Full Moon Sitting-out at the Cliffs of Fur1
The weather this evening calls for contemplation of the darker sides of
what is happening on this planet,
but also of its softness.
Softness, softness, softness, softness, softness.
Dark clouds to one side, and such a clear evening sky to the other side.
What does it mean?
Two fossil hunters just passed by with their axes, the axes with which
they destroy the diatom cliffs, destroy them to seek fossils, fossils that
should not be disturbed in their fossilized graves.
But these fossil hunters, they chop, chop, chop, chop, chop the diatomite rocks.
This afternoon we went to see the effects of extractivism at the other side of the island. I thought that the excavation of diatomaceous rock had been abandoned earlier.
But there are still two factories producing insulation bricks and cat litter from the mo-clay.
Destroying the earth, destroying the cliffs,
making big, big, big holes in the cliffs,
making big craters in the cliffs.
So sad. So sad.
My body aches at the sight of the axes, and I feel even more troubled,
when I begin to think about my own complicity.
I am also curiously visiting the island’s natural museum which puts the fossils on display.
How do we get to a planetary ethics? How do we get to an ontology of softness?2
To an ontology of vibrant death, so that every critter’s death is vibrant?3
So that every critter’s death is vibrant in the sense that the critter returns and can return cyclically.
Return is made possible through vibrant death. But extractivist death makes return impossible.
This is necropolitics. The necropolitics of extractivism.
Happening everywhere. Happening also on this island.
It is sad. It is very sad.
Now the sky is getting darker and darker. Darker and darker.
Yesterday, there was a very beautiful sunset, but today is the peaking of the June fullmoon, the Strawberry Moon or Honey Moon as it is called in old folklore.
So therefore, this is the chosen day, the chosen evening.
What does the planet, the sky, the earth, the diatomaceous cliffs, the waves, the seagulls, the living diatoms abounding in the waters, want to tell?
Saying: “Just get off you bloody destructive creatures. Get off my fleshy beautiful earthbody. If you plan to continue this way, then get off, get off, get off. If you want to stay, then attune to a planetary ethics and an ontology of softness. Otherwise, Get off!!”
© Nina Lykke June 24, 2021
∵
Sitting under the cliffs of the island of Fur, Limfjorden, Denmark
©Nina Lykke 2021
The poetic text which introduces this article came to me during a sitting-out ritual,4 organized by the artist group Independent Air. The ritual was carried out by an international group of artists, activists and scholars. During full moon evenings in May and June 2021, all group participants went alone to a preselected spot in their country of residence to sit down to contemplate their relations to the more than human world. The score was defined open-endedly, but the idea was to be alone and immerse oneself in a place, chosen because it felt significant and apt for perhaps facilitating a communication with the more than human world. The place, I had chosen, was the beach at the foot of the diatomaceous cliffs on the Danish island of Fur, located in a big fjord, Limfjorden, in the Northern part of Denmark.
Diatomite seabed and cliffs at Fur
©Nina Lykke 2020
When I learnt about the score, I had no doubt in my mind: the cliffs and beaches of Fur should be the location for my sitting-out event. My lesbian life partner’s ashes are scattered in the waters outside of the cliffs, and mixed with the sand of the seabed there. Like the cliffs, the seabed is made up of sediments of fossilized micro-algae belonging to the group, diatoms, which include hundreds of thousands of different species (Mann 1999). The layers of diatomite (sediments of diatomaceous rock/earth) there are 55 mio years old. Back then a subtropical sea covered the area. Strong volcanic activity was also the order of the day in this place during these ancient times; many layers of volcanic ashes cut through the diatom sediments – geologists have counted approximately 180 ashes layers cross-cutting the diatomite (Schack Pedersen 2008). In the Ice Age 10.000 ago, the sediments were pushed up by the ice to form 60 meters high cliffs. The cliffs raise out of the flat land, surrounding the fjord. They manifest the enormous diatomaceous activity which happened in the transition from the Paleocene to the Eocene Epoch of the planet’s history.
I am very attracted to the place, and go there at least once a year. I have developed an intensely spiritual-materially, queer love relationship with cliffs, beaches, seabed and waters. When I started to visit the place after we scattered my partner’s ashes there, I did not know that the sedimentary rock, earth and sand of cliffs and seabed were made by diatoms. I went there to be with my partner’s ashes which, together with my rainbow kin, I had decided to scatter in these waters due to their many oysters. However, I soon learned that the waters surrounding Fur do not only abound in oysters, but also in the single-cell aquatic algae of the group, diatoms. Living diatoms fill these waters, and cliffs and seabed are made of sediments of fossilized diatoms. When I understood how the diatoms have co-produced the cliffs, the seabed, and the sand with which my partner’s ashes now are mixed, I came to feel a deep resonance with them. My queer love for and symphysizing, i.e. bodily empathizing, companionship with my partner (Lykke 2022: 48–49) were extended to the assemblages with which her bodily remains have become entangled, and to the place, where her ashes are scattered. This is also the place, where my ashes are to be scattered as well, according to a pact I made with my beloved before she died.
