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Diffractive Propositions: Reading Alfred
North Whitehead with Donna Haraway
and Karen Barad
Melanie Sehgal
Published online: 11 Jul 2014.
To cite this article: Melanie Sehgal (2014) Diffractive Propositions: Reading Alfred North Whitehead
with Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Parallax, 20:3, 188-201, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927625
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parallax, 2014
Vol. 20, No. 3, 188–201, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927625
Diffractive Propositions: Reading Alfred North Whitehead with
Donna Haraway and Karen Barad
Melanie Sehgal
(Received 17 July 2013; accepted 19 October 2013)
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A stone drops into the water, disturbing its calm surface. The ripples caused by the
splash form amplifying circles. A second stone drops. The new circles of water waves
interfere with the first, thus forming a pattern.
Diffraction denotes the phenomenon of interference generated by the encounter of
waves, be it light, sound or water and, within quantum physics, of matter itself. Such
a superposition of waves produces a diffraction or interference pattern that records,
i.e. incorporates the trajectory of the waves.1 Donna Haraway draws on the optical
phenomenon of diffraction as a metaphor and a method for knowledge production,
because diffractions crucially differ from reflections. Whereas reflection is bound to
‘repeating the Sacred Image of the Same’, ‘diffraction patterns record the history of
interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference’, as she points out.2
Haraway thus reclaims the imagery of optics, much criticized within feminist
discourse. Rather than rejecting the non-innocent history of optical metaphors, this
method is itself a diffractive one: in substituting diffraction for reflection it displaces
the trajectory of Western epistemology and its potent optical imagery. This change
of metaphors has far reaching implications for the way in which the practice of
knowledge and theory production is conceptualized – precisely because diffraction
is more than ‘merely a metaphor’. As a method, diffraction incorporates historicity
and difference into the practice of theory itself. And in its emphasis on effects it is
essentially pragmatic: it is a ‘technology for making consequential meanings’.3
However, as Haraway specifies, ‘a diffraction pattern does not map where
differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear’.4 The
pattern generated by two stones dropping into the water, for example, is both the
effect and result of the event, the difference and the consequences it induces.
Diffraction patterns are, in Karen Barad’s words, ‘patterns of difference that make a
difference’.5 They are not classificatory, but rather performative.
While Haraway focuses on the epistemological aspects of diffraction as a metaphor
and method, Barad elaborates its ontological implications, drawing on quantum
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physics. As Barad never tires of emphasizing, it is a physical phenomenon that
shatters accustomed assumptions about matter and meaning. As process and the
result of a process at the same time, diffraction patterns render both how
something became as well as what it is. Being is becoming. As a physical
phenomenon, diffraction gained crucial importance in the still-ongoing discussions
around the consequences and interpretations of quantum physics. But these
consequences reach far beyond specialized discussions in theoretical physics. They
touch on the core of how we think about the world on an everyday basis after
Newtonian physics has lost its evidence. In Meeting the Universe Halfway Barad
lucidly brings to the fore the way in which classical metaphysics has not only
been thoroughly problematized within the humanities, but also has become
untenable if the insights in the natural sciences of the twentieth century are
followed through to their philosophical conclusions. Despite these problematizations of a classical metaphysics of individualism and presence, Barad argues, there is
thus nevertheless a need to reconsider and reconstruct our metaphysical or ontological
assumptions.6 Whereas classical metaphysics has implicitly relied on a particular
physics, namely a Newtonian one, Barad tentatively suggests that, in the light of
quantum theory diffraction phenomena, rather than denoting a specific type of
phenomenon, appear to be ‘the fundamental constituents that make up the world’.7
However, to attribute an epistemological consideration of diffraction to Haraway and
an ontological one to Barad seems a too hasty division of labour as the relation between
epistemology and ontology is precisely what seems to be at stake in thinking about
diffraction. The physics of diffraction not only forces us to reconsider what an entity ‘in
its essence’ is, but brings the entire distribution of subject and object, knower and
known, words and things, words and world under reconsideration. The relation
between knower and known can no longer be described as one of distant gaze. To
engage in a process of knowing is to be part of the equation, to be entangled in intraaction as Barad points out in her reading of twentieth century physicist Niels Bohr.
