Die Krafte hinter den Formen Erdgeschichte, Materie, Prozess in der zeitgendssischen Kunst The Forces behind the Forms Geology, Matter, Process in Contemporary Art| Monika Bakke Geologizing the Present. Making Kin with Mineral Species and Inhuman Forces Lithic intimacy runs slow and deep! Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Geology has never been so lively, and the geologic so alive as now. Not only is geology vigorously debated outside its own disciplinary context, but it is also visually present in art projects. Now, when natural history and social history are no longer separable, the geologic, as Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse point out, is considered “both as a material dynamic and as a cultural pre- occupation.” The interest in the material dynamic embracing matter beyond the organic comes with the realization that change and agency can no longer just be associated with life. Growing awareness of self-organizing capabilities of matter, abiotic factors in the origin of life, as well as the chemical and phys- ical impact on both biological and mineral evolutions, lead to an observation that “matter” ~ as Karen Barad writes ~ “is not a fixed essence; rather, matter } is substance in its intra-active becoming - nota thing buta doing, a congealing } of agency.”® The geological turn that can be presently observed, as Kathryn Yusoff ex- plains, “takes seriously not just our biological (or biopolitical) life, but also our geological {or geopolitical) life and its forms of differentiation."* Hence, the present interest in the geological, involving deep time perspective, not only embraces the past but also the future. Recalibrating our own scale, the scale of individuals and species, to the geological scale, brings a better understanding of our own bodily entanglements with autotrophic and heterotrophic metabol- ic systems; rearticulating materiality in ways not yet fully comprehended and not fully predictable, These topics emerge in the context of the growing aware- | ness of the anthropogenic environmental impact operating on a global scale | so that, as Donna Haraway points out, "the effects of our species are literally | written into the rocks.”® Being critical of anthropocentrism, the geological turn | requires us to reconsider the human position, both as a species and a carbon life form. This seems to be a necessary condition for more ecojustice and the opening up of yet another way of looking into the future of the planet. In what follows, | would like to demonstrate that the geologic now, both as a material dynamic and a cultural narrative, is always already affected, or perhaps even infected, by life. * ase NERA An dA eed SE USI”The ‘Geological Infiltration’ of Life One of the key aspects of geologizing now is recognizing what Yusoft calls the “geologi that is “the mineral dimension of human compasition.”* But actually all organic bodies, be they (human) animal, plant, fungal or bacterial, reach deeply into the mineral realm through metabolic systems and through ancestry extending to first life forms. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, “It is mat- ter, the thing, that produces life; sustains and provides life with its biological organization and orientation; and requires life to overcome itself, to evolve, to become more."” But underlying the ecstatic aspect of life, Grosz does not ne- cessarily manage to escape ‘organic chauvinism’. It seems that not directing the ecstatic aspect of life towards transcendence but immanence would solve the problem. In his last essay, Immanence: A Life, Gilles Deleuze suggests that, “Alife is everywhere, in all the moments a certain living subject passes through and that certain lived objects regulate: immanent life carrying along the events or singularities which do nothing more than actualize themselves in subjects and objects.” Life, then, needs to be considered beyond human, beyond spe- cies and beyond organic. Ina science fiction novel entitled The Black Cloud by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, first published in 1957, the sunshine is gradually obscured by an enor- mous dark cloud approaching earth from space; only later is the cloud rec- ognized by a group of scientists as being much more than black dust. This extraordinary encounter evokes inquiries into the basic distinction between living and non-living, as one of the characters explains, “You know better than I do that the distinction between animate and inanimate is more a matter of verbal convenience than anything else. When | said the Cloud may be je | ‘meant that the material inside it may be organized in an intricate fashion, so that its behaviour and consequently the behaviour of the whole Cloud is far ‘more complex than we previously supposed.” The philosophical proposal of neo-vitalism of the 21st century, similar to the Cloud investigating team, focuses on a vital process - the behaviour of matter ~ rather than individual embodied lives. Process is considered a mode of being, cutting across organic and inorganic and perceived in terms of flow, liveliness, and becoming. Life, therefore, is not opposed or limited by death which is here considered a transformation rather than a final disintegration. Being an im- mense inhuman force, life has the potential to permanently alter or even