In this chapter, I will use the text from the sitting-out event beneath the Fur cliffs as prism to a reflection on a planetary ethics of companionship. Rather than approaching the diatoms as material from which one can extract profits, I suggest that they should be seen as wise ancestors, who can teach us lessons about life, death and time. To frame the discussion, I shall, firstly, give a brief introduction to diatoms, to my intimate feelings of companionship with them, and to the posthuman autophenomenographic methodology which guides my contemplations in the chapter. Secondly, I discuss the revised understandings of life, death, and time which my efforts to corpo-affectively symphysize with alive and dead diatoms helped me to establish. I also account for the ways in which these revisions are sustained by a vitalist materialist and immanence philosophical approach. In an open-ended conclusion, I suggest an ethics of planetary companionship, based on the contemplations of the corpo-affective bonds, I try to establish with the diatoms.
1 What Is a Diatom?5
Diatoms are single-celled aquatic micro-algae, living in oceans, waterways and soil across the planet. Diatoms trace their ancestry back to the Jurassic Epoch, 150 million years ago. But living diatoms fill the waters of the planet today as well. They are characterized as eukaryotes, i.e. organisms with a cell nucleus, protected by a membrane. Diatoms are unique among micro-algae, insofar as their protective encasement is a silica shell, called frustrule, which appears as multicoloured as an effect of iridescence, when light is diffracted through minute markings of the diatom shell’s nanostructures (Tiffany and Nagy 2019: 33–34). The double shell which in a mussel-like fashion make up the cell wall of the diatom, comes in different shapes, e.g. circular or pennate shaped. The colour effects have inspired descriptions of diatoms as jewels of the sea and living opals. Diatoms belong to the group of phytoplankton, which, like terrestrial plants, contain chlorophyll; they transform light into chemical energy through photosynthesis, and produce oxygen. Living diatoms are reported to generate about 20–30 percent of the planet’s oxygen annually (Spaulding et al. 2022). They also contribute considerably to the storage in the oceans of carbondioxide from the atmosphere – at least 20% annually (Scarsini et al. 2019: 191).
In 2011, it was discovered that diatoms, previously considered plant-like due to their ability to photosynthesize, also have a urea cycle, enabling them to excrete nitrogen and metabolize in ways which, until then, were assumed to characterize only animals and animal-like creatures (Allen et al. 2011). Diatoms thus evade the standard biological taxonomies of animal kingdom versus plant kingdom. In evolutionary terms the in-betweenness of diatoms is assumed to have made them more robust and fit for overcoming problems such as nutrient starvation (Allen et al., 2011). Still, the way in which their metabolic system(s) make them resist well-established dichotomous schemes and cross boundaries between taxonomic categorizations was considered a remarkable and unexpected finding.
Diatoms also evade the dichotomy between asexual and sexual reproduction (Poulickova and Mann 2019). On the one hand, they reproduce asexually like many other micro-organisms. The “parent” diatom cell divides into two genetically identical “child” cells, each of which keep one of the two half shells of the parent diatom and grows a smaller half shell within the original one. This process implies that new generations of diatoms get smaller and smaller. However, on the other hand, this generational decrease is reversed through sexual reproduction. Diatoms shift between longer vegetative periods with asexual (mitotic) cell division, and short periods (hours, days) where sexual reproduction takes place. During the vegetative period individual diatoms may grow diploid (containing two complete sets of chromosomes), making it possible that meiosis (generation of sexually differentiated gametes, germcells) and sexual reproduction (fusion of these differentiated cells to zygotes) can be set in motion. The result of the zygotic fusion is a so-called auxospore, which has the potential to considerably increase the size of the next generation of diatoms. The auxospore sheds the small silica shells, inherited from its parents, and develops into a much larger diatom, which is covered by an organic membrane, and which eventually grows a bigger pair of shells.
