TAKING THE WRONG TURN
Alex Williams (University of East London).
For the ‘Planetary Politics After The Human’ Panel
Millennium Conference 2012, LSE.
This paper presents a critique of what has become known as the ‘post-human’ turn, with a
focus on the implications such a critique has in terms of thinking global politics. It will begin by
examining the most recent, and most widely celebrated faction within post-humanism, the
new materialists, focusing on the work of Jane Bennett and William Connolly.
This shift has some definite positive contributions to make to a number of fields within the
humanities and social sciences, but it also suffers from some significant and perhaps
fundamental flaws that I want to explore. These defects are rooted in the ontological
commitments of the movement, and results in some problematic political and normative
outcomes. It will be contended that far from a cutting edge materialism, what is offered in their
writings is a pre-critical panpsychism. When read into global political situations this results in
what might be termed a ‘lava lamp liberalism’, where an ontology valorising flow, the vibrancy
of matter, and the agency of all things, leads to a brand of pseudo-religious piety and liberal
quietism, incapable of actually analysing the material world such that we might effectively
intervene in it.
Moreover, this ecstatic animism rests upon a misunderstanding of the potentials of complexity
theory, the chief scientific body of knowledge which informs this group of thinkers. I will
suggest instead a distinct reading, which rather than invest all matter with panpsychist affect
and objectal agency, takes complexity theory in an analytic, non-metaphorical direction, as
the scientific-mathematical underpinning of complex global systems analysis. This is all the
more crucial in a century facing such complex cataclysms as climate change, resource
scarcity, continual financial instability, and the automation-led secular crisis of capitalism. It is
precisely this abstract, inhuman planetary-scaled domain which exceeds and confounds any
metaphorics.
1. New Materialism
As summarised by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost in their recent collection New
Materialisms, the turn towards post-human political and social theory arises as an attempt to
move beyond the ‘Cultural Turn’.1 This switches the focus from language and discourse, in
favour of a return to considering the materiality of things, a ‘new’ materialism in the sense of
avoiding a simple return to Marxist economic-productive materialism.
Now we might legitimately ask ourselves what the matter in new materialism actually consists
of. Given the broad spread of approaches currently being collected under the heading, we
must generalise a little brutally here. However, a chief scientific influence, as Coole and Frost
outline, is from complexity theory. Whereas reductionist science generally builds from a
bottom up stance, complexity science contends that many systems can only be understood
as systems, rather than as large agglomerations of tiny particles (or other relatively small
entities). As Miguel et al put it in a recent paper “if the goal of particle physics is the ultimate
analysis, that of complexity science is the ultimate synthesis.”2. It follows from this that the
complexity sciences are integrative, unlike physics, biology, and chemistry, whose analytical
methodology implies increasingly tightly defined specialisation. Marking a shift beyond
reductive Newtonian approaches, complexity science seeks to explain systems qua systems,
drawing on the study of dynamics, non-linear chemistry, cybernetics, the mathematics of
deterministic chaos and quantitative network analysis.3 Here systems (such as human
economies, metabolic enzyme reactions, colonies of ants foraging for food, computergenerated cellular automata, and weather formations) are modelled as potentially unstable,
irreversible, and radically open to perturbation. Key to this field are the concepts of feedback,
auto-catalytic, reflexive causality, and emergence, described by the sociologists Smith &
Jenks as “the absolute of complexity” 4. Emergence means broadly that, at the level of the
system rather than at that of its component parts, new behaviours emerge which are not
reducible to the behaviour of those components on their own. The whole acts in a new way,
1
Coole, Frost New Materialisms 2-3
Miguel et al, 2012, 2, emphasis added
3 Mitchell, M. (2009) Complexity, a guided tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4 Smith & Jenks, 2008, 62
2
as often relatively simplistic agent-level interactions generate complex self-organising
emergent patterns on a systemic level.
