“The living being is above all a thoroughfare, and . . . the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted. (Bergson, 1911: 128)”
“Life (anima – on the side of the mental image) is always already cinema (animation – image-object). (Stiegler, in Derrida & Stiegler, 2002: 162)”
“Redefining life is now an industry in itself.”
“it is the practical combination of technics and concepts that makes for new modes of living, new freedoms within, and new controls over ‘life’ – often all at the same time”
“Moreover, the proliferation of specific concepts of life is beginning to show that life is not ultimately to be defined, but is found instead in process, specificity and plurality; ‘in the interstices’ (Whitehead, 1978: 106).”
“It is found in the interstices even of those technical practices and ideas that are meant to capture and control life via tight procedures and narrow redefinitions.”
“In sum, it is the mobility of life – its productive potential – that gives it its seemingly infinite range of specific virtual and actual individuations (Cooper, 2002; Neilson, 2004; Massumi, 2002).”
“In turn, this extends the territories within which life can be put to work. It enables life to be worked via a series of different systems, concepts and values.”
“And, despite the rhetoric of genetic determination in biology, or ‘learning outcomes’ in the management of cognitive life, difference is indeed the key here – more precisely, productive and ongoing differential relations.”
“I shall shortly propose a simple concept of life – that of differential life –in which new technics and concepts give new modes of access to the virtuality of life.”
“Like magic, this industrial capture of life has two sides. It involves diverse attempts at micro-managing the actual individuations of life processes. At the same time it controls the production and capture of life as virtual – that is, precisely as potential for divergence and differentiation, creativity in the interstices.”
“Whitehead himself long ago recognised that the ‘status of life’ was a key problem across disciplines. He wrote that, ‘. . .the status of life in nature. . . is the modern problematic of philosophy and of science. Indeed it is the central meeting point of all the strains of systematic thought, humanistic, naturalistic, philosophic. The very meaning of life is in doubt’ (Whitehead, 1938: 148). He thought this was partly because of the ‘muddle-headed positivism’ of his times. This positivism still sometimes infects much research into interactive technologies and life.”
“After describing Whitehead’s philosophy of differential life in relation to interactive technics, I shall then turn to Paulo Virno’s work. The latter will allow me to complicate the notion of differential life in terms of the contemporary politics of the formation of labour. I shall argue that, precisely as the differential intensity of life is industrialised and maximised, so there is a frequent and paradoxical diminution of life as lived.”
“The end result is too often the simple reduction of life to work, as Capital and governments face increased demands to work life and research is directed towards finding increased power to do so.”
“Of course, the total control over differential life that is sometimes sought is seldom found. The working of life constantly converts life itself into something else, creating new differential series, which in turn create new freedoms.”
“Life – however it is defined – tends to over-run its rationalised contexts.”
“For some at least, this calls for new forms of control (in the drive towards a new world order, perhaps).”
“Thus the importance to any industry capitalising on differential life of what Virno calls ‘virtuosity’ as an in situ modulating response to life’s over-running of its contexts.”
“Virtuosity also suggests the ambivalence of enjoyment within the over-running of contexts. Enjoyment is a crucial register of the immanence of living, an ongoing (and in itself virtuoso) modulation of the pleasure and pain surrounding life’s differentiations and integral assemblages.”
“It also must be captured in order to maximise the capital of differential life. Here I shall be interested in the enjoyment found in assemblage, and in the potential this assemblage has to allow the new to emerge from the routine.”
“It is for this reason that I shall later outline Alfred Whitehead’s idea of self-enjoyment. This notion provides a way of rethinking interactive technics in terms other than the smooth symbolic processing and predictable outcomes that often form a goal for interactive technics”
“New technics have always led to mutations in the perception of matter.”
“It would be a mistake, however, to think that recent technical interventions in life have led to a new episteme, or a new world order (or Empire) that would give this new life, and new challenges to life, a common sense and a consistent politics.”
“The result is rather more diffuse, and more differential. Life is rendered (sometimes quite literally) more obviously the differential life that it has always been.”
