This is a summary of what is a ‘second empiricism’ written about by Latour in ‘What Is Given in Experience?’ (2005) boundary 2, 32(1), 223-237. Latour’s piece is a review of Isabelle Stengers’s Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts translated as Thinking with Whitehead: the free and wild invention of concepts)
‘The basic question is to decide whether or not empiricism can be renewed so that ‘‘what is given in experience’’ is not simplified too much.’ (p 226)
First a quick characterisation of the first empiricism. It is based on a bifurcation between primary and secondary qualities, between how things really are (essence) and how we experience them (attributes). Here knowledge is possible, because we can sense attributes, but limited, because we cannot sense essence directly. Hence, knowledge is possible (through correspondence) because we assume it is impossible (that there are objects completely separated from us). In this framing continuity becomes explanation in the form of substance. The reason why the five dollars I borrow from a friend for a card game is the same as a second five dollars I win in the card game, and continues to be the same all the way to the shop at which I buy me and my friend some dinner is that there is something – a substance – which endures, carrying the essence of five-ness that expresses itself as attributes which me, my fellow card players and the shop all recognise as the ‘same’ (whether the essence is a real abstract object, a cognitive tool or an social convention is not important).
So to the second empiricism. There is no bifurcation of primary and secondary qualities, but simply living organisms. Nature and knowledge are not separated, but are both interaction in the on going life of the cosmos. In the language of Whitehead we embrace or to grasp, not to describe nor justify.
‘To avoid the bifurcation of nature, there was only one thing that needed to be added, an understanding of the event of the grasping itself by science as being something that happens not only in the world but to the world.’ (p 230)
Hence, we could say an experiment is a collective becoming. What is understood to be perception changes in two ways. First, perception is not the sensing of attributes, but the attention toward something that cannot be eliminated in the the world’s own becoming. This means that the world is always open to interpret and change itself. Second, the ‘point of view’ which perception refers back to is not a subject or worldview, but a situation or loci that needs to be grasp in going on. I think it is this use of perception that Deleuze is using when he says events are composed of percepts – ‘packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them’ along with affects (becomings) and concepts (eternal objects) (Deleuze 1995, 137).
Latour writes this grasping becomes ‘intensely objective’ in that it concerns that grasping of other entities to go on with (think of my five dollars grasping at all the objects necessarily for it to continue: notes, cards, games rules, players, products and cash registers). But it also becomes ‘intensive subjective’ in that it is only like this in its own loci (that is that this five dollars is not like other five dollars elsewhere). But then Stengers writes,
‘‘What the reader should always be reminded of is the Whiteheadian decision to take the following statement literally: ‘this thing is present in my experience inasmuch as it is present elsewhere as well,’ and to stick to this statement no matter how fanciful the consequences to which it leads’’ (quoted in Latour, p 330).’
So, just because this five dollars is part of my experience of playing, winning, buying and eating, it is not only this experience. It is not exhausted by my experience of it.
So we come to the two significant and related problems. First, how do we account for continuity (and we refuse to return to substances)? How is there empirical knowledge, if our objects are never exhausted in experience (and we refuse to go back to primary and secondary qualities)? They are related by Deleuze as the problem of difference and repetition. First, continuity is not an explanation, (as it is with substance which connects primary and secondary qualities). Continuity needs to be explained. How my five dollars is translated through a currency, a card game, a denomination of notes, and a shop needs explanation. Second, if my five dollars is not simply the realisation of a potential or ideal ‘five dollars of value’, then what is it? This is important because we are dealing with entities which are organisms that perceive, interpret and invent. There is never anything new if everything is all already there in potentia, nor is there ever any change when the ‘real’ is always simply the full realisation of a potential. So we need both difference (that five dollars is different each time) but also repetition (in that something carries from the card game to the shop). Hence, Stengers’ makes the shift from the real/potential distinction to the actual/virtual distinction, and this, we are told, is why Whitehead needs eternal objects.
The virtual is not actualised in the way the potential is realised. As Latour writes,
‘If ‘Stengers is right in using Deleuze’s crucial distinction between the potential/real couple and the virtual/actual one. Eternal objects protect us against the confusion between the two. 13 [note: If you realize a potential, nothing really happens, since ‘‘everything was already there in potentia.’’ If you actualize virtualities, it is only retrospectively, because of the radically new event of the actual occasion, that the real can be seen as what has emerged out of what was possible.] It is because they [Eternal Objects] play no direct role but are present nonetheless that events can play the full role. They don’t explain, but they allow the scene of the world to be fully deployed.’ (Latour 2005: 235)
To paraphrase the preceding section to this quote, ‘the subject and object are not domains. The subject is present and object is past – this distribution is the ‘actual occasion’. Eternal objects are there to stop things becoming isolated or mere means for other objects, and to stop continuity becoming explanatory and keep reality as creative’ (235). So while actualisation does occur (I am dealt a hand and win five dollars, and can say look I won five dollars) there is an eternal object that keeps this five dollars a subject, an agent of becoming. The five dollars is never complete. The winning of the card game changed the five dollars (it made it a bet in a game) just like the five dollars changed the card game (it helped express a winner).
If we take Latour’s Darwinian language seriously – that we are always ‘betting on life’ – then this betting does not stop. Each winning (the object) is always already the next bet (a subject). But the rules of the game are no exception. Each ‘game’ determines the rules (the object) but at the same time puts the rules up as a bet that might determine the next ‘game’. In the case of my card game, the rules that won me five dollars put themselves at risk, one in which the game is able to change to become a game of ‘hunger-shop’ in which I bet my five dollars and won myself and a friend some dinner.
