Test1-6

The ‘posthuman turn’—defined as the convergence of posthumanism with postanthropocentrism—is a complex and multidirectional discursive and material event. It encourages us to build on the generative potential of the critiques of humanism developed by radical epistemologies that aim at a more inclusive practice of becoming-human. And it also supports an opening out of our conceptual imagination, the power (potentia) of thinking beyond the established anthropocentric frame, towards becoming-world. Deleuze’s geo-zoe-ethological philosophy, resting on the vital materialism he draws from revisiting Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, is particularly useful in stressing that we should abandon hierarchical comparisons in deciding the value or operative potential of humanity or a plant or a fly (for example), since these life-forms inhabit, or comprise, mutually affective ‘inter-kingdoms’. At the same time, Deleuzian materialism offers an important framework for understanding how these interlaced assemblages of life exist also in inextricable and constitutive connection to the nonliving forms and forces that factor in any particular framing of the earth for the emergence of a provisional stability.1 Félix Guattari adds his own specific contribution to this intensive philosophy of life, difference and the project of becoming ‘otherwise other’, by highlighting the constitutive effects of media and technological mediation, both on our self-understanding and on our relational capacity. What emerges from the posthuman convergence thus defined therefore is a qualitative leap based on the need to think in zoe/geo/techno-oriented frames.

This focus on trans-species formations, on technological mediation and ‘geophilosophy’ characterises an important strand of contemporary feminist thought observed, for example, in work by Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Elizabeth Povinelli.2 This collection of essays is situated in relation to such enquiries. Feminist epistemology, notably the 2materialist tradition of differential feminism that runs through ‘standpoint theory’, ‘situated knowledges’ and embedded, embodied nomadic subjectivity,3 stresses the importance of specific and accountable perspectives. This approach criticises the Eurocentric, masculinist universalism that is still operative in most knowledge production scientific systems, while proposing robust alternatives. Perspectivism is at work in feminist theory, not as a form of fragmentation and relativism, but rather as the source of counter knowledges and alternative values. It offers a point of encounter and intersection with the highly defined forms of perspectivism currently formalised by Indigenous philosophy. We recognise, therefore, that contemporary posthuman and ecofeminist efforts to describe a mode of thought adequate to the complex material energies of the earth—in geo/zoe-techno mediated ways—sits alongside a far older tradition of Indigenous philosophy, which likewise understands the power and potentiality of thought as being materially embedded in the geoformations and trans-species influences that shape and define existence in relational terms.4

Such grounded, accountable and perspectivist approaches inform the thinking in this collection of essays, which in their various ways continue the project of a materialist theorisation of posthumanist affirmative ethics.5 The chapters in this book respond philosophically and affirmatively to the ethical and political fractures and challenges that ensue as a result of the ex/implosion of a unitary and falsely universal notion of the ‘human’ and of the system of moral values and human rights that rest upon it. The posthuman paradigm as an analytic tool for understanding the perspectival nature of knowledge, and for drawing attention to the primacy of nonhuman influences in formative processes, can be misunderstood as celebrating an ‘inhuman’ system, potentially also expressing lack of concern or care for humans. We suggest this is not the case, however, with the posthuman convergence being best understood as an epistemological framework for supporting the elaboration of alternative values and new codes of inter-relation that extend beyond human influence and cognisance, but do not discount it.

