Isabelle Stengers and The Dramatization of Philosophy

Introduction
Isabelle Stengers and the Dramatization

of Philosophy
Martin Savransky
“Dic cur hic”

In what may seem like an uncharacteristic passage by someone
who otherwise described himself as the typical example of the Victorian
Englishman, Alfred North Whitehead once wrote that “[t]he notion of
pure thought in abstraction from all expression is a figment of the learned
world. A thought is a tremendous form of excitement” (Modes 36). It is
the patterned signature of its expression that not only gives thought its
own distinct character, but also propels it out into the world, exciting
its environment with a new variation of interests. Without this ability to
repattern, even if just slightly, the atmosphere of feeling in which they
are immersed, to make a difference by shifting the way in which a situ-
ation may matter, thoughts would all be equally uninteresting. This is
why, as it is expressed, a thought is like “a stone thrown into a pond.”
Shaking its environment with its ripples, “it disturbs the whole surface
of our being” (36).
I am reminded of this passage in Whitehead’s Modes of Thought
quite often. But I am drawn back to it with distinct force as I undertake
the task of introducing Isabelle Stengers’s thought, and the ripples cul-
tivated throughout what to the best of my knowledge is the first special
issue in the Anglophone world dedicated to her philosophy, into this
learned world. I’m drawn to it because such introductions would often
seem to invite something quite different from this expressive excitement.
Indeed, academic custom would perhaps advise that the importance of a
philosophy be introduced, to some degree at least, in abstraction from it.
To the degree, that is, that the scope of its ripples, those that may remind
us of a philosopher’s achievements, their distinguished trajectory, and the
breadth of their reception, may be abstracted from the singular patterning
of the ripples their philosophy generates.
Nothing, in this case, would prevent such an account. Ever since her
collaboration with the Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine on the implications
© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc.

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4 Martin Savransky
of the research on dissipative structures and irreversibility, and throughout

the course of her now extensive writings, Stengers has indeed crafted an
eminent career that has not only earned her the highly prestigious grand
prize for philosophy from the Académie Française, but has also established
her as a world-renowned philosopher of science, and an original reader
of Deleuze and Whitehead. Furthermore, thanks to her interventions in
the so-called Science Wars, and her constructively divergent association
with the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, many aspects of Stengers’s
philosophy have already become well-known in the Anglophone world as
an influential contribution to the post-disciplinary field known as ‘science
and technology studies,’ and she has been recognized as an important and
demanding voice within the emerging field of environmental humanities.
Many other achievements could be added to this list. But such in-
troductory habits are always somewhat paradoxical. Because more than
just abstracting the scope of the ripples from their own patterning, this
mode of recognition, however habitual, however celebratory, effectively
judges a philosopher’s importance according to another pattern, one that
may be relevant to the discipline, or to the academy, but not to the way in
which the philosophy in question may have succeeded in transfiguring
the atmospheres of feeling to which it has connected. Not, that is, to the
fact that “philosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a
great philosopher” (Whitehead, Process 11). If there is always something
of a paradox in such introductions, they feel especially inadequate when
it comes to addressing the philosophy of Isabelle Stengers. And not just
because of the greatness of the shock her philosophy may involve, a shock
that is very much alive and kicking, progressively gaining amplitude and
reverberation. They feel inadequate because nothing could be farther from
Stengers’s philosophical signature than the celebration of something called
“pure thought” in abstraction from its dramatic excitement, as if thought
were ever a neutral operation to be carried out purely in the sky of ideas.
Deleuze put it provocatively when he said: “Given any concept, we
can always discover its drama” (98). With Stengers, this isn’t just a possibil-
ity; it is a requirement. What would her philosophy of science, concerned
as it is with the possibility of cultivating an ecology of practices, each
endowed with their own requirements and obligations, mean in abstrac-
tion from the attempt to dislodge the arrogant resentments that fueled the
Science Wars and its ongoing aftermath on both sides of its trenches? How
should one understand her readings of Deleuze and Whitehead, so unlike
those of many Deleuzians and Whiteheadians alike, in abstraction from the
attempt not to be authorized by their thought, or to cipher them, but to
put her own thought to the immanent testing experience of conferring
upon her reading an ethopoietic character, one whose effect is no other
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Introduction: Isabelle Stengers 5
than to transform the reader who risks thinking with them? Even worse,
how would one make sense of the fact that the same philosopher who
explored the implications of thinking with far-from-equilibrium systems
and ventured into the history of chemistry, who meditated on the event of
Galileo’s experiments and his invention of a new form of scientific veridic-
tion, and delved into the abstract speculations of some great European
philosophers; that this is the same philosopher who has also written about
the efficacy of hypnosis and now calls for a reclaiming of animism, who
invites us to take the risk of affirming the reality of Gaia, and, through an
alliance with the contemporary neopagan witch Starhawk, endeavors to
think while feeling the smoke of the burning times in her nostrils? How
to understand it, that is, without paying attention to the atmosphere of
feeling in which her philosophy operates and whose mutation it pursues,
an atmosphere shaped by the dreams of a modern world which abstracts
at everyone’s peril, and shows nothing but disdain for everything that
its own abstractions have become incapable of feeling and making felt?
It seems to me that if there is a signature to the unique patterning
of the ripples that characterize Stengers’s philosophy, it may well be this:
the permanent dramatization of thought. Which is to say, the risky exercise of
crafting philosophy in the hold of the events that connect the creation of
concepts to the historical, political and ethical dramas that call for them.
As she wrote with characteristic humor at the beginning of her Thinking
with Whitehead: “The surest way to ‘kill’ philosophy is to transmit it in
the manner of a science: one does not need to enter into contact with
Newton’s problem to learn rational dynamics– the equations of Lagrange
and Hamilton define what must be retained of it– but to deal with Plato
without first sharing his problem is somewhat analogous to studying
butterflies on the basis of a collection of pinned butterflies, without ever
having seen one fly” (10).
Indeed, it is no surprise that Stengers is fond of recalling Leibniz’s
motto, “Dic cur hic”: say why here. For the “why,” here, has no recourse to
transcendental reasons, nor to universal principles capable of providing
a rational justification for the choice of how or what to think, feel, or do,
on any given occasion. To the contrary, dic cur hic functions as a pragmatic
test– it is precisely the demand not to “shield yourself behind general
justifications that block pragmatic imagination, the envisagement of the
kind of difference this choice is liable to make here and now” (Stengers,
“Thinking” 29). What demands to be expressed is not therefore the truth
behind the general reasons that would authorize your thinking, endow-
ing it with the seemingly neutral character of a logical deduction, but the
problematic situation whose gripping drama takes hold of you, forcing
you to think:
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6 Martin Savransky
Dic cur hic– suspend your action, let yourself be affected by this “here”,
that is, by this world; don’t give to your reasons a power they don’t
have, always general, valid for an innumerable host of different worlds,
but mute as to the way in which that which they justify will contribute
to each of these worlds. […] In a world where everything conspires,
learning not to confer on a judgement the power of a reason does not
guarantee a better choice, but it implies an act of consent, a “feeling-
with” this world, against that which Nietzsche would only very late
call ressentiment – the sentiment of impotence that nourishes contempt
for oneself, for this world, for the reasons that make this world, rather
than another, exist. (Stengers, “L’insistance” 10; my translation)
Refusing the reasons that give rise to resentment, and consenting instead
to feeling-with those worlds that make one think, with Stengers the task
of philosophy is staged in an entirely different way. Like alchemy, it be-
comes an impure art– transformed by a speculative gesture that no longer
confers on “pure thought” the power to dictate the reasons from which
judgments ought to be passed, or from which actions ought to be derived.
Shrugging one’s shoulders at the authority of general theories—with their
immaculate ideals of essence, logic, or transcendence, their “either/ors”
and their “if…thens”—to dramatize philosophy is to turn it into an earthly,
experimental, and gripping sort of affair: an immanent and situated act of
creation concerned with whens and wheres and hows, with abstractions
and their consequences, with practices and their dreams, with events and
the possibles they create.
What Has Happened to Us? The Gesture of Dramatization

This is a radical gesture indeed. For it is not a mere appeal to his-
toricism, always susceptible of being turned into a quasi-transcendental
gesture of disqualification of its own. Stengers’s dramatization is radical
because it strips philosophy from its rights. No longer protected by the
power of anonymous reasons, every thought is a wager. It is an attempt to
explore, and in so doing craft a creative and risky response to the dramatic
question, “what has happened to us?” (Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead
14-16). But Stengers’s exploration of this question is not performed with
the purpose of devising an explanation with the status of a verdict, an
account capable of settling the question once and for all, of providing a
final diagnosis whose incisiveness may endow us— the people of criti-
cal ideas— with a feeling of historical satisfaction at our own impending
demise. One asks the question “what has happened to us?” not from a
position of lucidity but from a state of perplexity, when an adventure has
gone astray– and a strayed adventurer will find little solace in an account
whose effect is simply that of providing rational justification for her sad
fate. If thought is a wager, it is because it involves the pragmatic risk of
trusting that, despite the success with which modernity may have turned
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its dramas into tragedies, another staging is possible– in its still ongoing
multifariousness, the world provides vital resources for resistance, culti-
vation, and careful experimentation. Rather than a nostalgic lament, the
question “what has happened to us?” is a lure for giving the possible a
chance, for regenerating our imaginations, for experimenting with other
ways of inhabiting our present, “for telling our stories in another way, in
a way that situates us otherwise– not as defined by the past, but as able,
perhaps, to inherit from it in another way” (14).
Pressing on in the modern ruins of our present, it is the insistence
of the possible which philosophy is called upon to dramatize, to which it
must invent a manner of responding. As such, the gesture of dramatiza-
tion demands a speculative leap, one that forces thought to put Reason
out of its depth and turns it into a creative and experimental art. With
Stengers, however, to suggest that dramatization turns thought into an
art of creation is never to say that, finally freed from the shackles of its
own justifications, philosophy turns mystical, enjoying a sort of poetic
license unencumbered by the rationalistic demands of consistency and
coherence that, in spite of all, may have so far prevented philosophy from
taking its last breath. As Stengers argues, philosophy’s “survival would
then depend on the continuing creation of what produces philosophers, of
what is able to transform what we call thinking into an adventure, because
it acts as an imperative, with a necessity of its own” (“Speculative” 188).
Dramatization is borne of a necessity that is neither rational nor
reasonable, but immanent to the problematic events and encounters that
force one to think. Indeed, as soon as Whitehead evoked the image of the
stone thrown into a pond, he felt the urge to correct it, for “we should
conceive the ripples,” he added, “as effective in the creation of the plunge
of the stone into the water. The ripples release the thought, and the thought
augments and distorts the ripples. In order to understand the essence of
thought we must study it in relation to the ripples amid which it emerges”
(Modes 36). The first task of dramatization is therefore to honor the prob-
lematic that turns one into a philosopher, and to make this problematic
matter. Which is to say that Stengers’s philosophy is indissociable from our
epoch, when thinking can no longer be a matter of an innocent dream of
the attainment of universal truth, ecumenical peace, or eternal salvation.
To dramatize philosophy is to refuse to partake in the perennial question
of “what is the true?” for as Deleuze suggested, this is never enough, and
one must ask “who wants the true, when and where, how and how much?”
(98). Indeed, in a present fraught with the deleterious histories of modern
“progress” and techno-scientific innovation, of capitalist accumulation,
Western colonialism, and ecological depletion, thinking becomes indeed
an imperative to ask such questions so as to struggle against the betrayal
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8 Martin Savransky
of the possibility of a more livable future for the many inhabitants of this
endangered Earth. It becomes a necessity to risk inventing new collective
arts and practices of attention, of struggle, of study, of imagination and
experimentation “capable once again of inhabiting the devastated zones
of experience” (Pignarre and Stengers 137) in an Earth whose ongoing
collective existence is precisely what is at risk of extinction.
Thus, the creative gesture of dramatizing philosophy consists, in the
first instance, in “the act of giving to an imperative question the power to
claim the concepts it needs in order to obtain its most dramatic, forceful
necessity, in order to force thinking in such a way that the philosopher
can no longer say ‘I think,’ can no longer be a thinking subject” (Stengers,
“Speculative” 189). But to the extent that its success may be understood
in terms of its efficacy in distorting the ripples, in generating a shock that
prevents philosophy from reverting to its old position, not being able to
claim a victorious “I think” in abstraction from what makes her think,
this imperative does not, for all that, make the philosopher submit to her
milieu. It does not make her indistinguishable from her epoch, as if un-
derstanding her signature would be equivalent to explaining it away by
waving the magic wand of a Zeitgeist. It is here that the task of telling our
stories “in a way situates us otherwise,” becomes a truly pragmatic art,
concerned not with the reduction of truth to politics, but with the political
creation of concepts whose truth “is instead related to the interest of the
problem that requires them” (190).
In this way, whenever Stengers is concerned, thought is not an origi-
nary well of conceptual invention but a singular vector of transformation of
a problematic field. Indeed, what is truly disruptive and exciting is not
the stone itself, but the stone-thrown-into-a-pond, that is, a singularity
that introduces an interstice, a shift in perspective, a variation, a break
in the equilibrium of the pond’s surface, and situates it otherwise, dis-
turbing the whole surface of its being. It is perhaps no coincidence that
Whitehead, in the same piece, would propose that the “concrete truth is
the variation of interests” (Modes 11). What’s more, this dramatization of
philosophy as an impure, pragmatic art, as a non-originary yet singular
vector of transformation of problematic fields, may perhaps also enable
us to understand Stengers’s insistence on the need to invent a manner of
inhabiting the interstices of the problematics she is moved by, on creating
concepts not only by consenting to feel-with other philosophers but also
with a plethora of situated practices within and beyond the sciences, whose
singularity she seeks to vectorize – practices “which exhibit the possibil-
ity of an approach by the very fact that they have already undertaken it”
(Stengers, Cosmopolitics II 313).
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One can discern this pragmatic art at work in her attempt to dislodge
the resentful trenches on both sides of the Science Wars, where indeed for
Stengers it is neither a matter of siding with the critics in cultural studies
and the social sciences, who by habit would reduce the sciences to another
game of competing interests, nor of simply extending a perfected, more
rational and consensual version of Popper’s criterion of demarcation,
a justification capable of abstracting an image of a purely disinterested
science from the problematic distribution of interests and passions that
configure the contours of the situations in which scientific practitioners
dream, operate, and invent. What is at stake in her intervention instead
is the creation of a “new mode of astonishment,” a novel situation of
perplexity, capable of asking anew the question “what has happened to
us?” Capable, that is, of dramatizing the problematic field which makes
‘the science question’ matter while identifying “a ‘motif’ (in the double
sense, both musical and desiring) that would singularize ‘science’ and
make it capable of becoming, certainly not an object of definition, but a
subject of history” (Stengers, The Invention 71).
If The Invention of Modern Science was primarily concerned with the
singularization of this thing called “science,” this situated gesture of dra-
matization soon reveals a proliferation of interstices, a demand to follow
its vectorial thread, every time anew, with manifold relationships across
divergent practices, engendering each time a new adventure: “How can
we make it possible for a modern practitioner to present herself, justify
her practice, draw attention to what interests her, without that interest
coinciding with a disqualification?” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics I 49). It is this
practical transformation of the philosophical problematic itself, then, that
enables Stengers to trust the possibility of envisaging an always-unstable
“ecology of practices,” a task most monumentally articulated in her Cos-
mopolitics. For indeed, as she presents it, the thinking of such an ecology
is borne again of necessity, of “the demand that no practice be defined
as ‘like any other,’ just as no living species is like any other.” And it is
this dramatic imperative that may in turn allow Stengers to approach
practices in their divergence, that is, by feeling-with each of their singular
borders, “experimenting with questions which practitioners may accept
as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, rather than posing
insulting questions that would lead them to mobilise and transform the
border into a defence against their outside” (Stengers, “Introductory” 184).
As it happens with good dramas, as soon as a few characters enter
the scene, the plot thickens, and as one follows its unfolding, the field
begins to refold onto new dimensions, infused with other relevant threads,
and a multitude of other problematics begin to resonate in tandem. If the
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10 Martin Savransky
ecology of practices operates as a vector of equalization, of mise en égalité,

speculatively enacting the trust in a possible togetherness of divergent
interests and dreams, it rapidly becomes perceptible that the entire ecol-
ogy itself, like the Earth we still precariously inhabit– or whatever is left
of either or both– are also part of another drama. For they subsist in an
ongoing process of capture and destruction by the dramatic capitalist
operation of a generalized mise en equivalence whose relentless effort of
turning everything into a productive force, and subjecting everything to
the laws of the market, propagates “a veritable cemetery for destroyed
practices and collective knowledges” (Stengers, In Catastrophic 98). It is
by dramatizing this dimension of multiple ecological devastation, by giv-
ing to this drama the power to claim the concepts it may need, that the
problematic field acquires new dimensions and demands: more than ever
before, crafting the possibility of a habitable interstice becomes imperative.
And it is here too that Stengers can be seen exploring new situations, and
vectorizing unlikely, speculative alliances.
Deeply moved by what she refers to as the “GMO event,” which
relates to the European movement of resistance to the proliferation of
genetically modified organisms, she is prompted to tell a story to situate
us, and the problematic, otherwise: no longer one simply concerned with
the authority of modern science in relation to a host of other knowledge-
practices, but one attendant to the often subtle but crucial discrepancies
between those activists and scientific practitioners “who were in the
process of producing more and more concrete, more and more significant
knowledges,” and “the knowledge of those responsible for public order,”
including the indeed capitalized figures of the Entrepreneur, the State, and
yes, Science (Stengers, In Catastrophic 36).
But there is more. For what this added dimension brings to the
problematic field, with the dramatic force of an imperative, is the need to
heed the intrusion of the Earth itself into the scene, one that is here to stay,
making perceptible that we can no longer “think of ourselves as being the
only true actors, capable of making and unmaking” (Pignarre and Stengers
117). A ticklish being enters the problematic anew, resituating everyone
and everything: from those responsible for the public order, who publicly
dream about geo-engineering this intrusion, to the insatiable critics in the
humanities and the social sciences who have not resisted the temptation
of engaging the idea of an epoch –the Anthropocene– that would finally
bear their name. Through the gesture of naming this character not in
order to be correct, or to speak the truth, but in order “to confer on what is
named the power to make us feel and think in the mode that the name calls for,”
Stengers risks renaming it “Gaia.” A singularity indeed: not a synonym
for a concrete, felt Earth, but a name for the-one-who-intrudes, one which
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demands a response “as much to what provoked her intrusion as to its

consequences” (In Catastrophic 43).
The dramatization of the fact that we are not the only actors, that
we are not alone in the world, also requires the reclaiming of practices
that would seem to have been already buried in the capitalist cemetery
and that we, bewitched by the power to measure everything according
to its contribution to the general interest, have failed to honor; practices
that require a humble apprenticeship, for they are the ones “that spoke
of prudence in a fearsome world, of the possibility of creation despite the
permanent probability of war” (Pignarre and Stengers 117). Here again,
Stengers seeks to craft stories that situate us otherwise, vectorizing not
just the practices of scientists and environmental activists, each in their
singularity and possible alliances, but now also entering into an appren-
ticeship with the practices of neopagan witches, whose singular craft, what
they crucially– because the naming is already part of their practice– call
magic, requires the reactivation of the art of paying attention, of protect-
ing oneself, “that is to say in the first place and above all, not to think
of oneself as sufficient onto oneself. They have learned the necessity of
casting the circle, of creating the closed space where forces they have a
vital need for can be convoked”:
Unlike scientists, it [the witches’ circle] is not defined against a world
that it would later conquer and convert. Unlike that of feminists and
of non-violent protesters, it doesn’t include human protagonists only.
What is invoked there, she who, the witches say, ‘returns’ is she to whom
thanks will be given for the event that makes each and all together
capable of opening up and of learning. She who makes them capable,
when opening the circle and parting, of encountering differently what
it was first necessary to keep outside. To honour the goddess is to learn
at one and the same time to close and to make exist, inside, the ‘cry’
of a world that demands that one learn how to join it again. (Pignarre
and Stengers 138-39)
Once again, the drama of thought keeps metamorphosing, transforming
the problematic in such a way that resisting the capitalist destruction of
practices and habitats connects, intimately, the question of the vulner-
ability of the ecology of practices to the test of honoring and relaying
the heritage of knowledges and techniques that modernity has already
dishonored. Situated anew, dramatizing the question “what has happened
to us?” forces Stengers to experiment with a different staging: “What have
we done, what do we carry on doing when we use words that make us the
heirs of those who eradicated witches?” (Stengers, “Cosmopolitical” 1002).
Thankfully, Stengers’s dramatization of philosophy is still ongoing.
It involves many other threads, transforming with its ripples a host of
problematic worlds that our modern habits of thought would rather keep
separate. But what breathes life into it is not so much, I insist, the devel-
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12 Martin Savransky
opment of the accomplished trajectory of an individual philosopher, as

the rippled cultivation of a mode of expression, a free and wild creation of
concepts that respond to a question rather than a vision. What is at stake
is the piecemeal development of a singular signature that simultaneously
requires, and is addressed to, others, “in so far as they are ‘in their ele-
ment,’ insofar as their habits constitute a world for them, into which they
admit no free trespassing.” A risky signature it is indeed, for rather than
be in the search for anonymous truths or lucid critiques of our epoch, it
proffers its divergence, trusting that “these habits may be inflected,” that
“laughter may resound testifying to the entertainment of a proposition
that transforms what was accepted as an unavoidable alternative into a
badly posed problem” (Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead 517).
Compassionate Thought: A Collective Effort in Creative Appreciation

The expressive sign, Whitehead wrote, “is more than interpretable.
It is creative. It elicits the intuition which interprets it. It cannot elicit
what is not there. A note on a running fork can elicit a response from a
piano. But the piano has already in it the string tuned to the same note”
(Religion 118). If this is true of Stengers’s philosophy, as I have proposed
above, it is also true of the many articles one will find in this special is-
sue. The articles collected here constitute interpretative explorations of
this unique signature that I have associated with Stengers’s philosophy.
But they are, each in their own way, co-creative of the notes that Stengers’s
running forks elicit, making them resonate in a variety of different keys,
and in relation to their own dramas and imperatives. What is more, when
one listens closely, it might be possible to hear how their different keys
begin to resonate with each other in often surprising and fertile ways.
Some of them address directly, and expand on, this nagging, dra-
matic dimension that sets Stengers’s philosophy in motion, that turns her
thought into an experimental wager and transforms her craft into a truly
pragmatic operation– that is, they deal with the question and status of
“the problematic” itself. Thus, in his article, Didier Debaise explores the
singularity of Stengers’s philosophy by elaborating a creative interpreta-
tion of the function that she attributes to it; one that, he wagers, dramatizes
philosophy as a political craft devoted to nothing less than resisting stupid-
ity, that is, resisting a characteristically modern mode of operation which
consists in the incapacity to evaluate what is of importance, an acquired
incapacity that Debaise correlates with “the celebration of false problems.”
Martin Savransky, for his part, relays this concern with the transfor-
mation of badly posed problems in a different key. Exploring the challenge
of what it may mean to think with Stengers today, his article pays attention
to the manner in which Stengers carries out this transformative task. In
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so doing, he emphasizes the importance that the resounding “laughter”

has in Stengers’s thought, and proposes that Stengers’s philosophy cul-
tivates what he refers to as a “humor of the problematic”– distinguished
both from the solemnity of serious epistemologists and the arrogance of
ironic sociologists, Stengers’s humor is an art of immanence that endows
the problematic with an existence and a force of its own. As such, “the
laughter of humor consists in allowing the problematic to be inhabited
such that one may be able to attend to the construction of differences
that diverging practices articulate in developing a sense of the problems
that animate them.” Subsequently, Andrew Goffey’s article throws into
sharp relief a dimension that resonates throughout the first two articles
and indeed throughout Stengers’s philosophy: the problematic of power.
And he chooses to stage this question in a very particular way– while
exploring several stages of her oeuvre, Goffey focuses centrally on the
approach to power that Stengers cultivates in her earlier and recurrent
writings on hypnosis and psychoanalysis. In this way, he argues that her
gesture of singularization is intimately connected to a multiplication of
powers, enabling an analysis of powers in terms of their instability: “suc-
cessfully infecting an environment but dependent, in one way or another,
on the patience of that environment so as to continue generating effects.”
Taking stock of these creative interpretations, the resonances that
the collection generates are augmented and reactivated in new ways by
the weaving together of other generative patterns and relays. As if in an
interlude, Donna Haraway’s short meditation energizes the echoes between
Stengers and her own thinking along and around the figure of SF: “string
figures, soin des ficelles, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact,
speculative fabulation, so far.” Cat-cradling with Stengers, echoing Vir-
ginia Woolf and her unfaithful daughters and sons, hers is a veritable call
for speculative arms: “Whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in
our hands. The answer to the trust of the held out hand: think we must.”
Think we must, indeed! The rippling patterns continue augmenting
and evolving in the hands of Vinciane Despret, whose article relays and
makes resonant again the fight against stupid questions, the humor of
the problematic, and the multiplicity of powers, through a challenging
and generative dramatization of her own: her research with “people who
continue to maintain active and living relationships with their dead.”
Taking inspiration from a number of crucial passages of Stengers’s La
Vierge et le Neutrino, among other works, Despret extends the ripples of
Stengers’s philosophy precisely as it is addressed to those who are “in
their element”: sociologists, anthropologists and folklorists who refrain
from passing quick judgments on those they study, who refrain from re-
ducing the presence of the dead as mere matters of belief or superstition,
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14 Martin Savransky
and instead learn to hesitate with them, to be instructed, “by agreeing to

be the connection point, or the crossing of two different orders of reality.”
The social sciences are also the milieu of dramatization in Michael
Halewood’s article, wherein he seeks to “eavesdrop on the ongoing
conversation between Stengers and Whitehead” in order to explore and
think with some of the aspects of “the problematic status of causation, as
something which we may deny in some aspects of our lives and yet require
in others.” Tracing the legacy of a scientific rejection of the metaphysics
of causation, he argues that scientific versions of causation arise from
scientists’ faith in the remorseless regularity of nature. But what good
does that do for social scientists, who have equally rejected metaphysi-
cal accounts of causation but are interested in the changing character of
human groups, societies, and institutions? Drawing on Stengers’s work,
Halewood wonders whether much of social science, in its search for
change, may have not inadvertently placed their faith in the unchanging
nature of its own concepts, thereby encountering difficulties in addressing
the situated question of how things change. Reaching out to Whitehead’s
held-out hand, he reclaims the concept of “conformation,” that is, the ways
in which each present is formed-with its pasts, and wagers that, with it, it
might be possible for the social sciences “to develop a sense of faith in the
future, balanced by a recognition of the role of causation in the present.”
It is the threatening future that our epoch makes felt that is the focus
of Adam Nocek’s article where, by way of an exploration of Stengers’s
writings on Gaia and her alliance with a host of non-modern practices,
he explores the challenges of staging “the conditions for thinking par le
milieu today.” Nocek argues that Gaia, as Stengers singularizes her, is a
proposition that resituates us in our thinking, and in our relations, towards
the Earth: “it is a problem we must learn from and not solve; anything
short of this destines us for barbarism.” In so doing, he proposes that this
problem of learning raises another generative question: the question of
what a non-barbaric response might constitute, which is to say, the ques-
tion of learning “what civilization could mean today.”
Taking the pattern into her own hands to inhabit new interstices,
Melanie Sehgal’s article explores Haraway’s “SF with Stengers” in relation
to an unexpected drama– the pasts, presents, and possible futures of what
we call ‘aesthetics.’ Noting that ‘aesthetics’ does not prominently figure
among Stengers’s concerns, Sehgal argues that the history of aesthet-
ics as a discipline formed in the eighteenth century can be understood,
speculatively, as the obverse thread that follows from the bifurcation
of nature and the invention of modern science. Dramatizing this other
dimension of the question of what has happened to us, Sehgal attends
to the importance of Félix Guattari’s “new aesthetic paradigm,” where
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

the aesthetic designates neither a theory of sensuous perception nor of

the beautiful, but a production of existence that is concerned with one’s
capacity to feel, to affect and be affected by the world. Relaying Stengers’s
“feeling-with the world” anew, Sehgal proposes a coupled gesture: to
singularize aesthetic practices while generalizing aesthetic concerns. In
so doing, she argues that to generalize aesthetic concerns is to attend
to the ways in which “practices make their environment feel and allow
themselves to be affected and constituted by it.” She proposes that this
is simultaneously key to understanding the singularity of Stengers’s
philosophical practice, in the SF mode: one “aimed not at representing
a world of matters-of-facts, but at writing in view of what this world, a
situation, might become capable of.”
This special issue is therefore the result of a collective effort in cre-
ative appreciation. To play on Whitehead’s metaphor, like a note struck on
a running fork in a hall full of differently tuned pianos, each one of the
contributions develops intuitions elicited by Stengers’s notes in radically
different directions. And perhaps their reciprocal resonances across the
hall compose, if not necessarily a harmony, then at least a collective mo-
tif, a different atmosphere of feeling, adding new variations to the initial
notes. That we can only hope. But just like the ripples are effective of the
stone thrown into the pond, the resonances may elicit, in relay and return,
a response from the struck note. This is why the collection ends, in two
movements, with a conversation between Isabelle Stengers and Martin
Savransky on (re)learning the art of paying attention, which explores many
aspects of her philosophy, as well as with a postlude by Stengers herself.
What one will not find in this collection, however, are quick, gratu-
itous judgments– neither disparaging critiques nor happy celebrations.
This collection– it may as well be expressed out loud: dic cur hic– is made
in creative appreciation of a collective affinity, an affinity for honoring what
makes us think, an affinity for philosophy as a dramatization of thought,
an affinity for what that expressive signature that is Stengers’s thought
makes matter, an affinity for what thinking together makes possible. But
it is not petty sympathy that prevents judgment. Affinity, etymologically,
evokes an exchange through borders. Alas, it evokes com-passion, which
is to say, feeling-with, making kin, feeling and thinking with those who
nevertheless remain “other” in order to discover and invent relevant and
novel contrasts and dimensions that are brought to our thinking and un-
derstanding by creatively exploring our differences and divergences. How
else may one appreciate a philosophy that is never just “pure thought,”
but always the dramatic expression of an impure and pragmatic art of
creation?
Goldsmiths, University of London
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

16 Martin Savransky
Acknowledgements
This special issue would not have been possible without the compassionate collaboration of
many others who provided assistance, support, guidance, patience and inspiration through-
out the process. I am especially thankful to Nick Gaskill, Monica Greco, Maria Puig de la
Bellacasa, Marsha Rosengarten, Katrin Solhdju, Paul Stenner and Adrien de Sutter for their
generous support, advice and encouragement. My sincere thanks also go to David Bell, Anita
Walia Harris, and the other editors of SubStance for their editorial support and their patience.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974. Semiotext(e), 2004.
Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” Making Things Public, edited by Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel, MIT Press, 2005.
---. Cosmopolitics I. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
---. Cosmopolitics II. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
---. In Catastrophic Times. Open Humanities Press, 2015.
---. “Introductory Notes to an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, 2005,
pp. 183-196.
---. The Invention of Modern Science. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
---. La Vierge et le Neutrino. Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2006.
---. “L’insistence du possible.” Gestes Spéculatifs, edited by Didier Debaise and Isabelle
Stengers, Presses du Réel, 2015.
---. “Speculative Philosophy and The Art of Dramatization.” The Allure of Things: Process
and Object in Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey,
Bloomsbury, 2015.
---. “Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead: A Double Test.” Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson:
Rhizomatic Connections, edited by Keith Robinson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
---. Thinking with Whitehead. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. Free Press, 1968.
---. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Free Press, 1978.
---. Religion in the Making. Cambridge University Press, 1927.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

The Minoritarian Powers of Thought:
Thinking beyond Stupidity with
Isabelle Stengers
Didier Debaise
Introduction
The thought of Isabelle Stengers undeniably holds a very particular
place in the field of contemporary philosophy. For anyone attempting to
situate it, the difficulties are innumerable. These not only concern the mul-
tiplicity of objects that she has explored, or the novel articulation between
practices that she has effected, but also the philosophical lines of filiation
within which she has inscribed her work. It would be in vain to establish
orders of priority or seek to establish a hierarchy of the set of objects that
punctuate the development of her work with the aim of giving coherence
to what nevertheless presents itself in a dispersed manner. Would one
find in The Invention of Modern Science a book capable of giving all the
impulses to a body of work that has not ceased to unfold its proposals
and amplify them? What would then become of all the new figures that
are subsequently deployed and that disrupt any presumed continuity,
such as the figure of the diplomat, the ecology of practices, as well as the
multiple speculative demands that Stengers constructs but which one
will only encounter later, in Cosmopolitics and in Thinking with Whitehead?
Should one, on the contrary, place the latter at the center of attention and,
by taking on this perspective, approach the ensemble of her other works
as a series of intimations of what there acquires its full expression? But
what place would then be given to the more transversal demand, notably
those originating in the minoritarian practices that Stengers relays and
that give her more theoretical propositions a life animated by collective
voices and insistences that go well beyond the writing itself?
It becomes clear that these questions, which result from purely
theoretical concerns, from the habit of retracing the coherence of a body
of work by identifying a hidden explanatory key, have no relevance here.
What seems crucial to me is, rather, to find out what new function Stengers
attributes to philosophy– a function that, I believe, has not changed and
is at work both in the texts as well as in the shaping of a certain stance, an
ethos or temper.1 In some respects, Stengers borrows this new function

SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018 17
18 Didier Debaise
from Gilles Deleuze, but does so by considerably modifying its meaning

and giving it an unprecedented field of application. This function is first
expressed in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and philosophy: “When someone asks
‘what’s the use of philosophy?’ the reply must be aggressive, since the
question tries to be ironic and caustic. […] It [philosophy] is useful for
harming stupidity [la bêtise], for turning stupidity into something shame-
ful” (106). When Stengers evokes the two philosophies that have mattered
most to her, that of Deleuze and Whitehead,2 she resorts to this function
of resisting stupidity, and by some strange alchemy, she opens a personal
route that redefines the set of speculative problems as well as, inevitably,
of political gestures. Thus, in an article entitled “Thinking with Deleuze
and Whitehead: A Double Test,” she does not hesitate in foregrounding
the theme of stupidity:
Since the 19th century, there is a new problem again, as exemplified
by Flaubert and Nietzsche: the problem ‘de la bêtise.’ Bêtise is usually
translated in English by ‘stupidity,’ but the Deleuzian bêtise is not ‘stu-
por,’ as the term may be associated with some kind of sleepy quality. It
is quite active, even entrepreneurial, as were Bouvard and Pécuchet. It
refers to the rather horrifying experience you can get for instance when
trying to speak with so-called neo-liberal economists, the stone-blind
eye they turn against any argument implying that the market may well
be incapable of repairing the destructions it causes. (12)
I believe this passage illustrates the demand that extends across

Stengers’s work and that endows the problems she develops with a sin-
gular character. Two dimensions of stupidity must be discerned. In one
respect, it is absolutely situated and incarnated in actions, attitudes and
manners; it always concerns this scientific, medical, therapeutic, economic
or environmental apparatus. It is indeed about the “stone-blind eye” in the
face of the destructions caused by the market. One could surely multiply
the cases, the examples of such attitudes and forms of neutral expression
in the face of economic, political and environmental catastrophes, but
what matters is that stupidity is always incarnated, situated, in the here
and now. But here we must be careful, for it is not a matter of reducing
stupidity to some psychological trait, to the character of those with whom
it is concerned. While always situated, stupidity for Stengers refers to a
kind of operation that I would qualify as one of capture or possession. It
constitutes a capture of the soul. She argues as much in her In Catastrophic
Times:
What I will name stupidity cannot be reduced to a type of psychologi-
cal weakness. It will not be said that “people are stupid” as if it was a
matter of some personal defect. Stupidity is something about which it
will be said instead that it seizes hold of certain people. And in particular it
seizes hold of those who feel themselves in a position of responsibility
and who then become what I call our guardians.” (117)
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The Minoritarian Powers of Thought 19
As Stengers indicates in the above passage, stupidity is at the same

time part of an epoch that celebrates it as a responsible attitude whenever
we are confronted with the crumbling of situations that would otherwise
require collective modes of reflection upon what appears as inevitable.
Thus, stupidity is at once thoroughly situated and profoundly linked to
an epoch. This is because, as Stengers notes, it is neither a temporary state
of consciousness nor a psychological form, and it must never be reduced
to stupefaction, a state of passiveness or somnolence of consciousness.
Stupidity is profoundly active, “entrepreneurial,” in the sense that it
actively addresses events in order to subtract from them their problem-
atic bearing. In a situation where one would be prompted to interrogate
the specific modes of existence at stake in an experimental practice, to
collectively invent alternative relations to a disease, to “cultivate the in-
terstices” implicated in every living relationship, to bring into existence
other worlds that resist the “infernal alternatives” intended to provoke
responsible sacrifices— in those situations stupidity instead incites an
attitude of resignation. It is this modus operandi of stupidity that we must
bring to light so as to become capable of resisting it.
For this reason, one should not be surprised that Stengers insists
on the historical and epochal dimension of stupidity. She reinforces this
by producing a strange hybridization of Deleuze and Whitehead that
permits greater emphasis on the historical dimension of stupidity: “[w]
hat Deleuze names bêtise, Whitehead related to what he calls nineteenth
century discovery, the discovery of the method of training professionals,
or what he calls ‘minds in a groove’ (SMW 197) and to the epochal fact that
‘professionalism has now been mated with progress’ (SMW 205)” (Stengers,
“Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead” 12). Inseparable from our epoch,
stupidity crosses all its aspects. Thus, what is at stake in thinking through
stupidity is a veritable diagnosis of the present.
The Celebration of False Problems

Stupidity is characterized, first of all, by a certain fascination with
false problems, with “infernal alternatives,” a kind of laziness or tired-
ness of thought, that “naturally” presents itself in every situation: truth or
belief, experience or representation, facts or values, subjective or objective,
and so on. For a time, philosophy had lost itself in these false problems3
by placing them at the center of absurd questions intended to define the
basis of all possible experience: how can knowledge be in accordance with
all the forms of existence, this “adaequatio rei et intellectus, at best good
enough to serve as a crutch for an elementary philosophy exam?” (Latour
71). How could purely constructed, heteronomous and artifactual beings
acquire a life of their own, a real autonomy, and become self-contained
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20 Didier Debaise
beings? Are facts constructed? What might the conditions for free action
be in a universe of deterministic laws? It may come as a surprise that,
up to this day, certain approaches which call themselves “speculative”
display the same sacralization of false problems under the guise of new
questions: how to know a world outside of human experience? What
might an experience before or after humanity be? How to render contin-
gency an absolute necessity? These are enormous false problems that are
only possible through various confusions between terms that had been
previously separated and constructed, but whose modes of construction
are no longer put into question. Certainly, every age has had its share of
false problems, and it would be absurd to limit these general questions
to modernity, but seldom have they acquired such a degree of efficacy
in the constitution of ontological, epistemological, or political modes of
experience.
Why has modern thought been so fascinated by false problems?
What has made this epoch so interested in them? Why is it that, today,
we are witness to the almost symptomatic resurgence of false problems
in philosophy and in “new” debates that animate it? These questions
seem to me to be fundamental, given that, behind these false problems,
so innocently epistemological, there is an entire political organization of
thought at stake. To take an interest in the fabrication of false problems,
in their dispersion and in their manner of mobilizing evidence to present
themselves, is to interrogate the construction of a certain image of thought,
at once political and speculative, which has stupidity as its final expression.
As Stengers argues: “What presents itself as a logical consequence (…)
has been fabricated by multiple processes of so-called rational reorgani-
zation that in the first place aimed at sapping or capturing the capacities
for thinking and resisting of those who were apt to do so” (Stengers, In
Catastrophic Times 55).
In order to understand false problems it in all their breadth, we must
return to the gestures, and operations from which they are derived. In her
Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers situates the originary operation within
what Whitehead called “the bifurcation of nature.” Most of Whitehead’s
readers had not, until Stengers focused on it, appreciated the profound
originality of the concept of the “bifurcation of nature,” and instead re-
garded it as nothing more than another expression of the characteristic
“dualism” of modern thought. In the initial chapters of Thinking with
Whitehead, Stengers radically breaks with such an interpretation of the
bifurcation of nature. Far from being a derivative, a secondary applica-
tion of dualism, it becomes the central term from which the invention
of modern experience emanates, and through which this new mode of
experience acquired its particular tonality. It required an interest in the
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

invention of experimental science, removed from a purely epistemological

or ontological interpretation, to truly understand its significance, because
it is there that its origins lie. Consequently, I will qualify the bifurcation,
as Stengers conceptualizes it, as an operation or a gesture through which
nature is bifurcated in the setting of an experiment on bodies (physical,
biological, psychological, or social).
Far from associating them with dualism, one should say of the mod-
erns that they are the ones who have reified the terms of an experimental
operation. Because it is always possible to distinguish, by a process of
abstraction, between primary and secondary qualities, they deduce that
nature is comprised of two realms of existence. In short, they turn their
abstractions into reality itself. In this way, resisting the bifurcation of na-
ture is above all resisting to the reifications of abstractions upon which
the modern experience of nature rests:
In other words, Whitehead does not in the slightest propose to “prove”
that we should abandon the great modern divide between primary
qualities, attributed to the entities that constitute nature, and secondary
qualities, relative to our perception. He does not even bother to name
those who prolong and repeat this division even today: he knows that
it is you and I, the philosopher or the scientist, all those who have ac-
cepted this division as important or as an unquestioned matter of fact.
He defines this division as the absurdity that his concept will have to
escape. (Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead 38)
What is the link between the false problems explored above and
the bifurcation of nature? I would say, following Stengers’s reading of
Whitehead, that the bifurcation of nature is the constitutive act of mod-
ern experience, and that false problems are its expression at the level of
representation. Having led to an opposition between two fictitious realms
of existence nevertheless presented as “real,” the bifurcation drives one’s
thinking towards a purely abstract realm where all practical requirements
have been lost. It is then that thought, lost in its own constructions, oscil-
lates between a “real” that is only the reified image of its own abstraction,
and a “subjective experience” void of all efficacy.
False problems emerge from these multiple confusions where one
has lost both the situated origin and its requirements. With Stengers’s
diagnosis, the seriousness that accompanies the grand epistemological
questions becomes laughable: questions about knowledge of a “real”
world beyond the human, about the distinctions between fact and inter-
pretation, as well as questions concerning the difference between what is
given and what has been constructed. Behind these questions, repeated
ad infinitum in always singular forms, there is something truly grotesque,
for everything seems to be inverted: if the practical divisions are always
susceptible of making experience bifurcate, why look at them as anything
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22 Didier Debaise
other than simply practical acts? Why the desire to absolutely reify, to
ontologize, that which amounts to a practice of differentiation?
However, the eminently more serious question is how these false
problems have, against all odds, been so effortlessly able to impose
themselves? How has the bifurcation, despite forcing its advocates into
ever-stranger arrangements and encasing them in insurmountable con-
tradictions, managed to maintain itself and even, sometimes, to intensify?
It would be a mistake to believe that false problems, as secondary expres-
sions of the bifurcation, amount to purely epistemological questions, or
that they would, after some clarification, disappear just as easily. Because
behind these so “innocently” theoretical issues, we in fact discover veri-
table war machines, turning without end and producing a desertifica-
tion of all modes of existence: the reduction of mental beings to simple
representations, of fictions to imaginary realities, of values to subjective
projections onto nature.
If Whitehead had left the question at an epistemological or meta-
physical level, Stengers prolongs and deepens the stakes by injecting the
political dimensions from which it should never have been disconnected.
Speculative thought, as an inquiry on the abstractions that govern ex-
perience, becomes then profoundly political, engaged in questions that
Whitehead could not have envisaged: what motivates the iterations of the
bifurcation? What are its effects? What is in the process of being disquali-
fied this time? With false problems, with the bifurcation of nature, what
one finds are incredible instruments of domestication of heterogeneous
and minoritarian knowledges that have for some time accompanied the
constitution of modern experience. It is thus a matter of making perceptible
the fact that “we live in a veritable cemetery for destroyed practices and
collective knowledges” (Stengers, In Catastrophic Times 98).
If the reading of Whitehead and the constitution of the bifurcation
of nature matter, if they take a special importance in Stengers’s thought,
it is because they enable her to interrogate the operations and multiple
disqualifications that are put into play in seemingly innocent questions.
What is at stake in the exploration of the bifurcation is the project of inter-
rogating the régime that institutes the great divide between knowledge
and belief— a divide which is at the heart of the political relations of a
new governing of the climate focused on defining the relationships and
distinctions among “users,” “experts,” and those who are “responsible.”
Through Stengers’s proposed path, Whitehead’s thought becomes a novel
speculative thought with eminently political dimensions, a speculative
thought concerned with the operations of disqualification that lie at the
heart of the modern concept of nature. Stengers provides the clearest
representation of this in Cosmopolitics, when she argues that:
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

