Sex,politics and inhuman artistry

As the introduction to a recent collection of articles that work the human–non-human juncture attests, ‘all kinds of new actors, forces and entities’ are now attracting attention in geographical thought – with a special nod to ‘objects, machines, and animals’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 2, 14). But what at first glance is a wide embrace may well harbour a certain selectivity, both in the range of things coming under scrutiny and the characteristics chosen for consideration. Speaking of the third category of the aforementioned trio, Hayden Lorimer observes: ‘the greater part of an encyclopedia of creatures, and possible relations, remains as yet unconsidered: not least those more distant, less immediately familiar and not so easily situated amidst human lives …’ (2010: 56).

Delving deeply into the distant, unfamiliar, even alien worlds of life is precisely what Dixon et al. (2012) do with great verve in this paper. As they suggest, an explicit and sustained engagement with the category of the aesthetic is still rare in the expanding geographical literature on the post-human, more-than-human and inhuman. However, it might be argued the broader style of thought behind Dixon et al.’s (2012) elaborations on the theme of the post-human shares much with other recent works in a relational materialist genre – in the manner that it draws upon the resources of continental philosophy to interrogate the ontological status of its objects of inquiry (see Barnett, 2008). Moreover, in keeping with thematising of the emotional, the affective, the corporeal, the multi-sensory, in similarly styled inquiries, ‘Of human birds and living rocks’ sets out to challenge the inherited privileging of cognitive processes in Western discourses by opening up the realms of experience to encompass an expanded range of sense making and expression. But I want to suggest that the paper is exceptional in two ways. First, it pushes the scope of the non-human beyond the range of the vital, the living, the organic that usually marks the threshold of human geographical inquiry. Second, it does not assume that it is necessary to justify its explorations of the expanded field of the post-human by immediately pointing at the political pertinence of its chosen matters of inquiry. Finally, I want to propose that it is this relaxation of the obligation to be immediately and incessantly political that facilitates the depth of the paper’s concern with regions ‘not so easily situated amidst human lives’.

Although Dixon et al. (2012) are reluctant to tie themselves down to any single definition of the aesthetic, justifiably preferring to let our imagining of artistry get shaped and filtered through the examples, it might help to make some comparisons with Elizabeth Grosz’s (2008, 2011) related take on the role of art in biological life. Dixon et al.’s (2012) discussion of the bowerbird’s elaborate decorative activities, while taking inspiration from artist Perdita Phillips’ work, also pivots on Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of an animal territorial formation as being more about a kind of aesthetic expression than about aggression – as well as taking cues from Darwin’s appreciation of the role of artistry in biotic sexual selection. Unsurprisingly, there are clear resonances here with Grosz’s exploration of art and territory – which similarly moves between Darwin and Deleuze and Guattari. In both approaches, the qualities of animal behaviour designated ‘aesthetic’ are those forms of expression which exceed basic cause–effect responses to environmental stimuli and are in excess of what is necessary for survival. Likewise, for both Grosz and Dixon et al., all art entails the perpetuation and elaboration by living creatures of the materials and the intensities of the inanimate forces of the earth. Grosz develops this more-than-human aesthetic theme through a strong focus on sexual display and allure – and on the more general role that sexual selection plays in promulgating non-utilitarian differences throughout the living world. For her, in summation, ‘art is the sexualisation of survival; equally sexuality is the rendering artistic of nature’ (2011: 172). For Dixon et al., however, there is much less weight afforded to the association of biotic artistry with sexual reproduction. This occasions a more distributed sense of expressiveness which accentuates creative to-ing and fro-ing between different species, in this case, between birds and humans: ‘a cross-species “expressivity”, made possible by a shared capacity for sense making’ (Dixon et al., 2012).

The subtle but significant difference between a sexually centred and a more distributed take on post-human artistic sensibilities becomes more pronounced in Dixon et al.’s (2012) second example. As a case study in non-human artistry, the bowerbird’s decorating skills, like the peacock’s tail or the luminescent displays of deepwater fish, are a bit of a pushover. The authors seem to be breaking us in gently before the mind-bending plummet into the archaic and alien world of thrombolites. These are the ‘living rocks’ of the title: multi-species communities of microorganisms, billions of years old, which engage in one of the most ancient forms of photosynthesis while also constructing rock-like carbonite structures. Even after the paper’s considerable theoretical and empirical warm-up, this is demanding stuff. For these are not life forms we can empathise with on any of the usual phenomenological registers, and without foreknowledge we may even fail to identify them as living beings.

For the evolutionary biologist, the late Lynn Margulis, thrombolites are one of the most impressive examples of biological diversification by way of symbiosis – the fusion of previously unrelated organisms into a new functional unity. There is an interesting point of divergence from Grosz’s privileging of binary sexual relations in this regard. Whereas Grosz argues that ‘sexual bifurcation … is a strategy to maximise the potential for variation’ (2011: 165), for Margulis ‘symbiogenesis is far more splendid than sex as a generator of evolutionary novelty’ (1998: 113; see also Hird, 2009: 111–112). For Dixon et al. (2012), the communality of the multiple microorganisms that compose thrombolites are clearly part of the attraction, for this extends and develops their notion of a ‘shared capacity for sense making’ that not only passes between potentially reproductive pairs of the same species but also emerges out of an extreme cross-species collaborative endeavour.

