CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE

If there's one shortcoming in my Nietzschean-Bataillean "excess theory"-- aside from the fact that anyone reading about it would have to know both Nietzsche and Bataille to gauge its validity-- is that all too often I've focused on the end rather than the means, the product rather than the process, From the beginnings of this blog I've tossed out such parallel terms as "symbolic complexity," "peak amplitude," "high mythicity," "super-functionality," and "the combinatory-sublime," all of which address the symbolic qualities of the finished literary work. But assume that a reader agrees with me that some works are simply more "ample" than others, whether in terms of symbolic discourse or one of the other three possible discourses. What process, then, explains  how one work reaches "peak amplitude," while other works don't climb that high?

I have yet to read any of the works of Alfred North Whitehead, not even his best-regarded work, PROCESS AND REALITY. However, knowing that Whitehead's philosophy was in part concerned with the ways in which humans construct value, I looked through the index of PROCESS, and wonder of wonders, the unfamiliar word "concrescence" leaped out at me.

Whitehead does not seem to have been adapted for purposes of literary studies much if at all, and most of his concerns seem entirely metaphysical in nature, as seen from this passage from THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY:

This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.

Eventually I may read enough Whitehead to learn whether or not his overall system coheres with those that have inspired me, ranging from Nietzsche and Bataille to Frye and Jung. But /happily
the word "concrescence" has a meaning independent of Whitehead. From the online Merriam-Webster:

1: increase by the addition of particles

2: a growing together : COALESCENCE

The term is used in both biology and medicine to signify organs that have grown together improperly. However, there's nothing improper in the process concrescence would connote in my system.

The Latin root of "conscrecense" connoted the ideas of "coagulation" and "solidification," but if the Encyclopedia is accurate, then Whitehead uses this physical process as a metaphor for the way "an occasion" expresses "its concreteness to the rest of the world." If we put aside the philosopher's specialized term "occasion" and replace it with any sort of phenomenal presence within the world of art and literature, then it would seem to aptly describe the intense interrelatedness of such phenomena to one another, much along the lines of Denny O'Neil's description of Hinduism's "Net of Indra," last referenced here:

We're looking at a net.  It has to be a largish one, though exactly how big is up to you... Now, imagine that at each juncture of your net there is a jewel, cunningly hung so it reflects all the other jewels... It's called the Net of Indra and scholars say it was conceived of by a Buddhist monk named Tu Shun about  2640 years ago. It was originally meant as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything that exists...

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

Further, the word is probably better for describing the intensification of any given discourse than the Aristotelian term I used in the two LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD that I employed here and here. Aristotle's "unity of action"-- which, when applied to the actual process of art, might be better termed "unity of effect"-- does not adequately represent the way artists bring together the representations of discourse within the four potentialities (even though for the most part I've devoted myself to the discourse of symbols alone). I will in future re-examine the few essays I've written on "unity of action" to determine whether or not "concrescence" proves a better fit, as it does for the LINE essays.

In addition, I'm considering the even more specialized term "hyperconscresence" to denote those works that "concrese" (not a real word, BTW) much better than any others.