Perception, living matter, cognitive systems, immune networks: A whiteheadian future for science studies

Configurations

Volumn 13, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 135-181

  Bono, James J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34248506802     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2007.0006     Document Type: Review

References (216)

1. On the turn toward practice, see Timothy Lenoir, "Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue between Theory and Experiment," Science in Context 2 (1988): 3-22;
2. Jan Golinski, "The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory: Sociological Approaches in the History of Science," Isis 81 (1990): 492-505;
3. idem, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
4. Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996);
5. idem, "Kuhn and Scientific Practices," Configurations 6 (1998): 33-50;
6. idem, How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
7. See, for example, many of the essays included in Timothy Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), including the overview provided by Lenoir, "Inscription Practices and the Materialities of Communication," pp. 1-19.
8. For example, see the recent essays by Bruno Latour: "The Promises of Constructivism," in Chasing Technology: Matrix of Materiality, ed. Don Ihde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 27-46;
9. "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225-248.
10. The latter, in particular, gives indication of Latour's turn toward Whitehead via Isabelle Stengers (see also Bruno Latour, "What Is Given in Experience?" boundary 2 32 [2005]: 223-237, where Latour reviews Stengers's recent book on Whitehead: Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts [Paris: Seuil, 2002]). Latour's efforts in these recent works at debunking deconstruction and his desire to stake out a position seemingly opposed to Heidegger strike me as unnecessary, targeting impoverished readings of these critical practices rather than richly productive ones. (See the example of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger - who incidentally stresses Latour's affinities with Derrida - later in this essay.) Indeed, the turn he takes toward revisioning science studies ontologically resonates in many respects with such a Heideggerian tradition. In my view Whitehead and Heidegger have much in common, despite formidably different styles and idioms. For a recent essay noting this turn to ontology in science studies,
11. see Casper Brunn Jensen, "A Nonhumanist Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention," Configurations 12 (2004): 229-261.
12. Deleuze, in fact, appropriates and deploys Whitehead's thought at a critical juncture, which happens also to be focused upon a rereading of the seventeenth century through a rereading of Leibniz and the Baroque. See "What Is an Event?" chap. 6 of Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 76-82.1 am indebted to Bruno Bosteels for reminding me of Deleuze's reliance on Whitehead. As I suggest below, Whitehead may be considered with the likes of Darwin, Bergson, Deleuze, and Varela as a philosopher of immanence. On Deleuze,
13. see Daniel W. Smith, "Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought," in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 46-66.
14. The very idea of a "scientific revolution" has a complex twentieth-century history. See in particular the essay by Roy Porter, "The Scientific Revolution: A Spoke in the Wheel?" in Revolution in History, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 290-316. The literature on the scientific revolution is vast, and I shall not attempt to review it in this essay;
15. see, however, H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
16. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modem World (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 41 (emphasis added). This aspect of Bacon's thought has, until recently, been almost entirely neglected in favor of the common misreading of him as a mechanist and precursor of the likes of Robert Boyle. For an important reassessment of Bacon in the context of the seventeenth-century tradition of living or working matter culminating in William Harvey and Francis Glisson,
17. see Guido Giglioni, "Matter and Appetite: Francis Bacon as a Hylozoistic Thinker,"
18. and idem, "The Darkness of Matter and the Light of Nature: Notions of Matter in Bacon and Comenius and Their Theological Implications";
19. I thank Dr. Giglioni, who is preparing a new book on Bacon ("Francis Bacon's Metaphysics of Appetite"), for sharing these forthcoming essays with me. This tradition of vital materialism has been central to my own work on Harvey and the seventeenth century.
20. Whitehead, Science, p. 42.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 50 (emphasis added).
23. Here, too, there is a large literature on the mechanical philosophy and its intellectual, religious, and sociopolitical contexts, including waves of revisionist historiography. I mention here but a handful of older and recent work as staring points for further investigation: James J. Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995);
24. Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
25. Gary B. Deason, "Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature," in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 167-191;
26. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
27. Keith Hutchison, "Supernaturalism and the Mechanical Philosophy," History of Science 21 (1983): 297-333;
28. J. E. McGuire, "Boyle's Conception of Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 523-542;
29. Margaret Osier, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
30. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985);
31. Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
32. For example, Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10);
33. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
34. John Henry, "Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory," History of Science 24 (1986): 335-381;
35. idem, "Robert Hooke, The Incongruous Mechanist," in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), pp. 149-180;
36. Margaret J. Osier, "Whose Ends? Teleology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy," in Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions, ed. John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osier, and Jitse M. van der Meer, Osiris 16 (2001): 151-168.
37. See also some of the essays in Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, eds., Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2001). As noted earlier, Guido Giglioni has been working on theories of matter and life in the work of such key figures as Francis Bacon, Francis Glisson, Johannes Baptista van Helmont, Robert Boyle, and Leibniz.
38. See Don Bates, "Machina ex Deo: William Harvey and the Meaning of Instrument," Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 577-593;
39. Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10);
40. James J. Bono, "Reform and the Languages of Renaissance Theoretical Medicine: Harvey versus Fernel," Journal of the History of Biology 23 (1990): 341-387;
41. Walter Pagel, William Harvey's Biological Thought (Basel: Karger, 1967);
42. idem, "William Harvey Revisited" History of Science 8 (1969): 1-31 and 9 (1970): 1-41.
43. René Descartes, Treatise on Man, French text with trans. by Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).
44. William Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (Frankfurt: Fitzer, 1628).
45. Harvey refers to irritations and the active response to them by living matter in a number of different passages in his works. For more details, see some of the works cited in the notes below.
46. William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium (London: Pulleyn, 1651). On medical spirits,
47. see James J. Bono, "Medical Spirits and the Medieval Language of Life," Traditio 40 (1984): 91-130;
48. Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10). See the latter also for the French physician Jean Fernel.
49. Harvey, De generatione animalium (above, n. 16), p. 251: "Ad eundem pariter modum, si sub fabulae involucro sanguinem alicui depingerem, lapidisque Philosophici titulo insignirem, atque omnes ejus singulares dotes, operationes, ac facultates aenigmatice proponerem; Ilium procul dubio pluris aestimaret; supra vires elementorum agere facile crederet, corpusque illi aliud ac divinius non illibenter attribueret."
50. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), p. 41.
51. Ibid., p. 50.
52. Key here is recognizing that, for Aristotle as for Harvey the Aristotelian, pattern - or what Aristotle calls form - is in the case of living things not simply a configuration, but in addition an active and transformative power (dynamis) that operates both to produce/reproduce the essential pattern of a specific living thing (a kind, or species) and to maintain it as a temporally emergent entity in face of change, the flux of its immediate environment. [The key example Aristotle uses of form as dynamis is that of the male semen and its role in generation. In Books 1 and 2 of his De generatio animalium, Aristotle carefully analyzes the way in which generation occurs through the operation of semen. He describes the operation of semen in numerous passages: e.g., the male "begets the young animal simply by means of the dynamis residing in the semen" (730a2-3); or again, "the semen of the male acts otherwise; in virtue of the dynamis which it contains it causes the material and nourishment in the female to take on a particular character" (730a13-16). (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. A. L. Peck [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963], emphasis in original).] Thus, by pattern I am assuming here not a fixed mold that can be conceived (as it was by a number of seventeenth-century mechanists) as a sort of unchanging template that might become the basis for passive, mechanical reproduction of a kind, but rather what might be thought of as patterned activity that is inherently temporal and thus responsive to the temporal flux of things. Of course, for Aristotle and many of the Greeks, form and patterned activity serve to define and identify precisely that which perdures through changes, that which engages and yet domesticates the very flux of things. Harvey's notion of irritation (see following note) captures and extends such an Aristotelian emphasis, wedding Aristotelian dynamism and the inherent power of patterned transformation to the inherent ability of living matter to sense (without the mediation of nerves) and respond to direct irritation. For an illuminating discussion of pattern and rhythm in both the ancient Greek and the ancient Chinese medical traditions,
53. see Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), esp. chap. 2;
54. Kuriyama cites Aristotle's comment that "'rhythm is form' (rhythmos schēma estin)" (p. 88).
55. For Harvey, irritation, and living matter see Bono, Word of God (above, n. 10), chap. 4, which is based upon idem, "Reform and the Languages of Renaissance Theoretical Medicine" (above, n. 12). For the concepts of irritation and irritability,
56. see Owsel Temkin, "The Classical Roots of Glisson's Doctrine of Irritation," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 38 (1964): 297-328;
57. reprinted in idem, The Double Face of Janus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 290-316.
