Communication without content? On how theory of communication can have its horizons broadened by Whitehead's thinking

According to Whitehead, the things of world are at the same time strange and provoking. We do not perceive them, but rather prehend them; they occupy us before we occupy them. The prehension happens at first as affection and only afterwards as cognition. Therefore, its approach is before anything else aesthetic, not ethical. Even so, beauty does not exist, for we are the ones who attribute beauty to a rose, for instance. In epistemology, his main concern is to understand how a subject feels the world which constantly provokes him. This essay wants to demonstrate the importance and the application of Whitehead's ideas to theory of communication. A provoking thought, which makes us think outside box and lose our grounds. In Whitehead's theory of events, the author argues that nothing dies and things reach a “final satisfaction”, a realization which, when realized, becomes datum to other living things. Thus, his philosophy is of the novelty, of the moment and of the concrescence.


INTRODUCTION
The philosophy of organism: feeling precedes perception For Whitehead, the real is made up of actual entities (or actual occasions) and of eternal objects.Actual entities are the realities from which world is constituted, the ultimate real thing which forms it.Nothing exists beyond the actual entities.They are everything in the world, at the same time they are processes (that is the meaning of the word occasion: the process by which something comes into being) and their being is composed by the becoming.They move from a non-existence to an actual existence, and it happens within a temporality with a start and an end.They are "animated" by the data they get from exterior.Associated, entities form an event or a society.When entities die they become data to be appropriated by another entity or actual occasion.The genesis of processes is attributed to the phenomenon of concrescence, in which multiple disjunctives constitute a conjunctive unity.
According to Whitehead, feeling precedes cognition.What for Kant was secondary, namely aesthetics, will receive a special attention.A "critique of pure feeling" should supersede a Critique of Pure Reason or a Critique E-mail: ciromarcondesfilho@gmail.com. of Practical Reason.Feeling precedes understanding.It is something similar to Merleau-Ponty's dehiscence, a "open to outside", a contact with the unexpected, the strange, the uncommon, which never brings us something we knew before.Therefore, it is neither about cognition nor hermeneutics, whose intention is to make the unknown known, based on the presupposition that the thing to be known already existed inside us.Together with art, philosophy also has the means of awaking individuals from their torpor, allowing them to experience the "shock of affective tones"; this painful episode which forces to move forward.Thus, feeling performs an event in the sense philosophers (and not the theoreticians of communication) understand.
Our contact with the outside world is affective.I become different and this becoming involves the formation of a space and a time.The spacial location and the temporal sequence tell us the paths which will allow us to receive the world data.Thus, time is not a priori fixed, neither is space.They are both constructions which guide the experience.
And just as a good constructionist, Whitehead seeks to find but refuses to comprehend.His concepts have no meaning independently from their practical working, which is, according to Isabelle Stengers, to allow "in each encounter, in each thing, and in each way of living, the power of being forced to fell and think" [Stengers, 2002, p.34]."To let Whitehead speak for a long time is to be exposed to him to trick you, making the organized train of explanation get off the track into an apparently incongruous horizon" [idem:110].And that is exactly what happens to students, adds Stengers, when a course arouses their interest.
In fact, Whitehead himself joined this creative process in the academic world, risking to practice a "real-time thinking", recreating in each step the meaning or the need of the next one [Stengers, 2002, p.110].This metaphorical feature of his thinking is confirmed by Isabelle Stengers, when she accepts to live this "strange adventure" which makes her lose her grounds and experiment "a way of thinking which leads to its highest degree and is able to converge freedom and pressure, boldness and obligation" [idem, p. 111] The concrescence Things happen through a process, in which many entities become one, from a disjunctive plurality to a conjunctive unity, forming something new.The final entity is the "divine world element": through which what was an inefficient and infertile disjunction of abstract potentialities reach, in a decisive way, the efficient conjunction on an ideal achievement [Debaise, 2007, p.41: PR, p. 98].
That is the concrescence.Organs would be the concrescence of cells, and the army the concrescence of soldiers.Novelty is a "joint new", never something which has already happened or something that will happen.The world is not the same twice, says Whitehead.Nevertheless, neither is novelty absolute, for it is always a restructure of given elements, what can be metaphorically called kaleidoscope.There is no starting point, nothing starts out of nothing, as well as nothing disappears from the universe: former existences engage into new becomings [Debaise, 2007, p. 26-27].
Every creation is a conjunction where new compositions come to be out of old ones.And its modus operandi is through publicity: creation is the publicity of multiple things returning to the private individual sphere [Debaise, 2007, p. 65: PR, p. 257], having a circular feature: from the private individual sphere it returns to the publicity of the objectified individual.In this latter case, it functions as an efficient cause, in which one thing is up dated by another and gets attached to it, functioning as an external intervening cause (different from the first -multiple things return to the individual -, in which prevails the final cause).
