The Living and its Environments more

Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 1 The Living and its Environments Didier Debaise in Process Studies, In: Process Studies, 37.2, California, 2008. Two essential chapters of Whitehead’s Process and Reality are dedicated to the question of the living: ”The Order of Nature“ and ”Organisms and Environment”. These chapters define the singularity of a speculative approach towards life. This approach is expressed in a phrase that at first sight seems enigmatic: “Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain.”1 This proposition has rarely been taken up by Whitehead’s readers. Most often, they have either ignored it or have understood it as a mere metaphor whose technical and conceptual expression was to be found elsewhere, in the more elaborated and systematic parts of Process and Reality. No doubt the phrase is rather allusive. Wouldn’t it be absurd to dwell upon a concept that Whitehead seems to more or less abandon? Here, on the contrary, I would like to follow I. Stengers who, in Penser avec Whitehead, proposes taking Whitehead’s proposition as the core of the speculative approach towards the living. Far from being limited to an annex or a metaphor, the idea that “life lurks in the interstices of each living cell” would then become, unexpectedly, the point of departure of a new coherence, yet to be constructed. From this perspective it would form the junction between other concepts such as “living societies,” “environment,” and “innovation.” It would thus be at the heart of a true philosophy of the living that would distinguish itself from preceding philosophies of life. I. Stengers calls this philosophy of the living “culture of interstices.” 1 A. N. Whitehead. Process and reality: An essay in cosmology, New York, Free Press, 1978, p. 105-106. Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 2 “If life lurks in the interstices of every living cell, one can also say that the singularity of living societies, what justifies them as such, would have to be called a ’culture of interstices‘.”2 Interstices and Societies ‘Interstice’ has two literal meanings, a temporal one and a spatial one. In its first sense, it designates empty, intermediary spaces, fissures inside a body, all those in-between zones that contrast with the apparently “full” body parts. It is this spatial idea of the interstice that Whitehead takes up in his definition of life: “The conclusion to be drawn from this argument is that life is a characteristic of 'empty space' and not of space 'occupied' by any corpuscular society.”3 Life is in the empty spaces. The consequence that Whitehead draws from this in-between character of life, which he noted in what seemed to be a mere aside, marks a profound break with preceding philosophies. It implies that life can not be identified with an “occupied space,” which would bring it close to the notion of the thing or of the physical or living body; life is rather the non-occupied space between bodies or body parts (whatever their dimension). This immediately excludes all approaches that think of life as reality as such (vitalism), as a form of existence or domain that has specific characteristics distinguishing it, for example, from the “physical realm.” Instead, for Whitehead, life has no positive quality whatsoever, no reality as such. The only characteristic he ascribes to it is that it is the “name for originality, and not for tradition.”4 But this is less a characteristic than a function: life produces innovation. Life presupposes the existence of “occupied spaces” and has no positive reality apart from the effect that it can have on them. Second, the term interstice has a temporal connotation. Here it is the matter not of a space but of an interval between two moments.5 An interval separates two 2 I. Stengers. Penser avec Whitehead: une libre et sauvage création de concepts, Paris, Seuil, 2002, p. 367. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 105. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 104. I owe my inspiration here to the essential works of E. Dupréel. In his book La cause et l'intervalle: 3 4 5 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 3 notes in a melody, thereby contrasting them with each other. An interval is the apparent absence of action that separates two acts or events. In William James’ Principles of Psychology there is a similar idea, which he develops using the example of silence after thunder. “Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunderbreaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.”6 Thunder is an event that in consciousness is followed by another; but it is an event “in contrast” that presupposes and integrates the preceding silence into its own existence. And if in the continuity of a series of thunderclaps it is possible to discern this clap of thunder breaking a continuity where they would otherwise be indistinguishable, it is due to the silence that separates them. But one can just as well inverse things and say that it is the silence that contrasts with the clap of thunder, and that one moment of silence is distinguished from another because in the interval that separates them there was the sound of thunder. There is hence nothing that as such could be qualified as “empty” or as “interval.” It is entirely a question of perspective: the series of thunderclaps is given a rhythm by silences, and reciprocally the series of silences – which is also filled with a multiplicity of loud events – is interspersed by the claps of thunder. The idea of rhythm comes into play with the Ordre et Probabilité (Bruxelles, Archives de la Société Belge de Philosophie, 1933) Dupréel demonstrates that the notion of causality is inconceivable without a distinction between at