In Process and Reality Whitehead writes:
…we always have to consider two meanings of potentiality: (a) the ‘general’ potentiality, which is the bundle of possibilities, mutually consistent or alternative, provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects, and (b) the ‘real’ potentiality, which is conditioned by the data provided by the actual world. General potentiality is absolute, and real potentiality is relative to some actual entity, taken as a standpoint where the actual world is defined. It must be remembered that the phrase ‘actual world’ is like ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow,’ in that it alters its meaning according to standpoint. The actual world must always mean the community of all actual entities… (65)
My thought process is murky today, so I just wanted to throw out a few points in response to this passage as placeholders for future thought. It seems to me that Whitehead’s distinction between general potentiality and actual potentiality is useful in articulating what Deleuze sort of ontological work Deleuze’s category of the virtual is trying to do. Suppose we take a canonical example of potentiality from the Aristotlean tradition: the acorn. It is said that the acorn has the potential to become an oak tree. However, this would be an example of general potentiality. When we think of the acorn in this way, we are thinking of the acorn abstractly, divorced from its environment or the way in which it is related to other entities. The question remains: will the acorn become an oak tree? We have no idea. We only know that the acorn has the potential to become an oak tree. I am still unclear as to what Whitehead has in mind by “eternal objects”, so hopefully I am not distorting his conception of general potentiality too much.
There are conditions under which the acorn has the potential to become an oak tree and conditions under which the acorn does not have the potential to become an oak tree. These conditions do not belong to the internal constitution of the acorn, but rather are defined by the relations the acorn entertains to its environment: soil conditions, mineral conditions, light conditions, heat conditions, water conditions, air conditions, etc. Whitehead would say that the acorn must “prehend these other actual entities so as to concress into an oak tree.” That is, it must integrate the world about it so as to creatively actualize itself as an oak tree. This process is creative in that it will be a novel event each time it takes place. As Leibniz famously observed, no two leaves are exactly alike. The reason for this is that each leave, each oak tree, integrates the “data” of its environment in its own unique way. In this connection, Whitehead is quick to emphasize that real potentiality is closely connected to place and time (he develops an elaborate and original account of space and time that I cannot develop at this moment):
Actual entities atomize the extensive continuum [the real potentials of the world]. This continuum is merely the potentiality for division; an actual entity effects this division. The objectification of the contemporary world merely expresses mutual perspectives which any such subdivision will bring into real effectiveness. These are the primary governing data for any actual entity; they express how all actual entities are in solidarity in one world. With the becoming of any actual entity what was previously potential in the space-time continuum is now the primary real phase in something actual. For each process of concrescence a regional standpoint in the world defining a limited potentiality for objectifications, has been adopted.
The acorn does not possess the potential to become an oak tree on the moon. Nor does the acorn have the potential to become an oak tree in the Sahara desert. If these conditions are not met, then the acorn is not actualized and no processes of individuation take place. These latter conditions thus constitute real potentiality. This, incidentally, would be the problem with political theories such as we find in figures like Rawls. They only speak of general potentiality and therefore give no account of whether or not such egalitarian ideals have the potential to be realized in really existing situations. As such, they remain entirely abstract. We can ask the question of why such theories became thinkable at such and such a time and what potentialities of their own they produce, but there can be no honest question of these theories dealing with concrete situations. Such are the philosophies of the armchair. These potentials always have their somewhere and their somewhen. These potentials are, moreover, limited depending on the conditions governing the situation. As such, they function as the sufficient reason for the actualized occasion, or the reason for the actuality’s being.
Real potentiality would thus consist of the real potentials population a situation at a given point in time. It is for this reason that Whitehead is quick to emphasize that the term “actual world” is an indexical like yesterday or tomorrow. It is an indexical in the sense that its content perpetually changes. Similarly, relations among actual entities are perpetually changing, thus leading to transformations in the real potential of situations. With the actualization of virtual potentials, new potentials are produced that are, in turn, opportunities for further actualizations. All of this comes very close to what I’m trying to get at when speaking of “constellations“. A constellation refers to the real conditions encountered within a situation, and is committed to the thesis that thought must proceed from these conditions rather than from universalizing abstractions that ignore the actual world.
It seems to me that all of this resonates very closely with Deleuze’s concept of the virtual and the concerns that motivate this ontological category. Discussing the virtual in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes,
We opposed the virtual and the real: although it could not have been more precise before now, this terminology must be corrected. The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object– as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension… The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements along with singular points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is structure. We must avoid giving the elements and relations which form a structure an actuality which they do not have, and withdrawing from them a reality which they have. We have seen that a double process of reciprocal determination and complete determination defined that reality: far from being undetermined, the virtual is completely determined. When it is claimed that works of art are immersed in a virtuality, what is being invoked is not some confused determination but the completely determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements, its ‘virtual’ or ’embryonic’ elements. (DR, 208-209)
Deleuze’s account of structure requires an extended commentary that I cannot provide at the moment, as it diverges markedly from “structuralist” conceptions of structure, allowing for dynamism, development, and evolution. What Deleuze is striving to think with the virtual is the concreteness of a situation and the differential relations that an entity entertains with its milieu in undergoing development. What, then, are these “genetic differential elements”, these “embryonic elements”, if not the real potentials that haunt a situation? The question then becomes one of how these real potentials might be awoken.
Larval Subjects . 
May 27, 2007 at 3:09 am
I’ve been wrestling around similar issues – how one speaks about the actuality and the determinateness of a potential.
I want to ask a question I don’t quite know how to formulate, about the relationship of these sorts of issues to your interest in ontology more generally. How do you understand the relationship between your broad interests in ontology, and the desire to understand the ontological potentials of our moment? Are you looking for a general theory of how someone could approach the analysis of the potentials of concrete situations in general? Or a theory of our specific concrete situation, where the theory would be understood as somehow bound integrally to its object?
In what might or might not be a realted question: I understand your notion of a situation to encompass nonhuman and human entities? and therefore not necessarily to be bound to the “social” – if this is inaccurate, please just correct the point – I’m not trying to ask questions that are pointed in any direction, but just to understand more clearly what you would like to do. If you are seeking a theoretical approach not grounded as strongly in the “social”, would you be able to speak a bit more about how you see this contrasting with approaches that focus more strongly on the emergence of forms of perception, thought or practice within human communities?