Epistemology and ontology can no longer be kept apart.
I would like to introduce the work of the mathematician and process philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead (1861 –1947) into this discussion, because reading his work
with Haraway’s and Barad’s – and vice versa – seems to me a way of precisely
elucidating the relation between epistemology and ontology as it is put into question
by the downfall of classical physics. As a contemporary to Einstein and Bohr,
Whitehead was steeped in the debates within physics in the first half of the twentieth
century and, just like Barad today, he was concerned with their philosophical as well
as worldly consequences. Whitehead forcefully describes the impact of these
revolutions:
We supposed that nearly everything of importance about physics was
known. Yes, there were a few obscure spots, strange anomalies having
to do with the phenomena of radiation which physicists expected to
be cleared up by 1900. They were. But in so being, the whole science
blew up, and the Newtonian physics, which had been supposed to be
fixed as the Everlasting Seat, were gone. Oh, they were and still are
useful as a way of looking at things, but regarded as a final description
of reality, no longer valid. Certitude was gone.8
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His late work, from The Concept of Nature (1920) to Science and the Modern World (1925)
and Process and Reality (1929) (and beyond), can be read as a grappling with these
consequences, as an attempt to respond philosophically to the problem raised by the
downfall of classical physics. What became evident in this discursive situation for
Whitehead was that what had seemed to be accounting for reality as such – a
Newtonian doctrine of matter – appeared to be an abstraction, accountable only for
a certain realm of reality at a certain level of generalization. The point for
Whitehead, however, was not to criticize Newtonian physics. Rather, the problem
for him lay in the general philosophical and cultural interpretation of Newtonian or,
as he further qualifies, ‘scientific materialism’. Whitehead discerns a central, albeit
implicit, assumption in the modern view of nature as it derived from Newtonian
physics:
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that which expresses the most concrete aspect of nature is thought in
terms of stuff, or matter, or material [ . . . ] which has the property of
simple location in space and time. [ . . . ] [M]aterial can be said to be
here in space and here in time [ . . . ] in a perfectly definite sense which
does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of
space-time.9
Matter in modernity is considered as ‘simply located’, without relations, without a
becoming – it is ‘merely’ matter, mechanically following the Newtonian laws.
Whitehead questions this conception of matter not only because it runs counter to
the findings of physics, from thermodynamics to the theory of relativity and
quantum physics. He also problematizes it because of its inherent, unavowed
metaphysics and anthropocentrism. Whitehead describes modern thinking as
plagued by an incoherence that he locates in the very concept of nature itself.
He describes this incoherence as ‘bifurcation of nature’ because, obviously ‘we’
humans exclude ourselves from the deterministic conception of nature it implies –
we are not blindly determined, but are free, follow purposes and values. Again,
Whitehead is concerned with the worldly consequences of what he considers a
logical fallacy. Modern thought, in mistaking the Newtonian concept of matter, an
abstraction, for something concrete, in consequence is trapped by the vice of
‘explaining away’: everything that does not fit into the ‘scientific materialist’ scheme
is in consequence denied the status of existence proper; it is defaced as merely
illusory, merely subjective, thus instantiating the rift between the realms of ‘nature’
and ‘culture’, subject and object, the human and non-human. This bifurcation in
the concept of nature informed, and continues to inform, a whole culture of thought
– the habits of thought constituting modernity. Such was the problem Whitehead
understood to be posed by his epoch. As Isabelle Stengers has shown, his speculative
philosophy can be read entirely as a response to this problem.10 His opus magnum,
Process and Reality (1929), is an attempt to construct a metaphysics in which nature
does not bifurcate – and thus to construct a frame of thought that avoids a
‘metaphysics of individualism’ (Barad), ‘human exceptionalism’ (Haraway) and a
representationalist epistemology.
