In many respects Whitehead’s actual occasions or actual entities are analogous to what I call “objectiles”. I have adopted the term “objectile” for objects to capture the sense in which objects are dynamic and ongoing activities unfolding or producing themselves through time. Thus the word “objectile” is a portmanteau word combining “object” and “projectile”, so as to underline the sense in which objects are not fixed points in a spatial location, but rather spatio-temporal processes over time. Like Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending A Staircase, objectiles are not to be thought as stationary substances composed of fixed qualities or predicates, but rather as this very unfolding and movement through time and space. Objectiles are not the now in which they are, but are this very adventure across space and time.
So too in the case of Whitehead’s actual occasions or actual entities. Actual occasions make up the ultimate building blocks of Whitehead’s universe. As Whitehead puts it in Process and Reality,
‘Actual entities’– also termed ‘actual occasions’ –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: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space… The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent. (18)
Whitehead’s ontology is thus atomistic in character. The universe, for Whitehead, is not composed of one substance, but of an indefinite number of substances, and, moreover, new substances are always coming into being. However, unlike Lucretian atoms that are eternal and indestructable, such that they never change and such that each one always possesses exactly the same properties for all time (i.e., they are immutable), Whitehead’s atoms or actual occasions are complex multiplicities or manifolds that become. “…[H]ow an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is… It’s ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming'” (23). In his earlier work Whitehead thus referred to actual occasions as events. An objectile, actual occasion, or actual entity is an event. And like all events it is therefore temporally elongated.
read on!
When Whitehead calls actual occasions “drops of experience” great care must be taken not to be mislead by his choice of language. Ordinarily we think of experience as something restricted to living and sentient beings. Experience here refers to the way a sentient being receives the world. For Whitehead– and I think this is one of the least meritorious dimensions of his metaphysics —all entities are drops of experience. Whether we are speaking of a rock, a subatomic particle, or a human being, these actual occasions are drops of experience. Objectiles are drops of experience not for us, but for themselves. That is, just as a human being might be said to be the sum of their experiences, a rock is the sum of its experiences. “…[I]n the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities in disjunctive diversity… acquires the real unity of the one actual entity; so that the actual entity is the real concrescence of many potentials” (22).
“Disjunctive diversity” refers to a set of existing objectiles or actual occasions independent of one another. Whitehead remarks that
[t]he ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. (21)
Concrescence refers to the manner in which things grow together to form a unity. Consequently, in the case of a tree, we can see how the manner in which the tree is a conjunctive unity of a disjunctive diversity belonging to the field that it inhabits or in which it becomes. The disjunctive diversity relevant to the becoming of the tree consists of photons of light, water, carbon dioxide, minerals in the soil, etc. These photons of light, molecules of water, carbon dioxide, and minerals are themselves actual occasions. The tree itself is a concrescence or assemblage of these other actual occasions producing a conjunctive unity that is itself a novel entity. The tree is “built” out of these other elements, but is also something new in relation to these elements.
It is here that we get Whitehead’s famous doctrine of “prehensions”. The term “prehension” refers to relations among objectiles or actual occasions or the manner in which one objectile draws on aspects from another actual occasion in its becoming or process. “…[T]wo descriptions are required for an actual entity: (a) one which is analytical of its potentiality for ‘objectification’ in the becoming of other actual entities, and (b) another which is analytical of the process which constitutes its own becoming” (23). When Whitehead speaks of “objectification” he is referring to the manner in which some aspect of another actual occasion is realized or integrated in another actual entity. Thus, for example, the tree becomes or continues its adventure in space-time through a prehension of light, but in prehending photons of light it transforms these prehensions through photosynthesis. Thus Whitehead will say that, “…every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how the subject prehends the datum” (ibid.). The ‘subject’ prehending in my above example is the tree, the datum prehended are the photons of light, and the result of photosynthesis is the ‘subjective form’ this datum takes in the becoming of the tree.
In his marvelous Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (a highly readable abridged version of Process and Reality with commentary), Donald W. Sherburne provides a helpful diagram for understanding prehensions and concrescence (10).
