This concept of self-enjoyment does not exhaust that aspect of process here termed 'life'. Process for its intelligibility involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion. It is the process of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealized potentialities. The process of self-creation is the transformation of the potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes the immediacy of self-enjoyment.
Thus in conceiving the function of life in an occasion of experience, we must discriminate the actualized data presented by the antecedent world, the non-actualized potentialities which lie ready to promote their fusion into a new unity of experience, and the immediacy of self-enjoyment which belongs to the creative fusion of those data with those potentialities. This is the doctrine of the creative advance whereby it belongs to the essence of the universe, that it passes into a future. It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration. This is the reason why the notion of an instant of time, conceived as a primary simple fact, is nonsense.
But even yet we have not exhausted the notion of creation which is essential to the understanding of nature. We must add yet another character to our description of life. This missing characteristic is 'aim'. By this term 'aim' is meant the exclusion of the boundless wealth of alternative potentiality, and the inclusion of that definite factor of novelty which constitutes the selected way of entertaining those data in that process of unification. The aim is at that complex of feeling which is the enjoyment of those data in that way. 'That way of enjoyment' is selected from the boundless wealth of alternatives. It has been aimed at for actualization in that process.
Thus the characteristics of life are absolute self-enjoyment, creative activity, aim. Here 'aim' evidently involves the entertainment of the purely ideal so as to be directive of the creative process. Also the enjoyment belongs to the process and is not a characteristic of any static result. The aim is at the enjoyment belonging to the process.
The question at once arises as to whether this factor of life in nature, as thus interpreted, corresponds to anything that we observe in nature. All philosophy is an endeavor to obtain a self-consistent understanding of things observed. Thus its development is guided in two ways, one is the demand for a coherent self-consistency, and the other is the elucidation of things observed. It is therefore our first task to compare the above doctrine of life in nature with our direct observations. (208 - 209, Nature Lifeless, Whitehead)

If you say, ‘Isn ’ t life the answer?’ to the question what

a body can do, the answer is ‘Yes’. But you have to make

life an adverb: lively. It ’ s about liveliness or liveness.

There is no life substance. Life is not a thing. Life is the

way in which the mental and physical poles of events

come together – differently every time, always under

singular circumstances, moving in the general direction

of the accumulation in the world of differences, of

improvised novelty. Whitehead says that life is in the

intervals between things – in the way things relate, in

the way they come together in events under the dominant

tendency towards the generation of new forms, or

ontogenesis.

The tendency towards ontogenesis cannot operate

without the contrasting tendency towards homeostasis.

Life can ’ t always live at the limit. It can ’ t continue to

survive if it is always pushing to the limit of intensity,

creating new forms. It needs a degree of stability, oases

of rest. It cannot be chaotically far-from-equilibrium at

all times. It has to fi nd its footing, to brace itself for new

becomings. This means that life is the movement between

the mental and physical poles, between conformation

and supernormal excess, between one event and another,

between all of the various factors in play. Life lives in
the gaps. Still, what I just called the supernormal tendency,

corresponding to the mental pole, is the dominant

tendency. Life is biased in its direction – otherwise

it would not be so changeable. We wouldn ’ t have the

exuberant proliferation of forms that we see in nature

and in culture.

Arno Boehler: In the workshop you uttered the claim

that contemporary philosophers have to construct a

relational form of logic to think this ‘liveliness’ and

thereby deconstruct the classical binary form of logic?

Brian Massumi: To stay for a moment with the question

of life, I would say that a life is not an in-itself, it ’ s an

outdoing-itself. In other words, it follows a tendency to

exceed already-realized potential in an actualization of

new potential. That process, as you said, is relational.

In order to think relation as primary, we need a different

kind of logic, because the traditional logic is one of

separation. Traditionally, the basic logical gesture is to

separate X from not- X , and then defi ne the common

characteristics justifying inclusion of a given case in

the set of X ’ s. It starts with exclusion and ends in sameness.

That doesn ’ t get you to a process of outdoingitself.

