The concept of autonomy crops up again and again in political philosophy. Autonomy seems to refer at times to the autonomy of the individual, and at others to the autonomy of peoples, territories, classes or multitudes. One important example includes Autonomism, which is a “bottom up” or “grassroots” theory of Marxism (and the connection between the “grassroots” and the “rhizome” is no coincidence, as Deleuze and Guattari have been influential to autonomist theory). Much like the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, it leaves us with the question of who are what exactly has the characteristic of autonomy.

The word itself means self-rule, and generally refers to individuals or human groups that live by their own rules (although the concept has come to mean something similar for technology in the case of autonomous robots, a problem we will return to later). The concept seems heavily tied up with the philosophical notion of free will — a strange connection for autonomist Marxism, considering the determinism present in much of Marxist theory. The meaning of autonomy always seems bound up somehow in human agency, whether that be the human individual or the human body (the biological body as well as the body politic). Even critical theory itself has been defined as a theory meant to increase individual human autonomy in the face of domination (see Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies by Jere Surber, p. 133).

Another definition of autonomy exists that deviates from the standard definition, yet seems present almost everywhere — an autonomy of the non-living, the non-human, and the unhuman — deeply embedded in humanity, yet apart (autonomous?) from it. The aim of my project, then, is to explore this unhuman side of autonomy and demonstrate the serious challenges it presents to any kind of political theory based on the human concept of autonomy.

We can see the traces of the alternate meaning of autonomy at work in almost every major critical theorist, even those influential on autonomism. Often, it is tied to the central problem or conflict in that theory. For Marx, the economy and the commodity were autonomous. For Nietzsche, morals take on their own autonomy from human activity. In Freud, the very foundation of our psyches, the unconscious, is autonomous from our conscious thought.

Those influenced by these thinkers pick up on the theme of unhuman autonomy. For Guy Debord, Marx’s autonomous commodity becomes image with its own affect, directly manipulating our ability to affect and be affected (although he doesn’t specifically reference Spinoza’s concept of affect, this seems to be the reasoning behind seeing the spectacle as mediating the relations between humans). For Michel Foucault, the techniques of disciplining the human body that begin in the military become autonomous in that they are able to move into other contexts, such as the factory, the school, and the prison. In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the philosophers of the multiple, everything from body parts to bird songs become autonomous. We can see autonomy outside of critical theory as well, in the sciences. In the work of Richard Dawkins, for example, genes are autonomous from the organisms they build.

Most recently, exploration of the the concept of networks and complexity has given us insight into the unhuman. Networks, composed of human groups, but also their technologies and diseases, lead to unpredictable situations in which no human is in control. It is this unhuman, even supra-human, aspect of groups that we cannot predict, and therefore have no control over. That which is bigger than us has become autonomous, or perhaps it always was.