Symbiosis

The biological process of different species living together over a prolonged period of time is called ‘symbiosis’. This word stems from Ancient Greek and is composed by σύν (sýn: together); and βίωσις (bíōsis: living). Unlike organisms performed extraordinary feats of cooperation throughout deep time so that humans may live with, and within such dazzling biodiversity today. The slimy, sticky, generative and at times confrontational process of getting get along is what I set out to understand.

To begin with, symbiosis is found within and across micro-organisms (i.e cells, ecosystems, interspecies) and macro-organisms (i.e grassroots movements, political parties, social networks, orchestras, institutions). Although not always mutually beneficial, the idea of symbiosis opens up the conversation that we are interdependent more than we might care to admit, or realise. As scientists Margulis and Sagan (2001) once argued “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking”, rings louder than ever for anyone and everyone who are interested in building futures that emerge from a present dependent in death and destruction.

Lichen is the companion species for this essay. 

The word  “symbiotismus” was first coined by German plant physiologist Albert B. Frank (1839–1900) in 1877 during his study of lichen to describe “where two different species live on or in one another under a comprehensive concept which does not consider the role which the two individuals play but is based on the mere coexistence and for which Symbiosis is to be recommended” (translated in Sapp, 1994, p.6). In 1907, Russian botanist Andrey Famintsyn (1835–1918) who established and taught at Russia’s first laboratory of plant physiology in St. Petersburg, was also impressed by the hybridity of lichens. Lichens are composite organisms that defy tidy definitions and lines of descent. They comprise of diverse microbionts that belong to separate taxonomic kingdoms entangling algae or cyanobacteria, and fungi. The study of lichen revealed that across single-celled (microscopic) or multi-cellular (animals, plants, fungi) organisms are not as ‘individual’ or ‘autonomous’ as they may appear. Instead, they are “consortiums” (Famintsyn, 1907) of various species, or “holobionts”, i.e a host of many species (Margulis & Fester, 1991) that rely on the communication and interaction among several species within and outside the organisms to evolve and survive.

For example the algae or cyanobacteria will fuel lichen metabolism through photosynthesis, and the fungal partner even following extreme cycles of wetting and drying, can re-organise its membranes and restart photosynthesis when moisture reappears. Artist Laurie Palmer (2023) remarks in her book Lichen Museum that, “neither of the most prominent partners, the algae nor the fungus, would look or act, on their own, anything close to how they look and act together, nor would they thrive” (p. 35). This is precisely why lichen may be found across climates and biomes, from the frozen tundra to parched desert rocks (Tsing, 2012).

To be in symbiosis means to be involved in a generative and transformative process of becoming-with through a permanent, long-lasting “intimacy of strangers” (Margulis, 1998) that enables all entangled species and organisms to adapt to conditions that would have been otherwise unfavourable. Symbiosis is not always a smooth encounter, nor is it a synonym for a mutually beneficial encounter. By the same token, it is also not always parasitic (extractive) and the conditions of the species’ interaction may change over time too. Nevertheless, the prolonged encounter of different species in the case of lichens, birds, pollinators, and more, allows both partners to thrive in environments where on their own, neither could survive.

What happens when the prolonged encounter of two species not only allows for their survival, but for the emergence of new species? In 1909, while Russian botanist Konstantin Merezhkovsky (1855-1921) was studying lichens on the Siberian tundra, he identified this process as ‘symbiogenesis’. Studies in symbiogenesis were occurring simultaneously as plant and marine biologists looking at micro and macro organisms became increasingly critical of the dominant Darwinian idea of evolution predicated on struggle and competition. Although symbiogenesis emerged in a number of countries in the work of countless scientists working across disciplines in the beginning of the early 20th century, this theory being a key driver of evolution, did not take root in Western mainstream zoocentric science (Hird, 2009) until almost a century later; when evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis wrote her first paper on symbiogenesis titled on The Origin of Mitosing [Eukaryotic] Cells (1966). It was rejected by fifteen scientific journals before it was finally published in 1967. She became symbiosis’s most ardent promoter, attributing the bacterial origins of human mitochondria and photosynthetic chloroplasts to the symbiogenesis of eukaryotic cells and disproving, with genetic evidence, that organisms are closed, individual, self-sufficient systems.

