Freedom and the Human in “Evolutionary” Political Theory

Evolutionary Political Theorizing

In recent years, William Connolly’s scholarship has emphasized the importance of micropolitical, affective, and nonhuman forces in cultivating political action and shaping political worlds. Connolly pursues what might seem to be contradictory tasks: to challenge robust configurations of human agency in relation to the nonhuman world, yet to encourage humans to foster gratitude for their lives on earth; to challenge the righteous sureties of implacable political positions, yet to reinvigorate investments in democratic practice; to emphasize the way that politics takes shape in microregisters, yet to use micropolitics to analyze macropolitical shifts in the contemporary global condition. Connolly not only holds these tasks together but also shows how they are, in fact, complementary, even dependent upon each other. So for instance, democratic practice is reinvigorated by softening a rigid moralism, and an ethos of gratitude is nourished by a decentered understanding of human agency. Connolly achieves these feats in part because of the approaches he takes. By refusing fealty to any singular thinker, political program, or analytic method, Connolly creates new ways of doing political theory by generating heterogeneous connections between seemingly incommensurate fields of study and sets of ideas. “Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom” works in this vein to argue that scientific research on evolution and political/cultural theories of agency inform and condition each other—theories of evolution inform how we understand agency, and theories of freedom and agency inform how we understand evolution.

The methodology of Connolly’s scholarship, in this sense, enacts the dynamics of species evolution he examines. He brings disparate fields of thought together—new materialism and pluralism in political theory, with developmental and dynamic theories of evolution in scientific research—to create a collision between them that produces new connections between freedom and evolution. Connolly’s work in political theory is well established, while his turn to evolutionary theory is relatively unexpected and thus travels a more contingent path. As these two different disciplinary species collide in the essay to form a composite, their symbiosis alters each. Yet while Connolly’s argument on freedom and evolution was likely set off by a “teleo-searching process,” its production cannot be simply reduced to the intent and interests of the author. Rather it emerged within the distributed agency of creative processes in which many human and nonhuman factors, accountable and unaccountable sources, geopolitical and micropolitical shifts, likely played a role in its formation.

The essay thus parallels the creativity of species evolution, or at least of Connolly’s reading of evolutionary processes. Is this evolution, exactly? Is this what biologists or physical scientists might find when they study evolution? Perhaps not, but what Connolly says of Nietzsche also applies here,

I think that what I am saying is roughly compatible with his view. But after a certain point, the issue does not matter much to me. The idea is to draw sustenance from a thinker, to work upon him or her, and then to see whether the result is coherent and illuminates experience enough to be defended.

Connolly’s mode of scholarship, what I would call “evolutionary” political theory, does not operate by fealty to a prior view or a static set of ideas. Instead, it is driven by a dynamic process that continually reworks ideas through their collisions with other ideas, and scrutinizes the heterogeneous connections that arise to see if they produce something new in the world or in our understanding of it.

Evolutionary political theory takes influence from multiple sources—philosophical, political, personal, scientific, familial, and phenomenological, sources intentional as well as unintentional—and thus is a risky practice of scholarship that relies on contingent and unorthodox connections to develop its arguments. In this sense, it might be more accurately titled evolutionary political theorizing, rather than theory; it is more of a processual mode of inquiry that ceaselessly shifts in relation to what it examines, whereas “theory” may sometimes connote rigidified categories of analysis placed over complex experiences. Evolutionary political theorizing, by contrast, nourishes complexity, cultivates dynamism, and encourages the collision of disparate ideas to gauge whether the results deepen our understanding of and care for the violent, cruel, enchanting, and sublime world that we collectively inhabit.

Freedom and the Human

In “Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom,” Connolly argues that the heterogeneous connections produced through the collision of evolutionary theory and political theory diminish the claims of mastery embedded in strong readings of human agency: “It is necessary to disconnect creativity from the consummate agency of either a god or humans to appreciate how it arises out of heterogeneous connections between entities that sometimes display micro-intentionality.” This diminution of human agency also cultivates an ethos of gratitude within humans for life itself and recognition of the interwoven existence of human and nonhuman life. Yet the two sections of this essay on evolution and pluralist political theory are in a more symbiotic relationship than Connolly lets on, one that extends the practice of freedom beyond the drives and tactics of the self that Connolly ends his essay by considering. I would suggest that Connolly’s argument is actually more demanding than his conclusion suggests, for it forces us to move beyond the self to reconceive the very practice of freedom and the very boundaries of the human.