“And yet, because shifts in perception lead to mutations in matter, this ‘rendering obvious’ changes life. Making differential life more visible has led to an entire new ‘ecology of practices’ surrounding life (Stengers, 2002: 262).”
“Life now produces, and is produced in, an ongoing and prolific series of relations between the technics of perception and mediation, animated and mutated matter, and our own ‘nervous elements’ which we often regard as closest to our sense of self (Bergson, 1991: 65).”
“It follows that any definition of life can only be partial and provisional. Life is better understood in the plural, from many different angles at the same time.”
“As the ‘movement by which life is transmitted’ becomes more complex, new modes of living approach the complexity of differential intensity.”
“These new modes of living are a response to the question of finding new forms of orientation to the shifting concepts and processes of life.”
“Of course, these new modes of living no longer give us ‘position’.”
“Instead, we could say that the implications of the mathematics of differential calculus are finally understood in the contexts of everyday life. This is to suggest that the new modes of living give us differentials and integrals as a guide to our movement within the world, instead of fixed points of reference. Or, that orientation increasingly involves not only position, but also precise velocities, modulations, differential conjunctions. In short, one is not only placed vis a vis places but also between places – places that are themselves in the process of movement and transformation.”
“With this complex orientation towards conjunctions and splits, flows and shifts, differential life opens up to virtualization.”
“Tiziana Terranova provides a very good definition of this new access to the virtual:
The virtualization of a process involves opening up a real understood as devoid of transformative potential to the action of forces that exceed it from all sides. In an informational sense, the virtual appears as the site not only of the improbable, but of the openness of biophysical (but also socio-cultural) processes to the irruption of the unlikely and the inventive. (Terranova, 2004: 27)”
“Does the question ‘What is life?’ have to have one answer in relation to technics? I want to suggest that Bergson, Whitehead and Virno enable us to think this question in terms that allow for differential life.”
“I am particularly interested in the way in which the thought of both Bergson and Whitehead might contribute to the stream of research into human-machine interactions based upon notions of embedded, contingent or situated cognition.”
“There are two basic aspects to this approach.”
“First, life itself is taken as interactive from the start, and moreover, as inhabiting a series of interactive technics (for example, biotechnologies, reproductive technologies, technologies of perception and mediation, the techniques by which one lives moment to moment) immersed among other series (the world at large).”
“This is the basis of what I have called differential life. Life is not taken as something more or less passive with which interactive technologies interact (or vice versa).”
“If we begin with interaction, there is no passivity, but rather a groundless field for the emergence of what Whitehead refers to as ‘occasions of experience’ (1938: 151).”
“Interaction is assumed as primary, not as something that comes after the supposed ‘stable entities’ involved.”
“Shifts in our interactive engagements can be seen to challenge life, but they can just as usefully be seen merely to express, indeed create the processual life that is already there differently – and not only in the future, but at every moment of every interaction.”
“Such an understanding allows us to examine more effectively the life that is already lived in conjunction with technics.”
“Furthermore, this approach is suggestive of a social theory – and ethics – of interactive life, situated within the immanence of current technical developments, not one fixed upon possible future developments, ongoing research and so forth (although of course this is important as well).”
“Second, perceptions, sensations, actions and mediations are taken as crucial components of life – as crucial as biochemical metabolism, or creative intelligence.”
“Biologists may have valid questions about metabolism and life from which we have much to learn in an interdisciplinary setting. Innovators in interactive technologies, however, have as many valid questions about perceptions, sensations, actions, mediations and life.”
“Indeed, it is important to investigate the difficulty of separating these processes absolutely when thinking of interactive fields. And in fact there are several transdisciplinary areas already investigating the junction of these processes.”
“Some physical interactions – even biochemical transductions – are often now thought as carrying a series of what may best be termed for the moment, ‘informational forces’.”