58. See esp., Francis Glisson, Anatomia hepatis (London, 1654);
59. idem, De ventricule et intestinis (London/Amsterdam, 1677);
60. and idem, De natura substantiae energetica (London, 1672). In addition to Temkin's essay cited in the previous note,
61. see Guido Giglloni, "Anatomist Atheist? The 'Hylozoistic' Foundations of Francis Glisson's Anatomical Research," in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 113-135.
62. Walter Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition, Life, and Voluntary Motion (London, 1659);
63. Nathaniel Highmore, The History of Generation (London, 1651);
64. Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy (London, 1664). I am working on a monograph, "Instrument or Mechanism? William Harvey, Industrious Bodies, and Vital Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England," that will discuss the work of these and other figures.
65. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), pp. 50, 80.
66. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1998);
67. idem, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991);
68. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
69. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), p. 50.
70. Ibid., p. 49.
71. Ibid., p. 50.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., p. 51.
74. Ibid., p. 50.
75. Ibid., p. 51 (emphasis added).
76. For Whitehead, an event is a nexus of those most basic ontological units of the world - what he calls "actual occasions" or "actual entities" - in which such actual occasions are "inter-related in some determinate fashion" (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne [New York: Free Press, 1978], p. 80). Importantly, Whitehead's actual occasions constitute themselves, like events, as gatherings or relations and not as classical discrete and isolated objects. Hence, he adds to his definition of "event" the following: "An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member" (p. 73), Deleuze's gloss on Whitehead is suggestive: "The event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples"; or again, emphasizing events as "infinite series" in which "intrinsic properties" come to "now converg[e] toward limits, with the relation among limits establishing a conjunction" (Deleuze, The Fold [above, n. 4], p. 77). This dynamism and connectedness of things and events in the world leads Whitehead to emphasize, correspondingly, the active and thoroughly embodied nature of what we, today, might call cognition in his Important notion of the "withness" of the body: "It is this withness that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of the circumambient world" (p. 81). Whitehead then goes on to explain that "for the organic theory, the most primitive perception is 'feeling the body as functioning.' This is a feeling of the world in the past; it is the inheritance of the world as a complex of feeling; namely, it is the feeling of derived feelings"; even "the later, sophisticated perception" that he terms presentational immediacy "begins with sense-presentation of the contemporary body. The body, however, is only a peculiarly intimate bit of the world. Just as Descartes said, 'this body is mine'; so he should have said, 'this actual world is mine.' My process of 'being myself is my origination from my possession of the world" (p. 81). Here Whitehead's thought converges with recent emphasis upon the gestural, embodied, and performative in science and mathematics in the work of Gilles Châtelet, Brian Rotman, Kenneth Knoespel, and Sha Xin Wei, and in my own work on performative and material metaphors.
77. Charleton, Natural History of Nutrition (above, n. 23), p. 124.
78. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6 (emphasis in original).
79. [Margaret Cavendish] Duchess of Newcastle, Grounds of Natural Philosophy:. . . The second Edition, much altered from the first, which went under the name of Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: Maxwell, 1668), chap. 8, "Of Nature's Knowledg, and Perception," p. 7.
80. Ibid., p. 18.
81. For more on Cavendish, including citation of important studies, see Deborah Boyle, "Margaret Cavendish's Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy," Configurations 12 (2004): 195-227.
82. C. H. Waddington, The Evolution of an Evolutionist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).
83. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 118.
84. Whitehead's impact on a number of important developmental biologists, who as a group included Waddington, is discussed by Donna J. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Haraway also discusses Waddington's concept of canalization (pp. 59-61).
85. For epigenesis, preformationism, and related biological notions, see the fundamental classic work by Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson, trans. Robert Ellrich (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
86. Waddington, Evolution of an Evolutionist (above, n. 39). See esp. chap. 3, "Canalization of Development and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters," pp. 16-22, where Waddington nicely Illustrates canalization as an interactive process with extended discussion of one example: the transformation of callosities on the skin of certain parts of ostriches from environmentally switched to canalized developmental pathways.
87. C. H. Waddington, "An Autobiographical Note," in Evolution of an Evolutionist (above, n. 39), pp. 1-11; quotations from pp. 3, 4, 3-4.
