of human, birds and living rocks: remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds
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Geographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored thenatural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this is because the aesthetic has been understood as a ‘humanist remain’. Here, we want to make a stronger claimfor the value of the aesthetic as a stepping off point for thinking through post-human geographiesTRANSCRIPT
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DOI: 10.1177/2043820612468692 2012 2: 249Dialogues in Human Geography
Deborah Dixon, Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth StraughanOf human birds and living rocks : Remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds
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Article
Of human birds and living rocks:Remaking aesthetics forpost-human worlds
Deborah DixonUniversity of Glasgow, UK
Harriet HawkinsRoyal Holloway, University of London, UK
Elizabeth StraughanUniversity of Glasgow, UK
AbstractGeographers have long pondered post-human worlds. And yet, whilst such analyses have explored thenatural and physical sciences as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that spanspecies and kingdoms, an explicit consideration of the aesthetic has been largely absent. To a degree, this isbecause the aesthetic has been understood as a humanist remain. Here, we want to make a stronger claimfor the value of the aesthetic as a stepping off point for thinking through post-human geographies. We beginby acknowledging a productive tension within Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of sense-making: that is, aseries of questions that speak directly to the post-human have been raised by dwelling upon how theaesthetic can be related to bodily needs and desires, as well as a feeling that emerges from the exercise ofjudgement. Then, we make the argument that, as a means of developing our aesthetic sensibility, geographycan usefully further its engagement with art theory and practice. This leads us to ground our own explo-ration of the post-human in a discussion of two projects created by artist Perdita Phillips. Moving from aconsideration of bowerbirds in the savanna to thrombolites in a saline lake, and from evolutionary biologyto a Deleuzo -Guattarian geophilosophy, we ask, where is the artistry?
Keywordsaesthetics, art, biology, post-humanism, sense-making
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Corresponding author:
Deborah Dixon, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences,
University of Glasgow, East Quadrangle, University Avenue,
Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK.
Email: [email protected]
Dialogues in Human Geography2(3) 249270 The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/2043820612468692dhg.sagepub.com
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Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1921)
Introduction
Yeats visionary poem, written in the aftermath of
the Great War, evokes images of compounding
chaos and revolution as one mode of living, based
around science, technology and democracy, gives
way to one that has so far remained submerged,
alien. His allegorical figures the bird in flight and
the wakening stone inhabit these differing modes
and, for Yeats, meet each other with mutual incom-
prehensibility. The writer and we as his audience are
of the old order; encountering a blank and pitiless
visage, we wonder, what rough beast slouches
towards Bethlehem to be born?
In this paper we take on board similar figures
the human bird and the living rock in order
to talk about change and transformation, in the sense
of both increasing uncertainty as to what the world
is and the place of such figures within it, but also
how to then think about and articulate the modes
of relationality that bind and cleave. Where Yeats
describes two inhospitable ways of living, each
spiralling away from the other, we want to use these
figures as signposts for an exploration of the frac-
tures and fissions, resonances and divergences, that
make up what has been termed the post-human.
The post prefix here, as elsewhere, denotes an
ontic and epistemic, as well as semantic, uncer-
tainty; most significantly for our purposes, post
can refer to what Welsch calls a radical break with
the modern decree that everything is to be under-
stood in departure from the human and by referring
it back to the human (2004: n.p.) including, we
might add, the nature of humanity itself.
Geographers have, of course, considered this
same prospect numerous times, gradually moving,
we would suggest, from a preoccupation with the
shards of analytic categorisation made brittle by
the crisis of representation, and a corresponding
concern as to what the human as critical inquirer
is considered to encompass and be capable of doing,
toward a more explicit questioning of how, in the
shift in thought that moves from being to becom-
ing, we go forth in the world to think and speak in
terms of things and their qualities. And so geogra-
phy has been witness to a number of attempts to
map a post-human disciplinary landscape of theo-
retical allegiances, figurings, concepts, techniques
and objects of analysis (Braun, 2004; Johnston,
2008; Panelli, 2010) as well as the import of these
for the traditional repertoire of geography, such as
landscape (Whatmore and Hinchliffe, 2010), site
(Marston et al., 2005), scale (Bingham, 2006) and
borders (Sundberg, 2011). Importantly, there has
also emerged an effort to delineate how a geographic
sensibility can in turn illuminate and even inflect our
framing of the post-human via a dwelling upon the
where of encounter (Hinchliffe, 2010), for example,
as well as the geographies of assemblages (Allen,
2011).
Yet, amidst this work a critical reflection upon,
and deployment of, the aesthetic has been largely
absent. To an extent, this is because the aesthetic,
whilst emerging in geography as a complex medita-
tion upon the nature of existence within what were
wide-ranging humanist debates (see Tuans, 1989
review), became decried, along with this para-
digm, as a paean to a narcissistic individualism
(e.g. Gregory, 1981). Specifically, for many huma-
nistic geographers as well as their critics, the aes-
thetic became both a personal (sensuous and
emotional as well as perceptive and cognitive) expe-
rience of landscape (e.g. Edensor, 2005), and the
set of conventions that shape these experiences
(Duncan and Duncan, 2004). Accordingly, geo-
graphic work on landscape has tended to deploy the
aesthetic as a being-in-the-world characterised by a
250 Dialogues in Human Geography 2(3)
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dynamic resolution, a co-ordination and a harnes-
sing of the tensions within experience, a field-
event incorporating horizons of feeling, the objects
of sense, and the foci of consciousness (Foster, cit-
ing Dewey, 1998: 336). Certainly, one of the distin-
guishing marks brought into play as a means of
distancing the more recent more-than-representa-
tional literature from an earlier humanistic geogra-
phy has been a rejection of the latters emphasis
upon the individual human being as sense-making
(e.g. Wylie, 2006). Notwithstanding the unfortunate
simplification of a humanistic geography per se
(Pickles, 1986), what has aided such a rendering,
as we go on to flesh out below, is a broader scale,
inter-disciplinary understanding of the aesthetic as
derived from a Kantian celebration of human ration-
ality, an understanding that has elided the liveli-
ness of the aesthetic within Kants philosophies.
There are a number of ways in which the aes-
thetic can be enlivened, but in this paper we work
from within our own fields of cultural geography
and art theory and practice, fields that, as we hope
will become clear, share a considerable Kantian
legacy. Whilst we make no claim to fully inhabit
Kants texts, and this is by no means a paper about
Kants philosophies, this liveliness, we go on to
argue, can be usefully acknowledged as geographers
proceed to work through to call into being, one
might say the post-human. Indeed, its analytic
value, we suggest, lies not in any sense of resolution
as to what sense making is or should be, or what is
appropriately human or not, but rather in the invita-
tion to thought. And in a suitably post-Kantian fram-
ing, such thought is a thoroughly visceral affair. As
Ruddick describes it, thought does not proceed
outwards from the cogito, nor is it inscribed in trans-
cendent principles: it is a social act, emerging in
combination (2010: 28). What provokes such a dis-
turbance? For Deleuze, it is the encounter with the
monstrous other, an as yet unthought figure the
human bird, the living rock that heralds unpredict-
ability and change. Such encounters have the poten-
tial for the creation of new, unique events and
entities, but more often herald the return to relatively
redundant orders and practices.
We begin, then, by acknowledging a productive
tension within Kantian and post-Kantian accounts
of sense-making: that is, we delineate the broad con-
tours of a debate that takes to task the aesthetic as
related to the exercise of human judgement, but
also (not necessarily human) corporeal needs and
desires. Next, we make the argument that, as a
means of developing an aesthetic sensibility, geo-
graphy can usefully further its engagement with art
theory and practice. This leads us to ground our own
exploration of the binding and cleaving, inclusions
and thresholds proffered by post-humanism in a
discussion of two projects created by artist Perdita
Phillips. The first project dwells upon a Darwinian
framing of bowerbirds as all too human in their
artistry, whilst the second considers the aesthetic
capacities inhering in the lithic, aswell as the organic,
via a consideration of living rocks, or thrombolites.
Kantian aesthetics: betweenand betwixt
Without delving too deeply into Kants oeuvre, it is
necessary to provide an initial context here in order
to place the discussion of aesthetics that follows.
