We don’t just start in the middle, when things are already underway. We remain in the middle: unmoored, unbounded, unanchored. There is no origin point where our pre-entangled life rests smugly in its autonomy, like a phantasmic engine of melancholic nostalgia. Nor is there an end point where we finally arrive at solitude, divested of all our pesky attachments and obligations. Entanglement – as an ethos, an orientation, a methodological tool and a description of life – is always emerging, always on the move. A great deal of critical language gets us into these muddy waters, but too much of it wants to get us out again, onto the safer shores of stability, foundation and stasis. To resist the ever-present lure of a safe harbour, and to help us remain in media res, we need to reanimate our understandings of entanglement with a much more dynamic vocabulary. Starting in the middle means we cannot place this ‘object of knowledge’ in front of us and issue the rather petulant demand: ‘what is entanglement?’ Such an act of distancing already assumes that it is a quantifiable state of being with static properties and clear parameters. Starting in the middle means a more careful, speculative and provisional mode of questioning that inhabits entanglement, knowing full well that our sticky attachments are always open to mutation. It allows us to ask, rather more patiently; ‘how have these subjects, objects, ideas and relations become entangled with each other’? As thinkers attuned to the work of power, we must be bold enough to push that query further; ‘how does an emergent entanglement cement itself into a durable reality that occludes, displaces and does violence? Who/what is doing the labour required to sustain that durable reality, and who/what is contesting it, at what cost’?
What follows is an unapologetic tribute to Foster’s legendary ‘ABCs of Contemporary Design’ which re-calibrated the landscape of design practice as a set of political interventions.
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With Foster in mind, I do not advance a systematic argument with a singular narrative arc, but instead offer some possible entrance points into re-imagining entanglement as a more dynamic coming together and falling apart. But there is something else at stake here: the entities that come together – that entangle – are never just humans agreeing or disagreeing over how to live a good life. What comes together is always more-than-human. This means that the lexicon of entanglement offered here must not just foreground dynamism, it must also contest the anthropocentric frame that sees cognition, language and meaning-making as ‘human-only’ practices. It must put process-oriented thinking to work in a landscape where non-human actors – things, objects, viruses, animals, data, ideas, habitats, ecosystems – are understood as having the capacity to act and affect change. To put it another way, the more-than-human must be central to any effort to re-craft vocabulary, make meaning and communicate. These two ideas of entanglement – that it is always dynamic and more-than-human – attach this lexicon to generative work across many different disciplines committed to a relational ontology.
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What all of us share is a sense that what really matters is not the immutable essence of a thing (e.g. a tree, a state, a weather system, an ideology), but rather its constitutive relations with other things. The secret is out. Nothing can be isolated from its plural, messy and mutable relations: we are always in the middle of multiple contaminations. I do not underestimate how tricky it is to pursue entanglement in a way that foregrounds its dynamic and more-than-human character. This requires a commitment to all of the following at the same time: (a) maintaining an account of entanglement as always-in-process; (b) inhabiting that turbulence in order to open the space for thinking otherwise, and (c) mapping the destruction caused by entanglements that become fixed into dominant structures. For those of us lurking in the more materially-oriented subcultures of critical International Relations (IR), we must also pursue an additional commitment: (d) interrogating the uneven distribution of both generative and violent modes of entanglement as they make themselves felt across the global register.
In an effort to think seriously about the dynamic formations of thing-power, I have resisted the tempting energy of active verbs and focused instead on the durable but often stubborn capacities of nouns, things and adjectives. Stabilising concepts in this way can only ever be a temporary measure, and I fully recognise the arbitrary and perhaps utterly futile nature of this entire exercise. What is the point of shoving our messy and lively entanglements into a hegemonic linguistic structure like the Latin alphabet? The point is a very modest one: to offer these 26 short interventions as tiny lifebuoys to grab onto for a moment as we tread water in the middle, whether that treading looks like the graceful propulsion of a jellyfish or the bloated flop of a water buffalo.
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They are not fixed anchors or permanent solutions; indeed, these conceptual floats are risky propositions that may capsize at any moment. However, with no hope of ever getting to shore, they provide brief moments of respite during which we can nestle into some material/political figurations and think alongside them for a while. Some of these configurations might work, others will not, but my hope is that at least a few of them might help us cultivate the agile disposition needed to interrogate how more-than-human worlds stick together and come apart, and demonstrate why that sticking and unsticking matters differently for different lifeworlds.
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Assemblage is a more familiar concept than entanglement, and is a powerful way to understand relational ontology. An assemblage is a coming together – an assembling – of different entities that stick together – or ‘entangle’ – in a more or less durable formation for a period of time. These entities are not all human or even man-made; indeed, assemblages are also constituted by non-human entities like objects and technologies, as well as intangible substances like ideas and atmospheres. Such a diversity of actors means that assemblages necessarily come together across multiple scales from the nanoparticle to the planetary. Assemblage thinking is important because it foregrounds the relations between the entities that entangle together. It helps us examine durability (i.e. how disparate actors co-ordinate, hold together and fall apart) and transformation (i.e. how relationships change the entities themselves, and how entanglements mutate over time). Centrally, then, assemblages do three important things: (1) they break with anthropocentric formulations by affording agency to actors beyond the human; (2) they shift the focus to relations between the heterogeneous entities who entangle together, rather than the substance or character of the entity itself; and (3) they foreground movement by attending to how these relations come together, endure and fall apart. Although assemblage thinking has a plural heritage, many thinkers draw from the original (if vague) formulation by Deleuze and Guattari and follow it through its reanimation in DeLanda’s work.
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For students and scholars of IR, it has especially energised our studies of security, war, migration and citizenship.
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While we often use assemblage and entanglement interchangeably, there seems to be a growing tendency to place them in a hierarchical relation so that an assemblage is the overarching ‘thing’ that is made up of a multitude of different entanglements between actors. Here, entanglement describes how entities relate to each other, and assemblage is the name of the congregation that is made up of these multiple entanglements and that endures over time. This may be conceptually useful, but it risks both flattening the dynamic and often turbulent actions that constitute the process of entanglement, and effacing the instability and contingency of any assemblage as it emerges and dissipates. Methodologically, there is also a tendency to use assemblage when conceptualising the co-emergence of social and political formations, but entanglement when conceptualising the ‘hard’ sciences (e.g. quantum physics; chemical reactions). This distinction may be efficient, but it often limits assemblage thinking to pre-given scales and prevents the emergence of transdisciplinary insights into how deep our attachments to the world penetrate, and how far they extend.
