Nonorganic Life

Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski

Related terms: animacy, animism, decolonisation, Indigeneity, more-than-human, nature-culture, new materialism

“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf”, mused farmer-conservationist Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac (1949, 115). Leopold speaks of sensing the presence of wolves from a multitude of signs: a deer’s flight, spooked pack horses, clattering stones – an acuity he traces to a youthful, trigger-happy encounter with a dying wolf. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” he recalls (1949, 115). From the experience of seeing himself and the world through the wolf’s ebbing consciousness, Leopold extrapolates a kind of mutuality of influence and cognition to the entire landscape. Summoning his audience “to think like a mountain,” he asks us to relinquish our self-centring and instead to imagine deer, wolves, trees, and mountain slopes registering and responding to each other’s presence.

Leopold’s ‘green fire moment’ and the land ethic he constructed around it have been formative in the environmental humanities’ quest to at once work with scientific knowledge and to explore alternative ways of relating to natural worlds (Beever 2016).  Through the human–wolf–mountain nexus, Leopold puts his own spin on the matter of what it means to be alive, animate or cognizant – questions that have long vexed natural scientists and social thinkers alike. From the outset, these issues have drawn environmental humanities scholars into conversation with ways of knowing beyond the West, and – unsurprisingly – researchers have made connections between Leopold’s environmental thought and Indigenous North American traditions.

But Anishinaabe scholar-activist and philosopher Kyle Whyte (2020) enjoins caution. Contrasting Leopold’s individualised ethical quest with an Indigenous vision of children, elders, and ancestors as vital participants in place-based knowledge systems, Whyte urges the acknowledgement of difference alongside discernment of more abstract similarities. These are points to keep in mind as Leopold’s mountain-thinking burgeons into a chorus of extrahuman cogitations. The nonhuman protagonists of Ray Naylor’s novel The Mountain in the Sea (2022) are eloquent, self-conscious octopuses; their human counterpart is the author of the book-within-a-book How Oceans Think. Like Naylor, the author of Is a River Alive? (2025) Nature writer Robert Macfarlane draws upon anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) account of Indigenous Amazonian life-worlds, How Forests Think. Earlier still came Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? (2005) and Elizabeth Povinelli’s Do Rocks Listen? (1999), ethnographic works that document Indigenous conceptions of distributed semiotic agency, respectively in Yukon-Alaska and northern Australia.

Hinging around the concept of ‘nonorganic life’, our concern in this essay is the current status of life or animacy in the environmental humanities: how liveliness is defined and distributed, how far and to what kinds of entities it extends. In modern Western science, the property of ‘being alive’ is available only to biological matter and is absent elsewhere. The OED is typical in defining life, in this sense, as “[t]he condition that distinguishes animals, plants, and other organisms from inorganic or inanimate matter, characterised by continuous metabolic activity and the capacity for functions such as growth, development, reproduction, adaptation to the environment, and response to stimulation”.  By contrast, in their collaborative work from the 1970s, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) deployed the term ‘nonorganic life’ to extend the capacity for creative, self-differentiating behaviour beyond the biological domain to other manifestations of matter and energy.

More specifically, our purpose here is to look at some of the ways that the question of what counts as living, organic or animate has itself been transformed or reframed in the decades since Deleuze and Guattari were writing – as a result of ongoing encounters between Western and Indigenous worldviews. We won’t be advancing our own definition of life nor simply insisting that the environmental humanities decolonise harder and faster. Rather, we aim to situate questions around life and its others, to consider what is at stake in these matters, to identify the tensions involved, and to suggest some ways through the current conjunction (see also Szerszynski 2015, 29-32).

The two of us come to this conversation as veterans of an earlier moment when the issue of the distribution of liveliness was attracting attention.  We were both strongly influenced by philosopher Manuel Delanda’s 1992 Deleuze and Guattari-inspired article “Nonorganic Life,” though one of us was reading this in northwest Europe, the other in a southern hemisphere European settler colony. In this work, Delanda tracked a paradigm shift in the natural sciences away from a restricted focus on steady-state physical systems toward systems that ‘bifurcate’ or undergo qualitative changes in their behaviour. Facilitated by growing computational power, he argued, scientists had gained a window into processes of self-organisation through which it became apparent that much of the creativity observed in the living world was also present in other kinds of materiality.

For DeLanda (1992, 155), this burgeoning interest in “the expressive powers of matter” came with political potential: by better comprehending how the physical stuff around us expresses its potential, he was saying, we both enhance our sense of the openness of our world to change and learn where best to apply leverage. As DeLanda concluded, the dynamics and potentialities now coming into visibility “seem to indicate that there may be ways of escaping our currently doomed environmental destiny” (1992, 161).

