The Current Starting Point

Strange Ciders Project

Culture is a 3.5 billion year-old project. By culture, I’m referring to the continual organization, communication, and exchanges amongst species to the ends of coexistence and progressive complexity. The microbial world was one of the first cultures to emerge; it’s also been one of the most successful, diverse, and durational. It’s true that our (human) culture, as we currently imagine it distinct from the domain of the natural world, is founded and totally dependent on the existence of these microscopic ecologies.

What we think of as the self—the idea of who we are as an individual distinct from our surrounding environment, including others who occupy that environment—is in fact a historical artifact and a farce. Each ‘one’ of us has ten times the amount of individual microbial cells in our body than our own cells. That’s as much as six pounds of our body weight! Our very early biological development, digestion, and immune system depend on this. Knowing these facts, how could we still presume to think that the term ‘individual’ is an accurate label? We are mostly and vitally not ‘ourselves’ at all.

Also curious: the belief in the existence of bodies. Like the ‘internal self’, our bodily identities have been worked and reworked in order to distinguish, separate, and individuate. We need alternatives for future iterations! We are not suggesting a bodily transcendence; on the contrary, we are advocating a bodily dissolution into the world, into networks, and into environments. We are barely discernable from our surroundings. We are always multiple. We consist only of flows, communications, and processes.

The microbes know how to live. They’ve been doing it longer than we have and in more diverse ways. The smallest living organism is a nanobacteria, or possibly a protobiotic known as a nanobe; the largest living organism is a fungus in Oregon measuring 4 square miles. The oldest organisms on earth are a 250 million year-old bacteria found beneath a salt flat and 40 million year-old bacteria living in the belly of a bee found in a chunk of amber. We mention these extremes only to point to the tendency that microbes have to be creative and radical in their living strategies and practices. We think that in addition to the anthropological study of these cultures, it would behoove us to establish friendships, romances, and enduring relations with the inhabitants of this world.

We needn’t travel far to undertake this endeavor. We need to look inside ourselves, literally. Our guts, skin, orphuses, all contain populations, ecologies, and communities. We are looking to these multitudes for collaborative opportunities and creative potentials. The idea of displacing creativity outside the bounds of the human seems very enticing to us. To this end, we want microbes at the forefront of our process; we want to follow them into an inter-species microbe/human world that offers new problem-solving strategies, politics, value systems, and ways of living. Eating pro-biotic yogurt doesn’t quite cut it.

We’re culturing yeasts from human body parts (hands, feet, crotches, bellybuttons) in order to combine them with hand-gathered fruits to create wild-fermented beverages that will not only intoxicate you, they’ll change the way you think and behave; they’ll give you more things to talk about. This is social drinking in the most radical sense.

We’ve been activating new ways to entangle ourselves in dynamic, symbiotic, and productive relationships with these indigenous yeast species. Ciders, beers, and wines are as old as Homo sapiens, the enjoyment of alcohol older and universal. For most of this history, the yeasts used to produce beverages had arrived as part of the fruit or grain ecology, omnipresent on the surface of things. They never left, but have been continuously ignored and replaced with more efficient organisms that have been selected to suit a normative taste, expectancy, and behavior on the part of humans. We’re bringing the ecology back but in ways that have never happened before; cider-making is no longer an addition of ingredients and prescribed process; it’s a set of practices, experiments, and an interaction of diverse ecologies meeting each other for the first time. We have fabricated a posthuman beverage with each glass constituting a world.

Diagrams:

 

Current Bibliography for Cider Project

DONNA HARAWAY—Feminist scholar examining human/animal relationships, science studies, and the posthumanities. When Species Meet, and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women are the two books I have from her so far.

ANGELA E. DOUGLAS—A biologist, author of The Symbiotic Habit. I’ve read this book once before, and even though it’s completely scientific (not ‘philosophical’) it contains many amazing ideas that run contrary to many Neo-Darwinist concepts of evolution. The most important of these is that competition is not a necessary or even common dynamic between symbiot and symbiont.

PATRICK E. McGOVERN—An archaeologist based in Philidelphia, he writes on the ancient history of alcohols and wines, and there impact on culture. I bought two of his books, Uncorking the Past and Ancient Wine and am looking forward to reading them this break.

JERRY LEWIS, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR—Classic movie, doesn’t he drink something that changes him?

ISABELLE STENGERS—A philosopher of science/cultural theorist dealing specifically in ‘political ecology’, a posthumanist political vision that grants things, ideas, and nonhuman animals their proper agency. Cosmopolitics I and II are her best-known works, this break I’ll be reading I.

BRUNO LATOUR—Same as Isabelle Stengers, a political ecologist. The Politics of Nature I’ve read and is an amazing book, reading next Pandora’s Hope.

LYNN MARGUILIS—A theoretical biologist, prolific writer. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution recently caught my eye.

KAREN BARAD—Takes political ecology a step further. Instead of focusing on the agency of things within a political network, she is more interested in the relationships that happen between things (intra-actions) that allow for the emergent property of ‘agency’ and even the emergent category of seemingly distinct ‘things’.

ERIN MANNING—Artist/philosopher, author of Relationscapes. Hopefully this book is about relations within scapes, that would be perfect for my project.

DELEUZE—‘Body w/o Organs’ posits a theory of bodily becoming.

GUATTARI—The Three Ecologies is an instruction manual for breaking cultures and making new ones.

SANDOR KATZ—Queer communist author of The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation. Both books posit forth radical histories and practices of food production and consumption, as well as recipes and instructions.

ARAKAWA AND MADELINE GINS—Two artist/architects that have exhausted the nature of being-in-environments, being-ecological (although I don’t think they’ve ever explored this via biological relations.

JANE BENNETT—Another political ecologist. Author of short book Vibrant Matter.

THE YEASTS: A TAXONOMIC STUDY—Edited by Kurtzman, the biological bible of unicellular fungi. Three volumes, covers everything. $400 but UMaine has it as an e-book that I’ve been downloading 50 pages at a time.