Rethinking the subject,reimagining worlds

Spinoza: The becoming nature of God

To return to the writings of Spinoza is, in a sense, to return to the scene of the crime, the moment of ‘ontological rupture’ when ‘Nature as we know it was invented in the differentiation of city and countryside, in the differentiation of mental and manual labor’ (Fitzsimmons, 1989: 108). At a time when ‘95% of earth’s ice-free land was in wildlands and semi-natural anthromes’ (Ellis, 2010: 593), the defining problematic for Spinoza and his compatriots was not our relation to the wider world, but relations between men, and the limits that monotheism and monarchy imposed on questions of governance and the project of human freedom. Reasoning against the theological image of an anthropomorphic deity who acted outside of nature and intervened in events as an act of Providence, Spinoza engaged a ferocious reasoning to topple God from a great height, absorbing ‘God’ into all of nature and flattening ‘him’ beyond all recognition. God acquired a monstrous horizontality—Deus sive Natura. Spinoza’s intention was to think humans and their actions not as separate from the laws governing the natural world, but ‘just as if it were an investigation into lines, bodies and planes’ (Spinoza, 2002: 278, EIIIPreface). ¹ Nothing, especially not man or the products of man, would be considered distinct from the nature: normative evaluations would not be made according to what was ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. This becoming-Nature of God transformed both God and Nature into a new ontological concept and gave form to a cascading set of questions around the problematic relationship between power as capacity and power as rule. Interesting for our purposes is the conceptual apparatus Spinoza built from the rubble, and the new challenges it poses for us.

What Spinoza retained from pre-Enlightenment scholasticism (all but lost with the rise of Cartesian mechanism) was a sense of the ‘occult’ forces at work in all living things: God became synonymous with the pervasive quality of conatus (from conatur meaning to endeavor or to strive) expressed in the innate tendency of all things to ‘persist in’ in their own being and to enhance their capacity to act (potentia) (Spinoza, 2002: 283, EIIIP6). The concept of potentia retains the celebratory impulses of ancient vitalists: contra Descartes, all things (even inanimate objects) exhibit persistence, striving in some manner or other. All things strive to enhance their capacity to act, their potentia, or constitutive power, understood as a dynamic (Negri, 1991), actualized force (Montag, 2001), expressing natural right (Matheron, 1988). Potentia is quite literally a necessary fact of life for all things. Affect marks our awareness of the passage between greater and lesser capacities.

These concepts, affect and striving, or some variation, have fired the imaginations of many posthumanist scholars. Drawing in part on the work of Deleuze (and his uptake of Spinoza), they have focused on a series of discrete becomings, inspired sometimes by the invitation to form common notions with nonhuman others by thinking through the body (e.g. Tsing, 2011). But their selective emphasis has created an ethical impasse. How do we deal with conflicts between humans and nonhuman others? I will revisit this issue in greater depth in the second section of this article, considering both the insights and limitations of the uptake of Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-animal. At the moment, however, I want to address the challenges of thinking becomings systemically with the tools that Spinoza’s concept of power and the composite individual offer us. To address the limits of a series of singular becomings, then, we need to take a short but important detour through Spinoza’s thinking on the doubled nature of power and his concept of the composite individual. Both shed light on ways to think organizational forms between humans and more-than-human assemblages.

While potentia names constitutive power, constituted Power, or potestas, is the organized expression of Power, understood as fixed, institutional (Negri, 1991), official, and legal (Montag, 2001), as in a formal Right (Matheron, 1988). Potestas cannot subsume or eradicate potentia; contra Hobbes, it is not possible to ‘transfer’ one’s power (potentia) to the state or institutions. Although potentia is always already embedded in associative constellations, we exist ‘in relation to’ not ‘apart from’…‘the real, immediate, and associative movements of human power, driven by imagination, love, and desire’ (Hardt, 1991: xv).

Spinoza’s doubled concept of Power/power provides a meeting ground for the articulations that continue to divide neo-vitalists (who either are agnostic about power or simply celebrate its creativity) and political economists or ecologists (who conceptualize power relations in terms of conflict and contradiction). Negri’s investigation of the historical relation between potestas and potentia identifies its historical manifestation as an expression of absolute antinomy, or ‘absolute antagonism’ (Negri, 1991: 229): ‘Power’ against ‘power’. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that postestas has been mobilized under capitalism in the restrictive, disabling qualities of a state-Power that enforces unity around a singular point of view, blocks flows, overcodes meanings (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 228–229, 368, 373). Thus understood, potestas has in the past truly separated the subjects of rule from their full capacity to act, from ‘what they can do’. But it need not be so. For Spinoza and these interlocutors, it is also possible to arrive at ‘a constituent Power, completely and freely constituted by the power of the multitude’ (Hardt, 1991: xvi), a ‘trembling organization’ as opposed to a ‘formal order’ (Thanem and Linstead, 2006), a mechanism whereby desire could be ‘more realistic, a better organizer and a more skillful engineer, than the raving rationalism of the present system’ (Guattari, 1984: 86).