88. Ibid., p. 4.
89. Elsewhere Waddington notes that "in doing science we have, on the one hand, to try to formulate simple objects which express the most important causal relations between events, but at the same time we have to ensure that these objects include (as sub-objects) as many as possible of all those involved in the event. The thrust of Whitehead's thought is not to simplify unduly; every time you 'reduce' you leave something out, and scientific ideas are richer and nearer to nature the less that has had to be omitted in order to reach them" (C. H. Waddington, "Whitehead and Modern Science," in Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy, ed. John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin [Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978], pp. 143-146, on p. 143 (emphasis in original).
90. See, for example, Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), pp. 184-185.
91. I borrow this phrase from Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 157.
92. For Whitehead and the event, see n. 33 above. Prehensions, for Whitehead, are fundamental features of experience: "The ultimate facts of immediate experience are actual entitles, prehensions, and nexus" (Whitehead, Process [above, n. 33], p. 20). In his philosophy of organism, "each ultimate unit of fact" - what he terms actual entities or actual occasions - comprising experience "is exhibited as appropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises" (p. 219). Whitehead's prehensions are precisely those "processes] of appropriation of a particular element" that, in effect, gather up selectively elements of the universe relevnt to completing the subjective unity of an emergent actual occasion (p. 219).
93. Thus, regarding development itself, Waddington states: "When the developing system is disturbed it returns not to the state it was at when the disturbance occurred, but to some later part of the stabilized pathway of change. The stabilized pathway of change is named a 'chreod/ and the whole system of chreods in a complex developing system such as an egg gives rise to an 'epigenetic landscape.'" Moreover, placing such complex developing systems within an evolutionary context, he suggests that "if one approaches the problems of evolution with a similar readiness to accept that the process may essentially involve very numerous components, one again comes out with a set of questions which are characteristically Whiteheadian rather than present-day orthodox. For instance, one admits that in much of evolution (probably all above the bacteria), evolutionary changes involve enormous numbers of genes, rather than a selection of one or two particular genes. . . . It reduces to very small proportions, almost negligible, in fact, the importance of the element of chance mutation" (Waddington, "Whitehead and Modern Science" [above, n. 45], p. 144).
94. Waddington, "Autobiographical Note" (above, n. 43), pp. 4-5.
95. Ibid., p. 7.
96. Ibid., p. 8.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid., pp. 8-9.
99. Ibid., p. 9.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid, (emphasis added).
102. Ibid., p. 10.
103. Ibid, (emphasis in original). See also n. 49 above for chreods.
104. Waddington asserts: "from the Whiteheadian point of view one has to recognize that the evolving events - actual animals and plants as we meet them in real life - are influenced by environmental factors as well as genetic. Further, all things above a very low level of evolution play some role, active or passive, in deciding what environmental influences will act selectively on their populations. All this produces a much more interactive theory of evolution than the conventional 'chance and necessity.'. . . We are dealing in fact with a Whiteheadian type of interacting network, rather than a straightforward linear sequence of cause and effect of the classical materialist kind" (Waddington, "Whitehead and Modern Science" [above, n. 45], p. 144).
105. Ibid., p. 145.
106. Ibid, (emphasis in original). For an account of the development of theories of information focusing on Shannon and Weaver, the Macy Conferences, and their impact in the decades after 1950, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For more specifically on the appropriation and deployment of information within the biological sciences of the second half of the twentieth century,
107. see Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000);
108. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989). Waddington provides a very inter
109. esting synopsis and critique of information theory in C. H. Waddington, "The Process Theory of Evolution and Notes on the Evolution of Mind," in Cobb and Griffin, Mind in Nature (above, n. 45), pp. 27-31, esp. pp. 29-31.
110. Waddington, "Whitehead and Modern Science" (above, n. 45), p. 145 (emphasis in original). Note the similarity of Waddington's emphasis here - on the evolution of Whitehead's terminology in the direction of a sustained emphasis on feeling as fundamental to prehension and to concrescence - to that of the earlier cited passage from his "Autobiographical Note" (see n. 50 for reference to this passage).
