Category: Theory

So antigram has a posting attacking a previous posting by k-punk that was about class power and “class confidence” (the sense of entitlement which is instilled in members of the ruling, or upper, class, while members of the “lower” classes tend to experience, instead, “a sense of inferiority, a constant worry about whether one should occupy certain spaces, the quietly panicky conviction that ‘surely they can see that I don’t belong here’.”).

Antigram doesn’t so much dispute the content of k-punk’s post, as reject its basic premises. Indeed, I’m inclined to say that no human being with any observational powers whatsoever could possibly disagree with k-punk’s basic observations (unless he or she were utterly blinded by ideology, which is an entirely different discussion). Consider, for instance, when k-punk notes that “in my experience, so many members of the ruling class resemble Daleks: their smooth, hard exterior contains a slimy invertebrate, seething with inchoate, infantile emotions.” Despite the differences between American class sensibilities and the British ones that k-punk is describing, this is precisely what I encounter whenever I visit The Somerset Collection, or any similarly upscale suburban shopping mall. This is the case, even though — in contrast, probably, to Great Britain — in the US the people who fit this description, and whose household income is probably at least two or three times mine, are just as likely as I am, or for that matter as people whose combined household income is one half or one third of mine, to describe themselves, if asked, as “middle class.” For class cannot be circumscribed by old-fashioned notions of “class consciousness”; it is something deeply embodied, and powefully affective , even when (or all the more if) we are not directly conscious of it.

It’s because antigram cannot really dispute any of this, that he puts the argument on a different footing. The part of k-punk’s argument that he rejects is contained in the first three words of the quotation I cited in the paragraph above: “in my experience…” Antigram argues (as does Jodi in her own comment on this exchange) that one cannot validly argue “from experience” at all. This is because, in the first place, “every argument from experience is really an argument from fantasy, and more specifically from the fantasies that a particular subject has for some reason produced in order to comprehend a traumatic experience.” The very fact that an argument is grounded in experience would therefore mean that it is skewed, partial, non-objective, and self-delusional. And secondly, “because arguments from experience are really disavowed arguments from fantasies, their categories often tend to become substantial and racialized.” The argument from experience always ends up being (horror of horrors!) an essentialistic and reified one. Therefore, according to antigram’s argument, k-punk is guilty of transforming “the Marxist conception of class” from “an economic and political category” into “a therapeutic and affective one.”

Now, it is evident that in a certain sense antigram’s criticism is correct. We don’t need the Lacanian theory of fantasy to know that merely anecdotal evidence is rarely accurate and complete. Indeed, it’s easy enough to find examples of bigotry (against black people, or not-quite-white Muslims, or darker-skinned people more generally; or against Jews; or against women; or against gays and lesbians) which justify themselves precisely on the grounds of anecdotal experience (“they” behave this way; I’ve seen “them”). Indeed, the justified distrust of the merely anecdotal is one of the major reasons for what has come to be known, in the past several hundred years, as the scientific method. The most reductionist quantitative social scientists are as likely as rigorous Lacanians, and other enemies of positivism, to distrust “experience” in this anecdotal sense.

The trouble with antigram’s argument, however, is that, for all its limits and distortions, “experience” is something you cannot get away from. There is nothing besides, nothing outside of, experience. All arguments are ultimately “arguments from experience.” We can argue, of course, about different sorts of experience, different ways of invoking experiential evidence, and so on; but that is a very different sort of argument. Scientific evidence (using “science” in the sense of physical, experimental science) has rules about validating evidence, which things to accept, and which not, as evidence, and so forth; but it still remains entirely within the realm of what is given to us by experience. Antigram invokes Lacan against k-punk’s appeal to (his own) experience, by citing the Lacanian critique of fantasy. But doesn’t Lacan also say that there is no metalanguage, and that psychoanalysis is, quite emphatically, not a matter of the analyst knowing what the analysand does not? As far as I understand Lacan (which admittedly is not very far), there’s nothing in his thought that would authorize us to separate ourselves from experience in the way antigram thinks we can, and ought to.

