Eben Kirksey: Boundless entanglements with the virosphere (ep392)
“Viral ontologies put the limited amphibiousness of the human to shame. Viruses refuse to sit still as stable individuals, variants, strains, or species. They proliferate in mutant swarms—clouds of particles with a fluid genetic makeup.”
In this episode, we are joined by anthropologist Eben Kirksey, who invites us to think and feel through a new wave of viral theory through a lens of multispecies entanglement. Through his insatiable curiosity about nature-culture, Eben humbly approaches the viral world as one that reflects the limitations of fixed or reductive categorization. Ultimately, he leaves us with an invitation to explore how radically rethinking viral systems can offer alternative ways of approaching contemporary socio-political predicaments. He asks: How can we sit with the complexities of symbiotic assemblages amongst species, and what novel relationships are imperative to uplift in an age of extinction?
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About our guest:
Eben Kirksey is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford where he teaches Medical Anthropology and Human Ecology. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and helped found one of the world's first Environmental Humanities programs at UNSW Sydney in Australia. Investigating some of the most important stories of our time—related to biotechnology, the environment, and social justice—led him to Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. His books include Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)–plus The Multispecies Salon (2014), and The Mutant Project (2020), a book that follows some of the world’s first genetically modified people.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by RVBY MY DEAR
Episode-inspired artwork by Luci Pina
Episode references:
“Welcome to the Virosphere”, an essay by Eben Kirksey
Emergent Ecologies, a book by Eben Kirksey
Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, books by Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Eben Kirksey: When I was a young kid, I spent a lot of time in my backyard. I grew up on a mountain—Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and I was basically turned loose in the summertime with my dog and was given free range to collect salamanders and crayfish and build tree forts. So I think the love and curiosity about the world around me just came from being out in it, and being out in a way that was totally unsupervised by adults. No, no screens, no books, just out, being in the world. I think that those early experiences as a kid opened me to wider worlds that I became curious about.
Kamea Chayne: In your piece, “Welcome to the Virosphere”, you begin by writing: "Perhaps you thought you could isolate yourself from viruses during the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic. Confined to your own apartment or small social bubble, you might have thought you were beyond the sphere of viral influence. Think again. You have always lived within the virosphere—the vast but poorly understood universe of viruses."
With that, I want to start here with a broad question: has our popular culture been reductive by perpetuating this limited understanding of viruses to these pathogenic so-called strains or agents that drive a sort of persistent germaphobia or viral anxiety, as you name it? Just to create some openings for us to begin seeing the virosphere in different lights, I wonder what you've found most foundational and fascinating about viruses, their roles, or our symbiosis with our own virome, that dominant narratives and depictions often miss.
Eben Kirksey: Like many of the people who are probably listening right now, I experienced profound disruption in my own life and in my own dreams during the pandemic. Everyday reality was difficult to navigate and it was hard to know what was coming next. And during the pandemic, I decided that rather than doing a lot of writing—I saw a lot of people putting out hasty, hot takes about the pandemic—I decided to do a lot of reading. So I started a reading group and we met every Monday in Zoom, and initially, we were just focused on reading the primary literature about coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2, but then we started going sideways a little bit, and really opened up into this broad universe of viruses that don't make us sick.
And I should say that that event was a collective trauma. It's a trauma that we're still individually processing, collectively processing. A lot of us lost loved ones. I lost a student of mine, a Ph.D. student, an Indigenous woman in West Papua—she didn't have access to oxygen or any of the vaccines or fancy treatments that were later rolled out in the States. But even amidst that mass death, I started to reflect on this vast, unknown universe of the virosphere, and these new technologies that have just come online in the last couple of decades that let us look at the DNA sequences in our body. We've got narratives and ways of understanding bacteria, and there's been a lot of conversation about the microbiome and probiotics, but we're really just starting to reckon with all of the viruses that are constantly swarming within our bodies.
And so just to give you one example, if you look at parts of your body that were previously thought to be completely sterile, so I'm talking about your brain, your cerebrospinal fluid, your blood, these are actually teeming with a kind of virus called phage. And phage is the kind of virus that infects bacteria.
One expert explained it to me much like a shadow immune system.
There's actually more phage virus in our bodies than white blood cells. And they're not just showing up by accident—the phage that are in our bodies, many of them are actively transported from our gut. In our gut, we have a lot of bacteria, a lot of other components of our microbiome, but the cells of our gut epithelium are latching on to these phage viruses and transporting them into our blood. Our bodies able to selectively incorporate these infectious strangers into our bodies.
It's also interesting for me to think about a quote that Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway have played with for many decades.
Primatologists would tell us stories about the behaviors that we've inherited from our primate ancestors, but I like thinking with viruses because they're constantly infecting us, changing our nature. Some of them, like retroviruses, are even changing our genome, so we're really constantly in relation with the world around us even though we can barely perceive and understand all of this complexity.
