Of human, birds and living rocks: Remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds

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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


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)


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


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



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


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



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

Dixon et al. 255


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



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

Dixon et al. 257


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.)



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

Dixon et al. 259


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)



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.)

Dixon et al. 261


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



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


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



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

Dixon et al. 265


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).



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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Of human, birds and living rocks: Remaking aesthetics for post-human worlds

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