To hear this noise as we do, we must hear the parts which make up this whole, that is the noise of each wave, although each of these little noises makes itself known only when combined confusedly with all the others, and would not be noticed if the wave which made it were by itself.
—G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding (1981)
It is interesting to note Whitehead’s choice of language in Process and Reality in paraphrasing William James’s notion of the “basic drops of experience” or his own concept of an actual occasion or entity. Whitehead terms an actual occasion or entity a “throb” or “pulse” of experience, a “throb” or “pulse” of feeling, hinting at the role in invention (or creative advance, Whitehead’s name for the process of becoming) of the expression of vibration.1 Whitehead’s thoughts on rhythm and vibration form an aesthetic ontology of pulses. To say that Whitehead’s ontology is aesthetic means that he posits feeling, or prehension, as a basic condition of experience. For him, even science emerges out of aesthetic experience.2 His ontology revolves around a nonanthropocentric concept of feeling. This notion of prehension exceeds the phenomenological demarcation of the human body as the center of experience and at the same time adds a new inflection to an understanding of the feelings, sensuous and nonsensuous, concrete and abstract, of such entities. To feel a thing is to be affected by that thing. The mode of affection, or the way the “prehensor” is changed, is the very content of what it feels. Every event in the universe is in this sense an episode of feeling, even in the void. Whitehead sets up “a hierarchy of categories of feeling,” from the “wave-lengths and vibrations” of subatomic physics to the subtleties of human experience.3 Crucially however, the hierarchy does not imply the dominance of conscious over nonconscious vibrations. At every scale, events are felt and processed as modes of feeling before they are cognized and categorized in schemas of knowledge. It is this complex emphasis on the primacy of prehension that makes his ontology aesthetic.
In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge from 1919, Whitehead lays out an early version of his own theory of rhythm. His first rhythmanalytic move is to point out that things that appear static are always composed at the molecular level by vibrating, that is, microrhythmically mobile particles. So he notes, “The physical object, apparent, is a material object and as such is uniform; but when we turn to the causal components of such an object, the apparent character of the whole situation is thereby superseded by the rhythmic quasi-periodic characters of a multitude of parts which are the situations of molecules.” In Adventures, the seeming simplicity of perception is therefore always shadowed by imperceptible excitation so that “any situation has, as its counterpart in that situation, more complex, subtler rhythms than those whose aggregate is essential for the physical object.”4
Later, in Lecture 3 from Religion in the Making, a series of lectures given in 1926, Whitehead, in outlining this aesthetic ontology, notes how the tension between stable, coherent pattern and the level of imperceptible vibration is the engine of invention in providing necessary “contrast”:
The consequent must agree with the ground in general type so as to preserve definiteness, but it must contrast with it in respect to contrary instances so as to obtain vividness and quality. In the physical world, this principle of contrast under an identity expresses itself in the physical law that vibration enters into the ultimate nature of atomic organisms. Vibration is the recurrence of contrast within identity of type. The whole possibility of measurement in the physical world depends on this principle. To measure is to count vibrations.... Thus physical quantities are aggregates of physical vibrations, and physical vibrations are the expression among the abstractions of physical science of the fundamental principle of aesthetic experience.5
Unlike Bergson, Whitehead does not indict physics for the method of abstraction, through chopping up the continuity of duration, but instead points to the power of science through this very process of abstraction. Unlike Bergson, Whitehead makes room for the fact that the science of acoustics, of the quantification of vibration, rather than merely capturing, has also led to the intensification of sonic affect.
In Whitehead’s philosophy, the throb of feeling is not perceived by a subject as such but rather constitutes the actual occasion out of which the distinction between subject and object emerges in a process he terms concrescence. Concrescence here can be understood as a rhythmic coalescence that results in the actualization of one block of space-time, among many, simultaneously rendering the division between subject and object, time and space of a second order. Moreover, the need to revise the relation between cause and event is reinforced. Instead of a cause producing an effect, effects attain autonomy in the process of the becoming of continuity. If the primary metaphysical ground is made up, for Bachelard, of instants and, for Bergson, of continuity, then Whitehead has a unique way of reconciling this apparent opposition that he terms the extensive continuum. This extensive continuum constitutes a kind of rhythmic anarchitecture that unites the discreet and the continuous, Bachelard’s rhythmic arithmetic with Bergson’s rippling waves of intensity.
In contrast to a continuity of becoming in Bergson, a spatiotemporality where the unity of events lies in an underlying continual temporal invariant, a flowing lived duration, Whitehead’s notion of the extensive continuum undoes the split between space and time. It expresses a general scheme of relatedness between actual entities in the actual world. More than that, Whitehead insists that the extensive continuum is, above all, a potential for actual relatedness. The continuum gives potential, while the actual is atomic or quantic by nature. The continuum is not pregiven but exists only in the spatiotemporal gaps between actual occasions. Rather than an underlying continual invariant, each actual entity produces the continuum for itself from the angle of its own occurrence. Only in this way is the continuum the means by which occasions are united in one common world. The actual entity breaks up its continuum realizing the eternal object, or particular potential that it selects. This breaking up, atomization or quantization, forces the eternal object into the space-time of the actual occasion; in other words, as the pure potential of the eternal object ingresses into actuality, it forces the becoming of actuality, and at the same time, pure potential becomes real potential.
Whitehead describes the general potentiality of the continuum as “the bundle of possibilities, mutually consistent or alternative, provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects.” The extensive continuum “is that first determination of order—that is, of real potentiality, arising out of the general character of the world... it does not involve shapes, dimensions, or measurability; these are additional determinations of real potentiality arising from our cosmic epoch.”6
Arguing against both a continual flow of becoming, governed by unspatial-ized pure time, and the locality of space-time, Whitehead’s extensive continuum points to vibratory potentials jelling a multiplicity of space-times: here there is a resonance of actual occasions, which are able to enter into one another by selecting potentials or eternal objects. It is in such a potential coalescence of one region with another that an affective encounter between distinct actual entities occurs. The vibratory resonance between actual occasions in their own regions of space-time occurs through the rhythmic potential of eternal objects, which enables the participation of one entity in another. This rhythmic potential exceeds the actual occasion into which it ingresses. To become, an actual entity must be out of phase with itself, self-contrasting; its tendency is to die and become other.
Whitehead, through the concept of the extensive continuum, makes access possible to the achronological nexus outside the split between space and time. This rhythmic anarchitecture is marked by the becoming of continuity that denotes change. Anarchitecture here indicates a method of composition, an activity of construction, which feeds off the vibratory tension between contrasting occasions. In this sense, the continuum is not pregiven but is a process enacted in the resonance of one pulse of experience with another.
For the theory of sonic warfare, Whitehead’s conception of the nexus, re-coded in terms of rhythm, is very productive. It is rhythm that conjoins the discontinuous entities of matter. This rhythm cannot be reduced to its phenom-enological experience. The prehension of a rhythmic anarchitecture is amodal. Rhythm proper cannot be perceived purely through the five senses but is crucially transensory or even nonsensuous. This is especially true of the rhythm of potential relation that holds a nexus together. Irrelevant of scale, physical, physiological, or sonic, a nexus is always collective, polyrhythmic, composed of an array of tensile spaces and durations. Finally, rhythmic mutation would be what Whitehead terms creative advance and entails the futurity of a nexus anticipated in its passing present.