Bumpiness acknowledges that the coming together of humans, creatures, objects and ideas is rarely a smooth affair. It encourages us to pay attention to the topography of entanglement; that is, the bumpy and uneven landscape generated by the process of coming together. In that sense, our job is to interrogate the differential capacities that are produced by such an uneven topography. Which attachments, constituencies and lifeworlds are given the opportunity to thrive (often for long periods of time) on the fertile mountains, and which are abandoned to the toxic wastelands below? Thinking about the bumpy topography of entanglement is a useful starting point because spatial difference, asymmetry and hierarchy are material expressions of underlying logics of power. For example, critical geographers have exposed powerful colonial histories underscoring the production, arrangement and utilisation of strategic space, from the aerial vantage point of the drone to the subterranean tunnels used by insurgents.
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However, what is often forgotten in these topographical accounts is the emergent and dynamic character of bumpiness. Indeed, the process of coming together is an irregular affair, sometimes stuttering, sometimes seamless, sometimes glacial, sometimes explosive. For William Connolly, spatial frames often negate the ‘bumpy temporalities’ of distributed agency – the uneven pace of different actors as they co-emerge together.
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His account of ‘entangled humanism’ requires human-centred rhythms to be humbled as they entwine themselves within a much more plural congregation of non-human temporalities. The central point here is that the bumpy process of emergence never stops: entanglements are constantly mutating, crumpling, warping, stretching, metastisising, re-formatting and folding in on themselves. It is for this reason that often static topographical analysis must be accompanied by topological analysis that puts bumpiness in motion by foregrounding distortion, instability and fluctuation.
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For example, recent work in critical border studies argues that it is not enough to show how sovereign ‘lines in the sand’ now operate internally and externally to the state; rather, topological analysis shows how borders mutate, modify and re-format in each encounter between human bodies, security technologies and border infrastructures.
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Controversy is a really useful way to think about the points of tension that arise within and between various human/non-human entanglements. Although Bruno Latour’s early work examines the often insular controversies that arise between scientists in their daily practices of experimentation and publishing, it is his wider account of ‘Science in Action’ that has political resonance.
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Here, he brings into view the technoscientific disputes ‘where the stakes are never about knowledge alone, where values and cultural practices matter, and where power reigns through far ruder means than the accumulation of textual allies and citations’.
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Crucially, controversies over techno-social issues (e.g. where to put a nuclear power station; how to manage toxic waste; whether to grow genetically modified crops) always involve ‘the public’ – however that category is constituted – and therefore tell us a great deal about our institutions and practices of governance. Indeed, much of the work in Science, Technology and Society (STS) critically interrogates how the closed world of science intersects with democracy’s demands for transparency and accountability, and seeks to expand the role of ordinary citizens and non-experts in ‘hybrid forums’ that address particular controversies.
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Within Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) more specifically, scholars have developed a ‘cartography of controversy’ as a methodology that uses digital technologies to map the multiple human and non-human actants that entangle together as they negotiate a ‘matter of concern’.
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Thinking through controversy is particularly useful because it is able to keep multiple actors in play. In that sense, we need to caution against accounts of controversy that propose a static narrative arc – a dispute that emerges, reaches crisis point and is then resolved. Such a temporally bounded narrative reinforces the idea that messy and irreducible political problems can somehow be solved by technoscientific means. Rather, we need to think about controversies as intensifications of struggle where publics – both expert and non-expert – routinely assemble to negotiate matters of techno-scientific concern.
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For example, as Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke show in their examination of the Big Data-Security assemblage, it is precisely the contestations that arise over data-driven security and digital surveillance that allow us to open the ‘black box’ of technoscience and expose it to wider questions of accountability, responsibility and justice.
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Durability describes the stability of entanglements and their capacity to endure over time. If we understand entanglements as always in process, always coming together and falling apart, then we need to explain why some arrangements appear to solidify into a stable and seemingly immutable structure. This requires a more temporally-attuned analysis beyond our more familiar spatial accounts about where entanglements emerge and how they intersect with existing geopolitical cleavages. Interrogating entanglements as constantly in-process demands that we pay much more attention to differential speeds – to the plurality of rhythms of coming together and falling apart. This is a refusal of problematic accounts of transcendent structures and agents, and a call to re-think what we used to call ‘hegemonic formations’. Durable arrangements of subjects, objects, infrastructures, discourses and imaginaries are never given for all time, but instead come together (i.e. they entangle and assemble), they endure over a period of time, and then they dissipate. Certainly, particular arrangements can stick tightly together and maintain themselves over long periods of time such that they can appear to be natural, given and timeless. But thinking through durability prevents these emergent entanglements from solidifying into a static hegemonic formation that sits in opposition to counter-hegemonic forces. Indeed, durability keeps the contingency, instability and open-endedness of these arrangements in play, which means that even the most intractable formations are always available for transformation, mutation and adaptation. These shifts may happen at different speeds, and endure for shorter or longer periods of time, but they never quite solidify into static, binary logics of antagonism. Foregrounding the constitutive instability of durable arrangements helps us remember that things were once not entangled in this particular way, which means that this particular arrangement – however exclusionary, oppressive or violent – is never as monolithic or overdetermined as it appears. It helps us remember that things can disentangle and re-entangle differently – that things can be otherwise. In this sense, thinking about durability rather than structure, and understanding durability as unstable and contingent, is a political intervention aimed at reconfiguring possibilities. By keeping entanglement always in process, ideas of durability refuse the submission to static logics of antagonism, and the fantasy that such logics will be resolved by new – and better – normative arrangements.
Ecology, as an ethical orientation and a critical methodology, is currently energizing our explorations of the relational ontology of entanglement in the global register. Conventional understandings position ecology as an object of knowledge: it refers to the interactions between all living organisms and their physical (non-living) environments. While this constitutive relation between nature and culture seems perfect for studies of entanglement, ecology’s multiple lineages in Romanticism, Evolution and the early environmental movement reproduce problematic claims about race and colonial histories.
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Here, ‘culture’ occupies the valued position of reason, civility, science and power over a passive natural world in which flora, fauna and ‘natives’ are always available for, at best, objectification and extraction, and at worst, total extinction. Rather than dismiss such violent mobilisations of nature/culture by retaining ecology as an object of knowledge, current re-imaginings formulate it as both an ethical orientation and a critical methodology that keeps such logics of power at the forefront of wider concerns about anthropogenic climate change. This understanding of ecology is particularly attuned to exposing the multiple entanglements that enable humans to dominate the non-human world through practices such as deforestation, pollution, and fossil fuel extraction, and calling attention to the bodies and lifeworlds that are harmed and even exterminated by such forces. This is not an effort to restore balance to a nature/culture divide that never existed in the first place, but rather a comprehensive critique of the anthropocentrism that has destroyed the natural world in the service of human greed and desire. This understanding of ecology signals a profound epistemological shift: if our previous anthropocentrism has gotten us into this mess, what kind of thinking can help us – and by ‘us’ we mean non-human as well as human – navigate the coming apocalypse? In short, the severity of the threat of planetary destruction has enlivened ecology as a new critical modality that (a) already understands the deep connections between humans and non-humans and the multiple scales through which these entanglements are forged (i.e. from the nano to the planetary), and (b) exposes and contests the entrenched logics of power and violence that such entanglements generate. This approach has a much different conceptual lineage with important antecedents in the Process Philosophy of A.N. Whitehead, the ecosophy of Felix Guattari, the reanimated vitalism of Jane Bennett and the Cosmopolitical ethos of Isabelle Stengers.
