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Abstract
Tis article strives to continue the lure of Whitehead’s call: that “Philosophy cannot exclude anything”. Tus speculative philosophy extends William James’s radical empiricism. Its task is to locate itself on the ground of experience in its multifariousness, and to preserve what experience makes important. But importance can never be reduced to a matter of fact. To make a situation important consists in intensifying the sense of the possible that it holds in itself and that insists in it, through struggles and claims for another way of making it exist. 13 The Insistence of Possibles: Towards a Speculative Pragmatism
DIDIER DEBAISE ISABELLE STENGERS
Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Isabelle Stengers, Professor of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, has written Recherche Scientifque (FNRS) and the Director of the Centre of Philosophy numerous books, among which the following have been published in English at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where he teaches contemporary translation: In Catastrophic Times (2015), Women who Make a Fuss (2014) philosophy. He is the co-founder, with Isabelle Stengers, of the Groupe with Vinciane Despret, Cosmopolitics I and II (2010 and 2011), Tinking with d’Études Constructivistes (GECO). His main areas of research are Whitehead (2011), Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011) with Philippe contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links Pignarre, Te Invention of Modern Science (2000), Power and Invention: between American pragmatism and French contemporary philosophy. He is Situating Science (1997), A History of Chemistry (1996) with Bernadette director of a collection at Les presses du réel, member of the editorial board Bensaude-Vincent, A Critique of Psychoanalytical Reason (1992) with Léon of the journals Multitudes and Infexions. He wrote two books on Whitehead’s Chertok, and Order out of Chaos (1984) with Ilya Prigogine. Starting with the philosophy (Un empirisme spéculatif and Le vocabulaire de Whitehead), defense of the passionate adventure of physics against its enrolment as model edited volumes on pragmatism (Vie et experimentation), on the history of of rationality and objectivity, she has developed the concept of an ecology of contemporary metaphysics (Philosophie des possessions), and he wrote numerous practices afrming a speculative constructivism in relation with the philosophy papers on Bergson, Tarde, Souriau, Simondon, and Deleuze. He has just of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and William James, and the published a new book entitled L’appât des possibles which will shortly appear in anthropology of Bruno Latour. English (Nature as event, Duke University Press, 2017). 14 PARSE JOURNAL
1. Alfred North White- PECULATIVE THINKING, as has been shown, inter alia by Eduardo head, Modes of Tought. Toronto: Macmillan. 1966 as we seek to inherit it, is Viveiros de Castro and Deborah [1938]. p. 2. expressed for the frst time, Danowski, they are the last spasms of a with the greatest accuracy, in reaction to catastrophes ahead.2 2. Danowski, Deborah and De Castro, Eduardo Alfred North Whitehead’s Viveiros. “L’Arrêt du Sexhortation “Philosophy can exclude In this context, it seems to us essential to monde”. In De l’univers 1 clos au monde infni. Emilie nothing”. A strange proposition, which, put forward a certain number of proposi- Hache (ed.). Paris: Editions while appearing to be a description of tions, which do not in any way claim to Dehors. 2014. philosophical activity in general, or of describe, and in so doing, to pin down, a
3. Tis was the title of a kind of heuristic prudence, in efect shifting scenario, but rather to highlight the symposium which denotes a deliberately polemical, violent what could in our view make necessary we organised at Cerisy in summer 2013, and which position. Te case is simple: modern that which we have called elsewhere 3 resulted in the publication philosophy has become bogged down “speculative gestures”. A proposition Gestes spéculatifs. Didier in the forms of a purifcation, of a has no descriptive vocation, much less Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (eds.). Dijon: Les reverting to principles, of a criticism of a normative one, but comes under what presses du réel. 2015. what is merely appearance, seduction or Whitehead called “Lure for Feelings”, a
4. Whitehead, Alfred North. alienation, which it believed was its own way of giving rise to possibles. Process and Reality. An Essay way of claiming to compete on at least in Cosmology. New York, NY: equal, if not superior, ground with that of Macmillan Publishing Inc. The Pragmatic Constraint 1929. p. 338. the experimental sciences. It believed, as in a belief one holds to in the face of all 5. See also on this subject Latour, Bruno. Enquête sur odds, that this was the condition of every Let us return to Whitehead’s exhorta- les modes d’existence: Une possible experience, of all knowledge, of tion. If he states this as a requirement, anthropologie des Modernes. all political constitution. How ironic to determining a possible trajectory of Paris: La Découverte. 2012. note today, in the guise of new specula- speculative thinking, this is because 6. Souriau, Étienne. Te tive proposals, clearly quite diferent there might be new dangers or tempta- Diferent Modes of Existence [1943]. Univocal. 2009. p. from the one we will be invoking here, tions taking hold of philosophy, which 131. (Paris; Presses Univer- the same lure towards purifcation and he intends to resist. In a nutshell, sitaires de France. 