Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art

Looking through the Symbiotic Lens

What posthumanism has achieved is a reorganization of the thinking on “ecology” and “ecosystems” by pointing out the symbiotic nature of all life on earth, including a symbiosis with the non-living and the technological. Radically decentering the Human, dislodging it from its position as the apotheosis of the planet’s evolutionary process and realigning the Human with the “rest-of-the-world” has demanded attention to connections, dependencies and mutuality. Conversely, the rise of the discourse of the Anthropocene has produced queries over the ways in which the Human, assuming this “centric” role for itself, has savaged the planet and generated the crisis of speciesism, eco-disaster, climate change and other planetary crisis-situations.

It would be uncharitable to assume or argue that posthumanism emerged from within a crisis – around the role of the human, climate change, technology such as cloning or AI – but it cannot be wished away either since posthumanism does address each of these massive seismic shifts in humanity’s re-evaluation of itself, it’s very being and, most importantly, a history of its ‘working’ on (literally) the planet. If pop culture is an index of our collective anxieties and aspirations, then some of posthumanism’s thinking on these matters of ecology, the human and the nonhuman, has already been at the edges of ecodystopian texts and crisis films, for example, or techno-thrillers obsessed with the ‘rise’ of the machines that would eventually supplant the human.

The acknowledgement of this not-so-praiseworthy role of the Human has resulted in posthumanism and ecological thought coming together in volumes such as this, but also in the work of Francesca Ferrando, Stacy Alaimo, Ursula Heise, Rosi Braidotti and several others, drawing upon texts by Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Tim Morton and other philosophers/critics but also the work of scientists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and commentators, from Lyn Margulis to Bruce Clarke and Anna Tsing.

Critical Theory such as those from the above-mentioned commentators has returned, one could say, to the idea of the responsible Human who needs to enunciate – as Haraway would argue – a different response to the world around. It develops a new grammar and vocabulary of connections and rhizomatic movements even as it strives assiduously to not retain the Human at the centre.

“We Are The Earth”: Posthumanist Realizations in the Era of the Anthropocene

We are the Earth; we are Everything. The trees dancing in the rain and creating the oxygen we breathe. The technosphere, which allows us to connect the human-sphere – that is, humanity and all ‘things’ human. We are part of a planet: this, we cannot forget, or our ignorance will endanger our own survival. This is who we are.

Ideas can help to better understand our cosmic presence; they can also obfuscate clarity and discernment. Academia is a powerful source where collective realizations shape (and eventually promulgate in) the world. We have a big role in our species manifestations, at the individual, social, bio-technological, and ontological levels. Sometimes, academia suits specific perspectives that are only of an era. Anthropocentrism fitted the ideological episteme of the Industrial revolution; it was, symbolically speaking, its ‘steam engine’, sustaining and guiding political actions, technological innovations and ecological devastations; it has fulfilled its role. Now, it’s time to change, as this paradigm no longer works in the 21st century. Ours is not just the era of the Anthropocene, but an anthropogenic epoch in which challenging characteristics of living in the Anthropocene are expected, and experienced daily; for instance, climate change and global pandemics are no longer ‘fears’: they are realities.

The emergence of the coronavirus has dramatically demonstrated how deeply we are connected to our own species, to other species, and to viruses. Scientifically, viruses are not considered alive, because they are inert outside of a living host: they are unable to perform biological processes without relying on the cellular system of another organism. From a human standpoint, ‘they’ become alive by becoming ‘us’, including (but not limited to) our genetic makeup. According to a recent study: “Our DNA contains roughly 100,000 pieces of viral DNA. Altogether, they make up about 8 percent of the human genome” (Zimmer, 2017). This is neither good or bad; it's who we are, at the evolutionary level.

These years have been eye-opening. In urgency, we have realized that the dignity of non-human nature can only ensue in global awareness; otherwise, other viruses currently hosted by non-human animals will also affect human survival – for example, in the possible case that some humans persist in disrupting natural habitats and invading wilderness. Technology can be of help, but obviously, is not the solution; for instance, the current bio-technological ‘fixes’ of the spread ←9 | 10→of COVID-19 variants have shown to be only partially successful. We, humans of the 21st century, cannot do it alone: we are part of the planet.