It would be beyond the scope of this paper to develop precisely how Whitehead’s
metaphysics answers to the challenge quantum physics posed to Western
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metaphysical beliefs, and thus answers to what Barad calls for – an ontology that
takes phenomena of diffraction ‘as the fundamental constituents that make up the
world’.11 In the following, I would rather like to read Whitehead diffractively
with Barad and Haraway in order to spell out a possible entanglement between
ontology and epistemology beyond modern strictures and as pointed to in the
discussion on diffraction. Such a reading is itself diffractive, because the point is
not to show that Whitehead already knew what theorists two generations later
would look for, but rather to read Whitehead today, in light of the shifts in
twentieth century physics as well as postmodern concerns in the humanities.12
What does it mean to speak of ontology, cosmology and metaphysics today?
How to reconcile the need of a new metaphysics with the recognition of our own
semiotic technologies? Modern thought posits epistemology as ‘first philosophy’,
such is the Copernican revolution that Kant effected precisely to restrain
metaphysical speculation. In consequence, Whitehead’s metaphysics has been and
continues to be widely read as a metaphysics in a classical, pre-Kantian sense. In
contrast, I would like to suggest that reading Whitehead with Haraway and
Barad shows that his reaffirmation of metaphysics is not to be construed as a
return to pre-modern modes of thought which leave the subject out of the
equation. Rather, such a reading radically changes the understanding of
metaphysics – as of subjectivity – itself. Whitehead constructs a situated metaphysics
in a double sense: his metaphysics answers to a problem posed by his own
epoch – the bifurcation of nature – and it incorporates situatedness into its own
theoretical practice.13 In other words, Whitehead undermines representationalism
in his own conceptual practice. His situated metaphysics is a pragmatic one; it
is committed to ‘making consequential meanings’. Whiteheadian concepts
are speculative because they are pragmatic; they acquire meaning by the way
they generate ‘consequential meanings’, not by a supposed capacity to mirror reality
as such.
A diffractive reading of Whitehead with Barad and Haraway not only accounts
for the surprising convergence of these heterogeneous thinkers, it also accounts for
the friction that such a bringing-together of heterogeneous texts necessarily
generates, without explaining it away. This friction first and foremost manifests
itself in the divergent styles of the two feminist philosophers and historians of
science, writing at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first
century, and the process philosopher, insisting on the necessity of coherence and
systematicity within a new metaphysics, at the beginning of the twentieth
century. For Haraway, situatedness and diffraction are writing technologies. Her
histories of western science are necessarily and explicitly stories, populated by
figures, indeed by a whole ‘theoretico-political zoo’, from the famous cyborg to
her dog Cayenne to the genetically modified OncoMouse.14 These figures are
markers of situatedness; they share the fate of inheriting ambivalent pasts (for
instance, the imperialist space race of the Cold War era in the case of the
cyborg). Rather than being a reason to give up on them, it is precisely these noninnocent pasts that call for a diffractive reading and rewriting for Haraway.
Whitehead’s opus magnum, Process and Reality, seems far away from such a figurative
and situated writing technology. Process and Reality is considered as extremely opaque
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in its excessive use of technical vocabulary. Not only do the ensuing difficulties for its
readers seem to be in stark contrast with Whitehead’s own conception of philosophy
as ‘sheer disclosure’,15 but Whitehead explicitly describes his speculative philosophy
as an attempt to develop a systematic cosmology and a conceptual ‘scheme that
should be coherent, logical, and in respect to its interpretation [of experience, MS],
applicable and adequate’.16 Whitehead thus explicitly affirms modes of philosophic
thinking that have been thoroughly problematized in the course of the twentieth
century; his emphasis on metaphysics, speculation and cosmology seems to suggest a
‘view from nowhere’ and thus to run counter to all attempts to construct ‘situated
knowledges’.17
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Nevertheless, in the following I would like to read Whitehead with Haraway
and Barad and ask what incorporating situatedness into metaphysical thinking
could precisely mean. What kind of conception of theory is necessary for
and implied in such a renewal and reconsideration of metaphysics? I argue
that by taking Whitehead’s particular conception of theory into account it
becomes possible to make an interference pattern visible between Whitehead’s,
Haraway’s and Barad’s thought. This interference pattern can also elucidate
Whitehead’s insistence on coherence and systematicity, as well as his affirmation
of metaphysics, which seem so hard to reconcile with post-modern concerns.
