Steven Shaviro - The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Posthumanities)

The Universe of Things

The Universe of Things

On Speculative Realism

Steven Shaviro

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis London

Chapter 1 was previously published as Self-Enjoyment and Concern: On Whitehead and Levinas, in Beyond Metaphysics? Explorations in Alfred North Whiteheads Late Thought, ed. Roland Faber, Brian G. Henning, and Clinton Combs (New York: Rodopi, 2010), 24958. Chapter 2 was previously published as The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2011), 27990. Chapter 3 was previously published as The Universe of Things, Theory and Event 14, no. 3 (2011).

Copyright 2014 by Steven Shaviro

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shaviro, Steven.

The universe of things : on speculative realism / Steven Shaviro.

(Posthumanities ; 30)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4529-4282-7

1. Whitehead, Alfred North, 18611947. 2. Realism. I. Title.

B1674.W354S435 2014

192dc232013049860

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

This book is dedicated to my daughters, Adah Mozelle Shaviro and Roxanne Tamar Shaviro.

Contents

It is impossible for me to offer a complete list of people who helped me with the various stages of this project. I would like especially to thank Michael Austin, Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, William Connolly, Roland Faber, Erick Felinto, Mark Fisher, Alexander Galloway, Richard Grusin, Graham Harman, N. Katherine Hayles, Matija Jelaa, Timothy Morton, Dominic Pettman, Scott Richmond, Isabelle Stengers, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, and Ben Woodard, together with others whose names have been inadvertently omitted here.

Books by Alfred North Whitehead are cited by the following abbreviations:

AIAdventures of Ideas

CNThe Concept of Nature

MTModes of Thought

PRProcess and Reality

RMReligion in the Making

SMWScience and the Modern World

SPScience and Philosophy

Whitehead and Speculative Realism

This book takes a new look at the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (18611947) in the light of a number of recent developments in continental philosophy that can be grouped under the rubrics of speculative realism and (to a lesser extent) new materialism. I seek to relate the divergent programs and goals of these new strains in philosophical thought both positively and negatively to Whiteheads own project. The biggest reason for looking at the resonances and connections between these two bodies of thought is this: Whitehead and the speculative realists alike question the anthropocentrism that has so long been a key assumption of modern Western rationality. Such a questioning is urgently needed at a time when we face the prospect of ecological catastrophe and when we are forced to recognize that the fate of humanity is deeply intertwined with the fates of all sorts of other entities. Anthropocentrism also has become increasingly untenable in the light of scientific experiment and discovery. Now that we know how similar, and how closely related, we are to all the other living things on this planet, we cannot continue to consider ourselves as unique. And we cannot isolate our own interests, and our own economies, from processes taking place on a cosmic scale in a universe whose boundaries we are unable to grasp.

Alfred North Whitehead was already aware of these tensions and dangers nearly a century ago. The basic aim of Whiteheads philosophy is always to overcome what he called the bifurcation of nature, or the absolute division between the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness (CN, 3031). On the one hand, Whitehead suggests, we have the worlds phenomenal appearance to us: the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet (CN, 31). On the other hand, we have the hidden physical reality, the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature (CN, 31). Much of modern thought is founded on this bifurcation, whether it takes the form of an opposition between primary and secondary qualities (Descartes and Locke, revived by Quentin Meillassoux), or between noumena and phenomena (Kant), or between the manifest image and the scientific image (Wilfrid Sellars and, most recently, Ray Brassier). Phenomenology, and continental thought more generally, sits on one side of this bifurcation; the more scientistic and reductionist versions of analytic thought sit on the other side. But Whitehead seeks to do away with the bifurcation altogether. We may not pick and choose, he says; we must develop an account of the world in which the red glow of the sunset and the molecules and electric waves of sunlight refracting into the earths atmosphere have the same ontological status (CN, 29).

Whiteheads quest to overcome the bifurcation of nature led him into a long course of metaphysical speculation. His final, developed philosophy, expressed in his magnum opus Process and Reality (1929) and further refined in his final books Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938), articulates a vision of cosmological scope. The world, he says, is composed of processes, not things. Nothing is given in advance; everything must first become what it is: how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is... Its being is constituted by its becoming (PR, 23). Understood in this way, the process encompasses both sides of the bifurcation of nature: it applies equally to what I apprehend and to the manner in which I apprehend it. I am not a subject confronting (or intending, as the phenomenologists would say) an object-world that lies outside of me, for both subject and object are themselves processes of becoming, and all actual things are alike objects [and] subjects (PR, 5657).

Most Western philosophy since Descartes, and especially since Kant, has reinforced the bifurcation of nature because it is centered on questions of cognition. It privileges epistemology (which asks the question of how we can know what we know) at the expense of ontology (which directly poses the question of what is). The Cartesian cogito, the Kantian transcendental deduction, and the phenomenological epoche all make the world dependent on our knowledge of it. They all subordinate what is known to our way of knowing. But Whitehead, to the contrary, insists that things experienced are to be distinguished from our knowledge of them. So far as there is dependence, the things pave the way for the cognition, rather than vice versa... the actual things experienced enter into a common world which transcends knowledge, though it includes knowledge (SMW, 8889). That is to say, the question of how we know