Beyond Resisting Security: Thinking the Complex Political Environment

Doerthe Rosenow (Royal Holloway, University of London) & Leonie Ansems de Vries (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus)

[email protected] [email protected]

Paper to be presented at the Millennium Annual Conference London School of Economics, 20-22 October 2012

Work in progress. Please do not cite without the permission of the author. Comments are most welcome.

1

Introduction

(…) between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is…a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.1

According to critical security scholars, categories of identity and opposition, the self and the other, are crucial to understand contemporary security practices, which ‘form[…] a people’ by instilling fear of what is deemed to be different.2 Security practices, the argument continues, facilitate exclusion and suppression of forms of life that are categorised as less valuable, or are deemed an outright threat. Related to this, the question of how to resist securitisation has emerged as an important one in recent years.3 Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster distinguish between two different approaches to resistance: (1) the ethical approach that focuses on how the subject of security can and should develop a different understanding of the self and its identity, recognising its interrelation with the Other, and (2) the agency approach that criticises how the Other, the abject of security, is continuously derived from the (ultimately Western) ‘us’ and deprived of any agency.4 This paper appreciates that the question of resistance has appeared on the agenda of critical security studies and values the insights provided by existing research, be they ‘ethical’ or ‘agency’-focused. However, the paper aims to express a discomfort with the incapacity of the discussion to move beyond the binary opposition that (still) underlies the understanding of self and other in both approaches. While the ‘other’ is indeed derived from a pre- conceptualised ‘self’ in the ethical mode, abject agency is equally analysed as re-active, resisting a particular pre-existing logic or practice of security. Indeed, one of the decisive problems lies in the term re-sistance itself, which defines struggle as always secondary. The contention of the paper is that we need to move beyond this impasse by investigating the fundamental ontology that lies at the heart of our contemporary way of thinking about politics. We will demonstrate that reducing the political environment to an oppositional framework does not only feature a problematic understanding of political struggle, but exemplifies a more profound misconception of the organisation of material life; a conception that always starts from the notion of bounded entities and their identities (subjects, abjects, and so forth). By contrast, we argue that (political) life is primarily produced by and productive of a complexity of movements, relations and positions. At first glance, this seems to be a conventional argument moving on the well-trodden path of complexity theory, which had found entrance into the social sciences, including their conceptualisation of the international/global realm, already a decade ago.5 However, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of life, we maintain that its fleshing-out and application has so

1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 280. 2 Michael Dillon, The Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 1996): 16. 3 Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, “Post-structuralism, Continental Philosophy and the Remaking of Security Studies”, in The Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, ed. Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Victor Mauer (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 77. 4 Ibid: 78-9. 5 See for example John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press; Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

2 far been rather limited, simply because of its inability to fundamentally move beyond what we call the politics-identity-opposition nexus and the continuing denial of the complexity of life’s becoming; especially life’s becoming different from itself. Our investigation thus poses a double challenge to both ethical and agency-focused analyses of the relationship between security and political resistance, by seeking to sever both the security-identity-difference and the security-abject nexus, in favour of a complex understanding of politics as becoming. For the purpose of both, the paper, unlike those poststructuralist critiques that seek to avoid ontological presumptions, embraces the significance of ontology in the pursuit of reimagining politics. This is related to William E. Connolly’s argument that no analysis of politics can take place without at least implicitly invoking ontological and political assumptions and beliefs. In other words: to fundamentally move away from the politics/opposition-impasse, we need to engage in what for Deleuze is creating ontological concepts that are able to transgress classical thinking. Instead of secondarily deriving an understanding of resistant politics from an analysis and critique of the ontopolitical assumptions unveiled in practices of security, as exemplified in Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s distinction between ‘biopolitics’ and ‘politics’,6 ontological creation in this sense is both primary and secondary – it entails the double movement of ungrounding and at the same time grounding political life. And to (un)ground political life qua complexity, it will be argued, one must turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s radicalisation of complexity thought qua becoming. This involves, firstly, the anteriority of relations and movements rather than prioritising bounded identities and entities; and, secondly, the specific materialism that derives from this. The latter not only blurs the boundaries between the living and the non-living, the organic and the non-organic and the material and the immaterial, but is premised on the primacy of heterogeneous connections and ‘unnatural participations’:

Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes…Propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. The vampire does not filiate, it infects. The difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. Or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates – against itself.7

To avoid making this argument about the complexity and radical relationality of life merely in the abstract, the paper will engage with a particular case of political contestation, which is the opposition to genetically modified organisms. Despite being, at first glance, simply another example of political struggle that is framed in oppositional terms, the paper will show that it is underlined by a different notion of life that focuses on its relational aspects and at least attempts to prioritise those over the identities of entities. The engagement with this particular set of practices will serve, on the one hand, to show how the politics-identity-opposition nexus is ungrounded whilst, on the other, it will reveal the (necessary) limitations of this movement of ungrounding in providing an alternative that moves beyond the politics of subject and abject, of self and other. Indeed, the paper will argue that oppositional mo(ve)ments are not to be denounced per se; rather, our understanding of politics must be expanded, multiplied, encompassing also

6 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 154. 7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 267. 3 what Deleuze terms lines of flight. These forces of resistance both disrupt and complexify the binary lines of dualistic politics, and create new lines of political becoming beyond dualistic either/or categorisations. We enter a play of becoming forces beyond identity/opposition and re-ordering movements producing binary orderings; a play which is not oppositional but complex and opens up to different modes of relationality and connectivity, different modes of individuation. Politics lies somewhere in-between these movements, in the middle [au milieux].

