Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that a periodic surfacing of resistance on the part of the exploited and oppressed that Marx described has been replaced with a new form of struggle requiring new topological metaphors. Pointing out that Marx deployed the deep image of the mole for the working class, they propose that this should be rethought in the globalized world in terms of the movement of snakes: ‘Well, we suspect that Marx’s old mole has finally died. It seems to us, in fact, that in the contemporary passage to Empire, the structured tunnels of the mole have been replaced by the infinite undulations of the snake.’1 The topology is redefined by the lack of depth that has been codified in postmodern theory, by the abolition of distance in the digitally connected world, by the openness of the external reaches of a network that can always be extended by adding new nodes. The systematic subterranean dismantling of the system, invisible until the moment of a sudden wholesale collapse, is replaced by a network that occupies the whole surface like a worldwide web.2 The virtuality of location, however, is twinned to an insistence on bodily existence: the denizen of Empire is monstrous due to the continuous shaping pressures of labour and oppression; it is sheer flesh forever remade by capitalism. To lean on China Miéville’s version of the potential of the monstrous, we can interpret Hardt and Negri’s idea of flesh in this way: the remade can turn to the voluntary refashioning of the body for their own purposes.3 Every point, every instance of flesh, connects to the virtual centre, so for Hardt and Negri any struggle constitutes a challenge to the organization of power in toto, as well as an expression of the unique circumstances of the point of subversion: ‘Simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order.’4 The new world order is defined by Hardt and Negri in terms of the way that power is smoothly diffused. The efforts to dominate and subjugate move not just horizontally to the frontiers but establish a hold ‘throughout the biopolitical latticework of world society’.5 With this, they see a potential for challenges to the status quo to arise from the single points caught in the latticework.

Looking back to the nineteenth century, they see proletarian and anti-colonial internationalism as prefiguring and in some sense inventing the globalization that they characterize as Empire.6 I, too, will be reading back to the nineteenth century, somewhat in the manner that Hardt and Negri reference nineteenth-century communist internationalism, and looking at the design work of William Morris as instances of latticework conceived of in biopolitical terms – as examples of coiled and distributed power and agency. The politics of the shallow field of pattern were Morris’s speciality, always conceived by him in relation to the depth of fleshed-out nature.

The question that comes to prominence in Hardt and Negri’s discussion is how a complete system can yield any opposition. This is their first concern: where is the point of resistance if there is an abandonment of classic formulations of ideology in which truth or science could offer a ground on which to stand? How is resistance generated if the ‘external standpoint no longer exists’, and rather than the coercive quelling of difference, the system maintains itself by ‘an insignificant play of self-generating and self-regulating equilibria’.7 Their answer is driven by an investment in energetics as linked to human potential. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, they take the position that the social arena is a dynamic field, subject to energy flows. Reimagining this social field as a muscular biological entity, in terms that challenge what they see as Deleuze and Guattari’s rather general presentation of dynamism, they contend that the living, totalized entity has the capacity to break out in challenge everywhere and anywhere.8

In taking this discussion back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, I argue that the biopolitical latticework was already a political tool, a way of conceiving of submission and resistance. Topological metaphors were being explored in which political possibilities, questions of the concentration of energies, of affect, desire and subjectivity, were being presented. The new topologies of the latter part of the nineteenth century were biologically based, positing a new kind of organism viewed in terms of the morphological potential of flesh subject to the variations produced by natural and artificial selection and the damaging impact of industrial labour and colonial and imperial warfare. Physiological aesthetics drew on evolutionary theory to vest life and identity in a total organism infiltrated by neural pathways. Mind and body dualities were set aside as consciousness was conceived of as dispersed through the mental apparatus not just of the brain’s grey matter but in the neural fibres and ganglionic centres. Will in flesh became a viable concept rather than will as the controller of despised flesh. In Victorian physiological aesthetics, the proposal is that the organism interacts with the environment, receiving stimuli through the receptor points connected to the nervous system. Pleasure – associated with effective vital functions – and pain – associated with damage or wasting to the biological entity – can be experienced by the subject. Aesthetic pleasure is seen as a variant of this reception of stimulus on the part of the organism.9 Grant Allen, in his Physiological Aesthetics of 1877, following on from work by Henry Maudsley, Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and James Sully, focused on the sense organs, the ‘peripheral end organs of the cerebro-spinal nervous system’. Indeed, Allen famously defined aesthetic pleasure as ‘the subjective concomitant of the normal amount of activity, not directly connected with the life-serving function in these peripheral end organs of the cerebro-spinal system’.10 The passive processing of sense data is aesthetic pleasure for Allen, and play or aesthetic production would be the active equivalent.