Entities "prehend" what is sent as publicity, as data.They assimilate it.The whole process is a sequence of phases.New prehensions emerge out of the integration of prehensions which emerged in previous phases.The amalgamation of former prehensions happens through inheritance, in which an object resists time and holds a certain identity because of its genetic feature inherited in actual occasions [Shaviro, p.30: W 1929[Shaviro, p.30: W /1978, p. 109], p. 109].
The actual entity prehends, integrates, builds connections with universe; animated by an "unsettling principle" which always projects the entity to beyond its actual state [Debaise, 2007, p. 67]; it incorporates multiples, even if they are different.In the end, the concrescence process reaches what Whitehead calls "determined integral satisfaction", when it is fully performed, when it becomes an act [ibid.].This is, evidently, the aristotle's metaphysical model, in which a being does not exist only as act, as a finished thing, but also by what it can come to be, namely its potentiality.
Thus, entity is no longer a becoming subject, for it made its life.It is now a new entity disjunctively situated in the midst of the plurality it synthesizes [Debaise, 2007, p. 26-72: PR, p. 73].Integrating everything which exists, the universe becomes an element of its composition; entity is both the joint-being of entities plurality it encounters, and of the actual entities in the disjunctive plurality core which it leaves [idem]: part of the whole and disjunctive element.
There is here a similarity with Merleau-Ponty, by the fact it incorporates multiples and differences, once the new harmony which is created does dissolve the dissonances, and the oppositions are converted into contrasts.Beyond that, as the flesh of my body integrated the flesh of world, and being only one, Whitehead says our body gains ambiguities: "sometimes, I treat my body as a simple part of the external nature; sometimes, on the contrary, I think it as mine" [Stengers, 2002, p. 99: PAF, p. 153].
When Whitehead reflects on the face, affirming it is "the expression of a possible world", it reminds us of Levinas' ideas.Moreover, he puts the face as the focal point of a possible communication: "the expression of the other's face poses the question of emotion: not what I perceive, but rather how what I perceive affects me [Stengers, 2002, p. 129, emphasis added].
Entity is at the same time subject and object; or, as Whitehead affirms, subject and superject; or even more, a state and a desire.In the moment of finalization, this desire or ambition identify themselves with their being, are their identity, "a point of perspective upon the universe that will no longer change" [Debaise, 2007, p. 67].The hegelian features of this idea cannot be denied.

Subject, superject, feelings and prehension
Whitehead has a philosophy of the organism.It differs from the idealist philosophy to the extent that, for example, in the cartesianism the subject creates the thought, whereas for Whitehead it is the thought that creates the thinker.If, according to Kant, the world emerges from the subject, in Whitehead's philosophy the subject emerges from the world.The actions of an organism are directed from former organisms to a immediate one and the former ones direct multiple things in the composition of only one superject [Debaise, 2007, p. 66].A subject experience things, this is not refused to him; but he is superject of the experiences as well.He is both, being always below and beyond his identity.It is the inadequacy produced by his desire or immanent ambition, "the subjective goal which animates him": the essential "to the philosophy of organism metaphysical doctrine is that the notion of an actual entity as a nonchangeable subject of the change has to be completely abandoned" [Debaise, 2007, p. 77-78: PR, p. 83].
Therefore, the subject-predicate model is to be mistaken.It is based on Spinoza's principle that a fundamental substance remains the same while secondary features, its "modes", are attributed to it and translated as "affections".On the contrary, Whitehead says, there is no unchanged substance but only modes; we are only modes, variable according to situations.The subject (Cf.Debaise) has nothing to do with someone adequate, complete, or autonomous, but rather with someone tensed, projected beyond himself [p.77-78]A being is characterized by his feelings.The subject is the one feels, the sentient.Actual entities are subjects when they show affirmation and self-pleasure.Feelings are oriented and integrated into desire or subjective ambition, that is their final cause.In order to reach the final cause of the actual entity becoming, one departs from potency to act, moved by an external force, the feeling, while an efficient cause.

Ciro 51
Feelings are experienced by the subject in the form of prehension: I am myself and keep my character only if I keep receiving my past heritage [Shaviro, 2012, p. 30].
That is what rocks and plants do as well.The difference is that I take in this heritage in a higher level and more reflexive than them [idem].
Whitehead creates the concept of prehension in order to avoid the term perception which is, according to him, too charged with anthropomorphisms.He equally rejects the concept of mentality for it puts him close to the cartesianism.Prehension reminds us Bergon's "the photographic universe" idea, to whom everything perceives: molecules, stars, nature, living beings.There is a permanent photographing of everything from everything which does not settles in the photographic film, having no register or memory.Merleau-Ponty drops the term perception in the last phase of his intellectual production, coming to use the notion of "experience" instead.
