Subverting the Biopolitics of Liberal Governance: Complexity,
Circulation and Self-OrganisationLeonie Ansems de Vries, University
of Nottingham, Malaysia CampusJrg Spieker, Birkbeck College,
University of London
AbstractTaking liberal governance as a regime of power whose
object, target, and stake is life itself, this article explores the
ways in which the liberal account of life can be subverted and
deployed against the very power relations it now informs. The
article begins with a brief consideration of how a
natural-scientific conception of life in terms of complexity,
circulation and self-organisation has come to shape liberal
biopolitics. It then attempts to trace the emergence and
development of this conception of life from its initial
articulation in the work of Kant, through its re-articulation in
Hayek, to its more recent appearance in discourses of governance
and complexity. It is argued that this naturalised and
depoliticised conception tends to reduce life to the kind of
material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order.
The article then engages Darwins notion of evolution to consider
how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical form can be
contested. This consideration is guided the following set of
questions: Is what is at stake in modern biopolitics not the
politicisation, but the depoliticisation of life? And if this is
the case, then do we need to think of resistance to biopower in
terms of the repoliticisation of life? Formulating an affirmative
answer to these questions, this paper suggests that forms of
resistance might be developed on the basis of the very conception
of life in terms of complexity that informs and sustains
contemporary liberal governance. It is, we argue, by embracing
rather than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the
difference that lies at the basis of their visions biological and
political life that conceptualising resistance to biopower becomes
possible.
IntroductionThis paper is an exploration of how, and to what
effect, liberal political thought and practice has historically
been shaped by certain naturalistic ontological frameworks. It is
mainly concerned with the relationship between liberalism and a
particular conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation
and self-organisation. We attempt to trace the emergence and
development of this conception of life from its initial
articulation in the work of Kant, through its re-articulation in
Hayek, to its more recent appearance in certain liberal discourses
of governance and complexity. It is argued that, notwithstanding
its emancipatory claims, this naturalised and depoliticised
conception tends to reduce life to the kind of material deemed
conducive to a liberal social and political order. We then move on
to discuss how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical
form can be contested. The argument put forward here is that forms
of resistance might be developed on the basis of the very
conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and
self-organisation that informs and sustains contemporary liberal
governance. Having outlined an alternative to the liberal account
of what life is and what it may become, the article concludes with
some tentative suggestions as to how this account might shape
critical thought and political agency today.
As will already be apparent, we follow Michel Foucault in taking
liberal governance as a regime of power whose object, target, and
stake is life itself. Our analysis emphasises the close
relationship between the truth about life and practices of power
the constitutive interdependence in which biopolitical forms of
knowledge and apparatuses of power are linked. As is well known,
Foucault first used the concept of bio-power (the power over life)
to refer to two distinct but related mechanisms of power: an
anatomo-politics of the human body and a bio-politics of the
population.[footnoteRef:1] In later writings, he renders this
seemingly straightforward concept considerably more ambiguous by
pointing to a number of possible origins and manifestations of the
link between politics and life.[footnoteRef:2] While recognising
that Foucaults original formulation of the concept is sufficiently
ambiguous to allow for a range of different interpretations, we
will adopt and elaborate on an understanding of the concept that
revolves around biology and biological being. Once this
biology-based definition of biopower/biopolitics is accepted, it is
important to realise that biological being has not been the same at
all times. [1: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.
The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1987), 139. ] [2: There is,
for example, the genealogical link between biopower and the
Judeo-Christian tradition of pastoral power. Then there is the idea
that biopower/biopolitics is inextricably linked to the rise of the
life sciences. Foucault also indicated that there is a historically
significant relationship between the biopoliticisation of politics
and the development of liberal political economy. Other leads,
complementary or alternative, may reasonably be inferred from his
comments on the governance of epidemics or on the discourse of
race.]
If we accept that the bio in biopolitics is associated with
biological being, then we also need to accept that the genealogy of
biopolitics is inseparable from the changing conceptions of life
offered by the life sciences. The life that is at stake in
biopower/biopolitics is inseparable from certain life-scientific
truth discourses about the nature of biological being. Foucault was
concerned with a biological conception of life that emerged in the
eighteenth century, a conception of life in terms of
(self-)organisation. It is this understanding of species being that
he first traced archaeologically in The Order of Things, and that
he then tenuously linked to his genealogy of liberal political
rationality in Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of
Biopolitics. For Foucault, the appearance of liberalism in the
eighteenth century is inseparable from the the entry of nature into
the field of techniques of power.[footnoteRef:3] The radical
innovation associated with the emergence of a distinctly liberal
political rationality is a conceptualisation of order in terms of
nature and self-organisation. He speaks of a certain naturalism
which is inscribed within the logic of liberal rule: the domain to
be governed by liberalism is a natural one in the sense that it is
thought to possess an intrinsic logic of its own. Indeed, what
appears in the middle of the eighteenth century, Foucault says,
really is a naturalism much more than a liberalism.[footnoteRef:4]
In this naturalistic grid of intelligibility, circulation is
conceived as self-organising, self-regulating as well as
independent of, and antecedent to, political order and authority.
[3: Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Note 4, p. 75.] [4: Ibid.,
p. 62. ]
The article is structured as follows. First we consider how
Foucaults original account of the nexus between liberalism and a
conception of life in terms of complexity and self-organisation is
reflected in the writings of Kant. It is Kant, we argue, who
provides the first more or less coherent liberal conception of
politics and life in terms of (self-)organisation. And it is in
Kants writings that we can also understand the depoliticising
effects of this biopolitical conception of liberal governance. In
Kant, life is reduced to its biopolitical form and circulation is
always already a property of life itself, rather than a product of
power. Then we will focus on the political thought of F.A. Hayek
and on role of notions of complexity, spontaneity and
self-organisation therein. We show that Hayek deploys several
concepts and ideas associated with complexity theory, and that his
defence of liberal-capitalism largely relies on the subversive and
emancipatory connotations of these ideas. We then argue that Hayeks
political project relies on a pervasive economy of inclusion and
exclusion through which liberal and non-liberal subjects are
constructed and positioned. The systematic violence that takes
place beneath the smooth surface of the open society undermines the
emancipatory pretensions of Hayeks political project.
