Affirmation of the Arbitrary

Concepts of vital materialism and objectness place the ontological claim of the other at its most extreme point. The collapse of the distinction between life and matter, and further the subject/object opposition, presents an elevation of the multiplicity of being to a level of equality with the traditional conceptions of life. With this elevation comes new obligations and relations to instantiate the place of the claim as not just an ontological exploration but a political mechanism that displaces sapient reasoning as the dominant mode of existence.

The premising of politics as a “confederation of bodies” pulled together by a “shared experience of harm”[1] sets the nature of a public collective as one that is fully integrated across ontological boundaries. A Deweyan ecology of affected bodies presents a proto-posthumanist politics that lowers the threshold of integration of other beings/things, conceived blithely as the environment. Latour takes such an idea further with his parliament of things composed of actants and assemblages. The threshold is removed as commitments and priorities become a holistic collectivity of integrated human/non-human interactions and debates.

At an ontological level, the opening up of being to objects, events and other modes of thought and extension is not particularly controversial in itself. While the nature of consciousness and our understanding of environment and the universe is extremely controversial and remains an open-ended set of questions and bifurcations, the recognition of the other as an actant within fields of forces and wills has been recognised philosophically. Descartes and Spinoza acknowledge the animal wills and the forces of nature.

Vital materialism puts these forces and wills on an equal standing with sapient reasoning, suggesting the possibility of negotiated outcomes with this collective other (whether nature, technology, bacterial forms or aggregates of these) that facilitate shared goals. We move from the ontological construction of being and its mysteries and unknowns to a political and moral project that divides responsibilities, assigns obligations and denotes the interactions and negotiations between various reasonings and collectives. Moving from the descriptive to the prescriptive as the visualisation of these relations and their institutionalisation become means of actioning this project.

Fundamental questions remain as to what the purpose or outcome of this political project would be. The political conception used by Bennett or Latour is highly conciliatory, noting reasoning as a primary factor in the mechanisms for negotiations. But what would be the nature of political achievements? A holistically-organised economy and polity? Greater empathy between actants? The construction of a whole new lifeworld?

Questions run the gamut from liberal-esque integration of alteric demands to utopian prospects for a world of linguistic multiplicity (which in a political system that could meaningfully integrate other forms of being would mean the capability for communication across linguistic and sensory barriers). This isn’t a criticism so much as an open-ended question. Such a broad project could conceivably integrate into existing systems or produce completely new ones. The capitalistic potential of bacterial communication and co-exploitation, or the development of a technosphere built around hostile AI architectures and top down command structures sits contrastingly with utopic imaginaries and a political equality of reasoning.

Beyond the macropolitical, deeper of questions of what the political is in vital materialism and what the nature of reasoning is between divergent actants emerge. What is the purpose of reasoning and the nature of existence? At a biological level, the collective construction of feedback processes and consciousness in humans is demonstrated via the interconnections of bacterial populations in the gut and mood-stabilising mechanisms. Organisms are holobionts, an “integrated organism comprised of both host elements and persistent populations of symbionts”[2]. In disease prevention, digestion and genetic evolution the organism is a collective entity of competing and cooperating populations and drives that is structured via multiway feedback processes. As a biological assemblage, we are not self-sufficient individuals, rather symbiotically integrated entities in a collective structure of differing wills (drives and forces).

More speculatively, Baluska and Reber postulate an evolutionary nature to consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. Cellular consciousness is premised on a subjective awareness of environmental flux and the integration of subcellular components (the mitochondria with the nucleus for example) that hierarchise biological functions. “Without an internal, subjective awareness of these changes, without being able to make decisions about where to move, how to modify gene-expression adaptively for shifts in nutrient levels, how to match the ambient temperature with a memory of what it was in a previous location for adaptive movement, a prokaryote would be a Darwinian dead-end”[3]. As cellular structures then scale, from unicellular to multicellular organisms and increasingly adapt to environmental changes, this subjective awareness evolves to maintain homeostasis and explore niches in this growing environment. The integration of circadian clocks[4] from organellar components to eukaryotic cells demonstrates a potential means of understanding this adaptive capacity. This synchronisation of circadian rhythms presents a scaling mechanism from subcellular to cerebral processes that demonstrates a sprawling form of being across biological parts. Consciousness as an emergent phenomenon from cellular structures decentres the uniqueness of sapient reasoning, as we found ourselves in a milieu of competing drives that require fine balancing to maintain optimal conditions for existence.