That is, in Kants work we find a number of itera-
tions of the aesthetic insofar as he is engaged with
both an empiricist tradition, exemplified in the
writings of Hume and Burke, for whom aesthetics
were expressions of subjective feeling without cog-
nitive content, and a rationalist tradition, repre-
sented by figures such as Baumgarten, for whom
aesthetics were based on the cognitive assessment
of an object to have a particular property, thus mak-
ing universal claims concerning the nature of those
objects possible. In post-Kantian aesthetic critiques,
we can discern the same preoccupation with this
tension, often expressed in the drawing of a marked
distinction between, on the one hand, an aesthetics
that is rooted in a sensuous, bodily nature, and which
has become associated with both individuality and
uniqueness, and, on the other hand, an aesthetics
that offers the opportunity for thinking through how
judgement can become a means of introducing new
concepts that reference both an external nature and
an interior human nature.
In Kants so-called first critique, from his
Critique of Pure Reason (1996[1787]), the aesthetic
is a science of all principles of sensuousness. He
Dixon et al. 251
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later describes this in his Critique of Judgement
(1987[1790]) as a liking that is conditioned patholo-
gically by stimuli and that holds for non-rational
animals too, gratifying bodily needs and desires
(Kant, 1987[1790]: 51, 52). Thus, aesthetics is based
on feeling, as opposed to a perception such as the
apprehension of the colour of an entity. For Kant,
in referring to the domain of sensibility, there is a
transcendental aesthetic or a priori forms of sen-
sibility of space and time that structure these sen-
sations of experience, as well as an empirical
aesthetic that refers to various sensations that popu-
late the sensible, such as the sounds, tastes and smells
that we encounter. The Critique of Judgement (1987
[1790]) also, however, contains a three-fold aesthetic
of the agreeable, of beauty (or taste), and of the sub-
lime articulated around the notion of judgement.
Here, Kant outlines four moments common to the
beautiful and the sublime. These are a disinterested
pleasure, universal recognition, a purposivelessness
and a sense of the pleasure in the object as necessary
and exemplary.
Importantly, in the Critique of Judgement, Kant
describes a pleasure, felt in beholding the beautiful,
that one cannot ascribe to the object in and of itself
(see e.g. Section 1). Such pleasure unfolds from an
appreciation of how these faculties provide for the
conditions of a systematic (and hence universally
human) judgement of something as beautiful; it
must be stressed, however, that such a law-like
play is not in and of itself subject to the operation
of a particular law or rule. It is with this caveat that
the term free is applied. The play of the imagina-
tion and understanding are also integral to Kantian
considerations of the sublime, wherein the human
power of reason is experienced as superior as a
super-sensible faculty to a meaningless nature spe-
cifically (see especially Sections 23 and 28). Given
the disciplines traditional focus upon humanenvi-
ronment relationships, it is not surprising to find that
it is the sublime, and particularly the dynamic sub-
lime, that has provenparticularly appealing togeogra-
phers. Here, the formlessness, or boundedlessness, of
phenomena such as volcanoes and earthquakes evoke
a wonder and awe that, whilst suggesting a physical
powerlessness, and proposing the apparent limits of
reason, nevertheless, when perceived as such, in turn
evidence the superiority of understanding over and
against imagination and sensuous experience (Baker
and Twidale, 1991).
This articulation of aesthetics as, on the one hand,
related to bodily needs and desires and, on the other,
as a feeling that emerges from the exercise of judge-
ment, is to catch Kantian aesthetics, as a number of
post-Kantian theorists have noted, between two irre-
ducible domains (Deleuze, 1994). That is, there is
the theory of the sensible, which engages embodied,
sensuous experience but is not confined to a human
corporeality, and the theory of the beautiful and the
sublime, which, in Deleuzes words, deals with the
reality of the real insofar as it is thought (1994: 68
[emphasis added]) and, in Kantian terms at least,
was often understood as the preserve of the human.
Certainly, Kants legacy has often been summarised
as a celebration of human rationality, predicated
upon the firm rejection of a nature in and for itself.
In disciplinary terms, the most direct approach
taken to Kants thinking remains, as Livingstone
and Harrison (1981) noted over 30 years ago, his
work on physical geography (see more recently
Elden, 2009; Elden and Mendieta, 2011). Yet, they
go on to argue, there is no doubting a Kantian legacy
within humanistic philosophies more broadly. And
within some strands of humanistic geography, we
can discern a Kantian, epistemic structuring of the
world by the human subject. Wrights (1947) geo-
sophic idealism, for example, pivots on outside
working, structures and orders and the most fasci-
nating terra incognita of all . . . those that lie withinthe minds and hearts of men (1947: 15). In similar
vein, Lowenthal (1961) expands upon landscape by
way of a question over the relation between the
world outside and the pictures within our heads.
More specifically, landscape is the joint product of
sensory material and structures of consciousness,
which actively organize the continued flux of frag-
mentary impressions and interprets them by its own
forms of understanding (Livingstone and Harrison,
1981: 366). In recent years, we find a continuation
of this human-centred approach to a geographical
treatment of the aesthetic, with particular attention
to the sublime, in work on the human perception
of the forms of animals and vegetables (Davies,
2010; Lorimer, 2007; Roe, 2006), as well as the
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politics of shock and awe (Anderson, 2010), rubbish
(Crang, 2010) and theorisations of politics more
generally (Dikec, 2012).
Small wonder, then, that some, including those
inspired by a speculative realism, to use a loose
term, have made the argument that, in light of such
a legacy, a humanmindsocial (over and against
a non-humanbodynature) nexus of thought has
characterised all manner of debates on the human
environment relationship (Anderson and Harrison,
2010; Hinchliffe et al., 2005). And as we note in the
following section, that such dichotomous modes of
thought have been challenged by the emergence of
a post-humanistic geography. What is yet missing
from such debates, we want to emphasise, is a more
thorough engagement with post-Kantian aesthetics,
particularly as manifest through the work of
Deleuze, for whom the focus is the productive
potential of Kants failure to escape epistemological
structures that foreground the human.
Post-human sublimations
Making space for the invitation to thought proffered
by Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics, we suggest,
allows for a rather different line of questioning to
emerge around the post-human than has so far been
manifest within geography. One particularly visible
framing of a post-human research agenda has come
from a wide-ranging effort to think how the animal
question illuminates the manner in which humans
have been deemed to exist or, rather, are able
to apprehend their own and others existence as well
as related spatial qualities rather than simply
be, to use a stark, Heideggerian framing (see,
e.g. Anderson, 2003, on this divisioning). Heideg-
gers animal question, of course, was also a
rethinking of Kant: he proceeded to place the
worldlessness of stone at one end of a spectrum,
and the world-forming nature of humans at the
other, with animals somewhere in the middle, each
sorted along a plane of equivalence derived from
what is considered to be a uniquely human logos
(1995: 274). Within the geographic discipline, it
is the organic realm, however, that has garnered
attention; utilising perspectives drawn from philo-
sophy and critical theory, as well as a series of
psychoanalytic, behavioural and neurobiological
literatures, geographers have inquired as to
whether or not there is indeed such a sharp disjunc-
ture to be had.
This has helped foster speculation on how, for
example, an emphasis upon the precognitive being
in the world of humans can be leveraged into a
decentring of an enlightenment figuring of the
human as master of all he surveys (Bear and Eden,
2011; Johnston, 2008). Though often presented as
an effort to think through the intersectionalities of
the lifeworlds of seemingly autonomous animals
a being with that folds in the inanimate, animate,
sentient, speaking, thinking (Simpson, 2009) such
a project has beenmore usefully specified as a means
of interrogating the spacings therein, brought to
light via tropes such as witnessing (Dewsbury,
2003), solicitation (McCormack, 2003) and singu-
larity (Harrison, 2011). What this specification
allows for is a further interrogation of what the
pre- in precognitive implies and disallows in our
understanding of sense and sensibility. It has also
become manifest in research that explores how the
capacity for communication as in indicative, rather
than simply vocal can itself be dehumanised. There
is work, for example, that deploys Latours actor
network theory (as well as other bodies of thought)
as a means of thinking through how the non-human
can speak within an environmental politics, such
that its excessiveness understood here as the
capacity to surprise in the face of both science
and politics is acknowledged (Hinchliffe, 2008;
Hinchliffe et al., 2005). And geographers have
identified Derridas concept of the trace as a
means of thinking through language as iteration,
or the marking of difference, that takes place via,
for example, genetic coding and territoriality as
well as friendship (Bingham, 2006).