111. "Enaction" is a term coined by Varela and his collaborators. As Hayles presents it, in moving beyond earlier autopoietic theory articulated under the influence of his mentor and coauthor, Humberto Maturana, Varela came to address as central to theoretical biology problems side-stepped by the former theory: "Although autopoietic theory implicitly privileges embodiment in its emphasis on actual biological processes, it has little to say about embodied action as a dynamic force in an organism's development. It is precisely this point that is richly elaborated by Varela and his co-authors in their concept of enaction. Enaction sees the active engagement of an organism with the environment as the cornerstone of the organism's development. The difference in emphasis between enaction and autopoiesis can be seen in how the two theories understand perception. Autopoietic theory sees perception as the system's response to a triggering event in the surrounding medium. Enaction, by contrast, emphasizes that perception is constituted through perceptually guided actions, so that movement within an environment is crucial to an organism's development. As Varela further explained . . ., enaction concurs with autopoiesis in insisting that perception must not be understood through the viewpoint of a 'pre-given, perceiver-independent world.' Whereas autopoietic theory emphasizes the closure of circular processes, however, enaction sees the organism's active engagement with its surroundings as more openended and transformative" (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman [above, n. 62], pp. 155-156). Waddington, employing the ontological perspective enunciated by Whitehead, can plausibly be seen as himself articulating an understanding of biological development - the manner of an organism's being-in-the-world as prehending and feeling actual entity - that might be thought of as enaction, avant la lettre! Such a Whiteheadian perspective embedded in the very ontological assumptions of Waddington's theoretical biology may account, then, for Waddington's status as a hero in biology for Varela (see below).
112. In concluding this section, it may be of interest to note two coincidences of Waddington's biography. His professional life, in a sense, was bracketed by a pair of incomplete historical-philosophical projects: on the one hand, he reports having written an unpublished essay on "The Vitalist-Mechanist Controversy and the Process of Abstraction" in 1928; and, in June 1974, at a Rockefeller Foundation symposium in Bellagio, he confessed his intention to "write a book about Whitehead." While discretion dictated the fate of the first essay and Waddington's subsequent strategy to deploy "vitalist" - more properly, neither mechanist nor vitalist (in the pejorative sense), but something akin to "organicist" - and Whiteheadian outlooks pragmatically and implicitly, rather than overtly, the second project met the fate of common humanity: Waddington died the very next year. See Waddington, "Autobiographical Note" (above, n. 43), pp. 10-11; idem, "Whitehead and Modern Science" (above, n. 45), p. 143.
113. Wilfred D. Stein and Francisco J. Varela, "Thinking about Biology: An Introductory Essay," in Thinking about Biology, ed. Stein and Varela (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993), pp. 1-13, on pp. 2, 5.
114. Keller, Century of the Gene (above, n. 40), p. 78.
115. See esp. Alfred I. Tauber, "Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood," Science in Context 8 (1995): 579-607.
116. For further discussion of immunology, see idem, The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
117. Alfred I. Tauber and Scott H. Podolsky, The Generation of Diversity: Clonal Selection Theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);
118. Anne-Marie Moulin and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Singular Selves: Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001);
119. Thomas Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jeme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003);
120. idem, "Darwinian Overtones: Niels K. Jerne and the Origin of the Selection Theory of Antibody Formation," Journal of the History of Biology 27 (1994): 481-529;
121. Henri Allan and Irun R. Cohen, eds., Theories of Immune Networks (Berlin: Springer, 1989);
122. Irun R. Cohen, Tending Adam's Garden: Evolving the Cognitive Immune Self (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000);
123. A. David Napier, The Age of Immunology: Conceiving a Future in an Alienating World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
124. This paragraph depends upon the historical and conceptual analysis of clonal selection theory provided by Tauber, "Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood" (above, n. 68) In general, I am indebted to Tauber's work and others cited in the previous note.
125. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), p. 50.
126. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventure of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 201.
127. Note Whitehead's remark: "This simple location of instantaneous material configurations is what Bergson has protested against, so far as it concerns time and so far as it is taken to be the fundamental fact of concrete nature. He calls It a distortion of nature due to the intellectual 'spatialisation' of things. I agree with Bergson in his protest: but I do not agree that such distortion is a vice necessary to the intellectual apprehension of nature. I shall in subsequent lectures endeavour to show that this spatialisation is the expression of more concrete facts under the guise of very abstract logical constructions. There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete" (Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), pp. 50-51). For a recent criticism of notions of spatiality by an otherwise sympathetic reader of Bergson, see Elizabeth Grosz, "Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought," in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. idem (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 15-28, esp. pp. 22 ff.
128. See the section on "Spatiality" (pp. 116-124) in Ron L. Cooper, Heidegger and Whitehead: A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 120-121.
129. Francisco J. Varela and Antonio Coutinho, "Immune Networks: Getting on to the Real Thing," Research in Immunology 140 (1989): 837-845, on p. 837.
