On Whitehead and Deleuze: The Process of Materiality

Newton's methodology for physics was an overwhelming success. But the forces which he introduced left Nature still without meaning or value. . . . A dead nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value.

A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought¹

Introduction

In his long career, Alfred North Whitehead was, variously, a mathematician, a speculative physicist, a historian of science, a philosopher of science, and a philosopher in his own right. He thus occupies a perhaps unique place within recent Western thought. Not only did he advance scientific thought, he also developed a novel, systematic philosophical understanding of science based on a deep historical appreciation of both its theoretical premises and its practical procedures. Whitehead did not dismiss science, he did not see it as divorced from philosophy—nor did he accept the premises that, he maintained, still inform much of modern science. One of his great achievements, which will be taken up later in this paper, is his insistence that science, philosophy, the humanities, and social theory all require a renewed conception of nature (in the broadest sense of the word), one that goes beyond strict scientific limitations, beyond any form of biological essentialism or reliance upon some notion of the ultimate laws of physics or nature. Through his philosophy of organism, Whitehead aims to develop a concept of nature that is able to incorporate all existence, thereby bringing together the empirical, the material, the social, the aesthetic, and thinking beings.

Gilles Deleuze shares with Whitehead the desire to develop a new ontological approach, one that goes beyond simplistic divisions or categorizations of the world into subject/object, natural/social, dead/ alive, and so on. Like Whitehead, he was also keenly aware of the need to situate such philosophical endeavors within a full appreciation of the history of philosophy. Furthermore, he was acutely aware of the need to uncover and develop the inextricable links, which have often remained hidden, between this history and other realms of thought and practice, such as the political, the social, and the aesthetic.

To attempt to outline all the similarities and dissimilarities, conjunctions and disjunctions between Whitehead and Deleuze is beyond the scope of this paper.² Yet it would seem clear that their interrelations and dual attempts to develop what might be termed a nonessentialist ontology is of both relevance and importance across a range of fields at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of academic uncertainty and renewal—with the increasing focus on interdisciplinarity and the increasing recognition of the need to reconsider the apparently unbridgeable dichotomy between the natural and the social, the need to move beyond overly culturalist or Foucauldian accounts of subjectivity, the need to renew and develop the interrelations of science and philosophy—Whitehead and Deleuze offer striking interventions which may prove fruitful for researchers thinking through a range of problems. One concrete example of this is the recent conference (May 2005) devoted solely to Whitehead and Deleuze, organized by the University of Leuven (Belgium) and held at the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Science in Brussels. This brought together an eclectic group of scholars from all over the world who were working on Whitehead and Deleuze, and it demonstrated both the extent and the depth of their current impact across philosophy, cultural theory, literature and literary criticism, mathematics, and sociology and social theory. While this paper will not be able to do justice to all such ramifications, I hope that it will operate as an introduction to some of the more significant aspects of the perspective that Whitehead and Deleuze share. In particular, I will focus on their understanding of the processual character of materiality or physicality, and the challenge they pose to customary scientific conceptions of these. I will also consider the status of subjectivity within their work (in relation to their understanding of materiality), and will conclude with a brief example of how their work might be applied within social theory to provide a forceful account of the...