Subverting the Biopolitics of Liberal Governance: Complexity, Circulation and Self-OrganisationLeonie Ansems de Vries, University of Nottingham, Malaysia CampusJrg Spieker, Birkbeck College, University of London

AbstractTaking liberal governance as a regime of power whose object, target, and stake is life itself, this article explores the ways in which the liberal account of life can be subverted and deployed against the very power relations it now informs. The article begins with a brief consideration of how a natural-scientific conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and self-organisation has come to shape liberal biopolitics. It then attempts to trace the emergence and development of this conception of life from its initial articulation in the work of Kant, through its re-articulation in Hayek, to its more recent appearance in discourses of governance and complexity. It is argued that this naturalised and depoliticised conception tends to reduce life to the kind of material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order. The article then engages Darwins notion of evolution to consider how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical form can be contested. This consideration is guided the following set of questions: Is what is at stake in modern biopolitics not the politicisation, but the depoliticisation of life? And if this is the case, then do we need to think of resistance to biopower in terms of the repoliticisation of life? Formulating an affirmative answer to these questions, this paper suggests that forms of resistance might be developed on the basis of the very conception of life in terms of complexity that informs and sustains contemporary liberal governance. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the difference that lies at the basis of their visions biological and political life that conceptualising resistance to biopower becomes possible.

IntroductionThis paper is an exploration of how, and to what effect, liberal political thought and practice has historically been shaped by certain naturalistic ontological frameworks. It is mainly concerned with the relationship between liberalism and a particular conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and self-organisation. We attempt to trace the emergence and development of this conception of life from its initial articulation in the work of Kant, through its re-articulation in Hayek, to its more recent appearance in certain liberal discourses of governance and complexity. It is argued that, notwithstanding its emancipatory claims, this naturalised and depoliticised conception tends to reduce life to the kind of material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order. We then move on to discuss how the liberal reduction of life to its biopolitical form can be contested. The argument put forward here is that forms of resistance might be developed on the basis of the very conception of life in terms of complexity, circulation and self-organisation that informs and sustains contemporary liberal governance. Having outlined an alternative to the liberal account of what life is and what it may become, the article concludes with some tentative suggestions as to how this account might shape critical thought and political agency today.

As will already be apparent, we follow Michel Foucault in taking liberal governance as a regime of power whose object, target, and stake is life itself. Our analysis emphasises the close relationship between the truth about life and practices of power the constitutive interdependence in which biopolitical forms of knowledge and apparatuses of power are linked. As is well known, Foucault first used the concept of bio-power (the power over life) to refer to two distinct but related mechanisms of power: an anatomo-politics of the human body and a bio-politics of the population.[footnoteRef:1] In later writings, he renders this seemingly straightforward concept considerably more ambiguous by pointing to a number of possible origins and manifestations of the link between politics and life.[footnoteRef:2] While recognising that Foucaults original formulation of the concept is sufficiently ambiguous to allow for a range of different interpretations, we will adopt and elaborate on an understanding of the concept that revolves around biology and biological being. Once this biology-based definition of biopower/biopolitics is accepted, it is important to realise that biological being has not been the same at all times. [1: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1987), 139. ] [2: There is, for example, the genealogical link between biopower and the Judeo-Christian tradition of pastoral power. Then there is the idea that biopower/biopolitics is inextricably linked to the rise of the life sciences. Foucault also indicated that there is a historically significant relationship between the biopoliticisation of politics and the development of liberal political economy. Other leads, complementary or alternative, may reasonably be inferred from his comments on the governance of epidemics or on the discourse of race.]

If we accept that the bio in biopolitics is associated with biological being, then we also need to accept that the genealogy of biopolitics is inseparable from the changing conceptions of life offered by the life sciences. The life that is at stake in biopower/biopolitics is inseparable from certain life-scientific truth discourses about the nature of biological being. Foucault was concerned with a biological conception of life that emerged in the eighteenth century, a conception of life in terms of (self-)organisation. It is this understanding of species being that he first traced archaeologically in The Order of Things, and that he then tenuously linked to his genealogy of liberal political rationality in Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. For Foucault, the appearance of liberalism in the eighteenth century is inseparable from the the entry of nature into the field of techniques of power.[footnoteRef:3] The radical innovation associated with the emergence of a distinctly liberal political rationality is a conceptualisation of order in terms of nature and self-organisation. He speaks of a certain naturalism which is inscribed within the logic of liberal rule: the domain to be governed by liberalism is a natural one in the sense that it is thought to possess an intrinsic logic of its own. Indeed, what appears in the middle of the eighteenth century, Foucault says, really is a naturalism much more than a liberalism.[footnoteRef:4] In this naturalistic grid of intelligibility, circulation is conceived as self-organising, self-regulating as well as independent of, and antecedent to, political order and authority. [3: Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Note 4, p. 75.] [4: Ibid., p. 62. ]

The article is structured as follows. First we consider how Foucaults original account of the nexus between liberalism and a conception of life in terms of complexity and self-organisation is reflected in the writings of Kant. It is Kant, we argue, who provides the first more or less coherent liberal conception of politics and life in terms of (self-)organisation. And it is in Kants writings that we can also understand the depoliticising effects of this biopolitical conception of liberal governance. In Kant, life is reduced to its biopolitical form and circulation is always already a property of life itself, rather than a product of power. Then we will focus on the political thought of F.A. Hayek and on role of notions of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation therein. We show that Hayek deploys several concepts and ideas associated with complexity theory, and that his defence of liberal-capitalism largely relies on the subversive and emancipatory connotations of these ideas. We then argue that Hayeks political project relies on a pervasive economy of inclusion and exclusion through which liberal and non-liberal subjects are constructed and positioned. The systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of the open society undermines the emancipatory pretensions of Hayeks political project.