In principle, beings are prehension.They prehend the whole time.But they do so differently from one another.As affirms Shaviro, the initial data and the coherence among them could have already served to other feelings in other subjects, but the subjective form is the immediate novelty: it is like that specific subject feels the objective datum [Sharivo, 2012, p. 56].No other subject feels the datum in the same way that another; novelty is a function of the "way" and not of the essence [idem].
That leads us to the questions which we are more directly interested in: how do we feel the world which is constantly sending us signals?How are these signals internally experienced when we turn to them?What effects do they have upon us?This all not in the sense of how they echo our physical or neurological reactions, rationally cognitive, as William James suggested in his book entitles What is Emotion?But rather, we are interested in how they interfere into existential issues into our sensitivity towards the world, into our attitude before the other and the universe that surrounds us.
Subjects prehend an object which provokes a certain reaction.By this reaction, or activity, an actual entity comes true, accomplish its concrescence.Through the prehension, the subject turns into becoming, prehending other entities data; prehending, while a living being, the dead which is there.Whitehead says that when he passes by the Cleopatra's Needle, in London, he prehends that and, thus, renews himself, prehending what he was a minute ago [80].The soil prehends the sun and a rock phehends the soil.The Needle prehends everything around it.
However, the point of view does not belong to us; we are just its eventual occupants.For Whitehead, the things occupy you more than you occupy the thing.Stengers says you are not the one who decides the variation of your own points of view, but it is rather something that happens to you and that you interpret in a way or another."What we 'instinctively know' is not so for our consciousness possesses a point of view, on the contrary, the 'here' of this point of view is what is ours" [bien plutôt que le « ici » de ce point de vue est nôtre, Stengers, 2002, p. 82].
And prehension is not the same to every being.When a rabbit turns its head to a certain noise, it explores its meaning.Also, bees explore their surroundings, but in a different way.Ticks, ants and spiders hesitate as well.But nettles and crape myrtles do not [idem, p. 45].

Further details
On the different ways of understanding the term Event/Happening to some philosophers and theorists of communication please see Marcondes Filho, C, Das Coisas que Nos Fazem Fensar.São Paulo, Ideias e Letras, 2014, Chapter 4.
Being is only being "in situation".In Heidegger, the Being is not "only presence", but rather is immersed in a situation, it is a Being "to which things are present".Let us see how it is exemplified when Heidegger mentions a simple object, a jug, into the wheel of the world.In Heidegger's The Thing, the philosopher says the jug does not exist to physics, but only what it represents as a possible object.It is like the wine, which is nothing but liquid.The "being" of this things are never revealed.
However, the jug is not only this object, made into this form, it is rather something that allows us to keep and pour liquids.In it, as well as in the wine, the earth and the sky is present (water comes from soil, crosses rocks, receives rain from the sky).Wine is the drink of the sacrifice as well, through it deities and mortals receive gifts.The being of the jug (as well as the wine) is the act of gathering together; it is not just a thing ( Sache), but rather something else (Ding).In the German language, the word Sache refers to something more concrete as the word Ding, but both are synonyms of the word "thing".As a Ding, the thing unfolds its being.A thing as a jug unites at the same time sky, earth, deities and mortals, and each of the four refers to the each other.
Whitehead's "new harmony" does not exclude dissonances."Negotiating with 'antithesis or 'apparent selfcontradictions', Whitehead's god neither selects between alternative possibilities as Leibniz's one, nor 'overcomes' oppositions aiming at a higher unity self-reflexive and self-differentiating as in Hegel's notion of the Absolute.It rather functions as a 'thought's turn which converts opposition into contrast (1929/1978, p.348).Where Leibniz's god selects the 'best of the possible worlds' excluding incompatibilities, Whitehead's affirms without preferences or restrictions 'the discordant multiplicities of actual things'" [Shaviro, 2012, p. 26].
The face as a possible world."The other's face does not gain ambiguity, different from our body, but rather the double-specialization, the most extreme one, it is the object par excellence and, also, the expression of a possible world in unison in which the becoming takes place [Stengers, 2002, p, 100].
Entity as a state and a desire.Didier Debaise affirmed: "L'entité était à la foi sujet et superject, état et visée...".The word visée means "turning your eyes to a goal".In the figurative sense, visée can be directing your spirit to a certain goal; therefore, it also means ambition, desire, intention (See Petit Robert).
On the uses of feeling.According to Petit Robert, the French verb to feel can be translated as: 1. to have a sensation, perception of an object; to perceive, to notice; to realize, to guess, to foresee; to appreciate, to like, to prove sth; 2. to smell, to stink; to suggest; 3. to have the impression.
On Aristotle's four causes.The material cause: the fundamental ingredients which constitute the world.The formal cause is the form which the thing turns in opposition to the initial matter, still without a cause.The efficient cause has to do with movement and rest.It is the passage from something that is potency into act.However, for that to happen an external intervention is necessary, its efficient cause, which performs this transformation.Finally, the final cause refers to the utility and answers the question 'what is it for?'.