So yeah, even as I was isolating with everyone else, even as I was trying to access the latest information about SARS-CoV-2 and the ecological conditions that produced this pandemic, I became very curious about the parts of the virosphere that aren't necessarily making us sick, but that are really a core part of life on Earth. And, if you look at biodiversity on a planetary scale and you count the viral particles, there's nonillion—I learned a new number in doing this research, [and] my seven year old loves to tell you that there's 30 zeros in nonillion. So this is a mind-boggling number of entities, and the story of genetic diversity on Earth is also a story of viral diversity, and we really don't understand it that well.
Kamea Chayne: Really fascinating and so much we've still yet to learn.
On the show, we've explored the limitations of categorizing and naming in general given a vastly complex and ever-changing world that refuses to sit still and be fixed or framed. And recently in my conversation with Dany Celermajer, we also touched on the troubles with the whole idea of species altogether—given that it relies on reductionism, it recognizes the already limited unit of a species as individuals, and that it stems from particular knowledge systems and worldviews.
Your work reminded me of this when you share: "Viral ontologies put the limited amphibiousness of the human to shame. Viruses refuse to sit still as stable individuals, variants, strains, or species. They proliferate in mutant swarms—clouds of particles with a fluid genetic makeup." I wonder if part of the reason for our relatively limited understanding and ability to understand the virosphere comes in part from the particular dominant lenses of our life sciences of defining and categorizing and reducing.
So how might thinking with viruses humble our human egos and invite us to better understand ourselves, too, as complex holobionts, constantly intra-acting with other holobionts and the multispecies world? If it feels relevant for you to bring in that word, holobiont, in your response, I would appreciate if you could introduce what that refers to as well for our listeners hearing it for the first time.
Eben Kirksey: I really love that question and I think I'm going to respond with a story. So one of the people I grew close to during the pandemic is named Sasha Gorbalenya. At a time when everybody was out in front of the media describing themselves as a coronavirus expert, Sasha was actually relatively quiet, but he was a real expert. He described the first coronavirus genome about 30 years ago and pioneered some math, some computing techniques, to really get inside of the genetic sequences and figure out what all these different proteins do.
So in these conversations with Sasha, first of all, I learned that our image of the virus as a particle is really just all wrong, focusing on the wrong thing. So he said, you wouldn't understand a tree by just carefully studying a seed. I learned about how viruses come alive inside of cells, inside of their environments, and they become sort of multiple. They aren't just one thing. They become all these different molecules that interface with different parts of ourselves. So one part goes to the nucleus and might grab some DNA base pairs or RNA and make more of itself; other components of the virus are going to the Golgi apparatus and going to sites of protein synthesis and intra-acting with and disrupting the cell that it finds itself within.
Sasha is also the one who gave the official name to SARS-CoV-2. So if you do a COVID test, you'll see that it's not testing for COVID-19, which is a disease that makes you seriously sick, and you could die from that; but most people get infected with the virus, SARS-CoV-2, and don't get seriously sick and don't die. So for starters, Sasha wants to differentiate, just like HIV and AIDS. There's a difference between the infectious agent and the experience of pathology. I think it's really important to think about how histories of racism and colonialism make certain kinds of people vulnerable, whether it's through the kinds of molecular wounds that our cells accumulate over a lifetime with metabolic diseases like diabetes. So it turns out that diabetes makes us express more ACE2 receptors on ourselves, so your body has an adaptive response to one disease, eating a lot of sugar, and that makes you vulnerable to this virus, SARS-CoV-2, and you're going to get COVID-19.
But back to your question about species. The paper that Sasha described SARS-CoV-2, the paper that gave this pandemic virus its official name, placed it within a known species that Sasha had described before. So SARS-CoV-2 is the same species as the original SARS, and he's basically told me this story about how it's been circulating amongst animals and people for decades, if not millennium. And in naming this entity, SARS-CoV-2, he compared it to a person. So the scientific paper compares SARS-CoV-2 to a person like Albert Einstein, maybe the original SARS is Marie Curie, RaTG13, the one that was found in bats in southern China, might be Rosalind Franklin.
But what's interesting, if you think about these viral persons, is that they really don't sit still. They don't have fixed boundaries.
So, he's not reducing that viral person to a single viral particle, but again, trying to get us to think about clouds and swarms that might be in multiple bodies, a multitude of bodies all at once. So imagine a cloud or a swarm encircling the whole planet in and out of, thousands, if not millions, of bodies, all at once. So this is what a viral cloud is. It's not something that sits still. It's not something that has its boundaries. And, these viruses, when they find themselves inside of the same cell, sometimes they're hybridizing, sometimes they're recombining with different strands.
