Interstitial Politics: Thinking in Catastrophic Times

Abstract

Recent editorials in Science, Technology & Human Values have invited us to expand alternative ways of doing Science and Technology Studies (STS) that respond to the here-and-now of planetary life. This paper relays these calls for these catastrophic times by considering the manner in which philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has approached this problem. Proffering an extended reading of the mutations of Stengers's thought in the last decade, it argues that one of the lessons of her work is to connect the planetary catastrophe to the devastation of our knowledge-practices and the depletion of our imaginations, and to give to the catastrophe that marks the present the power to transform our ways of thinking in common. Resisting the mobilizations engendered by the question “what is to be done?”, Stengers wagers on the generative capacities of interstitial practices to regenerate forms of collective intelligence, forms capable of protecting knowing and thinking practices from capture and experimentally reactivating the imagination even amid catastrophe. In so doing, the paper proffers a mode of imagining critical STS as an accomplice to collective experiments everywhere elaborating capacities to learn, for their own reasons, through their own means, how to pose their own questions.

We do, however, know one thing: even if it is a matter of the death of what we have called civilization, there are many manners of dying, some being more ugly than others.

Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times (2015, 10)

(STS) in Catastrophic Times

“Scientific research and innovation advance our economic, social and cultural wellbeing, provide health benefits and are key to a sustainable long-term future. However,” the Royal Society (2025) continues, “we live in times of great geopolitical, technological, environmental and demographic change, and the values that have driven science for the benefit of humanity are under threat.” These sentences open what is a rare, official position-statement by the United Kingdom's preeminent independent scientific academy on 25 February 2025, with the title “Science under threat.” The statement is couched in very general terms, from mounting a defense of the global health value of vaccines research, to urging “more ambitious action now to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change, while preserving and restoring nature.” Yet its date of publication betrays the fact that this was a thinly veiled response to a rather more specific threat: the radical cuts to US federal funding for scientific, health, international development, and academic research swiftly implemented in the first month of the second Trump administration through a combination of the “pausing” of payments on all federal grants; the review and potential cancellation of any grant mentioning terms indicative of support for “diversity, equity and inclusion;” as well as the wanton firings and budget cuts applied by the inaptly called Department of Government Efficiency (e.g., Ledford and Witze 2025). “Ideological agendas,” the Royal Society (2025) statement warns, “are being used to suppress research, threaten academic freedom and to cut funding. Scientific evidence and those who advocate for it are under attack by those who wish to undermine rational debate. Platforms that should facilitate open, transparent debate are giving free rein to harmful misinformation and ideological attacks on people and ideas. Equality is under attack and that threatens our global community of scientists—a community that is strongest when everyone can contribute, regardless of who they are or where they come from. “The Royal Society,” it proclaims, “will use its voice and the expertise of our Fellows to resist the various challenges to science.”

The Royal Society does not normally issue statements like this. Which is why virtually everything about it—not least that which the statement renders perceptible despite itself—is instructive of the catastrophic mess that is the present tense. While the disastrous speed and depth of the decimation of the financial infrastructure underpinning much of publicly-funded US science, international aid, and global health has been breathtaking, the fact that the Royal Society was moved to make such general pronouncements after this act of devastation—but not, say, after the Israeli government's destruction of all universities in Gaza as part of its latest genocidal campaign (Middle East Eye 2024); or indeed during the slower but implacable underfunding of universities and attendant scientific research capacity in the UK itself (Quach and Bush 2024)—illuminates both the neocolonial architecture underpinning international scientific research and the strict limitations to the notion of who counts as “someone” in well-meaning declarations such as “science should be open to everyone, without barriers that prevent people from reaching their full potential” (Royal Society 2025). That the Royal Society forcefully promises in its statement to use its voice and the expertise of its Fellows to resist the various challenges “science” faces yet cannot quite seem to find the voice to address the fact that it is one of its Fellows (Elon Musk) who spearheaded the US Government's very decimation of science in the US and beyond (Davis 2025), suggests that, in this banal symbolism as much as in the politics of climate change and global health more broadly, perhaps what such gestures decry is less the decisions than their style. By the same token, that perhaps what is brewing is less a shift in policy than the abandonment of “policy” as such, less a radical change in political direction than the overtly cruel and reactionary carnivalesque of a late-liberal politics of simulation that has devoted itself to sustaining the paradox whereby “the belief in, the desire for and the capability of authentic (eco)politics are exhausted but still indispensable for the stabilisation of the ecologically, socially and normatively unsustainable system of democratic consumer capitalism” (Blühdorn 2007, 267).

This is also to say that such statements are symptomatic of the political, scientific, and planetary catastrophe they purport to address. They are emblematic of the fact that to speak of catastrophic times is not, to borrow the piercing words of The Invisible Committee (2015, 29), to speak of a catastrophe to come but of the “catastrophe there in front of us, and that has been there for a long time … the catastrophe that we are, the catastrophe that the West is.” That catastrophe, they argue, is neither exclusively economic, ecological nor political. It comprises the convergence and compounding of a triple form of devastation—at once existential, affective and metaphysical—that binds the devastation of myriad terrestrial and marine habitats to the destruction of knowledge-practices (now including the sciences) and the depletion of social and political imaginations. One that ravages the capacities of manifold, divergent collectives to learn—for their own reasons, through their own means—how to pose their own questions (Savransky 2021a). In other words, to face the collapse of what modernity came to call civilization, to become sensitive to the sensible tangle that binds together the devastation of the earth and of the imagination, is also to contend with our own imaginative dispossession. It is to grapple with the fact that, after the ongoing violence exerted by the tangled histories of capitalism, colonialism and extractivism, there is no “our” to speak of, and that neither the growing awareness of an unevenly shared catastrophe nor the appeal to a common enemy will, by themselves, manage to make common cause, or to assemble a new and heterogeneous “we” (Savransky 2022). Thus, just as the present catastrophe confers a distinct urgency upon the question of “what is to be done,” the catastrophe is also that “we are as badly prepared as possible to produce the type of response that, we feel, the situation requires of us” (Stengers 2015a, 30).