Regenia Gagnier has pointed out the emphasis on consumption in this passive biological model that was important for the Aesthetic Movement and contrasts it with William Morris’s refutation of art for art’s sake, his insistence that art should serve a purpose.11 According to Gagnier, certain modes of Aestheticism were shaped by the logic of consumption in commodity culture. She rightly brackets Morris off from such aspects of Aestheticism (and, in the latter part of the century, Decadence).12 In Morris’s view, art was for the purpose of fulfilled being: art served a crucial purpose in sustaining and improving life. He considered it to be sheer deprivation, a vicious thwarting of natural human response, for there to be an absence of beauty in our utilitarian objects and in our surroundings. The pleasures of art are, for him, directly connected with a life-serving function and are a fundamental need for human beings. Additionally, he believed that, along with necessary access to the pleasures deriving from art, there was a need for both knowledge about making and skill in making – in other words, abstract and practical art and craft education, what he called ‘a share of knowledge and access to skill of human hand’.13 We certainly cannot see Morris as fixated on a notion of the consumption of art as the central reference point for the aesthetic. Production for need and artistic production meeting aesthetic needs form an inescapable corollary to the enjoyment of art. Nevertheless his position does overlap with that of the full array of Aestheticist positions in that he conceives of aesthetic experience in terms of the activation of the senses and the processing of sense data. In so far as he puts the sentient organism to the fore, Morris, like members of the Aesthetic Movement, draws on the ideas being developed in physiological aesthetics. His organism is ready to play, ready to know, ready to make, ready to fight. His aesthetic and social ideal centres on the healthy organism, active in supplying its appetites, polymorphous, libidinally charged, liberated from damaging or tyrannical inhibitions, and, like Grant Allen’s aesthetic physical being, open to the extremes of stimulation. I have argued that the life forms envisaged in his designs, the twisting plant forms, stand as representatives of the human subject as social being, beautiful in itself and engaged in aesthetic experience.14

Bearing in mind Hardt and Negri’s snakes and Marx’s mole, we can assess Morris’s designs in terms of slithering all-overness versus intimations of systematic tunnelling way below to enable a once-and-for-all caving in of a falsely integral surface. In one example of a Morris-designed printed fabric of 1876, African Marigold [1], the surging directional movement of the tulip stems in blue can be looked at to assess Morris’s vision of the energies, location and temporality of social and physiological being in its ideal form, its constitutional vigour enabling political action. The mutability and expansiveness of its flesh is the condition of organisms that can and do evolve. That mutability speaks of the future but also of the legacy of slavery (bond slavery and wage slavery) and the industrial deformities of the present. The biopolitical theme allows Morris to present utopian and dystopian visions simultaneously. The assumptions of physiological aesthetics oblige any vision of pleasure to consider the experience of pain as well.