Since the origin of nucleated cells—the latest major evolutionary step—evolution has only produced different variations of the same essential type of eukaryotic organisms. All fauna, flora and funga, and many unicellular organisms are eukaryotes. One wild, but vital leap of the imagination is to imagine for a moment that trees are variations of humans, humans are variations of butterflies, and butterflies are variations of trees. We are all variations of the same type of organism.

The close and careful observation of patterns, characteristics and systems in ecosystems and more-than-human life have offered endless inspiration for several domains of human knowledge creation, from agroecology and cybernetics to engineering and the arts. Palmer (2023) who has spent a great deal of time studying lichen, suggests these five qualities we can learn from lichens.

• Their collectivity: a lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and some algae as well as a miniature ecosystem of many organisms cutting across taxonomic lines messing with the idea of individual identities of linear evolutionary trees and pointing towards the survival strategies of mutual aid.
• Their site specificity: they constitute themselves an intimate relationship with their environment and can’t be separated from it reminding us that the environment is never a separate entity but we are part of it and it is in us.
• Their slow pace: their long-term perspective yearly growth is generally measured in millimeters and some can live thousands of years if they’re understood to die at all. This is a very different time frame than the speed up of global capital.
• Their refusal to be commodified: they can’t be grown in a lab and are too small and too slow to provide a steady source of anything for capital to feed on.
• Their diversity: wild diversity of form, porosity and sensitivity to their environment makes them highly adaptable. (p. 13)

Although applying these qualities in practice may sound like an experiment in metaphor, they are actively implemented across several grassroots movements, activist circles and all sorts of collectives. But what about larger or more complex configurations? How does the notion of symbiosis translate to larger systems, for example, when relations are considered among the collective, the public, the neighbourhood, local fauna and flora, the municipality, the city, the site?

The ongoing and increasingly alarming planetary shifts in climate, earth system functions and biodiversity extinction rates seem to escape language. A plethora of definitions by various scientists, theoreticians and thinkers have been proposed, connoting a variety of culprits – ‘the Anthropocene’ proposed by Crutzen (2006) being the most popular and disputed term of all. Others include capitalocene (Moore, 2017); anthrobscene (Parikka, 2015); plasticene (Haram et al., 2020) and, plantationcene (Haraway, 2015). These neologisms reveal a few things. First, our incapacity to fully grasp undoings of planetary proportions. Secondly, our urge to use words to feel out the limits and margins of our knowledge and purpose, and thirdly and most importantly, the limits of language to prompt radical action. 

Margulis was not fond of applying biological processes to interpret social phenomena even though she did recognise their impact. However, I would like to outline how fundamental evolutionary theories and sciences have been in shaping the material-discursive phenomena of modernity/coloniality. Even though Margulis was not fond of it, they are, politically, socially and economically deeply intertwined. Hence, anyone aspiring to contribute to urgent eco-social transformation could begin by revisiting the stories we tell about how life came to be and recognise how these stories brought to the fore what we have to reckon with today. Amitav Ghosh guides us through the essence of this recognition in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016):

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition. The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself (p.4).

The stories we tell about how life came to be should begin from recognising that we emerged from the living together of many. What follows is an important clarification regarding the conditions that allowed for the emergence of the brilliant diversity that populates our planet. To do so, symbiosis will ‘spill out’ of the natural sciences and into philosophical and sociological (re)considerations that shaped our understanding of agency, subjectivity and survival.

Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life was published in 1859, biological evolutionary theories flourished. Between the 1930s and 1950s the so-called Modern Synthesis or New Synthesis (Huxley, 1942) synthesised Darwin’s theory of evolution with Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics into a joint mathematical framework. As a consequence, a great deal of complex systems, organisations and relations (incl. code fragments, genes, cells, organisms, populations, species, ecosystems) were described and reduced to mathematical equations of competition and struggle. Among many famous works inspired by this logic, the work of British evolutionary biologist and zoologist Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) stands out for the lasting impact his sociobiological analysis had on our contemporary social imaginary. He argues that all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses are “survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” (p.xxi). While the expression ‘survival of the fittest’ he refers to is attributed to philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, who inspired by Darwin, wrote Principles of Biology (1864) in which he outlines correlations between Darwin’s theory of natural selection with his laissez-faire economic theory.