These difficult questions touch at the heart of a field like STS. And not just because it is the sciences too that are now being defunded, but because the field has been uniquely generative in its interrogations of just what it takes—technically, epistemically, socially, politically—to learn how to pose a problem well. Indeed, at this perilously turbulent historical juncture a series of insightful editorial reflections have appeared in the pages of Science, Technology & Human Values which have become even more urgent and important than they were already (Neale et al. 2023; Lancaster et al. 2024; Gül et al. 2025). Since taking over, the journal's current editorial collective has—in practice and on paper—taken seriously the need for such a vibrantly undisciplined field to avoid unwittingly disciplining itself through sheer force of habit and institutionalization (Kaltenbrunner et al. 2022). They have been working to counteract the narrowing of STS interrogations into those professional “minds in a groove” that Alfred North Whitehead (1967b, 197) had already criticized with regard to modern scientists’ own training—the kind of specialization that prevents one from “straying across country” and leads a field to treat the remainder of life with “imperfect categories of thought derived from one profession,” compounding the catastrophic devastation of the present by creating abstractions which “abstract from something to which no further attention is paid.”

Instead, the editors have been creatively problematizing what is to be done, how STS might be done, and what it might mean to do it now, in ways that make straying across country to collaboratively interrogate and experiment with the objects and topics of STS research itself part of what STS is (and what it is about) (Neale et al. 2023). As they asked, “what does it mean to do STS together, now? And how might we leverage our institutional and other resources to create those spaces that form community and animate the intellectual life of the field?” (Lancaster et al. 2024, 1166). Practicing what they preached, a recent editorial continued these lines of self-interrogation and intellectual vitality, but this time at the collaborative hands of four early career researchers who had been part of the space for thinking in common that was an “STS School” organized by the editorial team in 2024. Powerfully evoking an image of STS “as a community of misfits uniting to address shared problems,” Zeynel Gül and colleagues (2025, 4) subjected these questions to another turn of the screw—exploring how catastrophes have percolated through (and been promoted by) “decades-long transformations of the university” internationally in ways that retrench “durable hierarchies, individualistic practices that value competitiveness over collaboration, and unrelenting measurement metrics,” and lead to the proliferation and neglect of burnout, exploitation, precarity and layoffs. In response, they called for multiplying “the critical modes of doing STS” that can “help us develop prefigurative, alternative forms of politics and scholarship by embodying and enacting specific practices and orientations in responding to the here-and-now of planetary life” (Gül et al. 2025, 9). How, they asked in a crucial inflection of the question, “can we practice STS now, to foster the more just worlds that we want inside and outside the academy?” (Gül et al. 2025, 3).

The present article is a minor attempt to relay this call in catastrophic times, and to contribute to the collective and collaborative interrogations launched in recent pages of ST&HV by considering the mode of responding to this question proffered by a thinker who much of the field would probably recognize as formative and influential but whose work, to this day, few seem to dare to engage with in detail: the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers. Yet it is not, this time, to her earlier work in the philosophy of science that I shall turn, even though a sustained and generative engagement with that important work by STS scholars seems to me to be long overdue (see Savransky 2016; 2018a; 2018b, Savransky and Stengers 2018). For it is especially in Stengers's work since her magisterial Cosmopolitics (2010; 2011)—from hers and Philippe Pignarre's Capitalist Sorcery (2013) to the latest Making Sense in Common (2023)—that the turbulent, catastrophic nature of the planetary present becomes a constant preoccupation, even a form of “fear” (Stengers 2015a, 9), and a force of transformation. It is there that the question “what is to be done?” in the midst and wake of catastrophe becomes a fundamental key to the development of her thought. Indeed, one cannot, I suggest, fully appreciate the singular force of Isabelle Stengers's writings on the tempestuous character of the present without learning to read the distinct shift that this question engenders, and the speculative openings created by Stengers's way of transforming how the question is posed.

As far as Stengers is concerned, the challenge is not whether to pose the question of what is to be done, as if one could ignore that it is the catastrophe itself that brings it forth. Nor is it a matter of deciding whether to respond: of either consenting, through gritted teeth, to the various calls for mobilization, or of accepting the reasons that fuel one's impotence and one's contempt for the world (Stengers 2015b). The challenge is whether one can learn to reactivate the collective means of posing the question otherwise, in ways that consent to what gives it its force while resisting its power to subject one to its commands, to turn everyone into soldiers, “‘marching together as one man’” (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 22). It is a matter, in other words, of learning to think in the wake of the catastrophe the present has become (Stengers 2014; Savransky 2021b). The challenge is to raise the question of “what is to be done” not as a problem awaiting its solution, but as a question that gathers heterogeneous participants together in their shared exposure, thus provoking thought without authorizing anything, without mobilizing anyone. How to give to what compels us to pose the question the power to make us think, while simultaneously resisting the temptation to confer upon the devastation the character of a new foundation or general reason dictating what proper thinking should be? How, in other words, to regenerate the devastated landscapes of the imagination, to render one another capable of repopulating a “world devastated today by the confiscation or the destruction of collective, and always situated, capacities to think, imagine, and create?” (Stengers 2015a, 93).