Resisting security: ethics, agency, ontology

Drawing on the thought of Connolly and others, David Campbell argues that contemporary security logics do not recognise how relations of self/other are complex and intertwined, and that ‘secure’ identity-construction always takes place inbetween the ‘self’ and ‘other’. For Campbell, the question of how to resist securitising practices should therefore be answered by projecting an ontology of ‘the radical interdependence of being’ that enables the development of an ‘ethos of political criticism’, which recognises our ‘inescapable responsibility to the other’ and leads to a conceptualisation of politics that weakens its connection to the identity- opposition nexus, making it convincingly ‘agonistic’.8 It aims to challenge claims about ‘secure’ identities in order to replace them with an understanding of identity that is always conscious of its openness to and constitution in relation to difference.9 To put it in Connolly’s words: ‘Each identity is fated...to contend...with others it depends on to enunciate itself’, which means that ‘each constituency’ acknowledges that ‘its own identity’ is ‘bound up with a variety of differences sustaining it.’10 Politics, for Connolly, is consequently this contention and negotiation of identity and difference, with critical politics needing to aim at providing ‘new political spaces through which to engage strangeness in oneself and others.’11 This explicit affirmation of creating ontology for questions of politics and ethics puts these authors at odds with a variety of theorists in the critical study of security and International Relations (IR) more generally, who are often referred to under the label of ‘poststructuralism’. Wedded to Foucault’s perception of ontological statements as merely disguising historically contingent practices of power, poststructuralists have been keen not to ontologise, but to de-ontologise by unravelling and questioning what Connolly calls onto- politics.12 In Dillon and Reid’s words: ‘There is no politics without some account of the real, however deeply buried it is in the taken-for-granted world of political discourse, institutions and practices.’13 And according to their analysis, what characterises contemporary liberal practices of rule and war is ‘[a] changing ontopolitics of species existence’ that takes ‘biohumanity’ as referent object, which both authors set out to deconstruct and critique.14 However, Connolly himself is not entirely satisfied with such a move. In his opinion, the inability ‘to establish secure ontological ground for a theory’ does not mean that ‘deconstruction’ is the only sensible theoretical move.15 If the argument is valid that every

8 David Campbell, ‘Why Fight: Humanitarianism, Principles, and Post-structuralism’, Millennium 27, no. 3 (1998): 513. 9 Ibid: 509. 10 William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality (Newbury Park; London; New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993), 28. 11 Ibid: 29. 12 William E. Connolly, "The Irony of Interpretation," in The Politics of Irony: Essays in Self-Betrayal, ed. Daniel W. Conway and John E. Seery (New York: St Martin's Press, 1992). 13 Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War, 18. 14 Ibid., 18-20. 15 William E. Connolly, ‘Identity and Difference in Global Politics’ in International/Intertextual Relations, 336. 4 political interpretation contains an onto-political dimension, ‘no matter how deeply [events] are sunk in specific historical contexts’, it must be equally applicable to critical analytical work. Deconstructing ‘other’ theories’ onto-politics without making their ‘own’ onto-politics explicit and therefore contestable implies that critical theorists step into the same trap as the theorists they (rightly) criticise. For Connolly, Foucault himself falls prey to this problem: probably out of a ‘desire to minimize [deconstruction’s] implication in ontological assumptions it could never vindicate without drawing upon some of the same media it has just ambiguated’, he ‘sometimes acts as if genealogy does and can proceed…without invoking any alternative onto-assumptions of its own.’16 The attempt to proceed by making as few assumptions about the nature of nature as possible has problematic consequences, which the concept of biopolitics exemplifies. In the effort to reveal the artificiality and particularity of naturalised categorisations and order(ing)s, one can avoid constructing new order(ing)s only to a certain extent. If Dillon and Reid’s account of biopolitical (liberal) ways of rule and war traces the emergence and functioning of contemporary regimes of power by providing an alternative history of modern liberal politics, which deconstructs reified canonical narratives, then the concept of biopolitics also invites the production of a reality. Dillon and Reid may endeavour merely to reflect upon the developments that render life the referent object of politics, yet by doing so they engages in the production of a reality – a biopolitical reality that supposedly characterises our modern political condition. In critical security studies and IR, Campbell has been one of the very few poststructuralist scholars who has explicitly taken up Connolly’s challenge of explicating onto-politics in the way outlined in this section. However, for him, this exercise does not necessitate critiquing deconstruction – to the contrary, deconstruction, as exercised by both Jacques Derrida and Foucault, supposedly entails a particular politics of affirmation that is tied to the recognition and appreciation of the alterity of the other. The problem of Campbell’s onto-politics is that it still treats identity ‘as a problematic but still indispensable category’17 and thereby remains tied to the politics-opposition nexus. Although ‘insecuring’ and opening up identity by recognising its interrelational character, the category is still treated as constitutive of life. This failure to think beyond identity as such leads to a conceptualisation of alterity that entails an understanding of difference as non-identical and therefore necessarily oppositional. Indeed, for Campbell, ‘the active affirmation of alterity must involve the desire to actively oppose and resist…those forces that efface, erase, or suppress alterity and its centrality to the economy of humanity.’18 This level of politics might be indispensable insofar that ‘markers of identity’ are needed to show a ‘united front’ that can challenge ‘real forms of social inequality and disavowal’ in a ‘social universe’ that remains arranged according to these markers19, as exemplified in the realm of prevailing security practices. However, as we will show in one of the following sections with the help of the GMO controversy, politics is not exhausted, let alone constituted at this level. Indeed, from a Deleuzian point of view, politics must move from recognising the ‘radical interdependence of being’ that Campbell recommends, towards an encounter with difference-in-itself that enables us to relate ‘the materials given to us, our bodies, flesh and even the apparently substantial but ultimately superficial identities and binary oppositions…through their difference’.20 This move is impossible as long as critical thinking continues to focus on constituents and their identities (no matter how ‘insecure’), because the latter implies that difference remains ‘an

16 Connolly, “Irony of Interpretation”, 143-5. 17 Nathan Widder, Political Theory after Deleuze (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 150. 18 Campbell, “Why Fight”, 514. (Emphasis in original) 19 Widder, Political Theory, 150. 20 Ibid: 144. 5 object of representation …a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude’.21 A different, albeit related understanding of self and other underlies what Aradau and van Munster call the agency approach in critical security studies, which focuses on the politics of those who are excluded and rendered abject by prevailing security practices, rather than the relation of identity and difference in the subject. This type of research has so far mainly addressed the securitisation of migration in Western democracies, following Sandro Mezzadra’s urge to ‘move beyond [a] paternalistic vision and to see migrants as the central protagonists of current processes of global transformation.’22 Consequently, Peter Nyers, for example, is interested in migrants as ‘security agents…who are once the objects of deportation and the subjects fighting against it.’23 His excellent study on the role of anti- deportation movements explores activities that ‘focus[…] on disrupting…everyday securitization’ and attempt to develop ‘counter-strategies’ to deportation threats.24 Drawing on Jacques Ranciere, Nyers attempts to develop an understanding of politics that challenges sovereignty’s right to confine it with the notion of citizenship. Borrowing Akhil Gupta’s terminology, it is important to acknowledge the ‘strategic significance’ of this account of politics, 25 which is particularly manifest in the notion of abject agency that provides an alternative to victimisation. However, it is once again not able to overcome the self/other impasse, as well as the equation of other with ‘reaction’, and of subjectivation with ‘fighting against’. Moreover, the question arises how we can account for those migrants who do not ‘fight against’ their securitisation, who do not raise their voice, or who indeed do not have a voice to raise. How to account for more ‘complex’ life that does not fit easily into the binary ‘for’ or ‘against’, ‘agent’ or ‘victim’?26 The forthcoming sections will further substantiate the critique that was raised in this section, drawing, firstly, on the notion of life invoked in the opposition to GMOs, including its political implications and limitations. The article subsequently explores Deleuze’s appropriation and radicalisation of complexity theory, which will function to formulate a politics of resistance not grounded in the politics-opposition nexus.