What we have here is a relationship between two objectiles or actual occasions, A and B. Actual occasion A is prehended by actual occasion B. Actual occasion A can either be an occasion in the immediate past of B’s becoming. For example, a prior moment in the becoming of our tree. Or it can be the prehension of an entirely different actual occasion in the disjunctive diversity to which both actual occasions belong. Actual occasion A is composed of prehensions M, N, and O. In prehending actual occasion A, actual occasion B prehends A under the prehension N, excluding M and O. Here actual occasion B is the subject doing the prehending. N is the datum that is prehended. And X, marked out by the vector arrow, is the subjective form the datum takes on in actual occasion B. That is, X is the way in which the datum, N, is objectified in actual occasion B. If I am uncomfortable with Whitehead’s use of the term “experience” in describing this process of concrescence, then this is because we can just as easily describe these relationships as causal relationships among actual occasions.
When Whitehead asserts that actual occasions are the ultimate reasons, that there is no going behind actual occasions to find a deeper reality, he has two things in mind.
…[E]every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concresence, or in the character of the subject which is in the process of that concrescence. This category of explanation is termed the ‘ontological principle.’ It could also be termed the ‘principle of efficient, and final, causation.’ This ontological principle means that actual entities are the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities. It follows that any condition to be satisfied by one actual entity in its process expresses a fact either about the ‘real internal constitutions’ of some other actual entities, or about the ‘subjective aim’ conditioning that process. (24)
This disjunction is not an exclusive disjunction. To account for an actual entity is both to refer to the other actual entities that entity prehends and the internal constitution of the actual occasion doing the prehending. Thus to account for why our tree is thus and so and not otherwise– perhaps it is anemic –we must refer both to the processes by which the tree metabolizes itself and the photons of light the tree prehends in metabolizing itself. Perhaps the tree is anemic because it exists in a disjunctive diversity with other trees that prevent it from getting more sunlight.
From the foregoing light is shed on what I have called “Latour’s Principle” and the “Principle of Irreduction”. Latour’s Principle states that there is no transportation without translation. The Principle of Irreduction states that nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else. If there is no transportation without translation, then this is because the objectile prehending a datum from another objectile always transforms that datum according to its own internal constitution. Likewise, if nothing is either reducible or irreducible to anything else, then this is because no objectile is ever simply the sum of its parts– the other objectiles that enter into its constitution –but rather objectiles transform or translate those other objectiles that enter into its concrescence.
There are a few points where I diverge from Whitehead’s account of actual occasions. First, Whitehead holds that every actual occasion shares a perfectly determinate relation with every other actual occasion in the entire universe. I do not believe that this is the case. Within the scope of my ontology, the universe does not form a holistic system in which all objectiles are interrelated. Second, Whitehead attributes a key role to what he calls “eternal objects”, which he treats as potentials and universals (such as the color green and mathematical patterns), to the becoming of actual occasions. For my own part, I cannot see what these eternal objects contribute to the account of the becoming of objectiles. Third, Whitehead retains the notion of final causation in the becoming of actual occasions, arguing that occasions are pursuing “satisfaction” or completion that they accomplish through the integration of prehensions in a novel and aesthetically pleasing unity. Consequently, it is the final cause that accounts for the becoming of an actual occasion in Whitehead. Where Whitehead attributes becoming to final causes, I attribute it to difference or disequilibrium. Objectiles become because they contain disequilibrium within themselves and disequilibriums are introduced into their being through interactions with other actual entities. Becoming is the resolution of these tensions or disequilibriums producing new properties or qualities in the objectile, but this resolution of tensions is not governed by final causality but rather by the mechanics underlying the internal organization of the objectile. The resolution of disequilibriums marks the death or completion of an objectile, though the dead entity can still function in the becoming of other objectiles through being prehended by these objectiles.
Larval Subjects . 
March 7, 2009 at 9:44 pm
I haven’t read Whitehead so forgive me if I butcher him.
You say, “The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity.”