But DeLanda’s core concern, like that of Deleuze and Guattari, was the fusion of cutting-edge scientific knowledge with select themes from continental philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 411) had borrowed the concept of ‘nonorganic life’ from art historian Wilhelm Worringer, who coined the term in 1908 to draw comparisons between the flowing, organic lines of Gothic art and the geometric, mechanical lines of modern art, in which he detected a longing to return to the inorganic (1953, 247). Developing the idea in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari merged novel scientific understandings of nonlinear physical systems with historical-anthropological research into the ancient craft of metallurgy. In their controlled application of heat to coax ores over thresholds into a workable state, they propose that metallurgists embody a paradigmatic understanding of “a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such” (1987, 411).

Deleuze and Guattari’s extrapolations of the non-organic life theme go well beyond artisanal practice to explore the creative capacities of matter-energy throughout the cosmos. For them, biological life manifesting as individuated organisms is but one of the possibilities of expressive, self-differentiating tendencies that are irreducible to the specific forms that they generate. Bringing together Henri Bergson’s notion of the virtual as a field or reservoir of potential which life draws upon, and insights from the science and mathematics of nonlinear systems, they explored the implications of abstract ‘machine-like’ patternings that seemed to guide processes of problem-solving and self-ordering in otherwise disparate physical systems. In this way, the concept of ‘nonorganic life’ opens out into an encompassing theory of multiplicity, in which changes or self-differentiations in a field of existence emerge out of the reorganisation of its constituent elements.

At a time of escalating concern about global environmental change in critical social thought – a sensibility frequently coupled with frustrations that recent scholarship had over-invested in cultural, representational, or semiotic thematics – Deleuze and Guattari’s fusion of speculative philosophy with the wilder reaches of science struck a chord. Along with the work of later-generation luminaries such as sociologist Bruno Latour and science studies scholar Donna Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari’s writing played a key role in the rise of a range of ‘new materialisms’ in the social sciences and humanities in the 1990s and early 2000s. This involved approaches that sought to unsettle inherited nature–culture binaries with more ‘relational ontologies,’ to move beyond human- or subject-centeredness, and to transform the way their disciplines conceived matter and physical processes – all of which became core concerns of the emergent environmental humanities. As political theorists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost caught the gist of the new materialist thematic: “materiality is always something more than ‘mere matter’: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (2010, 9).

But just as new materialisms seemed to be making inroads into the heartlands of social and cultural thought, questions began to surface that would propel the ‘non-organic life’ idea in new directions. In 2010, Indigenous studies scholar Eve Tuck, of the Unangax̂ people, wrote a paper ruminating on her relationship with the thought of Deleuze. Paying tribute to what she had learned from him about a generative, interruptive, and more-than-human desire, Tuck also reflects on how her reception of Deleuze was complicated by her own Indigenous knowledge, eventually stating her preference for a yearning that is gradually learned and an intergenerationally accrued wisdom, rather than discontinuous and unanticipated Deleuzian flashes of desire (2010, 644). A year later, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate citizen and Indigenous and Science Studies scholar Kim Tallbear responded to new materialist themes from an Indigenous perspective, noting the shared concern with affinitive relationships between humans and other species. But she went on to observe how Indigenous peoples routinely extend notions of personhood or sentience well beyond the beings usually enrolled in ‘multispecies’ thinking, to encompass stones, wind, lightning, or thunder, before adding that relationships with such an extended register of “thinking beings” often involve not just alliance and respect but also coercion and deceit (Tallbear 2011, n.p.). A year or two on, Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee sociologist Vanessa Watts more pointedly argued that thematizations of nonhuman agency in Euro-Western thought still tend to hierarchize the degrees of actancy of its nominated beings in contrast to Indigenous attributions of spirit to all things, while also abstracting their ontological and political claims from the specific places – from the “land’s intentionality” – that remained indelibly central to Indigenous knowledge systems (2013, 30).

As decolonising imperatives intensified across Western academia, other voices – Indigenous, Black, people of colour, white, and unmarked – deepened the critique of the Eurocentrism or whiteness of new materialisms, which, by extension, implicated the environmental humanities. While the majority of these interventions emanated from North America, research from South America was concurrently staging a novel conversation between the enduring anthropological concern with animism and the philosophical repurposing of nonorganic life. In Cannibal Metaphysics (2014), white Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro recounted how Indigenous peoples of Amazonia not only viewed animals as having souls but saw them as beings that conceived of themselves as persons with their own opinions about humans.