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Within IR, ecological approaches are helping us reimagine conventional objects of inquiry (e.g. war, geopolitics, diplomacy, genocide, migration) outside of their static, anthropocentric heritage. Jairus Grove, for example, explains the methodological implications of ecology for his study of geopolitics: ‘By ecological, I mean a form of analysis characterized by inhuman encounters and deep relational processes across geographical scales rather than a form of thinking that relies on discreteness, causality, and an exceptional notion of human agency’.
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In this sense, ecological approaches are not reduced to a pre-determined space of the international, but instead follow how an abundance of things make a difference as they loop between multiple scales, terrains and registers.
Friction is a productive way to understand the uneven character of global entanglements, from smooth interlockings to explosive aversions. From his work conceptualising the ‘mobilities turn’, Tim Cresswell explains friction as ‘the way in which people, things, and ideas are slowed down or stopped’.
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However, to understand how friction manifests in the global register, a more precise formulation is offered in Anna Tsing’s ethnography of global connections – those unstable and often awkward meetings that only emerge through specifically located practices.
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Tsing’s work is crucial for those of us attending to the bumpiness of global connections because it destroys the methodological conceit of IR’s conventional ‘Levels of analysis’ approach. Studying friction does not allow you to remain in pre-given and hermetically sealed levels of ‘the individual’, ‘the state’, or ‘the international’ (or even, more recently, sexy recalibrations of ‘the global’ and ‘the local’). Rather, attending to friction immediately foregrounds the dynamism, contingency and emergent nature of the entanglements that coordinate in specific localised scenes. Within Tsing’s formulation, differently rough-edged entities emerge at different speeds, and their entwinings are necessarily marked by more or less friction, more or less stickiness. Some entities stubbornly hold their form no matter what relations are on offer, others are marked by porosity and a willingness to entangle, enmesh and mutate into something new. Tsing’s analysis is not a reductive critique that valorises smoothness and castigates friction as the negative result of global capitalism; as she argues, ‘Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine’.
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Instead, she offers a more generative, attentive and patient approach that foregrounds the productive nature of friction – how it acts, performs, and does things in the world.
Glitch unashamedly assumes that the co-emergence of actors is marked by hiccups, fractures, false starts and missed attachments. In computing, a glitch is understood as ‘a problematic, annoying or unintended error’ that can be ‘quickly absorbed by the larger, still-functioning system’.
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This has become the dominant understanding within socio-technical-political systems as well: instead of trying to avoid glitches, errors, accidents and failures, we build them – as well as their intrinsic forms of repair – into the system itself. If we already know that socio-technical-political systems constantly make mistakes (e.g. surveillance systems fail to identify dangerous threats; facial recognition produces false positives), the goal is to assimilate these failures to such an extent that they become part of the process itself. As Louise Amoore’s account of errant algorithms demonstrates, the folding in of error is the essence of Machine Learning: anything outside the pre-determined target is fed back into the model such that the target parameters (the weights and measures) are constantly adapting to new information.
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Instead of accepting this claim that failure is no longer dangerous because it can be incorporated into the system and learned from, critical scholars and digital artists are slowing down the moment of the glitch to see what effects these errors unleash. For Lauren Berlant, the glitch exposes the limits of understanding structure as ‘an intractable principle of continuity across time and space’ that can somehow be repaired and restored.
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Instead, she refigures the glitch as an opportunity to think about infrastructure as ‘that which binds us to the world in movement and keeps the world practically bound to itself’.
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For Berlant, infrastructures are malleable and contingent rather than static and timeless – they are socialities that are constantly in transition. When the glitch appears, as it always does, we cannot think about fixing it in order to restore a pre-glitch status quo. Instead, we must think, feel, act and relate in a condition of permanent transition so that we can better ‘alter the harder and softer, tighter and looser infrastructures of sociality itself’.
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That sense of interrupting the norm is what animates ‘glitch-artists’ working in the digital realm who see these errors as important ruptures in ‘the continuum of an idealized artifact’.
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Like Berlant, these artists are not interested in any form of restoration, but instead use the glitch to explore the uncertainty of computerised binary code, subvert the idea of technical perfection, and flirt with ‘breakdown, chaos and total immersion’.
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Haptic encounters take place between the skin of human bodies and the multiple surfaces that this skin touches. In that sense, they are a manifestation of the deeper relational ontology that underscores entanglement. What makes haptic encounters important is that they open up the affective register to scrutiny and allow us to zoom in on the micro-transfers between human and non-human surfaces. Haptic encounters are like nodes in a wider affective economy where sensations, energies and forces transfer across the material surfaces of different bodies. These are important primarily because they reveal the constitutive porosity of the bodies involved. For example, we conventionally think about the human body as encased by an epidermal layer, but once the affective register is in play the contingency of that ‘outer casing’ is exposed. Our bodies are not physically bound in the way we think they are: they are excessive, leaky and distributed. We leave traces and deposits everywhere (e.g. shit, skin cells, snot); we host an array of other, smaller bodies (e.g. bacteria, viruses, nits); and we participate in collective sensations that by-pass our cognitive reasoning (e.g. fear, excitement, anticipation). This porosity challenges the usual way we think about entanglement as an encounter between two hermetically sealed bodies that come together but retain bodily integrity. Instead, it encourages us to think about entanglement as a much more open-ended affair in which transfers of sensation take place through multiple openings and closings – all of which are subject to mutation. With that in mind, it makes little sense to talk of haptic encounters (which keep bodies in-tact), but rather to talk of haptic entanglements (which expose the circulatory pathways of sensation). When porous bodies come into contact, transfers of sensation can be smooth and quick, but they often hit pinch points, reversals, surprises and overloads as entries and exits are rearranged. Critically analysing haptic entanglements requires three important shifts. First, because transfers of sensation occur in registers other than the cognitive, they require a profound rethinking of multi-sensorial perception that is not beholden to the dominant ocularcentric mode. Bodies are always ‘enmeshed’ in circulations beyond the visible, which means that multiple sensations – touch, smell, sound, taste – must take their place alongside vision when we analyse modes of perception. Here, arguments about the ‘skin’ of cinematic and digital interaction, and Erin Manning’s theories of touch, help us to re-imagine the haptic as a collection of unstable entanglements – or ‘relationscapes’ – that do not reproduce bodily integrity.
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Second, because the multisensorium is not a neutral terrain, we must demonstrate how transfers of sensation get caught up in durable infrastructures such as gender and race. For example, trans-corporeal feminists unravel the integrity of gendered bodies by exposing their haptic entanglements with the unruly materialities of nature, and critical race scholars show how the bodily integrity of the human has always been produced by the ‘bestialization and thingification of blackness’.