Phenomenology
For Kant, the aesthetic subject neither understands nor legislates, only feels and responds.He does not impose his forms.Rather, he is informed by the external world.As Wallace Stevenes says, "the world fills the being before the mind can think" [quoted by Shaviro, 2012, p. 13].Thus, he is contemplative.It partially thinks, it is partially thought; something between passive and active voice."Voice of the medium," says, Shaviro.For Kant, he quotes, "we detain ourselves in our contemplation of the beauty because this contemplation reinforces itself and reproduces itself" [Kant, 1987, p. 68].Shaviro calls it "short circuit self-affection": the contemplated subject perpetuating in and to the contemplative subject.He subsists only "to the extent that resonates with the feelings inspired by that object."He is self-affected by the datum that goes into it [Shaviro, idem].
The concern of a Whiteheadian phenomenology is to identify what we learn in the world and how we learn.Perhaps he could expand its scope wondering "that transformations do these data cause into me?" and, therefore, we would be able to produce an interesting dialogue with the metaphor.But he seems to avoid it, stating that "we are not asked to commenting on the psychological subject-object relationship or on the status of each of them in the realm of the real" [Debaise, 2007, p. 31: CN, p.67].But, actually, it is not just a "psychological relationship", but rather a being in a world continually changed by the experience of external prehensions.That is, the issue is rather philosophical and refers directly to the phenomenon of communication, which, however, he avoids to address.
Whitehead's concern is that epistemology does not fall into an ontology, namely the search for the answer to the questions "what's that?" or "what does that mean?".There are three stages of this process.Initially, there is the experience of the prehension: the subject prehends.Then, the datum is taken into consideration; its convenience (or not) result in the birth of the prehension; it is necessary that we have a pragmatic interest in it.Finally, the subjective form, the affective hue which I will attach to it, what determines the effectiveness of the prehension in the moment of experience; the fact that it is incorporated as a "persistent fact", from which I cannot escape [Debaise, 2007, p. 47: AI, p. 231].In the process, there is always a margin of indeterminacy, a space for "decision" regarding "how that subject feels an objective datum" [Shaviro, 2012[Shaviro, , p. 55: W. 1929[Shaviro, /1978, p. 43, emphasis added], p. 43, emphasis added].This is the object of our phenomenology of perception, namely the New Theory of Communication.When seen from the conventional view, Ciro 53 none of the three steps is about perception.The subject who carries out the experience, who prehends, is the "new actual entity"; the data, the prehended fact are the "former actual entity", the third movement, namely the phenomenology.
If we were to use it for communication studies, his phenomenology would focus on steps similar to ours.It would turn to observe an external object, see how far it provokes in us, as observers, a pragmatic interest, and, in the end, we would simply incorporate it.In our case, it is different.We do not incorporate anything.We try to check the communicative abilities, I mean, if something as an event could provoke in us -or in anyone else who shares it as well -an effect of rupture, a break of patterns and constitution of meaning, making it different from non-communicational trivial facts which act only to supply us with new information from the same.
Isabelle Stengers mentions three other elements of the capture of the spirit through nature: the time present (the when), the percipient event (the where), and what makes the event to be discerned (the how); time, space and form.The fact discerned is that of which I experience in perception.The activity, she says, begins when for one reason or another I am interested in what I select [Stengers, 2002, p. 134].(It is not clear, in her argument, why "select" is not the same as have interest in something).Stengers gives a trivial example: "I know that if I go to my window, I will see that those who are laughing either keep talking or move away, and I know that if I was at the window two minutes ago, would have seen their meeting.From all this, I have the experience perceived by their laughter.This is because, moreover, they do not cause me a shock, as it would have been if I had heard a creak of desperate brakes: one day or another, one of these fools will kill not a cat but a child " [Stengers, 2002, p. 60].People laughing outside are signals.If I go to the window to see them, it turns into information.I select this action and only do so for it attracts my interest.A shock caused by a sound of desperate brakes will be a new signal that will attract my attention even more.Hence, we would fatally fall in our notion of information: what I capture from the set of signals (Whitehead would call it data) which I am subjected to by the external world.
One thing is nature, called "discernible", and another is the discerned, what we apprehend.An event discerned by us is connected to other events, is a "term" within a larger structure.Beyond that there is the "full general fact", the discernible, comprising the discerned.When we say that a certain datum "declares," what is being said is that this statement is made to us, our reading of it gives the meaning to the event -which is linked to other events -a subjective dimension.The cognizant spirit would be responsible for this significance.But there is another possible reading and it is provided by the whole.In this case, the verb disclose would bind to the idea that there is something revealed in the experience which is beyond the words themselves and the things [Stengers, 2002, p. 61].Thus we enter the field of extra-linguistic, of the expressive forms which are formed by the experience of every phenomenon, in the field of what is subtle, discrete, and sensory; or, seen from another perspective, the presence of Stoics' incorporeals.