They're not having sex when they reproduce like we do. A viral species looks very different from what a human species looks like. But, they can pick up snippets of DNA either from kissing cousins, members of the same broad group of organisms, or sometimes they might pick up a bit of genetic material from a completely different virus, or even a plant or an animal or a fungi. So, viruses are really interesting for this ongoing traffic of information—what Karen Barad would call these material-semiotic elements, things that are both three-dimensional in space, they have materiality, but they also have meaning, they have information, semiotics. So, you can also think about viruses as holobionts. You can think of the human as a holobiont, and we're holobionts that intra-act with each other.
If you go back to the root of that word holobiont, it means entire organism. And this is a word that Lynn Margulis popularized with her theory of symbiogenesis. Symbiogenesis is a way of thinking about the transformative encounters that might really change all the parties involved in such an encounter.
I really think the basic foundations of evolutionary theory, but also theories of change, corporeal change, ecological change in real time, could be radically rethought with this new wave of viral theory that's paying attention to this constant traffic of infectious agents amongst bodies of different species and of different kinds.
So in thinking about the assemblages of organisms and ecological communities that make us who we are, I think it's not only important to think about the kinds of intra-actions that you can have at the level that you can sense and perceive and understand with your eyes and your ears and your waking senses.
But, entering this speculative territory to think about these barely perceptible invisible agents that are constantly changing the trajectories of our cells, our tissues and possibly even our systems of thinking. So one of the phage virologists who's described this very crazy diversity of viruses in the brain speculates—and it might be idle speculation—but he's got a key section of the scientific review paper that speculates about phage mind control.
There's been a lot written on the gut-brain axis in terms of the neurotransmitters that bacteria produce in our gut that might change our moods or our appetites or our feelings. I think it's important not to be too deterministic as we think in molecular terms, but I really like to think about ways we might decenter the human. And, I think Lacan had a great way of thinking about discerning, centering the human in terms of psychology, and it's important to both recognize that as conscious subjects, we might not be fully present to ourselves, but we become who we are in relation to others.
But I think decentering the human subject in the terms of virology, in the terms of ecology, in the terms of what I call multispecies ethnography, might really help us get past some of the foundational hubris that's driving the modern project forward and really force us to reflect on how our contemporary lives are entangled with these industrial systems that are inducing all kinds of harm on livestock. We might think that we're separated from the meat factories that produce chicken and beef and all these things that we eat. But we're also entangled with these systems, not just by putting food in our mouth, but by living in a shared world where there's ongoing traffic of viruses, either benign, symbiotic or potentially pathogenic.
Kamea Chayne: Just learning about the virosphere makes me question a lot of things. It really invites me to see the world through a lens of movement and context and un-defining things, and of course, the synergies borne out of different intra-actions, and more.
I know that some people take issue with the label of the human world vs. the more-than-human world in how it again suggests this dualism and separation. But I guess I would be curious to think about how understanding our paraselves and what that means through the lens of our virome might literally situate us as being more-than-human, which would completely dismantle the binaries of us versus our environment; or the internal and the external; or the human and the more-than-human.
What would you add to this and how could this perspective shift influence how we go about defining what it means to be well?
Eben Kirksey: So the philosopher William James talked about the self as the sum total of beings and things for whom one cares for. So, back in his day, it might have included your home or your books or your kitchen—now we have all kinds of things that make us who we are, from the mobile phones that we carry around in our pocket that enable us to embed ourselves within these vast informatics networks and clouds of information, but also in these commodity chains that produce the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear. With these ongoing intra-actions, and this is, again, a term from Karen Barad, to refer to the ways that transformative encounters engender modes of being.
You can never have entities in isolation, but they are always in becoming, they're always in these flows of matter and exchange, and agency only emerges in those encounters, not in isolation.
Thinking about these viral flows... The root word virus means slimy liquid. It came about when they really couldn't figure out what was making these strange patterns on a tobacco plant. This was before electron microscopes and other technologies of perception enabled people to visualize the virus, but you could see impacts of this slimy liquid that they thought was making patterns appear on tobacco plants—what later became called the tobacco mosaic virus. So they knew that there was some kind of infectious agent or transformative agent that was small enough to pass through a filter that would normally entrap bacteria. But it wasn't chemical. They couldn't quite figure out what it was.
I think playing with that figure of liquid is important today. Viruses inhabit things like spit and are animating these clouds of particles that are all around us. But if we can also conceptualize these fluid ontologies that our bodies are entangled with, where bodies might seem stable in a particular time-space that's easy for us to apprehend, but within these greater flows of particles and genetic information, what appears to be stable in the now, is just an ephemeral form that is destined for future change.
