Test1-13

Heterogeneous Collectivity and the
Capacity to Act

Conceptualising Nonhumans in
Political Space

This chapter develops the concept of heterogeneous political space as an alternative to the exclusively human political sphere which dominates Western political thinking about collective action and justice. The aim is to make evident that capacities for action are constituted in heterogeneous milieus and to argue that insofar as political thought does not register this it is inadequate to thinking justice and flourishing in a world where ecological change renders human and nonhuman modes of life increasingly precarious. Heterogeneous political spaces are constituted by compositions of material, affect and desire which are occluded by humanist and individualist theories of action that theorise collective action at the register of a macro-political order made up of unified rational subjects with clear intentions and commitments. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of following and assembling enable accounts of a molecular or micro-political register composed of heterogeneous collectivities in processes of composition. In their insistence that human action cannot be separated from the productions of nature, we find that heterogeneity, rather than human plurality, is given as a condition of action. Conceiving of political action in terms of heterogeneity brings into view the processes by which capacities for political action are constituted by nonhuman forces, entities and elements. It focuses attention on that in virtue of which political action occurs, rather than on the intentional aspect of actions which aim to achieve an individualised interest (whether it be the interests of a human individual or individuated group). Heterogeneous political space complexifies our thinking about political action and diffuses the agency of political subjects so as to render our thinking more adequate in several significant regards. It provides a conceptual resource that brings the diverse human-nonhuman entanglements to the fore and thus acknowledges the differing ways that capacities for political action are constituted in different 142assemblages that always comprise nonhumans. This disrupts the liberal, humanist view of politics where nonhumans are excluded from the domain of action and appear only as passive resources to be exploited for human plans and actions. Further, by challenging the view of the more-than-human world as passively ‘standing-reserve’1 for the purposes of human agents, the concept of heterogeneous political space invites a critical questioning whether the conception of political space as exclusively human is capable of attending to issues of ecological justice where the well-being of humans and ecosystems is inextricable. In short, when the more-than-human world is excluded from conceptions of political space neither the needs of nonhumans (plants, animals, ecosystems, waterways) nor the constitution of human capacities in relation with nonhumans (co-habitation, dependence, care) register as politically significant. This, in effect, obscures the ways that different human-nonhuman assemblages increase and diminish capacities for action.

Heterogeneous political space considers human-nonhuman assemblages as a genetic condition for the emergence of capacities to act. All action can thus be seen as emerging from constellations where humans are assembled with material and incorporeal elements (plant, animal, mineral, technological bodies and statements, utterances, expressions, affects, moods, gestures, etc.). The breakdown of human exclusivity not only places humans within a system of nature but can also bring nonhumans into our understanding of ethics and politics, and this is evidenced by the care that political theorists take in justifying the exclusion of the nonhuman from political space, or the sphere of political action.

Two major obstacles to figuring nonhumans within the sphere of the political are liberal individualism and humanism. Liberal individualism focuses on the sovereignty of the individual subject over their actions; action and freedom are conceived along individualist lines. The humanism of Western political theory focuses on the uniquely human attributes of the political subject in terms of autonomous rationality. Together, these two features work to exclude nonhumans from the space of politics. Hannah Arendt’s political thought provides important resources for thinking political action beyond the confines of the narrow individualism of liberal conceptions of action. Her concept of the public sphere as the political space of action foregrounds the power of collectivity as constitutive of action. The collective nature of all action is attested to in her thought, as is the significance of thinking actions as resonating outside the confines of goals and intentions. In these respects, then, her conception of political space goes some way towards thinking action collectively rather than individualistically. It stops short, however, of supporting a conception of action that involves nonhumans. Thus, for Arendt, political space is constituted by a plurality of actors who are all human. 143Nonhumans, as will become clear in what follows, are resolutely excluded from the domain of the political on her account.