Also, you quote Whitehead, who says, “…[H]ow an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is… It’s ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’”
My basic problem with this is that it seems to entail impossible conclusions. For instance, if any entity’s ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’, this is a universal ontological property that would apply to all objects, at all times. Thus if an entity is continually becoming, if we looked at some entity at any phase in this becoming, how could we ever say that it *is*? To do so under Whitehead’s (or Latour’s) metaphysics seems impossible, because this flux of becoming is posited as a universal ontological property, and to under this model it would be a gross hypostatization of a being to say that it ‘is’ in the following sense: “this monitor screen is sitting here, on my desk, in front of me”. The point being, I find it impossible under this purely relational model to say that any entity actually has stabilized into some relatively autonomous form, holding something back from relations and just existing in terms of performing its existence without entering into relations with other entities.
[Also, the absurdity of thinking that on every occasion, each entity with which we’re faced (including ourselves) is transforming into a different one, seems hard to swallow, if in fact Whitehead’s metaphysics implies this.]
[I should also mention, it seems your interpretation of Whitehead as totally atomist conflicts with Graham’s idea that Whitehead’s metaphysics is totally relational, but probably I’m missing something.]
March 7, 2009 at 9:48 pm
[…] Objectiles and Actual Occasions […]
March 8, 2009 at 1:03 am
Thanks for posting this Levi, I quite enjoyed it. Whitehead is one of those people that I always feel guilty for having not read and yet everything I’ve heard about his work has made me more and more interested in reading him. If anything, you’ve moved Process and Reality (and perhaps the secondary source you mention) up on my list of things to read.
March 8, 2009 at 1:04 am
Hi Galatia,
I think you hit on the issue right here:
If I understand you correctly, when you speak of discussing an entity at any particular phase you’re speaking of the entity as it exists at a point in space-time. I agree that matters become incoherent when expressed in this way. However, as I was at pains to emphasize in the post above and in other posts, we must understand entities not as points in space-time, but as the entire trajectory of their being over time. Like a line that is indecomposible, the being is temporally elongated. Why think of entities in this way? One reason would be that if we don’t we cannot avoid Zeno’s paradox.
I am not sure why it is impossible for an entity to have a stable and relatively autonomous form under this model. The sun, for example, is changing at every moment as it burns its energy, yet still maintains its identity across time. Likewise, the cells of our body are constantly producing themselves and each other at every moment, yet the body possesses an identity over time. Finally, the particles that make up the desk and the monitor are constantly moving, yet they maintain an identity.
It is worth underlining the point that I am not making the claim that at each moment an entity is transforming into a different entity. Our bodies are an ongoing process and set of activities, but this is quite different than the claim that they are becoming a different entity in the course of this process.
March 8, 2009 at 1:42 am
“The sun, for example, is changing at every moment as it burns its energy, yet still maintains its identity across time.”
Is the sun an ‘eternal object’? If not, what is being ‘maintained’ then?
I prefer Deleuze’s use of ‘singularity’ instead of Whitehead’s ‘eternal object’ to describe the intersecting concresence of prehensions prehending each other. This helps avoid the ‘thinginess’ of concresence.
March 8, 2009 at 3:37 am
I agree, Glen, with respect to Deleuze and singularities. There is something very strange, somewhat ad hoc, and suspect in Whitehead’s account of eternal objects. It wouldn’t be correct, for Whitehead, to say that the sun is an eternal object. Rather, eternal objects would be one thing among many other things the sun prehends in its concrescence. Perhaps it could be said that the eternal object involved in the sun would be the ideal, abstract pattern that the sun strives to embody in the activity of its physical prehensions and self-concrescence. Whitehead talks of eternal objects “ingressing” into physical objects. What bothers me about this account is that he seems to have these ideal entities doing something, rather than simply being mathematical representations of purely physical relations.
March 8, 2009 at 7:05 am
“When Whitehead calls actual occasions “drops of experience” great care must be taken not to be mislead by his choice of language. Ordinarily we think of experience as something restricted to living and sentient beings. Experience here refers to the way a sentient being receives the world. For Whitehead– and I think this is one of the least meritorious dimensions of his metaphysics –all entities are drops of experience. Whether we are speaking of a rock, a subatomic particle, or a human being, these actual occasions are drops of experience. Objectiles are drops of experience not for us, but for themselves.”