“The recent development of the new (trans)disciplines of biosemiotics and neurosemiotics have suggested that communication – what I prefer to see as ‘a-signifying semiological’ interaction – occurs at the level of living cells and neurons (Hoffmeyer, 1996; Harries-Jones, 2002; Favareau, 2002; Guattari, 1995a: 4).”
“Any living system is already a question of the interaction of information channels, assemblages of forces and biochemical reactions.”
“Of course, this means that informational forces are never only, or always, symbolic processes.”
“Moreover, living systems come together with other forms of interaction in a society of networks, machinic assemblages, or hypercomplexity (Castells, 2000; Terranova, 2004; Guattari, 1995a & 1995b; Qvortrup, 2002).”
“In short, information, the transduction of forces and biochemical reactions are interdependent.”
“In doing so they have further complicated our understanding of living systems, human intelligence, and the role of technics within life, proposing a powerful mix of information and embodiment, life and technics. In such contexts, mind is an emergent, structurally coupled property of ‘radical embodiment’ (Varela and Thompson, 2001).”
“The most notable of these structural couplings is between brain, body and world in ‘extended mind’ (Clark, 1997).”
“In addition, for some of these thinkers it is technics that makes for human life. For Bernard Stiegler, for example, there is no human life without technics (1998).”
“Human life has always been that life which is pre-mediated by technics.”
“There is no ‘human’ that comes before the technical.”
“This means that human life has always been a somewhat paradoxical assemblage of the living and the non-living – human life has the dead, the mechanical, the past at its heart as well as anything we might call living, strictly speaking.”
“Stiegler writes that, as technics is a ‘“process of exteriorization”, technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life’ (Stiegler, 1998: 17).”
“And for Stiegler it is especially the technics of mediation that inhabit human life, often in a foundational (if differential) manner – of time, space, memory, understanding, imagination, vision, reason, movement, etc.”
“In particular, the new technics of networked mediation make for a tertiary series of retentions that increasingly intervene, indeed constitute, human short and long-term memory.”
“Technics also provide a ‘fourth synthesis’ that is increasingly found at the heart of Kant’s three syntheses of understanding, imagination and reason (and indeed the passive synthesis of intuition) (Stiegler, 2003a: unpaginated).”
“Now more than ever, there is no life, not even an awareness of life, that does not take place within an ecology of the living and the non-living. This means that embodiment is always processually assembled. There is no ‘essential’ body as against technics.”
“At the same time, to say that life is found in the interaction with technical systems is not to say that the machines are alive. Margaret Boden has convincingly argued that metabolism is ‘a fundamental requisite of the sort of self-organization that is characteristic of life’ (1999: 246). This means bluntly that ‘strong A-life is impossible’ (Boden, 1999: 246).”
“Yet this tells us that there are other questions about life and interaction, questions that are not to do with whether machines themselves are alive. What of the life that is lived in concert with machines – the shifts in metabolism occasioned by shifts in embodied mediations and vice versa, and perhaps the challenges or additions to metabolism as a criterion of life (Wilson, 2004)?”
“What if radically embodied theories of (often technically) extended mind are applied to life?”
“What if, at the same time, we were to take into account, more radically than the approaches of cognitivism or symbolic-processing, the part that perceptions and actions, sensations and mediations (or what we shall see Whitehead call ‘prehensions’), play in the processes of living.”
“Instead of the processing of symbols, linear forms of development and communication, or smooth ergonomic flows with the workplace, we might find network drives and archive fevers (Derrida, 1998).”
“There may be a role for symbolic processing in these drives and fevers. Yet, if anything at all, symbolic processes and symbols form only a subset of the non-living (that is, dead) part of the larger assembly that is thinking as life.”
“To live, then, is to assemble and mediate interactions between what we might normally call ‘living’ and non-living. It is literally to bring data, archives and so on (the past) into life, in combination with the as yet unactualised futures of potential interactions. Furthermore, life does not do this neutrally – not, we might say in the old sense at least, purely technically, or according to some boring routine. It does so in active ‘self-enjoyment’ (Whitehead, 1938: 150).”