Thinking political space by way of heterogeneity facilitates an ecological conception of political action; the nonhuman world is moved from the position of passive resource for human ends to active participant in political action. This shift in perspective can enable increased ethical and political consideration of the ways that human actions, decisions, policies and modes of living affect the nonhuman world for better and for worse, as well as increasing attention to different ways of ‘acting with’ the nonhuman world. In what ways might we ‘follow’ heterogeneous materials rather than imposing forms that shape nonhuman materials for human ends? Such ‘following’ has the potential to increase ethical modes of engagement with nonhumans rather than enacting a violence towards the world. This shift in perspective has important consequences for human beings and social justice as it renders more visible heterogeneous entanglements between humans and nonhumans, entanglements that are invisible from the instrumentalist view of the nonhuman world practiced within liberal, pluralist political discourse. In other words, by excluding nonhumans from political thought human-nonhuman assemblages are also thereby excluded, assemblages which are necessary for human capacities for action. For instance, humanist conceptions of the political are unable to adequately account for the social and ecological implications of extractivist development practices. Humanism elides and depoliticises human-nonhuman entanglements thus occluding from view the ecopolitical reconfigurations enacted by these development practices that adversely affect human communities. The concluding section of this chapter will engage the concept of heterogeneous political space in thinking about a specific case of Indigenous resistance to extractivism, the Mi’kmaq protest actions against the development of hydraulic fracturing in Elsipogtog (Mi’kmaq territory in eastern Canada).

Heterogeneous political space is a posthuman ecopolitical concept that overcomes the limitations of humanist political concepts and thus increases the adequacy of political thought to attend to the real implications of material interventions for human and nonhuman life. It accords with the strand of posthumanism that aims to overcome the ‘binary logic of identity and otherness’ at the core of humanism that has lethal consequences for those deemed as other and thereby inferior. ‘These are the sexualised, racialised, and naturalised others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies’.2 This strand of posthuman thought, developed by thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, Patricia MacCormack and Claire Colebrook, calls for ethical and political attention to the ways that life and subjectivity are constituted in multiple and complex relations with differing others. The posthuman political subject is nonunitary and in continual processes of differentiation,3 in 144contrast with the stability of the fully constituted liberal, humanist political subject. In this vein, heterogeneous political space foregrounds the processes through which capacities for action are constituted and from which individuals and groups emerge. The focus is on the complex, ecological constitution of action rather than on already constituted individuals and groups with varying interests that are the focus of liberal, humanist political thought.

Collectivity and Political Space

In certain important respects, Hannah Arendt as well as Deleuze and Guattari (together and separately) are interested in political philosophical problems related to the human condition. They share an approach to action which shifts the focus from the individual to the contexts that enable action, or which constitute the capacity to act. In their own ways, they are interested in the emergence of change and newness in the natural, social and political processes through which individuals are constituted. For Arendt, this context is an exclusively human political space where individuality and capacities for action emerge. For Deleuze and Guattari the context consists in human-nonhuman assemblages that increase or diminish capacities for action. Arendt posits a murky moment in the constitution of the capacity for action, opening it up to the question of the collective production of power. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, however, she does not give an account of nonhuman elements as contributing to this production. Instead she separates the realm of action or political space, what she calls the space of appearance or public space, from natural processes and nonhuman entities. So, although the collective production of the power that constitutes the capacity to act is very significant for Arendt, her analysis is built upon a strict divide between humans and nonhumans. In this way she remains within the tradition of humanist political philosophy in its exclusion of the nonhuman from the political. Deleuze and Guattari do not maintain this exclusion, and this is one reason why some might claim that there is no significant theory of agency in their work; they are read as philosophers of machinic processes who exclude human individuals.4 This, however, is to miss their move which posits assemblages as a genetic condition of the emergence of capacities for action. In Deleuzian philosophy, humans are not reduced to mere cogs in the machine; rather, the analysis of action becomes more complex and difficult to think, but arguably provides a more adequate construal of the real conditions for action.