My apologies for asking so vaguely – I’m very tired, and these questions are to some degree cumulative responses reacting to several recent posts, rather than direct responses to this one. If the questions seem completely off the mark, please don’t take this as in any way willful or critical – I’m just trying to stumble toward a clearer sense of the relationship between some of the questions you have been asking, and some of the questions I’ve been trying to ask.
May 27, 2007 at 3:18 am
With regard to your first question, I’m looking for a creative ontology, so there would be nothing but situations and the subsequent potentials they produce.
The second question is more complicated. I do understand what I’m doing to encompass both the social and the non-social. This is one of the reasons I often choose non-social examples as I believe that continental theory [wrongly] sutures everything else to the social. I do not believe that philosophy should be a branch of sociology or anthropology as a number in the French and German traditions conceive it, though I do believe that it should take social phenomena seriously as natural phenomena. I can’t get into the questions about human perception at the moment.
May 27, 2007 at 3:57 am
The problem will arise from poor phrasing on my end, but I think I was trying to get at something else with my first question: I’m asking whether you understanding yourself as unfolding an analysis of some specific situation and its potentials, or if you understand yourself to be unfolding a general approach for how to approach unfolding the potentials of any situation? Both could involve creative ontology, but there might be different implications for how to grasp the way in which the world explains the theory, to take the formulation from your earlier post? (I realise that you may not actually agree personally with the formulation that the world should explain the theory – you were mentioning my work, rather than your own, in the section of the post that used this formulation.)
The suturing of everything to the social seems to be one response that has emerged in some continental traditions to trying to understand how the world explains the theory. When theory is demonstrably historical – when theory has emerged in time and will presumably fade away – then the question becomes how we thematise the dynamism of the world – and some approaches do seem to try to resolve this problem by positing a sort of totalising framework in which the social or historical or human-practical is somehow constitutive of the natural.
An alternative might be to discuss the ways in which shifts that may be social or human-historical in origin, perhaps work to sensitise us to particular potentials or dimensions in a natural world – such an approach could discuss historical shifts in our theories about the natural, in a way that doesn’t reduce the natural to the social, but that discusses the qualitative characteristics of particular interactions that unfold in time between a specific kind of human community and its natural context… But I’m not sure this would be adequate to what you would like to do…
May 27, 2007 at 4:23 am
With the first question, it would be the latter option. There will be no point– that I can envision at the moment –where I will do the historical work necessary to fully account for the claims that I’m making in the way you describe. One can’t do everything. As an ontologist I’m more interested in the general framework, not the concrete details.
Yes, I think this approach is mistaken and onesided, though I understand the line of reasoning that leads to it. In my view there’s no such thing as a non-historical theory, however. I just take it that discussing the history of a thing is not always relevant or productive. You have yet to give an argument as to why it should be productive in all circumstances. I think this is a place where you extensively need to flesh out your arguments. As it stands I feel that a lot of what you’re positing is an unnecessary detour. In short, you have not shown me that there is productive value in the sort of historicization that you’re calling for with respect to the sorts of questions I’m trying to ask or the sorts of issues I’m trying to think about. Again, there’s only so much work that a person can do. I’m more interested in the general framework than these other issues.
May 27, 2007 at 4:32 am
I think my tone must have come across as critical in some way – this wasn’t my intention. I’m happy for you to criticise my work – that, for me, is the point of these kinds of exchanges. I’m not sure, though, whether you would really like a response to the questions you’ve asked me above – the tone sounds as though I’ve intruded in raising these points, and that you don’t find them productive for discussion. My deepest apologies if this is the case. Please understand that I never intend anything I write to be pressuring you to undertake a different kind of work than what you seek to do.
May 27, 2007 at 4:59 am
[Plato saw people as controlled by mind, will and appetite.] [Plato argues that the human soul has three parts: an intellective (rational) part, a spirited part (having to do with emotion and will), and an appetitive part (having to do with drives and basic impulses).]
Can this be a key to understand the cause of what you have called “constellations” or, by extension, the phenomenon of “castes” prevailing in India?
May 27, 2007 at 5:01 am
I’m just answering your questions and outlining what I will and will not do as far as the theoretical matrix I’m developing is concerned, that’s all.
May 27, 2007 at 5:09 am
Tusar, I’m not sure I’m seeing the connection. The caste system in India is certainly a situation, but how are you connecting this to Plato? Can you elaborate?
May 27, 2007 at 5:16 am
re the relation between Whitehead’s eternal objects, the two potentialities, and Deleuze’s work, I turn to the logic of sense where deleuze makes a series of distinctions between the event and the accident, between singular and ordinary points, between problematics and solutions in the ninth series of the problematic.
So problematic of acorn and environment determined by vectorial field of singularities actualised through the event of “to oak” (to grow) as the accidental solution of the oak tree. Object of oak tree is ‘ingressed’ in the event of the acorn and the event of the oak tree which presents an interesting problem of the non-linear relation between the two series of potentiality as they converge towards the event horizon of another singularity between them. One is inculcated in the problematic of the acorn and its environments ‘to oak’ while the other is inculcated in the problematic of the oak tree’s ecological functioning ‘to live’. The cultural question regarding the movement of sense and the thresholds of meaning between the two events (to oak of the acorn and the to live of the oak) must have its own potentiality.
May 27, 2007 at 5:22 am
Glen, so are you seeing Whitehead’s eternal objects as analogous to Deleuze’s sense? I think there’s definitely a strong connection between Deleuze and Whitehead, but increasingly I’m coming to feel that Deleuze is also offering a critique of a number of aspects of Whitehead’s ontology. These eternal objects really leave me scratching my head.
May 27, 2007 at 5:39 am
[The philosophers and the warriors are thus the “Guardians” of Plato’s ideal state. This does not seem like a familiar sort of definition for justice, but the result, Plato says, is that each interest is satisfied to the proper extent, or, in society, everyone has what is theirs. The philosophers have the knowledge they want; the warriors have the honors they want; and the commoners have the goods and pleasures they want, in the proper moderation maintained by the philosophers and warriors. The root of all trouble, as far as Plato is concerned, is always unlimited desire.]
The caste system in India, too, operates more or less on a similar taxonomy: knowledge, power, capital, and labour.