The contemporary scene is literally saturated with the “modern” heirs

of Plato. Each of these heirs denounces his “other,” just as the philoso-
pher denounced the sophists, accused them of exploiting that which he
himself had triumphed over. They include not only the heirs of Plato,
but those philosophers who, following the sophists, were used as an
argument to demonstrate the need for a foundation. What, in Plato’s
test, can be read as a network of analogies isolating the terrible instabil-
ity of the sophist-pharmakon has today split into a number of “modern
practices” (scientific, medical, political, technological, psychoanalytic,
pedagogical) that have been introduced, just as Platonic philosophy in
its time, as disqualifying their other – charlatan, populist, ideologue,
astrologer, magician, hypnotist, charismatic teacher. (29-30)
This is not to say, of course, that the processes of contemporary dis-

qualification, articulated through psychosocial types such as the charlatan,
the populist, the ideologue, etc., identically repeat a scene already invented
within Platonism. To the contrary, if ‘modern practices’ turn themselves
into heirs of Platonism through their own operations of disqualification
of minoritarian knowledges, they do so on an entirely new plane, in a
new epistemological and political space, on a new scene that implies
other tools, other operative modes, other strategies of disqualification.
This other scene, where all is played out once again, where the trials and
selections are reinvented even when the act of disqualification is reiterated,
is precisely what the term “bifurcation of nature” is intended to express.
A new episteme, Foucault might have said; certainly a new distribution
of power/knowledge. It is indicative of the importance of the notion of
the “bifurcation of nature” that it allows for the articulation of scientific
experimentation, the power of disqualification, and the political relations
that derive from their entanglements.
Intensifying the Possible

Stupidity is furthermore characterized by a certain economy of the
remarkable and the ordinary. As Deleuze stated in his Difference and Repeti-
tion: “stupidity is defined above all by its perpetual confusion with regard
to the important and the unimportant, the ordinary and the singular” (190).
The idea of a confusion that has amplified throughout the modern age,
reaching its peak in the 19th century and becoming the implicit principle
of the organization of knowledge in the present age, is one of the themes
that permeates Deleuzian thought and occupies a central position in Dif-
ference and Repetition: “The problem of thought is not tied to essences but
to the evaluation of what is important and what is not, to the distribution
of singular and regular, distinctive and ordinary points” (189). Stupidity
marks the confusion, the incapacity to evaluate what is of importance; it
is a form of active anesthesia of thought. It is for this reason that it is so
intimately tied to the celebration of false problems. Insofar as it renders
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

24 Didier Debaise
any evaluation between the important and the anecdotal impossible,

stupidity justifies the idea that any question has the right to be asked, and
that the only criteria of relevance for any ontological or epistemological
position would be those that are intrinsic to it: coherence, argumentative
cohesion, formal strength, and so on. Stupidity is thus only possible by
detaching thought from the necessities that truly require it, necessities
which are always situated in an outside within which thought originates
and is put to the test. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition on the
subject of voluntarist images of thought:
They lack the claws of absolute necessity–in other words, of an origi-
nal violence inflicted upon thought; the claws of a strangeness or an
enmity which alone would awaken thought from its original stupor
or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, aroused but
constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for
being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness of the world. Thought is
primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes
philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. (139)
Flaubert’s novel, Bouvat et Pécuchet, wonderfully expresses this idea

through the adventures of the two protagonists, autodidacts in search of
an encyclopedic foundation of knowledge, which in turn epitomizes the
state of an age: the celebration of facts—notably, through encyclopedism—
detached from all necessity, from all pragmatic relation to situations. And
what is known ends up getting lost in innumerable confusions, all of which
are an effect of the abstract conception of knowledge. To repeat the point:
one would be heavily mistaken to reduce the problem of stupidity—of this
confusion bearing such profound epistemological and ontological implica-
tions—to psychological dimensions, to a temporary state of knowledge,
to a kind of provisory diminution of thought.
If Deleuze gives rise to a very particular attention concerning the
emergence of stupidity, as well as to its consolidation and circulation, it is
Stengers who again must be credited with having intensified its political
dimensions, and established the conditions for always local and collective
forms of resisting to its disqualificatory effects. Let us pose the pragmatist
question: What are the effects of the confusion between the important
and the ordinary? What does it truly endanger? How can knowledge,
once it has condemned accounting for what matters, become a machine
of disqualification? It is once again in the unique hybridization between
Deleuze and Whitehead that we find elements for a response.
Thus, in Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers grants crucial importance
to Whitehead’s final publication, Modes of Thought, that had up until then
enjoyed little or merely allusive attention by his readers. She shows that in
that book a new question takes center stage, a question certainly present
in Whitehead’s previous works, notably in the first sentences of Process
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

and Reality, but which here finds unprecedented thickness: what is it that
gives the sense of importance? How can one not read this question as the
acme of an opposition to the bifurcation of nature? Indeed, the bifurcation
entailed a reduction of the important to a secondary category of nature,
to an effect of the projection of purely human values on a nature that is
otherwise devoid of them. All the operations that characterize the gesture
of bifurcating exclude this “sense of importance” from nature and locate it
in the only domain permeated by intentions and finalities: anthropologi-
cal experience. Once this reduction is effected, it starts to get lost in the
multiple confusions highlighted above, subtracting thought from all the
vital attachments that endowed it with consistency.
From this perspective, Whitehead’s gesture is, as Stengers remarks,
radical: asserting importance as a primary category of the experience of
nature. No longer reserved only for humans, the notion of importance
becomes a term for the expression of every center of experience. Whitehead
announces this in a formulation pregnant with consequences: “the sense of
importance is embedded in the very being of animal experience” (Modes
12) Before being an epistemological or axiological category, reserved to
consciousness, importance finds its foundations in the vital dimension
of experience. And it is this vital dimension, the need to distinguish, in
each situation, the remarkable from the ordinary, the important from the
anecdotal, that alone justifies thought and gives it its true consistency.
It is thus the status of philosophy itself that is at stake here. Stengers
extensively analyses this challenge in a chapter of Thinking with Whitehead
devoted to speculative thought. Returning to the function of the “specula-
tive schema” developed by Whitehead, she insists on the fact that impor-
tance is the only criterion of its justification:
Yet coherence itself, which obliges the thinker and which the scheme
makes prevail, would, if it were an end in itself, be bereft of importance,
for what it cannot render explicit is precisely that in which it matters.
If the principles must be stated in generic terms, no leap is generic. In
order for imagination to leap, it needs to trust the something will come
to meet it. The knowledge produced by the coherent scheme must be
actually “important.” (171)
The “speculative schema,” this construction of a system of thought
the purpose of which, Whitehead said, was to allow for an “interpretation
of all the aspects of experience,” would have no consistency if it weren’t
linked with absolute necessity to what matters in a particular moment of
experience. It is therefore not experience itself that must be evaluated in
the first place, but the capacity of a theory, a way of thinking, a philosophi-
cal schema, to account for what insists, to account for the often hidden
insistences which at any moment risk sinking into indifference. In this
sense, the “speculative” function he attributes to philosophy is also, and
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

26 Didier Debaise
above all, a moral and political attitude. Thus, in Modes of Thought, this
conviction takes on the form of a new maxim: “our action is moral if we
have thereby safe-guarded the importance of experience so far as it de-
pends on that concrete instance in the world’s history” (15). As Stengers
demonstrates, this is without doubt the leitmotif that extends across
Whitehead’s speculative thought and that renders inoperable any attempt
at tracing the differences between the epistemological, axiological, political
and ontological dimensions implicated in all experience.
Indeed, if the task of speculative thought is to “safeguard the impor-
tance of an experience,” how could we then separate these dimensions,
extracting one or the other? As soon as importance enters the scene as a
primary category, one deals with new questions: how do multiple attach-
ments articulate and take on a collective consistency without (re)invoking
all those operations of disqualification that accompany the bifurcation of
nature? Whitehead expresses this requirement of articulation at numerous
instances and notably in Process and Reality, where he writes: “Philosophy
may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and
Christ is nailed to the cross” (338). The challenge is thus not to judge—that
is, to silence—those for whom physicalism, in this case, does not have the
final word, but to bring into existence a “diplomatic” scene allowing for
the transformation of oppositions into contrasts. This is what Stengers calls
the “ecology of practices,”4 which is at the heart of her book Cosmopolitics:
Naturally, scientific field ecology can rely on the stability of the situa-
tions it studies when producing representations and an evaluation of
those situations. But once human practices come into play, the ecological
perspective cannot rely on such stability but, on the contrary, communi-
cates directly with the question of the pharmacological instability associ-
ated with pharmaka in general, and with the factishes that create and
are created by our practices in particular. The question of the identity
of a practice would then have to be answered not by a static diagnosis
but by a question of “value” and “value creation”, that is, the ecologi-
cal question of what “counts” and “could count” for that practice. (43)
The bifurcation of nature induced an ordering of knowledges through
hierarchies and disqualifications based on the invention of a univocal
nature. One may no doubt be astonished by the strange invention of the
modern concept of nature, by these dividing operations along which
natural bodies have been attributed to the realms of distinct qualities, and
by the transformation of initially practical abstractions into ontological
statements, pretending nothing less than being reality itself. However,
all of this would be even more surprising if it were not also the occasion
for the homogenizing and domesticating of a multiplicity of knowledges
that have become minoritarian, of situated knowledges, attentive to the
variations of the environment, to the inherent instabilities of all experi-
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

ence, knowledges that are ultimately indissociably entangled with the

attachments and values that matter to their practitioners and the issues
that assemble them.
Let us recall once more this passage in Cosmopolitics that marks the
effects of the bifurcation whose heirs are all those “‘modern practices’
(scientific, medical, political, technological, psychoanalytic, pedagogi-
cal) that have been introduced, just as Platonic philosophy in its time,
as disqualifying their other – charlatan, populist, ideologue, astrologer,
magician, hypnotist, charismatic teacher” (29-30). The bifurcation of nature
could not, however, have acquired this “all-terrain” power of disquali-
fication had it not been accompanied by an activity of the devaluation
of thought—that I have referred to as stupidity—in its capacity to define
what is important at any given moment. Against this backdrop, we can
at present clearly grasp the lack of innocence inherent in false questions,
to those fallacious problems so regularly celebrated: they conceal in the
background a silent power of disqualification.
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Acknowledgements
The English version of this paper benefited from the help of Adrien de Sutter, Martin
Savransky, and Katrin Soldhju.
Notes
1. I borrow this notion of temper or ethos from W. James, who, in his Some Problems of
Philosophy, writes: “philosophy expresses a certain attitude, purpose, and temper of
conjoined intellect and will rather than a discipline whose boundaries can be neatly
marked off” (12).
2. Of course, the constellation of philosophies with which Stengers has developed her own
work is not solely limited to these two individuals. Indeed, one would have to adjoin
the countless influences of Leibniz, Etienne Souriau, William James, Donna Haraway.
However, Deleuze and Whitehead occupy a very privileged position as initiators of a
certain philosophical stance.
3. I borrow this notion of false problems from H. Bergson who had inscribed it within
a genealogy linked to the activity of the intellect. (See Bergson, The Creative Mind: An
Introduction to Metaphysics, and in particular the chapter on the position of problems. I
would also bring to the attention of the reader the reprise of the notion of false problems
that I have developed to interpret Bruno Latour’s Inquiry on the Modes of Existence in an
article entitled, “The Celebration of False Problems”).
4. For an in-depth analysis of the ecology of practices by Stengers and current uses, see the
article by Katrin Solhdju and Karin Harrasser, “Wirksamkeit Verpflichtet.”
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Dover, 2007.
Debaise, Didier. “The Celebration of False Problems.” Reset Modernity, edited by Bruno
Latour, MIT Press, 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University
Press, 1994.
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28 Didier Debaise
---. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Columbia University Press, 2006.
James, William. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy.
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911.
Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Translated by Cathy Porter, Harvard
University Press, 2013.
Solhdju, Katrin and Karin Harrasser. “Wirksamkeit Verpflichtet. Herausforderungen Einer
Ökologie Der Praktiken.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Theme-Issue Medienökologien,
2016, pp. 72-86.
Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota
Press, 2010.
---. “An Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 2005, pp. 183-196.
---. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey, Open
Humanities Press, 2015.
---. “Thinking with Deleuze and Whitehead: A Double Test.” Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson.
Rhizomatic Connections, edited by Keith Robinson, University of South Dakota, 2009,
pp. 28-44.
---. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Harvard University Press,
2011.
---. “William James: Naturalisme Et Pragmatisme Au Fil De La Question De La Possession.”
Possessions, edited by Didier Debaise, Presses du Réel, 2010.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1920.
---. Modes of Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1938.
---. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Macmillan, 1929.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

The Humor of the Problematic:
Thinking with Stengers
Martin Savransky
Thinking with Stengers

In the chapter of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque
where Whitehead makes a surprising and crucial appearance, Deleuze
chooses to introduce the English mathematician and philosopher as the
successor, or “diadoche,” of what he describes as a somewhat secret school.
The reason for the secrecy of this school is itself something of a mystery.
Even when Deleuze alludes to the question “What is an Event?” as a
thread weaving its members together, it cannot be a coincidence that the
term he uses to characterize these connections is that of an “echo.” For
its secrecy speaks not of a desire from its members to remain unknown,
isolated, hermetically closed upon themselves, but rather of the fact that
the school itself remains somewhat secret even to those who have partaken
and continue to partake in it. When has it been instituted as such? Who
has ever succeeded in precisely identifying its members, in delineating its
borders, listing its tenets, or endowing it with any authority of its own?
What is it a school of? How can one join in?
That this secret school without name is formed through echoes of
questions and problems that bring it and its members into existence sug-
gests that, indeed, what its members undergo is no ordinary schooling.
For it is never simply a case of putting someone else’s thoughts to work
in relation to one’s own concerns. To be sure, we are too often taught,
perhaps regrettably, both to think in this way and to accept that this is
how one must learn to think. We sit or stand in classrooms, and we are
often faced with problems that are not our own, in which we cannot par-
ticipate—despite how often we are called upon to participate, or to make
others do so—save through the thoughts of someone else, unless we do
so only in the form of transposing what somebody else has thought to
this or that situation; or, vice versa, to find, in every situation, in spite of
its singularity, its novelty and its immanent requirements, the thoughts
of this or that thinker.
Somewhere along the way, such forms of schooling may surely give
one certain rights of participation in other spheres of academic or intel-

SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018 29
30 Martin Savransky
lectual life, but they will not, in and of themselves, grant one membership
to this secret school. For again, in the institutional mode, participation
often refers to the progressive “authorization” to partake in what Judith
Schlanger in Penser la bouche pleine would call a professional economy of
seriousness, by which academic disciplines, forms of expertise and judg-
ment, sources of funding, as well as criteria of publication and employ-
ability, become established. My point here is not to deny that there may
be some value in this kind of training, particularly when the cultivation
of such habits succeeds in being performed with enough generosity, and
with enough contrasts, to populate our thinking with differences and
alternatives, forming a cultural memory in relation to which, in response
to which, one might begin the task of attempting to think. But being let in
on this school’s secrets, learning to appreciate its existence and to develop
a certain affinity with the problems that animate it—enabling, in other
words, the echoes to resonate and reverberate once again (but always dif-
ferently, as echoes do)—turns “thinking” into an entirely different practice:
one of learning to think not from, not against, not just after, but with.
If the practice of thinking-with poses a different kind of challenge,
it is because it belongs to the intimate question of whom one is learning to
think with, and as such, situates this apprenticeship as a demand to resist
an unthinking participation in the way in which seriousness circulates in
thought. To recall the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, who is perhaps
the school’s most secret member and who once asked, “Who will save
us from seriousness?” (La Vuelta al día, 54), the difference is between cit-
ing others in order to be right, in order to seek authorization, and citing
others because we “want to gather our friends together.” In this way,
the attempt to think with others confronts one directly with a kind of
influence that is neither that of the historical determinations by which a
given epoch determines what matters—what or how it may be relevant
to think—nor that of the socializing processes by which one may become
a ‘serious’ thinker.
My sense is that what is put into play is a much more intimate and
felt influence– a veritable reverberation that shakes up the surface of our
being, and whose aim is not that of restoring thought to its origins but of
bringing new thinking into existence. To borrow the words of Schlanger
again, to think-with is “to find in ourselves the doings of others as well
as our doings upon those others, it is to think that we become,” and to
become as we think, “through the profound company of others” (Le neuf
31). It seems to me that the kind of adventure involved in “thinking with”
is therefore one that plays out in an encounter with practices to which
the questions are not simply about what they “say” or what they “do,”
but about what they cultivate in their doing– about what, through their
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

The Humor of the Problematic 31
careful gestures, they enable to come into existence, as well as what they
attempt to resist. This is a plane of thought where what is at stake is the
cultivation of certain sensibilities, certain tones and dispositions of feeling
that, as William James in The Will to Believe would put it, make rationality
more of a sentiment than a faculty, and that rather than tell us what to
think, force us to come to terms with the open problem of taking care of
how we think.
It is not enough to say that Isabelle Stengers has become a distin-
guished member of this secret school, or even its contemporary diado-
che. Conferring upon their reverberations the power to make her think,
the echoes that Stengers has made resonate have turned the school into
something of an open secret (see “L’Insistance”), but not without simul-
taneously transforming the shape and scope of their waves. One of the
distinct motifs of Stengers’s thought in this respect has no doubt been her
patient habitation of that very plane of thought of learning to think with
significant others. In her monumental Thinking with Whitehead, she turned
this attention into a modality of exploration of Whitehead’s thought,
one deeply sensitive to the specific requirements that the latter’s mode
of reverberating, his mode of making questions and problems matter,
demands of those who seek to make such echoes resonate. Thus, it is by
attending to the unique entanglement of Whitehead’s mathematical spirit,
his demands for coherence and technical, conceptual invention, as well
as the “obstinate tenderness” that made him alien to any form of polem-
ics and impervious to any established consensus, that the very specific
test of thinking with Whitehead makes itself felt. As Stengers proposed,
thinking with Whitehead today “means accepting an adventure from
which none of the words that serve as our reference points should emerge
unscathed, but from which none will be disqualified or denounced as a
vector of illusion” (Thinking 15)
What does it mean, in turn, to think with Stengers? What kind of
adventure may this be today, in this epoch marked by a generalized devas-
tation of experience, by so many broken promises, by the always ongoing
and impending emergencies, exceptions and catastrophes of a modern
world without refuge? It is under the sign of this question that I attempt
to develop the exploration that comprises this article– by becoming at-
tuned to the peculiar sound of the echoes that begin to resonate when one
embarks on the risky adventure of thinking in the profound company of
Isabelle Stengers. And the key that I propose for undertaking this task
may at first seem implausible, or even inadequate, in any case unworthy
of a “serious” philosopher– learning to think with Stengers today, I pro-
pose, means learning to appreciate the echoes of her laughter. It means
learning to laugh with her. Its test is that of experiencing the transforma-
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32 Martin Savransky
tive effects of daring, in the face of the urgent problems that besiege the
present, and especially in response to the corrosive and ruinous reasons
and solutions that are both demanded and imposed by those for whom
urgency authorizes the probable to shackle the possible, to cultivate a
certain manner of laughing that is not the laughter of irony or derision
but the laughter of another sense of humor– of what I here would like to
call the humor of the problematic.
Relearning How to Laugh: The Humor of the Problematic
“Our sciences,” Stengers regretted once, “no longer make us laugh”
(“Another Look” 41). Remembering a time when one would discuss sci-
ence in literary salons, a time when “Diderot imagined the mathemati-
cian Jean Le Rond D’Alambert in the transports of a dream in which he
existed as matter,” and when “Dr. Bordeu held forth to Mademoiselle
de L’Espinasse about the ‘various and prolonged’ cross-breeding experi-
ments which might eventually create a race of ‘goatmen’” (41), Stengers
expressed the need to “explore the problem of the loss of our sense of
humour” (42).
An odd problem, one may think, since it can hardly be said that mak-
ing us laugh is part of scientists’ job description. But it is not, of course,
a matter of whether making “publics” laugh–rather than “understand,”
as the imperative now goes– was ever an official scientific aim. What has
been lost, what we have learned to forget, is not the capacity to laugh, but
the art of laughing with the sciences. To be sure, some still laugh at the
sciences, and others certainly do wrap themselves in the flag of Science,
with a capital S, so as to bitterly laugh at those whose purposes diverge
from scientific purposes, those concerned with making something else
matter. Not many laugh, however, with the sciences. Alas, since 1991 not
only has scientific laughter itself become institutionalized, instantiating
the paradox of creating its own authority of judgment, a body capable of
awarding its own prizes to those who have asked whether a cat can be
both a solid and a liquid, or investigating what happens in the brains of
people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. What’s more, the very
name for this new authority, the Ig Nobel Prize, itself seems to testify to
our inability to conjoin laughter with the nobility that scientific inquiry
would otherwise evoke.
What we have learned to forget is thus not the possibility of laugh-
ing at the sometimes abstruse formulation of scientific problems or at
their awkward findings, but the importance of constantly reminding
Science that, as William James once wrote, “her purposes are not the only
purposes,” and that her formulations always partake in problems that
they can never hope to exhaust (Principles 576). What has been lost, then,
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

is not laughter as such, but the art by which humor acquires its sense.
How have we become so serious? Stengers’s response associates this loss
with the modern professionalization of the sciences, that which not only
imposed a “restraint of serious thought within a groove” (Whitehead,
Science 197), but simultaneously identified the very plowing of the groove
with progress. In so doing, the making of a professional science turned the
speculative dreams of scientists into the authoritative business of serious
men and even more serious “committees” tasked with judging away any
such dreams in the name of “objectivity.”
Stengers’s recalling of the literary salons is not, however, a lament
about the disenchantment of the modern world. One will not find in her
work the resentful craving for a return to a would-be glorious past when
science would run wild and experimentation was given free rein, as if one
could be freed from inheriting the often atrocious histories and stories by
which science became a serious affair. Exploring the problem of the loss of
our sense of humor is not a matter of freeing ourselves from that cultural
memory which is now our own, but neither is it one of rehearsing ad
nauseam the reasons and processes that would justify our resignation. The
exploration is instead animated by a wager on the nature of our present,
one that affirms the possibility of “living our present not as that which
must be the end […] but as that which will pass” (Stengers, “The Humour”
26). What it signals, therefore, is a wager on an unfinished present (see
Savransky, “The Wager”) that, despite the general seriousness affecting
our practices, may still provide vital resources for risking another form
of laughter, for relearning how to laugh:
What is learning to laugh again? It is relearning a laugh which would
not be the irony and derision which always avoids risk-taking, going
beyond the differences to recognize the same. It is, instead, the laughter
of humor. It is comprehending and appreciative without expecting to
find a secure position. It is able to disagree without being awe-stricken
or trying to be awe-inspiring. (Stengers, “Another Look” 52)
Stengers’s remarks on the lost art of laughter and the possibility of relearn-
ing the laughter of humor might possibly go unnoticed or may be easily
dismissed by anyone seeking to engage with her work as another case of
“serious” philosophical thought. Surely there are more important things
to consider! And yet, I wager that, whatever other secrets animate the
school, it is this sense of humor that brings its members in. I would sug-
gest that not only is humor at the center of what Stengers understands as
the task of philosophy, but that it is precisely this conflation of the serious
and the important that thinking with Stengers requires us to resist today.
Indeed, it seems to me that the throbbing insistence, across her work, of
the art of humor and the need to create new modes of laughter should
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34 Martin Savransky
now be read as an urgent cry. It becomes urgent as the present is shaped

not only by the global circulation of the serious, but equally by forms of
laughter that incite death, and by problems that encounter no response
if not the laughter of derision and humiliation.
To approach what I am calling “the humor of the problematic,” one
must avoid confusing it with theorizations of the phenomenon of humor
in social life that describe it as a mechanism for dispelling anxiety (Freud)
or as a form of responding to the manifestations of mechanistic fixity in
the flux of life (Bergson). Not because these be inadequate or ill-conceived,
but rather because, as we shall see, neither what Stengers calls “humor,”
nor what she names “irony,” refer to the question of what people find
funny, or why they do so. The humor that pervades Stengers’s thought
is not likely to provoke shrieks of laughter from those who encounter it
either. Rather than a phenomenon to be thematized, or a reaction to be
provoked, humor, irony and seriousness designate here different modes of
address– different gestures by which the problem of taking care of how we
think, of how we address ourselves to the problems that make us think,
of how we address our questions and thoughts to others with whom we
think, is cultivated.
Thus, Stengers articulates the specific mode of address that she
associates with the art of humor as a political, speculative response to a
double operation at the heart of modern thought. First, the operation of
assigning nobility and importance to a certain seriousness, which is to
say, to the seriousness of certainty, of general foundations and principled
convictions. Coupled with this, the operation of an ironic mode of address,
a corrosive laughter that, in attempting to inspire awe, laughs at the expense
of those who, even today, dare take the risk of dreaming speculatively–
that is, at the expense of those who trust that a different, less violent but
also less humiliating world, is possible.
In this way, the humor of the problematic is an effort to resist the
effects of the serious affecting our practices, as well as the proliferation of
ironic and cynical forms of laughter that come with it. It concerns the art
of cultivating another mode of addressing those with whom we think and
hesitate, those from whom we learn. Like all arts, humor is an acquired
taste, one whose appreciation must be nourished and developed in the
profound company of those practices of knowing, thinking and feeling
through which the present acquires its particular character. But it is also
one whose cultivation may enable practices, those that still dare to dream,
to respond to the insistence of the possible, to give the possible a chance
even in the midst of an urgency (Stengers, “L’insistance”). And what I
want to suggest is that acquiring this sense of humor, cultivating a mode
of addressing others that will not legitimize itself at their expense, simul-
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

taneously requires the establishment of a different relation to the problems

that force them, and us, to think. Indeed, the art of humor, as Stengers
articulates it, is a response to the thoroughly problematic character of the
present, an art that requires taking the risk of entering into a generative
play with the problems that animate it.
In this sense, one of the ways by which Stengers has enabled the
echoes of the secret school to reverberate has been by reclaiming and de-
veloping the constructivist task of philosophy that Whitehead dramatized
and Deleuze famously affirmed when he proposed that “philosophy is the
art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze and Guat-
tari, What is Philosophy 2). By now this proposition has become something
of a ‘Deleuzian’ motto that many scholars in the humanities and social
sciences affected by the influence of his thought have been keen to take
up. It seems to me, however, that Stengers is among the very few to make
this call resonate in a way that is attuned to the constraints with which, for
Deleuze, the task of inventing concepts was to be endowed. For Stengers’s
particular mode of philosophical invention has been acutely sensitive to
the fact that “all concepts are connected to problems without which they
would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or
understood as their solution emerges” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is
Philosophy 16) Thus, in a recent essay titled “Speculative Philosophy and
the Art of Dramatization,” she has stressed that
Doing philosophy, in Deleuze’s sense, means creating concepts. And
I would claim that the creation of concepts, as he characterizes it, is
intrinsically speculative. Concepts answer problems, which are not
defined in relation to a state of affairs, whose mode of existence is
rather that of a task to be accomplished, an answer to be given, a work
to be done. (190)
If concepts are responses to problems, what is it that they respond to? What,
in other words, is a problem? This is a challenging question because we
are in the habit of treating problems merely as confused, subjective states
that testify to the limits of our knowledge, to clashing viewpoints, or to
the imperfections of our methods. Problems, it would seem, are those
phantasmatic states we find ourselves in at those seemingly unhappy mo-
ments when we do not yet “know.” By the same token, they are also taken
to be only ever provisional states, bound to disappear as the “progress” of
Science yields serious solutions capable of containing them in its groove.
Here, modern epistemology and modern pedagogy join hands. For insofar
as teachers set up examination questions and epistemologists turn the
events of scientific invention into “an illustration of the right and general
obligation to subject all things to measurement” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics
I 11), the pedagogies by which we have been taught to become “serious
thinkers” and the epistemologies and policies by which scientific practices
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36 Martin Savransky
have been turned into a serious affair presuppose that problems enjoy
only a negative existence– they are shadows of thought and knowledge
that manifest lack, error, or poor understanding.
Interestingly, it is this understanding of problems as enjoying only
a sort of phantasmatic mode of existence that belies the gesture of se-
riousness, for it leads us “to believe that the activity of thinking, along
with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the
search for solutions, that both of these concern only solutions” (Deleuze,
Difference 158). In other words, as long as problems are but the shadow
of knowledge, a broken state of affairs in need of repair, they are also
deemed susceptible to capture by the hubris of objective knowledges and
technological fixes. It is this very understanding that, at the same time,
authorizes pedagogues and epistemologists to claim privileged access to
problems in which others—children, students, practitioners, publics, and
all those others who may otherwise be concerned with the problems at
stake—cannot participate. At least not until they have been taught how
to think seriously, until they have been persuaded to accept consensual
purposes, until they can be made to “understand” that everything is lost
once the true and tested measurements and methods for making nature
speak are confused with the “subjective values” and situated perspectives
of those who would otherwise, for other reasons, seek participation in the
determination of problems themselves (see Savransky, The Adventure).
It is not the capacity to laugh that has been lost, however, and not
everyone is immediately ready to bow down to the seriousness of techno-
scientific solutions. As Stengers has shown in her explorations of the
seriously bitter affair known as the Science Wars, among the first ones to
laugh at the seriousness with which the sciences have become endowed is
the figure of the sociologist—especially of the relativist kind—who knows
that values can never be excluded from the determination of problems
because, unlike the scientist, she knows that those values from which Sci-
ence draws its seriousness, those values of scientific reason, method, and
objectivity, are nothing but a “’particular folklore,’ susceptible to the same
type of analysis as the folklores of other human practices” (The Invention
58). For the sociologist who always knows better than to “believe” in
the possibility of making nature speak, who knows that only passionate
scientists and their institutions are capable participating in the order of
discourse, and has learned how to reveal the irony of a hot clash of human
values behind any declaration of a cold matter of fact, no techno-scientific
solution can claim to be “true,” because problems are always shadows of
something else. They are shadows of the social, cultural and economic
activities of claim-making and political contestation thanks to which
anything, whatever it is, may end up being formulated as a “problem”
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

to begin with. Indeed, for this sociologist, even the problem of drawing
the border between what is scientific and what is not, that problem that
has preoccupied serious philosophers for so long, turns out to be social
(see Gieryn).
Such sociological operations do enable a certain laughter. In a world
populated only by human values and social and economic conditions,
in a world devoid of the objective, brute, and mute matters of fact that
justified the seriousness of those who, in the name of objectivity, would
claim privileged access to problems, the sciences not only cease to inspire
awe– they become quite laughable. And so the sociologist laughs, but this
laughter too is at the expense of those who would take the risk of dream-
ing speculatively. For the laughter does not just irritate the seriousness of
epistemologists who, through their settled creeds, turn “objectivity” into
an obligation of measurement and obsess about which anonymous reason
may finally give Science its pride of place. As Stengers has shown, this
ironic form of laughter is also at the expense of those scientific practitioners
who, without denying that they are social beings too, are animated by
the sense that scientific practices are not just like any other social practice
(“Introductory Notes”). In this way, the sociological laughter of irony does
not resonate without inflicting a “wound” (The Invention 13), for its sound
corrodes the living trust that makes scientists capable of speculating and
taking risks, that is, of trusting in the possibility of engaging problems
in the profound company of those other-than-humans with whom they
seek to establish a rapport.
These two modes of address, seriousness and irony, become thus two
sides of the same coin– and indeed this common expression seems quite
appropriate to describe what earlier I associated with an “economy,” with
its own modes of distribution of value, judgment, and disqualification.
Just as the establishment of seriousness requires a privileged access to the
problem, the laughter of irony belongs to those who
will not let themselves count, who will bring to light the claims of the
sciences. They know they will always encounter the same difference
in point of view between themselves and scientists, which guarantees
that they have conquered, once and for all, the means for listening to
scientists without letting themselves be impressed by them. (Stengers,
The Invention 65)
The serious and the ironist disagree on what it is that problems are shadows
of, but their corrosive antagonisms disclose a shared operation– an appeal
to a transcendental position that, in being applicable everywhere, will
transcend not just concrete problems but the very nature of the problematic
itself by bringing its phantasmatic existence to light. By revealing, that is,
that ghosts don’t exist.
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38 Martin Savransky
In this sense, Steve Woolgar, a sociologist of science and technology

who for over three decades has been championing irony as a critical strat-
egy, has recently claimed in a talk at the University of California, Berkley,
that “the joy of irony” stems from the fact that “you have to perform the
possibility that some people won’t get it.” Of course, one cannot expect
everyone to find the same remarks funny. A comic trait may, at any time,
fail to resonate. But what does “performing” this possibility mean if not
actualizing it by default, sustaining one’s laughter, one’s mode of ad-
dress, on the basis of a distinction between those who laugh, and those
who are laughed at? This is precisely what the sociologist of science does
when, in the course of a constructivist ethnography of a laboratory, she
discloses how scientists, like children fascinated by magic tricks, marvel
at discoveries that they themselves have socially constructed. In other
words, the sociologist actualizes a demarcation, not between Science and
non-science, but between those who are “caught up” in the problematic
of making nature speak, animated by problems that demand responses
and development, and those who situate themselves beyond it, revealing
that in fact the problematic has no existence of its own but is merely the
shadow of a process of social construction that those who are caught up
in the problem “don’t get,” to which they have no access.
Thus, the sociologists, who are all too familiar with the social con-
struction of everything, may laugh among themselves, while the scientists,
busy trying to establish a reliable rapport with their subatomic particles,
remain at best baffled, and at worst, insulted. Irony and seriousness can-
not therefore laugh, if they do so at all, without gaining recourse to “a
more lucid and more universal power to judge that assures [their] differ-
ence from those being studied” (Stengers, The Invention 65). The dispute
between the epistemologist and the sociologist of science, then, is not one
between two different relationships to the problematic but between the
truth and falsehood of their respective solutions. In other words, the dis-
tinction between seriousness and irony is not a matter of how one laughs,
but a matter of who or what one should be laughing at.
What is remarkable about Deleuze’s characterization of philosophy
as an art of inventing concepts in response to problems is that it situates the
task of philosophy in direct contrast to such transcendental operations of
judgment.1 If concepts are responses to problems, the problematic cannot
designate a negative mode of existence, and problems cannot be reduced
to mere phantasms that a more lucid stance will dispel. Nothing comes
out of nowhere. If concepts can respond to problems it is indeed because
the problematic corresponds to something other than non-being. Not
without humor, Deleuze inscribes the being of the problematic with an
appropriately enigmatic, if telling, sign: not “non-being”, but rather
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

“?-being” (Difference 64). In other words, ghosts do exist. Rather than a

mere shadow of knowledge, the problematic has its own mode of exis-
tence. Or better, the problematic is a mode of existence of its own: the
mode of existence of a question to be answered, a problem to be solved,
a tension to be resolved, an enigma to be deciphered, a work to be done–
the mode of existence of difference itself.
Giving to the problematic its own mode of existence opens the pos-
sible once again. For it creates what James in The Will to Believe would
call a genuine option, a forking path that confronts one with a vital choice.
What it makes possible, and what it subsequently requires, is to cultivate
a different feel for problems, one that may enable an alternative relation-
ship between problems and solutions to be forged, and engender, in
turn, the possibility of a different mode of address. The serious and the
ironist reduce problems to manifestations of ignorance, and therefore
those caught up in the problematic, the laughing stock, are those with
incomplete information, those in (momentary or permanent) error, those
who are duped by false assumptions, fooled by appearances, unaware
of the effects of their own actions, and so forth. They, on the other hand,
as ultimate judges, are always beyond it, having access to principles that
can solve a problem by transcending the problematic as such. If ghosts
do exist, however, if the problematic is not a mere shadow of knowledge
but “a state of the world, a dimension of the system and even its horizon
or its home,” (Deleuze, Difference 280) the alleged lucidity of the judg-
ment that would claim to transcend the field of the problematic begins
to appear rather somber.
When the problematic is not a mistake but a dimension of the world,
one may admit to what is perhaps a more humble but also more fecund
position, that it is the problematic itself that not only transcends, but sub-
sists and persists in the solutions that are offered in response to it– there
is no stepping beyond it to bring to light the shadows that are cast upon
those who attempt to respond to it: “The oracle is questioned, but the
oracle’s response is itself a problem” (Deleuze, Difference 63). Insisting and
persisting in its solutions, the problematic doesn’t care for all those final
solutions and promises of salvation offered by transcendent judgments– it
resurfaces once again, through novel events, with different shapes, under
different names, pressing on the present like the imperative of a future to
be felt. And all solutions, for their part, depend on the problems that call
for and insist in them. This is why, as Mariam Motamedi-Fraser suggests,
“the best that a solution can do therefore is to develop a problem” (76).
But how to develop it? In what sense?
It is here that this other mode of address that Stengers associates
with the art of humor makes itself felt, in that it is indeed a question not of
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

40 Martin Savransky
bursting in laughter or in tears but of patiently cultivating another mode

of addressing our questions and thoughts to others, a sense of humor that
may in turn open problems to a new sense. Unlike seriousness or irony,
Stengers’s art of humor has no recourse to a transcendent plane capable of
making the problematic give up its ghosts. By contrast, humor “is an art
of immanence. The distinction between science and non-science” Stengers
writes, “cannot be judged in the name of a transcendence, in relation to
which we would designate ourselves as free, and where only those who
remain indifferent to it are free. For our dependence on this transcendence
in no way reduces our degrees of liberty, our choice as to the way we will
attend to the problems created by this difference” (The Invention 66). There
is no avoiding the necessity to respond that the problematic creates, but
this necessity does not determine how we might respond. It does not replace
laughter for the terrorized defeat of the one who suddenly finds herself
inescapably haunted by ghosts. Learning the humor of the problematic is
indeed a matter of paying attention, finally, to the quality of our laughter– a
question of how to laugh rather than whom to laugh at. For the wager of
addressing others with humor is a wager on the possibility of learning
to laugh collectively with the problematic ghosts, simultaneously accept-
ing that they demand a response, and affirming that this demand in no
way settles the question of how to respond. This is why, ultimately, what
is at stake is the possibility of nourishing a laughter that “comprehends
and appreciates without waiting for salvation, and can refuse without
letting itself terrorize [,] a laughter that does not exist at the expense of
scientists, but one that could, ideally, be shared with them” (Stengers The
Invention 17).
If the humor of the problematic can be associated with an art, it is first
and foremost because it is a patient endeavor that finds no amusement in
the speedy operations by which modern thought turns abstractions into
overarching generalizations. Only their acolytes find general theories
entertaining. Generalizations may and do silence those with divergent
purposes, but they will not keep the problematic at bay. Indeed, the risk
the laughter of humor takes is that of seeking to learn, in the complexity
of each individual occasion, how to disentangle the problematic exercise
of thought from the operations of censorship and disqualification that are
supposed to protect it (Stengers, Civiliser). In order to laugh, which is to
say, to address itself to others in its singular way, the humor of the prob-
lematic has to invent a manner of engaging the problems and speculative
dreams that animate a practice without denouncing these problems as
nothing but the product of their own fabrications, and without incurring
the quick but serious judgment that, after all, these are “just dreams.”
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

