Towards an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm: Animal Politics, Metamod-Elization, and The Pragmatics of Mutual Inclusion

A fascinating by-product of recent interest in vitalist philosophies of becoming—particularly in the area of affect theory—has been the import of the works of English anthropologist–cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, in particular his seminal 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Bateson broke down ecology into a series of three areas: the material (ecology, biophysical); the social (cultural and human); and the perceptual, which treats the mind as an interactive system characterized by an exchange of information: "Difference that makes a difference," as he put it. Bateson argued for the innate interconnection and interpenetration of the three ecologies to the point of always deterritorializating them towards an infinite outside that guarantees their difference and becoming. More importantly, this is also a de-hierarchized system, where humans are given no more preference than nonhumans or material objects, and neither is raised above the worlding capabilities of nature. In this sense, geomorphism, anthropomorphism, and biomorphism are equally embedded, with the aesthetic acting as a vital catalyst. Bateson's project has a clear connection to recent explorations in ecosophical aesthetics, in particular the groundbreaking work of Félix Guattari. In Chaosmosis (1992, English 1995), The Three Ecologies (1989, English 2000), and What Is Ecosophy? (2013, English 2018) Guattari developed a processual philosophy of the ecological through the use of asignifying components that think beyond the conventional split between subject and object, human and non-human, subjectivities and world, transforming the ecological into a machinic, decentered ethico-aesthetic paradigm, a subjectivity without a subject.

Enter Brian Massumi's What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), which also draws heavily on Bateson but in this case one of his more underutilized essays, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy" (1972).¹ Wittily written and rich in philosophical scope (in addition to Bateson, Deleuze, and Guattari, the work encompasses Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Giorgio Agamben and Raymond Ruyer), Massumi has structured his book as a form of practical user's manual geared towards a greater, creative vitalism of life (in Friedrich Nietzsche's sense of "that dark, driving power that insatiably thirsts for itself").² The book's title essay is a relatively short reflection on animal play as the staging of a metacommunicative paradox, an expression of difference and singularity on one hand and, through vitality affect, mutual inclusion and transindividuality on the other. These open-ended, fluid ludic gestures are followed by a series of fourteen propositions that act as a preliminary sketch for a practical philosophy (in Baruch Spinoza's sense) "to be Filled in according to Appetite" (38). Massumi fills out the second half of the book with three supplementary essays that apply Bateson's ludic principles to (a) writing, where, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the human "becomes-animal" most intently (specifically through the role of the "anomalous" in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis [1915] and Herman Melville's Moby Dick [1851]); (b) the zoological reduction of the animal to an object of spectatorship (via a constructed zone of indifference), and the concomitant need for a mutual inclusion of the animal and the human via an enactive, sympathetic gesture of double deterritorialization (producing a zone of indiscernibility of difference); and (c), lest one fall into abhorrent speciesism and anthropomorphism, "Six Theses on the Animal to be Avoided" (91). Massumi's main objective in the supplements is to open a gap between Bateson's original theory of animal play and the affirmative politics that might flow from it, whereby "[o]nly an enactive ecology of a diversity of animal practices, in a creative tension of differential mutual inclusion, can begin to do the trick" (89, his emphasis).

So what does Bateson's theory of play consist of, and how does it force us to rethink the very nature of instinct and, by extension, politics? Firstly, as Massumi points out, we must rethink the human as immanent to animality, for "[e]xpressing the singular...