“Assemblage and mediation allow both the self and enjoyment not so much to impose themselves on an interaction, but to emerge from it (and by self here, we do not necessarily mean the subject, especially not the human subject – self-enjoyment is a part of all entities, all occasions of experience as they become occasions).”
“This very rough sketch suggests that interactive technologies are a matter of life (network drives, assemblage, the transductions of various forces, chemicals and so on) and death (archive fevers, disassembly).”
“As my upper body fills the screen and is surrounded by cartoon attackers, it becomes clear that I have always been one interactive image amongst others (as Bergson saw it).”
“I discover myself assembled within a whole different mode of perception. This is a good example of the difference it makes when the non-living is assembled with the living. The ecology of self-enjoyment in which I am involved has to adjust, re-assemble. I also ‘rediscover’ a certain level of fitness, or lack thereof, as I rapidly lose my breath in the haze of technically enhanced perception/metabolism.”
“Such lived relations between data and potential are lived ‘the more’ in even broader interactive networks. Maybe my local network drives and archive fevers (say in the enjoyment of music) join with those of others as I interact with the Internet radio station found at http://www.last.fm/. My data (the music I like) and as yet unactualised potentials (the as yet unheard music I might like because other people who have similar tastes like it) are brought into a vast network of the data and potentials of others. The next song played constantly surprises me. It really has changed my life.”
“Bergson is particularly effective at explaining the intertwined nature of perception/action and life.”
“Bergson begins from interaction:
So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images, and in this material universe we perceive centers of indetermination, characteristics of life. In order that actions may radiate from these centers, the movements or influences of the other images must be, on the one hand, received and, on the other hand, utilized. Living matter, in its simplest form and in a homogeneous state, accomplishes this function simultaneously with those of nourishment and repair . . . perception arises from the same cause which has brought into being the chain of nervous elements, with the organs which sustain them and with life in general . . . Perception, in its pure state, is, then, in very truth, a part of things. And, as for affective sensation, it does not spring spontaneously from the depths of consciousness to extend itself, as it grows weaker, in space; it is one with the necessary modifications to which, in the midst of the surrounding images that influence it, the particular image that each one of us terms his body is subject. (Bergson, 1991: 63-65; my emphasis)”
“So for Bergson we live among moving ‘images’ (our own body for Bergson is one image among others – though a special image).”
“Life actualises itself as a series of centres of indetermination in the complex whirling of these images in relation to each other.”
“Life is thus not only survival in the sense of nourishment and so on, but also the ability to act from within centres of indetermination.”
“Or we could say that if life is survival, this is dependent upon being able to act from within centres of indetermination (one problem is that these centres are constantly transforming themselves).”
“Sensation is of the form of this movement of images – and the deepening of sensation (habits and modulations of habits in interaction with novelty, to put it too simply) gives us our sense of our interactive selves (we might say that sensation is converted into a kind of intuition). This leads us to Whitehead’s concept of life.”
“For Whitehead ‘life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe’ (1956: 102).”
“(This incidentally seems to me to describe the very life of the computer game, in that it is directed not only to repeat, but to conquer repetition, to rebel against the game in repeating it).”
“By this Whitehead meant that life was an excess beyond mechanistic repetition, ‘an aim at that perfection which the conditions of its environment allow’ (1956: 102).”
“In short, ‘life is a bid for freedom’ (Whitehead, 1978: 104). This is also a bid for ‘a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment’ (Whitehead, 1938: 150).”
“Life and self-enjoyment are not necessarily exactly the same here, but they are closely related in that they are perhaps the two sides to this ‘bid’. Self-enjoyment in assemblage arises in parallel to the real freedom that occurs in an ongoing individuation, or transduction, to use Gilbert Simondon’s term, a translation of forces so that they can come together into a novel assemblage (1992: 313).”
“Of course, a similar notion is found in Maturana and Varela’s discussion of life as autopoiesis, although Whitehead is perhaps closer to Guattari’s understanding of a combination of autopoiesis with allopoiesis (Maturana and Varela, 1980; Guattari, 1995b).”
