A very British genealogy of zoefuturism

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).

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Revisiting Collaborative Imagination through a Zoefuturistic Lens

By Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn

Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

At the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, we’ve edited and published more than a dozen collections of speculative fiction, along with various and sundry series and one-off narrative projects, since our founding in 2012. Although the first we’ve heard of zoetology or zoefuturism is in connection with this special issue ofVector, we’ve found it to be a helpful lens for reframing some of the stories we’ve had the good luck to work on, and for considering what has made some of these projects tick. It turns out that, perhaps, we’ve often been encouraging writers to approach the intersection of science, technology, and society in ways that could be described as zoefuturistic. This aesthetic’s focus on relationality, on complexity and emergence, and on the entanglement of the processes that give rise to life and living have helped us see the provocations and challenges we’ve issued to authors in new ways. Through the lens of zoefuturism, the project of inviting people to imagine hopeful futures—and practicing this relationship of hope to the future ourselves—is really an exercise in cultivating a different matrix of relationships that give our actions new meaning and consequence.

Roger Ames’s account of zoetology presents a contrast with what he defines as a “substance ontology” that dominates the Western philosophical tradition—it’s evident in Plato and much of Aristotle, with earlier roots in works like Parmenides’s The Way of Truth. In this ontology, existence is a matter of “being per se” (Ames 2023, 87) and reality is composed of discrete entities that embody immutable essences. If things have unique or particular attributes, those are layered onto the essential identity of an entity as “properties that are borne” (Ames 2023, 87). Ames describes this in terms of an “ontological intuition” that any individual thing—a household object, animal (human or otherwise), feature of the landscape, or celestial body—comprises “a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that” (Ames 2023, 88).

Drawing on the Book of Changes—but also unearthing strands in Western philosophy, from Dewey to Whitehead, and using a linguistic construction from Ancient Greek—Ames describes zoetology as a “process worldview” that captures the Chinese “shengshenglun” (蛺蛺紶), or “art of living” (Ames 2023, 90). This approach to life and the cosmos trades the Western tradition’s “beings” for “becomings,” insisting that “everything is constituted by its particular relations with everything else” (Ames 2023, 90). In a zoetological view, flux is a constant, and we exist enmeshed in “unbounded natural, social, and cultural ecologies” (Ames 2023, 90). We’re always being constituted and reconstituted by these ever-shifting relationships—with other people, with our natural and built environments, with social forces—and our thoughts and actions are reciprocally contributing to the perpetual reconstitution of those environments and systems. Zoetology also represents an anticipatory view, in the spirit of Dewey’s perspective on imagination or reflexivity in second-order cybernetics: we are all continuously changing and reaching towards the present moment and the future.

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Zoefuturism: Yen Ooi and Stephen Oram, in conversation

Yen Ooi: When I first came across Professor Roger Ames’s lecture on Zoetology, I felt a surge of relief alongside excitement, as finally, there was language to explain my “rationality” – the foundational thought-structure that I had grown up with. This applied easily onto science fiction, since it is literature that is grounded in “rational science,” allowing me to understand and explore why “rationality” in speculative fiction can differ so much from culture to culture, subgenre to subgenre.

As I discovered Zoetology alongside a depth of other theories (like convergence culture, participation revolution, techno-Orientalism, tabula plena, neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, polymedia, and more), and amidst all the distressing news in the world today (of wars, the climate crisis, the AI bubble, etc.), while my life kept “becoming” (through motherhood, researching and practising Zen, and lots of writing!), everything came together to become Zoefuturism in an organic discovery. Zoefuturism isn’t a new idea inasmuch as zoetology is what Ames calls “a new name for an old way of thinking.”

Stephen Oram: Talking with Yen over coffee about her theories behind Zoefuturism, the phrase she coined, was more than an insight into a new way of approaching science fiction, it chimed beautifully with some of my own thinking.

My cultural background is not one of eastern religions or philosophy, quite the opposite. However, since my teenage years I’ve been sceptical of absolutes, developing a keenness for seeing life as directional. By that I mean keeping an eye on whether things are going in the right direction towards a “notion” rather than setting absolute goals or end-points. More recently, I’ve been actively attempting to hold knowledge and ideology lightly, passionately but with the understanding that both will change and develop. This focus on change is reflected in a lot of my writing.

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