What do you find objectionable about the “drops of experience” concept (beyond possibly the anthropomorphic terminology)? The notion that all matter has a distinct history apart from its place in a taxonomy, its relations, or its list of qualities might be obvious but is not trivial.
March 8, 2009 at 9:14 am
“If I understand you correctly, when you speak of discussing an entity at any particular phase you’re speaking of the entity as it exists at a point in space-time.”
This is definitely not my position on the matter- sorry if I wasn’t clear on the matter. I’m more inclined towards an ontology of a democracy of objects, distributed in a (spatiotemporally) non-uniform, and, yes, characterized by being engaged in a process of becoming, as you eloquently describe such processes.
“It is worth underlining the point that I am not making the claim that at each moment an entity is transforming into a different entity. ”
But this is what I took to be Whitehead’s position, which is why I questioned how it could be possible to say that any relatively autonomous stable form exists as a durable unit, maintaining its identity even as it bears different qualities at different times. If being just IS becoming, there would seem to be no stability and no singularity, except for the singularity of a diversity of processes, which at each moment transform the actor in question into a radically new one. But maybe I’m missing something, or maybe what I say applies more to Whitehead or Latour than you (or my uninformed interpretation of Whitehead, who I have admittedly not yet read!)
March 8, 2009 at 11:47 am
This was a really interesting post but I wonder if once Eternal Objects are removed from Whitehead’s system and in addition the final cause (which is just the individual AOs urge for creativity or subjective aim) immanent to each actual occasion is removed how can we expect any kind of persistent pattern formation?
I can understand how objects are formed. AEs are not always becoming they exist as potentiality for the future – they ‘become’ and then they become objectively immortal as the past which insists on the present; but why would this not be some kind of completely random blob rather than the relatively consistent patterns we call nature’s ‘laws’? For this Whitehead requires not only EOs but also God. But Whitehead needs God precisely because EOs don’t do anything they are entirely neutral to their actualisation; they are merely abstract and as Whitehead’s ontological principle is that only AEs exist it is AEs that do all the ingressing from EOs.
I’m largely sympathetic to the removal of EOs though, but I’m not so sure about the removal of immanent final causation – without EOs something needs to be responsible for the creation of complex life and without the immanent urge towards novelty, I don’t know what that could be.
Here’s my favourite Whitehead quote about FC
‘Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that “purpose” is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting object for study’ FR 16
March 8, 2009 at 12:08 pm
There is also a quote in ‘What is Philosophy’? which seems to display adherence to a very similar thesis: ‘no causality is intelligible without this subjective insistence. Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things’ WP213
March 8, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Hey LS,
Perhaps you could explain this last bit for me where you state, “The resolution of disequilibriums marks the death or completion of an objectile, though the dead entity can still function in the becoming of other objectiles through being prehended by these objectiles.”
I understand that other objectiles can still interact with the dead objectile, but its this idea of completion that is confusing. By completion do you mean that each and every objectile strives with purpose to resolve its disequilibrium? Or do you mean simply that like Freud’s death-drive, every entity is simply moved to this resolution?
I guess my question deals with the idea of purpose behind this “completion”. Thanks for the clarification.
March 8, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Hi Pseudonym,
It’s simply the anthropomorphic connotations that bother me, nothing more. I quite agree with your remark about history.
March 8, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Hi Jeremy,
I guess I wonder why we can’t simply treat pattern as being immanent to matter itself. It seems to me that we only require EO’s if we’re implicitly working with an Aristotlean form/matter dichotomy where matter lacks any structure or pattern. Yet the more we’ve learned about the natural world the more this view seems to be unjustified. Following evolutionary thought I don’t see why an immanent urge towards novelty is required to explain the creation of complex life. Rather, it seems to me that heritability, random mutation, and natural selection do the job just fine without involving any sort of finality.