In one of the comments on antigram’s post, kenoma says that antigram’s argument brings back to mind “the dreary Theory-fetish shared by many British Althusserians such as Catherine Belsey in the early eighties.” I think that Althusser is somewhat to the point here (though I know almost nothing of Belsey or of 80s British Althusserianism). Althusser famously insists on the difference between “ideology” and “science.” He scandalized humanist Marxists with his valorization of science, but also scandalized hard-core Leninists, Stalinists, etc., with his insistence that even a communist society would still be in the grips of ideology, which was humanly uneliminable. But the whole argument has usually been misunderstood. “Ideology,” for Althusser, means any sort of subjective position, any sort of reliance on “experience,” altogether. “Science” means something that is radically asubjective, and that therefore cannot be called a “position” or a “perspective” at all. By science, Althusser basically meant Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, or knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. Part of Althusser’s point is that this sort of knowledge, although it exists and is articulated in certain texts, or in certain portions of certain texts, is strictly speaking impossible, in that it absolutely cannot be assumed or adopted subjectively, by a subject; it cannot be a matter of experience. This is why Althusser said that ideology would never be surpassed or eliminated, even in a communist society.

Now, the very idea of “science” led Althusser, as is well known, into all sorts of difficulties. These days, even Althusser’s admirers (if there are any left) probably don’t accept it. My own sense of the matter is that Althusserian science, like the Spinozian knowledge to which it is equivalent, is best regarded as an Ideal in the Kantian sense: an imperative that thought can neither fulfill nor disavow, and that has a regulative or “problematic” use, even as it is constitutively impossible. Althusser himself never accepted this as a resolution; though I’d like to think that his late work on “aleatory materialism” is not incompatible with it (this is more of a hunch on my part than something I can articulate in a convincing manner). In any case, I think that an understanding of “experience” in this crypto-Kantian-Althusserian way, as something that is never entirely adequate, but also that we can never presume to rid ourselves of, shows why antigram’s critique of k-punk is unacceptable. Antigram says that k-punk grounds his discussion in “an argument from a specifically childhood experience.” But k-punk is not offering this experience as the proof of his argument; he is rather using it in order to foreground his own subjective stake in the argument, which is an entirely different matter. It is antigram who is being disingenuous by writing as if he didn’t also have such a stake: as if his own argument could be scientific rather than ideological, or as if the position of the analyst could somehow be free of counter-transference.

(I don’t mean by this to demand that antigram reveal his own stake. Such a demand is never justified.There are all sorts of good reasons for privacy and disengagement; and writing and arguing often function, quite rightly, as ways of escaping from one’s personality or subjectivity rather than affirming it. I certainly regard my own writing, on this blog and elsewhere, as such an endeavor towards escape. But no argument, and no writing, has the sort of transcendence of all stakes and subjectivities, the freedom from any “argument from experience,” that antigram implicitly claims for his criticism of k-punk).

Another way to put this is to note what is problematic about antigram’s charge that k-punk transmutes class from “an economic and political category” into “a therapeutic and affective one.” Now, I’m a great advocate of retaining Marx’s understanding of the logic of capital as the basis for understanding class and many other things. Most essentially, class is a function of one’s relation to the processes of extracting, expropriating, and distributing surplus value. But I don’t think that k-punk is ignoring this, even though he is not focusing on it. And to say that class is ultimately determined (“in the last instance”, as Althusser liked to say) by one’s position vis-a-vis the expropriation of surplus value, is not to say that class is devoid of other sorts of components. And particularly of affective components. As far as I am concerned, the most important thing Deleuze and/or Guattari ever said is that there is a crucially affective dimension of all social and psychological processes; that affectivity is intrinsic to, or immanent to, among other things, the very logic of Capital. K-punk is trying to describe, in his post, one aspect (an important one) of the affectivity of class, i.e. the affectivity of the very movement of capital as it works in the world today. Antigram is wrong to exclude the affective, or to oppose the affective to the “economic and political.” For there is no economcs, and no politics, that is not at the same time affective.

Indeed, one major reason for the theoretical deadlock in which the Left finds itself today is precisely its failure to adequately consider the affective dimension of economics and politics. Neoliberalism is able to work as a form of class warfare (of the rich, or the capitalist class, against everyone else), and as a form of redistribution (away from everyone else and to the already ultra-rich and their corporations), only because it has been so effective, so triumphant, on the affective level. (This is something that Deleuze and Guattari, and the post-operaismo Italians, among others, touch on in various ways, but our understanding of it remains seriously underdeveloped).