It is clear that Deleuze and Guattari move their analyses of capacities for action beyond Arendt’s humanist concerns with the traditional political sphere. What is less apparent, however, is the degree to which their works in this area contribute to political philosophy; for what reasons should we take 145seriously their expanded approach to the fields in which capacities for action are constituted? Their work can be read as pointing to significant ways in which human individuals and groups can manifest change and bring about newness. However, the path to this is not in opposing the processes by which we are constituted as concrete individuals. We act, and thus bring about variation and newness, only in conjunction with the elements of the heterogeneous assemblages of which we are a part, and by taking into account those processes from which we emerge and which enable us to act. This capacity for action is thus always heterogeneous and collective, the capacity to act arises in virtue of a host of other entities and elements, human and nonhuman.

The capacity to act, for Arendt, (likewise) has the power of collectivity as a condition; it is constituted by a power that can only be conceived in nonindividualistic terms.5 For her, the power of an actor only ever arises from a collective. This is because she understands that action is political only ever with or in the midst of the actions of others. Collective power enables people to act together and is produced by their acting together.6 In other words, collectivity is both a source of the capacity to act and a product of action. It is by virtue of our relations with others that we are endowed with the capacity to act, or capacities for action. In beginning something new, the actor enables the actions of others, and in this sense also, action is engaged with collectivity; in acting, one is both capacitated by others and capacitating the actions of others. Rather than locating power in the actor as sovereign, Arendt locates it in the potentiality for action that is a part of the being together of people.7 ‘Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act’.8 A key feature of Arendt’s argument for the distinction between acting and fabricating stems from her analysis of power as different from strength.

Power is always, as we would say, a power potential and not an unchangeable, measureable, and reliable entity like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.9

Action for both Arendt and Deleuze and Guattari is nonsovereign, the actor is not in control of the outcome. Nonsovereign action for these thinkers is both unpredictable and relational: unpredictable because the effects of action are boundless,10 and relational because actors always act into a web of relationships.11 Actors do not seek to instil or maintain stable powers, but instead favour ‘a fabric of immanent relations’.12 Actions are open-ended13 as the consequences reverberate endlessly and thus can never be predicted from the beginning.

146 Because the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings, he is never merely a ‘doer’ but always and at the same time a sufferer. To do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its consequent deeds and sufferings. These consequences are boundless, because action, though it may proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of a new process.14

By reserving for action openness and unpredictability, Arendt’s thought gives us a view of action as highly complex and diffuse. It is complex because actions intervene in webs of relations where effects cannot be foreseen, and diffuse because actions are taken up by other actors by way of response or reaction. Therefore the one who acts is never the sole author or producer of their acts, but rather simultaneously actor and sufferer.15 To act is to begin a process that has no end.

However, in elucidating a conception of nonsovereign action, Arendt invokes the concept of plurality as the necessary condition of the capacity to act.16 In this move she limits action to an entirely human sphere wherein actors have the human condition of natality17 (capacity for new beginning) in common, and are also distinguished (pluralised) by this condition. Plurality is a necessary condition of political space for Arendt where actors are all the same, because they are human, and they are different in that each has a capacity for new action. ‘Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality … this plurality is specifically the condition … of all political life’.18 For Arendt, fabrication is in contact with the world, and action is in contact with webs of human actions and relations. She cautions that we should not see action as analogous with fabrication because, unlike fabrication, action is not upon the web of human acts and deeds in the way that fabrication works upon material.19 Humans are not mere material with which to make something.20 It is with strength that individuals work upon the world,21 but it is power rather than strength that is the motor of action, as power rises up between people when they act.22

Arendt sees an attitude of sovereignty in the figure of homo faber who violently opposes nature by forcing natural materials into the forms that pre-exist the production process as ideas. ‘The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. … The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material, as the wood justifies killing the tree and the table justifies destroying the wood’.23 The main relationship involved is between the maker and their material, which they shape to match their mental designs. In this way, making is structured by a division between knowing and doing. 147This corresponds with the respective stages of a fabrication process that begins with an image or an idea of an end-product, and is followed by a stage of execution.24 For Arendt, action is only immanent to the sphere of action insofar as the latter is founded on the transcendence from nature achieved by homo faber. In creating a truly human world which transcends nature, homo faber is thus, in her view, able to provide the foundation upon which political space emerges and political action is possible.