Neo-Darwinists not only argued that ‘the selfish gene’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ is a law of nature but also attributed the creation of new species to chance variations/mutations during gene reproduction, while disregarding the evolutionary mechanism of symbiogenesis and reducing ‘fitness’ to how many offspring an organism has. This misreading of Darwin’s theory of evolution lay the foundations for Social Darwinism, which applied certain human qualities such as superiority, greed and competition to all evolutionary process and life, fanning the flames of a capitalistic zeitgeist and justifying racism, interspecies oppression, extractivism, colonialism, eugenics and genocide, in the name of becoming the ‘fittest’. Even though these crimes well-preceded the 19th century, once the they were ‘supported’ by these narratives they determined how society – from politics, economics and culture and from public to private life – were shaped, and are still shaped to this day (Hird, 2009; Haraway, 2016).

Margulis (1995) reminds us that “Symbiosis has nothing to do with cost or benefit. The benefit/cost people have perverted the science with invidious economic analogies […] the language of life is not ordinary arithmetic and algebra; the language of life is chemistry” (p.135).  Among Margulis’ many accomplishments and contributions to evolutionary theory and science, perhaps the most important one is that she taught the world to recognise itself as becoming through/in relation. Gradually, her theories became recognised by mainstream science and to this day still inform evolutionary studies. Even Dawkins finally admitted the importance of her contribution to science:

I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I’m referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology. (Brockman, 1996)

Margulis remarks rather clearly that “Symbiosis is not a social relationship because social relationships refer to associations between members of the same species. To be symbiotic a relationship must refer to members of different taxa” (cited in Feldman, 2017). Yet, several scholars in the arts and sciences have since began to recognise that processes charatcteristic of symbiotic relations are not limited to the same species. Scholar of social theory, science and technology studies Maurizio Meloni admits in ‘How Biology Became Social, and What it Means for Social Theory’ (2014) that, “the traditional separation between the biological and the social has become increasingly difficult to define. […] sociology is becoming more open to biological suggestions, just at a time when biology is becoming more social” (p. 594). He attributes the ‘social rethinking of biology’ to three conceptual novelties:

• Technical changes in evolutionary literature that have made possible a rethinking of the possibility of altruism and cooperation in evolution (prosocial view of evolution);
• Changes in neuroscience from the brain as an isolated data processor in neuroscience to a multiply connected device profoundly shaped by social influences (the social brain)
• Finally, and probably more importantly, changes in molecular biology, from the view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the ‘reactive genome’ (cited in Keller, 2011; Griffiths and Stotz, 2013) of contemporary postgenomics (the socialized gene), a notion perfectly embodied in the new emerging field of molecular epigenetics (p. 594)
  

M. Beth Dempster was an Environmental Studies Master student in 1998 and coined sympoietic in her thesis A self-organising systems perspective on planning for sustainability. The term stems from the Greek sún “with” and poíēsis “to make” (also, the root of the word “poetry”) and she used it to define collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries, where information and control are distributed among components, and the systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change (p.30). The term ‘sympoietic’ was reconfigured by Haraway (2016) to refer to evolutionary systems from which the recuperation and survivability of living systems can emerge.

A system is a set of relations that describes some sense of connectedness. Even though, components and boundaries also contribute to the understanding of the kinds of systems, Dempster (1998) argues that it is the relations among these components that are even more critical for establishing a system, its behaviour, and its degree of complexity. “How are these relations established? What creates the pattern of organisation that describes any particular system?” (p.26).

Dempster (1998) observed that Systems Theories from a rational-comprehensive approach (i.e engineering) tend to “bound that which has no boundaries” and their rigidity prevents them from responding to complex and dynamic social and environmental issues. Dempster’s work also built on the cybernetic work in systems theory and philosophy of biology Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980) co-authored by Chilean biologists and philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. They make a case for the term ‘autopoiesis’ (from Greek aυτο “self” and poíēsis “to make”) to describe the property identified in cells and organisms that allows them to maintain and renew themselves by self-regulating their composition and boundaries.