To the Whiteheadian reading of Isabelle Stengers, we are captivated by the apparent simplicity of the present, of what we are living as "now".And this illusion is enhanced by altered states of consciousness (intoxication, hashish, etc.) [Stengers, 2002, p. 77].In any way, whether or not intoxicated, our subjective sense of time remains the same.There is a specious present (cf.William James, "beautiful in appearance, which seems true but it is not"), in which everything seems normal, the duration is extended, and a series of successive events likely to be separated appear in an undivided mode.A number of successive presents increase in the same episode.It is like duration retained in itself the passage of nature, says Stengers [2002, p. 75].But with this, "we were on the blade of a knife" and not in the saddle on which we would see the two dimensions of time [idem].
The specious present does not seem to be equal to the criticism that Bergson undertakes when he speaks of "the filmmaking process" of our thinking.On the contrary, they seem to oppose.Bergson claims that by seeing chained facts, we interpret them as disconnected: instead of shaking the kaleidoscope, we prefer to stop in the images that are formed.The extended present, specious, would accomplish the opposite.As the forms of altered states of consciousness, we "stretch" the present, experiencing it in its expanded form.It would be like a misrepresentation of the duration itself.But contradiction seems to be true.For remaining in the present paralyzes the movement, the inevitable result of becoming, like the cinematic mechanism.Both are reactions against the inevitability of change.
Datum is what is seized by an actual entity, what is the object of its feeling.It is both the material of the actual entity as what guides this entity's creativity.For example, it is a physical signal of light, while the feeling of freshness of a new day as well.Actual entities are governed by data.These impose limits to feelings which cannot be transgressed.
We saw above that at the end of the concrescence process, the actual entity, reaching its satisfaction, either dies or "becomes a disjunct".Disjunction is the fate of becomings.The actual entity, no longer animated by the life of a "subjective aim", which took it (as superject) beyond itself, disjuncts itself.But death is far from meaning disappearance.Objectively, actual entities are immortal.It dies as a "subject of becoming", but as an object, as datum, it acquires immortality.The transition from subject to object is the access to a immortal form [Debaise, 2007, p. 39].But even that immortality does not mean it has infinite duration, as the metaphysical thinking assumes, but rather the fact it can always be resumed.
What dies to the perception is the world revealed in the immediate presentation, that which shines with nuances, "fugitive, intrinsically devoid of meaning" [idem, p. 40].What remains is the world revealed by the external force of an efficient cause, which turns potency into act, that binds one thing to the next one, in which each event resonates its individuality on the steps of becoming [idem].

Further details
A customs agent sees a suspicious passenger.It is on another level he realizes fraud."The customs agent discerns -it is his job -the traveler as a possible carrier of goods liable to be taxed, but he knows too that as he makes his question, the statement he anticipates will not define the traveler [that way].What he should discern could, incidentally, and can -as soon as the fraudulent traveler join his family or his accomplices -be declared through a very different way: [with a] "Phew ...".The event here is the arrival of the traveler.It is judged as "agent sees a passenger coming who may have something to declare."This event, however, is linked to other events that are not declared, except in the discernible mode [Stengers, 2002, p. 61-61].

Current entities, eternal objects and events
Gilles Deleuze called uniqueness to what would be preindividual, non-personal, a-conceptual.It is a neutral.For Shaviro, it is the turning point or continuous transformation [2012, p. 19].Something similar is Whitehead's concept of actual entity: naked individuality to which the procedures of thought secondarily determine properties and relations [Stengers, 2002, p. 58].Each actual entity creates itself through a decision process by allowing some data, rejecting others, selecting several potentialities offered by eternal objects.
For Whitehead, the current entity has no self-determination.Its determination is given by how the potentiality of an eternal object enters it.Actual entities are "things which prehend".They appropriate the set of other existing actual entities and make their own, incorporating them [Debaise, 2007, p. 26-27: PR, p. 100;PR: p. 342], and they become "their data".For they emerge from data, they are "experiences in action".They inherit data from past occasions, but always introduce something new into the world.
Actual entities can be formal and objective.The sun in the sky is the formal sun but what exists in the understanding, while perceived idea, the sun is objective.When they have an independent existence, a meaning by themselves, they are formal; and when have an external existence, when prehended by other entities, they are objective [Debaise, 1007, p. 64].The difference between formal and objective has to do with perspective, from it or towards it.For example, an entity observing itself, practicing the enjoyment of its ownmode of being, being its prehension of all that there is, it is s elf-enjoyment, formal reality; and, when their existence is within another, it is objectification, objective reality [idem].The first, the formal reality, consists of once and for all, it is unchangeable.And the second one, the objective reality, it is continually engaged in new processes [idem].
