Lichen Metacosmology, or Dreaming with a Lichen Teacher

For the second iteration of Les Lichens Ne Mentent Jamais/Lichens Never Lie, Nolan Oswald Dennis has created a digital and printable cosmological map on lichens – intended not as an exercise in confining knowledge, rather as a means to implode the archival Western logics that have, historically and culturally, relegated nonhuman life to the margins. 

Lichens however eschew such categories: as the artist says, they are “expressions of a set of relations between multiple organisms”, that is, a photobiont (a photosynthesizing partner) with a mycobiont (a fungal partner). “Altogether a symbiont, itself in symbiotic interconnection with other symbionts. In our case a body full of others.” 

Symbiont-sociont thus emerges as a reflection on how we can learn from this multiplicity, borrowing notions on interconnection from Sylvia Wynter and the late Lynn Margulis - combining the symbiogenetic ideas of the latter with the sociogenetic principles of the former. Derived from popular science magazine supplements, Dennis explains that the diagram and folding object are “mediative companions to something I'm calling thinking lichenly, imagining between and across disparate fields”.

The following report presents the polyhedral paper folding diagram in two different versions, which may be downloaded and printed to form your own personal origami, either in A2 or A3. The diagram is part of a series of prototypes for thinking metacosmically with lichens. 

Accompanying the work is a new text by the artist, specially written as an adjunct guide to the map. Moreover, the report presents a short animation of the object, and further images of the artist’s process in creating it.

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symbiont-sociont 

a lichen metacosmology, or dreaming with a lichen teacher.

Let’s start, as usual, in the middle. We’ve already taken a leap (of faith) into an all too familiar world of uncertainty. This is where I’d like to stage this encounter with lichens. I’ll call it the zone [1]. Naming allows the illusion of consistency, so whatever we meet from here on is just a part of this zone with lichens. At the same time we have to keep in mind that just as “the foundation, the soil within which it is anchored, as well as the building, must be seen as one continuous whole-ness rather than independent fragments of reality” [2] so too the inverse - each apparent whole is a network of interdependencies. Our naming should not overdetermine the potentiality of relations between parts. We meet lichens here as teachers with a lesson that sounds like: we are parts, but might also be: we are apart. Not simple enough?

There is a version of history which can be improperly, generatively (mis)understood [3] as a history of being (and consciousness) in which beings oscillate between being themselves and being something else all at the same time. A double being (or more) [4]. For our lichen-like work, we always are aiming for that subversion of history. The zone in which unfoldment is continuous.

In spite of all this aiming for, continuous unfoldment is actually a relatively mundane experience. We who move, move through pluri-identification. Instability is our common ground so to speak. It is also what we share with, and learn to see better through lichenness. To be one and many, individual and social. Or more precisely, lichens remind us that individuality expresses sets of relations between multiple agents, between organisms which are themselves expressions of relations. In the case of lichens, a photobiont (a photosynthesizing partner) and a mycobiont (a fungal partner) altogether form a symbiont. This lichen symbiont itself is in symbiotic interconnection with other symbionts. In our case a (human) body full of others. Our bodies are the collective term for a host of microbial and cellular partners with whom we do not share DNA (genomically distinct entities) but without whom our lives would not be possible, and neither would theirs, indeed partners whose “theirness” and our “usness” is inseparable. We also test the limits of language. These are our microbiotic selves which live inside us, gut microbiota, and on us, skin flora. Deeper still are our intracellular organelles, ancient others which are impossible to conceive of separately from us (which they are not) but nonetheless form genetic lineages distinct from our nuclear dna. We are not individuals.

South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose describes ubuntu, our spiritual-philosophical tradition, as a zone where do-ing takes precedence over the do-er. We are called to see ourselves as doers doing, as “embodiments of the potentiality for an infinite variety of of an unceasing activity or merging and converging”[5]. We are people (abantu) not because we are something per se, but because we are enjoined to establish humane relations with others. The lichenality of our convergences also point us in the opposite direction, so that where we find wholeness we are also encountering multiplicity, abundance and divergence. Our whole-ness is an internetwork of humane relations to others which are not the same as us (and yet are what constitute us nonetheless). That these are necessary conditions for our ethical relations.

We are divisible. We are interconnected communities of organised beings who often feel like a single being, but often enough do not feel that way as well. We are parts in a symbiotic partnership called symbiosis. A long term stable association which delineates our physical and behavioural characteristics. Lichen-like, we are parts from a symbiotic lineage called symbiogenesis. A long term symbiosis which leads to evolutionary change (a heretical biological theory developed by Lynn Margulis [6])

Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter teaches us another way through divisibility. Challenging a monohumanist paradigm of being centred on the figure of universal western Man, Wynter traces an unravelling of the colonial horizon of humanity beginning with ”black anti-apartheid struggle for civil rights, women’s rights/feminism, indigenous and other of-color rights, gay and lesbian rights, and so forth”[7]. Out of this milieu emerges a reconceptualisation of humanness in the direction of a hybridly constituting double codification - a phylogenetic and sociogenetic understanding of being. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Wynter reminds us that humanness is not a noun. Human being is a praxis, what Magobe might call a do-ing. A sociogenetic praxis.