devas- tate environments, including, perhaps, life as is as yet unknown to us. Traditionally a question for religion, philosophy, and science, a coherent pathway from the geologic to the biologic is now increasingly an object of in- terest for engineers. Moreover, the understanding of the origin of life, when viewed as a transformation of the geologic into the biologic, is nowadays the desire of those scientists taking a bottom-up approach to synthetic biology and whose ambition it is to build protocells - living or life-like systems - from non-living components. The focus is not to tinker with biological information, but the material dimension of life as biochemistry and experimenting withself-organizing matter. Success here would promise to open up various pos- sibilities for building self-repairing technological devices that can be re-used and even develop other worthwhile features. Although scientists still struggle to solve the question of how matter came into being in a biological sense, the very question of the origin of life is being explored. In critically talking about the concept of ‘origin’ within a Darwinian context, Grosz points out that it "is in a certain sense impossible to understand [origin] as a locatable or knowable entity, a definite point in time, a single chem- ical reaction, for itis an origin ‘that is not one’, that is always already implicated in multiplicity or difference, in a constellation of transformations, an event that imperceptibly affects everything.”® Contemporary research suggests that life may have originated in more than one location; hence, its chemical and physi- cal contingencies may have been different, leading to the emergence of other life dwelling in conditions unsuitable for carbon-based life, and therefore not in competition with it." Or, possibly, life that is unfamiliar is in a symbiotic relation with ours but has not yet been recognized, as such. There is really no reason to believe that we ~ the carbon life forms ~ are alone, and this concerns not only outer space but also - and perhaps more importantly ~ our local habitat. With the abundance of existing matter, we cannot exclude other options. As Jane Bennett points out, “If we think we already know what is out there, we will almost surely miss much of it.” “Do we want to remain big people in a tiny world or to become a little people ina vaster world?" ~ is a question asked in Hoyle’s novel after recognizing the liveliness of the Cloud. The second option was chosen by one of those scien- tists who believed that being receptive to the likelihood of encountering unex- pected forms of matter, revealing yet unknown and unimaginable organization, is the most promising direction to follow. Doop Time: from Genealogy to Geology The vast temporal dimension of the materiality of the earth - being roughly 4.5, billion years old - opens up a perspective of mineral and biological evolutions in complexities and scales way beyond the species and organic formations. It was James Hutton, the founder of geological science, who in the 18th century proposed the concept af geolagical time (in opposition to the biblical chron- ology), and was followed some decades later by Charles Lyell who, in his book Principles of Geology, presented geological evidence supporting the concept of uniformitarianism maintaining that studying present day geological process- es can be used in reconstruction of the earth's past. Geology then offers an understanding of time as an inhuman force, which - as Elizabeth Grosz puts it ~ has a “capacity to hide in objects." These objects may be living and non-liv- ing, contemporary and long gone, as small as a grain of sand or as big as a planet. Yet, dealing with fossilized life, we come to an immensity of forms and connections which can only be hinted at because, as Henry Gee in his bookIn Search of Deep Time suggests, “Fossils, such as fossils of creatures we hail as our ancestors, constitute primary evidence for the history of life, but each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a fathomless sea of time, whose relation ship with other fossils and organisms living in the present day is obscure."* And because fossils accidently came into existence and under specific envi- fonmental circumstances, we will never have a complete picture of the long gone entanglements of the organic and the inorganic. But is it really the case that, in time, everything succumbs to a pettification process and turns into mineral? Is the mineral realm the inevitable destiny of the entire environment? In The Crystal World, which is a science fiction novel by James Graham Ballard published in 1966, the world undergoes a bizarre process of transformation, spreading like a disease under the effect of which everything, be it animate or inanimate, is transformed into glowing crystals. The affected area described in the book is a deep equatorial jungle, where “by day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forest, and jewelled croco- diles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river."” Dr. Sanders, the main character who accidently stumbles upon the crystalli- zation process, talks about “the immense reward to be found in that frozen forest. There the transfiguration of all living and inanimate forms occurs be- fore our eyes, the gift of immortality a direct consequence of the surrender by each of us of our own physical and temporal identities."