In the recent work of Jane Bennett, in particular 2010’s Vibrant Matter, she examines complex
assemblages of human and non-human entities, akin to Latourian ‘actants’.5 In a break from
the traditional subject-object distinction, Bennett hymns the agentic abilities of all entities,
from particles to elephants, skyscrapers to nation states, as a kind of “thing power”. Humans,
like all entities, living and non-living, sentient and non-sentient, are composed of the same
matter, in an univocal ontology woven into an eco-interdependent web. As Bennett puts it this
“sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the outside may induce vital materialists
to treat nonhumans – animals, plants, earth, even artefacts and commodities- more carefully,
more strategically, more ecologically”. 6 Human agency, on this account, is an interlocking
network of humanity and nonhumanity, with the meshing of the two ever-harder to ignore.
For Bennett, matter itself is eulogised as “wonderfully” or even “dangerously” “vibrant”, “lively”,
and “vital”7.The vivid biological adjectives which pepper Bennett’s work are instructive, in that
they dramatise the philosophical vitalism which forms the theoretical core of her project and
her vision of what matter is. Her blending of Latour’s actor-network theory with NietzscheanSpinozan-Deleuzean vitalism creates an ontology of universal agency, arranged in complex
assemblages, where each agent is a constant blur of becoming. Bennett is aware that a
degree of opprobrium may be the result of such a trajectory, even joking that she deliberately
risks “superstition, animism, vitalism, and anthropomorphism” in doing so.8 However, in
seeking to defend a kind of strategic anthropomorphism, she argues that the benefits of a
more inclusive approach to the kinds of entities social and political theory examines and takes
account of is worth the risk.
William Connolly’s most recent book, A World of Becoming, shares many features with
Bennett’s work, perhaps most importantly in terms of working from a common basis in vitalist
5
Bennett, J 2010 Vibrant Matter
Ibid 17-18.
7 Ibid, 13-17.
8 Ibid, 18.
6
process philosophy, with a decidedly mystical, imagistic stylistic bent.9 Connolly defends a
similar account of agency to Bennett, emphasising degrees of agency, but his work attempts
to knit more closely vitalism with complexity theory in thinking global social and political
dynamics. To do so, he strikes up a position akin to William James’ radical Empiricism in
seeking to bridge the gap between individualism and holism, a form of ‘connectionism’ where
all relations are loose, incomplete, and partial, enabling the titular universal flux to take place.
From complexity science he draws the ideas of pre-adaptation, redundant features within an
entity or system, that following a radical shift can become decisively important; Poincare
resonances, a kind of feedback generating self-organizing tendencies in a time of transition;
and open systems, potentially enabling highly improbable conjunctures between different
subsystemic components.10
Matter then, for the new materialists, is an all-encompassing vitalist flux of becoming.
Whether conceived as interlocking network or ensembles of ‘force-fields’ and resonance, this
materialism seeks to take into account the animate and the inanimate, the sapient, the
conscious, and the non-conscious, the organic and the artificial.
2. Making The Wrong Turn
Having briefly discussed what the ‘matter’ of new materialism is, we must now establish why
this is problematic. First, it elides the hard problems of epistemology. Second, in misreading
complexity theory, it often cannot explain, only describe. Third, on this basis it generates a
quasi-liberal politics which is frequently a poor guide to action.
First to epistemology. What Bennett and Connolly share is a focus on the question of what is
over the question of how we know what is, or of ontology over epistemology. An
epistemological blind spot is certainly not unique to this brand of post-humanism, being
exemplified and actively embraced by many of the ontologists they draw upon (especially
Deleuze and Latour). Deleuzean ontological univocity, in the form of being-as-difference,
9
Connolly, W. 2011 A World Of Becoming
Ibid, ch 1.
10
collapses the distinction between thinking, meaning and being. 11 In suggesting that everything
(or perhaps every thing) is real, we find little that enables us to ‘carve reality at the joints’ to
engage in the critical task of discovering what is really real. In addition, the total elision of
thinking and being logically results in the conclusion that everything which is, to some extent,
thinks.12 This pre-critical metaphysics can rightly be described as panpsychist, in that it
invests inanimate matter with degrees of cognition, consciousness, and affect.
Second, the implications of a pre-critical metaphysical outlook for the role of science and
explanation. Within the sciences (including quantitative and computational social sciences)
complexity theorists aim to extract general principles about complex systems. In the broadest
terms, classical scientific reductionism (of which Newtonian physics is the paradigmatic
example) attempts to understand the behaviour of the natural world through gaining
knowledge of its smallest possible component parts13. In this sense, classical dynamic
systems are no more than the sum of the interactions of their elements. By contrast,
complexity approaches seek to understand the behaviour of systems (from galaxies to ant
colonies, from chemical reactions to human economies) through a more holistic methodology.
