Agential Guts — Care and Creativity within the Messy Multi-species Assemblage
Riina Maaria Hentriika Hannula
Concepts transform thinking and doing and produce unconventional experiences and embodiments of relations, and this exposition format emphasises this interlinkage of academic and artistic endeavours. Agential Gut’s contribution to these ontological conversations is to experiment with posthumanist thought via art-based research and to produce the Gaia story that these theories invited to emerge, supporting speculative ethics to fuse with art-based practice and complete each other. Most key concepts, from processual and relational ontologies to this project, are theoretical ways to write about new modes of relating and caring in the multi-species context. The concepts like affect, agential cut, sympathy, symbiosis, and methods, and means like diffraction and becoming-with were lived in Agential Guts.
The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Agential Guts were that human actions cannot be solely derived from individual endeavours, and they need to be posited within relations (Barad 2007). Acknowledging symbiosis as a baseline to approach our agencies, I drew from a simple statement from Donna Haraway: ‘We become with each other or not at all’ (2016: 4). This being in the middle and breaking binaries of human and animal, nature and culture, subject and object, host, and microbe, etc., is the ontological basis derived also from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Being in the middle of processes and beings, being plural like Gaia, which is made up of multiplicity, is seen in excerpt 1 of G.O.A.T. Being in the middle is acceptance of becoming Earthbound. For Bruno Latour (2017), Gaia is the thin layer of the earth but also a disposition of responsibility toward it. Cultivating sensitivities needs time and repetition: ‘After each passage through a loop, we become more sensitive and more reactive to the fragile envelopes that we inhabit’ (Latour 2017, 140).
Brian Massumi (2014) brings us in the middle, stating that symbiosis is sympathy. The prefix sym- means ‘together’ and centres my argument around the processual and affective messiness of multi-species assembling. Furthermore, Massumi sees creativity in the matter as interspecies playfulness, which fuels becomings and makes unprecedented things emerge. Massumi interprets sympathy as an affect in a new materialist vein, something that can concern nonhuman agents, exceeding human feelings such as pity. Coming from Spinoza to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), affect is bodies’ capacity to affect and be affected and can concern as much as a goat, a microbe, a branch, and a human. Affect is the ability of all kinds of bodies to influence and become influenced. Affect in a new materialist vein is always wiping more than one, requiring a politics of relations, animal politics (Massumi 2014: 27–42). This concept, elaborated as a sort of nonhuman affect, creates a continuum between species (Massumi 2014). Agential Guts speculated how this sympathetic, nonhuman affectivity is embedded in microbial agency enduring to care in particular ways.
The symbiotic and sympathetic assemblage of care within Agential Guts was tactile, olfactory, and audible. Without reducing our entanglement into abstractions or scalable customs, it was rather about envisioning and embodying new forms of relating and thinking-with (Mitman 2019). Mammalian-microbial messy and muddy kin-making created new relations where asymmetries were not ignored but hierarchies were actively dissembled in the actions of microbial exposure, which the exposition demonstrates and the Gaia story tells.
The social study of microbes asks what if we take the holobiont paradigm as a starting point and not as a result. The social study of microbes that develops novel methods and theories to make sense of the microbial world and its societal meaning operates fractionally in the domain of Feminist science and technology studies (STS). Utilising speculative thinking, for instance, to open space for alternative meanings to technoscientific configurations is common within Feminist STS. Likewise, the social study of microbes it fosters space for being sensitive and committed to more-than-human worlds and aids at decentring human agency and privileges dismantling perception that places nonhuman agents as inferior to humans, objects of knowledge, or passive and mechanistic entities that can be instrumentalised (Bellacasa 2017.) Questioning human exceptionality by becoming and knowing with companion animals (Haraway 2016) and microbes (Brives, Rest, and Sariola 2021) acknowledges the different ways of meaning-making beyond the objective view from nowhere (Bellacasa 2017). Agential Guts contributes to the social study of microbes by art-based, speculative methods by practically generating multi-species practices of care where knowing would also stem from the holobiontic coexistence. It strives to work with care in the possibilities of meaning opening constantly around the scientific knowledge on microbial companions.
