ONTOGENESIS BEYOND COMPLEXITY

This special issue is the result of multiple years of collaboration among a diverse group of scholars, scientists, and practitioners. This group came to be known as the Ontogenetics Process Group (OPG). From the outset, what distinguished this unruly collective seemed to be a shared nostalgia for an intellectual space where scientists, humanists, and artists could engage in theoretical exchange without the pressure of superficial “outputs” to satisfy administrators, mixed with an insatiable hunger for the formation of an interdisciplinary conceptual frame capable of responding to pressing questions emerging not just from biological and computational systems (explored here in the essays by Longo, Nocek, Thurtle, and Wolfe), but also from the domains of social and cultural practice (plumbed in the work of Kauffman, Bennett, Espelie, and Wild). As the “roundtable” conversation shows, while the focus of this issue is tilted toward the sciences, the group has a keen interest in asking after the system dynamics, principles of organization and development, and modes of coherence that might obtain in the domains of law, the economy, and so on – and the extent to which those might be illuminated by models from the mathematical and biological sciences.¹

This kind of interdisciplinary theoretical endeavor has a long history, of course, one that, in recent decades, has been largely occluded by the rise of Big Data, the neo-Darwinian paradigm and its obsession with the genome as an engineerable “book of life,” and the assumption that “hard,” tenurable scientific knowledge is fundamentally quantitative in nature. It’s entirely possible, however, that that hegemony will, in the longer view, prove to be misguided or, at the very least, oversold, and in that longer view, the OPG might be situated genealogically somewhere between the intellectual investments of the Theoretical Biology Club in the 1930s (organicism), the interdisciplinary ambitions of the Macy Conferences in the 1940s and 1950s (that included figures as diverse as Warren McCulloch, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead), and the restless game-changing and institution-building work of the Santa Fe Institute in the 1980s and 1990s. From the very beginning, Stuart Kauffman, one of the original members of Santa Fe Institute, and a founding member of the OPG, would often remark (and we’re paraphrasing), “there is really something here that the complexity scientists over there at the Institute won’t be able to get their heads around.”

What Kauffman is referring to is the fundamental challenge that OPG researchers pose to what has become the lingua franca of theoretical biology: complex systems theory, on a quantitative and mathematical template. For all the descriptive and predictive power that the complexity sciences offer (the ability to compute feedback systems, recursive networks, emergent dynamics, etc.), they also presume that the living world in all of its modalities (biological, semiotic, economic, affective, social) can be reduced to finite schema of description that delimits in advance all possible outcomes. The mathematics of complexity function like a “grid of intelligibility” for physicists, biologists, economists, information scientists, sociologists, and now many humanists; they permit the sciences of the living and nonliving to speak the same language. What distinguishes this group of researchers, and this special issue of Angelaki in particular, is the breadth of disciplinary and methodological frameworks brought to bear on the possibilities and limitations of this proposition. More than this, what is proposed here are conceptual architectures for the living that are not only irreducible to physico-mathematical frames of reference but that are also as vital as the phenomena they wish to express. In short: life is more complex than complexity.

In a sense, this may not seem like an entirely new proposition for the theoretical humanities. There is a rich genealogy of continental thought that engages with the contemporary biosciences through the vital materialist philosophy of Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Canguilhem, and others (see Ansell-Pearson; Grosz; Braidotti; Thacker). Bennett, Nocek, Thurtle, and Epperson address these touchstones in their articles, with different angles of emphasis, to be sure. However, several features of the OPG’s treatment of the biosciences and related scientific fields resist some of the unfortunate clichés that have come to characterize humanist engagements with science, particularly under the broad rubric of “materialism.”

On the one hand, and in the interest of a more robust and rigorous form of interdisciplinarity, this collection opposes the pervasive tendency to keep scientific abstraction and mathematical formalism at a safe distance from philosophical and critical reflection, even or especially when the former are essential to engage head on. For example, Bergson’s vitalist critique of Darwinian mechanism (via the élan vital) has served as a rallying cry for many neo-vital materialists and contemporary biophilosophers, but it has very little to say about the actual work of evolutionary and developmental biology as such. Rather, this abstract principle of vital force contributes to an overly general critique of scientific abstraction that privileges a metaphysics of vitality over and against what is already an often rudimentary understanding of mechanism. Similarly, the Deleuzoguattarian fad of drawing on von Uexküll’s ethology, Leibniz’s calculus, and Jacob and Monod’s lac operon involves only the loosest appropriation of the hard sciences. This may tell us about continental philosophy’s motivations and interests in engaging the sciences, but it tells us very little about the practices of working scientists and how philosophy and theory can learn from them. The point is that the conceptual work of continental theorists is often sanitized from the concerns of working scientists and what counts as success in their respective fields. These immunization strategies are undercut at every turn in this special issue, and this is nowhere more evident than in the work of Longo, Kauffman, Epperson, and Sha. Indeed, the methods, problems, and concerns of scientists and mathematicians (from theoretical biology, information theory, physics, and topology) are on full display in their work. These perspectives augment the “second-order” observations and ramifications of scientific work for the larger social context in the articles by Espelie, Wolfe, Nocek, and Bennett, adding another layer of critical urgency to the many issues raised about the computational sciences and algorithmic styles of reasoning generally.

