To Compose with Gaia: Living Sympoetically
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To Compose with Gaia: Living Sympoetically Sean Sturm 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Covid-19 . Latour . Stengers . Gaia . Composition . Symbiosis . Philosophy of
education
[W]e do not have any choice, because [Gaia] will not wait. (Stengers 2015: 50)
Death or Symbiosis The moment that is ‘the coronavirus’ distends as slow disasters do. We ‘non-essential workers’ wait and weigh the space between us. As we do our best to fill our bubbles with meals, news updates, Zooms, walks, and worries, invisibilities coalesce in the corners of our eyes: & & & & &
A virus that leaps from bats to pangolins to people—from mouths to hands to faces A ‘market’ that delivers some their food and others their ventilators ‘Essential workers’ (who keep us non-essentials alive) ‘Social distance’ and ‘self-isolation’ ‘The new normal.’
The ‘new normal’ we see is the Prime Minister addressing us daily from the TV, messages proclaiming ‘This is a Covid-19 announcement…‚’ police crawling by, people queuing for supplies (though we have pinot and pesto, there is no toilet paper or flour). It is polite penury. But because the sun is out and we can get about, things do not seem too bad. We are dreaming the futureless now of the overdeveloped world.
* Sean Sturm [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Postdigital Science and Education
But the arrival of the ‘novel’ coronavirus—novel only to humans, it must be said—tells us that Gaia will not wait (Stengers 2015). It tells us that, before the virus arrived, we already lived in ‘pneumatic bubbles’ (Sloterdijk 2011: 49); that we have unlearned how to live in the weather, with its lasting seasons and passing moods; that, as we have lived out some version of the ghostly passage of the 1% from air-conditioned home/hotel to car to office to car to restaurant/gym/plane to home/hotel, we have exhaled our waste and exhausted the world. Michel Serres prophesied the consequences of this ghastly excremental economy in The Natural Contract (1995). There he argued that, as a result of our drive to master and possess the world, which we attempt to mark as ours by defiling it, ‘[w]e have lost the world’ (Serres 1995: 29). But all is not lost. The world is now ‘reminding us of its existence’ (29) by ‘turning [our mastery] back on itself’ (34). Gaia is ‘intruding’ on our dream of existence by blowing a deadly virus our way like a cannibal wind (Stengers 2015). And in the air is the hint that what we are waiting for—the return to the old normal—will never arrive. What is to be done, then, we ask? First of all, as Serres (1995: 33) has said, we must cease to assume that nature centres on us; we must ‘place things in the centre and us at the periphery, or better still, things all around and us within them like parasites.’ For Serres, this move requires that we counter the Copernican revolution, in the original and Kant’s sense. Counter-intuitively for us as would-be moderns, we must put the Earth—or Gaia—at the center of thi
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