THE BOOK

New Shapes of Reality

Aspects of A.N Whitehead’s Philosophy

Michael Jordon

This book has interested me. I have just finished it. The languaging. Whitehead makes language work. Nothing is just a category- because categories, things, people and what they get up to are known in their inter-relatedness. So there are Occasions and events and societies- clusters of stuff that jostle into sticking patterns for so much time- durational clumps where value is gotten at because of this resonant association- the harmony of these factors jostling – their affinity, flow and stoppage. It’s that limit factor or constraint that makes something into an appearance or value-(Whitehead actually sees that as a kind of God) otherwise it is not apparent and is non-existing- an indeterminate flow. That flow is the churning mix that keeps going endlessly. But the limitation is what makes something graspable- and we to one another of any significance.

Feeling is this juxtaposition of movement and stoppage- this pulsatory working between a continual becoming and the pre-selection of – and here’s where it gets whacky- “Eternal Objects”. These are the likelihood of anything and everything happening all boiled back down to one instance. A point, a thing, a person, a gesture is just such a cross-road between this wider indeterminate flux- here there is something of Simonden- where Individuation is the local and temporary resolution of a dissipated mixture of affects, their collisions, their re-combinations.

What is interesting here is that there is a constant interchange between this dissipated reactivity and the holding or stilling of this into temporary holdings- a “harmony” that coheres for just so long, according to the conditions of the situation- all the factors and players that make it so at that time in that place.

That is the playing out of “Feeling” which is basically the holding in a single scope of a contrast between flux and stoppage. Here change is felt from one state to another and this detecting of change is always an assemblage according to the environment or milieu of a certain set of contributors. That is what makes the Occasion, or event and the semblance of value is arrived at within that particular interplay. So, a stone rolling a distance down a slight incline has the cobbled together conditions of such a feeling event, between one instant and the next- so too does it allude to a wider sphere that is not the focus of the actual movement but is elastically or tenuously connected as part of the environment or society that occasions that event. This is not an outer “Atmosphere” or “field” through which the stone or anything else progresses form here to there, it is the generation of this sense of contrast actualized in the moving from one set of conditions to another in that stone.

The difference between this and a human social event is then in terms of the contributing factors and the degree of change. Yet, wherever there is repetition and then an alteration there is in affect the conditions for this kind of feeling event.

What is interesting here is that Whitehead is looking at the small interstices between one state and another relative to the considerations of a specific occasion. Each occasion where there is this relational and cohesive association going on qualifies as a feeling event at that scale and in that context of operation. So, meaning is forged by the actors that carry it forth- like an internal combustion that nevertheless spreads, through that association to a distributed pattern wrought within a continual flux. The stoppage is more then to be seen as the measuring up of counterweights that begin to act locally and minutely on one another to create affects- a shoring up in mutual support- a resonant equality of otherwise colliding compulsions, a lull in the rhythm where intensity builds and redoubles into a presenting- a form, an idea, a value. That value, instantaneous and provisional nevertheless is situated within a wide past and future and within the admixture of every kind of operation and perturbation that could set it this way and that way off of this one mark and from which for now it holds to and towards which, it is constantly flowing.

Because Whitehead starts with feeling affect, this becomes the measure of presence and it is internally generated within the atmosphere that creatively adheres into any arrangement. It is in the dissipative nature of this arrangement that local affects- between movement and pause happen simultaneously everywhere at once rather than in any cause-affect linear time line. Value arises spontaneously out of this process and hence Whiteheads association with this word, “Process”.

Two things become especially relevant in looking over this material with regards to Special Needs and non-functional usage. Value can be drummed up in the on-going workings of any process as long as this has duration- i.e. the hindsight to know one state in terms of another by building up instances of contrast between repetition and alteration, movement and stoppage. This becomes a society of value.

It can be made to seem that such activities hold no such value, feeling, moral cohesion, sense by interrupting this process of rhythmic interchange. This would be the result of morally classifying certain behaviors as retrogressive, unworthy, not to be valued, not of a human order, aesthetically without issue. It is not the Judgment that in itself has the power to outright de-sanctify certain practices or modes of being, it is the interruption of a process of an occasion- the disruption of an environment.

Invisibility is a condition that is demanded of certain types of curiosity and interests in marginal and subtle states of difference that these bring up and play out by obfuscating this on-going patterning.

Identities and languaging are built on these collectivities or multitudes of resonant occasions. They are mythic event-makers that operate on thresholds of climatic build and release, constraint and expansion, movement and arrest. They hold the conditions and enact the circumstances for complex sets of values and languaging to take place. They are the Occasions, distributed and symphonically scattered through which a kind of cohesion of wide attention and distributed awareness take place. They are an associative network never complete and always open to re-making. It is the affects of each condition of a particular compound that make it so. This is feeling. An on-going emotioning.