Finally, the paper engages Darwin to develop a politics of complexity that challenges the bio-political foreclosure of which Hayeks notion of the open society is ultimately productive. By producing a perspective of evolution that prioritises difference over reproduction, Darwins account can be invoked to challenge the depoliticisation inherent in and the war waged at the heart of Hayek's open society. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the difference that lies at the basis of biological and political life that conceptualising resistance to biopower becomes possible.

Kant: politics, life and (self-)organisationKant sought to develop a general philosophy of nature based on Newtonian physics. In Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, he presents a mechanical explanation of the origin and organisation of the cosmos. Kant sets out to reconcile his account of Newtonian physics with the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient god and thereby with a teleological account of a harmonious nature.[footnoteRef:5] Natures purposive striving towards order, harmony and perfection demonstrates, Kant argues, supernatural design. Matter must necessarily produce beautiful connections for it does not possess the freedom to stray from the plan of perfection.[footnoteRef:6] Due to the animate qualities ascribed to matter and nature, there is no distinction between the living and the non-living. In opposition to the inert matter of Newtonian mechanics, for the pre-critical Kant all matter is active. Kant ascribes to elements, themselves sources of life, vital forces [wesentliche Krfte] to set one another in motion. In opposition to Newton, Kant endows matter itself with force: all matter abides by the same fundamental and mechanical law of nature, i.e. its self-organisation and self-ordering towards perfection. [5: Martin Schnfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 98, 105. ] [6: Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, transl. Stanley L. Jaki (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 86. ]

By the time of writing the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant has reversed his view on the activity of matter as well as on the applicability of the mechanical law of nature to all matter. Indeed, Kant has been credited with playing a key role in effecting the shift from mechanics to organicism and the rise of biology by introducing the distinction between mechanisms and organisms.[footnoteRef:7] He distinguishes between the living and the non-living on account of the capacity of self-organisation, which was to become the defining feature of life from the nineteenth century onwards. He establishes the distinction between inert matter and living organisms on the basis of purpose and organisation, which, in his theory, are intrinsically and self-evidently linked. A thing constitutes a physical end only if it is both cause and effect of itself, which is to say if the parts (organ) and the whole (organism) reciprocally produce one another only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and a self-organized being, and, as such, be called a physical end.[footnoteRef:8] Only organisms abide by these conditions: an organized natural product is one in which every part is reciprocally both end and means. In such a product nothing is in vain, without an end, or to be ascribed to a blind mechanism of nature.[footnoteRef:9] In a significant reversal of his pre-Critical thought, the living, as opposed to the non-living, is characterised by Kant in terms of an interactive and mutually constitutive movement of (self-) organisation between organ and organism. In addition to self-organisation and in close relation to it what sets the organism apart from the non-living is its capacity of reproduction. For Kant, an organized being possesses inherent formative power [] a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained by the capacity of movement alone, that is to say, by mechanism.[footnoteRef:10] These characteristics of self-organisation and self-generation imply, furthermore, a capacity for and tendency of self-preservation. As will be elaborated upon below, in Kants philosophy of nature pre-Critical as well as Critical perturbation and movements of disorder(ing) are intrinsic to the processes of (self-)organisation and self-preservation. [7: Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 84-5.] [8: Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, transl. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 22.] [9: Ibid., pp. 24-25.] [10: Ibid., pp. 22.]

Whilst the explanation of organic form and organisation would become the chief occupation of the emerging discipline of biology in the nineteenth century, Kant is an eighteenth-century thinker to the extent that he believes that life cannot be explained. He stresses that the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us.[footnoteRef:11] Remarkably, despite reiterating that any analogy falters in the effort to conceptualise life, Kant suggests that one such analogy can nevertheless be drawn: [11: Ibid., pp. 23.]

We may, on the other hand, make use of an analogy to the above mentioned immediate physical ends to throw light on a certain union, which, however, is to be found more often in idea than in fact. Thus in the case of a complete transformation, recently undertaken, of a great people into a state, the word organization has frequently, and with much propriety, been used for the constitution of the legal authorities and even of the entire body politic. For in a whole of this kind certainly no member should be a mere means, but should also be an end, and, seeing that he contributes to the possibility of the entire body, should have his position and function in turn defined by the idea of the whole.[footnoteRef:12] [12: Ibid. ]

Kant establishes the identity between the individual body and the body politic on the basis of organisation. Given Kants definitions of life and organisation, and the intimate connection between the two, this analogy suggests that not only the individual organism, but also the body politic is an end in itself and its purpose self-preservation. This would evidently be a peculiar conclusion, reminiscent of a logic commonly attributed to Hobbes, and not to the liberal Kant of Perpetual Peace. The difference, as will become apparent later, lies in this: the Hobbesian body politic is an end in itself because it is artificial (albeit not without natural elements), whilst Kantian political organisation constitutes its own end because it is not artificial i.e. an organism. It is on this basis that political order(ing) is naturalised and universalised in the modern liberal image. The notion of self-organisation is common to the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte and the Kritik der Urteilskraft. In both works Kant not only argues that nature organises itself whether via the animated force of matter according to mechanical laws, or through an organic force that is beyond (mechanical) explanation but also elaborates how this process operates. As discussed above, in Allgemeine Naturgeschichte Kant rebuts Newtons account of natures entropic propensity if left to its own devices. Rather, Kant contends, nature strives towards harmony and perfection. Despite this teleological vision of harmony and order, the process itself is one of disorder(ing). At a certain stage in her movement towards perfection, entropic tendencies emerge which bring about the disintegration of organised structures.[footnoteRef:13] Yet, if nature possesses the capacity to move from chaos to regular order, Kant asks, would she not be capable of restoring herself from the new chaos consequent upon the slowing down and eventual standstill of her motions, spurring a new development from chaos towards order? Indeed, he affirms, planetary systems can fall into decay and re-develop into an orderly system, in a play [that] has more than once repeated itself.[footnoteRef:14] Kants conception of nature according to the laws of mechanics produces a phoenix of nature, which burns itself out only to revive from its ashes rejuvenated, across all infinity of times and spaces.[footnoteRef:15] He argues that, despite the conflict and collision of elements in natures process towards order, eventually all particles with settle in a state of the smallest reciprocal action, whereby all resistance disappears and elements continue in free circular motion.[footnoteRef:16] Not only does Kant here articulate a conviction in the final defeat of (forces of) disorder(ing), he furthermore appears oblivious to the existence or implications of resistance. This is precisely one of the ways in which the political is foreclosed in the modern liberal image. [13: Schnfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant, Note 24, p. 124.] [14: Kant, Universal Natural History, Note 25, p. 160.] [15: Ibid. ] [16: Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Note 27, p. 116.]