Both satisfaction and self-enjoyment refer to actual entities, the acts of becoming; they show every becoming is connected to an intensity.The actual entity "fills itself with world" (intensification process), and in the end it integrates to it [Debaise, 2007, p. 68-69]; but this does not apply to a plant, Deleuze's misunderstanding and pointed out by Shaviro, because the plant sings the glory of god filling itself of it but it is not an actual entity, but rather a "society", an event [idem].Let us look at this further.

Event
A person is crushed in Chelsea Harbour.The obelisk of Cleopatra is in the port of Charing Cross and I get to see it.In the solar spectrum there are dark clouds.In all three cases these are events for Whitehead.Also stones, pyramids, rivers are events.The difference is that there are some determined data in the first: a place, a time, a feature; and in others, there are not.
Event is a "living together", is a nexus of actual occasions (or entities), contiguous in space and time, interrelated in some way, determined in an extensive quantum [Shaviro, 2012, p. 18].No event occurs alone.In it, the actual entities associate in the becoming process, which defines the nexus itself.They are determinations and condensations of the passage of nature, that is, the kind of perception that goes beyond what we can perceive, which is wider, a kind of horizon that exceeds the object of our attention [Debaise, 2007, p. 30].These condensations are from the point of view of perception as Bergson's "immediate data of consciousness": original factors, originating because tied to experience, to perception.
In the process of becoming, the relationship with time turns the actual entities continuously moving.It is here that Whitehead refutes ontology for the fact that it generalizes the visual perception and enhance the permanence of things.In the ontology being is the perceived in its immediate presentation, namely the being of the here and now, the projected image of a particular perceptual experience [Debaise, 2007, p. 38].In contrast, Whitehead's being is a being in passage, of the movement, of becoming, and ... of permanence [Idem,p. 30].(Again, we feel here echoes of the hegelian realizetion of the spirit, or, if one likes, of the equally hegelian 'end of the semiosis ", from Peirce).Even so, Whitehead Ciro 55 uses Bergson's category of duration.The world is like a continuous chain of events which can be sectioned into finished events [Idem,p. 34].
Continuity is always produced; and temporary.Nothing comes to be at once and for all.Objects recreate and renew themselves.Consciousness is reduced to its minimal form of "tender consciousness" [Debaise, 2007, p. 30] An actual occasion is not an event, as the latter is associated with a continuous process, it is part of larger developments and its identity is variable.But the current entity or occasion is all the opposite of this: in it, instead of slow processes there is sudden turns, single prehension and a fixation of its identity in the becoming.
Events have extension and can be cut, actual entities are "prehension with no parts", their identity is fixed.
Whitehead also has its own definition for the word society.Society can be seen as a form of organization or grouping of actual entities, when they are not seen as an event.In fact, as "structured society", it is more of an "environment" where the subordinate societies negotiate their existence [Debaise, 2007, p. 35].Society is a union of actual entities which not only occurs by contiguity but because all elements inherit something common.They are self-sustaining and are considered "things which persist" as, for example, a stone, a cell, or a body, which seem simple but are complex.
The relationship between societies and nexus is a relationship of magnitude.Nexus is the first form of social order that emerged from the actual entities.It is still a reunion, but a condition of existence of societies.At the reunion there is mutual prehensions, in many ways.On the other hand, the societies involve, besides the inheritance of a common past, a new composition, an order [Debaise, 2007, p. 71].In this context, individuals are characters who represent roles and repeated operations, practicing a common heritage in specific moments of their history.This is what is called identity of a stone, a rock, a cell or a person.

Eternal objects
One cannot find the red out of red objects.Colors, tactile sensations of matter (smoothness, roughness), shapes (cube, circle), numbers, character traits (bravery, cowardice), the electric charge, the gravitational attraction are all eternal objects.They themselves say nothing about their ingression in the actual entities; it is their existence that justifies them -ingression is how a potentiality of an eternal object is realized in an actual entity, contributing to its features.
Eternal objects function as elements of potentialization in the actual elements becoming process.They provide the necessary qualities, the relationships which enter these objects: "an eternal object exists only for its insertion into an actual entity" [Debaise, 2007, p. 41-42], it can only be found within the experience when felt or selected by actual occasions [Shaviro, 2012, p. 39]; it is introduced and becomes the element of the entity existence in the form of ingression, [Debaise, 2007, p. 41-42].They are like "adverbs", the "how" of their manifestation.Just as for the Stoics, an actual object only becomes temporal with the participation of eternal things.There are two serieseternal objects and actual elements -which are mediated by something that combines (a) the update of what is temporal and (b) the timelessness of what is potential.By offering to update and determine the actual entities which select them, eternal objects represent the Stoic concept of "quasi-cause" [Shaviro, 2012, p. 42].