It gets you to a stable structure of thought that

cannot move. If you try to undo that logic, you have to

accept that you cannot operate with the principle of the

excluded middle – X or not- X . But you also have to

go beyond deconstructing that exclusionary logic. You

have to go on to affi rm a more encompassing logic that

is able to deal with what I call ‘mutual inclusion’. When

you get to that territory, you fi nd that it ’ s mined with

paradoxes that you cannot avoid. You have to fi gure

out how to make them productive. In that logic there

are more terms than X and non- X , because of the

included middle.

(184 - 185, What a Body can do, Massumi), 

At the beginning of the modern period Descartes expresses this dualism with the utmost distinctness. For him, there are material substances with spatial relations, and mental substances. The mental substances are external to the material substances. Neither type requires the other type for the completion of its essence. Their unexplained interrelations are unnecessary for their respective existences. In truth, this formulation of the problem in terms of minds and matter is unfortunate. It omits the lower forms of life, such as vegetation and the lower animal types. These forms touch upon human mentality at their highest, and upon inorganic nature at their lowest.

The effect of this sharp division between nature and life has poisoned all subsequent philosophy. Even when the coördinate existence of the two types of actualities is abandoned, there is no 

 proper fusion of the two in most modern schools of thought. For some, nature is mere appearance and mind is the sole reality. For others, physical nature is the sole reality and mind is an epiphenomenon. Here the phrases 'mere appearance' and 'epiphenomenon' obviously carry the implication of slight importance for the understanding of the final nature of things.

The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of 'really real' things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.

The first step in the argument must be to form some concept of what life can mean. (205, Nature Lifeless, Whitehead) 

Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of Natural Science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of Physical Science lies in the fact that such Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat—or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental. (212 Nature Lifeless, Whitehead)

Surplus-value of life is not given and it is not found. It is created.

A value is not just refl ective of the character

of an event. It becomes a key factor in the generation

of events that express potential, and that forward it on

to subsequent events. A value, once emerged, remains

as an attractor for other events to come. It is that

forward-pulling attractive force towards the recurrence

of a mode of coming-together-for-expression that defi nes

an existential value.

An existential value is a surplus-value of life, in the

sense that it carries a force of extra-being, of becoming.

A surplus-value of life is always collective, but not in a

sense of a simple aggregation of individuals as countable

elements of a set. It is collective in that truly transindividual

sense in which things come into supernumerary

relation with each other through the potentials they

activate, and surpass themselves in a joint movement

constituting the dynamic unity of their differential. The

collective is not just an aggregate of individuals. It is a

co-individuation. For that reason, Simondon always

uses the term collective individuation.

(201, What a body can do, Massumi)

[….] (226) Consider our notion of 'causation'. How can one event be the cause of another? In the first place, no event can be wholly and solely the cause of another event. The whole antecedent world conspires to produce a new occasion. But some one occasion in an important way conditions the formation of a successor. How can we understand this process of conditioning?

The mere notion of transferring a quality is entirely unintelligible. Suppose that two occurrences may be in fact be detached so that one of them is comprehensible without reference to the other. Then all notion of causation between them, or of conditioning, becomes unintelligible. There is—with this supposition—no reason why the possession of any quality by one of them should in any way influence the possession of that quality, or of any other quality, by the other. With such a doctrine the play and interplay of qualitative succession in the world becomes a blank fact from which no conclusions can be drawn as to past, present, or future, beyond the range of direct observation. Such a positivistic belief is quite self-consistent, provided that we do not include in it any hopes for the future or regrets for the past. Science is then without any importance. Also effort is foolish, because it determines nothing. The only intelligible doctrine of causation is founded on the doctrine of immanence. Each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in its own nature. This is the reason why events have a determinate status relatively to each other. Also it is the reason why the qualitative energies of the past are combined into a pattern of qualitative energies in each present occasion. This is the doctrine of causation. It is the reason why it belongs to the essence of each occasion that it is where it is. It is the reason for the transference of character from occasion to occasion. It is the reason for the relative stability of laws of nature, some laws for a wider environment, some laws for a narrower environment. It is the reason why —as we have already noted—in our direct apprehension of the world around us we find that curious habit of claiming a two-fold unity with the observed data. We are in the world and the world is in us. Our immediate occasion is in the society of occasions forming the soul, and our soul is in our present occasion. The body is ours, and we are an activity within our body. This fact of observation, vague but imperative, is the foundation of the connexity of the world, and of the transmission of its types of order.  (226-227 Nature Lifeless, Whitehead)