William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books include Capitalism and Christianity, American Style and Pluralism, both also published by Duke University Press. His classic study The Terms of Political Discourse won the Benjamin Lippincott Award in 1999. Connolly is an advisory editor of the journal Theory & Event, a co-editor of the blog The Contemporary Condition, and a former editor (1980–86) of the journal Political Theory.

A World of Becoming

By William E. Connolly

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4863-4

Contents

Prelude……………………………………………………………………………..1Chapter 1. Complexity, Agency, and Time…………………………………………………17Chapter 2. The Vicissitudes of Experience……………………………………………….43Chapter 3. Belief, Spirituality, and Time……………………………………………….68Interlude……………………………………………………………………………93Chapter 4. The Human Predicament……………………………………………………….97Chapter 5. Capital Flows, Sovereign Decisions, and World Resonance Machines…………………124Chapter 6. The Theorist and the Seer……………………………………………………148Postlude…………………………………………………………………………….176Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………178Notes……………………………………………………………………………….181Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………199Index……………………………………………………………………………….205

Chapter One

Complexity, Agency, and Time

The Complexity of Open Systems

There has been a tendency in cultural theory, philosophy, and political theory to bypass work in biology and neuroscience, even though we humans have ourselves evolved from other species and come equipped with genes, blood, hearts, muscles, brains, sexual organs, feet, and even hands for typing, a practice that depends upon unconscious habits wired into the body/brain system through training and repetition. (No one I know can recite the order of the alphabet on the keypad they use so efficiently.) There are diverse, even contending, sources of that tendency. The reductionism of biology and neuroscience has been one. The difficulty of engaging them from the outside has been another. The desire to provide cultural theory its own foundations has constituted a third. Related to this, the desire to protect a theology of transcendence has provided a fourth. These disparate pressures push in the same direction. They spawn modes of cultural theory that do not come to terms closely enough with the biocultural organization of perception, the layered complexity of thought, multiple modes and degrees of agency in the world, innumerable intersections between nonhuman force-fields of several types and cultural life, the role of multi-media micropolitics in organizing nonconscious registers of intersubjective life, the critical role that cultivation of the visceral register of being plays in ethical life, the connections between natural and cultural time, and other issues besides.

The arrival of complexity theory in the physical sciences places these reasons and excuses under new pressure. Complexity theory, as I receive it, moves natural science closer to the concerns of cultural theory as it surmounts reductionism. It advances several distinctive themes that touch received theories of explanation, interpretation, agency, ethics, and time in the human sciences.

First, because of periodic confluences between novel changes in the environment and “pre-adaptations” that cannot be identified in advance, much of biological evolution cannot be predicted. A pre-adaptation is a biological feature that plays one role or is redundant at one time, but upon a strategic change in the environment now becomes important and promotes a new function. Thus, early fish had lungs that evolved into swim bladders, a novel functionality that allows fish to adjust their buoyancy to the water level, as the amount of air and water in the bladder is adjusted. Without the lung, fish would have evolved in a different way; with it there was no way to predict in advance that it would evolve the way it did. It is impossible to predict its evolution apart from detailed knowledge of other changes in and around it at a later date. Innumerable such pre-adaptations are retrospectively discernible in cultural life, such as the bills of exchange that evolved into pivots of capitalist systems, the Calvinist quest for signs of predestination that evolved into capitalist tendencies in northern Europe to industriousness and accumulation, the creative (and destructive) use of high speed computers by a financial elite to exploit slower market transactions by the largest mass of investors, the Spinozist inspiration to Einsteinian theory, the receptivity of the visceral register of human intersubjectivity to multi-media coding by TV, the creative adaptation of the liberal doctrine of human rights into rights of doctor assisted suicide and same sex marriage, and the transfiguration of the human knowledge of mortality into a series of faiths that promise life after death. Since pre-adaptations are known after rather than before the fact, we already encounter a source of unpredictability and uncertainty in the evolution of nature/culture.

Second, because of “Poincare resonances” that come into play when a previously stable system is thrown into disequilibrium, there are potentials for self-organization in some natural systems that also exceed our powers of prediction before they find expression. Ilya Prigogine suggests that such resonances were already in play in the period immediately following the Big Bang, generating one temporal flow out of several potentialities available, a direction that has affected everything else since. When a simple physical system faces a new situation of disequilibrium, the pattern of resonance that arises seems to generate forks that can issue in more than one vector of development. The direction selected affects everything else that later emerges, without determining everything else in a simple, linear way. Brian Goodwin suggests, for instance, that such modes of self organization “at the edge of chaos” play a role at strategic intervals in species evolution. The turn actually taken at a bifurcation point is interpreted by some under the star of chance or contingency. Perhaps. I suspect that it is wise to read such turns as modes of emergent causality that are neither reducible to chance, nor to explanation according to a classic concept of causality, nor to probability within a known distribution of possibilities. The actual turn sometimes exceeds any probability heretofore organized into the matrix of recognized possibilities. Some modes of opacity are due to incomplete information and others to processes that are intrinsically complex, when we recognize new conditions of intensified disequilibrium but cannot project with confidence the new turn that will be taken from that point.

