This text was published in Albert, Marie and Ida Bencke (eds.) Art meets health and biomedical research, ART2M & Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2022.
Migratory birds’ lives unfold with little mind to borders drawn on the land below. While some of us attach ourselves to houses with heating, plumbing and other municipal comforts, for the birds, home is in this circular leaving and returning. A migrating bird does not belong to a place but to movement that follows seasonal variations, manifested by the shortening day, by changes in the wind, by the colour of the leaves. It is in this sense that the Sámi author Johan Turi has compared the lives of reindeer and nomadic reindeer herders to those of migrating birds. Inhabiting a landscape, dwelling, for the birds and the reindeer herders in Turi’s account, is marked by the cyclicality of how Earth’s orbiting of the sun makes itself known in nature. The sense of home that Turi wants to speak of is not attached to a building or a piece of land but to the landscape itself, ever changing but constant, and shared with its other inhabitants.
Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz , for her part, writes about how time is perhaps best not understood as a simple line extending from the past to future. For Grosz it is not a circle either, because time does not repeat itself and is irreversible. Past does not predetermine the future; yet, all future is contained in the past as possibilities and virtualities. This means that the future is open, not set on a specific path but changeable at any moment, but also that future does not come into existence as something that breaks from the past but rather as something that arises from its potential. If time has a cyclical nature, it is in how the past is actualized in ever new ways, as returns that are not repetitions.
A story of a return: in 1822, a stork was shot down by a hunter in Germany and was found to already have been pierced by a spear through its neck. The bird had flown all the way from central Africa injured in this way, as was deciphered by its European investigators, based on the design of the spear . The wound on the stork became a clue to the puzzle of where the birds vanish during winter. Until then, it had remained a mystery to the people who stayed behind. Aristotle had suggested that they hibernate like many other animals do, perhaps under water. Or maybe, as one 17th century theory explained, birds flew away to the moon. The argument ensuing was that in this case, humans surely could follow, if they could only find the means. The foreign spear, however, pointed towards another kind of faraway land. Its inscriptions were interpreted as a story of the stork’s journey. As for the wounded stork, its travels ended, and to this day it remains taxidermied and on display in the University of Rostock, with the African spear preserved still pointing through its throat.
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The figure of the gene, it seems to me, speaks of a way in which we have tried to make sense of how our bodies contain what has been before and what might be. Like time, it tells a story of both limits and moldability, about how what we are is not predetermined nor is it completely open, about what unfolds in the gap between what is given and what might be. Both knowing and genetics are intertwined with this hope of knowing and changing what before appeared as destiny. I imagine the geneticist I am thinking of here some kind of a wayward psychoanalyst, wielding needles, microscopes and databases, hoping to find answers to questions such as where do I come from and what is wrong with me. Hoping to reach the past in the present and find it stored somewhere, with the promise of solvability and certainty that we tend to concede to those aspects of reality we call material.
All this focus on individual becoming of course never was the whole story. Bodies are porous, as are ways of dwelling in time and in landscapes. Emilia Tikka, Oula A. Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää’s work Mnemonia – The Memories of Birds imagines a world where the technological moldability of life grapples with this. The gene has sometimes been held as an emblem of predetermination and individualized descent, in both the sciences that study it as well as beyond. I wonder however if it is not through the temporality of being where genetics comes to speak about connections. My body is not mine alone; it was passed on to me by generations before; and it may live in time as pieces in others’ bodies. Or not as pieces even, but as some kinds of scrambled and rearranged possibilities. In this way, too, all our bodies are haunted by pasts and futures.
Likewise, developments in epigenetic studies have inspired ways to reinterpret what genetics is and what individuality means. Epigenetic studies have highlighted the ways in which processes that happen outside the genome result in changes in the organism’s observable characteristics, and how these changes might be heritable. The latter part, the heritability of what happens outside the genome, is what has sometimes been seen as a return of environmental influences into understandings of genetics which, for some time, maintained that only what was inscribed in DNA would be preserved in time. This is not to say that epigenetics somehow stands in contradiction to knowledge about genetics. Rather, epigenetic functions operate as a kind of additional layer of mechanisms through which evolution works, through which we come into being, and which are passed on through time, to subsequent generations.
Mnemonia latches on to how both genetics and epigenetics alike are ways of approaching how our bodies are stretched across time, how they are bound in place, and what is carried through generations. The way cells store the past is drawn on as a kind of materialized mnemonic device that builds on the hope that shared skills and ways of life might still retain an existence somewhere, hidden in microscopically small parts of the body. This existence is harnessed to bring back forgotten memories from across time and across species. It is this latter notion, of a transcorporeality extending across species boundaries, that unsettle some of the focus on the descent of individualized species that perhaps is retained in how genetic technologies are imagined. Instead, it imagines a shared past, a shared presence, and a shared future that become both embodied and moldable.
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The politics of imagination inherent in technologies have to do with the way they solidify some ways of making, say, the gene matter. For Grosz, politics is what lies between an unchangeable past and the future that stretches out from this past. If the future is open and present in what is possible, in this moment, in time’s unfolding, negotiations about how to live together in new ways are possible.
Tikka, Valkeapää and Valkeapää’s notion of living with the ruins – not towards some eventual utopian state of being, but with what the past makes possible now ¬– draws from the thinking of Anna Tsing who, along with Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt has also talked about both pasts and futures haunt all landscapes. Landscapes, as well as the bodies dwelling in them, carry signs of what has been. These can often be felt only indirectly, as eerie presences or absences, as traces such as the loss of an animal species being followed by changing vegetation elsewhere. Or, as ways of inhabiting landscapes and temporalities that become possible or impossible with the changing world. Futures, too, can have a haunting presence due to exchanges and sacrifices made today in the name of dreams of technological progress. It is in this way that imagined futures bear their marks on today’s ways of inhabiting the planet.
Inscriptions, ghosts, genetic memories; like a story contained in the remains of a long dead reindeer. With the right tools or sensitivities to see or to remember, a landscape is teeming with ways of being that might not be gone, and with what they might make possible. How does a landscape remember, and who does it dream of? Perhaps a memory could be something else than just a component of a life story of an individual’s coming into being, fixed in past, scaffolding the present. In Mnemonia, memories are formed and re-membered at the juncture of landscape, reindeer and human, of beings that have passed through leaving traces on what has come into existence. Borders between past, present and future become rescrambled; a line of flight is drawn.
Bibliography
Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene”. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson & Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G1–G14.
Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time. Evolution, Politics and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Kay, Lily E. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
MacDonald, Helen. “Flight Paths”. The New York Times Magazine, May 15, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/flight-paths.html
Pigliucci, Massimo and Gerd B. Muller. Evolution, the Extended Synthesis. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010.
Turi, Johan. Kertomus saamelaisista. [Muitalus sámiid birra]. Translated by Samuli Aukio. Porvoo: W. Söderström, 1979.
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