Scrabbling for other ways of doing STS, this article follows an unusual form, in that it proffers an open provocation through an extended reading of the mutations in Stengers's thought around these questions. This is only one reading, which simultaneously remains close to the texture of her thought while troubling its established modes of circulation and deliberately exposing it to all sorts of shifts, slips, and dislocations in conditions that in many ways no longer resemble those in which her thought was first wrought. On this reading, Stengers's way of contending with the question of what is to be done in catastrophic times, in the wake of their own imaginative dispossession, is one which decidedly rejects the question's own destructive powers of mobilization so as to wager on the faint but insistent possibility of precarious reactivation. Hers is an attempt at activating a pragmatic and collective experimentation which can only be carried out in the singular—which is to say in the plural—according to the situated means of each practice and each struggle, in connection to the particular affordances and demands of the relation each experimental struggle establishes with its own milieu. A form of experimentation “which implicates ourselves in our present, requiring that one allows oneself to be touched by what the present presents in the form of a test, and allowing what touches us the power to modify the relation we entertain to our own reasons” (Stengers 2021, 73). In other words, it is an experimentation with the possibility of collectively reactivating, at the tempestuous edge of the present, collective forms of intelligence thanks to which practices might once again render one another capable thinking from the interstices of a devastated world.

Beyond Peace: Vulnerabilities of an Ecology of Practices

When it comes to the art of crafting thought capable of transforming the possibilities that a problem makes perceptible, Stengers has form. This is what elsewhere I referred to as her “gesture of dramatization,” the turning of philosophy into an impure form of experimentation whereby those implicated in a poisonous situation might render one another capable of thinking, of doing, of situating themselves otherwise (Savransky 2018a). It was such a gesture that was in play when she sought—through the speculative creation of the now well-known and influential concept of “ecology of practices”—to forge a double disarmament of the trenches of the “Science Wars” so as to enable physicists and their critical interpreters in the humanities to abandon the oppositional mobilization that the war itself demanded and by which they found themselves cornered (Stengers 2005). The concept of ecology of practices was an attempt at giving “peace” a chance by wagering on the possibility of inducing a shift in perception capable, as Whitehead (1967a) could have put it, of turning reciprocally impoverishing oppositions into mutually enriching contrasts. “How can we,” Stengers (2010, 49) asked speculatively in Cosmopolitics, “make it possible for a modern practitioner to present herself, justify her practice, draw attention to what interests her, without that interest coinciding with a disqualification?” It is in the hold of this question that the concept of “ecology of practices” sought to activate the possibility of a work of diplomacy that would seek to compose an “experimental togetherness among practices” beyond war (Stengers 2005, 196).

But it was never the concept itself that would singlehandedly bring such a togetherness of divergent practices about. As she suggests, giving peace a chance “is a necessary, not a sufficient condition” (Stengers 2005, 193). And like most of Stengers's concepts, “ecology of practices” simultaneously connects and responds to the warring situation that required its invention and to the possible this conceptual creature itself seeks to intensify. The demand that “no practice be defined like any other” is therefore only “a first step,” a requirement to approach every practice in its constitutive divergence, in its singularity, so as to enable the very possible to which the concept responds to become itself perceptible (Stengers 2005, 184). As such, the concept of ecology of practices is nothing more and nothing less than a pragmatic fabulation, which is to say—as William James (1975, 61) said of the pragmatic function of concepts—not a solution but “a program for more work:” a tool by which one might, without foundations, become capable of intervening in a situation that, notwithstanding its ferocious and opposing determinations, remains in the making in spite of all, open to addition and liable to loss. Its efficacy is that of subtending an experimental diplomatic work which the tool enables us to envisage but whose situated mode of intervention it does not prescribe. It opens up a form work to be done, that requires “a pragmatics of learning what works and how”—one achieved only when the tool succeeds in giving to the situation that demands it the power to make practitioners think (Stengers 2005, 196).

Its success, however, is never guaranteed. To insist upon the pragmatic character of the concept of ecology of practices, therefore, is to make its own distinct form of relevance come into relief (Savransky 2016). It is to make its own immanent form of political intervention perceptible. If, as Stengers (2005, 185) suggests, the relevant tools for thinking are not general concepts in search for their own illustrations—resilient metaphors adaptable to every instantiation—but those that “address and actualise this power of the situation, that make it a matter of particular concern,” and as result, “make us think and not recognise,” we could do worse than to imagine the ecology of practices as a counterspell against the very dynamics of reciprocal impoverishment that produce what one might call “endangered practitioners.” Endangered practitioners are those who have succumbed to or are in the process of becoming prey, no longer to a problem that makes them hesitate, but to what Stengers (2006, 241) has called a certain “somnambulism” that keeps them operating in the hold and groove of their own authority and the ravening powers of their own reasons. It is such somnambulism, she argues, that renders practitioners invested in categorical differentiations “between that which matters and that which would be merely secondary or anecdotal,” and does so precisely at the point where this outside (now deemed irrelevant) communicates with a matter of vital concern to others who would therefore become the object of disqualification.