130. Ibid., pp. 837-838.
131. Ibid., p. 837.
132. Ibid., p. 838; and Antonio Coutinho, Francisco Varela, et al., "The Dynamics of Immune Networks," in Idiotype Networks in Biology and Medicine, ed. A. Osterhaus and F. UytdeHaag (Amsterdam/New York: Elsevier, 1990), pp. 59-63, on p. 59, where the authors explain that the PIS "displays repertoires that are directed outward, because it expresses no reactivities to self-molecules. . . . PIS-lymphocytes obey the general postulates of the clonal selection theory, accounting for conventional immune responses upon introduction of foreign antigens."
133. Coutinho, Varela, et al., "Dynamics of Immune Networks" (above, n. 77) p. 60.
134. Francisco J. Varela, "A Cognitive View of the Immune System," World Futures 42 (1994); 31-40, on pp. 31, 33.
135. Ibid., p. 34.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid., p. 36.
138. Ibid. Note that Varela clearly intends us to understand that both the CIS and the PIS exhibit cognitive properties. While the immune system has "two distinct modes of operation" - that is, the "classical mode of clonal selection" and the "network mode" - Varela insists that "in both cases, we can conclude that the immune system does indeed 'perceive' its environment in the sense defined here" (p. 36). Moreover, he goes on to say that, again in both cases, the immune system's "actions" are "guided by its perceptions" (p. 36). Of course the actions of the CIS are far more complex than the purely defensive actions of the PIS; indeed, the very extent of the PIS's domain is defined and limited by the CIS. Thus, the latter exhibits true network properties as a cognitive system that forms the ever-changing, "historically" evolving context within which the more limited perception-action dynamics of the PIS operate.
139. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
140. Henri Atlan and Irun R. Cohen, "Introduction to Immune Networks," in Allan and Cohen, Theories of Immune Networks (above, n. 68), pp. 1-3, on p. 3.
141. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), pp. 49-51.
142. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), p. 73.
143. For example, see Millč Čapek, The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer, 1991);
144. David Ray Griffin, ed., Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986);
145. Richard Schlegel, Superposition and Interaction: Coherence in Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
146. Abner Shimony, Search for a Naturalistic World View, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
147. Pickering, Mangle of Practice (above, n. 35).
148. Isabelle Stengers, "Whitehead's Account of the Sixth Day," in this issue, p. 38.
149. Ibid.
150. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For his highly illuminating discussion of the transformation of spaces into places, and the significance of such cultural dynamics, see chap. 9, "Spatial Stories," and esp. pp. 117 ff. For a fuller discussion of de Certeau in relation to the analysis of scientific practices,
151. see James J. Bono, "Locating Narratives: Science, Metaphor, Communities, and Epistemic Styles," in Grenzüberschreitungen in der Wissenschaft: Crossing Boundaries in Science, ed. Peter Weingart (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), pp. 119-151, esp. pp. 130-135.
152. Bono, "Locating Narratives," p. 132 (page references in the quotation are for the citations from de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life).
153. Remember that Descartes's quest for certainty - for unshakable confidence in the necessary capacity of his experience of clear and distinct ideas to reveal with utter transparency the truth of things - forced him to confront the nightmarish probability not only that such experiences of things were no "more real than the Illusions of my dreams," but that they were Illusions produced by an "evil spirit" who had "bent all his efforts to deceiving me" (René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960], pp. 24, 80). In the seventeenth century, the turn toward new forms of reason based upon observation and experience of the natural world, rather than traditional forms of contemplative thought, generated anxieties about the very real possibility of deception, error, and the seductive allure of Illusions. For example, the precipitous rise of a culture of experiment and popular display, together with an unprecedented multiplication of images, scientific Illustrations, wondrous mechanical devices and statues-not to mention fancies of the human imagination such as poetry and the theater-were not always embraced as signs of progress. For some contemporaries, such questionable developments contributed to undermining confidence in experiential knowledge that precipitated a skeptical crisis over the boundaries separating the real and the illusory that some scholars identify with the Baroque. For these and related issues, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), esp. her discussions of "Systems of Imposture" and "Sleight-of-Hand";
154. Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1995);
155. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998);
156. Paula Findlen, "Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe," Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 292-331;
157. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
158. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (above, n. 10);
159. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
160. William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003). My new project on "technologies of the literal" and the scientific revolution will address many of these issues, including the status and uses of visual technologies (see below for more).