Alternatively, questions have revolved around
whether or not certain capacities such as suffering
(Lorimer, 2010), vulnerability (Harrison, 2008) or,
more commonly, creativity (Gandy, 2008) are to
be accorded the status of a fundamental human/
non-human distinction, overshadowing any mere
physiological or metabolic commonalities, or the
transfer of energy and matter between entities. We
find some geographers, for example, prompted by
Dixon et al. 253
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Agambens discussion of bare life, raising ques-
tions around the status of the essentially human
power of poiesis; that is, the creative act and its pure
potentiality (Thrift, 2004). By way of contrast, we
can also see a number of studies (inspiring but not
confined to geographers) that seek to push the
envelope in this regard, emphasising how, for
example, bacteria can be considered inventive,
as Hird puts it, by virtue of their originary role in
major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nano-
technology, metallurgy, sensory and locomotive
apparatuses (such as the wheel), reproductive strate-
gies and community organization, light detection,
alcohol, gas and mineral conversion, hypersex, and
death (2010: 3637). Conversely, Dixon (2009)
ponders the political efficacy of the semi-living,
in the form of lab-grown, cellular assemblages.
Small wonder that some have turned this question
around to ask how and with what effect does the pre-
sumption of such inalienable differences justify and
legitimise as natural a calculated, managed
approach to the purportedly non-human (Green-
hough and Roe, 2010; Riley, 2010).
Some have, however, delved more deeply into
the cleaving and binding of the organic and the inor-
ganic as part and parcel of this broader rethinking of
the human. Such efforts draw on a number of
impulses not all compatible by any means
including, for example, Serres writings on the
marking of the earth by flood (Clark, 2010),
Meillassouxs evocation of the great outdoors
(Saldanha, 2009), and a Deleuzian take on the mole-
cular (Dewsbury, 2011). For some, a possible
groundwork for this, it seems, is a sense of the evo-
lutionary character of the human, an at once micro-
scopic analytic that binds the animate and the
inanimate over geologic, even cosmic, time-scales.
Protevi (2010a, n.p.), for example, speculates as to
the working of a genetic phenomenology, wherein
. . . we have to show how single-celled organisms
generate their own concrete space and time (a bio-
logical or metabolic transcendental aesthetic) as
well as display sense-making . . . AND how this
develops along the evolutionary time scale into the
potentials for what will develop along the human
developmental time scale, that is, genetic
phenomenology as the constitution of corporeal
space-time and corporeal know how, from embryo
to adult. And then finally we can trace the synchro-
nic transformation of corporeal space-time and
categories/ideas into science/human high reason.
For others, such a framing yet retains an anthropo-
morphism, however, insofar as their dwelling upon
increased complexification speaks to a vitalism, the
analytic co-ordinates of which revolve around some
as yet un-acknowledged metaphysical pivot. And
so for Woodward (2010), for example, the capacity
to affect and be affected also directs attention
beyond agency towards a welter of metabolic
processes that undergird what we consider to be
life. Writing on the unicellular bacteria Volvox,
Woodward notes how these organisms interna-
lise their environment, and display a movement,
orientation and so on; but, there is no necessary
drive towards complexity.
In similar vein, Clark (2011: 24) ponders what
happens, in a post-Kantian world, when biology is
removed from its yoking to the evolution of a human
expressivity, and instead is allowed to persist other-
wise? For such bodies also touch and are touched by
an Earth that
bears the trace of an infinity that is palpably not of
this world, one that is extra-terrestrial in a material
rather than an ethereal or otherworldly sense: an
exorbitance that no form of reciprocity, no con-
tract, no economy on this spherical planet or any-
where else will ever square up (Clark, 2010: 8).
Such speculation disavows post-humanism as a
Latourian redistribution of agency, resonating
instead with Harrisons (2008) cautious questioning
of what is the remainder to just such an action-
orientated concept, so often ranged alongside the
capacities of intentionality, knowing, cognition and
so on. To somewhat presumptuously sum up such a
disparate body of literature, whilst the objects of
analysis that enter our research under the rubric of
the post-human continues to expand, there is the
increasingly careful querying of what the term
post signifies here, whether as a decentring of the
human and/or the tracing of an anthropomorphism.
And it is in reference to this body of work, we
254 Dialogues in Human Geography 2(3)
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suggest, that a more explicit engagement with
aesthetics can be of value insofar as it enables a
thinking through of how and with what import we
formulate sense making.
Post-human aesthetics/aestheticpost-humanisms
We noted above how Kants articulation of the aes-
thetic as both gratification and judgement has
invited a series of interrogations as to the nature,
quality and capacities of a putatively human cor-
poreality. Here, we want to reprise some of this
work as context again, partially and with neces-
sary brevity before drawing out what we see as a
productive engagement with the literatures and
practices of art and art theory. We suggest this not
because of their purported content, but because
these are domains that have long struggled with just
such a Kantian legacy, and where aesthetics have
been framed with a close attention to the with-
ness and the spacings that mark the post-human.
As such, they prompt us to consider what we under-
stand sense making to be, and what the thresholds
are to such understandings. They do so, however,
not via recourse to the domains of biology, chemis-
try and physics, or even philosophy, but rather by
enrolling these within their own particular terms
(and modes) of debate.
In order to introduce this work, we begin with an
outline of how the invitation proffered by Kants
aesthetics has been responded to within social the-
ory more broadly. We find such a revisiting, for
example, in Merleau-Pontys (1962[1945]) account
of bodily intentionality, and particularly his desire
to develop a concept of the mind adequate to this.
In his early work (e.g. Phenomenology of Percep-
tion), which has had a significant impact on geogra-
phers bodily project, to be sure, Merleau-Ponty
does not stray far from a Kantian transcendentalism,
wherein there is an a priori structuring of a sense of
space and time. There is a tendency here, as Harri-
son notes, to treat sensuality primarily as sensible
intuition and in this way regard it in terms of the syn-
thetic work and information yielded to an already
constituted and constituting consciousness or will
(2008: 429). In later work, though, Merleau-Ponty
reflects upon his own critiques of Husserls life-
world wherein consciousness bestows meaning
upon experiential essences, thus reaffirming the
presence of a transcendental ego and by way of
a response begins to lay out the chiasm. This is an
inter-twining, or crossing, that enables what he calls
a sensate body possessing an art of interrogating
the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired
exegesis (1968[1964]: 135).
For Whitehead, Kants aesthetics are marked,
like the rest of his philosophy, by an excessive cog-
nitivism, this despite, he suggests, the generative
possibilities that Kant affords to time. In contrast,
Whiteheads philosophy of organisms is, he claims
in Adventures of Ideas (1967[1933]), an inversion
of this. If, for Kant, the world emerges from the sub-
ject, then, for Whitehead, the subject emerges from
the world: there is, thus, no way of knowing the
world extra-experientially. As opposed to the subse-
quent, cognitive organisation of a Kantian rabble of
the senses, aesthetics becomes the mark of our
concern for the world, and for entities in the world
(1967[1933]: 176). We are reminded by Whitehead
to engage with feeling our bodies, as well as feel-
ing with our bodies. Such a rewiring of Kants sen-
sible data into an immanent being, as opposed to
the building blocks for a transcendent, conceptual
representation, lays the groundwork for the continu-
ities that Whitehead comes to identify between the
two forms of Kants aesthetics. That is, for White-
head, aesthetics become understood as the building
of intensity that encompasses, as Shaviro observes,
the most rudimentary pulses of emotion (like the
vibrations of subatomic particles). And at the high-
est end, even God is basically an aesthete (2009:
68). Thus, Whiteheads affect-based account of
experience undoes the ontological privilege of
being human, extending experience to encom-
pass all subjects, whether they be a dog, a tree, a
mushroom, or a grain of sand (Shaviro, 2009: xii).
