact . . . must needs be Self-knowing
and Perceptive.” To this general view of nature, she adds a distinc-
tion: inanimate parts of nature “are Self-knowing and Self-living;
yet, onely her Self-moving Parts have an active life, and a perceptive
knowledge.”36 Further, she insists that different kinds of creatures, and
even parts within the same creature, enjoy different forms of self-
knowledge and perception: “every particular part of one and the same
Creature, have varieties of knowledges, and Perceptions, because they
have varieties of actions.”37 Here it will be sufficient to note how
Cavendish has not only generalized self-knowing to all of nature, and
perception to all aspects of all animate creatures, but also links self-
knowing and perception to action: to the very ability of matter to act
and, beyond that, to the particularity of the specific actions necessary
and characteristic of different systems of matter and living things.38
With this in mind, let us shift scenes by several centuries.
36. [Margaret Cavendish] Duchess of Newcastle, Grounds of Natural Philosophy: . . . The
second Edition, much altered from the first, which went under the name of Philosophi-
cal and Physical Opinions (London: Maxwell, 1668), chap. 8, “Of Nature’s Knowledg, and
Perception,” p. 7.
37. Ibid., p. 18.
38. For more on Cavendish, including citation of important studies, see Deborah
Boyle, “Margaret Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy,” Configurations 12
(2004): 195–227.
150 Configurations
While Margaret Cavendish challenged the emerging mechanist

account of matter and natural phenomena in the seventeenth cen-
tury, Francisco Varela has in recent decades contributed to rethink-
ing the ontology and explanatory models associated with the bio-
logical and cognitive sciences through his often collaborative work,
including attempts to reconfigure theoretical biology itself. In his
work in theoretical biology, he seems to have recognized his affinity
with the great developmental biologist and devotee of Whitehead,
C. H. Waddington. Before I turn to Varela (and finally to Whitehead
and his significance for contemporary science studies), let me ex-
plore by way of Waddington some of the features of Whitehead’s
philosophy of organism that resonate with, and have been produc-
tive for, biological theorizing about the complex phenomena of liv-
ing things in the twentieth century.
III. C. H. Waddington, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism, and

Ontology
In a 1975 book, The Evolution of an Evolutionist, the renowned em-
bryologist and developmental biologist C. H. Waddington testified
to the utility of a Whiteheadian perspective in face of the complex-
ity of living systems.39 Waddington had utilized Whitehead’s ontology
in formulating key concepts and delineating important biological
phenomena in his own scientific work. Capital among such concepts
is his notion of canalization. As Evelyn Fox Keller reminds us,
Canalization was a term Waddington had borrowed from his reading of Alfred
North Whitehead, and the concept clearly accorded with much of his own
prewar thinking about “epigenetic landscapes.” But it was only after the war
that he began to envision the possibility of a theoretical account of such char-
acteristic features of biological organization. An explanation of “developmen-
tal canalization,” he wrote, requires supplementing conventional gene theory
with an “epigenetic theory”—one in which discrete and separate entities of
classical genetics would be displaced by collections of genes which could “lock
in” development through their interactions. In other words, an account of de-
velopmental stability needs to be sought in the complex system of reactions
that make up the developmental process.40
39. C. H. Waddington, The Evolution of an Evolutionist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1975).
40. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2000), p. 118. Whitehead’s impact on a number of important developmental bi-
ologists, who as a group included Waddington, is discussed by Donna J. Haraway, Crys-
tals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biol-
ogy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Haraway also discusses Waddington’s
concept of canalization (pp. 59–61).
Canalization supported Waddington’s insistence upon the cen-

trality of epigenetic biological phenomena in the development of or-
ganisms. As a concept, epigenesis has its roots in the biological
works of Aristotle, who emphasized the emergence of organic struc-
tures in newly generated living things out of an undifferentiated ma-
terial substance transformed by the patterned activity—the specific
heat and motion—of the male semen, as opposed to the preexis-
tence of discrete if minute parts in the matter contributed respec-
tively by male and female parents to their offspring. The latter view,
in its extreme form, was later known as preformationism, often car-
icatured in images of a tiny animal contained within the fertilized
egg at conception.41 At issue in the environment of twentieth-cen-
tury genetics is whether one regards the action of genes as a new
kind of preformationism, where embryological development is
likened to the mere mechanical unfolding of preexistent or prede-
termined parts, or, rather, considers the extent to which develop-
ment entails complex epigenetic interactions and transformations of
matter that are not contained in, prescribed by, or in any sense pre-
programmed and thus exhaustively determined by the genetic ma-
terial. It is in this sense—and this sense only—that epigenetic inter-
actions and transformations of matter might be considered
“beyond” or “in addition to” that which is contained in or con-
trolled by the genetic material of the cell. Thus, in Waddington’s
case, he highlights epigenetic processes through which complex in-
teractions of members of a species with their environments shaped
not only their immediate individual organic responses to stimuli,
but, more significantly, promoted the canalization of developmental
processes.
Canalization favored specific pathways in individuals; for
Waddington, the phenomenon of canalization is critical to under-
standing evolution, as it forces the reconceptualization of classic,
mechanistic gene-action and its seeming restriction of change to
random mutation and selection. Waddington noted how the selec-
tion of specific developmental pathways was initially “switched on”
by direct environmental stimuli. Canalization, he insists, eventually
leads to selection of those very same pathways in the developmental
processes of later generations prior to, and quite independently of,
the original environmental switches that had precipitated such de-
velopmental pathways in earlier generations. Through canalization,
41. For epigenesis, preformationism, and related biological notions, see the funda-
mental classic work by Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French
Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson, trans. Robert Ellrich (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1997).
152 Configurations
phenotypic variation—the very history of the organism itself—em-

beds itself in, channels, and comes to be expressed through the
evolving regulatory apparatus associated with the organism’s genes
without awakening the ghost of Lamarckism as monstrous night-
mare. In this view, the genetic constitution of an organism operates
less as a set of independent, atomistic units—and most emphatically
not as fixed and isolated units—than as an interconnected system:
one that takes account of genetic-developmental systems as a whole
and their environments. Echoing Whitehead once again, we might
say that Waddington’s notion of canalization and his characteriza-
tion of epigenetic developmental systems, in relation to both envi-
ronment and genes, refigures genes, themselves as dynamically and
temporally emergent, as process-embedded concrescences constituting
genes as actual entities enrolled within nested systems or nexu-s—
genetic, environmental, regulatory—which they constantly and se-
lectively prehend.42
For the most part, these Whiteheadian echoes remain implicit in
Waddington’s carefully measured descriptions of such systems and
in his theoretical accounts of canalization. Yet, in “An Autobio-
graphical Note,” he eloquently describes his affinity with White-
head’s ontology and defends its importance for theoretical biology.
As an advanced undergraduate, Waddington confesses, he “paid
much more attention” to Whitehead than to scientific textbooks:
Whitehead “suggested new lines of thought” as an alternative to a
“science dominated by essentially Newtonian conceptions of bil-
liard-ball atoms existing in durationless instants in an otherwise
empty three-dimensional space.”43 Yet, such clear evidence of
Waddington’s embrace of Whitehead’s critique of seventeenth-cen-
tury mechanistic materialism in the latter’s Science and the Modern
World is far from the most interesting or telling instance of his com-
mitment to Whitehead’s perspective.
Waddington’s adaptation of Whitehead’s metaphysics is pro-
found; he shows us precisely how and why Whitehead provides
fundamental resources for thinking and doing biology. Most impor-
tantly for the purpose of illustrating connections among seven-
teenth-century living matter, Varela and immunology, and White-
42. Waddington, Evolution of an Evolutionist (above, n. 39). See esp. chap. 3, “Canal-
ization of Development and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters,” pp. 16–22, where
Waddington nicely illustrates canalization as an interactive process with extended dis-
cussion of one example: the transformation of callosities on the skin of certain parts of
ostriches from environmentally switched to canalized developmental pathways.
43. C. H. Waddington, “An Autobiographical Note,” in Evolution of an Evolutionist
(above, n. 39), pp. 1–11; quotations from pp. 3, 4, 3–4.
head, Waddington testifies to the importance of a number of specific

features of Whitehead’s thought. Among these are an insistence
upon the “unity” and “duration in time” of an “occasion of experi-
ence,” and the “infinite and undenumerable” content of such an oc-
casion. Of course, the very capaciousness of an “occasion of experi-
ence,” as here noted, entails the “arbitrary and artificial” nature of
human attempts to analyze it. Such analysis, that is, involves isola-
tion of one or more “component parts,” a gesture that unavoidably
“injures” the integrity of such “occasions,” which exist in the world
as inherently interconnected, indeed as a nexus of relations and as
processes, rather than as discrete objects in the classical sense of this
term.44 Yet, such analysis and isolation is necessary, indeed ab-
solutely required, of the scientist, forming the very basis for produc-
ing scientific practices and hence knowledge: without such gestures,
the work of science could not proceed and paralysis would ensue. (I
shall return to this point and its significance for a Whitehead-in-
spired science studies praxis in the final section of this article.) The
real “sin” of the scientist is not the engaging in such an arbitrary
practice; quite to the contrary, such practice must be embraced in all
of its genuine positivity. Rather, the sin is the failure to appreciate
that the very power of knowledge—of scientific knowledge—is in-
trinsically bound up with just such tentative and provisional isola-
tion of occasions of experience out of the rich world of things
(events) to which they are linked in multiple and temporally evolv-
ing ways.45 Such a failure becomes consequential only when, and if,
we are lulled—or is it seduced?—into regarding our provisional
(though necessary) gestures in defining objects (for example, the
gene) as components of events in the world, as more than useful
tools for producing real knowledge of those webs of relations that
constitute things in the world, including such nexūs of actual enti-
ties as individual living organisms.
The subtlety of Waddington’s thinking as a theoretical biologist
reflecting upon the experimental and conceptual groundwork of
44. Ibid., p. 4.
45. Elsewhere Waddington notes that “in doing science we have, on the one hand, to
try to formulate simple objects which express the most important causal relations be-
tween events, but at the same time we have to ensure that these objects include (as
sub-objects) as many as possible of all those involved in the event. The thrust of White-
head’s thought is not to simplify unduly; every time you ‘reduce’ you leave something
out, and scientific ideas are richer and nearer to nature the less that has had to be omit-
ted in order to reach them” (C. H. Waddington, “Whitehead and Modern Science,” in
Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr., and
David Ray Griffin [Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978], pp. 143–146,
on p. 143 (emphasis in original).
154 Configurations
developmental biology, genetics, and evolution can be located