Antigram’s separation of the affective from the economic and political is thus where the real problem lies. As for the “therapeutic,” well, it seems curious for somebody using Lacanian arguments to disavow therapy. (But perhaps that is a low blow; Lacan certainly had acute, accurate criticisms of American-style therapeutic “cures”). In any case, I take the point (expressed more by Jodi than by antigram) about the problem with appeals to one’s own “experience” of “victimization” in American identity politics. But again, the way to get around this is not to stop considering affect, or experience, but to understand affect and experience in less “propertarian” terms. Affect and experience are necessarily “subjective”; but they can still, for all that, be collective and transpersonal rather than the “property” of an aggrieved individual. They do not “belong” to a specially privileged subject; they are rather that which transforms, shapes, and misshapes any such subject. Which I think was what k-punk was pointing to. The aggressive personal claims to the validity of one’s own experience that Jodi disparages are another thing altogether. (In fairness, Jodi — unlike antigram — never asserts that this is the case with k-punk’s post itself).

Antigram ends his post by asserting “the basic Lacanian maxim that, not Daleks, and not the class system, but rather oneself ‘is always responsible for one’s position as subject’.” I do not know whether or not Lacan really says this. But I find this maxim to be utterly appalling, “bad and reactionary.” It is a classic example of “blaming the victim.” It is the basic neoliberal mantra that the poor are “responsible” for their own poverty, that the failure of the so-called “underclass” to thrive is a consequence of its own deficiency in “values” or “entrepreneurial drive.” To hold this maxim is to endorse a Hobbesian and Malthusian view of the social world, to accept cutthroat capitalism as an ultimate ontological horizon, to smugly view whatever happens as the justified “survival of the fittest.”

The only politically and ethically acceptable maxim, to the contrary, is to say that nobody is ever responsible for his/her own position as subject.

I can’t seem to get away from the subject.

For Whitehead, the great accomplishment of Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy is its “conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning” (PR 156). That is to say, Whitehead credits Kant with originating philosophical constructivism. Kant denies the possibility (or even the meaningfulness) of knowing “things in themselves,” and points instead to the ways that we are always already constructively involved with whatever it is that we experience or observe. We do not represent, in our minds, a reality that would simply exist out there, by itself, independent of and prior to our experience of it. Nor do we just create the world through our own mental processes or forms of representation. Rather, our experience of the world, of what Whitehead calls “stubborn fact” (128-129) external to ourselves, is itself the reflexive process through which the world, including ourselves, gets constituted. For Whitehead, as for Kant, “the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the experiences of subjects” – and nothing else (166). As a constructivist, Whitehead is very much a post-Kantian thinker – rather than the pre-Kantian throwback that he is sometimes taken to be.

Whitehead signals his indebtedness to Kant at every turn. Like Kant, he performs a delicate balancing act, rejecting the claims of idealism on the one hand, and of scientific positivism on the other. But at the same time, Whitehead criticizes Kant for exhibiting an “excess of subjectivity” (15). Kant simply claims too much for thought, or for the mind. He says that our minds actively shape experience, by structuring it according to certain extra-experiential “concepts of understanding,” or Categories. “There can be no doubt that all our cognition begins with experience,” Kant writes. “But even though all our cognition starts with experience, that does not mean that all of it arises from experience” (CPR 43-44). For Kant, the Categories of the understanding cannot be derived from experience – even though they can only be legitimately applied within experience. In referring the Categories to “our spontaneity of cognition” (106), Kant in effect reaffirms the cogito, the Cartesian subject separated from, and unconditioned by, the world that it only observes and “thinks” from a distance. Though Kant, in the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” demolishes any substantive claims for the Cartesian ego, he nonetheless retains that ego in the ghostly, residual form of the “transcendental unity of apperception” that accompanies every act of cognition. Kant thereby exempts the subject from the (otherwise ubiquitous) sense of “experience as a constructive functioning.”

Whitehead, like many post-Kantians, rejects this exemption or separation. For constructivism to be complete, the transcendental presuppositions of experience must themselves arise – immanently, contingently, and historically – from within experience. Even Kant’s basic “form of intuition,” Whitehead says, must be “derived from the actual world qua datum, and thus is not ‘pure’ in Kant’s sense of that term” (PR 72). The transcendental presuppositions of experience must be processes, rather than fixed logical categories. And they cannot be attributed to the “spontaneity” of a subject that would already be in place. “For Kant,” Whitehead says, “the process whereby there is experience is a process from subjectivity to apparent objectivity.” But Whitehead’s own philosophy “inverts this analysis, and explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity” (156). The subject emerges from experience, rather than being presupposed by it. Whitehead thus replaces Kant’s “transcendental idealism” – his “doctrine of the objective world as a construct from subjective experience” – with something more on the order of William James’ “radical empiricism,” or of what Deleuze will later call “transcendental empiricism.”