It is, perhaps, in Deleuzes (1984, 1994) confron-
tation of an enemy that we find themost celebrated
reworkings of Kantian aesthetics across both geo-
graphy and art theory/practice. If the wrenching
duality of the two irreducible domains outlined
above are to be reworked, Deleuze argues, then one
must find the conditions that allow for both an
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image of thought that rests in a biological cogni-
tion an organic synthesis and a reworked
logic of sensation. Sensation here is neither cere-
bral nor rational, nor is it harboured in phenomenol-
ogys lived body; rather, it is constituted by the vital
powers and forces of rhythm and chaos (Deleuze,
2005; see also Groszs, 2008, appraisal of Deleuzes
work, to which she brings an Irigarayan sensibility).
Such a line of thought has much to contribute to geo-
graphic debate in particular, we might suggest, in
that Kants space and time (which, according to
Hartshorne, 1939, mark out the exceptional domains
of geography and history, respectively) are here
reworked as in dynamic genesis with the organic.
But, what this project also provokes is the question
of what precisely is capable of such a sensibility of
sense? In other words, if the aesthetic subject is no
longer a human being made exceptional by their
ability to make sense of the world around them, and,
crucially, to recognise their capacity for so doing,
then what, if anything, remains of the human? And
what does such a subject now encompass?
The aesthetic, then, is made to undertake a tre-
mendous amount of work within social theory. And
in these theorists explorations of sense making the
issues raised speak time and again to the post-
human. But how can the aesthetic become a more
visible pivot for dialogues within human geogra-
phy? For us, there is a productive engagement to
be had with the practices and literatures of art and
art theory. Given the place of art theory in the study
of humanism, and the long tradition of artistic prac-
tices as producing and reproducing ideal forms of
animals and of nature, it is unsurprising to find that
herein lie fecund sites for post-human imaginings
(Badmington, 2003; Haraway, 1991; Wolfe,
2009). Indeed, the welter of artworks and exhibi-
tions produced, and their accompanying theorisa-
tions, proffer a diverse body of post-humanisms,
fuelled in equal parts by an art world enamoured
with the social theory outlined above but also by
hyperbolic and apocalyptic narratives of both the
perceptually vanishing animal and the rise of tech-
nology and commercialized science (Lippit, 2000).
Such artwork, exhibitions and critique have long
been inspired, for example, by the languages and
critical practices of deconstruction; that is, a
querying of an anthropocentric logos via reference
to the mark-making, as well as the affective materi-
alities, of animals (Baker, 2000) They are also
increasingly shaped by an artistic search for other
onto-stories of the post-human, whether through
the forms of the cyborg (Lyons, 2010), the hybrid
(Langill, 2009) or the becoming-animal (Thomp-
son, 2005). As Livitt (2007: 230) notes, where once
we may have identified a glib quotation of Deluezo
Guattarian formulations of becoming-animal, pro-
ceeding by way of everything from dance to new
media works, there is now a closer examination of
the ontological work to be done in the tensions
between the desire to animalise and the obligation
to preserve (Chaudhuri and Enelow, 2006: 4).
Time and again the crux of such works ensues
from an (often playful) interrogation of scientific
theory, method and practice. In particular, we can
find the identification and enrolling of a variety of
scientific domains physics, chemistry, biology
within Kantian terms, each framed as a series of tel-
eological rather than aesthetic judgements. Contra
the liking for the beautiful, and the resolution of the
sublime, Kants teleological judgements borrow
their principles from reason, resolving concepts of
nature according to their seeming purposiveness,
that is, the rationality, comprehensibility and sys-
tematicity of nature. And so entangling the histories
of biological science with a reading of the mon-
strous in Kant, Kac and Ronell (2007), for example,
presents us with a bestiary of extreme life, the
inhabitants of which tell a story of alternative evolu-
tions. Such alternatives have reached their apotheo-
sis, perhaps, in recent developments in artscience
practices, wherein, and echoing concerns within
speculative realism, artists deploy the apparatus and
techniques of physics to challenge the inheritance of
human-centred thinking through an engagement
with dark materialisms, probing the annihilation
of matter.1
Though geographers tend to look to the materials
and practices of art as a means of grounding dialo-
gues on space, landscape, scale, site and so on, it
is important to note that such post-human art proj-
ects are very much a negotiation of the with-ness
and spacings of encounters, such that we find, for
example, alliances drawn through contact with
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animals as living flesh, and embodied beings,
rather than cultural objects. These include a rep-
rise of Derridian ideas that leverage the look of the
animal into a rethinking of the human: in the optical
and mimetic registers of art, the human I is made
in an engagement with the eyes of the animal
other, such that nakedness and the animal body
of the human come to function as a necessary sup-
plement to human subjectivity (Broglio, 2008).
Elsewhere, and in a partial critique of such anthro-
pocentric orientations, a body of artwork has devel-
oped that owes much to ethnology and particularly
the work of Jacob von Uexkull. Here, artists seek
to encounter (and to re-present) the subjective life-
worlds of the animals. Figuratively moving beyond
the human and to expose its boundaries through a
different animal phenomenology privilege is
accorded the mark of real, with animals engaged
by artists in making-processes, often through the
marking of surfaces. The resulting co-produced art-
work, most often for human consumption, then
becomes read as the genuine artifact of the event,
of the animals Umwelt (Baker, 2000: 13). We can
also find the aporia of Derridean hospitality being
employed within bio-art to develop an aesthetics
of care, with the artistic creation and hosting of
transgenic life forms offered as a consideration of
hybridity, but also a response-ability towards
and of the non-human other (Aristarkhova, 2010;
Baker, 2003). The challenge to anthropomorphism
is continued beyond the animal question in those
artscience practices whose adoption of the material-
ities and practices of nano- and genetic technologies
serves to draw out the material continuity of human
subject and world, specifically challenging the
membranes of skin and cell (Zurr and Catts, 2002).
In our own work, we partake in dialogues within
the fields of both cultural geography and art theory/
practice, dialogues that do not so much share a com-
mon ground though both, as we hope has become
clear, inherit a great deal of the aesthetic legacy
noted above as they proffer ways of framing a
post-humanism. And so, whilst we go on to flesh out
this topic via reference to a particular set of what can
be called artworks, each of which can be firmly
located in the post-human art world outlined above,
we want to emphasise that this is not accomplished
via the finding of geography within art, or, to turn
this around, the making art of geographic debate.
That is, we appreciate the differential points of
entry, and lines of inquiry, that become available
when we use artistic practices as a stepping off point
for thinking about aesthetics as a field of knowledge
that enables us to reflect and ask questions about
post-humanism.
The particular works we explore in the following
section are, appropriately then, by artist cum geogra-
pher Perdita Phillips, whose mediums are primarily
installation art, sculpture, drawing, photography and
sound, and whose projects turn time and again
toward the place of the human over and against
both animals and minerals. The first work we
engage is entitled Green, Grey or Dull Silver
(20072008) and consists of a series of in the field
interactions with male specimens of the Great
Bowerbird, specifically observation of their collec-
tion and arrangement of objects in their display
space, and the vocalisations performed as part of
their mating displays as well as installations, com-
mentaries, photographs and sketches. The second
is entitled The Sixth Shore (20092012). Here,
layered sonic landscapes are imagined and realised,
including the sound worlds of a colony of living
rocks (Glasgow, 2010) thrombolites, whose dis-
tinctive dome-like structures are the carbonate build
up from colonies of microbes as well as various
fauna, residents and scientists, all inhabiting the
shores of Lake Clifton, Australia. Drawing inspira-
tion from Deleuze and Guattaris geophilosophy,
these works, as we go on to discuss below, speak
to a series of thresholds, each fraught with philoso-
phical, scientific and artistic meaning for the post-
human, including art/science, academic/lay, lithic/
organic, taxonomic/monstrous, anerobic/aerobic
atmosphere and so on. We map our own journey
across each by asking, where is the artistry?