precisely in his ability to negotiate such traps. That is to say, by ap-
preciating “concepts” or “theories” as Whiteheadian “lures for
feeling”46 in their very positivity, he is able to reactivate concepts
(such as the gene), to move beyond mere frozen, abstract chimeras
(“the dark shimmer”47 of things) suspended in timeless space, and
thus to glimpse the temporally emergent systematicity of relations
“prehended” by and in “events.”48 As in the case of canalization, this
Whiteheadian ontological “feeling” for the world leads Waddington
to resist understandings of development in organisms as pro-
grammed—that is, as merely unfolding in successive moments of
time—and, instead, to grasp development as a dynamic process in
which the totality of prehended relations (internal and external, ge-
netic, physiologic, and environmental) are gathered together, vari-
ously taken account of, and temporally expressed in the epigenetic
constitution of the living organism itself.49
Waddington himself expresses this Whiteheadian perspective
clearly and succinctly:
46. See, for example, Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), pp. 184–185.
47. I borrow this phrase from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,
vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 157.
48. For Whitehead and the event, see n. 33 above. Prehensions, for Whitehead, are
fundamental features of experience: “The ultimate facts of immediate experience are
actual entities, prehensions, and nexu-s” (Whitehead, Process [above, n. 33], p. 20). In
his philosophy of organism, “each ultimate unit of fact”—what he terms actual entities
or actual occasions—comprising experience “is exhibited as appropriating, for the foun-
dation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises”
(p. 219). Whitehead’s prehensions are precisely those “process[es] of appropriation of a
particular element” that, in effect, gather up selectively elements of the universe relevant
to completing the subjective unity of an emergent actual occasion (p. 219).
49. Thus, regarding development itself, Waddington states: “When the developing sys-
tem is disturbed it returns not to the state it was at when the disturbance occurred, but
to some later part of the stabilized pathway of change. The stabilized pathway of
change is named a ‘chreod,’ and the whole system of chreods in a complex developing
system such as an egg gives rise to an ‘epigenetic landscape.’” Moreover, placing such
complex developing systems within an evolutionary context, he suggests that “if one
approaches the problems of evolution with a similar readiness to accept that the
process may essentially involve very numerous components, one again comes out with
a set of questions which are characteristically Whiteheadian rather than present-day
orthodox. For instance, one admits that in much of evolution (probably all above the
bacteria), evolutionary changes involve enormous numbers of genes, rather than a se-
lection of one or two particular genes. . . . It reduces to very small proportions, almost
negligible, in fact, the importance of the element of chance mutation” (Waddington,
“Whitehead and Modern Science” [above, n. 45], p. 144).
Definiteness of the Whiteheadian objects in an event implies that, although

the event has some relation to everything else past or present in the universe,
these relations are brought together and tied up with one another in some
particular and specific way characteristic of that event. . . . For this tying-to-
gether of universal references into knots with individual character, Whitehead
used various different phrases at different periods in the development of his
thought. . . . [for example,] when he spoke of the coming together of the con-
stituent factors in an event as a “concrescence.” Later, he described the way in
which an event here and now incorporates into itself some reference to every-
thing else in the universe as a “prehension” of these relations by the event in
accordance with its own “subjective feeling.” . . . As far as scientific practice is
concerned, the lessons to be learned from Whitehead were not so much de-
rived from his discussions of experiences, but rather from his replacement of
“things” by processes which have an individual character which depends on
the “concrescence” into a unity of very many relations with other processes.50
Such an outlook had a profound effect upon Waddington. Starting

with his “deeply ingrained conviction that the evolution of organisms
must really be regarded as the evolution of developmental systems,”51
he goes on to confess that “my particular slant on evolution—a most
unfashionable emphasis on the importance of the developing
phenotype—is a fairly direct derivative from Whiteheadian-type
metaphysics” and that “my approach to experimental epigenesis was
again strongly influenced by Whiteheadian metaphysics.”52
Nowhere was Waddington more convinced of the need for a rad-
ical rethinking of the ontological premises of biology than in genet-
ics itself. “The theoretical structure of the subject,” he insists, “needed
a good deal of attention”; and it was here for Waddington that “the
Whiteheadian approach came in.”53 Why did he cling to this convic-
tion, and what precisely was at stake? The answer has to do with the
need to understand the relationship between the “activities of
genes” and how the “potencies” identified by embryological theories
develop into specific organs and organ systems.54 For Waddington,
the belief that developmental mechanisms—indeed, development it-
self—could be understood on the assumption “favored by most ge-
neticists” that the genes acted atomistically, that it was largely a mat-
50. Waddington, “Autobiographical Note” (above, n. 43), pp. 4–5.

51. Ibid., p. 7.
52. Ibid., p. 8.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
55. Ibid., p. 9.
156 Configurations
ter of activating single genes, was wholly inadequate.55 Despite the

seeming success of such classical views of the gene through the
mid–1970s (when he wrote his autobiographical note), he insists
that such a model had from the start serious deficiencies when faced
with phenomena that the “epigeneticist” sought to interrogate.56 As
a result, he explains his search for an alternative model:
In the cells of higher organisms we are not usually, if ever, confronted by the
switching on or off of single genes. What we find is a whole complex cell be-
coming either a nerve or a kidney or a muscle cell. In the late thirties I began
developing the Whiteheadian notion that the process of becoming (say) a
nerve cell should be regarded as the result of the activities of large numbers of
genes, which interact together to form a unified “concrescence.”57
Waddington recounts how his early “preoccupation” with the
“nature of the switches” in connection with the problem of “’em-
bryonic induction’” led him to conclude that the “specificity” of
such switches to “recognize particular genes” must “reside inside the
cells which react to induction.”58 Yet, he now confesses that,
if I had been more consistently Whiteheadian, I would probably have realized
that the “specificity” involved does not need to lie in the switch at all, but
may be a property of the “concrescence” and the ways in which it can change.
Because of course what I have been calling by the Whiteheadian term “con-
crescence” is what I have later called a chreod, a notion which Rene Thom has
explicated; and the switches are Thom’s catastrophes. The specificity need not
be in what precipitates the catastrophe, but could reside only in the possible
stable regimes . . . into which the system could be flipped.59
In effect, Waddington articulates a view that would shift emphasis

from individual genes and cells—and their successive states as re-
spectively switched or unswitched—to the temporally changing
gathering or tying together of a multiplicity of relations into alter-
native configurations that mark a dynamic system, one in which ac-
tual entities take account of their world.60 Here, I shall suggest in the
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid. (emphasis added).
58. Ibid., p. 10.
59. Ibid. (emphasis in original). See also n. 49 above for chreods.
60. Waddington asserts: “from the Whiteheadian point of view one has to recognize
that the evolving events—actual animals and plants as we meet them in real life—are
influenced by environmental factors as well as genetic. Further, all things above a very
low level of evolution play some role, active or passive, in deciding what environmen-
tal influences will act selectively on their populations. All this produces a much more
interactive theory of evolution than the conventional ‘chance and necessity.’ . . . We
next section, we may see differences in the theoretical articulation of

complex biological phenomena and systems analogous to the differ-
ences we find in the clonal selection theory, with its mechanistic ex-
planation of immune specificity, as contrasted to the alternative cog-
nitive network theory of Varela and his collaborators, with its
juxtaposition of a temporally emergent, historically sedimented,
Central Immune System and a crudely reactive Peripheral Immune
System.
In fact, Waddington suggests that developmental and evolution-
ary systems might well be thought of as interacting networks that in
some sense involve information exchanges and, hence, something
like what Varela means by a cognitive network. Considering the re-
cent history of his own discipline, Waddington notes intriguingly
that “the next stage was to accept that in many entities we have to
consider a large number of interacting components, and processes of
cause-effect which are not simply linear, but may interest [sic: “in-
teract”?] either by being linked into networks, or by various types of
feed-back interaction, positive or negative, and so on.”61 Such systemic
interactive processes have been variously referred to under such
rubrics as “organizing relations,” “systems theory,” and “cybernetics.”
Here Waddington gestures toward “information theory,” but
tellingly dissociates his own view of information and its role in or-
ganisms from what he regards as impoverished and biologically in-
adequate definitions of information proposed by Claude Shannon
and Warren Weaver in the 1940s and 1950s. Insofar as the concept
of information may be linked with processes exhibiting biological
specificity (again, compare to immunological specificity and Varela’s
account in the next section), the problem with traditional informa-
tion theory, as Waddington sees it, is its articulation of specificity as
“inactive specificity.”62 The alternative to Shannon and Weaver’s
are dealing in fact with a Whiteheadian type of interacting network, rather than a
straightforward linear sequence of cause and effect of the classical materialist kind”
(Waddington, “Whitehead and Modern Science” [above, n. 45], p. 144).
61. Ibid., p. 145.
62. Ibid. (emphasis in original). For an account of the development of theories of in-
formation focusing on Shannon and Weaver, the Macy Conferences, and their impact
in the decades after 1950, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999). For more specifically on the appropriation and deployment of information
within the biological sciences of the second half of the twentieth century, see Lily E.
Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the
World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). Waddington provides a very inter-
158 Configurations
theory preferred by Waddington is one that gives to information the-

ory, to computing, and to the discourse of the program in biological
systems a decidedly Whiteheadian spin—one that emphasizes neither
fixity nor strict determinism, but (quite to the contrary) transforma-
tive action and process. Thus, Waddington notes approvingly the dis-
placement of Shannon and Weaver’s theory of information
from the centre of scientific thought by theories which are concerned with ac-
tive rather than inactive specificity. These are theories of Instructions (Au-
tomata Theory) or Programming. These have been of course, specially devel-
oped in relation to computers, but they deal with interactions in terms of
something which resembles information in that it is not material, but differs
from it in that it does not merely describe a state, as does information, but
both describes a process and, further, instructs that this process should be
done. It is in terms of vectors, not of scalars.
For vectors were the basis of Whitehead’s ideas of prehensions. . . . White-
head always thought of interactions as (a) involving something much more gen-
eral than the physical forces contemplated in classical dynamics, involving in
fact specificities akin to those contemplated in Information Theory, but (b) al-
ways as active ingredients of processes. That makes them very similar to the ba-
sic components of recent ideas about Automata Theory and Programming.
Whitehead had to go one degree further. He was concerned with the orga-
nization of specific character: every event reacts with every other, but not with
all aspects of every other. . . . Whitehead came to express this notion by say-
ing that the prehension of one event A for another event B was according to
the “Subjective Aim” of A, and instead of “prehensions” he began using the
word “feelings.”63
Here we come full circle. Seventeenth-century notions of vital, or

living, matter in the tradition of Harvey, Glisson, Charleton, and
Cavendish point toward features like irritation, perception, and sen-
sation as akin to Whitehead’s prehensions. Through the ability of
such features of things (whether organisms in the restricted biologi-
cal sense, or understood more broadly as “actual occasions”) to se-
lectively take account of their world, organisms not only exhibit
esting synopsis and critique of information theory in C. H. Waddington, “The Process

