The sense of creativity in the symbiotic relations became a link between care practice and artistic output. When different species collide, they do not just mechanistically follow some structural biologically determined rules but create difference: new forms, or modes of relating (Massumi 2014). In the plantationocene, creativity is diminishing because of the control that surrounds the milieu from all directions. Productionist principles define care for the objectives of industries, but more-than-human ethics of care offer alternative meanings and means for care (Bellacasa 2017).
Finding this place of active participation with the more-than-human world is the corpus of art in Agential Guts: it is not human inspiration from ‘nature’ but art done within relations, acknowledging the aesthetic and creative force of different kinds of bodies, and within matter, especially in how things transform each other and thrust them in a becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Conceptual, artistic, and other contributions to perceiving nonhuman agency as creative, caring, affective and affected, desiring, and playful are much needed as long as humans keep separating themselves from the rest of nature and othering different species.
Obtaining knowledge with companion animals and microbes substantiates a distributed web of care beyond objectifying, representing, and harnessing these companions. Caretakers are not just the ones who have a rational or emotional mind that makes decisions on behalf of passive others, but care is distributed across different agents and guts that circulate matter together. Reciprocity of care is asymmetric and multilateral, collectively shared. Being situated in soil communities the way Bellacasa suggests, we embedded relations of interdependency into our research (Bellacasa 2017: 192). Kin-making was stemming from material conditions, acknowledging that microbes and goats also care for. And humans certainly should not care for them only for humans’ benefit.
The anthropogenic deterioration of the environment produces enormous concern by itself but is more largely studied as a factor in the context of human health (Gilbert and Sariola 2020.) Because of the lack of interest in conducting research for the sake of the environment, and instead prioritising human well-being—there is a gap in the approaches to understanding the complexity and messy webs of interdependency. Concluding care as a symbiotic event involves an extended avenue to what it means to care about, take care of, and locate in reciprocal relations of care, which emerge as more-than-human technoscientific assemblings (Bellacasa 2017). In alignment with these endeavours lingering with the messiness of the holobiontic paradigm, Agential Guts proposes moving from self-care to multi-species care, which could account for all the agents in the specific, situated webs of care.
The distributed agency of care within the guts of soils, goats, and humans that I ended up following enacted microbial desire: I did not consider humans as having the only agency of care in the assemblage, but our abilities to care for stems from the desires that nonhumans invest in us. This involves especially microbes, as they need to be hosted by different bodies. Therefore, what Agential Guts cared for and about stemmed from the affective and sensory Earthbound learnings that were possible only through the arts of noticing. Care sparkles within agents diffracted by speculative effort, a lot like how microbes participate in holobiontic bodies in their leaky and messy way.