The important thing for Whitehead about Kantian “critique,” therefore, is neither its determination of the limits of reason, nor its deduction of the concepts of understanding, but rather its constructivist account of the conditions of receptivity, or sensibility. That is to say, Whitehead rejects Kant’s “Transcendental Logic,” according to which “ordered experience is the result of schematization of modes of thought, concerning causation, substance, quality, quantity” (113). But he largely accepts the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” in which Kant gives his “exposition” of space and time. This rendering of “the rules of sensibility as such” (CPR 107) is, for Whitehead, “a distorted fragment of what should have been [Kant’s] main topic” (PR 113). Kant’s great discovery in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” is that space and time are “constructs,” in opposition to “the Newtonian ‘absolute’ theory of space-time” (70-72); but also that space and time, as constructs, are acategorical and non-conceptual. Space is “an a priori intuition, not a concept,” Kant reminds us (CPR 79). Time, similarly, “is not a discursive or, as it is called, universal concept; rather, it is a pure form of sensible intuition” (86). This is why time is “nothing but the form of inner sense. . . the formal a priori condition of all appearances generally” (88). Space and time are immanent conditions of sensible intuition: they indicate the ways in which we receive the “data” that objects provide to us, rather than being logical categories to which the objects providing such data are themselves compelled to conform. Because they are merely forms of reception, space and time are not adequate for cognition. Indeed, Kant says that space and time are “sources of cognition” (92), in that nothing can be cognized apart from them. But space and time are not in themselves enough to authorize the active process of cognition.

This point can be stated in another way. Kant starts out with the Humean assumption of a complete atomism of subjective sensations, “the radical disconnection of impressions qua data” from one another (PR 113). For Hume adheres to what Whitehead calls the sensationalist principle: the idea “that the primary activity in the act of experience is the bare subjective entertainment of the datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception” (157). Kant’s aim, in the Critique of Pure Reason, is to avoid the skeptical consequences of Hume’s position by rejecting this sensationalist principle. He seeks to show how the chaos of “mere sensation” can be ordered, or its elements connected, in a more stable and satisfactory way than Hume is able to accomplish with his appeal to mere habit. In the “Transcendental Logic,” Kant does this in what Whitehead regards as an overly intellectualistic way. Kant appeals to what Whitehead calls “the higher of the human modes of functioning” (113), ignoring the more basic and primordial modes of sensation and perception. That is to say, Kant takes a cognitive approach, rather than an affective one. He also presupposes a dualism of form and matter, according to which materiality, or the “sensible” (that which can be apprehended by the senses alone), is passive, inert, and intrinsically shapeless, and that it can only be organized by an intelligibleform that is imposed upon it from the outside, or from above. In Kant’s account, the understanding, with its Categories, imposes a conceptual order upon an otherwise disconnected and featureless flux of individual impressions.

But in the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Kant does not altogther adhere to this dualism of form and matter. He does indeed say that space and time are the “pure forms” of perception, and “sensation as such is its matter” (CPR 95). But his discussion also bears the traces of a different logic. Because time and space are not categories or concepts, they do not relate to their objects in the way that the forms of logical intelligibility (“causation, substance, quality, quantity”) do. They are not organizing principles actively imprinted upon an otherwise shapeless and disorganized matter. Rather, space and time are themselves effectively “passive,” since they are modes of receptivity rather than spontaneity. Kant says that sensibility or receptivity “remains as different as day and night from cognition of the object in itself”; rather than being cognitive, sensibility has to do with “the appearance of something, and the way we are affected by that something” (CPR 96; italics added). And this is the crucial point. Even though the “thing in itself” is cognitively unknowable, nevertheless it affects us. And by conveying and expressing “the way we are affected,” space and time establish immanent connections among objects, and especially between the object and the subject. These affective connections are already given in the very course of any experience of spatialization and temporalization. In the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” there is no problem of formlessness, or of disconnected impressions; and therefore there is no need to impose the Categories of understanding from above, in order to give these impressions form, or to yoke them together. As Whitehead puts it, in such a process of feeling “the datum includes its own interconnections” (PR 113).

This is from the same chapter-in-progress as my previous post. It’s an attempt to work through Whitehead’s concept of “eternal objects,” and show how this concept is related to Deleuze’s notion of the virtual. I kind of feel this is not much more than “Whitehead 101,” but it is only by working things out as slowly and painfully as I am doing here, that I am able to get the concept straight in my own mind. Page numbers refer to Process and Reality. Footnotes omitted.

