7 - Writing lived abstraction: James, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze

Summary

True lived experience [le vécu] is an absolutely abstract thing. The abstract is lived experience. I would almost say that once you have reached lived experience, you reach the most fully living core of the abstract.

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Seminar on Kant: Synthesis and Time’ (1978)

I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.

William James, Pragmatism (1981: 133)

We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience: ‘O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee?’

A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (1985: 50)

It is a mistake to suppose that, at the level of human intellect, the role of mental functionings is to add subtlety to the content of experience. The exact opposite is the case.

A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1961: 213)

Let us guard against seeing a simple game …

Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (2007: 86)

We have seen how abstraction in Beckett might be abstraction in no ordinary sense. But with this reference to the abstract machine, how do we explain that further turn in abstraction's contradictory work by which ‘True lived experience’ for Deleuze is now ‘an absolutely abstract thing’ (Deleuze 1978)? No longer cold, distanced, theoretical, abstraction for Deleuze becomes the definition of immersed and immediate, flowing and changing life. How does this happen, and what do we learn, about what we still want from abstraction, from the fact that abstraction lives on by figuring its seeming other, and even as a critique of itself?

‘Mainstream culture’, writes Alberto Toscano, one of the most assiduous chroniclers of contemporary abstraction, ‘still nurtures a certain hostility towards the “abstract”’ (Toscano 2008: 57). Toscano is discussing the strong revival of interest in A. N. Whitehead's philosophy and Whitehead's scrutiny of ‘our very culture of abstraction’, and reflects on the part abstraction might play in response to Deleuze's call for a ‘superior empiricism’:

(R)ecent conceptual production has sought to circumvent the customary reproaches against abstract thought by promoting concepts that are ever more vital, supple, pliant: flows, rhizomes, the virtual, scapes, the diagram, and so on.