There is, on the other hand, another tendency in the theoretical humanities from which this project also wishes to steer clear. In the wake of the so-called speculative turn in the humanities, which has undergone a number of facelifts since its inception in the mid-2000s, we find a persistent, if entirely overblown, faith placed in the hard sciences as a “foundational” enterprise. The wager is that the theoretical sciences (which de-correlate thought from being) can deliver the “great outdoors” (Meillassoux) that has been apparently missing from post-Kantian philosophy. Of course, these realisms and materialisms, as well as their many offspring, were by no means the first philosophical programs to privilege scientific and mathematical abstraction (e.g., Badiou; DeLanda), but their efforts have contributed to a decisive shift in orientation within the humanities in the name of the “real.”

This story has been told many times, and there is no use recycling the history of its emergence here (see Mackay; Gratton; Harman), but what is nonetheless worth underscoring is that the “scientific turn” in the speculative humanities has less to do with philosophers and cultural theorists working alongside theoretical scientists, or engaging in genuine debate about scientific and mathematical reason, than with good old-fashioned humanists cherry-picking from the hard sciences (mostly physics, mathematics, and computer science). Frustrated theorists and philosophers have managed to negate one set of organizing principles (those that underlie the situated practices of humans) and replace it with another: mathematical formalism (Meillassoux), or lifeless matter (Brassier), or abstract universalism and computational intelligence (Negarestani), or automation and Promethean design (Bratton).

This is not to say that scientists, social scientists, and humanists have not been assembled in recent years to address the limitations of the computational sciences. An excellent example is the edited collection, Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back into Biology (Henning and Scarfe). At the center of this work is a commitment to using the underlying principles of process philosophy (and related conceptions) as the basis for addressing what computational practices have so far been unable to explain: in particular, the self in biological self-organization. On the one hand, it is remarkable that theoretical biologists are drawing (and not superficially) on Whitehead, Peirce, and even Kant for conceptual clarity. But on the other hand, the topics they explore are circumscribed by the presupposed relevance of a process-based metaphysics of life. What’s more, continental genealogies of nonhuman process, ecology, and subjectivity are entirely missing from the collection. Other collections and volumes have attempted to explore similar themes, most notably, Life and Process: Towards a New Biophilosophy (Koutroufinis), but here too we find the already-presumed sufficiency of process philosophy, and a complete lack of engagement with other conceptual histories.

Instead, the work done in the OPG meetings, and showcased in this issue, revolves around a genuine concern for scientific styles of reasoning, and in particular for the problems, concerns, and assumptions that animate scientific work. (Here, for example, a problem internal to the discipline of biology – the fact, as Denis Noble has suggested, that for decades theoretical biologists and experimental biologists have had almost nothing to say to each other – has stakes and implications that can be better illuminated, perhaps, from outside the discipline itself, when philosophy and anthropology shed light on what counts as “real” “science” and how that, in turn, overdetermines what counts as “life” (Noble 169, 235–37).) And what emerges from this engagement is not the ascendance of a new transcendental principle or (what amounts to the same thing) foundational bedrock, derived from the physico-mathematical sciences, but just the opposite: that theorists working in these scientific fields are searching for conceptual frameworks that can express the fact that certain material and energetic systems (living systems) exceed the computational and conceptual systems designed to understand them, a domain in which the ontological and the epistemological domains enter into a zone of strange (and unavoidable) entanglement.

As Alicia Juarrero asks,

Does emergence therefore simply come down to an epistemological ignorance, to our human inability to exhaustively list every ceteris paribus and disjunctive condition (even though such an exhaustive set of conditions in fact exists and there is a 1:1 correlation between each fully specified set of conditions and corresponding emergent property?). (518)

And Kauffman’s answer, in short, is that “it is impossible to predict emergent properties even in principle because the categories necessary to frame them do not exist until after the fact” (qtd in Juarrero 518). And this is where, as Wolfe suggests, what one might think of as the astringent force of a fundamentally deconstructive sensibility is crucial to doing justice to the challenge of complexity and resisting the temptation to extract yet another “final” version (whether realist or idealist, transcendental or foundational) that anchors the thinking of complexity and, in the process, evacuates it. This detotalizing impulse may take the form of deconstruction proper, or it may be found in Bennett’s attention to the thick description of the practice-based entanglement of minding and mattering and the worlds they create (both micro and macro), in Longo’s insistence on the specific boundedness of time and place of the biological organism, or in the theorization of the unentailed evolution of the biosphere and the fundamentally circular and recursive logic of living systems that we find in Kauffman and fellow travelers such as Anna Soto, Alicia Juarrero, and, of course, Longo himself.