Zimmer, Carl, ‘Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Your DNA’, New York Times, 4 October 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/04/science/ancient-viruses-dna-genome.html [accessed January 2022].

Introduction: Towards a Symbiosis of Posthumanism and Environmental Humanities or Paving Narratives for the Symbiocene

The era of the disastrous human impact on Earth’s systems, recently named the “Anthropocene”, poses several epistemological and methodological challenges for the Humanities, particularly in studying the relationship between the human and the more-than-human within a damaged world, full of shared precarities, vulnerabilities, and “unchosen proximities”.¹ Even if the material world is conceived as strictly tied to the non-human life-forms, the latter are bound to the human reality as humans are “enmeshed within the material flows, exchanges, and interactions of substances, habitats, places, and environments”.² Nevertheless, most public and academic discourses about the relationship of human and more-than-human world are grounded in an anthropocentric worldview that also entails the belief that human beings, assisted by technology, can use the planet to meet the needs of both current and future generations. Anthropocentrism (the narrative of humanity’s kinship with nature based on our needs) is diametrically opposed to a range of contemporary post-anthropocentric approaches in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, such as the discussions of new materialism, including vital materialism³. Vitalist approaches reject speciesism and human supremacy, putting the spotlight on “the politics of life itself”.⁴ Therefore, new modes of analysis and interpretation of these entangled webs of life must be ←11 | 12→developed if we seek to go beyond the binaries that underpin the human species’ separation from the non-human other and jeopardize the planet’s sustainability.

By focusing on the notion of symbiosis, this volume aspires to contribute to rethinking human subjectivity and agency in the 21st century as shaped by dynamic interplays between nature, technology, science, and culture. As Francesca Ferrando remarks, “Once we underline the human not as one but as many, some may emphasize that other notions and practices – such as interdependence, symbiosis, affinity, and so on – are as fundamental as the category of alterity […]”.5 The subject’s shifting nature⁶ is here perceived within the narratives of Posthumanism and Environmental Humanities, which are both prominent trends of the current global discussion about the future of humanity and the reimagining of the Humanities.⁷

Posthumanism, embracing a non-dual account of human beings and a non-anthropocentric perspective of the world, is a well-established critical discourse of Humanities and Social Sciences since the 1970s and 1980s. It has greatly affected the study of the relationship between humans and non-humans. While transhumanism promotes human beings’ biotechnological physical and cognitive enhancement to something radically different from their current status and conception,⁸ posthumanism does not imply a literal end of mankind. It rather indicates the end of a particular human image.⁹ It scrutinizes a historical moment “in which the decentering of the human, its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore”.¹⁰ A more dynamic conception of the human involves an expansion of the ←12 | 13→terrain in which it is constituted and the understanding that its structuration involves diverse layers, grids, and activations. Posthumanism criticizes anthropocentric humanism and opens its inquiry to non-human life including earth, materials, plants, animals, artificial intelligence, diverse processes, and potential entities such as hyper objects.11 The posthumanist condition is thus computational as much as it is ecological. For Louise Westling, posthumanism could assist in defining the place of humans within the ecosystem by “interrogating or erasing the boundary that has been assumed to set our species apart from the rest of the living community”.¹² A new “ecological posthumanism”, within an “eco-philosophy of multiple belongings”, calls for emergence as it raises issues of “power and entitlement”¹³ in the age of the Anthropocene. At the same time, it also questions the self-reflexivity of the subject at the center of classical Humanism and its contemporary variations.

