Bruce Clarke: Gaian Futurities: Beyond the Phoenix Complex to the Domains of the Infra-Human
Channel:  Hanart Forum
Date: 23/04/2024

What are Gaia’s credentials as an object of past and future cybernetic interest? Lovelock and Margulis originally conceived Gaia as a planetary system observing first-order cybernetic principles of homeostasis, negative feedback, and self-regulation. The second-order cybernetics concurrently codified by von Foerster and made concrete in Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis pressed the analysis of recursive processes beyond mechanical and computational control processes toward the formal autonomy underlying natural systems’ self-maintaining processes. At the end of the 1980s, Margulis and Lovelock restated the Gaia concept in this second-order or autopoietic manner, in terms of its self-reference: “Cybernetic systems are ‘steered’; biological cybernetic systems are steered from the inside …. The Gaia hypothesis postulates a planet with the biota actively engaged in environmental regulation and control on its own behalf.”

Alongside Gaia’s more recent mainstreaming in the scientific academy as Earth system science, other precincts of academe have seen a continuing interest in the Gaia debate, pushing back on occasion against Gaia’s cybernetic pedigree, as epitomized in Latour’s later thought. A host of other prominent thinkers in the critical and environmental social sciences and humanities, including Stengers, Chakrabarty, Ghosh, and Haraway, have taken on Gaia in a similarly positive key as a theme fit to challenge the legacies of modernity. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro put it well: “the name of Gaia is an anti-modernist provocation.” The implication here is that the unfolding of Gaian cybernetics in particular has ultimately been subversive of the Modern scientific program that set it forth. Responding to Latour’s evocation of the Terrans—the resistant multitudes who must outlive and so replace the modernist Humans who have wrought the worse degradations upon the Anthropocene biosphere, Danowski and Viveiros de Castro affirm that “What we still need to work out is who is the demos of Gaia, the people that this entity gathers and convokes, and who their enemy is.” In The Ends of the World, this “Gaia War” reflects our precarious present state.

When the Gaia War is over, what sociocybernetic forms will the future Terrans take? Viveiros de Castro himself evokes a slow society “rebecoming-indigenous” modelled on “Amerindian collectives” as a “‘figuration of the future’, not a remnant of the past. Masters of techno-primitivist bricolage and politico-metaphysical metamorphosis, they are one of the possible chances, in fact, of a subsistence of the future.” Alternatively, in their Air Age Blueprint, writing with OpenAI’s GPT-3, K Allado-McDowell turn Viveiros de Castro’s anthropological insights otherwise, in the explicitly cybernetic direction of interspecies communication. Mediated by AI intercessors, this “cybernetic animism” brings “entities into communication, which reveals them to be subjects like us, in other words: secretly human. This secret humanity is the foundation of the Amerindian cosmology,” what Viveiros de Castro has labeled perspectivism. Allado-McDowell’s cybernetic animism levels the floor under and so binds biotic and metabiotic objects by lensing them through a perspectivist construction of a Terran form of the posthuman, in which Gaia’s natural technicity becomes the ground of a newly planetary indigeneity.

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He explores critical ecologies of narrative and systems theory in relation to posthumanism and Gaia theory. In 2019 he was the Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. He was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Literature and the Natural Sciences, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2015,  and a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2010-11. His latest books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, co-edited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). Other books include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). Clarke co-edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press, and has edited or co-edited seven essay collections, most recently Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and with Manuela Rossini, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (Cambridge 2017).  More information is available at brunoclarke.net.