“In this there is a:
. . .certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of nature. Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process of appropriation. I have, in my recent writings, used the prehension to express this process of appropriation. Also I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an occasion of experience. I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging into creative advance. (Whitehead, 1938: 150-151; my emphasis)”
“This was no abstraction or idealism, as although ‘the aim is always beyond the attained fact . . . The goal is some type of perfected things, however lowly and basically sensual’ (Whitehead, 1956: 102).”
“Neither is it a complete rejection of routine, or of habit. Rather, like databases, these routines and habits play their part in interactive novelty.”
“In fact, routine cannot be completely assimilated into a controlling knowledge (as sometimes assumed in more rigid cognitivist approaches to HCI, and related areas). Routine is also engaged with the modulations of practical life to be a complete tool of control. Routine or habit (or memory, for that matter) always involve a repetition and a difference.”
“They are differential.”
“Furthermore, the more interactive it gets, and the more networked, then the more intense are the differences in repetition in the constant adaptation to shifting network ecologies.”
“Whitehead writes, ‘Now it is the beginning of wisdom to understand that social life is founded upon routine’. But he also writes that, ‘The notion of complete understanding controlling action is an ideal in the clouds, grotesquely at variance with practical life’ (1956: 114-115).”
“This is at odds with many of the fantasies of control that surround interactive technologies. Sticking to technical routines is often given precisely – and contra Whitehead – as a way of complete control over the ecology of actions within the network. Yet only partial control – in the form of immersion or participation – ever results, at the same time as a multiplication of the intensities of differences via networked ecologies.”
“These differential intensities are literally felt – that is, lived as new sensations (new occasions of experience) – within the interactions involved.”
“This explains the intensification of felt (often antinomies of) power so dramatically played out through interactive technologies.”
“Castells has pointed out that many of the actions of those immersed in the network society are directed precisely against an immersion in networked intensity (2000).”
“They are directed towards stabilisation, resisting change where possible, creating or preserving identities, even and especially when the case is hopeless.”
“Fifty years ago Whitehead could already see that this was the effect of a nasty historical hangover:
The whole of this tradition is warped by the vicious assumption that each generation will substantially live amid the conditions governing the lives of its fathers and will transmit those conditions to mould with equal force the lives of its children. We are living in the first period of history for which this assumption is false. (Whitehead, 1956: 102)”
“For much contemporary politics, it would seem that the task is to encourage or promise an impossible repetition that would transcend the new differential intensities (that of course such politics also feed upon at the same time). Whitehead’s approach is the inverse. It is the task of life, in Whitehead’s terms, to aim beyond this repetition while remaining immanent to it.”
“This approach also allows Whitehead to avoid opposing the technics of repetition to life, and instead pose an immanent philosophy of life as emergent from repetition.”
“Life includes the self-enjoyment of a novelty that is real. Yet the concept of self-enjoyment ‘does not exhaust that aspect of process here termed life’ (Whitehead, 1938: 151). Self-enjoyment is enjoyment of particular processes related to life.”
“It is enjoyment of:
a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion. It is in the process of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealised potentialities. The process of self-creation is the transformation of potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes the immediacy of self-enjoyment. (Whitehead, 1938: 151)”
“It is perhaps at this point that we can understand what Whitehead calls life as ‘aim’. Differential life – being novel – is always specific.”
“Moreover, the novel has a certain consistency. It is not a matter of ‘anything goes’. For Whitehead, ‘aim’ meant ‘the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining . . . data in the process of unification’ (1938: 152).”
“Thus, ‘the characteristics of life are absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, aim’ (Whitehead, 1938: 152). It is this combination that allows us to rethink interactive technics.”
