Response to Bruce Clarke’s “Climate Gaia”

October 21st, 2023

by Raúl Carrillo

Gaia is essentially systematic. Moreover, as the work of Bruce Clarke shows, Gaia’s systematicity does not imply the holism of a totalizing entity. Gaia’s systematicity can be understood in terms of hospitality. However, I propose that if Gaia’s systematicity is its hospitality then it is also its hostility.

In Facing Gaia, Latour argues against the systematic and cybernetic characterization of Gaia by James Lovelock: “Gaia, the outlaw,” Latour says, “is the anti-system.” (87) Furthermore: “Gaia is not a cybernetic machine controlled by feedback loops but a series of historical events, each of which extends itself a little further–or not.” (140) For Latour to talk about Gaia as a cybernetic system is to run the risk of equating it with a holistic or unitary superorganism of control and governmentality, i.e., another one of those fantasies of the moderns. Latour’s anti-systematic and anti-cybernetic Gaia would then be instead a “fine muddle” in which the “waves of action” of the actor-network propagate. (101)

In contrast, in Gaian Systems, Bruce Clarke argues convincingly that Lovelock’s initial description of the Gaia hypothesis as a cybernetic system is not simply a metaphor or a rhetorical device crossing the perilous boundaries between biology and sociology, but a precise technical term that allows for the formulation of scientific experimental protocols for investigating the Gaia hypothesis. Second, the historicity of Gaia is compatible with its cybernetic and systematic characterization. He refers us to the crucial work of Lynn Margulis who brought microbial deep time, symbiosis, and autopoiesis to the Gaian framework. Margulis’ neo-cybernetic Gaia is not a superorganism of control and governmentality. It is not holistic or totalizing, yet it is thoroughly systematic.

Clarke favors Margulis’ second-order non-informatic cybernetic Gaia over Lovelock’s initial formulation. However, taking into consideration the work of other thinkers of systematicity such as Francisco Varela and Niklas Luhman, he characterizes Gaia as metabiotic. “Gaia’s operations,” Clarke argues, “induce a partial immunity for the planetary holobiont.” (240) The key terms are operation, immunity, and holobiont. First, operation refers to the cybernetic concept of operational closure which defines the systematic unity of an autopoietic entity. It is also the way to maintain an operational distinction between the biotic and the abiotic, which Margulis argued for. Second, immunity should not be thought of alongside the militaristic allegories of defense, but as an autopoietic system that recursively produces its individual identity. Gaia is immunological not because it has a defensive membrane, but because it is all a membrane: “Gaia is itself the film and the interior space enclosed within the film.” (Clarke 223) Thirdly, the holobiont refers to the nonmicrobial manifestations of symbiosis. For example, lichens, but also the coupling between a multicellular animal or plant host and its bacterial or other unicellular guests. Symbiosis in this case refers to the systematic coupling between separate autopoietic entities. In other words, metabiotic Gaia is the membrane that maintains the operational identity of the sum of operations between the biotic and abiotic elements of the planet plus the operations between symbionts at multiple scales.

In his lecture “Climate Gaia,” given for the “Humanities and the Anthropocene” research initiative at Texas A&M University in October 19, 2023, Clarke understands habitability in the context of metabiotic Gaia in terms of biological viability. Gaia acts to “maximize habitability over geological time by stabilizing key planetary flows of energies and materials. But the “stasis” of such homeostasis is simply an ideal mean, not a fixed condition.” In other words, there is no balance-of-nature scenario in which Gaia responds harmoniously to alleviate human habitability. A future temperature may be much hotter or colder than today’s mean over geological time. Gaia, as system, does not care for human beings in particular. It is not our mother, but it also not our victim. If it is the case that the planet is transitioning to a new geological era, i.e., the Anthropocene, it is as a consequence of the effect of the entirety of the biota, and not because of the doings of homo sapiens.

Gaian hospitality is necessarily constituted by inhospitality. A host, in order to remain so, must always be capable of becoming hostile. “Hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable,” as Derrida would put it. (81) The possibility of Gaia’s hostility, even when unprovoked, remains necessary. “We need a new ‘we,’” Clarke concludes in his lecture, “Gaian beings, rendered diverse by restored indigeneity and interconnected by mutual reverence for a post-intrusive Gaia returned to its terrestrial rights as a planetary host.” However, if we follow Derrida’s insight, Gaia, insofar as it is a hospitable, must remain hostile. There cannot be a post-intrusive Gaia for intrusion is co-constitutive of host/guest relations, such as the relations between symbionts. Gaia does not prefer mutualism over parasitism, or vice versa. Hostility is at the heart of any possible Gaian symbiotic ‘we,’ whether it is indigenous or modern; human or not.

Works Cited

–Clarke, Bruce. Gaian Systems. Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

–Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby, Stanford University Press, 2000.

–Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter, Polity, 2017.