It is not the case, then, that the nonhuman world doesn’t appear in Arendt’s political thought. The nonhuman material world is shaped by the human activity of fabrication into a common human world from which political space can emerge. The common human world, the world built by humans, is a condition of human plurality. Each individual actor is the same, insofar as they are human, and yet different because each is individuated by having a different spatial location in and perspective on the common world. For Arendt, it is the common built world which is the ground of human difference. This individuating capacity of the common human world is what leads Arendt to disavow the political significance of those activities done in intimate relation with the nonhuman world. Insofar as one’s activities are entangled with the rhythms and flows of nature they are not political because they are done with the nonhuman world rather than differentiated from it. What are these activities that humans do with the world that are designated as nonpolitical on an Arendtian account? Eating, growing and gleaning food, working with waste, bearing children, caring for the sick are all activities done with the nonhuman world and which as such are excluded from Arendt’s conception of political space. Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak claim that Arendt fails to provide a theory of power and politics by which economic injustice and political disenfranchisement could be analysed and critiqued. In separating the public sphere from the sphere of labour, she depoliticises activities done with the material world (labouring) while at the same time making the public depend upon it.25 In her marginalisation of labour Arendt seems to silently endorse material conditions that detract from the capacities of certain people to participate in politics, those people who provide the conditions that enable others to act. This problem, however, is not unique to Arendt; it is a perennial component of humanist conceptions of the political that exclude from political space, not just the nonhuman material world, but those peoples who are seen to be in most intimate contact with it (women, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, racialised ‘others’).26

148 Heterogeneity and the Capacity to Act

Posthuman politics, insofar as it thinks political space and action beyond the exclusivity of humanist political thought, offers a way to overcome the exclusion of both humans and animals from political space by reconceiving political action as ‘fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations’.27 By invoking the concept of heterogeneity rather than plurality Deleuze and Guattari facilitate a conception of collective action that does not rest on a primary and constitutive distinction between human and nonhuman because it does not locate action in an exclusively human domain and does not conceive of collective action in terms of the identity of actors but in terms of constitutive processes of differentiation. The political problem shifts away from questions of constituted individuals and groups (with varying interests and perspectives) towards the collective processes within which individuals and groups are constituted with varying capacities for action. An important feature of this shift away from conventional humanist political thought is achieved by Deleuze and Guattari when they eschew a distinction between humans and nature. In Anti-Oedipus, they theorise nature as interconnected machines; not machines rationally designed to serve a purpose, but productive processes that encompass both producer and product.

There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.

On their account, nature can be understood ‘machinically’, as a process of production;28 as a result, the distinction between humans and nature is broken down. They outline three aspects of their use of the term ‘process’. First, production processes include recording, consumption and reproduction as aspects of a single process. Second, production as process overcomes any dichotomy between man and nature, cause and effect, subject and object by entwining these terms in one reality as producer-product. Last, processes are not goals or ends.29 If machines are understood as processes of production, then our standard understanding of humans as tool makers and machine designers does not work and technology cannot be used to get humans beyond or outside of nature. Humans do not introduce the technological into nature, as they are already technological themselves. ‘The “human” is now understood solely and strictly in terms of being a component in a machinic assemblage’.30 To consider tool-use as the primary feature that sets humans apart from other 149animals (or as that which constructs a world of artifice upon which exclusively human political space is made possible) is to use technology to see the human as transcending nature. ‘Machinic thought’, which places the human within the machine, asserts that there is no discontinuity between humans and the natural world. Clearly this is in stark contrast to Arendt’s conceptual attempts to establish clear distinctions between humans, artifice and nature.