least two events which implies a moment of time, however minute or considerable, that separates them. In that sense, “to be distinct, for two phenomena, means not to occupy the same space or time […]. There is always an interval between the preceding cause and the following effect. However closely two terms are connected, there is a residue of discontinuity that has to be accepted between them” (p.10). It follows that “the effect doesn’t touch the cause directly, it is only contiguous to this intermediary and composite reality where what persists of the cause is combined with the reality of interpolated facts” (p.11). For Dupréel this is the central element of a philosophy of life that distinguishes itself from mechanism and vitalism. He sees life as an “effect” but “totally different from everything that one could immediately propose as its cause […].” Life is then “essentially an interpolated phenomenon, an arrangement of intervals, an action of maintaining, a progression of order inside order” (p. 40). 6 W. James, The principles of psychology, New York, Dover, 2 vols, 1950, vol. 1, p. 240. Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 4 notion of “interval”: rhythm of the living, rhythm of the creative process, rhythm of events.7 It is not surprising that philosophy has been so little interested in these “intervals” of time that seem to be mere instances of “emptiness” separating cause from effect or action from reaction. Philosophy has always valued bodies and actions and neglected these intermediary moments, but by doing so it became incapable of demonstrating the importance of this particular event and its contrasting relations to preceding events. The intervals then are not pure “nothings,” as they not only by contrast determine the succeeding events, but also because it is in the interval that the originality of the particular event and its “consolidation” 8 is introduced. How do these aspects of the notion of “interstice,” in terms of time and space, enable us to make explicit Whitehead’s proposition concerning life? Let us recall that realities such as thunder, cells, or the brain are referred to in Process and Reality with one and the same term: societies. Whitehead writes that “(a)n ordinary physical object, which has temporal endurance, is a society.”9 As differing as these things may be, they are nevertheless united by a general term whose function it is to make evident what I. Stengers calls requisites10: it “is always societies that we study. In Process and Reality, Whitehead develops a cosmological vision of rhythm: “The creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual. The former swing is dominated by the final cause, which is the ideal; and the latter swing is dominated by the efficient cause, which is actual.” (A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., 151). Whitehead had already dedicated an entire chapter of Principles of Natural Knowledge to the notion of rhythm in its relation to life and nature. 7 I am borrowing this term from E. Dupréel, for whom in La cause et l'intervalle: Ordre et Probabilité (Bruxelles, Archives de la Société Belge de Philosophie, 1933) it is the fundamental principle of existence of things. He writes: “[T]he infinity of material things is only a collection of consolidated coexistence. Every object has a history; during a long or short period of time, its parts have been held together by a different force than the one that joins them in the present.” (p.38). This consolidation is produced by the events in the intervals. The consolidations are spatial (coexistence) as well as temporal (successions). See also E. Dupréel, La consistance et la probabilité constructive, Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Belgique, Mémoires, Tome LV, fasc. 2., 1961. 8 9 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 35. 10 I. Stengers proposes a distinction between requisites and conditions: “Conditions are supposed to answer an absolutely anonymous problem that anyone could state and whose answer will be theoretically valid for anyone. It is here that the crucial distinction between conditions and requisites is located: requisites are immanent to the problem posed, they are ‘what is necessary for the problem to Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 5 Everything is sociology.”11 The aim is not to say that thunder and a cell are the same thing from a speculative point of view, but that their difference will have to be determined starting from the shared requisites that will give their distinction its whole importance. It is because a common ground has been established artificially that we are able to trace the importance of trajectories that will define a society as physical or as living, a reality as sensory or ideal, real or imagined. The difference between a stone, a clap of thunder, and a cell should not be sought in particular essences but in trajectories. The most important of these requisites is given in the passage by Whitehead cited above: Societies have “temporal endurance.” They are united by the fact that in one way or another, whatever may be their extension, they endure. One can also speak of persistence, maintenance, or temporal thickness. A society is essentially persistence of order. The central questions in the sections that Whitehead dedicates to the living are: how do orders emerge, how do they maintain themselves? Whitehead puts the question of order at the centre of the speculative project: “For the organic doctrine the problem of order assumes primary importance.”12 But we shouldn’t be mistaken: “'Order' is a mere generic term: there can only be some definite specific 'order,' not merely 'order' in the vague.”13 Whitehead gives an example: the life of a man. “(T)he life of man is a historic route of actual occasions which in a marked degree […] inherit from each other. That set of occasions, dating from his first acquirement of the Greek language and including all those occasions up to his loss of any adequate knowledge of that language, constitutes a society in reference to knowledge of the Greek be given a possible solution’” (pp.64-65). 