Identity and/or complexity: the example of the GMO controversy

The political movement against GMOs is characterised by two dominant strategies: one emerges from science and, related to practices of security, is keen to point out the dangers of biotechnology that have to do with an alleged impossibility of predicting the consequences of gene alteration, while the other criticises the increasing power of multinational agricultural corporations that, it is argued, results in economic exploitation. In this paper, we are more interested in the former strategy, due to its strong relation to security practices and complexity

21 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 174. 22 Quoted in Peter Nyers, “Taking Rights, Mediating Wrongs: Disagreements over the Political Agency of Non- status Refugees”, in The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 49. See also other contributions in this volume, as well as Rens van Munster, Securitising Immigration: the Politics of Risk in the EU (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 23 Nyers, “Taking Rights, Mediating Wrongs”, 49. 24 Ibid: 56. 25 Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). 26 Rosenau engages with such an example in “Nomadic Life’s Counter-Attack: Moving beyond the Subaltern’s Voice”, Review of International Studies (forthcoming). In this piece, she explores notions of subjectivity and resistance regarding the illegal planting of genetically modified cotton seeds that took place in India in the early 2000s; a case that provoked disruption despite a lack of political intention and conscious resistance. 6 theory and the attempted advancement of a different notion of life that prioritises relationality to entities and identity, albeit, as this section will show, with certain (necessary) limitations. For decades, traditional genetics has been dominated by the ‘gene-centric’ school of thought, which is strongly related to a Newtonian understanding of the world as existing in perfect equilibrium. Gene-centrism is grounded in the so-called ‘Central Dogma’ that maintains that developmental information flows in an irreversible linear way from gene to protein to final organism. According to Susan Oyama, there is a relation between this understanding of life, which assumes that biological heritage is contained and passed on unaltered through the generations, and the underlying Western world view that emphasises ‘the persistence of the eternal soul, or order and stability in the face of change’27, resulting in the ideal of predictability and (self-)control. The stated aim is to get to know life as such and thereby one’s own identity; with this knowledge being compressed so that it can be possessed and controlled by the subject. Evelyn Fox Keller refers to Walter Gilbert, who describes as ideal the possibility that in future, every man and woman is able to pull out a CD of his/her pocket that includes every sequence of his/her DNA. This ideal mirrors a reductionist account of life – what we can and should know about ourselves, indeed the whole ‘grail’ of knowledge, is supposed to be contained in the sequences of our basic units.28 Although the results of the Human Genome Project have shattered the prospect of finding this grail in our DNA, due to the limited number of genes discovered and their consequential inability to account for the vast variety of organic traits, the ideal of possessing the information to predict and control the development of life has not been given up: despite the acknowledgement that ‘predictability…as understood by a physicist or control engineer, remains an elusive goal’, it ‘continues to exert a powerful intellectual attraction’ in the life sciences.29 The ability to predict and therefore enable control is closely related to the constitution of the scientist as an active subject whose task is to inform an ignorant ‘public’ that is constructed as his passive counterpart. Indeed, the identity of both science and scientist is reliant upon its opposition to other ways to know. This privilege is related to the traditional ideal of the purity of scientific aims, which assumes that objective truth exists, and that it is possible for the scientist to detach him- or herself from the ‘public’ realm he is supposed to act towards. Drawing on Nietzsche, Nathan Widder argues that ‘[m]odern science...continues the will to truth that drove its predecessors’. This will ‘does not seek after truth but instead demands that the world conform to ideals of purity and universality associated with a particular conception of truth.’30 In the GMO controversy, an interesting example for the constitution and legitimation of subject and identity in science is the so-called ‘Pusztai affair’. It was initiated by controversial GM research results released by Professor Arpad Pusztai at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen in 1998/99. After having publicly doubted the safety of GM food, based on his experiments with GM potatoes fed to rats, Pusztai lost his position at the Institute and was not allowed to speak about his research for a considerable amount of time. GE supporters blamed Pusztai of having abused his position to ‘whip[…] up public hysteria’.31 This