In other words, certain kinds of systems exhibit behaviour which cannot be simply reduced to
the sum of their components behaviour in a straightforward fashion. This is not to say
however that the complexity sciences refuse explanatory reduction since to reduce remains
essential to explanation as such, rather than mere description. Instead, this reduction rests
upon understanding the mechanism-independent properties of systems-qua-systems, that is
to say a relational account of how systems operate. However, this is not always how
complexity has been received by the social sciences and humanities. As Connolly puts it, “the
arrival of complexity theory in the physical sciences […] moves natural science closer to the
concerns of cultural theory, as it surmounts reductionism.”14 What is emphasised in these
accounts is precisely the elements of complexity which are most comfortable to the nonscientific scholar, shaped by recent developments in the post-structuralist tradition: the
11
Deleuze, Difference & Repetition
Brassier, “Concepts and Objects” in Srnicek et al (ed) The Speculative Turn
13 Coveney & Highfield, 1995
14 Connolly, A World of Becoming, 17.
12
finitude of human knowledge, radical contingency, and the limited purview of human agency
and cognition.
The most serious problems affecting the world today and for the foreseeable future, are all
clearly related to complex dynamic systems. But there is a significant risk involved here.
When complexity moves out of a mathematical or scientific domain and into that of the
humanities, frequently a set of essentially scientific principles and concepts metastasize into a
form of ‘new age’ mysticism. The lack of a mechanistic determinist system has all-too-often
been seized upon by those who would seek to obfuscate material reality, in favour of an
ontological-linguistic performance of processuality, flow, and becoming, condensing into a
mystical quietism, filled with a posthumanist piety for the inanimate and non-human world
which is properly speaking mostly utterly indifferent to us. A theoretical architecture developed
around metaphor, and indeed a singular, all-encompassing metaphor at that, flattens real
differences in the world, occluding the real and proffering an irreductionist methodology in
favour of explanatory purchase.15
Third, to the political implications of this. Bennett spends an entire chapter of Vibrant Matter
examining a power blackout which occurred in the United States in 2003 which affected more
than 50 million people. Whilst she is able to make some interesting observations about the
interdependence of humans and their technical systems, her political conclusions are timid,
singling out corporate regulation as one area in which political effort should be applied.
Moreover, in spite of her apparent emphasis on distributed agency, her approach to human
action is often expressed on an individualistic, liberal-ethical basis: do I elect to remain or
leave or join a particular assemblage of relations? 16 Above all her political prescriptions,
somewhat out of key with the otherwise affirmative lyrical prose of her text, frequently counsel
the reader towards caution and hesitancy.17
Cf: Brassier, “Concepts and Objects” in Srnicek et al (eds) The Speculative Turn, 52.
Bennett, J Vibrant Matter, 36-7.
17 Ibid, 38.
15
16
Whilst Connolly’s more complexity-infused approach brings together some useful conceptual
stimuli, particularly the notions of abstract large-scaled socio-political resonance machines, he
similarly, and surprisingly, falls into fairly mainstream liberal politics. His advice on how one
might be able to construct an abstract machine to counter the particular patterns of resonance
active in the United States at present gives rise to the suggestion to “buy a Prius or a Volt and
explain to your neighbours what you did […] ride your bike to work more often; consider solar
panels; introduce new topics at your church.” 18 This comes close to the advice of pop network
theorists: do good things to those immediately around you and the effects may cascade
outwards.
There may of
course be
occasions
when
such
actions
might have
disproportionately large effects. But the proximity of this counsel to the politics of mainstream,
hegemonic entities like the Democrat party in the US, or even the UK Conservative party’s
notion of the ‘big society’, ought to give us pause for thought here. Though Connolly is
justified in critiquing the pathological negativity of much of the contemporary ‘radical’ left, the
failure of the kinds of tactics he outlines makes us aware that feedback operates in multiple
directions, capable of reinforcing patterns of behaviour just as much as destabilising and
creating flux. Elsewhere, Connolly does examine mass movement politics, arguing that
individual cumulative shifts in behaviour can generate new collective transformations, in so
doing escalating pressure on corporations, states, and churches, radicalising individuals and
collectives to create a new resonance machine.19 Much of this is laudable, but the language
of complexity appears somewhat extraneous to a relatively conventional description of the
ebb and flow of contentious political movements.