By illuminating Whitehead’s specific notion of theory, I will argue, the speculative
and situated conception of his metaphysics can come to the fore. This not only
implies a metaphysical understanding of theory, but also opens up an understanding of
his own metaphysics as a diffractive one. Whitehead uses the image of a stone
splashing into calm waters precisely when developing his notion of theory. I have
added a second stone to this metaphor, thus causing a diffraction pattern, which is
precisely what I would like to do by reading Whitehead with Haraway and Barad and
vice versa.
Speculative starting points for quantum entanglements
In the chapter on ‘Expression’ in Modes of Thought, Whitehead writes: ‘A thought is a
tremendous mode of excitement. Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the
whole surface of our being’.18 Translated into the technical vocabulary of Process and
Reality, this ‘splash’ refers to the functioning of propositions. Propositions – a much
neglected category even among Whitehead scholars – could roughly be translated
as ‘theory’; but it is important to note that propositions do not merely refer to
explicit knowledge production, not even exclusively to the human activity of
conscious thinking. Propositions are a metaphysical category – that is, they belong
to the realm of existents.19 In the terminology of Process and Reality this means that
they are required to describe actual entities – it is in respect to actual entities that
propositions produce their disruptive ‘splash’.
‘Actual entity’ is a key concept in Whiteheadian metaphysics, standing at
the core of his speculative project and its inherent critique of a – to use Baradian
terms – ‘metaphysics of individualism’. Interestingly, Whitehead first introduces
this concept in Science and the Modern World in a discussion of quantum phenomena
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192
and the paradox of the discontinuous orbit of electrons. Whitehead argues that there
is only a paradox as long as we, explicitly or implicitly, assume Newtonian
parameters of enduring matter through time and space. The difficulty vanishes
however, ‘if we consent to apply to the apparently steady undifferentiated
endurance of matter the same principles as those now accepted for sound and
light’, that is, ‘vibration’.20 It is then that Whitehead for the first time introduces
the concept of ‘actual entity’ that will reorient his whole thinking and engage him in
the construction of a metaphysical system in which nature does not bifurcate.
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But what are actual entities? ‘Actual entity’ is Whitehead’s term for all that exists in
the full sense of what it means to exist. Actual entities designate the concrete:
Actual entities [ . . . ] are the final real things of which the world is
made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything
more real. They differ among themselves [ . . . ] But, though there are
gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the
principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The
final facts are, all alike, actual entities.21
There are, of course, other kinds of entities, such as eternal objects and societies, or
propositions. Indeed Whitehead, to use Haraway’s phrase, invents a whole
‘theoretical zoo’ of strange concepts and beings. But all these other kinds of entities
essentially refer to actual entities as the locus of their concretion. They are the
cornerstone of Whitehead’s empiricism.22 However, speaking of actual entities as
‘the final real things of which the world is made up’ could be misleading.23 They are
decidedly not to be imagined as things – the concept is introduced precisely to
circumvent the Newtonian focus on enduring entities, favouring a wave or vibratory
model. Actual entities are constituted by mutual intra-actions that Whitehead calls
‘prehensions’. Each actual entity constitutes itself through a ‘cut’ (Barad), a
‘decision’ (Whitehead), incorporating and eliminating what matters into its very
constitution.24 However, it is also not precise to describe actual entities as vibratory
entities existing in a microscopic realm. This point might seem technical, but it is
important because it touches firstly on the status of Whitehead’s concepts
as speculative concepts, and secondly on their relation to specialized forms of
knowledge, such as quantum physics for example. Whitehead’s point, I would like to
argue, is not to develop a cosmology that is, finally, more true to the world,
incorporating the most recent findings of physics. That would, on the one hand,
imply accepting physics as foundational for all other modes of knowing and
being in the world and thus run the risk of explaining other modes away. On the
other hand, methodologically, it would imply sticking to a traditional understanding of metaphysics as mirroring the fundamental constituents of the world.