It is a reasoned understanding of affect that plays a crucial role in developing an ‘adequate idea’ of points of commonality between ourselves and others, from which true collaboration emerges. Affect (or affective connection) is sometimes used as a shorthand to indicate mutually sustaining empathic connections between one person and an ‘other’ (whether human or nonhuman). The presumption here is that the experience of love and joy are the ontological register of an ethical politics. In a Spinozist framing, however, affect simply indicates the passage from one state of capacity to another (lesser to greater or greater to lesser). The emotional register—oscillation between the poles of joy and sadness (with many complicated registers in between)—is the spontaneous interpretation of this passage. The experience of joy or sadness can be passive or active. Affect, far more than ‘mere’ feeling (joy or sadness, sympathy or empathy), is the ground, the ontic register of relations of power, the mechanism through which we perceive our passage between increasing and decreasing capacities, the measure of our potentia. Active affections best express our enhanced capacity to act, because we understand rather than misrecognize the cause of joy or sadness. Passive affections enhance our power, but we remain ignorant of the cause of this increased power (Hardt, 1993: 73).

Affect, moreover, is not sequestered as a kind of ‘inner experience’, grounded in ‘the gut’, impervious to outside influences. We exist always and already in connection: ‘the political body is itself the elemental site of transformation and production. Affect is…de-subjectifying in an important respect as for Spinoza it is also a kind of force or power that courses through and beyond subjects’ (Williams, 2010: 246). Our emotional motivation to enhance capacity (whether love, imagination, or desire) is, on its own, a fickle compass: one can as easily desire fascism as liberation. Affect is inscribed in the very nature of the relation between potentia and potestas. Relations of conflict and collaboration are organized, routinized, or resolved in institutional forms—a different scaling of power, expressed as potestas.

It is with this understanding in mind that Spinoza postulated the basis for true collaboration between humans, a means through which formal order might emerge from immanent forms of organization. In the 1600s, the stakes involved associations between men, and for Spinoza associative connections were best forged between men, because they were beings ‘of a like nature’. The path was clear, which is not to say it was easy. To overcome the sad passions one would endeavor to ally with those in harmony with one’s nature (Spinoza, 2002: 336, EIVP31C), in bonds of friendship, gratitude, and mutual collaboration (Spinoza, 2002: 356–357, EIVP71&Sch), which would produce the greatest good for all (Spinoza, 2002: 337, EIVP35), a collaboration enhancing potentia or natural right (Spinoza, 2002: 686, TPII13). For Spinoza, collectivity and collaboration between all humans was not only ethical but also a matter of reasoned self-interest: it is the only rational political project precisely because true collaboration would maximize capacities to act for all. Active affections involve a ‘fusion of power…rather than the transfer of power’ (Goetschel, 2004: 72) and suggest an increased openness to the world, a subjective reorientation toward collaboration with others (see Sharp, 2011: 102). Thus, Spinoza imagined that we might arrive at ‘a constituent Power, completely and freely constituted by the power of the multitude’ (Hardt, 1991: xvi).

The most logical way to enhance capacity was not through force (one human over another) but collaboration on the basis of utility. In the extension of this framework to more-than-human collaborations, it is important to understand that Spinoza’s concept of utility is different from that of utilitarians: Spinoza is not John Stuart Mill avant la lettre. De Dijn (1996: 251) for example argues that for Spinoza ‘the true good that rational people desire for themselves they generally desire for other people’ (De Dijn, 1996: 252), and the bond between free people is characterized by friendship and gratitude (Spinoza, 2002: 356–357, EIVP71&S). Here, Spinoza entreats men to join powers in a collaborative fashion—a greater power is achieved by mutual enhancement of potentia among men. Thus:

If two men come together and join forces, they have more power over Nature and consequently more right, than either one alone; and the greater number who form a union in this way, the more right will they together possess. (Spinoza, 2002: 686, TPII13)

In opening our understanding of affect to the more-than-human, then, I am not proposing an expanded terrain for Benthamite philosophy, granting of ethical standing to other beings based on their ability to suffer, ‘feel’, or perceive the world in some way, facilitating in us an anthropocentric sense of community. Nor is this a kind of enhanced proposal for ecosystems services, based purely on the utility of other beings. Such an approach risks rendering other beings (and nonbeings) only in terms of an extremely narrow register of immediate human needs.

The problem remains, however, that animals and plants exist in complex relations of predator–prey (as do we in relation to nonhuman others—a fact we often ignore). As long as our becomings, our heterogeneous alliances with nonhuman others, are singular and discrete, we can comfortably ignore this difficulty. But when other beings necessarily come into conflict, as evidenced in a recent drama where Copenhagen zoo patrons witnessed the butchering and feedings of a young giraffe to lions (Smith, 2014), we navigate this path with difficulty.