Industrial excavation of diatomite at Fur
©Nina Lykke 2021
When diatoms die, they sink to the bottom. Layers of shells from dead diatoms are reported sometimes to reach as much 800 m., and fossilized diatoms, sedimented as diatomite, diatomaceous rock and earth, make up seabeds in many places on earth (Wikipedia 2022). The Fur Formation where my beloved’s ashes are scattered is one such place, but considered unique due to a special kind of diatomite that is only found in this area, and which is internationally known by the Danish name “moler” [mo-clay]) (UNESCO 2010). The mo-clay is extremely rich in animal and plant fossils from the Paleocene/Eocene Epochs (Bonde 2008), and has shaped up as extraordinary cliff formations due to a lot of glacier activity in the area during the Ice Age. Against this background, the place aspires to become a UNESCO World Heritage site (UNESCO 2010). Nonetheless, destruction of the cliffs through fossil hunting is legal, and even encouraged by local natural history museums, and industrial excavation of diatomaceous rock (used for insulation bricks and cat litter) is also taking place on the island (Schack Pedersen 2008: 21).
2 Practicing Companionship and Posthuman Phenomenology
A centerpiece of my sitting-out text is a critical and corpo-affective contemplation of the extraction happening on Fur – in the industry which excavates diatomaceous rock for commercial purposes, and practiced by fossil hunting tourists in search of trophies (well preserved animal and plant fossils), to be found in abundance in the diatomite cliffs. That the thoughts and feelings, which came to frame my sitting-out event, took this particular, sad direction was prompted by two fossil hunters, who coincidentally were the only other human beings present on the beach under the cliffs that evening. However, my contemplations were also moulded by my overall feeling of companionship with the pieces of diatomite which were chopped to small pieces by the axes of the fossil hunters. Within the framework of the intimate human-algae-relationship, which I try to establish with the diatomaceous environment at Fur, I felt the acts of the fossil hunters as if it was my body they chopped. I experienced them as amounting to a desacralizing of graves that should have been left in peace.
From earlier visits to the natural history museums at Fur and the neighbouring island, Mors – both nationally recognized institutions – I know that the practice of fossil hunting is officially encouraged. Visitors can borrow axes from the museums, and during summer, special guides do on-site-classes in fossil hunting for tourists, popular among families with children. I was thus painstakingly aware that the two fossil hunters whom I met on the beach that evening did not transgress any laws. On the contrary, their activities are considered legitimate and even commendable by the museums, as long as more significant findings are handed in to them. When done for the “common good”, fossil hunting in the diatomaceous cliffs is seen as giving us more knowledge about the fauna and flora of the transition period between the Paleocene and the Eocene Epochs of the planet’s history.
Being an avid museum goer, I cannot avoid somehow considering myself complicit with the fossil hunters. Indeed, I am also curious to know about these ancient times. So the troubling questions about an ethics of planetary companionship is addressed not only to the industrial extractivists, the museums, and the fossil hunters, but to myself as well. Is it at all possible to think and materialize a bio- and geoegalitarian ethics where all planetary beings, even diatoms and other critters that are considered to be evolutionary very “distant” from humans, are reontologized as companion species rather than seen as a priori instrumentalized objects of human curiosity and/or greed?
Feminist theorist Donna Haraway (2003, 2008, 2016) used the concept of companionship to account for her mutually transformative, embodied relations to her dogs, her becoming-with them, but also to address reciprocally enriching human-animal relations more generally. With the conceptualization, she wanted to critically disrupt the normative model, where humans and animals are considered to be ontologically divided in a hierarchizing way, which casts the human as exceptional and the animal other as a “lower” organism, just a mere stimulus-response machine. Haraway defines companionship as associated with response-ability, the ability to respond in a situated, sensitive, and ethically responsible way (2008: 88–89). I have taken inspiration from Haraway’s conceptualization, and want to try it out in relation to diatoms. Against this background, I note the broad and all-encompassing dimensions of Haraway’s use of the concept of companion species, her emphasis on the notion “companion species” as “less a category than a pointer to an ongoing ‘becoming with’” (2008: 16), i.e. to a shared process of mutual becoming across species and other borders. Companionship and becoming-with is for Haraway also related to minute critters such as, for example, the microbiome living inside our guts and bodies (2008: 4). Along somewhat similar lines, I shift the focus to diatoms. I ask if and how “we” (humans) can establish an ethical relation of companionship even to critters which, in an evolution biological sense, seem so very “distant” and “alien” to “us” as these oxygen-producing micro-algae which, like the critters in our guts, nonetheless play a decisive role for our wellbeing.