This is an imperative task for academic teaching and research as well, since the role of the ‘inhuman’ in reconceiving the humanities is ambivalent in its critical and creative potential. On the one hand, attention paid to the pre-individual and impersonal earth-forces that affectively condition terrestrial becomings and territorial beings opens a pathway to ‘the outside’ of current arrangements of social life.6 Insofar as these arrangements are most often orchestrated through a globally dominant paradigm of liberal subjectivation that takes its conceptual moorings from the compass of modern European thought, a less territorially constrained focus on geophilosophical forces of creativity and the ‘inhumanism’ of global processes creates new possibilities for reconceiving humanity and human responsibility beyond the 3circumscribed limits of (modern Western) sovereign entitlement. But on the other hand, ‘inhumanism’ conjures the spectre of premodern cruelty historically associated with the unchecked exercise of sovereign might; or else it references the merciless modes of social alienation and self-subjectivation that are pervasive postmodern consequences of diffuse global technologies of discipline and control, so characteristic of biopolitical operations in late capitalism. Each of these epochal political formations was, of course, strikingly analysed by Foucault in his lecture series at the Collège de France and developed further by Deleuze and Guattari’s neo-materialist philosophy.7 In light of this escalating problem of inhumanism, which in fact threatens to submerge and subvert the liberating potential of nonhuman forces of becoming, we insist the posthuman convergence of nonanthropocentrism and nonhumanism is not best conceived as a manifesto for inhumane indifference, nor does it point to a single direction for knowledge and freedom. It is, rather, a multidirectional appeal that resists and yet is in dialogue with the critical tendency to steer analysis towards a paradigm of ‘inhumanism’. Instead of proposing a single counter-paradigm to modern humanism and anthropocentrism, conceived under the banner of ‘the inhuman’, posthumanism is a wake-up call that aims at building on the generative potential of already existing critiques of both humanism and anthropocentrism, in order to deal with the complexity of the present juncture.

Furthermore, as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, ‘our common predicament’ of climate change and the threat of environmental collapse impacts differentially upon the various classes of humanity inhabiting ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, which may be differently rich or poor, vulnerable or resilient, according to a range of measures—and not all of them economic. This complexity means that not all humans are equally placed to respond effectively to the social and economic impacts of the inhuman earth-forces of natural disaster. An ‘inhuman’ approach would be all the more unacceptable considering that the devolved and dispersed character of human agency and moral responsibility induced by the posthuman condition takes place in a context of diffuse geopolitical arrangements and biopolitical technologies, subtending a contemporary necro-political regime of extermination of species and extinction of multiple life-forms, both human and nonhuman. The uncertain future faced by all of humanity—and by nonhuman life—in the contemporary era of ecological crisis that prominently defines the Anthropocene is both a unifying factor, and a prospect of uneven fallout that threatens to engulf more precarious life-forms more quickly, or more completely, than others. This raises difficult questions about distributive justice that ‘pose a challenge to the categories upon which our traditions of political thought are based’.8

4 As we have already suggested, one aspect of this challenge involves resisting the tendency to work with a single new paradigm—such as inhumanism—that would reduce posthumanism and postanthropocentrism to a relation of equivalence, despite their notable convergences.9 Whereas critiques of anthropocentrism denounce the species hierarchy that culminates in human exceptionalism and privilege, posthumanism more specifically engages a critique of the humanist ideal of ‘Man’, and the political and philosophical programmes of progressive Enlightenment (or ‘civilisation’) that rest upon this ideal. We believe the preservation of discontinuities and divergences between these two perspectives (despite their obvious conjunctions) enables a more nuanced critical and ethical response to our contemporary condition: it should be possible to decry human exceptionalism as the basis for species privilege, while also attending to the specificity of human responsibility and potentiality in conceptualising adequate forms of response to the damages arising significantly from human activity. At the same time, the effective performance and institutionalisation of such responsive understandings involves acknowledging how the experiences and perspectives defining humanity are not the universal prerogative of European Man as the normative measure of all excellence and inspiration. Rather, embodied and embedded experiences of humanity—our varied sexed and enculturated experiences of ‘being human’—are differential; and human differences may create diverse contextual solutions to global problems. Local and perspectival solutions to universal crises, developed contextually through human ingenuity in pragmatic relation to specific materialities, can be mobilised in innovative ways towards the development of practical measures with an emergent effect, potentially bringing general benefit.

The reclamation of diverse human agencies and accountabilities in the context of faceless phenomena of exploitation and inhuman(e) processes of production in late or cognitive capitalism—and perhaps also the potential redemption of humanity in the era of ‘the Anthropocene’—suggests there is an urgent need for new thinking about the differential nature of human influences in complex interactional systems, and about the nature of such systems and of agency within them, when such phenomena are conceived in nonanthropocentric ways. Indeed, the question of what human-actioned systems would look like beyond anthropocentrism haunts a range of contemporary enquiries into the nature of the diverse phenomena that interact in complex affective ecologies. How can human thought adequately conceive nonhuman temporality and spatiality? What are the nature, value and impact of nonhumanist productivity in natural, social and economic systems? What is a posthuman system of language, or of perception and subjectivity? How would a posthuman sensibility transform legal, political and educational systems? When it conceives subjectivity apart from intentionality or 5integrated moral selfhood directed actively towards discrete end purposes, can posthumanism offer an adequate framework for theorising responsiveness in complex interactive ecologies?