The most human of birds . . . themost aesthetic of all animals
Found across the savannas of Australia, the 14
bowerbird species that construct bowers have
become iconic for evolutionary biology, beha-
vioural ecology and biophilosophy as well as the
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subject of a number of artistic works. What is partic-
ular interesting to us about the project Green, Grey
or Dull Silver (20072008) is its focus on a series of
explorations into the collection practices and obser-
vances of the Great Bowerbird (Chlamydera nucha-
lis), collections that are read by bird behaviouralists
and biologists as a culturally conditioned sign of
mate quality. This is itself a neo-Darwinian, aes-
thetic play that aligns birds with humans in that
they have behaviours and characteristics that trans-
cend mere natural selection; as Darwin himself
remarked, birds are the most aesthetic of all ani-
mals (1871[2004]: n.p.).
The aesthetic enters into Phillips artwork by vir-
tue of another manoeuvre, however, as we go on to
explain below. That is, whilst she takes on board the
scientific method of bird behaviouralists, and indeed
her findings contribute to this body of research, there
is nonetheless a remaking of the relation between
observer and observed, human and bird. Enrolled in
her work, the behaviouralists credence to the taste
for beauty shown by these birds in their mating dis-
plays is marked by what we might term, following
Kant, a teleological judgement as to why and with
what effect such a taste is deployed. As Phillips
observes in a commentary for her mixed media
installation, The World has No Shortage of Things
(2007), The males freely avail themselves of human
made objects as long as they fit certain criteria of col-
our, size and roundness. These criteria are thought to
be both genetically inherited and in part culturally
learnt, and socially transmitted through generations
(Phillips, 2007, n.p.; see Figure 1) Bowerbird display
is given a purposiveness and a systematicity
finding a quality mate via sexual selection that
can be apprehended by systematic observation.
Whilst deploying the same experimental proce-
dures, Phillips, however, effectively makes art
Figure 1. Photograph from The World has No Shortage of Things (Phillips, 2007). Here, [t]wo shelves are positionedopposite each other in a secluded corridor. A Great Bowerbird and samples of objects collected by wild birds, face acollection of grey geometric shapes. The opposing displays are accompanied by intense bowerbird calls on the onehand and taxonomic descriptions of the birds on the other. The entire gallery echoes with a soundscape of theworld of the bowerbird from the Broome Bird Observatory. (Source: http://www.perditaphillips.com/index.php?optioncom_mtree&taskviewlink&link_id82&Itemid100151; copyright Perdita Phillips.)
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by remaking the relations that bind her to her sub-
jects. Specifically, this is accomplished via an
emphasis upon a cross-species expressivity, made
possible by a shared capacity for sense making. The
consequent sense-worlds created, though, like
Yeats widening gyres, are each alien to the other,
spiralling away from this mutual grounding in biol-
ogy. She writes whilst conveying theUmwelt of the
bowerbird might ultimately be an impossible task,
the artwork explores this space of uncertainty
between the human and the nonhuman (2007:
n.p.). In The World has No Shortage, this space
yawns to encompass the mineral world, represented
by grey, geometric shapes, which, Phillips notes, the
taxonomic system of Linnaeus floundered upon.
The artistry of Phillips works, then, we want to
argue in this section, makes an interesting foil
against which to engage with the artistry of the
bower-birds themselves, an approach made possible
by a series of scientific and philosophical interven-
tions on their behaviour and biology. The focus of
such fascination are the bowers the male birds cre-
ate, varying by species from avenues, to stick
towers up to 3 m high, and huts up to 4 m in dia-
meter, and decorated with as many as several thou-
sand flowers, fruits, mushrooms, snail shells,
butterfly wings, stones and other natural and
increasingly human-made objects. How do we
understand such activity? According to many bird
behaviouralists, the answer lies both in how female
bowerbirds respond to such bower collections and
how male birds compete in building them.
Borgia (1985), for example, has sought to investi-
gate what is termed the marker hypothesis, wherein
it is argued that female bowerbirds prefer more
highly constructed and decorated bowers, taking
these as indicative of a males quality as a mate.
Observing satin bowerbirds over a 2-year period,Bor-
gia and his teamproceeded to remove fromhalf of the
22 bowers under study some of the decorations (com-
prising blue feathers, yellow snail shells, cicada skins,
etc.), thoughmaking sure to leave three yellow leaves
which males hold in their beaks during their active
displays. This control was held to help isolate the
impact of the bower as decorated construct. Not only
did females choose themore decorated bowersmore
frequently, the lower quality specimens were more
likely to be attacked by competing male bowerbirds.
For Borgia, such a preference makes sense it has a
purposiveness, we might say insofar as only the
most dominant males can accumulate feathers and
snail shells as decorations in such large numbers
(1985: 270).
Diamonds (1986) study of New Guinea Bower-
birds (Amblyornis inornatus), by contrast, sought to
help explain the difference in style between
bowers of the same species in the same locale. Using
numbered, coloured poker chips, Diamond was able
to trace the differential preferences expressed
between bowerbirds over space. Decoration colours,
bower construction and height were all, he sug-
gested, selected according to culturally condi-
tioned, as opposed to genetically hard-wired,
traits. Small wonder he refers to these as the most
intriguingly human of birds (Diamond, 1982: 102).
The terminology deployed in such studies makes
clear their indebtedness to a Darwinist framing of
aesthetics, wherein there is a crucial difference
noted between natural selection, which is predicated
on the environmental fit of randomly produced
traits (including an aesthetics of form), and sexual
selection, which may well deploy seemingly detri-
mental traits, such as elaborate bower construction.
Indeed, it was Darwins focus on secondary sexual
characteristics that his critics, such as the geogra-
pher Alfred Russell Wallace, considered a futile
point of analysis (Grammer et al., 2003). For Miller,
however, such displays signal a truth about the
[bird] artists individual fitness (2001: 7). Sexual
selection thus highlights the capacity of choice
in the selection of a mate in a way that shapes artis-
tic virtuosity as a fitness indicator (2001: 20).
PhillipsGreen, Grey or Dull Silver (20072008)
borrows considerably from this body of work. Over
a period of 2 years, Phillips left a series of coloured
objects around 13 bowers, observing and recording
which were chosen by which individuals for collec-
tion and construction. It also harkens back to an ear-
lier form of study, however, one that does not reside
easily in either scientific or lay knowledges. In
the 1960s, retiree Reta Vellenga and her husband
undertook a study of satin bowerbirds in their back-
yard, located in the Blue Mountains outside of Syd-
ney, over a 6-year period. Following some 426 male
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satin bowerbirds, Vellenga (1970) writes of bowers
as love parlours that serve as a symbol of a males
property rights, a property to be protected aggres-
sively from raids but that were also tended daily.
Vellenga also left material decorations for her eth-
nographic participants in the form of a blue celluloid
band that was transferred between sites before
becoming woven into one male birds bower.
Vellengas thinking like a bowerbird has some-
thing in common with the mosquito hunter that
Shaw et al. (2010) describe, whose work picks site,
pace and purpose from the biogeographic life of the
mosquito. But, it also raises questions around the
purposiveness of collection practices and obser-
vances. Indeed, for Welsch, (2004, n.p.), the central
question becomes how is it that beauty and a sense
of beauty arise in the context of utility, without
being a sense of utility per se, or reducible to util-
ity? In response, Welsch teases out an apprecia-
tion of beauty as a capacity in and of itself, one
that cannot be reduced to an awareness of fitness
and a desire to mate. For if, he argues, there is no
clarity as to what the sources of the aesthetic are,
then one has no right to degrade animal aesthetics
or even to exclude it from the realm of aesthetic
consideration by pointing to its sexual grounding
(2004, n.p.).
It also raises question around the shared aes-
thetic experience of human and bowerbird. As Dar-
win went on to state [w]hether we can or not give
any reason for the pleasure thus derived from vision
and hearing, yet man and many of the lower animals
are alike pleased by the same colour, graceful shad-
ing and forms and the same sounds (1871[2004]:
88). For Darwin, the answer to the issue of an animal
aesthetics lay in neurology, wherein, he argued, a
sense of beauty is aligned with both emotional and
intellectual capacities. Their ubiquity enables
beauty to be judged beyond both the species limit
and a simplistic alignment with sexual drive and
desire. In the morphology of the bower from the
rudimentary practice bowers of an immature male
to the constant maintenance of a mature males dis-
play bower time and memory enable an aesthetic
refinement, Welsch (2004) insists, such that we
might say an awareness of agreeability, rather than
an immediate desire, emerges.
