The use of a mythological title to describe a serious subject for scientific study is fraught with dangers and opportunities not unlike those of Sigmund Freud’s borrowing of the Narcissus and Oedipus myths for use in elaborating psychoanalysis. Save for the Catholic Virgin Mary, mother goddesses have virtually vanished from the modern West; the unconscious association of the reappearing goddess Gaia with Mother Mary, however—if true, a kind of overcompensation for the transcendent phallocentrism of Judeo-Christianity—would help account for some of the shrillest among Gaian new ageists, whose moralistic slogans and puritanical admonitions are marshaled to save a (supposedly) pristine Earth. Yet, as Mary Catherine Bateson points out, it is of little use to treat Earth as a living body while living female bodies themselves still do not command cultural respect. Perhaps considering Earth a Narcissus-like extension of the human self works better than a neo-Christian feminization.
Although satellites had been envisioned as providing us with a view of “the whole earth,” in fact, what has been provided is only one-half of the surface, the “face” of Earth. And although they depend on personification, mythology, and the forever unfinished and eroticized nature of human symbolization, such ideographic or iconic chains—Narcissus, earth, expressive surface—enhance the ethical status of Earth by giving it (a) face. The alternative is to save (this) face by considering Earth as faceless—inanimate, insensible, and unresponsive—and therefore ourselves as unaccountable to it.
It is also possible to argue that “unprovable” Gaia is a species of noble lie, a “narrative integration of cosmology and morality,” and that, Western intellectual and moral biases against deception aside, Gaia is simply environmentally useful whether or not it is true. If this is the case, then describing Gaia theory as geophysiology may confer on this infant discipline the nominal equivalent of scientifically correct swaddling clothes. The culturally valuable noble lie (or ironic commentary thereon) dates back at least to Plato’s advocacy of a myth of metallic origins in the Republic. Like the topology-violating magician who slides a ring onto a knotted loop of string, the well-told noble lie seduces the beholder into believing (in) it despite knowing better.17
In my book Biospheres, I argued that “artificial” ecosystems—containing humans, technology, and the requisite elements for long-term recycling in materially closed environments—are not all that artificial but, rather, the first in a batch of planetary propagules whose proliferation is in keeping with prior epochal evolutionary developments (e.g., bacterial spores, animal bodies, plant seeds).18 Despite the exposure of the scientific inadequacy of the initiators of the world’s biggest closed ecosystem,19 Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona, other recycling ecosystems—including one that had been planned at the world’s biggest cathedral, Saint John the Divine in New York City, which would have digitally transmuted atmospheric gas measurements into music—will likely eventually be built. Already, greenhouses and buildings with central air conditioning represent a step in the direction of closed ecosystems large enough to contain human beings; the next step is the ability to completely recycle gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes.
Fully recycling self-enclosed ecosystems may first be built by the Japanese, whose limited space, island history, and technological prowess are sure to keep them interested in a project whose lucrative applications include pollution control and space station design. Farther in the future, functional biospheres may become necessary because of spoilage of Earth’s shared atmosphere. I believe that the pollution-engendered, technology-fostered cropping up of biospheres (already in its initial phase) will have represented the appearance of individuality at the planetary level. This level represents a natural continuation of the microcosmic level of the prokaryote and the eukaryote made from prokaryotes and of the mesocosmic level of animal and plant bodies made from reproducing eukaryotes.
Taking his cue from Vladimir Vernadsky (who popularized the term biosphere), Georges Bataille writes:
Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe. But, first, living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it. It then radiates or squanders it, but before devoting an appreciable share to this radiation it makes maximum use of it for growth. Only the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander. Hence the real excess does not begin until the growth of the individual or group has reached its limits.20
Vernadsky was a kind of “anti-Lovelock,” who, far from imagining the Earth to be alive, considered life a kind of mineral. Yet these two scientists, Vernadsky and Lovelock, are linked by their heuristic dismantling of the boundary between life and its environment, biology and geology—what Lovelock calls academic apartheid. But from either perspective, the appearance of materially closed ecosystems capable of recycling carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, oxygen, and other elements necessary to a total system of life, including human life, merits attention. Supererogatory biospheres, in Bataille’s schema, extend the limits of growth. Within that general economy beginning with solar radiation and bacterial photosynthesis, “bonsai” biospheres make use of the solar-driven material surplus generated by what Vernadsky has called the pressure of life. Bonsai biospheres funnel into a new form of life the metabolic reserve whose lavish squandering Bataille has described as a fundamental feature of cultures less acquisitive and profit-oriented than our own. The appearance of closed ecosystems within the general planetary ecosystem makes clear that the biosphere has a fearful symmetry of its own.