This slow, immanent dimension of the art of humor allows us per-

haps to attend to Stengers’s wandering curiosity from a slightly different
angle. Indeed, its cultivation has been long in the making. Traces of a
burgeoning humor of the problematic are already perceptible, for instance,
in Stengers’s earlier writings after her collaboration with Ilya Prigogine
and his collaborators on “dissipative structures” (e.g., Power and Inven-
tion), and the ways in which the invention of this very concept surfaced
in response to the particular character that the problem of life takes when
considered from the perspective of far-from-equilibrium systems. Even
more to the point, Stengers’s own characterization of the concept of “com-
plexity” precisely signals that what makes a situation complex cannot be
reduced to an incomplete formulation of the problem, or to the enormous
complication that the behavior of the many components of the situation
may pose to our models of explanation. This is because complexity “sets
out problems– we don’t know a priori what ‘sum of parts’ means– and this
problem implies that we cannot treat, under the pretext that they have the
same ‘parts,’ all the ‘sums’ according to the same general model” (Stengers,
Power and Invention 12-13).
It is in The Invention of Modern Science, however, that the humor of
the problematic becomes ever more present. It becomes present precisely
when, by situating science under the sign of the event, Stengers seeks
to elaborate a “politics of reason” that be “not reducible to the games
of power we today associate with ‘political politics’” (The Invention 63).
It is no coincidence that it is the concept of the event that confers on the
problematic the power to situate the sciences, and creates an opening for
an art of humor. For indeed, “the mode of the event is the problematic.
One must not say that there are problematic events, but that events bear
exclusively upon problems and define their conditions […] The event by
itself is problematic and problematizing” (Deleuze, The Logic 197). The
echoes of the secret school keep reverberating. As Stengers has remarked,
the event marks a difference, but it does not say what or whom that dif-
ference will bear upon:
The event creates a difference between before and after. But what is
this difference? On what, where, and how does this distinction bear?
The event does not tell us. A great many actors who have all, in one
way or another, been produced by the event will undertake to deduce
lessons from it; they will produce new stories, some of which will be
beautiful, others much less so. (“The Humour” 33)
What the event generates, therefore, is a rupture of time, a transforma-

tion of the possible. And it is through this transformation that the force
of the problematic resurfaces, situating all those who have in one way
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

42 Martin Savransky
or another been affected by it as they produce and contest each other’s

stories, that is, each other’s solutions to the problems the event poses.
But like the oracle, the event offers no solutions– it does not determine
how they will be situated. It gives no one the right to the definition of a
problem, and it gives no invented solution the power to make the prob-
lematic give up its ghosts. Instead, all of those who, in inventing their
own solutions, and in engaging with the stories that others have risked,
inhabit the problematic opened by an event, become actors in the task of
developing the sense of a problem.
Situated in the problematic folding of an event, no actor can claim a
transcendent position that would allow them privileged access to prob-
lems, either to enforce their own sense, or to declare them as nonsense.
Thus, when one is plunged into the problematic by a fecund event that no
one could anticipate, “irony is replaced by the humor of a shared problem
[and] what is produced is no longer a confusion of roles but a singular-
ization of interests” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics II 434). Tickled by the ghosts
of the problematic, the laughter of humor is that of the one who risks
participating in the development of problems themselves. It constitutes a
form of laughter that, while it recognizes that the function of solutions is
not to make problems disappear but to invent forms of developing them,
it does not for that reason denounce solutions as false or hopeless. The
humor of the problematic affirms the ways in which we are traversed by
problems over which we have no authorship, and in so doing encounters
solutions as singular adventures whose only truth belongs to the interest
of the problem that has provoked them, and whose efficacy is none other
than the degree and manner in which they become capable of developing
the problem such that new dimensions may be added to it.
For this reason, Stengers characterizes humor as that mode of
laughter that takes shape and makes itself felt at those moments when
one “recognizes oneself as a product of the history whose construction
one is trying to follow.” As she puts it:
Just as the event, in itself, does not have the power to dictate how it
will be narrated or the consequences that will be authorized on its be-
half, neither does it have the power to select among its narrators. […].
Whoever undertakes this work will have, as his sole constraint, the
recognition that he himself is the heir of what has taken place, that the
event situates him, whether he likes it or not […] that is, the recognition
that he himself is a constructor of the history that follows the event, one
constructor of signification among others. (Stengers, The Invention 67)
My sense is that to recognize oneself as a constructor of signification

among others, to recognize oneself an heir to the problems that animate
one’s present, does not, despite appearances, turn humor into a nihilistic
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

laughter. For while humor involves laughing in the midst of the contin-
gencies of what has situated us, it is from this experience of being situated
by a problem, of becoming a tool for the development of problems, that
humor becomes an ethical and political task without thereby reducing
every problem either to a question of morals or to a matter of “politics.”
Something more than “political politics” hangs in the balance here. It is
a question, first and foremost, of enabling the problematic to effectively
matter, to give to the problems that animate us the power to connect those
that are affected by them. And it is this power that may transform the
stakes, from the search for objective knowledge and true solutions, to the
question of whether or not with our solutions, no matter how modest,
one enables the present and its problems to trust the possible alternatives
that emanate from and insist in it.
This is why when it comes to addressing experimental physicists
and their vocation, for instance, to address their practices with humor is
not to denounce their passionate detection of neutrinos, those genuinely
phantom particles that ignore barriers and limits, as nothing but a product
of their own fabrication, owing everything to the enormous number of
instruments, interpretations, references to other known particles, and to
the entire array of social, cultural and technical practices that have gone
into their making. But neither is it to reassert the epistemologist general
assumption, that the physicist’s proofs, upon which the autonomous
existence of the neutrino is established, also reveal the more general ex-
istence of “an autonomous world that would ensure the unique authority
of physics.” It is instead to reject the “either/or” form of this polemic, and
to pay attention to the problem posed by the paradoxical mode of existence
of this singular being which is, at one and the same time, an achievement
in human history and an ingredient in the history of the universe. Indeed,
the humor that this problem elicits relates to the possibility that, “far from
being at odds, as is the case in traditional philosophy,” when the neutrino
is at stake “the ‘in itself’ and the ‘for us’ are correlatively produced,” such
that “the neutrino exists simultaneously and inseparably ‘in itself’ and
‘for us,’ becoming even more ‘in itself,’ a participant in countless events
in which we seek the principles of matter, as it comes into existence ‘for
us,’ an ingredient of increasingly numerous practices, devices, and pos-
sibles” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics I 22).
If Stengers on occasion refers to this as a “humor of truth” (e.g., in
Cosmopolitics I), and associates it with the invention of a possible peace, it is
not because it constitutes a realization that the proper object of laughter is
not science but “truth” as such. It is not because anything goes, or because
truth has stopped mattering. Truth matters a great deal, but a “solution
always has the truth it deserves according to the problem to which it is a
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44 Martin Savransky
response, and the problem always has the solution it deserves according
to its own truth or falsity– in other words, in proportion to its sense.”
(Deleuze, Difference 159). This is a pluralism and not a relativism– not
“anything goes,” but many things matter. By caring for the manifold con-
nections that bind a solution to the problem that has called for it, the art
of humor is able to dissociate the scientists’ speculative dreams of truth,
their passion for truth, from the exclusive seriousness with which their
solutions are otherwise endowed. Through what is ultimately a slow art
of singularization and discernment, the laughter of humor consists in
allowing the problematic to be inhabited, such that one may be able to ac-
company the construction of differences that diverging practices articulate
in developing a sense of the problems that animate them.
The possible peace to be achieved by such a humor is never, how-
ever, an ecumenical, perpetual peace. Neither is it another method for
mapping the many versions of problems in order to find that these are
everywhere and always the same– distributed and multiple. By contrast,
it is a situated and partial achievement, full of friction, whose only efficacy
is that of provoking, of convoking, a shared feeling, which is the feeling
of the possibility of caring for something that matters without, for that
reason, declaring that it must matter. One pays attention and trusts that,
by enabling the problematic itself to matter, one might become capable of
inventing concepts that allow one to understand. That is, in Whitehead’s
sense of the term in Modes of Thought, to induce an experience of trans-
formative disclosure– one that may trust in the possibility of adding new
dimensions to a problem that may enable a situation to find new means
of expression, and new ways of being felt.
The Laughter of the Pluriverse

To propose, as I have done here, that thinking with Stengers involves
learning to laugh with her, learning to appreciate the importance of cul-
tivating another sense of humor, is to suggest that Stengers’s philosophy
cannot be approached as one would approach a theory– becoming familiar
with its “keywords,” imitating the appropriate gestures, or following
the continuity of its premises as if it was a self-answering problem with
its “ifs” and its “thens.” Situating myself in the company of Stengers’s
thought, I have sought to appreciate the way in which, by making the
problematic matter, the art of humor operates as a means of creation, “cre-
ating the philosopher [herself] as a ‘means’” for the development of the
problems that turned her into a philosopher in the first place (Stengers,
“Speculative Philosophy” 189). It is this sense of a developing affinity
with the problems that has animated such a secret school, and with the
peculiar sound of the echoes that Stengers makes resonate, that for me
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

has become central in thinking with Stengers as she herself thinks and
laughs in the profound company not only of other philosophers but also
of a plethora of practitioners –scientists, witches, ethnopsychoanalysts,
and a few lucky social scientists– for whom problems may not necessarily
be expressed philosophically, but whose practices nevertheless have been
situated by a similar effort to inhabit the problematic, to make it matter.
But like the paradoxical mode of existence of the neutrino insinuates,
problems are more-than-philosophical, and as James put it, “philosophies
are intimate parts of the universe, and they express something of its own
thought of itself” (A Pluralistic 317). They also express something of its
own modes of laughter, of the ways in which it appreciates and depreci-
ates itself, the ways in which, with our ways of laughing, this pluriverse
increases or decreases in value. This is, at the end of the day, the political
function of the humor of the problematic– that when cultivated collectively
in the midst of our present with its seriousness and its corrosive forms of
laughter, it may allow us to nourish a sense of humor that does not come
at the expense of those who risk dreaming speculatively, but one that may
laugh with them in order to open the universe up to another sense. It is
indeed an art that offers no guarantees. What it does is to wager, which is
to say, to trust, that another way of laughing may enable us to add—thanks
to and not despite our plural, diverging activities—novel dimensions to
problems such that they may in turn transform, and make perceptible,
the possible that insists in the interstices of our present.
Goldsmiths, University of London
Note
1. Although it can give rise to an altogether different form of irony, an art of irony as an
operation of grounding that “consists in treating things and beings as so many responses
to hidden questions, so many cases for problems yet to be resolved” (Deleuze, Difference
63).
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. The Macmillan Company, 1911.
Cortázar, Julio. La Vuelta al Día en Ochenta Mundos. Siglo XXI, 1967.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
---. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Continuum, 2006
---. The Logic of Sense. Continuum, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Verso, 1994.
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Penguin, 1992.
James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
---. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2. Dover, 1990.
---. The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Dover, 1956.
Motamedi-Fraser, Mariam. “Facts, Ethics and Event.” Deleuzian Intersections, edited by
Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rödje, Berghahn, 2010.
Savransky, Martin. The Adventure of Relevance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

46 Martin Savransky
---. “The Wager of an Unfinished Present: Notes on Speculative Pragmatism.” Speculative

Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, edited by Alex Wilkie, Martin Savransky, and Marsha
Rosengarten, Routledge, 2017.
Schlanger, Judith. Le neuf, le different et le dejà-la: une exploration de l’influence. Harmann, 2014.
---. Penser la bouche pleine. Fayard, 1975.
Stengers, Isabelle. “Another Look– Relearning How to Laugh.” Hypatia, vol. 15, 2000, pp.
41-54.
---. Civiliser la Modernité? Whitehead et les Ruminations du Sens Commun. Presses du Reel, 2017.
---. Cosmopolitics I. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
---. Cosmopolitics II. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
---. “The Humour of the Present.” Transformations in Personhood and Culture After Theory,
edited by Christie McDonald and Gary Wihl, Pennsylvania University Press, 1994.
---. “Introductory Notes to an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, 2005,
pp. 183-196.
---. “L’Insistence du Possible.” Gestes Spéculatifs, edited by Didier Debaise and Isabelle
Stengers, Presses du Reel, 2015.
---. Power and Invention: Situating Science. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
---. “Speculative Philosophy and The Art of Dramatization.” The Allure of Things: Process
and Objects in Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey,
Bloomsbury, 2014.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.
---. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967.
Woolgar, Steve. “It Could Be Otherwise: Provocation, Irony and Limits.” YouTube, uploaded
by the Centre for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society at the University of California,
Berkley, April 10, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=69kvaOj58so.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Powers, in the Singular
Andrew Goffey
“To pose the problem of ‘scientific concepts’ is,

immediately, to pose the problem of their power.”
—Isabelle Stengers and Judith Schlanger
For many Anglophone readers, the interest of Isabelle Stengers’s

now extensive writings will have been shaped—in part, at least—by a
critical tradition of thinking that finds in the sociological and cultural
study of science a welcome set of intellectual tools for denouncing the
pretentions to a foundedness in scientific truth of socio-political domina-
tion. Informed by arguments about the instrumental qualities of scientific
rationality, the social and cultural construction of knowledge, and the
links between intellectual practices and domination, this is a tradition
of thinking which in many respects finds its raison d’être in its capacity
to call into question, and in its flair for suspicion. Pointing, often quite
rightly, to the unreflected social and cultural determinations of rationality,
what matters about science in this tradition is that it is, or has become,
“technoscience,” constituted through its relationship with and deployed
in the service of inequality, injustice, and illusion.
There is something of an irony in this. Not in the least because whilst
Stengers is a staunch advocate of addressing the politics of knowledge
practices, throughout her writings she has also been assiduous in devel-
oping a properly experimental approach to thinking that actively combats
any position that, in its appeal to “the truth,” explicitly or implicitly seeks
to have the last word.1 Forms of critical thinking that claim an all-terrain
power to judge, even in the deconstructed acknowledgement that the con-
ditions of possibility for such a power are at the same time the conditions
of its impossibility, call forth from Stengers the kind of laughter that she
associates with a humor that she explicitly contrasts with an ironic stance,
whose provenance within the Western canon has all to frequently been
made a central feature of criticism.2
In the light of this trajectory shaping the contexts of reception of
Stengers’s writings—which might find its variants in critical theory, the
sociology of science and/or cultural studies, to name but three—her re-
current thematization of power presents an interesting and useful test case

SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018 47
48 Andrew Goffey
for addressing the challenge that her work presents. For whilst power is
a quite explicit point of reference in her thinking, one of the remarkable
characteristics of the way in which Stengers develops her approach to it
is to be found in the manner in which she seeks to deploy it as a concept
without its cortège of connections to the modern habits of thought that her
work seeks to combat. Of course, considering the immanence of power
relations to knowledge is not a trait unique to Stengers— Foucault is a
significant figure here, and a problematic of power was arguably a com-
mon feature of much of the Francophone philosophy of the period during
the formative period of Stengers’s trajectory as a philosopher.3 However,
there are a number of traits to Stengers’s treatment of power that mark it
out here as worthy of close consideration.
Singularity and Multiplicity

Perhaps one of the most interesting features of the way that Stengers
addresses the links between scientific knowledges and power is her
manner of connecting it with a focus on the singularity of the practices
in which she is interested. Arguing that problematizing the success of
scientific rationality necessarily entails posing the problem of the power
of scientific concepts is a link that is made very clearly in her 1988 publi-
cation with Judith Schlanger, Les concepts scientifiques: Invention et pouvoir,
where she argues that
[t]o pose the problem of the power of scientific concepts instead of tak-
ing it for granted, whether through the rationality of the world or the
scientific undertaking, implies … an intrinsic and non-hierarchizable
diversity of scientific undertakings, which corresponds to the diversity
of problems posed by what the scientist deals with. From this point of
view, physics becomes, not a model science but a singular science, a
science singularized by its objects, which are, as a first approximation,
isolatable. (Stengers and Schlanger 59)
Indeed it is precisely the singularity of the achievement of modern ex-

perimental sciences that Stengers is seeking to capture in her complex
formulation of that achievement as the invention of “the power to con-
fer on things the power of conferring on the experimenter the power to
speak in their name” (The Invention 89). In this regard, the singularity of
the achievement of rational mechanics, for example, lies not in the way
in which a mathematician such as Lagrange exemplifies the progress of
an unsituated logic of scientific discovery, but in his inventing a man-
ner of constructing equations that allows the instantaneous state of a
physical system to be (fictively) described as an equilibrium state. It is
a mathematical fiction but one that has enormous power because of the
way in which it “redefines” what is empirically observable in a purely
“rational” language. This in turn creates a formidable equivalence between
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Powers, in the Singular 49
different empirical situations, the singularity of which has subsequently

been forgotten in the “reduction” of the problems addressed by rational
mechanics to a problem of mathematical analysis4 that is made possible
by thinking in terms of the abstract conditions of rationality in general.
As her characterization of the power that singularizes modern ex-
perimental science itself suggests, this singularity is also, unavoidably,
connected to an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of powers, for the
empirically and conceptually good reason that affirming the singularity
of a power entails a contestation of the order of generality that might
seek to take root in it. The singular inventiveness of the experimental
achievement of modern science precludes any reference to it as Science, as
an order of rationality that can be understood as conceptually separable
from—transcending—the problematic, mutating nature of the histories
of which it is an ingredient, and of which a proliferating ensemble of
powers forms a part.
In her 1997 essay, Sciences et pouvoirs (an essay published in the same
year as her Cosmopolitiques series), the problematic multiplicity of power
is an issue that she addresses directly. Speaking in this text to the way in
which scientific practices present themselves in the guise of the unified
entity called “science” (which she will later capitalize as ‘Science’), she
points in particular towards the “very different meanings” of power, a
difference that matters a great deal when it comes to scientific practices,
not in the least because any significant scientific invention “associates and
tangles together eminently different forms of power” (69). More pointedly,
discussing there the idea of “demoralizing” the power that takes advan-
tage of the singular achievement of scientific practices—typically, in the
name of Science—she remarks that “[a]ttempting to think sciences, at the
point we currently are, is to attempt to think them in such a way that the
‘submission’ that singularizes laboratory beings, the fact that they answer
the questions they are posed in a reliable manner, not become the general
model around which all powers (all interested in making the operations
of submission which they carry out invisible, natural) form a coalition”
(81). Rationality can be, and is, instrumentalized, but rethought in terms
of a plurality of practices that owe their success to a multiplicity of pow-
ers; this instrumentalization is itself contingent.
It is not surprising, then, to find a multiplication, even proliferation,
of powers across Stengers’s writings, featuring in the development of her
analyses without, for all that, forming a determining point for discus-
sion. Considering the role of theory in modern science and its manner
of mobilizing “a” power, for example, she refers to the manner in which
the theoretico-experimental sciences “presume the power of predicting
outcomes, of controlling in order to replace, of purifying to insure the
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50 Andrew Goffey
implication of a theory” (Chertok and Stengers xvi). In a discussion of

the sense in which Christopher Columbus can have been said to have
“discovered” America, she refers to the reality of America as “having
the power to hold together a disparate multiplicity of practices, each
and every one of which bears witness, in a different mode, to what they
group together” (The Invention 98). In her series of Cosmopolitics essays,
the rationality that critical thinking has acquired the habit of presenting
(in largely unitary terms) is analyzed into a set of practices with complex
relations that draw on a range of powers, the genesis of which is a sig-
nificant feature of the experimental achievement. Lagrange’s equations
in rational mechanics form one such power, but so too does the formal-
ism of Hamilton: the “Hamiltonian” of a mechanical system testifies to
a new power conferred on the sign for equality, “=.” Sadi Carnot’s heat
engine, another fiction, possesses a different kind of power, one that for
Stengers matters because of the obligations that it creates for the scientist
who would think with it. With Maxwell’s demon, Stengers detects the
“triple” power of the “Queen of Heaven” celebrated by Maxwell in his
letter to Peter Tait, and the correlative generation of a hierarchy within
the experimental sciences. But this multiplicity of powers, in Stengers’s
work, extends well beyond the practices of modern science. Beyond the
territory of modern science, in her discussion of political creation and
the need to enter into different relations with the forces that surround
them, she refers to alcoholics “dealing with a power that is all the more
fearsome as one tries to escape from it, a power which one must learn to
address” (Pignarre and Stengers 129), and to the empowering capacities
of neo-pagan witches. And we should not forget also that it is precisely in
terms of their erotic power that Stengers, following Whitehead, character-
izes Ideas in Plato (L’hypnose 138). Powers, addressed in the singular and
situated in the plurality of histories of which they become a part, speak
to a complex ecology of actors both human and non-human and, beyond
the “modern” settlement, demand a nuanced consideration that “we” are
not “alone in the world.”
Irreduction and Negotiation

The association and tangling together of very different forms of
power made evident in her characterization of the invention of mod-
ern science signals an important connection in Stengers’s work to the
“principle” of irreduction that she takes from the work of Bruno Latour.
Irreduction, in this context, is another way to characterize the endeavor
to think scientific practices in their plurality, and whilst there are some
very strong connections between the way in which Stengers explores the
network of associations that take shape around a scientific invention and
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Latour’s formulation of actor-network theory, one issue on which they dif-

fer quite markedly is the issue of power. Discussing Latour’s exploration
of actor-networks, Stengers flags his refusal to “explain” the successful
construction of a landscape of practices, actions, and passions in terms of
a “power.” Stengers, by contrast, holds onto the importance of acknowl-
edging the analytic value of power in an exploration of the complex
construction of networks of actors, allowing that an appeal to “power”
is a valid move as long as it doesn’t become a global reference point, one
which would allow us to forget the negotiated configurations of differ-
ent actors. As she puts it in terms decidedly reminiscent of Deleuze and
Guattari: “Power, when it grows a capital letter, transforms the rhizome
into a tree: each branch is ‘explained’ by its relation to another branch, one
closer to the trunk, and indeed to the roots, that is, to the site – occupied
by a ‘logic’ if not by actors – from which all the rest can be denounced as
puppets, acted on beyond their intentions and their plans” (The Invention
124). Power, from this point of view, is not a concept that can be used in
the manner of a “shortcut” “that would save one from having to follow
the construction of [the] ramifications” of a complex, rhizomatic network
of actors and their practices. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, any
more than it means scientific practices are a priori compromised by their
implication in power relations. The sciences, as she puts it, “are not, by
destiny, the allies of power, but they are, by definition, vulnerable to all
those who can contribute to the creation of differences, the stabilization
of interests, the disqualification of annoying questions, the facilitation
of the products of the laboratories” (The Invention 126). The singularity
of modern science, the inventive power of its “faîtiches”—Lagrange’s
equations and so on—generates a political problem that demands more
detailed attention to the networks of which scientific practices are a part,
not global explanatory strategies.
Stengers’s more recent work on capitalist sorcery and, in particular,
its consideration of the functioning of “infernal alternatives” as a crucial
element in the ongoing processes of capitalist redefinition of practices is
interesting in this regard precisely because it articulates political activism
with analysis in terms of the empirical details of practices on the ground
without reference to catch-all terms that would make it easy for actors to
ignore the specificity of the situation(s) in which they find themselves. It
is not the case, for Stengers, that actors are ideological dupes, but nor is
it the case either that accepting this entails giving up on the relevance of a
reference to capitalism, as appears to be the case with Latour. Thinking in
terms of infernal alternatives— “that set of situations that seem to leave
no other choice than resignation or a slightly hollow sounding denuncia-
tion” (Pignarre and Stengers 24)—is a way of drawing our attention to
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

52 Andrew Goffey
the manner in which the negotiated exploration of possibilities within

networks is blocked or captured in a manner analogous to the capturing
of scientific practices in and by “Science,” the interest of which has been
constructed as self-evident: “Wherever an infernal alternative is consti-
tuted, politics gives way to submission, and even those who resist may be
trapped, that is to say, may define their opposition in the terms fabricated
by the alternative” ( 25).
Stengers’s concern to follow the rhizomatic network constructed by a
scientific practice and to mark the points at which its negotiated extension
is blocked through the way in which power can operate to discourage,
for example, “annoying questions,” can also be seen clearly in her work
on hypnosis. The abuse of power allegedly exploited by the hypnotist
has, of course, frequently been the object of critical denunciation, not
in the least by psychoanalysts wedded to the theoretical purity of their
ethical relation to the other, and the fascination it exercises is testified to
in various ways in popular culture.5 But exploring the development of
a controversial phenomenon like hypnosis in an irreductive manner and
considering the powers that it puts into play demands an understanding
as much of the practical history of the power of organizations, the work of
journals and publishers, the skills of practitioners, the historical emergence
of affects—around the prestige of science, for example—that are put into
play in a network, as of the conceptual complexities of the controversies
it generates. In the second of her books with Polish émigré to France and
hypnotist, Léon Chertok—his (auto-)biographical Mémoires d’un hérétique
(also co-written with Didier Gille)—we see much of the complex ramifying
network of actors that Chertok’s lifelong engagement with hypnosis and
the perplexity it generates has succeeded in articulating. Chertok, in this
account, emerges as a figure not unlike Louis Pasteur in the account that
Bruno Latour offers of The Pasteurization of France, and hypnosis a phe-
nomenon subject to perpetual renegotiation, with the annoying questions
it poses repeatedly being marginalized in and by the knowledge practices
that purport to explain it (see Chertok, Stengers, and Gille).
Hypnosis and a Spinozism of Powers?

In the context of a consideration of her approach to power, Stengers’s
interest in hypnosis is worthy of much closer consideration, not in the least
because of its recurrent importance in her work. It is in the Critique of Psy-
choanalytic Reason, co-written with Chertok, in a series of pages exploring
the strategy pursued by Jacques Lacan in his endeavors first at founding a
science of personality and then in his engagement with the science ques-
tion in psychoanalysis, that Stengers develops a more directly speculative
consideration of power, one that draws on Spinoza. Spinoza, of course, is
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

an important reference point for contemporary critical thought, facilitat-

ing the rethinking of materialisms of various kinds (from the reading of
scripture (Montag), through the multitude (Negri) to the thing-power of
lively materialism (Bennett). But in the specific context in which Chertok
and Stengers make use of it—addressing the surprising propensities of
bodies dramatized in hypnosis—the reference to Spinoza helps as a way
of exemplifying the “pragmatic exploration of events of which the psyche
is capable,” which capacity, they argue, is expressive of the singular essence
of any individual. Power here and its links to the question “what can a
body do?” is thus as ontologically central (the Spinozist conception of
power as essence) as it is indeterminate, encapsulated in an injunction
to an experimental exploration that is refractory to the grounding of
knowledge in the “modern” split of subject and object characteristic of
critical epistemology. In both these respects, the articulation of power and
singularity that Chertok and Stengers draw from Spinoza—with particular
reference to Deleuze’s reading of the Ethics, which itself draws out the
consequences of Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian refusal to “ground” thinking in
a subject6—serves, as they go on to point out, “as a problematization of
any theory claiming to found the privilege of [psycho]analytic technique
in relation to other modes of exploration” (Chertok and Stengers 169).
More pertinently perhaps, it facilitates a rethinking of the complexity
of the power relations operative within practices of hypnosis, because
Spinoza licenses a conceptualization of power that precludes any easy
understanding of it as a priori a relation of power over.
The immediate interest of Spinoza for Chertok and Stengers and
the links between singularity and power that his work develops, lies in
the way in which his thinking allows them to characterize the intellectual
strategy pursued by Jacques Lacan in his coming to Freud. More pointedly,
it is through the limitations of his references to Spinoza that the political
qualities of Lacan’s early attempts to found a science of personality can
be characterized. Because while Lacan invokes Spinoza in his doctoral
thesis, drawing in particular on a quasi-Spinozist conception of parallel-
ism, Chertok and Stengers point out that there is nothing in the way that
Spinoza understands parallelism that would found “any possible right
to a general, shareable, transmissible knowledge of individual essences”
of the kind that is required to ground knowledge in the manner Lacan
seeks. Indeed, as they go on to point out, “[t]he Ethics, where this thesis
[of parallelism] is affirmed, defines the logic of an individual path where
all knowledge would come to be recognized by the individual himself [sic]
not as the acquisition of a rightful possession but as the expression of his
own cause, the power to know, and of God as what this cause expresses”
(Chertok and Stengers 171). Spinoza’s conception of the immanence of
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

54 Andrew Goffey
power to the individual actually facilitates a contrast that makes the

stakes of ambition to ground knowledge in an order of shared generality
perceptible.
Lacan’s endeavor to found a science are in this regard, in fact, more
Kantian than Spinozist—in spite of the reference—because of the way
in which developing a concept of personality in the way he proposes,
“amounts to claiming by right the power of independently judging against
circumstances and appearances” in a common subjection of object and
subject to a rule. If Spinoza enables Chertok and Stengers to read this en-
terprise as political, and thus subject to contestation, this is because of the
way in which Spinoza—controversially—reconceptualizes right in terms
of power: there is no right that can found the singularity of any power,
other than that power itself. Pointing thence to the “arbitrary assent” to
the postulate of determinism on the basis of which science in Lacan’s view
would unfold, Chertok and Stengers can then argue that the “conceptual
knowledge he [Lacan] attempts to found…would perhaps be that kind of
knowledge dreamed of by sovereigns and priests, whose power is ana-
lyzed in Spinoza’s [Theological-Political] Treatise” (Chertok and Stengers
171, 173). Spinoza, in this respect, enables Chertok and Stengers to mark
a distance with reference to Lacan and what Stengers in a later essay
(“Les déceptions”) refers to as a “Kantian politics of knowledges” that it
is difficult to avoid and which is a characteristic feature of epistemology-
centered modern thinking about science. The Spinozist exclamation that
we “do not know what the body can do” in this respect becomes a leitmotif
for the experimental perplexity that Stengers and Chertok use to mark the
insistent importance of the (annoying, irritating) question of hypnosis and
the unknown powers that it puts into play.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, as the well-known later characterization of
analyst as “sujet supposé savoir” suggests, bespeaks the futility of his earlier
endeavor at founding a science of personality. Chertok and Stengers go
on to consider the substitution of Hegel for Spinoza by Lacan, the latter’s
enrollment of Emile Meyerson’s work on identification, and explore more
generally the position of judgment that Lacan assumes (in the manner in
which he “summons” philosophers and scientists to testify in favor of the
right of analysis to theorize the subject of science as the psychoanalytic
subject), with regard to all projects aiming at positive knowledge and the
“misrecognition” on the basis of which they unfold. But this extended
thematizing of the supposedly subversive core of truth at the heart of
analysis (which truth is not just refractory to scientific claims to attain
reality “in itself” but also actively dismissive of other forms of therapeutic
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

practice) constitutes analysis as a “machine” (the reference is to Deleuze

and Guattari)
which has succeeded in capturing and setting in motion the most
anguishing themes of Western thought, those themes which speak the
vanity of all positive knowledge. Analytic truth transforms the theology
of an absent God, the infinite errance of a man guilty of a rupture that is
nonetheless the name of his freedom, the illusions of a subject captivated
by what permits him to forget his finitude, the unreasonable efficacy
of what liberates…into so many of its own components. (L’hypnose 89)
The ulterior developments of psychoanalysis, which Stengers fol-

lows in her continued work on hypnosis, belies the possibility that analysis
may occasionally have presented of an engagement with other practices
that would not be dismissive of the findings they present. The ethology
of the infant would be one such knowledge practice, Tobie Nathan’s
ethnopsychiatry another. And if Chertok and Stengers take a particular
interest in Lacan’s reference to ethology (and to Meyerson), this is perhaps
because such an engagement points towards the possibility of a different
kind of relation to positive knowledge practices, one that doesn’t assume
the position of sovereign or priest.7
However, much as Stengers acknowledges the importance of Spi-
noza, she is far from accepting his Ethics as the reference point in her
conceptualization of power. In spite of the proliferation of powers in her
work and her acknowledgement of the importance of affect in her con-
struction of an ecology of practices,8 Stengers’s references to Spinoza do
not themselves have a “foundational” role to play. Occasional references
to Chertok’s thematization of potentiality as a “fourth state” of the organ-
ism put into play by hypnosis might seem to suggest the foundedness of
the Spinozist distinction between potestas and potentia in Spinoza’s work
emphasized by Toni Negri (see The Savage Anomaly). In distinguishing
between power in its stabilized, constituted, institutionalized state, on
the one hand, and power in its fluid, unstable, constitutive multiplicity
on the other, Spinoza would, on this count, offer a way to understand the
stabilized power of knowledge practices and the unstable capacities of
the organism to escape or resist domination. But here, where it might be
tempting to find a way to ground such resistance, Stengers insists that
references to potentiality in the context of hypnosis stand as a generic
characterization of the problem of the relationship between organism and
environment, even whilst the notion risks reintroducing the disqualify-
ing, exclusionary logic of a “we know, they believe” that appeals to the
universal introduce.
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56 Andrew Goffey
A Pharmacological Regime
The capacity of bodies to destabilize and resist the machinery of
particular forms of power here is not something that Stengers wishes to
deny—far from it—but reading this directly in terms of the distinctions of
political philosophy would make it easy to miss the very deliberate way
in which in her deployment of the concept of power aims to deprive us
of reference points that obviate the need to pay attention to what is going
on in the very singular histories of which scientific practices are a part.
The reference to Spinoza in A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason facilitates
an articulation of power with an empirical injunction to experiment that
links it to the unknown that hypnosis puts into play, an unknown that
effectively demands the kind of exploration of the “rhizome” of prac-
tices that Stengers consistently associates with the question of hypnosis.
However, it does so only to the extent that Spinoza (and the references in
his Ethics to sleepwalkers) is already part of the landscape of knowledge
practices of which hypnosis and psychoanalysis are a part, enrolled by
Lacan in his thesis, and read by Deleuze and by Guattari in their critical
appraisal of analysis.
But if Stengers is somewhat reticent in her endorsement of Spinozist
positions with regard to power (she comes back to him very briefly in
In Catastrophic Times), this has perhaps more to do with her sense of the
difficulties to which many references to power expose contemporary
philosophy, particularly when it comes to science. Referring to Foucault’s
conceptualization of power (the congruence of which, with Spinoza, has
been emphasized by Pierre Macherey) and the connections that he makes
between psychoanalysis and the confessional practices that preceded it,
Stengers underlines the point that, following Freud’s project through the
lens of its explicit links to the experimental sciences, power is not the “hid-
den face” of the confessional practice from which psychoanalysis inherits.
The power attendant on the experimental scientific way of dealing with
the control and purification of the beings it puts into play—via the rep-
etition effected by transference—forms, as she puts it, the “explicit” and
“averred” condition of Freud’s work (“Les déceptions” 219). The capacity
of analysis to generate the return of the repressed in the consulting room,
from this point of view, is a power acknowledged by Freud in the strictly
scientific lineage of a practice distinguishing fact and artifact, truth and
suggestion. In this respect, addressing power in its relation to knowledge
practices does not, for Stengers, entail conceptualizing the present in either
the archaeological or genealogical terms that Foucauldian historiography
advocates. We fail to understand the ongoing, immanent construction of
the histories of knowledge practices if that understanding is constructed
around bringing to light “forgotten strata” of knowledges, or in the kind of
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

genealogical terms that would allow “the present to be relived as refusal,

repression, or covering over of that which in fact does not stop repeating
itself everywhere in a disguised manner”—including, it might be added,
potentia that potestas would struggle to control.9
If there is something like a theoretical grounding for the approach
to power that we find in Stengers’s work, it is to be found in Whitehead’s
speculative philosophy. Indeed it is in Thinking with Whitehead, in her
discussion of the transition in Whitehead’s work that she locates in Sci-
ence and the Modern World that Stengers elaborates on the connection that
she wants to make between power and “adventure.” Underscoring the
technical role played by the term “infection” in Whitehead’s writings,
Stengers makes a connection between Whitehead and Foucault: nothing
has in itself a power over something else; primarily, power does not repress
but “incites” “inspiring interests, questions, and knowledge… All ‘social
power,’ unless it is purely and simply repressive (a rare and unstable
case), designates first and foremost a dynamics of infection” (161). But
unlike Foucault, Whitehead displays little interest in describing power.
Rather, and this is the key element of the “test” to which Stengers argues
Whitehead exposes us here, what is crucial about power is its link to
adventure: inciting the take up of a role, a power is extended in multiple
adventures, all of which presuppose that power, but which that power
does nothing to explain. From this point of view, there are no grounds to
oppose power and freedom, not in the least because even an exemplary
manifestation of freedom—thinking, having ideas—testifies to the infec-
tious power of persuasion:
Of course, the persuasive character of an idea guarantees nothing: a
loathsome idea can infect the mind, as powerfully rhythmic music can
lead human beings into battle. Nevertheless, the reference to the power
of persuasion, in contrast to despotic power, is what is required by the
very definition of what we call ‘ideas.’ And no ‘deconstruction’ debunk-
ing the inciting infection where the illusion of free and transparent
rational production prevailed, can abstract from the fact that it presup-
poses, requires, and prolongs the power associated with ideas, while
describing it otherwise. Foucault’s incisive laughter, and the confusion
he sowed in so many well-thinking minds, presupposes and mobilises
this power just as much as the power-knowledge he describes. (163)
In this respect, what the concept of power, thought with Whitehead in

terms of a logic of infection, requires for Stengers is a consideration that
the roles that a power succeeds in stabilizing—designating one of Socrates’
hapless victims as a student, or Foucault’s confessing subject as tied by a
conscience to “self-knowledge”—might cease to hold. This perhaps is why,
finally, Stengers’s approach to power in its links with adventure demands
a pharmacological appreciation. From this point of view, the stabilization
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58 Andrew Goffey
of a scientific practice, that, say, an experimental achievement succeeds

in articulating together, or the invention of a technical laboratory—the
fragile assemblage of valves, wires, sockets, electricity, binary logic and
so on that makes up the early computer—is always at risk of becoming a
poison, dictating the kinds of questions that can “reasonably” be asked
of it. But the power that we associate with the successful scientific experi-
ment, or the more-or-less stable functioning device, has to be understood
in terms of the way in which it infects the practices of which it becomes
a part. Continuing to stimulate, say, the enthusiasm and imagination
of technologically inclined hackers, mobilized by it as part of a broader
technoscientific command to innovate, a device like a computer also con-
tinues to depend on the frustrated or irritated patience of the “user,” who
is required—as a function of other powers perhaps—to accept the terms
on which the computational device addresses him or her and not to take
an interest in the details of the device’s workings (or throw a machine out
of the window). Powers, in Stengers’s work, are susceptible to analysis
in terms of their instability: successfully infecting an environment but
dependent, in one way or another, on the patience of that environment
so as to continue generating effects, they demand a “pharmacological
knowledge” in which no action has any identity “independently of the
ensemble which stabilizes it but which, in so doing, makes it change its
signification” (Cosmopolitics 58).
University of Nottingham
Notes
1. Her essay on William James (“William James”) offers a concise statement of the chal-
lenge that this kind of approach represents. That James is himself often held up, in the
critical tradition, as an exemplar of the socio-economic instrumentalization of thinking
is a point that Stengers is perfectly aware of.
2. Diderot is a recurrent reference in this regard – see the discussion in Stengers (The Inven-
tion 17 and 57-69) for the discussion of humor. See also Savransky (this issue).
3. There is an acerbic commentary on the denunciation of power as a lieu commun of intel-
lectual production in the 1970s (Rosset).
4. See on the Lagrangean “event,” “The Invention of Mechanics: Power and Reason,” Book
2 of Isabelle Stengers’s Cosmopolitics Vol. 1.
5. For example, Raymond Bellour has mapped out the fascination of early cinema with
hypnosis in his Le corps du cinema: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités.
6. Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, developed principally but not exclusively in Expressionism
in Philosophy: Spinoza and in the later Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, is noteworthy for its
endeavor to propose a fully affirmative reading of Spinoza’s ontology, a reading that
dismisses the Kantian and post-Kantian problematic of the subject.
7. It is worth underlining the extent to which Stengers’s reading of Meyerson on identifica-
tion in the first book the Cosmopolitics series is anticipated in the discussion of Lacan’s
strategy in A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

8. The recurrent later reference to the scientist who jumps for joy in the laboratory, in this
respect, is not merely anecdotal any more than the framing of mobilisation in terms of
affect (in the Mémoires d’un hérétique) is accidental.
9. The discussion of archaeology and genealogy is to be found in the second chapter of the
third book of the Cosmopolitics series.
Works Cited
Bellour, Raymond. Le corps du cinema: Hypnoses, émotions, animalités. POL, 2009.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Chertok, Léon, and Isabelle Stengers. A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a
Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan. Translated by Martha Noel Evans, Stanford
Chertok, Léon, Isabelle Stengers, and Didier Gille. Mémoires d’un hérétique. La Découverte,
1990.
Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin, Zone
Books, 1990.
---. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley, City Lights, 1988.
Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power. Spinoza and his Contemporaries. Verso, 1999.
Negri, Antonio. The Savage Anomaly: Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics. Translated by Michael
Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Translated by
Andrew Goffey, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011.
Rosset, Clément. Le philosophe et les sortilèges. Minuit, 1979.
Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Bonnono, University of Min-
nesota Press, 2011.
Stengers, Isabelle, “Les déceptions du pouvoir.” La suggestion, hypnose, influence, transe.
Edited by Daniel Bougnoux, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1991.
---. L’hypnose entre magie et science. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002.
Stengers, Isabelle. The Invention of Modern Science. Translated by Daniel W. Smith, University
of Minnesota Press, 1997.
---. Sciences et pouvoirs: La démocratie face à la technoscience. La Découverte, 1997.
---. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Translated by Michael Chase,
Harvard University Press, 2011.
---. “William James: An ethics of thought?” Translated by Andrew Goffey, Radical Philosophy,
vol. 157, 2009.
Stengers, Isabelle, and Judith Schlanger. Les concepts scientifiques. 1988. Gallimard, 1991.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

SF with Stengers: Asked For or Not, the
Pattern Is Now in Your Hands1
Donna Haraway
When I first held a copy of Isabelle Stengers’s passionate book, a big

tome that tangles with a truly speculative philosopher, one we were both
in love with, I misread the actual title, Penser avec Whitehead, as Pensez avec
Whitehead! My French is better than that, but I fear my character is not. I
saw an imperative rather than a situated practice of thinking-with. Hor-
rified but laughing, in a characteristic act of friendship, with earth-rooted
and precise abstractions, Stengers lured me to think with her beyond the
catastrophes of my always-ready-to-hand self-certainties and ideologies.
She has taught me—taught us—to recognize the killing trap of believing
that we have nothing but infernal choices, each of which leads to authori-
tarianism and invested ignorance. Instead, she models how to think-with
each other in relentlessly situated and risky practices. Indeed, as in the
subtitle of her book, Stengers seeks for and elucidates “une libre et sauvage
création de concepts” (a free and wild creation of concepts).
In short, famously free and wild herself, Stengers actually recognizes
and practices the difficult but generative arts of thinking. She knows
how precious and how vulnerable these practices are in our Capitalist,
increasingly Fascist, and shockingly brutal contemporary worlds. In order
to cultivate a rare loyalty to telling the truth, she casts her lot with the un-
faithful daughters of patriarchy, racism, planetary destruction, scientism,
and capitalism. She embraces the pragmatism of witches in order to stay
true to the crafts of sciences. She is one of the Women Who Make a Fuss.
Stengers is adamant about learning to change the stories, and somehow to
do so in the presence of those who bear the consequences of the extractive
and dumbed-down stories. A materialist speculative philosopher in the
marrow of her bones, she is lured to propose new stories, new abstrac-
tions, not only in the presence of, but in relay and in concert with, those
who must live the tales. Stengers proposes and enables “gestes spéculatifs,”
the title of a weeklong colloquium at Cerisy to which she invited me in
2013. It matters what stories tell stories, what thoughts think thoughts,
what worlds world worlds.
A chemist, scholar of Whitehead and Deleuze, radical thinker about
materiality in sciences, and an unruly feminist philosopher, Stengers gives
me “speculative thinking” in abundance. With her we cannot denounce the

60 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
SF with Stengers 61
world in the name of an ideal world. In the spirit of feminist communitar-

ian anarchism and the idiom of Whitehead’s philosophy, she maintains
that decisions must take place somehow in the presence of those who
will bear their consequences. That is what she means by cosmopolitics.
In relay and return, SF morphs in my writing and research into specu-
lative fabulation and string figures. Entangled with Stengers in relays with
many unfaithful sons and daughters, I have proposed string figures, SF, as
a serious figure for thinking—as a cognitive trope and material-semiotic
technology for thinking more generative by far than binaries, hierarchies,
triads, and linear arrays, all of which operate almost pornographically in
the history of philosophy. SF: string figures, soin des ficelles, speculative
feminism, science fiction, science fact, speculative fabulation, so far.
Relays, string figures, passing patterns back and forth, giving and
receiving, patterning, holding the unasked-for pattern in one’s hands,
response-ability: that is core to what I mean by staying with the trouble in
serious multispecies worlds. Becoming-with, not becoming, is the name
of the game; becoming-with is how partners are, in Vinciane Despret’s
terms, rendered capable.
SF, string figuring, is sympoietic, not autopoietic. Thinking-with
my work on string figures, as well as with the work of another of her
companions in thinking, Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers relayed back to
me how players pass back and forth to each other the patterns-at-stake,
sometimes conserving, sometimes proposing and inventing:
More precisely, com-menting, if it means thinking-with, that is
becoming-with, is in itself a way of relaying... But knowing that what
you take has been held out entails a particular thinking ‘between.’ It
does not demand fidelity, still less fealty, rather a particular kind of
loyalty, the answer to the trust of the held out hand. Even if this trust is
not in ‘you’ but in ‘creative uncertainty,’ even if the consequences and
meaning of what has been done, thought or written, do not belong to
you anymore than they belonged to the one you take the relay from,
one way or another the relay is now in your hands, together with the
demand that you do not proceed with ‘mechanical confidence.’ [In cat’s
cradling, at least] two pairs of hands are needed, and in each succes-
sive step, one is ‘passive,’ offering the result of its previous operation,
a string entanglement, for the other to operate, only to become active
again at the next step, when the other presents the new entanglement.
But it can also be said that each time the ‘passive’ pair is the one that
holds, and is held by the entanglement, only to ‘let it go’ when the other
one takes the relay. (“Relaying” 134)
In passion and action, detachment and attachment, this is what I call cul-
tivating response-ability—the capacity to respond—that is also collective
knowing and doing, an ecology of practices. Whether we asked for it or
not, the pattern is in our hands. The answer to the trust of the held-out
hand: think we must.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

62 Donna Haraway
Historically situated relational worldings make a mockery both

of the binary division of nature and society and of our enslavement to
Progress and its evil twin Modernization. The Capitalocene was relation-
ally made, and not by a secular godlike Anthropos, a law of history, the
machine Itself, or a demon called modernity. The Capitalocene must be
relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns
and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could
be proud of. Shocked anew by our—billions of Earth habitants’, includ-
ing yours and mine—ongoing daily assent in practice to this thing called
capitalism, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (La Sorcellerie) note
that denunciation has been singularly ineffective, or capitalism would
have long ago vanished from the earth. A dark bewitched commitment to
the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal
alternatives, as if we had no other ways to reworld, reimagine, relive,
and reconnect with each other, in multispecies well-being. Pignarre
and Stengers affirm on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new
practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair and mourning, and of
living and dying well. They remind us that the established disorder is
not necessary; another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible,
but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the
belief/disbelief discourse of Progress.
I weave this little text for and to my friend and companion in the
wake of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States,
Marine Le Pen’s growing power in France, the rise of pro-natalist non-
feminist ethnic nationalisms all over the world, unprecedented divergence
of the hyper-rich and everyone else, human numbers and demands on
the earth that surpass all understanding, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism,
racism, misogyny, and the deepening immiserations of tens of millions of
human migrants and refugees, not to mention extinctions and accelerating
climate and other planetary devastations. I am sustained and inspired
by the thinking-making-acting of diverse Indigenous communities and
other resisters and inventers of livable stories in every nook and cranny
of the Earth. How do we think with these practices, now, in this vulner-
able world? I cannot imagine a time when Stengers’s commitment to
materialist speculative collaborative thinking would be more necessary.
We give each other heart, all of us, as we feel the stirrings of rising power-
ful natural-social movements of Earthlings, dedicated in love and rage,
to still possible flourishing, still possible turning from the rising storms.
I end with the slogans on the banners, in this week of the U.S. presi-
dential inauguration, of the people of my campus and my town as we
struggle to refuse the infernal alternatives:
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

SF with Stengers 63
Instruct. Obstruct. Construct.

