Whitehead and the object as an event

....'At the University of London, Whitehead turned his attention to issues in the philosophy of science. Of particular note was his rejection of the idea that each object has a simple spatial or temporal location. Instead, Whitehead advocated the view that all objects should be understood as fields having both temporal and spatial extensions. For example, just as we cannot perceive a Euclidean point that has position but no magnitude, or a line that has length but no breadth, it is impossible, says Whitehead, to conceive of a simple spatial or temporal location. To think that we can do so involves what he called "The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness," the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.[2]

As Whitehead explains, it is his view "that among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. … [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme."[3]

Whitehead's basic idea was that we obtain the abstract idea of a spatial point by considering the limit of a real-life series of volumes extending over each other, for example, a nested series of Russian dolls or a nested series of pots and pans. However, it would be a mistake to think of a spatial point as being anything more than an abstraction; instead, real positions involve the entire series of extended volumes. As Whitehead himself puts it, "In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world."[4]

Further, according to Whitehead, every real-life object may be understood as a similarly constructed series of events and processes. It is this latter idea that Whitehead later systematically elaborates in his imposing Process and Reality (1929), going so far as to suggest that process, rather than substance, should be taken as the fundamental metaphysical constituent of the world. Underlying this work was also the basic idea that, if philosophy is to be successful, it must explain the connection between objective, scientific and logical descriptions of the world and the more everyday world of subjective experience.

While at London, Whitehead also became involved in many practical aspects of tertiary education, serving as Dean of the Faculty of Science and holding several other senior administrative posts. Many of the essays in his The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929) date from this time. It was also during his time in London that Whitehead published several less well known books, including An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922).' quote from Stanford Encyclopedia

speculative realism and the sound sounding asoundingly

I've been reading alot of things lately ph(bloody)d, but Graham Harman's Object-Orientated Philosophy and his Tool-Being see below, on Heidegger, is ringing my bells. His anti Kantian position in terms of the primacy of the subject ... is gooood. In an article on Object-Related theory he writes about Heidegger and Whitehead and the crossovers between their thinking re this 'hermeneutic model'.
Gertrude Stein who had read Whitehead and met with him, says he was the only other genius in the world. (besides Picasso and herself.) Stein had met with Whitehead just before and during the writing of Two: Gertrude Stein and her brother, that I'm basing my PhD research on. I'm thinking now Stein might be more influenced by Whitehead than I was originally thinking. In Two: Stein talks of sound as being an event almost of other sounding itself in multiples. It is a continual (becoming) being that... that well, that just is.

‘Sound is coming out of her. Sound has been coming out of her. Sound can come out of her.

Sound coming out of her is coming out of her and she has not been hearing not been hearing the sound that has been coming out of her. Sound has come out of her and she is listening and sound can come out of her.

Sound comes out of her. Sound coming out of her is expressing that thing, is saying something. Sound coming out of her is expressing something, is saying anything. Sound coming out of her is expressing everything, is saying everything. Sound is coming out of her. Sound has been coming out of her. Some sound comes out of her. Sound comes out of her.

If sound comes out of her it is a sound that expresses that thing expresses sound coming out of her. Sound does come out of her. Sound coming out of her does express this thing does express sound coming out of her.

Sound coming out of her comes out of her and is expressing sound coming out of her. Expressing sound coming out of her is something sound coming out of her is doing. Sound coming out of her is something. Sound is coming out of her.

Sound is coming out of her and that sound has been the sound that has been expressing that that sound is coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is something that has that meaning that has the meaning that that sound is coming out of her. Sound com­ing out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not explaining. Sound coming out of her is something that the sound coming out of her is not suggesting. Sound coming out of her is something that is not relating to her having been one having had sound coming out of her. Sound coming out of her is some­thing expressing that thing expressing that sound is coming out of her …’

Gertrude Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and her Brother (p.8-9)

This, I think, is a new object for philosophy...

An article in Frieze magazine re the ’Speculative Realism and Speculative Materialism’ conference in Bristol last year outlines some interesting positions in relation to sound. I quote...

'Speculative realism has certainly revivified philosophy, inspiring a fervour of concept-production far beyond the traditional (but now largely moribund) academic spaces with which philosophy is usually associated: in the para-academic journal Collapse, for example, as well as in an efflorescence of blogs such as Speculative Heresy, Accursed Share, Planomenology and Naught Thought. The original Goldsmiths event brought together four philosophers – Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant and Quentin Meillassoux – who were united by an antipathy towards the dominant consensus in continental philosophy.

Is ’realism’ the right term? And what is the relationship between ‘realism’ and ‘materialism? Materialism is a label which is almost universally claimed by a continental philosophy which also prides itself on its hostility to realism. Harman (one of the speakers) (good interview here) wanted to reverse this valuation, holding on to realism while rejecting materialism. The tendency in materialism, Harman claimed, is always to dissolve specific objects, reducing them either to smaller physical entities or, as in the case of Grant’s philosophy, seeing them as ephemeral products of an underlying monist hyper-nature. Brassier, by contrast, pointed out that in the philosophy of someone like Slavoj Žižek the material seems to connote only a blockage, the point where thought fails – by this definition, the material cannot be thought. The problem was to return to matter without assuming a pre-established harmony between our conceptual apparatus and the world. Brassier also questioned the equation of materialism with practice: why is praxis material?'

What does this thinking do for my work on sound?...