Theory & Event

I

In what he terms an “Interlude” in A World of Becoming, William E. Connolly collects a series of remarks from various thinkers – Heraclitus, Nietzsche, James, Whitehead, and others. One of these remarks, found on page 94, and placed between similar reflections on time and complexity, is the following: “The layered, bumpy, and creative dimensions of thought on the way are closer in shape to several temporal force-fields in nature than classical conceptions of nature are to thinking.” There is a citation numbered 6 for this quoted sentence. Turning to the back of the book we find the note, which reads, “William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming, 94.”

I want to reflect on the situation created here – can we call an interlude in a book and its notation a situation?—I think we can – in which this citation/quotation is embedded. I notice first that I am using the present tense when describing the encounter I am having with this book and its author. Connolly is doing, I am wondering. Using the present tense suggests a particular engagement with time, a convenient way to allow a narrative to unfold in a coherent and linear way. This is a rhetorical device, but simply noting it as such doesn’t diminish, at least for me, the point of its use. (For instance, I am writing this review essay in Amherst, Massachusetts and in Ithaca, New York in November of 2012 and am revising it over several weeks, perhaps into December, though I hope not. (Some of this was part of a lecture I gave at a conference at the University of Essex last year, so I first started writing in May of 2011. And even before then I was writing as I was reading the book, so when did I begin this review, really?) I will revise it upon receiving comments from the editors of Theory & Event, and submit the final version of it, hopefully sometime in December. Yet throughout I will retain the present tense, that constantly moving present, timeless in its own way, yet chock full of time, embedded fragments of thought, built up and torn down. How else to write an essay? Also, how else do we remember our pasts and rebuild our present and future?)

For some philosophers the problem of the representation of presence is itself a problem of authenticity. All attempts to represent presence fall short of the objective of truly understanding radical subjectivity. But if we think that the shaping of the presencing of subjects through representation is a problem that needs to be solved, we deflect our attention from the possibility of imagining it as a situation to inhabit. In A World of Becoming Connolly identifies the question of the relationship of subjectivity to authenticity as an element of what he calls the human predicament. (Chapter Four) From that perspective, he enables us to start seeing things differently, to join in describing a world of becoming in which a predicament, as opposed to a condition, allows us to think more complexly about the directions we may take as we either bide our time or make it.

The temporal modality of this way of thinking about presencing – predicament entangles us in both predication and prediction – is what a lot of A World of Becoming is concerned about. Connolly moves away from seeking to penetrate into an imaginary heart of subjectivity and instead figuratively helps subjects to breathe, that is, he treats them as open systems, partial agents, beings who are complexly embedded in different and sometimes oppositional temporalities, up and down scales of time, as they interact with other partial subjects, in their complex vibrational pulls and pushes, in their strange and unpredictable resonances that can render miraculous and catastrophic system changes out of inadvertent, advertent, minute and gynormous , subtle and not so subtle rearrangements of objects in times. Connolly notes that clarifying the various subject positions of agents of power and powerlessness is not...