I’m intensely grateful
to the Graduate Program in Science and
Technology Studies (STS) at UBC for inviting Isabelle Stengers to
lead a seminar on her reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s
Process and Reality, and on what she
calls “cosmopolitics.” In practice, she didn’t really lead a discussion so much
as aim to foster spontaneous interchange and to interrogate and even challenge
some of her own thinking; her recent book is called Thinking with Whitehead (2002, trans. 2011)—rather than thinking about or explaining—and the character and practice of that with-ness, of a
reading that involves co-creatively being with
a work rather that staging some sort of magisterial (professorial?) exegetical
mastery of it, is what I think for Stengers makes philosophy matter.
Still,
the seminar involved less mutual interchange—less a practice of collaborative
speculation, a discursive echo of the “open ontology” she wants to address—and
became more about participants posing questions to Professor Stengers about her
work. She had offered two papers for participants to read ahead of time, in the
hope, perhaps, of avoiding professing, although given the opportunity of having
her present in the classroom, it’s certainly understandable why a rather formal
question-and-answer session might happen. Describing, in one of those papers,
the emergence of her term “cosmopolitical,” she points to how “gripped by
worry,” by what sounds like anxiety over philosophical reach, she “needed to
slow down.” That slowing is not a diminution of attention but rather its
intensification—an attention, moreover, that remains iterative and hermeneutic,
but that also aspires to a reading practice that is co-creative rather than derivative
or, in the mundane sense, rather than merely critical. “It’s better to read
slowly,” she said in the seminar, “in order not to have understood everything.”
Reading doesn’t aim at comprehension, but to actualize the creative potential
in careful misprision.
She
doesn’t really articulate an aesthetics in Thinking
with Whitehead, if by aesthetics you mean a theory of art. But what she
calls the “adventure of the senses,” of aesthesis, pervades her meditations on
Whitehead’s writing and thinking. What Professor Stengers wants a seminar to
become, I think, is something that Whitehead describes, in Process and Reality,
as “intense experience without the shackle of reiteration from the past. This
is the condition for spontaneity of conceptual reaction” (Process and Reality 105). The active mind slows into the present
tense, but that spontaneity—I want to call it improvisation, but Stengers does
not—is not without relation to a past, without any iterative purchase on
(reading) history. Rather, the active, embodied mind, as one reads, becomes (to
borrow a few metaphors from both Whitehead and Stengers) an electromagnetic
resonator, an amplifier, an interstitial matrix: “It receives from the past, it
lives in the present” (Process and Reality 339). The interstice—the fictive and
material space “between the lines” of tissue, of both flesh and text—is a
crucial trope for Stengers, marking both a material and a societal openness, a
biological and a conceptual betweenness (betweenity?) that offers the condition
of possibility for communities of difference, for community as difference, the
unresolved and contrary, risky situation of the speculative seminar itself:
“speculative presence, and the eventual efficacy associated with it,
constitutes the wager of the interstice” (Thinking
with Whitehead 514). “Life,” as Whitehead puts it, “lurks in the
interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain. In the
history of a living society, its more vivid manifestations wander to whatever
quarter is receiving from the animal body an enormous variety of physical
experience.” (Process and Reality
105-6) Those “vivid” intensities don't and can’t happen all the time, and I’m
not even sure what a seminar conducted along those lines of sustained risk
might look like, might feel like, but in the classroom yesterday, what for me
was notable was how often Isabelle Stengers laughed. Her laughter was never
nervous or imperious or cynical—although she did make it clear that she doesn’t
abide thoughtlessness or “stupidity”—but manifest moments of vital warmth, her
celebratory enthusiasm for thinking that matters, in the present. I couldn’t
help but hear, as well, the nascence of an interstitial poetics, an ecology of
writing that attends to some as-yet-unapprehended upwelling of life between its
own unfolding lines.
Books
Isabelle Stengers, Thinking
with Whitehead: A Free and Wild
Creation of Concepts. 2002. Trans. Michael Chase.
Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2011
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected
edition, ed. David Ray
Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne.
New York: Free P, 1978.
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