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Notes
1 For a detailed account of the physics of diffraction cf. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p.80.
2 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouseTM (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p.273.
3 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.273.
4 Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Cultural Studies, eds C. Nelson, L. Grossberg and PA Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992), pp.295–337, p.300.
5 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.72.
6 Barad uses the term ontology rather than metaphysics. While the terms are neither identical nor separable within the history of philosophy, it is safe to say that both are equally problematic and need reworking. While Whitehead reconceptualizes the notion of metaphysics, Barad reformulates ontology as ‘onto-epistemology’ and further as ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’. Both agree in the fact that epistemology and ontology cannot be separated and are thus used alternately here.
7 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.72.
8 Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead As Recorded by Lucien Price (Westport, CT: Greenword Press, 1977), p.4.
9 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p.49.
10 Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011).
11 For an engagement with Whitehead and quantum physics, see for example Timothy E. Eastman and Hank Keeton, eds, Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004) as well as Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp.129–131, pp.166–170.
12 Such a diffractive reading of Whitehead, Haraway and Barad has its obvious and less obvious aspects. Haraway explicitly refers to Whitehead as part of her toolbox; there is thus a certain plausibility to anachronistically read Whitehead with Haraway. The obviousness of reading Barad and Whitehead together lies in the shared diagnosis of modern thought as well as the project that springs from it, of constructing a metaphysics or an ontology that rejects the implicit allegiance of modern philosophy with Newtonian physics. However, in Barad's work Whitehead is entirely absent.
13 ‘Situatedness’ is here used in Haraway's sense as developed in her seminal text ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol.14, no.3 (1988), pp.575–599. I have developed the notion of a situated metaphysics in Whitehead in my ‘A Situated Metaphysics. Things, History and Pragmatic Speculation in A.N. Whitehead’, in The Allure of Things, eds. Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
14 Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p.300.
15 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p.49. Stengers addresses this contrast in her ‘A Constructivist Approach to Whitehead's Philosophical Adventure’ and throughout her major work Thinking with Whitehead.
16 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Corrected Edition), eds Donald W. Sherburne and David Ray Griffing (New York: The Free Press, 1985), p.3.
17 Reading Whitehead with Haraway and Barad as a situated metaphysics and inquiring into the entanglement of ontology and epistemology implies a comment on the recent discussions around the diverse renewals of speculative thinking. Unfortunately and significantly, what is lost in the debates around ‘speculative realism’ is precisely ‘situatedness’. The notions of metaphysics and speculation are not revisited, that is: what it means to construct a metaphysics in the twentieth century in the first place. Whereas ‘speculation’ for thinkers from Meillassoux to Harman refers, classically, to particular objects of thought as the absolute, speculation for Whitehead, in a pragmatist lineage, refers to the own practice of thought, emphasizing its situated character. This divergence in the ‘image of thought’ as one could say with Deleuze becomes manifest in the widespread misinterpretation of the concept of actual entity (see below and Melanie Sehgal, A Situated Metaphysics (2014)).
18 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p.50.
19 For Whitehead's (short) list of categories of existence, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.22.
20 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.35. Following Barad's reflection on quantum field theory even ‘vibration’ might suggest a too ‘steady’ form of being. Nevertheless, I think that the concept of the actual entity precisely answers to the challenges posed by quantum field theory to classical ontology, e.g. in its assumptions concerning the conceptualization of particles and the void. For Whitehead as for Barad ‘even the smallest bits of matter are an unfathomable multitude. Each “individual” always already includes all possible intra-actions with “itself”. That is, every finite being is always already threaded through with an infinite alterity diffracted through being and time’, Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman that therefore I am’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Studies, vol.23, no.3 (2012), p.214.
21 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.18.
22 Transforming traditional rationalisms as well as empiricisms, to search for a reason, for Whitehead, means to search for concrete elements in experience, not for some transcendent principle of reason: ‘Actual entities are the only reasons’, Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.24.
23 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.18.
24 Whitehead explicitly describes the actual entity's ‘decision’ as ‘cutting off’: Giveness ‘refers to a “decision” whereby what is “given” is separated off from what for that occasion is “not given” […]. The word “decision” does not here imply conscious judgement, though in some “decisions” consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a “cutting off”’, Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.43.
25 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p.333.
26 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.164.
27 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.249.
28 Thus Whitehead's actual entities can be read as an echo to Deleuze and Guattari's ‘magic formula we all seek – MONISM = PLURALISM’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.20.
29 Note that even conceptual feeling is nothing specifically human, every actual entity has a mental (as well a physical) pole.
30 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.32.
31 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.256.
32 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.69.
33 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.226.
34 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.22.
35 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.33, p.259.
36 Vice versa, Haraway's figures could be understood as incorporating a proposition. Historical figures as well as diagnosis of the present, they escape the judgment ‘true or false’, but are meant to be entertained. They are ‘lures for feeling’, embodying the hope of telling different stories of contemporary Technoscience.
37 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.188.
38 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.259.
39 Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead, p.401.
40 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.257.
41 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.259.
42 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.259.
43 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.256 (my emphasis).
44 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.35.
45 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p.36. The novelty propositions introduce is not necessarily good; no ‘theory’ is inherently good or bad – everything depends on the situation, the environment and the way a proposition is taken up, entertained, and its ‘ripples’ are prolonged or inhibited.
46 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p.36.
47 Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman that therefore I am’, p.207.
48 See Isabelle Stengers, ‘Achieving Coherence. The Importance of Whitehead's 6th Category of Existence’, in Researching with Whitehead: System and Adventure, ed. Franz Riffert (Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2008), pp.59–79, p.2.
49 That is Science and the Modern World [1925], Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933) and Modes of Thought.
50 William James, ‘The Will to Believe’ in The Works of William James, eds Fredson Bowers, Frederick Burckhardt and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), vol.6.
51 Whitehead insists that ‘the explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, “In no way.” The true philosophic question is: How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature? In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness’ (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p.20).
52 ‘You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critic of abstractions. […] An active school of philosophy is quite as important for the locomotion of ideas, as is an active school of railways engineers for the locomotion of fuel’ (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p.59).
53 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.273.
54 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness, p.273.
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Melanie Sehgal
Melanie Sehgal is Professor of Literature, Science and Media Studies at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. Her research spans from Anglo-American philosophy and literature to Science and Technology Studies and new materialist feminist thought. She received her PhD in philosophy from the Technical University of Darmstadt with a dissertation on empiricism and speculative thinking in William James and Alfred North Whitehead. Recent publications include: ‘A Situated Metaphysics. Things, History and Pragmatic Speculation in A. N. Whitehead’, The Allure of Things, eds. Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Email: [email protected]