Solución propuesta para la aplicación que soluciona el problema de shared

“What avenues of enquiry are opened up? What questions are made possible by thinking through social and material formations as assemblages?”

(Allen, 2011, p. 154). A naturalised transport methodology can be used to change the emergent effects of an entity by altering a transportation process of some kind. Methodology that is consistent with naturalised transport ontology, especially one that can be applied to research within social systems, needs to focus on how the power and influence of transport acts within an assemblage that is the focus of any project. Following my arguments for more focus on the immanent properties of materials and intensive thresholds, measures of transport and what is transported need to be made with a methodology that works with intensive properties. The focus here is on systems that are far from equilibrium where bifurcation could lead to new assemblages with different properties. To

understand a system in this way requires some knowledge of its historical coming into being, so we can understand its current dynamical state (DeLanda, 1997).

As already shown assemblage thinking includes an understanding that materials combine in the specific features of a new entity. Some parts of assemblages have small or predictable influences and don’t need to be torn apart or over explained. Other parts have feedback potential of many powers and greatly change the emergent properties of an assemblage. Charting and tracking the intensiveness and expressivity helps understand how processes of intensity act to create material objects within which those processes are hidden becomes part of a methodology, along with the need to gain an understanding of how historical material interactions expressed themselves. The quality of the specific type of energy is the most significant factor in how living systems develop. Transport within a system becomes the enabler of this flow of energy-matter, and the constituent changes to assemblages. Methodology in this context needs to recognise and analyse the presence, history, and intensity of this characteristic of transport. That the most significant factor in

assemblage properties is the change intensive difference in energy flows. Naturalised transport ontology accepts that wholes, with their own properties continue to perform as wholes within assemblages for which they are also parts. This means that when a change is made to any part of an assemblage, the ‘output’ of that whole changes how it affects as a part of other assemblages. I have identified that this creates novelty.

A challenge for modelling future possibility is to understand significant changes within significant assemblages, and to understand that it is from here that new assemblages exhibiting novel

capacities and tendencies will arise. It is an instinctive probing of possibility space and a revision of roles in processes of complexity and situations of power. Human minds are situated within the blind probing of possibility space and are at the same time exercising physical influences on flows of materials, relying on known differences that already manifest themselves in energy flows. Using historical examples of how similar assemblages expressed their properties means we can learn about the shape of possibility space by a comparative approach. A methodology that includes explanations of past events offers the opportunity to discover the architecture of processes and so identify the drivers of the main causes of the differences in outcomes between different places. A way to understand the abstract processes has already been pioneered in Odum’s systems diagrams. DeLanda also endorses this method of communicating and understanding how self- stimulating processes, feedback and active material processes can be combined. The level of self- stimulation may depend upon the strength of a hierarchy. A methodology needs to address how dominant the different decision-making processes are within an assemblage and whether the structure is centralised or decentralised in its makeup.

The presence of natural intelligence as part of perception and feedback systems and their role in guiding activity in the maintenance of the cell needs to be addressed. The physical information flowing through all systems and specifically complex systems with physical intelligence contain regulating controls akin to human thinking, with at least something that regulates activities that ensure their persistence as a physical entity. There are regulation systems in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells just as there is regulation in forest climax systems and this suggests that similar mechanisms of regulation can be expected to be found in social systems that govern flow in and out of economies and households operating at multiple institutional levels. This approach offers ways to experiment and understand the characteristics of assemblages buy looking at similar structures of other types and scale. The timescale of change and development need to be considered. The need or criticality of regulating mechanisms in system that took billions of years to develop may not at first be appreciated with human social systems where time is segmented into months and years. LeCain (2015) offers four principles and methods that help ground neo-materialist thinking. He says the material environment needs to be understood as a single unit of the technological and natural. This implies assemblages as “Humans and their machines, houses, cars and factories do not inhabit, destroy or impinge upon a separate natural environment; rather, these human-associated artefacts fuse with non-human nature to constitute the unitary material environment in which we live” p27. This situates our social world as a subset of our material world, and not separate from it. Baker and

McGuirk (2017) identify four common commitments found in a review of a range of assemblage thinking projects. They are ‘commitments to revealing multiplicity, processuality, labour and uncertainty’. Baker and McGuirk say that methodology needs to reflect a process of ‘arranging, organising and fitting together’ and how this happens. Assemblage processes are only ever

temporary, and relations may change constantly so opening new lines of flight, making it is a view of the world that is emergent and in flux. They say that ‘processes and practices come together to render their (never pre-determined) effects’ (2017, p. 431). Following from the ontological commitments made in Chapter 5 and then applying them with the methodological guidance of LeCain and Baker & McGuirk outlines a path for a new methodology for transport.

Within neo-materialist thinking there is a view that the natural and the technical are part of the one unitary environment continuum. This requires a non-anthropocentric stance where humans are there as the production of matter, and that the ‘sociocultural emerges from and is embedded in the material world’ (LeCain, 2013, p. 29). Understanding the world this way puts a focus on the material history of things as it captures the ‘dynamic, agentic and emergent capacity of the material

environment’ (2013, p.28), where geology processes lead to the creation of culture. The separation of the sociocultural and the material can be challenged, where the ‘social is not only a product of the material but contiguous with the material’ (2013, p.28).

The outcomes of any given situation then are not linear and cannot be predetermined and so it is important to avoid imposing on them rigid explanatory frameworks. There are labours of ‘putting together’ and ‘arrangement’ that come together and come apart. The agency of labour is

distributed across dynamic formations of humans and materials. In this context theorists are not distant observers, but ‘embedded translators’ of the immanent processes and ever-changing assemblages.

Methodology of this kind can be used to gain a better insight into the understanding of transport. Historically we see transport’s effect on culture captured by the observation that the first steam powered engine in 1830 changed the culture everywhere in the world (Atkinson, 2007, p. 10). Similarly, technology of energy extraction from coal reshaped assemblages that gain power from a thermal gradient. Given that difference in gradients are a universal of all thermodynamic material assemblages, it is almost inevitable that all things change when thermal gradients change.

In analysing the way that railways changed the world we can look at a number of those intensity differences that have the highest capacity to affect. The introduction of hydrocarbon engines, firstly coal then oil fuelled had a large impact on rail transport. Before that rail carriages were powered by

horses as was the case with New Zealand’s first railway from the Dunn Mountain mine to Nelson, or in Australia’s case – powered by the manual labour of convicts. The development of cotton mills relied upon harnessing the power of hydrocarbon energy, but the machinery also needed the variant of long fibred cotton that was being cultured at the time. There were already cities and cultural differences caused by an earlier topological change where sailing ships connected distant towns, and towns from different countries at a time scale much faster than that of land-based transport.

The topological change also affected the mass of things. Large volumes of material, such as coal could be transported at a fraction of cost and at in much less time over land distances previously not negotiable. The power output changed the parameters that defined what work means in a social setting and in the complexification of material structures. Within transporting engines, the intensive differences being exploited is the huge pressure gradient available through converting the concentrated energy of coal into work while on the move. That intensity became available to existing material structures such as railways, and the conversion of pathways previously only used by carts or drays.

Situating transport as part of expressive and vibrant material processes requires that past separation in theorising between social and material space be modified. By taking a different methodological approach to this where the focus is on the agencement, the assembling and reassembling of all kinds of material wholes – whether institutions or geological intrusions – can inform how transport systems inform the emergence of future novel assemblages. Once an assemblage is optimised it stops changing, or at least remains the ongoing selected entity under similar conditions. This does not mean that there is only one ultimate assemblage (for example a eukaryotic cell), but that within that environment that contingent structure is the one that interacts with the environment. For example, taking material of high energy transformity into a system of lower transformity will act as a positive feedback loop and increase the overall intensity of production. Identify the input assemblages of large influential assemblages and be prepared to research the history of how something came into being. Map likely lines of intensive differences. A historical assessment of biocentrism requires the serious consideration of the creative role of local and global biogeochemical cycle.

A methodology could be developed that includes ways to identify gradients and investigate them as places where there is the production of difference. Their steepness, the quality of the energy and power are a measure of the intensive forces cancelling within the project. As found by Odum, higher levels of transformity create the potential for larger effects on systems in both time scale of events

and magnitude. A priori techniques lack the ability to predict the outcomes of changes in

assemblages where novelty entities then act to change those assemblages as they are processes of emergence where the focus needs to be on understanding the abstract architecture of change agents.

As the exterior and final properties of the finished entity are not representative of the internal processes it is necessary to map feedback architectures that have been at play to identify the direction and effect of the non-linear processes. The more quadratic the intensity of the feedback is the larger the intensity of the effect. Because nonlinear systems allow small causes to have large effects and large effect so have small effects and understanding of the motive roles of intensities and singular points of attraction become significant. An aspect of this type of methodology would be that it examines how progress is affected by the reformation of assemblages, by not relying on predictive tools but instead measuring incremental material change at a stage where affects are easy to detect and easily countered should there be unforeseen consequences to a change. Feedback processes influence the nature of the change by amplifying the effects of immanent properties that are changing. Where transport systems are part of an indigenous material

environment this process can be followed by listening and looking at the way local knowledge in all its different forms manifests adaptive behaviours to increase positive flows of social and cultural materials. A materialist processual evolution progresses via this instinctive probing of the possibility space. In this context culture is an aspect of a connection to the material world’s innate expressivity where the methodology employed accepts that assemblages are entanglements of many material flows and expresses culture in connection with material world from which it emerges.

Once the expressivity of matter is included as real interactions between matter in the environment that influences the shape of human culture it opens ways to describe and document the activity the expressivity of key assemblages. Because the future is open and not limited to what we can

understand by examining the parts of the system that are about to interact in a new assemblage the process becomes one of an unfolding nature. This allows the cultural effects of high energy inputs to be identified to reassess the way we include material structures in actions that influence human society.

Many of the world system assemblages now have human created parts. The weather system has thermal energy added to it from the infrastructure of settlements and the emissions of vehicles. Weather is no longer an inanimate, isolated system, but is one connected to oil wells, and a billion machines that exhale thermal commotion into the atmosphere. “there are now so many of us

cutting down so many trees and burning so many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed become geological agents. We have changed the chemistry of our atmosphere”. (Oreskes, p93).