Their proposal that we see humans as a part of nature as processes of production dismantles the realm of artifice (the realm constructed by homo faber) which Arendt posits as the necessary condition for action. They suggest that there is a constitutive power to the activity of making when it is not done according to a hylomorphic model where form is seen as actively imposed on passive matter. By contrast, Arendt holds that it is strength and violence that exist in making, and that power arises solely in the realm of human affairs. In refusing to separate the activity of making from the productions of nature, Deleuze and Guattari deny that actions ever occur outside and separate from nature, materials and artifice. Rather than being confined to human-to-human intercourse, Deleuze and Guattari expose human action as occurring with heterogeneous others (books, weather, humans, animals, plants, affects, desires, gestures, moods, etc). In their insistence that action cannot be accounted for in exclusively human terms, we find that it is heterogeneity, rather than (human) plurality, that is given as the collective condition of action. When action is conceived outside of nature, taking place between human agents, human life is distinguished from the rest of nature in a way that preserves a view of nonhuman nature (animal, plant and mineral) as an exploitable resource for human ends. Given the increasing vulnerability of human and nonhuman life resulting from anthropogenic environmental change, such a view is simply no longer ethically and politically appropriate.

The idea that actions occur in virtue of a heterogeneous host of elements is unacceptable to Arendt because her theorisation of action—which relies on distinctions between action, work and labouring—sharply and effectively separates action from all nonhuman elements. In her theorisation of the figure of animal laborans, the human considered in terms of the activity of labouring, she argues that animal laborans is incapable of true plurality 31—and consequently action—because her activities are driven by and occur in conjunction with natural processes. In other words, one’s capacities for action are disabled when one’s activities are mixed with nature and the nonhuman. Deleuze and Guattari’s work, by contrast, implies a way of conceiving of action as occurring on the ‘plane of composition’ that consists in mixing with the nonhuman. Their concepts of becoming, assemblage and symbiosis enable us to conceive of this mixed kind of action as arising from heterogeneous collectives composed of both human and nonhuman elements. So, Deleuze and Guattari are in agreement with Arendt that ‘[a]ction … is 150never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act’,32 but they reject her view that action only ‘goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter’.33 As a capacity, action cannot be stripped of its heterogeneous, collective nature. It is always dependent on much more than just the human realm of affairs, and thoroughly mixed and entangled with other material entities and nonmaterial elements (affects, words, space, etc.).

A capacity can be thought of as a kind of power, specifically a constitutive rather than a constituted power. Let’s explore this through the example of swimming: what does it mean to think of swimming as a constitutive rather than a constituted power? One important feature we pointed to was that constitutive powers are not possessed by individuals but rather circulate in webs within which, or by virtue of which, individuals are constituted. Normally, we would think that the capacity to swim is possessed by an individual; I have the capacity to swim. What is the significance of thinking the capacity to swim free from possession by an individual? And how is this even possible? First, if we think of capacities as powers which are in processes of constitution, then we look to the elements at play in that constituting process. The capacity to swim is a power which is in an open process of constitution by such elements as: water, a particular kind of body, experience and skill, culture, geography (river or lake) or architecture (swimming pool), physical strength, desire. At the very least, the capacity to swim is constituted by a body of water capable of sustaining a swimmer, and a body with the minimal structure and strength capable of swimming. In other words, the capacity to swim is constituted at the intersection of, or through the relationship to, sets of other capacities; it can be adequately understood as constituted through dynamic processes whereby other capacities inform or give rise to the capacity to swim. Although we might say that one has a capacity to swim, focusing on capacity as a power which can be possessed (a property of an individual), we will illuminate a more complex dynamic if we consider capacities as constituted in virtue of other capacities. In other words, when we think capacity, we should be prompted to consider the elements in virtue of which the capacity is activated and exercised.