I came to ask the question of companionship with algae through my mourning practices, and my contemplations of them from the perspective of a posthuman phenomenology (Lykke 2022). With inspiration, among others, from discussions of intercorporeality and concorporation in recent body phenomenological theory (Shildrick 2002, 2005, 2009; Weiss 2009), I have theorized my relation to my beloved – now passed away – life partner within a framework of bodily intertwinement, a being one-flesh in a vitalist materialist, and absolutely non-Biblical sense (Lykke 2022: 47–53). Central in my theorizing is the verb symphysizing, which I developed in conversation with posthuman philosopher, Ralph Acampora’s noun symphysis (2006: 76). Acampora suggests symphysis as an embodied rethinking of the notion of sympathy. In line with his point of departure in the philosophy of Spinoza ([1677] 1996), Acampora stresses the concept’s reference to corpo-affectivity. Feeling bodily sympathy and showing embodied empathy imply that the subject, in a material, corpo-affective sense, is affected by and co-experiences the ways in which hir significant other/s are bodily affected. Acampora uses the example of horror movies to spell out what co-experiencing is supposed to mean. Looking at horror movies, your heart may start to beat faster and your stomach clench, when you watch the person on screen being threatened, i.e. audiences co-experience in an embodied sense.
Taking Acampora’s conceptual framework further, I have suggested a translation of the noun, symphysis, into its verb form, symphysizing (Lykke 2018, 2022). The purpose is to stress that the bonding between companions builds upon intercorporeal, affective processes, and not upon a static relationship, defined once and for all. Along these lines, I call forward the processuality of the verb symphysizing to account for the relation to my beloved, and my being intensely with and for her during her process of dying. I further use the term to describe the ways in which my desires to be with and for her in an embodied sense became extended to her bodily remains, and to the assemblages of which they eventually became part after her death and the scattering of her ashes in the diatomaceous waters of the Fur Formation. For me, symphysizing thus has also come to conceptualize the ways in which, I continuously try to learn to co-become with these diatomaceous assemblages, while, at the same time, taking care to attune to their difference and avoid anthropomorphization of their alienness. Symphysizing in this sense is what frames the ethics of companionship, which guide my relation to the diatoms.
In the following sections of the chapter, I shall tease out more elaborately what this approach implies. In so doing, I engage a posthuman autophenomenographic methodology in the analysis. Autophenomenography is autoethnography with a phenomenological perspective, i.e. analysis of autobiographical material, but with a focus on corpo-affectivity (Allen-Collinson 2010, 2011; Lykke 2022). When doing autophenomenographical analysis of human/ non-human relations, I shift away from a more conventional human-centered phenomenology to include the vast bodily levels of not only subjectivized and not necessarily consciously processed experience, which humans share with more than human worlds – such as being bodies of water (Neimanis 2017) or being mortal bodies embedded in life/death cycles (Lykke 2022).
3 Life and Death in the Worlds of Diatoms and Humans
It was through visits to the natural history museums at Fur and the neighbouring island Mors that I learnt that the cliffs and seabed where my beloved’s ashes are scattered, are made by diatoms, fossilized 55 mio years ago. When I immersed myself in cliff and seabed with this new knowledge in my mind, it struck me how thinking-symphysizing with diatoms has the potential to radically disrupt conventional human notions of life and death. Notably, this insight was not as such triggered by the knowledge of the geological and biological formation of cliffs and seabed, with which the museums provided me. The new horizons opened, when the conventional knowledge of geological and evolutionary history became entangled with my efforts to attune, symphysize and co-become with the diatomaceous cliffs and seabed. As part of the symphysizing process, I imaginatively as well as logically started to dissolve the sharp ontological dividing line which modern philosophy has set up between the Human, on the one hand, and the Non-Human (animals, plants, inorganic matter etc.) on the other hand – a dividing line which has been criticized by many scholars from Derrida (2008) to Haraway (2016). It became clear to me that as long as we stick to conventional ontologizations of the human world as exceptional and decisively different from the non-human one, it appears as “natural” to apply different logics to the two realms. In contrast, new horizons opened, when I – in a symphysizing mood and move – left the ontological, human/non-human divide behind, and began instead to rethink life and death in the human world with the world of diatoms as lens, and vice versa (Lykke 2022).
The human exceptionalizing, modern Western onto-epistemologies, secular- scientific as well as Christian ones, make us who inhabit them consider life and death as opposites. Death is the point of no return, where our individual life irreversably ends, and where our human agency and powers to act upon the world come to a decisive halt. If we embrace secular-scientific and atheist beliefs, death appears to launch us into nothingness; this is elaborately illustrated by the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1958). For those who, conversely, adhere to Christian narratives, death may free our immortal soul from the body, making it ready to join God in heaven. But no matter which of these options you subscribe to, life and death stand as opposites. They are located on a linear timeline where life predates death, understood as a point in time, which marks the end of the possibility of subjective intervention in the material world.