Finally, the paper engages Darwin to develop a politics of
complexity that challenges the bio-political foreclosure of which
Hayeks notion of the open society is ultimately productive. By
producing a perspective of evolution that prioritises difference
over reproduction, Darwins account can be invoked to challenge the
depoliticisation inherent in and the war waged at the heart of
Hayek's open society. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than
denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the difference that lies
at the basis of biological and political life that conceptualising
resistance to biopower becomes possible.
Kant: politics, life and (self-)organisationKant sought to
develop a general philosophy of nature based on Newtonian physics.
In Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, he presents
a mechanical explanation of the origin and organisation of the
cosmos. Kant sets out to reconcile his account of Newtonian physics
with the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient god and thereby
with a teleological account of a harmonious nature.[footnoteRef:5]
Natures purposive striving towards order, harmony and perfection
demonstrates, Kant argues, supernatural design. Matter must
necessarily produce beautiful connections for it does not possess
the freedom to stray from the plan of perfection.[footnoteRef:6]
Due to the animate qualities ascribed to matter and nature, there
is no distinction between the living and the non-living. In
opposition to the inert matter of Newtonian mechanics, for the
pre-critical Kant all matter is active. Kant ascribes to elements,
themselves sources of life, vital forces [wesentliche Krfte] to set
one another in motion. In opposition to Newton, Kant endows matter
itself with force: all matter abides by the same fundamental and
mechanical law of nature, i.e. its self-organisation and
self-ordering towards perfection. [5: Martin Schnfeld, The
Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 98, 105. ] [6: Immanuel Kant,
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, transl.
Stanley L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 86.
]
By the time of writing the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant
has reversed his view on the activity of matter as well as on the
applicability of the mechanical law of nature to all matter.
Indeed, Kant has been credited with playing a key role in effecting
the shift from mechanics to organicism and the rise of biology by
introducing the distinction between mechanisms and
organisms.[footnoteRef:7] He distinguishes between the living and
the non-living on account of the capacity of self-organisation,
which was to become the defining feature of life from the
nineteenth century onwards. He establishes the distinction between
inert matter and living organisms on the basis of purpose and
organisation, which, in his theory, are intrinsically and
self-evidently linked. A thing constitutes a physical end only if
it is both cause and effect of itself, which is to say if the parts
(organ) and the whole (organism) reciprocally produce one another
only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product
be an organized and a self-organized being, and, as such, be called
a physical end.[footnoteRef:8] Only organisms abide by these
conditions: an organized natural product is one in which every part
is reciprocally both end and means. In such a product nothing is in
vain, without an end, or to be ascribed to a blind mechanism of
nature.[footnoteRef:9] In a significant reversal of his
pre-Critical thought, the living, as opposed to the non-living, is
characterised by Kant in terms of an interactive and mutually
constitutive movement of (self-) organisation between organ and
organism. In addition to self-organisation and in close relation to
it what sets the organism apart from the non-living is its capacity
of reproduction. For Kant, an organized being possesses inherent
formative power [] a self-propagating formative power, which cannot
be explained by the capacity of movement alone, that is to say, by
mechanism.[footnoteRef:10] These characteristics of
self-organisation and self-generation imply, furthermore, a
capacity for and tendency of self-preservation. As will be
elaborated upon below, in Kants philosophy of nature pre-Critical
as well as Critical perturbation and movements of disorder(ing) are
intrinsic to the processes of (self-)organisation and
self-preservation. [7: Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity:
Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), pp. 84-5.] [8: Immanuel Kant, The Critique of
Judgement, transl. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 22.] [9: Ibid., pp. 24-25.] [10: Ibid., pp.
22.]
Whilst the explanation of organic form and organisation would
become the chief occupation of the emerging discipline of biology
in the nineteenth century, Kant is an eighteenth-century thinker to
the extent that he believes that life cannot be explained. He
stresses that the organization of nature has nothing analogous to
any causality known to us.[footnoteRef:11] Remarkably, despite
reiterating that any analogy falters in the effort to conceptualise
life, Kant suggests that one such analogy can nevertheless be
drawn: [11: Ibid., pp. 23.]
We may, on the other hand, make use of an analogy to the above
mentioned immediate physical ends to throw light on a certain
union, which, however, is to be found more often in idea than in
fact. Thus in the case of a complete transformation, recently
undertaken, of a great people into a state, the word organization
has frequently, and with much propriety, been used for the
constitution of the legal authorities and even of the entire body
politic. For in a whole of this kind certainly no member should be
a mere means, but should also be an end, and, seeing that he
contributes to the possibility of the entire body, should have his
position and function in turn defined by the idea of the
whole.[footnoteRef:12] [12: Ibid. ]
Kant establishes the identity between the individual body and
the body politic on the basis of organisation. Given Kants
definitions of life and organisation, and the intimate connection
between the two, this analogy suggests that not only the individual
organism, but also the body politic is an end in itself and its
purpose self-preservation. This would evidently be a peculiar
conclusion, reminiscent of a logic commonly attributed to Hobbes,
and not to the liberal Kant of Perpetual Peace. The difference, as
will become apparent later, lies in this: the Hobbesian body
politic is an end in itself because it is artificial (albeit not
without natural elements), whilst Kantian political organisation
constitutes its own end because it is not artificial i.e. an
organism. It is on this basis that political order(ing) is
naturalised and universalised in the modern liberal image. The
notion of self-organisation is common to the Allgemeine
Naturgeschichte and the Kritik der Urteilskraft. In both works Kant
not only argues that nature organises itself whether via the
animated force of matter according to mechanical laws, or through
an organic force that is beyond (mechanical) explanation but also
elaborates how this process operates. As discussed above, in
Allgemeine Naturgeschichte Kant rebuts Newtons account of natures
entropic propensity if left to its own devices. Rather, Kant
contends, nature strives towards harmony and perfection. Despite
this teleological vision of harmony and order, the process itself
is one of disorder(ing). At a certain stage in her movement towards
perfection, entropic tendencies emerge which bring about the
disintegration of organised structures.[footnoteRef:13] Yet, if
nature possesses the capacity to move from chaos to regular order,
Kant asks, would she not be capable of restoring herself from the
new chaos consequent upon the slowing down and eventual standstill
of her motions, spurring a new development from chaos towards
order? Indeed, he affirms, planetary systems can fall into decay
and re-develop into an orderly system, in a play [that] has more
than once repeated itself.[footnoteRef:14] Kants conception of
nature according to the laws of mechanics produces a phoenix of
nature, which burns itself out only to revive from its ashes
rejuvenated, across all infinity of times and
spaces.[footnoteRef:15] He argues that, despite the conflict and
collision of elements in natures process towards order, eventually
all particles with settle in a state of the smallest reciprocal
action, whereby all resistance disappears and elements continue in
free circular motion.[footnoteRef:16] Not only does Kant here
articulate a conviction in the final defeat of (forces of)
disorder(ing), he furthermore appears oblivious to the existence or
implications of resistance. This is precisely one of the ways in
which the political is foreclosed in the modern liberal image. [13:
Schnfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant, Note 24, p. 124.] [14:
Kant, Universal Natural History, Note 25, p. 160.] [15: Ibid. ]
[16: Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Note 27, p. 116.]
