THE WORLD WITHOUT OUTSIDE

Abstract

The world is all that there is. In the world, ontology and epistemology coincide. The thing and the perspective are part of it, scale is ingested in its multiplicity, communication stops at the world's edge. By reading together Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence and Niklas Luhmann's proto-global concept of Weltgesellschaft (“world society”), I suggest a conceptualisation of the world as the materiality of the multiple spaces of creation in an insular, all-inclusive immanence. Deprived of an outside, the world pushes its own understanding of circumference through, first, the expansion of its own limits through the process of worlding, and, second, the multiplication of modes of material (self-)production through its process of othering. Thus, the world swells up from the inside and expands on both the material and the semantic level, producing a multiplicity of fractal microcosms. Issues of responsibility and justice arise that are intricately linked to the materiality of the world and take place in and between the various bodies and spaces of the world but without an overarching hierarchy or principle. This approach is a way of counteracting the all-pervasive Hegelian understanding of synthesis, arguing instead for a plenitude that brims with positivity and that can never become fully complete. The world remains its own infinite process of worlding.

Keywords:

• world
• Luhmann
• Deleuze
• immanence
• responsibility
• spatial justice

Notes

I am grateful for the excellent comments by the anonymous reviewers as well as to Sharron FitzGerald for her insightful help.

1 Negarestani.

2 Blake, “A Preface to Pornotheology” 181.

3 Ibid. 177.

4 Rilke.

5 Llewelyn 307.

6 Morin, La Méthode. See also idem, “From the Concept of System to the Paradigm of Complexity.”

7 Spinoza.

8 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Niklas Luhmann.

9 Luhmann, “World Society as a Social System.”

10 For my treatment of this and Luhmann in general, see Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Niklas Luhmann.

11 Idem, “Critical Autopoiesis.”

12 Maturana and Varela.

13 Ibid. 9.

14 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft 95.

15 Ibid.

16 Lyotard 81.

17 Luhmann, “World Society as a Social System”; see, for example, Moeller 52ff., Geyer and van der Zouwen, and Roberts for a more “synthetic” understanding in terms of the world.

18 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft 93.

19 For the distinction, see Moeller.

20 Nancy.

21 Ibid. 51.

22 Ibid. 28.

23 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “The Successful Failing of Legal Theory.”

24 Clam 160.

25 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft.

26 Nancy 61.

27 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Spatial Justice.”

28 Luhmann, Social Systems.

29 Deleuze and Guattari.

30 Ibid. 16.

31 Ibid. 24.

32 Bennett; Braidotti.

33 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical 127–28.

34 Idem, Difference and Repetition 141.

35 Deleuze and Guattari 10.

36 Deleuze, The Fold.

37 Ibid. 31.

38 Ibid. 34.

39 Idem, Foucault 98.

40 Idem, The Fold 25.

41 See idem, Difference and Repetition.

42 Idem, The Fold 35.

43 Ibid. 39.

44 Ibid. 28.

45 Ibid. 8.

46 Deleuze and Guattari.

47 Hallward 57.

48 Ibid. 65.

49 Spinoza 3, P2 Sch.

50 Hallward 90.