Life in the Ruins with Whitehead and Stengers
A short essay on the "tentacular" metaphysics of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead.
The following essay was written for a graduate class at CIIS, “Process and Difference in the Pluriverse” with professor (and Integral Imprint author)
. Matt kindly encouraged me to publish this for my readership.Paid subscribers and Patrons get an early look at the essay (as ever, thank you for your support).
Keen to read more? Check out Matt’s philosophical review of the text here.
In Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse (2023), philosopher Isabelle Stengers summarizes the remarkable restructuration—what Bruno Latour would in his last work call ‘metamorphosis’—of the modern worldview. This metamorphosis presents a profound challenge for the activity of doing philosophy in such a time. “Apparently,” Stengers remarks, “the central motif for the history of living beings is no longer the selectivist motif of individual lineages competing for survival,” rather, “the motif now would be that of the generation of collectives of interdependent and intertwined living beings, at all scales, each making a living in its own manner… with others and thanks to others.”[1] Despite Margaret Thatcher’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as a society,’ the polycrisis continues, in nearly every facet of daily life, to demonstrate otherwise. If there is some wisdom that can be gleaned from how things are falling apart, what would it be? “We are individuals first, yes… but we exist in a larger social body,” writes Kim Stanley Robinson, a science fiction writer, for the New Yorker, “we are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies.” For Robinson, the recent coronavirus pandemic has catalyzed another kind of cultural mutation. Viral emissaries, messengers of Gaia, have rewritten the social imagination. “This is shocking news,” Robinson adds, “it demands a whole new worldview.”[2] The timing of this new worldview, which could be called a “milieu of belonging,” remains complicated.[3] It arrives in a world on the verge of collapse.
Borrowing from systems theorist Stuart Koffman, Stengers suggests that the task of philosophy in such a milieu has something to do with “making a living,” that is, making a life that is a “diversified, worth-while experience.”[4] What does this mean in the context of the sixth great extinction? At the very least, it has something to do with what Anna Tsing’s haunting description of “life in the ruins.” In a time of collapse, the question of making a living can no longer afford to be—and indeed never truly was—a solitary anthropic affair. To make a living is always, as the microbiologist Lynn Margulis demonstrated and cyborg anthropologist Donna Haraway popularized in recent years, an activity of ‘sympoiesis,’ a making-with. Stengers shares the words of Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber to underscore this point: “We have never been individuals.”[5] Some biologists have moved away from the individualist paradigm altogether. Nature does not select “individuals or genomes,” nature selects “relationships.”[6] In Earth’s long history, life has had a knack for making a life in the shadow of great catastrophes (from the Permian ‘Great Dying’ to the Cretaceous ‘K-T’ event). Life has made worlds out of ruins, but it has always done so in relation. Stengers applies this symbiotic view to Baruch Spinoza’s famous question concerning the body, reenvisioning its implictions for a planetary pluralism. “In such cases where we should stop speaking about nature,” Stenger writes, “the possibility of a ‘we’ is coming into existence: What might we be capable of, together, this animal and I?”[7] If human beings are ‘societies, made of societies,’ then the question of what a body can do becomes pluralized: what can a society do? Life in the ruins asks this question and makes of it a new world.
For human beings—let alone philosophers—living in an age of mass extinction, making a life in the ruins means overcoming the many paradigmatic bifurcations between human and more-than-human, subject and object, map and territory. What can no longer afford to persist in this time is that classical ‘view from nowhere,’ which the moderns once assumed to have privileged, dispassionate access. Like the actors in Bruno Latour’s networks, living in the ruins means learning that human beings have never stood outside the frame. The people who call themselves ‘modern’ suddenly find themselves in the muck and the mire of ‘contact zones,’ where actors and strange attractors come together to compose, in Latour’s words, a “fine muddle.” As human beings are implicated—and imbricated—in this muddle, their resilience is reciprocally linked to the actions of other actors (and the converse, as everything from oil spills to deforestation painfully remind us, is also true). Such is the way that Gaian organisms have made, and remade, their living. “Probabilities alter; topologies morph; development is canalized by the fruits of reciprocal induction,” Stengers writes.[8]
Metamorphosis, connoting both the imago of the insect and the imaginal Urpflanze of Goethe, appears to be at very heart of what it means for life to make its living. The history of life, as the microbiologist Lynn Margulis has helped to popularize, is best described as a series of marvelous interspecies achievements. From the mitochondria of life’s early cells to the world-transforming plant-fungi mycorrhizae, transformation is life’s answer to Spinoza’s question of “what can a society do?” Throughout Gaia’s history, then, organisms continue to “make themselves mutually capable of something they cannot do on their own, thus making their living with one another and through one another.”[9]
From symbiosis to sympoiesis, the question of ‘making-with’ comes to the forefront of philosophy in a time of collapse. Doing philosophy in the ruins has something to do with learning to interiorize this milieu, not merely as individuals, but as life teaches us, as new social possibilities. As self and society are linked in their metamorphosis, the anthropocentric polis must find a way to be reborn, and refashioned, into a wider and wilder ‘we.’ Stengers suggests such a more-than-human turn with her Spinozan inquiry: what can a society do in a time of collapse when what is meant by ‘we’ comes to include the more-than-human? For Stengers, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead becomes integral to the project of overcoming the “bifurcation of nature,” and making a life in the ruins. Whitehead’s process-relational thinking brings philosophy back down to Earth. It affords the chance to meet the pluralistic world and its beings in “actual occasions,” not de-worlding abstractions and universalisms (as modern thought has tended to do). ‘Making sense in common,’ for Stengers, resists the bifurcation of nature through a practice of philosophical vigilance, keeping our Whiteheadean feet on the ground enough to make possible a widening of the commons, so that it comes to include plant, fungi, and animal kin. “Where we stop speaking about ‘nature,’” Stengers writes, “the possibility of a ‘we’ is coming into existence: What might we be capable of, together, this animal and I?”
