The fungal paradigm: epigenetics, the transcendental and artistic intervention
One of the most notable gestures of the critical philosophy was an installation of transcendental laws and principles that guaranteed the regularity of the world, in opposition to sceptical argumentation. Such legislation followed from the conviction that the laws of nature are equal to our laws of understanding. However, this conviction has been a notable point of contention in continental philosophy since Kant – had he deduced this conviction, and its principles, or simply just argued for it? It is against this relatively common contention that Catherine Malabou constructs her idiosyncratic discourse – the transcendental, instead of being a rigid position, is a “space of transformability… it is a space of life”.[1] This paper will firstly trace Malabou’s discourse, paying particular attention to her coupling of epigenesis, extant in the critical philosophy, and epigenetics, a revolutionary paradigm in molecular biology. Culminating in a concept of temporality and surface, we will then consider the notions of perspective, scale and spread – counterposing the systematic philosophy of Thomas Luhmann to the mycological-anthropological study of Anna Tsing. In resolution, the potency of artistic intervention into any given paradigm or perspective posited in discipline-systems other than its own will be elaborated.
There is a way in which the multiple meanings ascribed to the term ‘transcendental’ in Kant’s philosophy can be aggregated. Firstly, to treat ‘transcendental’ as a synonym for a priori, which designates that which is “absolutely independent to all experience”[2], opposed to empirical knowledge which is obtained through experience, or a posteriori. However, it can be further distinguished in understanding it as a manner of cognition - “I call all knowledge transcendental which deals with not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects, insofar as this manner is possible a priori”.[3] Thus, as noted by Kant, “not every kind of a priori knowledge should be called transcendental; only that kind by which we know that and how certain representations (intuitions, concepts) can be used or a possible completely a priori should be called transcendental”[4], in other words representations that are not of empirical origin. The multivalent nature of the transcendental subsequently inspired, on the one hand, an indissociable bond between that which is transcendental and the subject i.e. idealism, and on the other, the problematisation of the transcendental as a fundamentally unstable proposition. In a philosophical tradition stemming from Hegel, criticism and development of these points tend toward a breaking away from the critical philosophy. Conversely, Malabou’s argument is that “all these attempts to relinquish the transcendental are at a dead end... [they] relinquish their object as they relinquish the transcendental, in other words, time, the scientific perspective on the life of thinking, and contingency”.[5] Subsequently, Malabou reconstructs Kant through his posterity, placing a premium on his later conceptualisation of an ‘epigenesis of pure reason’. Kant’s analogy of epigenesis arises during his discourse on the nature of agreement between experience and the pure concepts of understanding; the crux of the transcendental philosophy. The agreement can, for Kant, take two forms; either experience makes concepts possible, or concepts make experience possible. The former option is dismissed by Kant and Malabou as a form of equivocal generation, pertaining to a kind of ‘supreme world-cause’. The latter is taken to assume a ‘preformation’ argument wherein a pre-established conceptual harmony rivets all experience, and is similarly rebuffed. Hence, the third option of epigenesis elaborates a spontaneity of understanding that is at once locates pure understanding a priori, and legitimates a self-differentiating concept, developing through the life and experience of an individual. Epigenesis is conceptually analogous to the biological discourse of epigenetics that, in the early eighteenth century contemporary to Kant, argued for a gradual progression of embryonic growth as opposed to the preformationist claim that the embryo is a miniature individual.[6] The image of Malabou’s thought is a coupled conceptual maturation between epigenesis and epigenetics, between philosophy and biology.