May 27, 2007 at 5:50 am
Tusar, the examples I give such as the acorn and it’s environment are at the center of what I’m trying to talk about. What I’m trying to get at are actually existing conditions and their potentialities… What we find out there in the world in this particular situation. By contrast, Plato is talking about an ideal order of the State. I take it that there would be a very large difference between how India would be analyzed under the theory I’m proposing and under Platonic theory. Here I’m hesitant as I’m sure you know more than I. But under the perspective I’m proposing, we’d have to look at India’s concrete history, economics, geography, etc., to understand why India has formed a social system based on castes in just the way it has. Just as we’d have to look at local conditions to understand why grapes of a particular species are different when they’re grown in Italy than they are in California, we’d have to understand the specifics of the situation in India to understand why it is organized as it is. By contrast, Plato is asking himself what the Ideal State is and is thus ignoring these sorts of local and historical conditions. The Platonist might investigate the situation in India to see how well it fits the model of the soul. In doing so, it would miss the specific circumstances that led to this particular social organization.
In addition to the sorts of questions I’m posing about how things came to be in a particular way, there are also questions of how situations might be changed. The question here is that of how we locate potentials within a situation for change. Here I am not alluding to abstract potentials, but the real potentials that the genuinely existing situation offers for transforming this particular form of organization. For instance, how is it that a group suddenly comes to conceive new possibilities for itself where before it didn’t see these possibilities? Why is it that new social movements emerge? It sounds like you’re somewhat critical of the caste system. Yet in India, from what I understand (please correct me if I’m wrong), people were not always critical of the caste system in this way. So what is it that’s changed that allows an alternative to be conceived? And what needs to be done to bring that alternative into actuality?
I apologize for the vagueness of my thoughts. I’m still working through things here, so they’re not fully developed.
May 27, 2007 at 5:55 am
I’m open to the suggestion that I am mistaking your intention, but you seem to be doing a bit more than that:
These seem to be fairly attacking statements – which is fine. I have no objection to having my approach attacked for its inadequacy or insufficiency. It’s just that, because you juxtapose such criticisms to other statements that seem to close the conversation down, I’m not clear that a response is actually welcome. I have been in this position before in some of our exchanges, where quite harsh criticisms are being offered of my work, and I can actually respond to those criticisms – at least on a programmatic level, and sometimes on a substantive level – but I hold back because the tone suggests that you are offering such criticisms to shut the conversation down, rather than because you have any curiosity about how I might respond to the critique. This is fair enough – you may not find a deeper understanding of what I’m trying to do interesting in any way, or you may think my work is superificial and very unlikely to yield anything of interest for your work – I take no offence at this. I’d prefer, though, that this be stated, rather than my work be dismissed in fairly harsh language, but in a context in which I am left completely uncertain whether you are actually open to a response to your critique.
If you do such things reactively, because you believe I have engaged with you work in some similar way, I can only stress again: I am not attacking your approach – just seeking to understand it. If you wish to attack mine, that’s fine – but it’s a bit one-sided if you aren’t interested in how I might respond.
You know that I am not particularly interested in the historical origins or genealogy of things – which is the thing you seem to be dismissing in your comments. We’ve been through this a number of times before, and you should know this about my approach: when do I write on the historical origins of things? What do you see me writing on – how things came to be, or how they can best be characterised now? And in many of your posts – including several recent ones on Whitehead – you represent my position reasonably accurately, which leaves me very confused when you again try to frame my work as an exploration of historical origins or genealogy.
I am, though, interested in a couple of specific things that may sound superficially similar – although you should be familiar enough with my work by now to know at least some of the difference.
First, I tend to think that the fact that a theory understands itself to have emerged in time carries certain implications for the form of theory. Those implications don’t necessarily include that the theory must account for its own origins – I’m generally uninterested in this, as I believe (as you also seem to, given your references to emergence), that a thing once constituted may not share the same qualitative characteristics as the various processes through which it came to be constituted originally. I am interested in the way in which the theory can point to the potential for itself as a dimension of the world it is trying to explain. This kind of analysis can be undertaken without any exploration of the “past”. The concept of history enters into the analysis only through the suggestion that a sufficient explanation or understanding of a historically-bounded thing cannot be offered with reference to a less historically-bounded thing.
I should also note that I am specifically not making an argument that any particular theoretical approach – historical or otherwise – is always relevent or productive. I consider theories to be bound to their objects, and my own theory to be an attempt to explain a very specific kind of object – a particular assemblage.
I am interested in understanding what I regard as an unusual structuration of historical time in the modern era – I view this as an analysis of a particular kind of contingent assemblage – as something that has come into being and could fade away. Since the nature of my object is social and temporally bounded, I look for theoretical categories that are also temporally bounded and related to novel forms of social practice within human communities. I am not making any generalised claims about how to theorise other sorts of assemblages or constellations – such things are not directly my objects of analysis – although I may use my analysis of this particular assemblage to suggest issues that might need to be taken into account, if someone were seeking to construct some more general theory: since presumably a general theory would seek also to apply to the object that interests me, this kind of theoretical exchange could be productive, and not intrinsically a detour – particularly for an approach such as yours that is committed to materialist and self-reflexive analysis.
Again, I hope my tone doesn’t come across inappropriately here. There are time when you seem to strike out, and I’m unsure why. I am happy for you to be as harsh in criticism of my approach as you wish to be – how else will I know what you see the problems to be, unless you articulate them? I welcome such exchanges, and I don’t particularly care how they’re voiced. But I’m often a bit startled when you do such things – why in response, for example, to the sorts of questions I asked above? And, when my approach is labelled from the outset as a detour, I’m unclear whether there is actually any invitation to explore this issue further: are you telling me what I am, and thus ruling out a response, or are you asking me whether I have a response to a particular concern? Is this an invitation to a conversation, or would you rather not discuss such issues with me?
May 27, 2007 at 6:24 am
I think this is what you need to explain in more detail, i.e., the issue of why a theory must account for how it comes to envision certain potentials for itself. On the one hand, I get exceedingly impatient when you pose this question because I feel that I’m busy unfolding the potentials I do see for myself, and questions of how I came to envision such and such a thing as a potential strike me as either skeptical questions or sidebars that interfere with actually developing those potentials. On the other hand, I think the schizophrenia you’re sensing in me giving an accurate presentation of your project yet also getting frustrated with it stems from the fact that I also feel this question or trajectory of inquiry is important in promoting ways of rendering possibilities available within certain social fields. That is, for me one of the prime questions is that of how certain things might conceptually be made possible for people where before they weren’t. So as I see it, there are two different levels or scales of inquiry here. I get testy when I’m trying to develop something and I’m suddenly being confronted with what I perceive to be a question of “how did this become possible for you to think?” I don’t really care at the moment, I’m just trying to think it and I find this question distracting. Yet I am deeply interested in the question of what rhetorical actions might be taken and what events might occur that open possibilities for a group of people. Hopefully this makes some sense and explains some of my bizarre psychology to you. I think, perhaps, that I’m a bit more experimentalist than you are. I tend to be a bit flighty and am happy to follow through on a concept to see where it leads without engaging in all the smoke and mirrors that would demonstrate what it is that warranted that decision in the first place. I tend to think the critical stance is a kind of neurosis where one is engaging in endless propaeduetics and preparations without getting to the actual work, and that things prove themselves apres coup or after the fact in their results as “what will have been”. So in my view, the question is more, “what does this concept allow me to see and think?” rather than the question “is the concept adequate?” I take it that the inadequacy of a concept will show itself in practice and call for revision as a consequence. It’s not so much that I’m dismissing your questions or thinking them mistaken (I don’t think they are), but rather of saying “yeah but I’m trying to work through this and aren’t these questions better proposed with respect to this issue?”