Run Fast, Bite Hard.
Listen. Think. Respond.
Teach. Organize. Resist. Change. Hope.
Teachers for Thinking (and other dangerous things).
Asked for or not, the pattern is now in our hands.
Distinguished Professor Emerita,

University of California, Santa Cruz
Note
1. This little meditation on thinking with Stengers builds on sections of Donna Haraway,
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (see pp. 12-13, 34, 50-51).
Works Cited
Despret, Vinciane. “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis.” Body &
Society, vol. 10, 2004, pp. 111-134.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University
Press, 2016.
Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. La sorcellerie capitaliste. Decouverte, 2005.
Stengers, Isabelle. Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage creation de concepts. Seuil, 2002.
---. “Relaying a War Machine?” The Guattari Effect, edited by Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey,
Continuum, 2011.
Stengers, Isabelle, Vinciane Despret, and Collective. Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful
Daughters of Virginia Woolf. Translated by April Knutson, Univocal, 2014.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Talking Before the Dead
Vinciane Despret
Warning Against Stupidity

“I would define humor as the ability to recognize oneself as a
product of that very history through which one tries to pur-
sue the construction of history, and this conception of humor
is thus distinguished in the first place from irony (...). Hu-
mor is an art of immanence” (Stengers, L’Invention 79).
In her book La Vierge et le Neutrino [The Virgin and Neutrino], Isa-

belle Stengers uses ferocious humor to challenge the practitioners of the
humanities: “We are confident that the Virgin [who appears to Medjugorje
pilgrims] can be reduced to a product of human subjectivity. The only
question is which of the social sciences will emerge as most qualified to
do the job” (192). The Pilgrims Stengers refers to are the ones the French
sociologist Elisabeth Claverie follows on their pilgrimage to Medjugorje.
In her book, Les guerres de la Vierge, Claverie mentions the fact that her
research often raises suspicion or may even generate propositions of
ironic complicity: “Of course, for sure, for you and for me, we know this
is nonsense; that which you are talking about is, no doubt, unacceptable
and even dangerous” (351). These are the typical reactions one can hear
from social scientists, and these reactions are what lead Stengers to state
further: “The distinction between what really exists, what really can claim
to be able to explain; and what can be undone, dismembered and reduced
to something else, on the other hand, is a powerful weapon.”
During my research studying people who continue to maintain ac-
tive and living relationships with their dead (see Despret), I learned that
this critique can also be applied to those social sciences that have inves-
tigated these relations. For the most part, these social sciences adhere to
the rationalist belief that the only fate of the dead is nothingness (apart
from subjective productions ranging from memory to the “illusions” of
presence). They have investigated these “resurgent beliefs” through the
“lapidary mode” Stengers has described. Like the pilgrims of the Virgin
whom sociologist Elisabeth Claverie accompanied with such passion,
people for whom the dead “are not dead just because we bury them”—as

64 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
Talking Before the Dead 65
I have heard it expressed—are forced to live and try to think about what
is happening to themselves in what Stengers called “unhealthy environ-
ments.”
The Virgin and her anachronistic followers; the invisible and the
dead who are a little too alive: the social sciences usually subject these
beings to explanations of some type of collective or individual emotive
cause. At the collective level: the rise of irrationality, superstition, vari-
ous crises and all kinds of powerful pathologies. At the individual level:
social isolation, mental disorder, hysteria, pathological mourning, and
so forth. There will always be “bad” causes to account for the emergence
of these virgins, these invisibles or these recalcitrant dead, whereas the
progress of rationality will continue to be justified for good reasons. The
need to determine the causes for what is thus designated as something
that has to be explained in terms of causes, as deviations from reason,
as anomalies with regard to the collective heritage of Enlightenment ra-
tionality, or as “resistances to modernity” (Claverie 353), cannot expect
other consequences than those that impoverish their objects of study, and
contribute to poisoning their milieu.
Two stances are possible from these critiques addressed to social
sciences. The first, the critical stance, aims to diagnose the rules of method
these sciences submit themselves to, a method that takes the form of blind
authority claiming to reveal pre-existing reality thereby denying the man-
ner in which practical existence is produced (Stengers, L’Invention). Obey-
ing this method, the scientist usually takes the role of a judge questioning
her witnesses; or, in the case of the Virgin and her pilgrims, what Bruno
Latour (in Factures, Fractures) has called the anti-fetishistic critique, and
Stengers describes in la Vierge et le Neutrino as a “stupidity of our own”
(that is, the stupidity of modernity: “la bêtise qui est notre problem”). This
stupidity of our own, she writes, is that which leads us to privilege, as if
it were obvious, the logic of “either…or”: “by asking whether what ex-
ists, either exists ‘in itself,’ independent of us, or could be judged as and
reduced to a mere product of human subjectivity“ (La Vierge 196). The
second stance, which I would name the “pragmatic stance,” involves
learning to follow practices, this time not to judge or condemn them,
but to learn from them. And to learn from them, not in the manner of a
“more respectful” recipe or a new routine, but rather as an adventure (see
Savransky). Or, more precisely still, that of an enticement— an invitation
to create and imagine.
The first of these tracks, that of the denunciation of method, could put
us in danger of reproducing what Martin Savransky has called the “eth-
ics of estrangement,” which characterizes the epistemology of the social
sciences: “a method of inquiry that consists in becoming estranged from
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

66 Vinciane Despret
the realm of appearances made available by direct experience in order to

gain access to a realm of facts and causes.” This ethics of estrangement
is the translation, into the field of the social sciences, of the bifurcation of
nature that A.N. Whitehead denounced: “the bifurcation of nature involves
a mode of understanding whereby experience only discloses that which
is apparent, whereas the ‘relevant’ factors in the process of knowing the
world must always lie, and be sought, somewhere else” (Savransky 15).
This particular form of epistemic and ethical bifurcation, which is well
established in the social sciences, led investigators to define their work
as the search for the hidden “causes” underlying the conduct of actors
(often, in the areas I have just referred to, under the notion of beliefs). But
as Savransky points out, there is a difficulty: the denunciation of these
practices is itself likely to be subject to the same charge. This is because
the critique follows the same ethics of estrangement that it claims to be
resisting: “the critical social scientist or theorist is prompted to estrange
herself from the universalist claims to objectivity apparently made by
scientists in order to gain access to the parochial values truly informing
those claims” (65).
Stengers does not ignore this problem. Nor does she ignore the
difficulty (and the paradox) in the diplomatic perspective of the ecol-
ogy of practices to which she subscribes, to address oneself properly to
practitioners who themselves do not always adhere to the obligation to
properly address themselves to those they are interviewing. The problem,
she notes, is that these practitioners often try to extend the experimental
model. Yet, “[w]hat is the goal pursued by scientists who wish to make
the scientific and the respect for method coincide? Wouldn’t this goal be
to deserve the title of science?” (La Vierge et le Neutrino 74). This means
that achieving this goal comes at the price of the exclusion, in the name
of science, of the distinction between experimental fact—defined as that
which enables new learning—and “methodical” fact. There is therefore
no obligation that would cause one to hesitate— instead, the hesitation
here becomes their very enemy.
And yet, it is to these obligations that Stengers asks practitioners
to respond. Both the warning against stupidity-as-our-problem and the
routine of judgment (or, in its particular form, the reduction to the level of
“this is nothing more than...”), as well as the reference to the formidable
threat of dismemberment, testifies for Stengers—reader of Deleuze—to
the art of care for agencements1: the art of protecting those with whom
one tries to learn something; the art of hesitating with those with whom,
and thanks to whom, we are trying to learn. Thus, Stengers decides not
to choose between the two tracks that I mentioned: that of a rupturing
criticism and that of accompanying the practices that do not submit
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

themselves to the watchwords of methods, and of learning with and from

them. In order to do justice to its relevance, she accompanies the work of
Elisabeth Claverie as she also accompanies each of the protagonists of this
story in the difficulties and stupidity they faced.2 In other words, Stengers
decided not to choose between the track of the critics and the pragmatic
one because in following the pragmatic one she could ignore neither the
stupidity these practitioners were confronted with nor the fact that this
stupidity imperils their practice.
If this is the case with Claverie and pilgrims, it was even more so with
Léon Chertok’s work on hypnosis (see Chertock, Stengers, and Gille) and
Bertrand Méheust’s work on mediums (see Méheust). Isabelle Stengers
learned with each of them what could create an extremely unhealthy
milieu, and she learned of the deleterious effects that the sciences that par-
ticipate in such contexts could incur. Thus, with Méheust, she discovered
how the world of mediums was engulfed by the growing disillusionment
and indifference from those who could have otherwise been interested.
And the disappearance of such fascinating and enigmatic mediumistic
talents is inseparable from the way the scientific community assimilated
them and forced them to redefine their talents in accordance with the
“method.” Stengers has chosen to follow those among the practitioners
of the humanities who take risks, and has explored with them or through
them, practices that cultivate what Savransky calls “a different care of
knowledge”: practices that generate knowledge as part of the adventure
of engaging in the practice.
These are vulnerable practices, confronted with criticism, irony,
denial or rejection. The critique that Stengers levels against those sciences
that made the method their watchword is therefore not addressed from
a view-from-nowhere, in the name of a truth that imposes itself by right,
and neither does it reveal nor purport “to testify.” Rather, it supports and
lets one be instructed about the ways in which something can be learned.
And, in so doing, it resists. It diagnoses both forms of this “stupidity of
our own” and their effects, notably, those that produce an unhealthy
environment, and those that make us be stupid. Like any diagnosis, it
can certainly have effects: to encourage resistance, to open the capacity
to imagine and create, and above all, to enable the capacity to hesitate. It
is this gesture of hesitation that I would like to prolong, to which I aim
to give a sequel.
Hesitating
“When a scientist, male or female—although we could
equally say a photographer or a talented cook—thinks,
when he or she hesitates, when he or she doubts or hopes,
that which makes them think, hesitate or hope is what
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68 Vinciane Despret
makes them a scientist, photographer or talented cook;

these are the questions that convey the meaning and the
significance of their practice.” (Stengers and Despret 81).
The interest in hesitation as a sign that identifies that a thought is

occurring, finds a particularly fascinating echo in the testimony Claverie
provides about pilgrims. Because these people hesitate continuously. The
echo is especially interesting when one takes into account, in reading
her Les guerres de la Vierge, that this is a distinct feature of the adventure
Claverie offered to sociology: to hesitate with those it accompanies. For
Claverie, this translates into an obligation to which she should submit
her investigation: to follow how “the actors establish what they consider
as real and as unreal” (435). So, when photos and other images taken by
pilgrims at the place of the apparitions are circulating at their last meal
together, it is unusual, she says, for someone to allude to a trick, an illu-
sion, or an over-interpretation in discussing the possibility of the appari-
tion. These objections to the possibility of the miracle are however always
virtual: the pilgrims could easily talk about them, but never do so. This
objection is always present, she writes,
precisely because the effort relates to avoiding mentioning its possibility,
and to consenting to the collective recognition of the objectified miracle.
[This objection] could be mentioned, yet it is not, and the pressure not
to do so is perceptible to all. It produces [...] an emergence of possible
worlds, and accompanying this is a state of very particular receptivity,
the so-called ‘state of grace’. [...] The movement of the object between
two states (not real / true) and two worlds (proof / faith), associated
with different, parallel experiences, produces pure jubilation. (348)
The practice of hesitation may also take the form of a more openly con-
tradictory alternation of positions. People coming to Medjugorje pass
constantly, she notes, from “a critical position (it is not there, it is not
possible) to a position of belief (it is there, it is possible) and then back”
(139). The remarkable feature of these situations is thus the deliberate
effort by people to maintain this alternation, this ambivalence, or this
collectively created practice of equivocation between conformity and the
possibility—evident precisely through its active suspension—of criticism.
What Claverie learns to do throughout her work is to speak “from” the
experience of the pilgrims, who themselves speak “from” the Virgin who
inspires their pilgrimage and their prayers. This does not just respect the
way the actors define the right way to talk about them— of learning to
speak “before them,” as William James puts it. It goes further, and submits
the investigative work to the obligation to follow, or to “be instructed”
by, the hesitations.
There is nothing “natural” about these hesitations by the sociologists
or the pilgrims. Rather, they are constructed; they are cultivated using
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

many semantic or syntactic devices: silence, equivocations, ambiguities.

In sum, using narrative artifices. From this observation of the artifices
that some practitioners have used to activate the practice of hesitation, I
would like to return to the particular fields that I have explored in recent
years: the fields that some sociologists or anthropologists studied with
this same courtesy and sense of risk. In psychology, this is now called the
field of “continuing bonds”: the relationship between those left behind
and their dead. In doing so, I will focus on extending Stengers’s gesture:
paying attention to the difficulties, the traps, pitfalls and obstacles faced
by these practitioners, but also being attentive to the way they themselves
will learn to negotiate these traps.
These practitioners that study “continuing bonds” learned how
their objects could become victims of traps in which this “stupidity of
our own” could come to dismember the objects’ agencements, whereas
the notion of “belief” could claim to explain everything, and the question
“does this really exist?” could interrupt all hesitations. They learned by
struggling with the difficulties they were facing: difficulties, conventions,
or traps, that could prevent them from properly protecting their objects/
subjects, from making them interested and interesting. Thus, Claverie was
somehow “aligned” herself with the practices of the pilgrims: her own
practice was instructed by their practices; she thought and spoke “from”
the pilgrims’ own experience of thinking and living the metamorphosis
engendered “from” the Virgin. She did not think “about them” or of them
as a subject, and she did this in the same way that pilgrims think and
speak “from” the Virgin by using tricks to suspend or make hesitant any
proposal to distinguish between what is real and what is not.
Do Not Ask Certain Questions

“The most well-known Bergsonian example [of false
problems] is the problem of why something exists in-
stead of nothing, which implies that one empties the
stage of all that exists, and then one considers it as first
being empty, forgetting that one had initially to carry
out the ‘evacuation’” (La Vierge et le Neutrino 126).
In a recent paper written about Gaia (“Penser à partir du ravage

écologique”), Stengers notes that whenever a being raises the problem
of the conditions of its existence, it inhabits the domain of ecological ap-
proaches. She insists that the issue of the “condition of existence,” while
testifying to the singularity of the ecological approach, is in fact not a
typically scientific question. When a scientist raises the issue of existence,
it is usually to ask: “Can we demonstrate that this phenomenon (atoms,
neutrons, black holes) “really” exists?” This is not an ecological question.
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70 Vinciane Despret
The ecological issue is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing
establishment of relations and connections. The issue ecologists raise is
therefore not, “Does this being really exist?” or “Is it a representation?”
but rather: “How does a being manage to maintain its existence?” and
“What does this achievement require?” (154).
This particular “grasping” of the problem raised by what we could
call “problematic modes of existence” echoes the work of the anthropolo-
gist Angel Yankov with the ghosts in the village of Dolène, in Bulgaria.
Yankov undertook a rather atypical research whose originality can be seen
in the formulation of its question. His investigation appears very similar
to the one Plutarch conducted centuries ago when he searched for the very
concrete and practical reasons why, in some shrines, oracles have ceased to
function: Yankov asked why, nowadays in Bulgaria, the ghosts known as
“Drakous” have disappeared. To question this, he interviewed some very
old villagers from Dolène (see Les vampire Drakous de Dolène). His choice
of informant witnesses is deliberate: Yankov approached those who still
understand the prophylaxis that the presence of Drakous imposes. Among
other reasons for the disappearance of the Drakous, these people blamed
the appearance of electricity—but let us note that they also blamed the
misconduct of people, a misconduct that had, they say, the same effect of
discouraging the Drakous.
The theme of electricity as the cause for the disappearance of ghosts
or other creatures with a problematic existence is a well-known issue.
Thus, to cite one example, in the early 1940s, the theologian Rudolph
Bultmann announced triumphantly: “Now that the forces and laws of
nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, neither
good nor bad (...) It is impossible to use electric lights and radio networks
(...) and to believe simultaneously in spirits” (53). Anthropologists and
sociologists took with them, with the enthusiasm of an evangelist in con-
quered territory, their own versions, in which electricity appears in a non-
metaphorical way as the substitute of light for darkness. But this theme,
strangely, is not one that was selected by the interviewees. Although the
disappearance coincided with the installation of electric pylons, it is,
however, not referred to in terms of enlightenment, nor as an invention
that has brought on the march of progress, but as “currents” or “waves”
that disturbed Drakous.
The way Angel Yankov chose his questions and those he would
consult for answers is remarkable. It reflects what I would call an ecologi-
cal artifice: carefully constructing a question “ecologizes” the problem.
Others, favoring conventional approaches and routines, pose a question
that would involve as its ultimate meaning: “What makes you believe in
something that we know does not exist?” thus situating the problem in a
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

dual opposition between “really exists/does not exist.” However, Yankov

deliberately reversed the procedure and instead of approaching it in
terms of beliefs, used the special tools of an ecology or ethology of being:
what are the needs that have to be honored, and to which the existence
of Drakous thus testifies, and what in the environment in which they
had hitherto managed to survive caused their extinction? What are their
powers and vulnerabilities? If the anthropologist had asked the routine
question, “Why are there any Drakous?” people would probably have
been unable to answer, or if they had been able, their answers could have
led to typical analyses of the ethics of estrangement: a belief system (or
cultural or symbolic projections) would be responsible for these strange
apparitions. With the question of the disappearance, the anomaly changes
sides. It is not the presence of Drakous that is an oddity (and which thus
provokes the passions of interpretative science), but it is their absence
that should be explained. The question of existence is undermined; it
becomes undetermined: it is no longer posed in terms of “either it really
exists, or it is a product of your imagination.” By asking the people this
way, Yankov poses an ecological question, and asking those who are the
experts in these questions, the anthropologist learns that Drakous, like
humans and animals, maintain ecological relationships with their envi-
ronment— and even perhaps share with humans and animals a certain
vulnerability to technological inventions.
Making Detours
I will now relate this ecological research to another, carried out in
an entirely different context by the English folklorist Gillian Bennett.
Again, Bennett’s research broke with convention and routines and has
made use of artifices that made this rupture possible. And Bennett did
this deliberately, with the stated aim of generating interest— the interest
of those she consults, the interest of those with whom she can share, both
of which, Bennett finds, are inextricably linked.
Bennett describes her research by saying that she collects stories that
draw “a map of the interactions of the heavenly and mundane worlds”
(275). She does this in the banality of everyday life. She interviewed
women and men about how they think about their interactions with their
dead, and she did so in a very particular context of inquiry. After the initial
failures of uninteresting research in a traditional framework, eventually,
Bennett hit on the idea of asking her father, who, after fourteen years at
the same podiatrist’s practice, was nearing retirement, to let her talk with
his patients during surgery hours:
In a podiatrist’s clinic, conversation is considered both polite and
necessary, and is often of a fairly intimate nature. My father was used
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72 Vinciane Despret
to receiving confidences, discussing politics, religion, and philosophy,

giving practical advice, and hearing domestic and marital troubles. He
himself had a great interest in parapsychology and I knew he had often
discussed the reality of psychic powers and supernatural experiences
with his patients. (348)
Bennett thus installed herself for five mornings a week in her father’s
clinic in suburban Manchester, and was presented with patients with
an interest in their experiences of relationship with the deceased. And
people told her their stories. Stories that Bennett discovered to be rich,
artfully and carefully constructed. More importantly, these narratives are
evidence of true works of thought, even in the construction of the stories:
they are works—and this is a point I will come back to—of multiple forms
of hesitation.
Returning to the focus of our inquiry, the question of the environ-
ment is crucial. The context Bennett chooses is one in which courtesy is
important, and this is not always the case in inquiries that people often
find impolite or intrusive. It is also an environment in which the scientist
does not take the role of investigator and judge, but rather, I would say,
of an “interested amateur” (see Latour, Chronique d’un amateur de sciences).
The concrete details of the environment of the podiatrist’s clinic are also
important, and I cannot help thinking that it is actually a beautiful idea
to map the interactions between celestial and terrestrial worlds in a place
in which one cares for that which connects us to the ground and that al-
lows us to walk: our feet. Each of these details demonstrates that Bennett
honors her practice. She searches for and creates connections, and with
painstaking care, offers them every chance to be interesting.
The fact that Bennett conducted this investigation in this place was
already a deviation from the usual methods of inquiry. But this difference
itself produced another, one that I think is important: Bennett says that,
in the beginning, she agreed with her father that he should not join in
the conversation. “However, he soon got into the habit of joining in with
queries, comments, or stories of his own if conversation flagged—as any
good interviewer would—and soon we developed an easy, pleasant, and
productive partnership” (349). Thanks to the presence of her father, the
roles of “investigator / interviewee” were blurred, as evidenced by the
fact that during the meetings, the interviewees themselves often became
interviewers and asked for Bennett’s opinions. In addition, the presence
of an active third person, a third “expert,” the investigation became a real
research collecting stories, a research about, and from, stories: research
about the best way to tell them; about how to understand them, know-
ing that understanding here means linking stories, and connecting them
with others. The inquiry, therefore, really becomes a narrative workshop,
where each story stimulates others, reactivates them, responds to them,
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

discusses them, prompts hesitation, making all the protagonists appren-

tices in narratives that make one think.
The fact that many of the interviewees told her how much they had
enjoyed their visit is a testament to the success of this approach. Equally,
the quantity and quality of stories she was able to gather bears witness to
this success, which contradicts the dogma that historians and psycholo-
gists have repeated in recent years: that for the most part, the dead have
little status or power in modern society. Like the confidence in the effects
of the modern invention of electricity we have discussed, this credo seems
more like an attempt at exorcism than an empirical observation. Such
statements, Bennett writes,
betray a concept of history in which civilization is a process of move-
ment (as they see it, ‘upward’ movement) from a supernatural world
view to a materialist one (or, as they would term it, from superstition
to rationality). There is no real evidence, however, for evolutionary
assumptions as applied to society and culture, and there is certainly
no evidence that rationalism and materialism are the evolutionary
end-point of civilization. (24)
Obviously, the investigations were easily able to support this credo of the
victory of rationalization over superstitions because, Bennett says, if you
interrogate people by asking them if they believe in ghosts, the manner
of formulating the question itself introduces the rational responses that
are expected. Bennett also said that at the beginning of her investigations,
during her work on her thesis, she simply followed the practice of sociolo-
gist Geoffrey Gorer and blankly asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” And
everybody promptly replied, “No.” “Luckily, I was soon put on the right
track by a woman who said she did not believe in ghosts, but also said
she knew that a house could be ‘haunted’ and in fact she had ounce lived
in a house that ‘wasn’t right.’ On the same day, an old lady said she did
not believe in ghosts, but ‘funnily enough, whenever someone’s going to
be ill in my family, my mother comes to me’” (36).
This is the reason that leads Bennett to prefer, instead of asking
questions, to ask for stories and, not without humor, to remark that “[i]t
would seem that the worldview of quite a substantial proportion of the
population is probably decidedly less materialistic than scientists and
historians imagine.” To give these stories a chance to emerge—to produce
hesitation and thinking—Bennett had to learn how to present herself.
She learned that the terms “supernatural” and “belief in ghosts” are false
starts: they arouse, rightly, distrust; they are too full of judgments or they
offend those subject to such questions (353). By contrast, introducing the
subject by speaking of the “mysterious side of life” (350) literally opens
the conversation and, I would assume, designates the interviewer as a
‘curious amateur.’ Of course, Bennett still managed to ask questions, but
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74 Vinciane Despret
she learned a different way to formulate them. This was especially the case
in a second research, in collaboration with her daughter, the psycholo-
gist Kate Bennett, with a group of widows from Leicester with whom
she tried to learn what it might be to experience widowhood. Again, the
project was defined by an interest “in learning from the widows what was
significant to them. My approach was: ‘I am the novice and they are the
experienced’” (360). And when addressing the issue of the presence of
the dead, she said, “[i]t was always couched in vague and neutral terms,
such as ‘Do you ever feel he’s still around?’, ‘Do you ever feel his pres-
ence?’ and so on” (363).
Here, again, stories emerge from a large number of people. Bennett
also noted that, throughout her research, she got a different response
whether she asked people about astrology or whether she asked about the
presence of the dead. In the first case, that of astrology, the responses are
poor, told without details, somewhat hastily, and often lead to stereotypi-
cal generalizations. In the second, they are rich, connecting to many other
things, events, other stories. The quality of the stories demonstrates, said
Bennett, the fact that these experiences are important, and that therefore
they are what we need to focus on. Searching for what matters, but more
remarkable still, searching for how that which is important to people
makes them think: how—to put it in terms close to those of Stengers
(Civiliser) —people confer on that which is important, that which touches
them, the power to make them think.
Protecting
“To fabulate, to tell otherwise, is not to break with
‘reality,’ but to seek to make visible, to make one think
and feel aspects of this reality, which usually are
taken as accessories” (La Vierge et le Neutrino 169).
By listening, Bennett learns that these stories all have a particularity:

they are deliberately constructed so as to not give any privileges to one
version against the other. The two possibilities, that of thinking that the
dead have ‘really’ returned and that of considering that this is a dream,
or an illusion, coexist, and their coexistence is negotiated with remarkable
care. For example, this is how one of them, Vanessa, tells her story, in a
way that takes a form that oscillates between different versions:
Well, I have seen [she insists] my mother sometimes, occasionally. But
whether that’s occasions that she’s been on my mind or something...
[G. B.: How did you come to see your mother? Did she?]
It was in the night. Whether I was dreaming about her I do not know.
I saw her quite plainly. It only happened to me once. But whether she
was on my mind I do not know, and I cannot remember whether I was
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

perhaps a bit low (...) And it just came over me whether it was a warn-
ing that I was going to meet her or something. I never said anything
to anybody about it. (64)
One hears, in this narrative, all the open hesitations, a true proposition
of narrative plurality: is it in the head? Was it something else? Was I de-
pressed? Did she want to tell me something? How can we dream and see
clearly? Similarly, we find in the story of Sylvia the same indeterminacy:
My sister died some years ago. She was desperately ill, and we’d been
to see her in hospital the Sunday, and on the Sunday evening, the
specialist phoned and said the crisis was over and she would be on
the mend, and I could HEAR her TALKING to me ALL evening, and
suddenly, at five to six she just said, ‘I’m sorry, Sylvia, I can’t hold on
any longer’ and the phone went, and it was the hospital. She’d died
at five to six. But it was as if she was actually in the room with me and
said, ‘I’m sorry, Sylvia, I can’t hold on any more.’ (110-111)
These stories are constructed so that they do not allow the ambiguity to
be resolved. Either they oscillate between multiple versions, or they use
the narrative artifice of the “as if”; or they use homonyms, metaphors,
and other devices (including the syntactic construction of the middle
voice that Bruno Latour has taught us to recognize with the verb “make-
do”— to incite, to arouse, and so on [see Factures/Fractures]). These devices
and these narrative techniques protect the account. However, putting it
like this is risky. Because one could always interpret this as the fact that
people are building their statements this way to seek protection against
the charge of irrationality, that they are making some sort of concession,
the famous “I know but still”— techniques, in other words, that would
allow the narrator to recant: “I said it was like....” It is true that some
constructions could be similar to the “I know, but anyway” (and the “it
was like” could also play this role). This is the case when one reads what
Lettie said, speaking of the death of her mother, who died a year to the
day after her father:
But just before she died, I felt whatever that there was, ever there was,
father had come to meet her. Because she just sat up and she gave that
smile. Of course, I think they do sit up before they die. But and she
sort of held her arms out, and it was just that special smile she always
kept for him.
[G. B.: You think she actually saw him?]
I do! Oh, yes! (Lettie). (106)
The idea that people construct their speech in such a sophisticated mode
in order to protect themselves against the charge of irrationality has been
hypothesized by, among others, David Hufford (see Beings Without Bodies).
While we can agree with Hufford about the fact that people have many
good reasons not to trust the scientist who interviews them, this explana-
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76 Vinciane Despret
tion still does not do justice to how people themselves think about their
experience. The affirmation of Lettie (“Oh, yes!”), in response to Bennett’s
question, shows that it is not to protect herself, but rather to keep alive the
indeterminacy by switching between opposing points. The art of actively
using contradictions: the art of hesitation. This is the art of creating enig-
mas, which is what these stories are— or rather, what they become in the
wisdom of their construction. And what is a riddle? “A riddle is made to
be thought; to give us strength to overcome trials.”3
Bennett, and this is her merit, did not purport to explain why people
maintain their stories so carefully in this register of hesitation. Instead,
she seeks to understand how they do so, and what are the cultural tools,
including those of the language, that they use so artfully to do it. Such is
the art of protection, both on the part of the people who tell stories, and
on the part of the practitioner who listens. Thinking, as in Hufford’s case,
even with a happy reflexivity, that people protect their speech because
they know that the investigator does not share the same beliefs as them,
amounts to saying that there is a ‘real,’ authentic discourse hiding behind
the ambiguity, and that the investigator could still unveil this either by
being very clever when asking the questions, or even in a work of inter-
pretation that would purify the speech of all its precautions. An ethics
of estrangement again, and one that reinforces the “either...or ” which
requires people to choose whether they “really believe” or whether they
agree to recognize that these are only subjective productions. It seems
that our stupidity is not shared by those who cultivate these experiences
with great care because they are important, those who nurture them and
recount them in the register of hesitations that make them think.
Going Along With

Heonik Kwon is an anthropologist working in Vietnam. He studies
the relationship between the living and the dead, including how souls
of soldiers remain important in the lives of the living. One day he was
in conversation with a member of his host community, and they spoke
of a young ghost, Lotus Flower, who had long lived with a family in this
community. Ong Chiem, the interlocutor, tells him that at a certain time
the young ghost left the family to travel, and she sent letters through
the medium of other spirits to Bien, the daughter of the family, telling of
various adventures, including the fact that she was arrested for theft and
then released. At the end of the interview, Kwon and the old man discuss
the question of whether the act of theft, for a ghost, was right or wrong.
Kwon then asks his interlocutor:
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

‘Forgive me, Uncle, do you really believe Lotus Flower is real?’

‘Nephew, if she is not, why are you asking me about her?’ (128)
The fact that Kwon tells us this story is not innocent. It is not about con-
fessing a moment of “naïveté” but about the way the risk of stupidity
makes us think and hesitate. Ong Chiem’s response is neither “yes, of
course she is,” nor the questioning of the possible existence of ghosts.
It is a pragmatic response, which is given here and now, and implicitly
reexamines what will be considered “real.” It is a response that invites
one to think about the consequences: the consequences of the matter, the
consequences of his response, the consequences of the presence of Lotus
Flower. The question Kwon asks is an awkward question anthropologists
rarely ask their interlocutors (wisely keeping for themselves and their
readers a response known in advance). However, Kwon did not keep it
in his field notes but takes the risk of sharing it. This is a risky narrative
artifice that tells that something matters. Re-transcribing the end of the
discussion is a gesture, a gesture reflecting that something happened to
the anthropologist: he is obliged by those about whom he conducts its
investigation.
Kwon knows too well the stupidity that is our own, and he knows
the terrible dismantling power of irony— “this is nothing more than….”
He knows it all the more since he had been tempted to fall in the critic’s
trap— does Lotus Flower really exist? And his answer to these experiences
is neither reflexivity, nor the critique of critics. Kwon, in accepting that
there is no answer to the question he is tempted to ask, acknowledges what
the situation requests, and what makes its fruitful character: it belongs to
the realm of the enigmas. He let the enigma makes its own work, as do all
enigmas: to prevent us from stopping the flow of thinking, of hesitating.
Kwon’s gesture is actually, I would suggest, what Stengers calls
“humor,” as the ability to recognize oneself as a product of that very
history one is trying to follow. This very humor seems to me the unique
characteristic of the practitioners we accompanied through this paper,
all of them letting themselves be instructed by agreeing to be the con-
nection point, or the crossing of two different orders of reality. One lets
oneself be led to create, with those whom one addresses. Because that is
what these practitioners do: create thought, create stories, intensify what
matters. In other words, those who honor their practice produce truly
experimental sciences, sciences of enigmas, sciences of ordeals. And like
all enigmas, they make feel, create and hesitate. This is not to explain, but
to understand, in the sense of “to go along with.” To let oneself, again, be
instructed, which is one of many ways of being obliged.
University of Liège
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78 Vinciane Despret
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Martin Savransky for giving me the opportunity
(and encouraging me) to acknowledge what I owe to Isabelle Stengers. I am also thank-
ful to him as well as an anonymous referee for their generous rereading of the paper,
for their invaluable comments, suggestions, and questions. The English version of this
paper benefited from the help of John Pearson.
Notes
1. Deleuze’s translator, Brian Massumi, chose to translate “agencements” as “assemblages.”
I would rather opt for keeping the French word: “agencement.” First, this term renders
perceptible the intimate link between “agencement” and “agency,” and secondly, it insists
upon an active process of attunement that is never fixed once and for all. An “agencement”
is a rapport of forces that makes some beings capable of making other beings capable,
in a plurivocal manner.
2. Claverie speaks only rarely of the difficulties of the “unhealthy environment” with which
her choice of objects of study are confronted, with the exception of the reticence I men-
tioned, and rather prefers to speak of difficulties and suspicions faced by the pilgrims.
3. This is the proposition made by one of my friends, the philosopher Marcos Matteos, in
an e-mail (January, 11, 2012).
Works Cited
Bennett, Gillian. Alas, Poor Ghosts: Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse. Utah State Uni-
versity Press, 1999.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Nouveau Testament et Mythologie. 1941. Translated by Jean-Marc Tétaz,
edited by Labor and Fides, Logos, 2013.
Chertok, Léon, Isabelle Stengers, and Didier Gille. Mémoires d’un hérétique. La Découverte,
1990.
Claverie, Elisabeth. Les guerres de la Vierge, une anthropologie des apparitions. Gallimard, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans-
lated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Despret, Vinciane. Au bonheur des morts. Récits de ceux qui restent. La Découverte, 2015.
Hufford, David. “Beings Without Bodies: An experience-Centered Theory of the Beliefs
in Spirits.” Out of the Ordinary, edited by Barbara Walker, Utah University State Press,
1995, pp. 11-45.
Kwon, Heonik. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Latour, Bruno. Chronique d’un amateur de sciences. Presses des mines, 2006.
---. “Factures/fractures: de la notion de réseau à celle d’attachement.” Ce qui nous relie, edited
by A. Micoud and M. Peroni, Editions de l’Aube, 2000.
Méheust, Bertrand. Un voyant prodigieux: Alexis Didier. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond,
2003.
Plutarque. “Œuvres Morales: Sur les sanctuaires dont les oracles ont cessé.” L’antiquité
grecque et latine du moyen âge, Remacle.org, 2003, www.remacle.org/bloodwolf/histo-
riens/Plutarque/oracles.htm.
Savransky, Martin. The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry. Palgrave MacMil-
lan, 2016.
Souriau, Etienne. L’instauration philosophique. Alcan, 1939.
Stengers, Isabelle. Civiliser la modernité? Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun. Presses
du Réel, 2017.
---. L’invention des sciences moderne. La découverte, 1993.
---. “Penser à partir du ravage écologique.” De l’univers clos au monde infini, edited by Emilie
Hache, Dehors Editions, 2014, pp. 147-190.
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---. La Vierge et le Neutrino. Paris: La Découverte, 2006.