The Amerindian capacity to see ‘us’ and the world through other eyes – this interspecific “perspectivism” – Viveiros de Castro insisted, constitutes a philosophy that ought to be credited with the capacity to engage with, agitate, and enliven Western philosophical traditions (2014, 56). Having drawn sharp contrasts between Euro-western and Amerindian philosophy, however (2014, 188), Viveiros de Castro devotes several chapters of the book to teasing out commonalities between Amazonian cosmic and political thinking and the thought of Deleuze. Not only does that “precosmological flux of indiscernibility” found in Amerindian myth chime with Deleuzian virtuality, he proposes, but the perspectivism that is constitutive of Amazonian cosmopolitics and all the alliances between diverse entities that it entails resonates deeply with the relational and intensive multiplicities central to A Thousand Plateaus: “for as Deleuze would say, there are not points of view on things since things and beings are themselves points of view” (2014, 67, 73, 90).

Eduardo Kohn also attends to what can be learned from Amazonian peoples about how other animals conceive of us, proposing that his ethnographic writing is less a depiction of a particular worldview than an ontological assertion: “a claim about the way the world is” (2013, 10). However, while Kohn expands the realm of semiosis so that it encompasses all of life, he relies on a rather familiar categorisation of life. In contrast, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena’s work on “earth beings” in Andean cosmologies emphatically extends the domain of kindred, agentic, and communicative beings beyond Western conventions of the organismic to include rivers, rain, caves, and, not least, “mountains that intervened – decisively – in struggles among humans” (2015, 35).

Where DeLanda gestured towards the relevance of the nonorganic life framing to environmental politics, the ontological reading of more-than-human perspectivism homes in on a much more explicit political agenda: a decolonising impulse that atones for the epistemic violence inflicted by dominant Western ontologies and opposes the violation of extractivism and related environmental depredations. Indigenous perspectivism, in this regard, is politically – or rather cosmopolitically – radical precisely because, in defiance of Western universalism, it makes space for a multiplicity of ways of being and knowing.

Behind this suturing of the ontological or the cosmological to the political is the assumption that knowledge systems – and all the entities they bring on board – construct and sustain worlds rather than simply representing them. As science and technology studies scholar John Law puts it, in his affirmation of a “post-colonial ontological multiplicity”: “there is nothing outside practice. We are embedded in practices all the way down” (Law 2015, 134, 130). And because worlds are practised in a context violently structured by “one world” thinking, both the practice and the way it is articulated in thought or dialogue are seen as indubitably political. As Law adds: “The question is: who or what has the power to act?” (2015, 135).

Just as some commentators were dissatisfied with an angle on nonorganic life that failed to engage with Indigenous attributions of life and personhood, so too have claims for a cosmopolitical orientation shared by animist peoples and Western relational ontologists failed to convince everyone. Anthropologist Alcida Rita Ramos warns against the rush to identify commonalities between Amerindian cosmology and certain styles of Western thought, cautioning that “enormous indigenous diversity is currently in danger of being compressed into formulas and principles of an alien philosophy” (2012, 483). In a related sense, international relations scholars David Chandler and Julian Reid express misgivings over the marshalling of Indigenous knowledge to promote and legitimate a particular kind of western speculative philosophy – a strategy, they suggest, that risks collapsing the situated political-material struggles of Indigenous communities into a “very white, very western, very Eurocentric concern with the crisis of the modern episteme” (2020, 499).

We do not have to fully embrace such criticisms to recognise that there are tensions here; quandaries that, as geographers Marcus Doel and Mitch Rose (2024) indicate, are difficult, if not impossible, to fully evade. In seeking to learn from Indigenous thought and experience, they ask, How do those of us from more privileged epistemic communities avoid lapsing into yet another round of colonial appropriation? And in recognising that crucial aspects of Indigenous thought may not be available (or made available) to us, how do we stop ourselves slipping back into the kind of ‘us’ and ‘them’ divisions that we are trying to move beyond?  As Doel and Rose go on to suggest, these risks may be especially acute when readings of Indigeneity are ‘activated’ or marshalled for political projects other than those of Indigenous communities themselves.

Elizabeth Povinelli, a canny and seasoned participant in exchanges between Indigenous peoples and Western thought, has also explored the question of the political activation of different ways of knowing the world, with particular attention to the figures of life and nonlife.  Much as we did above, Povinelli observes that a great deal of recent Western social thought sets out from ontological claims about “the entangled nature of human and more-than-human existence”, from which it proceeds logically to a set of political orientations (2021, 16). But care is needed, she argues, for however valuable it is to pose questions about what exists, the answers do not necessarily have any direct political content or bearing.