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Finally, the real challenge is analysing how these powerful deconstructions of bodily integrity, and the animated multi-sensoria that they expose, operate across global registers. Here, the most compelling arguments show how affect circulates beyond the scale and lifespan of the human – in national atmospheres, in public feelings, in communities of sense.
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Intensity is a much better way to think about entanglement than the more familiar frame of ‘crisis’. When multiple forces co-emerge quickly together in a short space of time, we can say there is a process of intensification in which multiple bodies, objects, systems, attentions, imaginaries and resources are drawn further into relation. When this concentrated experience of entanglement is framed as a ‘crisis’, these emergent relations are lifted out of their regularised patterns of attachment and made exceptional. This hierarchy creates the conditions in which those in power across multiple sectors – governments, experts, academics, intellectuals, journalists and professionals – can use the crisis to suspend the normal rules allowing us to foster and maintain attachments to each other and the world around us. Crisis narratives feed the demand for exceptional measures in excess of the norm; that is, the more severe the crisis, the more draconian the exceptional measures will be. But as we have seen over and over again, exceptional circumstances quickly become normalised, and powers that were granted under the terms of a crisis become sedimented into the everyday routines of governing. Even as the urgency of the crisis recedes, these modes of governing continue to concentrate resources, constrain public debate and neutralise dissent across multiple domains. Thinking of entanglement as a process of intensification challenges this dominant crisis narrative because it attaches all concentrations of force to much longer histories of emergence. In this sense, crises are always expected: they are simply intensifications of entanglements, patterns and arrangements that have been emerging for a long time. Inhabiting a relational ontology means we are never surprised when, for example, long-standing racialised debt arrangements produce an economic ‘crisis’, militarised occupations arising from violent interventions produce a migration ‘crisis’, and increasingly powerful Feminist mobilisations produce a ‘crisis’ in heteronormative masculinity. None of these are crises: they are powerful intensifications of forces, energies and tensions that are already in play across the globe, and have been for a very long time. They may enrol more and different actors together in a concentrated dispute, but these never emerge ‘out of the blue’. By shifting our analytical focus from crisis to intensification we are able to historicise the entanglements in play, draw out their antecedent mobilisations, and prevent the closures that are enacted when those in power use a ‘crisis’ to justify new interventions.
Juxtaposition is a figuration of relationality that does not automatically foreground antagonism. It opens up a range of non-oppositional, diagonal and weird geometries that keep difference in play without necessarily collapsing into enmity. The value of juxtapositional thinking is that it can break apart familiar or sedimented structures and bring new (and often unexpected) relations into being. Crucially, it does not reproduce the methodological parameters of comparative politics which require an explicit condition of similarity in order to proceed. Instead, juxtapositional thinking allows us to telescope ‘out’ from our research focus in order to see which possible actors, objects, scenes or figures might be brought together to help dislodge conventional formations. In this sense, juxtaposition is useful in the initial stages of critical projects aimed at prizing apart entanglements that have become sedimented into a hyper-durable arrangement. For example, Juliet Hooker uses juxtaposition as a method for analysing racial tensions across the Americas which allows her to think ‘hemispherically’ about African American and Latin American experiences, rather than through rigid comparative categories.
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While her critique of comparative methodologies is both astute and necessary, her analysis also highlights the limitations of juxtaposition when it comes to theorising entanglement. Within juxtaposition, relationality is figured as an encounter between ‘two disparate objects side-by-side’ rather than a messy co-emergence in which disparate bodies entangle with each other to such an extent that they lose their bodily integrity. In this sense, juxtaposition offers a minimalist account of entanglement-as-encounter (i.e. ‘two disparate objects side-by-side’) rather than a more radical account of entanglement-as-enmeshing (i.e. porous objects that inter-penetrate to craft a new assemblage). Hooker is right that juxtapositional thinking has the capacity to produce new shapes, contours and lines of sight, and in the initial stages of critical analyses, this kind of re-framing helps us think otherwise. But to get beyond a minimalist understanding of encounter, I would argue that juxtaposition must be pushed into more dynamic and sticky modes of relation that do not preserve bodily integrity. In that sense, we might want to ask how juxtaposition transforms into stickier modalities such as nestling and burrowing, and further still into inter-penetration and contamination.
Kinetic has become a buzzword for any kind of active, embodied mobility as distinguished from either a sedentary position (passive immobility) or an online manifestation (disembodied mobility). Along with ideas about flow, liquidity and nomads, kinetic emerged as part of the ‘mobilities turn’ that theorised the multiple forms of movement intensified by post-Cold War globalisation.
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As our thinking about mobility has developed, however, we have been forced to re-think the kind of entanglements that kinesis offers. Part of the problem with the mobilities turn was its central logic of mobility/immobility: useful to track power asymmetries between the ‘kinetic’ elite with the freedom to travel and disempowered populations who were ‘stuck’ in local spaces, but not helpful when trying to think about ambiguous states in between. Indeed, mobility and immobility are always entangled in uncertain states of suspension that are neither moving nor still – states like waiting, anticipating, lingering, hesitating and preparing. For those of us working through ideas of entanglement, the challenge is how we theorise these ambiguous states while also calling attention to the increasingly violent forces facilitating a kinetic elite whilst imposing immobility on ‘suspect’ populations. Here, critical migration scholars have led the way by showing how mobility itself has become the primary target of security, and how incarcerated migrants ‘stuck’ in detention centres are never passive, but instead exert active agency through political mobilisation and acts of resistance.
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Moving beyond this reformulation of mobility/immobility, Sloterdijk offers a more damning account of the ‘kinetic model of success’ that modernity has built for itself: the belief that we make the world move forward through our grandiose plans, ideas and implementations.
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For Sloterdijk, we have plunged ourselves into a state of ‘pure mobility’ that we cannot escape: we are constantly in pursuit of a ‘kinetic utopia’ that is always out of reach.
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Lines are central to Tim Ingold’s wider account of correspondence which develops a particular theorisation of entanglement.
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Ingold uses lines to think about how bodies entwine with each other but never quite lose their integrity. He is particularly interested in how lines become tangled up with each other to form knots and sees the act of ‘knotting’ as a fundamental characteristic of collective life. Ingold is not interested in entanglements that mesh together into a new substance or a ‘blob’ that obliterates the distinct integrity of the original entrants. As he argues, ‘in a world of blobs there could be no life of any kind’ because there would be no mode of sociality between bodies.
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Instead, he is interested in how distinct lines intersect, ‘go along together’ and operate in harmony and dissonance whilst – importantly – always maintaining their form. In this account of entanglement, the separation of lines is necessary to maintain the relations endemic to social life; indeed, maintaining some kind of bodily integrity and distinction is precisely what allows us to ‘correspond’ with each other, with other non-human actors, and with the world around us. Like ideas of juxtaposition, Ingold’s ideas of correspondence reflect entanglement-as-encounter: lines can intersect, cross and stick together for a while, but never enough so that the intersecting lines lose their autonomy or integrity. In crafting this ‘meshwork’ of lines, Ingold recalls musical polyphony where each musical part (e.g. soprano, bass) is a separate line that must respond to – and therefore ‘go along with’ – another line in order to generate collective music.
