Dancing life into being: Genetics,resilience and the challenge of complexity theory

Introduction

In recent years, a new paradigm has emerged both in the social sciences and in an array of associated policy fields, such as international finance, corporate risk analysis, urban planning, development and national security. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as national administrations concerned with ‘homeland security’ in the post-9/11 world, have started to develop and increasingly use the concept of ‘resilience’ in their programmes and related governmental practices (Cooper and Walker, 2011: 143–4).

This discourse of resilience is inextricably bound to the rise of complexity theory in both the social and the ‘hard’ sciences in the last decades. Complexity theory challenges linear conceptions of time and stringent cause-and-effect relations, emphasizing the emergence of complex systems as a result of the multiple interactions of their different parts. Resilience theory is interested in what keeps a complex system persisting and absorbing change and disturbance while maintaining ‘the same relationships between populations or state variables’ (Holling, 1973: 14).

For a variety of scholars in critical security studies, resilience theory, and complexity theory more generally, provides the intellectual resource for the establishment of new forms of neoliberal world order and global control of life (see, for example, Cooper and Walker, 2011; Dillon and Reid, 2009). These scholars’ research has provided us with novel and valuable accounts of how to approach and understand contemporary governmental rationales around the world. However, this article is keen to introduce a note of caution into the debate about ‘new order[s] of the real’ that are supposed to define global governance per se. It does so by pointing at the number of governmental discourses and practices in which the ‘old’ order of the real, an order that expresses the desire for predictable management that has clearly controllable effects, is stubbornly persistent.

What will be argued in the following is that such a set of practices can be found in the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in which the dominant approaches and strategies still rely on what I want to call a ‘static-linear’ instead of ‘complex-dynamic’ understanding of life – an understanding that is inextricably bound to a particular episteme that assumes the sovereignty of the subject and the latter’s control over the world as object, and that is deeply at odds with the episteme that is advanced in significant strands of scientific complexity theory. ¹ After having engaged with the case of GMOs, the article moves on to discourses of resilience in a variety of social and governmental contexts to show how they are equally related to elements of the traditional episteme.

However, the aim of this article is not merely to unravel this struggle of ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemes in order to shed some light on the multiplicity of governmental realities that critical security studies occasionally fails to emphasize. Based on an understanding of power that draws on the thought of Michel Foucault, which recognizes the continuous interrelation of practices of rule and resistance (Foucault, 1998: 93), it equally aims to point at the strategies of resistance that are enabled by the highlighted struggle. In other words, while a majority of critical security theorists continues to focus on how scientific complexity theory is complicit with new manifestations of governance and domination, this article attempts to elaborate on its potential for challenging particular governmental rationales, manifested in both the resilience discourses and the GMO controversy.

The non-complexity of genetic engineering

According to Michael Dillon (2007: 46), in our contemporary neoliberal era, ‘the contingent’ has become ‘the primary strategic principle’ of securing life globally. This new governmental rationale is related to the emerging understanding in the life sciences that complex ‘biological being’ can no longer be conceptualized in ‘simple linear fashion’. In his collaborative work with Julian Reid and Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Dillon maintains that complexity theory as it has been conceptualized in the life sciences has led to the emergence of a new ‘molecular episteme’, a ‘new order of the real’ that underlies what he calls ‘recombinant biopolitics’ (Dillon and Reid, 2009; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2009). Other security scholars prefer to talk about a new ‘dispositif of precautionary risk’ that has emerged, for example, in the governance of the War on Terror (Aradau and Van Munster, 2008; De Goede and Randalls, 2009). This dispositif is no longer based, it is suggested, on the ‘appearance of science and calculation’, but on practices that ‘exceed the logic of (statistical) calculability’ (Amoore and De Goede, 2008: 11).

This work has provided us with tremendous insights into the workings of contemporary governmental regimes. However, it sometimes tends to transform knowledge about particular governmental practices into generalized assumptions about the workings of contemporary modes of global governance as such. By contrast, this article is keen to point out that there is still a significant number of governmental regimes and discourses in which the ‘new’ complexity-based order of the real is either not acknowledged or at odds with more traditional governmental assumptions that are upheld.

The GMO controversy is an example of such a governmental regime, featuring a traditional understanding of life as static that is in line with the Newtonian understanding of science. Indeed, it is the opponents of genetically modified foods who use insights provided by scientific complexity theory to argue that the contingent diffusion of manipulated genes into ecosystems cannot be prevented and has consequences for the stability of these systems that cannot be foreseen (see, for example, Ho, 1998, 2008). At a first glance, this argument closely resembles the argument that is made in resilience theory. However, in the course of this article I will argue that discourses of resilience show a discrepancy between recognizing the complexity of social-ecological systems, on the one hand, and believing in their ultimate governability, on the other – the latter being based on what I have called a more traditional episteme.

I infer from the arguments made by environmental activists and critical scientists who oppose genetic engineering (GE), as well as from the discrepancy within discourses of resilience, that complexity theory is not just implicated in global governmental regimes to transform and to a certain extent stabilize existing systems of rule. Governmental reality is multiple and not characterized by one ‘order of the real’, and what can serve a system of rule in one case can be its challenge in another – an insight that is in line with Foucault’s (1998: 93) general understanding of power and resistance as interrelated. But, in order to make that point, I first need to elaborate on the particular challenges that the integration of complexity theory into governmental understandings and procedures faces in the case of GMOs, including their underlying science.

