“The fish, then, is not only one of the stages in the evolution of living beings, but the paradigm of any living being—just like the sea, which need not be considered only as an environment specific to certain beings, but as a metaphor for the world itself. The being in the world of each living being should thus be understood starting from the fish’s experience of the world. This being in the world, which in consequence is ours, too, is always a being in the sea of the world; it is a form of immersion.
If life always is and cannot but be immersion, then most of the concepts and divisions we apply to the description of anatomy and physiology, as well as the active exercise of the bodily powers that allow us to live—in a nutshell, the phenomenology of the concrete existence of any living being—deserve to be rewritten. For every immersed being, the opposition between motion and stillness no longer exists: stillness is one of the results of motion and motion is, like a soaring eagle, a consequence of stillness.
Any being that can no longer separate between stillness and motion cannot contrast action and contemplation. Contemplation presupposes stillness: it is only by positing a fixed, stable, and solid world, which finds itself facing a still object, that one can speak of an object, and hence of a thought or of vision. On the contrary, the world for an immersed being—the world in immersion—does not, properly speaking, contain real objects. Everything in it is fluid, everything in it is in motion, with, against, or in the subject. It is defined as an element or flux that approaches, distances itself from, or accompanies the living being, which is itself flux or part of a flux. It is, properly speaking, a universe without things, an enormous field of events of varying intensity. So, if being in the world is immersion, then thinking and acting, working and breathing, moving, creating, feeling would be inseparable, because an immersed being has a relationship with the world that is not modeled on the relationship that a subject has with an object but on that of a jellyfish with the sea, which allows it to be what it is. There is no material distinction between us and the rest of the world.
The world of immersion is an infinite expanse of fluid matter according to varying degrees of quickness and slowness, but especially of resistance or of permeability—because in motion everything aims to penetrate the world and be penetrated by it. Permeability is the keyword: in this world, everything is in everything. The water of which the sea is made is not only in front of the fish subject but in it, passing through him, coming out of him. This interpenetration between world and subject gives to this space a complex geometry, which is itself in permanent change.
This approach to the world as immersion seems to be a surreal cosmological model, yet we experience it more often than we imagine. In fact we relive the experience of the fish each time we listen to music. If, instead of drawing the universe that surrounds us starting from the portion of reality to which vision gives us access, we deduced the structure of the world on the basis of our musical experience, we would have to describe the world as something composed not of objects but of fluxes that penetrate us and that we ourselves penetrate, of waves of variable intensity and in permanent movement.
Imagine being made of the same substance as the world that surrounds you; being of the same nature as music—a series of vibrations of the air, like a jellyfish, which is no more than a thickening of water. You will have a very precise image of what immersion is. If listening to music in a space defined exclusively by this activity (say, in a dance club) gives us such pleasure, it is because it allows us to seize the deepest structure of the world, one that the eyes, at times, prevent us from perceiving. Life as immersion is one in which our eyes are ears. To feel is always to touch, both oneself and the universe that surrounds us.
A world in which action and contemplation can no longer be distinguished is also a world in which matter and sensibility—or, if you wish, the eye and the light—are perfectly combined. Bodies and organs of sensibility can no longer be separate. We would no longer feel with a single part of our body, but with the totality of our being. We would be nothing but an immense organ of sense that merges with the object perceived. An ear that is nothing but the sound it hears, an eye that bathes constantly in the light that gives it life.
If life is tied indissolubly to fluid environments, this is because the relation between a living being and the world can never be reduced to one of opposition (or objectification) or to one of incorporation (which we experience in nourishment). The most primal relation between the living being and the world is that of reciprocal projection: a movement through which the living being commissions the world with what it must make of its own body and whereby the world, on the contrary, entrusts the living being with the realization of a movement that should have been external to it. What we call technique is a movement of this type. Thanks to it, the soul [esprit] lives outside the living being’s body and makes itself soul [âme] of the world; conversely, a natural movement finds its origin and ultimate form in an idea of the living being. This mutual projection takes place also because the living being identifies itself with the world in which it is immersed. Every household is the fruit of this movement. We project ourselves in the space closest to us, and we make of this portion of space something intimate: a portion of world that has a particular relation to our own body, a kind of ordinary, material extension of our body. Our relation with our digs is exactly one of immersion: we do not stand before them the way we stand before objects, we live in them as a fish lives in the sea, as primordial organic molecules live in their primordial soup. In effect, we’ve never ceased being fish. Tiktaalik roseae is just one of the forms we have developed in order to transform the universe into a sea in which we immerse ourselves.”
Passi di: Emanuele Coccia. “The Life of Plants”.