Rather, Whitehead not only develops a different metaphysics but a different
understanding of metaphysics – one in which epistemology and ontology, and even
ethics, cannot be separated. Rather than procuring a new foundation, the task of
metaphysics is to speculatively construct a hypothetical starting point for our
heterogeneous fields of experience and knowledge, including everyday experience
as well as the counter-intuitive findings of quantum physics, a starting point that
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will not lead to explaining away other forms of intra-action that make up and matter
in the world’s becoming. Whitehead’s actual entities propose such a different
starting point.
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As stated at the outset, Whiteheadian concepts are speculative because they are
pragmatic – their meaning depends wholly on the way they generate ‘consequential
meanings’. The crucial difference the concept ‘actual entity’ dramatizes is the
difference between existence as experienced and existence for its own sake. Specialized
forms of experience never ‘prehend’ existence (the realm of actual entities) as such,
they prehend it only according to specific and ‘interested’ modes of selection,
emphasis and senses of importance. Thus, actual entities are not objects of (our)
experience as such, not even methodologically guided experience in experimental
apparatuses. What is experienced are – in the vocabulary of Process and Reality –
societies, associations of actual entities forming a pattern, or in Barad’s terms
‘phenomena’: ‘intra-acting “agencies”’, ‘ontological entanglements’.25 Rather than
being what we experience, actual entities are that from which we experience, what is
presupposed by experience. And precisely because actual entities are never experienced
as such – i.e. in a representationalist mode of a detached observer – the concept of
actual entities is necessarily a speculative one.
Therefore, even when Whitehead uses terms from psychology, like ‘prehension’
(dropping the various prefixes) or ‘feeling’ in order to describe actual entities, these
concepts are decidedly not limited to human subjectivity. On the contrary, ‘feeling’,
Whitehead insists, ‘is a mere technical term’.26 Every actual entity is a process of feeling;
it is feeling the manifold data – and for Whitehead, in a Leibnizian vein, this data
comprises all that there is, i.e. the world in its entirety – and turning it into the unity of
its individual ‘satisfaction’. Countering modern habits of thought that let nature
bifurcate, the ambition of the term ‘feeling’ is a monist one; to be a concept that can, in its
generality, account for all kinds of existence.27 The use of terminology stemming from
descriptions of human experience therefore does not imply any anthropocentrism on
Whitehead’s part. To the contrary, this metaphysical and speculative generalization is
his way of countering the ‘human exceptionalism’ in modern thinking that
distinguishes between entities that feel, on the one hand, and entities that are ‘dead
matter’, on the other. Thus, speculatively positing the realm of actual entities as a
starting point for experience and thought importantly differs from the assumptions that
mark modern thought; instead of a Cartesian dualism of mind and body and its
inherent anthropocentrism, Whitehead proposes a monist and pluralist starting point,
one which does not let nature bifurcate.28 It is a methodological and pragmatic
postulate that not only proposes a radically non-modern beginning for quantum
entanglements, but also implies a fundamental reconsideration of the relation between
ontology (or metaphysics) and epistemology.
Diffractive Propositions
What are the consequences of such a speculative starting point for the conception of
theory? How is this non-modern entanglement of epistemology and ontology spelt
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out? As I suggested at the start, Whitehead, in response to modern incoherences and
quantum challenges, proposes a metaphysical notion of theory. In order to
understand what that could mean, it is necessary to delve deeper into the
Whiteheadian universe, at the risk of becoming a little technical. But this is
necessary in order to exhibit the experimentation in language that Whitehead’s
metaphysics is – necessarily is as a way of diffracting modern habits of thought.
Theories – or, in Whitehead’s technical term, ‘propositions’ – belong to the realm of
existents; they matter. What are propositions and how precisely do they matter in the
world? In its process of ‘concrescence’ – that is its process of becoming, of acquiring
its definiteness, its singularity – an actual entity can dispose of, or ‘prehend’, four
kinds of entities as its data: all other actual entities, eternal objects, societies and
propositions. In order to understand the particularity of propositions, it is necessary
to distinguish them from these other kinds of entities, and most importantly from
eternal objects. While the prehension of all other actual entities assures the
continuity of the universe, i.e. assures the conformation of each new actual entity
with aspects of the ones it inherits, novelty in Whitehead’s metaphysics depends on
what he terms ‘conceptual feeling’ – the prehension of eternal objects.29 Eternal
objects designate the realm of pure potentiality; they are the ‘pure potentials for the
specific determination of fact’.30 By means of selecting from these forms, the actual
entity decides how it inherits its past. It is important that it is the actual entity that
decides; the realm of potentiality in itself has no potential to act; eternal objects are
neutral as to how they are prehended, they ‘tell no tales about their ingressions’
about how they might be entertained in experience.31 It is in this way that
Whitehead secures his empiricism. When an actual entity ‘selects’ from these eternal
forms, it is in fact prehending all of them, but it grades them in terms of relevance.32
Thus negative prehension – the discarding of possibility – is crucial; whatever exists is
tinged by what might have been.33
Propositions – or as Whitehead defines them: ‘Matters of Fact in Potential
Determination, or Impure Potentials for the Specific Determination of Matters of
Fact, or Theories’ – stand between the entirely abstract nature of eternal objects and
the realm of the concrete actual entities.34 In contrast to eternal objects that can be
prehended by any actual entity, the reach of a proposition is already limited to
specific actual entities. Whereas eternal objects are ‘entirely neutral, devoid of all
suggestiveness’ as to how they will be incorporated in experience, having no efficacy
of their own, propositions do exhibit such an efficacy; they are ‘a lure for feeling’.35
Despite his lifelong practice as a mathematician, Whitehead disagreed with the
widespread view that propositions are mainly to be considered in view of their truth
and falsehood and thus reducible to the function of being judged. It is here that
thinking of propositions as theories in a customary, philosophical sense is
particularly misleading. For Whitehead, the primary function of a proposition is
not judgment, but entertainment. In a ‘world of pure experience’ – as Whitehead’s
could be described in the words of William James – propositions, like all entities,
need to manifest themselves in experience, the realm of actual entities. They need to
be embodied. As with Haraway’s figures, a proposition ‘collects up the people; [it]
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embodies shared meanings in stories that inhabit their audiences’.36 In Whitehead’s
words: ‘A proposition is entertained when it is admitted into feeling. Horror, relief,
purpose, are primarily feelings involving the entertainment of propositions’.37 This
is why Whitehead emphasizes the fact that ‘in the real world it is more important
that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that
it adds to interest’.38 Whitehead rebukes philosophers for their ‘favourite sin’:39
exaggeration, that is, extending what matters to them – logical propositions that take
the form of judgments – to be propositions as such. Whitehead, on the contrary,
emphasizes the importance of false and ‘non-conformal’ propositions (why else could
a proposition that we know to be wrong utterly enrage and draw us into endless
discussions and unexpected becomings?). But despite the strong ‘pull’ a proposition
might exert, even it cannot determine, decide the way it is taken up; a proposition also
‘tells no tale about itself’.40 Even if propositions can indeed be true or false, their
truthfulness is not immanent; it rather depends on the determinate actual entities
from which it is an incomplete abstraction. Depending on actual entities to prehend
it, a proposition ‘is a datum for feeling, awaiting a subject to feel it’.41 It is as such a
datum that a proposition has ‘relevance to the actual world by means of its logical
subjects that makes it a lure for feeling’.42 The efficacy of propositions, the way they
matter, is thus a suggestive one: they elicit interest, divert attention and propose a
way something is taken into account and what is likewise eliminated. In this way they
account for difference, divergence and novelty in the various processes of intra-action.
