Gassy -ships
Whenever I share the bed with a human, I hear a gurgling sound coming from my guts. I remember this happening since I moved to Athens for studies eight years ago. It occurs only with humans, no matter if we’re friends or sexual partners. This airy—more likely eerie—sound of fluids circulating inside my empty bowels keeps me from falling asleep for an hour or so. A feather of trust giggles my intestines and, sometimes, my sleepmate’s too. It feels uncomfortable at first, but it gets us out of the observer’s quasi-individual, quasi-whole being and into perceptions of intimate livings. The producers of the monotonous sound coming from my woofer meet another set of multiplayers and form a symphony of experimental noise music. It’s an egalitarian sign—and we laugh hearing it. The gut microbiota within us activate their dynamic functions as they try to push the boundaries. We don’t become One, we don’t wish to anyway. It’s the binding of our in-between openness that becomes sound before we fall asleep.
Maybe the gut microbiota are in slow pace when I share the bed with animals because my observer’s protective shield is already off. I’m not afraid to be silly and play in a childish, non-adult manner. The need for this dimension of games feels unsurpassable for reaffirming trust and intimacy. It’s just that with humans it feels like being among strangers, in the adult manner we’re playing—with words—whereas with animals play is among companions. Trusting takes the image of a continuous, fluid-like, unstable, quasi-floating circuit. Except for recharging it with energy that keeps all the mates within the tracks, there is no other end-point than dying together with intimate companions and strangers.
This is a story about embodied knowledges, entanglements, guts and the microbiota who live there. “Live there” might stick a bit anthropomorphised as an expression. A better term to describe it is in use in evolutionary biology. Symbiosis, coming from the greek verb συμβιώνω [symbiόno], means ‘living together’. Symbionts are those who live together: lichens and trees, insects, animals—including humans—and bacteria, friends and strangers. Same and different species that have physical interaction, even for a limited time of their life, are symbionts.
A debate between auto- and sym-
Bacteria, found in guts—and in most unimaginable places and times—are the motors of life on earth. Symbionts themselves in dynamic relatings of intra-actions, they expanded their boundaries by partially assimilating, partially digesting each other and by this process they invented the nucleated cell—otherwise known as eukaryotic cell. The bedrock of evolution for all animals, plants, fungi and protoctists.
She was the first to define the concept of holobionts. Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages that form ecological units and are composed of different species inside them, on them and around them. All of the members contribute in some way to the function of the ecological unit. Animals, their tissues, organs, cells and microbial symbionts are holobionts. So are bees, wasps and flowers. Coral reefs are of the most enigmatic holobionts and major literary work has been, and continues to be, conducted on their symbiotic relatings and the contributions of each symbiont. Holobionts are dynamic, complex, contingent assemblages that insist on staying open to involution with other species and other—already complex enough—holobionts. “They make each other through semiotic-material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements.”
There persists, however, a lot of controversy around perceptions of the holobiont. Contrary to its involutionary inception, it is also theorised as a single, well-defined, bounded unit whose maintenance is arranged by the autopoietic and self-regulatory principles of its entity as a whole. The debate derives, among other maladaptations, from a misconstruction of the autopoietic concept employed by Margulis. She incorporated the concept when she was collaborating with James Lovelock on the Gaia theory. Even though she writes that Gaia “is an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun,”
It is relevant that, like everyone else in the scientific community, she was introduced to autopoiesis by the biological research of Varela, Maturana and Uribe. In 1974 they published Autopoiesis: the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model,
But the term and framework keeps recurring, this time with an approach of community ecology. Continuing to work with the eukaryotic cells she gave a view of intertwined symbionts whose relatings involve regulation, maintenance and reproduction. In Origin of Sex, co-authored with her son Dorian Sagan, they proposed to dismiss the concept of the “eukaryotic individual” in favour of the “component-autopoietic” intra-actions of the ancestral bacteria contained within the plasma membrane of the cell: “All eukaryotic individuals must reserve, in a form capable of continued reproduction, their genetic components, the remnant bacteria in the combined form of the nucleocytoplasmic, mitochondrial, plastid, and undulipodial genomes. If we accept the cell as a microbial community, the germ plasm is equivalent to component autopoiesis: a complete set of heterologous genomes and their protein synthetic systems contained within a membranous package—not the nuclear membrane but the plasma membrane.”