On perception
Whitehead's concept of perception resembles James', Bergson's and Husserl's.Perception is a concrescence of feelings [Debaise, 2007, p. 12] and human perception, a type of prehension.There are two forms of perception: the immediate presentation, and efficient causality.In the first case, the world is perceived "as its presents itself", and immediate sensations are projected in the universe.This kind of perception was seen in the past as the only mode of perception [Ibid,, sensitive perception, the experience of the world lived in the moment, without any temporal thickness, world as a screen for the disembodied spectator [idem, p. 37].Features are felt: colors, sounds, flavors; age of solipsism, an actual body noticing actual things.
A distinction has to be made here between different figures of the time: "at the same time" does not equal "at the same instant".Simultaneous is different from instantaneous [CN,p. 56/75].Instant has to do with continuous time, broken up into an infinite succession of moments.This is the abstract time of Bergson.According to Whitehead, the sensitive experience only understands nature in an instant (specious present, seen behind), but what sensitive experience provides to the knowledge is nature itself during a period.What experience declares, as Stengers adds, is something different from the instant; it is tied to simultaneity; it is something that we experience in perceiving of nature, something that becomes discernible in the "now".In his words, it is "a real piece of nature limited by simultaneity which is an essential factor declared by sensitive experience" [Stengers, 2002, p. 66-67: CN, 53/73].
In Merleau-Ponty, the coincidence of intentional lines allows the creation of a sense, which is the "now" of the network of intentions.Similarly, Montaigne said at the end of his Essays, that to live the moment is opposed to "to live the present."For him, life should not be a crossing.Moment is stretched to become extensible [Jullien, 2004, p.122].

Aesthetic appreciation
In principle, there is such a thing as beauty.Beauty is not owned by the flower.One does not know the beauty of the object, he feels it without knowing.In fact, a flower suits the way we apprehend it, in the same way that the orchid adapts itself to how the wasp sees it [Shaviro, 2012, p. 2-3].The beauty appears when I find the flower, but I cannot shake its alterity, because it is the flower itself which "holds" its beauty, as well as alterity enables communication for the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.Alterity as something that provokes me, puts me in check and therefore invades me enabling changes in me.If I reject alterity, I "would no longer find the flower beautiful, but rather just useful" [idem, p. 4-5].
In his study on the perception of the beauty object, Whitehead is not interested in the object itself.It does not concern him.In fact, what interests him is how the object affects him [idem, p. 5, emphasis added].In appreciation of the phenomenon of beauty, communication does not unite those who share it.Here we find a communication concept in the true sense of that term is in its most radical form, namely, as "communicability without content" [Shaviro].In this passage, however, Shaviro is referring to the Kantian aesthetics.Kant does not take much time on it for he finds it equivalent to passion, a "free feeling, regardless of my needs".Well, but that is exactly where relies its strength to take us out of our indifference to the world.Surely, passion and communication does not mean the same, despite both having a relationship, if not aesthetic, at least strongly associated with ways of feeling the other and the world.
If we pay attention to what they Levinas says about passion, we will notice that between passion and communication there is an abyss, since although they depart from the same assumptions -impact before the unexpected, the strange, the surprising; my openness to this new experience; ability it possess to interfere with my feelings, my desires, my life-the ultimate goal of passion is the fusion of beings, their mutual amalgamation, and a break from the larger society by creating a "society of two".Nothing more strange to communication, which does not intend to merge, to own, self-denial or the denial of other, but rather an experience with the other who I will never actually know and who can always leads me to reordering myself and constitute new meanings.

Whitehead and the New Theory
In summary, if we raise the question "to what extent does Whitehead effectively confirm or oppose our concept of communication?", the answer will tend more towards a convergence than a divergence.
The Whiteheadian notion of process assumes actual entities apprehend data which become part of them.To our concept of communication data can be apprehended, but only as information.Communication, on the contrary, keeps the the other's alterity untouched -I do not incorporate it in me, the other remains strange and that is what promotes my restoration, my reordering from that confrontation with him.
Secondly, the philosophy of the organism highlights as important fact to know what we apprehend and how it happens.Our objective here seeks to go further by also wanting to know the changes promoted by this clash of actual entities and data in the successive actions of subjects and superjects.
Moreover, there is a third aspect, namely a great divergence between the concepts of event and process.If we follow the concept of realization of the Absolute Spirit in Hegel, where it says the dialectic finishes ends and "history ends," we mistakenly tend to think there is also an end in Whitehead, an actual death which would be the moment of "determined full satisfaction".Although the actual entity dies, its death will always be relative, as it survives as datum in other actual entities.Thus, the becoming-permanence movement formula could be better understood as an infinite becoming-reappropriation movement.The issue here is that, unlike Hegel, the object, since it reaches its "fulfillment", suffers a reappropriation and becomes datum to other actual entities.