Regarding the relation of genetics and complexity theory, Brian Wynn (2005: 70) points out that the complexity dimensions of the genetic processes of life ‘are difficult to domesticate within assumptions or promises of prediction-and-control’, which, owing to a certain ‘cultural habit of the institutional science-policy culture’, leads to their neglect. This ‘habit’ is related to what I have called the traditional episteme insofar as it expresses a desire to maintain a certain degree of predictability in order to preserve the ability to calculate and control the security of the population (Foucault, 2007). For Wynn (2005: 80), concerns about the lack of control when it comes to GE are dismissed on the grounds that ‘one has to start somewhere’.

It could be argued, in line with the theorists referred to in the previous section, that nowadays both genetics and (neoliberal) governmental regimes appreciate the concept of uncertainty and the limits of predictability. In the context of genetics, this acknowledgement is often led back to the results of the Human Genome Project (HGP), which have supposedly ‘killed the facile genetic reductionism of the heyday of developmental genetics’ (Sarkar, 2006: 86). It is this reductionism that grounds the so-called Central Dogma of genetics, which entails the assumption that the relation between genome and organism is static-linear, one-directional and predictable.

However, a thorough analysis of the discourses around the concept of the gene reveals that they are actually full of tensions, discontinuities and outright contradictions. Although the HGP has indeed revealed the complex interrelation of gene, protein and organism, in biological theory the stereotype of the gene as central and essential developmental agent is mostly preserved. This implies that the organism is still regarded as an entity made up of different parts with more or less clearly defined boundaries (see, for example, Neumann-Held and Rehmann-Sutter, 2006; Carolan, 2008, 2010; Stotz, 2009). Paradoxically, the preservation of the agency of the essential gene is based on a fluid and non-essential definition of these boundaries, which is particularly useful for a biotech industry that is interested in maintaining the possibility to patent and therefore own (modified) genes as sole carriers of developmental information.

Gene patenting is inextricably bound to the market economy, which relies on the creation, sale and trade of products with ‘discrete properties and clear boundaries’. What biologist Jack Heinemann calls ‘the industrial gene’ can be ‘defined, owned, tracked, proven acceptably safe, [and] proven to have uniform effect’ (Caruso, 2007). Therefore, it is questionable whether biotechnological ‘products’ could be patented if the notion of the stringent cause-and-effect relation between gene and organism was abandoned. This might explain why recent empirical developments in the life sciences, such as the HGP, have had so far no impact either on the biotech industry with regard to the justification of genetic modification in agriculture or on official governmental risk assessments of biotech products (Caruso, 2007).

Luigi Pellizzoni (2011: 797–8) emphasizes that the ‘underlying logic’ of biotech patenting is based on (a) ‘a mechanistic conception of the world’, in which ‘both organic and inorganic matter are assemblies of parts’; (b) ‘isolation and purification as criteria for distinguishing what is manufactured from what is not’; (c) the ‘dematerialization of physical matter into its informational contexts, that is pure function’; and (d) the ‘presumption of manufacture by virtue of the very demand of a patent’. These conditions are satisfied with the concept of the distinct gene as material (and sole) carrier of information that is translated into a clearly recognizable organic trait (Pellizzoni, 2011: 798). As Pellizzoni argues, this leads to an ‘ambiguous status’ for the gene as an ‘object of property’ that oscillates between bounded material entity and information. For this reason, the ‘ontological identity’ of the patented and owned gene needs to be kept fluid (Pellizzoni, 2011: 798, referring to Carolan, 2010). Another reason is the ‘substantial equivalence’ argument found in the discourse of biotech product regulation: on the one hand, for the process of patenting, the product-to-be needs to be clearly manufactured and therefore distinguishable from a ‘natural’ product or process that cannot be owned; on the other hand, for the sake of ‘easy’ regulation, the product needs to be defined as identical to its natural counterpart (Pellizzoni, 2011: 798). However, while for Michael L. Carolan (2008: 758) this leads to a ‘tension’ or ‘contradiction’ that is generated by different economic demands, Pellizzoni (2011: 798–9) maintains that fluidity is, to the contrary, a decisive feature of contemporary neoliberal rationalities. The latter render complexity theory ‘tractable’ by grounding it in an anti-essentialist ontology of biophysical matter. He concludes that this rationality entails the abandonment of ‘one pillar’ of the modern episteme – ‘the core distinction between inner and outer worlds’ – while the other one, the belief in ‘human agency as having capacity of control’, is reinforced (Pellizzoni, 2011: 799, emphasis added). It can be argued that, this way, notions of complexity and uncertainty are integrated into a neoliberal governmental regime that still crucially relies on the second epistemic pillar of predictability and control.

This analysis leaves us with a much clearer and ‘complex’ understanding of contemporary neoliberal governmental practices, at least in this particular case. It enables us to recognize that there are still governmental rationales, even in the neoliberal era, that entail crucial elements of a different, more traditional episteme. In the next section, I will engage with the discourses of ecological-social-political resilience to argue that their attempt to integrate an adequate understanding of complexity into rationales of governmental management faces similar difficulties and contradictions. After that, I will investigate the potential of complexity theory for resisting these rationales, concluding with an elaboration of how this potential is realized in manifestations of resistance to GMOs.

Resilience theory, regulation and the traditional episteme

The emergence of the paradigm of resilience in both ecology and the social sciences is closely related to the rise of complexity theory in both disciplines. However, the relation between complexity and resilience is not as smooth as it appears at a first glance; indeed, it is characterized by tensions and contradictions between discourses of complexity theory and what I have called the traditional episteme of human sovereignty, predictability and control, which still informs, as I will argue, the discourses of resilience. Elements of this episteme come to the fore in the normative presumption that social-ecological systems are still in need of being managed and steered (Folke, 2006: 159), even though complexity theory defines the capacity to self-organize as a central feature of complex adaptive systems. Resilience theory is bound to a particular style of policy that advises the nation-state to ‘move … away from a mere hierarchical command and control policy-style and towards a more decentralized policy-style, consensual negotiations, partial self-regulation (with legal boundaries), and the use of market mechanisms and instruments’ (Berger et al., 2001: 59). However, despite this move towards decentralized, bottom-up solutions to social and political problems within a system, resilience theory is still based on the assumption of the existence of an outside observer. This observer is supposed to have extended knowledge about the general processes of the system in question, and is therefore attributed the capacity to advise how to manage it properly, which implies that any self-regulation can only ever be partial (see quotation above).

This tendency is observable, for example, in the resilience discourse in national security policy. Christopher Zebrowski argues that ‘instead of imposing top-down control as in a hierarchical military structure of defence’, supporters of the concept of resilience seek to ‘promote self-sufficiency amongst emergency response units through training and the provision of a resilient communications infrastructure that units can depend on to circulate information during a crisis’ (Zebrowski, 2009: 15–16, emphasis added). The maintenance of the system is still based on the existence of someone ‘providing’ the training and the infrastructure in which information then circulates and is renewed. Complexity theory-based insights about the unpredictability of processes in complex systems and network societies do not lead to giving up the aim of securing society as such – what is questioned is the ‘how’ and not the ‘if’ of governmentality (compare Zebrowski, 2009: 3). Moreover, the rearticulation of governmentality around the concept of ‘resilience’ in some cases even extends the former’s reach, which becomes obvious when looking at the ‘threads’ along which the concept of resilience is applied in security policy: (1) greater preparedness rather than reactive management; (2) broadening of the emergency planning agenda; (3) the key role of institutional resilience, with an emphasis on the need to ‘create strong and transparent institutional arrangements’ for the sake of infrastructure protection; and (4) the reappropriation of ‘emergency planning-type policies for everyday civil use’ (Coaffee, 2006: 397–9). Zebrowski (2009: 18) is therefore right when arguing that ‘while [the] strategies [of resilience] differ considerably from sovereign forms of governance, they do not signify any diminishing measure of government in advanced liberal societies’.

Similar observations can be made with regard to recent developments in economic theory, which, according to Melinda Cooper and Jeremy Walker (2011), have also been informed by the discourse of resilience. The authors point out that one of the most famous neoliberal theorists, Friedrich von Hayek, compares a complex ecosystem and its central feature of self-organization to the institutions of law, language, money and markets. Cooper and Walker unravel the difference between Hayek’s ontology, which attributes priority to the laws of the markets compared to state laws, and his historical account, according to which the ‘pure society of market freedom has yet to be created’. The latter is a ‘project of radical reform’ that involves a complete reorganization of all social institutions in accordance with market dynamics, a project for which Hayek ‘paradoxically enrols the institutions of the state, even in its most authoritarian expressions’ (Cooper and Walker, 2011: 150, emphasis added). Moreover, Cooper and Walker point at the ‘de facto division of labour’ that takes place between neoclassical economics and Hayek’s neoliberal reconceptualization. While the former is ‘lending the imprimatur of unimpeachable accounting to routine budgetary decisions’, the latter represents the ‘high ideology’ of complexity theory (Cooper and Walker, 2011: 151). This shows well how difficult it is to integrate complexity theory into everyday governmental decisionmaking processes. ² It therefore comes as a surprise that, in her book Life as Surplus, Cooper (2008: 10) is keen to emphasize the smooth complicity to be found between complexity theory’s non-equilibrium approach and contemporary neoliberal regimes of power.

As Hayek struggles to bring together his strong anti-regulation stance with ideas of how to practically reform governmental institutions, so do Jon Norberg et al. (2008) in their elaboration of the consequences of resilience-theory insights for governmental regimes. One of the interesting aspects of their article is the level of comparison – ‘local populations’ as the smallest units of an ecosystem are compared to ‘local governance systems with local rules’ as the smallest units of social systems, in contrast to a direct population-to-population comparison that would seem much more straightforward (Norberg et al., 2008: 68). Consequently, when it comes to the value of diversity in social and ecological systems, which touches on a central element of ecological resilience theory, it is the diversity at the institutional and rule level that is emphasized as being advantageous, at least in social systems – not the diversity of actual people and their attributes, as is the case with regard to populations in ecological systems. This leads Norberg et al. (2008: 67) to the following conclusion:

In institutional settings, deliberate disturbances are achieved by changing the preferences on which decisions are based. Rotating national or local governments in democratic constitutions provides opportunities for changing individuals and thus the preferences they bring to the decision making process…. Long-standing totalitarian governance systems may, on the other hand, become increasingly vulnerable … as institutional solutions become more rigid if the worldview that forms the basic of decision making is kept streamlined and stable at all levels in the society.

Features of the traditional (outdated) approach to natural processes, such as predictability and stability, are attributed to totalitarian governments, while features of the new ecological systems approach, namely complexity and flexibility, are defined as inherent in liberal-democratic systems. Moreover, the market is determined as the decisive mechanism in society that fulfils the role of ‘natural selection’ in ecosystems: ‘important selective processes occurring in [social-ecological systems] include competition among species (natural selection) and competition among different forms of social and institutional arrangements and economic organization (competition in markets)’ (Anderies and Norberg, 2008: 159, emphasis added).