Characteristics of autopoietic systems are: 

Structure: autonomous units with self-defined boundaries

Terms of relation: closed (relations between parts)

Reproduction: Autopoietic: copy or self-production

Evolution: between systems

Goal: growth/development orientated

Balance: homeostasis

Trajectories: finite temporal trajectories

Pattern of organisation closed (relations between parts)

Dempster (1998)

Dempster proposes we recognise and plan also for sympoietic system (collectively-producing) and argues that they may be more capable of responding to sustainability challenges. Tsing (2017) clarifies that autopoiesis and sympoiesis are in generative friction rather than opposition to each other (p. M26) and that Margulis would also have used ‘sympoietic’ at times to describe “interlocked and multileveled systemic processes of non-reductionist organization and maintenance” (p. M27). Contrary to autopoietic, sympoietic systems allow for flexible and adaptive planning that is capable of recognising “uncertain futures, synergistic possibilities, differing perspectives, and multiple values” (p.v). 

Characteristics of sympoietic systems are:

Structure: unbounded, complex, amorphous entities, lack self-defined spatial and temporal boundaries

Terms of Relation: cooperative

Reproduction: amorphously and collectively

Evolution: occurs within the system

Goal: evolutionary orientated

Balance: dynamic tension

Trajectories: potentially infinite temporal trajectories

Pattern of organisation: ajar, open to external information and merging, unpredictable, creative

Dempster (1998)

Complex living systems are the original template from which the concept was developed, so ecosystems are an example of the ‘ideal’ sympoietic system. Other examples include: forest, community, an open group, common English, participatory processes and post-normal science (1998). Dempster does not use ‘sympoietic’ and ‘symbiotic’ interchangeably. Yet, the conditions for and characteristics of symbiosis overlap with several conditions for and characteristics of sympoietic systems. Both provide a counter-argument to the self or the individual as an autonomous unit and prove that novel capacities and capabilities emerge through the prolonged encounter of diversity, cooperation and complexity. This novel outcome or property is called an emergent property. It can either be a new species that demonstrates characteristics and functions that would not be present in the respective organisms had they not co-evolved, or the ability of small birds to confuse predators through their murmurations.

American author, social justice activist and facilitator adrienne maree brown (2017) spells out recognising emergence simply and succinctly in these terms, “The wonder and awe we experience being in the world is often the result of the recognition of how complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions” (p.3).

Potawatomi botanist Robin Kimmerer recounts in her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) the moment she first ‘tasted’ the missing language of her people, with the word Puhpowee in a treatise on the traditional uses of fungi by her people by the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay:

In the three syllables of this new word I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent. The makers of this word understood a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything. I’ve cherished it for many years, as a talisman, and longed for the people who gave a name to the life force of mushrooms. The language that holds Puhpowee is one that I wanted to speak. So when I learned that the word for rising, for emergence, belonged to the language of my ancestors, it became a signpost for me. (p. 44)

Emergence is all around us. It has inspired indigenous wisdom and language as well as the formation of social justice movements. It is important to note that Chinese American philosopher and anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2017) clarifies that autopoiesis and sympoiesis are in generative friction rather than opposition to each other (p. M26) and that Margulis would have used ‘sympoietic’ at times to describe “interlocked and multileveled systemic processes of non-reductionist organization and maintenance” (p. M27).

The term was reconfigured by Donna J. Haraway (2016), a feminist scholar and cultural critic to refer to evolutionary systems from which the recuperation and survivability of living systems can emerge. Sympoiesis (the making with) she writes is, “a carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becomingwith, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation” (p. 125).

I am interested in organisations, collectives and systems that require and facilitate the prolonged encounter of plurality and diversity, wherein friction becomes generative because cooperation is prioritised. I am curious about organisations, collectives and systems that respond to their sites with sensitivity and depth, changing, adapting or ending when it is time for other things to take their place. This is why the evolutionary process of symbiosis serves as the conceptual framework of this research to study how ‘the living together’ of critical environmental education and collective artistic practices may allow for the emergence of transformative ecopedagogies with/in/out of their institutional frameworks.

The purpose of this first reflection on symbiosis was to introduce the reader to the idea of symbiosis as a biological and systemic process and to challenge certain hegemonic social imaginaries around competition, cooperation and survival. The second reflection on symbiosis (to be published) will focus on the methodological considerations that informed the design of this research’s empirical experiments.

See also: Lichenizing Pedagogy

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