27 Mae-Wan Ho, Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare? The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (Bath: Gateway, 1998), 72. 28 Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge/Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 6. 29 Rohan B.H. Williams and Oscar Junhong Luo, "Complexity, Post-genomic Biology and Gene Expression Programs," in Complex Physical, Biophysical and Ecophysical Systems, ed. Robert L. Dewar and Frank Detering (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2010), 321. 30 Nathan Widder, Reflections on Time and Politics (University Park/Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 145-6. According to Nietzsche, the predecessor of science is religion. 31 Steve Connor, ‘Pusztai: the Verdict’, The Independent, 19 February 1999, www.gene.ch/gentech/1999/Jan- Feb/msg00243.html. 7 allegation is related to the implicit understanding of the scientist as disembedded, rational, informing subject, which is contrasted to the irrationality and emotionality of the public. According to some GE supporters, campaigns of NGOs such as Greenpeace do appeal to emotions instead of rational arguments and thereby diminish the ‘ability of people to make sound, evidence-based choices about how they should lead their lives’.32 This argument does not leave it up to people themselves to make decisions, but determines the legitimate criteria - rationality and evidence - that are supposed to be used in this process. Emotions need to be excluded and the result can be anticipated, as it is science itself that decides whether the criteria are kept. With a similar strategy, some scientists deal with the complexity-challenge of the results of the Humane Genome Project for the life sciences: in an editorial of one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, it is argued in 2006 that ‘among geneticists themselves, [the] notion [of a simple gene-protein relation] has long been eclipsed’, and that it is solely the media that is to blame for the continuous ‘tendency to boil down complex investigation’, not science itself. The simplification of the gene-organism-relationship in the public discourse, based on an understanding of the gene as central agent of development, is traced back to ‘a serious disconnect’ between scientists and the ‘public understanding of what they do’. For the former, this means that they need ‘to make sure that the gap doesn’t grow too wide.’33 What goes unmentioned is not only the decade-long marginalisation of so-called ‘developmentalists’ in molecular biology by the dominating ‘gene-centrists’, but also the ongoing unacknowledged use of gene-centric theory for a justification of genetic modification. By pointing at the purity and disembeddedness of scientific research that is based on and interested in nothing but ‘hard’ empirical data, the status of science with regard to its oppositional negative, the public, and its task of informing the latter, remains unchallenged. One of the best-known ‘developmentalist’ scientists opposing GMOs is Mae-Wan Ho, whose opposition to GE is fundamentally grounded in a complexity theory-based understanding of the world. Developmentalists contest the concept of gene agency in the development of organisms, maintaining instead that the developmental system ‘works by perfect intercommunication’, diffusing ‘the distinction between genetic and epigenetic, organism and environment.’34 Accordingly, ‘[t]he cause of development…is the relationship of the components, not the components themselves’, which implies that development is emergent, and causality rarely linear or straightforward.35 Ho’s opposition to GE, as well as her general approach to science and society, is grounded in this understanding. First, in her account, the dominance of the scientist as subject is softened via the upgrading of the role of nature and its particularities. Ho questions the traditional scientific approach of gaining knowledge via the ‘invasion’ and breaking up of organisms, which is based on the conviction that the whole is not more than the sum of its parts.36 Instead, it should be the cell or even the organism as a whole that becomes the subject insofar that it ‘is allowed to tell its own story…to inform us of its internal processes’.37 Although she does not object to the traditional aim of science as such, which is the gaining of knowledge via observation, based on the

32 Social Issues Research Centre, ‘Pusztai Published!’, www.sirc.org/news/pusztai_published.html. 33 ‘Coping with Complexity’, Nature 441, no. 7092 (2006): 384. 34 Mae Wan Ho, ‘Development and Evolution Revisited’, in Developmental Science, Behavior, and Genetics, ed. Kathryn E. Hood et al. (Malden; Oxford; Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 86. 35 Gilbert Gottlieb, quoted in Kathryn E. Hood et al., ‘Developmental Systems, Nature-Nurture, and the Role of Genes in Behavior and Development: on the Legacy of Gilbert Gottlieb’, in Developmental Science, Behavior, and Genetics, 4. 36 Mae-Wan Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: the Physics of Organisms (Singapore; London: World Scientific, 1993), 3. 37 Ibid., 100. 8 assumption that the amount of knowledge we have is constantly progressing, she contests the specific way of accessing the object of interest: the scientist turns out to be informed by the organism. Also, drawing on quantum theory, Ho questions the role of the human observer as such: according to the traditional view, the observer (=subject) is ‘strictly external to the system’ and does not influence the processes s/he observes, while in the quantum world, observer and observed ‘seem somehow inextricably entangled.’ Ho concludes that ‘the subjectivist-objectivist dichotomy is falsely drawn’, and that subjectivity as such is indeed an ‘anthropomorphic-anthropocentric concept’ that results from human chauvinism.38 She concludes:

Ideally, we ought to be one with the system so that the observer and observed become mutually transparent or coherent. For in such a pure, coherent state, the entropy is zero; and hence uncertainty and ignorance are both at a minimum…It involves a consciousness that is delocalized and entangled with all of nature, when the awareness of the self is heightened precisely because self and other are simultaneously accessed. I believe this is the essence of aesthetical or mystical experience.39

Aesthetic metaphors and images are increasingly used in the critical discourse around the notion of the gene and the development of the organism. Oyama, for example, emphasises that the concept of ontogeny resembles a ‘dance’ that is being performed throughout the life of an organism.40 Similarly, Ho argues that the mechanic ‘silent universe of lifeless, immobile objects’ should be replaced with a concept of life as a ‘vibrant world of colour and form, of light and music’.41 Coen confronts the common notion of the gene as alphabet or text with a visualisation, according to which genes ‘respond to “hidden colors”’.42 The idea of life as being static, linear and mechanical is countered with concepts that emphasise its creativity, art, non-reproducable originality, and the impossibility of planning due to a lack of choreography. However, the danger of accessing nature with aesthetic instead of mechanic means lies in a potential invocation of what Deleuze calls the ‘beautiful soul’, which maintains that differences are everywhere, but that they are ‘respectable, reconcilable or federative’.43 Indeed, the criticism of GE is often linked to an account of life that depicts it as possessing an inherent telos of progression and harmony. Jeremy Rifkin, for example, appeals in his publications and campaigns to notions such as the ‘integrity of natural kinds’ and the ‘natural telos of the self-defining purpose of all life forms’.44 This relates to another idea, namely that democracy is the most natural form of environmental and social organisation. Challenging the traditional boundary between ways of understanding nature and ways of understanding society, Ho maintains that organic systems can be compared to radically democratic systems, which are allegedly also characterised by inter-communication, mutual responsiveness, and the distribution of control.45 This is

38 Ibid., 142. 39 Ibid., 168. 40 Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution, rev. and enl. ed. (Durham/N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 26. 41 Ho, Genetic Engineering, 76. 42 Referred to and quoted in Mike Fortun, ‘Genes in Our Knots’, in Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era, ed. Paul Atkinson, Peter Glasner, and Margaret Lock (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 252. 43 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 64. 44 Referred to in Donna Jeanne Haraway, [email protected]: Feminism and Technoscience (New York; London: Routledge, 1997), 60. 45 Ho, Genetic Engineering, 273. 9 contrasted to the assumptions of struggle, competition, and the ‘survival of the fittest’ that underlie the (neo-)Darwinistic understanding of the world.46 This idea of the ‘naturalness’ of democracy is, however, problematic. Comparing organic to social systems enables a conception of life in which the democratic constitution of a society is depicted as natural as the organisation of the organism, which can lead to regarding the liberal-democratic constitution of society as naturally superior to other constitutions. This bias can for example be found in a text written by Stuart Kauffman, who is one of the central advocates of a complexity theory-based approach to the organisation of life on Earth as such:

[T]he emerging sciences of complexity, as we shall see, offer fresh support for the idea of a pluralistic democratic society, providing evidence that it is not merely a human creation but part of the natural order of things…thus we will see hints of an apologia for a pluralistic society as the natural design for adaptive compromise.47

As a result of this conception, the existence of other forms of life might not only be portrayed as ‘uncivilised’, ‘regressive’ or even ‘inhuman’, but as opposing the very nature of life as such, invoking the dark sides of the politics-identity-opposition nexus and its relation to practices of security. The limitations encountered in the anti-GM movement are related to the scientific appropriation of complexity more generally. Despite the emphasis on the diffusion of agency and identity, developmentalist biology is still based on what Deleuze calls a system of generality, resemblance and reference points that includes categories of identity, difference and opposition.48 For example, Oyama talks about the ‘single system’ of the organism in which interaction does not take place between two autonomous variables, one independent (the subject), one dependent (the object), as it is for example assumed in theories of statistical interaction, but becomes a systemic feature.49 Moreover, this interaction cannot be theorised in the abstract: there is always something ‘already in place’ on which information and its operations depends, which leads to the emphasis on history in developmentalist biology.50 However, Oyama struggles to find the right terms for an appropriate understanding of ‘interaction’ without falling back to the idea of variables, or separate entities (and their identities) that can be determined independently of each other. As the next section will elucidate, from a Deleuzean perspective, the recourse to stable categories is, to a certain extent, unavoidable since a too sudden movement of becoming may turn destructive or suicidal without resort to a minimal subject and a minimum form of organisation – in other words, territorialisation. The crucial difference lies in this: Deleuze’s ontology does not conceive of territorialisation as derivative rather than primary or constituent. This prioritisation of movements and relations over organisms and entities has

46 ———, ‘Development and Evolution’, 65-7. 47 Stuart A. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: the Search for Laws of Self-organization and Complexity (London: Viking, 1995), 5, 28. (my emphasis) 48 This is due to the fact that biology is still a science. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the objects of science, which they define as functions that are presented as ‘propositions in discursive systems’, and the objects of philosophy, which they call concepts. Concepts are multiplicities that are created in philosophy and located on the Plane of Immanence. They have no spatiotemporal, but only intensive ordinates. Consequently, philosophy is an immanent exercise, including the ‘order’ it establishes. In contrast, functions are independent variables, which, unlike concepts, are not characterised by an inseparability of their components, but by ‘distinct determinations that must be matched in a discursive formation with other determinations taken in extension.’ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 1994), 20-23, 43. 49 Oyama, Ontogeny of Information, 6. 50 Ibid., 3. 10 significant implications for generating a radicalisation of political thought and action that is not oppositional but engages and creates the complex political environment.

Complexity beyond identity and opposition: becoming play

Where Foucault, as noted earlier, is interested in ‘concrete practices’ and seeks to de- ontologise, Deleuze and Guattari’s biophilosophy constitutes an ontological, or onto-political, experiment along the lines of what Connolly demands. Deleuze and Guattari’s writings impart a full acknowledgement that the denaturalisation, uprooting and disordering of naturalised categories goes hand in hand with the construction of order(ing)s of a different – or indeed the same – nature. Besides, the value of their political philosophy lies in coupling this insight with a creative utilisation of its force. Albeit charged with its own specific dangers – e.g. productive merely of a new naturalised and universalised account of the order(ing) of things (territorialisation) or, alternatively, producing an absolute deterritorialisation in which all perspective is lost (a line of pure destruction) – it is this Deleuzean onto-political conceptualisation that this section will endorse as the most promising avenue for pursuing the complex political environment beyond, on the one hand, the foreclosure of politics imposed through the nexus politics-identity-opposition and, on the other, the limits of scientific complexity theory in its continued prioritisation of organisms and entities. Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, especially as produced in A Thousand Plateaus, engages complexity thought in a number of ways. The creation of concepts such as the rhizome, molecular flows, (de)coding, (de)territorialisation, but also the play of lines, can be regarded as explorations of the ways in which radically relational systems – physical, biological, social, philosophical, linguistic, political, etc. – possess emergent forces of self- organisation and (self)/(dis)ordering irreducible to the components of the system. A plethora of elements, levels, degrees, forces, movements and events encounter in a continuous play of forces that is, on account of its mobility and relationality, radically creative. In these processes, movements of deterritorialisation are primary albeit simultaneously and necessarily compromised and reactivated by forces of striation, i.e. by reterritorialisations into prevailing systems of order and organisation in the sense of identity and opposition. In this play of movements, matter is active rather than passive and its force immanent. The connections between a Deleuzean biophilosophy and complexity theory are of relevance, first, in positing the anteriority of relations and movements rather than prioritising organisms and, secondly, in the specific materialism that derives from this. Although the reversal of the ontological primacy of the constituted individual or preformed organism over movements and relations constitutes an effort common to Deleuze and Guattari and complexity theorists, neither the former nor the latter seek to do away with the organism altogether. Complexity theory is itself a complex and shifting field comprising diverging perspectives, e.g. regarding the continued relevance of the organism as an order of life. In line with the GMO opponents referred to above, complexity theorists such as Brian Goodwin and Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela regard the organism as a centre of action even if its boundaries are blurred and shifting.51 Deleuze and Guattari, whilst composing a political

51 Goodwin, Brian, ‘Organisms and Minds: the dialectics of the animal-human interface in biology’ in Tim Ingold (ed.), What is an Animal?. London: Routledge, 1994, p. 105; Maturana, Humberto R. and Varela, Francisco J, Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Company, 1980; Varela et al, The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, p. 198. For a discussion of the commonalities and distinctions between Maturana and Varela and Deleuze and Guattari, see: Ansell Pearson, Keith, Germinal Life. The difference and repetition of Deleuze. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 152-154; John Protevi, ‘Deleuze, Guattari and Emergence’, Paragraph: A 11 philosophy that prioritises movements, relations, forces and flows deny neither that organisms, individuals and populations exist nor that they are capable of contributing to life.52 According to Deleuze and Guattari, the organism is a stratum, that is to say the result of processes of stratification that capture, striate and rigidify life through their direction and organisation into particular – static – forms of movement. Stratification thus produces a particular form of order(ing) and organisation reductive of and negating life’s creative potential. However, they claim,

not all Life is confined to the organic strata: rather, the organism is that which life sets against itself in order to limit itself, and there is a life all the more intense, all the more powerful for being inorganic.53