Alongside events or actual entities, Whitehead also posits what he calls “eternal objects.” These are “Pure Potentials” (22), or “potentials for the process of becoming” (29). If actual entities are singular “occasions” of becoming, then eternal objects provide “the ‘qualities’ and ‘relations’ ” (191) that enter into, and help to define, these occasions. When “the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity,” it “contribute[es] to the definiteness of that actual entity” (23). It gives it a particular character. Eternal objects thus take on something of the role that universals (48; 158), predicates (186), Platonic forms (44), and ideas (52; 149) played in older metaphysical systems. But we have already seen that, for Whitehead, “concrete particular fact” cannot simply “be built up out of universals”; it is more the other way around. Universals, or “things which are eternal,” can and must be abstracted from “things which are temporal” (40). But they cannot be conceived by themselves, in the absence of the empirical, temporal entities that they inform. Eternal objects, therefore, are neither a priori logical structures, nor Platonic essences, nor constitutive rational ideas. They are adverbial, rather than substantive; they determine and express how actual entities relate to one another, take one another up, and “enter into each others’ constitutions” (148-149). Like Kantian and Deleuzian ideas, eternal objects work regulatively, or problematically.

To be more precise, Whitehead defines eternal objects as follows: “any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an ‘eternal object’ ” (44). This means that eternal objects include sensory qualities, like colors (blueness or greenness) and tactile sensations (softness or roughness), conceptual abstractions like shapes (a helix, or a dodecahedron) and numbers (seven, or the square root of minus two), moral qualities (like bravery or cowardice), physical fundamentals (like gravitational attraction or electric charge), and much more besides. An eternal object can also be “a determinate way in which a feeling can feel. . . an emotion, or an intensity, or an adversion, or an aversion, or a pleasure, or a pain” (291). “Sensa” – or what today are more commonly called “qualia” – are eternal objects; so are affects or emotions; and so are “contrasts, or patterns,” or anything else that can “express a manner of relatedness between other eternal objects” (114). There is, in fact, “an indefinite progression of categories, as we proceed from ‘contrasts’ to ‘contrasts of contrasts,’ and on indefinitely to higher grades of contrasts” (22). The levels and complexities proliferate, without limit. But regardless of level, eternal objects are ideal abstractions that nevertheless (unlike Platonic forms) can only be encountered within experience, when they are “selected” and “felt” by particular actual occasions. For this reason, they are well described as “empirico-ideal notions.”

Whitehead’s use of the word “eternal” might seem to be a strange move, in the context of a philosophy grounded in events, becomings, and continual change and novelty. And indeed, as if acknowledging this, he remarks that, “if the term ‘eternal objects’ is disliked, the term “potentials’ would be suitable” instead (149). But if Whitehead prefers to retain the appellation “eternal objects,” this is precisely because he seeks – like Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze – to reject the Platonic separation between eternity and time, the binary opposition that sets a higher world of permanence and perfection (“a static, spiritual heaven”) against an imperfect lower world of flux (209). The two instead must continually interpenetrate. For “permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts” (338). Actual entities continually perish; but the relations between them, or the patterns that they make, tend to recur, or endure. Thus “it is not ‘substance’ which is permanent, but ‘form.’ ” And even forms do not subsist absolutely, but continually “suffer changing relations” (29). In asserting this, Whitehead converts Plato from idealism to empiricism, just as he similarly converts Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant

When Whitehead says that forms as well as substances, or eternal objects as well as actual entities, must be accepted as real, he is arguing very much in the spirit of the radical empiricism of William James. For James, experience is the sole criterion of reality; we live in “a world of pure experience.” Classical empiricism has great difficultly in making sense of relations, as well as of emotions, contrasts and patterns, and all the other phenomena that Whitehead classifies as “eternal objects.” Since these cannot be recognized as “things,” or as direct “impressions of sensation,” they are relegated to the status of mental fictions (habits, derivatives, secondary qualities, and so on). But James says that, in a world of pure experience, “relations” are every bit as real as “things”: “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system.” Whitehead argues, by the same logic, that eternal objects must be accounted as real as the actual entities which they qualify, and which select them, include them, and incarnate them. Eternal objects are real, because they are themselves “experienced relations,” or primordial elements of experience.