I will start with the question of freedom that frames the title of the article. What is freedom in this essay? It is not, Connolly argues, purposiveness, self-determination, or self-reflexivity as these lead to a false and dangerous sense of human mastery over the self and over the earth. Freedom is less intentional, and less reliant on an opposite of domination, than Kantian, enlightenment, or neo/liberal definitions of the term that prioritize self-rule, autonomy, and sovereignty. Instead, freedom is “conditioned creativity and agency”; it is the capacity for experimentation and innovation within conditions of the world, the capacity for making something new. ¹ Freedom is an action not necessarily yoked to intent, or even to a specific agent who chooses to practice or experience freedom. Freedom, I would suggest, although Connolly does not say this explicitly, is like symbiogenesis: “the creative conjunction of two distinct things to form a new composite . . . a result that was not implicit at the outset.” Freedom’s creative conjunction of forces does not require intent for the conjunction to occur, or an agent who orchestrates the conjunction. Its results are not predetermined before the collision occurs but reveal the spontaneity and contingency that support freedom’s creativity. This creativity is found not only in the act of collision, or in its results, but also in the impossibility of predicting what will produce the effects and the paths that these intersecting force fields will subsequently take. Freedom does entail what Connolly calls “microintentional” registers, but this microintent is available to all life-forms. While not merely epiphenomenal, freedom does not require free will, nor self-determination, nor intent classically conceived.

If freedom does not require an agentic and willing subject, but rather creativity and dynamic processes, then freedom extends significantly beyond the human estate. This, in turn, may press for conclusions that reach past the distributed agency residing in individual cultivation or an ethos of gratitude. Connolly’s reading of freedom argues powerfully for care, but it seems to be a care that is irreducible to the care for the self. While in the past Connolly has argued persuasively for cultivating practices of care for the self as part of a practice of freedom, the emergent concept of “cultural freedom” in this essay suggests a broader register or venue than the “self.” Evolutionary processes define practices of freedom that not only go beyond human will but also beyond the human. “Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom” offers—at least in my re-collision of its ideas—a definition of freedom untethered to the human.

To push this argument even farther, Connolly’s essay seems to suggest that lichens demonstrate freedom, or at least that lichens are the effect of a form of evolutionary freedom: a freedom that is conditioned, that depends upon the teleodynamic force fields of algae and fungi colliding together, but that also is the interruption of conventional patterns of algae and fungal development to create new dynamic living processes and new composites. The challenge that arises from this expansive reworking of freedom is twofold: one, how to distinguish the capacities that enable action to be experienced as freedom; and two, for Connolly’s purposes, how to harness this chastened yet distributed understanding of freedom to a politics that militantly promotes care for the planet’s inhabitants amid ongoing ecological devastation.

This essay also challenges us to rethink the boundaries of the human. What is the human now, after this symbiogenesis of ideas? Connolly’s focus on the human through individual self-cultivation is located in the discussion of drives, drives that often help to power human agency. Their teleodynamism challenges robust readings of human action: “The relational, teleodynamic capacities of drives provide an element in the real creativity of human life, while they post sharp qualifications to centered visions of autonomous human agency.” Connolly examines how drives are triggered by many nonhuman forces, and how they often collide with nonhuman forces. I would add that the origin of drives is also critical for understanding their agency. And a focus on the origins of drives blurs the very contours not only of human agency but also of the human.