In response to such questions, the chapter contributions to this book explore the posthumanist implications of Deleuze’s assertion that ‘the system must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must also be a heterogenesis’.10 The authors draw resources from Deleuze’s philosophy to examine the operation of spatial, temporal, political, legal, economic, aesthetic, informational, epistemological, conceptual and educational ‘systems’, conceived as posthuman ecologies whose processual characters and complex relations are constituted by circulations of affect. Through specific readings and uses of Deleuze’s conceptual apparatus, each chapter extends nonhumanist concepts for understanding reality, agency and ethical interaction in dynamic ecologies of reciprocal determination and influence. Inquiry across a broad range of topics, traversing the traditional disciplines of the Humanities, offers new potential to expand contemporary discussions about the recomposition of the human as an enhanced and revised subject in the posthuman era, and of human-actioned systems as complex arenas of heterogeneous ethical concern and accountability. In drawing together such ideas, we hope this book will open new pathways for vital new theorisations of human scope, responsibility and potential in the posthuman condition.

‘The posthuman, as a dynamic, creative convergence phenomenon, is creating new fields of scholarship’.11 Based on the parallelism that Deleuze and Guattari establish between philosophy, science and the arts, this collection addresses posthuman systems in a diffractive and trans-disciplinary manner. The chapters traverse studies of earth processes, philosophical ideas, cultural texts, political practices, digital and geographical mediation, and pedagogy. In bringing such diverse topics of discussion together in a single volume, our primary aim is not to unify them by identifying commonalities that bridge their differences under the banner of a singularly defined ‘posthumanism’. Rather, our key intention in presenting such a clamorous and multiperspectival set of discussions taking place across and within the hybrid and marginal disciplinary terrains of ‘the new Humanities’—in chapters ranging across vastly varied topics—is to facilitate a methodological opportunity for diffractive reading as defined by Karen Barad, and elaborated here by Iris van der Tuin in chapter 2.12 Van der Tuin considers the encounter between Deleuze and Bergson in the light of contemporary interlocutions by Leonard Lawlor and Valentine Moulard-Leonard. For van der Tuin, this set of encounters provides an entry point for presenting diffractive reading as a methodology of indeterminancy, appropriate both for Deleuze studies and for the new Humanities. The practice of reading diffractively involves an effort to understand the complex and multiscalar consequences of productive encounters 6between differences when they are brought into affective relationships, always in particular and contingent circumstances of engagement. Iris van der Tuin argues that diffractive reading is an exemplary posthumanist methodology: ‘both in terms of how the philosophical canon is dealt with (transversally), and how the humanities and the sciences are traversed in the same stroke’. The diffractive reader is less animated by questions of definition (‘what is a posthuman ecology?’) than by questions of performative operation or orchestration and relational consequence (‘what happens when x meets y, and how does their encounter influence the way in which y impacts upon z to transform the relationship with a such that effects b and c might emerge?’).13 For example, in our case, we are interested by what happens to understandings of spatial construction, and to frameworks of education and pedagogy, when the reader encounters Radman (chapter 4) alongside de Freitas (chapter 5), to conceive how a change in affect produced by altered environmental or architectural conditions can influence an individual capacity for creative thought, for active learning and enhanced agential potentiality. Or, what happens when the reader forges new conceptual associations upon encountering theories of temporality (chapter 6) and nonhumanist agency (chapters 7 and 8), alongside an account of the geophysical shifts of the earth arising from the complex interplay of living and nonliving forces over aeons of time before (and likely beyond) human existence and earthly influence (chapter 14)? Taken together, the chapters relate to one another in various and shifting ways depending on the purpose or serendipity of their association, the perspective of the reader, and the order in which they are read.