In what way is political space revealed as heterogeneous when we consider how capacities for action are constituted in conjunction with nonhuman elements? When we consider something in terms of capacity we are prompted to acknowledge its heterogeneous, rather than plural, collective constitution. Plants have capacities for osmosis and photosynthesis, and these are connected with the ways in which it is able to compose its body with other bodies: sun, water, nutrients in the soil, etc. In a similar vein we can consider that capacities for political action are enabled by complex compositions; it is by combining with others that affects are produced in ways that will either 151increase or decrease a given body’s capacity to act. Indignation may give rise to powerful collective actions capable of overthrowing a given political order. But, militancy and ressentiment, as sad or reactive passions, may lead to a general decrease in capacities for action. Further, the fluctuation in the capacities of bodies for action (human and nonhuman) are dependent upon combinations formed with heterogeneous others.

In contrast with Arendt’s depiction of fabrication as the forced submission of nature and material to human violence, Deleuze and Guattari propose that the relation between a maker and their material consists in the maker ‘surrendering’ and ‘following’ the material.

On the other hand, to the essential properties of the matter deriving from the formal essence we must add variable intensive affects, now resulting from the operation, now on the contrary making it possible: for example, wood that is more or less porous, more or less elastic and resistant. At any rate, it is a question of surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos. One addresses less a form capable of imposing properties upon a matter than material traits of expression constituting affects.34

The material takes on an active dimension; it has the capacity to inform and guide the actions of the maker. As a result, we get a view of action as a kind of co-action comprising humans and materials. This account of productive activity makes room for the conceptualisation of human activities with nonhumans to be rendered in political terms; it creates an opening for the conceptualisation of collective political space as heterogeneous rather than exclusively human. Rather than disparaging bodily activity as less than fully human, as Arendt does when she claims that animal laborens whose activities are entwined with nature cannot act, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the diverse capacities of bodies for being affected. Capacities for being affected do not render bodies passive and incapable of action, but active and capable. The notion that one could ‘follow matter’ rests on a consideration of bodies in terms of their affects, as complex and heterogeneous entities. In contrast with Arendt’s individualistic view of the body (which she derives from John Locke) as absolutely private, incommunicable, and unshareable,35 Deleuze and Guattari advance a nonindividualistic conception of bodily life. On their account, the body is shot through with elements shared with heterogeneous others; the body is never separable from the milieus and assemblages with which it is connected as part or element. This conception of bodily life enables us to think about political actors as having, what Rosi Braidotti calls, ‘multiple ecologies of belonging’,36 and this opens conceptions of political 152space and community as involving the more-than-human world. Developing the conceptual resources to think nonhumans within the sphere of politics can aid in countering the exploitation of the nonhuman world which, if not explicitly supported, is silently condoned by political theory that registers the exploitation of the nonhuman world as apolitical.

As part of a complex and nuanced depiction of bodily composition, Deleuze and Guattari offer the concept of assemblage, a term that points to the heterogeneous multiplicities that generate capacities for action. Assemblages are multiplicities composed of bodies, desires and enunciations. The concept of assemblage takes the place of the subject and reveals actors as heterogeneous composites and action as co-action or symbiosis. Deleuze declares, with specific reference to speaking and writing, that one writes with: ‘With the world, with a part of the world, with people. … There is no judgement in sympathy, but agreements of convenience between bodies of all kinds’.37 Assembling is a kind of acting with; whether the action be teaching, protesting or making art it is to be done with the world and with others. Where a plural conception of political space and action only registers human participants, heterogeneous political space points towards the complex human-nonhuman entanglements that constitute actions. Pluralist political space fails to register the real conditions of action because it disavows the role of heterogeneous assemblages in constituting capacities for action.