And different subjects (in the metaphysical sense of the actual entity) will feel a
proposition differently, respond to it differently. It is thus the social environment, the
historical and experiential world, that decides on the relevance of a proposition. In that
sense, propositions have an empiricist bias; they have a particular relation to the world as
it is. Always told after the fact, propositions take up the past of certain actual entities and
divert their trajectory. As ‘the tales that perhaps might be told about particular
actualities’ they are one possible way of making sense of a situation and at the same time
they can lure it into a new becoming.43 Propositions are diffractive.
In order to elucidate this diffractive character of propositions, specially nonconformal ones, it is important to remember the contention that propositions refer to
actual entities rather than societies or phenomena as objects of experience. Again,
Whitehead’s concepts are pragmatic concepts and thus can only be evaluated by
their consequences. The difference between actual entities and societies lies first and
foremost in their temporality. While actual entities are atomic – they become and
perish – societies assure the continuity of the universe. The pragmatic consequence
of this distinction is that, for Whitehead, continuity – the continuation of a society
such as a body or social group – is considered an achievement. Continuity is not given;
it is made, instance for instance. Intra-actions matter. With a slightly critical glance
towards Bergson, Whitehead maintains that ‘[t]here is a becoming of continuity, but
no continuity of becoming’.44 Since propositions refer to the atomic actual entities,
when taken up, prehended, they introduce a break into the continuity of a
becoming; they divert a historical route and lure it into a different becoming, they
generate a different pattern. Thus ‘theory’ for Whitehead does not concern what
factually exists. Theories disrupt the given, as a lure to what could be but not yet is.
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This is why a ‘thought is a tremendous mode of excitement’ and ‘like a stone thrown
into a pond [ . . . ] disturbs the whole surface of our being’.45 And yet, Whitehead
later corrects – or rather diffracts – the metaphor of the stone splashing into calm
waters. Keeping the distinction between actual entities and societies in mind, it is
now possible to understand why: ‘But this image is inadequate. For we should
conceive the ripples as effective in the creation of the plunge of the stone into the
water. The ripples release the thought, and the thought augments and distorts the
ripples’.46 That propositions operate on the level of actual entities implies that they
operate on the pre-conscious, metaphysical level of feeling. In Barad’s words: ‘The
world theorizes as well as experiments with itself’.47 Nevertheless, thinking about
theories as a metaphysical entity in the Whiteheadian sense, thus pertaining to the
world and not the human alone, has repercussions for how we think of theory and
thought in a conventional sense. Propositions are neither to be equated with language
nor thought; they are, rather, what is presupposed by language and conscious thinking.
It is the excitement on the metaphysical level – the ripples – that then release, or better
might release, a conscious, explicit thought in a ‘splash’! An explicit thought or phrase
is the outcome of the tremendous excitement that propositions induce, if they
successfully ‘lure a feeling’. Propositions thus point to the dimension of adventure in
thinking, so crucial for Whitehead.48 They mark the speculative aspect of thought,
that imaginative jump a phrase, a concept or a metaphor presupposes and produces,
but never fully embodies in itself. Theories – in the Whiteheadian metaphysical sense
of propositions – matter, they induce difference into the intra-active becoming of the
world. They matter because they are diffractive.
Whitehead’s Proposition or: a Metaphysics in the SF-mode
In conclusion, I would like to develop what bearing this metaphysical and diffractive
notion of theory has on Whitehead’s own ‘theory’, on his own practice and
understanding of constructing a speculative metaphysics in the first place.
What consequence does such a notion of theory have for the conception of metaphysics
itself? Even if, for Whitehead as for Barad, with the downfall of classical metaphysics
and the advent of quantum theory, it is not enough to critique classical metaphysics, but
it becomes necessary to construct another metaphysics, it remains important to ask
what it means to speak of metaphysics or ontology today. My contention is that the
concept of metaphysics itself needs to radically change. Whitehead’s proposal for such a
shift in the understanding of metaphysics becomes legible in a diffractive reading of his
speculative philosophy through the work of Haraway and Barad; it is not merely a new
ontology, but the entanglement of epistemology and ontology in an ‘ontoepistemology’–even an ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ in view of constructing ‘situated
knowledges’ – a situated metaphysics. In proposing an understanding of Whitehead’s
metaphysics as a situated one, I would thus like to explore the possibilities such an
understanding offers to negotiate the possible tension between the epistemological and
ontological dimensions of diffraction.