Framed in this way, Phillips bowerbird experi-
ments resonate with Deleuze and Guattaris (2004)
understanding of the figure of the artist and the work
of art. Indeed, tracking the Brown Stagemaker (Sce-
nopoeetes dentirostris), a species ofbowerbird, across
their plateaux is to find an increasingly populated
world inwhich a veritablemenagerie, including spiny
lobsters andposter fish, amongst others, do theoretical
work within a broader geophilosophy. The artistry of
these various species moves us from the comprehen-
sion of territory as tied to aggression, such as we find
in bowerbird science, to territory as a form of art tied
to expression. That is, in reconnecting territory to
rhythm and expressive marking, Deleuze and
Guattari develop a series of examples of this becom-
ing-expressive-territory, not least of which is the
Brown Stagemaker, which
. . . lays down landmarks each morning by drop-
ping leaves it picks from its tree and then turning
them upside down so the paler underside stands out
against the dirt: inversion produces a matter of
expression. (2004: 348)
As Bogue (1991: 89) explores further, each leaf is a
component that is no longer simply part of amilieu
by which is meant an ensemble of qualities, sub-
stances and events but has been converted into
an artistic medium by dint of the repetitive, territor-
ialising behaviour of the bowerbird. In Deleuze and
Guattaris text, this visual component of an avian
aesthetic is linked into a sonorous element, the
becoming expressive of rhythm and melody that is
the site of the territorialising factor. Indeed, in
describing the bower as a ready-made (after the
Dada artists), they note a common, cross-species
denominator of working with what is to hand. Thus,
Territorial marks are ready-mades. And what is
called art brut is not at all pathological or primi-
tive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of
matters of expression in the movement of territori-
ality: the base or ground of art. Take anything and
make it a matter of expression. The stagemaker
practices art brut. Artists are stage-makers, even
when they tear up their own posters. Of course from
this standpoint art is not the privilege of human
beings. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 349)
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And yet, what does this mean to take anything and
make it a matter of expression? To remake territory
as an artistic movement? For us, such a post-human
aesthetic raises all manner of questions around the
thresholds of such a statement, which may well
take the form of a limit as to what kind of material
is under scrutiny, understood according to its partic-
ular expressive capacities, but also in regard to our
understanding of the practices that enable this
expression and its recognition in others. A threshold
may also, however, refer to a point of no return,
wherein the Kantian aesthetic order spirals in
ever-widening gyres till we can no longer refer back
to the analytic coordinates that allowed us to make
sense of sense. For us, these questions can be
explored via reference to a second artwork by Phil-
lips, The Sixth Shore (20092012), wherein, as we
go on to describe below, science is no longer so eas-
ily boxed off as teleological judgement. Here, we
find a biology that is not tied to complexification
and evolutionary imperatives, but is instead a matter
of stickiness and gliding, and the inside/outside
work of membranes. How, then, do we proceed to
think through the science of sense making in this
context? And, what is the import for our understand-
ing of the nature of aesthetics?
Of tiny sounds and evolutionaryalternatives
The Sixth Shore (20092012) takes the form of a
sound-walk based on and around Lake Clifton,
in the Yalgorup National Park, Western Australia.
Audiences, walking in other locales, use headspea-
kers to pick up geolocated layers of sounds from
here, including the songs of birdcall, the wind rus-
tling through trees, scientists discussing ecosystem
states and local residents offering oral histories.
Adding to the complexity of this sonic collage are
the imagined sounds of thrombolytic time, centring
on one of the few examples of these saline living
rocks to be found across the globe. Thrombolites
are made up of a complex community of microor-
ganisms, including cyanobacteria, and cemented
with crystallised or detrital minerals as well as a
slime of biotic material (Figure 2). Within this
soundscape, Phillips creates a spiral of tiny sounds,
a descent into geological past and tiny pinprick
Figure 2. Thrombolites of Lake Clifton, Western Australia. (Source: http://symbiotica-adaptation.com/?page_id46;copyright Perdita Phillips.)
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sounds like the multitudinous field of microbes
(2009: 4). These, she writes, help us to access a vast
panorama extending from the beginnings of life itself
to the present day . . . opening us out onto scalesbeyond our senses, a window onto the sublime (Phil-
lips, 2009: 4).
If Philips finds value in the thrombolites for what
she casts, in her artwork, as the challenge they pose
to anthropocentric spatial and temporal framings of
life, we are concerned with querying to what
degree, in what form, and with what import, might
we consider such thrombolite colonies, like bower-
birds, to have an aesthetic sense and an artistry. As
we go on to describe below, thrombolites do not
revolve around reproduction, and hence evolution-
ary biology as Darwin envisioned it, but around
accretion. In terms of territory, then, there are
no behaviours to be explored via reference to sex-
ual selection, but rather the working of viscera and
membranes in the context of physiological and bio-
chemical gradients. How, then, does this example
and its attendant biology prompt us to think about
the aesthetic?
The Sixth Shore (20092012) was developed and
funded as part of the art/science organisation Sym-
bioticAs on-going project, Adaptation, whose
launch was timed to coincide with the 150th anni-
versary of the publication of DarwinsOn the Origin
of Species. And as with her bowerbird work, Phillips
makes extensive reference to a body of scientific
research, this time encompassing the study of cli-
mate change and its impact upon the ecology of
Lake Clifton and its environs as well as the micro-
biology of the thrombolites. In regard to the former,
the thrombolites of Lake Clifton have been identi-
fied by environmental scientists as being of signifi-
cance because they are amongst the oldest evidence
of life on earth: the probability is that such ancient
ecosystems probably signalled the first appearance
of cellular organisation and photosynthesis (Smith
et al., 2010: 208). As evidence, their particular
constellation of materials and forces deserve to be
protected from the vicissitudes of environmental
change, especially in the context of global changes
that the biosphere is experiencing in recent decades
(Smith et al., 2010: 208). There is also an originary
moment acknowledged here, insofar as it was the
emergence of cynaobacteria with their photosyn-
thetic properties, fixing carbon dioxide and excret-
ing oxygen that led to the oxygen holocaust
22002400 million years ago, which in turn allowed
for the ascendance of aerobic life (including
humans). Certainly, Phillips reference to the (math-
ematical) sublime echoes this impulse.
The second body of scientific work she refer-
ences, however, looks to the micro in making sense
of the thrombolites. And it is here that we can see the
thresholds of a teleological reasoning as the meta-
bolic relations via which microbacteria help to form
the thrombolite not only withstand causeeffect
explanation, as we go on to show below, but reveal
an in-betweeness that challenges taxonomic efforts.
Indeed, at Lake Clifton, thrombolite growth has
been associated with the work of the filamentous
cyanobacteria Scytonema sp., especially, distin-
guishable by virtue of its particular metabolic func-
tions rather than its morphology or cellular structure
(Moore and Burne, 1994; Reed et al., 1984). It is
this research, at the level of themicro, which prompts
us to think more carefully about a post-Kantian aes-
thetic that seeks to enrol and rework the free play
of imagination and understanding or sensibility and
knowledge/cognition. Specifically, it prompts us to
consider the real conditions for the possibility of
an aesthetics for thrombolite communities. If we can
think of bats, for example, as developing sonar, a
new form of sensibility through which this organism
is enabled in the context of the complexities of its
environment and via which it selectively relates to
it (Bogue, 2003), then in order to understand throm-
bolite aesthetics, we need to take account of their
key capacity in relation to the complexities of their
environment and that is accretion.
What microlevel analysis of the thrombolites
highlights is that it achieves accretion via three pro-
cesses, each working with largely the same materi-
als, but via a variety of physical and chemical
interactions, and over a number of time-frames.