This does not mean that we should necessarily reject all of the individual insights which
Bennett and Connolly have. Ecological perspectives indeed should be embraced, given that
climate change is potentially the most critical threat to the continued existence of humanity in
the twenty-first century. But such considerations do not necessarily entail assenting to a
panpsychist animism of neospiritual wonder at the flux of creation. Further, an expansive
focus on multiple entities, (human and non-human) and the deployment of ideas of feedback
from complexity theory are essential components of a political theory better able to
18
19
Connolly, 91.
Ibid 144.
understand the intricate non-linear dynamics of global change. But to be rendered workable,
they require supplementation.
3. A Dark Enlightenment
Bennett describes her work as an “enchanted materialism”20 and whilst this is clearly intended
as a provocation, perhaps with a brutal economistic Stalinist Marxism in mind, we should
consider it an entirely accurate description of new materialism. I have already outlined the
difficulties such a process of enchantment entails. In its stead, I propose that we reconsider
positively the place of the Enlightenment, not as myth of Westernised progress, but as
process of radical dis-enchantment. To recover something useful from Enlightenment thought
we will be required to reinterpret it in two directions. In light of the work of the transcendental
realist philosopher Ray Brassier, we need to think the process of scientific augmentation of
knowledge as a vector of nihilism which profoundly disenchants our perspective on material
reality21. Moreover, in order to think a politics adequate to what might be termed the ‘moment
of complexity’ we
need to refurbish some of the more problematic associations the
Enlightenment has taken on, specifically in reconceiving its narrative of mastery. Between
these two pincers I propose a dark enlightenment of mastery after humanism.
In his 2007 book, Nihil Unbound, Brassier makes two basic arguments. Firstly that the
disenchantment of the world brought about by the Enlightenment and scientific investigation is
an “invigorating vector of discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment”, and hence an
achievement to be celebrated as a sign of intellectual maturity. Second, that we should
abandon the role of philosophy as a kind of feel-good supplement to render an essentially
inhospitable, meaningless universe more amenable to our existence. “Philosophy”, writes
Brassier, “should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.” As
Brassier puts it, “Nihilism is not an existential quandary, but a speculative opportunity” and
therefore thought itself “has interests which do not coincide with those of the living.” 22
20
Bennett, J. The Enchantment of Modern Life, Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2001. Emphasis added.
21 Brassier, R. Nihil Unbound. Palgrave
22 Ibid, xi
We can consider Brassier’s radically nihilistic recasting of the Enlightenment as a rejoinder to
the affective, irreductionist vitalism trafficked by the new materialists. Most crucial here is the
distinction he draws from analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars of the difference between
thinking and being. In Sellars’ 1962 paper “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, a
theory of the relationship between the manifest and scientific images of ‘man-in-the-world’ is
elaborated. The manifest image, a philosophically refined version of the manner in which
“man first encountered himself” is contrasted with the scientific imaging of the human as
simply a complex physical system. Whilst Sellars is a strong proponent of the reductionist
scientific programme, he thinks that there remains something which cannot be easily reduced.
That is to say, the very thing which offers the conditions of possibility for the process of
reduction itself to occur, that element of the manifest image which is normative rationality.
What Brassier extracts from Sellars is an understanding of the rational subject as a formal,
abstract, fundamentally empty process.
This is not to assert that humans have a special place in the world. Indeed, this viewpoint
might be seen as an extension of those espoused by Connolly when he talks of differences of
agentic and conscious degree. But it is one which pays more attention to the specifics of
sapience, consciousness, and agency. A human is not privileged, but sapience, the ability to
think, probably should be. Whilst various systems are capable of processing information of
some sort (DeLanda even claiming that geological processes perform a minimal information
processing23) rational thought, whilst instantiated in the same kinds of physical matter
(quarks, gluons, atoms, chemicals, proteins etc) has some specific properties which must be
considered in detail. Perhaps we might say that there are differences of degree, but some
differences have emergent effects which are not reducible simply to degrees. Sapience is no
longer the privileged domain of the human, but rather a procedure which can potentially be
instantiated in substrates which are not just individual human beings (for example within
social assemblages, or socio-technical ones, or even potentially artificial intelligence).