Ornament is well suited to plot the bodily and social coordinates of the decentred individual or the collective, viewed in terms of interconnected biological systems and an interdependent ecological system. Unlike the pictorial, ornament builds on two axes of the two-dimensional surface by repetition, potentially ad infinitum. Morris can be said to have put the proletarian body into ornament and thereby accessed the utopian possibilities of this art form. One way of thinking about this is to think of the Vitruvian theory of ornament – in which ornament originates in the decoration of triumphal monuments with the severed body parts of conquered victims – as having been brought into dialogue with the nineteenth-century design theory of Gottfried Semper – in which ornament is seen as the formalization of the intrinsic craft actions of the maker, transmitting the structural elements of textiles or pottery to painted or printed patterns on the surface.15 Morris puts not just the action but the body of the maker onto the surface, reversing the Vitruvian idea to present the recombined potential victor rather than the disassembled victim. He makes the design function in the essentially two-dimensional geometric grid and in the depth of the forms indicated; the two propositions – that the design is flat and that the forms have depth and move through three-dimensional space – are held in paradoxical opposition in a way that is unique to his work. The conviction of rude corporeal presence (and the health and strength, and so beauty, that go with it) depends on the three-dimensionality of the motifs in the design. The waxy, somewhat pliable fleshy petals of the white blooms, each petal structured with interior grooves and exterior ridges, occupy space assertively. These are manifestly tulip flowers. Morris’s choice of plant species is not always easy to determine, but comparison with a seventeenth-century Dutch watercolour of tulips accessioned by the South Kensington Museums in 1876, the year of Morris’s design, allows us to be sure [2].

2 Simon (Pietersz) Verelst, Tulips, watercolour, after 1668. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (263-1876). Photo: copyright © 2013 V&A Images. All Rights Reserved.

In Morris’s rendition, the tulip blooms with their primitivized stylization are vast, excessive. As the double ring of petals consists of some that fold inwards and others outwards, the bulk is magnified. The petals in the double ring are splayed and rolled together alternately along the nearest edge of the larger blooms, the rolling over of the petal serving to expose the stamens, which command attention within the design. They are as bright and almost as large as the African marigold blooms that act as the counterpoint to the tulips in the design. These stamens (in botanical terms, the male organs of the plant) rise as plump, apparently swelling, impossibly smoothly rounded forms, top-heavy on their flexible stems, clustered together, mutually touching, potentially moving apart as their increasing weight outbalances the available support. For all the challenging tectonic mass of the tulip blooms, the design shows us accommodation and curbing. If the maximum point of affect in the large tulip heads is the stamen as peripheral-end-organ, a mobile sense receptor, then an equal charge is available in the smaller tulip heads at the point where there is a collision with the surging line of the other stem. The S and reverse-S of the blue foliage ‘belonging’ to the smaller tulip slides behind the other stem; but then at the triumphant point of delivery of the flower head into the heart of the spiral there is a point of coincidence with that stem; the petals are forced back and down, others find a space by placing their points over the foliage. These instances of deflection present touch and sensory stimulus as the stamens do, and in line with 1870s materialist physiology there is a switching between pleasure and pain. The deflection is evidence of the energy of the vectored forces, the velocity and substantiality of the snakelike stems. In this congested design, there is a necessity for accommodation: the tulips cannot occupy the whole space of the spirals’ enclosure; they shift to left or right to give space to the less doughty marigold.

I wish to draw attention to the reformatting of the environment in terms of pattern in art of the 1860s (and beyond) and the importance to this reformatting of the biological. An early Victorian naturalistic presentation in which every object and figure held its place by virtue of its ability to signify moral categories or objective certainty gave way to one in which the cumulative repetitions of ornament governed the pictorial field. Morris and contemporaries such as Christopher Dresser, William de Morgan and Walter Crane were looking again at the presentation of the natural world, coming back to the sixteenth-century ceramics of Bernard Palissy so admired in the early Victorian period for the variety of natural form and mimetic representation that they offered, and seeing them instead in terms of an interconnected system offering overall pattern.16 Examples of Palissy ceramics were bought by the South Kensington Museum in the 1850s and 1860s in the prime period of Victorian naturalism [3].