Theory of Evolution and Notes on the Evolution of Mind,” in Cobb and Griffin, Mind
in Nature (above, n. 45), pp. 27–31, esp. pp. 29–31.
63. Waddington, “Whitehead and Modern Science” (above, n. 45), p. 145 (emphasis
in original). Note the similarity of Waddington’s emphasis here—on the evolution of
Whitehead’s terminology in the direction of a sustained emphasis on feeling as funda-
mental to prehension and to concrescence—to that of the earlier cited passage from his
“Autobiographical Note” (see n. 50 for reference to this passage).
feelings in the Whiteheadian sense of the term, but manifest, as a

form of what Francisco Varela would subsequently call “enaction,”64
the temporal, historical, and interactive nature of living things as
fundamental features of their own. With Waddington—and, by im-
plication, with Varela and his collaborators, as we shall see below—
we may trace a vector gathering together living matter, develop-
mental processes, cognitive systems, and immune networks passing
through Whitehead’s process philosophy.65
64. “Enaction” is a term coined by Varela and his collaborators. As Hayles presents it,
in moving beyond earlier autopoietic theory articulated under the influence of his
mentor and coauthor, Humberto Maturana, Varela came to address as central to theo-
retical biology problems side-stepped by the former theory: “Although autopoietic the-
ory implicitly privileges embodiment in its emphasis on actual biological processes, it
has little to say about embodied action as a dynamic force in an organism’s develop-
ment. It is precisely this point that is richly elaborated by Varela and his co-authors in
their concept of enaction. Enaction sees the active engagement of an organism with
the environment as the cornerstone of the organism’s development. The difference in
emphasis between enaction and autopoiesis can be seen in how the two theories un-
derstand perception. Autopoietic theory sees perception as the system’s response to a
triggering event in the surrounding medium. Enaction, by contrast, emphasizes that
perception is constituted through perceptually guided actions, so that movement
within an environment is crucial to an organism’s development. As Varela further ex-
plained . . . , enaction concurs with autopoiesis in insisting that perception must not
be understood through the viewpoint of a ‘pre-given, perceiver-independent world.’
Whereas autopoietic theory emphasizes the closure of circular processes, however, en-
action sees the organism’s active engagement with its surroundings as more open-
ended and transformative” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman [above, n. 62], pp.
155–156). Waddington, employing the ontological perspective enunciated by White-
head, can plausibly be seen as himself articulating an understanding of biological de-
velopment—the manner of an organism’s being-in-the-world as prehending and feel-
ing actual entity—that might be thought of as enaction, avant la lettre! Such a
Whiteheadian perspective embedded in the very ontological assumptions of Wadding-
ton’s theoretical biology may account, then, for Waddington’s status as a hero in biol-
ogy for Varela (see below).
65. In concluding this section, it may be of interest to note two coincidences of
Waddington’s biography. His professional life, in a sense, was bracketed by a pair of in-
complete historical-philosophical projects: on the one hand, he reports having written
an unpublished essay on “The Vitalist-Mechanist Controversy and the Process of
Abstraction” in 1928; and, in June 1974, at a Rockefeller Foundation symposium in
Bellagio, he confessed his intention to “write a book about Whitehead.” While discre-
tion dictated the fate of the first essay and Waddington’s subsequent strategy to deploy
“vitalist”—more properly, neither mechanist nor vitalist (in the pejorative sense), but
something akin to “organicist”—and Whiteheadian outlooks pragmatically and im-
plicitly, rather than overtly, the second project met the fate of common humanity:
Waddington died the very next year. See Waddington, “Autobiographical Note”
(above, n. 43), pp. 10–11; idem, “Whitehead and Modern Science” (above, n. 45), p.
143.
160 Configurations
IV. Varela, Immune Networks, and Whitehead

While Whitehead never considered immune networks, and
Varela, as far as I know, never refers to Whitehead, there is good rea-
son to think of and with them together. Here Waddington provides
a tantalizing link: reinforcing conceptual and analytic similarities in
their ontological commitments, he suggests a perhaps more direct
connection between Varela and Whitehead. In the introduction to a
volume coedited by Varela, entitled Thinking about Biology, Varela
notes as his prime example of a hero in biology none other than
Waddington himself, whose name graces the conference series out of
which the edited volume emerged: the Waddington Conferences in
Theoretical Biology.66 Evelyn Fox Keller notes in her recent book that,
“as a committed follower of Alfred North Whitehead, [Waddington]
was a perennial critic of what he referred to as ‘the genetical theory
of genes,’ seeking throughout his life to supplement that theory with
a more dynamic and process-oriented ‘epigenetic theory.’”67 Varela’s
own cognitive network model of the immune system follows directly
in the footsteps of Waddington and Whitehead.
Although chiefly associated with revisioning the cognitive- and
neuro-sciences, Varela and his colleagues have also formulated in-
novative, and dauntingly complex, models of the immune system.
In particular, following in the footsteps of the great Danish immu-
nologist Niels Jerne, Varela has challenged the hegemony of the late
twentieth century’s dominant model—clonal selection theory—with
his own account of a network theory of the immune system.68
66. Wilfred D. Stein and Francisco J. Varela, “Thinking about Biology: An Introductory
Essay,” in Thinking about Biology, ed. Stein and Varela (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1993), pp. 1–13, on pp. 2, 5.
67. Keller, Century of the Gene (above, n. 40), p. 78.
68. See esp. Alfred I. Tauber, “Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood,” Science in Con-
text 8 (1995): 579–607. For further discussion of immunology, see idem, The Immune
Self: Theory or Metaphor? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Alfred I.
Tauber and Scott H. Podolsky, The Generation of Diversity: Clonal Selection Theory and the
Rise of Molecular Immunology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Anne-
Marie Moulin and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Singular Selves: Historical Issues and Con-
temporary Debates in Immunology (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001); Thomas Söderqvist, Sci-
ence as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003); idem, “Darwinian Overtones: Niels K. Jerne and the Origin of the Selection The-
ory of Antibody Formation,” Journal of the History of Biology 27 (1994): 481–529; Henri
Atlan and Irun R. Cohen, eds., Theories of Immune Networks (Berlin: Springer, 1989);
Irun R. Cohen, Tending Adam’s Garden: Evolving the Cognitive Immune Self (Amsterdam:
Elsevier, 2000); A. David Napier, The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alien-
ating World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Clonal selection theory in its bare outlines is elegantly simple. It

proposes an uncomplicated mechanism for understanding how the
immune system is able to discriminate what is the self and what is
non-self: that is, to determine which molecular substances are for-
eign and therefore require action. The specific action taken by the
immune system is, of course, the production of antibodies specifi-
cally targeted against antigens identified as non-self in origin. How
does antibody production occur, and what accounts for the speci-
ficity and selectivity of the immune system’s response? Clonal selec-
tion theory answers these questions by supposing that the problem
of antibody production and the specificity of immune response are a
matter of selection: an antigen simply selects highly specific lym-
phocytes—antibody-producing cells—from a preexisting population
of such lymphocytes. How does this selection take place? Here is
where the simplicity and power of clonal selection theory shines
through: antigens select lymphocytes by virtue of the fact that the
external geometrical configuration of the antigen matches that of
the binding sites on the exterior wall of only certain lymphocytes.
The selective binding of antigens with specific kinds of lymphocytes
switches on those very same lymphocyte cells to produce clones of
themselves. The result of such selective antigen binding is the mass
production of antibodies produced by these specific lymphocytes,
which then bind with, and in effect neutralize, precisely those for-
eign antigens that initiated the attack in the first place: what is
known as the “immune response.”69
Clonal selection theory thus hinges upon the adoption, and adap-
tation, of a familiar “lock and key” mechanism common enough in
modern molecular biology, part of a paradigm for thinking about
molecular switching mechanisms that Waddington and other biolo-
gists frequently encountered. In effect, the theory translates a com-
plex problem of recognizing, remembering, and responding appro-
priately to traces of self and other into a mechanical process in
which the salient properties of matter are geometrical and, hence,
spatial. Once again, we find—as Whitehead found in the mech-
anistic materialism of the seventeenth century—a spatially isolated
“succession of instantaneous configurations of matter,” rather than
processes exhibiting dynamism, connectedness, and temporality.70
For Whitehead, of course, spatiality is a feature of our world, of
69. This paragraph depends upon the historical and conceptual analysis of clonal se-
lection theory provided by Tauber, “Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood” (above, n.
68) In general, I am indebted to Tauber’s work and others cited in the previous note.
162 Configurations
actual entities, and of the possible experiences of such actual occa-

