Toward an Organismic Subjectivity: Affect, Relation, Entanglement

Abstract

The motivating ambition of this thesis is the endeavour to think the subject anthropo-eccentrically, to free it of its conscious-agential overtones and to foreground instead the active organism in all its ecologically entangled, metabolically perspectival glory. I define the subject, in the course of the thesis, as a body productive of its own spatial and temporal fields, a body that lives its own space and time. Ecology is pluralized, made bodily. And the body itself is dynamicized and rendered porous—less an absolute limit than a variable topology separating, uniting, and enfolding organism and ecology, self and other, subject and world. I begin, in Chapter 1, with Deleuze and the rhythmic contractions that define the temporal pole of organismic subjectivity. In Chapter 2, I turn toward the way spaces are configured on the basis of the affective enaction of organismic life. This is organismic spatiality. In Chapter 3, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between the actual and virtual in order to properly theorize the way organismic abilities and environmental layouts are pre-subjectively related such that actual organismic activity individuates a field of spatiotemporal experience. And as the structure of this relation fluctuates, so too does the framework of subjective experience, the sensorimotor-perceptual affects by which experience is defined. Organismic subjectivity is, as a consequence, both relentlessly dynamic and tied irreducibly to the organization of its own world. To think this entanglement is to think subjectivity as swarm, a concept that opens this theory onto an array of new possibilities—toward, to take only one example among a range of many, a human-technological entanglement that conceives scientific apparatuses in their integration with a collectively human subjectivity. I conclude the thesis with a brief gesture toward the implications carried by the development of such possibilities.