While the chapters are diverse in their content and focus, and are best approached diffractively, they overall produce an interactive ecology of concepts and frameworks that ‘opens up the way to a general logic’14 for reconceiving and reconstructing the posthumanities. Chapter 3 by Jussi Parikka articulates some general geophilosophical principles that help us to think the operation of posthuman systems as complex ecologies, which always-already take their bearings in relation to the material situation of their genesis and their agendas. Parikka undertakes a cartographical analysis of the environmental arts, in this context encompassing a range of projects that traverse traditional boundaries between geography, philosophy, institutional mediation, artistic practice and science. His chapter is an exercise in mapping the practices and processes that make up an ‘operating system’, and he identifies a series of analytic strategies for understanding such systems. They involve cognisance of the principle of ‘survol’ or height, which enables a beyond-individual, trans-localised perspective for considering how a system of elements connect;15 the framing act or art of establishing a ‘frontier’ by carving out a situated or localised ‘territory’ from a boundless plane of consistency or composition; the institutional frameworks or technologies 7that engender (or constrain) this practice; and the temporality of the operating system as a process of organisation or a nonlinear series of operations, rather than a structure. These analytic strategies or cartographic techniques reveal how environmental art practices involve complex relational processes that constitute what Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘eccentric’ models ‘of becoming and heterogeneity’, in which ‘flux is reality itself, or consistency’ and the model is ‘problematic, rather than theorematic: figures are considered from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them’. In contrast to the teleological linear progressions of modern humanist systems, a posthuman system, though genetically situated in a particular material or environmental context of formation, ‘operates in an open space throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed space for linear and solid things’.16

Indeed, this book is engaged by the subject of ‘posthuman ecologies’, and is itself a network of posthuman concepts; but it is more narrowly subtitled ‘complexity and process after Deleuze’. In this respect, the collection is geared towards an enhanced understanding of the contribution made by Deleuzian philosophy to the emergence of the contemporary posthumanities. Returning once again to van der Tuin’s chapter on method, we recognise that reading Deleuze’s own philosophical oeuvre diffractively seems especially important when we consider the process of its genesis, its internal shifts and its indeterminate quality, in terms of Deleuze’s encounters with other thinkers. Although Deleuze’s works are impressive in part because of the erudition evidenced in his vast bibliographies, especially prominent among his philosophical engagements are persistent trysts with Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Simondon—and of course, especially, Guattari. In fact, if Deleuze is named in our title as a preeminent source for the emergence of a posthuman ‘ecosophy’, this can only be because of his long and productive association with the ‘ecological’ thinking of Guattari, whose late work, The Three Ecologies, describes the interactive relational systems of environment, economic society and subjectivity and defines a geophilosophical-political-ethical approach that has come to characterise various posthumanisms.17 If the current collection takes Deleuze, and not Guattari, as its philosophical focus, this is not, then, because we downplay the significance of Guattari’s thought in the Deleuze-Guattari assemblage, or deny Guattari’s prominent influence in shaping contemporary understandings of what it means to think ecologically. Rather, we take Deleuze as our focus because his important influence on posthumanist frameworks emerges not only from his collaboration with Guattari, but also from his other individual and highly idiosyncratic readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Simondon. And subsequent interlocutors with Deleuze have themselves become elements in a new series of philosophical assemblages that also describe the conceptual apparatus of 8posthumanism. Concepts produced (selectively and differentially) through this complex and dynamic array of philosophical assemblages are taken up in this collection in various ways, and put to various uses.

By focusing on the qualities of a posthumanist architectural practice in his chapter 4, Andrej Radman continues the analysis of the genetic power of affective encounters begun by Iris van der Tuin in her opening chapter, and by Jussi Parikka in his geophilosophical analysis of the emergent consequences of constitutive relations for the operation of posthuman systems. Radman argues that the recomposition of what Guattari refers to as ‘architectural enunciation’ profoundly transforms the role of the architect, who becomes its relay by assuming the analytic and pragmatic responsibility for the production not merely of the environment, but of subjectivation itself. Following Deleuze’s Spinozism, and continuing the affective corporeal emphasis subsequently given to this in work by Brian Massumi, Radman suggests that if to think differently one has to feel differently, and if the sole purpose of design is to change us, then architecture is effectively a ‘psychotropic practice’ that modulates and compels routines of experience.