Deleuze and Guattari oppose the organism as a stratified form of organisation to the body, which constitutes a set of relational and affective capacities. Put differently, organisms, individuals and subjects are stratifications – immobilisations of life – resultant upon prior and radically relational forces and movements rather than vice versa. The image of the organism is merely one form of what a body is capable of. Deleuze and Guattari oppose a different mode of individuation to the movement of stratification into an organism: becoming. A line of becoming has beginning nor end, only a middle [un milieu].54 Influenced by Simondon, they construct the individual organism as no more than a temporary consolidation in a continuous flow of life as a becoming of durational forces.55 This implies that the related categories of identity and opposition ‘do not have the substantiability and durability often attributed to them.’56 Simondon explains individual autonomy in terms of a being’s co-constitutive connectivity to an associated milieu, which constitutes its source of vitality.57 It is through its associated milieu that a being is ‘self-conditioning in its functionings’.58 The implication is that the unity of a being lies in its difference, in its ‘transductive’ capacity to pass out of phase with itself.59 Hence individuation is a matter of becoming through a milieu-relationality. Individuation is accordingly not simply the construction of an organism as a stratified organisation; for Deleuze, individuation is ‘mobile, strangely supple, fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins.’60 If modes of individuation may take many a different form or becoming, then its stratification into molar organisation, which Deleuze describes as the politics of the State and its organisations, constitutes its most limiting and problematic outcome in its foreclosure of life’s becoming – which does not mean that it dispensable. The order(ing) and organisation effected through processes of stratification, of which the organism constitutes an instance, is not merely problematic but also useful. Whilst problematically foreclosing, bounding off and capturing creative forces of becoming, strata are at once required to avoid these forces turning destructive. One must retain a minimum of forms and functions, and a minimal subject, in

Journal of Modern Critical Theory 29, no. 2 (2006): 19-39. 52 Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 153-154; Bonta, Mark and Protevi, John, Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 5. 53 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 554. See also p. 298. 54 Ibid., 323. 55 Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 145; Marks, ‘Introduction’, in Deleuze and Science, 6. 56 Widder, Political Theory, 9. 57 Alberto Toscano ‘Technical Culture and the Limit of Interaction: A Note on Simondon’ in Interact or Die! Ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing, 2007), 202. 58 Gilbert Simondon, ‘Technical Individualization’, in Interact or Die! 207. 59 Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 90-91. 60 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 320. 12 order to extract materials and affects - i.e. to produce further becomings. Stratification is, in other words, an inevitable process that is ‘beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others.’61 As Ansell Pearson puts it:

[t]he aim is not, therefore, to negate the organism but to arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of it by situating it within the wider field of forces, intensities, and durations that give rise to it and which do not cease to involve a play between nonorganic and stratified life.62

Life, the force of living, involves a play of nonorganic forces and stratified elements. This play is in fact more complex than described by Ansell Pearson for nonorganic life may be stratified, whereas organic life may be(come) destratified. Besides, the play is dynamic, which means that elements change character: relations produce difference whilst being transformed themselves; assemblages emerge, relate, clash or merge; bodies are striated or take flight, connect or abort; etc. Deleuze and Guattari level their attack not at the organism per se but at the organism understood as a specific mode of hierarchical and transcendental organisation.63 Thus, Deleuze and Guattari do not simply advocate the creativity of bodies or milieux of becoming over the rigidity and stasis of organism of centralisation and molarity. The stratification of movement into orders of organisation is both beneficial and unfortunate: the organism stifles becoming, frames and immobilises life’s creative potential, yet, by providing a stabilising order, processes of organisation simultaneously prevent forces of becoming from turning destructive and enable further deterritorialising movements, different becomings. Rather than a diametric opposition, what emerges here is a play of milieux, a play involving a wide variety of elements, forces, degrees, affects, movements, relations, forms, levels and events, which clash, merge, mix, become, destroy, produce, fracture, etc., etc. Put differently, ‘nature’ is not ‘naturally’ democratic, as argued by complexity theorists such as Ho and Kauffman. As alluded to in the introduction, becoming is of a different kind than filiation by heredity. Involving processes of relationality among heterogeneous forces and elements, becoming is monstrous, consisting of ‘unnatural participations’ and ‘interkingdoms’. This is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘the only way Nature operates – against itself.’64 The monstrosity of life’s becoming holds the paradoxical quality of being both the manner in which life operates according to its nature of creative difference beyond its own limits and hence the way in which nature operates against itself. A Deleuzean onto-politics of becoming thereby challenges the liberal-democratic superiority thesis qua complexity in a double manner. First, complexity implies that nature operates not democratically, but in a play of forces that may be – at once – productive, harmonious, destructive, ordering, disturbing, violent, etc. Secondly, one cannot predict in advance how this play plays out, or what the outcome will be. Nature and politics are not teleological but becoming. Deleuze and Guattari thus distinguish their thought from the tradition of Newtonian science, firstly, via a reversal of the order of priority of properties and relations. Secondly, ‘nomad science’ is opposed to hylomorphism, which tradition posits the passivity of matter. In a hylomorphic model an external power is required to order chaotic matter; production implies the imposition of a transcendent form on passive matter.65 Influenced by Simondon,

