The Symbiocene in Waiting

"A word is more than a mere combination of letters and sounds.
The potency of words reaches the substrata of all of us.
Words carry culture, carry history;
they form and confine our thoughts.
Words matter."
 
〰 Nora Bateson 〰
 
THE CHTHULUCENE & OTHER MINDBENDERS
 
"Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story," says Donna Haraway, American historian of consciousness and feminist studies.
 
In her essay Tentacular Thinking (2016), Haraway suggests to replace the whole Anthropocene construct with an alternative concept she calls Chthulucene.
 
“Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react.” (from Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene (2016).
 
Chthulu is a hybrid of the name of the Californian spider Pimoa cthulhu and the chthonic earth forces (from Greek khthon = earth, soil). Chthonic and Chthulu- relate to the Greek underworld or 〰 more pragmatically 〰 to what is ‘beneath the soil’.
 
According to Haraway, ‘our ancestors have given the name ‘subterranean’ to whatever they can’t see without digging up the dirt.’
 
On the other hand, some of ‘our ancestors’ already knew that all ‘the invisible stuff’ is an essential part of soil life. It is the living humus which nurtures all new life on planet earth (a knowledge which presumably the ancestors of out ancestors had all along).
 
A hundred years before the birth of the word Chthulucene, the Austriohungarian microbiologist and soil scientist Raoul Francé discovered the edaphon [from Greek edaphos = soil] 〰 the micro-life in the soil, equivalent to the plankton in the ocean.
 
Raoul Francé shared his discoveries in a book under the title Das Edaphon 〰 written in German and published in 1913. (Unfortunately Francé’s seminal and paradigm shifting work has not been translated into English. You can read a brief Abstract here ‘Das Edaphon’. Raoul H. Francé and The Ecology of Soil
 
Plankton [from Greek planktos = wandering, drifting] had only been named a couple of decades or so earlier, in 1887, by the German physiologist Viktor Hensen.
 
Haraway’s tonguetwisting neologism makes us wonder why she didn’t create a word to include the microlife in land and water. Doesn’t tentacular thinking also apply to the octopus and the giant sea spiders, or any of the other cosmopolitan pycnogonids (= official name for this genus of arthropods = the ‘joint footed ones’)?
 
It is not uncommon for neologists (creators of new words) to honour someone with a neologism 〰 in this case the honour goes to the Californian spider, Pimoa cthulhu.
 
Making up names to add a personal touch to general concepts or specific critters has a long and well respected history in the natural sciences. There is no shortage of tongue- and mindbending terminology in the naming of the flora and fauna inhabiting our planet.
 
In our meandering research we stumbled over a surprising nest of wasps named after contemporary celebrities, including Ellen de Generes, Shakira, Brad Pitt, and Lady Gaga.
 
Not to be outdone by the wasps, the spider clan has been coaxed to stretching its arthropodic tentacles into celeb-culture too:
 
Agerina boygeorgei is an extinct marine arthropod named after the musician Boy George.
 
Aptostichus barackobamai is a spider named after 〰 you guessed it 〰 Barack Obama.
 
Abba transversa, a genus of Australian orb-weaving spiders was honoured with the name of the Swedish pop group ABBA. (Sorry, no! The honouring was meant the other way round.)
 
 
STUMBLING INTO THE SYMBIOCENE
 
While the Anthropocene was ruled by the evolutionary theory of so-called Darwinism, the Symbiocene recognises symbiogenesis as the natural force which drives the evolution of Gaia and all living creatures sustained by our soil mother. The Anthropocene conjured up a hypothesis about competition as 'our natural drive’ and trumped up the whole edifice of a rat race environment around that narrative.
 
In the Symbiocene, humans have to relearn what nature has been doing all along 〰 to live together. What should be easy, because we are social beings after all, and it’s in our blood and genes, turns out to be surprisingly hard.
 
The difficulty doesn’t lie in the fact that different humans are so diverse in terms of race, gender, needs, desires, feelings, ways of thinking etc. The majority of distinctions between one person and another are fairly superficial cultural, generational, educational and experiential variations.
 
Beneath all those shallow surface glances 〰 if we open up and get to know ourselves deep enough 〰 all people are just people. Anthropoid beings trying to figure out how to do human life on earth. We’re all humans, holding a wide and fascinating diversity of experiences and perspectives in one palm, and almost identical fears, hopes, dreams, and a deep longing for connection with others in a closed fist on the other side.
 