Similarly challenging anthropocentrism are “ecocentrism” (ecosystem-centered ethics). which “places intrinsic value on all forms of life” and “biocentrism”, a life-centered ethics which, [...] accounts for “the obligations and responsibilities we have with respect to the wild animals and plants of the Earth”.¹⁴ The momentous posthumanist turn of Environmental Humanities (post-ecocriticism) is engaged with the nexus between organic and inorganic life-forms, expanded on sustainability and responsible action. Ethical responsibility is considered within a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human¹⁵ as all entities emerge through, and as part of, their entangled intra-relating and are perpetually “intra-connected” with the “flows of substances”¹⁶ and the agencies of environments.

The interplays between posthumanism and Environmental Humanities raise some questions such as how humans could be truly symbionts with more-than-human world. There are also concerns about the ‘danger’ of blurring the boundaries between human and non-human life-forms. The narratives of both posthumanism and Environmental Humanities reflect a desire to figure out the future of human beings as “it requires new forms that challenge views of human ‘dominion’ over the world and acknowledge the multitude of interactions and mutual interdependencies among humans, non-humans and their environment”.17 Our volume aims to contribute to this by formulating specific questions and elaborating conceptual tools that assist us in thinking about such issues.

“Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies”¹⁸ as a concept has analogies with relevant postulates of “Critical Posthumanism”¹⁹ which equally “favours co-evolution, symbiosis, feedback and responses as determining conditions rather than autonomy, competition and self-contained isolation of the human”.²⁰ Other research strands that resonate with the idea of humans’ embeddedness in more-than-human networks include “systems theory”²¹ and “actor-network-theory” (ANT).²² This perspective also has strong correlations within Environmental Humanities and especially their relatively new subfield of Environmental Posthumanities.²³ The idea of “ecology”, introduced already in 1866, broadly refers to ←14 | 15→the study of the relationships among organisms and the relationship with their surrounding environment, where we can include all conditions of existence. The focus is on the relations rather than the beings. The natural world is conceived as a dynamic flow, structured by constant streams of matter-energy, resulting in various bodies, forces, alliances, intimacies, etc.24 To be ecological means to participate in a mutuality, a collectivity: “ecology clearly shows the totality of the natural world -nature viewed in all its aspects, cycles and interrelationships- cancels out human pretensions to mastery over the planet”.²⁵ A recent relevant posthumanist and environmental concept to reconfigure nature, culture and human nature is “emergent ecologies”, which designates ecological communities formed through “chance encounters between life-forms, historical accidents and parasitic invasions”.²⁶

Various environmentalisms, such as “deep ecology” and “dark ecology” have affinities with western posthumanist ethics.²⁷ “Deep ecology” is an ecosophical approach²⁸ that embraces a holistic vision of the world and humanity’s relationship with non-human life-forms, defends the universal and non-quantifiable right of all forms of life to live, and is frequently endorsed by environmental movements striving to protect our planet. Expanding upon the critique of anthropocentrism, Timothy Morton urges ecological awareness in Dark Ecology through a critical reimagining of the terms ecology, nature and life and a radical ←15 | 16→reconsideration of our coexistence on the planet.29 The practices and processes of becoming fully and ethically aware of the connection between humans and the more-than-human world³⁰ reestablish the ties of the Humanities with the Natural Sciences.

Symbiosis, the Gaia Hypothesis and Life

Natural Sciences have developed the study of “symbiosis” to access various relationships among life-forms.³¹ The concept of symbiosis, has its roots in the Greek verb συμβιώνω which means live in close connection. It describes an association between different organisms attached to each other and living together, ideally referring to mutual and beneficial living. Albert Bernhard Frank first coined this living together in 1877 as “symbiotismus” to describe the mutualistic relationship among lichens.³² However, symbiosis can take different forms, obligatory or facultative. It can be mutualism (all agents benefit), commensalism (one benefits and others continue to live unharmed), and parasitism (one benefits and the other one, who is the host, is harmed).³³ For instance, the majority of human societies are stated to be in a relation of “non-mutual symbiosis” or “parasitic” relationship with our planet Earth.³⁴

Symbiosis has a growing recognition as a core principle of contemporary biology, replacing an essentialist conception of “individuality”.³⁵ However, despite ←16 | 17→the appreciation and use of symbiosis in natural sciences and philosophy, the concept lacks further and in-detail approaches to what it is and how it works today.36 The debates among those who accept the primacy of symbiosis in nature and those who deny it were triggered by the lack of a clear picture of symbiosis’ biophysics as a natural phenomenon,³⁷ i.e., how biological associations within a symbiotic relationship entail adoptions, energy, flows, interactions, abundance, distribution, etc., involving the same or different agents (intra- or inter-specific ones).

