Political Ontology - living in the web

Larval has written an interesting post about the interconnection of folding and unfolding, or what I understand as metamorphosis. I will not be able to do justice to the contents of the post, which can be read here. In terms of my interest I would like to focus on this section:

But if the fly is nothing but folds or weavings of the web, a product or creation of the web in the robust sense that an origami bird is not other than the paper out of which it is made but is itself continuous with that paper as a topological variation of its substance, then how can creations of the fly be anything but creations, foldings, weavings of the web of social relations? That is, how can they be anything but ways of strengthening the web.

There is great appeal in thinking politically about the point larval is making. This is what I call 'plateau thinking', where a quest for a transcendental signified, or essence, is rejected in preference of accepting immanent existence at this point in time. In other words, we are continual within the middle of a flux (or difference) without a teleological purpose causing the flux. Questions of agency, and transformation, then require focusing on how we can (intensively) fold and unfold that which is already present. Abstraction gives ways to experimentation. An example, which DeLanda uses, is adding fertilizer to the soil in order to help grow crops. Adding a certain amount will be beneficial while passing a certain critical threshold will poison the soil and kill the crops. The relations between the soil, crop, and fertilizer will be strengthened only if the ‘correct’ amount of fertilizer is added to the assemblage. However, this is not implying that the correct amount becomes a law, or atemporal figure. Instead the correct amount is dependent on ontology, which means the soil type/mixture, crop type, ecosystem, fertilizer type/mixture…would all be (quasi)causal interconnected dynamical factors.

The difficulty, and danger, of this type of thinking, which gives preference to ontology, is experimentation offers no promises or guarantees. This is because the web is all interconnect and open to other (cosmic) forces. For example, the field (i.e. territory) containing the soil, crops, and fertilizer may be destroyed from a weather system. In this sense the field has been opened too much to the forces of detteritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari realize this factor and throughout warn against excessive openness and practices:

There in fact botching the BwO: either on fails to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it, intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe (A Thousand Plateaus, p178).

The political impetus then is to focus on how experimentation can occur within the web, which will fold and unfold the web, without risking excessive detteritorialisation, and can instead strengthen the web.