The majority of misery and mental health issues, social and economical problems, violence and wars can be tracked down to one thing. One characteristic which is uniquely human. Symbiogenesis has been working well for all other species for millions of years. Only humans are prevented from participating in this process due to one feature: supremacy.
 
That’s current trend word for it. Other names are control, domination, hegemony, primacy, superior mind. All these terms describe the hypothetical need to be the best, first, fittest, greatest, latest, most powerful, smartest, strongest, technologically most advanced…
 
This human drive, by its very nature, makes us very lonely. Not because ‘it’s lonely at the top’, as they say, but because the urge for supremacy itself drives us apart. If this wasn't the case, then we'd all meet at the top and have one big party!
 
But this urge for superiority is not our true 'human nature'. It doesn't even make any sense whatsoever to anyone who takes the time to think about it a scratch under the surface. It's only a cover-up. A fake face and narrative presented as a 'social avatar'. A mask. A façade. It’s not even real. It is entirely made up of a thin layer of self-aggrandisement, created to cover up a deep chasm of dread.
 
This dreadful fear is the ultimate ‘culprit’. It can raise it’s ugly head in any form, on the scale from insidious anxiety or latent worries to panic, phobia and outright terror. It’s a poisonous and terrifying fear-monster. It lives and thrives in pretty much every human heart, mind, body and soul. The evil ogre separates humans from fellow humans, people from nature, and worst of all ::: us from ourselves.
 
But that's neither real nor true either. Those wicked demonic beasts can only survive on the emotional food we throw between their insatiable jaws. They are created in obscure ways by dark generative forces within ourselves 〰 forces of creation for which we had no word 〰 until very recently.
 
For this reason, our route into the Symbiocene 〰 and towards a reconnection with symbiogenesis, which is our natural way of being 〰 inevitably leads across that chasm and through whatever is so terrifying inside.
 
 
APHANIPOIESIS, THE OBSCURE FORCE OF CREATION
 
In 2018, Nora Bateson, filmmaker, writer, founder of the International Bateson Institute in Stockholm, coined a new word which might help us get through this difficult stretch and even make friends with the dreaded fear-monster within.
 
Aphanipoiesis [from Greek aphaneia = obscurity + poiesis = creation] essentially describes the process of creation which takes places in obscurity, or in Nora Bateson’s own words, “something that is insiduous but in a positive sense.” She defines Aphanipoiesis as an “unseen coalescence towards vitality” or “a coalescence of experience becoming unseen.”
 
Due to its nature, aphanipoiesis is not an easy word to explain or grasp in a few words (Bateson offers her explanation on youtube here)
 
Put into the linguistic context of its word family, aphanis [from Greek a = un- + phaínein = to bring to light, cause to appear] is closely related to epiphany [from Greek epi = beyond + phaínein].
 
An epiphany is a sudden insight into something that was until then unknown, invisible, unseen = aphanis. Aphanipoiesis can be described as the generative process which exists all along in the invisible realms of the mind.
 
Aphanipoiesis is the invisible force of life which Donna Haraway tried to capture in the composition of Chthulucene. It is the life of the edaphon that Raoul Francé observed in his field studies in the swamps around the Black Sea.
 
This creative coalescence of many forces and microorganisms in obscurity is the fertile soil for epiphanies.
 
The awakening of the Symbiocene is a process of creation. Like all creative processes, this must largely happen in obscurity. But it must also go hand in hand with epiphanies. These can be instigated by tuning into the unseen coalescence towards vitality, which now has a word.
 
In the wildwordwoods of Symbiopaedia, the invisible parts of symbiogenesis are supported by a Word⚘Fairy. Their name is Krypto⚘Fáni, or ‘the one who makes the invisible visible’. (Krypto, from Greek kruptos = hidden, invisible, concealed)
 
Any artist, artisan, craftsperson, or creator who works in any creative field is well acquainted with Krypto⚘Fáni. We meet them in the process of writing every time.
 
Whenever we start a new wordcast, or any other writing project, we sooner or later hit upon the fear-monster, scoffing. Sneering. Bursting out with the unsolicited opinion that ‘it’s all a load of crap, you don’t know what you’re doing, and you won’t be able to finish it.’
 
And every time Krypto⚘Fáni steps in and reassures us, whispering, ‘don’t worry about those fear-monsters. They’re only doing their job. Follow me.’
 
Coming to think of it, none of this work of foraging and tending, planting, pruning and cultivating here in the wildwordwoods is possible without Krypto⚘Fáni 〰 not to mention all the other invisible beings involved in the mysterious process of aphanipoiesis who have no name yet.