The Origin That Sought Flow

In contemporary thought, the origin ceased to wish to be a fixed, eternal, or inaugural point. Its place shifted to flow, to continuity without pause, to the incessant proliferation of forms that do not rest on any immutable foundation. This conceptual mutation is not a simple abandonment of classical and modern legacies, but an inversion of the gesture that animated them: where stability was previously sought — whether in fixed substance or in the founding break —, variation without limit is now celebrated as if, in the absence of any immobile reference, the real finally freed itself from the ontological constraints that bound it. However, this praise of absolute flow risks establishing a new form of absolutization: that of total indetermination.

In Bergson, real time is lived duration, indivisible and creative, in contrast to the spatialized time of science, which fragments and measures it as if it were extension. Bergsonian durée is pure creative flow, in which novelty is ontologically inevitable. However, beneath this refusal of fixity remains a trait of vitalistic unification: the élan vital, the original impulse that animates and guides creation. Thus, even in this philosophy of change, a kind of internal cohesion subsists which, if not teleological in the classical sense, preserves an underlying unity. The refusal of the fixed is, in this case, inseparable from the affirmation of a universal creative force.

Whitehead takes the logic of process to a level of systematic radicality: nothing is immobile substance, everything is “ocassions of experience” in interrelation. Reality is the living web of these occasions, and being is inseparable from becoming. But here too a principle of global cohesion is insinuated: the totality of processes is united by a field of relations that guarantees the intelligibility of the real. While dissolving the fixed point, the philosophy of 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 a continuous production of differences, without a prior model, without a final form. There is no essence that precedes creation, only a plane of immanence where variations mutually engender themselves. In Foucault, genealogy shows how “origins” are always retrospective constructions, effects of discourses that organize the past according to the needs of the present. The idea of a pure beginning dissolves into a network of practices, power relations, and regimes of truth. However, in this refusal of foundations, non-discursive materiality tends to remain in a conceptual penumbra: the risk is that the origin, having become a pure effect of discourse, moves away from the concrete conditions that make it possible.

Contemporary sciences reinforce this sensitivity to process and contingency. Chaos theories show that dynamic systems are sensitive to initial conditions and that their evolution is unpredictable in the long term; complexity theories describe emergent patterns that form without central command; inflationary cosmology projects a continuously expanding universe, with multiple local beginnings. However, here too the temptation remains to discover meta-patterns, universal laws, or principles of self-organization which, if not fixed points in the classical sense, function as formal invariants that guide all becoming. Even in the discourse of chaos, an occult order is often sought.

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity refuses both the fixed point and absolute flow. The origin, as we understand it, is neither an immobile foundation nor total indetermination: it is a situated material event, which emerges from 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 sustaining functional organization for a limited time. Flow without zones of stability does not allow the appearance of operative structures; stability without flow prevents the creation of new configurations. What we call “origin” is always the provisional meeting point between flows and stabilizations, between variation and form, between contingency and organization.

The critique of absolute flow is not a disguised defense of the fixed, but the refusal of all absolutization — whether of the immobile, the inaugural, or the fluid. By recognizing that every origin is also the outcome of previous processes and a condition for future processes, the illusion of a beginning without history or a becoming without form is avoided. Contemporary thought, by freeing itself from fixity, gained the possibility of thinking change as the engine of the real; but, by absolutizing 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 concrete reality, not as a foundational myth, but as an always localized effect of a reorganization of matter.

"Flow without form is as illusory as form without flow:
the origin lives only in the fragile truce between both."

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