Experience is already a continuum of transactions in which organism and environment co-constitute one another; there is no prior subject confronting a prior object. Dewey’s insistence that the precarious and the stable are phases of the same history, Whitehead’s doctrine that relatedness is dominant over quality and that actual entities are processes of prehension, Gibson’s demonstration that perception is the direct pickup of invariants in the ambient optic array, and Uexküll’s mapping of species-specific Umwelten as closed functional circles of meaning—all converge on the same refusal of vacuous actuality. The animal does not receive stimuli and then construct a world; the world is already structured by the possibilities of action that the animal’s organisation selects and, in selecting, helps to produce. Serres intensifies the claim: the elementary relation is parasitic, a one-way arrow that both nourishes and interrupts. Noise is not external disorder; it is the thermal exciter that collapses one cascade only to consolidate a more complex order. Elias shows that the same logic operates at the scale of human interdependencies: figurations are interweavings whose power balances and unplanned consequences generate the very sense of individuality that later myths treat as primary. Morin’s complex thought supplies the epistemic discipline required by this ontology—holding order and disorder, autonomy and dependence, in recursive tension—while Bourdieu demonstrates that even the scientific field remains a structured space of struggles for the monopoly of legitimate competence, where technical capacity and social power are inseparable. The continuum is therefore simultaneously ecological, perceptual, social and epistemic; every attempt to freeze it into substances, subjects or pure representations is already a parasitic interception that must itself be analysed as part of the process. The consequence for the construction and public life of a corpus is immediate. Archival practice can no longer treat documents as discrete items awaiting classification; it must track the continuous transactions, affordances and interruptions that constitute the medium itself. Indexing becomes the mapping of functional circles and parasitic cascades rather than the assignment of fixed categories. Circulation is recognised as interception: every act of reading redirects flows of attention, authority and possibility. Public legibility is the capacity of the archive to sustain ambulatory and ambient vision—users move through shifting vistas of interdependence rather than confront static representations. Governance of the corpus is the ongoing negotiation of power balances within the figuration of contributors, infrastructures and readers. Epistemic responsibility consists in keeping the continuum open: registering noise as generative, treating interruption as the birth of new order, and refusing the fiction of the isolated unit.
