Differential Life, Perception and the Nervous

Elements
Whitehead, Bergson and Virno on the technics of living

Andrew Murphie

The living being is above all a thoroughfare, and the essence of life is
in the movement by which life is transmitted. (Bergson, 1911: 128)

Life (anima on the side of the mental image) is always already cinema
(animation image-object). (Stiegler in Derrida & Stiegler, 2002: 162)

Redefining life is now an industry in itself. Life is increasingly put to work,

not only in a series of new technics,1 but also in a series of new concepts
(which could themselves be regarded as a kind of technics). This is obviously
the case within the biotechnology industries. It is less obvious but just as
important in HCI (human-computer interaction) industries and studies, in
new networks of perception, and in the new technics of cognition and
memory. It is the practical combination of technics and concepts in all these
areas that makes for new modes of living, new freedoms within, and new
controls over "life" often all at the same time.

Moreover, the proliferation of specific concepts of life is beginning to show

that life is not ultimately to be defined, but is found instead, in process,
specificity and plurality, 'in the interstices' (Whitehead, 1978: 106). It is
found in the interstices even of those technical practices and ideas that are
meant to capture and control life via tight procedures and narrow
redefinitions. Life emerges from the interstices to exceed performance
management, or outmanoeuvre the intellectual property borders set up by
biotechnology corporations.

This is not always problematic, not even for those corporate activities that at
first seem to resist life's interstitial becomings. In fact, the proliferation of
interstitial intensities between and within individual approaches to "life"
makes the constant redefinition of life an even more productive industry.
Life's elusive becomings keep the life industries going (here I mean the
technical production of life not only via biotechnologies but via media
technologies, lifestyle and performance management, etc). These industries
relentlessly re-align themselves to "life", quite literally by definition, and
there is always more "life" to capitalise. In sum, it is the mobility of life its
productive potential that gives life its seemingly infinite range of specific
virtual and actual individuations (see Cooper, 2002; Neilson, 2004; Massumi,
2002). In turn, this extends the territories within which life can be put to
work. It enables life to be worked via a series of different systems, concepts
and values. And, despite the rhetoric of genetic determination in biology, or
"learning outcomes" in the management of cognitive life, difference is indeed
the key here more precisely productive and ongoing differential relations.

At the same time, in a kind of double game, industrial developments are

devoted to the capture of life's potential under the spell of specific concepts
(with their patented technics) of life. Concepts here are not just "ideas".
They are indeed something like spells a form of "materialist magic". They
attempt to marshal forces, transformations, and potentials, in short, those
things that we cannot completely know, in the service of the magician
(researcher or corporation). Like magic, this industrial capture of life has two
sides. It involves diverse attempts at micro-managing the actual
individuations of life processes. At the same time it controls the production
and capture of life as virtual that is, precisely as potential for divergence
and differentiation, creativity in the interstices. The ambiguities that
currently surround patents, and intellectual property in general, all hinge on
this attempt to own both virtuality/potential and actual individuations.

I shall shortly propose a simple concept of life that of differential life life
in which new technics and concepts give new modes of access to the
virtuality of life. I shall then argue for the general importance of interactive
technics to an understanding of differential life. Following this, I shall briefly
describe some relevant examples of interactive technics. Then, using the
work of Henri Bergson and Alfred Whitehead, I shall give a more specific
conceptual framework for an expanded concept of differential life. Whitehead
himself long ago recognised that the 'status of life' was a key problem across
disciplines. He wrote that the status of life in nature is the modern
problematic of philosophy and of science. Indeed it is the central meeting
point of all the strains of systematic thought, humanistic, naturalistic,
philosophic. The very meaning of life is in doubt (Whitehead, 1938: 148). He
thought this was partly because of the muddle-headed positivism of his
times. This positivism still sometimes infects much research into interactive
technologies and life.

After describing Whitehead's philosophy of differential life in relation to

interactive technics, I shall then turn to Paulo Virno's work. Virno's work will
allow me to complicate the notion of differential life in terms of the
contemporary politics of the formation of labour. I shall argue that, precisely
as the differential intensity of life is industrialised and maximised, there is a
frequent and paradoxical diminution of life as lived. The end result is too
often the simple reduction of life to work, as Capital and governments face
increased demands to work life and research is directed towards finding
increased power to do so.

Of course, the total control over differential life that is sometimes sought is
seldom found. The working of life constantly converts life itself into
something else, creating new differential series, which in turn create new
freedoms. Life however it is defined tends to over-run its rationalised
contexts. For some at least, this calls for new forms of control (in the drive
towards a new world order, perhaps). Thus the importance to any industry
capitalising on differential life of what Virno calls "virtuosity" as an in situ
modulating response to life's over-running of its contexts.

Virtuosity also suggests the ambivalence of enjoyment within the over-

running of contexts. Enjoyment is a crucial register of the immanence of
living, an ongoing (and in itself virtuoso) modulation of the pleasure and pain
surrounding life's differentiations and integral assemblages. It also must be
captured in order to maximise the capital of differential life.

Here I shall be interested in the enjoyment found in assemblage, and in the

potential this assemblage has to allow the new to emerge from the routine.

It is for this reason that I shall later outline Alfred Whitehead's notion of self-
enjoyment. This notion provides a way of rethinking interactive technics in
terms other than the smooth symbolic processing and predictable outcomes
that often form a goal for interactive technics, for example in HCI (human-
computer interaction) research and development, or in biotechnological
manipulation (where genetic code is often taken as a pre-determined
message for the future it is supposed that we can neatly change this future
by changing the message2) or even in the way that many tend to think that
media and communications work.

Differential Life and New Technics

New technics have always led to mutations in the perception of matter.

These mutations in the perception of matter have changed not only our
concept of matter, but allowed us increasingly to animate matter, and
participate in matter's ongoing mutations (for example, in the development
of the cinema, or in the intervention in genetic matter3).

It would be a mistake, however, to think that recent technical interventions

in life have led to a new episteme, or a new world order (or empire) that
would give this new life, and new challenges to life, a common sense, and a
consistent politics. The result is rather more diffuse, and more differential.
Life is rendered (sometimes quite literally) more obviously the differential life
that it has always been. And yet, because shifts in perception lead to
mutations in matter, this "rendering obvious" changes life. Making
differential life more visible has led to an entire new 'ecology of practices'
(Stengers, 2002: 2624) surrounding life. Life now produces, and is produced
in, an ongoing and prolific series of relations between the technics of
perception and mediation, animated and mutated matter, and our own
'nervous elements' (Bergson, 1991: 65) which we often regard as closest to
our sense of self.

It follows, as above, that any definition of life can only be partial and
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provisional. Life is better understood in the plural, from many different Formatted: Left, Widow/Orphan control
angles at the same time.
As the bleed between concepts of life becomes something of a haemorrhage,
it has indeed become obvious that the 'living being is above all a
thoroughfare and the essence of life is in the movement by which life is
transmitted' (Bergson, 1911: 28). Life as a whole is thoroughfare for,
amongst other things: genes and related entities, biotechnologies, and
biometrics; electronic networks, human-computer interaction and
mnemotechnics (the networking and transduction between databases,
augmenting or even semi-replacing traditional memory); the
micromanipulation of cognitive and affective processes in social control (in
performance enhancement, new labour relations, new configurations of
enjoyment, and patterns of consumption); and of course mutating matter
itself in various forms (food, bodily fluids, impulses travelling via the
connections of nervous systems, etc).

New Modes of Living as Access to the Virtual

As the 'movement by which life is transmitted' becomes more complex, new

modes of living approach the complexity of differential intensity.