First, there is the precipitation of calcium carbonate
(CaCO3) from water in the form of calcite. This
occurs when CaCO3-rich water reaches a saturation
point, and the resulting coating forms a kind of
cement that embeds the existing material. Second,
there is the trapping and intertwining of detrital
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sediments by the sticky surface properties,
sheath hydrophobicity, and gliding motility (Burne
andMoore, 1987: 243) of the tough, cellular walls of
filamentous cyanobacteria as well as the slimy
extracellular DNA, proteins and polysaccharides
extruded by microorganisms. And, third, several
microbial groups including cyanobacteria, but also
aerobic heterotrophs, sulphide-oxidizing bacteria,
sulphate-reducing bacteria and fermentative bacteria
(Riding, 2000) biogenically precipitate CaCO3once a saturation threshold has been reached, with
crystals nucleating on and within the biomass. The
internal coherence and metabolic functioning of
an individual cyanobacterium, then, is expressed as
a complex sensible negotiation of environmental
outsides, understood here as physiochemical gradi-
ents. This internal composition simultaneously
impacts upon the relations expressed between and
amongst cyanobacteria as well as on their production
of lithic material (see Stal, 1995). At Lake Clifton,
cyanobacteria are sustained by carbonate and biocar-
bonate ions in the groundwater that seep into the lake
and precipitate CaCO3 as the mineral aragonite.
It remains a point of scientific debate, however, as
to the causeeffect relations operating here. Indeed,
the literature seems to point to the paucity of such a
mode of thinking in light of the difficulty in retaining
a sense of individual components acting upon each
other.This includes the seemingly antithetical charac-
ter of the organic and the lithic.2 For example, there is
a query over how the CaCO3-rich water reaches a
saturation point, thus precipitating the deposition of
theminerals that form the thrombolites lithic compo-
nents (see Dupraz et al., 2009). On the one hand, the
uptake of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis
increases the pH surrounding the cyanobacterial cell,
which favours carbonate precipitation. On the other
hand, biocarbonate is the product of microbial sul-
phate and nitrate reduction, and its production also
promotes CaCO3 precipitation. Calcification itself
can cause impregnationof sheathmaterial bycrystals
(which ultimately results in the formation of
macaroni-like tubes) or the encrustration of sheath
material to form an external crust [giving] . . . moldsof small intertwined and felted groups of sheaths
rather than individual filaments (Burne and Moore,
1987: 245). At the scale of the thrombolite, we find
that the living cyanobacterial mat grades into micro-
granular aragonite enclosing numerous remnants of
cyanobacterial sheaths (capsules) and then, deeper,
into pure aragonitic micrite (Kempe and Kazmierc-
zak, 2007: 252). Aragonite is thermodynamically
unstable in the ambient conditions of Earth, and tends
to alter to calcite at scales of 107108 years; these are
polymorphs, with the same chemical formula but a
different chemical structure.
Bearing this scientific framing of the microlevel
in mind, if we look to the cyanobacteria as an entry
point into the thrombolite we can in turn query in
what form we find aesthetics. A first, and increas-
ingly visible, route lies in biogenics (Lyon, 2007).
Here, there is a concerted effort to understand how
organisms such as cyanobacteria have an emergent
level of complexity such as we see, albeit in differ-
ent forms, in the aesthetic judgements of Kants
third critique, and in the expressive actions of the
bowerbirds. Bacteria have, under the scalar logics
of normative cognitive science that is, working
down from human cognition long been thought too
simple and too reactive to have cognitive capacities.
But, these recent biogenic approaches have insisted
upon bacteria as having the capacity for remember-
ing, problem-solving, learning and communication
(Stotz and Griffiths, 2008). Such approaches, taken
up most forcefully in the biohumanities and cogni-
tive biology, up-end normative arguments by seek-
ing answers to what were psychological
questions principally around cognition within
the realm of the biological (see Shapiro, 2007).
What is more, bacteria are not just to be considered
singular entities collected en masse, but are also
framed here in terms of their complex collective
behaviours, swarming motility or wolf pack hunt-
ing, all mediated by chemical forms of communica-
tion (Lyon, 2007). Biofilms, which include
everything from the layers of plaque on our teeth
to the complex communities of the thrombolites,
become rendered as highly structured living
arrangements that can contain many different spe-
cies of bacteria, and which allow for the division
of labour and mutual living.3
An alternative route, however, is focused not
upon humanising the traits bacteria are in posses-
sion of, but upon the wholesale working over of our
Dixon et al. 263
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understanding of cognition. Indeed, such an
approach raises a slew of questions concerning our
apprehension of aesthetics as a science of the sen-
sible in which biophysical and the biochemical are
centralised. Specifically, and once more following
Phillips lead, we can look to Deleuze, who identi-
fies a primary vital sensibility, wherein organic
syntheses metabolism in other words form the
building blocks for rational, conscious cognition
(Deleuze, 1994: 100). What is important for our
understanding of aesthetics here is not that such
basic syntheses are a stepping stone for a cognition
wherein we can recognise the modes and registers of
aesthetics identified above; that is, as based on
rational judgement or a form of sensed expression.
Rather, under the rubric of the biological transcen-
dental aesthetic (see Protevi, 2010a, 2010b), this is
a biological, or enactive, cognition. In other words,
sense-making is no longer to be apprehended, as in
Kants third critique, as a transcendental analytic,
with aesthetics as a higher level of emergent com-
plexity. Instead, biological sense making proffers
the a priori, but always concrete, genesis, of organic
time and space (Deleuze, 1994: 98).
Without wishing to delve too deeply into
Deleuzes oeuvre this time,4 sense-making is consti-
tuted here from a series of syntheses, not all of
which are operative across all organisms. Thus, the
active syntheses of thought are allowed for by the
passive syntheses of perception; these in turn are
allowed for by passive organic syntheses (or meta-
bolism). The challenge lies in avoiding a reductive
tracing back whilst articulating how such passive
syntheses are indeed constitutive. That is, in grasp-
ing how the organic synthesis of the elements of
water, earth, light and air is not merely prior to the
active synthesis that would recognise or represent
them, but is also prior to their being sensed . . .each organism not only in its receptivity and percep-
tion but also in its viscera (that is its metabolism),
is a sum of contractions, or retentions and expecta-
tions (Deleuze, 1994: 73, 99). Local selves, in
this case cyanobacteria, are formed in terms of these
contractions in the viscera, which thereby account
simultaneously for the possibility of experiencing
sensations [and] the power of reproducing them
(Deleuze, 1994: 98).
This gives us then, a biological (though not, it
must be stressed, a biologically reductive) aesthetic.
And yet, we wonder, do thrombolites challenge us to
query aesthetics even further than do the cyanobac-
teria that help constitute them? What is the relation-
ship between the aesthetics of cynaobacteria, as
outlined above, and the accreted, thromobolite
colony? By way of concluding this section, we want
to take the opportunity to offer a speculative line of
inquiry that looks a little more closely at milieu, a
term that appeared in the preceding section. There,
in the bowerbird context, milieu referred to leaves
that, redistributed by the bowerbirds, became
expressive insofar as they allowed for a territory
to emerge; such material recomposition being
described by Deleuze and Guattari in artistic terms
as a ready-made. In the thrombolytic context,
however, questions around milieu and expression
are cast in, more literally, molecular ways.
Milieu becomes, in the first instance, an illumi-
nating structural component, enabling us to better
comprehend these bioticnon-biotic assemblages
and the real conditions for their growth via accre-
tion. As we noted above, a crucial means of cemen-
tation is the sticky, unsheathed DNA material
extruded by microorganisms, and Deleuze and
Guattari, in discussing organic expression at the
scale of genes (amongst other scales), make a men-
tion of proteins drawn from a pre-biotic soup
(2004: 42). Here, expression means putting of
content to work, with content in this case being
amino acids, and expression being the nucleotide
sequences and the gene itself (Deleuze and Guattari,
2004: 42). Following on from this, is it possible to
see thrombolites as a figuring of milieu, which,
Deleuze and Guattari explain, grow from the mid-
dle (au milieu) when molecular materials and sub-
stantial elements are exchanged and organised
around a reversible boundary or membrane, forming
a unity of composition that is qualitatively unique?