The contemporary usage of the term ‘epigenetics’ is in reference to the work in molecular biology that observes relations between genes and their production; between genotype and phenotype.[7] The stakes of epigenetics are often located in demonstrating how the development of an individual organism is self-formed and continually formative. Malabou notes that the prefix epi- is used to specify that which is over or on the surface of something, and with epigenetics, epi- refers to how epigenetic “modifications never alter the DNA sequence itself, epigenetics work on the “surface” (epi) of the molecule”.[8] In brief, such modifications contribute to differentiated cellular development, which depends the use of certain genes via activation and silencing. This allows for phenotypic expression independent to the primary DNA sequence. The study of epigenetics is wide-ranging, and the model organisms that are used to study the phenomenon are similarly vast. For example, the mouse models of epigenetic inheritance, wherein the metabolic compensation undergone in early development does not match environmental changes, due to ‘epigenetic marks’ are inherited from previous generations. This research shows that inherited epigenetic marks during early development is major factor in the pathogenesis of adult disease.[9] Another model organism that has been useful in the study of epigenetics have been the microbial eukaryotes, such as filamentous fungi and protists. Fungi, much like mice, are excellent models for studying epigenetic phenomena. For example, Aramayo and Selker note that the filamentous fungi Neurospora Crassa, despite being not as widely studied as other model organisms, are well suited to a variety of studies, including “photobiology, circadian rhythms, population biology, morphogenesis, mitochondrial import, DNA repair and recombination, DNA methylation and other epigenetic processes”.[10] In more complex eukaryotes, epigenetic control of gene expression, in the form of gene silencing, plays a major role in development of the organism. In lower eukaryotes, like fungi and protists, these same silencing mechanisms have been preserved, but the role of these mechanisms are not clear - despite protecting the genome from selfish genes or junk DNA sequences, silencing has been lost in certain linages, indicating that they are not a mandatory survival mechanism.[11] The variety of studies in epigenetics reveal that the phenomenon is not only active in functions such as metabolism, but has played a major role in evolution, alongside changing environments, subsequently producing an understanding of the organism as plastic qua epigenetic process.
Philosopher of biology Henri Atlan elaborates that the importance of the epigenetic paradigm as follows: “the idea that the totality or essential aspects of development and functioning of living organisms is determined by a genetic program tends to be gradually replaced by a complex model that is based on notions of interaction, reciprocal effects between the genetic, whose central role is not denied, and the epigenetic, whose importance we are gradually discovering”.[12] Similarly, Malabou argues that gradually “Kant came to grasp these appearances which, in experience, do not present themselves as objects of experience like any other, and, in fact do not present themselves as objects at all: the beautiful, and that which interests us most here, the living being. Long before his twenty-first century readers, Kant completely exposed the transcendental to the factuality of life”.[13] The relationship between epigenetics and epigenesis is beyond that of analogy; in a sense, the two paradigms are scaled to one another, and readily exchangeable. Beyond Kuhn, wherein a paradigm can be taken to be a methodology accepted and shared by the scientific community, Malabou asserts the hermeneutic value of a paradigm, one that is fluid amongst a given set of concerns - “The increasing importance of epigenetics prompts us to propose that an epigenetic paradigm is in the process of constituting itself, there is reason to believe that in the future it will also become of the structuring tracks of philosophical rationality. A new transcendental”.[14] In other words, a ‘biologisation of the transcendental’ that postures itself according to the difference between the transcendental, empirical and life itself; it is an expression of organisation, a system of life that simultaneously acknowledges that “life can do without thought, and it has no need to be thought”.[15] Much like the epigenetic evolution of N. Crassa, we can not only assure an understanding of the immanent nature of metabolic physiology and the pathological environment, but also the time-scale of evolution that does not obey the regime of the arrow. Malabou: “Between an authentic temporality without maturation and a chronological vulgarity without ecstasy, epigenetic temporality unfolds at its own rhythm. Henceforth, all it asks is to be conceptualised”.[16] The epigenesis that Kant detailed in his later work, and the burgeoning area of epigenetic biology are two paradigms that do not only find analogy and thematic resemblance, but are readily scalable qua time - and it is this value of temporality, built in to Malabou’s putative ‘new transcendental’, that finds the dual surface-perspective spreading to other novel surfaces.
We have developed a conceptual tension between ‘spread’ and ‘scale’. On the one hand, if we talk about how the perspective built into a given paradigm is scalable to other paradigms, this is to systematise the relations between paradigms - the perspective performs at this scale as it does at another. On the other, the spread of a perspective insinuates a multi-directional movement across a given surface, effectively levelling each paradigm to a shared foundation. Anna Tsing, in her book The Mushroom at The End of the World, produces a theory that at once conceptually develops the tension described here, and applies it to an idiosyncratic anthropological study of matsutake mushrooms. Tsing turns to the notion of assemblage in order to entrench how multi-species worlds are routinely produced by living things in an indeterminate way - for example, “Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans... Humans, pines and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others”.[17] These assemblages are an ‘unintentional coordination’, contaminated by indeterminacy. In a sense, assemblages are paradigms that are spread along a horizontal vector of coordination, and in this way, as Tsing elaborates, “their elements are contaminated and thus unstable; they refuse to scale up smoothly”.[18] Further, “[s]calability requires that project elements be oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter; that’s how they allow smooth expansion”.[19] As such, Tsing proposes a ‘theory of non-scalability’ that flourishes in an environment of transformative difference, of which the matsutake mushroom is exemplary - “matsutake make it evident that they cannot live without transformative relations with other species... This transformative mutualism has made it impossible for humans to cultivate matsutake”.[20] In an analogous manner, epigenetic temporality is a method of rendering transcendental that which may find itself scaled empirical - transformative collaboration between entities over a time-scale plotted on the surface. Malabou identifies that the phrase ‘a system of the epigenesis of pure reason’ as a “process of completion [that] simultaneously modifies the starting point and retrospectively gives the entire critical undertaking its ultimate form”.[21] It is the paradigm of epigenetics as indeterminate; as assembled, that is itself rendered transcendental or ‘mutual’ to itself.