Reading Whitehead’s metaphysics as a situated one requires thinking his systematic
efforts in tight connection to the works that have been read as purely historical.49
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In this perspective, Whitehead’s metaphysics, despite its abstract and technical
language, can appear as less of an other-worldly and problematic endeavour than it
might seem at first glance. Whitehead inherited a decidedly modern world, and it is
in response to his reading of modernity that he is caught in the construction of a
metaphysics at all. For Whitehead, constructing a speculative metaphysics or even a
cosmology was nourished by a hope; the hope that the modern epoch with its fatal
incoherences would come to an end. Hence Whitehead’s insistence on systematicity
and coherence become readable as part of his critique of modern habits of thought.
Whitehead’s metaphysics, I would argue, embodies an own proposition; What if, –
this seems to be his question – we had a metaphysics, a frame of ideas, in which
nature did not bifurcate? In which the fundamental constituents of the world are
thought of not as self-identical essences but rather as phenomena of diffraction? To
speak of hope here is not to add an emotional touch to hard systematic work.
According to Whitehead, rationality is entirely misconstrued when understood as
abstraction, deduction or induction. Rather, when he insists on the necessarily
speculative dimension of rational thinking, Whitehead situates himself within a
pragmatist lineage, pragmatism, for him, being the only philosophy providing a
methodological response to the downfall of Newtonian physics – that is, to a discursive
situation when ‘certitude was gone’. For pragmatism, thought is necessarily
speculative. Because every process of knowledge production practically presupposes the
faith in a possible solution, often against evidence, it necessitates its hypothetical
formulation before evidence is found. In a leap of faith we ‘jump’ into a conclusion
that can only be verified after the fact. Importantly, this precursive faith is necessary
to bring about the conclusion.50 Knowing is part of the intra-action. For Whitehead,
following James, theories therefore are not and never can be logically justifiable.
Theories imply adventure, a risk that requires a leap of thought and imagination.
Therefore, Whitehead’s hope vis-à-vis a perhaps no longer fully modern world is
inherently linked to the way he conceives of the functioning of propositions. If
Whitehead’s metaphysics embodies a proposition, its claim is not on metaphysics
anew as first philosophy, nor is its aim to formulate a finally adequate conception
about what is.51 Rather than being the place of timeless truths, Whitehead’s
metaphysics is a situated one, itself lured by a proposition. It proposes one possible
rendering of the world we inhabit, a possibly interesting and adequate one. But
above all, its hope is the same as that of any proposition: to be relevant, that is, to be
able to act as a ‘lure for feeling’ in a specific context. In the particular mode of
philosophy – its specific social task being a ‘critic of abstractions’ – therefore
Whitehead tries to lure his readers into other-than-modern modes of thought.52
Whitehead’s metaphysics is, in this sense, a diffractive one: it is ‘non-conformal’ (in
Whitehead’s technical sense) to its social environment, an environment shaped by
modern habits of thought, and it hopes to lure it into a different becoming.
Whitehead thus – out of all things – suggests metaphysics as ‘another kind of critical
consciousness at the end of this rather painful Christian millennium’ [my
emphasis].53 Whitehead’s metaphysics can be read, again with Haraway, as a
metaphysics ‘in the SF mode’, ‘committed to making a difference and not to
repeating the Sacred Image of the Same’.54 A situated metaphysics embodies a
diffractive proposition.
Sehgal
198
Notes
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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 q_Meets_ OncoMouse TM (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,
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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 ¼ 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.
Sehgal
200
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
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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.
Melanie Sehgal is Professor of Literature, Science and Media Studies at the
European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder. Her research spans from AngloAmerican 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: sehgal@europa-uni.de
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