SF with Stengers: Asked For or Not, the Pattern Is Now in Your Hands

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. Horrified 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 authoritarianism 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 unfaithful 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 abstractions, 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 world in the name of an ideal world. In the spirit of feminist communitarian 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 speculative 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...