By Christine Aicardi
Vector’s call to explore zoefuturism was the first time I heard of the word. But the editors’ framing of this newly coined variety of futurism spoke to me. Reading it through the prism of (feminist) scholarly literature in Science and Technology Studies (STS), it brought to mind the theorizing of ethics in more-than-human worlds, and its emphasis on the living relationalities of care across human and nonhuman agencies (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017); it brought to mind multispecies assemblages and their lifeways entanglements (Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015); it brought to mind the Chthulucene, proposed by Donna Haraway as more apt than the Anthropocene at describing current times, when human and nonhuman are more than ever inextricably entangled in living and dying together (Haraway, 2016).
But what caught me was a recommendation in the “Further explorations…” section of Vector’s call – the short story “Euglena” by Jane Norris (Norris, 2024). I had read “Euglena” and remembered it as a moving homage to the second generation of British cybernetics through one of its main figures, Stafford Beer. The monologuing slime mould narrating the story (we don’t know at the start that they are a slime mould) explain that their “first connection was with Stafford Beer”, that they loved his brain, and that they were born as a pond computer around 1960 (265-67). This, for me, raised intriguing questions about the possible relations between zoefuturism and cybernetics.
Beer (1926-2002), born in Putney, London, is best remembered for his contributions to operational research, management cybernetics (a field he launched in the 1950s) and (exceedingly) complex systems thinking (Rosenhead, 2006). A historical landmark was Project Cybersyn (1971-73), an experiment in socialist cybernetics in Allende’s Chile, which was framed by Beer’s writings on management cybernetics and to which he actively participated (Medina, 2006). Less known are Beer’s highly imaginative forays into biological computing in the 1950s and 1960s, on his own and in collaboration with Gordon Pask, another important British cybernetician of the second generation.
From the mid-1950s, Beer started looking far and wide for natural systems that could be used in the construction of cybernetic machines (Pickering, 2010: 231-34). He investigated with young children (his own, probably), successfully using positive and negative feedback to train them in solving simultaneous equations without teaching them the maths. He reported on thought experiments aimed at enticing various kinds of animals to “play this game” using adequate “reward function[s]”: mice, using cheese; rats and pigeons (already studied for their learning abilities); bees, ants, termites, which “have all been systematically considered as components of self-organizing systems” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 232). But it was with simple pond life that he most experimented: colonies of a freshwater crustacean (Daphnia) and… of Euglena, a genus of microscopic unicellular flagellate algae, of which some species live in freshwater and some in saltwater. Eventually, for over a year he tried to enrol an entire pond ecosystem, in a large tank which contents “were randomly sampled from ponds in Derbyshire and Surrey” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234).
What was Beer’s goal? This work on biological computing was part and parcel of his thinking on management cybernetics and complex systems. All along, he aimed to improve industrial management, and through his cybernetic factory designs, to replace the factory’s human manager with a (better performing) ‘cybernetic brain.’ Would a pond be cleverer than a human? He thought that factories were embedded in economic environments that were exceedingly complex systems, posing problems beyond human representational cognitive abilities. In contrast, some biological systems had the performative ability to solve such problems as they could adapt to unexpected and unforeseeable changes (Pickering, 2010: 234-37). In biological computers, Beer’s hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 237).
There is a strong whiff of zoefuturism to the idea of handing over the running of our industry and economy to pond life. Yet the conditions of its enrolment, or its abandonment when it does not do the job, should give us pause. What happened to Beer’s experiments with Euglena? Or, what happened to Euglena in Beer’s experiments? Beer was trying to exploit Euglena’s sensitivity to light for creating optical couplings to tanks full of the microalgae’s colonies. “However, the culturing difficulties proved enormous. Euglena showed a distressing tendency to lie doggo, and attempts to isolate a more motile strain failed” (Beer, 1962, cited in Pickering (2010): 234). Did Beer think that Euglena were trying to avoid detection, as implied by his use of ‘lying doggo’? Who knows. But he must have thrown away the content of the tanks, hopefully in a pond rather than in a sink. So, when Euglena refused to behave as expected, refused to play the role they were assigned in Beer’s game, they were discarded. The wonders of self-organization and autonomous behaviour had their limits: biological systems had to be useful to their human ‘carer.’ Beer’s ‘care’ for Euglena was predicated on their usefulness to his personal goals. It was not a dis-interested, open-ended, performative dance of agency. In Norris’ story, Euglena loved Beer’s, their captor’s, brain. But this could be interpreted as textbook Stockholm syndrome.
These reflections led me to revisit “Euglena”. But I read a different story this time. It is certainly an homage to Beer and British cybernetics. However, there is much more to it when read through a situated (feminist STS) filtering of zoefuturism. Above all, Norris gives Euglena, the lowly pond life, a new lease on life out of its (en)forced confinement in a tank. This could be read as liberation from detention and from a form of slavery, although Euglena does not complain much about it. Crucially, Euglena’s freeing brings with it a heightened capacity for self-respect, agency, autonomy, and altruism.
“Euglena” has been a thought-provoking (and affecting) object to think with about zoefuturism and its potentially problematic kinship to cybernetics. It has left me with unanswered questions for aspiring zoefuturist writers: where to place the cursor in the murky borderlands between freely consented multispecies collaboration and reciprocal care on the one side, and unidirectional exploitation through more or less forceful nudging on the other side? And for those who like me have been bathed from birth in Western culture, like the British cyberneticists – are we capable, or willing, to entirely avoid reproducing colonial and exploitative styles of thinking and acting in the world, which have been so tightly woven into the fabric of modernity since the Enlightenment?
References
Ames, R. T. (2023). ‘Zoetology’: A New Name for an Old Way of Thinking. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 93, 81-98. doi:10.1017/S1358246123000012
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Medina, E. (2006). Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies, 38(3), 571-606. doi:10.1017/S0022216X06001179
Norris, J. (2024). Euglena. In B. Greenaway & S. Oram (Eds.), All Tomorrow’s Futures: Fictions That Disrupt (pp. 265-271). London: CyberSalon Press.
Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Sketches of Another Future. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minneapolis Press.
Rosenhead, J. (2006). IFORS’ Operational Research Hall of Fame Stafford Beer. International Transactions in Operational Research, 13(6), 577-581. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2006.00565.x
Christine Aicardi is a Senior Research Fellow working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Futures Studies, with special interest in theorising and developing the use of applied science fiction for participatory foresight. She has extensive experience in multidisciplinary collaborations to facilitate Responsible (Research and) Innovation for future technologies.
vector-bsfa.com 