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He argues that correspondence requires more care and attention than other concepts like network or assemblage because as we pursue our own lines, we must attend, follow, abide with and respond to the other lines we correspond with.
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Unlike networks with separated nodes of connection, or assemblages as ‘blobs’ of indistinguishable components, Ingold argues that the correspondence of lines offers a more meaningful understanding of attachment: ‘because they go along together and because their continual regeneration is nourished and impelled by the memory of their affection, they cannot be parted without a sense of loss, if not grief’.
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Mêlée has been used by Geographers and IR theorists to formulate understandings of community that do not lapse into spatial fixity and exclusive accounts of identity.
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This work engages with Jean-Luc Nancy’s ruminations over the fate of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in which the city was targeted precisely because it hosted an uncontainable and unfathomable congregation of diverse actors, both human and non-human. For Nancy, the urban fraternisation of ‘lineages, paths, and skins’ went far beyond polite mixing: Sarajevo was constituted by tempestuous scrimmages, polyphonous gatherings and wild ‘displacements, hazards, migrations, clinamens, encounters, chances, and risks’.
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Mêlée is especially helpful when theorising entanglement because it foregrounds the bumpy and often treacherous process of co-emergence – more cacophony, agitation and riot than smooth intermingling. It challenges the idea of entanglement-as-encounter where distinct bodies slide by one another or attach for a period of time without losing their bodily integrity. For Nancy, the frame of encounter is problematic because it reproduces the fantasy that it is possible to simply add more variables – more bodies – to get a complete picture, which results in a Politics reduceable to the simple practices of counting up and evaluating through pre-given metrics. But a mêlée is never that orderly. A mêlée reminds us that assembling together is always excessive: crowds always produce elements that don’t fit, that overload, that come up short, or that disrupt harmonious ideas of peaceful co-existence. For Nancy, the mêlée demands a different political imagination that disorders the ‘crude’ and ‘rubbish’ theorisations of purity that insist on either banishing these excessive co-minglings, or assimilating them into exclusive formulations of identity, community and belonging. I would argue that the threat, and also the enticement, of the mêlée lies not just in its excess, but also in its ability to move. As we know from Elias Canetti’s famous work on crowds, a riot is never still.
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As Nancy argues, ‘in a mêlée, there is countervalence and encounter, there’s resemblance and distancing, contact and contraction, concentration and dissemination, identification and alteration’.
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Neuroplasticity develops a dynamic and more-than-human account of entanglement by deconstructing the biological anchor of modern, liberal humans: the brain. Neuroscientists celebrate the brain’s essential ‘plasticity’ by exploring its ability to adapt to environmental forces like injury or trauma. While this story allows more room for environmental factors to shape brain structure and chemistry, it re-instates the superior human at the centre of the story – only now it is an even better human whose brain is more adaptive and resilient than we initially thought. Working against the celebratory anthropocentrism of neuroscience, Catherine Malabou offers a much more destructive account of neuroplasticity; that is, brain injuries, tumours and diseases like Alzheimer’s indicate the brain’s capacity to annihilate, rather than enhance, our identities and self-understandings.
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By figuring the brain as always entangled in, and therefore affected by, a fleshly body and a heterogeneous, intrusive environment, Malabou refuses the usual language of a brain in command – a brain that gives humans intention, determination and will. Working against the reigning Cartesian fantasy, Malabou helps us understand that the brain is never fully in command of its fleshy encasement or its surroundings. Rather, the human must be reconfigured as a brain-body-environment assemblage that fully deconstructs our cherished ideas of bodily integrity, autonomous human agency and superior cognitive ability. Malabou’s critique dislocates the ‘I’ at the heart of the integrated, fully conscious and cherished modern subject, and offers instead an incoherent ‘I’ that is not controlled by a masterful brain and can therefore never know itself. It turns out the very thing that we think makes us superior to ‘lesser’ creatures – our cognitive ability – is highly mutable, profoundly contingent, and often destructive. Moreover, the brain’s susceptibility to external pressure – its entanglement with otherness – has profound implications for how we think politically.
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If the brain is not a closed system in command of itself, and if that brain is constantly mutating (sometimes in destructive ways), then the human capacity to instrumentally control nature and bend planetary systems to its collective will is not as secure as we think it is. Here, Malabou extends William Connolly’s efforts to ‘humble the human’ by sticking her hands in our craniums and pulling us apart from the inside out.
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This work is crucial because it shows us that what we think we control (e.g. our bodies, our futures, other species, the planet) and all the man-made systems we have built to facilitate this control will always be open to questioning, contestation and disruption.
Ongoingness articulates a way to think without horizons, or specifically, to think without the conventional narrative of crisis → resolution that positions entanglements in a progressive trajectory towards a specific outcome. For Lauren Berlant, this means thinking about ‘crisis ordinariness’ rather than intense formations of trauma and recovery. Indeed, she offers a powerful case for starting in the middle: ‘In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown. Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least’.
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This, I think, offers a radically different attunement to subjectivity, relationality and futurity, and therefore demands a rethink of entanglement. Because our conventional epistemologies position crisis as an exception to be overcome, we are only ever attuned to heroic stories of conquering adversity – all of which promise a return to equilibrium and a restoration of familiar normative structures. The problem is that these stories have no traction in scenes of ordinary life where subjects are simply getting on with things amidst the slow accretion of multiple catastrophes (e.g. welfare state destruction, indebtedness, structural racism and sexism, chronic ill-health, climate change, arrested social mobility, ongoing wars and interventions). What we need are better attunements to the creative ‘logics of adjustment’ undertaken by subjects simply getting on with the art of living through permanent collapse.
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Human subjects, of course, never make these adjustments in isolation, which means we also need to pay more attention to the non-human entities that are enrolled in these ongoing practices of modification, repair and maintenance. This means following entanglements all the way into the ordinary scenes of everyday life: the non-spectacular, the routine, the banal. Much as we might appreciate the enlivening theories of entanglement, assemblage and relationality, too often they remain beholden to major events – or controversies – in which intensifications are at their most stark (e.g. major scientific discoveries, infrastructural collapse, pandemics, stock market crashes, protests and riots). What this spectacular frame misses are the ‘non-eventful geographies of slow violence and everyday endurance’: those scenes of living on in the midst of permanent, intersecting crises ‘where violence is experienced as a continuation rather than an eruption’.
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Ongoingness gives us a helpful way to politicise processual thinking: it brings us into the forgotten and abandoned scenes of ordinary life and helps us inhabit the slow and accretive rhythms of durational violence. This is what Elizabeth Povinelli means by quasi-events: those ‘forms of suffering and dying, endurance and expiring, that are ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime’.