These new modes of living are a response to the question of finding new
forms of orientation to the shifting concepts and processes of life. Of course,
these new modes of living no longer give us "position".5 Instead, we could
say that the implications of the mathematics of differential calculus are
finally understood in the contexts of everyday life. This is to say that the new
modes of living give us differentials and integrals as a guide to our
movement within the world, instead of fixed points of reference. Or, we could
say that orientation increasingly involves not only position but also precise
velocities, modulations, differential conjunctions. In short, one is not only
placed vis a vis places but also between places places that are themselves
in the process of movement and transformation. With this complex
orientation towards conjunctions and splits, flows and shifts, differential life
opens up to virtualization.6 Tiziana Terranova provides a very good definition
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of this new access to the virtual. Formatted: English (US), Do not check
spelling or grammar
The virtualization of a process involves opening up a real understood as
devoid of transformative potential to the action of forces that exceed it
from all sides. In an informational sense, the virtual appears as the site
not only of the improbable, but of the openness of biophysical (but also
socio-cultural) processes to the irruption of the unlikely and the
inventive. (Terranova, 2004: 27)

I shall shortly turn to Bergson, Whitehead and Virno in order to give an

account of this unlikely and inventive opening up of the real to the virtual. I
am not attempting to analyse the precise relations between them.7 I am
rather using the idea of all three thinkers to examine the politically urgent
questions involving the current syntheses of modes of living and concepts of
life in relation to the virtual. Throughout, the question of the relation
between the biotechnological and the mnemotechical syntheses of modes of
living will remain implicitly crucial. However, as biotechnology and
mnemotechnics are co-determining, I hope this will give me sufficient excuse
to focus on the mnemotechnical syntheses (primary in the form of HCI
events). If further argument for this is needed, Richard Beardsworth has
written that

molecular biologys own understanding of itself is philosophically naive

and pre-critical, if it fails to think the technical mediations that inform,
from the first, its framing of what it understands as the real, whether
it be the gene or any other constituent of life (Beardsworth, 1996:
unpaginated).

Interactive Life

Does the question "What is life?" have to have one answer in relation to
technics? Bergson, Whitehead and Virno will allow us to think this question in
terms that allow for differential life. I am particularly interested in the way in
which Bergson and Whitehead thought might contribute to the stream of
research into human-machine interactions based upon notions of embedded,
contingent or situated cognition.8 This is an approach at odds with the
somewhat prevailing approach in a number of related areas (media,
cognitive science, HCI and even some aspects of biotechnological
development) that which perhaps remains overly attached to cognitivism9
and symbolic processing. Virno will allow us to understand the dubious
political situation brought into being by this attachment.

There are two bases to this approach.

First; life itself is taken as interactive from the start, and moreover, as
inhabiting a series of interactive technics (for example, biotechnologies,
reproductive technologies, technologies of perception and mediation, the
techniques by which one lives moment to moment) immersed among other
series (the world at large). This is the basis of what I have called differential
life. Life is not taken as something more or less passive with which
interactive technologies interact (or vice versa). If we begin with interaction,
there is no passivity, but rather a groundless field for the emergence of what
Whitehead calls occasions of experience (1938: 151). Interaction is
assumed as primary, not as something that comes after the supposed
stable entities involved. Shifts in our interactive engagements can be seen
to challenge life, but they can just as usefully be seen merely to express,
indeed create the processual life that is already there differently and not
only in the future, but at every moment of every interaction. Such an
understanding allows us to more effectively examine the life that is already
lived in conjunction with technics. This approach is also suggestive of a social
theory and ethics of interactive life, situated within the immanence of
current technical developments, not one fixed upon possible future
developments, ongoing research, etc (of course, this is important as well).
Second; perceptions, sensations, actions and mediations are taken as crucial
components of life as crucial as biochemical metabolism, or creative
intelligence. Biologists may have valid questions about metabolism and life
from which we have much to learn in an interdisciplinary setting. Innovators
in interactive technologies, however, have as many valid questions about
perceptions, sensations, actions, mediations and life. Indeed, it is important
to investigate the difficulty of separating these processes absolutely when
thinking of interactive fields. Indeed, there are several transdisciplinary areas
investigating the junction of these processes.

Metabolising Information

Some physical interactions even biochemical transductions are often now

thought as carrying a series of what may best be termed for now,
informational forces. The recent development of the new (trans)disciplines
of biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer, 1996; Harries-Jones, 2002) and neurosemiotics
(Favareau, 2002) have suggested that communication what I prefer to see
as 'a-signifying semiological' interaction (Guattari, 1995a: 4) occurs at the
level of living cells and neurons. Any living system is already a question of
the interaction of information channels, assemblages of forces and
biochemical reactions. Of course, this means that informational forces are
never only, or always even, symbolic processes. It is precisely this that gives
work with biotechnologies and the bio-informatics much of their force.

Moreover, living systems come together with other forms of interaction in a

society of networks (Castells, 2000; Terranova, 2004), machinic
assemblages (Guattari, 1995a & 1995b), or hypercomplexity (Qvortrup,
2002). In short, information, the transduction of forces and biochemical
reactions are interdependent. This of course was the basic realisation of
cybernetics half a decade ago but it is often forgotten today (Dupuy, 2000)
in the analysis of HCI (and related fields), in part due to the reduction of
interaction to the premises of cognitivism. These premises provide a more
docile and linear series of objects and processes to study, and more
opportunity for research outcomes to be documented, funding bodies to be
persuaded and so on, it is true. This ease of use along with the production
of a docile form of interactive life is in part the reason they are so
widespread.

However, many recent theorists thinking about interactive technics have

moved beyond these premises. These theorists draw on a diverse range of
older philosophies as well as contemporary neuroscience or contemporary
developments in interactive technologies, often by-passing or minimising
many of the major tenets of HCI studies, and related areas, drawn from
cognitive psychology (roboticist Rodney Brooks, for example, writes simply of
intelligence without reason [1991a] and intelligence without representation
[1991b]). They have further complicated our understanding of living
systems, human intelligence, and the role of technics within life, proposing a
powerful mix of information and embodiment, life and technics. In such
contexts, mind is an emergent, structurally coupled property of radical
embodiment (Varela and Thompson, 2001). The most notable of these
structural couplings is between brain, body and world, in extended mind
(Clark, 1997).

In addition, for some of these thinkers it is technics that makes for human
life. For Bernard Stiegler (1998), for example, there is no human life without
technics. Human life has always been that life which is pre-mediated by
technics. There is no "human" that comes before the technical. This means
that human life has always been a somewhat paradoxical assemblage of the
living and the non-living human life has the dead, the mechanical, the past
at its heart as well as anything we might call living, strictly speaking. Stiegler
writes that, as technics is a process of exteriorization, technics is the
pursuit of life by means other than life (Stiegler, 1998: 17). And for Stiegler
it is particularly the technics of mediation that inhabit human life, often in a
foundational (if differential) manner of time, space, memory,
understanding, imagination, vision, reason, movement, etc. In particular, the
new technics of networked mediation make for a tertiary series of retentions
that increasingly intervene, indeed constitute, human short and long term
memory. Technics also provide a 'fourth synthesis' (Stiegler, 2003a:
unpaginated) that is increasingly found at the heart of Kant's three syntheses
of understanding, imagination and reason (and indeed the passive synthesis
of intuition). Now more than ever, there is no life, not even an awareness of
life, that does not take place within an ecology of the living and the non-
living. This means that embodiment is always processually assembled. There
is no "essential" body as against technics.

