Adventures of Ideas, page 204: Whitehead distinguishes (as always) between entities or occasions, and societies. But his language here is interesting. On the one hand, there are “the completely real things which are the actual occasions.” On the other hand, “the real actual things that endure are all societies.” So, although Whitehead’s distinction violates Levi Bryant’s flat ontology, and opens him to Harman’s charge of “undermining” objects, nonetheless he insists that the enduring objects, or societies, are in their own way entirely real. He doesn’t dissolve them into the actual entities or actual occasions of which they are composed. What is the force (if any) of the distinction between “real actual things” and “completely real things”? Societies endure and have histories, whereas actual occasions don’t. It is the agglomeration of occasions in both time and space that gives rise to societies, but this should not be taken to undermine the societies (the redness of the sunset is as real as the photons that scientists reduce it to — this Whitehead’s version of what Latour later calls the “principle of irreduction”).