In the 1870s it was possible connect with Palissy in a new way: to picture the snake as is done in a watercolour by George William Mote [4]. In Mote’s picture the snake stands both as an area of pattern and a biological entity, its breathing sentience indicated by the faintest touch of a grass stalk and two staring eyes. It is hardly a figure of sin, as Ruskin, spokesperson for Pre-Raphaelite naturalism, would have any snake (he called the snake ‘a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth’).17 The adder’s triangular markings are displayed as geometric shapes in a neat coil presenting an orderly area of patterning in amongst the rocks, fallen leaves and grasses. In paintings of the 1870s and beyond, subdued mood and ornamental order take the place of histrionics and multiplied symbols of natural theology. George William Mote, gardener-artist employee of the paper-mad aristocrat Sir Thomas Phillipps, was the artist who painted this work in 1870.18 His adder is probably painted from life on the estate at Thirlestaine House. We can imagine that if it moves, it will encounter not just leaves but scraps of paper or vellum, given that Phillipps strewed the country with paper from broken wagons when he moved his vast collection of documents there in the 1860s. The information-technology tycoon of his day, he bought up every available book, manuscript and stray document available on the market, significantly distorting the trade in books and in waste paper. I am offering Mote’s snake as a marker of the ground level of physiologically embodied aesthetic subjectivity that depends on an environment in which repetitive large-scale systems of accumulation occur. The parallel with a late-twentieth-century information age is deliberate.

3 Earthenware dish with coloured glazes, probably by Bernard Palissy. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (5476-1859). Photo: copyright © 2013 V&A Images. All Rights Reserved.

Biology, and in particular evolutionary biology, was arguably the sphere in which repetition on a vast scale and the overall results of minute variation were studied to greatest effect. Lying behind the formulations of physiological psychology were the findings of Charles Darwin on evolution. To draw attention to the forms of biological existence that Darwin proposed in the 1870s and at the start of the 1880s, I will refer in particular to the earthworm study that he produced as his last book: The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881).19 This is a book that explores bodily coordinates, sensibility and systems of accumulation. The worm is an index of any life form, and its achievements correspond to the possibilities inherent in nature, which accumulates minute changes and out of these produces the wonders of the natural world. The wonders that the worm produces are not diversity of form and colour but the beauty of the smooth and refined. At the end of the book Darwin says:

When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so much of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having been slowly levelled by worms.20

The levelling is done by the repeated ingestion, internal grinding and excretion of earth, which makes it finer and finer. He measures the amount of earth shifted and refined by worms over periods of time and establishes the mechanical and chemical processes whereby they break down the matter that passes through their bodies. He establishes the sensitivity of the eyeless worm to touch, vibration and light with a series of experiments. This hermaphroditic organism is a primitive life form of minimal organization capable of moving forwards or backwards, with a body that grows incrementally as the segments multiply. The naked, unarmoured worm, ringed by nerves, is a responsive creature. Most importantly, Darwin’s earthworms are credited with a form of subjectivity since he carried out experiments to show the decision-making powers of the creatures. He investigated the way that the worms draw leaves into their burrows, for food, to provide a cosy lining, and to plug the entrance as a weather-proofing measure. His interest in sensory apparatus gives way to a determination to demonstrate the worms’ decision-making ability. Not just their responsiveness to sensation but their intelligence is being asserted, notwithstanding the small size of the cerebral ganglia, which he acknowledges.21 According to Darwin, they drag different-shaped leaves into their burrows in different ways; they adapt the orientation of the leaf to the best way of plugging the entrance; the selection of orientation is not random.

