Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0002
Russell J. Duvernoy
This chapter explores motivations for speculative thinking in terms of the respective risks of certainty and creativity. Following their interests in thinking conditions of novelty and creativity, both Whitehead and Deleuze challenge Kantian meta-philosophical criteria that privilege apodictic certainty. The chapter then explores how such speculative thinking has historical roots in William James’ radical empiricism and especially the concept of pure experience. It shows how Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “bifurcation of nature” arising out of inconsistent commitments to metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism is refigured through radical empiricism. Finally, it raises the possibility of a realism that does not presume the necessary locus of a constituted metaphysical subject.
{"title":"Motivating Metaphysics: From Radical Empiricism to Process","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores motivations for speculative thinking in terms of the respective risks of certainty and creativity. Following their interests in thinking conditions of novelty and creativity, both Whitehead and Deleuze challenge Kantian meta-philosophical criteria that privilege apodictic certainty. The chapter then explores how such speculative thinking has historical roots in William James’ radical empiricism and especially the concept of pure experience. It shows how Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “bifurcation of nature” arising out of inconsistent commitments to metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism is refigured through radical empiricism. Finally, it raises the possibility of a realism that does not presume the necessary locus of a constituted metaphysical subject.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125092963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0003
Russell J. Duvernoy
Picking up the thread of an asubjective realism introduced in the first chapter, this chapter focuses on the question of individuation. Because pure experience lacks a transcendental subject as the source of identity, it intensifies questions of how to stabilise and identify either objects or enduring subjects. This metaphysical problem of individuation operates at the intersection between the abstract and the existential. The chapter argues that both Deleuze and Whitehead shift the nature of this problem from one of identifying discrete individuals to understanding processes of individuation that are perspectival, scale-relative, and by degree. The chapter develops three theses that emerge as consequences of this shift.
{"title":"Individuation and Attunement: Identities in Process","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Picking up the thread of an asubjective realism introduced in the first chapter, this chapter focuses on the question of individuation. Because pure experience lacks a transcendental subject as the source of identity, it intensifies questions of how to stabilise and identify either objects or enduring subjects. This metaphysical problem of individuation operates at the intersection between the abstract and the existential. The chapter argues that both Deleuze and Whitehead shift the nature of this problem from one of identifying discrete individuals to understanding processes of individuation that are perspectival, scale-relative, and by degree. The chapter develops three theses that emerge as consequences of this shift.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131868278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0001
Russell J. Duvernoy
This is a study of metaphysical resonances between two twentieth-century thinkers conducted in a spirit of speculative pragmatism. While it presumes an interest in its main figures (Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze), it does not aspire to exhaustively detail all of their conceptual convergences and divergences, but rather to do something with the resonance it studies. As such, with a dose of caution and humility, it follows Deleuze’s conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts. What concept comes out of a mutual reading of Deleuze and Whitehead? More specifically, how does taking seriously the process-inflected metaphysics implicated in their work potentially alter the lived experience of subjectivity?...
{"title":"Introduction: Ecological Turbulence and the Adventure of Metaphysics","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This is a study of metaphysical resonances between two twentieth-century thinkers conducted in a spirit of speculative pragmatism. While it presumes an interest in its main figures (Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze), it does not aspire to exhaustively detail all of their conceptual convergences and divergences, but rather to do something with the resonance it studies. As such, with a dose of caution and humility, it follows Deleuze’s conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts. What concept comes out of a mutual reading of Deleuze and Whitehead? More specifically, how does taking seriously the process-inflected metaphysics implicated in their work potentially alter the lived experience of subjectivity?...","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131566140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0005
Russell J. Duvernoy
This chapter translates Whitehead’s metaphysical results into existential implications, with Deleuze and Guattari’s work considered as one example. Attention is implicated in both of Whitehead’s forms of passage: the concrescence of actual occasions and the global passage of nature, thus arguing that attention is ontological in consequence and function. This requires further exploration of Whitehead’s conception of “society”. For Whitehead, societies as repeatable patterns of events tend either towards creative response to changing conditions (open) or limiting responsiveness to such conditions in the interest of conformity (closed). The chapter reads Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous “lines of flight” as closely resonant, though they additionally consider potential prescriptive recommendations towards intensifying affective capacity. However, the structure of becoming renders efforts to extract stable normative representations of such recommendations paradoxical. The chapter concludes with critical discussion of this paradox in the context of statistical norms and algorithmic data-mining, arguing that one stake of attention is resisting such closed loops in the interest of creative alternatives.