As a pragmatic fabulation, the efficacy of the concept of ecology of practices lies in the prospect of engendering a possible metamorphosis, making hesitation matter in the middle of a situation overtaken by opposing mobilizations. Yet no spell, and no counterspell, is ever cast in general. Its efficacy is always situated, indissociable from the questioning situation to which it seeks to respond. And if the concept addresses itself to endangered practitioners, envisaging a diplomatic experiment in learning to ask relevant questions that might enable practitioners to slow down, to make it possible to become interested in the constitutive divergences of a multiplicity of heterogenous practices, the catastrophe we have become radically changes the problem. For it is now the case that we already “live in a veritable cemetery for destroyed practices and collective knowledges” (Stengers 2015a, 98). In this ever-expanding graveyard of destroyed practices and extinct practitioners, the trust in the possibility of fabricating a certain mise-en-égalité, an experimental mode of togetherness among divergent practices, brushes against its own vulnerabilities. It itself risks becoming prey to—when not devoured whole by—an ongoing process of capitalist capture and enclosure whose effect is the catastrophic homogenization of a mise-en-equivalence: turning everything, including the sciences, into a power of capture, extraction, and destruction on which the knowledge economy feeds. Indeed, as Stengers (2015a, 91–92, original emphasis) writes in In Catastrophic Times, today it has to be noted:

that scientists have not … invented a manner of resisting the enclosures that are their lot too in the knowledge economy. That this is paid for by a loss of reliability can already be sensed, with the multiple cases of conflicts of interest—when one discovers that a scientist who presents himself as an expert on a question benefits from subsidies from an industry interested in this question. But even when there is no direct conflict, the situation of dependency is enough to destroy reliability because it dissolves the obligation to work together. One can “succeed” differently, with completely different means. Soon the baby will be thrown out with the bath-water and demystification will be redundant. We will be dealing with “true professionals,” who do not hesitate and who do not fear the objections of their colleagues. Because when everyone is dependent, when everyone is linked by partnerships to industry, no one will want to “spit in the soup,” to carry out research that might weaken the legitimacy of their, and everybody else's, participation in the industrial redefinition of the world.

In other words, capitalism does not care for diplomacy. It produces not practitioners—not even endangered ones—but professionals (see Lave, Mirowski and Randalls 2010), and as such it is precisely “what never stops inventing the means to submit what it deals with to its own requirements” (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 17). Being impervious as much to denunciations as to well-meaning negotiations, the system of “sorcery-without-sorcerers” that Pignarre and Stengers (2013, 28) argue capitalism constitutes is a machine of collective devastation, working through the production of enclosures whose effect is “continuously to reduce the intelligence of its agents, to replace it by automatic behaviour that can in turn become the matter of infernal alternatives.”

But this is not all. For the generalized war propagated by the capitalist devastation machine has provoked the earth itself to permanently intrude into every situation. And, for entirely different reasons, it is also this unstable earth—which scrambles habits and judgements, which forces us to pose entirely new questions, and puts liberal forms of life into question—that will admit no spokespersons and will not be lured even by the diplomats’ best efforts. As it intrudes into the political scene, the earth makes perceptible that, far from “Man” marching as one “force of nature,” we can no longer think of ourselves as the only agents of history, masters of our own destiny, completely free to determine the shape of a future made in our own image. But if Stengers (2015a) decides to call this intruding earth Gaia, it is not to invoke once again the image of a felt Earth in all its concreteness; a good, nurturing mother to which we are all said to belong. As Stengers (2015a, 44) insists, naming it Gaia is “not to say what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in the mode the name calls for.” And this mode is none other than that of a “ticklish” being who remains no less indifferent to our arguments and our reasons than she is blind to the destruction she's capable of causing. Gaia, in other words, names a being which puts our modes of thinking and living radically into question but which simultaneously “asks nothing of us, not even a response to the question she imposes” (Stengers 2015a, 46). For indeed, it is not she who is threatened. Pace the many green saviors who hasten to respond to the question “what is to be done?” by calling for a global mobilization in response to her intrusion, it is not a matter of calming Gaia or of “saving the planet.” It is a matter of learning to think in the wake of her implacable intrusion—not to fabricate “a response to Gaia but a response as much to what provoked her intrusion as to its consequences” (Stengers 2015a, 44).

Both capitalism's and Gaia's divergent modes of operation render vulnerable the efficacy of the concept of the ecology of practices. Yet to attend to its vulnerability is not to suggest that this speculative counterspell now reveals itself to have always been a naive abstraction, haunted by goodwill. Nor is it a matter of cultivating once again a blanket opposition to the sciences in Gaia's wake (capitalism is already ahead of that game). After all, the operation of naming not only concerns its own mode of address but also those to whom it is addressed. As Stengers (2015a, 49) suggests, if Gaia names a test that those who struggle for the composition of another world did not really need, it is also itself a wager on the possibility of making scientists think in spite of the onslaught: as much a matter of preventing them from appropriating the questions that Gaia imposes, as one of enabling them to resist the devastation of their own practices in the barbarism that suffuses the present tense. Hence Stengers's (2015a, 50) suggestion that naming Gaia, above all:

is naming a question, but emphatically not defining the terms of the answer, as such a definition would give us, us again, always us, the first and last word. Learning to compose will need many names, not a global one, the voices of many peoples, knowledges, and earthly practices. It belongs to a process of multifold creation, the terrible difficulty of which it would be foolish and dangerous to underestimate but which it would be suicidal to think of as impossible. There will be no response other than the barbaric if we do not learn to couple together multiple, divergent struggles and engagements in this process of creation, as hesitant and stammering as it may be.