In Kants vision, order must eventually prevail, whilst forces of
resistance inherent in the process are to be disguised through
their recycling into movements that sustain rather than undermine
order. Kant seeks to disguise the existence of perturbing forces as
soon as political order has been instituted in order to account for
the prohibition of resistance. He accordingly endeavours to sustain
his portrayal of peaceful order by warning against questioning the
origins of order: the subject ought not to indulge in speculations
about its [political orders] origins with a view to acting upon
them, as if its right to be obeyed were open to
doubt.[footnoteRef:17] Investigations into the actual historical
origins of the state are both futile and objectionable. Anyone who,
having unearthed its ultimate origin, offers resistance to the
state may with complete justice be punished, eliminated, or
banished as an outlaw.[footnoteRef:18] By demarcating the political
domain of justice, order, morality and rationality thus, Kant
restricts the potentialities of politics and life to certain modes
of (inter)action. In Kant, the universality and naturalness of the
liberal image are founded on a particular production of nature,
order and life; an understanding premised upon lifes requirement
and capacity for securitisation within a particular domain of
governance and order. Kants conceptualisation of nature entails the
demarcation of what life may be and become politically, which is
captured in organisational terms. Those forces moving outside the
circulation of self-organising reproduction must be eradicated:
life may be and become merely within the bounds of a particular
(re)production of circulation. Forces that cannot be made to work
productively for the production and sustenance of this domain of
security and freedom, e.g. resistance, rebellion and other rogue
forces, must be destroyed. [17: Kant, The Critique of Judgement,
Note 27, p. 143.] [18: Ibid.]
For Kant, life itself is inherently amenable to liberal
governance he reduces life to the kind of material deemed conducive
to a liberal social and political order. What follows from this is
that the only politics possible is the one that is already inherent
in life. Although his vision of political order is founded on
antagonism and war, this force is swiftly delegitimized through the
construction of a natural surface of order, harmony and peace.
Social order thus becomes spontaneous, self-organising,
self-regulating as well as independent of, and antecedent to,
political authority. What we can find in Kant is the idea that
liberal social and political organisation is inherent in, and in a
sense dictated by, life and nature. In portraying the development
of political order and political relations in terms of natural
development, or as a tendency towards order inherent in life, Kant
naturalises and depoliticises political order and power relations.
Thus, a particular order is separated from the power relations on
which it depends, and made to appear as if it corresponds to an
intrinsic design of nature itself.
Hayek and the order of the open society In this section, we
consider the role of notions of complexity, spontaneity and
self-organisation in Hayeks liberal political philosophy. How does
Hayek use these notions in developing his conceptions of life and
political order? First, we show that Hayek deploys several concepts
and ideas associated with complexity theory, and that his defence
of liberal-capitalism largely relies on the subversive and
emancipatory connotations of these ideas. Then, we examine this
ostensibly emancipatory political project for the ways it mirrors
the structures and configurations of power which it claims to
oppose. We argue that Hayeks project of the open society relies on
a pervasive economy of inclusion and exclusion through which
liberal and non-liberal subjects are constructed and positioned.
The systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface
of Hayeks open society undermines the emancipatory pretensions of
his political project. In Hayek, the notions of complexity,
spontaneity and self-organisation remain tied to a rather narrow
conception of what life and politics are and what they may become.
Rather than drawing on insights from complexity theory to embrace
the political potentials of the becoming of life qua movements and
relations, Hayek merely uses certain concepts to naturalise and
universalise liberal order.
Some believe that the emergence of the complexity sciences in
the latter half of the twentieth century amounts to a period of
general scientific re-conceptualisation, or indeed to a new
dialogue of man with nature.[footnoteRef:19] One of its most
influential exponents has described the emergence of complexity
science in terms of a shift of metaphors: rather than relying on
the Newtonian metaphor of clockwork predictability and linearity,
which has governed scientific endeavour for more than three
centuries, complexity is associated with metaphors more closely
akin to the growth of a plant.[footnoteRef:20] Political
philosophy, too, relies on metaphors and the affinity between
Hayeks political thought and the discourse of complexity is given
preliminary expression by the following statement: The attitude of
the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends
a plant and in order to create the conditions most favourable to
its growth must know as much as possible about its structure and
the way it functions.[footnoteRef:21] The shared metaphor is
indicative of what is otherwise well documented by Hayeks
references to the work of scientists such as Ilya Prigogine or
Donald Campbell whose contributions to complexity theory he draws
on for the formulation of his understanding of spontaneous
order.[footnoteRef:22] [19: Nicolis & Prigogine, Exploring
Complexity, 1989, p. 3.] [20: Brian Arthur cited in Waldorp, M.,
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, p.
329.] [21: Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London and New York:
Routledge, 1944), p. 18. ] [22: See: Hayek, Law, Legislation and
Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), Vol. 3, p. 158.
]
The relationship between Hayeks thought and complexity theory
remains subject to debate, and one of the questions that have been
raised is whether, or to what extent, Hayeks work can be seen as a
precursor to complexity theory.[footnoteRef:23] This has also
raised wider questions about the relations between what we now know
as complexity theory and the field of economics, and the subfield
of Austrian economics in particular. There can be little doubt that
the ideas of complexity theorists and Austrian economists seem to
have much in common, not least their rejection of the
presuppositions of neoclassical mainstream economic theory. Hayek
wrote several essays on complex phenomena in the later 1960s,
emphasising their spontaneous or self-organising character. In the
context of complex phenomena, such as life, mind and society, order
is the result of regularities of the behaviour of its constitutive
elements in this sense, these phenomena are to be understood as
self-regulating or self-organising systems. The notion of
spontaneous, or self-organising, order can be traced back to the
founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, who developed a theory
of the spontaneous emergence of money for transaction purposes in
primitive economies.[footnoteRef:24] [23: Kilpatrick Jr., Henry E.
(2001) Complexity, Spontaneous Order and Friedrich Hayek: Are
spontaneous order and complexity essentially the same thing?,
Complexity, Vol. 6, No. 3; Wible, James (2000) What is Complexity?,
in D. Colander (ed.) Complexity and the History of Economic Thought
(London and New York: Routledge), pp. 15-31.] [24: Apparently, the
theme of spontaneous order and self-organisation had played an
important role in the Austrian school of economics ever since it
was first developed by Carl Menger. ]
Complexity theory gains its subversive connotation from its
opposition to classical or Newtonian science and the mechanistic
world view that is said to have dominated Western science for too
long. Classical science tended to rely on the machine model of
reality and a mechanistic image of the universe. The scientific
enterprise, in its classical form, was concerned with closed
systems and linear relationships; its focus was on order,
stability, equilibrium and uniformity. Complexity theory challenges
and undermines many of the basic assumptions on which this
Newtonian model of science rests. One of the definitive claims
associated with complexity theory is that our world is
fundamentally non-linear linearity is the exception, not the rule.
Rather than focusing on the order, stability, and uniformity of
closed systems, complexity science focuses on the disorder,
instability, and diversity of open systems. Crucially, this shift
of focus also implies that the classical assumptions of
omniscience, predictability and full control have to be abandoned
or at least severely qualified. The idea that the world is complex
often goes hand in hand with the insistence on the imperfection of
knowledge and the unpredictability of things. Complexity theory is
often defined in terms of a series of oppositions: control versus
flexibility, hierarchy versus autonomy, reductionism versus
pluralism, centralisation versus decentralisation, etc. Complexity
replaces stable taxonomy and mechanical predictability with the
rationalities and problematic of the composite sciences of
contingent and emergent being-in-formation.[footnoteRef:25] [25:
Dillon, M. and Reid, J., The Liberal Way of War (London and New
York: Routledge, 2009), p. 73.]
Central to Hayeks liberalism is his conception of society in
terms of spontaneous order. He makes a general distinction between
orders that are made (taxis in Greek) and orders that grow (kosmos
in Greek). In the realm of social life, made orders would include
families, plants, corporations as well as the institutions of
government. What these orders have in common is that they rely for
their formation on prior collective agreement, and that they tend
to require centralised direction for their maintenance. Made orders
are the artificial product of concerted action and they tend to be
created with a specific purpose in mind. Grown or spontaneous
orders, by contrast, emerge endogenously they are self-generating
or self-organising.[footnoteRef:26] Spontaneous orders tend to be
complex in the sense that they involve a large number of elements
and the interaction between them; they comprise more particular
facts than any brain could ascertain or manipulate.[footnoteRef:27]
Hayek insists that the concept of spontaneous order is particularly
important for understanding the complex phenomena we encounter in
the realms of life, mind and society: Here we have to deal with
grown structures with a degree of complexity which they have
assumed and could assume only because they were produced by
spontaneous ordering forces.[footnoteRef:28] [26: Hayek, Law,
Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 37.] [27: Ibid., p. 38.] [28:
Ibid., p. 41.]
Complex spontaneous orders can also be distinguished from made
orders on the basis of their abstract character: they consist of a
system of abstract relations between elements which are also
defined only by abstract properties.[footnoteRef:29] The abstract
character of spontaneous orders is determined by the abstract
nature of the rules which govern the action of its constitutive
elements. The formation of a complex spontaneous order, such as
society, depends on individual elements acting in accordance with a
set of abstract rules of conduct. For Hayek, society is the order
that forms when individuals follow such rules of conduct in
responding to their immediate circumstances. It is Hayeks
contention that society is an order which is not the product of
conscious control or rational design, but the result of the
unintended and unforeseen spontaneous coordination of a
multiplicity of actions by self-interested individuals. In social
life order emerges of itself as the unintended consequence of
independent individual actions. While each individual pursues his
own ends on the basis of his own knowledge of his circumstances,
their actions are guided by certain rules. The spontaneous order we
find in certain fields of human activity, such as religion, morals,
language and the market, is in principle no different from that we
can observe in biological organisms, crystals or galaxies. All of
the above are complex phenomena which form spontaneously on the
basis of certain abstract rules or regularities of behaviour. [29:
Ibid., p. 39.]
Hayeks theory of spontaneous order is must be seen in relation
to his theory of mind and knowledge. For Hayek, not only human
social life but the life of the mind itself is governed by
unspecifiable tacit rules. At least some of the rules that govern
human action and perception are meta-conscious, that is, beyond our
capacities of identification and articulation.[footnoteRef:30] The
knowledge upon which social life depends cannot be concentrated in
a single brain because it is embodied in habits and dispositions
and governs our conduct via inarticulate rules.[footnoteRef:31] The
complexity of modern society extends well beyond our mental
capacities. Knowledge is dispersed, temporary and tacit in nature,
and only in a spontaneous social order can this knowledge be
utilised efficiently. Hayeks theory of knowledge emphasises the
cognitive limits of human reason. And it is on the basis of this
conception of knowledge that Hayek develops his critique of the
hubris inherent in socialist and collectivist thought. It has been
suggested that Hayeks scepticism vis--vis both individual knowledge
and centralised authority or decision-making embodies a certain
epistemological modesty.[footnoteRef:32] Hayek repeatedly warns
that we should always bear in mind the necessary and irremediable
ignorance on everyones part of most of the particular facts which
determine the actions of all the several members of human society.
In Hayek, spontaneous order is a solution to the epistemic problem
of the fragmented, temporary and tacit nature of human
knowledge.[footnoteRef:33] His whole defence of markets and private
property rests on his epistemological scepticism and his conception
of order in terms of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation.
[30: Gray, J., Hayek on Liberty (London and New York: Routledge,
1984), p. 23. ] [31: Ibid., p. 25.] [32: Kacenelenborgen, E.,
Epistemological Modesty Within Contemporary Political Thought: A
Link between Hayeks Neoliberalism and Pettits Republicanism,
European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2009.] [33:
Petsoulas, C., Hayeks Liberalism and its Origins (London and New
York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2.]