What then is our ethical response in the face of these complex relationships? It is increasingly clear that to base an ethics solely on proximate relations of care, affective connections, or empathy toward other living things is insufficient to the demands for the protection or rebuilding of a maximal biodiversity. Affect alone, even active affections, are not a guide if we treat nonhuman others as individuals, or even populations, simply standing alongside human counterparts.

Although Spinoza’s primary concern was man’s connection to man, it is possible to extend his conceptual apparatus to consider collaboration beyond the human to include nonhuman beings (Lloyd, 1980; Sharp, 2011), although the precise contours of these collaborations are by no means settled. In a world radically different from the one in which Spinoza penned his Ethics, we must reimagine the basis on which we evaluate our affective connections with nonhuman others, without simply extending the ethical framework guiding collectivities of humans (beings of like nature).

It is here that the politics underlying Spinoza’s ontology becomes useful to us, in particular his concept of the individual: not a physically bounded entity (the preferential lens of both Romantic and neoliberal individualism) but a composition of forces. This allows us to forge an alternative to the limited lens of atomic individualism, which fetishizes things in terms of perceived physical boundaries. Spinoza’s definition of a composite individual bears a strong resemblance to Simondon’s concept of a metastable equilibrium:

A composite individual can be affected in many ways and yet preserve its nature…If we now conceive another individual thing composed of several individual things of different natures, we shall find this can be affected in many other ways while still preserving its nature…If we thus continue to infinity, we shall readily conceive the whole of Nature as one individual whose parts—that is, all the constituent bodies—vary in infinite ways without any change in the individual as a whole. (Spinoza, 2002: 254–255, EIIP13L7S, emphasis added)

Deleuze and Guattari: The becoming animal of man

In the second of these becomings, we find Deleuze and Guattari’s making monstrous of man, by mobilizing, in the words of Deleuze (2003), ‘the immense pity which extends to meat’ becoming-animal, becoming meat. They attempt to topple ‘man’ from a position of perfection over the animal, and build anew, both in the decomposition of man (through the excavation of the senses) and in the beginnings of a recomposition of communities beyond man, and between man, animal, and other organisms. Here Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 2002) open our awareness to a cacophony of becomings in an effort to escape the hegemony of the oedipalized individual, overcodings which block becoming: in effect to find ‘an escape route from the human’ (MacCormack, 2009: 40).

Often conscious experimentation—the becoming-wolf of the WolfMan, the becoming-horse of Little Hans, the becoming-cock of Arpad—expresses ‘the reality of a becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing else’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 259), thus serving as an alternative to the oedipalized interpretations of Freud or Ferenczi (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 259). Against ‘the idea of the human individual that represses chaotic, inhuman and dynamic difference’ (Colebrook, 2002: 40), Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the productive quality of affect, not something to be suppressed by reason, but the necessary and active ground from which understanding emerges. Thus, as Smith notes:

the faculty of Ideas is no longer identified with Reason…[but posited] within sensibility itself…[ideas are] defined not by their transcendence to Nature but rather in terms of their immanence to experience itself (thenoumenal as immanent). Ideas are supra-sensible, but they now reveal forces or intensities that lie behind sensations, and which draw us into nonhuman or inhuman becomings (2003: xxii, emphasis in the original).

Other becomings, already operative as part of our actuality, express ‘unnatural alliances’, or inter kingdoms: the orchid-wasp; the human—an associative outcome of an animal, a bacterium, a virus, and a microorganism; or the truffle—involving a tree, a fly, and a pig. Each is the interplay between diachronic developments of lineage and synchronic, heterogeneous collaborations. The underlying logic governing all becomings (whether human or nonhuman) are ‘not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture…a wasp-becoming of the orchid, an orchid-becoming of the wasp’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 2). Not mimicry, or merely the interpretation of a sign but the assimilation and material expression of a code:

conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 280)

This contrapuntal ontology instantiates a boundary crossing that downplays the organism, an insistent focus on the connective tissue between things: the fly is spider-like and the spider fly-like—they form an ontological complement, a kind of becoming. The design of the spider’s web mirrors the visual capacities of the fly, such that the fly cannot see the web. The tick will always respond to the perceptual cues of temperature to identify a potential host. Two beings need not mirror each other in obvious ways but share a communicative bond between different aspects of their umwelt (von Uexküll, 2010). Following von Uexküll, Krampen (2001: 419) argues that even though some things (such as plants) ‘do not possess umwelt-organs’, quite simply there is a ‘structural correspondence’ between autotrophs (plants) and heterotrophs (animals), captured in the cryptic phrase ‘no plant: no breath.’ Whether organism, animal, plant or stone, the body is folded into and inseparable from the thickness of the world within which it emerges. Functional tones help to think things in their composition and their difference, beyond the ‘shadowy presence’ of a ‘flat, impoverished’ concept of the nonhuman (Lulka, 2009).