But even though eternal objects are altogether real, they are not the same thing as actual entities. Like Deleuze’s virtualities, they are precisely not actual. This is because, in themselves, they are not causally determined, and they cannot make anything happen. Eternal objects “involve in their own natures indecision” and “indetermination” (29); they always imply alternatives, contingencies, situations that could have been otherwise. This patch of wall is yellow, but it might have been blue. This means that their role is essentially passive. “An eternal object is always a potentiality for actual entities; but in itself, as conceptually felt, it is neutral as to the fact of its physical ingression in any particular actual entity of the temporal world” (44). You might say that yellowness “in itself,” understood as a pure potentiality, is utterly indifferent to the actual yellow color of this particular patch of wall. Yellowness per se has no causal efficacy, and no influence over the “decision” by which it is admitted (or not) into any particular actual state of affairs. Eternal objects, like Deleuze’s quasi-causes, are neutral, sterile, and inefficacious, as powerless as they are indifferent.

At the same time, every event, every actual occasion, involves the actualization of certain of these mere potentialities. Each actual entity is determined by what Whitehead calls the ingression of specific eternal objects into it. “The term ‘ingression’ refers to the particular mode in which the potentiality of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity, contributing to the definiteness of that actual entity” (23). Each actual entity creates itself, in a process of decision, by making a selection among the potentialities offered to it by eternal objects. The concrescence of each actual entity involves the rejection of some eternal objects, and the active “entertainment,” or “admi[ssion] into feeling” (188), of others. And by a kind of circular process, the eternal objects thus admitted or entertained serve to define and determine the entity that selected them. That is why – or better, how – this particular patch of wall actually is yellow. By offering themselves for actualization, and by determining the very entities that select and actualize them, eternal objects play a transcendental, quasi-causal role in the constitution of the actual world.

Whitehead also explains the difference, and the relation, between eternal objects and actual entities by noting that the former “can be dismissed” at any moment, while the latter always “have to be felt” (239). Potentialities are optional; they may or may not be fulfilled. But actualities cannot be avoided. Indeed, “an actual entity in the actual world of a subject must enter into the concrescence of that subject by some simple causal feeling, however vague, trivial, and submerged” (239). An actual entity can, in fact, be rejected or excluded, by the process of what Whitehead calls a negative prehension: “the definite exclusion of [a given] item from positive contribution to the subject’s own real internal constituion” (41). But even this is a sort of backhanded acknowledgement, an active response to something that cannot just be ignored. Even “the negative prehension of an entity is a positive fact with its emotional subjective form” (41-42). An actual entity has causal efficacy, because in itself it is entirely determined; it is empirically “given,” and this “givenness” means Necessity (42-43). Once actual entities have completed their process, once the ingression of eternal objects into them has been fixed, they “are devoid of all indetermination. . . They are complete and determinate. . . devoid of all indecision” (29). Every event thus culminates in a “stubborn matter of fact” (239), a state of affairs that has no potential left, and that cannot be otherwise than it is. An event consists precisely in this movement from potentiality (and indeterminacy) into actuality (and complete determination). The process of actualization follows a trajectory from the mere, disinterested (aesthetic) “envisagement” of eternal objects (44) to a pragmatic interest in some of these objects, and their incorporation within “stubborn fact which cannot be evaded” (43).

Still to be worked out:

• The genesis of temporality in the process of actualization. Whitehead describes the future as “merely real, without being actual” (238) — the same phrasing that Deleuze uses to describe the virtual.
• Eternal objects as the focus of Whitehead’s own version of Kant’s transcendental argument. Like Kant, Whitehead seeks to critique positivist empiricism on the one hand, and dogmatic idealism on the other.
• Part of the way that both Whitehead and Deleuze convert Kant is that, where Kant’s transcendental argument is devised to answer the epistemological question What can we know? (and also the questions What ought we to do? and, For what might we hope?), Whitehead and Deleuze instead found their transcendental reflection on trying to answer the question How are novelty and change possible? How can we account for a future that is different from the past?
• Double causality: In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes of the Stoic split in causality; there is real causality — causes relate to other causes in the depths of bodies, and quasi-causality — effects relate to other effects on the surfaces. In Anti-Oedipus, the distinction between depths and surfaces is abandoned; but we still have a distinction between desiring production and the quasi-causal anti-production of the Body without Organs. How does Deleuze’s split causality relate to the double causality in Whitehead, where causal efficacy or efficient causality refers to the inheritance of conditions and orientations from the past, and final causality is the entity’s “decision,” or creative self-actualization in the final concrescence? Both Deleuze and Whitehead thus posit a second causality that has to do with the virtual, in opposition to the linear cause-and-effect of the entirely actual. Can this be related in any meaningful way to Kant’s distinction, in the 2nd Critique, between “causality as natural mechanism” and “causality as freedom”?
• Whitehead’s concept of God, and Deleuze (or rather, Deleuze Guattari’s) Body without Organs. This is the comparison that I started out trying to get to. Both God and the BwO are non-totalizable “wholes” in which all potential is contained; both can be regarded as a “quasi-cause” and “surface of inscription” for all events, in such a way that it does not determine these events, but allows precisely for their indeterminacy and continuing openness to difference in the future. Both God and BwO need to be posited as a consequence of the very logic of multiplicity and open totalities with which Whithead and Deleuze/Guattari are working. Both God and BwO are traversed by similar dualities (the primordial vs the consequent nature of God in ; the BwO as body of Capital in Anti-Oedipus and the emphasis on constructing a “full” BwO in A Thousand Plateaus).

