The Complexity of Complexity and Relationality Unbounded

ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors

The complexity of complexity authored without intent over time by accumulative human actions enfolds the knowable and unknowable, the actual and the abstract, the functional and dysfunctional, order and chaos, and a mutational relationality between beings, elements and systems. While such a complexity is not fully within the grasp (defined here as that which is held or comprehended) of those of us trying to make sense of complexity, it nonetheless demands acknowledgement. Doing so recognises, as Luce Irigaray made clear (Irigaray, 2002: 158), that “A single Whole cannot hold together everyone and everything.’’ An unbounded compound of difference has no edge, no outside—there is no pluriverse of containment of interwoven difference.

All systems are situated in relation to other systems in time and space. None have an independent and infinite worldly existence. All systems exist by virtue of a situated dependence on what is externally relational to them as a greater complexity itself within a cosmological complexity–the very notion of Earth systems constituting a living organism (Gaia) depends on the Sun (as part of the Solar System). In this respect, all systems have no complete immunity from what is external to them. Thus, no system transcends the finitude of their finitudinal phenomenological and perceived epistemological conditions.

On relationality

The idea of relationality is not new within and between the histories of occidental and oriental philosophies. What is new is the recognition of its significance in advancing an understanding of the current planetary conjuncture. This goes in two directions: the causality and effects of the expanding impacts of enviro-climatic dysfunction; and the related ontological changes, as always present but now breaking down any claimed distinction between subjects and objects. Thus, “we” are not just affected by things (like technology), but our becoming as complex beings is indivisible from their effect—things are elemental to the specificity of “our” individuation. This recognition of the “mutual relation” between self and worldly things was made by Hegel; our “being-in-the world” was seen as completely relational by Heidegger, with the situated relational social ecology of our individuation present in thinkers as different as Emanuel Levinas, Gregory Bateson and Gilbert Simondon. All of this is to say that that animate existence (including our own) is the consequence of relations within and between multiple intertwined ecologies with varied, co-implications and temporalities that constitute material or immaterial regimes of function, order or chaos.

Of course, relationality is not universally affirmed. For instance, the philosopher Graham Harman (2020) argues that philosophy should be non-relational, as relationality implies taking all relations into account—and “this is not possible.’’ This is a ridiculous proposition and position. Philosophy is a consequence of the synthesis of a selective history of ecologies of mind. Moreover, philosophical thought, informed by a relational perspective, posits significance within or against traditions of thought deemed to be significant within and beyond its own epistemological foundations. Likewise, significance does not exist independent of, or without reference to, a conjunctural or discursive context. It thus exists in relation to something other than itself. Here, the very nature of the dynamic of intertextuality is an obvious example: any text has or has not significance in relation to language, other textual elements or texts, and a discourse.

On relationality and systems: the case of a warming climate

The climate system is a clear and very pertinent example of a system now being transformed by the unintended impacts of (industrial) systems external to it that go beyond a historicity of changes induced by natural and cosmic events. In this respect, there have always been variations in the duration and geo-situated climate produced during the planet’s interglacial cycles. These being due to the Earth’s orbital parameters not being stable but variable; as such, they alter the shape of Earth’s orbit, the tilt of Earth’s axis and its wobble (this process is known as Milankovitch cycles). What induced global warming is now doing is extending the length and amplifying the intensity of the current planetary warming cycle (which started at the end of the Ice Age around 12,000 years ago, and from which human settlement and agriculture emerged, and has perhaps 5,000, or more, years to run).

Climate change cannot be delinked from population movement. The initial planetary distribution of our species was in significant part driven by climate and related food availability. A coming mass migration unnaturally induced by changes in the planet’s climate will increasingly make areas of it unlivable due to extremely hot temperatures and sea level rise. Climate has had evolutionary transformative agency biologically. It determined the form of agriculture systems and associated diets, along with the forms of shelter and urban systems. It influences the formation of social ecologies, the character of psychologies, modes of governance and associated systems of population management. Climate was also generative of numerous industries, from clothing and tourism to specific forms of transport to cope with specific climatic conditions. All these industries were the product of socio-cultural and economic systems of operation, management and distribution. Current climatic instability will not only cause major problems of population displacement but also ones of global food, and national border security.

The essence of our collective being as beings is captured by uneven intercultural intensity of the dialectical character of the “our” transformative world-making agency as it indivisibly destroys and creates. Writ large, this unrestrained disposition is made clear by the scale of extractivism over time—this is not just environmentally but also historically in the overt destruction of people and their culture, and in the present neglect and exploitation of surviving populations. The ongoing material excesses of extractive nations act as if the extracted resource were inexhaustible, as evidenced by their ever-striving to advance the technological means and systems of extraction. Such action being the first in a defuturing unsustainable economic recursive system of material processing, manufacture, distributing, consumption system, and waste disposal demanding to be futurally met with the advancement of sustainment, which the condition that sustainability is meant to emplace but often fails to do—this by de facto sustaining the unsustainable.

The widespread failure of sustainability practices cannot be disaggregated from a failure to recognise that the systems that facilitate the function of an unsustainable economy do not, and cannot, function within a circular system that is sustainable. The reason for this is that the condition of unsustainability is constituted by a far more complex configuration of interrelated factors and systems that undermine notions like the circular economy. This complexity goes beyond the functionality of instrumentally characterised systems of exchange to include wider, diverse interests and forces of a global political economy. But equally, it fuses with what Jean-François Lyotard named as the ‘libidinal economy,’ which is not predicated upon rational but desiring subjects whose actions can be irrational, impulsively reactive, be against good sense, and infused with psycho-social and ethno-cosmological behavioural influences. So, no matter the complexity of inter-twined systems, the libidinal economy creates a complexity beyond it, one that, while being recognised, is unable to be made sense of, especially as an extended multiplicity within the complexity of complexity. These two economies do not exist as binaries, but rather in variable, differential, graduated relations within all of us. Feelings, desires, and moods direct action as much as do reason, knowledge, and sense.

Our individual and collective being is a nexus of systems convergence and difference of the bio-physical, the psycho-social, the ethno-cosmological, and the cognitive-mind. Everything functions systemically and relationally to constitute the complexity of our individuated self within the complexity of a specific plurisocietal formation, which is a difference that is not one.

Finally, ontological and systemic ontogenetic formation of our being dissolves the clear division between the human and the animate and the inanimate other-than-human. The historicity of our mutability as an animal that encountered and interactively appropriated bio-material things in the world meant that (ex)change has always been reciprocal. The perpetual imminence of this process of futural transformative change resides in that complexity of complexity. While “our” being can be enhanced and regenerated, this does not imply predetermined realisation of linear progress. Devolutionary conditions producing social regress are possible and happen, as is the loss of essential qualities of our species being (via dehumanisation). The dynamics of such change are already evident: this in coming climate conditions that portend mass population displacement and abandonment. At the other extreme is the small but growing attraction toward a transhuman augmentation of mind and body (especially in mainly young members of techno-economic elites). Such change opens the prospect of a mutant techno-natural subspecies (created from a synthesis of the current projects of AI advanced singularity and bio-engineered immortality). Such a science-fiction vision is no longer just the product of a literary genre but an economically invested developmental union between the imagined and actual systems.