In Kants vision, order must eventually prevail, whilst forces of resistance inherent in the process are to be disguised through their recycling into movements that sustain rather than undermine order. Kant seeks to disguise the existence of perturbing forces as soon as political order has been instituted in order to account for the prohibition of resistance. He accordingly endeavours to sustain his portrayal of peaceful order by warning against questioning the origins of order: the subject ought not to indulge in speculations about its [political orders] origins with a view to acting upon them, as if its right to be obeyed were open to doubt.[footnoteRef:17] Investigations into the actual historical origins of the state are both futile and objectionable. Anyone who, having unearthed its ultimate origin, offers resistance to the state may with complete justice be punished, eliminated, or banished as an outlaw.[footnoteRef:18] By demarcating the political domain of justice, order, morality and rationality thus, Kant restricts the potentialities of politics and life to certain modes of (inter)action. In Kant, the universality and naturalness of the liberal image are founded on a particular production of nature, order and life; an understanding premised upon lifes requirement and capacity for securitisation within a particular domain of governance and order. Kants conceptualisation of nature entails the demarcation of what life may be and become politically, which is captured in organisational terms. Those forces moving outside the circulation of self-organising reproduction must be eradicated: life may be and become merely within the bounds of a particular (re)production of circulation. Forces that cannot be made to work productively for the production and sustenance of this domain of security and freedom, e.g. resistance, rebellion and other rogue forces, must be destroyed. [17: Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Note 27, p. 143.] [18: Ibid.]

For Kant, life itself is inherently amenable to liberal governance he reduces life to the kind of material deemed conducive to a liberal social and political order. What follows from this is that the only politics possible is the one that is already inherent in life. Although his vision of political order is founded on antagonism and war, this force is swiftly delegitimized through the construction of a natural surface of order, harmony and peace. Social order thus becomes spontaneous, self-organising, self-regulating as well as independent of, and antecedent to, political authority. What we can find in Kant is the idea that liberal social and political organisation is inherent in, and in a sense dictated by, life and nature. In portraying the development of political order and political relations in terms of natural development, or as a tendency towards order inherent in life, Kant naturalises and depoliticises political order and power relations. Thus, a particular order is separated from the power relations on which it depends, and made to appear as if it corresponds to an intrinsic design of nature itself.

Hayek and the order of the open society In this section, we consider the role of notions of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation in Hayeks liberal political philosophy. How does Hayek use these notions in developing his conceptions of life and political order? First, we show that Hayek deploys several concepts and ideas associated with complexity theory, and that his defence of liberal-capitalism largely relies on the subversive and emancipatory connotations of these ideas. Then, we examine this ostensibly emancipatory political project for the ways it mirrors the structures and configurations of power which it claims to oppose. We argue that Hayeks project of the open society relies on a pervasive economy of inclusion and exclusion through which liberal and non-liberal subjects are constructed and positioned. The systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of Hayeks open society undermines the emancipatory pretensions of his political project. In Hayek, the notions of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation remain tied to a rather narrow conception of what life and politics are and what they may become. Rather than drawing on insights from complexity theory to embrace the political potentials of the becoming of life qua movements and relations, Hayek merely uses certain concepts to naturalise and universalise liberal order.

Some believe that the emergence of the complexity sciences in the latter half of the twentieth century amounts to a period of general scientific re-conceptualisation, or indeed to a new dialogue of man with nature.[footnoteRef:19] One of its most influential exponents has described the emergence of complexity science in terms of a shift of metaphors: rather than relying on the Newtonian metaphor of clockwork predictability and linearity, which has governed scientific endeavour for more than three centuries, complexity is associated with metaphors more closely akin to the growth of a plant.[footnoteRef:20] Political philosophy, too, relies on metaphors and the affinity between Hayeks political thought and the discourse of complexity is given preliminary expression by the following statement: The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and in order to create the conditions most favourable to its growth must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.[footnoteRef:21] The shared metaphor is indicative of what is otherwise well documented by Hayeks references to the work of scientists such as Ilya Prigogine or Donald Campbell whose contributions to complexity theory he draws on for the formulation of his understanding of spontaneous order.[footnoteRef:22] [19: Nicolis & Prigogine, Exploring Complexity, 1989, p. 3.] [20: Brian Arthur cited in Waldorp, M., Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, p. 329.] [21: Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London and New York: Routledge, 1944), p. 18. ] [22: See: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), Vol. 3, p. 158. ]

The relationship between Hayeks thought and complexity theory remains subject to debate, and one of the questions that have been raised is whether, or to what extent, Hayeks work can be seen as a precursor to complexity theory.[footnoteRef:23] This has also raised wider questions about the relations between what we now know as complexity theory and the field of economics, and the subfield of Austrian economics in particular. There can be little doubt that the ideas of complexity theorists and Austrian economists seem to have much in common, not least their rejection of the presuppositions of neoclassical mainstream economic theory. Hayek wrote several essays on complex phenomena in the later 1960s, emphasising their spontaneous or self-organising character. In the context of complex phenomena, such as life, mind and society, order is the result of regularities of the behaviour of its constitutive elements in this sense, these phenomena are to be understood as self-regulating or self-organising systems. The notion of spontaneous, or self-organising, order can be traced back to the founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, who developed a theory of the spontaneous emergence of money for transaction purposes in primitive economies.[footnoteRef:24] [23: Kilpatrick Jr., Henry E. (2001) Complexity, Spontaneous Order and Friedrich Hayek: Are spontaneous order and complexity essentially the same thing?, Complexity, Vol. 6, No. 3; Wible, James (2000) What is Complexity?, in D. Colander (ed.) Complexity and the History of Economic Thought (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 15-31.] [24: Apparently, the theme of spontaneous order and self-organisation had played an important role in the Austrian school of economics ever since it was first developed by Carl Menger. ]