What follows is an extract from the chapter I am in the middle of writing now — about “Deleuze’s Encounter with Whitehead,'” and the relations of both Deleuze and Whitehead to Kant. This passage doesn’t have much to do with Whitehead; it is mostly my endeavor to think about what Deleuze means by the ‘virtual’, and how this can be understood in Kantian terms. Still to be written is the part in which I relate all this back to Whitehead’s interest in potentiality, and his concept of potentials as what he calls “eternal objects.”

Deleuze’s own “transcendental empiricism” centers on his notion of the virtual. I think that this much-disputed concept can best be understood in Kantian terms. The virtual is the transcendental condition of all experience. And Ideas in the virtual, which are always “problematic or problematizing,” are Deleuze’s equivalent of “regulative ideas” in Kant (DR, 168ff.). For Kant, as Deleuze points out, “problematic Ideas are both objective and undetermined.” They cannot be presented directly, or re-presented; but their very indeterminacy “is a perfectly positive, objective structure which acts as a focus or horizon within perception.” The error of metaphysical dogmatism is to use these Ideas constitutively: to take their objects as determinate, transcendent entities. This is to forget that such objects “can be neither given nor known.” The correlative error of skepticism is to think that, since the Ideas are indeterminate and unrepresentable, they are thereby merely subjective, and their objects merely fictive. This is to forget that “problems have an objective value,” and that “problematic does not mean only a particularly important species of subjective acts, but a dimension of objectivity as such which is occupied by these acts.” Against both of these errors, Kant upholds the regulative and transcendental use of the Ideas. A regulative idea does not determine any particular solution in advance. But operating as a guideline, or as a frame of reference, the regulative idea works problematically, to establish the conditions out of which solutions, or “decisions,” can emerge. In positing a process of this sort, Kant invents the notion of the transcendental realm, or of what Deleuze will call the virtual.

There are, of course, important differences between Kant’s transcendental argument and Deleuze’s invocation of the virtual. For one thing, Kant’s stance is legislative and juridical: he seeks to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses of reason. Deleuze seeks rather (citing Artaud) “to have done with the judgment of God”; his criterion is constructivist rather than juridical, concerned with pushing forces to the limits of what they can do, rather than with evaluating their legitimacy. Also, Kant’s transcendental realm determines the necessary form – but only the form – of all possible experience. Deleuze’s virtual, in contrast, is “genetic and productive” of actual experience (NP, 51-52). Finally, Kant’s transcendental realm has the structure of a subjectivity; at the very least, it takes on the bare form of the “I” in the “transcendental unity of apperception.” But Deleuze’s virtual is an “impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field” (LS, 102); it does not have the form of a consciousness. In making these corrections to Kant, Deleuze himself does what he credits Nietzsche with doing: he “stands [Kantian] critique on its feet, just as Marx does with the [Hegelian] dialectic” (NP, 89).

To convert Kant from transcendental idealism to transcendental empircism, and from a juridico-legislative project to a constructivist one, means to move from the possible to the virtual, and from merely formal conditions of possibility to concrete conditions of actualization. Deleuze’s transformation of Kant thus leads directly to his famous distinction between the virtual and the possible. For Deleuze, the possible is an empty form, defined only by the principle of non-contradiction. To say that something is possible is to say nothing more than that its concept cannot be excluded a priori, on logical grounds alone. This means that possibility is a purely negative category; it lacks any proper being of its own. Mere possibility is not generative or productive; it is not enough to make anything happen. It does not satisfy the principle of sufficient reason. This is why Deleuze says that “the possible is opposed to the real” (DR 211). Something that is merely possible has no claim to existence, and no intrinsic mode of being. Its only positive characteristics are those that it borrows from the real that it is not. The possible “refers to the form of identity in the concept”; it “is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible” (211-212). That is to say, the possible is exactly like the real, except for the contingency that it does not, in fact, exist. And the real is nothing more than the the working-out of what was already prefigured and envisioned as possible. In this mirror play of resemblances, there can be nothing new or unexpected. When a possibility is realized – when it does come into existence – no actual creation has taken place. As Deleuze says, “it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like” (212).

