The Organic Cosmos: Cybernetics and Politics of Relations Between Arendt and Latour

Abstract

Relational thinking in International Relations Theory (IRT) and International Political Sociology (IPS) critiques Cartesian binaries by advancing relational ontologies of politics. Central to this critique is Bruno Latour’s theory of modernity, which challenges Cartesianism and calls for an emancipatory break from it. I engage Latour through a dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s account of the shift from Being to Process, which she links to cybernetics and the dominance of labor in the vita activa. I reinterpret this shift as a move from Cartesian mechanism (Arendt’s Being) to what I call organic cosmology (Arendt’s Process), reflecting digitalised reality. I argue that IRT and IPS have under-theorized this cosmological shift, with consequences for the politics of relations. Cybernetics inaugurated organic cosmology by positing that information constitutes relations. Yet information is treated as separate from matter, producing a post-Cartesian dualism left largely unaddressed by Latour and contemporary IRT and IPS. This binary underpins computational capitalism by enabling data extractivism as an ordering logic. Drawing on debates on earth-system governance and algorithmic ontology, I argue that neglecting cybernetics as a cosmological formation leaves relational IRT and IPS ill-equipped to grasp how cybernetic imaginaries structure politics of relations and reproduce new dualisms, weakening their critical purchase.