“For Whitehead, we must distinguish between:
the actualised data presented by the antecedent world, the non-actualized potentialities which lie ready to promote their fusion into a new unity of experience and the immediacy of self-enjoyment which belongs to the creative fusion of those data with those potentialities. (Whitehead, 1938: 151)”
“To think about interactive occasions such as computer games or interactive artworks is to have to think about actualised data; but also about non-actualized potentials and the creative fusion of both (and the virtuality that is brought to bear the more complexity there is, and the more relational networks there are to be drawn into an ‘occasion of experience’ – an example I have provided here is that of the Internet radio station last.fm).”
“Life lived is a creative fusion of past and future, although it is a fusion that is never complete but maintains, within specific assemblages of self-enjoyment, series of differential intensities (so that I can play Sony’s Kung Foo differently next time, or so that every time I listen to last.fm, it will be different – more different than a standard radio station).”
“While acknowledging the importance of routine, life in these contexts is defined according to the:
originality of response to stimulus. This amounts to the doctrine that an organism is ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritance. . .Thus a single occasion is alive when the subjective aim which determines its process of concrescence has introduced a novelty of definiteness not to be found in the inherited data of its primary phase. (Whitehead, 1978: 105).”
“In other words, we could say life is play.”
“In Virno’s terms, life expresses a certain virtuosity, and this, we shall see, is its value to Capital (2004).”
“In that Whitehead is describing a network of processes, summed up in the word ‘occasion’, his ideas are particularly apposite to the networks of sensations, perceptions and actions in a highly technical society.”
“Whitehead’s concern with the mutual immersion of routine and indetermination is particularly useful. Both routine and indetermination have to be worked with simultaneously in order to achieve anything at all – we could say simply to live with interactive technologies.”
“Whitehead’s notion of life thus makes sense of the network society as a ‘evocation of intensities’ that do not necessarily pre-exist that evocation, rather than only as an assembly and operation of pre-existent cognitive artefacts and symbols (1978: 105).”
“It is now that we can understand why it is that life is ‘in the interstices’.”
“First, Whitehead’s philosophy is based on a notion of process (or becoming) – ‘there is no nature apart from transition’ (1938: 152).”
“It only takes into account actual, processual but specific occasions of experience.”
“It is therefore based upon what is actually relevant within a given assemblage of circumstances that comes together in on ongoing manner to form events – ‘an endeavour has been made to base philosophical thought upon the most concrete elements in our experience’ (Whitehead, 1978: 18).”
“This is a matter of what is relevant to what he calls ‘actual entities’ or ‘actual occasions’ – the latter would include any kind of existence, whether of God or of ‘the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space’. In other words, all entities are occasions – temporal, in process, events.”
“Second, Whitehead’s is a philosophy of assemblages of these occasions – ‘the reason for things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual events’ (1978: 19).”
“Third, what he calls ‘prehensions’ are central to the assemblage of occasions. Although not entirely accurate, we could say that a prehension is a kind of basic ‘transportable’ perception/cognition extracted from other actual occasions (or we could say that perception/cognition is the transport of prehensions).”
“More precisely, a prehension is an element of the real relationality between actual entities.”
“’Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other’ (Whitehead, 1978: 20).”
“A prehension is a kind of intensity. It is both more and less than a symbol, a cognition, information, or even perhaps a personalised ‘feeling’ or sensation (and thus gives us a very different set of possibilities for understanding interactive technics).”
“An example Whitehead gives is thirst: ‘“thirst” is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching’ (Whitehead, 1978: 32).”
“prehensions are about the relatedness of actual occasions, or better, of past occasions come together into a new assemblage”
“this is a theory of interactivity in which ‘final causation and atomism are interconnected philosophical principles’ and ‘the reasons for things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities’ (Whitehead, 1978: 19).”
“Prehensions are ‘pre’hensions because they pre-exist the coming together of new actual occasions of experience.”
“As such, the relations subsequently formed are what are crucial to entities conceived as processual events (occasions of experience such as a particular quenching of thirst).”
“As Deleuze writes, ‘relations themselves are types of events’ and ‘Events in their turn are types of relations: they are relations to existence and to time’ (1993: 52).”