The virtual, on the other hand, is altogether real in its own right; it “possesses a full reality by itself” (211). It is just that this reality is not actual. The virtual is like a field of energies that have not yet been expended, or a reservoir of potentialities that have not yet been tapped. That is to say, the virtual is not composed of actual entities; but the potential for change that it offers is real in its own way. In the Proustian formulation so frequently used by Deleuze, the virtual is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” (208). One can in fact explain the virtual in entirely physicalist terms: as Gilbert Simondon did in work that greatly influenced Deleuze, and as Manuel Delanda has more recently done. But Deleuze most often describes the virtual as a transcendental field or structure, conditioning and generating the actual. The virtual is a principle of emergence, or of creation. As such, it does not prefigure or predetermine the actualities that emerge from it. Rather, it is the impelling force, or the principle, that allows each actual entity to appear (to manifest itself) as something new, something without precedence or resemblance, something that has never existed in the universe in quite that way before. That is why the virtual is entirely distinct from the possible. If anything, it is closer to Nietzsche’s will-to-power, or Bergson’s élan vital. All of these must be understood, not as inner essences, but as post-Kantian “syntheses” of difference: transcendental conditions for dynamic becoming, rather than for static being (cf. NP 51-52).

The virtual works as a transcendental condition for the actual by providing a sufficient reason for whatever happens. This brings us back to the distinction, or the gap, between sufficient reason and ordinary causality. Linear causality, of the sort that physical science traces, is always, and only, a relation among bodies. It is a matter, as Deleuze puts it in The Logic of Sense, of “bodies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions and passions, and the corresponding ‘states of affairs.’ These states of affairs, actions and passions, are determined by the mixtures of bodies. . . all bodies are causes – causes in relation to each other and for each other” (4). Everything in the world is determined by such physical causes; they consitute a necessary condition – but not a sufficient one – for whatever happens.

This linear causality is what Kant sought to guarantee against Hume’s skepticism. But if we accept Whitehead’s critique of Hume, then we will have to conclude that Kant’s very search for such a guarantee is superfluous. Causal efficacy is always already at work in the depths of bodies. Kant never questions Hume’s initial error: the idea that causality can never be found out there, and that consequently it can only be located in the mind of the perceiver. Where Hume appeals to habit as the empirical basis of the mind’s ascription of causality to things, Kant’s transcendental argument converts this into an a priori necessity. But Kant still accepts what Whitehead calls the subjectivist and sensationalist principles derived from Locke and Hume (PR, 157). In consequence, Kant’s transcendental deduction remains caught within “a logic of tracing and reproduction” (ATP, 12). Kant transfers causal efficacy from the world to the subject apprehending the world; but he does not thereby explain causality, or add anything to it. In Kant’s transcendental argument, the possible merely doubles the real.

Deleuze converts Kant’s argument from possibility to virtuality, and from the role of guaranteeing causal efficacy to one of providing sufficient reasons, by positing a different sort of transcendental logic. Alongside the actual, material “connection” of physical causes to one another, there is also a virtual relation, or a “bond,” linking “effects or incorporeal events” among themselves (LS, 6). The virtual is the realm of effects separated from their causes: “effects in the causal sense, but also sonorous, optical, or linguistic ‘effects’ ” (7), or what in the movies are called ‘special effects.’ Effects come after causes, of course, in the physical world of bodies. But transcendentally, these incorporeal special effects establish a strange precedence. Considered apart from their physical causes, and independently of any bodily instantiation, they are something like the generative conditions – the ‘meanings’ and the ‘reasons’ – for the very processes that physically produce them. Deleuze calls such generative after-effects “quasi-causes” (6). Quasi-causality is “an unreal and ghostly causality” (33), more an insinuation than a determination. The quasi-cause “is nothing outside of its effect”; but “it haunts the effect… it maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product, the moment that it is produced, into something productive” (95). The virtual thus induces the productivity of the actual. But in itself, it partakes only of “extra-being”; it is “sterile, inefficacious, and on the surface of things” (7). This paradoxical, ghostly quasi-causality, rather than linear physical causality, is the proper content of a transcendental that neither copies the real, nor prefigures it.