Darwin tested this by introducing leaflike pieces of paper into the worms’ environment. Narrow-based and very narrow-based triangles were cut out of writing paper and rubbed with animal fat to waterproof them somewhat. The worms’ interaction with these objects left traces: dirt is left on the paper where the worm has covered any part of it with slime; some more easily removed dirt is to be seen on the side that dragged along the ground. Dirty base edges and creases are left on triangles grabbed and pulled into the burrow from the base. However, in the surprise result of the experiment, in the greater number of cases relatively clean triangles without creases, and without dirty base edges resulted from the worms’ adoption of the most advantageous grab-and-pull method whereby the worm assesses the shape of the triangle and selects the sharp apex for the sucking grab. This Darwin takes as evidence of intelligence, careful decision-making on the part of the worms. He surmises that the blind worm moves around the object and touches it repeatedly with its front end, which Darwin explains serves as a tactile organ.22

The claim for the aesthetic effects of earthworm activity must be taken along with the account of their singular subjectivity. Physiological evolutionist models of biological existence in the 1870s and 1880s offered fresh approaches to the aesthetic where the body was at the centre, and mental and psychological processes were considered as aspects of embodied sensibility. This involved a reconceptualization of the participation of the sensible individual in the wider collective, where space and touch and force, accommodation and cooperation could come to be understood in terms of the systemic and incremental. The change produced by the action of worms is not actually evolutionary, but it stands as a figure for evolutionary processes and offers a different presentation of the outcome of evolution from that which was apparent in Darwin’s earlier work. Multi-coloured miscellany gives way to the smooth, ‘wide, turf-covered expanse’. This placid uniformity is subtended by the intense physicality of the worldwide population of constantly labouring worms.

William Morris’s design work was a conscious effort to envisage a healthy being under new conditions of life and to recognize the emotional and political ramifications of change, growth and contestation. He was interested in living labour and its fleshing out. He drew on the paradigms of evolutionist biology and physiological aesthetics to give an account of politics, the temporality of which does indeed seem closer to that of constantly slithering snakes than to the sporadically surfacing mole. Because this is a vision of a future unfolding of the commonwealth’s power and beauty, the healthy flesh is omnipresent, not set in dramatic opposition to an opposing oppressor. The process of change is ongoing, though: there is nothing here that is fixed or inert and the process involves the agonies and pleasures of growth and movement. Somatic and psychic investment is amplified, not reduced, in this utopian vision, and it is through this investment that the utopian can be seen to carry with it an account of the cost of political change and the toll levied on the bodies and minds of the labourers in an alternative dystopia. Such a dystopia corresponds to the late Victorian present or the continuation of the present into ever greater deprivation and provocation.

Hardt and Negri use the embodied labourer as a way of troubling postmodern theory, where the world is conceived of solely in terms of information flow. This puts fleshy depth of productive labour into the worldwide web. Equally they challenge an account of the all-embracing, disabling colonization of somatic being and mental life by the ruling forces in society, proposing that, while power has indeed been integrated into the bodies of populations in this way, the possibility of contestation remains. Glossing Foucault in order to revise his presentation, they write: ‘Society, subsumed within a power that reaches down to the ganglia of the social structure and its processes of development reacts like a single body.’23 Their claim is that the integration of every person through the annexation and control of somatic and mental processes relocates the position of social contestation, potentially, from the margins of the state to the substantial centre. The invasion of every physique and mind paradoxically creates a new context in which contestation is possible.24 This yields somewhat wishful visions of spontaneous revolt, which sits with traditions of syndicalism and anarchism if seen as a programme for political organization. But it also represents the ongoing activity of living labour, wormlike, breaking down the fixed territorializing structures attendant on the accumulation of dead labour.25 There is an analogy between the topologies explored in Hardt and Negri’s ‘omniversal’ and Morris’s vision of the commonweal: in both cases, there is a thickening of the web by the insistence on laborious, fleshy presence. To be aware of this analogy is to suggest another way of reading their work and the biopolitical lattice that they describe, as a dystopian-utopian meditation on power and potential.

This essay is based on a paper delivered at Historical Materialism Conference, London, November 2009; my thanks to Steve Edwards for inviting me to participate in the session on ‘Utopias, Dystopias and Socialist Biopolitics’.

1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000), p. 57.