At the same time, to say that life is found in the interaction with technical
systems is not to say that the machines are alive. Margaret Boden has
convincingly argued that metabolism is a fundamental requisite of the sort
of self-organization that is characteristic of life (1999: 246). This means
bluntly that strong A-life is impossible (ibid.). Yet this tells us that there are
other questions about life and interaction, questions that are not to do with
whether machines themselves are alive. What of the life that is lived in
concert with machines the shifts in metabolism occasioned by shifts in
embodied mediations and vice versa (see Elizabeth Wilson, 2004), and
perhaps the challenges or additions to metabolism as a criterion of life? What
if radically embodied theories of (often technically) extended mind are
applied to life? What if, at the same time, we were, more radically than the
approaches of cognitivism or symbolic-processing, to take into account the
part that perceptions and actions, sensations and mediations (or what we
shall see Whitehead calls "prehensions"), play in the processes of living. And
not only at the level of cells and neurons, but throughout the entire
processual assemblage, and mixed networks in which life is lived? Instead of
the processing of symbols, linear forms of development and communication,
or smooth ergonomic flows with the workplace, we might find network drives
and archive fevers (Derrida, 1998). There may be a role for symbolic
processing in these drives and fevers. Yet, if anything at all, symbolic
processes and symbols form only a subset of the non-living (that is, dead)
part of the larger assembly that is thinking as life.

To live, then, is to assemble and mediate interactions between what we

might normally call "living" and non-living. It is literally to bring data,
archives and so on (the past) into life, in combination with the as yet
unactualised futures of potential interactions.

Furthermore, life does not do this neutrally not, we might say in the old
sense at least, purely technically, or according to some boring routine. It
does so in active self-enjoyment (Whitehead, 1938: 150). Assemblage and
mediation allow both the self and enjoyment not so much to impose
themselves on an interaction, but to emerge from it (and by self here, we do
not necessarily mean the subject, especially not the human subject self-
enjoyment is a part of all entities all occasions of experience as they
become occasions).

This very rough sketch suggests that interactive technologies are a matter of
life (network drives, assemblage, the transductions of various forces,
chemicals etc) and death (archive fevers, disassembly). With apologies for
their brevity, I shall briefly list some examples of self-enjoyment in
interactive assembly from art and the everyday. I shall then finish with an
extended discussion of the theoretical frameworks to which I have gestured
towards so far.

The Unexpected Actual in Occasions of Self-Enjoyment

As if on a cadaver that is nevertheless a technics that brings me into a

different mode of living, I lay my hands upon an anatomically correct model
of a human body lying supine on a table. Set into this body are some 100
proximity, pressure, light and sounds sensors and a theremin (Paul
Woodrow and Alan Dunnings Derive) (Woodrow and Dunning, n.d.). To
interact with this body is also to assemble and be assembled within
occasions of self-enjoyment with the sonic and visual environment that this
interaction produces. The data, ones own and the system's, is brought into
an unexpected series of actualisations. Or, in simple self-enjoyment (again
not necessarily as a subject, but as an occasion of experience,10 that is, the
self-enjoyment of the occasion as a whole), I chase a robot on bicycle wheels
around the room but it is more than an object and I am less than a subject
the robot also follows me, plays with me (Simon Pennys Petit Mal [1995]).
I can also play chasings with polygons, and assemble in self-enjoyment
within an interactive visual field, as I chase image particles around the
virtual environment of the Cave in Pennys Traces (1998-2000). Here
Penny's stated aim is to produce the visceral sensation of collisions with
virtual objects (Penny, n.d.), as opposed to a disembodied experience. Or, in
a literal rendering of symbols as forces subject to embodiment, with my
hands I hit words like tennis balls as sentences disassemble and peel off the
walls in another VR installation (in Wardrip-Fruin, McClain, Greenlee, and
Carrolls Screen [2002]).

Maybe predetermined data and unactualised potentials a fusion of the

forces of indexical signs, music and the dancing body are assembled in real
time in the games arcade as I dance in Dance Dance Revolution. Or in
another playful example, maybe Sony Playstation's Eye Toy and the video
game Kung Foo allow me to re-actualise a martial arts training that was
"archived" long ago (as now vague habits of youth in my aging body). We
could say that the habitual data and unactualised potential material involved
have remained virtual until re-actualised when confronted with Kung Foo's
interface. Eye Toy captures the images of my movements in real-time and
places these within the frame of the television screen. As my upper body fills
the screen and is surrounded by cartoon attackers, it becomes clear that I
have always been one interactive image amongst others (as Bergson saw it).
I discover myself assembled within a whole different mode of perception. It
is a good example of the difference it makes when the non-living is
assembled with the living. The ecology of self-enjoyment in which I am
involved has to adjust, re-assemble. I also rediscover a certain level of
fitness, or lack thereof, as I rapidly lose my breath in the haze of technically
enhanced perception/metabolism.

Such lived relations between data and potential are lived the more in even
broader interactive networks. Maybe my local network drives and archive
fevers (say in the enjoyment of music) join with those of others as I interact
with the Internet radio station found at http://www.last.fm. My data (the
music I like) and as yet unactualised potentials (the as yet unheard music I
might like because other people who have similar tastes like it) are brought
into a vast network of the data and potentials of others. The next song
played constantly surprises me. It really has changed my life.

Digital technologies also make strange new forms of network ecologies in the
more experimental arts. In 1996, I visited a three-story gallery in
Copenhagen, in which 50 actors on 20 sets carried out improvisations as
determined by a computer processing live-via-satellite video images of an
ants nest in the United States (Lars von Triers Verdensuret see Murphie,
2004a). Such interactive networks combine a variety of self-enjoyments
ants, actors, audience for a start. To take another related example, there are
the strange new interactive ecologies of the visual arts. In the case of
Levitation Grounds by Joyce Hinterding & David Haines, 2000-2002, their
own digital 3D imagery was a combined with satellite images received from
passing weather satellites (see
http://www.caos.org.au/members/galleries/THE_LEVITATION_GROUNDS/).
Or, to take another wonderful example of the meeting of metabolism,
sensation and interface, there is Ulrike Gabriels installation Breath (1992), in
which the rhythms of breathing of the user change the visual experience in a
3D environment which of course changes the breathing of the user, and so
on.
In all these examples, perception is crucial to life as lived in the entire
assemblage of self-enjoyment and vice versa. Moreover, it would not be
right to take these as the special cases they might seem. In general, it is
impossible to imagine any process of living separate from perception even
for an amoeba.

Perception is not understood here in the sense of representations given to a

pre-existing subject, a communication between an isolated self and a
world distinct from this self. Rather I shall take up Bergsons sense of
perception as the very basis of our interactive immersion in the world, a
world in which we are interactive images amongst other interactive images
(it is useful to think of an image as any sensation; and to think of a
perception/action continuum, arising from movement, in interaction with
light, or sound, touch, etc; it is not useful to restrict the notion of image to
visual representation).

Life as Immersion in Sensation

Bergson is particularly effective at explaining the intertwined nature of

perception/action and life. I will quote a well-known passage from Bergsons
work here at length, as it is so apposite to the part interactive technologies
play in life. Bergson begins from interaction.

So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images, and in

this material universe we perceive centers of indetermination,
characteristics of life. In order that actions may radiate from these
centers, the movements or influences of the other images must be, on
the one hand, received and, on the other hand, utilized. Living matter,
in its simplest form and in a homogeneous state, accomplishes this
function simultaneously with those of nourishment and repair
perception arises from the same cause which has brought into being the
chain of nervous elements, with the organs which sustain them and with
life in general Perception, in its pure state, is, then, in very truth, a
part of things. And, as for affective sensation, it does not spring
spontaneously from the depths of consciousness to extend itself, as it
grows weaker, in space; it is one with the necessary modifications to
which, in the midst of the surrounding images that influence it, the
particular image that each one of us terms his body is subject.
(Bergson, 1991: 63-65 my emphasis)

So for Bergson we live among moving images (our own body for Bergson is
one image among others though a special image). Life actualises itself as a
series of centres of indetermination in the complex whirling of these images
in relation to each other. Life is thus not only survival in the sense of
nourishment and so on, but also the ability to act from within centres of
indetermination. Or we could say that if life is survival, this is dependent
upon being able to act from within centres of indetermination (one problem
is that these centres are constantly transforming themselves).
Sensation is of the form of this movement of images and the deepening of
sensation (habits and modulations of habits in interaction with novelty, to
put it too simply) gives us our sense of our interactive selves (we might say
that sensation is converted into a kind of intuition). This leads us to
Whitehead's concept of life.