Kamea Chayne: What got me especially excited reading about the virosphere through your writing is of course when you connect it to our broader issues. As you share: "Symbiotic relationships are often unwanted or unescapable. On the scale of communities, populations, and nations, new symbiotic arrangements can reinforce injustice."
And, skipping forward a few lines, you conclude: "When many institutions and politicians operate like virulent parasites with “the single-minded pursuit of maximum short-term gain” (to repurpose a quote from Merry Youle), learning how to think like symbiotic viruses might offer ways out of contemporary planetary predicaments. It is possible to infect and disrupt dominant systems and open up new generative fields of possibility."
I think people tend to see symbiosis as a positive because maybe it embodies that reciprocity that a lot of us strive to practice and learn from. So I would love it if you could first elaborate on what you mean by symbiotic arrangements reinforcing injustice. And ultimately, what can we learn from intra-actions in the virosphere, to think through how we can infect and disrupt the exploitative and destructive systems our bodies have become a part of but maybe yearn to help compost and shapeshift?
Eben Kirksey: I'll get into symbiosis with help from Robin Wall Kimmerer. I'm listening to her book Braiding Sweetgrass right now, and she really unraveled one of my favorite and unusual rock-inhabiting organisms, a lichen. It's called rock tripe, that I've tried to eat on a couple of occasions, although she's got a much better recipe in Braiding Sweetgrass than I was ever able to cook up myself. So in Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer describes how in isolation the two partners to this symbiotic arrangement, they don't generally want to hook up. If you are giving them, the ideal conditions of life, they're going to avoid each other, they're going to flourish independently, if they find themselves in an environment that is enabling that flourishing.
But if you starve the fungus, if you starve the algae, so the basics of lichen symbiosis is that you have a fungus and then you have an algae, the algae does photosynthesis, the fungus scours rocks and other things, for all kinds of minerals and nutrients. And, if you starve them of some of the key things they need, then they find each other and become enlocked in this entangled embrace. And, you could study the exchanges and conclude that the fungus is really being exploitative in this situation, all the photosynthesis is done by the algal partner and the fungus is taking the lion's share of the sugar. You could compare it to a bad marriage, as Kimmerer does. And we know of many relations in our social worlds where one partner seems to be taking more than the fair share of resources.
I also like to think of symbiosis in the more abstract terms of the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. She talks about modes of reciprocal capture, and she doesn't really differentiate with that idea between the bird and the butterfly, the prey and the predator, that are kind of entangled. The butterfly really doesn't want to be in any relation to the bird, but the bird has figured out what the butterfly looks like and has developed an ever-more sophisticated brain and perceptive system to detect the prey against the backdrop of the landscape.
Or you could think about, one of the foundational examples that Lynn Margulis uses, the organelles, the mitochondria in our cells or the chloroplasts and plant cells. She talks about symbiogenesis as a process of becoming together where there was probably an event back in the day where one microbe ate another, and you have these new kinds of cells emerge with new, interesting abilities. So these relations are often awkward, they're often unwanted. They're often stifling, to kind of anthropomorphize a little bit when we're talking about cellular dynamics. And we can think about viruses in the same light.
I was recently talking with an expert on pegivirus. Pegivirus is getting around right now in the blood supply, it sounds like around 30% of the blood that people are picking up in hospitals have pegivirus, but it actually seems to have some benefits to human hosts. If you're infected with pegivirus and HIV and you don't have access to standard drugs, the pegivirus is going to actually prevent you from dying. It sounds like you have a three times greater likelihood of dying from HIV if you don't have a pegivirus infection. And they're still trying to understand the mechanisms behind this, but it might have something to do with inflammatory responses. But just because a virus is good in one context doesn't mean it's going to give you broad health benefits.
I also really like Heather Paxson's work, who's studied this in the context of bacteria, and she insists that you can't really tell a good bacteria from a bad bacteria, in any kind of categorical way.
You can't identify the species and be like, oh, that's the bad guy, that's the good guy. It really depends on the situation. It depends on what other microbes are in the mix. It depends on your own state of health.
So a raw milk cheese that might be very tasty, and even some enthusiasts talk about it giving health benefits to people who eat it by enhancing the liveliness of your microbiome; if you happen to be pregnant, or if you happen to have a compromised immune system, that same cheese could make you really sick.
As much as some people like to celebrate this idea of symbiosis, which literally means living together, it often gets conflated with mutualism—this idea that two forms of life are actively getting along.
We've got to think about exploitation, and we've got to think about the ways that industrial systems, societal systems, intergenerational processes like colonialism and racism are also impacting vulnerabilities. Some people might be thriving with exposures to all kinds of viruses that might be making others sick. We have to think about chemical exposures, industrial chemicals that might be compromising bodies, that might be wounding them alongside viral exposures.