61 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 45. 62 Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, 154. 63 Ibid. 64 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 267. 65 Protevi, Political Physics, 8. See also: Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 66-68; Marks, ‘Introduction’; Gilbert Simondon, ‘Simondon and the Physico-Biological Genesis of the Individual’, transl. 13 who proposes that matter should be regarded as a continuous flux rather than inert mass, Deleuze and Guattari develop a materialism in which matter is energetic and mobile. Matter is energy, or matter-energy.66 By positing the immanent self-ordering capacities of matter Deleuze and Guattari collapse the distinction between the inertia of non-organic matter and the self-organising potentials characteristic of the organism, which has functioned as a founding premise of both modern science and modern political theory.67 If matter is self-ordering and self-organising, then force, movement and productivity are inherent to matter, or rather to flows of matter-energy. As John Protevi describes, the flux of matter-energy is self-ordering at certain thresholds of temperature, pressure, velocity, density, connectivity and so on, and thereby productive of self-ordering patterns such as crystallisation, turbulence, autocatalysis, etc.68 The identification of matter and energy blurs the distinctions between the organic and the non-organic, the living and the non-living, as well as between the material and the immaterial. What emerges is a world of continuous flux; of continuous movements of matter- energy. In this world movements and relations are primary. Moreover, movement constitutes an intensive continuum productive of difference. It is, in short, a world of/in becoming. Nonetheless, this world is simultaneously and inevitably characterised by processes of stratification, consolidation and capture; by the formation of structures and forms of organisation. These latter processes are, however, consequent upon, albeit intricately entangled with, the mobility and relationality of (dis)ordering forces of becoming. In the play of movements of matter-energy, forces of ordering and disordering, of perturbation and stabilisation, of connectivity, divergence, stasis, becoming, destruction, difference, etc. encounter one another in a complexity of dynamic and continuously changing interactions: distinctions blur, limits are surpassed, thresholds are crossed, frames are erected, territories are captured and limits drawn, orders are (dis)ordered, oppositions are established and once more uprooted and so on and so forth. The play of forces is continuous and continuously becoming, ad infinitum. In short, Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with complexity thought decentres the human being in favour of the primacy of movements and relations and, in relation to this, challenges the categories of the organism and the organic. More radically still, in Deleuze and Guattari’s biophilosophy the distinctions and boundaries between humans, organisms, individuals, animals and matter – i.e. between organism and environment, between living and non-living, between material and immaterial – become radically contingent and shifting and, from the perspective of becoming, redundant. No longer is the individual organism the basic or central unit of life for it exists only as part of a relational order(ing) or a complex play of forces in continuous movement and becoming. In this regard Deleuze and Guattari are more radical than scientific complexity theory, which remains premised on the primacy of the organism. Whereas the strand of complexity theory adopted by Ho refer to relationality in terms of the blurring the boundaries, Deleuze and Guattari argue that such boundaries are derivative – constructed afterwards. Their starting point is not an entity or boundary; they start in the middle [au mileu], with the becoming of forces, which are subsequently/simultaneously stratified into entities, objects, subjects and the relations between them. Albeit both inevitable and necessary – and even productive in some respect – the organism is a limiting case, a stratification of the body, consequent upon the striation of

Taylor Adkins, http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/translation-simondon-and-the-physico- biological-genesis-of-the-individual/, Chapter I. 66 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 449-45, 169; Marks, ‘Introduction’, 4-5. 67 Protevi, Political Physics, 7-9. 68 Ibid., 10. 14 relations and movements, which are both primary and vital. Relational and mobile forces of matter-energy constitute the fundamental connective flows and forces that characterise the (potentialities of the) becoming of life. This continuous, complex and mobile play of forces is characterised by all manner of encounters, clashes, mixtures, frictions, productions, destructions, consolidations, flights, (de)territorialisations, etc.; and productive of ordering and disordering, perturbation and organisation, conflict and agreement. Although their creative conceptualisations are phrased in terms not conventionally understood to be political, this play of forces is, for Deleuze and Guattari, directly political. Their radical move consists in the attack on (the continued reliance on and centralisation of) the organism. Indeed, by highlighting the primacy of movements and relations their biophilosophy offers a profound challenge both to the conventional account of politics grounded in identity and opposition, and to those strands of complexity thought that stress the role of the organism. Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition to the prioritisation of the organism/organisation as a central unit of explanation and production not merely decentres the human being: the principle of movements/relations blurs distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, the living and the non-living, the material and the immaterial. Deleuzean thought and scientific complexity theory thus produce different movements on crucial points. In complexity accounts such as that of Ho, life and politics continue to be understood in terms of organisation – i.e. politics is not detached from the governance of order based on a rationality in defence of a particular order of life. Deleuze and Guattari’s biophilosophy, by contrast, proposes that not organisation but movements and relations lie at the foundation of political (dis)order(ing) and constitute the vital connection between politics and life. Secondly, and relatedly, Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of becoming not merely moves beyond the organism by positing the primacy of movements and relations, this movement implies a simultaneous move beyond the capture of political life in instrumental terms. Becoming, as the continuous creation of difference, is by definition non-instrumental and excessive. Adopting a Spinozan ethics, Deleuze’s thought opens to difference; to that which is more and still to come; to that which cannot be rationally instrumentalised or predicted in advance.

Conclusion

This paper has posed a double challenge to the study of political resistance in critical security studies. It has sought to sever the nexus politics-identity-opposition in favour of a politics of resistance in terms of complexity qua becoming. Arguing that the construction of an oppositional framework exemplifies a misconception of the organisation of life that starts with bounded entities and identities, the article has, secondly, sought to highlight that this is, and must be, an ontological effort. Our endeavour has accordingly been an onto-political one: to (un)ground political life. This effort has highlighted that questions of uncertainty, predictability, instrumentality and excess feature prominently in the debate surrounding GMOs and in complexity theory, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s biophilosophy. One of the major arguments of GMO opponents, contested by GMO supporters, concerns the uncertainty of life, i.e. the lack of predictability of what altered genes will do. The acknowledgement and embracement of uncertainty is equally one of the political implications of Deleuze’s ontology. In the last couple of years, a variety of critical security scholars have pointed out that regimes of global governance, too, have appropriated complexity theory, putting uncertainty and becoming at the heart of their governmental rationality. Dillon and Reid, for example, argue that our contemporary biopolitical logic interprets 15

life as an informationally driven contingently adaptive process of complex emergence; which emergence necessarily establishes a continuous emergency of emergence, since life that is always becoming is life that is simultaneously also readily construed as becoming-dangerous.69