The same bias can be found in a text written by Stuart Kauffman (1996: 5, 28), who is one of the central advocates of a complexity theory-based approach to the organization of life on Earth as such:

the emerging sciences of complexity, as we shall see, offer fresh support for the idea of a pluralistic democratic society, providing evidence that it is not merely a human creation but part of the natural order of things … thus we will see [in this book] hints of an apologia for a pluralistic society as the natural design for adaptive compromise.

Put this way, complexity/resilience theory feeds into what Dillon and Reid (2009: 18) refer to as the (neo)liberal conception of life, which is governed by reference to the biological properties of the species, in depicting the liberal-democratic constitution of a society as naturally superior to other constitutions. While we might have become used to classifying human rights violators and terrorists as ‘inhuman’ and ‘animal’ (see, for example, Butler, 2006: 56–7; Rorty, 1999: 67–8), the complexity discourse also has the potential of portraying them as opposing the very nature of life as such.

However, if the comparison between ecological and social systems were more straightforward, with populations being compared to populations instead of rules and institutions, social resilience theory would risk slipping into social Darwinism. Norberg et al. (2008: 49–50) stress that, in contrast to traditional ecology, in resilience theory it is not ‘diversity as such’, defined as ‘species richness’, that is considered important, but ‘trait diversity’, which means the quality of what a certain species contributes to the maintenance of the system in question. If it is quality rather than quantity that matters, a ‘value can be attributed to an ecosystem service, in terms of it being better or worse from a human or social perspective, and thus be relevant to management’. The authors point out that after an ecological system has been disturbed, ‘very high rates of immigration can … hinder local adaptation processes’ (Norberg et al., 2008: 55). Similarly, they argue that immigration poses a problem to ‘ecological metacommunities’ when ‘rates of species from outside’ are so high that they ‘disrupt locally adapted communities’ (Norberg et al., 2008: 67). By comparing ecological species to societal rules (and not to human populations), Norberg et al. avoid being accused of hostility towards immigration, or of burdening regimes of governmental management with the task of determining which ‘populations’ contribute in a qualitatively valuable way to their system. The example shows what a direct comparison between ecological and social systems can easily lead to when concepts of management and control are upheld. Because what the authors neglect is the difficulty of determining which species are valuable for an ecosystem, as ‘species that may seem redundant and unnecessary for ecosystem functioning during certain stages of ecosystem development may become of critical importance for regenerating and re-organizing the system after disturbance and disruption’ (Folke, 2006: 258).

However, the comparison of human to ecological systems with an emphasis on the value of diversity might also have some counter-discursive potential, as a speech of Claude Lévi-Strauss, with which he commemorated the 60th anniversary of UNESCO, elucidates. In this speech, Lévi-Strauss (2007: 10) rejects the modern separation between human and ‘other’ forms of life:

the respect we wish to obtain from individual human beings towards cultures different from theirs is but one particular case of the respect they should feel for all forms of life. By isolating humans from the rest of creation and defining too narrowly the limits of that separation, western humanism inherited from antiquity and the Renaissance has resulted in rejection, outside arbitrarily drawn borders, of ever more neighbouring fractions of a humanity to whom it was particularly easy to refuse the same dignity as the rest enjoyed, since it has been forgotten that the human individual is primarily to be respected as a living being rather than as lord and master of creation: an initial recognition that would have compelled humans to show respect for all living beings.

The expansion of the forms of life that need to be ‘respected’ can easily be regarded as a mere confirmation of the (neo)liberal conception of life referred to before (Dillon and Reid, 2009: 18). However, I would argue that if the idea of regulating this respect of life is dropped, the potentially unlimited pluralization and multiplication of respected life can lead to a blurring of the legitimacy of any boundary-setting between what must and what must not be respected. This is the counter-side of the inclusion of the democratic constitution of human life into the ‘natural order of things’ – instead of defining how life is (and should be) constituted globally, it attributes to all forms of life the potential of being (self-)organized in a multiple number of ways, with no possibility of judgment about the best (and universal) way. This idea will be further pursued in the remainder of this article.

So far, the analysis has revealed the paradox that appears when discourses of complexity theory are compared to the expressed conviction in resilience theory that the management and control of a social system can and must be maintained. This paradox can be traced back to implicit normative and political presumptions about ecological-social systems in the relevant literature, which are related to a traditional episteme of predictable management and control. Although resilience theory features the fundamental notion that humans are part of nature, rather than decoupled from it, which implies that ‘our possibility to control and steer [nature] in a desired direction is, in the long run, impossible’ (Andersson, 2007: 27), there is a strong tendency to characterize change as manageable, at least to a certain degree. Even those authors in resilience theory who doubt that complex systems are controllable argue that this must not mean that the idea of a ‘reasonable analytical framework’, based on some necessary simplification of complexity, should be abandoned. Despite the acknowledgement that social-ecological systems are ‘complex adaptive systems … and as such are inherently unpredictable’, they are still convinced that researching systems with the help of resilience theory ‘increases the degree of predictable change’ (Anderies and Norberg, 2008: 161). The central arguments are: uncertainty is huge, but it can be decreased; there is no total, but only partial knowledge; and local solutions are always possible.