Stengers, Isabelle, and Vinciane Despret. Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters
of Virginia Woolf. Translated by April Knutson, Univocal, 2014.
Yankov, Angel. “Les vampire Drakous de Dolène.” Malmorts, revenants et vampires en Europe,
edited by Jocelyne Bonnet, L’Harmattan, 2005, pp. 313-322.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

A Question of Faith?
Stengers and Whitehead on Causation
and Conformation
Michael Halewood
Introduction
Generalized solutions with apparently limitless applications are
anathema to Isabelle Stengers, who demands that we recognize the
specificity of the remit of the abstractions that we are constructing. One
hallmark of her work is the distrust of any response that appears to be
able to mollify a wide range of positions, problems or questions. Stengers
is also wary of denouncing the positions held by opponents by claiming
to trap them in a logical vice or pinning them in an absurdity. This is why,
in this article, I do not set out to solve either the problem of cause or the
problem of faith. Instead, I want to eavesdrop on the ongoing conversa-
tion between Stengers and Whitehead and to provide some comments on
how their remarks could help us reorient how we approach some of the
unexpected interrelations between faith and cause in science, philosophy,
and social science. Stengers’s stance does not imply that we should not
be ambitious in the questions or problems that we address; though there
is a need to pay attention to that which has been isolated as being of con-
cern. In the discussions that follow, I will ask some apparently general
questions, but these are motivated by a central problem, namely, the very
status of cause and causation.
When we take a strict theoretical approach to science, or adopt a
purely philosophical position, we might find it easy to say that there is
no such thing as cause in the abstract. There is no hidden ultimate cause
that sits behind the world, governing, regulating and explaining every
single moment, item and process of existence. Yet, we also believe that
smoking causes cancer; we tell children that matches can cause fires; we
inform our insurance company that it was the other car that caused the
accident. However, such mentions of causation lack the strength of a full
concept of cause. It is not that smoking inevitably and always leads to
cancer; or that all matches are determined to produce fires; or that the
other driver was compelled to crash into us. The effect is not present in
the cause: the same cause does not always produce the same effect. This
leaves us in the tricky position where we may dismiss cause on theoretical

80 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
A Question of Faith? 81

grounds, but we find it harder to do without some notion of causation

in our everyday lives.
It is this problematic status of causation, as something that we may
deny in some aspects of our lives and yet require in others, that I want to
address in this article. For reasons which I hope will become clear, I will
also link this to the notion of faith in science and in social science. I will
use Stengers’s ideas to argue that we need some clarity with regard to
the distinctions between cause as an abstract concept, individual causes,
and the very notion of causation. Too often these are mixed, the boundar-
ies blurred, and this can lead to unnecessary confusion and a premature
rejection of “cause” as a genuine factor in the world and our experience
of it. This lack of clarity certainly constitutes a problem for many a soci-
ologist who have all been carefully schooled to talk only of correlations
and to avoid, like the plague, any mention of direct causes; so that they
unthinkingly cite the modern sociologist’s mantra –“Correlation is not
causation”– a mantra which only makes sense if the very concept of cause
is seen as problematic, as something to be shunned.
In the analyses which follow, there are three elements that I want
to draw out, in place of a solution. These are, first, the particular, and
slightly peculiar, stance of modern science with regard to cause. Second,
the idea that the problem of the problem of cause is one that we have inher-
ited in a very specific way. A recognition of this legacy could allow for us
to rethink the scope of this problem. Third, a reconsideration of the role
of faith in both science and social science. Perhaps social science has lost
faith in cause, when there was no need. What social science does require
is a reappraisal of its faith in itself and in the world.
Whitehead and Stengers on “the birth of modern science”

Both Stengers and Whitehead maintain that if we are to understand
contemporary science we must understand its origin. The aim is not
to indulge in a simple history of ideas but to “dramatize” the problem
(Stengers, Speculative; see also Cosmopolitics 182-88) to see what was at
stake in the arguments that surrounded its genesis. For Whitehead, the
story of modern science starts as a revolt against the overly rationalist
conditions of medieval thought: “Science was through and through an
anti-intellectualist movement. It was the return to the contemplation of
brute fact; and it was based on a recoil from the inflexible rationality of
medieval thought” (Science 10). This inflexible rationality, in turn, has its
own specific characteristics. Importantly, they are to do with metaphysics:
“By this rationalism I mean the belief that the avenue to truth was pre-
dominantly through a metaphysical analysis of the nature of things, which
would thereby determine how things acted and functioned” (Whitehead,
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

82 Michael Halewood

Science 49). It is against this metaphysical inflexibility that Whitehead sets

the rise of modern science.
Whitehead does not, however, dismiss all that the medieval era has to
offer. To do so would be to reinforce the mistaken idea that modern science
represents the dawn of a completely new era, heralding a break from a
past mired in religion and superstition, which can be seen, retrospectively,
as both the origin and the apotheosis of the Enlightenment’s claims to be
an ahistorical, secular and universal mode of thought. In Whitehead’s
version of the story, the key idea that modern science inherited from the
medieval era was “the inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence
can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exem-
plifying general principles” (Science 15). What medievalism and modern
science share is the need for an attention to detail. Where they differ is
with regard to the status of “general principles.” The medieval mind will
try to fit details into an already existing logical or metaphysical scheme of
“general principles” such as cause, effect, existence, individuation. How-
ever, these details are not self-sufficient and so are not of interest for their
own sake; they are located within a wider theological scheme. As such,
these general principles are governed and guaranteed by a specific kind
of God, one who inherits the rationality espoused by medieval readings
of Greek philosophy. According to this outlook, an investigation of the
details of the world will ultimately reveal the “rationality of God, con-
ceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of
a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search
into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality”
(Whitehead, Science 15).
Here lies the difference with modern science, and the motivation for
the latter’s revolt. The medieval metaphysical survey of nature did not
find anything more, it only vindicated what was already known. Modern
science announces a new approach. It may well, like the medievals, use
reason to search for general principles, but it does not want to rely upon
a rational explanation that comes prior to the details of its investigations.
The principles of science will be subordinate to the more basic and com-
pelling idea – that an investigation of the details of the world “for their
own sake” will yield more (Whitehead, Science 16). As will be seen later,
modern science’s commitment to the importance of details for their own
sake, and the resulting “more,” constitutes a crucial element of the “faith”
of science. For the moment, the main consequence of this outlook is that
the metaphysical concept of cause as a guiding principle that is discover-
able before or without recourse to the things of the world becomes alien
to science, as it runs counter to, or hinders, the investigation of the details
of what actually happens. By committing itself to a study of details that
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


may provide more, science may indeed outline localized regularities where
localized causes seem to operate.1 But these localized causes cannot be
ascertained prior to an investigation of the details. This is why “Galileo
keeps harping on how things happen, whereas his adversaries had a com-
plete theory as to why things happen” (Whitehead, Science 10). Whitehead
does not say much more about the detail of Galileo’s harping, whereas
Stengers has provided innovative analyses of his status in the development
of modern science (for example, Invention and Cosmopolitics). The follow-
ing discussion is offered not as a simple exemplification of Whitehead’s
analysis but as a development of it, one that takes us in new directions.
The most important, in terms of this article, are those of faith and cause.
Stengers would not want to dismiss the notion of cause out of hand,
but she would ask us to be specific in terms of the problem that we are
addressing. It may well turn out that it is possible to invoke efficient
causation but this must involve a recognition of the specific situations in
which it can be conceived, the demands that it places upon us, and the
limits of its application. One clear example of this can be found in her
reading of Galileo and his “discovery” of the laws of motion that govern
falling bodies. Here, Stengers makes the key point that Galileo’s argument
does not “come out of nowhere” (Invention 77-9). As with Whitehead’s
account, there is a need to understand that the specific milieu in which this
problem is situated, namely, the kind of skepticism which was to be found
in the late Middle Ages and which Galileo felt compelled to overcome.
To understand Galileo, we need to understand this form of skepticism.
Stengers characterizes it as follows: “the Middle Ages created a new figure
of skepticism […] condemning as erroneous, from the viewpoint of faith,
any use of reason that would limit God’s absolute freedom” (Invention
79). Again, as with Whitehead, there is a need to situate the reaction of
“science” to the theological.
Moreover, “faith” is not some abstract notion; it is particular. The
medieval mind’s conception of faith was mired in a sense of God’s free-
dom beyond the limits of human thought, intellect or reason. Within
Christian theology of the time, it was maintained that anything that an
individual human might imagine, speculate or state could in no way limit
the power or abilities of an omnipotent God. Galileo, or any other, may
announce the idea that all bodies fall in a regular way, for example, but no
individual human can claim that this surpasses God’s power. God could
have willed it, or still could will it, that some bodies remain still or rise,
or appear and disappear: “What appears absurd to us is perhaps not so
for God” (Stengers, Invention 77).
Galileo recognized this difficulty and this is why, in 1638, he set out
his discussion of falling bodies in the form of a discourse between three
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84 Michael Halewood

speakers. One of these speakers, Sagredo, is given the role of countering

Galileo with the theological skepticism of the day. In this vein, Sagredo
states: “I [Sagredo] may nevertheless without offense be allowed to doubt
whether such a definition […] established in the abstract manner, corre-
sponds to and describes that kind of accelerated motion which we meet
in nature in the case of freely falling bodies” (qtd. in Stengers, Invention
76). Here, Sagredo is simply reiterating a prevalent position of the day,
that the abstract definition offered by one human cannot claim, on its
own, to surpass the power or will of God for things to be otherwise. This
represents, in a slightly different manner, the challenge that Whitehead
envisaged for modern science to counter definitions “established in the
abstract manner.”
Galileo needs to show that his principles are not merely abstract and
therefore arbitrary. To accomplish this, he constructed an apparatus that
involved an inclined plane on a flat table. This enabled him to elaborate
the relations between the motion of a ball down an inclined plane, its
horizontal motion across the tabletop, its free-fall from the table to the
ground. The key point is that Galileo “constructed” an apparatus which,
once produced, enables “the motion to testify” on its own. There is no
longer any need for Galileo. He can withdraw and let the motion speak for
itself, and make its own argument. In an important sense, this procedure
marks the birth of modern science and modern physics, but this birth also
relies upon what Stengers calls the “power of fiction” (Stengers, Invention
79-80). It is only by recognizing the “power of the fiction” of Sagredo’s
objection, the power that such skepticism had at that time, that Galileo is
able to circumvent it. Only through a direct recognition of this fiction can
a different kind of fabrication and fiction, a specifically “scientific fiction”
(Galileo’s apparatus) be constructed, in order to contest the abstract fiction
of skepticism or relativism. But what does all this have to do with cause
and effect? Is this to suggest that cause and effects are merely “fictions”?
Galileo’s apparatus is designed to focus on how bodies fall, how
quickly balls roll down inclined planes, how they move across a table,
how they fall to the floor. He does not ask “why” they do so, as this would
return him to the metaphysical and theological problems that bewitch
Sagredo and his ilk, especially in terms of a prior, abstract cause explain-
ing “why” all bodies fell in predictable ways: “The scientific ‘how’ thus
has no other a priori limits than those of the questions that, rightly or
wrongly, are recognized as scientific. The ‘why,’ in this staging, has no
autonomous formulation […] [I]t must first learn from the ‘how’ what it
is authorized to ask” (Stengers, Invention 82). Questions about “why” lead
us to the metaphysical-theological concept of cause which is to be sharply
differentiated from the more limited scientific interest in what happens
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


and how it happens. This is not to suggest that questions of cause and
effect have simply disappeared, but they have been transformed within
Galileo’s apparatus:
The instantaneous velocity of a falling body is defined as the “effect” of
its past, judged from a determinate point of view: tell me what height
you have fallen from. And it is also the “cause” of a future, judged from
an equally determinate point of view: I’ll tell you how high you will be
able to climb. (Stengers, Cosmopolitics 104)
In the case of a pendulum, the height it will achieve after its first swing
is “caused” by its initial height. So, its second height is an “effect” of its
past. Cause and effect, in this instance, are reciprocal. As a result, “not
only does cause provide the true measure of effect, but the measurement
is reversible” (Stengers, Cosmopolitics 106). The use of scare quotes by
Stengers should alert us to the fact that this is not the discovery of the
“true” or metaphysical definition of “cause” and “effect”— it is a very
specific case. What is remarkable is the success of Galileo’s apparatus in
accounting for such causes and effects. His procedure has become the
model of “good” science, in that it requires no more than itself to express
its point. Even though it is a construction, a fabrication, a fiction even, it
is not mere speculation, the imagining or idle theorizing of an individual
mind.
The reading of Stengers’s account provided so far does not consti-
tute a general theory of cause or causation. It is very specifically related
to the velocity of falling bodies, to what we now call mechanics (or dy-
namics) — a subset of physics. Within this field, there is a reciprocity of
cause and effect but there is no notion of compulsion or determinism in
this relation. That particular body did not have to fall at that particular
moment, and certainly not from any specific height. But once it does, its
effect is guaranteed.
A Question of Faith
As has been seen, according to Whitehead, what science inherited
from medievalism was “the inexpungable belief that every detailed oc-
currence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite
manner” (Science 15). In the medieval era, this belief was guaranteed by
the rationality of a specific kind of God who supervised these occurrences
and their regularities. Modern sciences laid emphasis on the regularities,
the ability to correlate occurrences with antecedents in a rational manner.
For this to be possible, there must be genuine regularity in the world. It
is this regularity that would become called “the order of nature.” Nature
is not capricious; it displays the same characteristics, under the same
conditions, repeatedly, endlessly: “This remorseless inevitableness is
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86 Michael Halewood

what pervades scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of
fate” (Whitehead, Science 13). The next step is to move from fate to faith.
Whitehead takes his notion of fate from certain aspects of Greek
thought which the West inherited. This “vision of fate, remorseless and
indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision
possessed by science. Fate in Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature
in modern thought” (Science 10); remembering that “the essence of tragedy
is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working
of things” (Science 13). Whitehead is careful not to overstate his case. He
does not assert that individual scientists directly inherited this concept of
fate (Science 14) and he is clear that he is “not talking of the explicit beliefs
of a few individuals” (Science 16). Instead, he is outlining a certain “tone
of thought and not a mere creed of words” (Science 16).
This tone of thought did not come directly from a knowledge of
Greek literature but passed through the specific theology of the medieval
epoch. It is here that the theological element took on a new shape. The
faith of modern science is that the world will remain the same, that there
is an order to nature. This specific concept of an order of nature relies on
the Greek conception of fate in this sense: modern science has a faith in
fate: “My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, gener-
ated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an
unconscious derivative from medieval theology” (Whitehead, Science 16).
This faith in fate “is the motive power of research: that there is a secret, a
secret which can be unveiled” (Whitehead, Science 15).
Whitehead’s account is a general one; it aims to sweep us up in its
argument, to lead us to reconsider our understanding of science, to ap-
proach the problem in a new way. He asks us to consider the role of fate
and faith in its origin and in its legacy, without giving up on its capacity
to tell us more about the world. Stengers would not disagree with such
an approach but she would, perhaps, add that we need to pay attention
to the details, to what actually happened. Her reading of Galileo presents
not only the details of Galileo’s construction, but a description of the con-
struction of his faith— a faith that the world will do what is required of it;
it will provide the consistent falling and acceleration of bodies. Without
this faith, Galileo would not have been drawn to construct, redesign, re-
fine his apparatus. One upshot of his faith is a re-placement of cause and
effect. These are now distributed; they act as counter-balances. Moreover,
cause and effect become located in a specifically constructed arena in the
world and are divorced from questions of “why?” Galileo’s concern is
not why the bodies fall at regular rates; it is Leibniz and Newton who
will take up this question.
What Galileo and Stengers give us is an utter refusal of the meta-
physical concept of cause that predominated in the “inflexible rationality”
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


of medievalism. Science and scientists may well be interested in causes,

but not in “cause” as an abstract, metaphysical concept, which can be
elaborated prior to a detailed investigation of the world. This may seem
like a small point but it is an important one that is often overlooked by
both science and philosophy.
As a result, cause has a somewhat confused status. Stengers cites
Russell to clarify one element of this argument: “All philosophers, of
every school imagine that causality is one of the fundamental axioms or
postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as
gravitational astronomy, the word “cause” never occurs” (Russell qtd. in
Stengers, Cosmopolitics 122). This is because, following Galileo, science
became interested in mapping the details of interrelations, such as those
between gas molecules in a pressurized container, between planets orbit-
ing a distant sun. Such investigations preclude (or should preclude) any
conception of a cause beyond the instances that can be found in these
interrelations. Likewise, social science has moved beyond direct causes
and has placed its faith in correlations between variables which, appar-
ently like those of science, can be treated as independents (age, gender,
ethnicity, class, etc.). I will return to a discussion of social science in terms
of cause, correlation and faith toward the end of this piece.
Nevertheless, the problems of philosophy are different than those
of science or social science. Just because science has, for good reason,
rejected metaphysical conceptions of cause this does not mean that a
metaphysical conception of cause is not required within philosophy. We
live in a world in which we experience causes (matches causing fires, cars
causing crashes). What are we to make of these? Are they only illusions,
human fabrications designed to make sense of the otherwise remorseless,
meaningless, unfolding regularities in which scientists have placed their
faith? To respond to such questions, the following section will address
Whitehead’s philosophical rendering of cause. The discussion should not
be taken simply as the solution to the problem of cause. My aim, rather,
is to recast the problem. A crucial element of Whitehead’s account is that
much of the muddle over the concept of cause comes from a misrecogni-
tion of its very status. Although he makes his point in an understated,
almost quiet, manner, Whitehead is asking us to radically rethink how
we have inherited a one-sided, incomplete concept of cause.
From Causation to Conformation: On Causal Efficacy

Some of our experiences of the world involve experiences of things
happening, and that some of these happenings produce change. White-
head maintains that philosophers have all too readily subsumed all such
experiences under a specific and pre-formed concept of cause. It is this
specific concept that Whitehead wants to challenge, not the concept of
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88 Michael Halewood

causation itself. For Whitehead, causation is not mysterious: “The notion

of causation arose because mankind [sic] lives amid experiences in the
mode of causal efficacy” (Process 175). “Causal efficacy” signals one aspect
of Whitehead’s reformed approach to cause. The use of the term “efficacy”
shows that he wants to retain what the concept of “efficient causation”
was hinting at, without being constrained by it.
Whitehead balances this notion of “causal efficacy” by introducing
another term, that of “presentational immediacy” which, as its name sug-
gests, is concerned with what is immediately present. Other philosophers
might refer to this in terms of the sense-data of our immediate experience:
the colors, sounds, lights, smells, roughness which make the world, and
our experience of it, so vivid: “We open our eyes and our other sense‑or-
gans; we then survey the contemporary world decorated with sights, and
sounds” (Whitehead, Process 174). The nub of Whitehead’s argument is
that, when thinking about cause, philosophers have focused on presenta-
tional immediacy and have ignored the importance of causal efficacy. In
his understated way, Whitehead is making the bold claim that philosophy
has missed the point with regard to causation by considering only half
the problem: “Philosophers have disdained the information about the
universe obtained through their visceral feelings, and have concentrated
on visual feelings” (Process 121). As Meyer puts it, “philosophy has only
considered the ‘visual’ at the expense of the ‘visceral’” (“Introduction”
19). The problem arises when the visual, when presentational immediacy,
is taken as the only mode by which we gain information about the world
as it reduces the problem of cause to the realm of sense-perception.
This has both exaggerated and mispresented the issue. According
to Whitehead, philosophers and scientists who have followed Hume
and engaged in debates over whether we “see” causes in the world have
missed the point. We will never solve the problem of cause by trying to
impute or infer causes which supposedly lie behind what we can see or
observe, be it in everyday life, beyond the regularities we observe, or
lying behind the data that we have generated. Whitehead’s response to
Hume’s claim that causes are not disclosed in sense-perception, that they
are “unknown,” borders on the jocular:
If Hume had stopped to investigate the alternative causes for the oc-
currence of visual sensations—for example, eye‑sight, or excessive
consumption of alcohol—he might have hesitated in his profession of
ignorance. If the causes be indeed unknown, it is absurd to bother about
eye‑sight and intoxication. The reason for the existence of oculists and
prohibitionists is that various causes are known. (Process 171)
Causes are known. We live in a world in which cars crash into each other,
and we attribute blame (and financial reparation) by establishing who
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


or what caused the accident. Human activity is causing global warming.

Drinking alcohol makes you drunk (it causes changes in the nervous
system, etc.). It is the abstract, prior, metaphysical concept of cause that
is problematic. This is why science rejected it. However, modern science
has found it difficult to “replace” this concept of cause, as to do so with
another a priori concept would be to return to metaphysics, to the “inflex-
ible rationality” whose rejection was a cornerstone of the birth of modern
science (as has been seen in Whitehead’s general account and Stengers’s
specific analysis of Galileo). Whitehead invokes “causal efficacy” as one
way of developing a philosophical account of cause that is not tainted
by the inflexible rationality of medieval metaphysics. But, what exactly
is “causal efficacy”?
Causal efficacy provides information about location, and the rela-
tion of a body to the rest of the world. Our body is a specific locale that
endures and relates to other items in the world. Causal efficacy involves
the sense of movement from the past to the present. This is why it is tied
up with causation. If causation really were situated only within the realm
of presentational immediacy, then we would only see superficial changes
of color, shape, sound or taste. This information, and our experience of the
world, would be very limited. We would know little about where these
came from and would lack any sense of location, or of continuity between
the past, present and future. We would be stuck in an ever-shifting pres-
ent with no clue as to why things were changing. It is only because there
is the heavy, slower, enduring realm of transmission which constitutes
causal efficacy that we can ever experience or talk of one event following,
producing or causing another. For example, we may see a bright patch of
red moving quickly and getting louder. We only know to jump out of the
way of the approaching red car because our body, residing in the realm
of causal efficacy, provides a context for this data, and the ability to get
out of the way.
The concept of causal efficacy enables Whitehead to state that “We
are in the world and the world is in us” (Modes 227) and to talk “of our
general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious
actual world” (Process 178). Importantly, “Causal efficacy is the hand of
the settled past in the formation of the present” (Whitehead, Symbolism
50). This mention of the past and its relation to the present is important.
For, when Whitehead is talking of causation, he is also talking of how it
is possible to move from one state of affairs to another. If there were a
disjunction or separation between these, there would be no possibility
of a spatial or temporal passage from the past to the present. Thus, for
Whitehead, causation must always be considered in terms of what he
terms “conformation.”
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90 Michael Halewood

When something occurs it arises from something that precedes it.

Whitehead takes this a step further and states that it must also recognize
that which comes before. This is one role of “causal efficacy”: “Thus the
causal efficacy from the past is at least one factor giving our presentational
immediacy in the present. The how of our present experience must conform
to the what of the past in us” (Symbolism 58). One fact, event or occasion
does not simply follow from or produce another. “Facts” are not neutral,
even though they constitute what has happened, as they always occur
in a certain way, they always contain a “how”– they happen quickly or
slowly, for example. Such a “how” is not purely abstract, it is integral to
the happening and to what can follow. This “how” does not constitute a
metaphysical “why.” The relation of the “how” of the past to the present
is what Whitehead calls “conformation.” The present must form itself with
what has happened. Hence to con-form, to “form with”: “The past consists
of the community of settled acts which, through their objectification in
the present act, establish the conditions to which that act must conform”
(Whitehead, Symbolism 36).2
As Stengers makes clear, in both her close reading of Whitehead
(Thinking) and throughout her work, we need to pay more attention, to
be more specific with what problem we are dealing with: “Whatever our
many ways to access what we call reality, they are all passionate as they
all imply learning how to pay due attention, and accessing metaphysical
reality is no different” (“Speculative” 210).
Metaphysics requires a metaphysical response. This applies to the
concept of cause, and especially to that of final cause; to what draws us
on, to that which is invoked by the very word “faith.” I have not, how-
ever, offered a purely metaphysical account or response. In one sense,
it would have been “easy” for me to have presented Whitehead’s more
metaphysical account of final causation in terms of the “subjective aim”
which accompanies, indeed helps define, the specific coming to be of any
actual entity (see, for example, Process 19). Such an argument might have
been technically “correct,” in that it would, hopefully, be an accurate ren-
dition of what Whitehead “says.” It would not, however, have satisfied
the requirements of the argument that I am trying to set out here, namely,
that of the question of faith. Metaphysical questions are not sufficient in
themselves to account for the role and status of cause in science, social
science or the everyday world. A metaphysical concept, on its own, does
not necessarily draw us on.
Conclusion – Some thoughts on the Faith of the Social Sciences

Stengers does not often engage with social science and its concerns.
It is not a problem that interests her as much as other problems do. Her
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


occasional comments are, however, insightful. For example, in her com-

parison of physics, social science (in this case, economics) and the problem
of cause, Stengers comments on the apparent “disappearance” of cause
and effect, as seemingly enabled by Lagrangian equations:
This gave birth to the idea, so often advanced, that physics, the model
of science, promulgates laws that ignore causality. The theoreticians of
the social sciences, and economics in particular, who must constantly
remind us that the correlations they establish cannot be compared to
“causes” often use the example of rational mechanics to deny that, in
doing so, they are giving up anything at all. (Cosmopolitics 121-2)
The concerns of science and philosophy have been addressed through-

out this piece. For the remainder, I will focus on social science. This is a
notoriously difficult field to define, to analyze or speak for as a whole.
However, I will use the phrase “social science” in the manner suggested
by Savransky where he describes a commonality in terms of “a historically
situated attitude” (Relevance 15). This bears some similarities to Foucault’s
argument (Order) that the social sciences are constituted by those specific
techniques, ways of seeing, thinking and reading, that developed in the
18th and 19th centuries and which formed “man” as both the subject and
object of possible knowledges.
As discussed previously, science has a specific relationship to the
concept of cause, which arises from its direct rejection of elements of a
specific medieval theological context from which it was born. In practice,
many scientists may refer to causes or causal mechanisms in an ad hoc
way, but this arises from their faith in regularity, not their advocacy of an
abstract, prior metaphysical concept of cause. The same cannot be said of
social science, which has its own tortuous history. Although some social
scientists, such as those interested in “regression analysis” would want
to invoke some notion of causation,3 they would recoil from the charge
of advocating direct causation with its associated taint of determinism
and teleology.
The notion of direct causation, where one cause can be isolated and
used both to explain and predict the present and future of society, has
been abandoned (except by some diehards). It would be to resort to calling
upon crude mechanisms beyond the wit of humans, which nevertheless
explain the behavior of such humans. This is, in fact, the heart of Latour’s
critique of much sociology: that it indulges in a double-think, relying upon
direct causal objects (such as class and gender) to shore up its explana-
tions while both denying that it believes in cause and disallowing others
from so doing (see, for example, Latour, Matters). My point is not the same
as that of Latour. The question that interests me is whether social scien-
tists, in rejecting cause, have nevertheless, and like their natural science
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92 Michael Halewood

counterparts, retained a concept of faith. Science has faith in the order of

nature. This faith was partly constituted by its rejection of a metaphysical
concept of cause. Social science also rejected a metaphysical conception
of cause, but in what did it place its faith?
It might appear that social science has faith that things will change.
As a creature of modernity, the specific attitude of social science is premised
not on the remorseless unfolding of events, as is the case with the order
of nature. Its attitude is predicated on the changing character of human
groups, societies, institutions. Often this changeability is rendered in
terms of the “historical” and this is, perhaps, one reason for the endur-
ance of the triumvirate of Marx, Durkheim and Weber (in terms of, for
example, “historical materialism,” the “historical development of ever
more complex forms of the division of labor,” or the “historical spread of
instrumental rationality”). It is, however, important not to reduce what
might be termed “changeability” to some simplistic notion of the historical,
historiography or historicism. It is more a matter of the very possibility of
change, an attitude that can be found at the heart of feminism and queer
theory, and more. Is it possible to argue that changeability constitutes,
or should constitute the faith of social science? Stengers would probable
warn us that such a simple solution is both unlikely and dangerous. To put
it bluntly, just because science has a faith in the order of nature does not
mean that social science should seek to outline a faith which mirrors, yet
differs from, the faith of science. This would be to repeat the labyrinthine
arguments about the extent to which the natural and social sciences share
an epistemology (or not), or have discrete ontological bases.
As Stengers makes clear throughout her work, the misrecognition
of the origin of an abstraction is not only liable to vitiate its originality, it
leads to an abuse of its power (Cosmopolitics 126-8). In the case of physics,
this means that it claims more than it should for its field of inquiry. The
ways that social science has traditionally treated the theories and models
which it has developed to account for the changes supposedly witnessed in
modernity have tended to become divorced from their original locations,
and been redeployed across the “social field” without sufficient attention
being paid to their specificity.4 In the case of social science, this is liable
to render its abstractions if not irrelevant, then less able to convince. For
example, the following abstractions are famous, to social scientists are
least: alienation, anomie, hegemony, strain theory, standpoint epistemol-
ogy. All of these were hard won abstractions, developed in specific milieux
to respond to different problems. Marx carved out alienation from the
remnants of Hegel to outline the condition of workers in early capital-
ism; Durkheim sought to account for the ways in which solidarity could
both be produced and fail in newly developed industrialized cities and
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


societies; Merton described the “alternative” means chosen by “deviants”

to fulfill the cultural goals of the novel phenomenon of a consumer soci-
ety; feminists expanded traditional notions of epistemology by insisting
on a recognition of the societal location of knowledge and the knower.
However, it is the concept of hegemony that is the most telling for the
argument that I am trying to make.
Gramsci conjured the concept of hegemony to portray the manner
in which capitalism made concession to localized cultural and historical
elements in order to consolidate and extend its reach throughout the
cultural, societal, economic, political, religious aspects of society. Yet, this
concept was itself inherently “local,” a response by Gramsci to the specific-
ity of the economic, cultural and political field of early 20th-century Italy.
There is a danger that the terms “hegemony” and “hegemonic” become
dislocated from their immediate locale, without due care and attention,
and are applied, at will, to any situation without the requisite work be-
ing done. This flies in the face (and faith!) of the very radicality of the
concept that Gramsci worked so hard to construct. Social science has put
its faith in its abstractions without recognizing or admitting the details of
their construction. It has been assumed that they are equally applicable,
wherever “the social” can be found.
Stengers and Whitehead are clear that metaphysics has an impor-
tant role, but the occasions on when its arguments are relevant must be
recognized. Metaphysics involves adopting a specific standpoint,5 one
that forgets the “peculiar problems of modern science” so that we “put
ourselves at the standpoint of a dispassionate consideration of the nature
of things, antecedently to any special investigation into their details”
(Whitehead, Science 195). Taken in this sense, social science’s misplaced
faith in its unchanging concepts which, paradoxically, are supposed to be
able to render the very changeability of the world, have led it to become
metaphysical. It has prioritized its concepts over the details of the world.
The position I have just sketched out is somewhat pessimistic – social
science has again failed; it has misplaced its faith, and has misrecognized
the status of its abstractions. Pessimism may well be a hallmark of much
social science, with its tireless critique, but it is certainly not an accurate
description of the work and approach of Stengers and Whitehead, whose
work is laced with generosity and humor. With this in mind, I will finish
with, if not an optimistic stance, then, at least, an openness to the future.
If social science is concerned with the changeable, it should be able to
indicate something about such changes (without presupposing that it will
uncover either the reason or the cause of such changes). It is here, perhaps,
that Whitehead can help alter our approach. His challenge to traditional
philosophical conceptions of causation argues that these have focused
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94 Michael Halewood

on presentational immediacy alone, and have missed out on “causal ef-

ficacy.” This led to the question of how to approach causal efficacy, and
Whitehead’s response involves what he calls “conformation.” Could it
be that social science has over-emphasized changeability at the expense
of a recognition not of conformity but of “conformation”?
It might be possible to retain and cultivate the sense that social sci-
ence believes that things will change, that both we and the world will be
different. Could we somehow use this tentative belief to cultivate faith?
Not “a” faith in the singular, as if there were one identifiable “thing” which
could draw us all forward. Rather, just the idea of “faith” as something
that is possible. As Stengers puts it: “faith is what is required against the
‘all is vanity’ opium of scepticism, but it should be underlined that it does
not offer any of the assurances that would silence the sceptic” (Stengers,
William 16). Rather than reject a metaphysical concept of cause (rightly)
simply to replace it with a horror of any direct cause, accompanied by a
tepid faith in the power of correlation and the quasi-relativism induced
by seemingly ever-present skeptics, could social scientists not take some-
thing from Whitehead’s ideas of causation in terms of causal efficacy and
conformation?
By paying attention to modes of conformation, social science could
admit an interrelation of how something changes with what actually
changes. Causation will be involved, but not in the limited and limiting
terms of “efficient causation.” By paying more attention, social science
might come to realize that sometimes causes matter and sometimes they
do not. Moreover, a recognition that the future imbues the present, in
that the present articulates what is possible and is itself articulated by the
possibilities that it sketches out, would enable a realization that we are all
being drawn forward without falling back into an overarching teleology,
where we already know where we are going. By ignoring “conformation,”
social science has developed a peculiarly unhistorical history; by recogniz-
ing the interrelations of conformation and causation, it might be possible
to develop a sense of faith in the future, balanced by a recognition of the
role of causation in the present.
University of Essex
Notes
1. Although, as Stengers points out, science has not always been faithful to its discovery of
more. For, when science wants “to convince us that electromagnetic radiation constitutes
the sole type of entity which belongs to nature…it has found “more” in nature, but it
proposes to reduce it to ‘less’” (Thinking 52).
2. It should be noted that conformation and causal efficacy are only not concerned with
the passage from the past to the present. They also involve the future: “The future is
immanent in the present by reason of the fact that the present bears in its own essence
the relationships which it will have to the future. It thereby includes in its own essence
the necessities to which it must conform” (Whitehead, Adventures 250).
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


3. See, for example, Morgan and Winship, Counterfactuals; Best and Wolf, Handbook; Rubin
and Imbens, Inference and even a paper titled “Do UN Interventions Cause Peace? Using
Matching to Improve Causal Inference” (Gilligan and Sergenti, “Interventions”).
4. ��
I am grateful to Martin Savransky for pointing this out to me and his other helpful com-
ments on the first draft of this article.
5. ��
Melanie Sehgal has discussed this more fully in her chapter titled “A Situated Metaphys-
ics.”
Works Cited
Best, Henning, and Christof Wolf, editors. The SAGE handbook of regression analysis and causal
inference. SAGE, 2015.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Tavistock, 1970.
Gilligan, Michael and Ernest Sergenti. “Do UN Interventions Cause Peace? Using Matching
to Improve Causal Inference.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science, vol. 3, 2008, pp. 89–122.
Halewood, Michael. Rethinking the Social through Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Whitehead.
Anthem Press, 2014.
Latour, Bruno. “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of con-
cern.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 225–248.
Meyer, Steven. “Introduction.” Configurations, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1-33.
Morgan, Stephen, and Christopher Winship. Counterfactuals and Causal Inference. Cambridge
Rubin, Donald, and Guido Imbens, editors. Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical
Sciences: an Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Savransky, Martin. The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry. Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2016.
Sehgal, Melanie. “A Situated Metaphysics: Things, History, and Pragmatic Speculation in
A.N. Whitehead.” The Allure of Things, edited by R. Faber and A. Goffey, Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014, pp. 162-87.
Stengers, I. Cosmopolitics, Vol. I. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
---. “Speculative Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization.” The Allure of Things, edited by
R. Faber and A. Goffey, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 188-217.
---. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts. Harvard University Press.
2011.
--- “William James: An ethics of thought?” Radical Philosophy, vol. 157, 2009, pp. 9-19.
Whitehead, A. N. Adventures of Ideas. Cambridge, University Press, 1933.
---. Modes of Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1938.
---. Science and the Modern World. 1925. Cambridge University Press, 1932.
---. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. The Macmillan Company, 1927.
---. Process and Reality: An Essay In Cosmology. Gifford Lectures of 1927-8. Corrected edition,
edited by D. Griffin and D. Sherburne, The Free Press, 1978.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

On the Risk of Gaia for an Ecology of

Practices
A.J. Nocek
The work of Isabelle Stengers engages a baffling number of topics

and includes collaborators from across many disciplines and practices.
For this reason, there is perhaps no set of terms or concepts that easily
encapsulates her work. Nevertheless, in recent years concepts such as
“cosmopolitics” and the “ecology of practices” have gained a special cur-
rency in the context of humanities and social science research (e.g., Blok
and Farias; Yaneva and Zaera-Polo; Gabrys). While cosmopolitics is not
a new term, and Stengers is certainly not the only one to employ it today
(e.g., Latour and Beck), her use of it, and in conjunction with the ecology
of practices, seems to have sparked the critical and speculative imagina-
tions of many. This should be good news given that these concepts are not
exclusive to “professional philosophy.” Stengers very specifically refers
to them as “tools” to be put to use in practices (Stengers, “Introductory
Notes” 185).
One of the attendant risks of calling these concepts “tools” is that
they may be treated as all-terrain theories capable of being applied to any
and every situation. While I will not criticize current applications of the
concepts here, I will demonstrate how the ecology of practices in particu-
lar is an instance of thinking par le milieu in Gilles Deleuze’s sense of the
term, and how achieving it is a hard-fought struggle that is unique to each
situation. In what follows, I suggest that “staging a scene” for thinking par
le milieu involves tremendous risk, not only financial, social, and physi-
cal risk as activists clearly testify to, but also a risk for thinking: that is,
we must resist the temptation to apply our well-worn habits of modern
thought to a situation (as Alfred North Whitehead was fond of saying).
It is the latter form of risk that will form the crux of my argument,
which is that Stengers’s frequent appeal to non-modern practices (such
as animism, magic, and witchcraft) attempts to challenge our modern
dispositions of thought and activate modes of thinking par le milieu. To
demonstrate this, I draw explicitly on her use of Gaia worship in the
English translation of her work, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming

96 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
On the Risk of Gaia 97
Barbarism, and argue that it functions as a reclaiming practice (inherited

from Reclaiming Witchcraft) that stages a scene for thinking according to
what our epoch makes matter: namely, the threat the Earth poses to hu-
man and non-human life. Along the way, I draw on Deleuze’s notion of
the problematic in order to contend that Gaia is a proposition that makes
all modes of response an opportunity for learning and paying attention
to problems. Ultimately, thinking par le milieu today involves resisting the
protection that our modern references and citational practices afford us,
and being lured into feeling the efficacy of what we cannot accommodate
within these modern fortresses.
I. Risking The Middle

In her 2005 essay, “Introductory Notes on An Ecology of Practices,”
Stengers insists that the ecology of practices is not a general metric that
can be applied widely; instead it is a “tool for thinking” in the middle
of divergent and incommensurable worlds. The metaphor of “tool” is
helpful only if we recognize that although a tool can be “passed from
hand to hand” each instance of taking the tool in hand is a “particular
one” (185). Thus, to treat the ecology of practices as a tool means that it
acquires its meaning in and through its use (185). We do not know what
this tool means until it is put to work and gives the “situation the power
to make us think” (185). Stengers maintains that the situation’s power is
a “virtual one,” in the full sense that Deleuze intends this concept, and
so the tool is what actualizes this power: “The relevant tools, tools for
thinking, are then the ones that address and actualise this power of the
situation, that make it a matter of particular concern, in other words, make
us think and not recognize” (185). What this means is that the ecology of
practices is a particular achievement of bringing divergent series together
(actualization) without knowing in advance how those series will come
to matter to each other.
In Deleuze’s own work, the “dark precursor” is the figure that en-
sures communication between heterogeneous series without there being
a pre-existent resemblance or identity between them (Deleuze, Difference
119). The dark precursor is there, indeed “there is an identity belonging to
the precursor,” it’s just that “[t]his there is …remains perfectly indetermi-
nate” (119). This is why Deleuze insists that the precursor is not seen in
advance—it is not pre-given or visible in a situation—which is why it is
dark; rather, it is only visible retrospectively. Deleuze uses meteorologi-
cal phenomena to lend some clarity to the temporality of the precursor:
“Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are pre-
ceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their
path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated” (119).
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98 A.J. Nocek