The operative principles of becoming (i.e. alliances are heterogeneous and affective, not representational) offer alternative ways of thinking sociability, modalities of organization, collaboration rather than order. Elaborating upon Schérer and Hocquenghem’s consideration of wolf-children, they argue that becomings share ‘a particular zone of proximity…an objective zone of indetermination or uncertainty, “something shared or indiscernible,” a proximity “that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between [them] lies”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 273).

Scholars of the more-than-human have taken up these insights in a proliferation of divergent ‘escape routes’ from the human. These developments move us beyond Spinoza’s restrictive stipulation that we ought to collaborate solely with other humans (beings of a like nature) in a greatly expanded tableau of collaborative possibilities. We collaborate with beings of somewhat different natures insofar as we develop a ‘common notion.’ In so doing, potentia is enhanced not only quantitatively, but qualitatively in our associations with an expanding range of nonhuman beings whose affects differ from our own. But the singularity of these more-than-human explorations and their emphasis on physical proximity poses a new problem.

A first problem emerges in the uptake of research on affective relations with animals. Scholars of affect have often emphasized the transformative possibilities of physical proximity between human and select nonhuman bodies in new ‘becomings’ or attachments formed between humans and particular animal species (Griffiths et al., 2000; Haraway, 2008; Hinchliffe et al., 2005; Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006; Lorimer, 2006), a practice perhaps necessary to disrupt the hegemony of the Cartesian subject. But in navigating a path via these intensely cultivated alliances with select nonhuman others, they risk finding themselves uncomfortably close to the principles of democratic humanism. These becomings are reinterpreted as formal relations between individuals, haunted by a humanist theory of the subject that is never fully relinquished, but only extended to nonhuman others. They risk a problematic confluence between singular alliances (with specific species) formed through these ‘escape routes’ and the framing of animal rights activists’ programs which propose equity with other beings, or the extension of a complicated hierarchy of ‘citizenship’ to animals (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011; Singer, 1975).

It is not that these experiments go too far but that they do not go far enough. Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming is about undoing the subject rather than expanding its membership. Deleuzo-Guattarian proximity is topological and not topographical (at least not necessarily so), translated from the term voisinage—here not the physical attributes of neighborhood, but ‘a non-localizable relation sweeping up two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into proximity of the other—a border proximity that is indifferent to both contiguity and distance’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 293).

How, then, to think of an ethical engagement in a more expansive ecosophy? Here Spinoza’s concept of the composite individual, closer to the idea of an ecosystem than a state, offers a way to think the ethical premises of complex collective assemblies beyond the human. Spinoza’s ‘individual’ neither precedes its actions nor prefigures a collectivity. It is not a form but a power—a specific degree of power, of the capacity to act which tends toward a limit, a minimum and a maximum. There is no distinction here between the human and nonhuman, living beings or inert objects. An individual, based on a capacity to be affected and produce effects, could include relations between microorganisms, a complex socionature, a biophysical system of which humans are only a part (and not at all the dominant or directive part), or the whole of earth. Taking Spinoza at his word, we can argue that the greater and more diverse ways in which these collectives are affected, and the more ways we (humans and nonhuman others) can ‘combine our powers’, the more beneficial it will be to all involved. The becomings of spider–fly, for example, are of a different order than the Deleuzian undoing of the human subject. It names a relation of predator–prey rather than an alliance (except in the most limited sense of being joined or associated). But when considered at a higher level of complexity, arguably this coupling forms part of a composite individual (Spinoza, 2002: 254, EIIP13L7), wherein benefits accrue to populations rather than individuals who are themselves subordinated to complex ‘exchanges’ in the form of predator–prey relations (Spinoza, 2002: 254, EIIP13L4).

Here we might think of the composite individual as a more complex expression of constitutive power emerging in collaborations between heterogeneous components. Spinoza himself is agnostic about the compositional nature of the composite individual. But if we rethink his dictum regarding human collaborations via this larger constellation of beings, then arguably the more diverse the capacities to act and be affected in a composite individual, the more powerful: put more simply, our collaboration within and through a thriving biodiverse planet is preferable to a silent rock or a limited collection of monocultures.

We must think then, not only of the immediacy of our affective connections to proximate others, but also of an ethics as ethology that focuses on ‘enabling relations wherever they might be found’ (Sharp, 2011: 14, emphasis added). We must trace these connections and their multivalent impacts through complex interactions contained within and constitutive of a global whole. This is not a static conception of nature, but rather, Nature itself is infinitely distributed, not as a singular Subject oriented toward a goal, not as a static harmony, but (we might say borrowing from Althusser) as a ‘non-totalizing’ totality comprising an infinite number of shifting parts. Spinoza’s definition of a composite individual moves us beyond limited pairings with nonhuman others, away from nostalgic longings to preserve ‘nature’ in terms of a specific form, in the image of a static utopian past, or assertions that make a valuation based on the presumed ‘naturalness’ or ‘unnaturalness’ of a given configuration (McKinnon, 2013), without descending into a kind of relativism where everything is ‘natural’, and therefore equally valued.