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The challenge for those of us working through entanglement across the global register is to foreground the role of non-humans in this landscape of quasi-events – to show how humans, objects, creatures, species, habitats, ideas and affects come together and fall apart on the long, slow and unspectacular passage towards extinction.
Process gets at the heart of understanding entanglement as a dynamic co-emergence that is continually transforming. To be sure, entanglements can stabilise and endure over long periods of time such that their transformations appear to have stopped; indeed, this apparent solidity is what allows us to more easily identify constitutive asymmetries. But if we know that entanglement is never static, even if it might be very slow, the challenge is to think about it in processual terms. Indeed, Process Philosophy has produced some of the most creative accounts of entanglement coming out of ANT, Feminist STS, New Materialism and Post-Humanism. In refusing the foundations of Western metaphysics, early 20th century thinkers like Alfred N. Whitehead, Henri Bergson and John Dewey offer a profoundly relational and dynamic ontology that works against the static concepts populating so much of canonical Philosophy (e.g. Being, Substance, Essence, the Subject/Object divide). It is no surprise that this tradition has animated, and in some ways re-imagined, Poststructural approaches working through Deleuzean concepts of flows, folds, rhizomes and deterritorialisation.
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Thinking in processual terms is crucial because it gives us the analytical tools to put entanglement in motion and keep it moving. Conceptually, it allows us to think about pasts and futures as multiple, lively and contingent landscapes that always exceed metaphysical efforts to make them singular, linear, and unidirectional. Methodologically, processual thinking helps us start – and stay – in the middle. Even as we are carried along by multiple trajectories as they entangle together, we are compelled to examine this emergent process in detail, as it is happening. The challenge, of course, is to draw out the asymmetries that any entanglement might reproduce, and follow the global pathways through which these are maintained, protected and amplified.
Quantum entanglement is an enlivening way to think about the possible attachments between different entities, from sub-atomic particles to solar systems. What Einstein famously (and dismissively) called ‘spooky action at a distance’ explains how discrete entities in different locations may actually be connected. This goes against the laws governing Newtonian science that separate entities in space and time so they can enter into various conditions of cause and effect. In the quantum universe, sub-atomic particles are not governed by Newtonian laws, and can therefore exist in an infinite number of conditions, positions and trajectories. Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action is crucial for understanding the political effects of quantum theory because it explains the reconfiguration of both agency (i.e. what constitutes entities) and entanglement (i.e. how entities intermingle with each other).
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Materials, matter, objects and entities only come into being through their intra-actions with other materials, matter, objects and entities. In other words, agency does not precede intra-action, but instead materialises through it. This is what Barad means by agentic realism which ‘does not start with a set of given or fixed differences, but rather makes inquiries into how differences are made and remade, stabilized and destabilized, as well as their materializing effects and constitutive exclusions’.
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Intra-action occurs between two entities (e.g. particles) but also between these entities and the instruments, tools and practices used to study them (e.g. particle accelerators, electromagnets, qubits). Scientists are also a constitutive part of the research they conduct because they intra-act with their objects of study; that is, they cannot be dis-entangled from their tools or experiments. Barad’s more speculative re-working of quantum entanglement through agentic realism has been hugely generative for IR scholars exploring contemporary formations of science, technology and security.
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Within the discipline more widely, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt show how quantum theory has profound implications for computing, technology and intelligence, which means that IR theorists ‘had better be fluent in the ways of quantum theory’ if we are going to interpret its impact on security and geopolitics.
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For example, how will cybersecurity operate if quantum computing makes current practices of encryption obsolete? How will intelligence agents collect, analyse, share and store data on, for example, suspect individuals sending private text messages or conducting online banking?
Restlessness describes the disposition that results from acknowledging a world composed by dynamic entanglements. This is not a reassuring condition: it does not offer certainty, foundational grounds or a progressive narrative of emancipation. It is neither nostalgic for the normative infrastructures we have lost, nor hopeful for a restored future when we are ‘back on track’. Rather, the restlessness I refer to here is the result of unlearning conventional modes of analysis and practicing what John Law describes as ‘thinking that is not strategically ordered, tellable in a simple way, thinking that is lumpy or heterogeneous – difficult or impossible’.
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For Povinelli, restlessness is insurrectional in that it indicates ‘a kind of wilfulness in the face of dominant formations of knowledge – the will to know what exceeds, lies alongside, or refuses the functional coherences and formal systematizations that subjugate knowledge’.
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There is no stillness when you start in the middle – no assurances, no fixed coordinates, no safety nets. This generates a strange kind of vigilance that is permanently alive to trajectories emerging from multiple directions. But this rather disoriented restlessness is also an ambivalent condition. On the one hand, restlessness generates the energy required to discover, follow and analyse new entanglements as they emerge and solidify. On the other hand, these pursuits are exhausting – especially when they multiply – and that exhaustion is not evenly distributed. Indeed, like any disposition, restlessness never manifests outside of prevailing power relations. What needs more critical attention are the asymmetries that mark our conceptual and methodological efforts to start in the middle. These have a bearing on who is able to carry out critical interrogations in the first place because some bodies are able to inhabit restlessness and bear exhaustion more than others. For example, it is one thing for a tenured professor at a wealthy university to pursue wilful, insurrectional and restless research: it is quite another for an adjunct or precariously employed early-career researcher to do so. To properly foreground these asymmetries, especially their amplifications of racialised and gendered cleavages, any critical interrogation of entanglement must also stubbornly insist that the conditions of knowledge production be included in the study. In this sense, we would do well to craft our restless dispositions in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call The Undercommons – the radical space in which study always exceeds the institutional norms, professional practices and disciplinary modalities of the university.
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Speculation is the mode of theorising that emerges from radical open-ness, from the claim that all lifeworlds (both human and non-human) interpenetrate each other, and from acknowledging that our co-emergences are always in process. Speculation encourages us to ask: ‘What does the future look like if we start from the assumption that human and non-human worlds are entangled with each other?’ The future, of course, has always been a matter of concern for those who want to control it, singularise it, make it actionable in the present. But that is not the future at the heart of speculative theory. Rather, all future possibilities must be kept radically open with no guarantees that an intervention in the present will make the difference we think it will. For Isabelle Stengers, the key to maintaining this radical openness is to make sure that all relevant actors in the immediate milieu – humans (expert and not) as well as non-humans (animal and material) – are involved in composing the future together.
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These collective compositions are always uncertain because the outcomes can never be fully controlled: they are tentative and experimental, but they are also courageous in their insistence on keeping possibilities open. This is precisely what distinguishes speculative thinking from more familiar normative strivings for revolution and utopia. There is nothing ‘programmatic’ about speculation, no blueprint to follow, nothing pre-given in the act of composing together.