Chapter 5 by Elizabeth de Freitas shifts the reader’s attention to the developmental potentialities enabled by a posthuman approach to learning. Like Radman, she turns to Deleuze’s Spinoza, and to Massumi’s interpretation of this, to help think the nonhuman forces at work in learning. Her chapter discusses the use of sensory data in current learning sciences, and explores the ways this might be folded into an ‘amorous’ learning encounter that intensifies the enjoyment of the heterogeneity of life. De Freitas sees this as an attempt to rethink the refrain ‘love of learning’ in a way that seeks the inorganic potentialities of the nonhuman forces by which a body can ‘branch out into territories beyond its own self-maintenance’.18 The aim of her chapter is to show how Spinoza’s ontology, coupled with Simondon’s account of ‘thought networks’, can be mobilised to rethink and reclaim active learning in the context of today’s data industries. The industries generate excessive amounts of sensory information applied in education research through the massive proliferation of micro-digital body sensors. According to de Freitas, posthumanism helps us theorise this data in new ways. Rather than conceive biodata as that which belongs to the individuated and well-bounded body, and likely pathologises it, we can begin to imagine this surplus sensory data as that which circumvents consciousness and plugs into the textured richness of a ‘more-than-human’ thought, as evidence of a love of learning that is postphenomenological.

Concepts of processual expansion and the affective development of agentic capabilities are likewise taken up for discussion in following chapters on the topics of temporality and posthuman agency. Indeed, these topics raise urgent questions regarding progress, human experience and responsibility in 9‘the time of the now’, while also querying the possibility and desirability of conceiving posthumanist and nonanthropocentric notions of time and temporality. How, for example, might we respond sanely to the contemporary posthuman situation of instantaneous and proliferating information overload driving cognitive capitalism, without reinforcing accelerationism by normalising presumptions of Anthropocene apocalypse as a symptom and effect of ‘catastrophic time’?19 Is it possible to hold fast to modern notions of progressive politics, while also abandoning conceptualisations of linear temporality in favour of a notion of history as multiple and simultaneous, ambivalent, fragmented, ephemeral, discontinuous and dissonant, registering the posthuman reality that diverse entities live diverse histories that travel incompossible lines of time? What happens to chrononormativity and chronobiopolitics when bodies are augmented for alternative reproductive capabilities? How do some Indigenous and non-European models of time and temporalisation resist the ‘homogenous empty time’ of universal History to affirm the ways in which experiences of time and history are shaped by places, and what happens to such experiences of temporal existence when ancestral places are destroyed by colonial histories of devastation?20

In chapter 6, James Williams connects Deleuze’s philosophy of time to an opposition between two recent ways of taking up his philosophy over the question of posthumanism. He argues that one way, described by Rosi Braidotti, adopts Deleuze’s philosophy as a starting point for an exploration of a posthuman future, which leads to posthumanism in the humanities. By contrast, the other way—developed by A. W. Moore—develops a sympathetic interpretation of Deleuze’s work, but then departs from it critically around the idea of the need for philosophy to be anthropocentric. Williams shows how Deleuze’s philosophy of time supports Braidotti’s posthumanist approach, and he sheds light on the forms posthumanism might take. For Williams, Deleuze’s philosophy of time provides a set of rejoinders to Moore and to his strong defence of anthropocentrism in thought and experience.

Chapter 7 by Sean Bowden takes as its focus the temporal structure of action and agential responsibility, conceived in the light of a posthumanist sensibility. With reference to Deleuze’s work on the ‘third synthesis of time’ in Difference and Repetition, Bowden investigates what it means to be an agent of an action when, as agents, we are lodged in a ‘caesura’ between past and future, and when our actions, in their very temporal structure, outstrip what we intend and can foresee? He answers this question by elaborating an ‘expressive’ account of agency that is very different to the Hegelian one. Bowden draws not only on resources found in Deleuze’s oeuvre, but also in the work of Hölderlin, who is identified as an important reference in Deleuze’s exposition of the third synthesis of time. Hölderlin sketches an account of thought and agency that does not depend on the ideal or achievement of an 10agent’s full self-understanding of what is expressed in their activity, as it does in Hegel, and that is capable of bearing the ‘momentarily incomplete’ without denying the very notion of agential responsibility. Bowden expands conceptual resources evident in Deleuze’s work on time and temporalisation, which he uses to extend Hölderlin’s account and provide a conception of agency appropriate to the posthuman condition.

