The two bodies of a ‘fossil subject’ (2018)
A subjective essay on fossil-fuelled subjectivities. This is a slightly modified version of my contribution to the publication The Lives of Others:
Edited by Joosung Kang, Seoul: Factory 2 (2018): 190–197.
Publishing date 2 October, 2018
The Two Bodies of a ‘Fossil Subject’
Jenni Nurmenniemi
Situating the First Body
Recovering from a spring filled with intercontinental air travel and the usual intensities of contemporary art labor, I am writing this while reclining on the terrace of my mother’s countryside cabin: a small wooden house surrounded by pine trees, on top of a hill overlooking a glimmering lake, in an area currently known as Southern Finland. It is July, and an exceptionally fierce heat wave is sweeping over these Northern latitudes. While I enjoy the warmth on a sensorial level, I cannot stop thinking about the reasons behind this somewhat unusual weather phenomenon.
The climate has everything to do with the experience of space and place, for humans and more-than-humans alike. While it controls the liveability of habitats, it can also affect the sense of belonging, or feelings of alienation. While I am writing this, a blue-green algae vortex the size of Manhattan is whirling in the Baltic Sea and changing how the 16 million people living on its coastal areas relate to its waters.
To situate myself into a broader context, my sense of place and belonging has probably been influenced the most by my work as a curator with the international art residency centre HIAP, in Helsinki, Finland. I have enjoyed the privilege of being able to combine a stable anchor spot on the historic fortress island of Suomenlinna with travels crisscrossing various frontier zones of Europe, a couple of longer stints in the US and South Korea, and a recent research trip to Australia. This is mostly thanks to a five-year-long project, Frontiers in Retreat, which mapped diverse artistic and curatorial practices that approached specific ecosystems from different angles.
Rather than a theme or a topic, our project approached ecology as a critical perspective. It provided insight into the invisible entanglements that contribute to the world’s becoming and allowed us to perceive a jumble of power relations. This sustained focus, combined with the exposure to different socio-political and ecosystemic contexts, has shaped my perception of space and my ways of being in the world. I want to use the opportunity to contribute to this publication by writing about the things that are currently changing my understanding of space. I also want to write to find out where I am precisely – besides my physical body’s lakeside retreat. But let’s first return to the weather.
Wherever I have wandered in the past few years, I have been greeted with unusual weather phenomena, ‘extremes’ and ‘anomalies’, according to the locals. There has been scorching heat, or drought, or snowfall where there haven’t been winters before. The world, its ecosystems and climate, is always transforming but the increasing awareness of the massive changes set forth and accelerated by humans create novel experiences of space, place, and belonging. These changes are not about the environment. They are entanglements of social, political, and economic issues enmeshed with the ecosystems. They foster new migration patterns and will alter perceptions of time, space, and our bodies.
Encountering the Second Body
Thanks to my book-loving life companion, I recently came across the essay Second Body by Daisy Hildyard. Brilliantly and poetically it weaves a fascinating argument regarding bodies, time, and space in the early 21st century. It shifted my perception of my body and of the spaces that it inhabits. Through Hildyard’s case studies, interviews and participatory observations loops of the contemporary global economy, and the lives shaped by them, start to unfurl.
Hildyard’s main argument is that every being currently exists not in one, but two bodies. Besides the porous physical contours of our first body, we have a somewhat ghastly but still in many ways concrete global presence, as beings and phenomena get increasingly entangled in the global flows and loops of production, distribution, and consumption – willingly or unwillingly (with varying level of awareness).
Not everyone has an equal impact on Earth’s ecosystems or leaves an equally heavy footprint. The ones who enjoy the luxuries provided by the global market economy the most tend to leave the most significant carbon footprints, whereas those, whose labour makes these luxuries possible, usually have to deal with their consequences. Some people (such as very isolated populations) might not be consciously implicated, but as long as one lives on this planet, there seems to be no escape from the two-body situation. Everyone’s organism and/or living environment is being affected one way or another. The awareness of how the mundane decisions we make might affect someone on the other side of the planet can be very unsettling.
Hildyard writes about how bodies become ‘all over the place’ as if they have begun to leak and their contours to dissolve. Our smallest everyday choices have unpredictable and often unwanted consequences. Literally, more and more toxins circulate within our interconnected metabolic systems. This also applies to other-than-human bodies, and bodies of socio-political fiction, such as nation states. Their borders may appear tightly barricaded, but in the global currents of products and pollutants, their boundaries are in flux.
When I am at the corner store, carefully feeling the chemically ripened avocados for the desired texture, my second body then somehow hovers, in a dispersed fashion, over the whole production chain. I become implicated in the lives of everyone involved in the avocado line of business. My second body is wreaking havoc on distant ecosystems, while my first one tries to satiate its appetite in its Helsinki habitat. Considering the number of decisions like this I make on an everyday basis, not to mention the regular flying, my second body appears to be amorphous, humongous, and destructive. I am inclined to call it a blob. It seems that I am not in a specific location at a given time; I am instead all over the place.