Indeed, to attend to the vulnerability of an ecology of practices is precisely to give to the catastrophe the power to make one think. It is to take the non-metaphorical character of this concept seriously, as a problem of the historically shifting conditions of (co)existence of a multiplicity of radically divergent yet partially connected practices, lives, struggles, and worlds (Stengers 2006, 243). And on an earth at loose ends with itself, the problem has changed. The intrusion of Gaia and the capitalist devastation machine differentially demand that one contends with two modes of power that change the contours of the problem to which the ecology of practices was addressed. In the case of Gaia's intrusion, this is the introduction of an implacable power, “deprived of the noble qualities that would allow it to be invoked as an arbiter, guarantor, or resource” (Stengers 2015a, 47). And in the case of capitalism—which cannot but treat Gaia's intrusion as always potentially profitable, as another chance to impoverish collective forms of intelligence—at stake is the operation of a spiritual, predatory power, that “captures, segments, and redefines always more and more dimensions of what makes up our reality, our lives, our practices, in its service.” Capitalism's power, therefore, is “not implacable, just radically irresponsible, incapable of answering for anything” (2015a, 53).

That these two brutal forms of power mark the catastrophic coordinates in the tempestuous nature of our present is no mere coincidence, for:

the brutality of the intrusion of Gaia corresponds to the brutality of what has provoked her, that of a development that is blind to its consequences, or which, more precisely, only takes its consequences into account from the point of view of the new sources of profit they can bring about. But the questions of contemporaneity they pose don’t imply any confusion within the responses. Struggling against Gaia makes no sense—it is a matter of learning to compose with her. Composing with capitalism makes no sense—it is a matter of struggling against its stranglehold. (Stengers 2015a, 53)

It is in the catastrophic convergence of these brutal forms of power that the question of how to fabricate forms of collective intelligence capable of posing their own problems acquires existential urgency. And this catastrophic convergence calls, in turn, for other tools and counterspells, for alternative arts of experimentation and improvisation. For indeed, if it still is a matter of thinking par le milieu, without foundational definitions or progressive horizons, it is also the case that the catastrophic milieu these forms of power engender requires more than ever that one learns, collectively, how to protect oneself from what renders one susceptible to capture. “When a belligerent party engages in predatory war, for example, which is to say defines the opposing party as its prey, there is no room for diplomacy” (Stengers 2020). The concept of ecology of practices is vulnerable, in other words, because the contours of the problem it was crafted for have been overwhelmed, overtaken by forces that transform those to whom it was addressed as much as the nature of the problem itself. It is vulnerable because in the cemetery for destroyed practices and collective knowledges it is diplomacy that is dead, it is the possibility of peace that has passed away. To think in catastrophic times requires that one learns, experimentally, how to reclaim the political possibility of “fabricating an intelligence of the heterogeneous as heterogeneous” (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 112).

The Milieux of the Between: A Political Ecology of Interstices

“We are living,” Stengers (2023, 90, trans. modified) writes in Making Sense in Common, “through the collapse of this civilization and, as if shipwrecked, we are trying to determine what we should put in our lifeboats, what might be of use, what may prove to be of value in a future ‘outside modernity.’” But how to make such determination? Perhaps the first step in searching through the rubble is not giving to the catastrophe a power it does not have, that of the total and complete erasure of a certain memory that still harbors traces of the very practices and collective knowledges this now exhausted civilization has destroyed. For that would prolong the same civilizational habits that brought such devastation about, those that sought to constitute the present as a radical rupture with the past, and declared bygone, backward, or banal what had once been worthy of cultivation (Savransky 2022). Capitalism may have expanded the cemetery of practices and collective knowledges, but it is the modern project that displaced and relocated cemeteries, out of sight, at a distance, as part of its culture of estrangement and neglect of the dead. Indeed, if in capitalism's ongoing entanglement with the genocidal project of late settler-colonialism, its algorithms are now globally livestreaming the predatory, nihilistic powers of devastation across Gaza (Puar 2017; Ghannoushi 2025), this is against the backdrop of a more enduring necropolitics: a necropolitics of withholding the bodies of the killed at the hands of Israeli police, burying “fallen Palestinians in undisclosed zones without the consent or knowledge of their family, and designat[ing] them with numbers” (Daher-Nashif 2020, 946–947). And while, of course, the cruelty is the point, the stated justification of preventing “funerals from turning into protests” betrays the fact that cemeteries have not just been places of burial. They have also been spaces of refuge and milieux of social life. In medieval Europe, for instance, it was in cemeteries that people “conducted their spiritual and temporal business, played their games, and carried on their love affairs.” It was the cemetery itself that “served as a forum, public square, and mall, where all members of the parish could stroll, socialise, and assemble” (Ariès 1981, 62–63).

