Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0262517973
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In Without Criteria, Steven Shaviro proposes and explores a philosophical fantasy: imagine a world in which Alfred North Whitehead takes the place of Martin Heidegger. What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought? Heidegger asks, "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" Whitehead asks, "How is it that there is always something new?" In a world where everything from popular music to DNA is being sampled and recombined, argues Shaviro, Whitehead's question is the truly urgent one. Without Criteria is Shaviro's experiment in rethinking postmodern theory, especially the theory of aesthetics, from a point of view that hearkens back to Whitehead rather than Heidegger. In working through the ideas of Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro also appeals to Kant, arguing that certain aspects of Kant's thought pave the way for the philosophical "constructivism" embraced by both Whitehead and Deleuze. Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze are not commonly grouped together, but the juxtaposition of them in Without Criteria helps to shed light on a variety of issues that are of concern to contemporary art and media practices.
the dictum of a flat ontology and reintroduces the very "bifurcation of nature" that Whitehead is so concerned to overcome. As I have already suggested, Whitehead needs this distinction in order to affirm the actuality of meaningful change—or what he calls the "creative advance into novelty" (Whitehead 1929/1978, 28 and passim)—and to avoid reducing becoming to what Ernst Bloch, criticizing both Bergson and the endless alternation of fashions in capitalist consumer society, calls "sheer aimless
transcendental in opposition to both the transcendent and the mere flux of sensations, so Whitehead argues against two opposed, but complementary, philosophical positions. On the one hand, to assert the objective reality of sensa or qualia is to reject mainstream empiricism and positivism. From Locke through Hume, and right on up to mid-twentieth-century positivism, sensa are regarded as "secondary qualities," not present in reality, but only in the mind. The doctrine of "private psychological
principle to fix it into any sort of finality or closure.18 Deleuze and Guattari therefore proclaim that they “believe only in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately” (1983, 42). The body without organs is a “whole” or “unity” that
discussion that might ensue from taking Whitehead’s ideas seriously. Indeed, there can be no end to such discussions. For Whitehead’s thought is capacious, open, and continually inventive; it does not reach (and, in principle, it can never reach) any sort of completion or self-reflexive closure. Whitehead continually reminds us that no metaphysical formulation is definitive. “In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition,” he says, including his own (1929/1978, 7). It is a commonplace to
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