sions as, for example, when they group themselves through the per-
formance of some common function into a nexus.71 The point is not
that he simply privileges temporality over spatiality in some polariz-
ing fashion (he does not), but that his philosophy of organism re-
gards the classical view of things as “instantaneous configurations of
matter” as an impoverished abstraction resting upon an inadequate
interpretation of “space” that does violence to the concrete experi-
ence of actual occasions.72 Thus, for Whitehead, space and spatiality
are themselves experienced concretely as connected and dynamic:
they are not mere abstractions.73
Varela’s construction of the immune system seeks to acknowledge
and account for precisely those features that are highly suggestive of
such dynamism, connectedness, and temporality. Specifically, he has
in mind “systemic global immune properties such as learning, mem-
ory and self-assertion”—let me note that one must add “tolerance”
as well—“properties,” he goes on to say, “that find no clonal expla-
nation.”74 These global properties are not rooted in simple clonal se-
lection mechanisms, but rather belong to “true immune networks”
defining the “molecular composition of ‘self’” in relation to the “di-
versity of [lymphocyte] repertoires embodying the immunological
history of the individual.”75 Thus, the salient features of the immune
system for Varela cannot be defined in terms of stable and spatially
isolated configurations of matter, but instead embody a dynamically
71. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 201.
72. Note Whitehead’s remark: “This simple location of instantaneous material config-
urations is what Bergson has protested against, so far as it concerns time and so far as
it is taken to be the fundamental fact of concrete nature. He calls it a distortion of na-
ture due to the intellectual ‘spatialisation’ of things. I agree with Bergson in his protest:
but I do not agree that such distortion is a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehen-
sion of nature. I shall in subsequent lectures endeavour to show that this spatialisation
is the expression of more concrete facts under the guise of very abstract logical con-
structions. There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the ab-
stract for the concrete” (Whitehead, Science {above, n. 6}, pp. 50–51). For a recent crit-
icism of notions of spatiality by an otherwise sympathetic reader of Bergson, see
Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” in Becomings: Explo-
rations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. idem (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1999), pp. 15–28, esp. pp. 22 ff.
73. See the section on “Spatiality” (pp. 116–124) in Ron L. Cooper, Heidegger and
Whitehead: A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 120–121.
74. Francisco J. Varela and Antonio Coutinho, “Immune Networks: Getting on to the
Real Thing,” Research in Immunology 140 (1989): 837–845, on p. 837.
75. Ibid., pp. 837–838.
emergent and constantly evolving network of relations marked by

global connectedness—systematicity—whose features are the unique
product of an individual’s history. A history, I might add, that itself
intersects and interacts with other entities and histories.
To explore the richness and complexity of the immune system,
Varela and his colleagues have elaborated Jerne’s suggestion of a net-
work model. The true power of immune networks, they claim, has
not been realized due to misapplication of the network model for
the exclusive “study of clonal immune responses.”76 Instead, Varela
has insisted that the model of an immune network chiefly applies to
what he and his colleagues term the Central Immune System (CIS)
rather than the Peripheral Immune System (PIS). The latter, the PIS,
constitutes a simple defense system against “’non-self’ molecular
patterns”: this is the classical clonal selection system in which lym-
phocytes not integrated into the immune network as such circulate
freely; when they encounter antigens not recognized as part of the
(self-) network, these resting or unactivated lymphocytes are turned
on (remember the lock-and-key mechanism!) to produce the classic
immune response.77
By contrast, the CIS is a true network. Within this network we
find free immunoglobins (that is, antibodies composed of immuno-
globin molecules) and activated lymphocytes. Indeed, the lympho-
cytes of the CIS are activated precisely because (if I understand this
model correctly) they are reactive to so-called self-molecules. This re-
activity takes the form of recruiting such lymphocytes into the in-
terconnected CIS network itself. In other words, out of the vast num-
ber of different lymphocyte cells regularly produced in the body,
those that are activated by self-molecules—those that display what
Varela calls auto-reactivities—discover and forge links to other lym-
phocytes, thus forming an ever-evolving (usually expanding) im-
mune network displaying a high degree of connectivity. As Antonio
Coutinho, Varela, and their colleagues put it:
Once positively selected by activation, lymphocytes acquire effector-func-
tions, and, as a consequence, the selective processes become recursive, leading
76. Ibid., p. 837.

77. Ibid., p. 838; and Antonio Coutinho, Francisco Varela, et al., “The Dynamics of Im-
mune Networks,” in Idiotype Networks in Biology and Medicine, ed. A. Osterhaus and F.
UytdeHaag (Amsterdam/New York: Elsevier, 1990), pp. 59–63, on p. 59, where the au-
thors explain that the PIS “displays repertoires that are directed outward, because it ex-
presses no reactivities to self-molecules. . . . PIS-lymphocytes obey the general postu-
lates of the clonal selection theory, accounting for conventional immune responses
upon introduction of foreign antigens.”
164 Configurations
to the recruitment of newly formed specificities that are complementary to

those operating in the CIS. Learning about auto-reactivities within the limits
of physiology has to occur . . . in the context of a network, and this appears to
result in a global behavior of “tolerance.” By contrast, positive selection of dis-
connected clones by antigens usually results in immune responses and behav-
iors of immunity and rejection.78
This connectivity is what produces global systematicity and the ac-

tive properties of recognition, learning, memory, self/non-self dis-
crimination, and tolerance that characterize the immune system as
a system, and that serve its most wide-ranging functions.
Rather than describe the above in greater detail, I want to con-
clude my summary of Varela’s model of the immune system by ges-
turing toward his view of the immune network as a cognitive network.
For Varela, more is at stake than the obvious fact that immunologi-
cal discourse since at least the 1950s speaks of “recognition, learn-
ing, memory, and self/non-self discrimination” as properties of the
immune system. Rather, the cognitive nature of the immune system
permits it to function as an “autonomous, self-activating network.”79
Instead of being constrained by a “fixed, pre-given, external entity”
in the generation of the immune network itself, the “constraints”
that shape it as a dynamic system are themselves “generated by the
process itself.”80 The process involves the interactions of the im-
mune network (CIS)—composed, you will remember, of activated
lymphocyte cells and free antibodies—with antigens. This process
and these interactions are, for Varela, cognitive because the immune
system is “capable of both perception and action” and “the link of
perception and action is mediated by a [sic] emergent properties of
some underlying network-like process.”81 The immune system—
both CIS and PIS—perceives its environment in two fundamental
ways: the PIS “perceives an antigen by mounting an immune re-
sponse,” while the CIS perceives an antigen by incorporating it into
the network of now newly realigned “chains of clones” (lymphocyte
cells).82 Moreover, such forms of immune-system perception lead to
actions guided by those perceptions: the PIS acts to destroy the per-
ceived non-self antigen; the CIS acts (in ways too complex to spell
78. Coutinho, Varela, et al., “Dynamics of Immune Networks” (above, n. 77) p. 60.
79. Francisco J. Varela, “A Cognitive View of the Immune System,” World Futures 42
(1994): 31–40, on pp. 31, 33.
80. Ibid., p. 34.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid., p. 36.
out here) to incorporate the self-antigen “into immunoglobin

chains” that, in turn, can lead to an enhanced integration of physi-
ological and biological phenomena in a given individual.83 In the
end, the perception-action nexus in the CIS leads to the dynamic con-
struction of self-identity:
Summing up, then, it seems that it is both plausible and fruitful to envisage
the hypothesis that the immune system is indeed cognitive in the basic sense
defined here. This signifies that the employment of cognitive metaphors is not
just loose heuristic talk, but may correspond to a workable scientific reality. As
we have seen, in immunology a central issue is the positive constitution of a
self-identity; the capacity for self/non-self discrimination is a secondary con-
sequence. . . . such self/non-self discrimination cannot be encoded in the
germline; it is the result of a process of epigenetic learning. Turning the cog-
nitive metaphor around, our analysis of the immune system suggests that
learning is an epigenetic phenomenon, fundamentally inseparable from the
ontogenetic organization of the system as a whole. This perspective is in har-
mony with the suggestion that memory may basically be nothing other than
a reflection of the fact that the current state of a cognitive system arises from
the total history of its ontogenetic constitution.84
This passage links Varela’s cognitive network theory of the immune

system—conceptually, if not historically—to the Aristotelian program
of epigenetic developmental processes as refined in the seventeenth
century by Harvey’s insistence on the irritability and inherent percep-
tual capacities of living matter, to Waddington’s insistence on the
fundamental epigenetic features of developmental-genetic processes,
and to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism with its process-
oriented vision of ontology as temporally emergent. The notion of
things and events as interdependent and temporally constitutive of
each other is fundamental to Whitehead’s challenge to traditional
scientific ontology. Varela’s view of the immune system represents, I
83. Ibid. Note that Varela clearly intends us to understand that both the CIS and the
PIS exhibit cognitive properties. While the immune system has “two distinct modes of
operation”—that is, the “classical mode of clonal selection” and the “network mode”—
Varela insists that “in both cases, we can conclude that the immune system does in-
deed ‘perceive’ its environment in the sense defined here” (p. 36). Moreover, he goes
on to say that, again in both cases, the immune system’s “actions” are “guided by its
perceptions” (p. 36). Of course the actions of the CIS are far more complex than the
purely defensive actions of the PIS; indeed, the very extent of the PIS’s domain is de-
fined and limited by the CIS. Thus, the latter exhibits true network properties as a cog-
nitive system that forms the ever-changing, “historically” evolving context within
which the more limited perception-action dynamics of the PIS operate.
84. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
166 Configurations
argue, just such a Whiteheadian perspective. Rather than a stable,

atemporal self confronted by an alien other giving rise to the classic
immune response, Varela, contesting such notions of immune iden-
tity, sees the immune system as a cognitive network—temporally
fluid and emergent—engaged in continuous redefinition and recon-
figuration. As such, in a Whiteheadian manner, the immune system
is, as Varela’s colleagues Irun Cohen and Henri Atlan argue, “an
evolving network or self-organizing entity”—one marked and con-
stituted by its temporality, by its “non programmed history of en-
counters.”85 Whitehead had, if you recall, based his philosophy of
organism on a critique of the mechanistic materialism of the seven-
teenth century, which itself stemmed from the fundamental error of
the spatialization of matter—of things in the world. Framing nature
as composed of stuff having “the property of simple location in
space,” for Whitehead, leads to the “conclusion that the lapse of time
is an accident, rather than of the essence of the material,” and that
things and events in the world are isolated and without connection.86
By contrast, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism insists on the
temporality and connectedness of actual entities—or, to use his pre-
ferred term, actual occasions—and events, which are nexu-s of actual
occasions.87 As with the case of Bacon cited by Whitehead, and the
tradition of living matter from Harvey to Cavendish in the seven-
teenth century, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism would lead to
a view in which bodies take account of other bodies: where bodies in
some sense exhibit the property of perception and hence the ability
to be affected by other bodies. Varela’s revision of the mechanistic
model of the immune system contained in classical clonal selection
theory, his insistence on embedding such immune response—a
property of the PIS—in the dynamic, temporally evolving CIS,
which exhibits both high connectivity and epigenetic properties of
emergence, strikes me as a concrete example of a system exhibiting
the kinds of properties that for Whitehead describe a fundamental
ontology privileging process over substance. Varela’s cognitive net-
work model of the immune system places perception, and action
guided by perception, at the center of the temporality and dynamics
of the immune system. It is indeed through these processes that the
immune system—and the positive constitution of a self-identity—
85. Henri Atlan and Irun R. Cohen, “Introduction to Immune Networks,” in Atlan and
Cohen, Theories of Immune Networks (above, n. 68), pp. 1–3, on p. 3.
86. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), pp. 49–51.
emerge: much as, for Whitehead, it is through prehending other ac-

tual occasions that any actual occasion (or actual entity) emerges.
V. Whitehead, Ontology, and Science Studies