Words fail to articulate the relentless devastation and mass extermination that continue to rain on the people of Gaza today. But it remains worth remembering that, to borrow Gilles Deleuze's (in Deleuze and Sanbar 1998, 29) words on Palestine from the early 1980s, “against apocalyptic history, there is another sense of history that is only made with the possible, the multiplicity of the possible, the profusion of possibles at each moment.” And just as Palestinians’ own defiant aliveness has made it apparent for decades, as well as during the tragically short-lived ceasefire obtained in January 2025 (al-Al-Hajjar, Hussaini and Aziz 2025), recalling the unbowed sociality that once coursed through cemeteries and continues to frustrate the efforts to flatten entire landscapes might provide one small step toward an attempt to learn how to reinhabit the devastated zones of experience that our present makes present at every turn. For in the midst of catastrophe, it is not in some great beyond, in some thing-in-itself, in some pristine image of nature, that one is going to discover an untapped spring of regeneration. Nature green, nature pristine, nature harmonious, nature resourceful: “nature,” this singular modern invention, always susceptible to extraction, is but one nickname for the spell that fuels the devastation. And in its wake, it is not in some great beyond but in and through the cracks, that what escapes it insists and persists. Which is why, if it is now a matter of learning how to think and live in the rubble of capitalist devastation, the question becomes how to learn to pay attention to what lurks in the folds and snags of the present, what insists and persists inside and in spite of it, dramatizing possibilities improbable, implausible and derided, divergent modes of thinking and living that remain impossible for us to fathom yet precipitate a speculative and pragmatic experimentation in the wake, making life in common in unsafe operating space (Wakefield 2020; Savransky 2021b).

Which is to say that, like weeds between the gravestones, like a profusion of possibles emanating from ruins, it is a matter of activating what is engendered in the interstices of this depleted present: where political openings may be disclosed even amid closure, where a certain regeneration of the imagination might yet get underway, where situated struggles and forms of collective intelligence are, sometimes, reactivated in the wake. After all, the once buzzing sociality of the cemetery reminds us that life does not belong to the living any more than it does to the dead. It reminds us, as Whitehead (1978, 105) famously wrote in Process and Reality, that rather than being a property of a living organism, a defining characteristic of a certain form of being, life is a bid for freedom that “lurks in the interstices of each living cell,” precipitating ongoing and unfinished connections between living bodies and their inexhaustibly complex environments, connections which modify these environments just as they infect and transform the bodies they connect. “That is why we like the image of the interstice,” write Pignarre and Stengers (2013, 110), because an “interstice is defined neither against nor in relation to the bloc to which it nevertheless belongs. It creates its own dimensions starting from concrete processes that confer on it its consistency and scope, what it concerns and who it concerns.” Interstices are an-archic, without roots or foundations, the milieux of the between. Ongoing and unfinished, in the interstice nothing is given except the possible itself. Which is why “what an interstice is capable of is an unknown [une inconnue], except that the notion of the interstice calls for the plural.”

Defined on its own terms, according to the rhythms of its own insistence, the plural that an interstice calls for and makes resonate has of course nothing to do with what nevertheless surrounds it from every angle, the catastrophic bloc that lays siege to it, the violent riverbanks that interstitial undercurrents quietly corrode and occasionally break out. The plural that an interstice calls for is that of an immanent and inappropriable outside (Savransky 2024), of a generativity that lurks therein and which makes itself felt in the form of questions and problems that are felt before they are posed (Savransky 2021a). These are questions and problems for which the interstice offers no ready response yet around which a heterogeneous collective may gather, around which divergent practices—living and dead—might problematically conspire, “where each term is an occasion for the other experiencing his or her position a little differently” (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 113). If I call the interstice the milieu of the between it is precisely because the fabrication of each interstice engenders its milieu inside and in spite of the enclosure that the interstice has upended, in response to the profusion of possibles which bring it into its own. And it does so at its own risk, consenting to the fact that “no interstice has ever had an a priori guarantee of survival—they can all be eaten up by the state or by capitalism. But neither are any of them condemned in advance. All may be conceived as experiments, as apprenticeships. All need what each can learn,” even when none of them can claim the authority to teach what everyone should learn (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 119). Neither economy nor consensus, but the very profusion of the heterogeneous, is the interstice's keynote. An interstice speaks for no-one and represents no-one. An interstice preserves nothing except the collective unrest that precipitates its fabrication. It causes nothing save for the generative activation of a pragmatics of the unruly imagination inside and in spite of a catastrophic situation.

It is its anarchic call for the plural that makes it possible to envisage another mode of political intervention in and amid catastrophe. A call that of course differs radically from the attitude of resentful resignation (which is nothing if not the result of defeated mobilizations) and that also crafts styles that are other to diplomatic negotiation (which requires a milieu that has been destroyed). In other words, the interstice′s mode of intervention amounts to an interstitial political ecology. Indeed, one could go further and argue that all political ecology is fundamentally concerned with the outside that interstices harbor, the insurgent bids for freedom that lurk therein. For, whether it has been a matter of bringing climate, soil, water, energy, air, or a multiplicity of divergent beings into the political, nothing dramatizes the task of political ecology better than the gesture of messing with what is meant to be none of your business. It is precisely in this sense that Bruno Latour (2004) argued that political ecology has nothing to do with “nature.” Because, rather than it being a question of shifting attention from human affairs to those of the natural world, political ecology precisely calls the order of being into question. That is, it questions “the possibility of collecting the hierarchy of actors and values, according to an order fixed once and for all” (Latour 2004, 25). To envisage a political ecology of interstices is therefore to seek to engender the activation of an improper intrusion into the order of the politically proper, into the order of politicality itself: upending what soldiers on, what marches ahead, what otherwise fuels those forms of power, authority, order, law, state, and violence that thwart the profusion of possibles and seek to destroy what would disturb them, that reduce the multitude of relevant forces that compose a situation (see Robinson 2016).