The politics that follows from this stance is as attuned to affective relations as it is to their larger impacts, connections forged that might sustain alliances over the long-term. Thinking through affect in this way invites an ongoing attentiveness that enhances our ability to think the complex conditions for ‘blocks of becoming’ that would support a maximal biodiversity, defined in terms of the maximal range and diversity of beings that contribute to a thriving planet. This extends Spinoza’s notion of the complex individual in a manner that completely sidesteps our tendencies to group things of like size, scale, and tempo. The concept of a complex, more-than-human ‘subject’ draws on Spinoza’s understanding of conatus as well as his differentiated concept of power and the conceptualization of a ‘thing’ as a force rather than a boundary. It expresses a Deleuzian sensibility to rhizomatic connections and cross-species associations. And it offers the tools for a different sensibility of emancipatory assemblages, one that escapes the constraints of species being, emerging rather out of diverse sociabilities composed across a wide range of human and nonhuman actants which themselves might be engaged in other combinatorials and occupying other space-times.

This simultaneous unfolding of subject and world leads us immediately back to questions of composition that are at once ethical and normative, eloquently posed by Deleuze (1988: 126) around ‘whether [and which] relations can compound directly to form new extensive relations or whether capacities can compound directly to constitute a new capacity or power’ and ‘whether they agree or disagree with us, that is whether they bring forces to us or return us to the miseries of war’ (Deleuze, 1997: 135). Spinoza’s concept of the composite individual offers a framework for complex relations between continuously aggregating ‘blocks of becoming’—framing our collaborations, not solely in terms of immediate attachments but ever expanding capacities and affectivities.

A second problem remains: it is still not clear how the range of nonhuman others engage in this pas de deux of becoming—what are the becomings of plants, animals, the organic, or even the inorganic in this arrangement? As Ansell-Pearson remarks, in their reconfiguration of von Uexküll’s framework, Deleuze and Guattari shift attention from endless debates about whether animal ethology is innate or learned, to focus on the constitutive aspect of the milieu, the mutual interaction of animal and environment, a complex ethological assemblage without central agency: ‘the becoming of nature in animal-worlds and human-worlds is inseparable from milieus, temperatures, climates and times…and these too constitute an essential part of an assemblage’ (1999: 170–181). And yet, he suggests they are ‘blind to the specific ethology of the animal’ (pp. 185–186). Ansell-Pearson does not expand on this statement except to say that ‘in many of the examples given in the ethological assemblages that involve supposedly nonhuman becomings of the human, the crucial component in the assemblage is more often than not the human one’ (pp. 185–186). It would be unfair, however, to suggest that Deleuze and Guattari have replaced one form of mechanism (internalized), that of ‘the invariant character of DNA reproduction…or simple reproduction of species qua species’ (Ansell-Pearson, 1999: 151) for another (externalized)—the mechanical response of the organism or species to differentiated milieu. In fact, Deleuze (1986: 63) argues, ‘even at the level of the most elementary living beings’ there exists the plane of an interval, a ‘micro-interval’, or gap, between action and reaction, ‘centers of indetermination…formed in the acentered universe’. It is within this interior milieu of delayed reaction that living beings ‘have the time to select their elements, to organise them or to integrate them into a new movement’ (1986: 62). The more complex the organism, moreover, the more expansive its ‘interior milieu’, the more deterritorialized it is from the exterior. The ontic ground then is not defined by the boundary of the body of the organism (or the animal) but is constituted in a complex relation between the interior milieu (its center of indetermination), the associated milieu (its sources of energy), and even the para-strata around that milieu (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 51–53).

But Deleuze and Guattari are thin on specifics. How then to expand our understanding of the dynamic nature of nonhuman becomings?

The becoming sign of earth

Who is the utterer of signs of the weather? (Peirce, c. 1907: 205)

It was Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of semiosis and a contemporary of von Uexküll, who would pry open this relationship in a more specific exploration of the communicative connection between things. Before investigating the ways in which semiosis can expand our understanding of becomings, I want first to enumerate the distinctions between semiosis and semiotics (which explain its particular appeal for Deleuze and Guattari) and mark some of their concerns about the limitations of the Peircean framework.

Semiosis differs from semiotics on several important counts. For Peirce and his interlocutors, communication, broadly understood, is considered the evolutionary foundation and precondition for language. Communication is not framed solely in terms of speech utterances but includes the appearance of, and response to, phenomena or ‘meaning-factors’ (e.g. tracks in the snow). The sign system expresses a triadic relationship between a signified and an interpretant via a signifier, completely sidestepping the closed representational system of ‘word = thing’ that is characteristic of semiotics.

The sign acts as an intermediary codification of this triadic relationship, the link between two things that are nonnecessary to one another. Through the sign ‘things’ engage in and through a cojoint relationship. Here, the point of the interpretation of this communication is the maintenance of metabolic coherence (not merely understanding in a general sense), which depends on the correct interpretation of (or brute response to) the sign.