I very much don't want to just uncritically celebrate the traffic of viruses in and out of our bodies, but to think about who has access to good healthcare, who might be in a position to benefit from some cutting-edge gene therapy delivered from a virus, but who might be really at risk from those kinds of experiments that have a chance of going off the rails and running amok.
Kamea Chayne: It's really important to note symbiosis as simply living together, and we are aware that the vast majority of people today are dependent on partaking in or even reinforcing the extractive systems that we live as a part of in order to survive, so it's definitely important to note those exploitative relations that can be symbiotic as well.
Earlier we touched on the word paraselves, which you say "are like the figural parasites described by Michel Serres—they are jokers, wild cards, taking on different values depending on their positions.”
In a portion of Emergent Ecologies, you talk about chytrids—which are defined as any simple, algae-like fungi that does not typically form mycelium. And you name how while our bubbles of comforts and happiness are dependent on these chytrid paraselves, no theory of work has really ever taken notice of chytrid labor. I would love this opportunity to bring to the forefront this invisibilized and less charismatic part of the daily functioning of our world, and ask you about the role of chytrids as jokers and paraselves, as well as how our lives depend on chytrids for constant renewal.
Eben Kirksey: I really love your question about chytrids. These organisms are all around us as, as a multitude of other unloved entities and beings are, in our worlds and sustaining our lives, that really go unnoticed unless something goes wrong. So, I got to know chytrids because I was studying this wave of mass extinction that was sweeping through the worlds of amphibians. Basically, the conventional conservation strategies weren't working.
In the highlands of Costa Rica, there had been this sustained campaign to save the rainforest and buy up land, but in the 1980s, when the eco-tourists showed up, it seems like one of them brought a chytrid spore on their foot.
Chytrids are really cute when you look at them under the microscope. I'm describing one kind of chytrid called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which is basically the kind of chytrid that gets inside of the skin of frogs and eats it while they're alive. Frogs depend on their skin for breathing. And this disease went global. It went global not only because of our mundane practices of global travel, things like tourism, business travel, exchange students, really the same kind of travel that was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic, but in the case of this chytrid, it seems like the biotech industry might have some responsibility for this mass pandemic. You see the international traffic of amphibians either as laboratory animals or in the pet trade, or also in the food industry as the probable source for this new kind of chytrid that started to become pathogenic and led to this mass extinction event.
Even as we're accounting for mass extinction in this time that many called the Anthropocene, in many ways the stories are often too anthropocentric, focusing on human agency, human action, but this is an eruption of an unseen, unloved and unnoticed force in our world.
So panning out, your broader question was about the unseen work that these chytrids are doing, that they're jokers, that they're part of ourselves, they're beside ourselves, they're becoming with disillusion and glee...
Chytrids like to eat things that other things can't eat. So one example is keratin from your fingernails, also present in your hair. Chytrids will get in there.
They live in watery environments. They look like little sperm when they're babies, they swim around and then they insist on the tasty thing like a fingernail, and they're doing the molecular work to open up that detritus and make it available to other things, other kinds of fungi, bacteria, Actinomyces. Without these chytrids in the world, we would have an accumulation of all kinds of undigestible shit, and I'm using that word literally. There's one kind of chytrid called Fimicolochytrium jonesii, which I'm told in Latin, means Dr. Jones' horse shit chytrid, so it's only found in horse poop and it's part of that first wave of ecological succession that opens up this waste to be bioavailable to other forms of life.
In thinking about these worlds, I often think with Deborah Bird Rose, who thinks about death and waste as this kind of intergenerational gift. I think industrial ecologies right now are producing what Deborah Bird Rose calls double death, on a planetary scale, the forms of death that don't get channeled back into life, that they're sort of a greedy death, a death that doesn't get turned into food for others. Like, we embalm ourselves, we try to put ourselves in these caskets and coffins and concrete to protect ourselves from the liveliness of the afterlife. And chytrids illustrate how lively the afterlife might be. If you look at them under a microscope, you see all these bubbles nested within other bubbles.
So basically, the baby chytrid swims to the substrate. It insists, it grows bigger, it puts up these little root-like structures called rhizoids, and then you can see all these little balls wiggling inside of the chytrid as it grows. And if you happen to catch one under a microscope, you'll see this little hole open up inside of it and all of a sudden a bunch of little babies come whizzing out. They're called zoospore, and you might get a hundred bursting out in a single moment. You can see matter becoming lively.
For me, giving a presence to these beings that make our life possible, not in any kind of direct, giving us sugar from photosynthesis kind of symbiotic way, but a mode of living with that's more about distributed assemblages and taking the things that fall off our bodies that we don't even think about very much. We clip our fingernails and might flush it down the toilet or discard it in the trash or maybe it ends up in the dirt. But if our detritus finds its way into these aqueous wet landscapes, it's going to be the chytrids that are giving these parts of our bodies an afterlife.