11 I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op. cit., p. 363. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 83. Ibid., p. 83. 12 13 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 6 language. Such knowledge is a common characteristic inherited from occasion to occasion along the historic route.”14 A man is an entanglement of orders, a series forming a historical route; this historical trajectory is itself composed of subordinate series—e.g. the knowledge of Greek—which in turn have their own historical routes. There is an agency of societies that act upon one another, each at their own scale, and by means of these reciprocal actions they establish orders at other levels. There are series everywhere: acts succeed other acts and form trajectories. Whitehead speaks of them as “series of engenderment” in order to emphasize the fact that a society passes on a common form to its succeeding members, which they then integrate into their own existence. The series here becomes a principle of individuation, and the “persistence” of a society—the knowledge of Greek, a man, but also the organs that he is composed of—is the repetition of this individuation for the new members of this society. There is no “reason” for the existence and maintenance of societies. Why a society at a certain moment emerges and maintains itself is a question for what I. Stengers calls “speculative sociology,”15 which she links to forms of pragmatism: to know a social order can only consist in accompanying it in its own mode of existence. “I follow Whitehead in supposing that a society is not a reason, in the sense of the ontological principle; it enjoys no transcendence whatsoever in relation to its member entities. The ‘reason’ for an entity to belong to a society does not refer to ‘the society’ but to other actual entities prehended by this society.”16 14 Ibid., p. 89-90. Bruno Latour, extending the proposition of G. Tarde according to which “every thing is society,” puts into place a true speculative sociology which is very close to Whitehead’s. See B. Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social,” in P. Joyce, ed. The Social in Question: New Bearings in the History and the Social Sciences. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 117-132, and Changer de société – Refaire de la sociologie, trad. fr. N. Guilhot, La découverte, Paris, 2006. 15 16 I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op. cit., p. 360. Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 7 The “reason” if one wants to stick to the term, is not to be searched for in the parts—the actual entities—nor in the whole formed by the social order; it is to be found in the mobile, dynamic operations of mutual prehensions. Social existence is not a simple addition of actual entities, but it is also not a common form that imposes itself unilaterally upon its members. One could rather say that social heritage is “betrayal, in the sense of ‘recuperation.’”17 Rather than the imposition of form, one would have to speak of the “canalization of becoming” by the society.18 Being part of a society produces specific constraints—a weight of the past—that orient the becoming of its new entities. These new entities take up the society’s heritage, giving it new life, but they do so in their own way that is not entirely determined by the heritage. The novelty that they embody nevertheless only exists on the grounds of what they inherit. Indifference and Originality: The Mode of Existence of Societies The identity of a society is its heritage; it is identical with its “historical trajectory.” That is why it is not quite correct to say that a living body—of a man or of a cell—inherits a past that precedes it. A body above all inherits itself; we are heirs of our own existence and of the acts of which it is composed. Identity is situated in this inheritance of oneself. But “there is no society in isolation. Every society must be considered with its background of a wider environment of actual entities, which also contribute their objectifications to which the members of the society must conform.”19 Borders and strict limitations are abstractions, put into place for practical reasons (which partly justifies them), but societies spread out in all directions. They are traversed by other connections that extend them and make every neat distinction between inside and outside, between the self and the non-self, 17 Ibid., p. 368. 18 I think of living societies as societies that maintain their continuity by means of innovation. A different, though possible, reading would have been to interpret this innovation as the passage towards another society, the interstices being the elements that incite change. I justify my choice by the distinction Whitehead makes between “physical societies” and “living societies,” a point to which we will return below. 19 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 90. Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 8 impossible. The environment is both internal and external, it is in the parts of societies that are not directly engaged in the “common form” defining them, and in the other societies in which, in one way or another, these entities are engaged. It is a question of stability and instability, of orders and disorders that is at stake in the relations between societies. “The doctrine that every society requires a wider social environment leads to the distinction that a society may be more or less 'stabilized' in reference to certain sorts of changes in that environment. A society is 'stabilized' in reference to a species of change when it can persist through an environment whose relevant parts exhibit that sort of change. If the society would cease to persist through an environment with that sort of heterogeneity, then the society is in that respect 'unstable.'”20 It is in this very pragmatic question of the difference between stability and instability, connected to distinct systems of societies, that Whitehead situates the line of differentiation between “physical societies” and “living societies.” What makes the difference is the society’s way, aptitude or power for maintaining stability in changing environments. Whitehead distinguishes two possible ways in which a society can respond to variation: indifference or metamorphosis. The first response characterizes “physical societies.” These societies are capable of being indifferent, to varying degrees, towards changes in their environment. “These material bodies belong to the lowest grade of structured societies which are obvious to our gross apprehensions. They comprise societies of various types of complexity: crystals, rocks, planets, and suns. Such bodies are easily the most long-lived of the structured societies known to us, capable of being traced through their individual life-histories.”21 20 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 100. Ibid., p.102. 21 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies 2008 9 Certainly, all societies are continuously affected by their environment and the exchanges, destructions, and transformations occurring within it, but physical societies are characterized by their capacity for indifference. Everything affects them, and they are no less subject to alterations (most often imperceptible) than are “living societies,” but they seem to be able to ignore them. What continuously saves them from destruction is their coarseness. They function in terms of “averages” (such as an average of change), reducing most transforming factors to simple details that they are able to ignore. This power of the average allows them to persist in their heritage in a uniform way. This is why Whitehead considers these societies generally to be the most durable ones; they maintain themselves as much as they can, that is, as much as ignorance can be upheld. At certain moments though, changes in the environment can become so massive that the physical societies are left no space for the average of ignorance they had kept up until then. Unable to change themselves, they will not be able to continue the trajectory that has defined their identity. The stability of living societies derives not from their indifference, but from the soundness of their partiality. The notion of partiality becomes the crucial element in I. Stengers’ understanding of Whitehead’s living societies: “[A] living society, on the contrary, has to be approached in terms of what makes its partial character explicit: what is nourishment or poison for it, what will allow it to reproduce, what will give it the chance to survive, what will kill it.”22 Living societies are essentially, one could say vitally, interested in their environment. Changes that might seem insignificant to “physical societies” are of great importance to them. For living societies to be interested means that they “orient themselves,” “choose,” “search” —essentially that they perform an activity in relation to the environment in question.23 They are not simply affected passively by what happens in their environment; they rather actively seek out being affected. This is why, in the order of nature, living societies are the most fragile ones. The environment, for them, 22 I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op. cit., p. 471. We would like to leave the question of how the “interested” character of the living transforms knowledge aside here. V. Despret has dealt with the subject in Quand le loup habitera avec l’agneau (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, Paris, 2002). 23 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies - 10 2008 is not an indifferent succession, consisting of an average, but an ensemble of questions that entice the living society to metamorphoses, whether internally (modification of form) or externally (transformation of elements in the environment). One could say that these societies are capable of “an initiative in conceptual prehensions, i.e., in appetition.”24 If a society is defined as the endurance of a social order, then living societies are capable of modifying this social order, their way of being together. This capability is the very condition of maintaining their existence. Their past is not what is imposed on them; it is rather a virtuality25 that they actualize, each time in a different way according to the variations of the environment. They let themselves be transformed by what lurks in their interstices and in return integrate these elements into their historical trajectory. We find here again a time definition of the interstice: the moment between a cause and the reaction, a stimulus and an answer. Physical societies, stones, or crystals “are not agencies requiring the destruction of elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an agency. The societies which it destroys are its food. This food is destroyed by dissolving it into somewhat simpler social elements. It has been robbed of something.”26 The conditions of existence of a living society imply robbery and the destruction of elements belonging to its environment. What is plundered can well be an inferior organism but “whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery.”27 The point of demarcation between the crystal and the living is the interested activity that defines the latter. The crystal is indifferent to what it produces and to the effects of the environment in the short term; the “hurricane does not search for the most populated zone in order to feed itself from the ravages that it causes. It goes 24 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 102. I owe the notion of virtuality from H. Bergson’s Matter and Memoy, particularly the chapter 3, and from G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. It seems to me that the notion of virtuality defined by Bergson and Deleuze corresponds by some aspects to the “real potentiality” in Whitehead’s philosophy. 