“This, incidentally, tells us what a living person is (and in fact what all living entities or events are). A ‘living person is some definite type of prehensions transmitted from occasion to occasion of its existence’ (Whitehead, 1978: 107).”
“As Whitehead tries to avoid a mind/body split, one way to describe the latter is as the feeling of a concept – something that ‘feels like a thought’. In other words, this is that which is often bracketed off into the kind of study performed by cognitive science, but for Whitehead this is not wise. For him, ‘conceptual feelings are primarily derivate from physical feelings, and secondarily from each other’ (Whitehead, 1978: 247).”
“We could thus think of conceptual feelings as a particular series of feelings immersed amongst others, somewhat distinct in character but not separate from other feelings in this immersion – that is, the non-conceptual feelings.”
“On the other hand, the assemblage of pure physical feelings is hybridised by the conceptual feelings, once derived.”
“This leads to ‘impurity’, in which ‘an “impure” mental prehension is also an “impure” physical prehension and vice versa’ (Whitehead, 1978: 33).”
“This occurs, in other words, when ‘the actual entity forming the datum is objectified by one of its own conceptual feelings’ (Whitehead, 1978: 246).”
“This is usually the case. Again it is a matter of the relational, and this leads to hybrid prehensions. A ‘“hybrid” prehension is the prehension by one subject of a conceptual prehension, or of an “impure” prehension, belonging to the mentality of another subject’ (Whitehead, 1978: 107).”
“The startling result is that networked ecologies of subjectivity are undoing, both conceptually and in everyday practice, the final thin borders between embodiment and abstraction/concept/cognition.”
“Networks, interactive technologies, and interfaces can all be seen as transporters and intensifiers of prehensions – and they blur the boundary between ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’ more and more.”
“Whitehead’s work enables us to begin to develop a positive understanding of differential life that emerges from the interstices of contemporary events involving technics.”
“As I outlined at the beginning, one crucial combination in this regard is the expansion of the engagement with the potential of life via technics which is synthesised with/modulated by the reduction of life to ‘worked life’ (a life which is increasingly over-worked at every level). In response to this, the temptation is to think that it is, as always, a question of a concept of life misapplied for political gain – one that can be corrected by critical analysis. Yet it is much more than this. The reduction of life to work is an active conversion of life itself. It is a re-synthesis of life in favour of its appropriation into the new attempts to both open up the virtual to Capital, and to regulate this opening up of the virtual in the direction of particular modes of life that feed back into the new networks of worked life.”
“multitude is then a diversity linked by differential networks”
“virtuosity that works towards a ‘potential to produce’ and ‘produce itself’ (Virno, 2004: 81; Lotringer in Virno, 2004: 12). Potential is always what is at stake.”
“’Life’, pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential.
Capitalists are interested in the life of the worker, in the body of the worker, only for an indirect reason: this life, this body, are what contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis. The living body becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the aggregate of the most diverse human faculties (the potential for speaking, for thinking, for remembering, for acting, etc.). Life lies at the center of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial (and in itself non-present) labor-power. (Virno, 2004: 82-83)”
“Within an engagement with interactive technologies, this fusion involves a literal and specific series of embodiments of the differential intensities of broader networked ecologies.”
“Endnotes”
“’Technics’ should be taken to include both technologies and techniques, in technical systems. As Peter Pels writes, it refers to:
. . .a regulation of human practices that comes in a certain objectified form, as a set of objects (tools, machines, buildings), as a set of more or less explicit rules, as a ritual or an exemplar of conduct, or as a disciplinary apparatus (of course, technology usually combines two or more of these). (Pels, 2000: 137)”
“For Stengers, an ecology of practices:
. . . is about how different forms of knowledge and cultural practices work, but it is also the relation between what is happening and the way it defines itself in relation with others, or the way it represents those others. (Stengers, 2002: 262)”
“Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.”
“Bergson, H. (1911) Creative Evolution. Trans. A Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt.”
“Bergson, H. (1991) Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul & W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone.”
“Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.”
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