Ma hew Fuller and Olga Goriunova BLEAK JOYS Aesthetics of Ecology & Impossibility Bleak Joys Cary Wolfe, Series Editor 53 Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova 52 Variations on Media Thinking Siegfried Zielinski 51 Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement of Sensation, Cognition, and Matter Alexander Wilson 50 Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction David Farrier 49 Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe Bjørn Ekeberg 48 Dialogues on the Human Ape Laurent Dubreuil and Sue Savage- Rumbaugh 47 Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture Ernst Kapp 46 Biology in the Grid: Graphic Design and the Envisioning of Life Phillip Thurtle 45 Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude Michael Haworth 44 Life: A Modern Invention Davide Tarizzo 43 Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts Carsten Strathausen 42 Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human Dominic Pettman (continued on page 193) posthumanities 42 posthumanities 43 posthumanities 44 posthumanities 45 Bleak Joys posthumanities 46 Aesthetics ofposthuman Ecologyitie ands 47 Impossibility posthumanities 48 posthumanities 49 posthumanities 50 MATTHEW FULLER and OLGA GORIUNOVA posthumanities 51 posthumanities 52 posthumanities 53 posthumanities 54 posthumanities 55 posthumanities 56 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS posthumanities 57 MINNEAPOLIS • LONDON posthumanities 58 posthumanities 59 posthumanities 60 posthumanities 61 An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Devastation,” in On General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm in the Neocybernetic Age, ed. Erich Hoerl and James Burton (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published as “Worse Luck,” in Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuller, Matthew, author.| Goriunova, Olga, author. Bleak joys : aesthetics of ecology and impossibility / Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2019. | Series: Posthumanities ; 53 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018061114 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0552-1 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0553-8 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Environment (Aesthetics) | Philosophy of nature. Classification: LCC BH301.E58 F85 2019 (print) | DDC 111/.85—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061114 Dedicated to Varvara This page deliberately left blank Contents Acknowledgments / ix Introduction / xi Devastation / 1 Anguish / 25 Irresolvability / 51 Luck / 75 Plant / 93 Home / 121 Coda / 155 Notes / 161 Index / 185 This page deliberately left blank Acknowledgments Many people and places have provided contexts in which we have been able to develop this work, and we would especially like to thank Alexandra Anikina, Cecilia Åsberg, Rosi Braidotti, James Burton, Olga Cmielewska, Geoff Cox, Jennifer Gabrys, Annie Goh, Erich Hoerl, Patricia Pisters, Margerita Radomska, Bev Skeggs, and Zooetics— Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas. Doug Armato, Gabriel Levin, and Cary Wolfe have each been immensely supportive and made it a pleasure to work with the University of Minnesota Press and the Posthumanities series. ix This page deliberately left blank Introduction Bleak Joys is a book about ecological aesthetics. It is also a book about bad things. Ecological aesthetics attempts to develop an understanding of complex entities and processes, from plant roots, to forests, to ecological damage as dynamic processes of composition. As such, its approach to the aesthetic is an expansive one that is both hungrily sensual and abstract. As a book about bad things, it discusses conditions such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjectivities and beings. These combine in the present day at multiple scales and in many ways, but they are also too often avoided, considered finite or absolute, rendered indifferent yet totalizing, because we do not have the language to speak about them. Bleak Joys attempts to capture some of the modes of crisis that constitute our present ecological and cultural condition, and to reckon with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest. This approach to ecological aesthetics is combined with an engagement with number, prediction, and the modes of knowledge that are assembled to reckon with complex formations that are beyond simple calculation. As such, the book combines what it draws from ecological aesthetics with a set of accounts of calculative power and the wider ontological conditions brought about by the technological encounter with supercomplex systems. In order to do so, it must site itself at points of paradox, of ambivalence and the overlappings of multiple absences. The question of the formation of such points is one that haunts contemporary theory in its proliferation xi xii IntroDUCTION of terms, such as complicity, irony, embeddedness, situatedness, the folds of the baroque, economic or topological subsumption— as these are figured in variously social, economic, epistemic, cognitive, aesthetic, and political forms. Bleak Joys inhabits such a condition— not in the mode of lament but as a part of ontological structure of its argument, which draws on the work of Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Rosi Braidotti, among others, yet asks along with this tradition whether affirmation is enough, and what is to be affirmed. Setting up an interplay between an ecological materialism that is necessarily bleak, mineral, and appreciative of disaster on the one hand and the inheritance of the monist theorists of affirmation that find potentials and actualizations of a joyful conatus in being on the other is part of the pattern that sustains this inquiry. As such a pattern, it does not therefore find itself in some implied median between the better and the worse but instead is a means of sprouting axes that cut into and compose realities. This bleak joy is a way of thinking things that are commonly and culturally figured as negative without losing the force of their impact but also without succumbing to the luster of mere doom. Its relation to philosophies of affirmation is therefore complex. We draw on the formation of the ethico- aesthetic, via Mikhail Bakhtin and Félix Guattari, a conjugation of aesthetics and questions of powers and the interarticulations of beings, ecologies, and forms of life, in which sensation and perception, following moves toward embodied and ecological cognition, circulate and are active in wide ecological dynamics yet crystallized and instantiated at numerous scales of analysis, experience, and force. More broadly than resting solely within the domain of sensation and perception, the ethico- aesthetic relates to a question of polyphonic composition discussed more fully below. These formations are rarely arranged around the question of the aesthetic dimensions of “bad things,” such as ecological damage or the sense of anguish. In order to fully understand the present— a time that, like some others, distinguishes itself partly in the invention of novel forms of destruction— this is a necessary task. Ecological aesthetics is thus not a mourning for an irreparable and singular loss— nor simply musing, in more or less verbose terms, on the unknowability and inexpressibility of it all— but a process of finding the cultural and scientific coordinates of the damned vivacity of the cosmos in terms that are more fully adequate to it. IntroDUCTION xiii Here then we draw on and contribute to the posthumanities’ relation to the question of science, proposing approaches that synthesize scientific and cultural modes of reflection. Bleak Joys takes as a given that scien- tific, cultural, and philosophical approaches and inquiries are neither symmetrical nor always in every case of equal value but are in a mobile state of disequilibrium that renders them in a state of great excitatory capac- ity. The book draws on scientific work in ecology, plant sciences, systems theory, computing, and cybernetics in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and of the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. But to return to the question: what then are these bad things? And how do they gnaw into or dispel other processes? This is something we try to work through in reference to particular cases or kinds: namely, in the chapters devoted to devastation, anguish, irresolvability, and home. These chapters draw on a set of theoretical resources to ask questions of