How a tool comes to function as a catalyst for thought within a

practice depends entirely upon the situation in which it finds itself em-
bedded—it cannot be seen in advance. Following Deleuze, we might say
that we are in the dark about how an ecology of practices will take hold,
that is to say, how the powers of thought will be actualized in a situation.
And while each situation or practice will surely have its own constraints,
holds, and attachments, what they will come to mean to an ecology of
practices cannot be predetermined; we can only ever identify these mean-
ings retrospectively. It is in this way that the ecology of practices might
be thought of as a dark tool for activating thought. “A tool can be passed
from hand to hand,” Stengers insists, “but each time the gesture of tak-
ing it in hand will be a particular one—the tool is not a general means,
defined as adequate for a set of particular aims, potentially including the
one of the person who is taking it, and it does not entail a judgment on
the situation as justifying its use” (“Introductory Notes” 185).
In an attempt to clarify her position on the ecology of practices,
Stengers insists that it “may be an instance of what Gilles Deleuze called
‘thinking par le milieu” (“Introductory Notes” 187). She points out that
“milieu” is intended in the full sense of the French term, which means
“both in the middle and the surroundings or habitat” (187). Where “in
the middle” references the fact that thinking has no ultimate ground,
transcendental starting point, or “ideal horizon,” according to the “sur-
roundings or habitat,” by contrast, means that there is no fixed perspec-
tive that would be capable of disengaging thought from what a milieu
has come to mean to its surroundings. There is no going “beyond the
particular towards something we would be able to recognize and grasp
in spite of particular appearances” (187). But this also does not mean that
all the power lies in the environment, that is, the meaning of the milieu
cannot be “derived from the environment” (187). This would simply be
to locate the transcendental principle elsewhere, in a set of environmental
coordinates that could be known, instead of affirming how thinking par
le milieu means that we are “obliged” or “forced” to think according to
the specific way a situation comes to matter within its surroundings. It is
for this reason that the ecology of practices is a specific kind of achieve-
ment: it is an event of thinking par le milieu, in the very specific sense that
Stengers intends this notion.
It is from this perspective that we can appreciate the importance
Stengers attributes to the “GMO event” in Europe. In In Catastrophic Times
she speaks at length about the failure of our “guardians”—or those who are
responsible for us—to find a way to use patents to appropriate agriculture
for late-stage capitalism. The commotion over GMOs was supposed to
dissipate and the rhetoric of “progress” and “innovation” was supposed
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

to take hold in the general public (57). That the coordinated dreams of
Entrepreneurs, the State, and Science did not settle in, at least in the way
they were supposed to, is a consequence of a genuine event of learning and
thinking “through the middle.” “The arguments that our guardians were
counting on,” Stengers writes, “provoked not only responses but above
all new connections, producing a genuine dynamic of learning between
groups that had hitherto been distinct” (37). For her, and for those who
so bravely and publicly resisted the intrusion of the GMO, a genuine ap-
prenticeship took place: the situation’s ways of mattering and obliging us
to think and act found a temporary hold instead of being disqualified as
“irrational” or “un-scientific” (40). Communities became educated, ques-
tions were asked, and complaints were voiced about GMOs, and in such
a manner that they were able to temporarily resist the presumed truth of
our epoch: to make everything an opportunity for profit.
Crucial to this event, and what makes it an important instance of
thinking par le milieu, was the ability to guard against the temptation to
disqualify concerned voices from outside of the realm of expertise. To stage
a scene in which divergent voices come to matter, and without subsuming
them under a common measure, such as the “uneducated public,” cuts to
the heart of what it means to think “through middle.” Stengers throws the
importance of non-expert thought into sharp relief in her essay, “Specula-
tive Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization.” Among other things, she
writes about what speculation means in the context of Whitehead’s early
and mature philosophy, and more specifically about the significance of
“common sense” to it. Stengers is not speaking of course about Deleuze’s
notion of “common sense,” the sense that is presumed to be true because
it is held in common (Deleuze, Difference 132-135); rather, she is talking
about the necessity of “taking an interest in the way others make their
world matter, including animal others, or tales about different ways of life,
for experimenting with what may be possible” (Stengers, “Speculative”
200). The idea here is that paying due attention to what matters in a situ-
ation, as Whitehead commits himself to, means accepting that there are
radically different ways of having a situation matter, and these differences
cannot be explained away, or accounted for in advance. In other words,
the common sense of a situation indexes the divergent ways a situation
comes to make sense to others.
In the case of GMOs in Europe, this meant refusing to give profes-
sionals the authority to make decisions on behalf of others, and being
moved to think according to the multiple ways that genetically modi-
fied foods are and might one day be significant. This is not to disqualify
professional knowledge in advance, to say that it is an illegitimate mode
coming to know something, but it is to suspend its authority in order to
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100 A.J. Nocek

allow for divergent series to communicate. As Whitehead put it in The

Concept of Nature, expert and non-expert awareness “must be put in the
same boat, to sink or swim together” (148).
In saying all of this, however, it would be all too easy to forget that
GMO event in Europe also entailed tremendous suffering and hardship.
Thinking does not come easy today. Elsewhere, I have discussed the sig-
nificance of the Barbara van Dyck affair for Stengers (Stengers, “‘Another
Science’”; Nocek). Very briefly, van Dyck was a scientist at The Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven, who was sacked for publicly endorsing actions taken
against genetically modified potatoes in Belgium. More appalling than
this was the fact that the Leuven authorities deemed her to be an “enemy
of science”; indeed, they even called her actions “violent.” While I won’t
recount any more specifics about her case here, suffice it to say that what
the Van Dyck affair and numerous other cases illustrate is that the kind
of apprenticeship and learning experience that Stengers calls for is not
only difficult to stage, but may also involve deep emotional and physi-
cal suffering; and all of this occurs without the benefit of a guarantee. In
thinking according to an ecology of practices, we are stripped of so many
of those securities we tend to shore up for ourselves before we get involved
in something. This is why thinking par le milieu is always a risk. But it is a
risk whose conditions for occurrence are, unfortunately, becoming more
and more difficult to imagine.
In this regard, it is significant that Stengers draws our attention to
how the guardians surely have learned from their failures and that the
“progress” argument, which was supposed to “charm” the public, will
be soon replaced, if it hasn’t already, by the kinds of “infernal alterna-
tives” that she and Philippe Pignarre detail in their book Capitalist Sorcery.
These alternatives are the commonly heard, though carefully constructed,
fabrications that bear the logical form of “if… then”: “if you refuse this
bad-sounding thing, then the consequences will be far, far worse.” These
fabrications are “aimed at sapping or capturing the capacities for thinking
and resisting of those who were apt to do so” (Stengers, In Catastrophic
Times 55). What’s so worrisome, then, is that staging the conditions for
thought and action is becoming more and more difficult.
In another context, Stengers asks: “How [do we] design the political
scene in a way that actively protects it from the fiction that ‘humans of
good will decide in the name of the general interest’?” (“The Cosmopoliti-
cal” 1002). She suggests that designing such a scene really concerns the “art
of staging.” It is a matter of staging or designing a scene for learning and
thinking together that shields it from those habits of thought that would
presume to already know what a situation demands and from whom. But
it is precisely this staging that has become all the more difficult, and so
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

what obliges us in the era of proliferating infernal alternatives is to fabri-

cate such a scene for ourselves—to build the conditions for struggle and
risk in the face of those fabrications that undermine our ability to do so.
To stage such a scene involves drawing on techniques that force us to
confront our modern disposition to judge a situation, to disqualify certain
practices or claims, call them superstitious or naïve, and privilege others.
In other words, we must suspend those habits of thought that presume
to know how a situation will come to be efficacious. It may come as no
surprise that language can be a particularly powerful ally in this struggle
against modern judgment. This is why Stengers’s use of compromised
words such as “animism,” “magic,” and “witchcraft” is so important for
us to pay attention to.
I’m confident that Stengers caused some of her readers to stutter
and stammer for a moment when they first encountered her praise of
Starhawk and her use of witchcraft and sorcery in the context of contem-
porary struggles over technoscientific innovation and global capitalism.
Stengers’s invocation of non-modern practices is nothing new (her work
with Leon Chertok and Tobie Nathan testifies to this), but there is nev-
ertheless something poignant about her appeal to these practices when
many humanities scholars today feel compelled to make strong statements
about returning to scientific rigor and materiality in the wake of cultural
and linguistic constructivism (see especially, van der Tuin and Dolphijn).
Given this, we may even be tempted think, as Andrew Goffey re-
marks in the Introduction to his translation of Capitalist Sorcery, that there
are “two Isabelle Stengers” for contemporary readers: “the good one, who
writes about science and the politics of knowledge—and the bad, slightly
crazy one, who seemed to have got a bit new age-y and dreamed up some
nonsense about witches” (xviii). Goffey is quick to criticize this view (if
it even exists), and for good very good reason.
In her article, “Reclaiming Animism,” Stengers insists that we live
in a modern milieu in which terms like animism and magic tend to be
relegated to the dustbin of culturally situated beliefs. We tend to think
about them as part of a particular historical milieu that can be accounted
for, but no longer exists. We “know better” now: witchcraft and magic
are not “real.” We have protected ourselves from these kinds of illusions.
If Stengers asks us to “reclaim” terms like animism or magic, this is not
because she is asking us to return to a time when we believed in rock souls
and witchery; this is the wrong kind of question to ask.
Rather, she is asking us to confront how it “is that we are the heirs
of an operation of cultural and social eradication—the forerunner of
what was committed elsewhere in the name of civilization and reason”
(Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism” 6). Following the neo-pagan witch and
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102 A.J. Nocek

feminist activist, Starhawk, reclaiming terms like magic and animism

forces us to situate ourselves within a modern milieu that is defined by
its capacity to distinguish what is real and not real, what is fact and fic-
tion (see also Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). If these terms make us
feel slightly hesitant, then they are doing their job: they are obliging us to
“smell the smoke in our nostrils”—we are modern witch hunters—and to
“reclaim” the capacity to “honor an experience” without speaking on its
behalf, without knowing how it may be relevant to others (see Stengers,
“Reclaiming Animism” 7).1 It is in this context that we might begin to
appreciate how naming practices are capable of threatening our modern
fortresses of thought and luring us into feeling the efficacy of divergent
ways of being moved to think, feel, and act in a situation without being
able to answer on behalf of them.
The point for Stengers is not to get us to believe in the reality of
magic and casting spells so that we might put it on the side of really real
things. Thinking par le milieu concerns resisting the temptation to know
in advance how a technique or practice will come to matter, how it will
take hold, and how it will move us to think, act, and feel. We cannot speak
on behalf of what is “not ours” (Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism” 7). This
includes of course not appropriating or using what is “not ours” for the
sake of “us,” only to reinstate our modern fortresses.
In her essay on animism, Stengers insists that she received the no-
tion of “reclaiming” as a gift from the neo-pagan witches. The witches
she is referring to are the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco, a group
formed in 1979 by two Jewish women, Diane Baker and Starhawk (see
Salomonsen). In thinking through how Stengers might have learned
from these women, it is crucial to emphasize that Reclaiming is a radical
political movement with deep ties to eco-feminism, civil disobedience,
and direct action. According Jone Salomonsen, and with specific refer-
ence to Reclaiming’s eco-feminist leanings, the movement is invested
in reclaiming the proper name, “Witch,” as someone who is “skilled in
the craft of shaping, bending and changing reality” and not somebody
involved in supernatural evil doing (Salomonsen 7). Reclaiming is also
and fundamentally invested in the “spirituality these feminists feel they
have reclaimed from ancient paganism and goddess worship in order to
heal the experiences of estrangement occasioned by patriarchal biblical
religions” (2). In this view, Reclaiming Witchcraft is, at least in part, a
feminist healing practice borne out of a need to “bend and shape” our
sense of reality through goddess worship. In response to our sharp mod-
ern criticism that “…your Goddess is only a fiction,” Stengers insists that
“they would doubtless smile and ask us whether we are among those who
believe that fiction is powerless” (“Reclaiming Animism” 7).2
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

In what follows, I want to pay special attention to how naming

practices, inherited from Reclaiming Witchcraft, take hold in the con-
text of Stengers’s work on environmental activism. Not only do they
confront us with our own tendency to disqualify or culturally situate a
non-modern practice, but they also experiment with the possibility that
it could become a powerful lure for us to learn and pay attention to what
our contemporary epoch makes matter. How might Stengers’s naming of
the ancient goddess, Gaia, help heal our “barbaric” relation to the Earth
by “bending and shaping” our sense of reality? But of course naming
a goddess does not in itself put our modern habits of thought to rest.
Nor should we think that Stengers is appropriating the concept of Gaia
from Reclaiming Witches. While the act of reclaiming is a gift from the
witches, I want to insist that the Gaia who is named in the context of In
Catastrophic Times is generated out of the obligations of our epoch. Gaia
is a creative response and not an appropriative act. What we need to ask
is how does naming this goddess, namely, Gaia, in our epoch make us
stutter and stammer? What does naming Gaia call into being that would
challenge our modern temptation to denounce goddess worship and even
Stengers as superstitious? How does Gaia make it possible to think par le
milieu in the 21st century?
II. Gaia, What She Makes Matter

In In Catastrophic Times Stengers tells us that what, among other
things, marks our era as distinct from others is that we are no longer
only confronting a “nature” “that needs to be ‘protected’ from the dam-
age caused by humans, but also with a nature capable of threatening our
modes of thinking and living for good” (20). If our epoch has changed,
then it is because this “inconvenient truth […] imposes itself” (20) and
“no future can be foreseen in which [we] will be given back the liberty
of ignoring” it (49). But what also marks our epoch is that “we are,” as
Stengers affirms, “as badly prepared as possible to produce the type of
response that, we feel, the situation requires of us” (30). “Barbarism” is
how she characterizes our capacity to respond to the situation; or more
precisely, barbarism is the future promised to us by the “three thieves,”
namely the State, the Entrepreneurs, and Science, who generate the pos-
sibilities for our response to what imposes itself on us today. And those
possibilities index so many infernal alternatives that eclipse our capacity
for formulating our own questions and answers (56).
In an effort to stage the possibility of a response to what is distinc-
tive about our epoch, Stengers proposes that Gaia is the one who intrudes
today and in the future, and that she is the deity to whom we must pay
attention. The notion of proposal must be taken very seriously here.
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104 A.J. Nocek

Stengers is careful to point out that naming Gaia is “pragmatic,” and then
much later in the text she insists that Gaia is a proposition whose “truth
derives from [its] efficacy” (146). “To name,” Stengers writes, “is not to say
what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think
in the mode that the name calls for” (43; italics in original). Whitehead also
speaks about the proposition in similar terms. For Whitehead, a proposi-
tion is neither true nor false in itself, but is a “lure for feeling” a world that
“might be.” The proposition is a “matter of fact in potential” (Process 22,
188) whose truth is evaluated according to its effects, according to what
it makes matter. In just this way, Stengers is testing the efficacy of the
naming practices of the Reclaiming Witches: How might we use naming
to “bend our sense of reality”?
Stengers is quick to point out that naming Gaia should not be con-
fused with the need to generate a sense of connection and belonging to the
Earth in the wake of the global fragmentation and destruction produced
by capitalism (43). But neither does Stengers want to fall into the trap of
those scientists who first popularized Gaia in scientific discourse in the
1970s. For James Lovelock in particular, Gaia names an Earthly Mother
who has to be protected, and indeed whose danger seems to require of
us rather horrific and final solutions, namely, reducing the population
by 500 million or so in order to live in peace with her (47). These are final
judgments we make on Gaia’s behalf. More than anything, Gaia is named
in order to produce a feeling of intrusion that is “blind to the damage she
causes” (43). What Stengers wishes to bring to our attention through
naming Mother Earth is how there is “no afterwards,” there is no going
about our business in a post-Gaia world (57). The Earth’s presence makes
itself felt today although it is not threatened by us. Nor is Gaia judging
us, and seeking to be the “righter of wrongs” done to her (46). We have
provoked her through the “brutality” of capitalism (53), which puts life
in danger, but she is indifferent to our responses to her.
It’s worth noting that classics scholars, such as Robert Lamberton,
have paid special attention to the fact that in Homer and Hesiod, Gaia’s
epithet is pelore, from the ancient Greek pelor. In Homer, pelorios is most
often used to designate what is “awe-inspiring” or “large.” In Hesiod, on
the other hand, the “pelor group is never used for things that are simply
large” (72). Along with Gaia, the epithet is used in relation to the “snake
portion of Ekhidna” as well as Typhoeus and the Giants, and refers to
what is monstrous—that is to say, the “monstrous Earth.” “[I]t has long
been noticed,” Lamberton continues, “that the pelor group of epithets
bind together Mother Earth and her huge, unruly offspring, the Giants.
In her aspect as Gaia pelore, ‘monstrous Earth,’ she is specifically linked
to the destructive forces represented by the Giants and Typhoeus” (73).
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

In light of this, I would argue that Stengers’s very specific invocation

of Gaia makes the epithet, pelore, seem entirely reasonable. However, it
would be a mistake to think that Gaia is vengeful, that is, angry with us
and seeking revenge; rather, Gaia’s true monstrosity stems from the fact
that she is indifferent to us—she is an indifferent mother. She has produced
offspring, such as Typhoeus, the monstrous storm-giant, whose storms are
liable to make it impossible for human life to thrive. But Gaia, for her part,
is “blind to the damage she causes” (Stengers, In Catastrophic Times 43).
What is so difficult about the proposition of Gaia as the one who
intrudes is that she is here to stay and demands nothing of us, or more
precisely, she is “indifferent to our reasons and our projects” because
they have no effect on her intrusion—she is not the one who is threat-
ened, ever (47). “Gaia herself is not threatened,” writes Stengers, “unlike
the considerable number of living species who will be swept away with
unprecedented speed by the change in their milieu that is on the hori-
zon” (46). For this reason, there is no getting rid of Gaia, and so there is
no solving the right problem to be done with her intrusion. This is why
Stengers insists that Gaia’s intrusion is not a “simple problem,” by which
she means that she is not a problem whose solution is just waiting to be
discovered or invented (43). Gaia’s intrusion is “unilateral” (46). We must
therefore learn how to “compose with her” instead of trying to protect
her, solve her, or struggle against her (50).
We must surely struggle against what provoked Gaia’s intrusion,
namely, global capitalism, but not Gaia herself (53). We must also struggle
against the temptation to know what tools to compose with and how to go
about using them; we must resist the urge to provide an answer to these
questions lest we fall prey to our well-worn habits of thought that assume
Gaia prescribes an answer to her own intrusion. Rather, Gaia names the
fact of her intrusion now and in the future, and that there is no mode of
response that could eclipse this fact (47).
What we must do, instead, is learn how to compose answers and
responses to her that do not presume to know which ones will be effica-
cious. This is because Gaia’s intrusion provides no explanation or reason
that would be capable of disqualifying questions and answers in advance
of them being put to the test. For Stengers, failure to engage in this struggle
is barbaric, even suicidal; it is suicidal not to take on the demanding task
of fabricating responses to an intrusion that has no adequate response (50).
What I want to foreground here is how Gaia is a proposition that
makes responding to her necessary; and yet, no response, or sum total of
responses, will ever be sufficient. Responding to Gaia, worshiping her, is
therefore a problem that never finds its solution. If Stengers insists that
Gaia is not a “simple problem,” then I nonetheless think that her proposi-
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106 A.J. Nocek

tion frames our obligation to respond to her in terms of a true problem.

Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are well known, of course, for their
work on the problem, and I think what Stengers has managed to stage
through naming this divinity is how the concepts, apparatuses, and solu-
tions assembled in Gaia’s name can and should become expressions of a
problem in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.
As Martin Savransky’s article in this special issue demonstrates,
the problem for Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari is a tension in a tran-
scendental field that is never resolved, although each solution transforms
the conditions for future response (Difference 161, 163, 169). Put in these
terms, the problematic tension that the proposition of Gaia fabricates for
us is one in which we are obliged to respond to the fact that life on Earth
is threatened without there ever being an adequate response to this threat.
But what we must also come to appreciate is that with every response, with
every struggle, with every apparatus for learning and sharing assembled,
the conditions for future struggle change; they undergo transformation. In
other words, the problematic field doesn’t go away, but it generates new
conditions for learning and responding. But what, then, does it mean to
engage in this kind of learning practice?
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze is speaks about the importance
of learning from problems. He insists that “learning evolves entirely
in the comprehension of problems” (192). Where education is so often
regarded, and especially today, as addressing itself to the production of
knowledge from out of effective solutions, Deleuze reverses this priority:
“an apprentice,” he insists,
is someone who constitutes and occupies practical or speculative prob-
lems as such. Learning is the appropriate name for the subjective act
carried out when one is confronted with the objectivity of a problem
(Idea), whereas knowledge designates only the generality of concepts
or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions. (164)
Learning from problems, instead of knowing solutions, requires a

transformation on our behalf (Deleuze, Difference 192). What this trans-
formation entails, more specifically, is adjusting our expectations about
the outcomes of learning. If true problems do not correspond to the
“possibility of their solution,” then we cannot expect to know what will
be generated from an apprenticeship with them—“[w]e never know in
advance how someone will learn…” (165). Thus, we cannot approach
a situation composed of various tensions and strains already knowing
how to resolve them, already expecting a result and how to go about
achieving it. Rather, learning concerns the art of crafting responses that
are always local, always situated, and always risky. Each adjustment, each
pull, changes the nature of the composition of the problem, which is why
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

attention and care are so essential to learning from problems (165).3 With
one wrong adjustment, the field of potential action changes and the milieu
can become “poisoned” (100). One must always be attentive to dosages.4
Each response to a problem intervenes in the modes of thought and action
that are possible in the future.
This mode of learning and paying attention to problems also means
guarding against those who are apt to fabricate questions and answers
on our behalf and pose them to whomever (Deleuze, Difference 100). The
problem of a non-barbaric response to Gaia is an occasion for learning
what such a problem demands from us, namely, crafting questions and
answers based upon what a situation makes matter, how it moves us to
think, act, imagine, and ask new questions. Learning is not about solving
the problem, but about changing our conditions for engaging it.
So what does the proposition of Gaia make matter? What do the
naming practices of Reclaiming Witches lure us into feeling? I want to
suggest that naming Gaia makes responding to the threat the Earth poses
to human and nonhuman life problematic. The proposition of Gaia lures
us into feeling that there is no transcendental capacity to judge how best
to solve the problem of the Earth’s intrusion; there is no secure perspec-
tive from which we can evaluate this threat and eliminate it. Gaia makes
it impossible for judgment to work confidently—that faculty which is so
quick to apply the ready-made tools neoliberalism has made available to
it. There are no prepared answers, only local questions and provisional
answers that change the possibilities for future response. Responses to
Gaia, Stengers writes, “will always be local responses, not in the sense
that local means ‘small’ but in the sense that it is opposed to ‘general’ or
‘consensual’” (In Catastrophic Times 131).
What I want to propose, then, is that Gaia stages the conditions
under which we can begin to think par le milieu in our era. If we take Gaia
to be the proposition that refuses to authorize a solution to her, then she is
the one who facilitates the suspension of all those forms of judgment that
would disqualify solutions to her in advance of being put to the test. Gaia
is the one who lures us into confronting the fact that there are radically
different ways of having a situation come to matter, and none of them can
be subsumed under a common measure or a set of “shared values.” Put in
other terms, Gaia is a fabrication that obliges us to approach each situation
by asking: how can an ecology of practices be actualized in it? How can
divergent series come together in our epoch so that we may formulate
questions and answers without a transcendental measure that would be
capable of validating or disqualifying them in advance? The possibility
of a non-barbaric response to the Earth depends upon our capacity to
put the presumed authority of our guardian’s questions and answers in
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108 A.J. Nocek

suspension and feel the efficacy of those responses that diverge from our
own. “There will be no response,” Stengers insists, “other than the barbaric
if we do not learn to couple together multiple, divergent struggles and
engagements in this process of creation, as hesitant and stammering as it
may be” (In Catastrophic Times 50).
III. Civilizing the Milieu?

Very generally, this article has tried to bring to the fore just how
difficult it is to stage the conditions for thinking par le milieu today. And I
mean “difficulty” in the sense that van Dyck and others may have expe-
rienced it—in terms of physical and emotional loss and suffering—but
also in the sense that we experience everyday, that is, in terms of those
deeply engrained modern habits of thought that make it so easy to speak
on behalf of others. Stengers addresses this difficulty in so many contexts,
and I have just barely begun to scratch the surface here.
Nevertheless, this challenge is also an opportunity to situate
Stengers’s use of non-modern practices in terms of her ecology of prac-
tices. In particular, her use of Gaia worship, and her appeals to Reclaim-
ing Witchcraft and other non-modern practices more generally, stages a
scene for thinking “through the middle” in an era (and all future human
eras) when human life is threatened on Earth. Gaia is a proposition that
reorients our thinking about the Earth: it is a problem we must learn from
and not solve; anything short of this destines us for barbarism. One of my
central provocations here is that this “reorientation” may itself be a kind
of witchcraft in the sense that goddess worship has managed to “bend
and shape” our sense of reality. The efficacy of Reclaiming practices is
thrown into sharp relief as we feel it transform what matters to us in our
contemporary era.
Although Stengers often refers to our current capacities to respond
to our epoch as “barbaric,” she never names what a non-barbaric response
would be. Would this be a civilized response? In other contexts, Stengers
talks about civilization in Whitehead’s sense, but not here (e.g., “’Another
Science’”; “Speculative Philosophy”). At minimum, we could say that it
involves learning and paying attention to how all responses get folded
back into the problematic scene that Gaia helps stage. This, I think, could
be another opportunity to think with Whitehead. And in particular, “The
Rhythm of Education” becomes especially fertile ground. George Allen,
for example, insists that Whitehead’s philosophy of education needs
to be understood both as a processual adventure of learning that never
finds its solution (it is cyclical) and as a fundamental part of Whitehead’s
metaphysics more generally. In this regard, each of Whitehead’s stages
of education—Romance, Precision, and Generalization—have clear ana-
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

logues in the final part of Adventure of Ideas, which just happens to be

titled, “Civilization” (Allen 35-58). In this way, I’d like to suggest that by
creating the conditions for a non-barbaric response to Gaia, Stengers has
also lured us into entertaining how Whitehead may help us learn what
civilization could mean today.
Indeed, I think her work asks us to make this question a priority. We
get a glimpse of this in the lecture she delivered in 2012 titled, “’Another
Science Is Possible!’ A Plea for Slow Science.” There, Stengers references
Whitehead’s civilized modes of appreciation from his Modes of Thought.
She draws attention to how modern professionalism is what eclipses
civilized knowledge from taking hold (Whitehead, Science 197). In par-
ticular, she disparages the professionalism of scientific education today
and its inability to place abstractions in wider contexts and encourage
its practitioners to ask questions that have not already been prepared
for them. She worries that modern professionalism eclipses the ability of
scientists to subject their claims to severe objections and difficult criticism,
and then celebrates Barbara van Dyck’s resistance to GMOs in Belgium.
Stengers contends that van Dyck’s resistance was made possible by her
non-professional education, her education as a citizen, and then sug-
gests that she captures the spirit of what Whitehead meant by civilized
learning. Stengers’s work thus raises the question of civilized learning in
Whitehead’s sense, but I think it remains for us to learn what composing
with Gaia in a civilized mode means in the 21st century.
Arizona State University
Notes
1. Stengers writes that “[r]eclaiming means recovering, and, in this case, recovering the
capacity to honor experience, any experience we care for, as “not ours” but rather as
“animating” us, making us witness to what is not us. While such a recovery cannot be
reduced to the entertaining of an idea, certain ideas can further the process – and can
protect it from being “demystified” as some fetishistic illusion” (Stengers, “Reclaiming
Animism 7).
2. Furthermore, Stengers addresses the neo-pagan use of magic in this way: “As the witch
Starhawk wrote, calling forth the efficacy of ritual magic is in itself an act of magic.
Indeed it goes against all the plausible, comfortable reasons that propose magic as a
simple matter of belief, part of a past which should remain in the past. ‘We no longer
...’— as soon as we begin like that, the master word of progress is speaking in our place,
precisely the one the contemporary witches contest as the name they gave to themselves
is there also to recall to memory witch-hunting and the ‘burning times’ ” (“Introductory
Notes” 194).
3. Learning to swim in the ocean is a good example of the formation of a problematic field
of relations. “To learn to swim,” writes Deleuze, “is to conjugate the distinctive points of
our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a problematic
field. This conjugation determines for us a threshold of consciousness at which our real
acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real relations, thereby providing a solution
to the problem” (Difference 165).
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110 A.J. Nocek

4. Stengers speaks of the “pharmacological” uncertainty that pervades the tools employed
in “user movements.” In particular, she argues that our “guardians” cannot handle the
danger of the “pharmakon.” As such there is no appreciation for the art of dosages. She
contends that “what has been privileged again and again is what presents, or seems to
present, the guarantees of a stable identity, which allows the question of the appropriate
attention, the learning of doses and the manner of preparation, to be done away with.  A
history in which the question of efficacy has been incessantly enslaved, reduced to that
of the causes supposed to explain their effects” (In Catastrophic Times 100).
Works Cited
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Press, 2012.
Beck, Ulrich. “Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction between Cosmopolitanism in
Philosophy and the Social Sciences.” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs,
vol. 4, no. 2, 2004.
Blok, Anders, and Ignacio Farias, editors. Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies,
Atmospheres. Routledge, 2016.
Chertok, Léon, and Isabelle Stengers. A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Hypnosis as a
Scientific Problem from Lavoisier to Lacan. Translated by Martha Noel Evans, Stanford
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta,
University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
---. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Continuum, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press, 1994.
Gabrys, Jennifer. “A Cosmopolitics of Energy: Diverging Materialities and Hesitating Prac-
tices.” Environment and Planning A, vol. 46, no. 9, 2014.
Goffey, Andrew. “Introduction.” Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, edited by Philippe
Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, translated by Andrew Goffey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Lamberton, Robert. Hesiod. Yale University Press, 1988.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1991.
---. “Whose Cosmos? Which Cosmopolitics? A Commentary on Ulrich Beck’s Peace Pro-
posal?” Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 3, Fall 2004.
Nathan, Tobie, and Isabelle Stengers. Médecins et sorciers. Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2012.
Nocek, A.J. “On Symbols and Propositions: Toward a Slow Technoscience.” Rethinking
Whitehead’s Symbolism: Thought, Language, Culture, edited by Roland Faber, Jeffery Bell,
and Joseph Petek, Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Translated by
Andrew Goffey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. Routledge, 2002.
Stengers, Isabelle. “”Another Science Is Possible!” A Plea for Slow Science.” Lecture, Inau-
guratial Lecture, Chair Willy Calewaert, 2012.
---. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 2005,
pp. 994-1003.
---. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
---. Cosmopolitics II. Translated by Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
---. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey, Open
Humanities Press, 2015.
---. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no.
1, 2005.
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---. “Reclaiming Animism.” E-flux, vol. 36, July 2012. www.e-flux.com/journal/reclaiming-

animism/
---. “Speculative Philosophy and the Art of Dramatization.” The Allure of Things: Process
and Object in Contemporary Philosophy, edited by Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey,
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
Van der Tuin, Iris, and Rick Dolphijn, editors. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies.
Open Humanities Press, 2012.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventure of Ideas. The Free Press, 1933.
---. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. 1929. The Free Press, 1967.
---. The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November, 1919. 1920.
Cambridge University Press, 1964.
---. Modes of Thought. 1928. Macmillan, 1968.
---. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. 1927-28. Edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne,
Free Press, 1978.
---. Science and the Modern World. 1925. Free Press, 1967.
Yaneva, Albena, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, editors. What is Cosmopolitical Design? Design,
Nature, and the Built Environment. Routledge, 2015.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Aesthetic Concerns, Philosophical

Fabulations: The Importance of a ‘New
Aesthetic Paradigm’
Melanie Sehgal
I. Stengers and Aesthetics?

“Aesthetics” is not a concern that figures prominently in Isabelle
Stengers’s work and it is not difficult to find the reasons why. Reading
the discipline of aesthetics through a historical and systematic perspec-
tive derived from Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead, the invention
of modern aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the 18th century can
be read as the flipside to “the invention of modern science” described
by Stengers in her seminal book with just this title. Understood in this
historical sense as the philosophical discipline founded by Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant, aesthetics instills and cements
what Alfred North Whitehead termed “the bifurcation of nature,” the
implicit distinction between a “bare nature,” object of scientific inquiry
but never perceived as such, and “nature perceived” by subjects, with its
qualities and values. In Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers has shown how
crucial this reading of the modern constellation was for Whitehead’s entire
speculative endeavor. Much the same can be said of Stengers’s own work:
her whole work seems to be an attempt to understand, from a multitude
of angles, the precise mode of functioning of the binaries that structure
modern thought and the particular role the conception of modern sci-
ence plays in this. How to recount “what has happened to us” (Stengers,
Thinking 13), “without sharing in the opposition between modern and
non-modern” (The Invention 55)?
Despite the manifold practices that this concern made her engage
with – from Galileo’s experimental apparatus, to the history of the neu-
trino, to the holy Virgin Mary – questions of aesthetics and art are curi-
ously missing. Against this evidence one could point out that there are
important references to thinkers concerned with aesthetics in Stengers’s
work: Étienne Souriau’s inquiry into different modes of existence, Félix
Guattari’s new aesthetic paradigm, John Dewey’s consideration of art as

112 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
Aesthetic Concerns, Philosophic Fabulations 113

experience and, last but not least, Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative
philosophy, which he himself described as an inversion of the Kantian
Critiques, a Critique of Pure Feeling. However, Stengers’s reading of
Souriau, for instance, who is the one most clearly associated with aesthetics
from the above, seems to suggest that Stengers is interested in Souriau not
because, but in spite of, his concern with aesthetics. In the introduction to
the re-edition of Souriau’s Les Différents Modes d’Existence, co-written by
Stengers and Latour, their general skepticism towards aesthetics clearly
surfaces. Their argument is that Souriau, though responsible for the devel-
opment in France “of this branch of philosophy that one calls aesthetics”
(“Le Sphinx” 1) needs to be read not as aesthetician or epistemologist, but
as a metaphysician (14). Stengers and Latour point out the irony in the
fact that Souriau was classified as aesthetician, a superficial classification
according to them, based on his Vocabulaire de l’Esthétique, but missing the
point of his metaphysical ambitions expressing a radical empiricism much
in the spirit of William James or Whitehead (“Le Sphinx” 9).1
In the following, not despite of but because of this obvious absence,
I would like to inquire into the place of aesthetics within Stengers’s work.
On the one hand, this leads me to a quest for the importance, function and
constraints of aesthetic practices today – including theoretical ones – that
don’t follow the habit of letting nature bifurcate, thinking with Stengers
rather than analyzing her work. On the other hand, I hope to shed some
light on Stengers’s work itself by way of this detour, looking at its very
own practice and describing it as an aesthetic one in the sense developed
hereafter.
II. Aesthetics and the Bifurcation of Nature: A Speculative

Perspective
Before I embark on this, it is important to speculatively assess the
effects that the habit of letting nature bifurcate has had on the constitu-
tion of aesthetics. What I refer to by “aesthetics” are not the myriad of
aesthetic practices that have been part of the human adventure across the
ages, but the philosophical discipline and way of thinking about aesthetic
practices that formed in the 18th century, in response to “the invention of
modern science,” as I would like to suggest. This perspective doesn’t stem
from a purely historical interest. Rather, my contention is that the habit
of letting nature bifurcate has informed and provided the dispositive for
aesthetic practice ever since.
Whitehead suggests that the habit of allowing two inconsistent con-
ceptions of nature to coexist within a culture of thought results from an
implicit generalization of a Newtonian notion of materiality. Due to the
overwhelming success of 17th-century physics as an explanatory frame,
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114 Melanie Sehgal

its notion of materiality became generalized beyond its experientially

warranted boundaries and turned into a metaphysical assumption about
the most concrete aspect of nature in general:
One such assumption underlies the whole philosophy of nature during
the modern period. It is embodied in the conception which is supposed
to express the most concrete aspect of nature. […] the answer is couched
in terms of stuff, or matter, or material […] which has the property of
simple location in space and time. […] material can be said to be here
in space and here in time […] in a perfectly definite sense which does
not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-
time. (Science 49)
How could this generalization take hold far beyond academic discourse
and mark a culture of thinking that we have come to call modernity?
Thinking with Stengers’s Invention of Modern Science, it seems to me that
it was by providing a practical dispositive for knowledge production – in
particular the experimental dispositive, invented by Galileo Galilei – that
these metaphysical assumptions could be carried over into other domains,
well beyond the confines of physics and science at large. In this book,
Stengers shows that what was original to and important about Galileo
– what ‘created an event’ – was not primarily his manifold research,
reaching its pinnacle with the laws of movement, but a whole new way
of producing truth, that is of producing a new type of truth, that of the
experimental fact. By setting up an experimental demonstration – an
inclined plane; billiard balls that Galileo, as Stengers emphasizes, made
sure to have polished well in order to minimize friction; and last but not
least, colleagues to witness the event – Galileo not only proved his theory
about how bodies fall with an experience, but was also and simultane-
ously able to silence other theories by showing that his theory was “not
a fiction like the others” (Stengers The Invention 82), that it certainly was
not “only a fiction” (81).
Stengers analyses Galileo’s writing before and after his invention,
focusing on the aesthetic presentation of his texts. At first, Galileo’s texts
come in the form of dialogues, featuring (semi-)fictional characters that
take on different theoretical positions, for example, the different positions
held at his time about celestial movement. The battle that Galileo fought
in these early writings is a rhetorical one, as his readers could only make
a choice between the different theories that are presented on the basis of
the arguments presented and the respective quality of logical reasoning.
All of them are fictions, stories that can be told about how bodies fall and
which can only be distinguished by logical and rhetorical criteria. Once
Galileo has constructed his inclined plane, however, this symmetry is
fundamentally disturbed. All other theories/stories about how bodies fall
are from now on subjected to the test of Galileo’s experimental disposi-
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


tive. The criterion for the production of truth, as Stengers emphasized, is

no longer merely logical or rhetorical but practical:
The singularity of this apparatus (…) is that is allows its author to with-
draw, to let the motion testify in his place. It is the motion, staged by
the apparatus, that will silence the other authors, who would like to
understand it differently. The apparatus thus plays on a double register:
it makes the phenomenon “speak” in order to “silence” the rivals. (84)
This new type of truth, based on experimental demonstration, thus creates

a distinction between science and opinion, fact and fiction, and in this way,
it also becomes a polemic instrument. “The power of fiction,” as Stengers
puts it, “is that against which science must differentiate itself, and that
through which it defines-disqualifies everything that is not science” (83).
It comes as no surprise that Galileo’s texts from then on are no
longer literary dialogues but demonstrations and proofs. The fact that
this new type of truth – the experimental fact – was invented within
physics but came to provide the general model for producing scientific
truths may account for how a specific physical notion, that of Newtonian
materiality, could become generalized beyond its experiential domain. By
providing the dispositive of scientific knowledge production well beyond
17th-century physics and thereby providing a model and notion of what it
means to know, the bifurcation of nature – with its accompanying binaries
between fact and fiction, nature and culture, subjective and objective – was
firmly installed into the metaphysics of the moderns.
The discipline of aesthetics played an ambivalent role in this process
of generalization. Read through the historical and speculative perspec-
tive provided by the bifurcation thesis, the formation of aesthetics as a
discipline in the 18th century appears as a direct reaction to the general-
ization of a Newtonian notion of materiality, based on the idea of simple
location, its explicit aim being to grant a place to what did not fit into the
conceptual scheme provided by (generalized) physics: the subjective,
sensory and emotional, the spiritual and aesthetic. Before Immanuel Kant,
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten proposed in his monumental Aesthetica
(1750) to create a new discipline, designated to a realm separate from the
world of physical facts and primary qualities, in order to justify the role
of the “lower faculties,” the senses, as a faculty of knowledge production
in its own right.
Thus, the bifurcation of nature not only marks the defining moment
of aesthetics, but is also inscribed in its very constitution: After Baumgarten
and Kant, “aesthetics” is on the one hand defined as “aesthesis,” that is,
as a theory of sensuous perception that emphasizes the senses as a mode
of knowledge production (without, however, challenging reason in any
significant way). On the other hand, “aesthetics” is understood as the
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116 Melanie Sehgal

theory of the beautiful and sublime, laying the foundations for a theory
of art and artistic expression. Thus, in one understanding, aesthetics
deals with the experiencing subject, and in the other, it is concerned with
a specific object: art. “Aesthetics” then exhibits the bifurcation of nature
at its foundation since the relation between these two sides remains
conceptually problematic and indeed has been a matter of dispute since
the inception of the discipline. However, whether focusing on a theory
of perception or on a theory of the beautiful and the art object, there is a
common drive towards categorization, demarcating a particular realm that
is aesthetic, creating or confirming separations that are easily recognizable
as specifically modern divides – fact and fiction, primary and secondary
qualities, subjective and objective.
For these early proponents of the discipline of aesthetics, the question
is not whether it is possible to carve out a specific realm of the aesthetic,
but rather where its lines of division run. By simply supplementing the
modern constitution with the realm of the aesthetic, however, the newly
founded philosophical discipline implicitly accepted the Newtonian
framework as an adequate description of the material world. Instead of
challenging the fallacy of misplaced concreteness at its core, it cemented
it, with palpable repercussions to this day. These repercussions manifest
in a curious mix of overemphasis and underappreciation of the relevance
of the aesthetic in the world. On the one side, the model of the artist as
genius and creator who confers values onto a valueless matter of nature
enjoys a high standing well beyond the arts. On the other hand, works
of art are reduced to circulating in the art-world, at most questioning the
relation between art and society or life.
III. The Importance of a New Aesthetic Paradigm

Of course, this story about the birth of aesthetics from the bifurca-
tion of nature is speculative – if speculation is understood as a necessary
and situated endeavor, never neutral and always implying a perspec-
tive. That is, this story could be and has been told otherwise. One such
case may be that of Steven Shaviro (Without Criteria), who by rereading
Kant’s third Critique, indeed the core of aesthetic thinking in the 18th
century, showed how at the high-time of the bifurcation of nature, even
its advocates began to challenge this frame of thought from within.2 But
choosing to speculatively answer the question, ‘What has happened to
us?’ with the proposition of the bifurcation of nature opens up an inquiry
into the importance, the necessity of, in this case, practicing and thinking
about and with aesthetics beyond the habit of letting nature bifurcate
today. Far from criticizing aesthetics at large or suggesting that, by being
irrevocably marked by the bifurcation of nature, the realm of the aesthetic
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


has become superfluous then, I will now seek to think with Stengers in
order to inquire into the importance and the outlines of a “new aesthetic
paradigm” as Guattari envisioned it (Chaosmosis). However unfinished this
task necessarily will have to remain here, it derives its importance from
the fact that changing old habits of thought might today have become an
urgent task, maybe even a prerequisite for survival.
In the closing remarks of The Invention of Modern Science, discussing
and emphasizing the dimension of responsibility inherent to scientific
knowledge production that stems from “the irreducible link between
the production of knowledge and the production of existence” (148),
Stengers turns to Guattari’s “new aesthetic paradigm” and takes up the
hope which Guattari himself had connected to a way of conceiving of the
aesthetic as no longer confined to a special realm of society but rather as
transversally cutting across every domain of experience: “Rather than a
strictly ethical question,” Stengers writes, it is “much more a question of
what Félix Guattari has called a ‘new aesthetic paradigm,’ where aesthetic
designates first of all a production of existence that concerns one’s capacity
to feel: the capacity to be affected by the world, not in a mode of subjected
interaction, but rather in a double creation of meaning, of oneself and the
world” (148).
Such a capacity to feel, to be affected by the world, may acquire
new significance in times of stifling habits of thought – including, but not
limited to, the bifurcation of nature. Against the backdrop of reading the
history of modernity as consequentially marked by the habit of letting
nature bifurcate, aesthetic practices – within and without the art-world
– may take on new importance and relevance, because the bifurcation
of nature is not a purely philosophical problem; it is also an experiential
one. In a culture of thought that lets nature bifurcate, abstractions, which
lead us through experience and which most of the time remain implicit,
more often than not explain experiences away instead of explaining them.
Experiences such as those of beauty, love or spirituality are explained
away as “merely subjective” and hence not “really real,” devaluing them
in favor of a primary reality that needs to be attended to by knowledge but
not accessible to experience. Thus, the bifurcation of nature, understood
as a cultural habit of thought, desensitizes or even anaesthetizes, makes us
feel less rather than more than what is given in experience.3 This is why it
is so crucial to take into account that the bifurcation of nature is not only
a habit of thought, but also a habit of feeling. As Whitehead and James
point out, no philosophy can ignore the teachings of physiology, that is,
the fact there every thought, no matter how abstract its content, is rooted
and manifests in feeling. In order to counter the bifurcation of nature as
a cultural habit of thought, rather than becoming superfluous, aesthetics
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118 Melanie Sehgal

could thus acquire a new and important function. A new aesthetic para-
digm could become a vector for “civilizing” modern abstractions when
majoritarian philosophy fails to accomplish its task of taking care of our
abstractions (cf. Whitehead, Science 59).4 Such a new aesthetic paradigm,
fostering new modes of being affected by the world, is a crucial ingredi-
ent towards building a radical empiricism in the sense of William James,
an empiricism that refuses to include that which is not experienced but,
crucially, also refuses to exclude that which is experienced.
IV. Generalizing Aesthetic Concerns

