The Ontopolitics of Complexity: Toward Agonistic Democracy and Ecological Political Economy

Complexity is among the most used yet rarely defined and often misunderstood terms in sustainability science. In this text, I argue that the conventionalization of the concept of complexity has resulted in the conflation of “thin” (i.e., reductionist) complexity and “thick” (i.e., perspectivist) complexity, and the resultant confusion surrounding these categories has created unnecessary tensions between sustainability science and environmental justice. Employing William E. Connolly’s ontopolitical-genealogical approach, I tease out implicit ontological commitments relating to complexity, holism, organicism, and environmental determinism, in the intellectual history of systems theory, cybernetics, and theoretical ecology. I critique key interlocutors in the pluralism debate within ecological economics to illustrate how conventionalized complexity has created barriers to pluralistic engagement between ecological economics and political ecology. Following radical democratic theorists, I argue that the distinction between thick and thin complexity is essential to fostering “agonistic pluralism” between sustainability science and environmental justice while also serving as a defence against the misuse of systems concepts by anti-pluralists, authoritarians, and technocrats. I argue that totalizing, functionalist expressions of systems theory exacerbate political violence by displacing political discourse and serving as a pretext for ecofascism. As an alternative to functionalist organicism, I articulate a relational ontology of life, in the tradition of Robert Rosen and Terrance Deacon, that creates affordances for agency that is both creative and reflexive. I explore how such an ontology destabilizes politically conservative, neoliberal, anti-pluralist interpretations of thin complexity, and I argue that thick complexity, relational holism, and teleodynamism can serve as core concepts for a more robust discourse in ecological political economy that is concurrently attentive to the dual imperatives of biophysical limits and environmental justice.