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Glossary of 25 Key Terms Glossary of 25 Key Terms Abstraction For Deleuze, Whitehead and Bergson (hereafter DWB) there is both a critical and creative sense of abstraction. First, philosophy must be, as Whitehead says, ‘the critic of abstractions’. Abstractions are not false, but present a limited and narrow aspect of the object. Plato’s Forms serve as an example here. Plato begins with the abstract forms and asks how they are realized, or ‘participate’, in the object world. In so doing con- crete reality is measured in relation to an abstract ‘essence’ or ‘Idea’. For DWB it is a mistake to attempt to explain the concrete by appeal to the abstract since ‘the abstract does not explain but itself be explained’. The real philosophical question becomes: ‘how can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?’ (PR: 20). The answer leads us to the creative sense of abstraction. Behind Plato’s Forms we find an indeterminate abstract space of ‘process’ (q.v.), ‘duration’ (q.v.) or ‘difference’ (q.v.) that submits its elements to cre- ative actualization. Prior to forms DWB thus posit an abstract yet real space that conditions actuality (q.v.). One crucial difference here will be how each philosopher understands the relation of creative abstraction to actuality. Actuality The product of the process of creative abstraction. Actuality is ‘existence’ in the fullest sense of this term. For DWB actuality is to be contrasted with potentiality and/or virtuality (q.v.). In general terms one can say that, for Deleuze, potential is virtual, pure or eternal rather than actual; for White- head there is both actual and eternal potential, whereas Bergson is the most consistent in thinking of potential as only ever actual. Actuality, then, appears to have a different status and value for each, although determination of the actual is given by potential. Arguably, Deleuze more consistently aligns actuality with the negative, identity, ‘repre- sentation’, lack and loss of potential in favour of the reality of the ‘virtual’, whereas Whitehead and Bergson are more positively ‘actual- ist’ in the sense that creativity and potentiality can only be actual or understood in relation to an actual (for Whitehead the ‘eternal’ can only 220 Glossary of 25 Key Terms 221 be described in relation to actuals). However, both Whitehead and Berg- son allow – indeed require – non-actual elements in their metaphysics, but the nature, role and purpose of these is the subject of much debate and controversy. Actual entity/actual occasion This is perhaps the central concept of Whitehead’s metaphysics, with nothing in either Deleuze’s or Bergson’s metaphysics that closely corre- sponds to it (this fact raises important questions about the ‘rhizomatic connections’ between DWB and the nature of all the important terms in this glossary). Actual occasion is first used in Science and the Mod- ern World (1925) and then throughout Process and Reality (1929) to refer to the atomic or ‘epochal’ unit of becoming, the final ‘real’ activity of which the world is made up. Each actual occasion is a ‘drop of expe- rience’, a metaphysical ‘organism’ that grows, matures and perishes. Process and Reality offers a detailed description and analysis of each phase of this process. Opposed to philosophies of ‘substance’, the actual occa- sion in Whitehead’s process metaphysics is not a ‘thing’ that becomes, but the ‘subject’, ‘prehension’ (q.v.) or ‘occasion’ of its own becom- ing. As Whitehead describes it, each occasion ‘feels’ the multiplicity of ‘data’, ‘objectifies’ it and internalizes it (see ‘concrescence’) into one com- plex integrated feeling or ‘satisfaction’. Following satisfaction the actual occasion is now ‘superject’ and ‘objectively immortal’, a determinate fact available in ‘transition’ (q.v.) for prehension (q.v.) by other actual entities. Becoming One of the central concepts that DWB share. Challenging the ‘static’ ‘substance–predicate’ view of reality made up of unchanging substances and changing predicates, DWB each develop an idea of the real as a perpetual becoming. Becoming is the dynamic movement of temporal- ization and change that never ‘is’ but insists in between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’, pulling in both past and future directions at once. Becoming is a pure or empty time that has no real beginning or point of termination, no subject or object. There is no progress or regress in becoming, and no thing that becomes or fails to become, only a pure passage or continuity. Thus, at one level DWB all agree that becoming is the continuous process of temporalization. However, each offers a differ- ent interpretation of becoming and continuity and the relation between 222 Glossary of 25 Key Terms them as each of their systems evolved. In general, however, we can say that for Deleuze and Bergson there is a continuity of becoming, but for the later Whitehead there is a becoming of continuity. The differing emphases in the relation, and which term has precedence, reflect not only