This is conventional logics in the human world of modernity. However, when my desires for a symphysizing companionship with the world of diatoms prompted me to give up the exceptionalizing dividing line between humans and non-humans, and compare notes with the diatomaceous cliffs and seabed at Fur, a different understanding of life and death suggested itself to me. Cliffs and seabed came now to stand as visual and materially manifest monuments over the accumulated effects of the posthumous agency of generations of dead diatoms, diatom corpses. According to geologists who analysed the Fur Formation, the diatomaceous sediments shaped up over a period of around 3 mio years, when the Paleocene Epoch transitioned to the Eocene one (Sharma 1969: 221; Krarup Petersen 1981: 501). So what suddenly met my desiring eyes, hands and body, when I looked upon as well as touched the cliffs, the waters and the seabed with these knowledges in mind, seemed to be an effect of dizzying 3 mio years of phenomenally vibrant building activity, layer upon layer, generation upon generation.
When, in a desiring symphysizing mood, I, further, let this understanding spill over to my understanding of human life/death, while still sticking to the principle of undoing human exceptionalism and disallowing the use of different logics for the two realms, firm ontological grounds started to erode under my feet. In the human world, we are used to see the material monuments of earlier generations’ agency as a product of the activity of back then living subjects. The actions of our dead ancestors – the books they wrote, the buildings they built, the constitutions they signed etc. – are of course understood as having material, posthumous effects on the lives of later generations. But in the human world, such posthumous activity is considered as long-term effect of the performative agency of formerly living subjects. Beliefs in the phenomenal agency of the dead are in modernity conventionally relegated to the realms of superstition, madness or fiction. However, when I undid the hierarchical and exceptionalizing divide between humans and non-humans, and started to compare notes across the divide between the two realms, the diatomaceous cliffs and seabed challenged the idea of activity as something which exclusively characterizes the living. Cliffs and seabed are, indeed, results of the phenomenal agency of dead bodies, of vibrantly acting diatom corpses. How onto-epistemologically dizzy, but very happy this insight made me! Because when I brought it to bear on the idea of human life and death as separated and dichotomously opposed to each other with the in/capability to intervene in the world as an important marker of distinction, this opposition crumbled. Taking lessons from my diatom companions, I could now much more confidently, follow my deep desires to leave behind conventional life/death ontologies and their disrespect for the agential vibrancies of all matter, dead or alive.
A bottom line in these contemplations is that the new insights, which my symphysizing and attuning engagement with the diatomaceous cliffs and seabed of the Fur Formation brought about for me, sustains and resonates with a monist, vitalist materialist and immanence philosophical approach to life and death. I elaborate this approach in detail in my book Vibrant Death (Lykke 2022). However, briefly recapitulated, I work from political philosopher Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter (2010), which is inspired by Spinoza’s monist notion of conatus, the endeavours of all matter to persevere ([1677] 1996). I argue that if there is only one matter, and all matter is conative, this must apply not only to living bodies, but also to dead ones. To underpin my argument, I also call upon feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s notion of zoe (2006), the immanent inhuman, dynamic and generative forces of which the cosmos, and, therefore, all dead and living bodies are made. In my book, I discuss the agential and conative zoe-matter in relation to the human corpse. The point, I want to make in this chapter, though, is that these philosophical reflections are forcefully sustained, when I read the meanings of life/death in the human and the diatom world through one another, while engaging in an un-exceptionalizing symphysizing.
In the next section, I shall take the reading of the two worlds (the worlds of humans and diatoms, respectively) through one another a step further – to the issue of temporalities. Here, too, I shall account for encounters with barriers as well as the paths to philosophical resonance that I found.
4 From Deep Time Vertigo to Instants of Symphysizing Border-Crossing
I have already hinted at the temporal dizzyness, which caught me, when, longing for companionship and symphysizing with the diatoms, I was told by geological science that the diatomaceous sediments of the Fur formation were built over a period of 3 million years (Sharma 1969: 221; Krarup Petersen 1981: 501), geo-historically located on the threshold between the Paleocene and the Eocene Epochs of the history of the planet. I interpret the dizziness in a phenomenological framework. From my situated location in an embodied human experience of linear time, a symphysizing across the timelines, stipulated in geological history, is not possible. I can symphysize with something which resonates with the timeline of an individual human life, to some extent, with the timeline of written human history, and, if I stretch my imagination, with the 300.000 years of human history on earth. But the time scales of events such as the emergence of the Fur Formation happening about two thirds into the timeline of the 150 million years period of diatom existence on earth is corpo-affectively beyond the imaginative capacities of my symphysizing. I can logically understand the figures on the timeline of geological history, but I cannot symphysize with them. If I try, I am thrown into a kind of deep time vertigo: time becomes a bottomless hole.