What Whitehead offers, Stengers suggests, are philosophical tools for living, or rather making a living, in this world we call a ruin. Admittedly, what Stengers offers is “tentacular version” of Whiteheadian metaphysics. One should imagine Whitehead ecologized in a burst of more-than-human relations (I am reminded of pop-culture psychedelia images, like the Android Jones “Forward-Escape” poster, which depicts a human skull ‘breaking open’ into kaleidoscopic hyperspace). Much of what was needed for this tentacular turn was already present in Whitehead’s process-relational metaphysics which, as Stengers describes, could be thought of as “a matrix for producing nonconforming propositions… neither illustrated by familiar, habitual facts nor in conformity with social heritage,” and that “such propositions become objects of feeling,” and so doing, “lifts the hegemony that prevents us from feeling our abstractions a living… imparting importance in this way and not some other.”[10] Thinking ceases to be a static, frozen affair; a ‘dead abstraction.’[11] Again, Whiteheadian thought encourages “cultivating vigilance toward our modes of abstraction,” at the same time that it aspires to ‘weld’ imagination with common sense. Process philosophy embraces speculative thought without that thought becoming untethered, as it were, from the relational ground of “individual concrete facts,” and so Whiteheadean thought finds itself at home in the Jamesian pluriverse. “There is no where extant a complete gathering up of the universe in one focus,” as James wrote in a 1910 correspondence, “something escapes, even from God.”[12] But what, for Whitehead, is common sense, when it must be done in the dark? Both a constraint and a wager. It involves brooding, or the refusal to “lose confidence in the value of experience, even if experience is difficult to put into words.” Brooding insists that there is something about experience, concrete sense, that carries speculative potential: brooding is tentacular, it reaches its feelers out beyond the confident extensions of theory, and there, where it cannot guarantee to know how, or why, brooding insists on participating. Brooding refuses to omit what cannot be known, but only darkly felt. It is therefore speculative, in that it aids in the practice of welding philosophy with imagination. Brooding affords philosophy the possibility of taking necessary fabulations, and speculative leaps—Whitehead’s wager and adventure—while trusting that, even in our unknowing, some part of us always remains in touch, in relation, with a pluralistic universe (or, as Catherine Keller describes, a form of ‘apophatic entanglement’ with Gaian realities). Making common sense in the ruins has no use for false certainties—they are, in fact, more of an existential threat to our common survival than maintaining a degree of vigilance against the objective view from nowhere. “In this world,” Stengers writes, “nothing is self-evident and nothing happens by right… consent to precarity must be cultivated.”[13] Stengers echoes the insights of systems thinker Bruce Clarke in his discussion on the “epistemological limit” of Gaian thinking. “To me,” Clarke writes, “it means that the universe is just as unobservable in its totality as in any other whole system.” In Whiteheadian fashion, Clarke observes that “the true view is in process,” and that “our best recourse is to echo Gaia’s own operational recursions… We cannot possess totalities, but we can oscillate among states, over time.”[14] We can, in a fashion appropriate to Whiteheadian process and its tentacular milieu, make sense in common.
Whitehead helps us to make a life in the ruins through ensuring a mode of thinking that insists on staying in relation, and therefore in common. “Always here and never off the ground.”[15] Stengers nudges Whiteheadian metaphysics firmly into the nascent ‘tentacular milieu,’ and it is in the context of living and dying here, in the ruins, and not elsewhere that she proposes cultivating “the art of attention,” where ‘contact zones’ between human the human and more-than-human arrive at their “genuine option,” as James called it: to make sense in common (i.e., interspecies fabulation). It is in the ruins of the pluriverse that this grander sense of ‘we’ is free to take the unthinkable leap, make the ancient wager: for life, for Whiteheadian “living societies,” it is always a question of metamorphosis. ‘What is possible?’ is both question and answer, and so therefore the process by which most unlikely alliances are formed, and federations of beings compose and recompose themselves, which is to say their world. With tentacular feelers ‘we’ reach out to each other in the ruins, and ‘we’ seek relation, and there, always there, it is Gaia who asks again: what can a society do?’
Works Cited
[1] Stengers, Isabelle. Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse 130.
[2] See Robinson, Kim Stanley. “The Coronavirus is Rewriting our Imaginations.” New Yorker. 2020.
[3] Stengers 134.
[4] Ibid 127.
[5] Ibid 130.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid 129.
[8] Ibid 136.
[9] Ibid 137.
[10] Ibid 145.
[11] Ibid 144.
[12] Goodman, Russell B. “William James’s Pluralisms.” Revue internationale de philosophie 260, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 155–76. https://doi.org/10.3917/rip.260.0155
[13] Ibid 175.
[14] Clarke, Bruce. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
[15] Stengers 175.
Love this essay!