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As Jairus Grove argues, ‘what we have is everything around us, and it is sufficiently creative and weird all by itself’.
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How, then, might we conduct research in such a radically open landscape? Or, to put it another way, how might we start in the middle? For speculative thinkers, certain aspects of Pragmatism offer a mode of empiricism explicitly committed to taking in ‘everything around us’. Unlike Western Philosophy’s abstraction from everyday life and its reproduction of subject/object hierarchies, thinkers like John Dewey and William James encourage us to reveal the connections between various subjects, objects, bodies, artefacts, scenes, systems and atmospheres across multiple scales.
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This is a much slower kind of empiricism that carefully draws out heterogeneous entanglements but does not place them on a singular pathway to a solution, hypothesis or formula. Rather, speculative thinking allows us to dwell inside these entanglements as we compose with them and each other, always uncertain of what will emerge.
Turbulence is an old term in IR, popularised by James Rosenau’s 1990 account of the momentous structural changes transforming the Westphalian system as Cold War geopolitics came to an end.
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Indeed, much conventional IR tries to explain turbulence in the global system – usually figured as war and conflict – by discovering what causes it and offering ways to overcome it. IR theory in this conventional mode is underscored by a fantasy that the ‘natural’ state of the international system is equilibrium, and an IR theorist’s job is to put forward the best hypothesis for how to resolve the turbulence that upsets this balance. Thinking through entanglement does more than simply turn that equation on its head by positing turbulence as the norm (indeed, the Realists are quite comfortable with conflict as the normal state of affairs in the international system). The difference is that entanglement thinking does not seek to resolve turbulence, but instead reconfigures the international as a scene of emerging intensities that express weird mixtures of both turbulence and equilibrium. These intensities are not bound by distinct registers of action: that is, they do not obey the fictitious distinctions between Man, the State and War, domestic/international, or even local/global. Rather, they mobilise and circulate on an open terrain, enrolling heterogeneous bodies, objects and relations across multiple scales. Sometimes these intensities are turbulent and marked by excessive friction, and other times they appear smooth and undramatic. The job of the critical IR theorist is to figure out how these intensities endure over time such that we come to think of them as natural features of a timeless international system. This means engaging in genealogical analysis to demonstrate how durable intensities like ‘the State’ have been actively produced, how that reproduction amplifies existing asymmetries and generates new ones, and how these asymmetries are sustained across multiple scales and over long periods of time. Because this genealogical ethos does not position equilibrium as the ‘natural’ resting state of the international system, durable formations like ‘the State’ – no matter how overwhelming or overdetermined – are always constituted by some form of turbulence, and therefore always open to mutation, fracture and overturning. We cannot know what these mutations will bring forth; we can only know that they are always possible. Attuning to turbulence in this way shows us the openings that we must pursue if we are going to break down the façade of an international system that is supposedly capable of ‘balancing itself’ to avoid collapse.
Uselessness is the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the gatekeepers of knowledge production trying to discipline which entanglements are legitimate objects of study. They are all for ‘interdisciplinary’ research that reveals new connections, but not the kind that locates the university itself within wider assemblages of power, knowledge, exploitation and violence. Gatekeeping operates through multiple metrics of value, but one of the most pernicious is that which determines what ‘useful’ research is (i.e. research that has a measurable impact on society). Understanding that knowledge is never divorced from power, we must ask over and over again (even as university managers block up their ears): ‘useful for whom’? These questions of power and knowledge are central to the critical intellectual landscape through which entanglement has emerged as a generative concept. Speculative work cannot predetermine what actors or relations will matter until we follow, carefully and slowly, emergent entanglements in specific scenes. What we discover in that following may very well serve the interests of those in power – especially when those entanglements solidify into stable structures protecting elite interests – but then again, they may not. The open-ended, turbulent and bumpy nature of all entanglements means that they cannot be pre-emptively yoked to a priori categories of ‘usefulness’. In this tempestuous intellectual landscape, we will find what we will find, regardless of what the university managers, funders and governments desire. We would do well, then, to develop Erin Manning’s ‘Pragmatics of Uselessness’ which refuses all our usual normative attachments to value precisely because of the way dominant practices of valuing do violence to bodies and lifeworlds that do not conform.
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Without the overdetermined goals of ‘usefulness’ or ‘value’ driving intellectual curiosity, some wiggle room is created within which it becomes possible to follow the process of entanglement for more than a brief moment. Of course, as Jessica Dempsey and Geraldine Pratt remind us, not all bodies experience the same capacity to wiggle around in speculation, and there are real costs to actively pursuing intellectual uselessness in the face of the ‘patterned arrangements of accumulation’ that dispossess specific bodies, objects, ideas, relations, projects and futures.
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In this sense, uselessness is both an political strategy of refusal against dominant forms of value, as well as a generative strategy of care in solidarity with non-conforming lifeworlds.
Vulnerability is crucial in any entanglement, especially those that penetrate further than an encounter between two separate bodies. A generative reading of vulnerability positions it against conventional ideas of essence and substance that figure bodies, objects, entities and phenomena as hermetically sealed and spatiotemporally contained. Vulnerability connotes porosity rather than smooth edges, openness rather than closure, permeable thresholds rather than hard borders. If we understand vulnerability as constitutive of all entanglements, zero-sum formulations make no analytical sense. The multiple bodies that make up entanglements enmesh with each other, endure over time and dissipate at different speeds; it is precisely their vulnerabilities that enable them to co-emerge and co-ordinate together. These bodies cannot be understood as discrete, fully autonomous, hermetically sealed units (e.g. billiard balls crashing into each other) because they exhibit different manifestations of vulnerability and porosity. The process of entanglement, then, is characterised by different experiences of friction as bodies feel their way around, in and through each other. Vulnerability’s constitutive role in entanglement cannot be separated from its uneven distribution; indeed, vulnerability always emerges in relationship to power, and therefore to risk. Some of the most durable entanglements of late capitalism persist precisely because they privilege certain bodies and lifeworlds by displacing their vulnerability onto ‘lesser’ bodies. As protected bodies are resourced, protected encouraged to thrive, lesser bodies are excluded, abandoned and left even more exposed. As I have argued elsewhere, these asymmetries endure because those most able to displace their vulnerability onto others craft a powerful narrative about its threat, and direct resources toward its eradication.
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Here, vulnerability is something that must be overcome through, for example, ‘resilience training’ or ‘emergency preparedness’. The problem, of course, is that these interventions do nothing to address the logics of global asymmetry that have produced vulnerability in the first place. Indeed, reducing vulnerability to a technical problem that can be solved by intervention perpetuates the lie that everyone is capable of getting rid of their vulnerabilities if they simply work hard enough, make good decisions and listen to the experts who are already ‘future-proofed’. To refuse that dominant narrative, we need a much more radical formulation of vulnerability that understands it to be constitutive of all relations and entanglements. Here, vulnerability becomes a resource for generating solidarity and practices of care rather than a character flaw to be divested, displaced and eradicated.