In Wynter’s sociogenesis, our already symbiotic biological being is itself a co-evolving entity with our sociogenic being. The genetic codes which govern our biochemical expression function in close partnership with the non-genetic codes which govern our social expressions. The stories, myths, and structures of sharing which constitute our knowledge of the world both constrain and enable what is possible, and what it is possible to be in the world. Importantly, we must not forget that these non-genetic codes are how we constitute our interconnected humanness. They are the protocols which deploy and distribute the violence and care which (de)stabilises our ‘imagined communities’. The sociogenetic principle does not rest on the ethics of these relations, we are in every case expressions of that collective encoding. We are sociogenetic because we come into being (human, subhuman or nonhuman) together. For better or for worse.

If lichens are the archetypal symbiont consisting of an energy producing photobiont and a structuring mycobiont. Humanity might be the archetypal sociont consisting of a biological carry-bag of skin and and a mytho-political veil of masks [8].

I read Lynn Margulis and hear the echo of Sylvia Wynter. Reflecting on the limitations of disciplinary zoology Margulis says “It’s as if you wrote a four-volume tome supposedly on world history but beginning in the year 1800 at Fort Dearborn and the founding of Chicago” [9] She calls it the codification of ignorance. In a similar vein Wynter says “our present history, as narrated by historians, [is] empirical data for the study of a specific coding of a history whose narration has… given rise to the existential reality of our present Western world system”. The rhythm is erratic but in my head it resonates.

Lichens absorb water and minerals from the rain and the atmosphere, the photosynthesizing symbiont converts sunlight into chemical energy which feeds the structural symbiont. Their tight trophic loop (autotroph and heterotroph in one) means they are highly reactive to environmental changes. Lichens are sensitive. They are often the first to be affected by air and water pollution. Their presence, absence and general health in an environment is therefore a reliable indicator of soil and air pollution10. Lichens are sociogenic as well as symbiogenic it seems. Their being is an expression not only of genetic codes amongst the symbionts but also non-genetic codes of social relations. Lichens too are expressions of the distribution of violence we call pollution, climate change and capitalism.

Reading the symbiogenetic project of Margulis’ alter-phylogeny (indebted to the work of persistent heretics like Samuel Butler and James Lovelock) alongside Wynter’s sociogenetic principle (developed from Fanon’s sociogeny) we can imagine something about the zone. In this (sub)version of history we see the combination of queer agency rooted in symbiosis11 with the pluri-human agency of the sociogeny as something commonplace. In this zone being umuntu12- a person in ethical relation to others - is a convergence of composite being and plurihuman agencies which reroute conventional senses of who and what counts as a biologically legible and politically meaningful entity. We are already there. Or not.

There is another question beneath all this bio-political misremembering. In an anti-black world polluted by the excesses of capitalist production and colonial fantasies of forgetting, is there the possibility of ethical kinship with lichens?. To feel like a lichen means we are attuned to the same environmental violences as they are. Lichens are bioindicators that reflect the politics that make some of us the first symptoms of a planet in crisis, and the first made absent by the distribution of death in that crisis. Maybe this is a case of over-identification between victims. Let's call it a necropolitical13 misrecognition. A sense of ourselves simultaneously multiple and misused.

Symbiont~sociont is a paper meditative tool, a working diagram of relations and ideas for thinking near lichen. A kind of practice board for working through a question and sitting with it. When cut up and reconstructed the diagram forms a 3-dimensional octahemioctahedron. There is also a second 3-dimensional possibility.

1 See Frantz Fanon on the zone of non-being; Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic; and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation
2 Mogobe Ramose. The philosophy of ubuntu and ubuntu as philosophy
3 See Fred Moten. The Universal Machine
4 See WEB du Bois on Double Consciousness
5Mogobe Ramose. The philosophy of ubuntu and ubuntu as philosophy
6 See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species
7 See Katherine McKittrick. Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis
8 See Frantz Fanon .Black Skin, White Masks
9 https://www.edge.org/conversation/lynn-margulis1938-2011
10 See Jennifer Gabrys. Sensing Lichens
11 See David Griffiths. Queer Theory for Lichens
12 Mogobe Ramose. The philosophy of ubuntu and ubuntu as philosophy
13 See Achille Mbembe

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Nolan Oswald Denis

Nolan Oswald Dennis is a para-disciplinary artist. Their practice explores ‘a black consciousness of space’ - the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization and planetary transformation - questioning the techno-political history of space (and time) through system-specific, rather than site-specific interventions.

They hold a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), AutoItalia SouthEast (London), CAN (Neuchatel), the Young Congo Biennale (Kinshasa) among others.

Nolan Oswald Dennis, symbiont-sociont, 2022, specially commissioned by Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation as part of World Weather Network.

Part of the weather station: Grasse, France - find out more here.