The Political Economy of Heterogeneous Generative-Relational Subjects: A Preliminary Discussion

The political-economic relations of heterogeneous human, artificial, and nonhuman participants raise questions about the production and control of conditions under which distinct forms of activity remain possible. Systems capable of similar observable performance may depend on substantially different histories, infrastructures, material processes, interpretive resources, and institutional authorities. This preliminary discussion develops a generative-relational perspective for analyzing such differences alongside asymmetries in economic and normative power. It proposes to distinguish productive capability from discretion over another participant’s feasible practices, the circulation of value from control over its conditions, and stable rule compliance from legitimate rule-making authority. Human–AI relations offer a concrete focus, while multispecies arrangements and hypothetical extraterrestrial encounters serve as bounded comparative cases. The inquiry draws selectively on existing political economy, institutional analysis, generative justice, artificial agency, and multispecies scholarship. It sketches a programme of conceptual comparison and empirically discriminating research without attributing consciousness or moral personhood to present AI systems, postulating a common utility scale, or establishing general laws of generativity.