The tendency in political philosophy to overemphasise the human ability to shape and order materials, de-emphasises the capacities of the materials to certain kinds of shaping and arrangement. Nonhuman materials play significant roles in political action which are not adequately registered by conceptualising political space as exclusively human. Consider the role of materials (the metal coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo for instance, which is used in the manufacture of mobile technology and is mined using child labour), constellations of desires (for cheap mobile technology, political power, freedom), global political and economic systems (liberalism and capitalism), regimes of enunciation (speeches and the popular press) and a host of other material and nonmaterial entities with which actions occur. Just as an ecological perspective of plant life would take into consideration the larger processes in which a given plant is immersed, Deleuze and Guattari, in their providing resources for thinking through a nonindividualistic conception of any body (from humans to words to insects), could be said to facilitate an ecological conception of action. Guattari argues that mental, social and environmental ecologies are radically intertwined and that the partitioning of the real contributes to deterioration of psyche, society and environment.38 To see the human as one component in an assemblage (and not necessarily the most important component) brings into view the complex, heterogeneous constitution of capacities for action. Thus, when we analyse political space, 153the space of action, we will consider the nonhuman components of the assemblage with which actions are capacitated. ‘Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy’.39 Multiplicities ‘with heterogeneous terms, confunctioning by contagion, enter certain assemblages’;40 the ‘assemblage is co-functioning, it is “sympathy”, symbiosis’.41

Heterogeneous Political Space

In the fall of 2013 Mi’kmaq peoples and non-Indigenous residents of New Brunswick, Canada, engaged in a series of protest actions to oppose the development of the shale gas industry which would employ hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) on lands (which were never ceded) in Elsipogtog (a community located near Rexton, New Brunswick). The government of New Brunswick (NB) had contracted a US company, Southwestern Energy Company (SWN), to conduct seismic testing for the exploratory phase of extracting gas from the Frederick Brook shale deposit. Hydraulic fracturing, an unconventional gas extraction process, is considered by many to be excessively invasive, resource intensive, and a potential contaminator of ground water.42 The protestors’ actions were supported by a diversity of Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups (Council of Canadians, students, NB residents and labour groups) across Canada.

The SWN-NB-shale-fracking assemblage had the potential to significantly impact Mi’kmaq and settler assemblages with the land (altering capacities for fishing, hunting, farming), but also, importantly, activated new political assemblages that resisted the realisation of the potential assemblage that the SWN-NB alliance was attempting to actualise. In fact, it was the potential assemblage itself which became a component in the resistance assemblage. The assemblage that emerged in resistance to the plan to extract oil from the Frederick Brook shale was not only a Mi’kmaq–settler assemblage in defense of Indigenous rights, justice for the land, and ways of life that depend on the land (fishing, hunting, farming), but was arguably a collective action constituted by existing heterogeneous assemblages (entanglements of humans, soil, waterways, animals, history, colonial politics, ancestral and traditional practices) that gave rise to the capacity for resistance in the form of a collective political assemblage of Mi’kmaq, settlers and land. The activation of this assemblage produced a heterogeneous political space that involved a becoming and reassembling of previous forms of relations and capacities for action. Unlike previous Mi’kmaq political resistance in Atlantic Canada, the Elsipogtog protestors were joined by non-Indigenous residents; potentials for new alliances emerged with transformative potentials for settler-Indigenous 154relations. Collective becomings continued beyond the end of the protest and the halt of SWN exploratory testing, as is evidenced by the recent claim to Aboriginal title over one-third of the province of New Brunswick made by the Mi’kmaq. Recognition of Aboriginal title would give Mi’kmaq the legal right to decide what happens to the land. Kenneth Francis, a member of Elsipogtog First Nation, says of the recent title claim: ‘We never really used to take ourselves seriously. … After the blockade—the feeling of empowerment that we got from it, the co-operation we were getting from our allies, is that this can be done, that we can do this. You say, “Oh my goodness we can do this” ’.43 Mi’kmaq capacities for action have been amplified through the emergence of a heterogeneous space of action. Insofar as our manner of conceptualising human space and action adamantly refuses to attend to the active power of nonhuman entities and elements in capacitating human political action, we fail to recognise degrees of complexity requisite for registering potentials for transformation. Thus, liberal political thought, though it may oppose social and ecological injustices resulting from neoliberalism and globalisation, reinforces the depoliticisation of heterogeneous assemblages wherein injustices are actualised, suffered and resisted.