What Whitehead did not consider is that there is a radical difference between biological life and cultural life.The biological life ends, the being dies, its body decomposes, nothing remains.It will never be a datum to another actual entity, for it disappears without a trace.However, its works do not die, they survive them and become part of new actual entities.So they become cultural beings with life.
Despite those differences, the similarities between Whiteheads' ideas and the New Theory of Communication outnumber.Firstly, Whitehead pays more attention to affection than to cognition.This precedence is shared by us when we suggest communication is primarily an aesthetic event and it is through aesthetics that actual entities change.Shaviros' term "communicability without content" or "non consensual communicability" fits perfectly in this case, both to refer to an aesthetic consideration as to define the concept of communication.Communication is something that enraptures me, seduces me, that unexpectedly posses me.The consensus occurs rather in my quest for information, not for communication, which is by its nature disharmonious to what I think and feel.
Shaviro writes on the "disturbingly beautiful" and on the fact that art is able to touch our moods by its mere existence.For Whitehead it is not the work of art that Ciro 57 does it, not even the beauty of a flower, a landscape, a scene or a particularly moving melody.For him, these things are nothing, for it is who produce beauty.The poet, he says, praises in fact himself.Here there is a proximity to Martin Buber, to whom the work of art is an appearance that comes before its spectator, requiring from him an effective power.It is the man who realizes the work of art: if he gives the principle-word I-Thou, it will spring the effective strength that will make the work appear.
Secondly, the philosophy of organism's study procedure and research are constituted by the interest in finding instances -there is no need to understand or even less explain them.And how does he proceed in this endeavor?His formula is to encourage students to think (Buber would say, "awaken the chrysalis"), make them leave the regulated and established path of knowledge, make them feel uneasy, or, as Isabelle Stengers says, to endure a "strange adventure" that makes us to lose our ground.
It is this quality of tearing us from our certainties, our well-settled and petrified positions.His "thinking in real time" has Kantian roots, something like the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze, which seeks rather the achievement of events' dimension (in Deleuze's conception) -rather simple facts, but through the exercise of thought at the same time that this thought occurs (Kant).
In order to think likethat,i.e."thinking with Whitehead", as the title of Isabelle Stengers' book suggests, the adoption of permanent movement is necessary, which was also relevant for Bergson.The world is not the same twice, no experience can be repeated; no experience can be compared with another one.Everything happens only once.
Finally, we should highlight the importance (equally averse to the positivist research) of considering factors that are not measurable, visible or traceable, but interfere with the phenomenon.A discernible nature permeates human relations and their clashes, as well as between other objects and actual entities.It shows its presence without ever present in fact."Eternal" elements promote their ingress into processes and they form their active substance.There is something in beauty but not in the object itself, for it is nothing.What is important is how the object affects us, and above all how through this process, and in every moment, novelty is created in the relationships with actual entities, eternal objects, data, and prehensions which act together to actualize the virtual.

Further details
On the end of the semiosis in Peirce, see my essay "The misconceptions of Peirce", in Marcondes Filho, C. O escavador de silêncios, São Paulo, Paulus, 2004, Excurso 3. Shaviro and the issue of passion."That's why beauty is a lure, driving me out of myself.The aesthetic experience is a kind of communication without communion or without consensus.It can be divided or kept together, but without mingling the parts which separate them.This is because it is a 'universal communicability that is not, in fact, based on a concept' (Kant, 1987, p. 79).As pure communicability without content, beauty is, therefore, a pure effect, divorced from its rational and material causes.The painter Francis Bacon transmits this idea very well when he says that in his paintings of the 'human cry' he 'intended to paint the scream itself more than the horror "it caused.The cries of Bacon paintings are disturbingly beautiful, all that cannot be seen in those situations to which they refer.A good synonym for Kant's aesthetic lack of interest may be the passion.The scandal of passion is that it is completely free, it has no bottom, no proper occasion.In this sense, it is entirely free (although one is not free).Passion has nothing to do with my current needs, it lets me alone with my selfinterest or what is 'good for me'.It does not seem to belong to me.It moves me, drives me, takes possession of me, but it always remains out of me, out of my control.It is superfluous and further, even inescapable.I pursue my passions and my interests without considering needs and even to their detriment [Shaviro, 2012, p. 6-7, my translation].In footnote 4 from this same passage Shaviro says: "the final form of aesthetic interest or passion would be the so-called 'Stendhal syndrome', in which the encounter with a beautiful work of art would lead to fainting and hallucinations [idem].
The poet praises himself."Nature gets the credits for what, in fact, should be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, the sun by its brightness.Poets totally deceive themselves.They should direct their chants to themselves and should make odes of self-congratulation by the splendor of the human spirit.Nature is a stupid topic, devoid of sounds, smells and colors, [made] simply of matter that endless and meaningless rushes [Stengers, 2002, p. 54: SMW, 54 / 73-74].