BACTERIAL OMNISEXUALITY
Bacterial omnisexuality refers to the genetic exchanges among bacteria considered promiscuous in the sense that they do not delimit these exchanges with species barriers.21 Theoretically, any bacterium can at any time in its life cycle give a variable quantity (rather than exactly half, as occurs during the meiotic sex of plants and animals) of its genes to any other bacterium, although it may require intermediaries such as plasmids or viruses to do so. Bacterial omnisexuality was the first type of sex to appear on the planet, some three billion years ago. It was always crucial to the biota’s ability to react quickly to environmental changes and emergencies, since the lateral transfer of useful traits among rapidly reproducing bacteria is of far greater environmental consequence than the slow, vertical inheritance of meiotically reproducing organisms. (Although bacteria are termed asexual, this refers only to their means of reproduction.)
After the evolution of eukaryotic cells from symbiotic bacteria, bacteria omnisexuality became important as a way of genetically “locking” together once diverse groups of prokaryotes. We are accustomed to thinking of them merely as germs, but most bacteria are harmless to humans. Bacteria are biochemically and metabolically far more diverse than all plants and animals put together. The natural history of bacteria is so bizarre that they would have excited huge interest had they been discovered in outer space rather than beneath our feet. All things considered, bacteria appear crucial to the upkeep of Gaian systems of sensation, feedback, and physiological control. Indeed, Gaia may have appeared on Earth some three billion years ago basically as an emergent phenomenon of bacterial crowding.
Four-fifths of the history of life on Earth has been solely a bacterial phenomenon. Moreover, all plants, animals, fungi, and the miscellaneous eukaryotic kingdom known as protoctists are bacterial in nature. The nucleated, mitochondria-containing eukaryotic cell on which all nonbacterial forms of life are modularly based is itself the result of symbiosis and bacteria recombination (omnisexuality). The xenic origins of the eukaryotic cell have major implications for the self, the body, and a vulgar Darwinism that equates evolutionary success with competition. With respect to the bacterial colonization prerequisite to Gaia and its global metabolism, animals including humans are epiphenomenal. There seems little doubt that even full-scale nuclear war could not destroy the bacterial infrastructure.
Eukaryotic cells evolved through a process known as endosymbiosis. Perhaps the simples
t model of endosymbiosis is for one organism to swallow another without digesting it. In microbes especially, because of their lack of an immune system, organisms may be eaten that are likely to survive within their hosts. A more complex form of endosymbiosis is bacterial infection: in this case, too, death does not ensue but, rather, the invading organisms successfully reproduce inside, and in some cases may have become absolutely required by, their hosts.22
Not only the origin of new species but the origin of the metakingdom Eukaryotae as well, comprising all nonbacterial organisms, occurred not through gradual accumulation of mutations but through endosymbiosis; we may owe our very existence to the ancient “failure” of Lilliputian vampires, oxygen-respiring bacteria similar to modern-day Bdellovibrio, to kill the hosts whose bodies they had invaded. This was of course a Pyrrhic victory, since these organelles now energize our entire bodies. They are now generally well behaved, although cancer is noteworthy as the enhanced activity of mitochondria, which provide energy for tumor growth.23
Technogenetic manipulation of bacterial strains, which promises huge financial returns from the biomedical market and, ultimately, a radical refashioning of the human genome into new species, is bacterial omnisexuality—bacterial omnisexuality ministered, “engineered” by human hands. If eukaryotes could trade genes as fluidly as do bacteria, it would be a small matter for dandelions to sprout butterfly wings, collide with a bee, exchange genes again, and soon be seeing with compound insect eyes. Bacteria are able to trade variable quantities of genes with virtually no regard for species barriers. Indeed, despite a lingering Linnaean nomenclature, bacteria are so genetically promiscuous, their bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species presents us a false conceptual shackle falsifying the genetic fluidity of these ancestral life-forms.