A mundane act for the un-rest of holobionts
The problem with autopoiesis, concretely, emerges when the entity it characterises is perceived as a host and all the involved participants are reduced to being dependent on it. No matter how contingently organised, beings do not precede their relatings. Nothing that has come to exist as a unit can seal off its arrangements and proceed happily to eternal, unmodified, proliferation. That’s a lesson bacteria have taught us. When your existence is at stake, play brings new parties to the meetings. “Auto” combined with “poietic”, when it’s attributed to higher-order forms of organisation, is a pure indication of reduction of all the involutions; it presumes immense power for stabilization that, conversely and consequentially, leaves all the participants innocent and without responsibility for any damaging action they might commit.
The feminist point of view and framework in technoscientific knowledge-production is generally, even today, characterised as ideological and biased. It’s really funny, and ironic, to receive a rejection like this from a science worlding that is almost religious regarding individuality, hierarchy of species, and anthropogenic mutilation. Besides being passive aggressive, a counter-position stating that all science and technology is ideologised and biased is the absolutist version of relativism. A zero-sum game in both cases.
A model is a work object—either sex, fungi, or poetry—it requires response-ability. One has to be faithfully intimate with this stranger and be able to embody its view with loving care in order to be response-able. I cannot recite its doings and use it for my purposes without being curious and open-hearted towards its reality. Objective knowledge is situated knowledge according to Donna Haraway. The closest we can get to real knowledge is by getting entangled with. One cannot claim to be something other than her boundaries allow, but boundaries get pushed outwards with inter- and intra-actions. String figures engage us in becomings-with others. Moreover, one should take care of the alterations of the prosthetic embodiments of vision he or she renders in his or her work. “One cannot be either a cell or molecule—or a woman, colonised person, labourer, and so on—if one intends to see and see from these positions critically… Also one cannot relocate in any possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement.”
After dismissing the idea of single, bounded units, holobionts will maybe get a postmodern look—ready to adhere to other holobionts of their choice and transform altogether. This is more appropriation, than it is ‘natural selection’. The work of the god-eye, the supremacist observer that exercises authority over others by assuming a higher positioning. Watching everything from above, the self-divinated observer claims authorship over the beautiful and useful ones. It takes credit for inventing their charismatic capabilities and potentialities. It ditches the ugly and useless ones in the lost and found section and it incubates the rest that it now possesses. The god-eye, says Haraway, seems “to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters.”
This is hardly the case in the end, simply because holobionts rarely have the option of selection. Like bacteria shows us, the fusion of genomes in symbioses is the primary evolutionary motor, followed then by natural selection—with a very modest role kept for mutation which denies genetic inheritance. Holobionts interpenetrate, split, reform and rejoin through partially assimilating, partially indigesting and digesting. They build a diverse monstrous model of viewpoint and practice in place of the individual, masculinist, white, whole, human theories.
Unlike the techno-monsters that assimilate only after a selection of the hypnotising, addictive, power-inflicting, remorse-inducing properties, the female monstrous gaze and living produced by feminist knowledge is a trope for appearances. Multiple partial embodiments, intersections and entanglements make one appear as a monster when she or he renders them tactile. It’s the space of a body, of a writing piece, of an engaged community that embodies diverse prosthetic vision mechanisms. Many different parts comprise these bodies. They invent new kinds of entities in synergy. Monstrous under the male gaze. A mundane act for the un-rest of holobionts.
Showcase of monsters
The monstrous inception and feminist knowledge-production of intertwined relatings that affect the livings and dyings of multi-species are a core entity in the work of Daniela and Linda Dostálková. Linda is a graphic designer and Daniela is a professional photographer specialising in photo-documentation. Together they form a duo of artists, curators, co-authors and commissioners. Since 2016 they are providing services to cultural institutions, and individuals, through Institutional Homeopathy©, an international hybrid social art agency. Their aesthetics and representational strategies slide a gloss of consumerist pleasure on the surface of their work. But from the point of an immersed gaze, this seeming reconciliation with commercial mechanisms is being reversed. The represented agents reveal threatening implications and threatened entanglements that lure one into a critique of the commercial techniques, which build long-lasting structures of gender identity, fetishisation of some species and utilisation of others. The concept turns into a submerged, but forward, attack against the consumerist capitalist mechanisms that construct some “charismatic” behaviours and “cute” appearances over the suppression of everything else that they, perpetually, exclude.
