The Origin That Wanted Flow
In contemporary thought, origin no longer requires a fixed, eternal or inaugural point. Your place moved towards flow, towards continuity without pause, towards the incessant proliferation of forms that do not rest on no immutable foundation. This conceptual mutation is not a simple abandonment of classical and modern, but an inversion of the gesture that animated them: where stability was previously sought - whether in the substance fixed, whether in the founding cut - , we begin to celebrate the unlimited variation as if, in the absence of any reference immobile, the real was finally freed from the ontological ties that constrained it. However, this praise of Absolute flow risks establishing a new form of absolutization: that of total indeterminacy.
In Bergson, real time is lived duration, indivisible and creative, in contrast to spatialized time of science, which fragments it and measures it as if it were extension. Bergsonian durée is pure creative flow, in which to novelty is ontologically inevitable. However, beneath this refusal of fixity there remains a trace of unification vitalist: the élan vital, the original impulse that animates and guides creation. Thus, even in this philosophy of change, there remains a kind of internal cohesion which, if not teleological in the classical sense, preserves a unity underlying. The refusal of the fixed is, in this case, inseparable from the affirmation of a universal creative force.
Whitehead takes the logic of the process to a level of systematic radicality: nothing is an immobile substance, everything are "occasions of experience" in interrelation. Reality is the living web of these occasions, and being is inseparable of becoming. But here a principle of global cohesion also insinuates itself: the totality of processes is united by one field of relations that guarantees the intelligibility of reality. At the same time as it dissolves the fixed point, the philosophy of The process reinstates, in a new form, the idea of a universal order that embraces all events.
Post-structuralism further shifts the origin to the field of pure multiplicity. In Deleuze, the real is continuous production of differences, without previous model, without final form. There is no essence that precedes creation, just a plane of immanence where variations engender each other. In Foucault, genealogy shows like the "origins" are always retrospective constructions, effects of discourses that organise the past according to present needs. The idea of pure beginning dissolves into a network of practices, power relations and regimes true. However, in this refusal of foundations, non-discursive materiality tends to remain in a twilight conceptual: the risk is that the origin, turned into a pure effect of discourse, moves away from the concrete conditions that the make it possible.
Contemporary science reinforces this sensitivity to process and contingency. Chaos theories show that dynamic systems are sensitive to initial conditions and that their evolution is unpredictable over a long period of time deadline; the complexity theories describe emergent patterns that form without central command; the cosmology inflationary projects a continually expanding universe, with multiple local beginnings. However, here too there remains temptation of discovering meta-patterns, universal laws or principles of self-organisation that, if not fixed points in the in the classical sense, they function as formal invariants that guide all becoming. Even in the discourse of chaos, We are often looking for a hidden order.
The Ontology of Emergent Complexity refuses both the fixed point and the absolute flow. The origin, like the we understand, it is neither an immobile foundation nor total indeterminacy: it is a situated material event, which emerge of transitory compatibilities and dissolves when these are exhausted. There is no creation ex nihilo nor undifferentiated infinite continuity; Every emergence requires local fields of relative consistency, capable of of sustain the functional organisation for a limited time. Flow without stability zones does not allow emergence of operational structures; flowless stability prevents the creation of new configurations. O that we call "origin" is always the provisional meeting point between flows and stabilizations, between variation and shape, between contingency and organisation.
Criticism of absolute flow is not a disguised defense of the fixed, but the refusal of all absolutization - whether of immobile, inaugural or fluid. By recognizing that every origin is also the outcome of previous and condition for future processes, the illusion of a beginning without history or a becoming without form is avoided. O contemporary thought, by freeing itself from fixity, gained the possibility of thinking about change as a driving force of real; but, by absolutizing the flow, it risks dissolving the very possibility of differentiation. It is in this unstable - but necessary - balance between variation and consistency that the origin finds its reality concrete, not as a foundational myth, but as an always localized effect of a reorganisation of matter.
"The formless flow is as illusory as the formless form: the origin lives only in the fragile truce between both."