The Living and Its Milieu

Styling the future. A philosophical approach to design and scenarios

“…Style, then, is not simply an attribute or quality but an array of affects spread across a particular milieu (Deleuze, 1995;Canguilhem, 2001;O'Reilly, 2015), with each affect on its own trajectory and meeting other bodies with their own speeds and slownesses (Spinoza, 1955), and swerving in different directions (Serres, 1982;Hales, 2015). A style may be launched with a particular spin, but the complex nature of the interplay between the space, the medium through which everything is moving and the vast range of other bodies on their own trajectories criss-crossing it all, will lead to nondeterminable outcomes (Prigogine, 1980;Prigogine and Stengers, 1984;Stengers and Prigogine, 1997).…”

“…The scenarist styling in the way we are discussing follows the nooks and crannies of the present (maps the strategic landscape of operations, values, forces, regulations and so on) to see where and how the future might insert itself, as Whitehead might say; to create the possibilities of experience (individual or organisational). To follow the forming that matter undergoes (to design, or plan scenarios) creates new fissures in the present for the future to be styled anew (Canguilhem, 2001;O'Reilly, 2015). Emergent scenarios are not imposed, godlike, on inert matter, making sense of the real for the ignorant, allowing for knowledge to be imparted or held back.…”

“…In French the word refers to a space, a medium (as in the material through or according to which something moves), and a being-in-the-middle(Canguilhem, 2001;Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). O'Reilly argues (2015) that this is important to consider for design because the designer is always in a milieu: in the middle of a network of flows, materially constituted by these flows, and all of these developing within a spatial context.…”

The Case of the Missing Hand: Gender, Disability, and Bodily Norms in Selective Termination

“…However, this can also be specified further, in that the environment is not simply the sum total of elements that surround an organism. Rather, Canguilhem uses the term to emphasize the way that an environment is subjectively determined in accordance with the interests (for want of a better term) of the organism or individual in question—it is not objectively given (Canguilhem ). Without going into further detail, let me summarize the implications of this.…”

Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology

“…Uexküll reverses the relationship and says: time and favorable circumstances exist only in relation to a specific living thing." 54 But what is the time specific to a cryptobiotic organism like the tick or the tardigrade? Toward answering this same question, Yair Neuman reimagines C.H.…”