Self-organization and chaos: The challenge of complexity theory

In Life as Surplus, Cooper (2008: 19) argues that the parallel complexity theory turn in both the life sciences and American neoliberal economic policy represents a ‘new and mutable set of biopolitical relations’ that have replaced the ‘geopolitics of world imperialism’ in the post-World War II era. According to Cooper, new research into bacterial recombination and horizontal gene transfer motivated a few theoretical biologists, such as Lynn Margulis, James Lovelock and Stuart Kauffman, to reread the evolution of life from the point of view of the microcosm. Cooper (2008: 20) maintains that, according to these theorists, microbes represent the most lifelike of living organisms because they are so ‘indifferent to the limits that constrain the reproduction of whole organisms’. She concludes that this ‘philosophy of life as such’, which depicts catastrophes as the continuous rebirth of universes, ‘runs the risk of celebrating life as it is’ (Cooper, 2008: 39, 42).

However, Cooper neglects that these theorists, among others in the life sciences’ school of complexity theory, also open up new spaces for a general challenge to the traditional episteme that, as pointed out before, still underlies a variety of governmental practices and discourses. Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia Theory, as well as the so-called Earth System Science in general, attempts to contest the dominance of neo-Darwinism in biology. It argues against the assumption that planetary life develops through competition based on random gene-mutation that gives a selective advantage to certain genotypes, which is played out in their improved chances to survive in an environment that exists independently from them. Instead, Gaia Theory views the Earth ‘holistically as a living entity’. It is convinced that living organisms actively shape the planet’s geochemistry to the advantage of life as a whole, and that the ‘Earth itself may be understood as a complex, bounded, self-organizing, adaptive organism’ (Litfin, 2005: 502).

Tracing the ‘order in organisms’ back not to random selection, but to the ‘spontaneous order of self-organized systems’ (Kauffman, 1996: 25) has drastic consequences for the understanding of political order and chaos, and therefore for the need of governmental management. In traditional modern political theory, the necessity of order and security, guaranteed by the state, is justified by referring to the Hobbesian state of nature that is perceived as chaotic, anarchic and incapable of ordered self-organization. However, if chaos ‘is not a characteristic part of [life’s] normal function’ (Lovelock, 2006: 161), the question emerges whether socio-political systems do not also show a natural drive for order and self-organization. Consequently, order and security might not be in need of being purposefully upheld, managed or controlled.

According to my reading of Gaia Theory, its advocates do not celebrate the evolution of life through unstable and therefore disorderly extremes. To the contrary, their theory relies on the observation that ‘Gaia can provide stability for long periods of time while undergoing changes in response to external stimuli and/or emerging components within the biota’ (Schneider et al., 2004: xiv). The concept of self-organization is based on this observation about the stability – or indeed ‘resilience’ – of the Earth system as a whole, which contradicts the principle of ‘randomness’ in the development of life that is stressed in neo-Darwinism.

The problem of complexity theory as conceptualized by Lovelock and Kauffman is not that these authors place too much emphasis on extremes and disorder in the development of life but, to the contrary, that they place so much emphasis on the order that can be found in the way the planet works as a whole. Indeed, in the past Gaia Theory was accused of supporting the idea of ‘global scale teleology’ (Schneider et al., 2004: xiv–xv). Depicting the planet as an orderly ‘superorganism’ points at the theory’s inclination to perceive internal regulation as natural. Kauffman’s enthusiasm about the ‘natural’ democratic constitution of the world points at the critical implications of this approach.

In the following, it will be argued that ecologist Lee F. Klinger’s research on complexity theory in relation to Gaia Theory avoids the trap of teleology by making a good argument for how ‘biological control is not a purposeful, but an emergent property of the complex Earth system’ (Schneider et al., 2004: xv). Klinger replaces Lovelock’s concept of the Earth as a ‘superorganism’ with the concept of the Earth as a ‘superecosystem’ that emerges from the coupling of ecosystems, particularly the major biomes (Klinger, 2004: 194). She explores in detail how the Earth’s internal self-organization works via the interplay of order and chaos, through the processes of development and evolution, and she compares this interplay to the relationship of yin and yang in Chinese philosophy. Her study enables the further development of complexity theory-based ideas about self-organization and the role of chaos.

Klinger defines ecosystems as complex adaptive systems because, according to her analysis, they fulfil the three main criteria provided by Simon A. Levin: (1) sustained diversity and individuality of components; (2) localized interactions among those components; and (3) the existence of an autonomous process that selects from these components a ‘subset for replication of enhancement’ (quoted in Klinger, 2004: 187). She then refers to Timothy M. Lenton and Marcel van Oijen, who classify complex systems according to three behavioural states – ordered, critical, chaotic – and comes to the conclusion (contradicting those authors themselves) that Gaia as a whole, like an ecosystem, is in a critical (and not orderly) state. This means that it is near the edge of chaos, but still within an ordered regime (Klinger, 2004: 188). Consequently, ‘Gaia exhibits both symmetry and asymmetry in its surface structures, consistent with the dual action of symmetry-building (yin) and symmetry-breaking (yang)’ (Klinger, 2004: 188) – one tendency representing the drive towards order, the other the drive towards chaos:

The edge of chaos is where living systems are most likely to find new means and forms of existence in their pioneering efforts to domesticate chaotic landscapes. Evolution is about finding some kind of stable existence in place ever farther from equilibrium by experimenting with new forms, new behaviors, new ideas (Klinger, 2004: 191).