2009. pp. sovereignty, the same formalist fascina- we would express this danger as an 110-111). tions of all kinds, the same relation to immoderate taste for false problems, for 7. James, William. Essays in demiurgic decision as those which laid drastic alternatives, for a kind of lazy Radical Empiricism Dover Publications. 2003 [1912]. down the motorways of modern thought. thinking or stupidity arising “naturally” If speculative thinking today is undoubt- in every situation: belief or truth, 8. Whitehead, Alfred North. edly gaining a new lease of life, it is experience or representation, facts or Modes of Tought. New York, NY: Macmillan Company. important not to confuse Whitehead’s values, subjective or objective, etc. Tese 1938. plea with formalist sacralisation, identi- alternatives, which appear so innocently fying speculation with purely formal and theoretical, are in fact unstoppable war abstract decision-making, which governs machines, spinning in a vacuum and an important part of philosophy today. producing a desertifcation of all modes How could we believe for one single of existence: reducing thinking to mere moment that a break has occurred, when representations, fctions to imaginary all underlying gestures ft so clearly into realities, values to subjective projections the context of continuity, and form a onto nature. One might counter that kind of new hyper-modernism? Perhaps, philosophy has never ceased displaying DIDIER DEBAISE AND ISABELLE STENGERS 15
dualities of this kind, bifurcations, yet rarely are they in a considerable part of contemporary speculative so celebrated, dramatised, highlighted at all levels of thinking. But Whitehead’s position, afrming that experience as during the modern period. To all these nothing must be excluded, does not for all that state alternatives, like any false problem, questions of a that everything must be taken into consideration: pragmatic nature should be addressed: what might it stipulates that we must reject the right to their aim be? What are their efects? What is it on disqualify. Experience must create constraint. It is this occasion that we are attempting to disqualify? experience upon which philosophers must confer the power to make them think. Tis position places To exclude nothing means therefore resisting the Whitehead’s speculative thinking in the extension terms of the alternatives that so inexorably seem to of what William James called “radical empiricism” foist themselves upon us, leading to false choices. (pace all those who take school distinctions too We are hence dealing with problems of a new kind, seriously): “To be radical, empiricism must not admit and Whitehead expresses this in a form, which, at in its constructions any element that is not directly frst glance, appears cryptic. “Philosophy cannot experienced, nor exclude from them any element neglect the multifariousness of the world—the that is directly experienced”.7 Te two parts of the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”4 So proposition form a crucial double constraint. Firstly, speculative thinking calls on us to explore modes to exclude nothing, to factor in the multiplicity of the of existence in their own setting, in their mode dimensions, which make up an experience here and of success, in their immanent demands.5 Faced now, not taking anything away for a priori reasons, with the drying up of modes of existence, Étienne whatever disqualifcations might apply to it. Ten, Souriau makes a similar plea when he declares, as not to allow a principle of judgement outside the a true research programme, as a new philosophical situation, which would domesticate this multiplicity input: in terms of categories or requirements alien to it. Any thought is, from this viewpoint, absolutely located, At present, we must identify and study those embedded in the situation from which it emerges and diferent planes, those diferent modes of existence, which gives it meaning. It is a matter, we might say without which there would be no existence at all— with Gilles Deleuze, of thinking through and by the no more than there would be pure Art without milieu, of thinking, with everything an experience statues, pictures, symphonies, and poems. For art implies, enfolds within itself, and with no principle is all the arts. And existence is each of the modes of critical sorting at work, tending to purify, isolate, of existence. Each mode is an art of existing unto make of it a self-sufcient “case”. Nothing of what itself.6 is real is self-sufcient. Tere is no such thing as an isolated fact: “Connectedness is of the essence of all Does this mean that speculative thinking is things and all types. It is of the essence of types that condemned to being a kind of neutral collection they be connected. Abstraction from connectedness of a multiplicity of modes of existence that make involves the omission of the essential factor in the up our experiences? Should we welcome them all fact considered.”8 Hence any experience, however indiscriminately? Does the plurality of modes of factual, is saturated with interpretations, ideas and existence require preservation as discussed for living multiple links. species in danger of disappearing? Should speculative thinking become so general that it could include Whitehead’s exhortation therefore concurs with everything, the multifarious modes of existence and James’s radical empiricism in rejecting classical the alternatives locking them into the major forms? empiricism as epistemology dealing with conditions Tis is certainly one of the temptations to be found of knowledge in general. For Whitehead the tragedy 16 PARSE JOURNAL
