Encounters With Being and Event

Deleuze’s Encounter With Whitehead

By Steven Shaviro

In a short chapter of The Fold (1993) that constitutes his only extended discussion of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze praises Whitehead for asking the question, “What Is an Event?” (76). Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929/1978) marks only the third time – after the Stoics and Leibniz – that events move to the center of philosophical thought. Deleuze wrote less about Whitehead than he did about the other figures in his philosophical counter-canon: Lucretius, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Foucault.

But Whitehead is arguably as important to Deleuze as any of these other thinkers. It is only today, in the wake of Isabelle Stengers’ great book Penser avec Whitehead (2002), that it has become possible, for the first time, to measure the full extent of Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead. My work here is deeply indebted to Stengers, as well as to James Williams (2005) and to Keith Robinson (2006), both of whom have written illuminatingly about Whitehead and Deleuze.

“What is an event?” is, of course, a quintessentially Deleuzian question. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he affirms that, in fact, everything is an event. The world, he says, is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances. Becoming is the deepest dimension of Being.

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A Review of Pinker’s Blank Slate

Tunnel Vision: A Review of Pinker’s Blank Slate

By Thomas Hylland Eriksen

The gap between sociocultural anthropology and biological/physical anthropology is deep, but fairly recent. In the 1870s, Tylor enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Darwinists; he was inspired by, and in turn inspired, Darwin himself. Later generations also engaged in respectful dialogue until, roughly, the end of the SecondWorld War.

After the war, biological approaches to human nature and culture were discredited in public life, only to reemerge with a string of popular books by the likes of Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger, culminating in the last chapter of E. O.Wilson’s scholarly work Sociobiology (Wilson 1975), where the great entomologist pleads for a reintegration of the social sciences into the mother science, that is to say biology. The relationship between sociocultural anthropologists and some evolutionary biologists (who we may call neo-Darwinists) has been tense and occasionally hostile since then.

Certain developments in recent years nevertheless suggest that the aggression and deliberate mutual misunderstandings typical of the sociobiology debatemay have given way to a more sober and relaxed attitude among social anthropologists confronted with biological explanations of sociocultural phenomena. According to Knight et al. (1999), social and biological anthropologists in Britain had not really spoken to each other between the Royal Society conference about ritualisation among humans and animals in 1965 and a similar, but smaller conference on ritual and the origins of culture in 1994. A few years after this event, a number of social anthropologists contributed to a volume about ‘memetics’ (Aunger 2000; for a scathing critique see Marks 2002b) dominated by Darwinian scholars, and around the same time, a symposium organised by Harvey Whitehouse (2001) brought together different views on the role of evolution in shaping religious beliefs and practices.

Perhaps social anthropology is keen to find its feet again after postmodernism, and is therefore more open to ambitious and robust modes of explanation? Certainly, the new evolutionary psychology appears to more relevant and better informed about cultural variation than the old sociobiology, whosemacho obsession with sex and violence, and na¨ıve search for adaptive functions everywhere in cultural practices, could hardly win the admiration of many sociocultural anthropologists.

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Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a social anthropologist at the University of Oslo and Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Peace Research. Thomas has conducted fieldwork in Mauritius and Trinidad, exploring ethnicity, identity politics, nationalism, and minority right

The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution

The Central Role of Culture in Cognitive Evolution: A Reflection on the Myth of the "Isolated Mind"

By Merlin Donald

Human symbolic culture constitutes a distinctive, species-universal trait, usually thought to be the result of our having evolved special cognitive capacities, such as language. Seen from this vantage point, the flow of influence runs from cognition to culture, in that order, and the task of evolutionary psychology should be to decide how and when the basic cognitive foundations of modern culture came into being.

According to this doctrine, the coevolutionary brain-culture spiral that characterized hominids must have been driven primarily at the cognitive level. Thus, cognitive evolution triggers cultural evolution, which triggers further brain evolution, and so on. This is the conventional meaning of brain-culture coevolution.

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Also by Merlin Donald: A Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind and Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature