523347
research-article2014
PRQXXX10.1177/1065912914523347Political Research QuarterlyAnker
Mini-Symposium
Freedom and the Human in
“Evolutionary” Political Theory
Political Research Quarterly
2014, Vol. 67(2) 453­–456
© 2014 University of Utah
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DOI: 10.1177/1065912914523347
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Elisabeth Anker1
Abstract
“Evolutionary” political theory is a dynamic process of scholarship that collides disparate ideas into each other to form
new, symbiogenetic concepts that were previously unthinkable. As evolutionary political theory, “Species Evolution
and Cultural Freedom” enacts the dynamics of species evolution the essay examines, colliding theories of freedom
into theories of evolution to offer new ways of imagining the self. Yet I argue that the essay’s evolutionary argument
moves beyond the “self” to untether freedom from the human and to redefine the human as the symbiogenetic effect
of colliding force fields: both human and nonhuman, cultural and environmental, genetic and evolutionary.
Keywords
Keywords, Freedom, Evolution, New Materialism, Agency, William Connolly
Evolutionary Political Theorizing
In recent years, William Connolly’s scholarship has
emphasized the importance of micropolitical, affective,
and nonhuman forces in cultivating political action and
shaping political worlds. Connolly pursues what might
seem to be contradictory tasks: to challenge robust configurations of human agency in relation to the nonhuman
world, yet to encourage humans to foster gratitude for
their lives on earth; to challenge the righteous sureties of
implacable political positions, yet to reinvigorate investments in democratic practice; to emphasize the way that
politics takes shape in microregisters, yet to use micropolitics to analyze macropolitical shifts in the contemporary global condition. Connolly not only holds these
tasks together but also shows how they are, in fact, complementary, even dependent upon each other. So for
instance, democratic practice is reinvigorated by softening a rigid moralism, and an ethos of gratitude is nourished by a decentered understanding of human agency.
Connolly achieves these feats in part because of the
approaches he takes. By refusing fealty to any singular
thinker, political program, or analytic method, Connolly
creates new ways of doing political theory by generating
heterogeneous connections between seemingly incommensurate fields of study and sets of ideas. “Species
Evolution and Cultural Freedom” works in this vein to
argue that scientific research on evolution and political/
cultural theories of agency inform and condition each
other—theories of evolution inform how we understand
agency, and theories of freedom and agency inform how
we understand evolution.
The methodology of Connolly’s scholarship, in this
sense, enacts the dynamics of species evolution he examines. He brings disparate fields of thought together—
new materialism and pluralism in political theory, with
developmental and dynamic theories of evolution in scientific research—to create a collision between them that
produces new connections between freedom and evolution. Connolly’s work in political theory is well established, while his turn to evolutionary theory is relatively
unexpected and thus travels a more contingent path. As
these two different disciplinary species collide in the
essay to form a composite, their symbiosis alters each.
Yet while Connolly’s argument on freedom and evolution was likely set off by a “teleo-searching process,” its
production cannot be simply reduced to the intent and
interests of the author. Rather it emerged within the distributed agency of creative processes in which many
human and nonhuman factors, accountable and unaccountable sources, geopolitical and micropolitical shifts,
likely played a role in its formation.
The essay thus parallels the creativity of species evolution, or at least of Connolly’s reading of evolutionary
processes. Is this evolution, exactly? Is this what biologists or physical scientists might find when they study
1
George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Elisabeth Anker, Department of American Studies, George
Washington University, 2108 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20052,
USA.
Email: [email protected]
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evolution? Perhaps not, but what Connolly says of
Nietzsche also applies here,
I think that what I am saying is roughly compatible with his
view. But after a certain point, the issue does not matter
much to me. The idea is to draw sustenance from a thinker,
to work upon him or her, and then to see whether the result
is coherent and illuminates experience enough to be
defended.
Connolly’s mode of scholarship, what I would call
“evolutionary” political theory, does not operate by fealty
to a prior view or a static set of ideas. Instead, it is driven
by a dynamic process that continually reworks ideas
through their collisions with other ideas, and scrutinizes
the heterogeneous connections that arise to see if they
produce something new in the world or in our understanding of it.
Evolutionary political theory takes influence from
multiple sources—philosophical, political, personal, scientific, familial, and phenomenological, sources intentional as well as unintentional—and thus is a risky
practice of scholarship that relies on contingent and
unorthodox connections to develop its arguments. In this
sense, it might be more accurately titled evolutionary
political theorizing, rather than theory; it is more of a processual mode of inquiry that ceaselessly shifts in relation
to what it examines, whereas “theory” may sometimes
connote rigidified categories of analysis placed over
complex experiences. Evolutionary political theorizing,
by contrast, nourishes complexity, cultivates dynamism,
and encourages the collision of disparate ideas to gauge
whether the results deepen our understanding of and care
for the violent, cruel, enchanting, and sublime world that
we collectively inhabit.
Freedom and the Human
In “Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom,” Connolly
argues that the heterogeneous connections produced
through the collision of evolutionary theory and political
theory diminish the claims of mastery embedded in strong
readings of human agency: “It is necessary to disconnect
creativity from the consummate agency of either a god or
humans to appreciate how it arises out of heterogeneous
connections between entities that sometimes display
micro-intentionality.” This diminution of human agency
also cultivates an ethos of gratitude within humans for
life itself and recognition of the interwoven existence of
human and nonhuman life. Yet the two sections of this
essay on evolution and pluralist political theory are in a
more symbiotic relationship than Connolly lets on, one
that extends the practice of freedom beyond the drives
and tactics of the self that Connolly ends his essay by
Political Research Quarterly 67(2)
considering. I would suggest that Connolly’s argument is
actually more demanding than his conclusion suggests,
for it forces us to move beyond the self to reconceive the
very practice of freedom and the very boundaries of the
human.
I will start with the question of freedom that frames
the title of the article. What is freedom in this essay? It is
not, Connolly argues, purposiveness, self-determination,
or self-reflexivity as these lead to a false and dangerous
sense of human mastery over the self and over the earth.
Freedom is less intentional, and less reliant on an opposite of domination, than Kantian, enlightenment, or neo/
liberal definitions of the term that prioritize self-rule,
autonomy, and sovereignty. Instead, freedom is “conditioned creativity and agency”; it is the capacity for experimentation and innovation within conditions of the world,
the capacity for making something new.1 Freedom is an
action not necessarily yoked to intent, or even to a specific agent who chooses to practice or experience freedom. Freedom, I would suggest, although Connolly does
not say this explicitly, is like symbiogenesis: “the creative
conjunction of two distinct things to form a new composite . . . a result that was not implicit at the outset.”
Freedom’s creative conjunction of forces does not require
intent for the conjunction to occur, or an agent who
orchestrates the conjunction. Its results are not predetermined before the collision occurs but reveal the spontaneity and contingency that support freedom’s creativity.
This creativity is found not only in the act of collision, or
in its results, but also in the impossibility of predicting
what will produce the effects and the paths that these
intersecting force fields will subsequently take. Freedom
does entail what Connolly calls “microintentional” registers, but this microintent is available to all life-forms.
While not merely epiphenomenal, freedom does not
require free will, nor self-determination, nor intent classically conceived.
If freedom does not require an agentic and willing subject, but rather creativity and dynamic processes, then
freedom extends significantly beyond the human estate.
This, in turn, may press for conclusions that reach past
the distributed agency residing in individual cultivation
or an ethos of gratitude. Connolly’s reading of freedom
argues powerfully for care, but it seems to be a care that
is irreducible to the care for the self. While in the past
Connolly has argued persuasively for cultivating practices of care for the self as part of a practice of freedom,
the emergent concept of “cultural freedom” in this essay
suggests a broader register or venue than the “self.”
Evolutionary processes define practices of freedom that
not only go beyond human will but also beyond the
human. “Species Evolution and Cultural Freedom”
offers—at least in my re-collision of its ideas—a definition of freedom untethered to the human.
Anker
To push this argument even farther, Connolly’s essay
seems to suggest that lichens demonstrate freedom, or at
least that lichens are the effect of a form of evolutionary
freedom: a freedom that is conditioned, that depends
upon the teleodynamic force fields of algae and fungi colliding together, but that also is the interruption of conventional patterns of algae and fungal development to create
new dynamic living processes and new composites. The
challenge that arises from this expansive reworking of
freedom is twofold: one, how to distinguish the capacities
that enable action to be experienced as freedom; and two,
for Connolly’s purposes, how to harness this chastened
yet distributed understanding of freedom to a politics that
militantly promotes care for the planet’s inhabitants amid
ongoing ecological devastation.
This essay also challenges us to rethink the boundaries
of the human. What is the human now, after this symbiogenesis of ideas? Connolly’s focus on the human through
individual self-cultivation is located in the discussion of
drives, drives that often help to power human agency.
Their teleodynamism challenges robust readings of
human action: “The relational, teleodynamic capacities
of drives provide an element in the real creativity of
human life, while they post sharp qualifications to centered visions of autonomous human agency.” Connolly
examines how drives are triggered by many nonhuman
forces, and how they often collide with nonhuman forces.
I would add that the origin of drives is also critical for
understanding their agency. And a focus on the origins of
drives blurs the very contours not only of human agency
but also of the human.
The origins of drives are not only located in individual desire and biological instinct but also in environmental conditions, evolutionary patterns, contagious affects,
psychological development (both ontogenetic and phylogenetic), world events, and cultural investments, as
well as social norms, philosophical ideas, and historical
conditions. When we begin to see drives as originating
from all of these vectors and not just colliding with them,
then the boundaries of the individual self begin to blur in
far-reaching ways. An examination of the heterogeneous
origins of drives offers a distributive image of agency
that not only decenters human agency but also erodes the
very boundaries between self and not-self. The boundaries that erode are not merely between one human and
another but between the human and culture, the human
and the biosphere, and the human and the nonhuman.
The self is, in this sense, the “effect” of different freedoms experienced as the microcollisions of force fields,
human and nonhuman, cultural and environmental,
genetic and evolutionary.
The human microbiome serves as one example that
demonstrates the blurring of the boundaries of the
human. The human microbiome refers to the billions of
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nonhuman microorganisms living in the human body.
They not only help us to digest food, fight infections,
and protect our skin but they also literally make up who
we are, outnumbering our cells by a factor of ten to
one.2 From a numerical perspective, we are more nothuman than human. Microbiota determine many of our
choices and actions and shape our drives: they influence everything from what we eat, to how we feel, to
how we interact with the world. They comprise our
body and cultivate our agency. The human microbiome
reveals the human to be a symbiogenetic collision
between human cells and thousands of nonhuman species of microbiota that form a constantly shifting composite—a dynamic and processual re-composition of
matter. Microbiota constantly fluctuate in response to
the environment, and they are the product of collective
cultural, political, and economic practices too. They
change depending on cultural and historical norms of
eating and caring for the body, as well as corporateeconomic decisions about how to process food or what
chemicals to put in soap, as well as political decisions
about what medications to regulate and how to properly
dispose of prescription drugs (The Human Microbiome
Project Consortium 2012). Microbiota certainly power
some of our drives, and the world powers some of our
microbiota. Connolly’s essay invites us to use the
microbiome as one way to examine the intense ambiguity between the human and nonhuman world and to
attend to their evolutionary shifts in relation to one
another. The task that follows is to figure out how to
reinterpret the human in the midst of the collision of
political theory and evolutionary theory, and simultaneously to scrutinize what is at stake in the (potential)
inability to draw these lines as clearly as before.
These altered understandings of freedom and the
human together challenge the conventions of modern
political thought and contemporary politics. A brief comparison with Kant’s arguments on freedom and the human
reveal the extent of this challenge. Kant (1999) argues
that the agency required for freedom is properly distinguished from the natural world because nature is organized by determinism whereas freedom must rise above
determinism: freedom is the ability for self-rule through
reason. Freedom is constitutive of the human. Both freedom and the human are distinguished from the limited
forms of agency found in the nonhuman natural world.
Freedom is the capacity that, therefore, defines the human
in distinction to nature. “Species Evolution and Cultural
Freedom” challenges Kant on many levels. By amalgamating the human and nonhuman natural world, and then
distributing freedom itself throughout both, this essay’s
collision of evolutionary theory with political theory
destabilizes both the boundaries of the human and the
practices of freedom that ground modern thought and
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contemporary politics. Its destabilization is made possible through the method of evolutionary political theorizing, which creates a novel composite of freedom and
agency that impels us to think these fundamental categories anew.
Yet given the radical blurring of the human that
occurs at the intersection of evolutionary and political
theory, I wonder whether or why gratitude will result
from this rearticulation of freedom and evolution. I
very much hope, with Connolly, that diminished interpretations of human capacities can lead to an increase
of wonder of the world, or to a felt experience of relatedness between human and nonhuman fields, or even to
gratitude for the astonishment of life itself that arises
from this. But given the values of a political-economic
culture like our own, so invested in human mastery,
self-determination, and control over the earth and its
resources, I fear that a more likely response than gratitude might be a violent backlash that aims to shore up
agency. What specific measures are most likely to help
prevent the shoring up of agentic power, the fortification of unstable boundaries of the self, or the desire to
enact violent or desperate demonstrations of sovereign
freedom in the face of diminished human agency? In a
culture steeped in images of sovereign power, heroic
action, and neoliberal valuations of choice and selfreliance,.what needs to be in place for this kind of gratitude in response to contracted human power to take
place? How can a decentered reading of human capacities be harnessed in the service of the ecological survival of the planet, rather than the further rapacious
stripping of its material in the service of fortifying
human mastery? Connolly’s project levels a challenge
to all of us: to build a politics based on a radically redistributed practice of freedom that enables the fight for,
rather than against, the flourishing of the planet and its
inhabitants.
Political Research Quarterly 67(2)
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Connolly’s definition of freedom aligns with, but also
departs radically from, Hannah Arendt’s. Arendt defines
freedom as creation of newness in reciprocity with others,
as creativity, natality, nonsovereign experience, and action.
Connolly edges very close to her reading of freedom but
also dramatically departs from it—implicitly refusing her
limitation of freedom to the political and public sphere,
and challenging her insistence that freedom requires reciprocity and recognition. Perhaps this subterranean debate
with Arendt is partly why the essay emphasizes “cultural”
rather than “political” freedom. See Arendt (2006). For a
longer discussion of nonsovereign freedom in contemporary politics, see Anker (2014).
2. Human Microbiome Project http://www.beiresources.org/
About/HumanMicrobiomeProject.aspx (accessed 10/2/13).
References
Anker, Elisabeth. 2014. Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the
Politics of Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. “What is Freedom?” In Between Past
and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, 143–73.
New York: Penguin Classics.
The Human Microbiome Project Consortium. 2012. “Structure,
Function and Diversity of the Healthy Human Microbiome.”
Nature 486, 207–214. doi:10.1038/nature11234
Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cambridge
Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Translated and
edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.