Thus, Maturana and Varela suggest (1987: 23) that ‘[c]ognition [is] effective action’ that conserves the organization of a living being, even at the cellular level. Here Varela (n.d.) makes an important qualification, quite in keeping with the dynamic quality of becoming for Deleuze (and the active nature of conatus for Spinoza). In spite of a relative stability of corporeal being, becoming is not concerned with the maintenance of a form, fixing an individual to a determinate species. What is conserved is not a specific molecular composition, but ‘the manner in which a living system becomes a distinguishable entity’ (Varela, n.d.: 6, emphasis added).

A sign (meaning-factor) might be indexical, iconic, or symbolic depending on whether it: expresses a cue or physical link to the object in question (e.g. smoke and fire); represents the object (e.g. a portrait of a person); or is associated as a matter of convention (the conventions governing language). Communication, as distinct from languaging, does not require perception (in the sense of the making of an image or symbol, or a representation).

Different taxa (organisms, plants, animals) express different kinds of semiotic systems, different ways of ‘knowing’, and different modes of communication (e.g. brute response, biochemical affinities, or language).The knowledge inherent in the process of cognition/interpretation can refer to ‘know how’ rather than formal ‘knowledge acquisition’. Thus:

A cognitive system is a system whose organization defines a domain of interactions in which it can act with relevance to the maintenance of itself, and the process of cognition is the actual (inductive) acting or behaving in this domain. Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without nervous systems. (Maturana, 1980: 13, emphasis added)

The maintenance of these relationships is at once part of an immanent conversation and the transmission of information across generations in a kind of ‘ecological inheritance’ (Kull, 2010), which acts (and can fail) on many granular scales of perception. Perceptual cues can sometimes be learned or transmitted through cultures that arise intergenerationally, within or across species. Some are based on a physiochemical affinity; others require the work of active interpretation. Signs can ‘lie’, or betray the interpretant (e.g. the actions of the chameleon); and signs can be uttered by things with no conscious intention of doing so (the weather, tracks in the snow; Deely, 1994; see Peirce, c.1907: 205–206). Systems of communication are fundamentally relational: language as communication is not generated in the interiority of a ‘self’ or subject but arises through ‘the structural coupling that generates behavior…in the phenomenal domain of interactions not “in” the body’ (Bains, 2006: 25, modified). Even landscapes can be thought of as a ‘semiotic interface’, broadly speaking, between an animal and its resources (Farina, 2008).

In the Peircean formulation, meaning-factors are at work across the entire universe of things, such that, for example:

[There are even] meaning-factors at work in an environment [which lacks] the Umwelt-structure introduced by cognitive interactions…. One of the meaning factors, as far as oak leaves are concerned, is the rain. Falling raindrops follow precise physical laws governing the behavior of liquids upon striking a leaf…. The form of the leaves is such that it accommodates the physical laws governing the behavior of liquids. The leaves work together by forming cascades in all directions in order to distribute the rain-water on the ground for optimal use by the roots. (Krampen, 1981: 195 in Deely, 1990: 124–125)

A first caveat: semiosis does not provide us with an ethical basis to evaluate relationships. The use of semiosis to explain how livestock read a landscape in order to design abattoirs in which they can be docilely led to slaughter (Grandin, 1998), for example, might be considered an improvement on current practices, but it would hardly be an ethical end point to a vegan. More difficult choices arise when projects are undertaken either to preserve or to rewild particular species or systems by reintroduction into existing habitats. And such constructs cannot escape cultural norms or historical practices, as Paul Robbins makes clear in his discussion of contrasting interpretations of the introduction of Prosopis julifora, a salt-tolerant tree from the Mexican southwest, into the alluvial plains in India. To the Indian herdsman, it was the English representation of forest, in fact a degraded wasteland, which only ‘crowded out valuable grasses and forage’ (Robbins, 2004: 108).

How might we move beyond cultural relativism? Here Spinoza’s framework anticipates contemporary arguments supporting biodiversity. For Spinoza, the greater capacity that a body has to be affected, the greater the possibility for forming alliances (or common notions) with a variety of bodies that are external to it (Spinoza 2002: 255, EIIP14). Although Spinoza is speaking here strictly of the human body, we might think this in relation to a composite body, or in this case an ecosystem. A complex ecosystem involving complex interdependencies between bodies exhibits greater capacity than a simple one. The more complex the ecosystem in its patterns of exchange, the greater its capacity. While we cannot strictly speaking accord an ecosystem a ‘mind’ in this understanding of interdependencies (but see Kohn, 2013), we can think of complex communicative systems at some level. For example, the farming practices of Polyface Farm involve a highly productive biofarming approach of grass farmers who have harnessed the complex rhythms and feedback systems between grazing (and defecating) cattle, incubating fly larvae in cow dung, and chickens proclivity to eat the larvae: a system which is more productive—and more sustainable—than comparable monocultures. It harnesses the extant interdependencies and impulses in an ecosystem to shift farming practice from ‘growing things’ (involving yearly outside inputs to combat degradation) to ‘things growing’. Thought through Spinoza’s framework, this practice demonstrates an ethics arising from an understanding of potentia—the innate capacity within things that moves beyond cultural relativism or questions of abstracted human preferences. It supports activities and actions, which enable a maximal capacity to act and a broader diversity of actants (be they chickens, larvae, grasses, or cattle). Here potentia (the capacity inherent to things) and potestas (a system of their organization) come into closer alignment, such that the system effects maximal thriving. Striving or conatus, moreover, is not only internal to a ‘thing’ but courses through things, a multiplicity of subjects of varying capacities, a subjectivity ‘living outside in the dappled world’ (Latour, 2002: 140), a complex coming together of many ‘things’ that are concerned with themselves in a myriad of scales and in a myriad of sites.