March 8, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Mike,
As I see it, what I described as “disjunctive diversity” would be precisely the sort of democracy of objects you’re talking about. The becoming of an entity is the manner in which it maintains itself in time, converting what is other than itself into itself, or integrating what is other than itself into itself. Thus, for example, when you eat your body transforms that material into your various cells, maintaining your being in the order of time.
March 8, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Hi NrG,
I take it that the resolution of disequilibriums or tensions within a system is not a purposive activity, but is simply what happens in a system. The idea behind completion would simply be that when there are no longer disequilibriums within the system there is nothing left to animate the system and the system therefore become inert.
March 8, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Interesting…so then would you consider this inert system no longer an objectile since it is no longer a difference but only exists in making a difference?
March 8, 2009 at 3:37 pm
It would have ceased its becoming, though circumstances could change reanimating it.
March 8, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Ah, okay. Thanks for clarifying.
March 9, 2009 at 1:12 am
[…] would refer to actual occasions or objectiles, and his relation-to-another-one would refer to prehensions of other entities. Hegel clarifies just what he has in mind with this conception of existence in an […]
April 21, 2010 at 6:42 pm
[…] and ex-Lacanian analyst Levi Bryant) is blogging about ontology, assemblages, speculative realism, Whitehead, Deleuze, and trees. Heideggerian-Latourian Graham Harman churns his stuff out at Object-Oriented […]
December 28, 2010 at 10:31 pm
I also have a problem with Whiteheads Eternal Objects. Especially if he says that there is nothing besides actual ocasions, then waht is the nature of his Eternal Objects? Are they after all behind actual occasions? I get the feeling Whitehead just copied these from Plato and then did not mention about thier nature anymore. But if you keep them away (as done in this discussion), then I get the impression the actual occasions have no frame of reference anymore to give a subjective interpretation to the datum-vectors of preceeding actual occasions. My idea would be taht in that case there is no creativitiy anymore but only mechanistic repetition of the content of earlier actual occasions.
March 20, 2011 at 7:35 pm
Whitehead doesn’t seem to have specified the nature of prehensions. He only stated that actual entities are related to each other by reason of their prehensions. What then is the nature of this prehensions was not specified.
December 7, 2011 at 7:52 pm
[…] Levi R. Bryant, “Objectiles and Actual Occasions,” Larval Subjects, 7 Mar […]
July 29, 2013 at 4:07 am
Excellent point Pseudonym:
You write:
“What do you find objectionable about the “drops of experience” concept (beyond possibly the anthropomorphic terminology)? The notion that all matter has a distinct history apart from its place in a taxonomy, its relations, or its list of qualities might be obvious but is not trivial.” This is the essential point in Whitehead…there is no “shear isness”: what is real involves process and that process can never be understood as simple “activity”…there must be a real becoming with some form of subjectivity as an essential ingredient in that activity.
September 21, 2013 at 2:54 pm
I would like to add a few points to the above comments:
Whitehead repudiates the materialist conceptual scheme that had already been refuted bythe collapse of classical physics when it tried to deal with the fundamental nature of light and of the atom. There is no shear “isness” and phenomena cannot be explained by the mere perturbation of matter. Rather the fundamental activity is real itself and that reality must have something like subjectivity as it’s essence. But it is a confusion of Whitehead’s system to say that rocks and chairs are actual occasions. Rather they are enduring objects which maintain an organization of immense societies, so called, of actual occasions. The structure is sustained but is not fundamental.
September 21, 2013 at 3:19 pm
Richard, Whitehead is working with a tendentious conception of matter when he rejects it on those grounds (Greek atomism). All that’s required is that matter be physical. Whether its physicality be atoms, energy, forces, vibrating strings, etc is something to be discovered through inquiry. It does not merit the rejection of materialism and if appreciating Whitehead entails we must reject materialism his books belong in the trash can as obscurantist rubbish. The new physics didn’t refute materialism but showed us we didn’t know what matter is.
I’m aware that chairs and trees are societies in his vocabulary, but outside the circle of Whitehead scholars, this language is bound to be misleading, suggesting cultural constructivism. Ergo, it’s best to be slightly inaccurate so that readers not familiar with his work can get a sense of what he’s talking about. Thanks for “educating” me.