the evolution of their thought, but also their differing responses to Zeno’s paradoxes. For the later Whitehead, unless we posit something like a ‘unit’ of becoming where we differentiate the ‘act’ of becoming from what becomes, then Zeno is unanswerable since determining a ‘before’ or a ‘next’ would be impossible. In Process and Reality Whitehead requires this ‘atomism’ to account for the ‘serial’ nature of continuity ascribed to the relation of occasions. For Deleuze and Bergson, by con- trast, it is by appealing to the continuity of becoming (of difference or duration) that Zeno’s paradoxes are dissolved as a false problem (of representation or intellect). Concrescence Concrescence is literally a becoming concrete, a ‘growing together’ or a synthesis and is an important term in Whitehead’s metaphysics, equivalent to actualization in Deleuze. First used in Process and Reality, concrescence is a process by which the ‘many’ acquire determinate unity in the ‘one’. It is the ‘real internal constitution’ of an actual occasion and in Process and Reality concrescence is divided into several phases for the purpose of analysis (the question of whether the phases are ‘in time’ is of some interest among Whitehead scholars). In general terms concrescence begins with the ‘reception’ of ‘data’: there is something to be received and an act of receiving or grasping (see prehension below). Concres- cence describes the ‘form’ of that reception, how the data are received, ‘directed’ and integrated into the becoming of the occasion. In a first phase multiple, ‘simple’ or physical feelings are felt in ‘conformity’ with another. In later phases these conformal feelings are integrated into a developing ‘conceptual’ reaction and fused with a ‘decision’ about what will be received in the immediate future. Concrescence is a process of prehensions (q.v.) and is to be contrasted with ‘transition’ (q.v.). Creativity One of the most important concepts in the metaphysics of DWB inform- ing each of their respective understandings of being, thinking and life. Glossary of 25 Key Terms 223 For Whitehead creativity (a term invented by Whitehead1) is the ‘cate- gory of the ultimate’. It is the reality involved in every new unity that emerges out of the many in accordance with the principle of novelty. Creativity is an energy individualizing itself into actualities. For Bergson creativity is driven by the élan vital which re-ascends the incline that matter descends. All the divergent lines of life are created in the tension between an impetus to accumulate energy and a resistance to that impe- tus that would discharge itself as a ‘canalization’ in myriad forms. For Deleuze similarly, creativity is simply the actualization of the virtual, a repetition of difference, the production of the new. One important ques- tion for DWB here is the implications of an ontology of creativity for politics and ethics. Difference DWB all have important uses for this term, but Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, is rightly regarded as the primary philosopher of differ- ence. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze challenged the philosophical tradition’s subordination of difference to identity and resemblance by attempting to give difference its own concept, an ‘internal’ difference that would differ only from itself rather than an ‘external’ difference that provides a measure of similarity between things or states. By cou- pling difference with repetition (which for Deleuze was also thought of in relation to identity and the same), Deleuze was able to show how difference and repetition could be thought outside of the philosophy of representation and the dogmatic ‘image of thought’ that grounds it. Even in ‘infinite’ representation (Deleuze gives the examples of Hegel and Leibniz) difference remains unthought in itself since infinite repre- sentation fails to capture or ‘express’ the sub-representational source or ‘problem’ from which difference comes. Deleuze’s great project in Dif- ference and Repetition was to think this problematic groundlessness of difference outside of representation with the help of a whole array of new ‘notions’: virtual ideas and problems, intensities, singularities, indi- viduations, series, spatio-temporal dynamisms, and their actualization in qualities and extension. 1 I thank Steven Meyer who persuaded me of this. See his introduction to the special issue of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, 13(1) (Winter 2005) on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead. 224 Glossary of 25 Key Terms Duration Bergson’s term for the lived movement of temporality and used by both Deleuze and Whitehead. In science and philosophy Bergson claims that the intellect tends to ‘spatialize’ time, reducing it to a ‘freeze-frame’, or static representation, of the present. Indeed, occasionally Bergson suggests that time cannot be thought at all since the intellect and its modes of conceptualization are incapable of thinking a pure mobil- ity.
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