The process of symmetry-breaking necessarily creates instabilities, and therefore evolution often results in failure. However, living systems at the same time develop, which means they grow and mature. The process eventually gives way to ‘more predictable, orderly traits and behaviors’ (Klinger, 2004: 191). While evolution drives the system towards chaos, development drives it towards order (Klinger, 2004: 192). To flourish and be sustained, complex life is in need of both processes. The latter is characterized by self-organization, self-regulation, autocatalysis and crystallization, and the former features bifurcation, turbulence and morphogenesis (Klinger, 2004: 189).

Elements of ‘chaos’ and evolution in the functioning of a living system are often not sufficiently considered when insights from complexity theory in the life sciences are transferred to socio-political systems, as they imply notions of radical change, transformation and potential failure. In contrast, in many contemporary governmental systems, including neoliberal ones, there is still a heavy emphasis on the need for controlled development that leads to the growth and maturity of a particular way of life. Consequently, in the discourse of resilience, turbulences and catastrophes are only considered desirable if they lead to a controlled improvement of the fitness and security of a particular population (compare Zebrowski, 2009: 3).

However, Klinger herself stresses that ‘evolution as a symmetry-breaking force must not be allowed to run rampant, or else chaos would prevail’. She points at the unique aspect of living systems to facilitate and moderate evolution through processes of natural selection, which is the regular assessment of the fruitfulness of the search for ‘a new basis of attraction, new stable existences’, and the quick and accordant response ‘if the search is unsuccessful’ (Klinger, 2004: 194). The question is whether such a ‘mechanism’ that prevents total collapse is also needed in social organization and, if the answer is yes, what this can be if the idea of predictable governmental management and control, including its emphasis on the market as the mechanism of ‘natural selection’, is abandoned.

Imploding governmental regimes through the multiplication of life: Strategies of resistance

Following Karen Litfin (2005: 504), the decisive difference between ‘living systems’ and ‘soft (human) systems’ is that the latter are ‘purposeful … systems’, endowed with the ‘human faculties of perception, intention, interpretation and imagination’. The capacity of ‘purpose’ and ‘intention’ seems to disable the process of systematic self-regulation through natural selection. In the following, it will be shown how the argument for ‘purpose’ and ‘selection’ nowadays leads not only to the maintenance, but also to the extension of a particular governmental strategy. Afterwards, I will attempt to make an argument for how ideas of holism and autopoiesis can challenge this strategy.

According to Cooper (2008: 41–2), complexity theories in the life sciences are likely to ‘lend themselves to a distinctly neoliberal antienvironmentalism … that … stems from a position that can only be described as vitalist’. Gaia Theory in particular has been accused many times of depicting the Earth as strong enough to ‘survive our affronts’ and to ‘“clean up” our messes, for if we perturb the system, it will respond, via feedback mechanisms, to reinstate homeostasis’ (Schneider et al., 2004: xvi). However, Gaia theorists today are keen to stress that the contention that it is difficult to threaten life as such does not imply that Gaia will save the human species in particular. To the contrary, ‘large-scale, swift changes can lead to unpredictable perturbations of the Earth system – perturbations that are not likely to be benevolent towards our species’. There is also no doubt among Gaia theorists that most of these changes are man-made and need to be tackled (Schneider et al., 2004: xvi). Gaia Theory has not pushed forward an anti-, but a pro-environmentalist agenda that enables an expansion of the role of governmental management.

In the last decades, the Earth has come to be regarded as a ‘human-dominated planet’ in which ‘humans have emerged as a new force of nature’ (Lubchenko, 1998: 492). This means that humanity is nowadays perceived to be able to impact on the environment that sustains its life, and has thereby gained the capacity to threaten its own existence. Although in traditional governmental regimes the significance of the ‘milieu’ for human life has also been acknowledged (Foucault, 2007: 19, 21), its (continuous) existence has nevertheless been taken for granted. Today, this is no longer the case, and consequently in a majority of modern societies the role for regulation is broadened to include the need to secure the natural milieu through precise management. Additionally, the object of regulation – life – is also redefined and expanded: Jane Lubchenko (1998: 491) defines the ‘century of the environment’ that we have now entered as the century that is characterized through ‘intimate connections between [ecological] systems and human health, the economy, social justice, and national security’. Regulation is supposed to target not just the population, but ‘life’ as a whole, conceptualized as biologically healthy, economically governmentalized, socially balanced (through social justice), and secured against all possible environment-related threats, such as ‘human migrations, war, disease, social disruption, political fragmentation, competition for scarce resources, and ecoterrorism’ (Lubchenko, 1998: 494; compare Dillon and Reid, 2009). ³ This is one possible way to define the purpose of human action in relation to its environment, and to govern its exercise. However, there might also be other ways.

For Litfin, the relevant concepts of Gaia Theory for global politics are, among others, autopoiesis and holism. The implications of autopoiesis have already been pointed out: ‘living systems and human systems are self-organizing, meaning that they generate high degrees of order through complex relationships among their parts and with the environment rather than as a consequence of any clear external agency’ (Litfin, 2005: 507). If the difference between human systems and living systems is that the former are ‘purposeful’, the question is who defines which ‘purpose’ should be pursued. There is no automatic link between existing governmental regimes, the definition of ‘purpose’ and consequential social action. If more emphasis is placed on life’s necessary drive towards symmetry-breaking, towards evolution and chaos, the consequence might not be a strengthening of governmental regimes, but a multiplication of the knowledge and the actors that are involved in the purpose-determination.