9. Ibid. of modern philosophy has been to replace be found throughout Whitehead’s work.
10. “Te lightweight dove, the question “what do we know?” by the “Te notion of importance is like nature fying through the air, all-powerful, of-ground question, “what itself: Expel it with a pitch-fork, and it senses resistance, and might are we entitled to know?”9 Te position ever returns”, he wrote.12 Te translator’s imagine that it would fy even better in a vacuum, Whitehead ofers philosophy divests it difculty no doubt stems from the with no air resistance. Tis is of all sovereignty. It is itself located, and fact that the use of this word indicates precisely how Plato came to leave the world of the senses placed in relation to a task correspond- the strong link between Whitehead’s since this world opposes ing to no entitlement. If speculative speculative thinking and the pragmatism too many various obstacles, thinking has been accused by Immanuel of James, a pragmatism all too often and ventured out beyond, on the wings of ideas, in the Kant of committing the same error as a reduced to a philosophy of utility, a vacuum of pure ideas.” Kant, dove imagining that it would fy better businessman’s philosophy drawing no Immanuel. Critique of Pure 10 Reason. 1791 [German]. without the friction of air, Whitehead’s distinction between philosophy’s striving speculative thinking aims at maximising for the truth and blinkered common 11. Whitehead, Process and friction with experience, refusing the sense. Reality, op.cit. right every specialised thought grants 12. Whitehead, Modes of itself: to explain, while eliminating Yet we should not underestimate the Tought, op.cit. anything that cannot be framed by the link between Whitehead and James. 13. Whitehead, Alfred explanation. For Whitehead, it is James who ushers North. Science and the in a new period of philosophy just as Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes inaugurated the modern Making Important 1925. period. Like Descartes in 1637, in his
14. Whitehead, Modes of Discours de la Méthode, James, in his Tought, op.cit. Te very challenge of eliminating nothing 1904 Does Consciousness Exist?, “clears runs through the early pages of Process and the stage of all paraphernalia; or rather 15. See Despret, Vinciane. 13 “En fnir avec l’innocence. Reality (1929). Here the need to introduce he entirely alters its lighting.” But the Dialogue avec Isabelle into contemporary philosophical thinking new broom sweeping clean is nothing Stengers et Donna Haraway”. In Elisa Dorlin the requirements of speculation is stated if it does not convey the urgency of new and Eva Rodriguez (eds.). thus: “Tis course of lectures is designed questions. Rarely was the fact that ideas Penser avec Donna Haraway. as an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its have practical consequences evoked with Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 2012. frst task must be to defne ‘speculative such force as by James, that the possibili- philosophy’ and to defend it as a method ties they introduce into an experience are 16. Whitehead, Modes of 11 Tought, op.cit. productive of important knowledge.” that which verifes them. Tus, in Te Te crucial point is to be found at the Dilemma of Determinism, James turns 17. See Debaise, Didier. Un end of this proposition: to produce the calm way his colleagues can call empirisme spéculatif. Lecture de Procès et réalité d’A.N. important knowledge. It is surprising themselves determinists into a matter Whitehead. Paris: Vrin. 2006. that the translators of Process and Reality of astonishment, without for a moment suggested translating the English word concerning themselves with the literally “importance” with “de grande portée” unbearable consequences of this doctrine [= far-reaching; translator’s note], and which reduces to illusion everything of that, when the same word appears in the importance to us: even regret becomes last sentence of the book, it is replaced irrational. James’s colleagues are in this by “emprise” [= sway, power: translator’s sense worse than the Kantian dove, being note]. Tis is all the more surprising convinced that the more they distance since the appeal “this is important” is to themselves from the fabric of our lives, DIDIER DEBAISE AND ISABELLE STENGERS 17
the more faithful they are to the only thing important into what belongs to the subject (knowing) and to to them, the defnition of a thinkable world in the the object (knowable). But what also loses hold is light of what they call rationality. the anthropocentrism. For the sense of importance cannot be a human privilege in the face of an indif- It would not be exaggerated to see in Whitehead’s ferent world. Tis means we need to fully grasp the philosophy a far-ranging attempt to preserve what radical nature of Whitehead’s idea stating that “Te an experience makes important. Tis is an eminently sense of importance is embedded in the very being ethical, political matter: how to ft together the of animal experience.”16 multiplicity of zones of importance, human and non-human, in a given situation? Tus he writes, If Whitehead draws more obviously speculative con- in the form of a maxim: “Our action is moral if sequences regarding the demands made by the irre- we have thereby safe-guarded the importance of ducibility of importance to whatever may be more experience so far as it depends on that concrete general than James does, this is because he places instance in the world’s history.”14 Tis means himself “after” James, systematically ordering what that morality implies what Donna Haraway calls James has assembled. Tat is also to say, construct- “response-ability”, the capacity to be accountable for ing a “speculative reality” such that importance an action or an idea to those for whom the action or and values are its crucial characteristics, ones idea will have consequences. And the immoral idea which human experience is not responsible for but par excellence then becomes the one that claims to only intensifes, and sometimes in an exaggerated be innocent, destroying nothing more than illusions. manner. Like Jamesian emotion, such characteris- Morality, in Whitehead’s sense, therefore requires tics can never be attributable either to the subject or being open to the consequences. Whatever the to the object. Te question of knowing whether a reasons justifying it may be, no idea is innocent. performance is moving or whether it is I who, being Tis does not mean that it is guilty: it is the sense of moved, perceive it as such, will always be the wrong non-innocence which is the frst and the last word of question because of its general nature. Te critic any morality.15 might fnd this important, albeit at his own risk.