May 27, 2007 at 6:26 am
The caste syndrome is not confined to India alone and should be seen as prevailing everywhere in many disguised forms, as Bob has blogged:
[Sunday, December 03, 2006 Know Your Caste posted by Gagdad Bob at 12/03/2006 08:26:00 AM
The great metaphysician René Guenon once mentioned that one of the problems with the modern world is that so few people are “in their proper place.” He made the remark in reference to something that we in the West categorically reject, the caste system, so it should not be surprising that people have no idea what caste they belong to.
But natural castes exist, and if you try to eliminate them, they will just return in a perverse form — just as you can try to eliminate sexual differences but will end up with weird sexual hybrids and a lot general confusion — confusion that is then institutionalized and taught as “wisdom” in our universities…. but only because there are so many academics who are in the wrong caste and have no business being in academic life! (As a brief aside, you will also notice that when I have a troll problem — or more accurately, a “problem troll” — it is always a caste issue, so that there is really little Dupree can say aside from “pipe down and keep pulling the rickshaw!”)
Let’s review our castes, shall we? But before doing so, let us remind ourselves that this is not a matter of equality under the law, much less before the eyes of God. To be honest, it is actually an issue of compassion, for it is difficult to be happy if one spends one’s life on the wrong path. As the Buddhists say, “another man’s dharma is a great bummer,” or something like that. I hope it goes without saying that I am not advocating some sort of imposition of the caste system, any more than I would advocate stratification of society based upon Jungian typology. Having said that, there is a good chance that you will be happier in life if you know your Jungian typology — your “psychological DNA,” so to speak — and pursue a career consistent with it. In fact, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, let’s just stipulate at the outset that we are speaking “mythologically,” in a Jungian sense of the term. One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin]
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/12/know-your-caste.html
[Now, I am not one of those modern space age a go-go people who imagine that gender is irrelevant to our destiny. But nor do I think that our destiny can be reduced to gender. Rather, our destiny is influenced by several archetypal factors that go into our “blueprint” and inform who we are: sex (for each sex emphasizes different divine qualities), age (i.e., season of life), intellect (not its content, but its height, depth and breadth), temperament (e.g., Jung’s useful system), caste (e.g., priest, warrior, menial/intellectual laborer, merchant, etc.), and even zodiacal type (in the archetypal sense, not the debased “predictive” variety found in newspapers and most books on the topic).]
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/10/men-without-chests-and-women-without.html
May 27, 2007 at 7:09 am
This is good – sorry to raise the issue like this, I’ve just been confused why we so often end up in these sorts of exchanges, when I’m often perceiving myself to be developing things to which you’ve responded well in other places. I’m also happy for you just to say “not now” – that’s fair enough. It’s just when you articulate this objection as though it’s some kind of substantive critique of my approach that I’m left uncertain what to do – the “not now” message comes across but, when it’s paired with what sounds like a criticism of my work, it places me in a very difficult position.
I’m curious whether some of my questions sound more individual to you than I mean them? I know you’re not engaging in individual reflection – I’m not suggesting that. I’m just wondering whether you think that, when I raise issues about self-reflexivity, I’m talking about the theorist? I ask this because of what you say here:
Questions of self-reflexivity for me aren’t questions about theorists, but about theories. They also aren’t really questions about how something comes to be envisaged – they aren’t causal questions, for example, or questions about the mechanisms by which something comes to be thought – but about what is envisaged. The potentials of the “what” are sufficient explanations for the theory of the “what” – I’m not looking for anything else (although this can be a bigger ask than it seems…). To me, the questions of “what does this concept allow me to see and think” are integrally bound to questions of adequacy – since adequacy within an immanent framework cannot be posed with reference to some outside standpoint, it therefore boils down to an assessment of what a concept allows us to think and see. I don’t think we have any fundamental disagreement here?
I understand that you see your work as a form of rhetorical intervention – and I try not to introduce theoretical questions into the threads that are most clearly constructed as such. You are also, though, trying to outline a theory – you’ve committed to a number of specific stances in relation to immanence, materialism, etc. – and sometimes you are open to theoretical discussion. I’m just not always clear when you are open to this, and when you would rather such discussion be suspended for the moment, as you are trying to develop concepts. I’m happy for you just to say this, if I intrude – it just creates an awkward situation for me if you frame this point as though you are offering some kind of global critique of my work, or (as you’ve done again above, and have done in conversations with me the past) when you suggest that “the critical stance is a kind of neurosis”: is this meant to suggest your verdict on my thought, or are you inviting a conversation on this topic? (I’m asking this gently – I don’t intend to force a discussion, but just pointing out that these elements in your response create dilemmas for me, as then I feel like I have to choose between allowing what is often a quite unfair critique to stand, or being rude and continuing to intrude into your thought process with a theoretical argument you clearly don’t want to have at that time.)
I’m happy to talk about why I think the issue of self-reflexivity on the level of the theory is important, and is not an interruption of practice but is instead a particular form of practice adequate to an immanent understanding of a situation, but I don’t think such a conversation must happen now – and it wasn’t actually the conversation I was trying to introduce through my initial questions above, which were really just open-ended probes. I appreciate that you are trying to be patient, and that I have tossed issues into the discussion that may not be productive for you at this time. I just value the ability to speak with you – there is a very real and literal sense in which I would not be currently engaging in any serious theoretical work if it weren’t for our discussions – and I am trying to understand how it might be possible to prevent these sorts of frictions.