The authors conclude that as for resistance, what should be stressed is the impossibility of saying ‘definitively what the human is’, or indeed what it is ‘for’.70 They suggest that precisely in this impossibility lies the possibility of a different account of politics, which is warranted due to the flagrant and arbitrary destructiveness of contemporary biopolitical regimes. Albeit only briefly elaborated, their argument is that because life is not ‘for’ anything, a new account of politics would revolve around the idea of the ‘good for nothing’.71 This idea, that the possibility of a new account of politics lies in the impossibility to say what life is ‘for’, that people are ‘good for nothing’, is of course, as they themselves point out, an onto-political claim.72 Yet, Dillon and Reid stop short of pursuing this move: their effort is to critique and not to create. Our argument is that one cannot stop short of onto-politics. Hence this article not merely claims life's unpredictability, it actively pursues the becoming of life. Asserting that political life is definited, first and foremost, in terms of movements and relations is to claim that life continuously becomes different to itself in ways unpredictable, indeterminable and fleeting. Moreover, we have maintained in this article that the encounter with life’s profundity, indeterminacy and excess expressed in a plurality of movements, relations and forces, Deleuzean thought and scientific complexity theory produce movements that go beyond the biopolitical interpretation of life’s becoming that is analysed by Dillon and Reid. First, the GMO controversy shows that the adoption of complexity thought does not take place in all regimes of governance, and even if it does, it does so only partially. Thus, rather than proposing or imposing a biopolitical framework qua complexity to analyse and/or critique liberal governance per se, more research is required on the extent to which and the ways in which complexity plays out in particular cases – i.e. within the particular (complex) political milieux. Moreover, Deleuze’s understanding of uncertainty is far more radical, as it is related to an understanding of life as continuously becoming, beyond the bounds of its constitutive identity, always capable of invention and transformation in ways that undermine and render obsolete existing models and restrictions. From a Deleuzean perspective, therefore, politics is not a matter of binaries, oppositions and entities; nor is it simply a line of flight or becoming that uproots and destroys such categorisations. Rather, politics becomes the mo(ve)ment in- between the rupture of the line of flight and its re-appropriation into stable entitities, identities and orders of governance, whilst the course of this mo(ve)ment cannot be predicted in advance. Insofar, politics is always already depoliticising once we seek to understand, explain and regulate it. Yet, depoliticisation is inevitable for without such movements of reterritorialisation politics may well turn suicidal. Therefore, taking Deleuze's radicalisation of complexity as a starting point (or mediating movement) for politics does not lead us beyond opposition altogether. Rather, we enter a play of becoming forces beyond identity/opposition and re-ordering movements producing binary orderings. The point is that forces of becoming are primary rather than derivative, and that this play is not oppositional but complex – self-organising – thus producing complex effects, becoming different to itself whilst being negotiated by re-ordering forces. Politics lies somewhere in-between these movements, in the middle [au milieux].

69 Dillon and Reid, Liberal Way of War, 147. 70 Ibid: 149. 71 Ibid: 150. 72 Ibid. 16

An example of a politics in-between, taken once again from the GMO controversy, will serve to draw out some of the implications of this move. Both GM supporters and opponents use the concept of ‘democracy’ to legitimise their respective argument. In the Pusztai affair, the Social Issues Research Centre, which doubts the validity of Pusztai’s research and firmly supports genetic engineering (GE), stresses that NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are ‘unelected’.73 This argument suggests that illegitimate political interests drive these organisations – illegitimate because they are not legitimised by the people via an election. However, with a similar argument, British opponents of GE blame the British government of ‘undemocratically’ ignoring that the ‘great majority of British people’ rejects GM food.74 In an article in The Guardian, George Monbiot goes so far as to say that in its support of the biotech industry, the government is ‘forcing us to eat [GM products]’ without giving any choice.75 Both sides reject ‘undemocratic’ processes, but have a different understanding of what the concept implies: for the former argument, democracy refers to the will of the people, which is represented by the government via formal elections, while for the latter, this will is presumably revealed in opinion polls and consumer choices, to which government is supposed to react. From a Deleuzean complexity perspective, both sides remain grounded in molar organisation. Starting with entities and identities that produce binary relations – e.g. government vs public or scientist vs public – these conceptualisations generate a territorialised notion of democracy; politics in its most depoliticised form. However, as Deleuze and Guattari’s thought also exemplifies, perhaps the germ of resistance qua becoming lies, not in an opposite or in a beyond, but within the binary order itself. The argument put forward by GE opponents implies a diffusion of the referent of ‘the public’, which means that democracy is delinked from formal representation. Maybe counter- intuitively, this referent-diffusion can actually serve as a challenge to molar modes of governance. If the traditional ideal of science and its dissociation from the public enables the constitution of a clear subject–object distinction (informing scientist – to be informed public) via the establishment of a truth monopoly, dissolving the referent of the public also dissolves the foundation of this construction, enabling science to acknowledge and reflect its cultural and political embeddedness. It also enables explicit reference to norms that can then be politically confirmed or contested. This might make science more political and thereby break traditional boundaries that relate concepts such as democracy to strictly formalised rules. It permits new notions of relationality and connectivity, which do not only challenge what was (and still is) regarded as separate and distinct, but also what is defined as subject and object – a politics in-between. Ethics, science, emotions and politics become mixed up, leading to a

treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that…help to constitute a certain point of view which can be very useful as a tool for analyzing what’s going on now (…).76

Politics becomes a play that eradicates any space for objective and disembedded ‘apolitical’ truth; a play of becoming that is not grounded in subjects, objects, identities, and opposition, although simultaneously productive of and challenging such categorisations. Politics takes place, creates and becomes a milieu in the original sense of the word, as a force in-between that accounts for the non-contiguous transmisison of motion, or action at a

73 Social Issues Research Centre, ‘Pusztai Published’. 74 Arpad Pusztai, ‘Genetic Engineering - Genetechnology: Is it Salvation or Curse for the 21st Century?’ (2008) 75 George Monbiot, ‘Feeding Us Lies’, The Guardian, 13 February 1999, http://www.monbiot.com/archives/1999/02/13/feeding-us-lies. 76 Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (New York: New Press, 1997), 261. 17 distance77; and in the Deleuzean sense as a line of becoming which has beginning nor end, only a middle [un milieu].78 In Terranova’s words, the milieu

expresses the unruly potential of series of events unfolding through the non-linear and chaotic ‘action-at-a-distance’ between dispersed and scattered bodies.79

As a line of becoming, the milieu creates different modes of connectivity and relationality, thus opening to other modes of individuation, ‘less stabilized and more unruly, capable of individuating new transnational and translocal subjectivities.’80

77 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, Graham Burchell (transl.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 20-21; Westfall, Richard S., The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanism and Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp 140-143. See also: Newton, Isaac, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, Andrew Motte (transl.). Kessinger Publishing Company, 2003, p. 366. 78 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 554. See also, p. 298. 79 Terranova, Tiziana, ‘Another Life. The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics’, Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6. (2009): 242. 80 Ibid. 18