I claim that the American evangelical-capitalist resonance machine arose in a similar way, though the fact that its generators included sophisticated human subjects interacting across different subject positions during a period of accentuated uncertainty makes a real difference to the account. At a pregnant moment of new uncertainty, when many social scientists projected the expansion of secular development, a constellation of disaffected white workers, evangelicals, and neoliberal corporate leaders responded creatively to an evolving situation in a way that enabled a new econo-political constellation to emerge. It was irreducible to the separate parts—the perceived self-interests of each constituency—from which it emerged. Its advance grew out of prior spiritual affinities (pre-adaptations) across partial differences of interest and creed between the constituencies. Such a set of spiritual pre-adaptations is most readily identified retrospectively, though those who worried about how new movements of pluralization were closing out white blue collar workers did sense dimly that a potential realignment of some sort could be in the works.

As we shall see in a later chapter, similar developments are discernible in global politics today. The demise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War has combined with concomitant changes in the three religions of the Book to open new destructive patterns of resonance between cross-territorial constituencies.

Third, because every spatio-temporal system constituting the universe is open to some degree, and because each regularly maintains connections with other heterogeneous systems and periodically forms connections to others, another source of potential disequilibrium stalks stable systems. For instance, the tier of chrono-time on which an asteroid flow is set could intersect with the rotational pattern of the earth, creating a collision that affects future life on the face of the earth. Or the trajectory of global capitalism and that of climate evolution could intersect, altering the intensity of the latter and changing the pressures for capitalist development. Or a world financial system with some degree of autonomy could collapse, creating new pressures for war or capitalist reform that were not discernible before that event occurred. Stuart Kauffman, indeed, conjectures that a collision between three open systems helped to generate preconditions for life on earth. “It may be that myriad small organized molecules and even more complex molecules, fell onto the young earth to supply some preconditions that then mixed with the electrical force-fields and soupy stuff on early earth [to form life].” Each of these open systems—molecules, electrical force-fields, and the soupy earth—was propelled by its own tendencies, but the improbable conjunction between them may have been responsible for the origin of life on earth. Of course, many will doubt that such an improbable event could have occurred in this way, as much as some of us doubt the story of a divine creation of life.

Pre-adaptations unstateable in advance, intersections between partially open systems of multiple kinds, and novel capacities for self-organization within a system triggered by infusions from elsewhere periodically operate in and upon each other, generating turns in time out of which a new equilibrium emerges, transcending our ability to articulate it in advance. That means that recent developments in complexity theory carry implications for the image of time we bring to the study of nature and culture and particularly to the multiple imbrications between them.

Some advocates of complexity theory in the natural sciences see this. Ilya Prigogine, for instance, a Nobel Prize-winning founder of chaos theory, argues that time preceded “existence” at the inception of our universe, meaning that the chaos preceding the big bang was itself temporal in character. The universe we inhabit, not necessarily the only one that could have evolved, continues to be “heterogeneous and far from equilibrium.” This leads him to postulate an image of time as becoming, a temporal flow that is irreversible in ways that upset the Newtonian model of reversible processes, replete with an element of uncertainty in what becomes and periodically the source of new events and processes. It is the relations between disparate processes set on different time scales that impress him the most.

“We are in a world of multiple fluctuations, some of which have evolved while others have regressed. These fluctuations are the macroscopic manifestations of fundamental properties of fluctuations arising on the microscopic level of unstable dynamic systems … Irreversibility, and therefore the flow of time, starts at the dynamical level. It is amplified at the macroscopic level, then at the level of life, and finally at the level of human activity. What drove these transitions from one level to the next remains largely unknown, but at least we have achieved a noncontradictory description of nature rooted in dynamical instability.”

The flow of irreversible time is eternal: “We have an age, our civilization has an age, but time itself has neither a beginning nor an end.”

Stuart Kauffman evinces a similar view. He draws upon the elements listed above to identify real creativity in the trajectory of natural and cultural processes. Attempts to expunge the creative dimension from natural processes are legion, either in pursuit of a linear, deterministic science or to protect the image of an omnipotent God who monopolizes creativity. But they rest upon speculative leaps or unproven articles of faith. Kauffman is willing to make such a leap in the opposite direction. Why go in that direction? Well, dominant assumptions postulate a radical break between nature and culture that is more and more difficult to sustain. The radical break between humanity and other processes—the “anthropic exception”—is introduced to explain how we have capacities to understand natural regularities but the objects we comprehend have no power to participate in a world of becoming at all. Moreover, the alternative conjecture opens a door to urgently needed modes of collaboration between practitioners in literature, the natural sciences, and the human sciences, as we explore complex interconnections between the human estate and nonhuman processes. This conjecture also carries considerable promise in several fields of inquiry in the natural sciences, most particularly biology and neuroscience. And finally, following this trail may promote new possibilities of cross-fertilization between devotees of divine transcendence who concentrate creativity in God (not all devotees of transcendence do so) and devotees of a world immanent to itself who, while joining them in resisting closures in the Gallilean tradition, admit differential degrees of real agency and creativity into a variety of natural-social processes.