May 27, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Yes, I understand that the question of self-reflexivity is about theories not theorists. I do, however, believe that it can be an impediment to theory and to concrete practices in the world. In many instances, I believe that something can only productively deploy itself when it contains a certain blindspot with regard to its own position of enunciation. I do think there’s something of a disagreement here:
I am less concerned with questions of adequacy than with questions of what concepts allow us to do, and therefore advocate a creative invention of concepts that are then put into practice to see where they lead. Concept creation, in my view, both emerges from practice (we produce the concepts we need in light of our engagement with the world) and are tools of practice. In this regard, I suppose I have something of a pragmatic conception of these things. I do not think the question of adequacy is something that can be posed at the outset of inquiry, but rather believe the inadequacy of concepts is something that shows itself in the actual use of concepts to analyze and work with concrete phenomena in the world. Now this might sound like a free-for-all where concepts are created willy-nilly, but I’ve actually outlined, quite carefully, what I have in mind in my posts on individuation and problems. As I’ve argued in that connection, the individual produced in a process of individuation is always a response to a problem that inhabits the field in which it unfolds. Problems are not in the head, but are, for me, virtual realities out there in the world. They are objective entities defined by constellations and are certainly not negative. The grown tree, for instance, is a solution to the problem of its soil, water, light, and air conditions as they specifically characterize that milieu. We don’t refer to the tree as being adequate or inadquate (unless we’re Aristotleans or Hegelians and believe in final causes and forms), but see it as a specific response to this particular field. So too with concepts. A concept is always a specific response or solution to the field in which it emerges.
It is in this regard that I feel that the critical stance is a sort of neurosis– specifically, an obsessional neurosis. The obsessional is the one who is constantly making preparations to pursue his desire without ever finally pursuing his desire. For instance, he endlessly plans a first date with a woman he ardently loves, wishing for it to be absolutely perfect. Fifty years later he dies or she dies and he’s never asked her out on the date. Indeed, she’s not even aware that he was interested in her. This occurs often with political theory as well. Endless preparations to get things just right without jumping into the fray. This is the issue I have with epistemology: Kantianism, Husserl’s endless phenomenological reductions, Heidegger’s endless preparations to pose the question of the meaning of being (he argues that there has to be all sorts of preliminary work before the question itself can even be posed!), the epistemological debates of the 17th century, and yes, the endless refinements of critique among the critical theorists. Lacan liked to say that obsessional desire is the desire for an impossible desire. As a structure– i.e., something about a particular form of life, not an individual –obsessional desire sustains its desire by perpetually deferring the object of its desire, and it defers its object of desire by rendering that desire impossible. Critique, in my view, often functions in this way. By contrast, I have a “Macguyver” approach to theory building. You’ll recall Mcguyver from the 80s. He was the guy that had the swiss army knife that would find his way out of any situation so long as he had some duct tape and a few odds and ends. You work with what you have, always midstream, and with what the situation affords and hopefully your produce something in the process. Once again, essentially, I think about these issues in biological terms. Evolving life doesn’t sit about asking which form would be best or most adequate to the ecosystem it lives in. No, it experiments and sometimes is successful and sometimes is not successful. Non-experimentalist critical stances just strike me as holdovers from representationalist philosophies that haven’t yet caught on to the fact that their questions of adequacy are questions that only make sense in the context of a world that is lost.
I am open to theoretical discussions, but only within a somewhat limited framework. When I discern that the subject is being changed from what I’m trying to write about and suddenly an entirely different set of issues is being introduced unrelated to the main claims I’m developing I get [rightly] annoyed. Compare my recent discussion with Dominic Fox with these questions of self-reflexivity. Why would I not get annoyed with Dominic’s remarks about reductivism and would get impatient with your remarks about self-reflexivity? Dominic’s remarks remain within the orbit of the issues outlined by the post even though he disagrees with my position on emergent properties, whereas your remarks, in my view, are entirely changing the subject. You haven’t done the necessary footwork to show the relationship, but just bring up the same issue again and again. Were I writing about these particular issues I would be very interested, but I see them as a distinct topic of discussion. Hence, out of my desire to remain on the subject, my tone becomes short and brusque and I’m inclined to be dismissive. Of course, I can’t police how anyone takes what I write and people do tend to speak about what’s of interest to them. As Lacan puts it in seminar 23, we’re only ever interested in our own symptoms. But, if the value of something isn’t clearly and concretely demonstrated to me and its legitimacy to what I’m doing isn’t clearly and concretely shown, then I certainly don’t have to entertain it too deeply either as I too am only interested in my own symptoms. Once again, I do think you have work to do in illuminating the “cash-value” of this particular issue you’re trying to outline with regard to self-reflexivity. As it stands it looks to me like it remains attached to both a subject-centered perspective and a culturalist perspective. I think you need to pull away from the abstraction with which your ordinarily pose these questions (yes yes, I know you have reasons for this abstraction and you don’t need to repeat those reasons, but I think that abstraction is detrimental to the case you’re trying to make) and show, through some concrete examples (political movements, institutional reform, whatever) what the cash-value of this question is. If I can be shown that there is a cash-value to these issues that doesn’t throw me back into some sort of neo-Kantian or society-centered form of constructivism my tune might very much change.
May 27, 2007 at 5:46 pm
I will say that there’s something of a paradox at work here. On the one hand, the vague ontology I’ve developed so far logically entails something like what I understand you to be talking about vis a vis self-reflexivity (I’m still unclear as to just what you’re talking about or calling for: concrete examples please!). On the other hand, I think your conception of critical theory requires an ontology such as the one that I am describing (i.e., a non-substance based account of change, becoming, and individuation that allows for the production of new entities, forms of subjectivity, etc). Paradox is not necessarily a bad thing. As Deleuze somewhere puts it, paradox is the proper domain of philosophy as it is both opposed to doxa and cannot be equated with contradiction:
May 27, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I just want to emphasize that the point I take issue with in this question is the reference to what someone can and cannot do. I take the question of how someone could approach the analysis of potentials as a derivative question from the standpoint of ontology. Such a mode of analysis is still subject-centered. For me the issue is simply one of understanding the relationship between potentiality and actuality for its own sake. How that is put to use by “someone” is an entirely different issue. Again, in the final sentence you humanize the issue and trace it back to a subject. You ask about our situation, when the ontological claim is that there are situations. Some of those situations happen to have agents in them, many do not. This is precisely the reason I chose the example an acorn (something that is not human or social) rather than an example drawn from political theory. The political examples are a subset of a more general ontological principle. However, to answer your question, because everything that comes-to-be or is actualized does so within a constellation, this would hold of theory just as it would hold of acorns or planets in a solar system. I guess I should really emphasize and underline that I’m developing an “anti-humanist” ontology here. By this I don’t mean something that is “against the human” but rather something that doesn’t treat humans, agents, knowers, etc., as the center but treats them as one case within the spectrum of being.