{"title":"Attention, Openness and Ecological Attunement","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter translates Whitehead’s metaphysical results into existential implications, with Deleuze and Guattari’s work considered as one example. Attention is implicated in both of Whitehead’s forms of passage: the concrescence of actual occasions and the global passage of nature, thus arguing that attention is ontological in consequence and function. This requires further exploration of Whitehead’s conception of “society”. For Whitehead, societies as repeatable patterns of events tend either towards creative response to changing conditions (open) or limiting responsiveness to such conditions in the interest of conformity (closed). The chapter reads Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous “lines of flight” as closely resonant, though they additionally consider potential prescriptive recommendations towards intensifying affective capacity. However, the structure of becoming renders efforts to extract stable normative representations of such recommendations paradoxical. The chapter concludes with critical discussion of this paradox in the context of statistical norms and algorithmic data-mining, arguing that one stake of attention is resisting such closed loops in the interest of creative alternatives.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"201 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116148494","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0004
Russell J. Duvernoy
The chapter focuses on the early modern distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities. The chapter first discusses Quentin Meillassoux’s efforts to rehabilitate the primary-secondary distinction in his critique of “correlationism”. Despite Meillassoux’s claim that correlationism applies to all modern philosophy since Kant, the chapter argues that Whitehead’s reworking of the primary-secondary-tertiary distinction, based in his unusual reading of Locke, avoids the correlationist charge while opening a different kind of realism. This reworking amounts to an ontological inversion of the three qualities, such that tertiary quality becomes ontologically primary. A key consequence is that “feeling,” for Whitehead, names a metaphysical process constitutive of the real. This is neither a humanist nor psychological claim, but rather a metaphysical one. The chapter closes by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s use of affect along similar lines. However, where Whitehead is largely content with a technical metaphysical result, Deleuze and Guattari explore ensuing existential possibilities in their concept of “becoming-imperceptible”.
{"title":"Feeling as Creation: Affect and Tertiary Qualities","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter focuses on the early modern distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities. The chapter first discusses Quentin Meillassoux’s efforts to rehabilitate the primary-secondary distinction in his critique of “correlationism”. Despite Meillassoux’s claim that correlationism applies to all modern philosophy since Kant, the chapter argues that Whitehead’s reworking of the primary-secondary-tertiary distinction, based in his unusual reading of Locke, avoids the correlationist charge while opening a different kind of realism. This reworking amounts to an ontological inversion of the three qualities, such that tertiary quality becomes ontologically primary. A key consequence is that “feeling,” for Whitehead, names a metaphysical process constitutive of the real. This is neither a humanist nor psychological claim, but rather a metaphysical one. The chapter closes by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s use of affect along similar lines. However, where Whitehead is largely content with a technical metaphysical result, Deleuze and Guattari explore ensuing existential possibilities in their concept of “becoming-imperceptible”.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123808489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0006
Russell J. Duvernoy
This chapter draws on Deleuze’s distinction between practices of philosophy and science to articulate a philosophical concept of ecology. Because ecology is constitutively concerned with relations between unity and diversity, it is necessarily entangled with metaphysical questions. The chapter uses Félix Guattari’s framework of the three ecologies (psychic, social, and material) and Deleuze and Guattari’s “existential territories” to connect the metaphysical conception of subjectivity from the book’s first half to the idea of psychic ecology. Drawing on Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy, the chapter explores how what Marx calls “equivalence” exceeds its initial operation as metric of exchange to also function in the production of predictable patterns of subjectivity. Equivalence as a value tacitly orders and constrains attention in manners that make behaviour predictable, making equivalence-prediction two modes of the same logic perpetuating capitalist subjectivity. This diagnosis opens the possibility of counter habits of attention in the service of contributing to the active creation of different futures.
