The Origin is That Which Becomes Origin

When we speak of origin, we almost always imagine a point. An inaugural instant, a primitive scene, an explosion or a beginning. But here, we are not talking about the start of a narrative, a culture, a history or an organism. What is at stake is the origin of the universe — the emergence of the real as such, before there was time, measure, language or observer.

And what this origin shows, or rather, what it refuses to show, is that no absolute emergence occurs as an origin at the moment it happens. There is no inaugural instant that recognizes itself as the beginning of everything. What emerges is not named; it simply happens. When a reorganization occurs, it does not offer itself to thought as an origin, but as operative insistence, as unstable continuity that has not yet acquired form. The birth of the real has no date, no mark, no point. It is merely matter that, upon reorganizing itself, crosses a threshold of consistency. Only much later, when stability allows for the symbolic gaze, is that which did not begin declared as “beginning”.

Every origin is retrospective. Only when something persists does thought retreat to try and find where it might have begun. But this “where” is not found — it is constructed. It is named based on an already constituted system that needs a starting point to organize its own coherence. The origin is not at the beginning; it is in the middle. It is at the moment when an already formed body needs to explain its own form. This is not about falsehood — it is about symbolic function. We do not say “it started there” because it started there, but because it is there that our narrative can begin to operate.

What we call origin is not a given of the real, but a gesture of inscription upon it. It is an imposition of limit on a field that has no margins. It is the way thought traces a retrospective line to fix what has passed, what can no longer be repeated, what has become unrepresentable by the very dispersion of time. The origin is always a reduction — a way of making the excess narratable, the unspeakable legible, the contingent tolerable. Naming an origin is always silencing what was not allowed to be inscribed. It is choosing a landmark and forgetting everything that remained outside of it.

There is no neutrality in this gesture. Naming an origin is also founding an authority: saying what counts as a principle, what will be remembered, what will have value. Every origin is an exclusion disguised as a beginning. It is an operative selection that legitimizes what comes next. There is no innocent beginning. Every starting point is already a strategy of stabilization. Therefore, when we say “that’s where it all began,” we are operating a form of domestication: we retain a segment of the real to be able to operate upon it, but we leave out everything that does not fit into the narrative line we traced.

Philosophical thought, throughout its history, has rarely questioned this gesture. Even when it breaks with classical foundations, it tends to maintain the figure of the origin as something to be unveiled, discovered, understood. But there is no origin to discover. There are only reorganizations that become stable enough to allow for the inscription of an origin. The origin is not something that precedes — it is something that is instituted. It is not what is before, but what is made afterward, as a symbolic condition of intelligibility. The origin, after all, is always subsequent.

It is this posteriority that the Ontology of Emergent Complexity insists on making visible. Not to deny emergence, but to refuse that it be interpreted as a fixed point, as an inaugural given, as a founding essence. Emergence is real — but the origin is a symbolic operation upon it. When matter reorganizes and this reorganization is maintained, thought looks back and says: “it started here.” But what started there was not matter, nor the real — it was the possibility of saying that a beginning was there. The origin does not found the real. What it foun ds is the narrative.

Therefore, there is no origin in the sense that one seeks an absolute beginning. There are only zones of greater consistency, zones where variation was retained, where form stabilized enough to become legible. It is there that the origin is inscribed — not because everything began there, but because it is there that it became possible to think a beginning. The origin is always the name given to that which resisted disappearance. The inscription does not represent a beginning — it operates a distinction. What persists, is inscribed. And this retroactive inscription is what we call origin.

We never name what passed, but what remained. The origin is not the mark of the beginning, but the trace of a persistence. It is always the symbolic survival of that which, for an instant, resisted dispersion.

"The origin was never there.
It was there that we learned to say that everything had begun."

—— David Cota — Founder of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity ——