by Bruce Clarke
Review: Cary Wolfe, Jagged Ontologies (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2026), x + 194 pp.
Unpacking Paradox
At the beginning of Jagged Ontologies’ first chapter, ‘What “the Animal” Can (Therefore) Teach “the Anthropocene,”’ Cary Wolfe notes that his ‘point in this project is not so much to defend the usefulness of the theory of autopoiesis per se’ (17). However, that critical defense is certainly one of its main points, precisely because that theory still orients and informs the core of his world constructions. Wolfe’s writings have mounted and fortified this theoretical position since his first contacts with the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and his social systems theory, as documented in the 2000 volume Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity developed from a 1994 conference at Indiana University that brought Luhmann together late in his life with Wolfe and his colleagues along with premier American scholars including N. Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi.[1] Here is an important early coalescing of the larger discourse of posthumanism whose many tributaries tap into the discourse networks of cybernetics broadly understood. Over several decades, Wolfe has contributed large-scale theoretical expansions to this discussion, variously drawing upon deconstruction, systems theory, animal studies, biopolitics, ecocriticism, American pragmatism, and critical theory. Wolfe gathers up these various schools of thought under the banner of a particular construction of posthumanism that is conceptually rooted in second-order systems theory—that is to say, in the unfolding of the theory of autopoiesis from its biological emergence in Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to its metabiotic uptake in Luhmann’s social systems theory.[2]
It is axiomatic in social systems theory that only complexity can reduce complexity. Hence the paradox that even while theorizing reduction of complexity as the systemic function par excellence, Wolfe is an especially complex thinker—a Derridean Luhmannian posthumanist enlarging animal studies through biopolitics. In the ongoing seminar of Wolfe’s communications, longstanding conversations within the theoretical literature continue in the background, ready at any moment to be tipped, without overelaborate explanation, into the foreground of the discourse. Wolfe’s articles are broadly woven by seizing these diverse threads as needed according to the theme at hand, drawn at will from this large network of references running from the major figures mentioned above—the Derrida-Luhmann alliance being uppermost—to thinkers from Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito to Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour to Hannah Arendt and Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to Alice Juarrero and Stuart Kauffman. From this base of operations, Jagged Ontologies goes on to assess the new forest ecology in ‘How (Not) to Keep the Forest Weird’ and ‘Everything is (Not) Connected: Biopolitics and Jagged Ecologies in Big Bend,’ where a forest ‘island’—a high-altitude relic of a bygone climate—prompts a meditation on niche construction that expands into a Derridean critique of Roberto Esposito’s ‘affirmative’ biopolitics. A chapter on the German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys considered through a biopolitical lens adds a dash of artistic panache to the discussion as well as the musky redolence of a conceptual art practice that involved dead hares and live coyotes. This performance is followed and concluded by the tours de force ‘“Posthumanism” Thinks the “Political”: How Autopoiesis Radicalizes Foucault’ and ‘What Species is Multispecies Justice?’.
Jagged Ontologies is a box set of recent articles operating on the front lines of this specifically second-order systems-theoretical configuration of high posthumanism, a discursive field in which critical theory mediates between science and philosophy. Wolfe opens with a caveat, a ‘warning’: ‘The land of jagged ontologies is . . . a land of inescapable paradox’ (1). The landscape of paradox here features the theoretical proximity of deconstruction—a milieu where paradox comes forth ‘naturally’, conceptually in formations such as the pharmakon, the poison that cures, the remedy that kills—to social systems theory, for which paradox is not so much conceptual as operational, foundational to the phenomena of life and meaning. In short, paradox undercuts the fixities of meaning making: ‘paradox is the opposite, indeed the antagonist, of sovereignty’ (2). Foregrounding paradox has the crucial critical function of reminding the Law to practice some humility, to be deliberate in factoring in its own lack of ultimate foundations. ‘Parsing these different aspects of paradox is crucial because it helps us understand . . . that what separates us from the world is precisely what connects us to the world, a principle I call “openness from closure”’ (4). The paradox of openness from closure is the crux of systems theory’s approach to meaning—the hinge that connects self-reference, recursivity, sign-play and meaning-making, language, and technicity. The discourse of paradox then intersects with the inexorably diverse yet mortal temporalities of living systems. Wolfe’s overture on necessary paradox pays homage to a master of the genre, the cybernetic visionary Gregory Bateson, and his meditations on the unpredictability of living systems as they unfold and terminate together with their environments within an emergent sheaf of overlapping times.
Eliciting Derrida’s discourse on the ‘limit’ in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Wolfe aligns that abstraction with the concept of an autopoietic system’s dynamic closure within an operational boundary. Here is the tenor for which Wolfe’s jaggedness is a sharp figure: for all their relational embeddedness, specific systems are submitted to complex delimitations bearing the sharp edges of their sufficient finitude, relative differentiation, and eventual termination. Wolfe cites Derrida on ‘a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on an abyss’ (7), which abyss is simply the corresponding but undelimited, hence more complex environment beyond that systemic limit:
Derrida’s topology of ‘edge’ and ‘abyss’ here is strikingly similar to system theory’s axiomatic insistence that the ‘outside’ of an environment is always already exponentially, even infinitely, more complex than the ‘inside’ of any system that encounters it, thus calling upon those systems to establish an ‘edge,’ in very novel and creative ways (‘multiplying its figures,’ as Derrida puts it), against this relentless onrush from the ‘abyss’ of the outside— the very engine of diversity, novelty, and individuation in the domain of what we call ‘the living.’ (8)
In other idioms more rooted in physics, one might speak here about entropy and negentropy in thermodynamic systems, their measures of order and disorder, energy and information. Wolfe’s systemic idiom is rooted instead in the alliance of complexity theory and biological systems theory. In this realm, ‘environmental complexity’ takes on the planetary weight and profusion of systems upon systems within an ecological matrix that reaches its own limit and boundary only at the porous edge of the biosphere. For Wolfe the living world’s ‘relentless onrush’ of differences goes beyond abiotic thermodynamics and its informatic extensions. Organismal autopoiesis must produce a viable course of selections called life while framed by a massively granular and virtually unbounded environment—which is not itself a living system per se but rather a metabiotic mélange—always more complex than any system that can stabilize its formal order in the manner of life and so come to its own terms of origination, maintenance, and reproduction within that larger context. So the complexity axis is transversal to that of order and disorder, and it is the complexity differential that organizes Wolfe’s system of thought.
Wolfe traverses the organic, psychic, and social registers of contemporary autopoietic discourse as a poststructuralist posthumanist vigilant to interrogate residual vestiges of metaphysical idealism still lurking within the precincts of the new materialists and the flat ontologists. He slates these atavistic fabrications for their due obsolescence, even while we endure their afterlife. At the same time, Wolfe submits the rigors of deconstruction to matters of organicity and the technics of meaning in the co-production of psychic and social systems, for which any shared set of iterable signs can serve as the medium of their interpenetration or inter-implication without merger or loss of specificity. As we increasingly understand, diverse biosemiotic regimes are pervasive in the more-than-human world, and for whatever kinds of beings may participate in communication as a social activity, such psychic and social formations are the immediate and reciprocal environments of the meaning systems that construct them. For instance, as musicologist Gary Tomlinson works with the biosemiotic schools of Charles Sanders Peirce and Terrence Deacon toward the new planetary biology of the extended evolutionary synthesis and niche construction theory, he pluralizes the noosphere concept to include non-human musical societies, such as we encounter in birdsong.[3] Minds and communities extending well beyond the human occupy co-implicated domains, material technicities mutually enmeshed with whatever organic dynamics are running in parallel at any moment. Wolfe himself reformats deconstruction for systems theory’s environmental dynamic within a multispecies world, the key datum here being, as we just saw, ‘the exponential difference in complexity that obtains across the system/environment difference’ (13), whatever form of autopoiesis is consulted.
All forms of life face this inexorable incommensurability between their own being and an environment that alters with every interaction and exceeds them at every point. Bereft of such virtual totality, living systems must make choices and take their chances. Wolfe’s introduction cites Luhmann’s key point in this regard: ‘the system’s inferiority in complexity must be counter-balanced by strategies of selection’ (13). This is a formulation fit to cross the virtual autopoieses of minds and societies with the molecular autopoiesis of living systems, or again, to bring the connections between Derrida’s and Luhmann’s systems of thought toward the seminal theorizations of Maturana and Varela regarding the bootstrapping operations of biological autopoiesis. Whether material or virtual, biotic or metabiotic, autopoietic systems are fundamentally precarious insofar as self-maintenance can and will eventually fail: they keep themselves going from moment to moment with acceptable selections from ever-shifting environmental affordances. The slash connecting the system/environment distinction is the razor’s edge along which Wolfe parses beings into their systemic/environmental co-constituents, the rapier he brings to the field of critical theory to contest the pitfalls of indifferentiation committed under the neighboring posthumanist banners of intra-action, sympoiesis, and the holobiont. Wolfe places these conceptual formations under scrutiny for potentially unrigorous concepts of connection, relation, and collectivity that too easily slide over a jagged ontology’s radical discontinuities.
Reconstructing Sympoiesis
Maturana and Varela formulated the theory of autopoiesis in Chile in 1971. Working closely with Heinz von Foerster and his Biological Computer Lab, they disseminated a short technical paper in English in 1974, followed by a lengthy BCL research report that amounted to a 1975 in-house preprint of the widely circulated 1980 volume Autopoiesis and Cognition that put autopoiesis on the global intellectual map.[4] Wolfe’s engagements with autopoietic theory, then, rest on several decades of vigorous discussion within the cybernetics and systems literatures as philosophically received by critical theory, and especially as these debates were distilled within Luhmann’s own wide-ranging work centered on sociology. In the late 1990s the young scholar Beth Dempster published a conference presentation for which she minted the term sympoiesis as a portmanteau of symbiosis and autopoiesis to give a name to her critique of the limitations of the autopoiesis concept as she understood it. Dempster eventually left academe, but a decade later her paper found its way to Donna Haraway, who seized on Dempster’s winning coinage, as we can read in her 2016 volume Staying with the Trouble, for a treatment promoting, as Wolfe deems it, ‘the popular misrepresentation of “autopoiesis”. . . as a form of solipsistic, atomistic individualism (often coded as an avatar of neoliberal individualism)’ (6).[5]
Wolfe’s rebuttal of this characterization is definitive. Its focused pursuit in the volume’s second chapter, ‘Sympoiesis Dreaming,’ joins the larger critique running throughout Jagged Ontologies. I understand it like this: the conceptual shortcoming here rests in overriding or wishing away the ‘jaggedness’ of living systems through a sympoietic ‘embrace’, as Wolfe describes it, ‘of a kind of ur-level activity at work in the biosphere that embodies (and scientifically grounds, as it were) the values of cooperation, harmony, community building, and the like—a feel-good recasting of the biosphere that rises to rebut the bogeyman of neo-Darwinism’s competitive individualism, for which autopoiesis, as we’ve already seen, is taken to be an avatar’ (58).
I have pronounced myself on these matters in previous publications and am cited here by Wolfe in that context.[6] So at the moment I will just note how his parenthesis regarding ‘scientific grounds’ marks the crucial distinction at hand. The concept of autopoiesis is rooted in the scientific bona fides of its emergence within theoretical biology and its subsequent course of normal contestation and extension. In contrast, the concept of sympoiesis arose within the larger autopoiesis conversation as a handy theoretical proposal that inadvertently provided a scientistic lure for ethical projections. But be that as it may, by now there is important work currently at hand taking up the task of providing the sympoiesis concept with a concrete reference, a proper organismic theory. These discursive extensions largely postdate the period under observation in Wolfe’s text. Meanwhile, as Wolfe is at pains to affirm throughout his work, one can subscribe wholeheartedly to the ethics of a world construction that foregrounds reciprocity and humility without the need to prop it up on a piece of previously semantically untethered systems jargon.
