No wonder! No wonder that our sophisticated civilizations, brimming with the accumulated knowledge of so many traditions, continue to flatten and dismember every part of the breathing earth … For we have written all of these wisdoms down on the page, effectively divorcing these many teachings from the living land that once held and embodied these teachings. Once inscribed on the page, all this wisdom seemed to have an exclusively human provenance. Illumination—once offered by the moon’s dance in and out of the clouds, or by the dazzle of the sunlight on the wind-rippled surface of mountain tarn—was now set down in an unchanging form. [281]
Stengers notes that "Abram still writes and passionately so," but not as a critique. Might there be a way of understanding "writing (not writing down) [a]s marked by the same kind of crucial indeterminacy as the dancing moon"? It's a beautiful, if poignant move, and one which thrills me as someone ambivalent about what she's calling "writing down." She proposes a magical way of describing what happens when a person writes.
Writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation. It makes one feel that ideas are not the author’s, that they demand some kind of cerebral—that is, bodily—contortion that defeats any preformed intention.
What I take her to mean (with a bright array of provisos, of course!) is that the craft of writing, from the perspective of the person doing it, is one of tangling with things felt to be beyond the writer, which the writer is trying to do right by in words. Later it will seem that these were "my" thoughts all along, but at the moment of writing, they aspire to something more and different, something beyond and separate from me. But where Abram illuminates the way speech participates in the always local and always more-than-human world of change and relationship and breath and feeling, Stengers is thinking about writing, and ideas. She references Whitehead's famous claim that western philosophy is just "footnotes to Plato" and gives it a little spin: something in Plato's ideas (not to mention Plato's Ideas) invites footnotes. As we philosophize, as we write, ideas animate us.
Writing, Stengers proposes, is really also a kind of animism - a recognition that we are enmeshed in relationship with other than human agencies. Properly understanding it might help us
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.
But she shares Abram's worry about the way the written word estranges us from the world by making the abstracted seem the really real. Can writing be recovered as an animistic practice? Perhaps if we focus on it as craft, as magic - terms she recovers in this essay. Or, since she is a philosopher for science after all, as akin to what she calls the "adventures of science." Unlike "Science," which is thought to be the only and ultimate arbiter of what's real, inevitably disenchanting the world (but doing so only because we think that's what it does), Stengers celebrates a little-s science as local as Abram's orality.
An experimental achievement may be characterized as the creation of a situation enabling what the scientists question to put their questions at risk, to make the difference between relevant questions and unilaterally imposed ones. [¶] What experimental scientists call objectivity thus depends on a very particular creative art, and a very selective one, because it means that what is addressed must be successfully enrolled as a “partner” in a very unusual and entangled relation.
Scientific experiments yield knowledge when they allow the things beyond our ken to animate our interactions with them, but the knowledge lives only when understood as localized in particular experimental situations (milieux). Knowledge grows as these situations proliferate rhizomatically, engaging creatively with other partners in other locations. It stops growing when this is forgotten, becoming instead a barrier to the reality of our constant partnering with the other than human. That's why we need to retrieve words like magic, especially in the now largely metaphorical sense in which we speak oof "magical" events, landscapes, etc.
Protected by the metaphor, we may then express the experience of an agency that does not belong to us even if it includes us, but an “us” as it is lured into feeling.The metaphor may be enough to recover a sense of an un-disenchanted world. Stengers imagines neopagan goddess worshipers bemused by the blinders the deadening categories of a "Science" which thinks it has vanquished animism forces on us:
If we said to them, "But your Goddess is only a fiction," they would doubtless smile and ask us whether we are Mong those who believe that fiction is powerless.
Though I am simply enraptured by how Stengers uses "believe" here, the words she writes down aren't on the whole words I am comfortable handling. Where I'm talking relationships and persons (terms from animism as some others define it), she uses the language of rhizomatic assemblages from Deleuze and Guattari, ensembles of constantly reconstituting relations where even the idea of individual agency dissolves, not to mention persons. For her the animistic experience of writing is ultimately one where the assemblage writes. She's a "partner" in the writing just like the ideas and everything else.
my existence is my very participation in assemblages, because I am not the same person when I write as I am when I wonder about the efficacy of the text after it is written down.This is a philosophical animism I can't quite follow - or should I say that no assemblage yet has me following it? But I've enjoyed trying to write about it, that is, letting it animate me. I'm not sure I could manage this for a less obviously "localized" craft of writing than this blog, but maybe that proves her point. Here I don't have to be the same person, or carry out the same intention, from day to day. I largely punt on the question of "the efficacy of the text after it is written down," and this allows me to craft it in the first place.
But enough about me. This intricate and illuminating argument from Stengers helps me appreciate what she will later mean by the "intrusion of Gaia," too. For Gaia represents an Earth no longer willing to partner with us, a frustrated animism:
Gaia is the name of an unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence: a transcendence deprived of the noble qualities that would allow it to be invoked as an arbiter, guarantor, or resource; a ticklish assemblage of forces that are indifferent to our reasons and our projects.