A further aspect that challenges the traditional episteme is brought in by the idea of holism. Holism implies a planetary perspective; but, instead of merely leading to an expansion of governmental reach, it also has the potential to challenge a core element of the traditional episteme that still features in many governmental regimes, namely, the idea of human sovereignty: ‘Current economic and political institutions reflect a state of consciousness that is essentially oblivious to our embeddedness within and dependence upon the entire Gaian system’ (Litfin, 2005: 505). Litfin counters what she perceives as the dominant dogma of neoliberal economics, according to which competition is the central basis for achieving societal progress and development, with the concept of ‘symbiosis’, which is based on the idea of holism (Litfin, 2005: 514).

If these complexity theory-based ideas about the lack of knowledge about life and its processes, the necessity of (chaotic and uncontrolled) evolution for the prospering of life, the confidence about the capacity of life to regulate itself, and the understanding of life as being holistic and thereby anti-sovereign, are brought together and radicalized, the consequential pluralization of knowledge about life, purpose-setting, regulation and cooperation might have the potential to implode the traditional episteme and the governmental regimes that rely on it. Life in modern societies is conceptualized and governed in particular ways, and there is little space to think and act outside this box. However, the task might not be to overcome prevalent logics completely, but ‘to infuse [them] with more flexibility, inclusivity, and plurality, and to act upon localities, states, supranational capital, religious organizations, and international institutions to redistribute the world assemblage’ (Connolly, 2004: 35). Litfin’s thought is still related to the governmental implications of the traditional episteme, but nevertheless indicates ways that have the potential to challenge it, based on new notions of life provided by complexity theory. These threads can be pursued to challenge the traditional episteme, including the governmental regimes that are based on it, at a variety of sites in a variety of ways.

In the last section of this article, I will come back to the example of the regulation of GMOs as one potential site for this challenge, this time focusing on the strategies of resistance that utilize scientific complexity theory for their opposition. To finally bring the two decisive threads of the article together (the GMO controversy and the resilience discourse), I will then use the insights provided by these strategies for an elaboration on the counter-discursive potential of resilience theory.

Dancing life into being

Having argued in the first two sections of this article that the regulation of GMOs is still based on an episteme that emphasizes human sovereignty, control and predictability, I will now elaborate on how complexity theory informs the strategies of resistance of a minority of GE-critical scientists. One of the best-known scientists in the controversy is Mae-Wan Ho, whose opposition to GE is fundamentally grounded in a complexity theory-based understanding of the world.

First of all, in her account, the dominance of man as subject is softened via the upgrading of the role of nature and its particularities. Ho questions the traditional scientific approach of gaining knowledge via the ‘invasion’ and breaking up of organisms, which is based on the conviction that the whole is not more than the sum of its parts. She aims to replace this approach with the method of non-invasion: It is the cell or even the organism as a whole that becomes the subject insofar as it ‘is allowed to tell its own story … to inform us of its internal processes’: man turns out to be informed by the organism (Ho, 1993: 100). Moreover, drawing on quantum theory, Ho questions the role of the human observer: following the traditional view, the observer (=subject) is ‘strictly external to the system’ and does not influence the processes he or she observes, while in the quantum world observer and observed ‘seem somehow inextricably entangled’. Ho concludes that ‘the subjectivist–objectivist dichotomy is falsely drawn’, and that subjectivity as such is indeed an ‘anthropomorphic-anthropocentric concept’ that results from human chauvinism (Ho, 1993: 142).

The dissolution of this subject–object distinction is one of the reasons for Ho’s opposition to GE, as this technology is based on the notion that man as subject is in clear control of what he/she does with the object. But, following her argument, neither he/she nor the organism is subject of the processes that give life (Ho, 1998: 77). For Ho, GE attacks the mechanisms of integrity and autonomy that constitute the organism as an ‘active, autonomous being, which is open to the environment’ (Ho, 1998: 71, 135). According to her, the focus on the potential action, openness and transformative potential of the organism is avoided in mainstream molecular biology, because it would threaten the status quo, which still maintains (despite the revolutionary insights of the HGP, as pointed out before) that the organism is a ‘passive object’ controlled by a programme that is determined by the genes (Ho, 1998: 71, 105).

Ho has been involved in the establishment of the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) and the Independent Panel on Science that have been actively campaigning against GE in the UK in recent decades. What is most interesting for the purpose of this article is the way the involved critical scientists depict ‘life’: they use the metaphor of ‘dance’ to describe its processes, which is extraordinary for a discipline that claims to know no aesthetics but only brute ‘facts’:

The best thing about the human genome project is to finally explode the myth of genetic determinism, revealing the layers of molecular complexity that transmit, interpret, and rewrite the genetic texts. These processes are precisely orchestrated and finely tuned by the organism as a whole in a highly coordinated molecular ‘dance of life’ that’s necessary for survival…. All of this goes against the very grain of the Central Dogma that posits linear, mechanistic control. Instead, layers upon layers of chaotic complexity are coordinated, it seems, by mutual agreement in an incredibly elaborate, exquisite dance of life that dances itself freely and spontaneously into being. (Ho, 2008)

In a different text, Ho (1998: 76) also argues that the mechanic ‘silent universe of lifeless, immobile objects’ should be replaced with the concept of life as a ‘vibrant world of colour and form, of light and music’. This conceptualization of life is very similar to the one that is found in Gaia Theory, with its central idea of the non-accidental, complex self-regulation of the whole of the planet that is more than just the sum of its parts. Indeed, Lovelock (1990: 8) himself talks about the ‘unceasing song of life’ that ‘is audible to anyone with a receiver, even from outside the Solar System’. The idea of life as being static, linear and mechanical is countered with a concept that stresses its vibrancy, art, and non-reproducible originality. The idea of it being ‘free’ counters the idea of control, and the idea of it being ‘spontaneous’ the impossibility of planning due to a lack of choreography. Still, life is not ‘chaotic’, but immanently coordinated and regulated in a highly complex manner that cannot be (fully) understood. It is argued that the genome has ‘a definitive “architecture” that holds up beneath the fluidity’ (ISIS, 2004) – comparable to what Klinger has called the developmental features of systemic life processes.