# It is only after extensive travel through the crystallized forest that Dr. Sanders stops perceiv- ing the crystallization of living creatures as ultimate death, but rather as an extraordinary mode of carrying existence where the life/death dichotomy does not apply. To Sanders the crystallization of rivers, trees, crocodiles, mud, peo- ple, etc. is a continuation of their material existence. From the book we learn that “this process is theoretically without end” and that “itis time (‘time with the Midas touch’ [..J] which is responsible for the transformation,"® as it leaks away causing the super-saturation of space. No wonder that the intense and dazzling process possesses seductive powers, as a number of main characters, decide to voluntarily succumb to it, including Dr. Sanders himself, who in the final page, returns to the transformation zone of the crystalline forest. Deep time perspective reveals the immense influence of organic life on mineral environments; mineral diversification is a result of mineral evolution or perhaps a co-evolution of mineral and organic species. It is estimated that about two-thirds of the earth's 4,300 known mineral species came into ex- istence because of a direct or indirect influence of biochemical processes.” Microbes interacting with the soil produce ‘microenvironments’ enabling the formation of new minerals; but some of the life forms made a global change. Rook-like structures called Stromatolites - life forms thriving 3.5 billion years ago but still found on earth today ~ consist of layers of cyanobacteria which trap minerals from water and build so-called living rocks. They are the most ancient oxygen-producing form of life and are actually responsible for the “Great Oxygenation Event, also known as the ‘Oxygen Catastrophe’, which led to the massive extinction of anaerobic life about 2.2 to 2.0 billion years ago,but which simultaneously induced the rise of multicellular life supported by skeletal structures like ourselves and changed the mineral composition of the planet irreversibly. Certainly much more familiar life forms that are capable of creating elab- orate landscapes are corals which, for a long time, puzzled naturalists. Whether corals were rocks, plants or animals was once a legitimate question.*' Their landscape-forming ability became a challenge for Charles Darwin who en- countered reefs on his voyage on the Beagle. Intrigued by fringing, barer, and atoll reefs, Darwin eventually proposed an explanation of their evolution re- lated to the geological structures on which they grew. He claimed that coral islands and atoll formations begin with a fringing reef and depend on the sub- strate upon which the reef is growing as well as on changing sea levels. Darwin presented these ideas in his first book Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs published in 1842. Nowadays, when questioning the mineral footprint we are most likely to leave behind on the planet surface, we are actually asking about intricate eco- logical relations that we are entering and, eventually, about who and what will ‘come after us? Geologi 1g Humans or Becoming Earth The beginning of geology is linked with the introduction of a very radical con- cept of deep time, allowing us to envision a world without people. The con- ‘temporary, geologically inspired narratives go even further by questioning the present status of human existence constitutively entangled with the nonhu- man, Itis in this sense that Haraway can state, “We have never been human."=? The postulated recalibrating of “the human’ in relation to ‘the geologic"? also challenges the key genealogical narratives of human origin. Human fossils, reveal that deep time environments were populated not by one, but by multiple human ancestors whose traces may be found in the DNA of modern humans. Kathryn Yusoff points out that, especially with the fossil records of Denisovan (up to five percent of whose genes can be found in genomes of modern Papuans and Australian Aborigines}, disputed Homo floresiensis and the sequencing of Neanderthal's DNA (whose genetic material - up to four percent ~ became incorporated into the modern Euro-Asian genome) the origin of the modern human is not one, "The genus of the human is rapidly becoming articulated as multiply situated and genetically differentiated.”* With more fossils being excavated, we get a glimpse into previously unimaginable ancestral liaisons. Going beyond ancestry and genealogy in focusing on our present entangle- ments with biotic as well as abiotic components becomes a challenge giving rise to political hopes. If we can “see our ways of being as geological rather than biological per se,”* as Yusoff suggests, human experience is no longer limited to living on earth, but actually, as Rosi Braidotti points out, it is becom- ing-earth, Perceiving human bodies as biochemical transformations ultimatelytranslates them into a flow of matter and energy positioning us in a geological perspective. In this sense De Landa is right when he suggests that “our organic bodies are [...] nothing but temporary coagulations in these flows: we capture in our bodies a certain portion of the flow at birth, then release it again when we die and microorganisms transform