I take my account to be a general account of entity. I’m uncomfortable with even the suggestion that it encompasses human and non-human entities because human here functions as the marked term and is given an exceptional status within the order of being. The problem I have with the other approaches you mention is that I perceive them as subordinating discussion of anything in the world to cultural categories, whether those categories be history, economics, linguistics, social formations, and so on. As a result, a regional ontology (the theory of a particular type of being such as sociology, linguistics, history, and so on) comes to precede general ontology. Usually these positions fall into a sort of skepticism. On the one hand, I see this as a way critical theorists and other cultural critics deal with anxieties and insecurities they have about their place vis a vis hard sciences. They try to trump these other disciplines by telling a story about how these things are culturally contingent. On the other hand, I believe these approaches encourage a way of thinking that leads to cursory analyses of various phenomena. Hence I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too. I want a general ontology that doesn’t perpetually bring issues back to linguistic, historical, and cultural concerns while also respecting and appreciating these modes of analysis.
I take it that this property of coming to be and passing away in history is a general characteristic of all entities, not just human formations. Consequently, I’m far more interested in these general characteristics than the special case of human formations. When I put on my social theorist hat I then focus on those sorts of issues.
Okay, but here again you’re shackling general ontological questions to humans and how humans perceive things. This is usually the move that sets me off. That acorn or the moon functions as it does regardless of whether critters such as ourselves theorize about it. We end up with an intrinsically subject centered ontology, a human centered ontology, whenever we make this move and are just repeating the Christological conception of creation with man at the center of things. I think you’re making a number of assumptions about what I’m up to that just aren’t there and this is what’s leading you to ask the sorts of questions you’re asking. I am bracketing these social and historical questions when doing general ontology as I think they’re dead ends, and only bring them into the fray again when I’m focused on specifically political and social questions.
May 27, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Working backwards: I would agree with this – and the fact that I agree with this is one reason I often get confused at your reactions, since I generally “think” my comments in this spirit:
I don’t see that this is particularly paradoxical, or understand why such issues wouldn’t be something that would be thought at the same time. Why would something that you have on a number of occasions posited as a logical implication of your ontological commitments, stand in a paradoxical relationship to those commitments? (I can see how this might happen – I just don’t see how, in this specific case, it does happen.)
Much of my work is trying to talk about a specific problem that is social in character: I’m trying to understand what capitalism is, how this social formation is constructed in practice – with an expansive conception of practice that includes practices of perception and thought. Some of the “cash value” of my approach comes in the understanding it provides of how various social movements have managed to reconstruct the forms of practice associated with this social configuration, even if they were consciously and directly intending to abolish “capitalism” as they understood it. Some of the “cash value” relates to how I can tie together the forms of practice associated with this social formation, with forms of thought that ordinarily present themselves as conceptual abstractions – so that abstractions are tied back to determinate elements and relationships within a concrete configuration. Doing this makes it easier to understand the contingency of the formation – and also why the formation can at time appear impervious to change. In this sense, my work is an intervention into the general discussion about why it’s difficult to conceptualise alternatives to capitalism: my argument is that we are actually conceptualising alternatives already – we don’t lack imagination in this regard, in spite a certain current pessimism around the issue; my argument also is that some of the things we believe are alternatives, actually aren’t – they are instead moments in a complex network of social relationships by means of which capitalism is reproduced in practice.
My analysis is social because I am making an argument that the object of my analysis is social. I’m therefore arguing against approaches, for example, that would try to derive certain symptomatic dimensions of capitalist society from things like “complexity”, the “division of labour”, “post-traditionalness”, or various other tropes that see certain kinds of social problems as somehow intrinsic either to human nature, or to the emergence of a complex and differentiated system. I think we are practicing a particular complex and differentiated system in a contingent way, and am trying to cast light on determinate potentials to practice such a system in a different way.
My approach is not “culturalist” – unless you are defining “culturalist” such that any approach to understanding a problem within a human community would be intrinsically culturalist. It’s also not “social” in a conventional sense, although I regard myself as focussing on a problem generated by particular forms of collective practice. My work involves a complex argument about the ways in which particular types of collective practice mutually differentiate themselves in such a way that “culture” and various forms of concrete social institutions (the things we most intuitively think of, when we think of the “social”) come to be readily visible as such, while another, more impersonal dimension of social practice can by contrast appear as a form of impersonal necessity. I am trying to situate these dimensions of social practice back into an analytic framework that makes it easier to understand their relationship to one another, and to specific forms of human practice.
One of the things that “falls out” of this kind of analysis is an argument about the resonance of concepts like “materialism” on a mass scale in the modern era – the ability to talk about how such forms of perception and thought sit in relationship to other forms of perception and thought and to determinate forms of practice within a specific social configuration is also part of the “cash value” of this approach.
This does not mean that I am arguing that particular forms of perception, thought, or practice can be mobilised only within a particular form of social life – or that I think that human social life is the only interesting object of analysis. It simply means that I am trying to understand how these various elements empirically fit together within a particular constellation – and also thematise how some of these elements might be removed from this constellation, and reconfigured in different forms through a transformation of the current context.
The cash value of self-reflexivity specifically within this approach has to do with the critical nature of the theory. All that self-reflexivity means here is that the theory successfully manages to explain how its object suggests its own contingency. It doesn’t involve an explanation of why the theory arises, but instead an argument that, in the terms you used in the Whitehead post, the “world” being analysed suggests the potential that it can be transformed in specific ways. The theory becomes self-reflexive by pointing to such potentials in unfolding its own social analysis. In this way, the theory doesn’t stand outside its object, but is instead an immanent potential within that object. The cash value of self-reflexivity for a critical theory is that self-reflexivity points to determinate potentials for transformation.
I would understand this sort of approach – with its very specific and frankly social object of analysis – to “nest” within any more general theory. In other words, I am not trying to suggest that all analysis should take the form of the analysis I’m undertaking, although any analysis that would try to encompass this one might need, in specific senses, to be compatible.