Moreover, when, in my efforts to symphysize with the diatoms, I focus not only on their geo-history, but also on their biology and classification along the line of the history of biological evolution, the vertigo intensifies. Firstly, my symphysizing efforts meet their ultimate limits, when I start to cross between geo- and biohistory, and speculate about the immensely long line of diatom generations which, working through 6-day life cycles, produced the diatomaceous rock sediments of the Fur Formation over a period of 3 million years, 55 mio ago. Once again, I end in temporal vertigo; human phenomenology falls short also vis-à-vis the combined time scales of geo- and bio-history. Secondly, the average 6-day life span of an individual diatom, which, of course, stands out as ultra-short seen from a human perspective, is also giving me a hard time, when I relate it to evolutionary bio-history in itself. The move from simplicity to complexity, which evolutionary theory lines up (Schrader 2012), creates one more dizzying gap, when I try to symphysize across the border between “complex” trillion-cells me with an average life expectancy of decades and the 6 days life span of my “simple” single-cell diatom companion. We (the diatom and I) are separated by so unbelievably many steps on the ladder of evolution that I once more is left with vertigo, when I try to bridge the gap through efforts to symphysize.
But are the vertigos, called forward by the chronologies of deep time, and the history of biological evolution, the only possible responses I am capable of? Or can my desires to take up an unexceptionalizing and symphysizing approach to my diatom companions, here too, lead me to other pathways? When I scrutinize the philosophical resources with which I concluded my reading of the human and the diatom world through one another with respect to the life/death-question, another possibility opens up. Let me invoke immanence philosophy once more, and now put focus on Deleuze’s distinction between time as Chronos (chronological time), and time as Aion (the time of the instant) (Deleuze 2020). This distinction opens a platform for reconsidering the barriers which produce vertigos rather than facilitate a symphysizing human-diatom companionship. With this distinction as my tool, I can stop considering the barriers as stemming from universally given onto-epistemological conditions and instead understand them as effects of universalization of time as Chronos, which modernity taught us to adhere to. Geological science and evolutionary history project a chronological linear time upon the history of the planet and its critters, as if this was the one and only reasonable approach. Deleuze’s conceptualization of time as Aion opens another horizon. This is important for my symphysizing efforts; though, notably, I do not argue that chronologization is a “wrong” approach to the history of the planet. I do, indeed, respect the meticulous scientific work which led to the dating of cliffs and seabed at Fur and the biological understanding of the life/death cycles of the diatoms. However, enlisting Deleuze’s distinction of Chronos and Aion, I want to disrupt the onto-epistemologies which cast chronological time as universal. I want to redefine Chronos as one way of mapping time, but without mistaking the map for the temporal landscape itself. Chronos is a sovereign master only if we allow him to act that way. Time as Aion provides an alternative.
According to Deleuze (2020: 167–73), the time of Chronos works within partial and limited systems, founded through a particular position of enunciation in a “thick”, essentially substantiated present which acts as a measuring standard for past and future. The chronologies of the sciences of geology and evolutionary bio-history can serve as examples. In contrast, the time of Aion is cosmic, made up of a non-chronologizable instantaneity that exists in excess to the delimited timezones of Chronos. According to Deleuze, time as Chronos is conceptualized as a one-directional movement, a sequence of “thick” and substantial presents, following each other along the forward moving arrow of time, i.e. moving towards future presents, while leaving the past ones behind. In contrast, time as Aion (Deleuze 2020: 167–73) is the time of the always ephemeral instant, which as a thin line separates past and future, but escapes being pinned down to something essential and substantial. The Aionic time of the instant works multi-directionally, intensely connected to rhizomatic networks of other past and future instants, which, in their ultimate ephemerality, are impossible to submit to any kind of measure or predetermined directionality.