The alliance forged between the NB provincial government in Canada and SWN is a political alliance constituted by the material capacity of the Frederick Brook shale deposit, an Atlantic economy characterised by high unemployment, a general lack of recognition for Indigenous land rights nationally and for Mi’kmaq land rights locally, the widespread desire for cheap oil and the corollary material, ethical and political habits through which humans and nonhumans are assembled in such a way that the more-than-human world appears simply as a resource for human ends. We are our habits and it is through habit that we contract elements of the world. ‘Every contraction is a presumption, a claim—that is to say, it gives rise to an expectation or a right in regard to what it contracts, and comes undone once its object escapes’.44 As such, the human habits and ways of living that depend upon a steady flow of petroleum point us towards human-nonhuman assemblages that humanist political theory casts as nonpolitical, thus obscuring the very real implications for human lives that certain modes of assembling actualise.

Kathryn Yusoff argues for the importance of developing a philosophy of the geologic that attends to the agency of fossil fuels in shaping what human bodies can do. ‘The work of fossil fuels is everywhere evident, and yet there is a strange absence in the conceptualization of the agency and historicity of fossil fuels within corporeality and an overreliance on the study of the effects of fossil fuels on the Earth in political geology. … At present, accounts of the work of fossil fuels are centred on human subjects and their practices, rather than on developing a philosophy of the geologic that grapples with what fossil fuels allow and what they might say to the work of inhuman forces’.45 155Such conceptual work is a necessary component of our becoming less reliant on fossil fuels, developing new geologic subjectivities, and activating new potential futures. ‘All this entails understanding and experimenting with the active forces of the geologic—both as inheritance and future force. Refusing the reproduction of this inheritance requires … unlearning forms of geologic corporeality as far as we are able, and fostering new geologic subjectivities’.46 The shift from thinking about nonhumans as mute and passive recipients of human active practices to active and differentiating forces with capacities to shape human actions echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s account of following the material traits of matter. This shift in conceptualising moves us from seeing humans as being in control of material practices and towards being collaborators with material agencies, and it reveals political space as heterogeneous rather than homogeneously human. Humanist political theory provides accounts of the macro-political order made up of molar subjects. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming describes a micro-political register composed of multiplicities, collectivities and assemblages in processes of composition. In contrast to political philosophies that view political agency as human and individual, the concept of heterogeneous political space considers action as a capacity constituted by heterogeneous collectives of both humans and nonhumans. The starting point, then, for thinking about political action along these lines is to understand the capacities and conditions from which collective actions emerge.

Notes

1. Heidegger 1977, 17.

2. Braidotti 2013, 15.

3. MacCormack 2012, 12; Braidotti 2013, 49.

4. Hayles 2001, 147.

5. The concept ‘nonindividualistic’ is here being transported from work in the philosophy of mind: Preston 1998; Burge 1986. Preston argues for a nonindividualistic understanding of tools and artefacts and Burge argues for a nonindividualistic individuation of mental content, sometimes understood as wide content or social externalism. In each case, they are interested in the supra-individual elements that bear on individuating the entity under consideration.

6. Arendt 1958, 200.

7. Arendt 1958, 202.

8. Arendt 1958, 188.

9. Arendt 1958, 200.

10. Arendt 1958, 190.

11. Arendt 1958, 184.

12. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 358.

156 13. Arendt 1958, 233.

14. Arendt 1958, 190.

15. Arendt 1958, 184.

16. Arendt 1958, 7.

17. Arendt 1958, 9.