What happens to the potentiality of nonorganic life or the shapeshifting of animacy, then, if we do not subsume it within an ontological quest? Sharing our own concern with the juncture between the living and the non-living, Povinelli’s advice is to set out from the particular social, historical, and material conditions resulting from the “catastrophe of colonialism and slavery” (2021, ix). “[W]hat kinds of questions become unavoidable”, she asks, “when we begin within the force of history rather than with a claim about ontology?” (2021, 2). Or to put it another way, what happens to our conceptual framing of life and nonlife when our inquiries “need to do something,” when thought is propelled by confrontation with the ongoing destruction wrought by capitalism? (2021, 114). One of the possible ontological consequences of taking our bearings in this way, Povinelli maintains, is that we might indeed come to conceive of the human in terms of other entities, forces and regions of existence, rather than evaluating existence on grounds of its greater or lesser approximation of humanness (2021, 125).

We have circled back on an orientation to the Earth and cosmos that is not a world away from DeLanda’s counsel to learn from the expressive powers of matter, and perhaps closer still to Whyte, Tuck, Tallbear, and Watts’ respective situating of questions of animacy within communal, place-based experience. But while we heed Povinelli’s cautioning around grounding the political in the ontological, and acknowledge the pressing need to resist place- and planet-threatening forces, our inclination is that catastrophic situations are but one of many prompts “to do something” – whether that something is thought, material practice, political action, or some admixture of these. For as geographer Clive Barnett reminds us, problematization – the process by which something becomes an object of attention and concern – is not just a matter of crisis or catastrophe, but “a feature of the everyday world as it is lived and experienced” (2015, n.p.). Indeed, as biologist Michael Levin argues, the spatially situated problem-solving capacity of humans and other animals seen as exhibiting ‘intelligence’ can be seen as just a variant of the far more ancient capacity of not just biological but also non-biological agents to solve problems in diverse metaphorical ‘spaces’ (2022).

In this light, taking the perspective of animals that we hunt or that hunt us – whether in Leopold’s Sand County or Viveiros de Castro’s Amazonia – seems to relate to a rather ordinary experience in hunting-foraging communities, and may not be entirely alien to the shifting human-animal perspectivism that pet owners the world over regale us with. In other times and places, Deleuze and Guattari’s favourite example of inducing red-hot metallic ores to cross a threshold – the act of sensing and tracking a life intrinsic to minerality – is also rather mundane. It is so much so that Smith, Schmidt, Ferraro, Kowalski, and Haddad are amongst the common surnames in Europe and Western Asia. The heat-driven coaxing of edible organic matter over thresholds – otherwise known as cooking – is even more routine.

Practices like hunting, metallurgy, cooking, or any of the thousands of ways human collectives tangle with the expressive material properties of their life-worlds may indeed become politicised (Clark and Szerszynski 2021, 93-99). This seems to occur most often in situations, both catastrophic or quotidian, when there is interference in the things people have learned and chosen to do. Protecting or enhancing the manifold ways that ordinary human actors learn from other beings and play variations on the theme of nonorganic life should be a matter of great importance, especially when the Earth itself is reorganising its constituent elements. But such interventions and experiments do not necessarily require us to sort out our onto-stories in advance – though they may well summon us to attend carefully to place, kin, allies, enemies, and the ongoing rumbling of the Earth and cosmos.

Some ‘us’ will follow, or have long followed, threads and tangles of significance that reach deep into the ecological, the geological, the planetary or the cosmological. In tracking the changing fortunes of the concept of nonorganic life, what we most want to stress is the ordinariness of facing challenges or stumbling across opportunities that nudge us to think afresh about what it means to be human, or alive, or alert – including the way that being human always opens out into inhuman domains and dimensions, and at a more general level that biological life is always dependent on and exploits the processes of nonorganic life. To which we would add that these prompts or summonses will shift from time to time, as events unfold and new things appear. Along the way, and just as inevitably, this will involve encounters with other communities and their particular modes of attributing vitality, animacy or thoughtfulness.

This contact zone now stretches so far and wide that literary studies scholars Sam Durrant and Philip Dickinson speak of “animism in a planetary frame” (2022): a designation that refers not only to the globality of lively conversations but to the problematization of the Earth itself and all its constitutive processes. If at present, the ongoing wrangle between Western powers and Indigeneity is one incitement to rethinking the matter of life and its others, so too are escalating concerns about species extinction, innovations in genetic modification, the probing of the cosmos for traces of extraterrestrial life, and the rise of artificial intelligence and digital ecologies. However fraught or intriguing the current conjecture appears, perhaps the most enduring lesson of the nonorganic life concept is an appreciation that significant things will occur even when we humans didn’t make them happen or when we aren’t there to watch.

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