Perception, Living Matter, Cognitive Systems, Immune Networks: A Whiteheadian Future for Science Studies

Unlike Athena, science studies did not emerge fully armed from the head of Zeus. Its eruption from the very loins of its disciplinary progenitors—history of science, sociology of science, philosophy of science—represents more than simple refashioning of well-worn problems, analytic approaches, and models dressed up in bright new, cosmetically retouched, form. Something profoundly more interesting happened on the way to science studies: rather than frictionless reproduction of the same, repetition gave issue to difference. Traces of such difference within the familiar analytics of the historical, the social, and the philosophical (one might add: the anthropological, the literary) abound in science studies, nowhere perhaps as strongly as in the so-called turn toward "practice."¹ Despite attempts to contain practice within traditional disciplinary regimes, attention to practice has proven time and again deeply disruptive. Not only has it caused science studies—I mean, of course, individual historians, sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists of science—to attend to the materialities and contingencies of engagement with and communication about nature and natural objects,² but, most significantly, attention to practice has, in addition, slowly (one resists the temptation to add, inevitably) shifted attention from epistemology to ontology, from matters of fact to matter as richly entwined and situated in a world of agencies.³

This turn toward ontology in science studies, though slow and far from complete, nonetheless has deep roots that are only gradually beginning to be exposed, tended, and nurtured. Its genealogy includes Martin Heidegger as well as Gilles Deleuze⁴ and Félix Guattari, and has been extended back to the likes of Henri Bergson and Charles Darwin. This essay, arguing through the examples of seventeenth-century theories of living—or working—matter, the mid-twentieth-century developmental biologist and epigeneticist C. H. Waddington, and late-twentieth-century reconfigurations of the immune system as a cognitive network in the work of Francisco Varela and his colleagues, will insist upon the significance of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism to science studies and to its possible future.

I. Reexamining Seventeenth-Century Notions of Matter

In Science and the Modern World (1925), Alfred North Whitehead sketches out terrain that subsequently will give rise to his fully developed philosophy of "organism." While his philosophy drew upon developments in mathematics and the sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Whitehead turned in Science and the Modern World to the foundations of modern Western science in the seventeenth century—his "Century of Genius"—to reveal the assumptions that shaped the very ontological and metaphysical beliefs to which the modern world had become enthralled and against which he would offer an alternative philosophical cosmology. Yet, for Whitehead, however misplaced was the confidence exhibited by the "New Science" in such fundamental assumptions, its shining achievements in physics and mathematics nonetheless paved the way for subsequent intellectual developments that formed the immediate context for his own thought. More provocatively, he also glimpsed in the seventeenth century the seeds of potentially countervailing tendencies. I would like to suggest that such countervailing tendencies were stronger, more fully developed, and far more substantially in evidence than Whitehead, and the Whiggish historiography of the "scientific revolution" of his day, could possibly have imagined.⁵

What Whitehead glimpsed is tellingly suggested by his brief response to a passage from Sir Francis Bacon's (1561–1626) Silva silvarum. "It is certain," Bacon claims, "that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception; for when one body is applied to another, there is a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable, and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate; and whether the body be alterant or altered, evermore a perception precedeth operation."⁶ Bacon's passing attribution of "perception"—"taking account of"⁷ in Whitehead's gloss—to ordinary bodies contains the seeds of an alternative ontology to the emerging orthodoxy enforced by the New Science of the seventeenth century. Thus, Whitehead further remarks:

Bacon is outside the physical line of thought which finally dominated the century...