The site on which these investigations converge, then, isn’t just complexity, but constitutively irreducible complexity, of the sort increasingly mitigated against in the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) world ruled by “governmentality” and “medicalization” (to use Foucault’s well-known terms), where “science” is increasingly seen tout court as applied science. That complexity may be converged upon from various directions, of course. From one orientation (the one given “goth” voice in Thurtle’s essay), difference, alterity, the chaotic, “noise,” and so on is a desideratum, something to be liberated from falsely reductive forms of identity, recovered and valorized. For another orientation, it is a problem that systems of organized complexity have to figure out a way to solve if they are to persist in the world: not “problem” in the sense of “bad” but rather in the adaptive and pragmatic sense, as a puzzle or a challenge. Either way, yet another turn of the screw here is to recognize that this domain of alterity, “noise,” and chaos is itself an enormous asset in the larger gambit called “complexity.”

Order and noise (to use shorthand) are not opposites but are rather co-implicated, and the liminal zone where they converge is, for us, the zone of interest, one that requires a new kind of dynamic, non-reductive theory whose most familiar shibboleth in contemporary continental philosophy is probably “repetition with difference” and its variants. As Yuk Hui puts it,

Recursivity is not only a mechanism that can effectively “domesticate” contingency […]; it is also a mechanism that allows novelty to occur, not simply as something coming from outside but also as an internal transformation […] [T]he recursive mode can effectively integrate contingency in order to produce something new; in other words, it demands constant contingencies. (138)

But since the alterity or negativity of temporality is at the (non)core of this process on both the micro- and macro-levels – hence our emphasis on “dynamic” – we are dealing here not with “the identity of identity and non-identity” (as in Hegel), but rather “the non-identity of identity and non-identity,” a logic that is “heterogeneous” (as Derrida puts it) “to the dialectic and the calculable” (116), to the logic of any identitarian scheme, one that Epperson’s essay explores in cross-mapping theoretical physics and the work of Whitehead and Simondon on the processes of “ontogenesis” and “individuation.”

If this introduction reads like it is preparing the genealogical and intellectual ground for the claims made by the OPG, then it is because spaces for such theoretical engagement do not yet exist. Rarely, if ever, do we see an information scientist, a complexity theorist, a design and organizational theorist, a mathematician, a historian of science, an experimental filmmaker, an anthropologist of science and religion, a philosopher of physics, and a couple of theoretical humanists assemble in order to contemplate modes of living that are more complex than complexity. At the heart of this shared inquiry is a deep and sustained interest in biology, in questions of self-organization, morphogenesis, epigenetics, cultural inheritance systems (soft inheritance), downward and distributed causation, as well as the implications of quantum physics in these domains. But in taking these questions on board, especially in light of the work Longo and Kauffman have done on the limitations of complex systems science, two things become startlingly clear: (1) that cultural, political, and economic systems cannot be isolated from the physicochemical emergence of living phenomena; and (2) that the reigning models of complexity need to be paired with non-computational and non-algorithmic modes of inquiry in order to better express the unfolding of living worlds. And yet, just what relevance these extra-biological systems have and what modes of (non-algorithmic) inquiry are most appropriate (ethnography, mathematics, conceptual art, philosophy, speculative design) are not agreed upon and remain open for debate.

This lack of agreement should not be treated as a limitation, however. Where other anthologies, volumes, or working groups would demand a clear path forward, and might even insist upon formulating a “new science” out of the non-algorithmic study of the living, we maintain that this is precisely the style of thinking that leads to the metaphysics of life that we aim to critique. We therefore see the radical plurality of views, which do not always sit comfortably together, as a strength that forcefully demonstrates the resistance of the living to metaphysical capture.

Notes

1 Somewhere along the away, OPG researchers realized that these conversations were too important to go unrecorded. But because we did not intend for these meetings to yield specific outcomes (like a publishable roundtable conversation), many conversations went unrecorded. We would like to pay tribute to those individuals who were essential to the development of the Ontogenetics Process Group, but whose utterances are not transcribed here. These individuals include: Erin Espelie, Helga Wild, Giuseppe Longo, Patricia Pisters, Wim Hordijk, and Peter Sloot.