Thinking about aesthetics in this way opens up a myriad of ques-
tions. What repercussions does this perspective have on contemporary,
i.e., existing aesthetic practices? How would or do aesthetic practices that
avoid letting nature bifurcate look like? Thinking with Stengers about
aesthetic practices beyond the frame of a bifurcated concept of nature
cannot mean answering these questions for aesthetic practices in general.
It could mean thinking through or experimenting with concrete examples
within and outside of the realm of contemporary aesthetic practices, learn-
ing from them in the concrete, how and with which consequences they
manage to circumvent majoritarian habits of thought and feeling.5 But
thinking with Stengers about aesthetic practices could also mean – and
this is the question that matters for me here – to inquire into the relevance
and importance of other ways of thinking and doing aesthetics from the
philosophical and historical perspective that has guided me to pose the
very question, and in view of the practice whose trajectory both she and
I belong to and prolong: philosophy. If, as Whitehead contends, “phi-
losophy has been ruined” (Science 55) by the bifurcation of nature, then
reconsidering the question of aesthetics is crucial for philosophy. Recon-
figuring seemingly clear distinctions between fact and fiction, subjective
and objective, primary and secondary qualities, cannot remain without
consequences for a tradition of thought that has in the past centuries
implied and even justified these very distinctions.
Let us then turn to the philosophy of Whitehead – the philosopher
Stengers has most famously thought with and whose philosophy, as
she has aptly shown, is a direct attempt to address and counteract the
bifurcation of nature – and carve out what role and place the aesthetic
acquires in his work. In his late speculative work, Whitehead aims at a
radically empiricist reconstruction of the notion of an “an event as the
most concrete actual something” (Science 93), one which would replace
the Newtonian notion of materiality, mistakenly taken for something
concrete rather than as a potentially useful but always limited abstrac-
tion. Counter to the categorical division between fact and value that is
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so fundamental to the project of aesthetics in its modern guise, value for

Whitehead permeates every type of event, not only those events pertain-
ing to human experiences, or those said to be beautiful or sublime. It is
in discussing this understanding of value that he turns to an aesthetic
practice par excellence, to poetry:
Remembering the poetic rendering of our concrete experience, we
see at once that the element of value, of being an end in itself, of be-
ing something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any
account of an event as the most concrete actual something. “Value” is
the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event. Value is an element
which permeates through and through the poetic view of nature. We
have only to transfer to the very texture of realization in itself that which
we recognize so readily in terms of human life. (Science 93f)6
What, however, may warrant this turn towards literature, towards

poetry? It is the “ruins of philosophy” itself that necessitate this philo-
sophical engagement with poetry. As philosophy has failed to accomplish
its task – taking care of our abstractions and our modes of abstraction –
Whitehead turns to the poetry of the Romantics, in particular Wordsworth
and Shelley, as a source for constructing a radically empiricist cosmology.
Their poems clearly express the connectedness and relationality of experi-
ence and thereby draw attention to the limits of the scientific materialism
that molded common sense within and without the sciences. In a generic
sense, the task of works of literature for Whitehead is to express experi-
ence most accurately and concretely (and to combine this with reworking
language accordingly). This is precisely why philosophy, after it has been
led away from experience by the habit of letting nature bifurcate, would
be well advised to turn to this aesthetic practice for its own sake:
Every other sentence in a work of literature which is endeavoring truly
to interpret the facts of experience expresses differences in surround-
ing events due to the presence of some object. An object is ingredient
throughout its neighborhood, and its neighborhood is indefinite. (The
Concept 145)
Whitehead reads the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley as a form

of protest against the “simple minded theory that an object is at one place
at any definite time, and is in no sense anywhere else” in which science,
philosophy and common sense have “entangled themselves” (The Concept
145). Thus, rather than finding in Wordsworth or Shelley the expression
of an extreme form of subjectivity, for Whitehead they express a radical
empiricism according to which all kinds of experiences are to be included
and nothing is to be left out:7 “Wordsworth […] felt that something had
been left out, and that what had been left out comprised everything that
was most important” (Science 77). This crucially concerns experiences of
relatedness, the feelings of “if,” “by,” and “and” that, as James empha-
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120 Melanie Sehgal

sized (The Principles 238), had been neglected in philosophy even by the
classical empiricists themselves. Countering this neglect of relationality,
Wordsworth insists on his experience of the relations and values within
nature. In Whitehead’s situated reading, for Wordsworth values are not
what subjects confer on a valueless nature, but are immanent to nature
itself:
It is the brooding presence of the hills which haunts him. […] He dwells
on that mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself
on any separate element that we set up as an individual for its own
sake. He always grasps the whole of nature as involved in the tonality
of the particular instance. (Science 83)
Far from rejecting aesthetics because of its entanglement in the bifur-

cation of nature, for Whitehead the aesthetic appreciation of value needs to
be generalized. Values and relationality are part of the fundamental mode
of becoming of all kinds of events, not only “aesthetic” ones in the narrow
modern sense.8 As Shaviro contends, with Whitehead aesthetics becomes
first philosophy (15). Rather than being compartmentalized and limited
to the realm of art or a specific kind of human experience, the aesthetic
for Whitehead, as for Dewey or Souriau, permeates the continuum of ex-
perience, not even confined to the human. Such a generalization of aesthetic
concerns marks the first step for thinking about and practicing aesthetics
beyond a frame of thought whose habit has become to let nature bifurcate.
V. Singularizing Aesthetic Practices

In the previous section, I have sketched out how philosophies that
Stengers thinks with – such as Whitehead’s, and the same could have
been said for Souriau’s or Dewey’s – do not abandon aesthetics in view
of its entanglement with the bifurcation of nature but instead general-
ize aesthetic concerns – to the event (Whitehead), the work (Souriau)
or experience (Dewey). Thus, in doing so they locate the aesthetic on a
generic and even metaphysical level countering habits of dividing and
compartmentalizing realms of experience and kinds of objects.
But what of the specificity of aesthetic concerns such as they have
come to matter within the modern framework? What about the different
ways of cultivating aesthetic concerns? Even if we take the term “gener-
alization” in a Whiteheadian sense and understand generalizations not
as authorizing a definition but as speculatively making “the wager that
the questions to which they well give rise will shed light on features that
are important for each situation“ (Stengers, Thinking 19)9 – doesn’t such a
generalization of aesthetic concerns run the risk of making it impossible
to attend to the specific trajectories, the specific “modes of mattering”
(Savransky, “Modes”), specifically those which have shaped the ways in
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which the realm of the aesthetic has come to signify in nature-cultures

marked by modern habits of thought? The question to be tackled, how-
ever provisionally, then, is: How might this generalization of aesthetic
concerns manifest today, taking into account the modern trajectory of
aesthetics? How to inherit these trajectories in a way that might open up
different futures?
In Chaosmosis, Félix Guattari points out the difficulty of imagining
aesthetics beyond modern parameters, simply because these parameters
are so deeply embedded in our conceptual apparatus that they predefine
any attempts at looking into other forms of organization located in other
times or spaces. However, Guattari points out the specificity of West-
ern approaches to aesthetics, reminding us of the fact that “it was only
quite late in Western history that art detached itself as a specific activity
concerned with a particularized axiological reference. Dance, music, the
elaboration of plastic forms and signs on the body, on objects, and on the
ground were, in archaic societies, intimately connected with ritual activi-
ties and religious representations” (98).
Historically, then, for the most part of human experience the aes-
thetic has not been the realm of disinterested enjoyment but functionally
interwoven with all kinds of natural-cultural processes, cutting across the
different aspects of a society rather than belonging to a separate space
and time. And in the same way that it was impossible to make out an
“aesthetic sphere distinct from other spheres (economic, social, religious
or political)” (Guattari, Chaosmosis 98), the individual wasn’t marked by
a compartmentalization of the psyche into faculties such as those that
underpin Baumgarten’s and Kant’s categorizations. The generalization
of aesthetic concerns, then, has been a historical occurrence before, as
discussed in the previous section, it systematically and also historically
became a necessity anew. For Guattari this historical trajectory, though
necessarily speculative, becomes an anchor for his hope for “a new aes-
thetic paradigm” (Chaosmosis). But how precisely may we reclaim this
speculative past now, when these demarcations have settled into to our
collective imagination? How does the generalization of aesthetic concerns
manifest itself, or how could it potentially manifest itself within the realm
of the aesthetic as we know it today?
In a first instance, the generalization of aesthetic concerns, when
conferred to the level of practices to which I have now shifted the ques-
tion of aesthetics, seems to lead to the well-known but little distinctive
claim that “everything is aesthetic.” Against the backdrop of modern
bifurcations, however, this might be a more relevant and interesting a
claim than it might seem at first glance, because it highlights what the
aesthetic, from the historically situated and speculative perspective em-
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122 Melanie Sehgal

ployed here, might come to mean: the aesthetic, no longer confined to

specific objects or subjects, to specific times and places, addresses the level
of feeling (presupposing the generic use of the term feeling proposed by
Whitehead, feeling thus largely transcending human interiority). Thus,
to generalize aesthetic concerns draws attention to the ways in which all
kinds of practices, not just specific ones, make their environment feel and
allow themselves to be affected and constituted by it. They draw attention,
in Stengers’s words quoted above, “to the capacity to be affected by the
world (…) in a double creation of meaning, of oneself and the world”
(The Invention 148) and thereby to the relations generated on all levels.
Rather than referring to specific kinds of experiences, the aesthetic is a
specific dimension inherent to all kinds of experience, again taken in a non-
humanist sense that the philosophy of Whitehead or also James suggests,
that takes into account and puts into practice and motion the reciprocity
of feeling, relationality and existence.
While this might still seem vague and potentially unsatisfying,
specifically for those implicated in contemporary aesthetic practices such
as art practices, such a generic description of the aesthetic doesn’t need
to preclude particularities. While some practices have refined the ways
in which they generate, incorporate and cultivate feeling – like artistic or
spiritual practices – other practices have tended to downplay this dimen-
sion – such as scientific ones – and again others have put it to use in ma-
nipulative ways – the field of economics might provide the most obvious
examples here. The question thus becomes how precisely the aesthetic key
is played rather than if it gets struck.
However, it is not enough to resist the modern confinement of the
aesthetic in a discrete ontological realm, even if it is a crucial step. Once
these divisions have settled into a collective unconscious, the very practi-
cal question remains of how different practices and forms of experience
that each come with their own traditions, forms and trajectories, might
re-learn to interact and nourish one another.
Stengers’s crucial philosophical response to the bifurcation of nature
is her conception of an “ecology of practices.” As an attempt to substitute
the ecology of prey and predator that the bifurcation of nature leads to,
an ecology of practices is one in which modes of relating between prac-
tices are possible that don’t impose hierarchies and try to explain other
practices away. Interestingly, Stengers develops the generic notion of an
“ecology” precisely in contrast to an aesthetic practice understood in a
modern sense: an ecologist, as she points out, is not to be confused with
a “gardener” (Cosmopolitics 56). A gardener “is free to select her plants,
to arrange them as she pleases, to prune them as needed, and to try to
get rid of whatever she considers weeds. She has the power to judge and
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to select” (Cosmopolitics 56). The ecologist, however, may not take such a
transcendent stance. There is no sovereign act of judgment and selection.
An ecology of practices is qualified by the way in which all practices are
presented as being interdependent and belonging to the same temporality
(57), to one entangled ‘oikos’ – the Greek term for household and hearth, in
distinction from the ‘polis’, the site of the political – or milieu. There is no
outside, no neutral position, but only a pragmatics of “reciprocal capture”
(57) in which no move and no statement remain without consequence.
Developing her ecological approach in the face of the so-called Sci-
ence Wars, Stengers emphasizes not only the urgent need for heteroge-
neous practices to be in “civilized” conversation with one another but also
provides conceptual tools for such an undertaking. Stengers especially
emphasizes the importance of taking into account the constraints that are
singular to each practice, instead of invoking universal values and gen-
eral criteria, which enables different practices to partake in an ecology of
practices in view and not in neglect of their differences. In particular, this
makes it necessary for practitioners to be able to introduce themselves,
their practice and what matters to and interests them without implicitly
disqualifying other practices (49).
Stengers exemplifies the problem by pointing out that a scientist
who says, “’rest assured, I’m an astronomer (physicist, molecular biolo-
gist, doctor, psychoanalyst),’ by the very same token implicitly adds ‘and
not an astrologer, vitalist, charlatan, hypnotist.’” (49) In order to avoid
such implicit and structural disqualification, Stengers distinguishes two
kinds of constraints that make it possible to singularize practices, be they
modern or not, scientific or not: “requirements” and “obligations.” An
obligation concerns the type of interpretation that can be given to a fact,
thereby allowing to differentiate between two types of fact – a simple or
raw occurrence and an artifact or, with Latour, a “factish.” A fact in the
sense of an occurrence and an experimental artifact can be distinguished
in relation to the way interpretations can be given to them, the stories that
can be told about them. While, as Stengers contends, an earthquake that
occurs doesn’t oblige the one who interprets it in any particular way, the
experimental fact does so indeed because such an interpretation is obliged
to take into account the history, the specific trajectory of the process of
experimentation that produced this artifact.
Returning to the Galilean event, Stengers points out that “the core
of this history is that facts have value only if they can be recognized as
being able to obligate practitioners to agree about their interpretation” (50).
Obligations thus refer to what “a practice imposes upon its participants,”
to the controversy that animates a scientific community and precondi-
tions the value of each individual contribution (51, 55). But the constraints
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124 Melanie Sehgal

imposed on scientific practices are not only a matter of obligations, of

“colleagues and controversy” (51), alone. They also concern the world,
the specific milieu of an (arti)fact. These are its requirements. Require-
ments are what a practice depends on, that which it needs – requires – in
order for its artifacts to exist, to be able to be stabilized as a reliable wit-
ness, as an experimental fact that can then be a matter of controversy and
interpretation.
Stengers spells this distinction out by thinking through the experi-
mental sciences. What would it mean to address such questions to aesthetic
practices in the contemporary world? Describing practices in terms of their
requirements and obligations rules out any attempt to describe them via
external, pre-established values such as “objectivity,” “truth,” the “good,”
or “the beautiful,” and it enables one to speak about practices without
making use of the structurally polemic distinction between “modern”
and “non-modern.” Thus, these terms are of critical importance in asking
how to think about aesthetic practices beyond modern strictures. But are
these concepts – which Stengers develops in relation to the experimental
sciences – applicable or extendable to aesthetic practices, and if so, how?
To be sure, Stengers stresses the fact that “requirement” and “ob-
ligation” do not pertain to experimental practices alone: she points out
that these forms of constraints cannot be turned into the touchstone that
singularizes experimental sciences nor do they apply solely to modern
practices (Cosmopolitics 54). The above-mentioned example of the way in
which a scientist within modern habits of thought is bound to present
herself with a structural disqualification of other “non-modern” practices
can easily be transferred from the realm of science to that of the aesthetic:
“Rest assured, I am an artist, and not a decorator, craftswomen or healer.”
The problem thus prevails. Nevertheless, its specific answer, the concept
of “obligation” is forged – in its own becoming in Cosmopolitics – in rela-
tion to the question of the specificity of experimental facts.
I would like to put this question out into open because I am not sure
what the answer is. Moreover, my sense is that thinking with Stengers
about a practice – in this case, as we are looking for the place of the aesthetic
in the contemporary world, art – in which neither she nor I are situated,
can only mean carving out questions and lines of flight from the perspec-
tive that matters to each of us, namely, the speculative perspective derived
from the diagnosis of a bifurcation of nature within modern thought. But
my intuition is that while it might be relevant, indeed important, to think
about the requirements and obligations – the forms of discourses, structur-
ally inherent in art institutions for example – that contemporary artistic
practices face, it may be necessary to add a form of constraint that precisely
singularizes practices that emphasize and work the aesthetic dimension
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rather than say, a dimension concerned with the production of truths. One
might draw parallels to the way in which the mode of functioning of the
experimental sciences cannot simply be extended to the social sciences,
simply because the questions that are asked within the social sciences
matter to its “objects” of inquiry (Stengers, “Science Fiction”; Savranksy,
The Adventure). Rather than debating whether this constraint should be
located in the subject or the object of aesthetic experience, in its reception
or production, from the background developed here, it might be fruitful
to search for it in the world, that is, in feeling, and consider it pragmati-
cally, in view of the experiential effects and consequences of an aesthetic
occurrence. In other words, it may lie in the importance or relevance of
an aesthetic contribution, in the situated question of “how” something
comes to matter aesthetically.10
VI. Philosophy as Aesthetic Fabulation

To conclude, I would like to ask one last question: What does this new
aesthetic paradigm (to stay with Guattari), resulting in a generalization
of aesthetic concerns, mean for the practice of philosophy itself? Rather
than “thinking with Stengers,” as I have done so far, I will now turn to
Stengers more directly in order to show how the generalization of aesthetic
concerns not only manifests in her own work, which then provides an
example for conceiving of aesthetics beyond the bifurcation of nature, but
also takes an eminently pragmatist turn: it qualifies her very own practice.
For Stengers, answering the question, “What has happened to us?”
(Thinking 13) with the proposition of the bifurcation of nature, fundamen-
tally affects our image of thought, our understanding of philosophy itself.
If the categorical distinction between fact and fiction is, as we have seen
in her reading of Galileo, a direct outcome of the invention of modern
science and part of the constellation that we have throughout been calling
the bifurcation of nature, then challenging this habit of thought also puts
the clear distinction between fact and fiction into question.
Donna Haraway points out that etymologically, fact and fiction
share the same root: both “refer [...] us [...] to human action, to the act
of fashioning, forming, or inventing” (Primate 3f). The difference lies in
their tense: “the word fiction is an active form, referring to a present act
of fashioning, while fact is a descendant of a past participle […]. A fact
seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always
inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashioning of life” (3f). If a
fact never was a neutral representation but a thing actively fashioned
(Galilei constructed his inclined plane and polished his balls, as Stengers
points out), and more so, if the idea that it could be a neutral representation
itself testifies of the success of the Galilean event, of making the author
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126 Melanie Sehgal

of the experimental dispositive disappear in order to become a “modest

witness” (Haraway, Modest Witness) of nature speaking through it, then
philosophy too displays a form of scientism if it pretends to be a neutral
representation of how things simply are. This is why, for Stengers, phi-
losophy necessarily is a particular form of fiction, “of fashioning, forming,
or inventing, as well as […] feigning” (Haraway, Primate 3), rather than a
representation of the “thing done.” It is an act of fabulation.
Drawing on the literary genre of science fiction, Stengers describes
fiction as “that which allows us to be transported into another time,
another place, to experiment with how it feels to become someone else,
a princess, a drug-addict, a banker, a dinosaur or an ant” (La Vierge 176,
translation M. Savransky). But even fiction in this classical sense is not
“just a fiction,” with no relevance to the world. In the words of science-
fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, fiction writers “desire the truth” too (3)
– “But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in
inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist
or occur (…) and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies,
they say, There! That’s the truth!” (3) But this truth is a very particular one,
because it doesn’t refer to completed matters of fact, but to an exploration
of potentials in becoming. What is true of fiction at large, Stengers makes
out to be particularly highlighted by science fiction:
Contrary to futurology, or even anticipation (…), SF is never wrong,
just more or less interesting, because it is not about the future (or the
past, or “another world”) but about intervals, about what lurks in the
interstices of the assigned signification of each moment as preparing for
the next. It is about our own epoch’s possibility of “changing planes,”
not by escaping the present but by suspending the continuity of self-
answering problems (if-then), whatever their register (including the
critical or demystifying ones), and exploring the virtual halo of the
questions and speculations this particular epoch makes us capable of.
(“Science Fiction” 9)
Philosophy, as Stengers understands it, operates in such an ‘SF mode’
too. It is neither “just fiction” nor simply “the truth as a matter of fact”
but what Stengers calls a “fabulation”:
Fabulating, relating otherwise, is not breaking with ‘reality’ but seek-
ing to render perceptible, to make one think and feel, aspects of this
reality that are usually taken as mere accessories. […] The stakes of the
kind of fabulation I propose concern the creation of a different way of
perceiving, of being affected, and of being frightened. (La Vierge 167,
translation M. Savransky)
Conceiving philosophy as fabulation, then, doesn’t mean giving
up on the notion of truth, but implies a situated and pragmatist notion
of truth according to which truth is never given and simply found but
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must be carefully constructed, taking into account the “milieu” in which

it is constructed and the way in which this milieu is in turn affected. As
Stengers, taking up Gilles Deleuze’s formulation, never tires of empha-
sizing, it is about affirming not the relativity of truth, but the truth of
the relative (La Vierge 181f). Rather than hoping for a neutral description
that merely represents (and thereby affirms) what already is, “an openly
constructivist approach […] affirms the possible, [it] actively resists the
plausible and the probable targeted by approaches that claim to be neu-
tral” (Cosmopolitics 57).
This not only is, in Donna Haraway’s words, a plea for “situated
knowledges,” that is, knowledges that are able to account for their “radical
historical contingency” as well as their own “’semiotic technologies’ for
making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of
a ‘real’ world” (“Situated Knowledges” 579), it is also accounting for the
aesthetic nature of philosophy itself, countering modern habits of thought
which strictly distinguish between objective knowledge produced in the
sciences, subjective perspectives developed in the arts and the humanities.
One could say, then, that the diagnosis of a bifurcation of the concept of
nature is an example of such fabulation. If it is speculative as much as it
might be historical, it is so purposefully, following the plea for “a register
of intervention that explicitly affirms the reciprocal capture that reflects
and brings about any point of view recognized as pertinent” (Cosmopolitics
57). It is about telling the story of what happened to us otherwise and in
view of different forms of becoming.
In concluding, I would then like to suggest that the generalization
of aesthetic concerns that I have described with Whitehead and Guattari,
manifests in Stengers own work in an inherently pragmatist way, under-
stood in the sense of William James. For James, the pragmatic “primacy
of practice” was not about giving primacy to practice in distinction from
theory, but refers to the practice of the philosopher, thereby conferring
theoretical significance to that practice itself. In Stengers’s case, this means
that her entire practice can be described as an aesthetic one, aimed not at
representing a world of matters-of-facts, but at writing in view of what
this world, a situation, might become capable of. Philosophy in the SF
mode, as aesthetic fabulation, works in a performative rather than repre-
sentational way, inventing lures for feeling in view of different kinds of
becoming. Aesthetic concerns are crucial for such an endeavor: changing
habits of thought requires and presupposes changes in habits of feeling. It
is in this sense that one could say that – contrary to a seeming absence of
aesthetic concerns – for Stengers, too, aesthetics becomes first philosophy.
European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)
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128 Melanie Sehgal

Notes
1. “On voit l’ironie de cette étiquette d’esthécien que lui attribuent ceux pour qui le nome de Souriau
n’est pas tout simplement inconnue“ (9) .
2. This might be true for most post-Kantian aesthetics. Through the perspective developed
here, these attempts might have failed precisely because fundamental assumptions have
not been called into question.
3. I use the term ‘experience’ in the Jamesian sense of a pure, not yet human experience
(1976).
4. The term ‘civilization’ is here employed in a technical sense as developed by Whitehead
in Modes of Thought. It refers to the fact and the way in which “notions of large (…)
generality” are entertained. These notions are not necessarily explicitly held; rather, they
form habits of mind. The concept of civilization, then, refers to a kind of metaphysics,
a metaphysics that remains implicit but nevertheless is dominant in a certain epoch.
Against this backdrop, the bifurcation of nature can be regarded as largely shaping the
metaphysics of modernity, despite the predominance of an anti-metaphysical stance
within modern thought (cf. Sehgal 2012 and 2016). As the habit of letting nature bifurcate
leads to metaphysical concepts which privilege certain experiences as ‘really real,’ that
is, concepts that are not wide enough to include all kinds of experiences, viewed from
this perspective, modern thought is ‘uncivilized’ – its concepts are not sufficiently wide
to include experience in its entirety and, in consequence, it explains experiences away.
5. Against the backdrop of what I have developed so far, giving and finding examples
within contemporary aesthetic practices is actually more complicated than it might seem
at first because by being contemporary, they are necessarily inscribed in the modern
aesthetic paradigm. Therefore, it might be easier to begin with examples outside of what
is currently recognized as the realm of the aesthetic. Spiritual practices come to the fore
here because they are very clearly directed at cultivating and widening experience and
it then seems to be no coincidence that Stengers has engaged with spiritual practices
throughout her work (see, for example, La Vierge).
6. This quotation shows that locating value within each event for its own sake does not
mean positive or negative judgment is inherent to the event too. The question of value
is precisely distinguished from judgment, which can only come after the fact.
7. James describes such a radical empiricism in this way: “To be radical, an empiricism
must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced,
nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy,
the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any
kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ›real‹ as anything else in the system“
(Essays 22).
8. Whitehead makes this generalization of aesthetic concerns very explicit in an exchange
with John Dewey, the pragmatist that most directly addressed and included questions of
aesthetics: “My own belief is that at present the most fruitful, because the most neglected,
starting point is that section of value-theory which we term aesthetics” (“Remarks”).
9. “The generic notion does not authorize any definition. It suggests a way of addressing
a situation whose eventual achievement will be the relevance of the questions to which
it gives rise. Generalities in the logical sense authorize classifications, with each par-
ticular case, exemplifying the general characteristic that defines the class. Whiteheadian
philosophical generalities, and the notions he calls ‚generic’, make the wager that the
questions to which they well give rise will shed light on features that are important for
each situation“ (Stengers, Thinking 19).
10. On Whitehead’s technical notion of importance, see Whitehead, Modes of Thought and
Sehgal’s Eine situierte Metaphysik; on the notion of relevance, see Savransky, The Adventure
of Relevance.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


Works Cited
Bellacasa, María Puig de la. “Ethical Doings in Naturecultures.” Ethics, Place & Environment,
vol. 13, no. 2, 1 June 2010, pp. 151–69.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Penguin, 2005.
Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Indiana UP, 1995.
Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouseTM:
Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge, 1997.
---. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1989.
---. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, 1988, pp. 575–99.
James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism, Vol. 3. The Works of William James, Harvard
UP, 1976.
---. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2. The Works of William James, Harvard UP, 1981.
LeGuin, Ursula K. Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. 1969. Ace, 1976.
Savransky, Martin. The Adventure of Relevance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
---. “Modes of Mattering: Barad, Whitehead, and Societies.” Quantum Possiblities: The Work of
Karen Barad, edited by Karin Sellberg and Peta Hinton, special issue of Rhizomes: Cultural
Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 30, 2016.
Sehgal, Melanie. “A Situated Metaphysics: Reading Whitehead on Things and History.” The
Allure of Things, edited by Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey, Continuum, 2012.
---. Eine situierte Metaphysik: Empirismus und Spekulation bei William James und Alfred North
Whitehead. Konstanz UP, 2016.
Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. MIT, 2009.
Souriau, Étienne. The Different Modes of Existence: Followed by On the Work To-Be-Made. Intro-
duction by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, Univocal, 2015.
Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics (Posthumanities). University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
---. The Invention of Modern Science. Translated by Daniel W. Smith, University of Minnesota
Press, 2000.
---. “Science Fiction to Science Studies.” Unpublished manuscript, 2016.
---. Thinking with Whitehead. Harvard UP, 2011.
---. La Vierge et Le Neutrino: Les Scientifiques Dans La Tourmente. Les Empecheurs de Penser
en Rond, 2006.
Stengers, Isabelle, and Bruno Latour. “Le Sphinx de L’Oeuvre.” Les Différents Modes
d’Existences, PUF, 2009.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature. Prometheus, 2004.
---. Modes of Thought. Cambridge UP, 1938.
---. “Remarks.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 46, no. 2, March 1937.
---. Science and the Modern World. Free Press, 1967.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Relearning the Art of Paying Attention:

A Conversation
Martin Savransky & Isabelle Stengers
I. Philosophy as a Provocation of Thought
Martin Savransky (MS): The first question I wanted to ask you has to do with
the manner in which you do philosophy, in the sense that the concepts that you
create, develop and experiment with, always resist the temptation to tell others
what to do. In fact, at the very beginning of your “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”
(994), you begin with a question that I think resonates with this. You write: “How
can we present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to
provoke thought?” So what I wanted to ask you is, how would you characterize
the importance of this challenge of creating concepts that provoke thought, rather
than instruct others on how to think?
Isabelle Stengers (IS): Well, probably you never know why you do
what you do as you do it. I mean, it may be that others are better placed
to answer this. But to me, this cannot be disentangled from the reason I
did become something called “a philosopher.” In fact, at the beginning, I
did not even know about philosophy. When I left chemistry, I knew that
in chemistry there were “good questions,” concerned with advancing
knowledge, and any other question would not be considered serious.
And to me, philosophy was just the place where I could learn to craft my
own questioning path, a place where nobody could tell me “but this is
not philosophy!” just as I had been told “but this is not science!”
Now, the wish to craft your own path may be very dangerous if you
entertain the ambition to instruct others! It is all the more dangerous if, as
an ex-scientist, you feel that you have a “mission,” that what you are to
craft is what is lacking either to scientists or to philosophers, or even to
both. Happily, I rather felt as a “refugee” having to learn what my new
country enabled me to become. And it is when I discovered the texts of
Deleuze, first, and then of Whitehead, that I experienced questions that
provoke thought rather than demand answers; or, in other words, that I
experienced philosophy as an adventure that I did not know existed. It
was no longer a matter of asking “my questions” but of engaging with

130 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
A Conversation 131
questions that get me. [Laughs.] And my loyalty as a philosopher is to

such questions.
So, if I dislike it when the concepts I create end up being used with
a kind of authority that makes them an answer without the insistence of
a thought-provoking question, it’s simply because the reason I became a
philosopher was precisely to resist that! [Laughs.] This is also the reason
why I don’t usually spend a lot of my time criticizing others, because that
is still to engage in a certain kind of authoritative gesture. You cannot
criticize such ways of doing philosophy without, in fact, entering into
the same kind of game. For me, it is better to just avoid them. Or else, to
attack, but then it is because you feel something ugly is entering the world
and you need to put this threatening ugliness into words. For instance,
I feel that there is something ugly in the current Anthropocene fashion,
when suddenly the trouble with the climate is turned into an academic
opportunity.
But mostly, I try to never separate a proposition from the problem-
atic path from which it resulted, situating it in an open-ended story, not
concluding it. In a way, I am continuing an experience I had when I was
very young. I always felt stories were too short, or too poor. What happens
then? The first response was to feel sad, alone in an environment that was
too easily satisfied. But now I ask: who is killing those stories? How do
they kill them? In this way, you may criticize the operation of authority
but from the point of view of what it is doing. So, it is a pragmatics of
making stories more risky, interesting, shareable, of producing effects
which you cannot dominate but you can learn with and learn from. Very
strangely, the term “learning,” learning with or from, is not so common
in philosophy. I would never say I’ve read Kant in such a way that I can
state this with any authority, but I don’t think “learning” is a word he
uses a lot. [Laughs.]
Thus, an instruction is always a story cut too short. The kinds of
concepts I learned from Deleuze or Whitehead are not a matter of instruc-
tion. They cannot be cut in the format of a discursive argument you have
to master. Learning in this case means being provoked into thinking,
and if this is not what you experience, it is better to leave them alone.
Maybe you will encounter them again later. In this sense, I loved Donna
Haraway’s idea of “cat-cradling,” which means that you are activated by
someone or something into intervening, and produce a motif that is a bit
different – even if you do not necessarily wish it to be different – because if
you were just repeating the same points then you would not be activated,
you would just be satisfied. Cat-cradling is, for instance, what I have
been doing with Bruno [Latour] for a long time, and what Haraway has
taught me to name. I think it is the kind of “working together” which is
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

132 Martin Savransky & Isabelle Stengers
adequate to philosophy, and which is also deeply different from science

or any other practice, because there is no referee that can intervene in
that game without also cat-cradling with it! [Laughs.] Whitehead wrote
that Western philosophy may be understood as a series of footnotes to
Plato. An ongoing set of footnotes upon footnotes, indifferent to the will
of some philosophers to close the series. The only way to close it is to kill
it, to try and fix the metamorphic aptitude of concepts which are ongo-
ingly transformed by the feeling and thinking they themselves transform.
II. Cat-Cradling with Truths, or, The Speculative Gesture
MS: It occurs to me that one of the threads through which you have pursued
this metamorphic ability of concepts relates to the particular way in which you
address the question of truth. For instance, you wrote recently that to cultivate
a “humor of truth” is to come to terms with the sense that “if it is not in our
power to access the truth of our reasons, it is also not in our power to condemn
as a mere artifice the efficacy that supposes and simultaneously intensifies the
capacity that, for Leibniz, makes us into rational souls – the capacity to expose
our reasons, to put them to the test of that from which they have been abstracted”
(Stengers, “L’insistance” 10). Would you say that it is perhaps here, with this
humor of truth, that the question “What is philosophy?” might connect with the
pragmatic question of effects, a kind of cat-cradling with consequences?
IS: In one way or another, philosophy is embarked with the question of

truth. Or more precisely, it has to respond for unleashing this question,
a question I do not think we can put back into the bottle, but only try to
civilize. Post-modernism and post-humanism are not the ways to do it,
nor is any other “post,” again and again bringing with it a very classical
“we now know better, and too bad for the naïve, backward people who
still ‘believe’ in….” This is the consequence of most academic “turns,” the
cheapest kind of truth, just good for the academic market. The humor of
truth is not cheap because it means caring not to add to the devastation
that comes with the idea of an equivalence between truth and the defeat
of illusion. It is the lesson I learned on the occasion of the so-called Science
Wars, and the devastating avalanche of aggressive stupidities it triggered.
The humor of truth is a situated art, an art of the artifice, which cannot but
frustrate truth-warriors. Its ancestor is indeed Leibniz, who was accused
by his countrymen of not really believing in anything (“Herr Leibniz glaubt
nichts”). The compass of Leibniz, which is also James and Whitehead’s
compass, is the trust that wars mobilizing in the name of truth demand
the kind of simplifications which arm contradictions. Demobilizing truth
has nothing “post” about it. It rather calls for adding to the issue a dimen-
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

A Conversation 133
sion which will not bring peace but will disentangle a conflict from its
relation with truth-claims. As Haraway would say, we have to side with
some ways of living and dying and not others. This may well be the case
today more than ever. But we do not need to turn this engagement into
a crusade, thereby keeping the issue simplified, which means also to
prosecute as traitors those who would complicate it. So, indeed, what I
resist is those sad generalities where you are always right, and each time
you’re right, the world is poorer. In this sense, it is a pragmatic, and it is
a pragmatic of what we demand from what we call “truth.”
MS: Yes, a pragmatic of truth, and perhaps also an intervention in the cat-cradling
that truths themselves weave together with the present. This is also at the core of
what you understand by “speculation,” is it not?
IS: Exactly! The weaving together of truths with the present is a beautiful
way of saying that if you are able to add a dimension to a situation, it is
because you are not the author of the addition. The motif you weave is
what the present enables you to add to the truths you intervene upon.
While cat-cradling with Haraway in a French context, she added “Soin des
Ficelles” (care for the threads) to her SF series (science fiction, speculative
fabulation, scientific fact, string figures, speculative feminism…). To me
it means, “do not cut the threads”– honor the way you are indebted in
order to escape the triumphalist ring of truth. We do not need to judge
away the past as if what we are adding to it would somehow be what it
was missing. We have to inherit it together with the possible it conveyed,
to make it denser and more indeterminate in order to inhabit a thicker,
ongoing present. One of the worst academic habits is the remark that
somebody else has already produced something similar to what you are
proposing. Well, one would hope so! But instead of stopping at the trium-
phant effect of recognition, what would be more interesting is to comment
(in the sense of thinking-with) on the insistence of what is trying again
to become audible – the changing accent it has acquired, the present-day
situation it connects with. For instance, nothing is more stupid than all
those philosophers who “recognize” the current proposition by Bruno
Latour about modes of existence and their instauration as the return of
Wittgenstein all over again. This is to not take care of the thread, because
it does not lead to enriching Wittgenstein, to problematizing him. What
if instead you were to imagine Wittgenstein reading Etienne Souriau, the
philosopher of instauration?
As for speculation, I indeed take the word as related to a way of
thinking which challenges business-as-usual explanatory frameworks.
I take it, that is, as a mode of thought which endeavors to activate what
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

might be possible against the safety of probability. Speculation comes from

Latin – speculators were spies, or scouts, or guards on a watchtower – not
a contemplative activity but one of the lookout, of resisting reassuring
appearances, not in order to go “beyond appearances,” or to escape il-
lusion, but because such appearances rely on the confidence that what
has mattered will go on mattering in the same way, which is what makes
probability calculus possible.
MS: So this indeed suggests that what you associate with speculation bears little
resemblance to what often goes by that name today, right? I mean, there is surely
a common enemy in Kant, but that doesn’t make you partners.
IS: Not at all. I am not haunted by the need to overcome, one way or
another, Kant’s subject/object division, or his philosophy of finitude. I
rather inherited Whitehead’s speculative proposition as an exercise for
the imagination, an exercise actively separating what seems to be given
from any explanation or definition which would give it a supplementary
stability or authority. For instance, at the beginning of Thinking with White-
head, I associate speculative thought with the story of the twelfth camel,
which makes peace possible when war between brothers seems the logi-
cal outcome of the father’s last will. The camel, added to the eleven ones
to be shared, will not itself be shared but it makes the sharing operation
possible. This operation had an implicit undetermined dimension which,
if taken for granted, would have led to war. In the same way, conceptual
wars are fought between objective causality and free subjectivity (includ-
ing alienated one because alienation means the possibility of freedom),
but causality has an undetermined dimension too, which belongs to the
question “how does a cause cause?” Whitehead speculation gives to the
“how” a pivotal role all the way down – any coming into existence has
to determine how it will have been caused. Thus, the double powers of
sovereign freedom and causal determination crumble together. So, what
I learned from Whitehead was not some speculative vision, but rather a
speculative gesture demanding not to stay with a problem as it is usually
formulated, but as calling for the addition of relevant dimensions. The
camel’s story may be misleading here. The point is not to solve the prob-
lem, but to make it more interesting. To produce a new appetite for what
may be possible. Now the call for “speculating” after and in spite of Kant
is all over the place, and I don’t feel connected at all with this. I’ve learned
from Whitehead how to let Kant rest in peace, and instead remember that
it was during the eighteenth century that the first “speculative bubbles”
exploded. When Kant says that it is better to have a hundred Thalers in
your pocket than to have the idea of them, perhaps he was also thinking
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

A Conversation 135
also about such crashes. Thus, to claim speculation for philosophy is to

claim it as something whose relation with truth is complicated, non-
innocent, with nothing natural about it. Just like the relation between
speculation and making a living in an honest way, with an honest wage,
is complicated. To me, it matters that philosophy not be confused with
moral, honest, correct thought. To try and think with the consequences is
to accept non-innocence, all the more so as claiming innocence comes to
ratify the silencing of those who will bear the consequences.
MS: This is also perhaps another dimension of associating philosophy with a