While the above examples in theoretical biology argue for White-
head’s impact on the ontological commitments and analytic strate-
gies of scientists (still others from biology and the physical sciences
might be added),88 I want to dwell in this concluding section on im-
plications of Whitehead’s thought for the practice of science studies.
As starting point, let me return to my earlier observation that, from
a Whiteheadian perspective, scientific analysis must, of necessity,
proceed through the isolation of one or more component parts of an
event, or an actual entity, in order to produce scientific knowledge.
In so doing, the scientist perforce transforms multivalent (or multi-
vectorial) processes into something like traditional discrete objects.
That is to say, the very practice of science continually isolates and
hence constructs objects out of the rich world (or flux) of things
(events), much as, in the idiom employed by Andy Pickering, the
“mangle of practice” continually engages multiple agencies in the
world on its way toward describing and explaining that world.89
Isabelle Stengers evocatively characterizes just such a Whitehea-
dian understanding of the active and transformative work of science
and scientists when she writes, an “experimental success” is always the
success of an actual “operation of disentanglement” disentangling
something “from the entangled world.”90 The very success of sci-
ence, in other words, traces its origins to multiple and continual acts
of forgetting. For Stengers, it becomes possible to “forget” the “en-
tangled world” that we are given, as we become enchanted with the
power and objectivity of the very “definition of the specific closed,
functionally articulated set of conditions” that the scientist’s work
has isolated from the complexity and flux of events.91 Put differently,
the scientist in such a Whiteheadian analysis continually transforms
open, contingent, and multiple—if not infinite—interconnected
88. For example, see Milič Čapek, The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties.
Selected Papers in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer, 1991); David Ray
Griffin, ed., Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Phi-
losophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986); Richard Schlegel, Superposition and Interaction: Co-
herence in Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Abner Shimony, Search
for a Naturalistic World View, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
89. Pickering, Mangle of Practice (above, n. 35).
90. Isabelle Stengers, “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day,” in this issue, p. 38.
91. Ibid.
168 Configurations
spaces into discrete and painstakingly mapped places in which

processes, agencies, and events are made to re-present themselves as
isolated objects arrayed and ordered according to a now specifiable
and finite set of constraints, rules, or laws. Here we may see reso-
nances with Michel de Certeau’s analysis of processes of cultural ap-
propriation.
De Certeau was concerned with the tactics of the weak, with the
very possibility of resistance, and therefore with such tactics as ex-
emplary of destabilizing practices within complex and dominating
cultural systems. For him, a paradigmatic example was the native
Americans’ adaptation in the early modern period of imposed Euro-
pean colonial discourses and practices (such as Christian religious
beliefs and practices) in a manner that simultaneously exposed their
arbitrary nature (and pretensions to universality) and allowed alter-
native performances (myths, rituals, etc.), insinuating and reassert-
ing, however tentatively, the subversive existence of local, native
meanings. For de Certeau, such interplay between dominant and re-
sistant systems exemplified the agonistic process of delimiting open,
contingent, and multiple spaces, thus transforming them into
highly specified places, and vice versa.92 As with Stengers—and, I am
arguing, Whitehead—such attempts to delimit, constrain, and con-
struct meanings and objects involve acts of forgetting fueled by what
Whitehead would term subjective feelings.
De Certeau’s analysis of cultural authority and resistance empha-
sizes the link between such forgetting and fiction. As I have noted
elsewhere regarding this link in de Certeau,
the fiction consists in re-presenting a subjective position as an established and
unqualified place; in defining . . . a stable, enduring cultural place within
which objects and agents occupy their own “proper” and distinct “places” and
thus define a stable “configuration of positions” (pp. 177, 44). The possibility
of such a fictional configuring of objects, agents, and “proper” cultural au-
thority rests upon the author’s/authority’s propensity to forget: to “[camou-
flage] the conditions of the production of discourse and its object.” For de
Certeau all such systems are, of course, collectively produced and contingent:
92. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984). For his highly illuminating discussion of the
transformation of spaces into places, and the significance of such cultural dynamics,
see chap. 9, “Spatial Stories,” and esp. pp. 117 ff. For a fuller discussion of de Certeau
in relation to the analysis of scientific practices, see James J. Bono, “Locating Narra-
tives: Science, Metaphor, Communities, and Epistemic Styles,” in Grenzüberschreitungen
in der Wissenschaft: Crossing Boundaries in Science, ed. Peter Weingart (Baden-Baden:
Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), pp. 119–151, esp. pp. 130–135.
they only acquire the aura of an objective configuration of proper relation-

ships—of a universal and rational order—through masking of those very
“traces” of its “belonging to a network” (p. 44).93
The sense of forgetting as rooted in an act of fiction retains in de

Certeau a hint of the unsavory. While inevitable in the production
of discourses, there remains a sense in which the task of the critic,
like that of the Freudian psychoanalyst, is to unmask, chart, and ex-
pose the return of the repressed, and thus to reveal the objective as
merely subjective. De Certeau himself, I think, goes beyond this cari-
cature. Yet, much of the fractious nature of the Science Wars of the
1990s can be traced to misunderstandings generated by critical ef-
forts to understand the fictional or constructed nature of scientific
knowledge, which was far too often (and most unfortunately) un-
derstood by both sides simply and simplistically as negative critique:
as mere exposé of the foundationless and therefore (or so they as-
sumed) arbitrary nature of all scientific knowledge. I would insist, in
its stead, that we turn to the act of forgetting within a Whiteheadian
cosmology not as a moment of negativity, but rather as moment of
positivity to be embraced as the very engine of creativity, connectiv-
ity, and discovery. That is to say, to regard forgetting as the begin-
ning not of ideology and error (as the triumph of mere subjectivity),
but instead of knowledge: specifically, knowledge of multiple modes
of belonging to a network.
Whitehead, and the turn to ontology encouraged by a Whitehea-
dian understanding of science, permits us to think of a positive cri-
tique and to rethink science studies as a form of just such a critical
practice. Such a critique does entail remembering science as a process
of making objects, of re-membering the world. But the form that that
process takes—isolating or disentangling something from its world—
also attaches us to that world, opens us to the world in ways that are
pragmatic, productive, meaningful, and concrete. In this sense, the
fiction and forgetting involved in the work, the operation, of exper-
imentally disentangling bits and pieces of the world are hardly to be
condemned as trickery or mere sleight of hand, as prophetic fulfill-
ment of the Cartesian nightmare of the Baroque triumph of man-
made illusions.94 Quite to the contrary, a Whiteheadian cosmology,
93. Bono, “Locating Narratives,” p. 132 (page references in the quotation are for the
citations from de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life).
94. Remember that Descartes’s quest for certainty—for unshakable confidence in the
necessary capacity of his experience of clear and distinct ideas to reveal with utter
transparency the truth of things—forced him to confront the nightmarish probability
not only that such experiences of things were no “more real than the illusions of my
170 Configurations
emphasizing as it does the multiplicity of processes, vectors, and re-

lations among actual entities in the world, permits us to re-value fic-
tion as positive making. All actual entities—whether inanimate, con-
scious, nonhuman, or human—prehend the world subjectively and
constitute themselves within it. Through feeling they attach them-
selves to the world selectively, constituting themselves as and within
webs of relations, forming nexu-s.95 Fiction, as both tool and expres-
sion of that subjective feeling in the specific case of humans, repre-
sents but a specialized instance of a general phenomenon (that is,
feeling in Whitehead’s sense of the term) characterizing all actual
entities, and therefore of all processes through which actual entities
relate to and constitute the world.96 With respect to science as a hu-
man activity and form of relating to and understanding the world,
dreams,” but that they were illusions produced by an “evil spirit” who had “bent all his
efforts to deceiving me” (René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans.
Laurence J. Lafleur [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960], pp. 24, 80). In the seventeenth
century, the turn toward new forms of reason based upon observation and experience
of the natural world, rather than traditional forms of contemplative thought, gener-
ated anxieties about the very real possibility of deception, error, and the seductive al-
lure of illusions. For example, the precipitous rise of a culture of experiment and pop-
ular display, together with an unprecedented multiplication of images, scientific
illustrations, wondrous mechanical devices and statues—not to mention fancies of the
human imagination such as poetry and the theater—were not always embraced as
signs of progress. For some contemporaries, such questionable developments con-
tributed to undermining confidence in experiential knowledge that precipitated a skep-
tical crisis over the boundaries separating the real and the illusory that some scholars
identify with the Baroque. For these and related issues, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Art-
ful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), esp. her discussions of “Systems of Imposture” and “Sleight-of-
Hand”; Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kun-
stkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1995); Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the
Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Paula Findlen, “Jokes of Na-
ture and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern
Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 292–331; David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx:
Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002); Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (above, n. 10);
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question
of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). My new project on “technologies of the lit-
eral” and the scientific revolution will address many of these issues, including the sta-
tus and uses of visual technologies (see below for more).
95. See above, nn. 33 and 48.
96. For Whitehead, feeling is closely tied to propositions; see n. 127 below. In general,
see Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), esp. the chapters and sections on feelings and on
propositions in parts 2 and 3.
Whitehead allows us to embrace, rather than deride, the insight