A second caveat: what is gained via Peirce in a broadened appreciation of the components of ‘blocks of becoming’ can be lost in a sometimes not so subtle reassertion of the primacy of thought and language. For Peirce:

every sign certainly conveys something of the general nature of thought, if not from a mind, yet from some repository of ideas, or significant forms, and if not to a person, yet to something capable of somehow ‘catching on’,…that is, of receiving not merely a physical, nor even merely a psychical dose of energy, but a significant meaning. (quoted in Deely, 1990: 111, emphasis added)

To rethink semiosis in terms of territorialization is to become aware of ‘specialized vectors’ that trigger relations of territorialization and deterritorialization critical to the cohesion of complex systems (see Ansell-Pearson, 1999: 170–179). We might think here in terms of trophic cascades such as the one that linked the introduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park to the changing course of its rivers (Monbiot, 2013).

Caveats aside, the Peircean communicative web admits a whole host of couplings, including the intercession of discrete geophysical processes such as rises in temperature and seasonal changes in light that link species. Here the potential of a semiosis (albeit refashioned in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s concerns) lies in its ability to think ‘blocks of becomings’ beyond conventional boundaries—to offer us a means to more fully understand the ways that ‘we exist through a multiplicity of others’ (Sharp, 2011: 216). Thinking, for instance, the relationship between leaf shape and rainfall as a meaning factor, it is clear that sudden changes in weather systems can have drastic implications for plants, and ecosystems more broadly, for these have evolved in response to different rainfall patterns. Although the coordination of meaning factors (following Peirce) or the dance of territorial practices (following Deleuze) can lead to long periods of stability within ecosystems, the inherent indeterminacy and fragility of this relationship becomes evident when cues are misunderstood or fall out of sync.

This disruption of basic communicative connections can have vast repercussions, threatening the existence of life-forms that have developed habits or responses to the recurring patterns of different ‘meaning factors’. It was Bateson who argued that the eco-crisis would first manifest as a collapse of a communicative order. This is borne out when, for example, scientists raise concerns about the threat posed to a millennial ‘conversation’ that has evolved between birds migrating to the Arctic (timed in response to seasonal increases in daylight), and the food sources they greet on arrival, grubs, and bugs whose hatching is triggered by shifts in temperature (Boelman, 2011). Disruption of visual, auditory, olfactory, electromagnetic, and other cues in the landscape influence the behaviors of animals and organisms in broadly defined geosystems: our knowledge of perceptual cues (or meaning factors) is increasingly important as logging, mining, urban, and other developments alter textual cues of the landscape. But more opportunistic associations can come into play as well. Beings are not restrictively encased in an umwelt, as some can engage ‘exowelten’ (von Duuglas-Ittu, 2009) in collaborative, learned association with other beings. This is perhaps the most immediate experience of a decentering of the human subject. Von Duuglas-Ittu argues:

[B]ecause there are real differences in the world that make up the terminus and perceptual limits of our bodies, and the bodies of other biotic and non-biotic forms, any strict species-specific distinction of realms or ‘spheres’ has no ultimate footing. Our ‘Forms of Life’ are already semiotically conjoined, and no delineation of experience can unjoin them. (2009: n.p.)

Reimagining worlds

‘Things are actions’ (Deleuze, 1981: n.p.)

None of the ‘becomings’ charted here are on their own sufficient to help us reimagine our worlds or the kinds of combinatorials that we might actively assist. But, taken together, the concepts can help us think beyond their application in singular relations with animals, or nonurban contexts. Consideration of the difference between potentia and potestas enables us to think across the persistent divide between political ecological engagements and vitalist approaches. Whereas the former tend to focus on the destruction of natures, the latter, in a celebration of the lively world, often ignore the fact that all pattern-forming matter is in a continuous state of recomposition and decomposition: to live is also to destroy something in the act of living, but it is possible to make normative choices about what we must destroy in order to live, and how we effect that destruction. Spinoza’s differentiated and unbounded concept of the ‘thing’, defined in terms of capacity to act, frees us from a subject tethered exclusively to human reason, or bounded by the physical limits of ‘a’singular body. We can extend this Spinozist view of the individual to associative contagions (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002)—most unfamiliar to a Linnean mind-set bound to divisions from kingdoms to species—recognizing collaborative connections between organisms and species, animals and trees, breezes, scents, that combine across multiple scales.