us into a new batch of raw material But what his description omits is the intricate web of entanglements with the non-human through exchange and collaboration throughout the entire life of a body, not only at its death. The non-human - not only operating in us but actually as us ~ is in effect constitutive for what we become as a species and as individuals. Human being, postulates Haraway, is best conceptualized not as an “astral being” aspiring for cyber and/or extraterrestrial heavens and looking for an opportunity of escaping the burdens of terrestrial materiality, but as a “crea- ture of the mud,” “compost-ist” or “human-as-humus.” Warning against the attempts to leave behind ecological problems actually caused by our species, Haraway criticizes the ambitions of entering the post-human age. Instead, she advocates remaining with the troubles, pointing out that the environmental and evolutionary entanglements with the non-humans, including mineral spe- cies, need to be recognized and respected, and only then is there a chance for a multispecies ecojustice. Urging us to mobilize “imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species Haraway hopes for new ways of becoming with others rather than reproducing ourselves. “Make kin not babies", is her slogan for more acceptable ways of building the multi-species future. While for Lyell, the present was an opening to the geological past, which is almost entirely non-human, for us the present is expected to be a key to the pethaps almost entirely non-human future. The geological perspective helps us to realize that the future may not belong to humans the way the present does. It will not have to be the result of global catastrophic events, so eager ly portrayed by TV productions such as Life After People (2008-2010) and Aftermath: Population Zero (2008), which are actually nothing more than a symptom of nostalgia for human grandeur. Rather, perhaps the significant, change will gradually emerge from a multitude of small steps of practical and technical significance undertaken on the everyday basis as a personal choice such as refraining from excessive consumption and reproduction. And if "An- thropocene is more a boundary event than an epach,"®* it is perhaps the very best moment to realize that despite the global impact we impose now, in the long run our species will get transformed by inhuman forces and become other-than-human. Its material traces will only for a while, in geological scale, still be carried on in those of kin belonging to organic and mineral species. ee Soe pi 5 bo, one tan ‘rahe ‘sth ons1 Jotcy Jerome Cohen. “coop of The Low of Stone insContnent sue 442,206, pM, URL: Wie? ontrentzontinen.ee/indox Pipfeontinant/arti/ iw 18 ‘01 November 2015, 2 aabih Elsaorth nl rie rae od ating the Geologie ows, Mow York 2013.9 7. 3 Karen Barad"Posthumanist Performa: Toward.an Understanding of How Mater (Comes to Mattern: Stacy ‘Naim and Suzan Hekman (cd), eter Feminism. Bloomington 2009, 146 4 Katey Yust,“etogle Life Prehistory mate, Futures the Antvopocena, In: Environment and Panning D: Society and Space vl 31, 2013, p77 5 Donna Haranay,"Anthrapo~ ane, Capitlocene, Chul ‘ene. Donna Haraway CConveraation vn Matha ‘Kenney: Heather ais and urine Tupi feds, Arn the ‘Arahropacen: Eneouoters arn Jesthois, Poites Environments ‘and Epstemelogics, Loon 2015, p. 298, URL: ‘panhuranaspress.org/ Davis Turin. 2015. Ari therAnthropseenejp a of Newombor 2018 1 Kathy Yo soe not 7 Glzaboth Gross, The Mek of Tino, Delite, Evolution, and the {inte Duran 2004, 0.132. 1 Giles Deluze, Pure Immanonc. E5075 00 ae New York 200%, p.5. 18 Fred Hoyle, The Bleck Cloud (1857), Bungay 197 9.15 40 Eleabeth Grosz, one not 7, p25, ALCL Pie Luigi List The Energence of ife:From (Chemical Origins Syl Bio. Cambridge 2006; Fchord Ege, Dirk Lankenau and ‘remen¥ Mulia (ed, hig f Le: Th Pia St- (igaizavon Bethn-Howelbora 2am 12 Jane Bennett, Vtvant Mato: ‘4 Potical Ecol of Mio Durham 2010, .¥, 12 Fred Hoyle. se not . 210 1 Cl Charles Lye Principles 2F Geology, Landon 1830-1833, UUeLhntevrwgutenbora raytus/99224/9224-h/ £39224 hiya of No. 2015, 45 Elaabeth Grosz, seo note, pz 16 Hen Ges, n Search of Doon Time: Beyond the Foss Rocerd tone Hitry oft, aca 1398,0.2, 17 James Graham Ballad The hy or (966), London 20085; . 169, 1 tid 189. 19 ep 85, 20 Ci. Rogor M., Hazon, Deine Papineau, Weuiar Bloke, Reber Dow, John Ferry, Tim eCoy, Dit Sverensiy and Heer Yang, Mineral volo: Anerican Minato, sue 9, Novarber-Decomber 2009, ppt603-1720. 21 ronch natalia Jan-Andeé Peyeeonna pronounced thm suas 753 the sealed "orl owes wer bleed to bepans of nsecte mauscus ‘worms oreven animales ike rmcrobel. 22 Donna Haraway, When [pect ect, Minospals 2008, 29 Eleabeth Eltworth and Jamia Kruse eds ee nto 2, po. 2a they Yo soe nated, 2.786 28 ii». 704 26 Manel DeLand, Thousand Years of Monlnaar sar. New Yark 2000, 9.104 27 Dumina Haraway, "Anio= ‘econ, Capialecone, Pontationocene Chhulscens Making Kin Enron) uranic, ol 6, 2015, pp. 150-165, ete. 16h URL: hep//enaronmenathumenits. ‘org/archal6/6.Lpdh a November 2015. 20 Tc, 29 For morson this tape. Matto A Taylor “Whither a2 ine Subject. volumes 2012! pp, 276-280, hore p.277 Jeanna 2ynska, Minimal Ets forthe Antropacene Amn Dror 204106, URL hi? ‘wermapentumaniesores. ovina ates Ml of vember 2015 £20 Donna Haraway, sea not 27, 160,