James Bono, History, Univ. of Buffalo

2:05. Ian Bogost introduces James Bono.

2:06. Bono thanks the organizers for their hospitality, which he says has reached “classical proportions.” [Normally these are perfunctory niceties not worth recording, but in the present case the hospitality has gone so far beyond the norm that I feel the need to record Bono’s attitude on the topic, with which I fully agree.]

2:08. Whitehead takes Aristotle’s account of individual things as symptomatic of a problem Whitehead wishes to address: Aristotle’s individuals are built of abstractions.

2:09. Whitehead’s complaint is that accounts are given of individuals in Aristotle but not of their interrelations. This makes the real world of interconnected individuals quite unintelligible.

2:10. Whitehead: “Substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing.”

2:12. Bono recalls a Stanford conference at which Haraway also responded to Stengers, and Haraway wondered on that occasion why Whitehead feels so wedded to atomicity.

2:13. Whitehead: no such thing as an inert fact.

2:14. In Bono’s opinion, science studies [by which he presumably means a figure such as Latour] has been too focused on things, not enough on creativity in Whitehead’s technical sense of the term: namely, events.

2:16. Recently, “form” in Aristotle has been likened to a program or genetic code, in which everything merely follows from what was already there. [note: Latour makes a similar critique of Aristotle in Irreductions, though there it is dunamis that is criticized rather than form.]

2:19. Whitehead: purposes and ends are not programmed in advance.

2:20. Actual occasions are atomizations of the extensive continuum that come into being and then perish.

2:23. The becoming of continuity is not incompatible with the gathering of the past.

2:24. The importance of vibration and rhythm in Whitehead.

2:25. Enduring objects are societies composed of actual occasions, but not substances of course. Thus, enduring objects are continually remade.

2:27. The relation between contrast and novelty in Whitehead.

2:30. The rivalry between intensity and stability in Whitehead.

2:31. Things live the vibratory life. They are not bundles of abstractions.

2:32. Thinking John Law’s work with the help of Whitehead [so, maybe he didn’t mean Latour earlier when speaking of science studies, as I assumed-g.h.]

2:38. The relevance of Francisco Varela’s biological work to these issues.

2:38. In a certain sense, Whitehead’s Aristotle is a straw man [I agree with Bono here].

2:40. Both vitalism and mechanism assume the inert character of matter.

2:40. Francis Glisson’s 1572 book has been neglected despite its important remarks on vitalism.