that, as Mary Baine Campbell notes, “fact and fiction are in fact ety-
mological brethren, both children of facere, to make or fabricate. ‘Les
faits sont faits,’ says Bachelard.”97
Of course, the problem leading to the proclivity to deride fact as
fiction—to the desire to cleanly separate fact from fiction—has al-
ways located itself in our desire to see our concepts, our abstractions,
our representations for something other than what they are: as, in
themselves, tokens of timeless mastery and of a perfect, stable knowl-
edge. Whitehead, I firmly believe, can help us see them in a new light.
Despite the highly formal and dauntingly systematic character of
his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Whitehead’s philosophy of or-
ganism is less magisterial—less about mastery—than about that
which is denied and repressed in what Michel Foucault would later
come to call the “will to truth.”98 In his insistence on recognizing
the abstractness of our most familiar, even utilitarian, representa-
tions (his famous “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”);99 in his invo-
cation of feeling at the core of the subjective (and selective) nature
of all prehensions; and in his characterization of theories-concepts-
abstractions not as mirrors of some eternal and unchanging reality
but, rather, as “lures for feelings,”100 Whitehead reveals himself to be
an “anti-philosopher.” And, as such, one who, as Bruno Bosteels has
brilliantly argued,101 always attends to—better yet, in Whitehead’s
felicitous phrase, takes account of—that which confident, magister-
ial affirmations of truth repress and even deny. It is precisely such a
“logic of disavowal”102 at the core of the tradition of Western philos-
ophy that Whitehead takes aim at and in effect dismantles in his
97. Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 6.
98. For example, Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of
Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pan-
theon, 1972), pp. 215–237; on p. 218.
99. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), pp. 7–8: “This fallacy consists in neglecting the
degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it
exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are sim-
ply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories.”
100. Ibid., passim. See below for more on lures for feelings.
101. Bruno Bosteels, “Borges as Antiphilosopher” (talk given at the 14th Annual Sym-
posium on Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Uni-
versity at Buffalo, SUNY, April 30, 2005). I am indebted to Professor Bosteels’s talk and
personal communications.
102. Ibid.
172 Configurations
embrace of the thoroughly entangled nature of experience and of

our/the scientist’s attempt to disentangle bits and pieces of the
world—things or scientific objects—from the flux of experience. In
so doing, Whitehead takes his place of renown among philosophers
of immanence from Darwin and Bergson to Deleuze and Varela.
Despite Whitehead’s relative lack of interest in the role of lan-
guage, his philosophy, I would argue, offers a rich and robust ontol-
ogy compatible with a constructionist view stressing the performa-
tive and material role of representation and metaphor. In gesturing
toward such lines of connection through the insights offered by Is-
abelle Stengers, I turn finally to my own work and to that of Hans-
Jörg Rheinberger. It may prove useful in situating my work to recall
the move made by Andy Pickering, who urges a reorientation in sci-
ence studies away from characterizing science, and scientists, as fun-
damentally producing representations of the world—what we might
term “mimetic representations” of things in the world—to engaging,
instead, a world filled with what he calls “agencies.”103 The aim of
studying a world filled with agencies is precisely to disentangle those
relations, vectors, and connections that constitute an evolving phe-
nomenal world in order to make sense of some part of it. Such a
goal, in my view as in Pickering’s, demands that we regard science as
practice and scientific practices as performative. I shall return to the
performative dimensions of science presently.
For now, I want to note two consequences of Pickering’s specific
formulation of the mangle of practice. The first is his insistence on
the temporality—the emergent character—of scientific practice. The
very attempt to grasp a world of ever-changing agencies, a world of
flux and complexity, requires attentive engagement with the dy-
namic interplay of things: not as isolated and independent sub-
stances, but as interdependent—perhaps intradependent—compo-
nents, themselves evolving within and in relation to evolving
networks of agencies. (I would add that human agents, their tools,
and their technologies ought to be included in such evolving net-
works.) In such a world, the practices deployed by scientists must
themselves emerge over time and in relation to the very inter- and
intradependent agencies that such practices aim to encounter, en-
gage, and plot.104 This characterization of the world and of scientific
103. Pickering, Mangle of Practice (above, n. 35), pp. 5–6.

104. Here we may wish to engage the work of Karen Barad, her notion of intra-action,
and her rethinking of agency and realism within an ontological context. See, for ex-
ample, Karen Barad, “Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Sci-
entific Practices,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York/London:
Routledge, 1999), pp. 1–11.
practices leads directly to what Pickering calls the “dialectic of resis-

tance and accommodation,” which continually engages scientists as
they respond to the contingencies—the “resistances” of “things”—
encountered in the “dance of agency.”105 Through tinkering with
such components of practices as instruments, machines, and exper-
imental protocols, scientists tune and retune their practices in order
to accommodate them to the resistances encountered in their at-
tempts to intervene in and represent the world. The world as Picker-
ing characterizes it, and the strategic activities of the scientist, can
themselves be recast in precisely the Whiteheadian terms I have
noted above in discussion of seventeenth-century science and of
Waddington and Varela.
The second consequence of Pickering’s views is less salutary.
While tactically useful, his utter rejection of the representational id-
iom can induce an unwarranted and unfortunate neglect of the fun-
damental role played by representational practices in the production
of scientific knowledge.106 In effect, an uncompromising insistence
on banishing careful attention to representation in science from the
practice of science studies could have the unintended consequence
of replicating the magisterial move of uncoupling fact from fiction.
As I have argued, and as I think a Whiteheadian understanding of
science supports, facts—“things” and agencies in the world—emerge
as a consequence of an actual occasion’s prehension in accordance
with its subjective feeling. Science is an aesthetic accomplishment of
prehending subjects, where the cognitive claims of science are sec-
ondary to the embodied cognitive apparatus of an affective, feeling,
subject whose attachment to the world is necessarily selective and
temporally emergent.107 Let me be clear: I am not advocating a re-
105. Pickering, Mangle of Practice (above, n. 35), pp. 21–23.

106. In fairness, Pickering does acknowledge a place for representation in science,
claiming that “I can immediately add that thinking about material performativity does
not imply that we have to forget about the representational aspects of science. Science
is not just about making machines, and one cannot claim to have an analysis of sci-
ence without offering an account of its representational dimensions” (ibid., p. 7). My
concern is with understanding the role of representation and, more to the point, ac-
knowledging the inseparability of representation, materiality, performativity, and the
narrative or fictional in science.
107. See n. 33 above, and Whitehead’s notion of the “withness” of the body as a gloss
on the embodied nature of cognition. For Whitehead, the “disregard of any subjective
judgment” presumed necessary to the analysis of “facts” by the “most ardent uphold-
ers of objectivity in scientific thought” is misplaced; instead, the “zeal for truth,” he in-
sists, “presupposes interest. Also sustained observation presupposes the notion. For
concentrated attention means disregard of irrelevancies; and such disregard can only
be sustained by some sense of importance. Thus the sense of importance (or interest)
174 Configurations
turn to the representational idiom criticized by Pickering, one in

which the ideal of science is to produce fully adequate representa-
tions of the world in which a given scientific representation corre-
sponds in a mimetic one-to-one relationship to stable and isolated
things as they exist, atemporally, in the world. Instead, I want to in-
sist that there are other senses of representation that are not only
important but crucial, perhaps even essential, to science as tempo-
rally emergent, as historical, and as practice.
Here it is critical to distinguish between this first sense of “repre-
sentation”—mimetic representation—as a kind of pointing or ges-
turing to things outside of discourse, and a second sense in which
“representations” are themselves practices that allow “things”
and/or agencies to emerge from their entangled networks to become
a part of emergent scientific practices and knowledges. As Bruno La-
tour has remarked, “We always forget that the word ‘reference’
comes from the Latin, referre, ‘to bring back.’ Is the referent what I
point to with my finger outside of discourse, or is it what I bring
back inside discourse?”108 Representations—more exactly, represen-
tational practices—work precisely to bring back into scientific dis-
course salient aspects of the world. In this way, the imaginative and
affectively constituted fictions produced by scientists, and material-
ized by means of those technologies and practices that they devise to
study nature, operate to disentangle things from the world.109 The
fictions of representation thus prove indispensable to the facticity of
the world we know.
How is this possible? What kind of work makes possible both en-
gagement with the world and scientific knowledge of that world?
is embedded in the very being of animal experience.” He then goes on to add that
“feeling is the agent which reduces the universe to its perspective for fact. Apart from
gradations of feeling, the infinitude of detail produces an infinitude of effect in the
constitution of each fact. And that is all that is to be said, when we omit feeling. But
we feel differently about these effects and thus reduce them to a perspective. ‘To be
negligible’ means ‘to be negligible for some coordination of feeling.’ Thus perspective
is the outcome of feeling; and feeling is graded by the sense of interest as to the variety
of its differentiations” (Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought [New York: Free
Press, 1968], pp. 8–10; see also pp. 60–62).
108. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 32.
109. I am exploring instances of such disentangling in my new project on what I call
early modern technologies of the literal (see below for more details). In addition to my
own work on metaphor, narrative, and science, see the following for the role of fictions
and/or narratives in scientific practice: Rouse, Engaging Science (above, n. 1); Thomas
Nickles, “Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning,” Configu-
rations 6 (1998): 51–85.
These questions are, I would argue, essential to science studies. The

ontology of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism provides an im-
portant orientation toward such questions and, hence, toward the
future of science studies. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s Toward a History of
Epistemic Things points, in turn, to the work of representation in the
sciences in a manner that helps us glimpse such possibilities and
such a future.
Rather than dodging the role of representation, Rheinberger frankly
acknowledges it: “when it comes to the heart of what the sciences are
about, we touch on representation.”110 Indeed, central to his account
of science are what Rheinberger calls “Spaces of Representation.”111 For
Rheinberger, and in my own work, representation embraces much
more than the uncritical gesture of pointing to that which simply is.
Rather, it is a polysemic notion that puts into play, in the case of sci-
ence, a variety of activities: “analogies” (for Rheinberger, Charles
Sanders Peirce’s “symbols”); “models or simulations (Peirce’s icons)”;
and “an experimental realization (comparable to an index in Peirce’s
semiotic system, i.e., a trace).”112 What is especially important to note
here is that such a rich, polysemic understanding of representation
insists that we not fall for the standard traps of restricting the signifi-
cance of representations to one of two commonsensical, but mis-
leading, meanings: as mimetic stands-ins for things-in-themselves, or
as mere literary-linguistic artifice to be distinguished from the mate-
rialities of actual scientific practices and (so the argument goes) as-
siduously purged. Such meanings associated with representations in
science have proved endlessly seductive; like the enticing song of the
Sirens they conjure misdirections, ultimately leading those who
heed them to dead ends—or worse, to utter destruction. In avoiding
this Scylla and Charybdis of representation, we must instead plot a
course that re-joins—that lashes together as inseparable and intrin-
sic to each other—the material and the semiotic; that thus refuses
the simplistic dichotomy of fact and fiction; and that grasps think-
ing and cognition as operations performed by means of various ma-
terialized gestures upon the stage of material practices.113
110. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins

in the Test Tube (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 102.
111. Chap. 7 is entitled “Spaces of Representation”: ibid., pp. 102–113.
112. Ibid; p. 103.
113. My colleague, Jim Swan, reminds me of Wittgenstein’s remark about the place
where “thinking takes place” as (among others) “the paper on which we write” (Lud-
wig Wittgenstein, The Blue and the Brown Books, 2nd ed. [New York: Harper and Row,
1960], p. 7). Such revaluation of material, embodied gestures as fundamental to think-
176 Configurations
Rheinberger tellingly gestures toward such a difficult-to-navigate

and indirect course when reminding us of a distinction between rep-
resentation “of” and representation “as.”114 Commonly, we take rep-
resentations to be direct likenesses of our world; by contrast, we con-
tinually construct representations in order to model some especially
significant aspects of our world, to devise strategies for exploring
them, and to intervene pragmatically upon such aspects of our
world. These latter activities simply require that we imagine those
aspects of the world and then frame representations of them as ob-
jects, events, or processes that might act in a certain way. (My own
work considers, for example, the consequences of representing Na-
ture as a Book; disease as an invasion; the immune system as a de-
fense system against foreign invaders or, alternatively, as a cognitive
network for recognizing and constructing self and other.) Not only
do these two categories of representations “of” and “as” carry differ-
ent entailments, they have important consequences for our under-
standing of the work that science does. For Rheinberger this distinc-
tion is crucial: it leads to an understanding of “spaces of
representation” as material-semiotic spaces within which scientific
practices are produced and performed.115 What is more, this distinc-
tion and his invocation of an exemplary theatrical analogy points to
my own insistence on the role of performative and material
metaphors (and their narrative reemplotments) in science.
Indeed, for Rheinberger, “upon closer inspection, any representa-
tion ‘of’ turns out to be always a representation ‘as.’”116 The point is
ing—as the very modalities through which thinking occurs—has experienced a sudden
resurgence of interest: see Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and
Physics, trans. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), with Kenneth
J. Knoespel’s introduction (“Diagrammatic Writing and the Configuration of Space”);
Brian Rotman, “Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing,” Configurations 10 (2002):
423–438; Sha Xin Wei, “Resistance Is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Re-
sponsive Media,” ibid., pp. 439–472; Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Be-
yond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); James J. Bono, “Per-
forming Science: Metaphor, Material Practices, Invention, and Exchange(s)”
(unpublished paper written for the 2004 MLA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia).
114. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (above, n. 110), p. 103: “If we
speak about the representation of something given, the common sense of the notion
is plain: we speak about a representation ‘of.’ If, however, we claim that we have seen
the actor Bruno Ganz yesterday evening representing Hamlet, we speak of a represen-
tation ‘as.’”
115. As Rheinberger states, “I am speaking here of the function of representation on
the level of scientific practice itself, as it gets enacted in the materialities of the labora-
tory” (ibid., p. 103).
116. Ibid., p. 104.
fundamental: the work of science resides in the very production of

“traces” that re-present the world—or, rather, re-present “things” as
encountered within “transient events”117—as something else, as cap-
tured, if you will, within a trajectory, data-set, image, graph, inscrip-
tion (the list could go on). The work of science, to reiterate, is thus
an “activity” that “consists in producing, in a space of representa-
tion, material metaphors and metonymies.”118 One trace leads to an-
other, producing a “chain of representations.”119 The key is that such
chains of representations are themselves tools used by scientists in
experimental systems, the latter notably characterized by Rhein-
berger as “machines for making the future.”120 Rather than simply
mirroring the world, this work of producing representations as traces
is fundamentally performative in science, enabling the very power of
science to select, isolate, purify, and operate on and with the world:
Latour, too, takes representation as a particular kind of activity, as a process of
inscription that results in a particular category of things, called “immutable
mobiles.” They are characterized, not by what they depict, but by how they
work. Immutable mobiles fix transient events (make them durable), and in do-
ing so, allow them to be moved in space and time (make them available in
many places). This is their power. What is significant about representation qua
inscription is that things can be re-presented outside their original and local
context and inserted into other contexts. It is this kind of representation that
matters. Inscriptions are thus not mere abstractions. They are durable and mo-
bile purifications.121
117. Ibid., p. 106.

118. Ibid., p. 105.
119. Ibid.
120. See, for example, ibid., pp. 80, 107.
121. Ibid., p 106. Rheinberger here refers to Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,”
in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19–68, on p. 26. See also Bruno Latour, Science in Action:
How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1987), p. 227. More recently, Latour has insisted on refusing the typical
binaries that inform our readings of images in science in his articulation of a critical
practice that he terms “iconoclash.” For Latour, “a scientific image” is “a set of instruc-
tions to reach another one down the line,” and, the “paradox of scientific images” is con-
structive and unavoidable: “If you wanted to abandon the image and turn your eyes in-
stead to the prototype that they are supposed to figure out, you would see less,
infinitely less. You would be blind for good” (Bruno Latour, “What Is Iconoclash? Or Is
There a World Beyond the Image Wars?” in Iconoclash, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter
Weibel [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002], pp. 14–37; on p. 34; emphasis in original).
Note the similarities to Whitehead’s lures for feelings, to disentangling the entangled
world, and to my own view of material metaphors (see n. 125, 126, and 127 below).
178 Configurations
Following Nelson Goodman, Rheinberger thus suggests that “to rep-

resent is . . . to ‘take and make.’ All representation is production/re-
production. . . . Representation is ‘eventuation’ (it is about interven-
tion, invention, and the creation of events).”122
My own work argues that such taking and making depends upon
the very metaphoricity of scientific practices and, increasingly since
the sixteenth century, upon the strategic deployment of what I call
“technologies of the literal.”123 Metaphor and related tropes are fun-
damental to the activity of producing representations—representa-
tions “as”—in science, and hence to taking and making, to “bring-
ing back” (as Latour would have it) into the practices of scientists
aspects of the world deemed salient and of interest (to use a good
Whiteheadian term). More than “mere” literary ornament and
rhetorical device, metaphors have now come to be regarded as fun-
damental components of our cognitive apparatus.124 I argue that
metaphors are, additionally, more than cognitive tools: they are in-
tegral to the material and performative dimensions of science and,
along with narratives deployed by scientists, essential to what I call
the cultural poetics of science—the poiesis, or making, without
which we would have no science.125 While metaphors are certainly
122. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (above, n. 110), p. 108 (empha-
sis in original). Rheinberger here refers to Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indi-
anapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 8.
123. I have explored the emergence of the literal and its construction through human
technē—my “technologies of the literal”—in my 2003-2004 Folger Institute Collo-
quium, “Imagining Nature: Technologies of the Literal and the Scientific Revolution.”
I have begun to flesh out this argument in a number of talks and works-in-progress, in-
cluding “Language, Inquiry, and Invention: The Metaphorics of Nature, Technologies
of the Literal, and the Production of Natural Knowledge, Arts, and Objects,” and
“Imagining Nature: Technologies of the Literal, the Scientific Revolution, and ‘Litera-
ture and Science.’” These will culminate in two related books: vol. 2 of my Word of God
and Languages of Man project, and a separate volume on technologies of the literal (in-
cluding especially visual technologies) and the scientific revolution.
124. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980); idem, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge
to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Also see comments on and critiques
of Lakoff and Johnson by Richard Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Post-
modern Age: From Method to Metaphor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), chap. 7,
“Metaphors and Machines: Metaphor, Being, and Computer Systems Design,” pp.
249–301, esp. pp. 264–276; James J. Bono, “Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of
Scientific Practice,” in Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge, ed.
Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2001), pp. 215–234;
Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart, Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge (Lon-
don/New York: Routledge, 2000).
125. With respect to the work or action accomplished by language, including
metaphor, and texts, see Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II,
tools employed cognitively in science, their very role in scientific

practice points toward a complex, networked, multivectorial, tem-
porally emergent—in short, entangled—world that requires us to
cast about for an alternative to traditional ontology, one better
framed in Whiteheadian terms.
Because metaphors are subject to narrative redescription, they are
pliable and responsive to changing cultural and material circum-
stances—a point worth considering in connection with Pickering’s
dance of agency. In turn, through their performative and material
dimensions, metaphors serve as “invitations to action” and thus
help scientists engage in the work of disentangling (and, I would
add, of accommodation).126 If metaphors are invitations to action,
the responses of scientists to metaphors and the actions they conse-
quently take are highly specific, resulting in their selective prehen-
sion of objects according to what Whitehead would call subjective
feeling. Such specific and selective responses and actions, I argue, de-
pend upon the specific narrative contexts formulated by scientists,
within which metaphors are received, appropriated, and translated
into meaningful plans and actions. Narratives, in other words, emplot
trajectories and map patterns of action through a given metaphorically
imagined domain. Narratives are users’ manuals for putting metaphors
into action, for learning to work with and through metaphors.
Through material metaphors and narratives, scientists take account
of the world and construct scientific knowledge as an aesthetic ac-
complishment: “Les faits sont faits.”
Metaphors are, like concepts and theories for Whitehead, “lures
for feeling,”127 while the narratives informing the scientist’s aspira-
tions and actions focus the very feelings that, through the lure of
metaphor, express the prehending subject’s mode of being-in-the-
trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univer-
sity Press, 1991). I have discussed performative and material metaphors in Bono, “Why
Metaphor” (above, n. 124), and in a number of earlier papers, as well as in my Decem-
ber 2004 paper “Performing Science” (above, n. 113).
126. For the cultural and narrative redescription of metaphors, and for the very idea
of metaphors as performative and invitations to action, see James J. Bono, “Science,
Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in Literature and Sci-
ence: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1990), pp. 59–89; and esp. Bono, “Why Metaphor?” (above, n. 124).
127. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33): Feeling is a fundamental feature of White-
head’s philosophy of organism, and he articulates the notion of lures for feelings in
many places. I cite just two examples: “It is evident, however, that the primary func-
tion of theories is as a lure for feeling, thereby providing immediacy of enjoyment and
purpose” (p. 184); and, “A proposition is an element in the objective lure proposed for
feeling, and when admitted into feeling it constitutes what is felt” (p. 187). It is also
180 Configurations
world. Thus does the entangled world become disentangled. Here I

