#concrescence

“Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal,” meaning they die from disease, injury, or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old age. We rarely imagine life without such limits—and when we do we stray into magic. [Mycologist] Alan Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminacy expand our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter.”

The above passage comes from anthropologist, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s, fungallly fantastic book, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Tsing suggest that mushrooms, particularly Matsutake mushrooms, can teach us how to better cohabitate with non-human species in a time of massive human destruction. It’s a great book!

Interestingly for me the above passage, specifically the part about how “our indeterminate life form being not our bodies but the shape of our motions over time,” reminded me of how some Whitehead scholars have described the pattern of the process of prehension and concrescence in Whitehead’s work. Some describe it as a snake-like trail of dead datum. Others, like Richard Lubbock, who references something else that many people think could be “potentially immortal,” describes it this way:

“Whitehead groups his occasions into ‘societies’. The most typical ‘society’ of his occasions is the human soul, as it grows in time. One pulse of enjoyment follows another, and, as their number grows, all the pulses form the serial society we call the soul. It is like a growing pile of coins. Each pulse takes in all the frozen data from its predecessors and adds novel feelings of its own. The occasion does not passively copy the past: in the act of self-creation it refreshes the design of the past, thereby inventing its novel present, and preparing for its possible futures. Whitehead calls these takeovers ‘prehensions’. The verb ‘to prehend’ means to engulf, perceive and transform […] So the soul of a human, or of an electron, or of a bacillus, is a sequence of prehensions, or takeovers, each of which prehends all its predecessors. As it grows in time the sequence defines the society called the soul. Your soul–your ‘Self’–is a pathway of dead occasions, with one living occasion at the very tip, the growth point. Whitehead calls this kind of sequence a ‘personal society’.”

This, to me, sounds somewhat similar to the “fungal indeterminacy” described by Tsing above. And that pathway of occasions with one growth occasion at the tip sounds a lot like a mycelial network with a fruiting mushroom at the end… Well it’s one way to potentially visualize it anyway I suppose.

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Image above: Mycelium Rhizome by Richard Giblett

Meaning runs far deeper than designation. We will never be able to think our connection to reality if we think of reality as a collection of things, because meaningful experience is about more than things. Experience is constituted by events. The ontology of an event cannot be captured by the mental representation of material things or structures; rather, Whitehead’s event-oriented ontology replaces traditional notions of substance dualism and mental representation with novel concepts of processual polarity and prehensive unification. Mind and matter are thus not conceived of as separate substances but as poles in dynamic tension with one another, each one contributing to the unification of every actual occasion of experience in Nature. The distinction between mental thoughts and physical things is not denied by Whitehead, but shifted from a spatial and substance-based framework into a genetic and process-relational one. Meaningful experience is constituted by the growing together (or, in Whitehead’s terms, the “concrescence”) of the stubborn facts of the past with the novel possibilities for the future that these facts afford the present. The past lingers in our physical feelings and corporeal habits, even in the very morphology of our skeletal muscles (reflecting the decision of our ancestors to walk upright), while the future goads us ever onward, quickening our minds with youthful ideals as yet unrealized. “Science is concerned with the facts of bygone transition,” that is, with the past, while “[it] is the religious impulse in the world which transforms the dead facts of science into the living drama of history”; it is for this reason, Whitehead continues, that “science can never foretell the perpetual novelty of history.” A new world-picture must acknowledge the scientific evidences of the past as well as the religious evidences of the future. It must account for the meaning of experience, of “being here,” in its full temporal depth (RR, 22).

The above passage is from another recent and remarkable essay by marvelous Whitehead interpreter, Matt Segall. Great stuff.

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Paper flower above by Tiffanie Turner

concrescence  noun (biology):

the coalescence or growing together of parts originally separate