161. See above, nn. 33 and 48.
162. For Whitehead, feeling is closely tied to propositions; see n. 127 below. In general, see Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), esp. the chapters and sections on feelings and on propositions in parts 2 and 3.
163. Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 6.
164. For example, Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language, " in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 215-237; on p. 218.
165. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33), pp. 7-8: "This fallacy consists in neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought. There are aspects of actualities which are simply ignored so long as we restrict thought to these categories."
166. Ibid., passim. See below for more on lures for feelings.
167. Bruno Bosteels, "Borges as Antiphilosopher" (talk given at the 14th Annual Symposium on Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, April 30, 2005). I am indebted to Professor Bosteels's talk and personal communications.
168. Ibid.
169. Pickering, Mangle of Practice (above, n. 35), pp. 5-6.
170. Here we may wish to engage the work of Karen Barad, her notion of intra-action, and her rethinking of agency and realism within an ontological context. See, for example, Karen Barad, "Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices," in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York/London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 1-11.
171. Pickering, Mangle of Practice (above, n. 35), pp. 21-23.
172. In fairness, Pickering does acknowledge a place for representation in science, claiming that "I can immediately add that thinking about material performativity does not imply that we have to forget about the representational aspects of science. Science is not just about making machines, and one cannot claim to have an analysis of science without offering an account of its representational dimensions" (ibid., p. 7). My concern is with understanding the role of representation and, more to the point, acknowledging the inseparability of representation, materiality, performativity, and the narrative or fictional in science.
173. See n. 33 above, and Whitehead's notion of the "withness" of the body as a gloss on the embodied nature of cognition. For Whitehead, the "disregard of any subjective judgment" presumed necessary to the analysis of "facts" by the "most ardent upholders of objectivity in scientific thought" is misplaced; instead, the "zeal for truth," he insists, "presupposes interest. Also sustained observation presupposes the notion. For concentrated attention means disregard of irrelevancies; and such disregard can only be sustained by some sense of importance. Thus the sense of importance (or interest) is embedded in the very being of animal experience." He then goes on to add that "feeling is the agent which reduces the universe to its perspective for fact. Apart from gradations of feeling, the infinitude of detail produces an infinitude of effect in the constitution of each fact. And that is all that is to be said, when we omit feeling. But we feel differently about these effects and thus reduce them to a perspective. 'To be negligible' means 'to be negligible for some coordination of feeling.' Thus perspective is the outcome of feeling; and feeling is graded by the sense of interest as to the variety of its differentiations" (Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought [New York: Free Press, 1968], pp. 8-10; see also pp. 60-62).
174. Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 32.
175. I am exploring instances of such disentangling in my new project on what I call early modern technologies of the literal (see below for more details). In addition to my own work on metaphor, narrative, and science, see the following for the role of fictions and/or narratives in scientific practice: Rouse, Engaging Science (above, n. 1);
176. Thomas Nickles, "Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning," Configurations 6 (1998): 51-85.
177. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 102.
178. Chap. 7 is entitled "Spaces of Representation": ibid., pp. 102-113.
179. Ibid; p. 103.
180. My colleague, Jim Swan, reminds me of Wittgenstein's remark about the place where "thinking takes place" as (among others) "the paper on which we write" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and the Brown Books, 2nd ed. [New York: Harper and Row, 1960], p. 7). Such revaluation of material, embodied gestures as fundamental to think
181. ing-as the very modalities through which thinking occurs-has experienced a sudden resurgence of interest: see Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, trans. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000),
182. with Kenneth J. Knoespel's introduction ("Diagrammatic Writing and the Configuration of Space");
183. Brian Rotman, "Corporeal or Gesturo-haptic Writing," Configurations 10 (2002): 423-438;
184. Sha Xin Wei, "Resistance Is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media," ibid, pp. 439-472;
185. Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
186. James J. Bono, "Performing Science: Metaphor, Material Practices, Invention, and Exchange(s)" (unpublished paper written for the 2004 MLA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia).
187. Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (above, n. 110), p. 103: "If we speak about the representation of something given, the common sense of the notion is plain: we speak about a representation 'of.' If, however, we claim that we have seen the actor Bruno Ganz yesterday evening representing Hamlet, we speak of a representation 'as.'"