Complexity theory gains its subversive connotation from its opposition to classical or Newtonian science and the mechanistic world view that is said to have dominated Western science for too long. Classical science tended to rely on the machine model of reality and a mechanistic image of the universe. The scientific enterprise, in its classical form, was concerned with closed systems and linear relationships; its focus was on order, stability, equilibrium and uniformity. Complexity theory challenges and undermines many of the basic assumptions on which this Newtonian model of science rests. One of the definitive claims associated with complexity theory is that our world is fundamentally non-linear linearity is the exception, not the rule. Rather than focusing on the order, stability, and uniformity of closed systems, complexity science focuses on the disorder, instability, and diversity of open systems. Crucially, this shift of focus also implies that the classical assumptions of omniscience, predictability and full control have to be abandoned or at least severely qualified. The idea that the world is complex often goes hand in hand with the insistence on the imperfection of knowledge and the unpredictability of things. Complexity theory is often defined in terms of a series of oppositions: control versus flexibility, hierarchy versus autonomy, reductionism versus pluralism, centralisation versus decentralisation, etc. Complexity replaces stable taxonomy and mechanical predictability with the rationalities and problematic of the composite sciences of contingent and emergent being-in-formation.[footnoteRef:25] [25: Dillon, M. and Reid, J., The Liberal Way of War (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 73.]

Central to Hayeks liberalism is his conception of society in terms of spontaneous order. He makes a general distinction between orders that are made (taxis in Greek) and orders that grow (kosmos in Greek). In the realm of social life, made orders would include families, plants, corporations as well as the institutions of government. What these orders have in common is that they rely for their formation on prior collective agreement, and that they tend to require centralised direction for their maintenance. Made orders are the artificial product of concerted action and they tend to be created with a specific purpose in mind. Grown or spontaneous orders, by contrast, emerge endogenously they are self-generating or self-organising.[footnoteRef:26] Spontaneous orders tend to be complex in the sense that they involve a large number of elements and the interaction between them; they comprise more particular facts than any brain could ascertain or manipulate.[footnoteRef:27] Hayek insists that the concept of spontaneous order is particularly important for understanding the complex phenomena we encounter in the realms of life, mind and society: Here we have to deal with grown structures with a degree of complexity which they have assumed and could assume only because they were produced by spontaneous ordering forces.[footnoteRef:28] [26: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 37.] [27: Ibid., p. 38.] [28: Ibid., p. 41.]

Complex spontaneous orders can also be distinguished from made orders on the basis of their abstract character: they consist of a system of abstract relations between elements which are also defined only by abstract properties.[footnoteRef:29] The abstract character of spontaneous orders is determined by the abstract nature of the rules which govern the action of its constitutive elements. The formation of a complex spontaneous order, such as society, depends on individual elements acting in accordance with a set of abstract rules of conduct. For Hayek, society is the order that forms when individuals follow such rules of conduct in responding to their immediate circumstances. It is Hayeks contention that society is an order which is not the product of conscious control or rational design, but the result of the unintended and unforeseen spontaneous coordination of a multiplicity of actions by self-interested individuals. In social life order emerges of itself as the unintended consequence of independent individual actions. While each individual pursues his own ends on the basis of his own knowledge of his circumstances, their actions are guided by certain rules. The spontaneous order we find in certain fields of human activity, such as religion, morals, language and the market, is in principle no different from that we can observe in biological organisms, crystals or galaxies. All of the above are complex phenomena which form spontaneously on the basis of certain abstract rules or regularities of behaviour. [29: Ibid., p. 39.]

Hayeks theory of spontaneous order is must be seen in relation to his theory of mind and knowledge. For Hayek, not only human social life but the life of the mind itself is governed by unspecifiable tacit rules. At least some of the rules that govern human action and perception are meta-conscious, that is, beyond our capacities of identification and articulation.[footnoteRef:30] The knowledge upon which social life depends cannot be concentrated in a single brain because it is embodied in habits and dispositions and governs our conduct via inarticulate rules.[footnoteRef:31] The complexity of modern society extends well beyond our mental capacities. Knowledge is dispersed, temporary and tacit in nature, and only in a spontaneous social order can this knowledge be utilised efficiently. Hayeks theory of knowledge emphasises the cognitive limits of human reason. And it is on the basis of this conception of knowledge that Hayek develops his critique of the hubris inherent in socialist and collectivist thought. It has been suggested that Hayeks scepticism vis--vis both individual knowledge and centralised authority or decision-making embodies a certain epistemological modesty.[footnoteRef:32] Hayek repeatedly warns that we should always bear in mind the necessary and irremediable ignorance on everyones part of most of the particular facts which determine the actions of all the several members of human society. In Hayek, spontaneous order is a solution to the epistemic problem of the fragmented, temporary and tacit nature of human knowledge.[footnoteRef:33] His whole defence of markets and private property rests on his epistemological scepticism and his conception of order in terms of complexity, spontaneity and self-organisation. [30: Gray, J., Hayek on Liberty (London and New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 23. ] [31: Ibid., p. 25.] [32: Kacenelenborgen, E., Epistemological Modesty Within Contemporary Political Thought: A Link between Hayeks Neoliberalism and Pettits Republicanism, European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2009.] [33: Petsoulas, C., Hayeks Liberalism and its Origins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 2.]

It is Hayeks contention that the rules of human conduct that make the spontaneous order of society possible are themselves spontaneous formations inasmuch as they have emerged in a process of cultural evolution. By cultural evolution, Hayek means the evolution of sets of rules, norms and practices, especially those dealing with several property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain, and privacy.[footnoteRef:34] The theory of cultural evolution is the conceptual framework through which Hayek attempts to explain the origins of the liberal-capitalist order it explains how the open society has emerged and why it must prevail. In order to grasp Hayeks account of cultural evolution it is useful to begin with his understanding of the relationship between cultural and biological evolution. First of all, biological and cultural evolution are analogous in the sense that both rely on the same principle of selection: survival or reproductive advantage.[footnoteRef:35] Hayek emphasises that cultural evolution works through the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. Reproduction and survival are mediated by economic productivity, and natural selection will favour those forms of life whose cultural formations create the condition for high productivity. It is Hayeks contention, then, that the open society has prevailed because of its superior capacity to ensure survival and increase of population. There are important differences between the way in which selection operates in the transmission of acquired cultural properties, and the way in which it works on biological properties and their transmission.[footnoteRef:36] Inasmuch as cultural evolution works through the transmission of acquired rather than genetic properties, it is more in line with a Lamarckian than a Darwinian explanation. Moreover, cultural evolution operates mainly through group selection and not through the selection of individuals: selection will operate as between societies of different types, that is, be guided by the properties of their respective orders.[footnoteRef:37] [34: Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 12. ] [35: Ibid., p. 25.] [36: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 1, p. 23. ] [37: Ibid., p. 44.]

It is important to recognise that, for Hayek, culture is ultimately grounded in our biological endowments it is thus not, strictly speaking, cultural but bio-cultural evolution that he has in mind. Hayek contends that mans instincts were initially made not for the open society but for closed societies, or, for a life in small roving bands or troops.[footnoteRef:38] Genetically inherited instincts, such as solidarity, altruism as well as an instinctual aggressiveness towards outsiders, served cooperation within a type of order in which human activity was guided by concrete and commonly perceived aims, dangers and opportunities.[footnoteRef:39] These innate natural longings for common ends and purposes enabled the tribal way of life in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed.[footnoteRef:40] Our instincts are largely collectivist and enabled human coexistence in the small and closed societies that man relied upon before he came to develop those rules of conduct that made possible the emergence of the open society. According to Hayek, the process through which present civilization has emerged is that of a gradual replacement of innate responses by learnt rules.[footnoteRef:41] But how were men able to learn in the first place? Hayek answers this question by pointing to what he regards as the single most important biological endowment of man _ the capacity to learn. For Hayek, this particular genetic endowment was the last decisive step determined by biological evolution which has enabled other instinctual modes to be partly displaced.[footnoteRef:42] In other words, the growing capacity for learning is an innate characteristic which helped to displace other, tribal instincts, such as those of solidarity and altruism. The capacity to learn, Hayek asserts, is one of the prime benefits conferred during our long instinctual development; it is perhaps the most important capacity with which the human individual is genetically endowed.[footnoteRef:43] Through this capacity, the process of cultural or social evolution was set in motion and the move from the near animal state to civilization became possible. [38: Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 11. ] [39: Ibid.] [40: Ibid.] [41: Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, p. 16. ] [42: Ibid.] [43: Ibid., p. 26.]

In Hayeks view, civilization, as it has developed during the last ten or twenty thousand years, is a product of our capacity to learn. This aspect of Hayeks evolutionary framework is of crucial importance in the present context, for what it shows is that his defence of liberalism is ultimately grounded in a biological distinction between two forms of life. What we find in Hayek, then, is a bio-ontological account of the human condition which features a fundamental conflict between two biological properties and their respective cultural expressions. For Hayek, human evolution is explicable on the basis of this distinction or conflict between our collectivist instincts and the tribal way of life, on the one hand, and our capacity to learn and the liberal way of life, on the other hand. What is at stake in this conflict, as we shall see below, is nothing less than life itself. It is Hayeks contention that the open society has prevailed because of its superior capacity to ensure survival and increase of population.

What Hayek argues, then, is that the whole framework of legal, moral and economic rules of conduct, including, above all, the institution of private property, has been conferred upon man by cultural evolution through natural selection. According to Hayek, the open society is the condition of possibility of the life and wealth of the vast majority of the human population. There is but one way of life or one culture the culture of capitalism that provides the institutional properties necessary for the biological and economic sustainability of the global population. This also implies that any departure from the economic, legal and moral rules and institutions associated with this culture must represent a biopolitical threat that is, a threat to the life of the global population. What we find beneath the deceptively smooth surface of order that Hayek calls the open society is a fundamental struggle between two biocultural forms of life. The relationship of struggle/war between adaptive life and tribal life that emerges from Hayeks evolutionary ontology is inscribed into the order of the open society. It is our contention that this aspect of Hayeks theory is important insofar as it undermines, or at least strongly qualifies, the emancipatory pretensions of his liberalism. We can only grasp the systematic violence that Hayeks political project entails if we focus on his (bio-)political ontology, for it is here that liberal self and other are defined and positioned. In Hayek, tribalism haunts the interior life of every individual: there is a constant conflict between our tribal instincts and emotions, on the one hand, and the norms and conventions of the open society, on the other hand. Hayek stresses the necessity of restraining those natural instincts that do not fit into the order of the open society.[footnoteRef:44] And it is through discipline that these tribal instincts, which are to be understood as animal rather than as characteristically human or good instincts, are to be restrained.[footnoteRef:45] When Hayek speaks of discipline, he refers to a set of constraints through which we suppress our dangerous tribal instincts and emotions, such as the demand for social justice or any other collectivist proposal for social and political change. Hayekian discipline is a silent war against tribalism which is waged on the terrain of the individual body and against certain human instincts, desires and emotions, such as solidarity and altruism. In Hayek, the liberal subject is the product of a successful struggle against its tribal self. Fitness for the open society depends on the prior domestication of ones animal instincts through obligations of self-restraint. The form of subjectivity suitable to liberal society the self-interested, rational and entrepreneurial individual is a product of(self-)discipline. [44: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, p. 160.] [45: Ibid.]

Hayeks conception of the internal other who undermines the open society from within by allowing her tribal instincts to find political expression in thought and action. According to Hayek, the greatest threat to society comes from those who, driven by their savage desires, seek political change in the form either of a return to older forms of social and political order or the construction of new ones. Hayek sees great danger in the dissemination and circulation of certain ideas which appeal to our tribal instincts and generate demand for political change. As part of the internal struggle against tribalism, the open society must be purged of the ideas which potentially undermine it, especially theories of repression, alienation and domination. While Hayek does not explicitly advocate censorship he clearly states that education poses a threat to society if it disseminates false political knowledge. Liberal principles, Hayek explains, can be consistently applied only to those who obey liberal principles.[footnoteRef:46] He fails to discuss in detail the methods and practices through which the liberty of disobedient subjects might be restricted. Our interpretation of Hayek emphasizes the structural and systematic violence engendered by the order he envisioned. By focusing on this aspect of Hayek, this paper puts into question Hayeks emancipatory claims. [46: Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3, p. 56. ]

Darwin and the difference of lifeHayek thus undermines the emancipatory potential of his vision of the open society by drawing a clear line between forms of life to be fostered and forms of life considered a threat to the open society. The similarities between Hayek and Kants bio-politics are striking in this context. Hayek, like Kant before him, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on security freedom is produced through and operates on the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion, which naturalises and universalises liberal order. Both Hayek and Kant develop a bio-politics, which captures both politics and life in terms of self-organisation. Despite Hayeks adoption of complexity the open society assumes the same operative principle as Kants vision of political life: the capacity to adapt to liberal society constitutes the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion.

This section enages Darwin to develop a politics of complexity that challenges the bio-political foreclosure of which Hayeks notion of the open society is ultimately productive. It thereby draws upon and produces a different perspective of evolutionary thought. By prioritising difference rather than reproduction, this section seeks to develop a perspective that challenges the depoliticisation inherent in and the war waged at the heart of Hayek's open society.

It is interesting to note that Darwin himself acknowledges a form of complexity in the natural world:

in several parts of the world, insects determine the existence of cattle. Perhaps Paraguay offers the most curious instance for this; for here neither cattle nor horses nor dogs have ever run wild, though they swarm southward and northward in a feral state;this is caused by the greater number in Paraguay of a certain fly, which lays its eggs in the navels of these animals when first born. The increase of these fliesmust be habitually checked by some means, probably birds. Hence, if certain insectivorous birds (whose numbers are probably regulated by hawks or beasts of prey) were to increase in Paraguay, the flies would decrease then cattle and horses would become feral, and this would certainly greatly alterthe vegetation: this again would largely affect the insects; and thisthe insectivorous birds, and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity.[footnoteRef:47] [47: Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 58. ]

Moreover, Darwins theory of evolution of species via natural selection introduces into the analysis of the development of life over time the aspects of struggle, excess and contingency, in distinction to Kant and Lamarcks accounts of nature, in which harmony and teleology are firmly linked. The difference between the latter two lies in the complete exclusion of crisis and struggle in the relation between organism and environment by Lamarck, whereas Kant accords antagonism and war a productive capacity in natures progression towards fulfilment, that is to say harmony.

Thus, whereas Lamarck and Kant conceive of the order and development of nature teleologically according to the principle of harmony, Darwin, after lenghty and thorough study and observation of plants and animals, discovers that species evolve gradually over time in a struggle for survival. Rejecting both harmony and teleology, Darwin instead posits the contingency of nature and the primacy of struggle. No preconceived plan, purpose or inevitability can be drawn upon to explain variation. Darwin does believe in the overall harmony of the system, nevertheless, natural selection its regulatory element operates through contingency and struggle as well as excess and destruction. Hence contingency is furthermore opposes to Lamarcks belief in the usefulness of variations, which appears to have been adopted by Hayek.

Darwin stresses the ineffectiveness and wastefulness of nature, e.g. although millions of germ cells are produced only the exceptional one can play its role.[footnoteRef:48] Or in the case of bees: [48: Jacob, The Logic of Life, pp. 167 &175; Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 49 & 90.]

[w]e need not marvel at the sting of the bee causing the bees own death; at drones being produced in such vast numbers for one single act, with the great majority slaughtered by their sterile sisters; at the astonishing waste of pollen by our fir-trees; at the instinctive hatred of the queen bee for her own fertile daughters; at ichneumonidae feeding with live bodies of caterpillars; and at other such cases.[footnoteRef:49] [49: Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 347. ]

Individual cases of destruction and/or excess are of little concern for Darwin who, in a fundamental shift in biological thinking, focuses attention on populations rather than individual organisms. The population becomes in fact the mediating element through which the milieu acts on the organism. As Foucault puts it: the medium between the milieu and the organism, with all the specific effects of population: mutations, eliminations, and so forth.[footnoteRef:50] Contra Lamarck, for whom the environment acts directly on the organism, Darwin argues that only on occasion does the milieu cause variations in species; in general its effects are limited to favouring the reproduction of some species at the expense of others.[footnoteRef:51] In Darwins theory of evolution the milieu influences the organism only via the mediating elements of the population and reproduction. [50: Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 78. ] [51: Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, p. 105; Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 102; Jacob, Logic of Life, p. 158.]

Key to standard readings of Darwins thought is the notion of natural selection as a process of filiative reproduction, productive of change qua evolution. Whereas these accounts focus on filiation and struggle the survival of the fittest , this article follows Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari by prioritising the element of evolution in terms of becoming. Deleuze and Guattaris encounter with Darwin in A Thousand Plateaus centres on the significance of the role accorded to contingency and the population without discussing natural selection as such. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari credit Darwin with effecting two key changes which imply a movement in the direction of a science of multiplicities and away from filiative models: first, the substitution of populations for types and, secondly, the substitution of rates of differential relations for degrees. Whereas in the natural history tradition types of forms function as the ordering element in the study of nature, with Darwin these come to be conceptualised increasingly in terms of populations, packs, colonies, collectivities or multiplicities. In short, the population will be understood as a multiplicity. The second change for which Deleuze and Guattari credit Darwin is the understanding of degrees of development in terms of speeds, rates, coefficients and differential relations.[footnoteRef:52] [52: Ibid., pp. 53-54. See also Darwin, Origin of Species, pp. 43ff. For another conceptualisation of Darwin as thinker of difference, inspired by Deleuze and Guattaris reading, see: Grosz, The Nick of Time, especially chapters I-III. ]

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Darwins double move implies that forms do not pre-exist the population but are its statistical result:

The more a population assumes divergent forms, the more its multiplicity divides into multiplicities of different nature, the more its elements form distinct compounds or matters the more efficiently it distributes itself in the milieu, or divides up the milieu.[footnoteRef:53] [53: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 53-54]

Species are the result of geographic and ecological processes and not the stages of them.[footnoteRef:54] The second implication is that [54: Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 165. ]

the degrees are not degrees of pre-existent development or perfection but are instead global and relative equilibriums: they enter into play as a function of the advantage they give particular elements, then a particular multiplicity in the milieu, and as a function of a particular variation in the milieu.[footnoteRef:55] [55: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 54. ]

Hence Deleuze and Guattari credit Darwin with a reversal that is key to their philosophical thought: movements and relations precede and are productive of forms and degrees as well as of populations and not the other way around. This reversal functions to set up an opposition between natural philosophy and Darwinian biology; and a reversal characteristic also of the movement from Newtonian science to complexity theory.[footnoteRef:56] [56: Dillon and Reid, Liberal Way of War, p. 74. ]

Deleuze and Guattaris ascription of a theory of multiplicities to Darwin starkly diverges from the prevailing teleological reading of Darwinian evolution. Standard, neo-Darwinian interpretations explain evolution in terms of a means-end progression towards perfection for in the struggle for survival only those fittest or best adapted will survive. The idea that life develops instrumentally towards a certain end implies a future projection. As Grosz explains, however, Darwins endeavour is to record how life may have evolved historically. His theory is retrospective and does not make future predictions because life cannot be predicted.[footnoteRef:57] The Origin of Species develops an idea of natural selection that is non-teleological; life is contingent and evolves through difference. Albeit on the basis of reproduction, the idea of evolution as the production of difference is asserted by Darwin himself. The reproduction of organisms, he explains, ensures the stability of the species and the individual organism in future generations. Reproduction constitutes the link between individual and species life as well as between its preservation and adaptation. This is because transformation and error are intrinsic to the process of reproduction and hence to the preservation of the species. Darwin demonstrates that evolution does not and cannot occur without producing difference. Although emphasising the slowness of the process of selection, there is, according to Darwin, no limit to the change it may produce: [57: Grosz, Nick of Time, pp. 8-9.]

I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by natures power of selection.[footnoteRef:58] [58: Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 84. ]

Deleuze and Guattaris intervention bends the notion of reproduction by centralising the idea that deterritorialisation precedes territory e.g. the species is a result, an outcome rather than a starting point.[footnoteRef:59] Secondly, they introduce a theory of becoming, a rhizomatics which moves beyond filiative reproduction altogether. The Universe does not function by filiation, they write.[footnoteRef:60] Rather than dependent on lines of filiative descent, life is transformed and (dis)ordered more productively and creatively through different processes of relationality that involve heterogeneous elements, i.e. unnatural participations and side-communications. Lifes evolution or involution is complex, non-linear and unpredictable. [59: In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze credits Darwin with inaugurating the thought of individual difference. According to Deleuze, the leitmotiv of The Origin of Species is that we do not know what individual difference is capable of! See: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 310. ] [60: Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, p. 267. ]

Deleuze and Guattari thus highlight the monstrous nature of lifes becoming. Darwin himself suggests that monstrosity is inherent to the process of evolution when he remarks that it is an almost universal law of nature that the higher organic beings require an occasional cross with another individual.[footnoteRef:61] Life mutates and transforms, is in continuous movement and produces difference. Whereas, for Darwin, this process remains subject to the pressures of selection, Deleuze and Guattaris radical creativity consists in its release from notions of selection, heredity and filiation. Where standard Darwinian interpretations focus on the replication of the species on account of the invariant structure of DNA, Deleuze and Guattari point out that reproduction is dependent on primary processes of deterritorialisation and decoding.[footnoteRef:62] Indissolubly entangled with movements of productive disordering, evolution is not the straightforward or linear reproduction of the species as such. Rather than the translation of code, that is the passage of one pre-established form into another, code is inseparable from intrinsic movements of decoding. There is no genetics without genetic drift.[footnoteRef:63] Every code, they write, has a margin of decoding due to supplements and surplus values, which enable side-communication. Through viruses fragments of code may, for instance, be transmitted from the cells of one species to another.[footnoteRef:64] Rather than simply being transmitted genetically, from generation to generation, code is subject to primary processes of de- and trans-coding, that is to say side-communications and monstrous couplings as movements of transformation beyond filiative reproduction. [61: Darwin, Charles, The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. Elibron Classics, 2005, p. 1. ] [62: It is to be noted that Deleuze and Guattaris thought is also influenced by Weismannian neo-Darwinism, e.g. with respect to population thinking and the focus on the vitality of non-organic life i.e. the demoting of the organism , however, they refute the idea of evolution as the simple reproduction of DNA, focusing instead on the primacy of decoding and non-filiative becoming. See: Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, pp. 4-6, 8 & 145. ] [63: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59. See also: Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life, p. 189.] [64: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 59. ]

The rhizomatics into which Deleuze and Guattari transform Darwins theory of evolution is a far cry from standard Darwinian theory with its perfectionist and progressive values[footnoteRef:65]. Understood as becoming involution is not the reproduction of pre-established forms of life; it is characterised by processes of decoding, genetic drift, monstrous couplings, etc. Life is characterised by its perturbation more than by its preservation; and by becoming more than by reproduction. One of the implications of the way in which Deleuze and Guattari make this move is that chance, error and resistance become not merely immanent to life processes; their force is anterior. Only via perturbations such as genetic drift and transversal modes of communication does life become and do forms of life emerge. [65: Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 151. ]

It will be noted that Foucault underlines the fundamentality of error, too. At lifes most basic level, Foucault argues following Canguilhem, the play of code and decoding leaves room for chance, which, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something like perturbation in the information system, something like a mistake.[footnoteRef:66] As Foucault defines it, [i]n the extreme, life is what is capable of error.[footnoteRef:67] Most characteristic of life are chance, contingency and difference. That is to say that life is irreducible and undecidable and cannot be laid out in advance. Thus, if Deleuze and Guattaris reading of Darwin uncovers the centrality and immanence of perturbation, chance and disorder(ing) and hence the superfluity and excess characteristic of life Kant and Hayek seek to render invisible and neutralise these aspect through an image political life that operates via (the reproduction of) circulation. In the latter image, lifes political requirements and capacities are bound up with governance and the nexus security-freedom. [66: Foucault, Michel, Introduction in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, Carolyn R. Fawcett (transl.). New York: Zone Books, 1989, pp. 22-23.] [67: Ibid., p. 22. ]

The notion of excess does, however, not merely feature in an involutionary reading of Darwins evolutionary thought. Darwin himself broaches the importance of excess in terms of encounters and forms of interaction that cannot be rationalised according to the survival of the fittest. In addition to natural selection, Darwin introduces the notion of sexual selection, which depends not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor but few or no offspring.[footnoteRef:68] Grosz suggests that sexual selection is characterised merely by courtship and pleasure as opposed to those qualities that facilitate survival. Yet, Darwin himself describes sexual selection in terms of an advantage of males in terms of their weapons, means of defence or charms.[footnoteRef:69] In most species, he remarks, struggle constitutes a primary feature of sexual selection. Groszs analysis is nevertheless valuable insofar as it elucidates that, according to Darwin, there is something more to (the reproduction of) life than a struggle for survival pure and simple: the process of selection features in addition a play of sexual taste, appeal and pleasure.[footnoteRef:70] As Darwin himself notes in relation to birds, in which the contest is generally more peaceful, [68: Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 68. ] [69: Ibid., p. 70. ] [70: Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, p. 33.]

there is the severest rivalry between the males of many species to attract by singing the females. The rock-thrush of Guiana, birds of Paradise, and some others, congregate; and successive males display their gorgeous plumage and perform strange antics before the females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner.[footnoteRef:71] [71: Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 69. ]

Reproduction contains a non-instrumental aspect, in which transformations are not necessarily useful or beneficial, yet always creative of a difference that cannot be predicted in advance i.e. becoming.

ConclusionHow does a conception of evolution qua difference and complexity help us move beyond the systematic violence that takes place beneath the smooth surface of Kant and Hayeks visions of society? This silent war[footnoteRef:72] undermines the emancipatory pretensions of, and depoliticises, their political projects. It is, we argue, by embracing rather than denouncing as dangerous and domesticating the difference that lies at the basis of their visions biological and political life that conceptualising resistance to biopower becomes possible. [72: Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 16. ]

Present in all three accounts in Kant, Hayek and Darwin is an economy of inclusion and exclusion, which functions as an economy of life or, perhaps, an economy of life and death. For Kant, both life and politics are to be understood on the basis of (self-)organisation and circulation. This conceptualisation produces a distinction between life that circulates on the basis of its understood nature and rogue or rebellious forces endangering liberal society. The erection of a boundary between relations and forms of life understood to be productive, and to be fostered, and those that must be eradicated is bluntly articulated by Kant, who asserts in Perpetual Peace that [t]he saying let justice reign even if all the rogues in the world must perish is true; it is a sound principle of right.[footnoteRef:73] Moreover, the prohibition of resistance is absolute: [73: Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 123. ]

all the incitements of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebellion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in the commonwealth, for it destroys its very foundations. This prohibition is absolute.[footnoteRef:74] [74: Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 81. See also: Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 143 & 162. ]

Hayek, too, produces an onto-politics of freedom based on security. That is to say, a notion of freedom produced through and operating on the basis of an economy of inclusion and exclusion tribal life versus adaptive life which naturalises and universalises liberal order. Despite Hayeks adoption of complexity the open society assumes the same operative principle as Kants vision of political life, according to which only a specific form of life is considered worthy.

The economy of life characteristic of standard neo-Darwinism renders this mechanism more explicit: adapt or die. This paper has, however, provided a different reading of Darwin in which movement and relations gain primacy over instituted forms. Sexual selection, which Darwin elaborates in addition to natural selection, goes beyond instrumentality and the prioritisation of the struggle of life and death in which the best adapted triumph. Instead, sexual selection, as a play of sexual appeal and pleasure, operates on the basis of excess and becoming. Secondly, engaging Darwin in terms of becoming beyond filiative reproduction, life is characterised by its perturbation more than by its preservation for chance, error and resistance are both immanent and anterior to forms of (self-)organisation. Hence it is our suggestion that a starting point for the repoliticisation of life is a different approach to the question of what political life is and may become, an approach that starts with and embraces forces of difference and becoming rather centralising the self-interested individual and neutralising the forces of war and resistance at the heart of a so-called open society. 22