Kamea Chayne: I think what this gets me to think about also is how the idea of renewal in a way is also a lens. So even though the shedding of my hair or my nails might be the end of them as a more direct part of me, the chytrids might see us actually as agents of renewal for them because they depend on our and other beings' waste in order to feed themselves. So maybe in their eyes, like we are the agents of renewal, and for us, they are the agents of renewal, because they turn our waste into something else that cycles back into this whole web of life. It's interesting to think about how these different perspectives of different beings might lead us to label certain acts in different ways.
We've been largely exploring how the virosphere and the microscopic world ought to really humble our human egos and sense of mastery of knowledge about the world. And I'm curious to also explore some ant ecology with you—specifically, in Emergent Ecologies, you name these Ectatomma ants as being ontological amphibians. What does that mean and what can we learn from it? And also, if it feels relevant, why do you suggest a departure from looking at ant colonies or ecosystems as superorganisms, instead calling for us to view them as ensembles of individuals?
Eben Kirksey: For starters, grappling with this notion of the ontological amphibian is really playing with a phrase from Peter Sloterdijk, so Sloterdijk is this German philosopher, he's alive today, and he imagines himself as the second coming of Martin Heidegger and Heidegger's the 20th-century philosopher, he's most famous, or infamous, for really relentlessly insisting that the human is special. Heidegger said, the stone is worldless; the animal is poor in world; and the human is world-forming. So Sloterdijk modified that, to suggest that humans are the only animals able to move amongst ontologies and move amongst worlds and create and inform new worlds.
And in some ways I've been trolling Sloterdijk, with my work on chytrids and ants, I try to explain how chytrids are very amphibious and often inhabiting these multiple worlds, multiple ontologies, becoming otherwise, depending on who or what is in the world with them. So if you take a chytrid in isolation, it's going to look like one thing, but if it's surrounded by all kinds of other beings, its structure and formation and mode of life looks and appears and acts totally differently. So in many ways these chytrids are world-forming and becoming with others, but they're also world-destroying, right?
So I describe how chytrids created this global pandemic, this mass extinction event for amphibians, a humble virus, a virus that hadn't been well characterized before, SARS-CoV-2, suddenly disrupted the modern world system, it brought capitalism to a halt, it globally reduced carbon emissions, something that we couldn't accomplish politically. But the force of this viral agency accomplished something that humans couldn't bring themselves to do. Ants, I also describe, in particular Ectatomma ruidum, as these ontological amphibians that are able to get inside of the worlds of others and create worlds, some of the worlds involve caterpillars that they actually can sing to. There's kind of a call and response, sometimes, between these ants and caterpillars. I also tell stories of plants that try to enfold Ectatomma into their worlds by bribing them with sugary treats.
But really, your core question is getting at this metaphor, the superorganism, that's both applied to ant colonies and to ecosystems.
I think the history of ant research has in many ways focused on the wrong thing, at least for like 20, 30 years.
A lot of emphasis has been focused on the ant workers that are out foraging, and the ways that they all kind of cohere into some kind of cooperative unit. But if you look at the babies, if you look at the ant larva, they are these little white grubs, and they're not very cute from a anthropomorphic viewpoint, but they're kind of the key entities that hold a group of ants together.
I've got one student who just finished a PhD on Eciton burchellii. Conventionally, they're called army ants, but [they have] done some really great work to decolonize the ant metaphors and push back against these conventions of naming. So I'm thinking about a nest of ants that hangs together, I think about the babies as doing the key work of what actor-network theorists call interessement, they're basically what holds these groups together.
So if you see an ant carrying solid food around, it doesn't really have the mouth parts or the ability to eat that food. They're bringing that food back to the babies that do have the mouth parts that eat it, and then they basically secrete these nutritious liquids and proteins that the adults will lick off of them, so adult ants generally can only eat liquid food.
So in following these individuals and thinking about how they hang together as an assemblage or an ensemble, it's really looking at the larva and how they kind of choreograph these dances in space and time. I think that's what makes these entities hang together.
Kamea Chayne: From my read of your work, I get the sense, and correct me if I'm mistaken, that you are critical about the "ready-made script of invasives" as the naturalization of xenophobia. You talk about how the reductive environmentalist messages to kill the aliens and save the native species takes on this purist and reductive approach, akin to the agrochemical industries trying to kill the pests and enrich the crops, perhaps just repeating the same problematic dynamics and patterns in different forms.
I have been really challenged to think through the whole idea of invasive species and I'm not sure where I land yet, but I resonate with what you share when you talk about, and these are in my paraphrasing words, the ever-changing and ever-emergent ecosystems everywhere that do not sit still, and are constantly being co-produced by every being in the community—from the micro to the macro to the synergies they intra-act to create together.