Life as an Offensive against Repetition Self-Enjoyment

For Whitehead, life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious

mechanism of the Universe (1956: 102) (This incidentally seems to me to
describe the very life of the computer game, in that it is directed not only to
repeat, but to conquer repetition, to rebel against the game in repeating it).
By this Whitehead meant that life was an excess beyond mechanistic
repetition, an aim at that perfection which the conditions of its environment
allow (1956: 102). In short, life is a bid for freedom (Whitehead, 1978:
104). This is also a bid for a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment
(Whitehead, 1938: 150).

Life and self-enjoyment are not necessarily exactly the same, but they are
closely related in that they are perhaps the two sides to this 'bid'. Self-
enjoyment in assemblage arises in parallel to the real freedom that occurs in
an ongoing individuation, or transduction, to use Gilbert Simondons term
(1992: 313), a translation of forces so that they can come together into a
novel assemblage. Of course, a similar notion is found in Maturana and
Varelas (1980) discussion of life as autopoiesis, although Whitehead is
perhaps closer to Guattaris understanding of a combination of autopoiesis
with allopoiesis (Guattari, 1995b). In this there is a

certain immediate individuality, which is a complex process of

appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as
relevant by the physical processes of nature. Life implies the absolute,
individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process of appropriation. I
have, in my recent writings, used the prehension to express this process
of appropriation. Also I have termed each individual act of immediate
self-enjoyment an occasion of experience. I hold that these unities of
existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which
in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging
into creative advance. (Whitehead, 1938: 150-151 my emphasis)

This was no abstraction or idealism, as although the aim is always beyond

the attained fact The goal is some type of perfected things, however lowly
and basically sensual (Whitehead, 1956: 102).

Neither is it a complete rejection of routine, or of habit. Rather, like

databases, these routines and habits play their part in interactive novelty. In
fact, routine cannot be completely assimilated into a controlling knowledge
(as sometimes assumed in more rigid cognitivist approaches to HCI, and
related areas). Routine is too engaged with the modulations of practical life
to be a complete tool of control. Routine or habit (or memory for that
matter) always involve a repetition and a difference. They are differential.
Furthermore, the more interactive it gets, and the more networked, then the
more intense are the differences in repetition in the constant adaptation to
shifting network ecologies. Whitehead writes, Now it is the beginning of
wisdom to understand that social life is founded upon routine, but he also
writes that The notion of complete understanding controlling action is an
ideal in the clouds, grotesquely at variance with practical life (1956: 114-
115).

This is at odds with many of the fantasies of control that surround interactive
technologies. Sticking to technical routines is often given precisely and
contra Whitehead as a way of complete control over the ecology of actions
within the network. Yet only partial control in the form of immersion or
participation ever results, at the same time as a multiplication of the
intensities of differences via networked ecologies.

These differential intensities are literally felt that is, lived as new
sensations (new occasions of experience) within the interactions involved.
This explains the intensification of felt (often antinomies of) power so
dramatically played out through interactive technologies. This play can
perhaps be harmless, as in some interactive art. Yet if coupled with a desire
for control, this play of differential intensity can producing the political
antinomy of our times. This often leads to a certain virulence in the
management of life (something mirrored in some computer games). It also
leads to a series of resistances to differential life and interactive technics.

Castells (2000) has pointed out that many of the actions of those immersed
in the network society are directed precisely against an immersion in
networked intensity. They are directed towards stabilisation, resisting change
where possible, creating or preserving identities, even and especially when
the case is hopeless. Even fifty years ago Whitehead could see that this was
the effect of a nasty historical hangover.

The whole of this tradition is warped by the vicious assumption that

each generation will substantially live amid the conditions governing the
lives of its fathers and will transmit those conditions to mould with equal
force the lives of its children. We are living in the first period of history
for which this assumption is false. (Whitehead, 1956: 102)

Whitehead's philosophy is perhaps an antidote to the virulent antinomy of

control and intensity in contemporary politics. For much contemporary
politics, it would seem that the task is to encourage or promise an impossible
repetition that would transcend the new differential intensities (that of course
such politics also feed upon at the same time). Whitehead's approach is the
inverse. It is the task of life, in Whiteheads terms, to aim beyond this
repetition while remaining immanent to it.
This approach also allows Whitehead to avoid opposing the technics of
repetition to life, rather posing an immanent philosophy of life as emergent
from repetition. The virulent antinomy is defused in favour of the enjoyment
of novelty.

Let us tease out the life, enjoyment and novelty a little. Although very much
involved with each other, they are not the same. Life includes the self-
enjoyment of a novelty that is real. Yet the concept of self-enjoyment does
not exhaust that aspect of process here termed life (Whitehead, 1938: 151).
Self-enjoyment is enjoyment of particular processes related to life. It is
enjoyment of

a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion. It is

in the process of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which
antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealised
potentialities. The process of self-creation is the transformation of
potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes
the immediacy of self-enjoyment. (Whitehead, 1938: 151)

Of course, the enjoyment is in the specific processes given by the aim the
differential intensities of specific series of events in relation. The enjoyment
is not in any impossible and vague ideal. One could recall here the
specificities of martial arts training as opposed to, for example, ballet
training, my own body's habits with regards to martial arts, the development
of Sony's specific platform for video games, and the specific games, all with
their own potential events that are actualised in relation to each other in a
specific occasion of experience (the playing of Kung Foo). Other instances
would provide other specific occasions of experience. We can thus talk about
"life" in many specific forms. Doing so would open up HCI, biotechnology and
other practices involved in modes of living (for example, architecture and
design in general) to the differential intensity inherent within them.

It is perhaps at this point that we can understand what Whitehead calls life
as 'aim'. Differential life being novel is always specific. Moreover, the
novel has a certain consistency. It is not a matter of "anything goes". For
Whitehead, aim meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative
potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which
constitutes the selected way of entertaining data in the process of
unification (1938: 152).

Thus the characteristics of life are absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity,

aim (ibid.). It is this combination that allows us to rethink interactive
technics.

The Interaction of Actualized Data and the Virtual

For Whitehead, we must distinguish between

 the actualised data presented by the antecedent world, the non-
actualized potentialities which lie ready to promote their fusion into a
new unity of experience and the immediacy of self-enjoyment which
belongs to the creative fusion of those data with those potentialities.
(Whitehead, 1938: 151)

To think about interactive occasions such as computer games or interactive

artworks is to have to think about actualised data, but also about non-
actualized potentials and the creative fusion of both (and the virtuality that is
brought to bear the more complexity there is, and the more relational
networks there are to be drawn into an occasion of experience an
example I have described here is that of the internet radio station last.fm).