It is Hayeks contention that the rules of human conduct that
make the spontaneous order of society possible are themselves
spontaneous formations inasmuch as they have emerged in a process
of cultural evolution. By cultural evolution, Hayek means the
evolution of sets of rules, norms and practices, especially those
dealing with several property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade,
competition, gain, and privacy.[footnoteRef:34] The theory of
cultural evolution is the conceptual framework through which Hayek
attempts to explain the origins of the liberal-capitalist order it
explains how the open society has emerged and why it must prevail.
In order to grasp Hayeks account of cultural evolution it is useful
to begin with his understanding of the relationship between
cultural and biological evolution. First of all, biological and
cultural evolution are analogous in the sense that both rely on the
same principle of selection: survival or reproductive
advantage.[footnoteRef:35] Hayek emphasises that cultural evolution
works through the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection.
Reproduction and survival are mediated by economic productivity,
and natural selection will favour those forms of life whose
cultural formations create the condition for high productivity. It
is Hayeks contention, then, that the open society has prevailed
because of its superior capacity to ensure survival and increase of
population. There are important differences between the way in
which selection operates in the transmission of acquired cultural
properties, and the way in which it works on biological properties
and their transmission.[footnoteRef:36] Inasmuch as cultural
evolution works through the transmission of acquired rather than
genetic properties, it is more in line with a Lamarckian than a
Darwinian explanation. Moreover, cultural evolution operates mainly
through group selection and not through the selection of
individuals: selection will operate as between societies of
different types, that is, be guided by the properties of their
respective orders.[footnoteRef:37] [34: Hayek, The Fatal Conceit,
p. 12. ] [35: Ibid., p. 25.] [36: Hayek, Law, Legislation and
Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 23. ] [37: Ibid., p. 44.]
It is important to recognise that, for Hayek, culture is
ultimately grounded in our biological endowments it is thus not,
strictly speaking, cultural but bio-cultural evolution that he has
in mind. Hayek contends that mans instincts were initially made not
for the open society but for closed societies, or, for a life in
small roving bands or troops.[footnoteRef:38] Genetically inherited
instincts, such as solidarity, altruism as well as an instinctual
aggressiveness towards outsiders, served cooperation within a type
of order in which human activity was guided by concrete and
commonly perceived aims, dangers and opportunities.[footnoteRef:39]
These innate natural longings for common ends and purposes enabled
the tribal way of life in which the human race and its immediate
ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological
constitution of homo sapiens was being formed.[footnoteRef:40] Our
instincts are largely collectivist and enabled human coexistence in
the small and closed societies that man relied upon before he came
to develop those rules of conduct that made possible the emergence
of the open society. According to Hayek, the process through which
present civilization has emerged is that of a gradual replacement
of innate responses by learnt rules.[footnoteRef:41] But how were
men able to learn in the first place? Hayek answers this question
by pointing to what he regards as the single most important
biological endowment of man _ the capacity to learn. For Hayek,
this particular genetic endowment was the last decisive step
determined by biological evolution which has enabled other
instinctual modes to be partly displaced.[footnoteRef:42] In other
words, the growing capacity for learning is an innate
characteristic which helped to displace other, tribal instincts,
such as those of solidarity and altruism. The capacity to learn,
Hayek asserts, is one of the prime benefits conferred during our
long instinctual development; it is perhaps the most important
capacity with which the human individual is genetically
endowed.[footnoteRef:43] Through this capacity, the process of
cultural or social evolution was set in motion and the move from
the near animal state to civilization became possible. [38: Hayek,
The Fatal Conceit, p. 11. ] [39: Ibid.] [40: Ibid.] [41: Hayek, The
Fatal Conceit, p. 16. ] [42: Ibid.] [43: Ibid., p. 26.]
In Hayeks view, civilization, as it has developed during the
last ten or twenty thousand years, is a product of our capacity to
learn. This aspect of Hayeks evolutionary framework is of crucial
importance in the present context, for what it shows is that his
defence of liberalism is ultimately grounded in a biological
distinction between two forms of life. What we find in Hayek, then,
is a bio-ontological account of the human condition which features
a fundamental conflict between two biological properties and their
respective cultural expressions. For Hayek, human evolution is
explicable on the basis of this distinction or conflict between our
collectivist instincts and the tribal way of life, on the one hand,
and our capacity to learn and the liberal way of life, on the other
hand. What is at stake in this conflict, as we shall see below, is
nothing less than life itself. It is Hayeks contention that the
open society has prevailed because of its superior capacity to
ensure survival and increase of population.
What Hayek argues, then, is that the whole framework of legal,
moral and economic rules of conduct, including, above all, the
institution of private property, has been conferred upon man by
cultural evolution through natural selection. According to Hayek,
the open society is the condition of possibility of the life and
wealth of the vast majority of the human population. There is but
one way of life or one culture the culture of capitalism that
provides the institutional properties necessary for the biological
and economic sustainability of the global population. This also
implies that any departure from the economic, legal and moral rules
and institutions associated with this culture must represent a
biopolitical threat that is, a threat to the life of the global
population. What we find beneath the deceptively smooth surface of
order that Hayek calls the open society is a fundamental struggle
between two biocultural forms of life. The relationship of
struggle/war between adaptive life and tribal life that emerges
from Hayeks evolutionary ontology is inscribed into the order of
the open society. It is our contention that this aspect of Hayeks
theory is important insofar as it undermines, or at least strongly
qualifies, the emancipatory pretensions of his liberalism. We can
only grasp the systematic violence that Hayeks political project
entails if we focus on his (bio-)political ontology, for it is here
that liberal self and other are defined and positioned. In Hayek,
tribalism haunts the interior life of every individual: there is a
constant conflict between our tribal instincts and emotions, on the
one hand, and the norms and conventions of the open society, on the
other hand. Hayek stresses the necessity of restraining those
natural instincts that do not fit into the order of the open
society.[footnoteRef:44] And it is through discipline that these
tribal instincts, which are to be understood as animal rather than
as characteristically human or good instincts, are to be
restrained.[footnoteRef:45] When Hayek speaks of discipline, he
refers to a set of constraints through which we suppress our
dangerous tribal instincts and emotions, such as the demand for
social justice or any other collectivist proposal for social and
political change. Hayekian discipline is a silent war against
tribalism which is waged on the terrain of the individual body and
against certain human instincts, desires and emotions, such as
solidarity and altruism. In Hayek, the liberal subject is the
product of a successful struggle against its tribal self. Fitness
for the open society depends on the prior domestication of ones
animal instincts through obligations of self-restraint. The form of
subjectivity suitable to liberal society the self-interested,
rational and entrepreneurial individual is a product
of(self-)discipline. [44: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol.
3, p. 160.] [45: Ibid.]
Hayeks conception of the internal other who undermines the open
society from within by allowing her tribal instincts to find
political expression in thought and action. According to Hayek, the
greatest threat to society comes from those who, driven by their
savage desires, seek political change in the form either of a
return to older forms of social and political order or the
construction of new ones. Hayek sees great danger in the
dissemination and circulation of certain ideas which appeal to our
tribal instincts and generate demand for political change. As part
of the internal struggle against tribalism, the open society must
be purged of the ideas which potentially undermine it, especially
theories of repression, alienation and domination. While Hayek does
not explicitly advocate censorship he clearly states that education
poses a threat to society if it disseminates false political
knowledge. Liberal principles, Hayek explains, can be consistently
applied only to those who obey liberal principles.[footnoteRef:46]
He fails to discuss in detail the methods and practices through
which the liberty of disobedient subjects might be restricted. Our
interpretation of Hayek emphasizes the structural and systematic
violence engendered by the order he envisioned. By focusing on this
aspect of Hayek, this paper puts into question Hayeks emancipatory
claims. [46: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, p. 56.
]
Darwin and the difference of lifeHayek thus undermines the
emancipatory potential of his vision of the open society by drawing
a clear line between forms of life to be fostered and forms of life
considered a threat to the open society. The similarities between
Hayek and Kants bio-politics are striking in this context. Hayek,
like Kant before him, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on
security freedom is produced through and operates on the basis of
an economy of inclusion and exclusion, which naturalises and
universalises liberal order. Both Hayek and Kant develop a
bio-politics, which captures both politics and life in terms of
self-organisation. Despite Hayeks adoption of complexity the open
society assumes the same operative principle as Kants vision of
political life: the capacity to adapt to liberal society
constitutes the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion.
This section enages Darwin to develop a politics of complexity
that challenges the bio-political foreclosure of which Hayeks
notion of the open society is ultimately productive. It thereby
draws upon and produces a different perspective of evolutionary
thought. By prioritising difference rather than reproduction, this
section seeks to develop a perspective that challenges the
depoliticisation inherent in and the war waged at the heart of
Hayek's open society.
It is interesting to note that Darwin himself acknowledges a
form of complexity in the natural world:
in several parts of the world, insects determine the existence
of cattle. Perhaps Paraguay offers the most curious instance for
this; for here neither cattle nor horses nor dogs have ever run
wild, though they swarm southward and northward in a feral
state;this is caused by the greater number in Paraguay of a certain
fly, which lays its eggs in the navels of these animals when first
born. The increase of these fliesmust be habitually checked by some
means, probably birds. Hence, if certain insectivorous birds (whose
numbers are probably regulated by hawks or beasts of prey) were to
increase in Paraguay, the flies would decrease then cattle and
horses would become feral, and this would certainly greatly
alterthe vegetation: this again would largely affect the insects;
and thisthe insectivorous birds, and so onwards in ever-increasing
circles of complexity.[footnoteRef:47] [47: Darwin, Origin of
Species, p. 58. ]
Moreover, Darwins theory of evolution of species via natural
selection introduces into the analysis of the development of life
over time the aspects of struggle, excess and contingency, in
distinction to Kant and Lamarcks accounts of nature, in which
harmony and teleology are firmly linked. The difference between the
latter two lies in the complete exclusion of crisis and struggle in
the relation between organism and environment by Lamarck, whereas
Kant accords antagonism and war a productive capacity in natures
progression towards fulfilment, that is to say harmony.
Thus, whereas Lamarck and Kant conceive of the order and
development of nature teleologically according to the principle of
harmony, Darwin, after lenghty and thorough study and observation
of plants and animals, discovers that species evolve gradually over
time in a struggle for survival. Rejecting both harmony and
teleology, Darwin instead posits the contingency of nature and the
primacy of struggle. No preconceived plan, purpose or inevitability
can be drawn upon to explain variation. Darwin does believe in the
overall harmony of the system, nevertheless, natural selection its
regulatory element operates through contingency and struggle as
well as excess and destruction. Hence contingency is furthermore
opposes to Lamarcks belief in the usefulness of variations, which
appears to have been adopted by Hayek.
Darwin stresses the ineffectiveness and wastefulness of nature,
e.g. although millions of germ cells are produced only the
exceptional one can play its role.[footnoteRef:48] Or in the case
of bees: [48: Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 167 &175; Grosz,
Nick of Time, pp. 49 & 90.]
[w]e need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bees
own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one
single act, with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile
sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at
the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile
daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding with live bodies of
caterpillars; and at other such cases.[footnoteRef:49] [49: Darwin,
Origin of Species, p. 347. ]
Individual cases of destruction and/or excess are of little
concern for Darwin who, in a fundamental shift in biological
thinking, focuses attention on populations rather than individual
organisms. The population becomes in fact the mediating element
through which the milieu acts on the organism. As Foucault puts it:
the medium between the milieu and the organism, with all the
specific effects of population: mutations, eliminations, and so
forth.[footnoteRef:50] Contra Lamarck, for whom the environment
acts directly on the organism, Darwin argues that only on occasion
does the milieu cause variations in species; in general its effects
are limited to favouring the reproduction of some species at the
expense of others.[footnoteRef:51] In Darwins theory of evolution
the milieu influences the organism only via the mediating elements
of the population and reproduction. [50: Foucault, Security,
Territory, Population, p. 78. ] [51: Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life,
p. 105; Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 102; Jacob, Logic of Life, p.
158.]
Key to standard readings of Darwins thought is the notion of
natural selection as a process of filiative reproduction,
productive of change qua evolution. Whereas these accounts focus on
filiation and struggle the survival of the fittest , this article
follows Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari by prioritising the
element of evolution in terms of becoming. Deleuze and Guattaris
encounter with Darwin in A Thousand Plateaus centres on the
significance of the role accorded to contingency and the population
without discussing natural selection as such. In fact, Deleuze and
Guattari credit Darwin with effecting two key changes which imply a
movement in the direction of a science of multiplicities and away
from filiative models: first, the substitution of populations for
types and, secondly, the substitution of rates of differential
relations for degrees. Whereas in the natural history tradition
types of forms function as the ordering element in the study of
nature, with Darwin these come to be conceptualised increasingly in
terms of populations, packs, colonies, collectivities or
multiplicities. In short, the population will be understood as a
multiplicity. The second change for which Deleuze and Guattari
credit Darwin is the understanding of degrees of development in
terms of speeds, rates, coefficients and differential
relations.[footnoteRef:52] [52: Ibid., pp. 53-54. See also Darwin,
Origin of Species, pp. 43ff. For another conceptualisation of
Darwin as thinker of difference, inspired by Deleuze and Guattaris
reading, see: Grosz, The Nick of Time, especially chapters I-III.
]
According to Deleuze and Guattari, Darwins double move implies
that forms do not pre-exist the population but are its statistical
result:
The more a population assumes divergent forms, the more its
multiplicity divides into multiplicities of different nature, the
more its elements form distinct compounds or matters the more
efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the
milieu.[footnoteRef:53] [53: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, pp. 53-54]
Species are the result of geographic and ecological processes
and not the stages of them.[footnoteRef:54] The second implication
is that [54: Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 165. ]
the degrees are not degrees of pre-existent development or
perfection but are instead global and relative equilibriums: they
enter into play as a function of the advantage they give particular
elements, then a particular multiplicity in the milieu, and as a
function of a particular variation in the milieu.[footnoteRef:55]
[55: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 54. ]
Hence Deleuze and Guattari credit Darwin with a reversal that is
key to their philosophical thought: movements and relations precede
and are productive of forms and degrees as well as of populations
and not the other way around. This reversal functions to set up an
opposition between natural philosophy and Darwinian biology; and a
reversal characteristic also of the movement from Newtonian science
to complexity theory.[footnoteRef:56] [56: Dillon and Reid, Liberal
Way of War, p. 74. ]
Deleuze and Guattaris ascription of a theory of multiplicities
to Darwin starkly diverges from the prevailing teleological reading
of Darwinian evolution. Standard, neo-Darwinian interpretations
explain evolution in terms of a means-end progression towards
perfection for in the struggle for survival only those fittest or
best adapted will survive. The idea that life develops
instrumentally towards a certain end implies a future projection.
As Grosz explains, however, Darwins endeavour is to record how life
may have evolved historically. His theory is retrospective and does
not make future predictions because life cannot be
predicted.[footnoteRef:57] The Origin of Species develops an idea
of natural selection that is non-teleological; life is contingent
and evolves through difference. Albeit on the basis of
reproduction, the idea of evolution as the production of difference
is asserted by Darwin himself. The reproduction of organisms, he
explains, ensures the stability of the species and the individual
organism in future generations. Reproduction constitutes the link
between individual and species life as well as between its
preservation and adaptation. This is because transformation and
error are intrinsic to the process of reproduction and hence to the
preservation of the species. Darwin demonstrates that evolution
does not and cannot occur without producing difference. Although
emphasising the slowness of the process of selection, there is,
according to Darwin, no limit to the change it may produce: [57:
Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 8-9.]
I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and
infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic
beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of
life, which may be effected in the long course of time by natures
power of selection.[footnoteRef:58] [58: Darwin, Origin of Species,
p. 84. ]
Deleuze and Guattaris intervention bends the notion of
reproduction by centralising the idea that deterritorialisation
precedes territory e.g. the species is a result, an outcome rather
than a starting point.[footnoteRef:59] Secondly, they introduce a
theory of becoming, a rhizomatics which moves beyond filiative
reproduction altogether. The Universe does not function by
filiation, they write.[footnoteRef:60] Rather than dependent on
lines of filiative descent, life is transformed and (dis)ordered
more productively and creatively through different processes of
relationality that involve heterogeneous elements, i.e. unnatural
participations and side-communications. Lifes evolution or
involution is complex, non-linear and unpredictable. [59: In
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze credits Darwin with inaugurating
the thought of individual difference. According to Deleuze, the
leitmotiv of The Origin of Species is that we do not know what
individual difference is capable of! See: Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, p. 310. ] [60: Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, p. 267. ]
Deleuze and Guattari thus highlight the monstrous nature of
lifes becoming. Darwin himself suggests that monstrosity is
inherent to the process of evolution when he remarks that it is an
almost universal law of nature that the higher organic beings
require an occasional cross with another
individual.[footnoteRef:61] Life mutates and transforms, is in
continuous movement and produces difference. Whereas, for Darwin,
this process remains subject to the pressures of selection, Deleuze
and Guattaris radical creativity consists in its release from
notions of selection, heredity and filiation. Where standard
Darwinian interpretations focus on the replication of the species
on account of the invariant structure of DNA, Deleuze and Guattari
point out that reproduction is dependent on primary processes of
deterritorialisation and decoding.[footnoteRef:62] Indissolubly
entangled with movements of productive disordering, evolution is
not the straightforward or linear reproduction of the species as
such. Rather than the translation of code, that is the passage of
one pre-established form into another, code is inseparable from
intrinsic movements of decoding. There is no genetics without
genetic drift.[footnoteRef:63] Every code, they write, has a margin
of decoding due to supplements and surplus values, which enable
side-communication. Through viruses fragments of code may, for
instance, be transmitted from the cells of one species to
another.[footnoteRef:64] Rather than simply being transmitted
genetically, from generation to generation, code is subject to
primary processes of de- and trans-coding, that is to say
side-communications and monstrous couplings as movements of
transformation beyond filiative reproduction. [61: Darwin, Charles,
The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by
Insects. Elibron Classics, 2005, p. 1. ] [62: It is to be noted
that Deleuze and Guattaris thought is also influenced by
Weismannian neo-Darwinism, e.g. with respect to population thinking
and the focus on the vitality of non-organic life i.e. the demoting
of the organism , however, they refute the idea of evolution as the
simple reproduction of DNA, focusing instead on the primacy of
decoding and non-filiative becoming. See: Ansell Pearson, Germinal
Life, pp. 4-6, 8 & 145. ] [63: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 59. See also: Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life, p. 189.]
[64: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59. ]
The rhizomatics into which Deleuze and Guattari transform
Darwins theory of evolution is a far cry from standard Darwinian
theory with its perfectionist and progressive
values[footnoteRef:65]. Understood as becoming involution is not
the reproduction of pre-established forms of life; it is
characterised by processes of decoding, genetic drift, monstrous
couplings, etc. Life is characterised by its perturbation more than
by its preservation; and by becoming more than by reproduction. One
of the implications of the way in which Deleuze and Guattari make
this move is that chance, error and resistance become not merely
immanent to life processes; their force is anterior. Only via
perturbations such as genetic drift and transversal modes of
communication does life become and do forms of life emerge. [65:
Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 151. ]
It will be noted that Foucault underlines the fundamentality of
error, too. At lifes most basic level, Foucault argues following
Canguilhem, the play of code and decoding leaves room for chance,
which, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something
like perturbation in the information system, something like a
mistake.[footnoteRef:66] As Foucault defines it, [i]n the extreme,
life is what is capable of error.[footnoteRef:67] Most
characteristic of life are chance, contingency and difference. That
is to say that life is irreducible and undecidable and cannot be
laid out in advance. Thus, if Deleuze and Guattaris reading of
Darwin uncovers the centrality and immanence of perturbation,
chance and disorder(ing) and hence the superfluity and excess
characteristic of life Kant and Hayek seek to render invisible and
neutralise these aspect through an image political life that
operates via (the reproduction of) circulation. In the latter
image, lifes political requirements and capacities are bound up
with governance and the nexus security-freedom. [66: Foucault,
Michel, Introduction in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the
Pathological, Carolyn R. Fawcett (transl.). New York: Zone Books,
1989, pp. 22-23.] [67: Ibid., p. 22. ]
The notion of excess does, however, not merely feature in an
involutionary reading of Darwins evolutionary thought. Darwin
himself broaches the importance of excess in terms of encounters
and forms of interaction that cannot be rationalised according to
the survival of the fittest. In addition to natural selection,
Darwin introduces the notion of sexual selection, which depends not
on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males
for possession of the females; the result is not death to the
unsuccessful competitor but few or no offspring.[footnoteRef:68]
Grosz suggests that sexual selection is characterised merely by
courtship and pleasure as opposed to those qualities that
facilitate survival. Yet, Darwin himself describes sexual selection
in terms of an advantage of males in terms of their weapons, means
of defence or charms.[footnoteRef:69] In most species, he remarks,
struggle constitutes a primary feature of sexual selection. Groszs
analysis is nevertheless valuable insofar as it elucidates that,
according to Darwin, there is something more to (the reproduction
of) life than a struggle for survival pure and simple: the process
of selection features in addition a play of sexual taste, appeal
and pleasure.[footnoteRef:70] As Darwin himself notes in relation
to birds, in which the contest is generally more peaceful, [68:
Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 68. ] [69: Ibid., p. 70. ] [70:
Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, p. 33.]
there is the severest rivalry between the males of many species
to attract by singing the females. The rock-thrush of Guiana, birds
of Paradise, and some others, congregate; and successive males
display their gorgeous plumage and perform strange antics before
the females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the
most attractive partner.[footnoteRef:71] [71: Darwin, Origin of
Species, p. 69. ]
Reproduction contains a non-instrumental aspect, in which
transformations are not necessarily useful or beneficial, yet
always creative of a difference that cannot be predicted in advance
i.e. becoming.
ConclusionHow does a conception of evolution qua difference and
complexity help us move beyond the systematic violence that takes
place beneath the smooth surface of Kant and Hayeks visions of
society? This silent war[footnoteRef:72] undermines the
emancipatory pretensions of, and depoliticises, their political
projects. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as
dangerous and domesticating the difference that lies at the basis
of their visions biological and political life that conceptualising
resistance to biopower becomes possible. [72: Foucault, Society
Must Be Defended, p. 16. ]
Present in all three accounts in Kant, Hayek and Darwin is an
economy of inclusion and exclusion, which functions as an economy
of life or, perhaps, an economy of life and death. For Kant, both
life and politics are to be understood on the basis of
(self-)organisation and circulation. This conceptualisation
produces a distinction between life that circulates on the basis of
its understood nature and rogue or rebellious forces endangering
liberal society. The erection of a boundary between relations and
forms of life understood to be productive, and to be fostered, and
those that must be eradicated is bluntly articulated by Kant, who
asserts in Perpetual Peace that [t]he saying let justice reign even
if all the rogues in the world must perish is true; it is a sound
principle of right.[footnoteRef:73] Moreover, the prohibition of
resistance is absolute: [73: Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 123. ]
all the incitements of the subjects to violent expressions of
discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the
greatest and most punishable crime in the commonwealth, for it
destroys its very foundations. This prohibition is
absolute.[footnoteRef:74] [74: Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 81. See
also: Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 143 & 162. ]
Hayek, too, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on
security. That is to say, a notion of freedom produced through and
operating on the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion
tribal life versus adaptive life which naturalises and
universalises liberal order. Despite Hayeks adoption of complexity
the open society assumes the same operative principle as Kants
vision of political life, according to which only a specific form
of life is considered worthy.
The economy of life characteristic of standard neo-Darwinism
renders this mechanism more explicit: adapt or die. This paper has,
however, provided a different reading of Darwin in which movement
and relations gain primacy over instituted forms. Sexual selection,
which Darwin elaborates in addition to natural selection, goes
beyond instrumentality and the prioritisation of the struggle of
life and death in which the best adapted triumph. Instead, sexual
selection, as a play of sexual appeal and pleasure, operates on the
basis of excess and becoming. Secondly, engaging Darwin in terms of
becoming beyond filiative reproduction, life is characterised by
its perturbation more than by its preservation for chance, error
and resistance are both immanent and anterior to forms of
(self-)organisation. Hence it is our suggestion that a starting
point for the repoliticisation of life is a different approach to
the question of what political life is and may become, an approach
that starts with and embraces forces of difference and becoming
rather centralising the self-interested individual and neutralising
the forces of war and resistance at the heart of a so-called open
society. 22