In terms of whether my remarks change the subject: the difficulty from my point of view is that, in some conversations, you react this way; in others, you don’t – and I’m at a loss to know how you’ll respond in particular circumstances, as there don’t seem to be clear signals. There are times when I’ll suggest something along these lines in a very tentative way, and you’ll complain that I’m being self-effacing, or tease me for not realising that you had my work in mind when you were writing – in other words, you seem baffled about why I’m worried about how you’ll react. Such interactions – and we’ve had a number of these recently – seem to be invitations to discuss such issues with you. Then there are occasions such as this where, to be honest, I actually wasn’t trying to introduce the issue at all in my first two comments, where you are hypersensitive to the issue, and become immediately hostile and reprimand me for being obsessive and act as though you’d rather speak with people who are being overtly critical of your position, than to deal with my irrelevancies. I have absolutely no idea how you’ll react when I respond to your writing, and therefore constantly post on tenterhooks. I’d rather not have to approach your writing or our interaction this way: are you aware that you respond so disparately?
May 27, 2007 at 7:27 pm
This is far more clear than what I’ve heard you articulate so far and are indeed a set of issues I’m highly sympathetic to when I have my social theorist cap on. This resonates closely with what I understand Marx to be doing and a lot I find in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.
I do not think I’m erratic in the way you suggest. I think I respond impatiently when you bring up these kinds of issues in a post that is raising questions of general ontology. The posts where I’ve responded in this way have generally been pretty consistent: the posts on individuation, difference, virtuality, process, relation, essence, and so on. In all of these posts I’m interested in being-qua-being and what I take to be processes that all entities share in common. Consequently, when you bring up issues outlined in the quoted paragraph above I take you to be subordinating being-qua-being to being-qua-social and therefore repeating the Christalogical assumption of humanity as the center of creation. In my posts that are specifically social in character– where I’m working in a region of being –I do not, I think, tend to respond in this way and am more open to these sorts of questions. One of the things I’m strongly reacting to here is the way, in a certain field of continental philosophy, all questions seem to have become subordinated to political concerns and there’s no legitimacy to forms of inquiry that do not have “political relevance”. Of course, I did somewhat invite your response due to the last sentence or two of the original post. I suspect that when I was writing I was anticipating you raising issues such as you have and throwing a bone in their hoping to forestall a sociological discussion of an ontological issue.
May 27, 2007 at 7:53 pm
It may not always be as visible to me what you intend your target to be in a specific post – particularly because you will often be referencing similar theorists and analytical categories to ones you have recently discussed in a social theoretic context: issues about individuation, difference, virtuality, process, relation, essence are no less relevant to the social theoretic context – and you do also discuss such concepts in that context. You may have a clear distinction in mind when you write a particular post – and this distinction may communicate more clearly to other readers than it does to me – but I’m not sure that your reaction is commensurate to the level of error I might be making, if I respond to a post with an issue you aren’t intending to discuss at that point: this doesn’t need to translate into the odd combination of suggesting a dramatic criticism of my work, while also suggesting that you are not open to hearing a reply to that critique.
In this particular case, however, I think I did understand that you were unfolding a more general analysis, and I was simply asking a question about how you understood the relationship between the two moments within your thought – where my interest was somewhat methodological: I was curious how you understood the process of constructing your ontological theory, and whether how this process might relate to more social theoretic concerns you sometimes also express.
I wasn’t actually trying to press you on the issue of self-reflexivity – and certainly not to push you on why your work was “relevant” in some way (you actually do frequently ask this question of me, but it’s not an issue I tend to push – I have ongoing conversations with people whose theoretical work is far less “practical” than yours – it’s really not an issue for me). One reason that I was curious about the methodological question I originally asked is that you will often use formulations like the one offered to Tusar above:
One of the things that interests me as you grapple with such things is that – as with my own work – you have to struggle with what kinds of categories make it possible for you to: (1) criticise a particular kind of ideal (a “Platonist” notion that there is some non-existent ideal against which existing conditions can be judged and found wanting), while also (2) offering an alternative kind of existent “ideal” that also sits in a kind of counter-factual relationship to what is – as an immanent potential that can nevertheless be described as “real” in a way that Platonist ideals are not real. You’ve mentioned in other places that you tend to mine any kind of relational philosophy or theory, because it seems to offer something for your project. My interest here is very similar: it’s a core issue for me, how to talk about existent potentials, and I’m interested in knowing more about how you speak about such things – this was really all that motivated my initial question. I was curious to hear more, not critical.
May 27, 2007 at 8:07 pm
I really don’t have any answer to these questions and am not, in my own work, interested in pursuing them at present. These are questions that I do see as detours. I’m not sure why I should have to have an answer to these sorts of questions. Simply put, I believe that the kind of Platonism I was targeting in that post is false and that ontologies that focus on actually existing conditions have more to offer in understanding the world. Why should I have to engage in naval gazing as to what kind of categories make such a criticism possible? Questions of methodology and these types of questions about possibility will generally evoke a very negative response from me for the reasons I’ve outlined in connection to my problems with epistemology. I don’t know how to say it any more clearly: I don’t have a method, am not interested in developing a method, and am not interested in giving an account of how alternative ideals emerge. What I think is important is that forms of life and existence come to posit alternative ideals. Or maybe my exasperation is that I feel like I give arguments that explain these things all the time, yet still these humanist methodological questions get asked yet again. Honestly it really makes me want to pull my hair out. Enough with the questions about how alternative ideals get formed!– at least directed towards me, in your own work sure, that’s fine. I’m not sure what the issue here. Perhaps it is how you pose these questions or your rhetorical framing of them. After all, I have looked at various rhetorical procedures from time to time as to how new possibilities are introduced into social situations. But there I think I’m actually doing the work of developing that theory, rather than endlessly posing the question of how such a theory would be produced.
May 27, 2007 at 9:45 pm
This must be an issue of phrasing – I am simply trying to gloss your original post. I am interested in how you do your theory – I am asking for a further development of what you have already begun above. I am not asking you to do something different, but just expressing in an interest in seeing you continue your line of thought.
I have not asked you – anywhere in this thread – to respond to the self-reflexive question of what makes your theoretical activity possible. I understand that I often do make this point, but it is not the only point I ever make, nor was it the point I was trying to make above. I am interested in how we talk about possibilities, in such a way that those possibilities are conceptualised as real, rather than as ideal – interested in how we talk about how possibilities emerge as realities within situations. I mean this quite literally: I am curious how you are going about this – not about what enables you to go about it on some meta level – but just for more information on where your thoughts are leading you. I am not asking the kind of question you hear me to be asking.