The resulting material assemblage incorporates all
that is involved in the interactions between its ele-
ments, compounds, energy sources and organisms
from the molecular to the molar levels. Can we
sketch out a framing for the thrombolite science
described above that proffers expression, and hence
an artistry of a form, to these bioticnon-biotic
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assemblages? Specifically, in contrast to our bower-
bird example, such a framing would be, in part, pos-
sible because genes become here a means of
expression they put content to work not only via
their role within reproduction (in this case, morpho-
logical bifurcation) but also via accretion. Are there
hints, perhaps, of a post-human aesthetic that can be
linked to a biology that persists otherwise than via
the evolution of human expressivity?
In the second instance, thinking through milieu
directs us to the manner in which the components
that make up the thrombolite bind and cleave. In
DeleuzoGuattarian terms, living and non-living
materials are both topological, insofar as they are
an intensification of space and time, but Protevi
(2010a, n.p.) argues, following Simondon
(2007[1995]), organic life possesses a particular,
dynamic topological configuration that allows
for the measured unfolding of time at both the
molecular and species level. That is, in the
ontogenetic organic register, cellular displace-
ment and temporality of gene expression net-
works are linked in embryonic development,
whilst in the evolutionary organic register, the
distribution of plastic developmental systems
(multiplicity of concrete space and time of onto-
genesis in a population) provides the variation
for the temporality of genetic accommodation
(Simondon, 2007[1995]). Are thrombolites, per-
haps, figures par excellence of Deleuze and
Guattaris self-consistent aggregate? These are
composed of heterogeneous elements, as
opposed to the homogeneous strata that ensue
from a series of linear causalities between ele-
ments. In a passage that actually concerns itself
with bowerbirds, Deleuze and Guattari write that
with such self-consistent aggregates
instead of a regulated succession of forms-
substances we are presented with consolidations
of very heterogeneous elements, orders that have
been short-circuited or even reverse causalities,
and captures between materials and forces of a dif-
ferent nature: as if a machinic phylum, a destratify-
ing transversality, moved through elements, orders,
forms and substances, the molar and the molecular,
freeing a matter and tapping forces. (2004: 370)
Rendered thus, the paradoxical figure of the living
rock chimerical, alien, otherwise that has so
often been configured as a remarkable leftover from
another time and place, both preceding and helping to
beget life as we know it on this planet, no longer
appears to slouch towards us in quite so confounding
amanner. But, wewonder, is this because the analytic
co-ordinates via which we have made sense of sense
have now been set adrift in a post-human landscape?
Have we reached the expressive limits of the aes-
thetic?Or, havewemerely caught sight of newvistas?
In conclusion: the value ofhumanist remains
Todeploy, for themoment,more traditional frames of
reference for an understanding of the aesthetic, its
analytic value, we suggest, as with science, lies not
in any sense of resolution, but rather with the unfold-
ing of question after question. The terrain it inhabits is
an invitation to thought. This does not take the formof
a systematicmethodology, of course, but rather a tra-
cing between science, philosophy and art around the
notion of sense-making. From Kant to Deleuze, bio-
genics to darkmaterialisms, we can see how aesthetic
inquiry partakes of each it acquires a motile lexicon
of sense, sensibility and cognition yet we do not see
the final triumph of one or other framing, whether this
be a biological reductivism or a transcendentalism.
Instead, the aesthetic makes a display of its constitu-
tive outside, inviting the arrival of new empirics, the-
ories, speculations, all to be placed over and against
each other as well as previous work. Conceived of
as a sk(e)in that connects but never envelops its con-
stitutive parts, the aesthetic surely resonates with a
geographic discipline that continually negotiates the
physical and social sciences aswell as the humanities.
In particular, we want to conclude, it resonates
with a humanistic geography and a post-human
geomorphology. In regard to the former, this is not,
as we hope has become clear, because the aesthetic
is allied with an uniquely human rationality and rea-
son or is concerned with an individualistic, emo-
tional response to art. Rather, such an aesthetic
field of inquiry echoes the breadth of commentaries
by geographers such as Tuan (1989), as noted ear-
lier, and Buttimer (1976), commentaries usually
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consigned to the underlying layers of a disciplinary
palimpsest. Yet, bearing in mind the arguments
made above, what could be more post-human, for
example, than Buttimers (1976: 283) call for more
in-depth inquiry into the organic, cognitive, affec-
tive and symbolic foundations of our place in and
with the world? Faced with the desire to decentre,
as well as the obligation to preserve, this humanist
impulse has indeed deepened over recent decades
into a consideration of what remains of the human.
Indeed, it has become relevant to the halting
emergence of what might be termed a post-human
geomorphology, insofar as this exploratory work
calls into question the very foundations upon which
a humanenvironment relationship has been made
central to physical geography. At first glance, recent
interest in the framing of landforms as emerging
from the intersection of human consciousness and
quantum processes, such that consistent macro-
scopic idealizations are perceived and cognised
as landforms (Harrison, 2001; Rhoads, 1999), would
appear to very much resonate with a Kantian notion
of knowledge production. The intent here, however,
is to underscore the ontic, rather than epistemic, char-
acter of landforms, insofar as their emergence
requires an immersive experience of a world charac-
terised not so much by flow and flux as by material-
ities that collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and
disintegrate (Bennett, 2009: xi). Small wonder, then,
that some geomorphologists have developed an inter-
est in what may be termed the affective capacity of
landscape, such that awe and excitement are both
mobilised and acknowledged as part and parcel of
the research experience (Baker, 2008; Baker and
Twidale, 1991; Tooth, 2006, 2009).
We hope to have made the argument that the
aesthetic should play a substantive role in these
debates, whether in the form of a post-Kantian
questioning of the sense making subject, as we have
outlined it, or via other routes, such as a Neitzschean
partaking of process. For our part, we find within this
tracing of the aesthetic a suite of concepts that cry out
for further attention from geographers, not least of
which are play and creativity, the former con-
signed to the word of children, the latter making an
emaciated appearance within the economic geogra-
phy literature. If we acknowledge their circulation
through the arts and humanities, certainly, but also
philosophy and biology, what new invitations to
thought are put forth?
Authors Note
A draft of part of this paper was presented in the session on
Human Remains: The place of the human in a post-human
world organised by Paul Harrison and John Wylie for the
IVth Nordic Geographers Meeting, Roskilde, 2011.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Paul and John for proffering this invita-
tion to thought and to the participants for their comments.
We are also very grateful to three referees for their
engaged, constructive reviews.
Funding
Research for this work was funded by an AHRC/NSF grant
[AHRC Grant No. AH/I500022/1; NSF Grant No. 86908].
Notes
1. See, for example, works collected together during the
Real Thing exhibition and event (https://www.tate.
org.uk/britain/eventseducation/lateattatebritain/lateatt
atebritainseptember2010.htm [accessed 12 August
2011]) and also those under discussion at the Dark
Materialisms Symposium (conducted on 21 January
2011) hosted by the Natural History Museum (http://
back doorbroadcasting.net/2011/01/dark-materialism/
[accessed 12 August 2011]).
2. This is a dichotomy that Bennetts (2009) Vibrant Mat-
ter so engagingly takes to task, not least via her deploy-
ment of an image from Cornelia Parkers (1992)
installation Neither From Nor Towards as cover-art.
Here, a flock (?), shoal (?) of rocks rises up from the
floor. These flighty (?), swimming (?) rocks are loo-
sened from their geologic stratum, emerging into
another airy (?), liquid (?) realm. The emphasis here
is not upon a strange transformation from the inorganic
into the organic; rather, there is an unfolding of a
capacity for flight (?), floating (?).
3. Of course, descending to a sub-microlevel allows us to
query the coherence of just such a system, and thus the
making of such claims. Microbacteria, for example, are
themselves thoroughly permeated by viruses that enable
particular microbial growth rates, genetic exchange,
diversity and adaptation (Desnues et al., 2008).
266 Dialogues in Human Geography 2(3)
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4. For a consideration of the relationship between Deleuze
and key geographical concepts, see Bonta and Protevi
(2004), Buchanan and Lambert (2005) and Doel (1999).
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