Chapter 8, by Suzanne McCullagh, also investigates genetic conditions of emergence underlying the capacity to act, but her chapter is located more firmly in the context of the political sphere. She develops the concept of heterogeneous political space for the purpose of better conceptualising the systemic political requirements, and agentic capacities, of nonhumans. Bringing Hannah Arendt’s humanist political philosophy of the pluralist public sphere into contact with Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of heterogeneous assemblage, McCullagh advances posthumanist modes of thinking about collective action and justice. Heterogeneous political spaces are constituted by compositions of material, affect and desire, features which are obscured by humanist and individualist theories of action. Traditional theories of collective action provide accounts of a macro-political order made up of unified rational subjects with clear intentions and commitments, whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘assembling’ and ‘becoming’ describe a micro-political register composed of heterogeneous collectivities in complex processes of composition and co-emergence. 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. More explicitly, human-nonhuman assemblages form the genetic conditions for action. All capabilities for 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, and so forth). The breakdown of human exclusivity in constructions of political subjectivity allows us to register nonhuman forms of influence and activity. This shift not only places humans within a system of nature but also brings nonhumans into focus as relevant ‘subjects’ of ethics and politics. The concept of heterogeneous political space therefore helps us to ‘renaturalise’ justice.

The following chapter 9, by Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney, also contends with the notion of a heterogeneous political space potentially opened up by posthumanist frameworks. Their starting point is the problematic legacy of colonialist systems on philosophical thinking after the Enlightenment, which bears also upon the contemporary development of Continental posthumanism. As an Indigenous political sociologist and a non-Indigenous philosopher, Rigney and Bignall bring together Indigenous conceptualisations of ‘more-than-human’ being with notions of ‘posthumanity’ arising in 11Continental philosophy. They argue that some posthumanist theory, like most European philosophy, risks the elision of Indigenous cultural and intellectual authority by remaining blind to the ancient presence and contemporary force of Indigenous philosophies of human being, which are typically materialist, naturalist and expressivist. This exclusion allows Continental European philosophy to claim the ‘new Humanities’ as its current ‘discovery’ after modern humanism, but this apparently ‘new’ intellectual frontier in fact traces an ancient philosophical terrain already occupied by Indigenous epistemologies and associated modes of human experience. Insofar as posthumanism has emerged strongly influenced by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, the authors enquire about the role of their philosophy in the continuing elision of Indigenous ontologies in the emerging posthumanities. They argue that the potential usefulness of Deleuzian ‘nomadic thought’ is by no means unambiguous when viewed from a postcolonial perspective. It may indeed have multiple potentialities: some appear colonialist in effect, others decolonising in outcome; for this reason it is necessary to interrogate the intersection that Deleuze forges between indigeneity, nomadology and the creative exercise of thought. Bignall and Rigney ultimately affirm how contemporary renditions of Deleuze’s philosophical nomadology, notably by Rosi Braidotti, are engaged in advancing a non-imperial posthumanism.

Chapter 10 continues a posthumanist focus on political systems. Thomas Nail uses elements of a Deleuzian framework to explain how the most defining feature of any system is its movement. In contrast to essences, forms and structures—which are defined by stasis, immutability and fixity—systems are defined by their flux, mobility and circulation. Accordingly, a system is not just an assembly of heterogeneous elements, but a kinetic pattern or regime of circulation through which elements are continuously reproduced and transformed. For Nail, there are numerous strengths and implications of shifting our understanding of politics from one of anthropocentric forms and cultural structures to one of material kinetic systems. If political systems are defined and distinguished not by their anthropocentric and ideological content (authoritarianism, liberalism, Marxism, and so on) but more fundamentally by their patterns of motion, then political theory ought to provide a much closer analysis of the nonhuman material and kinetic systems within which ideology itself emerges. Nail’s chapter analyses the mobile nature of borders to illuminate how posthumanist perspectives help us to think responsively about the contemporary politics of migration.

