Unconscious Ontology

Jon Mills, writing about Whitehead's "unconscious ontology," sees the processual nature of reality as deeply connected to acts of prehension:

Although lacking articulation and development, the primacy of unconscious process is already prepared in his most elementary treatment of prehension. For Whitehead, prehending is pure activity: it may be understood as a process of seizing, absorbing, and synthesizing the elements of the surround into an internal unity or organized emotional pattern. Prehending is equivalent to feeling: it is a purposeful, valuative, self-determined act. In Whitehead's words, "To be an actual entity is to have self-interest. This self-interest is a feeling of self-valuation; it is an emotional tone."(6) Thus feeling becomes the expression of an actual entity's subjectivity. An actual entity is tantamount to an occasion because it is an instance--an "event," "stream," or "throb" of experience arising out of data (PR, 190, 40), subsequently appropriating elements from its environment and making it part of its internal structure. The infinite societies of occasions that comprise the universe embody every mode of electrodynamic energy explained through quantum mechanics to the highest instantiations of human consciousness. Through the philosophy of organism, Whitehead is able to show that nature is not inert or static substance, but rather a dynamic array of transactions constituted as actual agencies that respond to and express themselves in the flow of inter-relational activity that comprises all reality.

Remixology is the quantum mechanics of feeling as an intersubjective and affective mode of mediumistic becoming, where the postproduction of presence, of prehending the selected source material into an aesthetic fact of life, is what a performance artist does while immersing themselves in the creative process.

To be self-consciously aware of ones own remixological potential is to throb with intensity while envisioning the next seamless becoming.

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Metadata: intensification, remixology, unconscious, ontology, creativity, art