1900: The Vibrational Nexus 17

While Bachelard argued that the primary continuity proposed by Bergson drains the concept of the event, moment, or instant of its singularity, it is necessary to go beyond or stretch his conception of rhythmanalysis to be able to conceive of singular thresholds in the vibratory composition of matter at which the propagation of vibration is activated. These intensive vibrations could be conceived of as the vibration of vibration. At a certain rhythmic density, a threshold is crossed in the process of individuation, producing a body in excess of its constituent particles, a vortical body out of phase with itself, in tension with its potential, a potential that always exceeds its current actualization. This volatile turbulent nexus, far from equilibrium, is characterized by rhythmic asymmetry more than balance.

The atomistic process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead offers some kind of route through this standoff between Bergson and Bachelard. If there is a rhythmanalysis implicit in Whitehead’s metaphysics, then it pulls in a different direction, accounting for a rhythmic break flow or (dis) continuum, which he refers to as the extensive continuum. Whitehead’s philosophy intervenes in two directions: first, against the overrationalizations of idealism, and second, against the appeal to raw sensation of currents of empiricism. His process philosophy results in a “transcendental empiricism” or, to use William James’s phrase, a “radical empiricism,” in which the relation between things assumes as much significance as the things themselves.1

The basic elements of Whitehead’s philosophy are what he terms actual occasions or entities. His process philosophy deploys an ontology of affect, conceiving of the emergence of the distinction between subject and object as a second-order effect in a cyclical yet differential ecology of onset and perishing. Moreover, subject and object are not conceived in epistemological terms, with the subject the knower and the object the known thing/world. Rather, the “occasion as subject has a “concern” for the object. And the “concern” at once places the object as a component in the experience of the subject, with an affective tone drawn from this object and directed towards it.”² Instead, the reformulated subject-object relation “can be conceived as Recipient and Provoker, where the fact provoked is an affective tone about the status of the provoker in the provoked experience.”³

The becoming of an actual occasion is, for Whitehead, analyzable into modes, whereby the occasion itself is subject and the thing or datum (autonomous from the occasion itself) becomes object as drawn into relation with the specific emergent event. “Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject.”⁴ This mutual relation of provocation, Whitehead terms prehension, and it is marked by three key factors: “There is the occasion of experience within which the prehension is a detail of activity; there is the datum whose relevance provokes the origination of this prehension; this datum is the prehended object; there is the subjective form, which is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience.”⁵

Actual entities, prehensions, and nexus are the basic facts of experience for Whitehead. A prehension is a “simple physical feeling,” and actual entities that feel one another constitute a nexus. Yet a simple physical feeling also means the feeling of a prehension (the feeling of a feeling) Here, perception of an object is not of a closed entity, but rather the perception of the potential of an object to perceive and be perceived. A nexus is a relational entity, based purely on mutual immanence, where relation is composed of mutual prehension or mutual objectification. An actual occasion is a limit case of an event or nexus, having only one member. The nexus, or collective entity, is an event in its own right, greater than the sum of actual entities and their feelings from which it is composed. Each actual entity is a numerically distinct entity from its component prehensions, and each nexus is numerically distinct from its constituent entities. It is greater than a mere mode of togetherness such as a set or multiplicity, yet it could be said that it has intermediate reality in the same way that James takes relations between things as facts as much as the things themselves. A nexus is therefore not merely subjective but also objective:

A nexus enjoys “social order” when i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the denniteness of each of its included actual entities, and ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and iii) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings involving that common form. Such a nexus is called a “society,” and the common form is the “defining characteristic” of that society.⁶

What is the process of construction of a nexus or “society of actual entities”? First, an actual entity must come into being through the imminent process of concrescence. The cycle of the actual occasion can be analyzed in terms of phases of concrescence. This process involves a multiplicity of simple physical feelings of antecedent actual entities, the derivation of conceptual prehensions, and the integral prehensions leading toward satisfaction, whereby an actual entity becomes “one complex, fully determinate feeling.” As the actual entities in a nexus come into being, their intermediate reality, the nexus of the actual entities, comes into being.