But what is most intriguing to me about the way that Dixon et al. (2012) work up this example is that they are not even particularly in thrall to variation or novelty. The inhuman artistry they identify in the thrombolite is not explicitly linked to reproduction, or any other mechanism for diversification. What is of most interest to them is accretion, the process by which the thrombolite community senses shifts in the chemical composition of its environment and responds to these changes by engaging in metabolic processes that create successive layers of calcium carbonate. But as the uninitiated are wont to say in modern art galleries – is this art? Here Dixon et al. (2012) are explicit about their intentions: they have deliberately steered away from any of those microbial activities we might easily recognise has predecessors of (or variations upon) familiar human capacities, in favour of privileging a mode of sense making and form building that is maximally challenging to human cognition (cf. Colebrook, 2010: 14).

In Deleuzoguattarian terms, there is artistry in thrombolite’s extraction of qualities from an uncertain and shifting (‘chaotic’) environment and in the fashioning of a milieu composed of heterogeneous materials. Even so, this seems like an odd case. For not only is there little going on in the way of melody or visual allure, there is hardly even pattern or rhythm in the accretionary process. In place of modern art’s incessant shock of the new, or sexual reproduction’s institution of combinatory novelty, here is a mode of expression that is almost unfathomably enduring and literally lithic in its obduracy. While Dixon et al. (2012) are not going so far as to suggest there is an artistry proper to rocks themselves, their explicit concentration on a mineral dimension to biological expressiveness runs counter to the overwhelming emphasis on vitality in most post-human or relational materialist thought.

Its thin biospheric envelope notwithstanding, the Earth itself is a rocky planet, comprised of the densest accretion of minerals of the eight planets in the solar system. But this minerality is a condition rarely acknowledged in the more-than-human corpus. Even amongst human geographers, minerals have scarcely featured amongst the recent ledger of ‘objects, machines, and animals’. In Donna Haraway’s genre-defining Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1991), it is worth recalling, it was the ‘liveliness’ of machines that was the main provocation. In subsequent work in the post-human genre, where ‘matter’ has been subjected to inquiry, it is almost always its potential vitality or incipient biological qualities that are stressed, while any tendencies to form chemically stable, crystalline or otherwise ‘non-animated’ structures are most often overlooked. Indeed, ‘calcifying’ – the imputing of inertness or non-becoming – is frequently used as a term of abuse in contemporary critical thought.

The rare liberty to probe the lithic or mineral dimensions of material reality that Dixon et al. (2012) have granted themselves, I am suggesting, hinges on a decision (or intuition) not to explicitly politicise their field of inquiry. The much more familiar move in the narrating of onto-stories of the post-human in geography and cognate fields is the assertion of a correlation between the expansion of the range of objects under consideration and the extension of what counts as meaningful and effective political activity. In the words of Nigel Thrift, for example:

Similarly, as Brian Massumi has it, what is required is ‘… a radical politics equal to the “radicality” of the expanded empirical field itself’ (2002: 243; see also Bennett, 2004: 367; Bennett, 2010: xi; Connolly, 2011: 8). Or in the case of Grosz’s post-human aesthetics: ‘art is not the antithesis of politics, but politics continued by other means’ (2008: 76).

When politics is tightly implicated in the ontologization of objects of concern in this way, one or both of two things usually starts to happen. First, politics itself gets bundled into preconscious or nondiscursive layers of existence, in such a way that ‘makes it difficult to avoid a sense that politics is all about interventions that go on below the threshold of explicit articulation’, as Clive Barnett puts it (2008: 195). And in this way, through its radical expansion, politics risks losing something which many political thinkers have held valuable, namely the process of justifying ones actions – giving and asking for reasons. And second, those aspects of existence which do not seem to be compatible with whatever version of radically extended politics happens to be the preference tend to get passed over or backgrounded. So while the ‘radicality’ of more-than-human modes of vitality, liveliness, sexual expression and so on may articulate comfortably with the expanded political field, less ‘progressive’ domains of existence (the stubbornly lithic or mineral, the inert and stable, the violent or the destructive, for example) tend to be excluded from critical consideration. It is these twin temptations of the onto-political that the current paper deftly evades.

Now, this does not mean that aesthetics – in the sense of the opening up or rearranging of the sensible – should not be drawn into political projects. Deborah Dixon (2009) has herself offered an eloquent account of the way that contemporary art practice can help sensitise audiences to complex and intangible environmental or techno-scientific concerns (see also Last, 2012; Yusoff, 2010). Indeed, there may be vital aspects of political action that require aesthetic techniques and insights to render issues visible and communicate them to new audiences. Or as we might say, paraphrasing Bruno Latour (2004), artistic expression and sense making can help us ‘learn to be affected’. But what this does not mean is that the relationship between politics and the aesthetic (or more generally, the ontological) needs to be symmetrical or bilateral (cf. Clark, 2011: chapter 2). That is, politics might well need aesthetics, but aesthetics does not necessarily need politics.

Dixon et al.’s (2012) paper impressively – and immodestly – effects a stretching of what counts as the aesthetic, all the way ‘… till we can no longer refer back to the analytic coordinates that allowed us to make sense of sense’. There might well be an occasion on which such ‘post-human imaginings’ are worked up by political actors and set to the task of convening publics, shaping issues and leveraging opinions. But it feels significant to me that in this paper there is no assertion, or even insinuation, of a political salience that always already inheres in avian display or in the microbial accretion of calcium carbonate. Rather than an act of depoliticisation, this might better be interpreted as a refusal of the ontologization of the political. What could follow from this, further down the road, is that we give some thought to the question of how and when a modest, circumscribed notion of the political might be brought into engagement with an exorbitant, immoderate and speculative take on the aesthetic.