And we can begin to understand how ‘things’ make their appearance in a never-ending call-and-response to the world and evaluate what it means for something to be concerned with itself, to maintain metabolic coherence (in the framework of semiosists) or enhance its capacity to act (in Spinozist terms). We need at the same time to appreciate that this concern is inseparable from the larger material system of which this thing is a part, through which things themselves emerge as such. We are not, however, left in an ethical no-man’s-land, where we conserve things because they are ‘natural’ or ‘alive’. This argument quickly runs aground when we are confronted with the understanding that all things are equally ‘natural’, from the sprawl of the suburbs to protected wilderness, or when we recall that to live is also to destroy because we all must eat. We have instead a basis to consider and evaluate what natures we want to promote.

Our ethical stance derives from a principle of extending the capacity to act, maximizing life in a way that goes well beyond Spinoza’s circumspect treatment of the nonhuman to complex collaborations, while still taking as a principle that the more things we can act in concert with the greater our power. Deleuze puts it this way:

It is not a matter of judging life in the name of a higher authority which would be the good, the true; it is a matter, on the contrary, of evaluating every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve. (1989: 141, emphasis added)

For example, organisms and species with short life spans and rapid rates of reproduction have survived and reoccupied a post-Chernobyl red forest persisting under the radar, with the persistence of radioactivity shielding them from the human destruction of their habitat. This discovery prompted one environmentalist, James Lovelock, to remark that ‘I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers’ (cited in Mycio, 2001: 235–236). The point here is not to champion radioactive no-go zones as a last wilderness preserve—in this case a Faustian bargain! But it suggests we need to become much more attentive to choreographies of space-times of different assemblages. Franklin, for example, analyses rhythms of the Australian gum tree as a temporally slow and spatially vast engagement, a rhythm of growth and change spanning centuries, defined in part by actions that are structured not from the top-down, but the bottom-up, in the myriad of responses by humans and others to the dropping of branches. Bruno Latour (Latour et al., 2009: 1) speaks of an Amazonian forest ‘hung on the sky in a certain sense…almost ungrounded…hang[ing] from the top through a rapid water circulating system, the circulation of nutrients, of organic products. If you cut the forest, the ground immediately disappears’. These analyses are not anthropocentric. Humans play a supporting role through different regimes and responses, within complex systems of matter in motion. Their agency, as Franklin (2006: 556) describes it, ‘slides backwards and forwards across a once stable boundary [between natures and cultures]’. Perhaps this is what Deleuze and Guattari allude to when insisting: ‘nothing develops, but things arrive late or early and form this or that assemblage depending on their compositions of speed’ (2002: 266). The point is that there are spatiotemporal modes, pulses, and rhythms that subtend, interrupt, intercept, and outlive our own experience but which nevertheless act in concert with us.

As the neoliberalization of nature extends far beyond control of resources to the intercession in life processes, the commodification of life itself (Bakker, 2005; Prudham, 2007; Yusoff, 2011), it is all the more critical to rethink the grounds of our subjectification in relation to nonhuman others. This is not simply a question of ‘shift in attitude’ but rather refashioning institutional structures, for ‘the fundamental cause of the citizens’ “vices” (as of their virtues) always lies in the actions of institutions’ (Balibar, 1998: 68). Nor is this simply a reaction formation to the incursions of neoliberal capitalism on the commons: this wider world forms the very ground upon which our conditions of subjectivity are constituted, part of (to borrow from Read, 2011) the ‘unresolved potential of the subject’. Strategic interventions such as attempts to fence or protect ‘reserves’ of nature, the attribution of iconic status to certain species (e.g. polar bears), the extraction and preservation of genetic material in seed banks, the attribution of ‘rights’ to nonhuman others—even rivers—are to be valued, but they do not go far enough. Worse still, they risk being reabsorbed into principles of methodological or atomistic individualism and social contract theory, now extended to nonhuman others, an expanded list of ‘subjects’, replicating rather than altering alienating modes of subjection. To think our subjectivities in relation, as a composite, is to understand ‘relationship of each individual to other individualities and their reciprocal actions and passions which determine the form of the individual’s desire and actuate its power’ (Balibar, 1998: 108). We must explore this question of composition, the ways in which we are sociabilities and communities, in relation to entities and constellations comprising different communicative rhythms, relational entities (to borrow from Law, 1999), or combinatorials that traverse the organic and inorganic, constellations of practices that include diverse species, topographies, and rhythms, not as bounded objects with distinct territories, but as things that come into being, that territorialize—not in the defense of edges but the constitution of forces. It is only this way that we can come to a fuller appreciation, not simply of what we are fighting against, but of what we are fighting for.