So how can a shift of perspective from Chronos to Aion open new horizons? Together with a posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis 2017; Lykke 2022), which investigates that which is shared across borders of human and non-human, the Aionic perspective on time allows me to transgress the onto- epistemological schemes of Chronos, which keep me and the diatoms apart. Firstly, Aion overall undoes the ways in which Chronos decisively lets a vast chronology of geological eons and epochs separate my Anthropocene presence from the Paleocene/Eocene past of the fossilized diatoms; this means that we (the diatoms and I) generally come closer to each other. Secondly, Aion makes it possible for me to bridge the specific evolution biological gap between the “simple” single-cell diatom and “complex” trillions-cell me. For within the realm of Aion, both I and my diatom companions are moving in a rhizomatic network of becomings which momentarily can bring us bodily close to each other. Using Aionic time as onto-epistemological lens, and engaging a posthuman phenomenological approach to shared conditions across species, the rhizomatic network of Aionic instants can, for example, facilitate my symphysizing with diatoms’ becoming victims of violent, “premature” death due to deadly environmental conditions: anoxic events (i.e. events where oxygen depletion and acidification together make sea waters toxic). Such events killed diatoms en masse, when the Fur Formation once was formed. According to some scientists, these events were, indeed, the reason for the Formation’s diatomaceous emergence in the period of transition from Paleocene to Eocene (Krarup Pedersen 1981). Anoxic events happen today as well – in the Anthropocene, as a result of human-induced global warming, and discharge of phosphates and nitrogen from fertilizers, used much too intensively and carelessly in human agriculture (Skriver 2006; Carstensen, Henriksen and Heiskanen 2007). Within a network of Aionic instants, I can bodily symphysize with diatom death due to anoxic events in earlier times, as well as today, because such events are dangerous for my body as well (Lykke, Forthcoming).
Thirdly, when establishing my symphysizing efforts in the cosmic timezones of Aion, beyond the chronologies of eons and evolutionary steps on the ladder of evolution, I can also start to contemplate, attune to, and perhaps learn from the wisdom which diatoms carry in their bodies. An enormous bodily fund of accumulated generational – ancestral – experience from instants not only of violent death, but also of conative ability to persevere in vibrantly repeated cycles of entangled living and dying is materialized in diatom bodies. They have an intergenerational experience of attuning to planetary conditions, which by far surpasses that which has been accumulated by my species (Hazekamp and Lykke 2022). Indeed, diatoms have successfully attuned to companionship with the planet over a period of 150 million years! In the rhizomatics of Aionic time, my species may take lessons from this.
5 Towards a Vitalist Materialist Ethics of Planetary Companionship
In the first part of the chapter I posed the question if and how Haraway’s conceptualization of cross-species companionship can be extended beyond critters such as dogs who are “close” to “us” (humans) in a body phenomenological sense. In particular, I asked if establishing of companionship could happen across the borders to critters that are so “distant” from humans as micro algae. This question was prompted by my intense, queer love relationships to diatoms, which has been brought about by the spiritual-material mourning practices that I developed in the wake of my life partner’s death and the scattering of her ashes in the waters of the diatomaceous Fur Formation. In the ensuing sections of the chapter, I used a posthuman autophenomenographic approach to contemplate how my efforts to corpo-affectively symphysize, attune and co-become with the world of living and dead diatoms helped me to rethink and reimagine ontologies of life, death and chronological time beyond the limited outlooks and imaginaries, cultivated by Western modernity. I underpinned my contemplations, while showing how they resonate with conceptualizations of life, death and time in immanence philosophy, and vitalist materialism. In this concluding section, I shall return to the issue of companionship, against the background of the insights, gained through my contemplations. What does it mean to establish an ethical relation of companionship across the borders of human and algae? Why, what and whom is such a relationship good for? What does it entail?
As co-editors Johanna Weggelaar, Sergio Mugnai, Natalia de Rossi and Yogi Hendlin so appropriately underline it in their introductory chapter to the volume, it is urgently needed to stop “the current demonization and deification of algae” as well as to “detox[ing] from our reducing algae to their mega-machine use value” (Chapter 1, this volume). In line with a posthuman approach to phenomenology, which I, too, have argued for above, it is, according to the co-editors, necessary to “return to the algal first-organism perspective: what is it like to be algae?” (Chapter 1, this volume). There is an urgent need for a complete reevaluation of these “foreign”, “primitive” and “alien” critters, and for totally different algae-human relations, which, as explored, for example, by Jesse Petersen (Chapter 2, this volume), and Julia Lohman (Chapter 12, this volume) may entail a search for ways to attune to algae perspectives through speculative and creative methodologies. My drawing on posthuman autophenomenography and poetic writing is also to be understood in this perspective.