Fabricating an intelligence of the heterogeneous as heterogenous, a political ecology of interstices necessarily takes innumerable forms, as multifarious as the multiple trajectories of apprenticeship that each interstice activates, as manifold as the plurality of worlds that each experiment brings forth. Some interstices are born of ruptures, of events that blow up the terms of order and fabricate a space which turns the upheaval into a learning experience of its own. Such is the case of the protests and confrontations that have emerged over the last decade or more, between state-backed mining corporations in the northern Andes of Peru and those who resist the expropriation of land and draining the lagoon that is necessary for copper and gold extraction, and who do so despite corporate promises to build water reservoirs to serve the local population several times over. If, following Marisol de la Cadena's (2015) thoughtful account of this confrontation, one may call it an event, it is not because it marked the before and after of a victory. Nor is it because it would have contributed to bringing environmental concerns to the heart of political contestation inside and in spite of Peru's extractivist state. While environmentalists argued that the reservoirs would “destroy the ecosystem of the lagoons, a landscape made of agricultural land, high-altitude wetlands, cattle, humans, trees, crops, creeks, and springs” (De la Cadena 2015, 5), the confrontation constituted an interstitial event because it precipitated a collective problematization of the order of politicality itself.

Indeed, De la Cadena (2015) shows that the collective unrest that precipitated this interstice's fabrication was activated by modern environmentalist conceptions of nature, and by guardians of the lagoon and members of the local population. These actors effectively unsettled at once the modern order of politics and of nature, refused to give up their claim to the land as they affirmed the lagoon's existence outside a mere body of water, “untranslatable to H₂O,” integral to another order of being given in the shared inextricability of people, animals, water and plants. The refusal to sell their land was therefore also, at one and the same time, a refusal of “the transformation of the entities just mentioned into units of nature or the environment,” or the act of commoning the insubordination to the order of being and modality of togetherness that capitalism and the state deemed proper to them (De la Cadena 2015, 6). The profusion of refusals and untranslatable questions activates a veritable pragmatic of the imagination, what De la Cadena would call “uncommon” modes of problematization engendering a milieu that determines its own dimensions and unknowns while simultaneously muddling and interrupting the efforts of mobilization. “This complex, heterogenous form” instituted in the interstices of the divergence between environmentalist and local orders of being in opposition to the mining corporation, “allows for alliances and provokes antagonisms.” It gives shape to shared interests that are “not the same interest,” a milieu of the between or a political ecology of interstices that, apposing environmentalism and local activism, transforms the mode coexistence of those whom the event inadvertently assembles: upending “the requirement of politics for sameness” and provoking “ontological disagreement among those who share sameness.” The fabrication of the interstice renders allies capable of implicating themselves in the formulation of a problem whose terms of order already relied upon the devastation of collective forms of concern (De la Cadena 2015, 6).

But to insist upon the call for the plural that interstices precipitate is to emphasize the fact that, while ongoing and unfinished alliances can be forged whenever there is the need and possibility of making common cause, no interstice by itself is ever scalable, capable of universalizing its lessons, or building some general consensus. Constructing a general consensus, the interstice's own terms of order, would imply addressing its lessons to an anonymous audience by definition incapable of posing its own questions, ready to abide by answers to problems they have not posed themselves. It is for this reason that I suggested that while each interstice needs what others can learn, none of them can claim the authority to teach what others should learn. If what an interstice is ultimately capable of is an unknown, it is because its efficacy is moot unless it succeeds in activating the imagination from the perspective of each situation. The milieu of the between is always to be made. When it succeeds, its success is defined by the very achievement of enabling people to think. And learning to think, learning to intensify the bids for freedom that lurk in the cracks of a devastated landscape, can only be done from somewhere, in relation to something, with someone, somehow. What resonates across divergent interstices, what each interstice needs from others—the debt each owes to the other and none of them can ever repay—is the trust in the possibility of thinking amid catastrophe, and in the importance of acquiring a taste for the questions and problems that make one think (Savransky 2018b).

As such, while some interstices are born of ruptures, disclosed from the middle of historical upheavals engendered by events, others are born of operations of repair, as a question of learning “to renew one's links with ancient practices that capitalism has dishonoured and which we have triumphantly believed we can do without. Practices that spoke of prudence in a fearsome world, of the possibility of creation despite the permanent probability of war” (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 117). Thus we can appreciate the importance that Stengers confers upon the ecofeminist practices of neopagan witchcraft, notably San Francisco's Reclaiming movement spearheaded by Starhawk (1988; 1990) and others. For indeed, it is not just that their practices enable Stengers to name capitalism in a manner that dramatizes its capacity to enslave and subject, to force those it enslaves to “be free”—which is to say, to name capitalism as a form of sorcery. It is that the naming is already part of their practice, one of the means by which they seek to protect themselves from the frightening power to enslave, and also to disqualify and deride, in the name of Reason and Progress, the very practices that might offer some tools of protection or means of getting a hold on what has taken hold of us. But interstices born of operations of healing and repair are not exclusive to neopagan witchcraft. What's more, they are already being elaborated on the margins of STS. Or at least that is how I read Abigail Neely and Laura Meek's (2024, 300) efforts to take seriously experiences of illness and practices of healing in South Africa, Tanzania, and elsewhere in Africa, as they engaged with people's “search for and experimentation with treatment, cure, prevention of illness and misfortune.”