However, we must justify scalability in order for the dual perspective of the epigenetic paradigm to be achieved. Tsing notes that scalability is not strictly negative: “The main distinguishing feature between scalable and non-scalable projects is not ethical conduct but rather that the latter are more diverse because they are not geared up for expansion”.[22] ‘Expansion’ here refers to how models of scalability, such as the plantation, are oriented toward the image of capitalistic progress, as opposed to assembled collaboration that cannot scale smoothly. The question, relativised to the enterprise of an epigenetic transcendental philosophy, is how can scale be reintroduced so that paradigms can maintain a variety of perspective? The systems philosophy of Niklas Luhmann, in particular his work Art as a Social System, can begin to bridge this conceptual dilemma, and is useful in introducing artistic practice into the arena of discourse. In this work, he discusses how experimentation in art has shown to scale between different levels of complexity - “After such bursts of complexity, evolution tends to start all over again on a smaller scale, exploring new possibilities on a relatively simple basis without any evolutionary guarantee of success. The current reduction of art to form, its minimalism and radical simplicity, cannot satisfy in the long run. Sooner or later, one might once again demand a maximum amount of complexity from the individual work”.[23] Scale here is not limited to the notion of expandability per se; complexity in any system - artistic, philosophical, fungal or otherwise - spontaneously waxes and wanes on the surface of its own evolution. What is important for the paradigm of epigenesis is a collusion of spread and scale - transformative, indeterminate mutual to multiple species of organism, of thought coupled with a movement in scaled complexity plotted over a self-determined time frame. Luhmann is direct in stating that “[a]rt had very few direct effects on other functional systems, and this is why society rarely responds to the differentiation and autonomy of the art system”.[24] However, in light of the epigenetic paradigm we have been working through, this is not a way of diminishing art. Much like the collaboration between spread and scale, and between the transcendental and the living being, artistic work can accomplish paradigmatic interventions; events and entities, particularly given the play of complexity inherent to practice of art, autonomous from external systems but nonetheless scalable.
Transdisciplinary artist Elaine Gan, who, along with Anna Tsing, involved with the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, is concerned with historical materialism. Her ongoing work Fungal Clock (2012-) represents the time-based collaboration between pine, oaks, humans and matsutake mushroom - “All three are simultaneous in any scene, yet we separate them to show each shapes the others. We call them folds: phenology, or events timed to seasons; emergence, or transformations that arise from encounters across difference”. A gesture that at once separates and folds, instituted in an art system, a space for collaboration and collusion of concepts. Perhaps autonomy or autopoiesis (viz. self-organising), via Luhmann, is not the focus here; Donna Haraway counterposes the term ‘sympoiesis’, which “means making-with... nothing makes itself, nothing is really autopoietic or self-organising... sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems”.[25] The phenological design of Fungal Clock is situated in an assemblage of four entities, and across a scale of temporality folding and unfolding at its own rhythm. But this scale does not necessarily induce expansive antagonism - just as Kant brought the transcendental to the beautiful and to the living being, we can understand that scale is generated in a mutual sense. Haraway: “All critters share a common “flesh”, laterally, semiotically and genealogically. Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active”.[26] The notion of an ancestor as stranger to our flesh or to our thought is an epigenetic conception par excellence.
