It was as though these beings did not merely exist, in the way marble for instance exists, but as if they were on the verge of vanishing, but would recreate themselves at the same time. (Michael Ende, Neverending Story)
This paper proposes to think the materiality of sound through a reconsideration of what objects are and do. Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the “static fallacy” provides a ground for such subject matter.[1] In his discussion around the static fallacy, what arises is a different approach to what we call “reality.” If we ask the question “What is nature made of?” (Whitehead 1967b: 48), and if we follow Whitehead’s answer, we will discover that the difference between sound and so-called material objects will differ slightly from what we expect. The answer Whitehead gives is that they are both made of feeling. Within his philosophical system, everything that exists is made of process, and what moves process is feeling. The “static fallacy” arises with the problem of “simple location” (Whitehead 1967b: 49). Within simple location, things are said to be “here” in space and “now” in time. The consequence of such understanding of matter is that reality appears to be a mere juxtaposition of simple located points. This bypasses and denies the possibility of feeling as a key ingredient in the becoming of things. Where simple location advocates for juxtaposition, a processual account of reality will favor overlapping, intertwining, and rhizomatic connections.
I have long been puzzled by object-oriented ontology (OOO), but although it fascinated me, I could not pinpoint what continuously prevented me from accomplishing the great leap. This restraint generated a feeling that operated like a productive question. It felt like a moon eclipsing the light of a very specific understanding on the cusp of being grasped. It persisted, making itself felt here and there, until I read Steven Shaviro’s “The Universe of Things”: “When objects encounter one another, the basic mode of their relation is neither theoretical nor practical and neither epistemological nor ethical. Rather, before either of these, every relation among objects is an aesthetic one” (Shaviro 2014: 52-53). The reason why OOO did not satisfy my needs became then apparent. The fact is, even though I welcome this “autonomous power” and the “actus of the thing being what it is” (Shaviro 2014: 52-3), beyond the relation between objects, I am interested in the ontological problem of the object in a way that OOO simply does not address. It is closely related to what Gilles Deleuze (1994) has called the “virtual” and its role in the constitution of the world. More particularly, I am interested in how “potentiality,” in Whitehead’s vocabulary (1978), raises ontological issues around materiality and thus challenges established ideas about objects. In Didier Debaise’s words, this is aligned with “Whitehead’s criticism of scientific materialism,” and “his affirmation of a superior materialism, a materialism that he sometimes calls ‘organicist’” (Debaise 2017b: 10). Feeding from Whitehead’s ideas and clearly acknowledging it as an antecedent of Affect Theory (Shaviro 2009), I propose to work with sound materiality, understood as a dynamic and relational process, through the concept of “affective territories” (Ramos 2020). The affective territory generates – and is generated by – a sonic materiality that should be understood as an emergent process of individuality. This challenges the common sense around subjects, placing them outside the human realm as something that is transitory but consistent and concrete. This materiality is incorporeal (Grosz 2018), and it is powered by affect.
When Whitehead affirms that an object is data available for experience, it requires a reconsideration of objects – and consequently subjects. For Whitehead, the most concrete thing in the world is the unit of actuality that he calls actual entities – and sometimes actual occasions. Every actual entity becomes itself by the subjective act of the enjoyment of feeling. Whitehead calls this process of becoming concrescence: “[t]he process is itself the actuality” (Whitehead 1967a: 276). As a reminder, experience here should not be synonymous with human experience. Subjectivity does not belong to the human but to the process of concrescence. This shifts the attention to processes that are beyond the human. Still, although this point of view denies anthropocentrism, it does not deny the human perspective. On the contrary, it calls forth a reflection of the human contribution in a universe where nonhuman agency becomes truly collaborative. Although the focus that OOO brings to the aesthetic dimension of relation (Shaviro 2014: 53) may be seductive, the interesting part with Whitehead is that it does not focus on objects but on feeling. If we take Whitehead’s definition of an object seriously, we find ourselves with the necessity to expand the idea of object to every single experience – at the pre-individual level of the actual entity.[2] Although OOO considers, to a certain extent, potentiality (i.e. virtuality) through discussions around relation, objects in OOO refer to a reality already there and, as such, do not reach this pre-individual dimension. OOO incorporates relationality in the “autonomous power” and “actus of the thing being what it is,” but this always concerns relation between things, not “relation” in itself, i.e., an autonomous being, as developed by William James (2003 [1912]). This is the main difference between OOO and the speculative pragmatism developed by authors such as James, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others. Although this “autonomous power” does somehow posit objects in an “actant” position, it elides the process of subjectivity. In OOO, certain actions are possible for an object under specific circumstances, and to discover the full potentialities through which an object can relate is a quest in itself. The object is what it is, and in this sense, it is similar to an object in the Whiteheadian sense. Only, for Whitehead, objects – just as much as their relations – are data available for the experience of the actual entity. The actual entity is the subject: the “event” in Deleuzian terms, or “relation” for James.
