Process Philosophy and the Possibility of Critique

Abstract

ed phase of conformal feeling is not meant to imply that such a phase could, in concrete, ever occur alone. concrete becoming of an actual entity is always dipolar and atemporal. This discussion is for purposes of analytic clarity only. It is a discussion that can occur only within genetic division. 9. For a superb treatment of these notions, see Jorge Luis Nobo, Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 10. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 42. 11. This is, I suppose, a rather fundamental notion of psychology. past presents possibil ity of its overcoming. But I emphasize again that non-conformal proposition emerges from feeling of specific situation to which that proposition refers. As evidence of this, I have noticed, when teaching African American Philosophy, that many white students in class will repeatedly say that does not matter believing that this pronouncement is very liberal and liberating. They do not understand that only someone who has not been subjected to racism can make this claim. For those who are oppressed on basis of their race, race always matters. It is (processively) a part of who they are because it is a part of landscape out of which they must construct themselves. 12. Take, for example, recent event of mainstream media being increasingly acquired by major corporations. Such acquisition allows a certain formal characteristic of these media to appear rather more evidently and starkly than it has in past. 13. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 19-34. 14. See Noam Chomsky, Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 121-36. notion of the manufacture of consent was, Chomsky points out, coined by Walter Lippmann to indicate a revolution in practice of democracy (136). Needless to say, what Lippmann saw as a great advance, Chomsky sees as fundamentally antithetical to freedom. 15. This may be at heart of Walter Benjamin's notion of dialectical image and its explo sive revolutionary potential. 16. See Max Horkheimer The Authoritarian State, in Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Mike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1995), 115-17. 17. original line is, of course, Thinking of key, each confirms a prison. line is from The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot, Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1934), 45. 18.1 should hope that one would think here of Derrida's astounding passage: let us never neg lect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on earth, from Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: State of Debt, Work of Mourning, and New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 85. 19. Karl Marx, Grundisse: Foundations of Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 542. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.112 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 05:22:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Process Philosophy and Possibility of Critique 49