Life lived is a creative fusion of past and future, although a fusion that is
never complete but maintains, within specific assemblages of self-
enjoyment, series of differential intensities (so that I can play Sony' Kung
Foo differently next time, or so that every time I listen to last.fm, it will be
different more different than a standard radio station). Within an
engagement with interactive technologies, this fusion involves a literal and
specific series of embodiments of the differential intensities of broader
networked ecologies. While acknowledging the importance of routine, life in
these contexts is defined according to the

originality of response to stimulus. This amounts to the doctrine that

an organism is alive when in some measure its reactions are
inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritanceThus a single
occasion is alive when the subjective aim which determines its process
of concrescence has introduced a novelty of definiteness not to be found
in the inherited data of its primary phase. (Whitehead, 1978: 105).

In other words, we could say, life is play. In Virno's (2004) terms, life
expresses a certain virtuosity (and this, we shall see, is its value to Capital).
In that Whitehead is describing a network of processes, summed up in the
word "occasion", his ideas are particularly apposite to the networks of
sensations, perceptions and actions in a highly technical society. Whitehead's
concern with the mutual immersion of routine and indetermination is
particularly useful. Both routine and indetermination have to be worked with
simultaneously in order to achieve anything at all we could say simply to
live with interactive technologies.

The Network, Life and Society

Whiteheads notion of life thus makes sense of the network society as a

evocation of intensities (1978: 105) that do not necessarily pre-exist that
evocation (rather than only as an assembly and operation of pre-existent
cognitive artefacts and symbols). It is now that we can understand why it is
that life is 'in the interstices'. Whitehead explains that neither society nor
subjectivity are enough to explain this evocation of intensities.
 Gods purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities.
The evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute aim. The
characteristic of a living society is that a complex structure of inorganic
societies is woven together for the production of a non-social nexus
characterized by the intense physical experiences of its members. But
such an experience is derivate from the complex order of the material
animal body, and not from the simple personal order of past occasions
with analogous experience. There is intense experience without the
shackle of reiteration from the past. This is the condition for spontaneity
of conceptual reaction. The conclusion to be drawn from this argument
is that life is a characteristic of empty space and not of space occupied
by any corpuscular society. In a nexus of living occasions, there is a
certain social deficiency. Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell,
and in the interstices of the brain. (Whitehead, 1978: 105-106 my
emphasis)

Social context is not enough11 not even in a society of cells or neurons.

Although, of course, this life in the interstices does eventually turn back to
society: it binds originality within bounds, and gains the massiveness due to
reiterated character (Whitehead, 1978: 107). I shall go into this relation
between the pre-existent and novelty the bounded and the interstitial as
again it is relevant to interactive technics.

First, Whiteheads philosophy is based on a notion of process (or becoming)

there is no nature apart from transition (1938: 152). It only takes into
account actual, processual but specific occasions of experience. It is
therefore based upon what is actually relevant within a given assemblage of
circumstances that comes together in on ongoing manner to form events
an endeavour has been made to base philosophical thought upon the most
concrete elements in our experience (Whitehead, 1978: 18). This is a matter
of what is relevant to what he calls actual entities or actual occasions the
latter would include any kind of existence, whether of God or of the most
trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. In other words, all entities
are occasions temporal, in process, events.

Second, Whiteheads is a philosophy of assemblages of these occasions

the reason for things are always to be found in the composite nature of
definite actual events (1978: 19).

Third, what he calls "prehensions" are central to the assemblage of

occasions. Although not entirely accurate, we could say that a prehension is
a kind of basic transportable perception/cognition extracted from other
actual occasions (or we could say that perception/cognition is the transport
of prehensions). More precisely, a prehension is an element of the real
relationality between actual entities ('Actual entities involve each other by
reason of their prehensions of each other' [Whitehead, 1978: 20]). It is also
carries the burden of the relationship of actual present experiences to actual
past experiences. It allows for an embodied experience that is also an
experience of process of the event (although prehensions are not
immediately sensory as in empirical data they are more like an intuition). A
prehension is a kind of intensity. It is both more and less than a symbol, a
cognition, information, or even perhaps a personalised "feeling" or sensation
(and thus gives us a very different set of possibilities for understanding
interactive technics). We might describe it as a kind of slightly virtualised
version of an actual entity. It is a carriage of an entity's diagram of
differential intensity into a new assemblage of self-enjoyment or occasion of
experience. Of course, in the process, a prehension is dynamic, and allows
passage from past the future. An example Whitehead gives is thirst. '"thirst"
is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of
its quenching' (Whitehead, 1978: 32).

A prehension reproduces in itself the general characteristics of an actual

entity: it is referent to an external world, and in this sense will be said to
have a vector character; it involves emotion, and purpose, and valuation,
and causation (Whitehead, 1978: 19). It is not the actual entity itself,
however, because it is only partial, referring elsewhere to the entity. As such
prehensions are about the relatedness of actual occasions, or better, of past
occasions come together into a new assemblage. Prehensions can be positive
or negative, in that, relationally, an actual entity has a perfectly definite
bond with each item in the universe (Whitehead, 1978: 41). Negative
prehensions involve definite exclusion of that item from positive contribution
to the subjects own real internal constitution (ibid.) and positive
prehensions involve definite inclusion.

In other words this is a theory of interactivity, in which final causation and

atomism are interconnected philosophical principles (Whitehead, 1978: 19)
and 'the reasons for things are always to be found in the composite nature of
definite actual entities'. Prehensions are prehensions because they pre-exist
the coming together of new actual occasions of experience. Yet it is the
coming together that matters and this is transformative (thus producing
novelty). As such, the relations subsequently formed are what are crucial to
entities conceived as processual events (occasions of experience such as a
particular quenching of thirst). As Deleuze writes, relations themselves are
types of events and Events in their turn are types of relations: they are
relations to existence and to time (1993: 52). This, incidentally, tells us
what a living person is (and in fact what all living entities or events are). A
living person is some definite type of prehensions transmitted from occasion
to occasion of its existence (Whitehead, 1978: 107).

However, this becomes more complicated in the coming together of pure

physical feelings (the obvious felt embodiment of, for example, 'the transfer
of energy in the physical world' as felt by 'simple actual entities' [Whitehead,
1978: 246]) and conceptual feelings. As Whitehead tries to avoid a
mind/body split, one way to describe the latter is as the feeling of a concept
something that "feels like a thought". In other words, this is that which is
often bracketed off into the kind of study performed by cognitive science, but
for Whitehead this is not wise. For him, 'conceptual feelings are primarily
derivate from physical feelings, and secondarily from each other'
(Whitehead, 1978: 247). We could thus think of conceptual feelings as a
particular series of feelings immersed amongst others, somewhat distinct in
character but not separate from other feelings in this immersion that is,
the non-conceptual feelings.

On the other hand, the assemblage of pure physical feelings is hybridised by

the conceptual feelings, once derived. This leads to "impurity", in which 'an
"impure" mental prehension is also an "impure" physical prehension and vice
versa' (Whitehead, 1978: 33). This occurs, in other words, when the actual
entity forming the datum is objectified by one of its own conceptual feelings
(Whitehead, 1978: 246). This is usually the case. Again it is a matter of the
relational, and this leads to hybrid prehensions. A 'hybrid prehension is the
prehension by one subject of a conceptual prehension, or of an impure
prehension, belonging to the mentality of another subject (Whitehead,
1978: 107).

Collapsing the Walls between Embodiment and Abstraction

Today we might say that pure physical feelings have never been so mixed in
with their related 'conceptual feelings'. We might also say that prehensions
have never been so mixed so "hybrid". The startling result is that
networked ecologies of subjectivity are undoing, both conceptually and in
everyday practice, the final thin borders between embodiment and
abstraction/concept/cognition. A defining aspect of network and interactive
technics is that they allow us to feel networked abstraction, impure
prehension, so well (an obvious example might be Wardrip-Fruin et al's
Screen, as described above, in which words can be hit away in a virtual
environment). It is this that forms the basis for our interactive participation
in real formations of specific abstraction.

Networks, interactive technologies, and interfaces, can all be seen as

transporters and intensifiers of prehensions and they blur the boundary
between pure and the impure more and more. We can also see
networked interactive engagements with their rules, procedures, and taking
up of habits and techniques, as kinds of society (examples might again be
gameplay, or the network of research and other practices such as legislation
surrounding stem cell development). Life moves in the interstices of these
societies, introducing novelty that then turns back into the actual occasions
of experience of societies.

If there is a subject to be found in all this, it is Whitehead's subject-

superject. The subject-superject (Whitehead, 1978: 28) involved in
interactions is only partly social (thus Whitehead's novel concept of the
subject). It inhabits the gaps of unactualised potential that are not yet
social in the full sense. It finds self-enjoyment in the bringing together of a
unity of experience from both the social and unactualised potential (as a final
cause it brings together prehensions, habits, techniques, hybrid prehensions,
previous and other occasions of experience).
In sum, Whitehead's philosophy can explain the intensity and dynamism of
interactive technologies within the network society. It also allows us to raise
questions about the status of perception/cognition (or prehension) in relation
to life as variation or intensity, and both in relation to technics and the
social. Such conceptual movements so complicate many common notions in
the study of interactive technics that they call for a diverse methodological
experimentation to match that found in interactive technologies themselves
(Lunenfeld, 2000; Murphie, 2004b).

This experimentation with the intensity of the new, however, also forms part
and parcel of the new politics of worked life. I shall therefore conclude with a
brief summary of the relevant ideas of Paulo Virno (2004).

Life, Cognition, Work and Politics

Whitehead's work allows us to begin to develop a positive understanding of

differential life that emerges from the interstices of contemporary events
involving technics. It also allows us a politics that analyses the social as it is.
More importantly, however, it allows both an understanding of, and
participation in, the synthesis of new modes of living that arise within the
interstices of a society as they arise. All three of these are useful points from
which to begin to propose a politics of the technics of the living.

Yet it is perhaps the new forms of synthesis that must be engaged with
above all else. As I outlined at the beginning, one crucial combination in this
regard is the expansion of the engagement with the potential of life via
technics which is synthesised with/modulating by the reduction of life to
"worked life" (a life which is increasingly over-worked at every level).

In response to this, the temptation is to think that it is, as always, a question

of a concept of life misapplied for political gain one that can be correctly by
critical analysis. Yet it is much more than this. The reduction of life to work is
an active conversion of life itself. It is a re-synthesis of life in favour of its
appropriation into the new attempts to both open up the virtual to Capital,
and to regulate this opening up of the virtual in the direction of particular
modes of life that feed back into the new networks of worked life.

The concept of worked life here has many aspects. It includes new modes
of organization of production that reduce life to work (along with associated
strategies that Virno points to, such as those concerning the increased
synthesis of cognition as labour [2004: 61]). It includes worked life as
conceived within biotechnology, that is, the obvious working of life via its
possible modes of (bio)technical reproducibility. As we have seen, it also
includes the working of life via new networks of perception, and via the rapid
expansion of the mnemotechnics that have always played an important part
in human modes of living.
It would be easy to take Whitehead's concept of self-enjoyment as in
opposition to the notion of worked life, and in many ways it does re-open the
potential of differential life beyond its forms of capture in, for example, the
deployment of cognitivism. Yet I would suggest Virno complicates the notion
of self-enjoyment itself via his concept of 'virtuosity' (2004: 61), something
very close to an ongoing event of self-enjoyment, but this time precisely as a
mode of living in ongoing capture by new labour relations.

For Virno, the virtuosity of temporary assembly and creativity in thinking or

living, often taken as oppositional to more static and obviously oppressive
modes of labour, is one of the characteristics of labour in the contemporary
formations of Capital. Virtuosity, the ongoing enjoyment of assemblage, is
one of the defining characteristics of the labour of what Virno, among others,
calls the "multitude".

The multitude is the mode of social life at odds with what has been assumed
as the basis of political life throughout the modern, that is, the "people". A
people is engaged in the act of producing identifiable forms of general
communality (such as via a public sphere or democracy) through relatively
fixed processes (like voting). A people is more or less unified in common
political purpose, whether that is the expansion of empires, or opposition to
Capitalist modes of production. On the other hand, the multitude is a kind of
differential series. It never comes together in the general way that the
people is supposed to.

For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such

in the public scene without evaporating within a centripetal form of
motion. Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the
many, seen as being many (Virno, 2004: 21)

The multitude is then a diversity linked by differential networks. As Virno

puts it

An entire gamut of considerable phenomena-linguistic games, forms of

life, ethical inclinations, salient characteristics of production in today's
world will end up to be only slightly, or not at all, comprehensible,
unless understood as originating from the mode of being of the many.
To investigate this mode of being, one must circumnavigate the
multitude-continent, changing frequently the angle of perspective.
(Virno, 2004: 22)

However, there is something unifying the multitude, if in its diversity. The

differential unification of diversity is the very power of globalisation and
networked technics. More than this, globalisation and networked technics
allow the diversity of the multitude to be capitalised by a new form of
functionalist overdetermination. The

multitude does not rid itself of the One, of the universal, of the
common/shared; rather, it redefines the One. The One of the multitude
 no longer has anything to do with the One constituted by the State,
with the One towards which the people converge. (Virno, 2004: 42)

What constitutes this One? It is the functionalist

linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the species the general

intellect. It has to do with a unity/universality which is visibly unlike
that of the state. Let us be clear: the cognitive-linguistic habits of the
species do not come to the forefront because someone decides to
make them come to the forefront; they do so out of necessity, or
because they constitute a form of protection in a society devoid of
substantial communities (or of "special places"). (Virno, 2004: 42 - my
emphasis)

First, I will assume here that this general multitude of functionalist linguistic-
cognitive habits are always embodied forms of cognition, precisely because
they are 'habits', in (embodied cognitive) labour or enjoyment for example.

Secondly, I will assume that this does not preclude cognitive-linguistic habits
(falsely) premised upon concepts of disembodiment (as in cognitivism or
symbolic processing, for example, both of which are of course, central to the
functioning of the general intellect in the imposition of cognitivist
educational theories on the deployment of technics within universities, for
example). Of course, these concepts must find real embodied assemblages in
order to continue to exist.

Thirdly, I will assume that these habits are interlinked across the new
networks that exceed any state, community or notion of the people.

With these assumptions, we can begin to explain the synthesis of a broad

range of conceptions and practices involved in modes of living. In many of
these the point of the dialogue between a modulating but tightly channelled
and regulated series of linguistic-cognitive habits (in performance
management, learning outcomes, or intellectual property as applied to the
manipulation of genetic material or the work on creative arts such as music
or film) and the enhanced potential of life is both to produce the potential in
a certain manner, and to synthesise particular modes of living suited to the
differential intensities involved.

Of course, Whitehead has shown that this will never be a predictable affair,
for which we can be thankful, but this is precisely where the work of
virtuosity is targeted. There is increasingly a kind of virtuosity, whether in
the production of stem cells, in new interactive technologies, or in the
working, thinking subject-superject. It is a virtuosity that works towards a
potential to produce' (Virno, 2004: 81) 'and produce itself (Lotringer in
Virno, 2004: 12). Potential is always what is at stake.

"Life," pure and simple bios, acquires a specific importance in as much

as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential.
 Capitalists are interested in the life of the worker, in the body of the
worker, only for an indirect reason: this life, this body, are what
contains the faculty, the potential, the dynamis. The living body
becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but
because it is the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the
aggregate of the most diverse human faculties (the potential for
speaking, for thinking, for remembering, for acting, etc.). Life lies at
the center of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial (and in
itself non-present) labor-power. (Virno, 2004: 82-83)

In the multitude that no longer forms a people, labour and the virtuoso
performance of the intellect are interchangeable. This is a double-edged
sword.