A way to understand the concept of symbiosis and its role in life’s evolution on Earth is to proceed through the various embedded assemblages, systems, and collaborative networks.³⁸ Their relationship is studied in the “Gaia hypothesis” (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974; Margulis and Hinkle, 1991; Lovelock, 1995; Margulis, Sagan and Eldredge, 1995; Margulis, 1998), the idea that the Gaia (a Greek name for Mother Earth) is a living entity and life can be seen as a collaborative process. The Gaia forms a physiological self-regulating system where different agencies and life-forms interact effectively to sustain the biosphere (all the parts of Earth that make up the living world) and its evolution through time. Moreover, it is claimed that the planetary Gaian system functions as “interrelated dynamic life processes”³⁹, and as “an open thermodynamic system” where “energy flow across gradients generates organization and order”.⁴⁰ The Gaia hypothesis postulates that the conditions on the planet are kept within boundaries favorable to life by self-regulating feedback mechanisms involving organisms tightly coupled to their environment. Under this account, Tyler Volk embraced research on models about “chemical flows with and without life” and their consequences on the sustainability of their environments:

The Gaia hypothesis is an eco-systemic theory⁴² in which geological and biological elements “interlock abiotic and biotic subsystems”.⁴³ All life-forms bear constant modulations and configurations through these subsystems. According to this hypothesis, Gaia is “more an enormous set of nested communities that together form a single ecosystem than she is any single organism”.⁴⁴ The “nested” scales and systems shaped by symbiotic relations, – “from the nature reserves that are targets of rewilding to the human bodies that are subject to biome restoration”⁴⁵ – are also central in probiotic approaches. The dynamic interactions among various system scales are studied, for example, by Eric J. Koch and Margaret McFall-Ngai, who examine the symbiotic relationships within nested ecosystems that link the biological scales of the body and its environment.⁴⁶ This dynamic scalar approach of interactions in a system illustrates how a system is embedded within larger systems and is built of smaller subsystems. Lynn Margulis’ accounts on cellular evolution are centered on describing symbiosis mainly at the molecular level. According to Margulis, symbiosis is apt to the “organization of the living”; it shapes hence also, the structure and operation of ecosystems and Gaia as a “system” that embodies “living systems”.⁴⁷ In this sense, the study of symbiosis in biology is a Gaian approach itself, not only a biological term and issue.⁴⁸

Although the Gaia hypothesis is a biocentric approach,49 it does not appear to be able to address current environmental challenges. Margulis’ affiliation with Gaia hypothesis contributed to the rise of “symbio-studies”, an interdisciplinary field of research dealing with both symbiosis and “symbiogenesis” (an evolutionary process that may lead members of different species that live in physical contact to merge physiologically and genomically to generate new organisms and species). She argues that life evolved by incorporating bacteria into other bacteria to create the mitochondria common to all eukaryotic life-forms.⁵⁰ In this sense, symbiogenesis is an evolutionary term that describes the “origin of new tissues, organs and organisms -even species- by establishing long-term or permanent symbiosis”.⁵¹ The concept of symbiogenesis involves various interplays between different kinds of “actors”⁵² (such as individual entities or collectivities) perceived in interactions of hybridization, mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, etc. The missing mark in Margulis’ involvement with Gaia as a complex autopoietic system through symbiosis, is underscored in Haraway’s account about “symbiosis” and “symbiogenesis” as a troublemaker for autopoiesis:

Furthermore, the proposed “cooperation” over “competition” in Gaia hypothesis, this kind of “arrangement” of symbiogenesis “doesn’t show that cooperation is the norm or that cooperation is always good or that it’s always possible [...] and you can’t read into it any message such as that nature is fundamentally cooperation”.⁵⁴ The reverse process of symbiogenesis, or another way to put the sympoietic tangling, the incessant composing and decomposing of each other ←19 | 20→of earthly critters in life processes, is the process of “sym-thanatosis”, proposed by Claire Colebrook. It is suggested as a “violent symbiosis” to describe how human has evolved in the Anthropocene “as ‘man’ – the animal that turns against the milieu and sustenance of his own life”. As she claims, man “is neither accident nor exception, for ‘life’ as such – in its lure of self-maintaining organisation – is an anarchic, order-destroying tendency towards extinction”.55 Symbiosis as symbiogenesis (or sym-thanatosis) emphasizes the ecological multiplicity of all living arrangements and challenges the humanist principle about an essential humanity composed of uniquely human individuals.⁵⁶ Symbiosis, thus, may provide an eventual epistemic ground for reconstructing Humanities-Natural Sciences coalitions and a ‘bridging’ between posthumanism and Environmental Humanities.

Symbiosis, Agency and Subjectivity

The concept of symbiosis also encompasses theoretical and empirical reconsiderations of agency and subjectivity. The representation of non-human agents entwined in more-than-human relations with humanity often eludes tools of expression or frames of cognition. As Sherryl Vint notes, the genre of science fiction provides a viable platform for thinking and representing them:

The posthumanist and environmental perspectives confront us with the question of the adequacy of these literary narratives concerning not only the non-human beings but also the humans’ place in the world. Symbiotic perspectives, allegories and metaphors could pave a path to understanding and representing different real, potential, or fantastic agencies in literature and art. Shifting from an anthropocentric to a post-anthropocentric worldview entails a rapidly changing approach of symbiosis within the “linkage across present and past in the act of ←20 | 21→constructing and actualizing possible futures”.58 Jane Bennett’s “vital materiality”, which runs through and across human and non-human bodies, Karen Barad’s theory of “intra-actions” underscoring how the agents in a network are themselves constituted by the actions that relate them to others, Lauren Fournier’s study of “fermentation”, Donna J. Haraway’s “compost” kinships, Anna L. Tsing’s anthropological perspective of human nature as an “interspecies’ relationship” through “contamination”, Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality”, are some of the approaches that study the constant flows of human and various non-human life-forms, emphasizing on the material networks in which humans and non-humans are constantly embedded.

According to Bennett, “thing-power materialism” addresses the mutual implication of humans and non-humanity, as the latter is an active actant.⁵⁹ Thus, agency is perceived in terms of assemblages of humans and non-human entities and forces. Accordingly, Barad studies the constant entanglement between materialism, culture, human and more-than-human world, which exist in a mutual accord.⁶⁰ While “interaction” describes the contact between pre-existing entities assumed to be separate, “intra-action” emphasizes the agential nature of each entity. Barad’s contribution to “agential realism” refers to “agency” which is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity. It is an “enactment, not something that someone or something has”.⁶¹ Moreover, in Barad’s study entitled Meeting the Universe Halfway, “agential realism” encapsulates the “matter’s dynamism” as “matter refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization”.⁶²

Extensions of symbiosis can be traced in Lauren Fournier’s study of “fermentation”, which brings together fermentation and feminism, energizing the latter by the processes of transformations and interactions which concern a change from anthropocentrism to post-anthropocentrism. According to him, “fermentation ←21 | 22→is a generative metaphor, a material practice”63 and a microbiological process.⁶⁴ One of the ways to think about fermentation is “interspecies symbiosis and coevolution”.⁶⁵ For instance, the knowledge that the symbiotic cultures of microorganisms constitute fermenting bodies expands the human body’s understanding as “biocultural” and the awareness of the constant cross-species permeability.⁶⁶