25 26 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 105. Idem. 27 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies - 11 2008 where it goes.”28 But the living requires “means to catch, trace, seduce, capture, trap, chase;”29 the history of the living is the history of “increasingly efficient destruction”30 that allows the living to endure. All the metaphors we dispose of to compare the realm of the physical with the living risk making us forget what essentially separates them: the interest and the attachment towards an environment. The Dynamics of Infection I. Stengers has proposed calling this ensemble of interested and interdependent relations between the living and its environment a “dynamics of infection.” We can speak of dynamics because the relations are variable, never established once and for all; what at another time or from another perspective was an agent of infection can now appear as an effect of infection. The only points of stability are these dynamics themselves, the negotiated and changing relations between the living and the environment. From this follows a minimal definition of the living, which, even if not explicitly formulated by I. Stengers, seems to be the logical consequence of making evident the dynamics of infection. We could formulate this definition as follows: the living is what infects and what lets itself be infected. The term “infection” also appears in Whitehead’s works. He uses it at times to express what “poets celebrate in terms of ‘presence;’” at times to give account of the mute, unconscious, and implicit dissemination of ideas.31 One can say of certain ideas that they are “alive” because they infect others, they imperceptibly mingle in their existence and seem to transform them slowly from the inside. They have their own life and endurance in the singular environments formed by the representations and general ideas of an era. In both cases—presence and dissemination of ideas—the term infection is used by Whitehead in order to refer to specific modes of 28 I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op.cit, p. 350. Idem. Idem. I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op.cit., p. 182. 29 30 31 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies - 12 2008 “endurance.” And it is this relation between infection and endurance that justifies the definition of life as infection proposed by I. Stengers: endurance “can not be explained by any virtue of an individual that endures; it depends first and foremost on a dynamics of infection. Everything that manages to endure has managed to infect its environment in a way that is compatible with this endurance.”32 The term “infection” is understood here in a sense that is speculative, i.e. neutral33 in respect to its consequences for any particular living being. Infection can refer to the destruction as much as to the metamorphoses of which the living is capable. What is important is to point out the various relations of dependence, activity, contagion, and the processes of integration by which living beings appropriate elements of their environment—“life is robbery”—and transform the latter in return. Everything happens in the zones in between bodies and their environment, in what we have described as “interstices.” Bodies and environments are infected in their non-occupied spaces. “To infect” originally meant “to stain”. The environment “stains” the living, affects it by introducing itself into each of its parts—in its interstices—and obliging it permanently to negotiate its endurance throughout internal as well as external variations. The relation between the ability “to be affected” (passive potentiality) and “to affect” (active potentiality) is complex, as the living can neither be explained by its environment nor by its own components. Everything happens in the encounter.34 32 Idem. See I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op.cit, p.184. 33 34 One could draw a relation between this idea of an “inciting” power expressed in the notion of infection and the thinking of Foucault. I. Stengers writes: “Whitehead—although differing completely in tone as for him it is not about shattering human illusions—is fairly close to Michel Foucault’s thesis according to which power is not primarily repressive but inciting, arousing interest, questions, and knowledges. This could actually be a way of defining ‘infection’ in Whitehead’s sense: not by the imposition of a role but by the incitement, passed on in multiple and disparate ways, to take up and take on this role. In a general sense, nothing imposes anything because there is no institution having the power to impose as such. All ‘social power,’ if it is not purely and simply repressive (which is a rare and instable case), refers primarily to a dynamics of infection.” (I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op. cit., p. 186). Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies - 13 2008 This is why “Whitehead can no more tell us what a society is than Spinoza could tell us what a body is capable of. In both cases ‘we don’t know.’”35 The abilities of a body are relative to its environment and vice versa. We can not go beyond a form of empiricism, where what counts are the interactions of the living beings: “The point to be emphasized is the insistent particularity of things experienced and of the act of experiencing. Bradley's doctrine - Wolf-eating-Lamb as a universal qualifying the absolute is a travesty of the evidence. That wolf eat that lamb at that spot at that time: the wolf knew it; the lamb knew it; and the carrion birds knew it.”36 A different wolf, a different environment, a different encounter would imply a different event and different potentialities. The potential of the wolf is relative to the potential of the lamb and to the spot in which the encounter took place. None of the terms a priori takes precedence in explaining what happened: “Every time Whitehead uses ‘infection,’ it is about denying that anything in itself could have power over something else.”37 It is a true ecology of relations that is implied in the dynamics of infection. Until now we have considered them on one sole level—the encounter of an organism with another—but they have to be applied to all levels. Every organism is a society that is itself an ecosystem. A conception that is very close to this generalization of relations of infection can be found in the work of the French biologist P. Sonigo.38 In Ni Dieu Ni gène P. Sonigo writes: “The cells form a society similar to the one with which we are familiar at other levels in ecology or economics.”39 These are not metaphors but different, though equally technical, ways of accounting for the modes of existence of living societies. In that sense, it can be 35 I. Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, op. cit., p. 364. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 43. I. Stengers. Penser avec Whitehead, op. cit., p. 185. Cf. P. Sonigo and I. Stengers. L’évolution, Paris, Mot-à-Mot, 2003. J.-J. Kupier and P. Sonigo. Ni Dieu ni gene, Paris, Seuil, 2000, p. 129. 36 37 38 39 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies - 14 2008 said that “the relations between cells rely on exchanges of resources comparable to the ones that structure ecosystems (food chains) or human societies (economic circulation).”40 An entire ecosystem is gathered “inside each of us, composed of millions of tiny microscopic animals that we call our cells. They live for themselves, not for us. They do not know that we exist.”41 The relation between the wolf and the lamb described by Whitehead, against Bradley, is echoed on the level of the billions of cellular societies that constitute an organism. As living societies they take, capture, and destroy other living societies and try to prolong their existence, to endure in the same way as all the others do. Even cells are interested in their environment, affected by its transformations in which they partake. However we may conceptualize the most complex organisms, we have to be able to apply these conceptualizations to infinitely smaller scales. Even tiny organisms are affected and affect. The consciousness that the living being may gain from these dynamics is one of its expressions and in no way its model. Conclusion The terms of Whitehead’s proposition have taken on new dimensions in the reading that I. Stengers proposes. Neither life nor living societies as such are primary; we have to free ourselves from the idea that the vital principles could be explained by simple causes, or be identified with any one reality. These principles emerge in the midst of dynamic relations in which “historical trajectories” mutually influence one another in particular environments. We have to replace the question: “What is life?” by questions of a different order, questions that are essentially pragmatic: How does an individual persevere in its existence? How does it manage to capture elements that allow it to endure? There is only one question that can legitimately be considered ultimate: “What is this being capable of?” Beyond that, questions become purely abstract and the source of “false problems.” 40 Idem. Idem. 41 Didier Debaise – The Living and its Environments – Process Studies - 15 2008 The problem addressed to “living societies” concerns their consistence. The consistence of a being can be defined as the “ability to conserve its identity throughout the vicissitudes that result from its relations with other beings.” In this way, “every body is provided with a certain degree of consistence.”42 With continuously reinvented means, living societies tend to maintain the order out of which they emerged and to perpetuate a tradition that defines them. They share a common goal with physical societies: persistence. But they distinguish themselves by the means they employ. For living societies, everything happens on the level of the interstices43: space-interstices, such as parts of societies, zones that separate several series engaged in one and the same persistence and times-interstices such as the intervals of blocks of becomings that determine the form of endurance. A cell is a living society, as much as a man is, because between the acts that constitute them and their reabsorption, transformations are inserted that change their modes. Both man and cell partly reinvent their way of inheriting themselves, of consisting in the midst of a dynamics of infection —a true “culture of interstices.” E. Dupréel. La consistance et la probabilité constructive, in Mémoires. Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Belgique, Tome LV, fasc.2, 1961, p. 7. 43 It is interesting to note that Deleuze and Guattari, in the closing lines of What is philosophy?(Columbia, Columbia University Press, 1996) bring to the fore similar notions to the ones that we have tried to develop here. 42