Actuality is not a substance, and it is not even a static state; actuality is a process. When the actual entity accomplishes its “subjective aim” and attains “satisfaction” (Whitehead 1978), it perishes. Then, it no longer becomes. It is what it is: an objectified actual entity. As such, it is data available for the experience of other actual entities. Anything that contributes to the fulfillment of a next actual entity (subject) is, in Whitehead’s terms, objectified as a datum (object of experience). What we commonly call objects are included here. Whitehead’s definition of an object differs greatly from our common notion[3]: “The processes of the past, in their perishing, are themselves energizing as the complex origin of each novel occasion. The past is the reality at the base of each new actuality” (Whitehead 1967a: 276). This synthesis of the Whiteheadian Theory of Feeling is at the basis of the premise that process permeates and sustains everything in the universe. In other words, reality unfolds as process.
In its becoming, the actual entity acts as a subject of experience through the fulfillment of its highest potential; its experience is oriented toward what it needs to be. This orientation is called subjective aim. At every state of its process of concrescence, the actual entity carries within itself, in a germinal state, what it will be. In fact, the actual entity is given, in its process of concrescence, more objects of experience than what will effectively enter its constitution as a subject. This implies that only some objects will enter its experience. The subjective aim acts as an orientation toward the “decision” around which objects need to be included into experience. In Whitehead’s terms, “‘[a]ctuality’ is the decision amid ‘potentiality’” (Whitehead 1978: 43). This decision is based on what is most relevant to the actual entity’s “enjoyment” of its own subjectivity. When it perishes, the unicity of feeling that it synthesizes, according to its subjective aim, becomes an object available for experience. At this level, this is about an actual entity’s experience. When we talk about one single unicity of feeling – pertaining to one actual entity – we are referring to what Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called the “molecular” (1987). We can only refer to this dimension at a speculative level.
Most of the time, what we experience with our five senses are what Whitehead calls “societies,” i.e. a group of actual entities that share a “common element of form,” this being the “defining characteristic of the society” (Whitehead 1978: 34). Another important aspect of a society is the line of inheritance that arises from that passing along from one actual entity to another. What we commonly call an object would, in Whitehead’s vocabulary, most frequently refer to an “enduring object”: it is a society of actual entities with a “single line of inheritance of its defining characteristic” (Whitehead 1978: 34). This entails that we may consider a rock, for example, as the conglomeration and re-emergence of past feelings through a line of inheritance sharing the same common element of form, and hardness would act as a qualitative defining characteristic. This line of inheritance is always about feeling being passed along. In this sense, Whitehead’s ideas of unicity of feeling and objects (as data available for experience) are very close. Objects are a prior step of process energizing the next occasions of emergence of novelty.
Reality is made by this passing along of feeling, which is prehended and recreated, as novelty appears, at every instance of pulsation of actuality thus making object and subject interchangeable roles. Once subject, the actual entity becomes an object. Every bit of reality is profoundly aesthetic because the way every single actual entity comes to being is utterly unique. As Shaviro points out, for Whitehead, the how is more important than what the subject experiences: “novelty is a function of manner, rather than of essence” (Shaviro 2009: 56). The uniqueness of how experience comes into being is due to the difference between “to determine” and “to condition.” Although the object is what it is and does not change, it conditions but does not determine the experience. Its experience does not reproduce its characteristics; on the contrary, the actual entity’s decision plays a crucial role here. This is exactly what allows novelty. Aesthetics thus appears as an immanent artistic act (Shaviro 2009: 68) present at every instance of actuality.
This untangles the knot that conflates this shaping and passing along of feelings with what we commonly call objects. If things are – if everything is – made of feelings, it means that they do not simply exist (as in static fallacy). At a molecular level, they are constantly vanishing and simultaneously recreating themselves (gathering feelings). Now, the reason it is said to happen at a molecular level of experience is because we do not directly perceive actual entities. What we perceive is some kind of “contiguity” (Whitehead 1967a: 202-203). Actual entities are only perceptible as a gathering of forces that may only appear through the act “of the transference of quality from the many individuals to the nexus as one” (Whitehead 1967a: 213). The nexus is this gathering of forces, the assemblage of feeling into one singular unity of “dominating importance” (Whitehead 1967a: 197). There are many types of nexūs: “Regions, Societies, Persons, Enduring Objects, Corporal Substances, Living Organisms, Events, with other analogous terms for the various shades of complexity of which Nature is capable” (Whitehead 1967a: 198). The nexus stands at the level of perceptible experience. In fact, since feeling is present both at the molecular level of actual entities and at that level of contiguity that reverberates as nexus, Whitehead does not confine the discussion around feeling to the molecular level of experience – on the contrary. These molecular experiences spread out, proliferate, and create the world as we, from a human perspective, experience it. In other words, molecular experiences are not only fully part of reality; they constitute its very foundation. According to Whitehead, “in separation from actual entities there is nothing, merely nonentity” (Whitehead 1978: 43). If actual entities are the most concrete part of the universe (Whitehead 1978: 51) and “the final real things of which the world is made up” (Whitehead 1978: 18), then the ontological problem of the object becomes a problem of concreteness.