2 Karl Marx drew on the idea of the mole a number of times. In a letter of 1858, it is a figure for the undermining effects of unsustainable economic arrangements: ‘From a paper which recently appeared in the Moniteur it transpires that, if compared with 1855 and ’56, the stored up commodities in the French customs entrepôts are enormous, while the Economist’s correspondent declares outright that Bonaparte caused the Bank to make advances on the same and thus enabled their holders to return them. But with the approach of spring they will inevitably be thrown on the market, and then, there is no doubt, there will be a crash in France, answered by crashes in Belgium, Holland, Rhenish Prussia, etc./ In Italy the economic situation is truly frightful.… Taken all in all, the crisis has been burrowing away like the good old mole it is. Salut. Your K. M.’ Marx-Engels Correspondence 1858, Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 22 February 1858, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_02_22a.htm>, accessed 22 March 2013.

3 China Miéville envisages a category of people or creatures remade by the punitive state in his Bas-Lag series of novels: Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), Iron Council (2004).

4 Hardt and Negri, Empire, op. cit., p. 58.

5 Ibid., p. 41.

6 Ibid., p. 51.

7 Ibid., p. 34.

8 Ibid., p. 28.

9 See Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1970); Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987); and Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000).

10 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (Henry S. King: London, 1877), p. 34.

11 Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2000), p. 137. See also Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1986).

12 Regenia Gagnier assigns Morris to a category of ‘practical Aesthetes’ along with Ruskin and Wilde, whom she distinguishes from the Decadents.

13 William Morris, ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’, 1884.

14 Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2008).

15 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Architecture: In Ten Books (c. 15 BC), trans. Joseph Gwilt (Priestley and Weale: London, 1826), Book One, pp. 4–5; Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996), chapter 4, ‘The Zurich Years 1855–69’.

16 Fiona McCarthy, A History of British Design 1830–1970 (George Allen and Unwin: London, 1970; 2nd edn, 1979); Stefan Muthesius, The Poetic Home: Designing the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Interior (Thames & Hudson: London, 2009).

17 John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, II (1869), ‘Athena Keramitis (Athena in the Earth)’ (George Allen: Orpington, 1883), p. 88.

18 Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) was a compulsive collector of books and manuscripts, buying secondhand material and job lots of papers. His collection included 40,000 books and 60,000 manuscripts. In 1863, he moved from Middle Hill near Broadway (Worcestershire) to Thirlestaine House, Cheltenham, and required over a hundred wagons to move his vast collections. When several of the wagons foundered in the process, papers were scattered; the countryside was said to be littered with scraps of paper for years. Sir Thomas Phillipps: Portrait of a Collector, exhibition held at Grolier Club, New York, 1972 (no catalogue). See The Middle Hill Press: A Checklist of the Horblit Collection of Books, Tracts, Leaflets, and Broadsides Printed by Sir Thomas Phillipps at His Press at Middle Hill, Or Elsewhere to His Order, Now in the Library of the Grolier Club (Grolier Club: New York, 1997). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22143>, accessed 27 March 2013.

19 Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881) (Appleton: New York, 1882). In this book, Darwin came back to observations he had published early in his career in a paper for the Geological Society in 1837 and an article for the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1844.

20 Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, op. cit., p. 313.

21 He introduces, as a point of comparison, the worker ant.

22 ‘When a worm first comes out of its burrow, it generally moves the much extended anterior extremity of its body from side to side in all directions, apparently as an organ of touch’, Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, op. cit., p. 28.

23 Hardt and Negri, Empire, op. cit., p. 24.

24 This, the ‘paradox of power’ is that of a new context attendant on the invasion of every physique and mind: ‘a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularisation – a milieu of the event’, ibid., p. 25.

25 ‘As it contests the dead labour accumulated against it, living labour always seeks to break the fixed territorialising structures, the national organisations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the force of living labour, its restless activity, and its deterritorialising desire, this process of rupture throws open all the windows of history’, ibid., p.52.