23
DeLanda, M. 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
This is not to simply to argue for a traditional Enlightenment conception of the self-initiating
free subjectivity of humans. Instead it dethrones the humanist conception, in a manner which
is complimentary to similar decentrings from libidinal psychoanalysis to contemporary
neurophilosophy such as Thomas Metzinger, as well as in the application of complexity theory
in the fields of economics and society.
4. Mastery After The Human
This Brassieran intelligence is quasi-autonomous, in the sense of not necessarily being in line
with individual human needs. What this means is that rationality and scientific insight disclose
a universe which is radically indifferent, if not inhospitable to us. The second use of
Enlightenment ideas must come in seeking, within the domain of global politics, to deploy this
intelligence towards achieving a new kind of mastery over this inhospitable non-human
domain. As opposed to the kind of relatively quietist ethical withdrawal offered by the new
materialists, we ought to engage the tools at our disposal to properly think, map, and act
within complex non-linear systems. The kind of mastery imagined under a LaplacianNewtonian mechanistic scientific paradigm, an image of a clockwork, entirely deterministic
universe where we might potentially predict the behaviour of the total universe and every
component in it providing we possessed sufficient information about its initial state, is no
longer available to us.24 But this is not to indicate that mastery is off the table entirely.
Let us take, for example, the subfield of complexity science which deals in chaotic systems.
Far from endorsing the post-modern perspective of the new materialists where contingency
reigns and virtually any becoming is possible, instead we find a kind of deterministic chaos.
This means that, within deterministically chaotic systems, we do not necessarily know
precisely what will occur, but that what does occur will be drawn from a relatively limited
range of possible options. Chaos, far from being totally indeterminate, has large-scaled rules.
Primary amongst these is what is termed period doubling, as a linear relationship between
parameters first oscillates between two values, then four, then eight, in a predictable
sequence of bifurcations, until it reaches a point of chaos. At each bifurcation point,
24
Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, 7
deterministic description breaks down and only a statistical or stochastic description is now
possible.25 The second large-scale feature of chaotic systems is Feigenbaum’s constant,
which holds that each period doubling occurs approximately 4.6692 times faster than the
prior one, resulting in a regular asymptotic approach on the way towards becoming chaotic. 26
Here we have a vision of chaos which rather than consisting in the absolutely random, is
instead deterministic, giving rise to predictable patterns within an apparently chaotic
distribution. Non-equilibirum, rather than delivering unintelligible randomness, actually creates
order out of chaos, with occluded regularities hidden within chaotic systems. It is in light of
scientific findings like these, (along with others such as Barabási and Albert’s principle of
preferential attachment in network theory, Von Neumann’s concept of self-reproduction, and
Holland’s notion of balancing exploration and exploitation within complex adaptive systems)
that we can begin to conceive a new form of mastery. Gone is the God-like perspective of a
mechanistic universe of absolute linear causality. But in its wake have come new ideas which
give us the ability to begin to think non-linear interventions, deploying circular causality to
generate an emergent mastery.
5. Towards a Collective Self-Mastery
To do so, rather than anthropomorphise nature, we must continue along a path of disenchantment made possible by a critical epistemology keen to the distinctions between
thinking, meaning, and being, generating a new conception of collective, autonomous
rationality which is no longer precisely identified with the liberal humanist understanding of the
human as self-initiating will. And rather than bow down before a pagan pantheon of complex
forces beyond our control, hymning the boundless wonder of creative flux, we should deploy
the findings of complexity science to render our socio-technical reality tractable, both to
thought and to political action. In a world increasingly marked by human activity (whether in
the rapidly changing climate system or our technospheric computational extended mind)
politics faces a choice: shrink back into a quietist withdrawal at the sublime complexity of
reality, (in the sense of being both awesome and horrifying) or use the tools which are rapidly
25
26
Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, 177-8
Mitchell, 2008, 24-9
emerging to be at our disposal to intervene within complex global systems, with all the risks
and benefits associated. Together, these might begin to give us the basis from which to move
beyond a liberal capitalism and towards a collective self-mastery.