The awareness of multi-species’ symbiosis and sympoiesis (co-creation) is structured within different discourses, from new materialism to the critical study of the Anthropocene. Fermentation process has analogies with the well-known Haraway’s “compost” kin-making of human and non-human critters⁶⁷: “Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman”.⁶⁸ Composting metaphors that emphasize “the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part”⁶⁹ evoke actual metabolic events in which all critters engage daily. In Haraway’s conception of the “Chthulucene”,⁷⁰ -characterized by tentacles or tentacularity, as a reference to a capacity to feel and try, and through this, make connections and attachments-, humans hold a much less central position. “Holobiont” is another term to describe a collection of closely associated species that have complex interactions, the “symbiotic assemblages, at whatever scale of space or time” in competitive or cooperative interactions.⁷¹ According to Haraway the complex kinships of holobionts bring new knowledge about the generations and collaborations of the inorganic life-forms, such as bacteria, perceived through senses and embodied experience.⁷² This understanding of kinship is ethically oriented “to stay with the trouble”, as it requires that kind of thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities. It is postulated that the species could handle the urgencies of the Anthropocene through this “becoming-with” other beings, ←22 | 23→entangled in multi-species relationships.73 Human history hence is perceived as a multi-species story.

In the same line, Tsing’s approach of human nature as an “interspecies relationship”⁷⁴ elucidates the kinship between humans and non-human life-forms such as plants, animals, microbes and bacteria.⁷⁵ For the American anthropologist, “contamination” is a foundational concept to explain how gathering became happening that is greater than the sum of its parts; it works through collaboration and assures survival. “Staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination”.⁷⁶ In this sense, contamination as a symbiotic dynamic of bringing together different agents and material processes encourages biodiversity.

Putting “transitivity” at the center of the discussion of human/non-human bodies and subjectivities, – as “trans” implies interchange, movement across categories –, the trans-theories have turned to forms that have always been troubling clear borders between species and kinds. Colebrook argues that any encounter is already a “transitive encounter” as any dialogue between the human and non-human is “preceded, conditioned, and haunted by a condition of transitivity”.⁷⁷ The transmaterial processes are studied by Alaimo, who addresses the shifting nature of the subject by introducing the concept of “trans-corporeality”.⁷⁸ The latter recognizes entangled relations between bodies, places, and material substances within the environments and flows that shape and characterize the conditions of interconnectedness.⁷⁹ Trans-corporeality “emerges from a sense of fleshy permeability”, eroding a humanist understanding of the world.⁸⁰ Based on Barad’s approach and other materialist theories, Alaimo’s posthuman environmental ethics promotes human and more-than-human interconnectedness ←23 | 24→constituting material realities81 and the need to understand our world through relations and affinities that are ethical, cultural and political. This ‘material turn’ in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences has broadened our knowledge of agencies to understand the vibrant energies that operate in the material world. As a result, it accentuates the urgency to strive for “multi-species abundance,” “by which we mean futures with more diverse and autonomous forms of life and ways of living together”.⁸²

Symbiosis, Humanities and Citizenship

While having a fundamental role in modern Biology and Natural Sciences, symbiosis transgresses disciplinary boundaries. By emphasizing the structural interdependence among species, symbiosis could stand for a re-grounding of both Posthumanities and Environmental Humanities in a materially embedded sense of action, awareness, and ethical responsibility for our planet. As we have seen above, although symbiosis risks keeping an anthropocentric aspect, it seems that we can use the concept metaphorically to learn more about the mechanisms and functionalities of any kind of interaction to better frame our worldviews and shape sustainable futures. It gains not be seen merely as the outcome of a whole process but as a behavioral attitude and enactment. It raises questions such as the following: is it possible to recast symbiosis so that it epitomizes the narratives of posthumanism and Environmental Humanities that render the world as a whole Being rather than a resource for use and exploitation? Could symbiosis be seen as a way to cultivate posthumanist/ecohumanist epistemologies, ethics, politics, and aesthetics of the future? Which symbiotic futures shall we have to pursue? And finally, what a symbiotic future would look like?