end by returning to Isabelle Stengers, who, with Whitehead, insists
that we avoid the modern trap of making “language our creator”128
and its consequence: describing humans not as souls but as “intel-
lects dominated by intellectual abstractions.”129 Like Bacon, who in
the seventeenth century railed against the “abstractions” and mere
logical propositions of Aristotelian science as a prideful human dis-
traction from the flux and richness of things, Stengers and White-
head seek to recapture the “adventures of souls” and the “power of
wandering.”130 Language is no more the cause of wandering than it is
creator of the world. Unlike the “sentences usually selected as exem-
plary by philosophers and linguists” of the operation of language,
which obscure the very “efficacy of propositions,”131 propositions for
Whitehead and Stengers are “not primarily for belief,” nor for “judg-
ment.”132 Rather than defining what it is that we should believe
about the world, propositions are about efficacy, about entertain-
ment and excitement. Whitehead, once again, finds himself on the
side of Bacon, concerned more with wonder and power in encoun-
tering the world than with the empty sense of mastery that comes
from overzealous belief in the proper meaning of abstract Aris-
totelian definitions and propositions, and in the ability of the latter
to capture and stabilize a changing world of phenomena as if it were
separate “from our own shadows.”133 Language, a “new proposi-
tion,” is about “entertainment,” “efficacy,” and “excitement:”134: “it
disturbs the whole surface of our being”135 precisely because of its
worth noting that for Whitehead, “Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and
transform it into what is here” (p. 87; all emphases in the original). This Whiteheadian
formulation gives added significance to Latour’s reminder that reference (and by im-
plication representation as) is a form, or process, of “bringing back.” Among other
points I would wish to stress, Whitehead’s formulation captures—indeed insists
upon—the fundamentally active and transformative quality of engaging the world; it
arguably also insists on what we might today term the embodied character of cogni-
tion and meaning formation.
128. Stengers, “Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day” (above, n. 90), p. 50.
129. Ibid.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid., p. 52.
132. Ibid., (quoting Whitehead, Process [above, n. 33], pp. 186–188).
133. Ibid., p. 50.
134. Ibid., p. 52.
135. Ibid., (quoting Whitehead, Modes [above, n. 107], p. 36).
“disruptive power.”136 With its power to disrupt, language—at least

language not fetishized as thing-in-itself, as “misplaced concrete-
ness”137—is no creator of the world, but instead a tool for disturbing
that world, for “induc[ing] a mode of excitement,”138 for wandering
in the word and experiencing it as adventure. Rooted in an ontology
stressing the dynamic, multivectorial, and entangled character of ac-
tual entities and events, Whitehead’s philosophy invites us to
reimagine science studies as itself concerned with the power and ef-
ficacy of the trace, with the metaphorics of scientific practice, and
consequently with the performance, deployment, and mobilization
of all kinds of material metaphors in the very technologies and prac-
tices responsible for scientific knowledge.
Acknowledgments
I must thank Steven Meyer for the audacity—and good sense—to
encourage a return to Whitehead, and for his constant support, un-
flagging enthusiasm, otherworldly patience, and, not least, for won-
derful conversations and invaluably smart comments. Joan Richard-
son helped point the way back to Whitehead for me, and has proved
a sympathetic reader and intelligent friend. To numerous students
and colleagues subjected to my newfound enthusiasm, I owe much.
Finally, I want to thank two former and formative teachers, Patrick
Heelan and Leonard Feldstein, without whom this article would
never have been written.
136. Ibid., p. 52.

138. Stengers, “Whitehead’s Account” p. 54.
Contributors
James J. Bono is Associate Professor of Histo-

ry and Medicine at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Past President
of the Society for Literature and Science, founding editor (emeritus)
of Configurations, and author of The Word of God and the Languages
of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol.
1, Ficino to Descartes. He has been a member of the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study at Princeton, an Eccles Fellow at the Tanner Humani-
ties Center, University of Utah, and recipient of several NSF grants.
He is about to complete a new book, Figuring Science: Metaphor, Nar-
rative, and Scientific Practices, and is a 2006–07 NEH Fellow at the
Folger Shakespeare Library at work on volume 2 of The Word of God
and the Languages of Man, and a related book, Imagining Nature:
Technologies of the “Literal,” the Scientific Revolution, and Visual Cul-
tures of Early Modern Science.
Don Byrd is a Professor of English at the
State University of New York in Albany. He has published several
volumes of poetry and literary criticism, including The Great Dime
Store Centennial and The Poetics of the Common Knowledge. He is cur-
rently completing a long prose poem or philosophic essay, entitled
Abstraction, in which Alfred North Whitehead figures significantly.
Michael Halewood is a lecturer in sociology
at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also a member of
the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP).
Steven Meyer is a literary scholar and intel-
lectual historian who teaches at Washington University in St.
Louis. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the
Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford UP, 2001), and current
book projects include Robust Empiricisms: Twentieth-Century Specu-
lative Thought for the Twenty-First Century and Rhythms of Thought:
Understanding Twentieth-Century Poetry.
Joan Richardson is Professor of English,
Comparative Literature and American Studies at The Graduate Cen-
183
184 Configurations
ter, City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of A

Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Ed-
wards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge, 2007), the two-volume critical
biography, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–1923 (Morrow,
1986), Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923–1955 (Morrow, 1988),
and co-editor, with Frank Kermode, of The Library of America edi-
tion Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (1997). She has been
the recipient of a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, a Mellon Arts and Society Fellowship, a
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Huntington Library Research Fellow-
ships, and several research awards from the Professional Staff Con-
gress of CUNY.
Sha Xin Wei obtained his Ph.D. from Stan-
ford University with a dissertation on the phenomenology of dif-
ferential geometric practice and the technologies of writing, as a
joint project in Mathematics, Computer Science, and History and
Philosophy of Science. He is director of the Topological Media Lab,
and currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Media Arts and Sci-
ences and is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts and Computer Sci-
ence at Concordia University
Isabelle Stengers, born in 1949, teaches phi-
losophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her work center
around both the constructive adventure of modern sciences and
the problems born from the association of this adventure with
power and claims to rational authority. She has written numerous
books, among which, in English, are Order out of Chaos (with I. Pri-
gogine), A History of Chemistry (with B. Bernadette Bensaude-Vin-
cent), Power and Invention: Situating Science, and The Invention of
Modern Science. Her long-standing interest for Whitehead’s specula-
tive philosophy resulted in Penser avec Whitehead. Une libre et
sauvage création de concepts (2002)

WHITEHEAD Now - Configurations

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

WHITEHEAD Now - Configurations

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Configurations

Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2005

Meyer, Steven, 1959-

Sha, Xin Wei.

Byrd, Don, 1944-

Richardson, Joan, 1946-

Bono, James J. (James Joseph)

I. The Invention of Creativity

As Isabelle Stengers has observed, for Whitehead creativity is not

Configurations, 2005, 13: 1–33 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University

what is “taken for granted or explained away by [such] explana-

transmutation, etc.), an opacity compounded by his resistance to the

Incidentally, it was another philosopher, Paul Kurtz, who directed

Whitehead himself conceived of the term as novel in his usage of

published posthumously in 1934 and assembled from students’ lec-

Certainly, this description of the genius-in-the-lecture-room is

25. Their presumed semantic near-equivalence is demonstrated in the OED’s defini-

This is a rich passage, and I will limit myself to observing that in it

intersum, interesse (meaning “to be between, to differ, to make a dif-

other-than-cognitive symbolic forms.”34 It is more important that a

II. Six Ways of Looking at Whitehead Creatively

Let us start, then, in medias res, with a seventh way:

34. Angus Fletcher, “Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge,” in Colors

Figure 1. Standing among other residents of Marseille, a Frenchman weeps as he watches

38. Ibid., p. 29.

stream of experience, forerunner of the stream of consciousness”44—

III. The Neural Substrate of Creativity

In his highly original account of symbolism, Whitehead offers a

experience. “According to Hume,” Whitehead observes, “our behav-

“The word ‘association’ explains it all, according to Hume.”53 The

52. Whitehead, Process and Reality (above, n. 3), p. 174.

“along nerves to some nodal centre,” with a “return spasm of con-

58. Ibid., p. 174.

merely due to some sort of mechanical association. (Surely, a deus ex

1. Causal efficacy is primary with respect to presentational immedi-

2. Whitehead distinguishes visceral from visual feelings, with the

3. Causal efficacy is not all vagueness, though. “Bodily experiences,

4. I have already mentioned that Whitehead insists that in human

66. Ibid., p. 121.

tion.”69 He also observes that “there can be symbolic reference

5. Picking up on this last point: “We find ourselves,” Whitehead re-

69. Ibid., p. 168.

from experiments conducted by Michael Posner and Mark Raichle at

this respect that questionable assumptions about language—ques-

In turning now to my chief exhibit of the invisible brain, I had

And here is how Michael Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry, and George

(A much more extensive account of the structure and functioning of

Association-Centres in the Brain as Described by Flechsig,” Journal of Nervous and Men-

The debt to associationist psychology is patent. Still, Flechsig’s ac-

medical school. Andreasen’s literary background—her study John

boring semantic memory.”87 Although one might dispute whether

87. Ibid., pp. 72–73.

is used to permit the brain’s owner to integrate the information he

If Whitehead is right that we feel something he calls causal efficacy, feel it

Here we find ourselves at the heart of the Whiteheadian revision

95. Whitehead has often been called a panpsychist—erroneously, I believe—because

This sentence, concluding the chapter “Expression” in White-

Configurations, 2005, 13: 35–55 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University

Leibniz’s solution sends the conflation of existence and knowledge

no surprise in the way the event of experimental success was ex-

Here is what I would call a Whiteheadian dramatization of the

I am now able to address the singularity of Whitehead’s answer to

Empiricist conversion—believing in this world, in this life—may