“craft,” in the sense that it is no longer a matter of stepping back and contem-
plating from without, but about situating it – philosophy has to go out and play
in the mud.
IS: Yes indeed. At least you cannot just dream of innocent truths! I mean,
we cannot. There are many epochs and meanings of philosophy – the
meaning for Plato, for medieval theology, and so on – each time it is a
new throw of the dice. So, each time there are new threads connecting
and complicating the game. But I think that modern philosophy, being
contemporary to colonization, to witch-hunting, to so many eradications,
cannot dream of innocent truths. Philosophers may be tempted, but I
would say we cannot afford that any longer. We need what Haraway
would call “response-ability.” We cannot play the innocent and produce
conceptual ideals warranting our innocence. Accepting that we are in
the mud means that living is dangerous, and thinking is dangerous. So,
indeed, speculation may be dangerous! [Laughs.]
III. Relearning the Art of Paying Attention
MS: And is this where the importance of the art of paying attention comes in?
In your In Catastrophic Times, you suggest that “[w]hat we have been ordered
to forget is not the capacity to pay attention, but the art of paying attention. If
there is an art, and not just a capacity, this is because it is a matter of learning
and cultivating, that is to say, making ourselves pay attention [faire attention]”
(62). Doing a bit of cat-cradling with this myself, I was struck by the fact that
there seems to be a very interesting thread connecting “paying attention,” or
“heeding,” and its etymological association with “providing shelter.” As if it was
indeed, perhaps, an art of constructing shelters where the logic of stability and
scalability would allow for none…
IS: Yes, yes, it is all the more relevant if one takes into account Anna Ts-
ing’s – to whom I owe the scalability idea – pointing to the destruction of
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

ecological refuges as what may contrast the Holocene with this damned
Anthropocene. After devastations, refuges were the starting point for
regeneration, or resurgence, not coming back to the past but connecting
threads again. Today the world is full of refugees, but there are no longer
any refuges. To come back to my case, today I would not find a refuge in
a philosophy department. “You intend to learn? But what do you think!
You have to arm yourself for the competition with your colleagues about
subjects liable to be published international journals.” It is everywhere the
same, a general mobilization for the war of all against all. Thus refugees
become a burden we can no longer afford.
The art of paying attention also connects with something Whitehead
(16) takes from unnamed sources, that is, the Cromwell cry: “My breth-
ren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be
mistaken.” The cry is probably echoed by the Whitehead who read Wil-
liam James, and it communicates with an immanent art, because there is
no answer to the question “to what should we pay attention? And with
what consequences? What are the dangers?” Paying attention means
slowing down and accepting that intrusive interstices open up even in
the midst of an urgency. For Whitehead, life itself lurks in the interstices
of our reasons. Sheltering what lurks is not claiming that the reasons are
bad; this is not what Cromwell cries. Rather, it is wondering that maybe
something has been muted, that we need a suspension to entertain the
possibility to throw the dice again. I call it an art because it needs a ritual
in order to foster this possibility. And this is very interesting when we
do it well and with joy. This is not about being critical or reflexive, this
is not about looking for an imperfection, about playing with arguments.
It is just creating the occasion – a rather Quaker art, to “bethink,” to pay
attention to what may lurk.
To me it is important that it be an art, and not the manifestation of
an imperfection. Perhaps the initial idea or reasons were indeed quite
good, but maybe there is something more important! [Laughs.] This does
not mean that everything will ever be taken into account, that attention
should be paid to everything. There is also no guarantee that what will
be obtained will be better. It is a matter of a cultivation of our reasons, of
feeling together both what they do to the situation and the fact that they
do not demand our submission. I remember an occasion, when I was
the president of a commission asked to award a price to the best science
documentary film, and we proceeded as usual, each listing our own ap-
preciations individually and then summing them up to produce the list
of winners. I then asked the others, “Are you satisfied?” Nobody was
satisfied! [Laughs.] So we shredded the pieces of paper and I said, “Now
we can talk!” But I could not have said it before people had understood,
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A Conversation 137
as did I together with them, that the list resulting from the summing
up was meaningless. It was neither bad nor good; it was meaningless.
Talking together had to happen as a second step, or people would have
rejected it. But when we did talk together, a strange and joyful trust had
been obtained, and we agreed on a list which made sense for all of us.
This was improvised but it points to the need for rituals. Talking together
is not “normal,” it must be achieved.
IV. Problematic Trajectories
MS: Speaking of cultivating reasons and developing problems, how would you
characterize the development of the problems that your own work has opened up?
How do you see your own work transitioning?
IS: I think that there may have been a double, but coupled, transition.
One of the transitions was probably marked by the unleashing in the
media of the Science Wars. In fact, at the very beginning of The Invention
of Modern Science, which I wrote in 1993, I anticipated the possibility of
such a confrontation. If only the critics had proposed that science was
a practice among others! It would have opened the question of what is
proper to each practice. But no, they had to claim that it is a practice like
any other, which implied that they already knew how to define a practice.
I had already discussed this issue a lot with Bruno Latour, but he did not
see the point. He would answer, “No, no, scientists are on our side. It’s
only epistemologists who are the problem.” Indeed, he never wished to
insult scientists. For him metaphors or constructions were positive – not
critical – characterizations. But what I knew was that for experimenters
the very point is to be able to claim that what they propose is not only a
metaphor. Bruno privileged terms like enrolling, or recruiting, because
it could be used both for humans and for non-humans. The issue is that,
for those experimenters, recruiting humans is easy, while experimentally
recruiting microorganisms is an event! So, one of the themes of The Inven-
tion of Modern Science is the theme of the event as opposed to the general
epistemological question. It happens that in a lab, a non-human may
be enrolled as a “reliable witness” in an argument. But this reliability is
a matter of collective concern – this is what Latour now proposes and
could be endorsed by scientists! The event which makes for the specific-
ity of experimental practices is the possibility to claim that no competent
colleague’s objection has succeeded in defeating the claim, in proposing
alternatives showing that the so-called witness may betray its role.
But when the Science Wars really happened, the level of stupidity
and nastiness was overwhelming. I remember that one of the papers I
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

wrote was concerned with the question: “What about peace?” What I
attempted was to address this question in terms of a peace that was not
just a leveling of differences, but a matter of creation. The point was no
longer science as such but what I called “practices” in a speculative sense.
Because no peace was possible if practitioners did not accept presenting
themselves together with what matters for their practice. This is specu-
lation indeed because it supposes that practitioners accept letting go of
any general reference – like rationality or objectivity or human progress,
which indeed makes them stupid and arrogant – that they present the very
specific and demanding character of what matters for them, of what they
count as an achievement. This is the very gist of the idea of an ecology
of practices. In turn, what I call a practice is not a matter-of-fact socio-
epistemological category. Many so-called sciences are unable to give up
such general references. Thus, together with the concept of practice, what
I was envisaging was the possibility of different alliances between critics
and scientists who would openly refuse the opposition between “objec-
tive science” and “subjective opinion.” Not a frontal clash, rather an acid
attack dissolving amalgams. I would say that I don’t know what difference
such alliances can make but I think they would make a difference. They
may make a difference, for example, regarding those who would judge
the destruction of scientific practices as ‘well deserved’ because they un-
derstand sciences as a mere tool for industrial development and the state.
And this may be my second transition. Because of some students
of mine, I was recruited to an anti-GMO demonstration which ended
up in court. A bit like the actual Sciences Wars, it activated my imagina-
tion about consequences – here the consequence of what is called the
“knowledge economy.” Practices, as I defined them, may be destroyed,
and the knowledge economy means the systematic, ongoing destruction
of practices. I had to resist the acceptance by some of these activists that
sciences are, by definition, serving capitalism, because accepting it would
mean that the enslaving of sciences by the knowledge economy was in fact
not destroying anything, just dispelling an illusion – that sciences were
always slaves. I came to insist that we should never accept any destruc-
tion by capitalism as well deserved. So, what are the consequences this
makes? Again, I cannot define them. But it means resisting Marxism when
it claims that such destructions open the way to socialism. Here I set out
to engage with Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, and began to try and
learn to think to re-situate the question of peace, but from the point of
view of devastation. Ours is a devastated world. About the same time,
I also read the neo-pagan witch Starhawk. So when we wrote Capitalist
Sorcery, it was really about that, I mean, the need to learn how to collec-
tively protect ourselves from this devastating machine.
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A Conversation 139
There are then two steps: the notion of “practice” was related to this
peace to be created, and then this connected to the sense that in capitalist
times, peace could hardly be thought. It was also the beginning of the
time when activists claiming that another world is possible reclaimed the
struggle that so many militants had deserted. For me it was important
to think with activists, while I had kept my distances from militants, for
whom my way of thinking was rather the enemy, a “petit bourgeois” de-
mobilizing approach. The very definition of mobilization, be it military
or militant, is to pay no attention, to classify what may slow down as an
obstacle. Activists, by contrast, were interested in transversal alliances. To
propose an escape from the general denunciation of objectivity could open
the possibility of such alliances. In that sense, the GMO event was very
important because there were scientists who were siding with activists,
adding their own charges against GMOs to the others without hierarchy.
If I speak of an event, it is because all protagonists became more intelligent
because of the others, together with others, all actively learning about the
kind of world we live in. This is one of the reasons why it made experts
hesitate and stammer. They were unable to claim that those resisting
GMOs were simply resisting progress. And the event is not over. Now
I would say that I feel that I am curiously thinking together with many
others, sharing a common sense of what might be possible and the need
for what Haraway calls new narratives corroding the ones which divided
us. I would say that as a philosopher I now present myself in a double
way– as a child of Seattle, connected with the witches, and a child of the
GMO event!
V. We Have Been Devoured! On Civilizing Modern Practices
MS: Would you say this is the milieu out of which your proposition to civilize
modern practices emerges?
IS: I would rather say that the proposition of civilizing modern practices
has now acquired new resonances. First, with this idea that you cannot
civilize a dead practice! [Laughs.] It connects with themes like resurgence,
regeneration, but also mourning – themes which belong to our epoch, the
time of what is called the sixth extinction. But second, we now inhabit
new intellectual and affective landscapes where one cannot simply take
“civilization” for granted, as Whitehead, for instance, did, even if it was
the decline of this civilization that haunted him. It is a bit like Bruno La-
tour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence: he speculates about the possibility of
civilizing our attachments, that is, of leaving room for others; something
we never could do – we just “tolerated” them. And he trusts that maybe
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

others will accept us as protagonists if we come speaking well of what

we are attached to. I understand that because I do not think we can do
anything else. We cannot know better than the others what they need, and
so on. We can only try to understand how stupid and arrogant we have
been! But I also think we have to go a bit further. The story we have to
learn to tell about ourselves is not only a story which could satisfy us, but a
story that might have a chance of interesting them. And this is what I have
tried to learn from Tobie Nathan, as well as from Whitehead. Whitehead
wrote about the power of ideas to animate our souls as Plato’s great gift;
we could even say, as the gift that made us human. What if we accepted to
take it literally, as Nathan would propose, and recognized that what, since
Plato, we call ideas, were indeed beings, and beings of a new kind? What
if the notion that “we are all humans” was indeed such an idea, making
us a people among others, the “people of ideas?” The point then would be
that, if I follow Nathan, other peoples know that those beings that make
you a people ought to be honored, “fed,” or else they will devour you.
Taking ideas as something “cognitive,” we instead honored ourselves as
capable of explaining and judging what matters to others, and allowed
ourselves the power to authenticate our ideas as true and rational! Per-
haps to say “We have been devoured!” might be of interest to others. We
have been devoured, not because we are who we are, but rather because
the kinds of beings who made us who we are, are particularly dangerous
beings, able to have us forget them, or take them for granted. Whitehead
also remarked that after Plato wrote The Symposium, where he tells about
ideas’ power to inspire us, he should have written another piece, The Furies,
about what is unleashed when Ideas are not well received. In this sense,
“cosmopolitics” was already haunted by the danger of our goodwill, of
our trust that if we get civilized, the others will accept our invitation to
think together. The figure of the diplomat was born from this danger.
The point is not to feel guilty but to keep remembering that we need to
“humor” our ideas, to foster and nurture them, but never to blindly trust
them. Which is also to say, we need to learn fright concerning what they
may induce us into accepting.

MS: This recognition of having been devoured, and of relearning how to share,
with others, the fright that those modern ideas and explanations induce, is where
your work also makes interesting connections with current debates among an-
thropologists like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philipe Descola. How do you
situate yourself in relation to those debates?
IS: Well, Viveiros de Castro’s idea that the task of anthropology is to de-
colonize thought is a good way of relating to the choice that contemporary
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A Conversation 141
witches created for me – do I accept the lineage of the witch hunter or

that of the witches? This plays out not in historical terms but in those of
today – learning to recognize the effect of the witch-hunter, learning to
recognize the censorship, that in this world where thinkers seem to benefit
from a universal right to critique, it is only on condition that they play
the game of critique. This a dangerous place when you may be accused
of being a dupe – then, as Starhawk writes, you can feel the smoke of
the burning times in your nostrils. Obviously witch hunters are part of
the past, but we, academics, know very well the strict conditions of our
so-called freedom. We are allowed to critique whatever we feel like, as
long as we conform to the “they believe/we know” master contrast. This
is why Viveiros de Castro’s proposition about taking seriously animism
exposes him to academic malevolence, while I do not think Descola’s
quadri-partitioning puts him at risk. Certainly “naturalism,” that is, the
way “we moderns” are thinking, is only one subset, but, as he himself
recognizes, only a naturalist could propose such a partitioning. So we
are safe – naturalism defining the whole landscape! We are still the ones
whose problem is to define the others. Our historical position is preserved.
I am not an anthropologist. My problem, as a philosopher, is to
detoxify our tradition; feeling the smoke is learning to pay attention to
the way ideas get us. In this sense, I would say that I really love What
Is Philosophy? by Deleuze and Guattari because the power of ideas is
characterized in a quasi-ethological way, and so is the metamorphosis of
thought they cause and the danger associated with this metamorphosis.
This power is what made me a philosopher, and therefore I can understand
how strange the effects are, and not be astonished that other peoples also
cultivate strange adventures. I have absolutely no appetite to produce a
philosophy of shamanism, but I am happy that shamans cultivate sha-
manism and I would wish philosophy learned to cultivate ideas in a way
that also matters. It is about understanding ourselves in a manner where
we are as strange as others. [Laughs.]
VI. The Condition of Diplomacy
MS: What role does the question of diplomacy play in relation to what you’ve
just said?
IS: I think that there is one condition for diplomacy. This is, as Bruno
Latour proposed, the difference between peace and pacification. This
is really the test for the diplomat: not to dream of pacification, not to
dream of the possibility of going beyond what divides, and of arriving
at a place where we can finally remember that we are all humans. In a
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

way, a mathematician at work is as strange as a shaman at work, and the

fact that both are humans tells us nothing about the metamorphic power
of the beings they associate with. This is why the relationship between
a physicist and a mathematician can be very complicated, and the idea
that they are all scientists or that they are all using mathematics will not
just solve it. But the complication will become toxic if they do not learn to
honor what makes them diverge from the pacifying norm. Diplomats, in
the cosmopolitical sense, are those who do not address humans in general
but humans as attached, as diverging, and they need to have protagonists
presenting themselves together with these attachments. As such, they
may also be agents of detoxification, dispelling the dream of pacification.
MS: It is interesting you would use this example because I remember you once
telling me that one of the first instances when you started thinking about the
idea of diplomacy was precisely in relation to the work that you had been doing
with Ilya Prigogine…
IS: Yes! But it was a retroactive realization. At that time, my problem was
to situate myself among Prigogine’s coworkers (and not be considered as
Prigogine’s creature!). And for that I had to not dream that they would
be better scientists if they knew a bit of philosophy. It was me who had
to learn how philosophy could be relevant in relation to scientists, and
I did not see them as lacking anything that philosophy as usual might
bring them. So, indeed, being interested in what matters to them, and
not looking for something that should matter to all of us, was a key. It
was indeed a learning experience about boundaries and about how to
exchange through boundaries. Not to cross the boundary, not to overcome
boundaries, but given the boundary, to explore what could be exchanged.
Tobie Nathan defines boundaries as zones of exchange. For him, the Cairo
of his youth was the very example of civilization, because of its constitu-
tive multiplicity, implying the need to pay attention everywhere, never to
take for granted that something should matter to all. No argumentation
but careful negotiation – this leads us back to the pragmatic care for a
non-devouring truth.
VII. Thinking Together through Boundaries
MS: That contrasts very interestingly with many current discourses on inter-
or transdisciplinarity, where it would seem that what is pursued is indeed the
dream of a pacification across disciplines, of an erasure of boundaries rather than
an exchange through them.
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A Conversation 143
IS: Yes. This erasure can be the ground for a new kind of paradigm, not
a Kuhnian one at all, which in fact corresponds to experimental selec-
tive achievements, but rather an encompassing one which institutes a
deliberate, mandatory blindness with regards to the specific demands of
relevance proper to the encompassed fields. What matters is an “it works”
which corresponds to showcases, “look what it can perform,” together
with speculative promises of technoscientific profitable innovations.
As many modern enterprises, the sciences as practices have now
learned that the kind of achievement they aimed at is not needed if
speculative promises are what matters. But it is important not to depict
them as innocent victims. I would characterize the achievements we as-
sociate with modern sciences as cases where it seemed possible to have
your cake and eat it, to claim that to do science was to understand, to
“advance” knowledge, and to create new possibilities of aligning what
was understood with what was called a development of productive
forces. What is now part of the past is the old Baconian motto “obey and
master.” Knowledge economy is about impatience, not depending on the
making of the cake. Whatever Kant thought, a speculative cake will do if
the point is to extract profit from the world. Scientists who try to resist the
destruction of their practices may wish to return to the making of honest
cakes. But they often forget that the advancement of knowledge as they
understand it cannot be disentangled from the devastation of the world.
When addressing scientists about a slowing down of science, I fight against
any nostalgia for the past. I even put into question the relation between
knowledge and advancement as a toxic.
What does advancement demand and what is then explained away?
Reading Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, I encountered
this word which I have quoted earlier and which must have intrigued
some readers of this conversation – “scalability.” She uses it to think, for
example, about the colonial mode of production of monoculture planta-
tions invented by the Portuguese in Brazil, which has meant eradicating
local inhabitants, human and non-human, and importing in this “clean”
environment both slaves and sugarcanes, which are both deprived of the
possibility of doing anything other than what they are meant to do. They
have created the first “scalable” enterprise, an enterprise proceeding in a
way that can be reproduced at all scales, its extension making no relevant
difference. Scalability for Tsing is the aim of any enterprise that aims at
working definitions impervious to encounters, contingency, conjunc-
tures, that deals with beings which “do not tell stories.” But to me this is
also the very definition presupposed by the idea of an “advancement of
knowledge”: the knowledge produced must keep its relevance whatever
the circumstances in order to make a clean contrast between before and
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

after. The privilege of scalable questions, able to escape the messiness

of situations, has different consequences in the experimental sciences
and in the social sciences, but everywhere it concurs to the devastation
of the world. Even critical thinkers contribute, when they consider that
“theory” allows them to take the wider view, impervious to people’s
dubious commitments.
But this privilege also directly communicates with the ways sci-
ences align their way of understanding with other institutions that also
privilege scalability, namely the industry and the state. From that point
of view, scientific knowledge is all but politically neutral; it can even be
said that it is an anti-democratic knowledge par excellence, which normal-
izes situations demanding that people conform to roles that are already
set for them. I’ve met this alignment so very often when a proposition,
in medicine or education or whatever, is refused because it could open
the door to something dangerous and not controllable. They will say,
“It would be a good idea but it is not a realistic one because we cannot
make the consequences of the proposition scalable, independent of the
way people engage the situation.” This to me adds a new dimension to
an older theme, that of la bêtise. There is no word to translate it in English,
but in my use, it refers to the active, nasty way in which those who feel
responsible define a situation, saying, “If only everybody was like you
and me, but they’re not like that, thus we must…”
Mobilizing for the advancement of knowledge has been the very for-
mula of the modern academic institution, which opposes not only always
backward and dangerous opinion, but also the adventure of empiricism,
what Tsing calls the “art of noticing.” Noticing would be indulging in
the observation of anecdotal features, if what is noticed does not open
the road to a scalable interpretation (see the famous “serendipity”). The
education of scientists perfectly reflects the inculcated phobic ignorance
of a “messy” world which would demobilize researchers, have them
“wasting their time” on questions which will not result in an “advance”
of their discipline. And no amount of academic trans- or interdisciplin-
ary formation can regenerate what education, selection, and evaluation
have destroyed.
While putting into question the “core business” of science as an
institution, I have chosen to keep the word “practices” as designating
commitments which may be radically non-innocent but should not be de-
fined as guilty, deserving destruction. Instead I associate modern practices
with an unknown – we do not know to what a practice may enable its
practitioners. What we do know is that, if there is a possibility of avoiding
the coming nightmare, we do not need guilty, opportunist or repentant
practitioners, but practitioners who have actively learned that, trying to
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A Conversation 145
overcome the mess, to produce scalability, their practices are liable, even
prone, to add to the mess. We need practitioners who have learned what
embracing the messiness of the world demands. To me a slowing down
of science thus means another science, betraying its constitutive connec-
tion with the constellation of “advance-growth-development-progress”
order-words, which parasites and poisons the demands of an effective
democracy, not a pastoral art of guiding a turbulent herd. In other words,
decolonizing thought, as Viveiros de Castro proposes, is needed not only
with regards to “others” but also to our own institutions, and it demands
what Whitehead associated philosophy with: the welding of common
sense and imagination, the resurgence of commoning practices which give
to an always particular – non-scalable – situation the power to have all
those for whom this situation matters in diverging ways, thinking together.
Acknowledgements
This conversation began on an exceptionally sunny day of spring in London in 2016, on
the occasion of Isabelle Stengers’s visit to Goldsmiths, University of London for a two-day
symposium on her work. Martin Savransky would like to thank the Centre for Philosophy
and Critical Thought and the Centre for Invention and Social Process (both at Goldsmiths),
for their support in making this event possible.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Verso, 1994.
Latour, Bruno. Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Harvard University Press, 2013.
Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. Capitalist Sorcery. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Plato. The Symposium. Penguin, 2005.
Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” Making Things Public, edited by Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel, MIT Press, 2005.
---. In Catastrophic Times. Open Humanities Press, 2015.
---. “L’Insistance du Possible.” Gestes Spéculatifs, edited by Didier Debaise and Isabelle
Stengers, Presses du reel, 2015.
---. The Invention of Modern Science. University of Minnesota Press.
Tsing, Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Free Press, 1967.
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Postlude
Isabelle Stengers
Reading this collection of articles is a troubling experience because,

each in their own manner, they produce something like a “portrait of a
philosopher with her problem” – to recall Gilles Deleuze’s proposition
about how to characterize the work of a philosopher. I am most grateful
to Martin Savransky and those who accepted his invitation because, in
order to obtain such a “portrait,” they needed not to stop at the obvious but
respond, each in her or his own way, to what has been a learning process
rather than the obstinate development of one ever- recurring problem.
Indeed, as many of the contributors emphasize, my work can
hardly be associated with such a development. It may rather look like an
opportunistic trajectory related to encounters and collaborations. When
questioned about this trajectory, I used to describe it as an amoeba-like
locomotion – as when a pseudopod encounters what might be food and
the whole amoeba follows, shifting its form around it. Obviously, the point
of this image is not capture and digestion, but it nevertheless refers to
sustenance. It may well be that I became the kind of philosopher whose
portrait, here proposed, cannot be separated from what I first felt as my
“personal” problem: the incapacity to feel sustained by the resources my
“milieu” provided me with.
This looks like a psychological problem – the feeling of not fitting,
the desire to be like others who seemed to be satisfied with the available
resources and would actively compete for their possession; the temptation
to just mimic them, but with the “idiotic” awkwardness which comes from
being unable to really enjoy what you wish to be satisfied with. Gilles
Deleuze’s idiot, the one who slows down where others rush, as if “there
was something more urgent, but she does not know what,” has since come
to matter for me, but the idiot is the figure of a force, a conceptual persona,
who can make you think but cannot sustain you. It may be that in another
epoch I would have fitted the psychosocial type of the Lacanian hysteric,
the one who looks for a master, only to convince him, or herself, of his im-
posture, and I might have turned into a reflexive, critical thinker. I believe
that my luck was to have effectively felt that “another life was possible,”
that maybe the lack of sustaining resources was not “my” problem but
that of the milieu, when that milieu was suddenly affected by the ripples
of the May 1968 event, but also through what I learned from the feminist
so-called second wave.

146 SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018
Postlude 147

The capacity of situated collectives to generate, as a transformative

truth, the experience that “the personal is political” was the first “pseu-
dopodal” encounter with a resource to think with, that is, to live with.
It was also my first encounter with what I would later call a practice,
with its pragmatic artificiality. In such encounters, personal experiences
were convoked but not as confessions or as indictments. They were not
to be discussed or interpreted. It is the way they made sense for others,
the way they entered into resonance with each other, that transformed
their signification, separating them from their hold, “depsychologizing”
them. Laughing together was both a challenge and the transformative
realization of the commonality of what we had experienced as our own
shameful inadequacy.
However sustaining and generative, this experience has not turned
me into a feminist militant. It may be because I was not ready to engage
in the feminist theoretical enterprise, to become an analyst of “the power”
at work beyond or behind gender differentiation. What I had encountered
was not the call to go beyond or behind. It was an experience that can only
be cultivated, not theorized. Donna Haraway has written that I embraced
“the pragmatism of witches in order to stay true to the crafts of sciences”
and, as usual, she touches on the vital point. What I have stayed true to
is the way such crafts, in spite of their epistemological theorization, are
able to transform their practitioners, to produce a form of collective intel-
ligence I had never experienced with militants. Philosophy, as I learned to
practice it, was never a militant enterprise implying that those I worked
with were lacking what, as a philosopher, I could bring to them. What I
have come to call “practices” is rather what had the power to force me
to think as a philosopher, that is, to address philosophy with the ques-
tion I had learned to ask about them – how does a practice sustain its
practitioners? But through the question of practices, what insisted to be
kept alive was the memory of the speculative unknown May ‘68 and its
continuations had activated – never accept that what is given is “normal.”
Practices, including philosophy, cannot be separated from the question –
what might belonging to a practice make their practitioners capable of?
I will not comment on each contribution, as I received them as gifts,
and as the testimony that the way I have tried to inherit the practice of
philosophy has made sense for some readers. In the following pages, I
will, rather, let myself be activated by these gifts, which are also occasions
to unfold what I now can understand about the one the portrait is about.
As Melanie Sehgal has well perceived, my work may be character-
ized as animated by an aesthetic question, but a question depending on en-
counters – when practitioners make me feel how their practice transforms
them, what it demands from them, how it makes them think, imagine and
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

148 Isabelle Stengers

hesitate. To me, contemporary neo-pagan witches are practitioners whose

political and ethical concerns are empowered by an experimental aesthetic
craft that they call magic, but magic cannot be theorized, cannot enter into
a theory of art, just as the variety of knowledge practices may (but at what
price!) enter in a theory of knowledge. That my trajectory has led me to
think with knowledge practices has no meaning transcending its amoeba-
like opportunist character. But the question of what their practice might
make those who call themselves artists capable of is today a question as
important as that which concerns scientists. My conviction is that, just
like knowledge practitioners, the question of the obligations that sustain
them will have to be disentangled from the hold of such encompassing
categories as “Science” or “Art.” We, philosophers, cannot speculate in
an “off-the-ground” manner about the way this hold may be dissolved,
because it depends on the creation of new assemblages luring new pos-
sibilities. To me, the GMO event was such a creation, the reclaiming of a
technoscientific proposition enabling people to intervene in a question
that concerned them. Hoping that Melanie Sehgal’s questions will be
activated and sustained by such long overdue events is both a personal
and a political answer.
It could be said that Haraway’s SF proposition, because of its internal
practical variety, is apt to challenge settled categories like art and science.
But I am afraid to even allude to this possibility. If I may invoke the num-
ber of invitations I have to refuse from art (and architecture) institutions,
the reference to SF practices may become some kind of a desirable status
to be acquired, and the answer to such practical questions as “what are
our obligations?”, “what makes us hesitate?” may then become a norma-
tive, programmatic self-presentation required to claim entrance into the
select club of the day’s winners. This is why I prefer to emphasize that
obligation and hesitation imply vulnerability. The most generic definition
of a practice is that it can be destroyed, and the (modern) world we have
inherited is a cemetery of destroyed practices.
Practices, as I characterized them, were meant to be a speculative
rendering of this vulnerability at the time when scientists furiously at-
tacked the deconstructive motto that the sciences are practices like any
other, claiming instead to be defenders of rationality, the only rampart
against barbarity. In other words, the notion of practice belongs to our
epoch; it is a (speculative) manner of dramatizing the ongoing devastation
that characterizes it without (maybe) falling into the trap which awaits
those who resist destruction – the way they defend themselves would
prove they are reactionary, clinging to traditions and privileges, refusing
the famous creative destruction, which, as we know, is the condition of
progress. It intends to make sensible the cry “you will destroy us” with-
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018

Postlude 149

out its usual retinue of reasons telling why this destruction would spell a
civilizational disaster. This became a refrain for me: each practice creates
its own divergence, and all are, as such, partial and non-innocent. But no
destruction can be defined as reparable or anecdotal. Each destroys a way
of worlding the world, of having the world matter.
As a way of worlding the world, practices cannot be explained by
something more general. For instance, I am not sure that the theme of
faith in the order of nature, as Mick Halewood proposes, is adequate to
characterize the practices of so-called natural scientists. It is even dan-
gerous, since it is in the name of the faith that animates them that, ever
since the end of the nineteenth century, physicists have proclaimed their
right to remain deaf to everything liable to complicate their world vision.
This is why I insist on the novelty of the practice born with Galileo’s first
achievement as distinct from the faith that it came to confirm. It is novel
both with regards to the empirical attention to details and to the philo-
sophical faith that no detail is arbitrary, that each must be seen as part of
the order of nature. Yes, the spot where a well-polished ball will touch the
ground after a well-prepared descent is a detail when compared to the
general truth that all heavy bodies fall to the ground. But not all details
matter – the ones related to the friction have been actively eliminated.
And no philosopher would ever have envisaged that turning rolling balls
into reliable, if partial, witnesses for the way their frictionless movement
may be understood, would transform Galileo into the representative of
the authority of facts with regard to the order of nature.
It may well be that “trust,” in the Jamesian sense, would be more
appropriate than “faith” for what regards practical achievements, includ-
ing that of physicists. When William James wrote about jumping from the
ground of the settled facts, of what everybody takes for granted, towards
something which we trust might come and meet our jump – for instance,
might lend itself to its enrollment as a reliable witness – he dramatically
rendered both the world-making character of practices and the absence
of warrant transcending the trust. Moreover, the precursive trust required
by the jump is not to escape the ground, to go beyond appearances. It is a
practical trust in the possibility of a new, consequential relationship, be it
in the possibility that it might be possible to determine the number of mol-
ecules in a gram of gas, or to convoke the One “who changes everything
She touches and everything She touches changes” in the rituals of witches.
Not all jumps are alike – in my book, La Vierge et le neutrino, I made
a difference bearing on the consequences of what a jump achieves. Now
that neutrinos are defined as liable to be detected, they are part of the
settled ground available for other jumps, participating in the “advance of
knowledge and technoscience,” while the Virgin towards whom pilgrims
SubStance #145, Vol. 47, no. 1, 2018


converge is never to be taken for granted. She will not manifest herself
under control and command conditions. This is why she is reputed “not to
exist” by secularists among whom are, unhappily, many social scientists. If,
as Vinciane Despret notes, we have to face here a “stupidity of our own,”
it may well be that what this stupidity feeds upon is to be thought of as
relative to their milieu, to the poisoned invasive amalgam between the
“advance” made possible by experimental practices’ achievements, and
the right of conquest of knowledge dispelling illusions. It is this milieu
contemporary anthropologists have to resist when they recognize as an
obligation of their practice not to interpret away, not to deprive others of
their authority about their own practical experience. But to “let themselves
be instructed,” they also need to trust. They need the trust required by
another kind of jump than the experimental one, accepting the so fragile,
easy-to-disregard insistence of an enigma, and the way it matters for oth-
ers, in order to leave the settled ground of what their milieus define as
“thinkable” and experience what it takes to become a “connection point.”
For me, thinking par le milieu has first of all been learning the need
to resist the temptation of giving to the indisputable “stupidity of our
own” the power of enclosing us into an identity, such as the naturalist
one proposed by Philippe Descola. This is why the reclaiming witches
matter so much to me. They situate us at a crossroads – what will be our
inheritance, that of the burned witches or that of the witch-hunters? When
neo-pagan witch Starhawk writes that the smoke of the burning times
“still hangs in our nostrils,” her intervention activates the question of our
milieu, which has classified those times, including both the witches and
the witch hunters, as belonging to a bygone past. But listening to practi-
tioners – that is, very often, given the unhealthy milieu which is theirs,
listening to their doubts and perplexity – reactivates this past, and gives
new resonances to the question of our inheritance.
This, at least, is what I began to learn working with Léon Chertok,
who had addressed a “good” question to me – not how to promote the
unfairly discredited practice of hypnosis, but rather how to understand
that which was again and again presented as a possibly decisive starting
point for a science of the psyche, only to be rejected as disappointing or
even deceptive. Or worse – and this is the deathblow – as raising the ques-
tion of their seductive power over those who let themselves be captured
by them. Hypnosis was liable to be a starting point for a decisive “advance
of knowledge,” but only if it could be a weapon, liable to “disenchant” in
one stroke the whole fascinating continent of mysterious so-called magi-
cal operations. But if the weapon did not allow to state, “It is only this or
that,” if it betrayed its function to bring rational light and dispel mysteries,
it was itself to be rejected as a false friend, censored as a dangerous lure.
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Postlude 151

Working with Léon Chertok, I have learned that humor was his an-
swer to the impossibility of turning hypnosis into a conquering weapon,
an example of what Vinciane Despret calls “ontological tact,” of the art
of taking care of that which gives to the irreducibly ambiguous hypnotic
relation its power to exist. This protected me from taking the “stupidity
of our own” as some “deep” question confronting us with the paradox
of modern identity. The heroic resistance against seductive appearances
of the descendants of the witch hunters was rather entering into strong
resonance with the diagnosis Bruno Latour has now proposed about “the
moderns.” While their course seems future-oriented, they seem quite un-
able to think with this future, or to give it the power to make them think.
They rather seem to be fleeing from some archaic monster stalking them
from behind.
My luck, learning to be a philosopher with physicists, was that I
had never met among them this kind of stupidity, this feeling of being
missioned to protect a light which is our only defense against darkness,
this fear of a world replete with dangerous luring appearances. Physicists,
from this point of view, are “innocent” – whatever the wild speculations
some of them indulge in, they do not entertain the fear of being lured
into sin. This may be why, in order to situate myself as a philosopher in
relation with these researchers, I had needed to connect with philosophers
like Gilles Deleuze or Alfred North Whitehead, who did not fear to sin
and betray their charge, who feared only – as Didier Debaise, Adam No-
cek and Martin Savransky all point to – stupidity and the anesthetizing
power of false problems; problems which, as Whitehead wrote, substitute
the question of what we can know for the question of what we do know.
False problems, as a modern specialty, situate us in the continua-
tion of the witch-hunting tradition. They both need and promote in-built
limitations and injunctions, they must obtain the restriction of thinking
inside secure borders in order then to demand submission to consequences
which parade as nec plus ultra, as inescapable alternatives. Andy Goffey
remarks the absence of any definition of “power” in my work even if
questions of power are about everywhere. Indeed the injunction to define,
to answer the “what is?” question, is often the start of false problems. For
instance, power, as related to “what we can know,” tells about suspense
and the possibility of achievement in experimental science. But as soon
as it is separated from its inventive practical requirements, it relates to
a duty that must be obeyed, at whatever the price. Who pays the price?
Cui bono? This question can never be formulated in general. It demands
that the situation be given the power to make feel, think and imagine.
Power is never innocent, certainly; it is always partial. But can we only
conceive the possibility of a world or even a situation from which it would
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be absent? Power is what Whitehead would call a “generality” – we can

never catch the actual world taking a holiday from its sway. It matters,
but thinking with the multifarious ways in which it matters will prob-
lematize any definition.
Goffey nevertheless formulates what could well be a generic
proposition about power, as “successfully infecting an environment but
depending on the patience of that environment.” In other words, power,
in this Whiteheadian sense, demands “thinking par le milieu.” The ques-
tion is not to produce some symmetry between those who wield power
and their victims, but to dramatize what could be characterized as a SF
proposition, in Haraway’s sense, dramatizing in this case the “So Far”…
So far, this way of infecting works, but never take that for granted. Never
confuse your description with a justification. It could be otherwise. You
may characterize, but beware, characters may change, not conform any
longer to their assumed role.
The positive impossibility to attribute to anything the power to
explain or to cause “by right” may well be the hallmark of Whitehead’s
metaphysics, its way of resisting modern thought’s “stupidity of its own,”
that is, the demand for a standpoint which will enable one not to be lured
into adventure but to identify and judge. In my last book (Whitehead et les
ruminations du sens commun: Civiliser la modernité?) I have come to associate
this hallmark with what linguists call the “middle voice,” when the subject
of an action is not active by right – I eat the apple – but becomes “this”
subject through the enfolding of “this” action – I let myself be seduced
into eating the apple, explains Adam, who has just discovered that his
action has made him a sinner.
Whitehead’s metaphysics aimed at disarming the old opposition
which Immanuel Kant has promoted as insuperable – either we address
the subject’s choices and action as explainable, determined by whatever
causation we will mobilize to understand it (from culture to neuronal
configurations), or we give up understanding and address the subject as
responsible for his action, as God did, remaining deaf to Adam’s claim
for mitigating circumstances. But the conceptual articulation Whitehead
designed has a positive efficacy of its own. The middle voice which this
articulation metaphysically implies is not only the very voice of what
comes into being, but this articulation (the metaphysical scheme) is de-
signed in such a way that its only truth resides in its applications. While
Gilles Deleuze could only wish that his concepts would be grasped as
tools, that they would enter into agencements that escaped him, Whitehead
effectively created concepts, or propositions, which cannot make sense if
they are not transforming the way in which a situation is apprehended,
including, that is, the thinker. They never propose a model, never induce
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Postlude 153

an act of recognition, always call for “ontological tact” – the middle voice
is the voice whereby the thinker can no longer function as a judge but is
forced to think by the situation.
When Whitehead affirmed that philosophy should never feel entitled
to exclude or explain away, neither did he promote some kind of liberal
laisser-faire or laisser-penser, a free-for-all anarchical ontology. He proposed
that philosophers accept the adventure of letting themselves be affected
and forced to think by this world, that they do not impose on it demands
ensuring their own secure position. This, at least, is the way I understand
how he became a philosopher, how he required the middle voice beyond
what is now opposed as subject- or object-oriented philosophies.
As a philosopher, I am indebted to those who, as I have retroactively
understood, have related philosophy with an art of thinking in the middle
voice; and first of all to Deleuze who made me experience for the first
time the transformative power of concepts. “The Ideal Synthesis of Differ-
ence,” in Difference and Repetition, acted as the “stone in the pond” Martin
Savransky characterizes, exciting for the first time the rippling experience
of philosophical thinking. In this chapter, the themes of the problematic,
of the dramatization of Ideas, of the question of false problems, of the
construction – or with Etienne Souriau, the instauration – of solutions,
are all present, resonating together. They activated the very regime of
thought they characterized, a witch’s flight which can only be repeated,
never appropriated or generalized, which can never authorize an inter-
pretation, but only generate propositions whose truth, as Adam Nocek
emphasizes, derives from their efficacy – lures for thought, not veridical
expression of states of affairs.
In the Abécédaire, Deleuze spoke about being on the watch (aux
aguets), attentive to what would activate him into thinking, not developing
a program. He even said that each time he embarked upon a new flight,
he would forget about his past ones, save for the Spinozist one, which, he
said, was in his heart. Each time the dice must be thrown again if what
you encounter must be given the power to make you think. A zigzagging,
opportunist trajectory, not a conquest. An apprenticeship, not a theoriza-
tion. A jump to be repeated, not a claim to be extended. But it may well
be that I needed Whitehead’s humor to begin this apprenticeship “by the
milieu,” avoiding the temptation to try and “think with” what activated
Deleuze’s thinking.
As William James noted, “jumping towards” has been censored,
and we have been intimated to stay with the “settled facts” because what
comes out of the encounter could be deeply repulsive. It might certainly
be argued that the two are interlinked, that censorship favors the mon-
strous manifestation of what it endeavors to silence. Did not Brecht write
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that we often speak of the violence of a river, but never of the violence of
the banks that confine it – here of the alliance between so-called modern
rationality and censorship? But we go round and round in circles, in the
staging of a humorless confrontation. The proud motto which Immanuel
Kant proposed for the Enlightenment, “sapere aude” – dare to know, dare to
use your own capacity of understanding – may as well be heard as “dare
to let the wild truth of the river overwhelm your securing defense,” or as
“dare to impose your own demands over its unsettling, seductive appeal.”
Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus faced that question
when they called not for wisdom but for caution as a rule immanent to
experimentations that would aim at dismantling the “organized” body.
But the aim remains to bear what is in right unbearable, an aim which,
following Whitehead’s gentle critique, may be “a bit exaggerated” or,
in other words, a bit too modern, also a bit too virile. The Roman poet
Horace, whose formula Kant hijacked, might have been surprised by this
exaggeration. His “sapere aude,” his injunction to dare, was an injunction to
“begin.” Horace wrote “Sapere aude. Incipe.” And we might also remember
that the Latin “sapere” does not only mean to know but also to taste, that
is, to accept the risk of actual encounters, encounters which may mean
sustenance but also poisoning – we live in a dangerous world, where not
all transformative encounters are generative ones. Daring to taste is then
the beginning of a cautious, relational exploration. A situated one, as the
effects are never “objectively” good or bad, but neither are they “only
subjective” either. They are related to what is at stake in the encounter.
Tasting means paying attention to the effects of this encounter on you,
not blindly undergoing them. Dare to taste and then you may become an
apprentice, learning what this encounter demands and how it transforms.
The formula “sapere aude” may then sound like a motto for our time,
when we have, to borrow Anna Tsing words, to live in the ruins and learn
to beware what presents itself as unsurpassable mesmerizing dilemmas.
We may be on thin, precarious, ice but, as Haraway wrote, “whether we
asked it or not, the pattern is in our hands: think we must.” And thinking
(that is, also tasting and imagining) we have to reclaim as a vital collec-
tive need, not as a heroic duty, as a matter of always situated, pragmatic
experimentation, not of claims and counterclaims. The experience which I
first tasted in “the personal is political” groups and which I now associate
with middle voice syntax offers one warrant only: nobody can pretend to
know what those who called themselves humans may become capable
of. It is something we can only learn with others, thanks to others and at
the risk of others – be they human or not.
Université Libre de Bruxelles
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Postlude 155

Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Éditions Montparnasse, 2004.
---. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 1978.
Stengers, Isabelle. La Vierge et le neutrino. Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2006.
---. Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun: Civiliser la modernité. Presses du Réel, 2017.
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Isabelle Stengers and The Dramatization of Philosophy

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Introduction

Isabelle Stengers and the Dramatization

“Dic cur hic”

© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc.

of the research on dissipative structures and irreversibility, and throughout

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What Has Happened to Us? The Gesture of Dramatization

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ecology of practices operates as a vector of equalization, of mise en égalité,

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demands a response “as much to what provoked her intrusion as to its

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opment of the accomplished trajectory of an individual philosopher, as

Compassionate Thought: A Collective Effort in Creative Appreciation

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so doing, he emphasizes the importance that the resounding “laughter”

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and instead learn to hesitate with them, to be instructed, “by agreeing to

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the aesthetic designates neither a theory of sensuous perception nor of

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© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and SubStance, Inc.

from Gilles Deleuze, but does so by considerably modifying its meaning

I believe this passage illustrates the demand that extends across

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As Stengers indicates in the above passage, stupidity is at the same

The Celebration of False Problems

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invention of experimental science, removed from a purely epistemological

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The contemporary scene is literally saturated with the “modern” heirs

This is not to say, of course, that the processes of contemporary dis-

Intensifying the Possible

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any evaluation between the important and the anecdotal impossible,

Flaubert’s novel, Bouvat et Pécuchet, wonderfully expresses this idea

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ence, knowledges that are ultimately indissociably entangled with the

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Thinking with Stengers

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now be read as an urgent cry. It becomes urgent as the present is shaped

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taneously requires the establishment of a different relation to the problems

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In this sense, Steve Woolgar, a sociologist of science and technology

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