The origins of drives are not only located in individual desire and biological instinct but also in environmental conditions, evolutionary patterns, contagious affects, psychological development (both ontogenetic and phylogenetic), world events, and cultural investments, as well as social norms, philosophical ideas, and historical conditions. When we begin to see drives as originating from all of these vectors and not just colliding with them, then the boundaries of the individual self begin to blur in far-reaching ways. An examination of the heterogeneous origins of drives offers a distributive image of agency that not only decenters human agency but also erodes the very boundaries between self and not-self. The boundaries that erode are not merely between one human and another but between the human and culture, the human and the biosphere, and the human and the nonhuman. The self is, in this sense, the “effect” of different freedoms experienced as the microcollisions of force fields, human and nonhuman, cultural and environmental, genetic and evolutionary.

The human microbiome serves as one example that demonstrates the blurring of the boundaries of the human. The human microbiome refers to the billions of nonhuman microorganisms living in the human body. They not only help us to digest food, fight infections, and protect our skin but they also literally make up who we are, outnumbering our cells by a factor of ten to one. ² From a numerical perspective, we are more not-human than human. Microbiota determine many of our choices and actions and shape our drives: they influence everything from what we eat, to how we feel, to how we interact with the world. They comprise our body and cultivate our agency. The human microbiome reveals the human to be a symbiogenetic collision between human cells and thousands of nonhuman species of microbiota that form a constantly shifting composite—a dynamic and processual re-composition of matter. Microbiota constantly fluctuate in response to the environment, and they are the product of collective cultural, political, and economic practices too. They change depending on cultural and historical norms of eating and caring for the body, as well as corporate-economic decisions about how to process food or what chemicals to put in soap, as well as political decisions about what medications to regulate and how to properly dispose of prescription drugs (The Human Microbiome Project Consortium 2012). Microbiota certainly power some of our drives, and the world powers some of our microbiota. Connolly’s essay invites us to use the microbiome as one way to examine the intense ambiguity between the human and nonhuman world and to attend to their evolutionary shifts in relation to one another. The task that follows is to figure out how to reinterpret the human in the midst of the collision of political theory and evolutionary theory, and simultaneously to scrutinize what is at stake in the (potential) inability to draw these lines as clearly as before.

These altered understandings of freedom and the human together challenge the conventions of modern political thought and contemporary politics. A brief comparison with Kant’s arguments on freedom and the human reveal the extent of this challenge. Kant (1999) argues that the agency required for freedom is properly distinguished from the natural world because nature is organized by determinism whereas freedom must rise above determinism: freedom is the ability for self-rule through reason. Freedom is constitutive of the human. Both freedom and the human are distinguished from the limited forms of agency found in the nonhuman natural world. Freedom is the capacity that, therefore, defines the human in distinction to nature. “Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom” challenges Kant on many levels. By amalgamating the human and nonhuman natural world, and then distributing freedom itself throughout both, this essay’s collision of evolutionary theory with political theory destabilizes both the boundaries of the human and the practices of freedom that ground modern thought and contemporary politics. Its destabilization is made possible through the method of evolutionary political theorizing, which creates a novel composite of freedom and agency that impels us to think these fundamental categories anew.

Yet given the radical blurring of the human that occurs at the intersection of evolutionary and political theory, I wonder whether or why gratitude will result from this rearticulation of freedom and evolution. I very much hope, with Connolly, that diminished interpretations of human capacities can lead to an increase of wonder of the world, or to a felt experience of relatedness between human and nonhuman fields, or even to gratitude for the astonishment of life itself that arises from this. But given the values of a political-economic culture like our own, so invested in human mastery, self-determination, and control over the earth and its resources, I fear that a more likely response than gratitude might be a violent backlash that aims to shore up agency. What specific measures are most likely to help prevent the shoring up of agentic power, the fortification of unstable boundaries of the self, or the desire to enact violent or desperate demonstrations of sovereign freedom in the face of diminished human agency? In a culture steeped in images of sovereign power, heroic action, and neoliberal valuations of choice and self-reliance,.what needs to be in place for this kind of gratitude in response to contracted human power to take place? How can a decentered reading of human capacities be harnessed in the service of the ecological survival of the planet, rather than the further rapacious stripping of its material in the service of fortifying human mastery? Connolly’s project levels a challenge to all of us: to build a politics based on a radically redistributed practice of freedom that enables the fight for, rather than against, the flourishing of the planet and its inhabitants.