I did, in my original comment, express some curiosity about how these sorts of concerns relate to other dimensions of your project – this was to some degree a methodological question, but in a very abstract way – I was just curious whether you were thinking with reference to some specific concrete situation. If you don’t want to reflect on this, don’t: how does a question from me get translated into some kind of confrontational interaction, as though by asking a question, I am taken to be criticising you for not answering that question right now? Where are you getting the perception that I am saying you “must” address this issue, as if I were stating some kind of logical objection or critique here? This is not my attitude – I don’t think it reflects the tone of my writing. Certainly, if it does, this is entirely unintentional.
May 27, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Just a quick additional note, in case this is adding to the conversational confusion: my post #20 somehow crossed your #19 – I’ve only just realised this. I have to prepare for a class, but just wanted to flag that, if I’ve seemed to overlook issues you’ve raised there, it’s because I didn’t see the post. Apologies if this has contributed to your frustration.
May 27, 2007 at 10:36 pm
I must have misunderstood what you were asking in the passage I quoted in my previous post. You wrote “One of the things that interests me as you grapple with such things is that – as with my own work – you have to struggle with what kinds of categories make it possible for you to…”, which gave me the impression that you were asking this kind of question. This impression was invited especially by your choice of words: ‘what kind of categories’. For me potential is an ontological category, not a cognitive category, so the question doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Put otherwise, potentials are something that are. Now there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done with the concept of potential and I hardly know where to begin. Potentials are strange beasts. They are in the sense that they haunt and dwell within the world, but in an unactualized form. For instance, the match has the potential to produce fire. But what is the ontological status of this potential? Where is it? How is it?
Leaving aside the tricky question of what, exactly, potentials are or how they are, I’m making two major claims:
1) Entities are the actualization of potentials within a given field. In this regard, I’d like to do away with the concept of “thing” or “entity” altogether and conceive all that is as events or ongoing processes. In other words, I’d like to banish any sort of subject-predicate logic where entities are thought as substances that remain the same underneath ever changing accidents or attributes. Rather, I’d instead like to see entities as unfolding events that perpetually reproduce themselves in time in much the same way that the cells of my body and their relations to one another are constantly reproducing themselves.
2) I am making the claim that potentials change and shift as a function of changes in the elements composing a situation. Going back to my acorn example, the acorn can lay dormant in the earth for many months doing nothing, yet a shift in temperature and rain conditions shifts the potentials in the situation such that the acorn begins to germinate. As the acorn grows into an oak tree, the potentials of the situation now change for other elements in the situation. For instance, there’s now competition for nutrients in the soil, animals and insects can now make the tree their home, and so on. The idea is really basic and somewhat superficial. It’s the thesis that the distribution of potentials change as events are actualized according to these potentials.
You write:
I don’t think there’s a one-size fits all answer to this question. For instance, in the case of the acorn example it’s clear that this isn’t an issue of envisioning possibilities as there’s no one there to do the envisioning. With Whitehead, I guess, we can say the acorn or the rock “perceives” its world or “prehends” its environment about it– I like Whitehead’s formulations here as they make human and animal perception a subspecies of basic interrelationships characteristic of all things, i.e., all things prehend and integrate the world from a particular point of view –but potentiality in the case of acorns and rocks is a different ball of worms.
One of the reasons I’ve pulled away from Badiou and Zizek so much where social theory is concerned is that I feel they’re ignoring the way in which possibilities come to be envisioned in very specific historical circumstances where issues of technology, nature, economics, and intercultural relations are involved. I believe, for instance, that I’ve argued in the past that women’s suffrage followed the emergence of factory labor in the late 19th early 20th century. I only intend this example as a sort of thumbnail sketch, so hopefully you won’t beat me over it. Here we had women entering the factory, which placed them in very different roles from their traditional roles. Now certainly the intention of factory labor was not to liberate women or give them the right to vote. Yet these possibilities began to emerge for life and practice as a sort of unintended consequence of these shifts in technology, labor organization, and economics. Drawing analogies to biological speciation, then, we get a sort of “genetic drift”. That is, just as two species of finches can evolve in very different ways when separated geographically from one another, we begin to get a “new species” of woman as a result of this different ecological space, the factory space. At some point, this new species becomes “for itself” (organized, self-aware, self-directing) such that there is an intensification of the process (initially the process still thought of itself in the older terms) and as this “new species” begins to formulate its own identity it feeds back into the social constellation, challenging a number of social institutions and social mores, intensifying the process by which the social field is itself changed.
I give this only as an example. I want to exercise caution when analyzing things in this way as I don’t want to give the impression that there is only one way in which change takes place. This is one of the purposes of the concept of constellations: to look at the specifics of situations and their own immanent organization. I think it’s important here to distinguish between potential and possibility. You seem to use the terms interchangeably, but I’m not certain they’re identical. The potentiality of the example above would be found in the configuration of factories, the bodies that occupy those factories, and so on. The possibility would be what emerges where some of these bodies come to posit a possibility for themselves that feeds back into their self-relation and their relation to the social world about them, directedly transforming themselves and the world about them. Admittedly the conceptual space here is extremely knotty, as the emergence of possibility out of potentiality itself feeds back into the potentialities of a newly configured situation as a new bit of furniture that the situation itself must contend with and that generates further actualizations (reactionary counter-identities, conflicts, struggles, new institutions, and so on). I’m not sure if any of this is clear or makes sense. I want to be as flexible and open as possible to avoid one-sided and single-answer theoretical approaches. Thus, for instance, I can also see merit in something like what Badiou is describing with his truth-procedures but believe he’s overstating his case and ignoring other important directions from which change comes that involves little in the way of agency or intentional directedness.
May 27, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Does it help for me to say that this was the sort of response I was trying to elicit, when I was fumbling around with my original questions? :-)
You know enough about my background to know that there’s an inconvenient autodidactic element to it – which means, among other things, that I often use terms strangely, and am still in the process of working out how to say what I’m trying to say, so that I can make some small measure of sense when speaking with other people. It would help if I would just pick a discipline, as the different uses and connotations of terms in different disciplines confuse the issue even further. Unfortunately, if I haven’t picked one by now, it’s probably unlikely to happen… ;-P
Apologies for not responding more substantively – I do really appreciate your response – these are the sorts of issues I was, clumsily, trying to open up. I’ll be teaching for the remainder of the day, and then preparing for a nightmare day tomorrow, so I may not be able to pick things up in any timely way (assuming that I have anything meaningful to say, which may not be the case).