In chapter 11, Gregory Flaxman takes up Deleuze’s essay on ‘Control Societies’ to consider the vexed relationship between Deleuze’s views on political economy and his occasional, more hopeful, suggestions regarding political ecology associated with a vitalist or affirmative ethics. As Deleuze foresaw, contemporary societies have undergone a rapid and radical 12transformation: over the last twenty years, the institutions of disciplinarity—the structures of the welfare state—have increasingly given way to an age of ‘control’. Flaxman’s chapter lays out the problem that this regime entails: while it introduces a smooth, digitised and altogether posthuman regime, control also describes a digital economy that capitalises on ‘freedom’ because it optimalises choice, but only in order to track our movements, manipulate our desires, feed our addictions, and invent a supple new system of domination. This diagnosis forms the basis for the two elements of Flaxman’s argument. The first is that control, as Deleuze characterises it, ought to be read in tandem with Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics; control is rooted in the posthumanist constituents of neoliberalism. But second, Deleuze’s analysis of ‘control’ must be read literally as a ‘postscript’ signalling what Deleuze left unsaid, at the point where he broke off the analysis at the end of his own book on Foucault. For Flaxman, Deleuze’s thinking regarding a political economy of control is at once a counterpoint to, and the formative impetus for, that which Deleuze calls ‘life’.

Like Flaxman’s contribution, the chapter by Jon Roffe is focussed at the nexus of political and economic processes in posthumanist systems. Following Bataille’s famous analysis in The Accursed Share, Roffe explains that any attempt to define a discrete set of activities and processes as the economic sphere confronts a problem of delimitation. Since all activity involves loss, gain and circulation, restricting the definition of economics to commercial activity indexed to a currency is illegitimate. At the limit, then, the category of the economic tends to absorb the entirety of reality. In the work of Gilles Deleuze, Roffe finds two solutions to this problem. In Difference and Repetition, the economic names only the virtual facet of society, which is actualised in turn concrete (extra-economic) social relations. Consequently, ‘there are only economic social problems’,21 and society is the creative and contingent response to these problems. However, in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari instead claim that only specific forms of society possess an economy. In this second model, the economic names a particular form of social organisation structured around infinite debt. In this way, it belongs to social-production and the plane of organisation rather than to desiring-production and the plane of consistency which are infraeconomic. In this sense, the account in the volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia advances an implicit rejection of Bataille’s position, given that the capitalist economy functions to deal with the troubling excess he identifies, by taking it as fuel. Roffe’s chapter elaborates on these differing accounts of what constitutes the economy. He finally proposes a certain syntheses of the two in relation to capitalism, on the basis of the concept of price. Prices, Roffe suggests, are the intensive features of social organisation that problematise existing regimes of evaluation.

13 Shifting our attention to the realm of law, Edward Mussawir points out in chapter 13 that Deleuze’s work is sometimes acknowledged for its affinity both for certain kinds of animals or ‘becomings-animal’ as well as for jurisprudence as a mode of thought in relation to law. Mussawir’s contribution explores the close connection that Deleuze’s ‘casuistic’ conception of jurisprudence has with the method and technique of the classical Roman jurists. Mussawir attends especially to the appearance of the animal (the bees) in a fragment concerning liability under the lex Aquilia. A rather atypical and awkwardly phrased ‘case’, the example of the bees in Ulpian’s text reveals how the animal can occupy a remarkable centrality in the thought of law: not so much as metaphor but as jurisprudential ‘diagram’ capable of refining and extending juridical institutions. Offering a conception of law that can, in Deleuze’s words, ‘do without any subject of rights’,22 Mussawir explains how the casuistry of Roman law provides some unexpected avenues into the contemporary projects of antihumanism and nonanthropocentrism in law.

It seems appropriate that our final focus is trained upon the Earth processes that shape and define interactional ecologies to produce new forms of emergence. These complex relational geo-systems comprise not only life forces, but also the influences of nonliving materials: minerals, metals, acids, complex polymers and so forth. In chapter 14 by Myra Hird and Kathryn Yusoff, we learn how microbes have newly begun to digest toxic waste at the Berkeley Pit, a dump site filled with acidic and metal-laden toxic waste from copper mining in Butte, Montana. The artificial lake that is a mile wide and a mile-and-a-half long is breeding a new form of life that has scientists bioprospecting for unusual bacteria to fulfil evermore intricate forms of inhuman labour, from antivirals to anticancer drugs. Among the new forms of life, one bacterial agent—found only in the rectum of geese—has the ability to digest metal waste. This bacteria had evidently found its way into the pit after the mass die off of migrating snow geese stumbled into the toxic lake, impacting its ecology. This chapter maps out the multidirectional and nonhuman trajectories of the interstratum of life and nonlife. Attending to insistent and opportunistic bacterial innovation and the emerging science of mineralogical evolution, the chapter argues for a form of mineral-microbial heterogenesis; an interlocking stratum that has consequences for thinking the multipersectival dimensions of becoming across geologic and biologic strata in post-Anthropocene worlds.