Attending to practices of protecting a house from both weather- and witchcraft-engendered lightning, of turning their TV sets and mobile phones into objects that became endowed “with the power to enact divine presence” and cure a variety of afflictions, as well as practices of gardening and cultivating herbal remedies to see and treat someone's “affliction in his njozi (dream/vision),” Neely and Meek (2024, 300–304) refuse to prolong the classic neocolonial gesture of documenting so-called “traditional” or “religious” medical practices outside the modern world so as to disclose something about people's “beliefs” or indeed their “culture.” A critical anthropological tradition known as “the modernity of witchcraft” had earlier invited us to understand the role of witchcraft across postcolonial Africa as a vernacular response to the upheavals and disasters that modern colonial capitalism wrought (see Geschiere and Rottman 1997). But Neely and Meek's (2024, 297) proposition—echoing Britt Russert (2017)—to think these practices as forms of “fugitive science” elaborated out of an expanded empiricism “outside spaces of institutionalized science” turns this gesture inside out. It effectively invites us to take seriously not only their own efficacy but the efficacy of modernity's own forms of witchcraft, to attend to these sciences also as modes of protection to the system of “sorcery-without-sorcerers” that capitalism constitutes. One that, in enclosing the territory of “science” and then poisoning both what it encloses as much as what it disqualifies, has the effect of continuously undermining “the intelligence of its agents, to replace it by automatic behaviour that can in turn become the matter of infernal alternatives” (Pignarre and Stengers 2013, 28).

What becomes perceptible through these and other efforts to attend to the collective elaboration of forms of intelligence that lurk in a catastrophic situation is the fabrication of pragmatic artifices for an interstitial politics of insubordination to the predatory and implacable powers that continue to prey upon and devastate the present. Artifices that affirm the counter-powers of an immanent and inappropriable outside lurking inside and in spite of the devastation. A counter-power that is not so much wielded as shaped, sheltered, shared—possessed by no one except the very situation that welcomes it and which it activates. After all, what interstices engender, what they disclose, is the very dynamic of experimentation and improvised elaboration of heterogeneous intelligences. Forms of collective intelligence that simultaneously bind the mess that is the present tense to forces that insist and persist below the threshold of catastrophe, and also bind the edges of catastrophe to a profusion of possibles that still lurk in the still of the night, through which the very possibility of other modalities of (un)common existence might yet be given a chance, perhaps (Savransky 2021b).

Making Sense in Common: An Art of Complicity

One pays attention to what lurks in the interstices not in order to discover the answer to the question “what is to be done?” One pays attention in order to learn how to give to the situation that brings such a question to the fore the power to subtend a collective experience that upends the terms which the question commands. Dramatizing forms of thinking responsive to the here-and-now of planetary life, what Stengers's work makes perceptible in the midst of catastrophe is that the value of the question “what is to be done?” lies not in the various possible answers it appears to demand but in the much more difficult task of learning how to pose this question well. Or, of learning how to compose the situated means of ruminating together, and of enabling such ruminations to reactivate the imagination, to enable an experimentation with what could still be collectively engendered at the tempestuous edge of the present. What might a collective become capable of when it allows a situation to assemble them otherwise? What might become possible in the elaboration of an intelligence of the heterogeneous as heterogenous? It is this collective rumination that Stengers (2023) counterintuitively associates with “common sense.” Which is to say, the experience and the possibility of making sense in common: putting into question the definition of that from which experts draw their authority. Not with the resentment of those who refuse to understand, but with the intelligence of those capable of trusting in the importance of a collective experience, those who are in the process of elaborating together an incalculable debt that is shared rather than paid. It is this which may upend the public order of collection so as to subtend a generative milieu of imaginative composition and experimental invention.

Indeed, if Stengers (2023, 17) relays Whitehead's pivotal proposition, that the task of philosophy is the welding of the imagination and common sense, she is also right to note that “the question of common sense has changed.” In the wake of Gaia's intrusion, of capitalist predatory destruction, of the devastation of spaces for thinking in common, the welding of imagination and common sense is no longer a task for philosophy alone. And it “is not achieved in general. It is achieved through intensification, the dramatization of singular experiences, through what might be called ‘ontological mutations’” that break with the reiteration of the same, that make what has been deprived of importance matter, that make it matter otherwise (Stengers 2023, 141). That, I suggest, could be Stengers's way of relaying the challenge that recent editorials in this journal lay down for us, when they interrogate how STS might be done “now,” which is to say how else it could be done now. “To opt for learning, right now today, to live in the ruins,” Stengers argues (2023, 174), “is to opt for learning to think without the security of our proofs and to consent to a world that has become intrinsically problematic.”

As a result, the task of reactivating the imagination can today only be accomplished in the company of a multiplicity of others (human and more) engaged in manifold forms of ongoing collective unrest. It can only be sought among those who risk the cultivation of their own milieux inside and in spite of the devastation, and risk it in order to ruminate and experiment together. They ruminate together not to reach agreement, or to come up with the truthful answer. They do so because “what makes them brood is the sense that what is common is irreducibly problematic, the sense of compositions to be ongoingly revisited and always situated by what compels them to think here and now, and not in general” (Stengers 2023, 17–18). As such, one way critical STS might be imagined and done today is first and foremost as an art of complicity to a makeshift, collective experimentation—without ready-made toolkits, without heroic definitions or destinations—that dares upend the terms of order in order to participate in the heterogeneous composition of unruly habits of thought and modes of planetary habitation.