On the one hand, it binds a number of modes of living thought, work,

enjoyment, perception, work on the substances and processes of life itself
to new post-Fordist modes of production based on potential, and in the
service of a regulating general intellect. A little like Whitehead's ongoing
processes of self-enjoyment, 'a virtuosic performance is without end
product' (Virno, 2004: 55)12 aside perhaps from more potential more
differential intensity along with modes of control of this intensity (again the
general intellect), with both of these open to ongoing Capitalisation. These
virtuoso modes of production might include the production of services and
communications, of "life" as a new commodity, of potential itself as
commodity, even of politics as a dispersed and general series of events of
commodity-potentials. The aim is that everything can be swept up in these
new forms of production of commodity-potential.

On the other hand, this interchangeability forms the basis of a contemporary

alternative politics that turns potential away from the commodity, if only
temporarily. Politics in this sense is precisely an ongoing and particular series
of events of self-enjoyment (or perhaps a divergence from the particular
series of events of self-enjoyment tied to particular differentials between
virtuosity and the general intellect) that always must re-assemble, for
example outside of the frame of the general intellect. These events occur
with more and more frequency within the new forms of access to virtuality,
made possible by commercial imperatives to be sure, but also by the
interchangeability of labour, politics and intellect (with the crucial, if always
ambiguous, intervention of enjoyment).

With regards to the technics of the living we could now describe the modes
of synthesis of the political ambivalence of technical virtuosity more
precisely, and more in tandem with events as they occur. I would suggest,
moreover, that thinking about the arguments played out within this political
ambivalence involves re-thinking the relations between technics, life and the
embodiment of functionalist linguistic-cognitive habits.

In order to fully understand these arguments it is perhaps necessary take

the term "argument" as inclusive of a technics of analysis and synthesis
broader than, if inclusive of, that covered by the terms "language",
"rhetoric", or even "discourse". Assuming this, it is possible, in this context of
interchangeability, to understand differential life as produced by the
argumentative mix of technical virtuosities via which life plays itself out in an
ongoing manner. It is this technical virtuosity, whether in the case of work
with stem cells, or in mixing media elements to make people dance, or in re-
arranging ones process of cognition along with ones laptop, that is the
ambivalent work/enjoyment of life.

Knowing how to place the health of one's own soul in danger

Whitehead and Virno thus allow us to redefine not only the politics of life, but
of work and enjoyment in relation to life. With respect to all three, Virno also
explains a paradoxical contemporary situation with regard to politics. This is
that, although nobody believes in politics (of the people) any more, we are
all increasingly encouraged to be politicians.

Virno here refers to Webers definition of the qualities of the politician,

which include knowing how to place the health of one's own soul in danger
(Virno, 2004: 55). Within the multitudes one is constantly encouraged to risk
oneself, one's thinking, one's somatic potential in virtuoso style, in the
service of both the general intellect and the potential of differential intensity.
At the same time, the dispersal of the multitude makes a general politics
almost impossible. In short, the health of ones own soul is almost always
required locally as a way of temporarily actualising the work of the general
intellect/differential life. This always puts one at risk, but at the same time it
counts less and less beyond the local situation. One is always in danger, but
one never matters. As Virno puts it,

The crisis of the society of labor consists of the fact that social
wealth is produced from science, from the general intellect, rather than
from the work delivered by individuals. The work demanded seems
reducible to a virtually negligible portion of a life. (Virno, 2004: 101)

Worse than this, there is always a sense of being worked in public

(performance evaluation, DNA records are obvious examples), yet without
access to a public sphere. Virno writes here that

if the publicness of the intellect does not yield to the realm of a public
sphere then it produces terrifying effects. A publicness without a
public sphere: here is the negative side the evil, if you wish of the
experience of the multitude. (Virno, 2004: 40)

This produces a kind of 'dread-panic, angst, pathologies of various kinds' in

either 'an "I" that no longer has a world or a world that no longer has an "I"'
(Virno, 2004: 78). One is exposed. One must perform with virtuosity. Yet
this performance is subsumed into the general and the personal angst
involved, finding no anchor, turns into a kind of featureless dread.
In the absence of a unified politics that can be taken over, but in which one
must perform and in which one's performance is constantly assessed by
general criteria, life of all kinds can be increasingly exposed to a strange
public situation. Life becomes a form of property administered by the general
intellect but no longer owned by the people. It is this that determined the
way in which life is worked (via, for example, work on the human genome, or
via proprietary formats for the exchange of the elements of the technics of
memory and mediation). It is in the microcosms of this public life miniature
experiences of public life that never quite come together that one is
constantly a kind of politician, putting at risk the health of ones own soul in
order to precipitate certain events of processual assemblage (Rossiter,
2003).

Thinking Life Differently

The activity in this publicness without public sphere takes place according to
the demands of performance without unifying principles beyond the
functionalist general intellect. It is thus often the activity of cognitive labour,
especially with regard to differential life. One must always think up
principles, strategies, and tactics. One has many more decisions to make.
One habituates one's body to interactive technics, converted now as much as
possible into embodied and technically extended decision-making processes.
So that one's embodiment is also pre-mediated by the technics of the
general intellect. Thus the creation of the general intellect precisely as the
multiplicitous cognitive drive that fuels contemporary culture in its new
networks, and which sweeps up labour, life and enjoyment in its path. This
applies especially to all interactive technics, from new media to
biotechnologies and techniques and procedures for performance regulation.

The result is somewhat devastating. At what is left of the personal level, the
general intellect is accompanied by the feeling that my own intellect is no
longer really mine (something literalised in battles over intellectual
property) and perhaps that my own life is not mine (literalised now in the
development of ethics for the biotechnology industries). The feeling is also
perhaps that my own intellectual production, or "my own" living, is not
terribly significant in the larger mix of research and assemblage, or even
perhaps enjoyment. Why? Because, although at all times it is the
multitudinous life that it at stake in my thinking, at the same time I cannot
influence this multitudinous life in any significant way, or even comprehend
its coordinates. In short, I am caught up at the same time both in a general
diversity of life, and in my own faltering attempts to draw together events as
they are reflected in my own processes of living. And neither of these poles
of my experience of living finds anchor or resolution.

Whitehead's philosophy might, of course, suggest that there can be

coherence without anchor or resolution. Virno, however, writes that problem
is that the permanent mutability of forms of life, and the training needed for
confronting the unchecked uncertainty of life, lead us to a direct and
continuous relation with the world as such, with the imprecise context of our
existence (2004: 33). Specific fears about specific events are merged with a
more general anguish, unmuffled, as Virno puts it, by the substantial
communities that once hid our relationship with the world we could also
say with life in general. Yet, again Whitehead's philosophy suggests that we
might be able to enjoy a certain diverse series of coherences in our relations
within the world.

In short, although Virno's work seriously qualifies Whitehead's with regard to

life and the self-enjoyment of assemblage, Whitehead's may also suggest
that things are not as bad as Virno sometimes seems to think. I would
suggest that the problem is not so much the relationship to the world beyond
our substantial communities. For one thing, the new technics of life make
much available to us in terms of community, if we can find a way of
participating in occasions of experience or assemblages of self-enjoyment
differently.