But the philosophies of James and of Whitehead are also speculative insofar as they are committed, Intensifying the Sense of the Possibles as they aim at making an impact, intervening in a landscape devastated by disqualifcations and Whitehead’s plea can therefore be understood as by chasing after illusions. James, in order to resist dwelling on the plurality of modes of importance, determinism, dramatised its consequences outside which are part of the self-same reality in which of the protected, non-specifc area of epistemol- we participate. Tis is at least the way in which ogy. He stated and felt the vital nature of faith we endeavour to inherit it. But importance can in our capacity to make a diference, even if we never be reduced to a de facto or given situation: it can never have guarantees as to the consequences implies attachment to something in a disappearing of the diference we will have made. Whitehead world, dwelling on possible becomings, pressing for, made the blatant incoherence of the “bifurcation of insisting on, all those “might haves” or “could bes” nature”—between an “objective” nature, a nature implicit in situations.17 Making a situation, past or existing without us, and an “apparent” nature, present, be of importance, means intensifying the with its sounds, tastes, values, produced by human sense of possibles it harbours, as expressed by the subjectivity—important. In both cases, what loses struggles and claims to another way of making it hold is the Kantian grip dissecting the experience exist. Tis is why speculative thinking is so readily 18 PARSE JOURNAL
18. With Donna Haraway we would like found in stories and tales, which, like science fction, explore other to highlight the strong link between the 18 “speculative” type of science-fction pioneered possible trajectories. by Ursula Le Guin in the early 1970s and the so-called second-wave feminism. We, however, believe that critical thinking does not support this kind For this feminism, science-fction was an experimental feld of thought which resists of intensifcation. It confers upon the meaning of the possible the the reasons justifying why the world had to be quasi-messianic grandeur of an expectation requiring fdelity, but more the one we know and not a diferent one, that is, resisting the great modern narratives of particularly rooting out imposture, condemning that which is not a progress and development. On this subject see legitimate pointer to what lies ahead. In Whitehead’s words, the sense also Russ, Johanna. To Write Like a Woman. of the possible to be activated always lies in the interstices of a situation, Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. however incapable this situation may be of validating it. It means sensing 1995; and Hache, Emilie. “Te Future Men the virtualities present within this situation, despite the weight of the Don’t See”. In Debaise and Isabelle Stengers. Gestes spéculatif, op.cit. judgements transforming its lack of guarantee into a matter of fact, tantamount to condemnation. 19. We can never be too prudent when faced with the risk of confusion between the sense of the possible and the reference to the probable, It would appear as if our only choice today is between increased generality which must be distinguished as diferent of the notion of the possible (messianic plea, utopian construction, in nature. By defnition the probable has to do with a transposition or a rearrangement political decisionism, non-situated possibles) leading to its loss of all of what has already taken place or what is efectiveness, and an across-the-board entrepreneurship of opportunities ongoing, as shown by the calculation of in a market selecting winners and losers. But these choices are part of a probabilities. Te probable belongs to a logic of conformity: that which was important in psycho-social symptomatic. Another way of characterising our epoch is the past, making it possible to characterise it, to say that it is literally devoured by the exacerbated sense of a possible will preserve this importance in the future. Te possible, however, makes important the imperative—as if reality was of importance only from the viewpoint of possible eruption of other way of feeling, what it makes possible. We could say with Whitehead that the possible, thinking, acting, which can only be envisaged banished in the name of modern rationality based on facts claiming to in the form of an insistence, undermining the authority of the present as regards the impose themselves in the mode of authoritative statement, has returned defnition of the future. like a bolt , unleashed by its ofcial banishment. And that, as Karl Marx
20. James, William. Pragmatism. A New Name stated as early as 1847 in Te Manifesto of the Communist Party, it has for Some Old Ways of Tinking. 1907 invaded, redefned everything and turned everything upside down. What we need to activate today is a thinking that commits to a possible, by 21. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minne- 19 apolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2010. means of resisting the probable —fghting any interpretation subscrib- pp. 12-13. See also Stengers, Isabelle. La ing to the irresistible nature of unbounded capitalism as if that were our Vierge et le neutrino. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil. 2006. Chapter I immutable destiny, even the conduit conveying the message of progress among other passages. and emancipation, whereas in fact it denotes the desertifcation of our worlds and our inability to think that what we care about might have a 22. Deleuze, Gilles “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ?” In Deux régimes de fous. Paris: future. Minuit. 2003. pp. 295-296.