Self-regarding and understanding the self within nature potentially emerge from consciousness evolution. “The recent unexpected discovery of a SELFO, the DMN, in the human brain, however, has required a substantial revision of such a ‘reflex’ model of nervous systems and reignited interest in endogenous neural activity. Since its discovery, the DMN has become increasingly linked to the ‘self’ in humans, potentially acting as a brain-wide integrator, but its precise function and mechanism remains obscure given the limitations of both imaging and manipulating human brains. Interestingly, the same kind of spontaneous electrical activity found in the human DMN appears to be highly conserved throughout life. The widespread presence of SELFOs suggests they may be playing an important role in organism-wide integration and communication in biological systems at all levels of scale”[5]. Presence of SELFOs provides further potential for a distributed understanding of being that integrates various components into a multi-way hierarchy of interactions and competing wills.

At a wider level of social intelligence and collective engineering, the collective brain further shows the sprawling nature of being in relation to lifeworld construction. “Humans possess cultural brains—brains that evolved primarily for the acquisition of adaptive knowledge”[6]. Mainly through familial and communal interactions facilitated by linguistic coding and cultural overcoding, shared norm structures develop that inhere social learning. Such adaptive knowledge provides environmental cues related to survival and intra-communal identification. The social nexus provides a grounds for innovation via cultural recombination, incremental improvement and selection by undergirding such means with a vast collective knowledge that can be drawn on, particularly when in shared social lineages or cultural spaces.

However, these conclusions are largely arbitrary as a means to understanding the nature of reasoning or willing. All are premised on “variables” that “are inter-related, because they are a by-product of brains evolving to acquire, store and manage adaptive knowledge. The specific evolutionary pathway taken by different species is influenced by ecological and phylogenetic constraints related to the richness of the ecology”[7]. The discovery and exploitation of ecological niches so as to maintain living standards (food supplies and living space) and control larger amounts of resources for the development of progeny. All come back to the basic necessities of space and power.

“We demonstrated that populations evolve toward a distinctive regime in behavioral phenotype space, where small responses of individuals to local environmental cues cause spontaneous changes in the collective state of groups. These changes resemble phase transitions in physical systems. Through these transitions, individuals evolve the emergent capacity to sense and quickly respond to resource gradients (i.e. individuals perceive gradients via social interactions, rather than sensing gradients directly), and to allocate themselves among distinct, distant resource patches”[8].

Bodily extension and the capacity to think relate to environmental and social adaptivity. SELFOs, evolved consciousness and collective brains are there for the purpose of extending oneself or one’s group over the available space and inhabitants within it. “For an individual human, superior intelligence is an asset in competing for position in the social dominance hierarchy. It conveys advantage for attracting and winning a desirable mate, in raising a large, healthy, and prosperous family, and seeing to it that one’s offspring are well provided for. In competition between human groups, more intelligent customs and traditions, and more highly developed institutions and technology, lead to the dominance of culture and growth of military and political power. Less intelligent customs, traditions, and practices, and less developed institutions and technology, lead to economic and political decline and eventually to the demise of tribes, nations, and civilizations”[9]. This isn’t to say that all affects are reductive and all substances treated as innately exploitable, but when we are talking about the way in which intelligence and will are used, we are talking about means to achieve goals. These goals are not unitary, existing in social milieux that propagate alternative visions for collective and disparate lifeworlds. The capacity to do this is linked to the power an actant has to negotiate, compete and dominate the available space and the other actants within it. This can mean holobionts and structured thinking things, but also conflict for resources and progenation.

Braidotti begins to recognise this in her Spinozist ethics – “Spinoza sees bodily limits as the limits of our awareness as well, which means that his theory of affectivity is connected to the physics of motion. Another word for Spinoza’s conatus is therefore self-preservation, not in the liberal individualistic sense of the term, but rather as the actualization of one’s essence, that is to say, of one’s ontological drive to become. This is neither an automatic nor an intrinsically harmonious process, insofar as it involves interconnection with other forces and consequently also conflicts and clashes”[10]. An actant’s drives, their conatus, inhere the forms of negotiation and extension that are possible. What’s being described is a possibility space, the actualisation of virtual forms into concrete realities. Yet the language is always optimistic, assuming that the negotiated systems are inherent to activity that is beneficial. But beneficial is a subjective term, related to the aims of the extending actant. Braidotti, like others, falls into the political conceit of a space that will concretise responsibility and relationality as affirmed values or norms across the biological and technological spheres.