{"title":"Attention, Equivalence and Existential Territories","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter draws on Deleuze’s distinction between practices of philosophy and science to articulate a philosophical concept of ecology. Because ecology is constitutively concerned with relations between unity and diversity, it is necessarily entangled with metaphysical questions. The chapter uses Félix Guattari’s framework of the three ecologies (psychic, social, and material) and Deleuze and Guattari’s “existential territories” to connect the metaphysical conception of subjectivity from the book’s first half to the idea of psychic ecology. Drawing on Guattari and Jean-Luc Nancy, the chapter explores how what Marx calls “equivalence” exceeds its initial operation as metric of exchange to also function in the production of predictable patterns of subjectivity. Equivalence as a value tacitly orders and constrains attention in manners that make behaviour predictable, making equivalence-prediction two modes of the same logic perpetuating capitalist subjectivity. This diagnosis opens the possibility of counter habits of attention in the service of contributing to the active creation of different futures.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130202748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0007
Russell J. Duvernoy
This chapter dwells on axiological and existential tensions raised by the concept of ecological attunement. First, it distinguishes this concept from Heidegger’s well-known discussion of attunement and world. Then, it places Whiteheadean/Deleuzean concepts of affect and feeling in dialogue with the affect theory of Sylvan Tompkins and Daniel Stern, arguing that the “vitality affects” of the latter are ontologically prior to constituted worlds in a phenomenological sense. It considers how attention to affective tertiary qualities are shaped by inheritance of affective patterns and attentive choices of the past while also oriented towards a potentially open future. In this way, selection (from inherited qualities) and orientation (towards future projection) become the two sides of ecological attuning as an existential ideal. This double-sided structure is considered in relation to Whitehead’s discussion of “evil” and Deleuze’s emphasis on willing the event and counter-actualisation.
{"title":"The Risks of Affect","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter dwells on axiological and existential tensions raised by the concept of ecological attunement. First, it distinguishes this concept from Heidegger’s well-known discussion of attunement and world. Then, it places Whiteheadean/Deleuzean concepts of affect and feeling in dialogue with the affect theory of Sylvan Tompkins and Daniel Stern, arguing that the “vitality affects” of the latter are ontologically prior to constituted worlds in a phenomenological sense. It considers how attention to affective tertiary qualities are shaped by inheritance of affective patterns and attentive choices of the past while also oriented towards a potentially open future. In this way, selection (from inherited qualities) and orientation (towards future projection) become the two sides of ecological attuning as an existential ideal. This double-sided structure is considered in relation to Whitehead’s discussion of “evil” and Deleuze’s emphasis on willing the event and counter-actualisation.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":" 27","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132094492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-15DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0008
Russell J. Duvernoy
The book concludes by summarizing key implications for ecological attunement in the context of ecological crisis. Though such implications remain resolutely pluralistic, one imperative is challenging the dominance of received norms and cultivating attention to quality and affect prior to their consolidation in such norms. A tactic for this is through cultivating attention to centre-periphery relations and corresponding background-foreground shifts. Finally, Deleuze’s repurposing of Bergson’s concept of fabulation is discussed in the context of resisting hegemonic norms in an affirmative rather than reactionary manner. This notion of fabulation is connected to Whitehead’s discussion of “propositions” and “lures for feeling”. Such affirmative fabulation seeks to create connections across differences rather than consolidate us versus them narratives. This involves an openness to the unexpected and unpredictable rather than the dogma of propagandas or ideological identity.
{"title":"Conclusion: Fabulation and Epoch(s) to Come","authors":"Russell J. Duvernoy","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474466912.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The book concludes by summarizing key implications for ecological attunement in the context of ecological crisis. Though such implications remain resolutely pluralistic, one imperative is challenging the dominance of received norms and cultivating attention to quality and affect prior to their consolidation in such norms. A tactic for this is through cultivating attention to centre-periphery relations and corresponding background-foreground shifts. Finally, Deleuze’s repurposing of Bergson’s concept of fabulation is discussed in the context of resisting hegemonic norms in an affirmative rather than reactionary manner. This notion of fabulation is connected to Whitehead’s discussion of “propositions” and “lures for feeling”. Such affirmative fabulation seeks to create connections across differences rather than consolidate us versus them narratives. This involves an openness to the unexpected and unpredictable rather than the dogma of propagandas or ideological identity.","PeriodicalId":137199,"journal":{"name":"Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead","volume":"58 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120854254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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