23. Te thought of living in the ruins was Speculative commitment therefore has little to do with what Kant coined by Tsing, Anna. Te Mushroom at the denounced, i.e. abstract thinking, founding the world on one’s own End of the World. On the Possibility of Life theoretical principles or judging it in the light of one’s projections. It in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2015. is all the more necessary to highlight this point since we fnd the same characteristics in the formalist trends of speculative thinking today. Perhaps we should recall at this point that etymologically the speculator was the one who observes, watches, cultivates the signs of a change in the situation, opening themselves to what, in this situation, might be of DIDIER DEBAISE AND ISABELLE STENGERS 19
importance. Not dwelling on the critical question Tis is the aim we have since associated with James had made into an undecidable—is this “speculative gestures”, “idiotic” gestures, in the sense remarkable because I pay attention to it or am I of the Deleuzian idiot who slows down when others being drawn to it by its remarkable nature?—this speed up, not because he thinks they are mistaken “speculator” knows that the question exposes them, but because he knows/feels that “there is something but that there is no answer to it other than the more urgent”, more urgent than to be right, or rather speculator’s capacity to distinguish between a utopian not to be duped, which, as James pointed out, is chimera and virtuality. And in any case they will the main fear of the moderns.22 Only probabilities, have to raise the pragmatic question par excellence: which mobilise the past to provide categories for the does the possible whose insistence I sense add or future, provide the power to be right. Speculative detract from the situation?20 Tey will have to accept gestures, plural by defnition, have the truth of the that the way they answer is part of the situation, and relative, the truth of an always situated. One does that they will have to make themselves response- not decide to perform a speculative gesture, one able, answerable for its consequences. risks it in so far as one feels “bound” by a situation, bound to respond to virtualities made perceptible It is in this sense that, as early as 1997, one of us had only by the way in which one is bound. engaged with the adjective “speculative”. After the clash between scientists and critical thinkers that To feel bound and to present oneself as such is the was labelled “wars of the sciences”, she profered the mark of minority thinking in a double sense: in not diagnosis of a dead-end situation: critical, demys- dreaming of thinking on behalf of others and in not tifying thinking, was “right” but this being “right” seeking to follow at any price the postulates of one’s extended the desert, ratifed capitalist appropria- own inspiration. Te situation which binds us and tion, was an insult to that to which practitioners are makes us think is that which unsettles or enrages attached, to what binds them. But diagnosing this any majority thinking. In one way or another, dead-end is by no means performing an autopsy. whether or not the worst is avoided, we know that It is, in Nietszche’s sense, making perceptible the the children of this century and of centuries to becomings eluding it. She wrote: come will have to live in the ruins of a world where everything the moderns have taken for granted Te diagnosis of becoming is not the starting point will have become precarious.23 Living in the ruins of a strategy but rather a speculative operation, does not necessarily mean the triumph of a “free- a thought experiment. [It does not have] any for-all”, of “every man for himself and devil take role other than that of creating possibles, that the hindmost”, but it makes it crucial to drop any is, of making visible the directives, evidences, nostalgia for an era already over and done with. and rejections that those possibles must question Perhaps this life in the ruins calls for the apparent before they themselves can become perceptible. unnatural marriage of the speculative, open to the [It is] frst and foremost a struggle against insistence of the possibles, and of the pragmatic, as probabilities, a struggle wherein the actors must the art of response-ability. defne themselves against probabilities. In other words, it is a question of creating words that are meaningful only when they bring about their own Originally published as Didier Bebaise and Isabelle reinvention, words whose greatest ambition would Stengers, “L’insistance des possibles. Pour un pragmatisme be to become elements of histories that, without spéculatif”, Multitudes, 2016/4 (n° 65), p. 82-89. them, might have been slightly diferent.21 Translated by Angela Brewer