On the assumption of collective consciousnesses comes an altruistic body politic. Creativity is always constructive. Spinoza points out the limits of this potential in relation to reasoning as the structuring understanding of things that is itself limited and maldistributed. Access to reason is highly contingent on factors such as control of the desires and the recognition of our will as a limited expanse in the interactions of bodies[11]. In a political context, reasoning leads more to aristocracy and control of the masses rather than a distributed demos of actants[12]. Distinction between the state of nature and state of reason remain paramount in Spinoza’s work, and if we recognise the potential for conflict and clashes of wills then they should remain paramount in modern conceptions of political life too.

Reason’s subjective aporias provide a framework for misunderstandings that instantiate conflicts based upon a degraded will. “The world model provides the intelligent system with the information necessary to reason about objects, space, and time. The world model contains knowledge of things that are not directly and immediately observable. It enables the system to integrate noisy and intermittent sensory input from many different sources into a single reliable representation of spatiotemporal reality”[13]. But this also entails the possibility for misinterpretations that change the form of deterministic systems and the interactions of actants within such systems. Politics as a system of interactions mediated by ideological concerns and environmental cues (linked to control of living space) is not innately a reasoning thing.

World modelling on the basis of adaptation and external inputs makes distinctions between internal representation and external understanding (this referring to shared concepts of things in the universe that are observable by multiple actants whose social milieu allows for comparison). The distinction between qualia and social facts[14]. But the problem of qualia is its subjective existence which cannot extend beyond the individual observer. We cannot represent our interpretations of affects (like shape and colour) unless they share qualities with other’s experiences which then moves into the realm of social facts. The initial private fact is of limited consequence unless its explanation moves beyond the purely subjective. But the scaling of subjectivity to systems and collectives means limitations on the potential interactions of alternative forms and substances which breach the boundaries of distinct systems. A shared reality becomes impossible when the underlying facts disagree.

Holobionts reveal the limits of political assemblages. The biological interrelations of cellular and bacterial constructions cannot have a meaningful political identity beyond perfunctory symbols. We move instead to the simplicity of Spinoza’s interacting bodies and their functions of cause and effect. There is limited control and a constant battle of desires and affects in the interrelations of the will.

Going back to dynamics, we see other issues in relation to system evolution and bifurcation. Stochastic dynamics can birth from deterministic systems[15]. Chaos can be treated as a simple property of phasal entities through periodic doubling in transitions. So-called natural systems even at low frequency can produce chaotic bursts, with new phase states growing and then declining and tailing off as energy dissipates. Linking to political systems specifically, determinations are those done by systems governed by specific cause and effect relations, with the power to instantiate those sitting with a system determiner, in the case of politics this being collective functionaries in their social milieu. If the scaling of subjective understandings produces divergent criteria for assessing actions and determining objectives, there is greater chance for chaotic phase transitions as systems reach environmental and social limits (the latter demarcated by clashes of wills in coexistent living spaces and the reduction of resources inhered by conflicts that reduce use efficiency).

As political systems expand and develop autonomy from a micropolitical structure toward macro and metapolitical forms, the complexity of entities within its purview also increases. New forms of systematicity instantiate particular epistemological requirements that change the forms of being that are either possible or desirable. “Complicated as well as simple nonlinear systems may exhibit chaotic solutions. Chaotic activity in a laboratory computer system may be inconvenient; in a locally autonomous complicated military system it could be unfortunate. One can only hope that as the complexity of a system increases, access to any domains of chaotic activity becomes more and more unlikely”[16]. As complexity increases, the potential for phase transitions along ecological lines goes with it. It also increases the same on ontological lines, as the structuring of knowledge becomes difficult to grasp for individual actants within a pre-existing paradigm. The requirements for those who can grasp totalising forms of knowledge and control vast sources of information become key for the extension of power over an environment. Being in the world advances meta-systematically as systems become multivalent actors themselves, capable of autonomous potentials within controlled or disputed spaces. Reasoning, and its associated responsibilities and forms of agency, transition into the emerging paradigms changing the ways in which it is expressed.

From this, there is the assumption of knowledge, particularly self-knowledge, as a precondition of universal action. The original Cartesian question, how does one recognise oneself[17], is multifaceted and deconstructive. Identity is a patchwork of often contradictory tendencies, as well as being influenced by outside drives and tropisms that are beyond a knowable control. The control of space does not just mean a geographical extension, but control of the processes and actants within it. One of the major questions concerning cellular consciousness is the extent to which decisions over food sources, viral protection and anaesthetic affects is driven by a subjective, thinking form, rather than something dictated by innate drives or tropisms that prevent a conscious decision being made over the action completed. A similar argument was made in relation to total war by Loeb[18] who noted the tropistic nature of led peoples in the First World War and how their national commitments interrelated to survival instincts such that the direction of a people became a matter of the will of the sovereign. Representation means nothing in an authoritarian collective dominated by a specific will. What we’re discussing is the last man in relation to the will(s) that is overtaking him and opening new potentials for the means of being.