Because this patterning is essentially multi-scalar, it can be reinvested, re-formulated, migrated and begun all over, with the slightest of gestures, the flick of an eye-lid, the slightest of skid marks in the turn or posturing from one emphasis to another. The knot where two states come up against one another and so define one another in their affect is all it takes and it is everywhere.

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Further thoughts:

I think Whitehead’s notion of feeling as this internally generated gage between one state and another; the drumming up of the conditions of contrast through what is actually done, is quite similar to Rancieres’ ideas in the “Ignorant Schoolmaster”, where it is not any kind of outside “Standard” of over-arching intelligence or a certain subject matter that is deemed to be cultivated and appropriate that matters but the intelligence that is actually generated out of acts of looking, comparing, re-formatting upon any circumstance, material, surface that presents itself. That interlacing of associations becomes the material, the environment, the matter of concern and such an address provides the situation for attention and learning capable of generating every kind of possible questioning. Ranciere takes the example of a Cobbler who can learn all the permutations of contrast through the material at hand in the form of an old boot.

In a sense, all sense become interlinked and interchangeable, linking in and drawing out one another through this power of association. It is the questioning that elicits the value. ( After the Drumming session at the Arts Hut yesterday where we work on a certain encasement of a rhythmic sequence, then break it up or jostle it into a different category through its association in a single mis-beat with a different grouping, creates a widened sense awareness. Rather than being discriminatory- this bloc or that bloc- it is associative and creates linkages that cross-cut these blocs into patterns within patterns. The patterning in affect makes itself, out of these momentary holding back or letting though of on-going passages that then bunch up differently into clusters and streams. It’s like wading through mud- stop and the mud clusters around the skin giving a certain definition of leg according to this resistance and an awareness of skin sensation as if the mud were a tight fitting boot. Keep moving and there is this push-me pull-you gripping and letting go that is neither one nor the other- more a frame of working that elicits a certain force out of this opposite pulse on the verge of letting go that nevertheless staggers the process- draws it out- makes it into an occasion of some sort.

Synaesthasea is not really the right term because it is the depth of engagement that mixes up the senses before the senses ever really get going as separate experiences. After drumming my entire motioning is drawn into the certain patterned engagements through which it is both resistant to and emoted towards. The two work as one- an enfolding in the flaps of a concertina. – air is caught-yes but it is utilized and so becomes a force of resistance- a charge in its own right in this working up of a state of play. Afterwards I’m on the bus. A kid is working the mouth of its mother, open and closed, speaking it for her with its two hands clumped on her cheek and lower jaw. She allows this but at times offers some resistance and so the engagement never entirely fluid, is assured. That very stickiness- the hold is what keeps the engagement- the association locked on. It takes the one function into something more than this single itemization. I suddenly realize that I know this woman and the child- every day I face them across my kitchen sink over the distance of two back gardens. They are in the row of houses adjacent to me. But it is only in this motioning of the child’s hands on the mother’s jaw – the condition of a skin rash all over the child’s hands and arms and face that I notice up close, that a million separate instances of us being neighbors yet never exactly recognizing one another, come into mind.

After the drumming I see across to the lights over Waltham- stow Marshes. The train signals, the line of the train snaking through the land. I am intuited into the landscape. In the pulses of the stopping and starting. The signaling, the delays and the rush-on. I am seeing it but I am feeling it through a body tenderized through intensive cycles that I have recognized and helped to make so, in the delays and rushes of the drumming circle. I would not have had these ideas outside the beats that arose there and then between us all, together on that day, Easter Sunday, where a few of us gathered nevertheless in the shadows of the Funfair that hoisted people up and down on elasticated levers that shot well above the multi-floored buildings on the opposite side of the road, then down again to nearly touching the earth of the park.

At first- in the small hut where the day’s sunshine did not reach- we felt embarrassed by our piecemeal gathering. Than something took hold bit by bit almost as an afterthought but building on the decision, however half-hearted, to actually stay; us being there. Staying with that inclination the event built, becoming real. The value was composed.

It feels to me like a kind of freedom- that freedom to stop and start that is as much a part of inhibition- limitation as it is of flow. I think of Whiteheads connection of Limitation with Value- not something in and of itself- an idealized form separate from our living that is always somehow lacking- but something worked up through the conditions we find ourselves in. This, our only environment- not a separate garden- a gated community, but the stops and starts in the interstices of day to day existence- a becoming.