Towards an ontology of transport: Transport naturalised

Abstract

This thesis develops an ontology of transport that is appropriate for transportation as it occurs in all earth systems, whether physical, biological, social, or economic. I argue that the current very restrictive ontology makes it essentially impossible to understand the wider relationships between material movement and activity on one hand and economic, social, and environmental phenomena on the other. The thesis focusses on the conceptual issues. In the broadest usage, the term ‘goods transport’ refers to the movement of materials from one place to another. However, its central conception is usually considered within a narrow context as a demand that is derived from other activities. Understandably then most transport research is applied to improving how systems operate and focus on optimisation and efficiency. This occurs within the context of an ambivalent approach to the governance of freight transport where what is moved within New Zealand and across borders is determined largely by market forces. This particularly economic view of the role and governance of goods transport struck me as unsatisfactory. To address the unease that I had about this I focus on conceptual issues through interdisciplinary and explorative research that questions the normal view of transport as a techno-economic function that focus on factors that lead to greater efficiency and effectiveness in existing transport systems. The result is a conceptual framework for the unified treatment of transport in a variety of natural and human systems. The basis of the theoretical framework so devised develops ontology of transport from aspects of thermodynamics, self-organising systems, and broad evolutionary thinking. This is an approach largely ignored in previous theorising and I address these issues within an explanatory framework that situates transport within neo-materialist philosophical thinking. The framework is augmented by ideas developed from aspects of assemblage thinking and consideration of speculative realism. In doing this I provide a new theoretical basis to address the role of modern transport that is creating problems such as climactic warming in a changing world. The ontological commitment provides a basis for theorising ways to address transport within the socio-economic problem of the more we expand transport by generating the energy it needs from fossil fuels, the more we change global economies, but the more massive the social and environmental consequences become. The theoretical framework develops ontology of transport from aspects of thermodynamics, self-organising systems, and broad evolutionary thinking. This is an approach largely ignored in previous theorising. The model of explanation is analogical and iterative and compares goods movement in a social context with other evolutionary entities with similar structures and speculation about ontological commitments of the perceived similitude. I then explore whether the analogy is appropriate in theorising the difference between cellular, ecological and goods transport, and how the social aspects of materials transport can be explained with a new understanding of transportation ontology. Transport has had a relationship with matter and energy since the very beginnings of living cellular systems and plays a meaningfully part of the persistence of all living things, It is central to evolutionary processes and the development of complexity. Transport at different scales has the same purpose with similar abstract architecture and informational processes, that are developed to levels of complexity that rival those of modern logistics operations. Topological governance of transport systems is found to be as important as the management of network logistics systems and work together for the viability of the whole entity over time. My findings suggest that social and political discourse around transportation could benefit from a broader consideration of how entities from the scale of households to nations could benefit societal health through managing energy flows within regions and across borders To make sense of this requires a transport ontology allowing a commitment that matter and energy interact within informational systems. I propose an ontology that is processual and allows for an order producing and active relationship between matter, transport, and energy flow to create complexity as part of the evolution of the earth. The ontology allows relationships at and between many scales entailed in ‘perception-action’ cycles and manifest as transport and communication. Transport theorised in this way is an analysable production function of whole entities that connects the capacity to affect with the capacity to affect with the capacity to be affected as found in all material flow processes. In summary, transport produces situations of adjacency where material get close enough for their properties and capacities to interact. My overall contribution is the thesis that there are thermodynamic, material, and evolutionary reasons to naturalise transport and consider it meaningfully in the development of complex living systems at many scales. My project shows that when transport is theorised within neo-materialist thinking a different and richer perspective on transportation emerges that offers an alternative conceptual foundation applicable to a broad range of problems found in human systems and especially in integrated human-natural systems within developing neo-materialist thinking. My conclusions are that the earth can be seen as reliant on the transportation of matter at every level and scale and when seen in this way implies an ontological commitment that differs from the current paradigm of transport. It supports a naturalised transport epistemology and an ontological commitment that allows transport to be theorised as a universal function that is critical to every spatial transfer of matter at every level of existence.