Barad (2007), among others, creates space for acknowledging nonhumans as active participants in knowledge production. In my home, which was also a standpoint and an artist’s studio, I experienced in action how the knower and known coalesce when research is not about reflecting but about diffraction that produces difference (Barad 2007). An agential cut is an epistemic tool for co-enactment, contrasted to the cartesian cut that separates subject and object, knower and known (Barad 2007). The agential cut, a conceptual contribution to knowledge practices, points out how any activities to create knowledge or produce facts on other species are entanglements, and diffract both. Similarly to Barad, Haraway points out how nonhumans also shape the study, and not only humans hold an active position in knowledge production (Haraway 2008). Aligned with this, thinking with other species like goats and microbes configures an ethical stand to acknowledge their agency. Thinking-with is not just a theoretical but a methodological new materialist and post-anthropocentric justification of collaboration with nonhumans. It is embedded in the feeling of becoming influenced by others, and this draws the condition for the vulnerability that ethical coexistence requires (Barad 2007: 217).
The arts of noticing produce sense-based knowledge that the social study of microbes also relies on (Brives, Rest, and Sariola 2021). In Agential Guts, the microbiome of the gut is a material place for the agential cut, thinking-doing, and artistic collaboration with nonhuman companions. Epistemic conceptualisation can be prosecuted beyond words generating tactile, visual, audible, and multi-sensory meanings. Accordingly, the guts and brains of humans and goats connected by microbial agency was materialised in the artistic exposition. Methods for reconfiguring our relationality and care are shown in G.O.A.T. excerpt 1 and excerpt 2. These scenes display the actions required to think with care and creativity with soils, plants, and goats, to commute and distribute hierarchical and isolated positions, and to allow messy entanglement of the microbiomes. The agentiality of the gut, which refers to the intense space of microbes that we share, is a material, embodied, and situated place for creating knowledge with microbes.
As Anna Tsing (2015) proposes, the art of noticing that is central to multi-species ethnography requires multi-sensory skills. Agential Guts had ‘a research object as contaminated diversity and unit of analysis as the indeterminate encounter’ (Tsing 2015: 37). Most of the skills to learn in gardening and living with other animals require embodied and sensory attunement; for instance, microbes cannot be seen as such, but olfaction and other senses are used to detect their actions. In the case of composting faecal matter and biowaste, for instance, hands-on doings skills are a necessity in becoming more creative with what can be done to improve conditions for the whole assemblage. Multi-species care becomes repurposed via sensing-knowing of the ethnographic fieldwork. Care is not separated from what motivates and directs the research and artistic collaboration. The significance of faeces is made explicit in the opening scene of the video work G.O.A.T. 2022 (excerpt 3).
The fieldwork of Agential Guts was a microbial exposure enabled by sympathetic and symbiotic becomings-with. The ethnographer was entangled with the study subject, circulating symbiotic matters and re-organising them on a small scale. G.O.A.T. excerpt 1 presented a jacket-sized crop field to detour the roles and hierarchies of the agents in the assemblage. Because of the relational and even symbiotic-sympathetic practice of kin-making, I started calling the method in Agential Guts sympoietic-ethnography. The level of observation was not exactly auto-ethnography, since knowing and artistic collaboration were all happening within the messy relations of care, and the knower was not a separate subject. Sympoietic-ethnography expands on the concept of sympoiesis; making with, worlding. Haraway has drawn the term ‘sympoiesis’ from biology, where it occurs in contrast to autopoiesis, which assumes biological individuality (Haraway 2016: 33, 58). Additionally, sympoietic-ethnography elaborates multi-species ethnography, accounting for how all agents are active in the co-enactment of knowledge. As Haraway proposes: ‘We have a mammalian job to do, with our symbiotic and abiotic sympoietic collaborators’ (Haraway 2016: 102).