Women and animals are the two core agents of the sisters’ work. They exaggeratedly play the roles that appropriation imposes on both of them while, in an upside-down dimension, they reinforce and demonstrate their in-between solidarity. They are moved by the same mundane feelings and desires for coexistence. Prosthetic embodiments are, primarily, prostheses of corporeal sensoriums that get conceptualised through the desire to transmit reasons. Reasons that move response-able actions between intimate companions and strangers, a horizontal affectioning. Gazing from below, while understanding that you are being watched from above, has this very specific string sensation. This ‘above’ is positioned far off from Christianity, as the ‘below’ has nothing to do with ethics of contractual reciprocity.
The Dostálková sisters work with figures that aren’t shy, they don’t hide in their vulnerability. They expose both a cold, distant immiseration—showcased as a trophy of the subjugating rhetoric—and the monstrous figure of feminist rhetoric along with all its nodes of partial embodiments. In their project Campaigne—exhibited at the Cursor Gallery in Prague, and curated by Edith Jeřábková—the artists, with the help of the third-party monster, reaffirm the interconnections among women and “uncharismatic” species and show the consequences that humane hierarchisation entails. One consequence is that the monstrous woman trope emerged even before the inception of feminism, as their interview with Jeřábková reads:
The close associations between women, animals and monstrosity are often linked to romantic ideas and provide a very vital investigative resource of our communication. The stories recounted in novels contribute to the creation of a gender ideology that in our opinion is justified in the case of the protection of animal rights. Generally speaking, women are either marginalised or placed in a subsidiary role, whereas monstrous women in reality occupy the central position in their own stories. We avail ourselves of these positions even though the novel qua genre came into being primarily in order to promote the knightly virtues.
Daniela and Linda Dostálková, “An Interview with Daniela and Linda Dostálková,” interview by Edith Jeřábková, Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, May 2019, https://cca.fcca.cz/en/galleries/cursor-gallery/2/linda-daniela-dostalkova-campaign/.
Daniela and Linda Dostálková spent many years exploring the strategies pursued by animal rights groups in their attempt to inform the general public about the practices of factory farming. “These strategies, however well intended, themselves create monsters because we remain unwilling to face up to reality as such.”
In their search for alternative, more effervescent, gassy campaigne strategies, Daniela and Linda Dostálková superimpose the monster of feminist rhetoric upon the techno-monsters of mechanisation and fearful individualisation. Two photographs of monster women embody prosthetic parts and visions—creating, thus, a holobionts gaze. These figures demand the space that has been refused to them, along with the acknowledgment of their intrarelatings. But then again, they display an acceptance of their given roles: care and concern. Immersed, as they are, in plant lives of absorption from anywhere; soil, sun, water, even pesticides and hormones, they meddle with whatever the “uncharismatic” species are also meddling with.
The female monster could be thought of as too friendly. That’s not undermining. It was friendly already from its inception. What matters is friends with whom? Trusting, long-lasting friendships are complex bonds of a rare kin that work their becomings through semiotic material involution. Things don’t appear as sterile and innocent anymore. As the sisters say: “During a crisis, many species that are customarily portrayed as monsters appear in a new light, one that lies outside the notional hermeneutic circle.”
That’s how getting in the muddle looks and what it feels like. Who could manage to keep clear from the muddle when it’s found to be bigger and more mortal than we thought? Filled with polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, bisphenol A, uranium, premarin, pesticides and a load of toxic multi-species exchanges?
Even the loves of Lynn Margulis cannot deal with these syntheses. The bacteria in the guts of mealworms and superworms are shown to biodegrade polystyrene, but it’s more likely a failure than a success. Some of the polystyrene gets out of their system as carbon dioxide, while more than half breaks into nano- and micro-plastics
Toxicological managements should try and do more than feed superworms and mealworms, fed with plastic, to factory farming animals and call it zero waste. The coda is that, as the ones immersed in monstrous appearances, we’ll be there when the future parties arrive—to welcome them and become intimate with them.
Elena Stavraki lives and works in North Greece (Alexandroupolis) during summer and central Greece (Athens) during winter. She studied Theory and History of Art and is currently doing her masters on Culture and Documentary Film Production. Recurring themes of her writing are animal studies, interdependence among friends, the environment and synergy. She has published writings in Paragka zine, the MASS, and NAHR.it. Periodically she curates exhibitions: Crystals in Soil, Athens 2019; 16 mins of love [A New Sentimentalism], Swindon 2019.