In conclusion, the movements and tactics discussed above can be grouped as a series of mutual interventions across several surfaces (surfaces that are thematically mycelium-like). The community of any given paradigm can contain many perspectives; vertically organised across scale; horizontally plotted across a spread. It is the role of the transcendental to put forward, perhaps tentatively given the climate, a principle that can be named ‘life’, biologically proper, to organise interventions and their concepts. French phenomenologist Michel Henry had insisted that the “only life which exits is the transcendental phenomenological life… it carries no divide or gap within it and never differs from itself. Life is an auto-revelation”.[27] What is the tenor of such convictions in the present philosophical arena, wherein transcendentalism is seen to inseparable from idealism, the latter calling forth images of subjectivism – Žižek, following Hegel, posits that “transcendentalism… elevates the very forms of our mind, of subjectivity, which (de)form our access to the in-itself and thus deny us direct access to it, into an a priori, a positive fact constitutive of our phenomenal reality”.[28] However, the polarisation of transcendentalism does not have to continue given a rational re(construction) of the concept of the transcendental itself; evidenced in the epigenetic model of paradigm and perspective that we have detailed in this paper. Adrian Johnston, with a similar emphasis to Malabou, asserts that “[t]he adjective ‘transcendental’ can and should be (re)made to stand for, if nothing else, a cluster of theoretical features/positions involving staunch opposition to unreserved determinism, eliminativism, historicisms, reductivisms and relativisms. For me at least, a key philosophical task is to wed such opposition to a nonetheless uncompromisingly materialist ontological framework not without its historical sensibilities and with a theory of spontaneous, self-determining subjectivity irreducible to both its natural and cultural bases”.[29] While not every one of Johnston’s ambitions have been touched on here, we can see that our elaboration of paradigm and intervention – in particular the intervention carried out by artistic practice – is enthused by a similar desire for self-determination and spontaneity. A new sense of the transcendental, scalable and spreadable as a mycelium model, can offer a new interpretative tool for scientific, philosophical and artistic work, particularly for instances of collaboration and mutual intervention.
[1] Ruda, Frank and Agon Hamza. “An Interview with Catherine Malabou: Toward Epigenetic Philosophy” in Crisis and Critique 5 (2018). 435-443. 444.
[2] Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, B3. Marcus Weigelt and Max Müller trans. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2007. 38.
[3] Ibid. A11-12. 52.
[4] Ibid. A65/B81. 94.
[5] Malabou, Catherine. Before Tomorrow Epigenesis and Rationality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. 35.
[6] Ibid. 39.
[7] Ibid. 140.
[8] Ibid. 141.
[9] Bernal et al. “Chapter 15 – Mouse Models of Epigenetic Inheritance”, in Handbook of Epigenetics, Trygve Tollefsbol ed. Cambridge: Academic Press, 2017. 233-249.
[10] Aramayo, Rodolfo and Eric Selker. “Neurospora Crassa, a Model System for Epigenetics Research”. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology 5 (2013). doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a017921. Accessed 29th June, 2018.
[11] Malagnac, Fabienne and Philippe Silar. “Chapter 13 – Epigenetics of Eukaryotic Microbes”, in Handbook of Epigenetics, Trygve Trollefsbol ed. Academic Press, 2017. 185-201.
[12] Malabou, op.cit. 143.
[13] Ibid. 265.
[14] Ibid. 258.
[15] Ibid. 282.
[16] Ibid. 290.
[17] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 22.
[18] Ibid. 43.
[19] Ibid. 38.
[20] Ibid. 40.
[21] Malabou, op.cit. 262.
[22] Tsing, op.cit. 42.
[23] Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Eva M. Knodt trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 178.
[24] Ibid. 181.
[25] Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. USA: Duke University Press, 2016. 58.
[26] Ibid. 103.
[27] Henry, Michel. “Phenomenology of Life”, Angelaki 8:2 (2003). 97-110. 103.
[28] Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2014. 17.
[29] Johnston, Adrian. “Whither the Transcendental?”, Crisis and Critique 5, 2018. 163-208. 165.
Works cited:
- Rodolfo Aramayo and Eric Selker. “Neurospora Crassa, a Model System for Epigenetics Research”. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology 5 (2013). doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a017921. Accessed 29th June, 2018.
- Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble. USA: Duke University Press, 2016.
- Michel Henry. “Phenomenology of Life”, Angelaki 8:2 (2003). 97-110.
- Adrian Johnston. “Whither the Transcendental?”, Crisis and Critique 5 (2018). 163-208.
- Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Marcus Weigelt and Max Müller. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2007.
- Niklas Luhmann. Art as a Social System. Eva M. Knodt trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
- Catherine Malabou. Before Tomorrow Epigenesis and Rationality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
- Frank Ruda, Agon Hamza and Catherine Malabou. “An Interview with Catherine Malabou: Toward Epigenetic Philosophy” in Crisis and Critique 5 (2018). 435-443.
- Trygve Tollefsbol. Handbook of Epigenetics, Second Edition. Cambridge: Academic Press, 2017.
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
- Slavoj Žižek. Absolute Recoil Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2014.