The ideas of life that are produced in this scientific counter-discourse have the potential to implode the traditional episteme in the way described before, undermining elements on which a number of governmental regimes still rely: human sovereignty and the controllability of life. The remaining task is to determine whether the resisting potential that complexity theory offers can also be actualized within the framework of resilience theory, or whether the concept of resilience as such needs to be abandoned. This will be done through linking the discourse of resilience to the resistance to GE.

It has not been possible to find a text in which a direct connection is made between the GM debate and resilience theory. However, there are a couple of articles that were published in a 2000 special issue on GMOs in the international Resilience Alliance journal Ecology and Society. ⁴ Following the arguments in these articles, it is clear that a radical ‘ban’ on genetic modification as such goes beyond what is regarded as justifiable and practical in the resilience literature.

The authors of the articles tend to advocate an integration of the knowledge of diverse specialists by making them communicate with each other, as well as a broadening of participation in the debate and genetic experimentation through the inclusion of local farmers. They confirm what I have pointed out in a previous section of this article: that resilience theory acknowledges the lack of general (total) knowledge, but considers partial knowledge as sufficient for moving ahead – in this case, with biotechnology. Norman Ellstrand (2000), for example, stresses that ‘a single person cannot know all of the interconnections of a system’. However, bringing different knowledges together makes it possible to make good use of biotechnology, if it is recognized that it is a ‘complicated tool’ whose usefulness cannot be disentangled from its ‘context’. He recognizes that genetic science cannot be isolated from cultural and social-economic systems and processes, but is convinced that if the necessary connections are made, and the knowledge is broadened, biotechnology can be put to good use. Gordon Conway (2000) stresses on top of that the need for ‘participatory approaches that strengthen farmers’ own experimentation and decision making’. If these conditions are fulfilled, and the release of GMOs into the environment carefully monitored (Peterson et al., 2000), all of these authors advocate going ahead with genetic modification.

Conclusion

Based on an exploration of the role of complexity theory in governmental regimes and discourses, with the example of the regulation of GMOs and the discourses of resilience, the aim of this article has been to show, on the one hand, the multiplicity of governmental reality that makes it difficult to draw generalized assumptions about the workings of global governance per se. But, more importantly, the article has also been keen to point out how this multiplicity enables strategies of resistance to emerge, which tends to be neglected in the work of security scholars drawing on the thought of Foucault. The article has shown that scientific complexity theory can be a powerful intellectual resource not for the facilitation of but for the contestation of particular governmental regimes, owing to the attack on the traditional episteme that this strand of science entails. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault (2007: 3) emphasizes how his work can and should further contestation, insofar as it aims to give ‘some key points … some lines of force … some constrictions and blockages … in other words … some tactical pointers’ to the ones on the ground who ‘want to struggle’. The analysis to be found in this contribution has been carried out in this spirit.

I have pointed out how scientific complexity theory is at odds with decisive elements of what I have called the traditional episteme: the understanding of human sovereignty, based on a distinction between subject (man) and object (the world around him), and, related to this, the understanding of the need for controlled management that has predictable effects. The first two sections have outlined how the regulation of GMOs, related to traditional (and still prevalent) understandings of genetics and the needs of the biotech industry, is still fundamentally based on this episteme, and how complexity theory is used by critical scientists who oppose GMOs to make their case. I have then moved on to the discourses of resilience in various contexts to show how, despite appearing to fully embrace complexity theory at first glance, they are equally still related to the traditional episteme, which leads to tensions and contradictions. After that, the potential of complexity theory with regard to resistance has been explored. This potential can be realized via strategies of multiplication and the pluralization of knowledge about life, an acknowledgement of the role that ‘chaos’ plays for the thriving of life, a holistic approach to life as such, and ideas of autopoiesis and self-organization. It needs to be acknowledged that it has been beyond the scope of this article to flesh out further how these different elements can be integrated into a viable and comprehensive strategy of resistance – the ambition of this contribution has been to give indications that need to be more fully developed in future research. However, I have shown in the last section of the article how some of these ideas have been put into practice in the resistance to GE.

Regarding resilience, the argument of the authors pointed at in the previous section shows that the potential of resilience theory to provide a basis for counter-discourses is limited. Resilience theory attempts to find a way between the extremes – it cautions against reductionism, but maintains the idea of the management of complexity; it recognizes the limits of knowledge, but does not dismiss the aim of increasing certainty; it advocates the inclusion of local knowledge and a wider range of participants in decisionmaking processes, but only as complementary to the structures of knowledge-gaining and regulation already in place. In contrast, the demand for a ‘ban’ on genetic engineering is based on a refusal to moderate between different interests in order to find a solution that serves all. Resilience theory’s very power lies in its radical, uncompromising opposition, based on a notion of life that escapes attempts to pin it down and make it comprehensible, a notion of life that has at least the potential to implode a variety of governmental regimes and move life beyond their reach.