Going ‘Post-Fossil’
To seek solutions, or rather the right questions, to cope with this blob body of mine, I turn to philosophy. Another text currently shaping the way in which I experience space, is an extraordinary book on ‘anergy’, the forgotten side of energy, by Finnish thinkers Tere Vadén and Antti Salminen. I think they might be able to help in trying to fathom this two- body situation. Their text is currently only available in Finnish, but its key ideas can be found in English in Salminen’s essay in the book co-edited by me and writer and artist Tracey Warr, The Midden.
Salminen and Vadén approach different questions from Hildyard. However, while they try to rethink how to articulate energy, they end up defining another type of monster – or, the birth and demise of the ‘fossil subject’. It is a creature, or a way of existing made possible by the reckless burning of fossil fuels, which again is made possible by misunderstanding the nature of energy.
Vadén and Salminen are advocates for ‘post-fossil’ thinking. They try to imagine approaches to living meaningful lives without being so dependent on fossil fuels. This is challenging since for the past 150 years or so, almost all aspects of lives in modern societies have been shaped by the consumption of fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas). Their use has transformed how people live, move, and communicate, and how they experience their environments and themselves. Salminen and Vadén call this period ‘fossil modernity’. It has fostered particular ways of being in the world and sense of selves, fossil-fuelled subjectivities.
Fossil subjects with their globally entangled second bodies are causing severe issues that transgress national borders. Salminen and Vadén strive to figure out how it is possible that societies continue to feed on oil, despite the grave threats that this poses on everybody’s wellbeing. In the anticipated wake of the so-called 4th industrial revolution, a topic that seems to be widely discussed in South Korea, it is very urgent to re-think energy. This will affect the tone of the collective choreographies that our bodies participate in.
Salminen and Vadén argue that the modernised, namely highly Westernised, societies are built upon a dangerous misunderstanding of energy, anergy blindness. The modern societies and their ideas of efficiency, predictability, productivity, and economic growth are tainted by a fixation on exergy. This is the side of energy that can be calculated, harnessed into force, or in other words, ‘put to work’. To Salminen and Vadén energy, however, is mostly about something else. It is hard to define or calculate precisely. It is over-pouring solar flow, life-generating (and destroying) heat, that is mostly not possible for humans to utilise. They name this side of energy ‘anergy’.
Unlearning Fossil Subjectivity
The relatively broad accessibility of fossil fuels has made it possible for a significant amount of the world’s population not to think of energy on a daily basis. In a way, it has made possible the whole outlandish idea of an individual human subject detached from the rest of the biosphere. This is how the blob bodies are born, out of a false idea of detachment and blissful ignorance.
Forgetting how energy actually works – how it heats and haunts us also when we don’t actively think of its overflowing, ‘excess’ part (that now manifests itself, for instance, in the form of increasing greenhouse gas emissions) has allowed humans to forget how our lives depend on other lives and thriving, diverse ecosystems, and to destroy a big part of the world’s biodiversity. Since anergy has not been in our vocabulary or focus, we have not paid enough attention to its destructive aspects. Acknowledging anergy forces one to remember that every life depends on the lives of others.
My own hovering two-body presence, the dispersed way of living that has brought me to reside in Hong Kong, Berlin, New York, and Seoul during the past ten years, and to exert my toxic consumer influence even while anchored in Helsinki, has only been possible by burning a mind-boggling amount of ancient fossilized creatures. Thinking about it makes me dizzy and highly aware of how my life is entangled with more-than-human materialities and temporalities. While trying to stay body positive regarding my first body, how do I slim and slow down the second? Less flying and more vegan food, for sure, but what happens to my perception of space when the conventional structures of my fossil subjectivity inevitably have to dissolve?
The philosophers might not be the ones to seek simple solutions from. Salminen and Vadén call for a complete rethinking of the very ideas that have shaped the world as it is today. The whole concept of individual human subjects that master a world of objects has to go. I think I might have to situate and attune myself anew in an all-encompassing manner. Everything affects everything, writes Hildyard. Phenomena are co-constituted in ‘intra-action’, following Karen Barad’s articulations. Or, as Donna Haraway might continue, life is all about ‘sympoiesis’. There are many material-discursive ways to challenge the lingering mythical idea of the independent economic and rational subject.
Surprisingly practically, Salminen and Vadén propose re-focusing in and rooting (when possible!) to localities (seen as changing ecosystemic, social and political situations, instead of fixed places, spaces, or meanings) and the intergenerational passing down of knowledge and skills that contribute to their making. Localities, traditions, and heritage, such as language, should not be understood as opposites to global processes, but instead as interwoven with them. They are making each other without clear-cut borders. After being mostly on the move for many years, it is not easy to even figure out what is my context. It is easier for me to think of space as a multi-layered situation instead of something fixed, and to cultivate responsibility from that starting point. The most important thing, in my view, is to acknowledge the connectedness of our existence and that our localised actions have wider-level consequences.
My blob body is becoming aware, trying to get ‘woke’, but I want to cultivate it into a more responsible being, even though I realise that what we need to set forth is a systemic change, not an individual ego-polishing project. First and foremost, we will have to understand that every life depends on the lives of others.
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