In an earlier discussion of my relations to diatoms (Lykke 2019), I have referred to the work of posthuman scholar Astrid Schrader (2015), who – in a discussion of leaf bugs, deformed by low, long-term doses of radiation in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster – raised the question: how can we even begin to care for critters so apparently far away from “us” as leaf bugs? Schrader was prompted to pose the question, when, in a classroom setting, she confronted the students with two texts on the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe. One text addressed human suffering in the aftermath of the catastrophe. The other one dealt with the artwork of Swiss visual artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, who, with her paintings of deformed leaf bugs, articulates an activist protest, encouraging viewers to begin to care about these critters. To Schrader’s surprise, a majority of the students became appalled by her juxtaposition of the two texts. Confronted with the human misery, caused by the Chernobyl disaster, most students wondered in disbelief: how could one even start to care about deformed leaf bugs?
With the immensely accelerated species extinctions happening in the 21st century, the awareness of the need to care also about very “alien” genera and species is becoming more widespread. Still, Schrader’s example with her students shows that such an understanding is far from generally accepted and acknowledged. In the hierarchy of those “we” (modern humans) care about, and those we don’t, strange minute beings such as leaf bugs or micro-algae seem still to lurk unnoticed around in the bottomless abyss of this hierarchy. I also feel compelled to admit that I would probably not have begun to care about diatoms myself, had I not encountered them under the special circumstances, related to the scattering of my beloved’s ashes and my desire to develop new material-spiritual practices of mourning. So Schrader’s question – how to begin to care? – is highly pertinent and urgent.
With the chapter, I have suggested an ethics of companionship which emerge from efforts to symphysize and attune as a way to perhaps begin to care. I suggest such an ethics as a way to take some first steps into a planetary caring, which, at least, make it difficult to stay comfortably within the framework of epistemologies of ignorance regarding the ways in which modernity, colonialism and extractivist capitalism have created a world which is highly inimical to biodiversity and to the vital agencies of the planet body – from the micro level of single-cell diatoms to the macro level of climate change. The proposed ethics of companionship implies an undoing of the exceptionalizing of the human subject, presiding over a hierarchy of more or less “distant” and instrumentalizable others. As my discussions of human-diatom relations, related to life, death and time, have indicated, this undoing points in the direction of radical revisions and recalibrations of modern, onto-epistemological frameworks. However, notably, the ethics of companionship for which I argue, is not a normative ethics which stipulates universal moral values. What I propose is a vitalist materialist, critically affirmative ethics, unfolding through pluriversal commitments to response-able practices of open-ended symphysizing attuning to, learning from and co-becoming with the more than human world.
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An earlier version of this text (© Nina Lykke) is published at the Independent Air organization’s Ute-Sita project webpage, http://www.theindependentair.com/nina-lykke.
For contemplations of a planetary ethics of softness, I am indebted to research and artistic collaboration with curator, artist and scholar Camila Marambio (Marambio and Lykke, Forthcoming). I am also grateful to Camila for acting as spirit helper in the fullmoon evening ritual on June 24, 2021.
The text on vibrancy echoes my poem What if Every Critter’s Death Was Vibrant? (Lykke 2022: 249–253).
Independent Air is a non-profit organization focusing on creative projects within photography, visual art & environmental sustainability, <http://www.theindependentair.com/>. As part of the Nordic Culture Point funded network SOTAN (State of the Art Network, gathering scholars, artists and activists to critically address climate change and the Anthropocene, http://www.theindependentair.com/news/2019/9/6/state-of-the-artnetwork), Independent Air organized a sitting-out event in the spring of 2021, http://www.theindependentair.com/full-moon. The model for the event, the sitting-out, is an indigenous spiritual-material practice, cultivated by peoples in the Nordic region of Europe before modernity. In relation to the event in 2021, the Independent Air organizers and the participants defined the score for it open-endedly: each participant should stay alone outside on a Full Moon evening/night to contemplate and immerse hirself in a self-chosen spot, and, if possible, enter into a conversation with it.
Where no other specific references are provided to biological and geological description of diatoms and diatomaceous rock/earth (diatomite), the text builds on Seckbach and Gordon 2019, Wikipedia: Diatom, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom (accessed Sept 20, 2021), and Hickman et al., 2012. Moreover, specific information on the Fur Formation and its diatomaceous rock/earth is derived from Wikipedia: Fur Formation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur_Formation (accessed Oct 3, 2021), and from on-site as well as virtual visits to the natural history museums at Fur (https://museumsalling.dk/kom-og-besog-os/fur-fossiler/ (accessed Oct 3, 2021)) and Mors (https://museummors.dk/ (accessed Oct 3, 2021).