Taken together, the contributions to this volume advance our understanding of the new transdisciplinary knowledge systems emerging today, as traditional academic disciplines transform and blend to accommodate and reflect posthuman paradigms. The change of focus is both thematic and methodological, traversing concepts of geology, biology, power, law, economy, technology, learning, animality, communality and creativity. The chapters 14describe for us core elements of, or possibilities for, posthuman life and alternative ways of producing knowledge. The posthuman convergence rests upon and coproduces a vital materialist method that is illustrated throughout this volume. It approaches differences as modulations within a common matter, linked in a relational political economy that is framed by relations of power as both restrictive and empowering. This is no ‘flat ontology’, but rather embedded and embodied material perspectivism at work in addressing real-life issues.

Viewing these emergent knowledge formations as Deleuzian ‘systems’, whose processes are complex, relational, nonlinear, heterogeneous and heterogenetic, enables a clearer vision of the ‘three ecologies’—environmental, socioeconomic and subjective—of the posthuman condition. This is at once a planetary consequence of the era of the Anthropocene, and a culturally and biologically differential experience, inflected by diverse materialities and vitalities. In turn, the understanding thus generated enables an ethological understanding of how knowledge may be put to use towards an affirmative posthumanist ethics that responds to trenchant inequalities, exacerbated now by cognitive capitalism. And this achievement, for us, refocuses the true purpose of knowledge: not to control, nor merely to describe the world; but to transform it for the betterment of all.

Notes

1. Bonta and Protevi 2004.

2. For example, Grosz 2011; Povinelli 2016; Barad 2007; Haraway 2016.

3. For example, Harding 1991; Haraway 1988; Braidotti 1994.

4. See, for example, Cajete 2000; Simpson 2011; Bentarrak, Muecke and Roe 2014; Bignall, Hemming and Rigney 2016; Viveiros de Castro 2017. On the potential of the posthumanities for enhanced receptivity to historically marginalised knowledges (and subjects of knowledge), see Braidotti 2018 and 2016.

5. This project has been advanced by Rosi Braidotti over several decades. See, for example, Braidotti 1994 and 2013.

6. Grosz 2011; see also her interview in Grosz, Yusoff and Clark 2017.

7. Foucault 1995, 2008; see also Deleuze 1988, 1995.

8. Chakrabarty 2017, 25. See Birch 2018 for a discussion of the intellectual resources—scientific and philosophical—that Indigenous custodians of knowledge offer for working towards environmental and social resilience in the face of climate change.

9. Braidotti 2018.

10. Deleuze 2007, 365.

11. Braidotti 2018, 8.

12. See Barad 2007 (forerunning her many other recent writings on this topic).

15 13. Deleuze 2004.

14. Deleuze 2007, 177.

15. See Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) references to ‘overflight’ and the concept as existing ‘in a state of survey [survol] in relation to its components’ on page 20 and the closing pages of What Is Philosophy?

16. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 361–62.

17. Guattari 2000.

18. Colebrook 2014, 138.

19. Colebrook 2017.

20. Barad 2017; for an Indigenous account of temporality see, for example, Deloria 1972.

21. Deleuze 1994, 186.

22. Deleuze 2007, 354.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Barad, K. (2017). ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable’, New Formations 92, 56–86.

Bentarrak, K. Muecke, S., and Roe, P. (2014). Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Bignall, S., Hemming, S., and Rigney, D. (2016). ‘Three Ecosophies for the Anthropocene: Environmental Governance, Continental Posthumanism, and Indigenous Expressivism’, Deleuze Studies 10(4), 455–78.