Degrees of Agency

Does such rethinking imply that all differences between “nature” and “culture” are to be erased? Do natural processes contain as much agency as cultural processes? An amoeba as much as a human? A cloud system as much as a state? No. But it does encourage us to rethink the dicey problematic of agency, to convert a dichotomous view that bestows agency upon humans only—or in many cases upon humans to some degree and God to an infinite degree—into a more distributive image of agency.

As we pursue this trail, it is pertinent to recall that traditional images of human agency in the monotheistic traditions—revolving around the idea of free will—are themselves replete with ambiguity and paradox. The human will was presented by Augustine, the most profound philosopher of early Christendom, to separate human beings categorically from both unfree nature and an absolutely free God. His image of human free will is set in a fixed tri-archy consisting of nature without evolutionary possibility, a human estate with severe limits, and a God. Before the Fall, the perfectly free act of human will was a perverse act of rebellion; after the Fall, human freedom becomes confounded. We can now will evil by ourselves but cannot will the good unaided. The latter is possible only when human agency is infused with divine grace, that is, with what those outside the Augustinian tradition would call heteronomy. If you try to will the good unaided, another, lower part of the will intervenes, fighting against the first priority. That is to say, the vaunted idea of a free will wheeled out in early modern life to counter mechanical theories of nature and culture is a will essentially divided against itself after the Fall. It is free from mechanical determination, but its internal freedom is profoundly compromised. Even Kant is eventually pressed to move close to the Augustinian image of a will divided against itself. Later philosophies of a mechanical universe either tend to drop the idea of will from human life or to introduce an “anthropic exception” that is not otherwise examined. It is this exception, it is said, that allows us to explain and control nature; the question of the relation between our bodies and the rest of nature is left in limbo.

My judgment is that no fully adequate conception of human agency is available today. Each theory comes replete with problems and mysteries that render it contestable. But a shift from the tri-archy—nature without agency, humanity with imperfect agency, God with perfect agency—to a heterogeneous world composed of interacting spatio-temporal systems with different degrees of agency carries considerable promise. The agenda is neither to reduce humanity to the rest of nature conceived as lacking all creative power nor to supplement a human will divided against itself with divine grace. It is to appreciate multiple degrees and sites of agency, flowing from simple natural processes, through higher processes, to human beings and collective social assemblages. Each level and site of agency also contains traces and remnants from the levels from which it evolved, and these traces affect its operation.

One charge leveled against such a conception of distributed agency is that it presupposes a conception of linear progress with one breath that it denies with another. But that misses the point. The hierarchy of agency projected here does measure it according to the standard expressed in the human estate; that is, you might say, the partial species provincialism embodied in this account. And it does suggest that some forms of agency precede and enable human agency. But the development of agency often proceeds in a topsy-turvy way, as we have suggested with respect to the origin of life from non-life. Most pertinently, a philosophy of becoming projects no encompassing temporal logic guaranteeing that the retrospective trajectory identified at this point will continue in the same direction. It might change radically, as it did from the vantage point of dinosaur species provincialism when an asteroid shower destroyed dinosauric conditions of maintenance. We say that time is irreversible, but we do not equate irreversibility automatically with progress.

A second charge, more commonly asserted, is that a distributed conception of agency is “anthropomorphic”: it projects onto nonhuman entities traits, capacities and feelings that only humans possess. The charge of anthropomorphism did enable the classical European conception of laws of nature to break free from an earlier, enchanted view. But today it functions like a straitjacket. It reflects the convergent upshot of contending assumptions about the world now open to challenge. The contending assumptions are that human beings are made in the image of a creator God and endowed with unique capacities and that nonhuman nature is governed by ironclad laws of determination without agency. These two contending images converge to define anthropomorphism as the fallacy by which human traits are illegitimately assigned to other species and some non-living processes.

With the emergence of complexity theory, however, these injunctions against proceeding from the human estate to consideration of degrees of agency in other domains lose some power. Now it becomes plausible to construe human agency as an emergent phenomenon, with some nonhuman processes possessing attributes bearing family resemblances to human agency and with human agency understood by reference to its emergence from nonhuman processes of proto-agency. For if human agency is an emergent phenomenon rather than an eternal trait, precursors with different degrees of complexity are likely to be found. And other modes of agency that escape the designation of “precursor” are too. If that is the case, the door is open to explore whether force-fields, implicated or not in the evolution of the human species, express this or that degree of agency.

(Continues…)

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