Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

7 | A Unison of Becoming

140 seven a unIson of becomIng There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Alfred Whitehead, Process and Reality whItehead’s unIson of becomIng, an inherently temporal concept , positions the world creating itself at each moment of the present. At each moment, all the contemporaneous actual entities of the world are in a process of becoming, just as those that came before them are in a process of perishing. The perishing entities pass information to the present entities that are becoming. As set out in Chapter 2, “The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.”1 This is, as already described, what Whitehead terms prehension. It is the creativity of the world that emerges as the present grasps information from a just passed present, which is in the process of perishing, in order to use this information in its own becoming. The process of change that underscores reality is thus a double-sided process in which each moment of the present is perpetually perishing while a new present is becoming. However, this process also takes place between contemporary actual entities, as they pass information to one another across time, in the one immediate moment, affecting one another in a unison of becoming. We have seen this previously in the discussion of the event and Claerbout’s computer-based work Present , where the temporal aesthetics of the work arise from the processes of the software and the network as well as the re-presentation of natural processes. In addition to Present, we have also previously seen an example of a unison of becoming in Whitehead’s example of the perception of the sense data of a chair, provided in Chapter 5, in which the becoming of our sensation of a chair object is based on the objectification of the chair by our hands and eyes. In short, our experience is based on the interpenetration of our own sensory processes and the external processes with A Unison of Becoming 141 which they come in contact. We can thus say that the concept of becoming involves a commingling of forces, an adaptation based on processes working through one another. Commonly theorized through Deleuze’s ontology, we can also think of the process of becoming through a Whiteheadian framework; specifically by enacting the concept of a unison of becoming, along with his concept of the extensive continuum, a concept that was first introduced in Chapter 2. Whitehead states that the extensive continuum is the wider complex of becoming from which actual occasions emerge. He points out that “this extensive continuum is one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. It underlies the whole world, past, present, and future.”2 As Halewood points out, this may seem to suggest a preexistent ground that subtends all existence; in essence a space from which objects emerge. But as Halewood goes on to indicate, this is certainly not Whitehead’s position.3 This is because the extensive continuum comprises actual entities; the extensive continuum is made up of actual entities that have already become and now accumulate, providing the potential for ingression in the present entity’s becoming.4 The extensive continuum is always relative to the process of events; it is constituted by occasions and provides the field of potential for future occasions . The extensive continuum is not a preexistent structure from which objects emerge and in which interaction is carried out. Rather it is a field of extension; a field that collects events of the past and through this provides potential for the future. The Whiteheadian reading of the process of becoming sees events, one of which is the user, emerging from the world and its process. Whitehead states, “The character of an organism depends on that of its environment. But the character of an environment is the sum of the characters of the various societies of actual entities which jointly constitute that environment .”5 Here Whitehead indicates that the actual entity, in our case a society of entities that constitute the human as user, is characterized by its environment. In the structure of a feedback loop, this same multiplicity of entities interrelates with many other actual entities to constitute this environment. The process of interacting with technology thus involves more than just strapping on sensors or manipulating interfaces, although it involves this too...