Because reckoning with these changing bodies of ecosystems also pushes us to question the idea of conservation or saving near-extinct forms of species or engaging in captive breeding as a way to “save the planet”—given that the transformed conditions and extended realities that led to their decline and endangerment are still present, or maybe have yet just transformed even further away from what those forms of species had evolved and grown most adapted to.
So I guess my question, without necessarily any right answers, is, do we embrace the unpredictable and ever-changing new orders that the entangled webs of life everywhere are co-creating? And otherwise, if we understand anthropogenic change as an inevitable just given our own entanglement with all of life, how do we determine what constitutes the healthiest balance of acting as keystone species to manage and sometimes manipulate for our greater wellbeing, versus maintaining a humility to let go and let ourselves be caught up in the webs of changes stringing us along?
Eben Kirksey: I think it's important to question the value system of consumer capitalism, that teaches us from a very young age to value everything new, everything novel. So, the latest movie or the latest song, the new hit single—this is what we're trained from a very early age to desire.
And there's a whole movement in ecology that's interested in novel ecosystems, and to think about the kinds of ecological assemblages that have emerged in degraded and blasted landscapes, places like former bombing ranges. I think at the same time, it's important to appreciate these emergent dynamics, it's important to also appreciate emergent diseases like the chytrid fungus or like the pathogenic coronavirus that just disrupted the modern world system, alongside other kinds of more hopeful emergencies. The first plant to sprout after a volcanic eruption—this is an emergence of sorts.
The question becomes, who does one love in an era of extinction, in an era of dynamism and ecological change?
And I think it's often the charismatic animals, the colorful ones, the ones that are most like us. It's less easy to even notice, much less love insects or microbes, chytrids, ants. So in part, my work has been aesthetic—just sort of disrupting dominant perceptions of beauty and care and valuation, to think about the kinds of species that might be cared for even amidst these big destructive forces that we're all entangled in.
I'm talking to you today mediated by technology that was created in factories likely in Shenzhen, China—in conditions of work that are not good. The electricity that's sustaining this conversation undoubtedly has some coal in there. We're entangled in these systems that we hate, but nonetheless, they sustain our contemporary forms of life, and our contemporary forms of life are having rammifying effects on these worlds around us. So I think it's important to think past these metaphors of holism.
The superorganism metaphor is one that emerged out of early 20th-century ecology. There was a famous debate between Clements and Gleason that went on for years. And one of them was insisting ecosystems are superorganisms. They have functional parts. This is what stays stable over time. And the other was insisting, if you look at long periods of the geological record, you see groups of animals and plants come and go in time and space, they're not always the same sort of metasystem—it's a contingent assemblage that comes and goes.
Even Tansley, the guy who coined the term ecosystem, was really puzzled by where to draw boundaries and tended to side more on the part of the debate that was about these very fluid boundaries, coming and going of non-essential parts.
Human affection and care is important to reckon with, and it's important to grapple with the kinds of life that animates people to save the rainforest, for example, or, intervene in a particular situation and protect trees or rivers or these kind of spaces. But I think all of these conservation politics need to be viewed again, against this backdrop of histories of settler colonialism, of racism.
I was studying some monkeys that were out of place in Florida at the same time as a white vigilante shot dead a young Black boy named Trayvon Martin. And the parallels in discourse were so apparent. This was on the Silver River in Florida, the place where the original Tarzan movies were filmed, and those movies were filmed in a section of the river that was historically the colored part of the river, a legacy of segregation, a legacy of intense racism and discrimination. And so I dwelled with African-American communities that have been excluded from these spaces, at the same time that I tried to understand the emergent ecological dynamics with these monkeys that many people deemed as being out of place.
Who belongs in a society, who belongs in an ecological world, is always a political question.
It's a question of identity. It's a question of inclusivity, and ultimately of care. But, sometimes that care can look like violence, and often in situations of conservation, people are often losing sight of who or what is being cared for, so often violence is enacted on particular kinds of plants or animals. Sometimes poison is brought into the picture with chemicals like glyphosate that are killing whole communities and ecological processes. I think learning how to do that work of promoting flourishing in a changing world is always situational, is always complicated.
But we also have to acknowledge that white settler colonial imaginaries are often very blind to entangled ways of relating to place that aren't about a pristine nature. Many of these biocultural worlds that are flourishing in the shadows of white settler colonialism are all about intimacies and uses of forested ecosystems and rivers. So thinking about ways of relating to place that aren't just about coming up with these picturesque backdrops, but thinking about places where people and plants and animals might flourish together—that's what a lot of my work has tried to explore.
Kamea Chayne: As a closing, you ask: "What sorts of novel ecological assemblages might we build together? Can we construct new ecosystems while embracing social justice concerns, grappling with the subjective experiences of other organisms, and upholding conservation values all at the same time? Can we craft tactful proposals to those whom we love, offering links to our social worlds and industrial supply chains while keeping windows open that give them opportunities to escape?"