Waywardness radically reorients our desire to craft a teleology for entanglement – that figures co-emergence as something purposefully aiming for a pre-arranged destination. It punctures the smug stories we tell about ourselves as rational, goal-oriented humans who, through hard-work, ingenuity and instrumental application, move forward in life by ordering and disciplining our bodies, our relations, our desires. Waywardness does not buy into that hubris. Instead, it foregrounds the vibrant entanglements enjoyed by bodies that refuse to be gathered into, and governed by, dominant trajectories of improvement, direction and emancipation. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments exemplifies the political power of waywardness as a disposition of refusal.
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In re-telling the stories of young black women who were objectified by social reformers in the early 20th century, Hartman re-figures their waywardness as both a powerful evasion of capture and a determined practice of freedom. The everyday intimacies she uncovers remind us that generative, creative and resistive entanglements are not just the purview of those in power – those bodies fully committed to established trajectories of success – but also persist in spaces of so-called degradation (e.g. ‘The ward, the Bottom, the ghetto’).
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As Hartman goes on to explain, these spaces constitute ‘an urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise the forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them. . . The terrible beauty is more than one could ever hope to assimilate, order, and explain’.
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Xenogenesis is the original title of the 3-volume collection by Octavia Butler (now referred to as Lilith’s Brood) which explores the entanglement and interbreeding between humans and the alien species of Oankali.
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Speculative science fiction, especially that which starts with the end of the earth, is one of the most vibrant spaces allowing us to both imagine a world not ordered by the spectacular hubris of human superiority, and consider how we might build relations and communities with radically different bodies such as alien life forms or AI robots. Xenogenesis is the story of how humans and aliens eventually learn to co-habit, but it is not a hopeful narrative of smooth attachments, harmonious relations or cathartic reconciliation. Entanglement, for Butler, is always marked by the violence that humans perpetrate against each other, especially on the basis of race, gender and sexuality, and how that violence affects any new relations we might pursue out of necessity (e.g. the end of the world) or choice (e.g. desire). Her work is an unflinching examination of the persistence of violence, even in the utopian futures we like to imagine for ourselves.
Yearning is usually understood as a purely human activity – an articulation of longing that exceeds the biological requirements of food, rest, shelter and procreation. To yearn is to desire, and to put desire into action you must have agency – not to mention will, intention, capacity, and hopefully the resources needed to fulfil your desire. Certainly, desire’s entanglement with power has been at the heart of much critique, including Deleuze and Guattari’s reformulation of bodies as ‘desiring-machines’ and Foucault’s acknowledgement that while desire is productive (i.e. it helps us to do things), it also calls forth multiple forms of subjectification, discipline and governmentality. All of that is fair enough, but what happens to all of these human-centred yearnings when we figure ourselves on more-than-human terms? How are our desires entangled with the desires of other non-human forces, creatures and constructs? This reconfiguration is central to critiques anthropocentrism because it deconstructs the masterful, fit and fully-conscious human in control of both his mind and body. Our desires and drives are never fully conscious to us, and therefore not always available for rational modes of intervention, management and control. Desire is an unruly beast that circulates through affective and libidinal economies: it exceeds rational logics, disrupts patterns of cognition and escapes routine choreographies. In this sense, yearning is an ungovernable state of becoming that, despite our best conscious efforts, keeps re-attaching us to a multiplicity of both human and non-human entities. And yet, one of the limitations of this rather psychoanalytically inspired deconstruction of desire is that it remains anthropocentric – wedded to human bodies, brains and sensations. As political economists have long explained, unruly human desire is precisely the condition that our late modern capitalist system wants to harness. The whole system is premised on privileging these human desires, and cultivating the promise that such desires can be fulfilled by entanglements to specific objects, services and commodified experiences. In other words, whatever we yearn for is available for purchase, and that purchase will make us whole, happy and content. It is not hard to see how the privileging of human desire has led to a rampant instrumentalisation and commodification of the world such that all of its resources, materialities and capacities are valued only to the extent that they service our wants. Within such conditions, we should not be surprised at the violent entanglements than ensue, for example, the trafficking of human bodies, the selling of human organs, indentured labour, the destruction of ecosystems to fuel human meat consumption, and the mortgaging of the future through disembodied financial techniques. Be careful what you yearn for: the entanglements produced by late capitalism are both hollow and violent.
Zoe refers to the facts of biological life, or the biological processes of living, and exists in contrast to Bios which refers to the quality of life, or the way life is lived in the public sphere. This distinction, drawn out in Aristotle’s work, has shaped many debates about nature/culture, but is central to Georgio Agamben’s argument about bare life in Homo Sacer.
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Bare life is an instructive case of the politics of entanglement: it shows us what happens when trajectories are not held in tension but instead collapse into a radical asymmetry. For Agamben, modern Western life has been consumed by biopolitics because Bios has been reduced to Zoe: we care less about the quality of life lived (Bios) than we do about the administration of populations through the management of biological life and death (Zoe). This amplification Zoe at the expense of Bios leads to the condition of bare life as embodied in the homo sacer – the figure exemplified by the Musselman in the extermination camps of World War II. Bare life – the apotheosis of Zoe – is what emerges in the state of exception when the sovereign has suspended the normal rule of law. To be sure, Agamben poses crucial questions about sovereignty, law and biopolitics, but his account of bare life as the triumph of Zoe over Bios is hugely problematic. By stripping bare life of all agency and reducing it to biological fact, all acts of resistance, expressions of protest and political mobilisations that refuse conditions of abjection are ignored. Indeed, as critical scholars have demonstrated, there is nothing ‘bare’ about the migrants currently incarcerated in detention centres and refugee camps: they are active in negotiating, resisting and pushing back against the sovereign decisions trying to make them illegal.
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More to the point, bare life effectively ends the relationality between Zoe and Bios by having one triumph over the other. In short, there is no lively entanglement between nature and culture anymore – just the static and terminal life of abandonment in the camp. For William Connolly, this inability to understand the ‘messy, layered and complex’ intertwining of Zoe and Bios – even in the most brutal conditions – is the biggest flaw in Agamben’s argument which ‘reflects a classical liberal and Arendtian assumption that there was once a time when politics was restricted to public life and biocultural life was kept in the private realm. What a joke. Every way of life involves the infusion of norms, judgements, and standards into the affective life of participants at both private and public levels. Every way of life is biocultural and biopolitical’.
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This is not an ending. When you start in the middle and your entanglements extend in all directions, it is hard to know what an ending would even look like, let alone how you might move towards it. In offering this lexicon as a selection of tiny lifebuoys designed to keep us afloat, I hope they can connect up, somehow, to form a weird kind of adaptive floating structure. That way, we can instigate multiple conversations as we take turns scanning for sharks, maintaining the raft and, very occasionally, resting in the sunshine.
. Last accessed February 18 2021.