In the wider milieu of Jagged Ontologies, the best antidote for a dose of vapid sympoiesis is a bracing draft of Lynn Margulis’s own writings on autopoiesis in relation to her monumental elevation of symbiosis as a core strategy in the persistence of the biosphere. At the same time, as just noted, the biological thinker Scott F. Gilbert has been supplying the sympoiesis concept with positive organismal content drawn from the frontiers of developmental biology. Here the sympoietic ‘becoming-with’ of a living system is observed over entire life-cycles, especially during key episodes in the maturation of the plant or animal embryo that involve suites of cellular intra-activity between mutually-entraining components of the developing host organism in relation to its own organic (sub)systems and its microbiome. As Gilbert remarks in his forthcoming work We Are All Lichens: ‘We require words that can distinguish a mutualistic symbiosis (exchanging gifts, which can be done by relatively stable adult organisms) from sympoiesis, wherein the partnered organisms are changed and matured through these interactions. . . . Such identity-forming sympoiesis is seen during embryological development, as when the lens and retina mutually form each other through a series of calls and responses.’[7]
In a similar vein, Gilbert’s current work is also helping to rescue the concept of the holobiont from the sorts of holistic obfuscation Wolfe derides in passing, by rooting it back into its rightful organismal (here, embryological) frame of reference. In this mode of specification, a holobiont is any life form, including of course our own, that can be observed as a composite, multi-genomic entity reorganized through epigenetic processes, some consortium of organisms arriving at a relatively stable integration of microbial symbionts with each other, and in many cases, with and within a vegetal or animal host. Here the microbial contingent forms one tier of distinct yet incorporated (endosymbiotic) living systems for which the effective environment is some portion of the tissues of the host’s body at large. The organismal holobiont is an embodied demonstration of the recursivity of the system/environment distinction, insofar as the allied organisms furnish each other with an organic environment, a relationship of paradoxical “interior exteriority” that can be embedded several levels deep, as for instance with Mixotricha paradoxa.[8]
As with sympoiesis, then, the holobiont concept (an outlier in the biological literature until Margulis raised its profile) is concretely descriptive only in relation to living systems. And in its turn, to gain literal metabiotic purchase for larger cultural application, the sympoiesis concept will need the sort of dedicated retooling that Luhmann brought to bear on the autopoiesis concept in order to apply it non-metaphorically to psychic and social (rather than strictly biological) descriptions. The takeaway for critical reading here is that both ‘sympoiesis’ and ‘the holobiont’ literally pertain only to specific relations among the living systems at hand as collective biological regimes. In any other context, these terms risk being marked as theory jargon, colorful rhetorical operators for matters whose particular relational dynamics are still to be explained. This material-organic base must ground any further ethical projections toward our own psycho-social milieux.
In Cary Wolfe’s world, then, all worlds are virtual insofar as they are to be referred to the capacity of any particular living entity—from bacterium to holobiont—to build its picture of an environment sufficient to its needs, however bare or elaborate these pictures and needs may be. Autopoietic operation brings about that delimited capacity, producing nodes of primary cognition within the biosphere that may be likened to islands negotiating their modest portion of an infinite sea, doing so both in their own right and, sympoietically if you will, through interactions and constraints that co-construct themselves and their surroundings through the selection or refusal of the world’s abiotic and organismal offers. Here neither competition nor cooperation hits the mark. This is a world of continuous contestation, of constant jostling and potential adhesions among systems material and virtual, organic and semiotic, bidding for reconstitution and continuation one way or another, offering threats or forging alliances, going pragmatically with whatever works.
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Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity, edited by William Rasch and Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000). The earlier development of Wolfe’s posthumanist discourse can be traced from Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the ‘Outside’ (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003), to What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012). ↑
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For more on this topic, see Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory, edited by Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2009). ↑
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See Gary Tomlinson, The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2023). ↑
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For details here, see the chapter ‘Neocybernetics of Gaia’ in my Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Pres, 2020), 83-98. ↑
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For more on Dempster and Haraway, see Bruce Clarke and Scott F. Gilbert, ‘Margulis, Autopoiesis, and Sympoiesis,’ in Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, edited by Caroline A. Jones, Natalie Bell, and Selby Nimrod (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2022), 63-77. ↑
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See the article cited directly above; the chapter ‘Margulis and Autopoiesis’ in Gaian System, 157-80; and Bruce Clarke, ‘Gaian Technics: Lynn Margulis, Natural Technicity, and the Technosphere,’ in The Space of Technicity: Theorizing Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, edited by Robert A. Gorny, Stavros Kousoulas, Dulmini Perera, and Andrej Radman (TU Delft OPEN Publishing and Jap Sam Books, 2024), 117-45. ↑
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Scott F. Gilbert, We Are All Lichens: The World-Making Symbiosis of Science and Religion, with a foreword by Donna J. Haraway, forthcoming from Fordham University Press. ↑
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See my ‘Symbiosis and the Holobiont: The Message of Mixotricha paradoxa,’ in Life is Other: A/Biotic Entanglements in Art and Curating, edited by Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser, and Lucie Strecker (Berlin, de Gruyter Arts, 2024), 72-95. ↑