By affirming the place of objects and materialities as agential actants, potentiality is foreclosed in a will-less inertia. Will gives way to habitation as the force of the act – to inhabit is to grant status, to give one the capacity to claim rights and duties within a relational field. Yet what does this entail? For Bennett, the possibility of a more ecologically-attuned lebenswelt where the needs of objects, non-human subjects and interrelated flows (that break down the object-subject duality) are considered. But this does not escape anthropic hegemony and instead takes Latour’s equitability of claims to an extreme level that becomes arbitrary. “We now recognise the importance of the agency of these various things”. So what? The potential conclusions that come from this do not entail an ecological future. They centre power as the primary object of the claim, with representation a veil of control over these various agential potentialities. By bringing to light the varieties of subjectivation and thingness, new shadows are created in the liminal spaces between claim and representation whose futurity is not amenable to a purely political or environmental project.

The nature of responsibility is itself arbitrary. The relations between actants that demand it are purely derivative of the power discrepancies between them. “Where there is no recognisable supremacy, and where a conflict would be useless and would injure both sides, there arises the thought of coming to an understanding”[19]. The political representation of phase transitions, which can be overtaken and made redundant as new cues and alternative forces enter the fray. Nietzsche noted as much in the move of the value of actions from the prehistoric (pre-moral) to the modern period[20]. In the former, actions were judged by their consequences. In the latter, by their origins, which required self-knowledge so as to recognise the morality inherent in said actions. Representation and responsibility are fetters, demonstrative of the dominant power in the prevailing system. They’re discarded when no longer useful in controlling space.

The primary question that comes from vital materialism, the so what?, makes the representation of claimants itself pointless. If we are constantly interrelated with material and non-material flows which direct us, contain us and cohere our subjectivity, what purpose is there in a praxis of the object? Reality is both constructed by and for us in fields of forces that are only partially responsive to sapient agency. Rather than bringing to light, it reveals just how blind such agency is, how limited it is and how little concepts of responsibility and representation have beyond our anthropic reasoning. So what becomes of what we can do? The answer is as arbitrary as the question – anything our wills allow. Thus we enter axiomatic warfare and the battlegrounds of the subject.

“It will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendancy – not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives”[21]. Harnessing tropistic natures and constructing new systems within the shadows of the old. “The degree to which a system can evaluate possible consequences of various actions, in pursuit of those goal states, can vary widely, but is essential to its survival. The expenditure of energy in ways that effectively reach specific states despite uncertainty, limitations of capability, and meddling from outside forces is proposed as a central unifying invariant for all Selves—a basis for the space of possible agents”[22].

Projects like vital materialism appear as conservative attempts to foreclose emergent possibilities within the realm of established sapient politics of reason, maintaining the moral world and the position of the last man. The nature of concepts like planetarity[23] and post-humanism invoke similar paradigms to post-historical narratives, the end of history and the hegemony of globalisation. “When confronted by the definition of the human in the anthropocentric era as ‘a dominant species that accelerated its own disappearance by consuming and altering its planet’, it is of course hard not to think of more traditional apocalyptic narratives. The claim that the anthropocene and the ethics of the post-human are the only way to think about the future and to refashion the past brings to mind another historical moment when there was an equally pressing call for radical global readjustment”[24]. Closing the spaces of potentiality to inhere a purely moralised future. This invokes Braidotti’s altruistic concept of Spinozist ethics, only recognising the positive outcomes of such a venture while ignoring the conflict undergirding it. But it is the darkness with the light that allows a full perspective on the forms of being made possible by drives and forces that batter sapient systems in the interactions of bodies.

Closure in the world will always occur. Openings foretell closings as much as conceptualisation foretells re- and deconceptualisations. It is in the shadows of established norms and values that new means and forms will arise. In cosmopolitical patchworks that cut across the established laws of enquiry and forms of being inhered by self-knowledge and universal ethics. This can be both the construction of grand projects of futurity, breaking the chains of Anthropocenic teleologies, but also the grubby work of existing on the edges of systems, constituting ontologies of survival and bare life under the auspices of a tropistic sovereignty of total war.

[1] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

[2] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/668166

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.201800229

[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202100121

[5] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0763

[6] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192

[7] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192

[8] https://www.ab.mpg.de/383726/collective-sensing

[9] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/97471

[10] https://rosibraidotti.com/publications/affirmation-versus-vulnerability-on-contemporary-ethical-debates/

[11] Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics

[12] Benedict de Spinoza, Political Treatise