Bacteria are omnisexual. Genes received by bacteria in one generation are passed down indefinitely thereafter during cell divisions. The discovery that most of the DNA in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms is “redundant,” coding for no known proteins, suggests that it may be left over from the merging of stranger bacteria whose incorporation produced superogatory information, genetic “deadwood.” An example of bacterial recombination is the evolution of penicillin-resistant staphylococci. The gene that directs the synthesis of an enzyme that digests penicillin probably arose in soil bacteria. But via phage-mediated omnisexual exchanges, staphylococci have incorporated such resistance and survived the hospitalization of their hosts. Omnisexuality makes bacterial boundaries plastic and forces us to view bacterial cells not in isolation but as the cell of an extremely diffuse yet continuous Gaian body. Indeed, Sorin Sonea has postulated that such horizontal gene transfer among bacteria qualifies them as a single superorganism whose body coincides with the surface of the planet.24
Aside from fictions of Gaians using bacterial omnisexuality to remodel their bodies after the image of beauty or strength or even the demihuman metazoans of Greek myth, where does the confluence of bacterial omnisexuality and evolving notions of the human body lie? Whether discussing the disappearing membranes of endosymbiotic bacteria on their way to becoming membrane-bound organelles, or the current changes within the global human socius, the rectilinear notion of the human self, the bounded, stands challenged today from yet another viewpoint, that of the new biology. This zoological “I” is open to radical revision.25
How does a concept of the individual that leans toward the physical model of bacterial omnisexuality and aesthetic model of a différance differ from the “encased self” model of zoocentrism? One example is that used by Burgess—the artist whose production, genius, or gift results not from her or his own body but from the interference patterns generated by a series of symbiotically living forms (spirochetes in this case). The disease that causes discomfort and near madness is also a symptom of a musical disturbance of former ecological harmony, of what was once environment, oikos, but is now neither home to nor home of but rather body. As an organism’s connections to the external environment grow, that environment becomes its body. Like the snail whose house is carried on its back, the “case” of the “self” has been moved, through an incorporation of what once would have been called inanimate matter—admittedly, organically worked and reworked. The boundaries of selfhood are expanding. In microbial ecology, the “I” is literally a figure of large numbers. Pieces of the self—from plasmid and viruses to laboratory-spliced genes and prostheses, from milking machines to mechanical and real hearts—are obvious examples of a circulation of elements of subjective identities always already undergoing active (de)composition. Because the self is not closed but open—for the relations of the elements of physiological identity and psychological subjectivity link up with all matter through all time—it would be hasty to dismiss the general medieval scheme of microcosmic correspondence as mere superstition. Nor, of course, is this in any way to suggest a one-to-one linkage or reliably complete mapping for the series prokaryote–protist–person(a)–planet.
Today, for humans, the body and the self are most clearly in a state of fundamental Heraclitean change. The proverbial river is recognized as a conduit in the circulatory system of a being that has exerted control over the composition and redox state of its atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years.26 Ostensibly, human bodies are integrating newly evolved and evolving viruses, only some of them, such as herpesvirus, identifiable from their pathogenicity. The majority of viruses and bacteria circulate around the biosphere and technosphere harmlessly and unnoticed, joining together fragments in jamais-vu combinations. Humans, too, are not merely zoe or metazoa, in the sense of bare life, or mitotically cloned cells differentiating from an embryo into tissues. We are metametazoa, metazoans whose industrial pollutants, ecological impact, and telecommunications have not only altered the shape of life on Earth but forced us to recognize the environment of the sum total of life on Earth as a totality with shared destiny, as a single, integrated, sensitive, and sensing system.
Life, according to my mother, is bacterial. And this bacterial world, according to Lovelock, has a life span. The biggest challenge to life over the long run has little to do with the paltry meanderings of human beings. It comes rather from the source of all life, the Sun. According to astronomical calculations, the core of the Sun is expected to swell as helium begins to fuse with carbon in nuclear reactions, luminosity increases, and the Sun becomes a “red giant.” To forestall a dangerous heating of Earth attendant with the death throes and rise in temperature and expansion of the Sun would likely involve carbon dioxide. As is widely known, carbon dioxide is a “greenhouse gas” whose presence in the atmosphere heats Earth by trapping infrared radiation. Gaian scientists believe that (over the long run) life has managed to sequester increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to counter the effects of a Sun that has been growing steadily more luminous since the inception of life on Earth. The carbon dioxide that has vanished from Earth’s atmosphere exists on the terrestrial surface in the form of carbon-containing minerals and carbon-based life-forms. If the biosphere has indeed been removing CO2 keeping itself cool, Gaia’s future as a terrestrial being extends only some hundred million years: there is only so much carbon dioxide that can be removed from the atmosphere to counter the increasing luminosity of the Sun (and this, of course, assumes a total reversal of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2, because of human industry).27
Although imminent from a geological point of view, a hundred million years is about twenty times the average life span of a vertebrate species. It is almost certain that by this time Homo sapiens will have become extinct or speciated. Humanity as a species is no more distinct than animals as individuals, and I have tried in this essay to use the new biology to relativize that zoocentric bedrock, the bounded, autonomous self. In a certain sense, this relativizing represents a preliminary sacrifice to the Sun, whose red giantism “we” at least will have escaped.
CHAPTER 13
KERMITRONICS
The ch
oral song which rises from all elements and all angels, is a voluntary obedience, a necessitated freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life
ker·mi·tron·ics
noun pl [ker-mi-tron-iks]
singular in construction: the philosophical understanding and application of ourselves as sensuous and responsive beings not, however, under our own control. First used 2012. From Kermit the Frog, a Muppet (= combination of marionette and puppet), first introduced in 1955.
LIKE THE MIME IN A CIRCUS who pretends, from the dirty floor, to balance the high-wire walker, or the clown who, twirling her fingers with a gleeful simper, seems to send the acrobats falling head over heels in their aerial somersaults, before reaching through thin air to catch a helping hand, so we may be pretending that we are running the show. Only in our case we don’t seem to know we are pretending. The performers wear no special clothes. They are not paid union dues or the celebratory object of a special occasion. The big top, far from being the circumscribed arena of a circus tent, is the surprisingly vast if more intimate space of our own head.
Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science Page 21