188. As Rheinberger states, "I am speaking here of the function of representation on the level of scientific practice itself, as it gets enacted in the materialities of the laboratory" (ibid., p. 103).
189. Ibid., p. 104.
190. Ibid., p. 106.
191. Ibid., p. 105.
192. Ibid.
193. See, for example, ibid., pp. 80, 107.
194. Ibid., p 106. Rheinberger here refers to Bruno Latour, "Drawing Things Together," in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19-68, on p. 26.
195. See also Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 227. More recently, Latour has insisted on refusing the typical binaries that inform our readings of images in science in his articulation of a critical practice that he terms "iconoclash." For Latour, "a scientific image" is "a set of instructions to reach another one down the line," and, the "paradox of scientific images" is constructive and unavoidable: "If you wanted to abandon the image and turn your eyes instead to the prototype that they are supposed to figure out, you would see less, infinitely less. You would be blind for good" (Bruno Latour, "What Is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?" in Iconoclash, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002], pp. 14-37; on p. 34; emphasis in original). Note the similarities to Whitehead's lures for feelings, to disentangling the entangled world, and to my own view of material metaphors (see n. 125,126, and 127 below).
196. Rheinberget, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (above, n. 110), p. 108 (emphasis in original). Rheinberger here refers to Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 8.
197. I have explored the emergence of the literal and its construction through human techne - my "technologies of the literal" - in my 2003-2004 Folger Institute Colloquium, "Imagining Nature: Technologies of the Literal and the Scientific Revolution." I have begun to flesh out this argument in a number of talks and works-in-progress, including "Language, Inquiry, and Invention: The Metaphorics of Nature, Technologies of the Literal, and the Production of Natural Knowledge, Arts, and Objects," and "Imagining Nature: Technologies of the Literal, the Scientific Revolution, and 'Literature and Science.'" These will culminate in two related books: vol. 2 of my Word of God and Languages of Man project, and a separate volume on technologies of the literal (including especially visual technologies) and the scientific revolution.
198. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
199. idem, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
200. Also see comments on and critiques of Lakoff and Johnson by Richard Coyne, Designing Information Technology in the Postmodem Age: From Method to Metaphor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), chap. 7, "Metaphors and Machines: Metaphor, Being, and Computer Systems Design," pp. 249-301, esp. pp. 264-276;
201. James J. Bono, "Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice," in Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge, ed. Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2001), pp. 215-234;
202. Sabine Maasen and Peter Weingart, Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge (London/New York: Routledge, 2000).
203. With respect to the work or action accomplished by language, including metaphor, and texts, see Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blarney and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991). I have discussed performative and material metaphors in Bono, "Why Metaphor" (above, n, 124), and in a number of earlier papers, as well as in my December 2004 paper "Performing Science" (above, n. 113).
204. For the cultural and narrative redescription of metaphors, and for the very idea of metaphors as performative and invitations to action, see James J. Bono, "Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), pp. 59-89; and esp. Bono, "Why Metaphor?" (above, n. 124).
205. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 33): Feeling is a fundamental feature of Whitehead's philosophy of organism, and he articulates the notion of lures for feelings in many places. I cite just two examples: "It is evident, however, that the primary function of theories is as a lure for feeling, thereby providing Immediacy of enjoyment and purpose" (p. 184); and, "A proposition is an element in the objective lure proposed for feeling, and when admitted into feeling it constitutes what is felt" (p. 187). It is also worth noting that for Whitehead, "Feelings are 'vectors'; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here" (p. 87; all emphases in the original). This Whiteheadian formulation gives added significance to Latour's reminder that reference (and by implication representation as) is a form, or process, of "bringing back." Among other points I would wish to stress, Whitehead's formulation captures - indeed insists upon - the fundamentally active and transformative quality of engaging the world; it arguably also insists on what we might today term the embodied character of cognition and meaning formation.
206. Stengers, "Whitehead's Account of the Sixth Day" (above, n. 90), p. 50.
207. Ibid.
208. Ibid.
209. Ibid., p. 52.
210. Ibid., (quoting Whitehead, Process [above, n. 33], pp. 186-188).
211. Ibid., p. 50.
212. Ibid., p. 52.
213. Ibid., (quoting Whitehead, Modes [above, n. 107], p. 36).
214. Ibid., p. 52.
215. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 6), p. 51.
216. Stengers, "Whitehead's Account" p. 54.