The problem instead lies in the series of existential dependencies produced

by a feeling of crisis. And there is a real feeling of crisis identified by Virno in
new formations of labour. The anxieties involved lead to what Stiegler calls a
much expanded technics of decision (2003b) and this leads to very common
philosophies and practices quite at odds with those of the like of Bergson and
Whitehead (cognitivism is one I am obviously at odds with in this respect).
The 'technics of decision' is a concept to perhaps accompany Virnos general
intellect. Life, cognition and technics combine within this technics of
decision. It is a way of living, a mode of thinking, a series of procedures and
machines. It emerges as a series of mediated perceptions and interactions
that are re-enforced technically at every moment (decisions dealing with the
software on ones laptop, dealing with medical systems in crisis, wondering
which form to fill in, dealing with environmental crisis, with acts of terror,
with media presentations of leading politicians who seem to possess insane
views of the world). The technics of decision must exhibit a virtuosity in
dealing precisely with the uncertainty of ways of living, modes of thinking,
and contemporary technics that give rise to this technics of decision in the
first place. Moreover, to repeat, the technics of decision must perform all this
in the absence of a comforting and supportive, unified public sphere.

In sum, it is as though nearly everything has to be re-created at every

moment (though this is not a problem for Whitehead). The difficulties
involved carry the risk of 'drastically increased forms of submission' (Virno,
2004: 41) to each and every new set of local forms of power as they arise.
There is nothing beyond them to give one security, so every local form of
power is clung to. As Virno puts it, having to perform with virtuosity, to
assemble interactions on the hop, carries the danger, when it does not take
place in the public sphere of an unchecked proliferation of hierarchies as
groundless as they are thriving (Virno, 2004: 41). In these hierarchies and
their demand for the virtuosity of a technics of decision along with new
assemblages of interaction, the whole person is subdued, the persons
basic communicative and cognitive habits.
Does life provide a multitude of ways out of this predicament as well as a
multitude of ways into it? As I have just suggested, life needs to be thought
differently with regard to the affective modes that accompany processes of
self-enjoyment. If it is a combination of fear and anguish (in ongoing dread)
that lays the ground for a submission to hierarchical assemblages, it may
well be that forms of enjoyment that work around this dread, pose
alternatives to it, are crucial to a shift in the nature of possible forms of
living. The Italian activist Bifo ventured, while in Sydney recently, to speak of
love in this context.

This is a love that might have to both protect some established modes of life
and find new forms of expression for them. Virno suggests that, as with the
seventeenth century (2004: 42) multitude, there is the question of
safeguarding forms of life which have already been affirmed as free-standing
forms, thus protecting practices already rooted in society. Even for the
post-Ford multitude (Virno, 2004: 43), it is not a question of seizing
power, of constructing a new State or a new monopoly of political decision
making; rather it has to do with defending plural experiences, forms of non-
representative democracy, of non-governmental usages and customs. At the
same time, the task for the multitude is not, as it might have been conceived
in the past, to capture the political process in its entirety (this is already
captured in the diversity of forms of production reduced to one form of value
under the new cognitive labour and assembled habits of dread). The task
might be that of calmly and realistically searching for new political forms
(Virno, 2004: 43) appropriate to the multitude.

This is clearly a question of the self-enjoyment of the interstices of

interactive assemblage, along with the acceptance of the new modes of living
and the intervention of the technical in the midst of life. Yet it does not have
to involved submission to the general intellect. The philosophical, political
and technical task, if one is to dismantle the contemporary power of the
general intellect might be to re-assert the specificity of self-enjoyment in
occasions of experience.

Endnotes

1. Technics should be taken to include both technologies and techniques, in technical

systems. As Peter Pels writes, it refers to:
a regulation of human practices that comes in a certain objectified form, as a set of
objects (tools, machines, buildings), as a set of more or less explicit rules, as a ritual
or an exemplar of conduct, or as a disciplinary apparatus (of course, technology
usually combines two or more of these). (Pels, 2000: 137)

2. In general, see the work of Karola Stotz, Paul Griffiths and their collaborators on, as Stotz
puts it, ' the changing concept of the gene and the current shift in molecular biology from
genetics to (post)genomics' (http://www.pitt.edu/~kstotz/). More specifically see Stotz's
description of the effect of transcription in the genome (Stotz, 2004), or Stotz, Griffiths and
Rob Knight on how biologists conceive of genes (Stotz et al, 2004). Neil Theise and Diane
Krause's recent work on nonlinearity in stem cell development is also relevant here (Theise
and Krause, 2002), as is the interdisciplinary project CELL, involving Theise, artist Jane
Prophet and mathematician Mark d'Inverno and others (see Prophet and d'Inverno, 2004 or
http://users.wmin.ac.uk/~dinverm/cell/).

3. For a detailed discussion of a specific example that combines both animation and a kind of
participation, see Catherine Waldby's work on the Visible Human Project (2000).

4. For Stengers, an ecology of practices

is about how different forms of knowledge and cultural practices work, but it is also
the relation between what is happening and the way it defines itself in relation with
others, or the way it represents those others. (Stengers, 2002: 262)

5. Here I am to a large extent following the key discussion given by Bernard Stiegler (1996,
1998).

6. A more detailed discussion of the virtual in relation to interactive technologies can be

found in Murphie, 2002. See also Massumi, 2002.

7. Bergson and Whitehead obviously have a lot in common as philosophers. Yet Whitehead
also disagreed with Bergson on key points notably the status of calculation (or quantity),
to which Bergson was much more hostile than Whitehead. Their relationship is quite
complex, for example, over the status of "spacialization". Whitehead both deploys and
criticises Bergson's views on spatialization in Process and Reality (see, for example,
Whitehead, 1978: 220 & 321).

8. This stream might include the work of such diverse thinkers as: Lucy Suchman (1987) on
the foundations of embodied interaction within the discipline of HCI studies; Richard Coyne
(1995), Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores (1987) on the digital, design, Heidegger and
(in Coyne's case) poststructuralism; Rodney Brooks on robotics and 'intelligence without
reason or representation' (1991a and 1991b); Hubert Dreyfus (1996) on embodiment within
cognition; Andy Clark (1997) on extended, embodied mind; Yvonne Rogers (2004) and Mike
Scaife (Scaife & Rogers, 1996) on external cognition in the context of interactive technics;
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (1991) on embodied mind; Bernard
Stiegler (1998) on technics, time and life; Brian Massumi (2002) on the virtual and
interactive technics; Vicki Kirby (1997) on the corporeal and the signifier; Donna Haraway
(2004) on the cyborg and the politics of informatics; N. Katherine Hayles (1999) on
information theory, cybernetics and embodiment.

9. Cognitivism, as opposed to behaviourism, for example, focuses on the internal processes

of thinking (and assumed that thinking is a matter largely of internal processes). Arising in
part from information theories it tends to dwell upon the symbolic processes it assumes to
be working within individuals, and via which individuals then communicate (for example via
media devices, or just via speech). I would not want to suggest that cognitivist approaches
to HCI have no practical value. For discussion of recent shifts in the investigation of HCI
within HCI studies, see Rogers, 2004, or Hollan et al, 2000.

10. Again, although subjectivity might sometimes come into this (late in the experience)
self-enjoyment is not about the subject (thought Whitehead does discuss a "subject-
superject", as I shall explain). In fact, subject and object are inadequate terms when one
takes interaction first. The problem with a lot of analyses of ethics, life, biotechnology, HCI,
and so on, is that they start with subjectivity. Here cognitivism is again part of the problem.

11. See also Elizabeth A. Wilson (2004) on this in the context of rethinking feminism, the
brain and the body, or William Bogard (1998) on the inadequacy of social theory with regard
to bodies.

12. Here of course, Whitehead's philosophy can avail itself not so much of an end product,
but of occasions of experience. Whitehead does not mourn the loss of unity as much as
Virno perhaps does, though he shared the antipathy to the general intellect. For example,
Whitehead wrote that that 'no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining
individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste' (1929: 13).
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