Given a lot of what may seem like contradictions which maybe are just more complexities calling on us to think in an all of the above type of manner, I would love to hear how you've thought through this question raised by Matthew Chrulew, which is, how do we love in a time of extinction?
Eben Kirksey: I really love Crenshaw's ideas about intersectionality in human worlds, as well as Stuart Hall's articulation theory, his ideas about these nonessential links that we can establish between political projects or ideologies. In approaching these multi-species worlds and thinking about, flourishing and justice for whom? I really think in part it's an aesthetic project. How can we reconfigure ideas of beauty to be more encompassing, to think about the forms of life that have been either actively vilified and targeted for destruction, or the ones that just simply aren't noticed, and elevate them to, not necessarily as having the same kind of rights as people.
We've seen how human rights discourse fails in the realms of people. I spent my first book working with Indigenous people from West Papua who basically aren't deemed fully human before the law. You kill people in West Papua, if you're an Indonesian soldier, you do it with utter impunity.
So rather than trying to mobilize these rights frameworks, how do we think about making these tactful proposals—whether it's in a material way, like creating a zone or a space for flourishing, whether it's in a backyard, a public park, whether it's part of a sanctioned conservation initiative, or what the artist Deanna Pindell calls these fugitive projects?
How might we find fugitive justice for creatures and peoples who are on the run, who aren't part of kind of the dominant logics of the state protection and care?
In thinking about these future-oriented flourishings, it's about being inclusive and celebrating both the possibilities of small justice for the ones that we love. It's really an arbitrary and high-stakes decision: who am I going to love? Who am I going to care for in this world? And often the answer that you derive for that question has high stakes for how you're going to behave towards others in the world. So some are going to be protected.
And how do we do these counter-hegemonic justice projects that are inclusive, that are intersectional, that are articulating diverse communities of people and other creatures together, in the here, in the now, while also holding on to dreams about possible tomorrows that are going to radically reconfigure the structures of power? That's what I'm hoping for and trying to illustrate with some of this theoretical work.
~ musical intermission ~
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Eben Kirksey: I just picked up an older book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, called Gathering Moss. And this came to me through the artist Jackie Brookner, who worked with moss in her studio in Manhattan, and I just love the way that Kimmerer shows us how moss can be used to care for these places that have been utterly devastated. She focuses on one in particular, Bryum argenteum, that's found on roof tiles in Quito, Ecuador, and also on the asphalt tarmac of John F Kennedy Airport, and she shows how moss can not only find a foothold in some of these spaces that have been utterly devastated by mining, but also increase the survivorship and germination rate of trees, so moss becomes kind of a companion in this rewilding or reworlding of landscapes that have been utterly devastated by extractive industries.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Eben Kirksey: I am learning how to garden now. So I've inherited a garden that was created by someone else. And I think the garden is kind of a metaphor for these practices of embodied care and love. This is my capacity to care, in this here and now, this particular semi-urban landscape. Like, there's a particular this-ness of the garden. The garden has a multitude of plants, but also frogs and birds, so that daily practice of interacting and caring for others in the real world gives me a chance to reflect and think about broader possibilities for the world.
Kamea Chayne: What is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Eben Kirksey: Jackie Brookner. I was with her the day that she got the phone call telling her that she had lung cancer, and this is someone who has been doing really interesting art practices, in addition to working with moss. One of my favorite projects that she did was she went to the American South with people, African-American communities, where people had been picking cotton, and she took the soil that they had been working in, many of them barefoot and just simply modeled their feet and did this very humble, gestural project, trying to get us to think about where our clothes come from and all the social relations, the histories of slavery, the histories of dispossession that underpin modern life, and so to think about the debts that we owe each other in human worlds, but also in these multispecies worlds.
I really think that Jackie Brookner had a lot of things figured out, and I'm also really inspired by her final artwork after she passed away. She was buried in a fungal shroud, in basically a hole in upstate New York that her friends dug in the Earth, and it was a gesture that was kind of at the edges of the law, but showing us how in dying, we might give a gift to future life.
Kamea Chayne: Eben, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Super fascinating and thought-provoking conversation. I'm really looking forward to relistening to this. But for now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Eben Kirksey: Go out there, make some loving gestures to those in the world that you can perceive immediately around you, but also do that speculative work to think beyond your immediate scope of influence and imagine the possible coalitions and the collective energy that it might take to transform the world, as it is, to a future that we might collectively desire.
// This conversation was recorded at the start of 2023. This episode’s supporting researcher and transcript editor is Tammy Gan; the audio editor is Scott Donnell; and the host and producer is Kamea Chayne. //
