On Gaian Systems: An Interview with Bruce Clarke

Abstract

On Gaian Systems:An Interview with Bruce Clarke Asijit Datta (bio) Asijit Datta interviewed literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke during a webinar on August 27, 2021. Their conversation centered on Clarke's presentation and development of Lynn Margulis's neocybernetic approach to the Gaia concept in Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. Often seen as an outlier in science since its debut in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory has run a long and varied course, gradually bringing the Earth and life sciences into closer integration around new understandings of planetary dynamics. This interview explores the development of Gaia's scientific variants and some key theoretical frames that have been brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Particular attention is paid to Margulis's adaptation of the concept of autopoiesis, which she viewed as providing a clarifying criterion for the autonomous self-production and symbiotic collaboration of living systems, in contrast to the first-order and computational cybernetics of control systems favored by Lovelock. Clarke's own work in this area extends Margulis's autopoietic approach to the Gaian system. Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He was Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress in 2019; Senior Fellow at the Center for Literature and the Natural Sciences, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2015; and Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2010–11. His latest books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (2020); other books include Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (2001). He coedits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham [End Page 431] University Press, and is the editor or coeditor of seven essay collections, most recently Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (2020) and, with Manuela Rossini, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (2017). asijit datta: Professor Clarke, when you point to Lovelock's "circular logic" [Clarke 2020, 6] concerning Gaia, as that recursive logic is understood in second-order cybernetics, are you looking at Gaia as a system operated by a continuous loop whose essential components are indestructible? Do you think that Gaia has a fixed volume of unalterable properties, while other components keep metamorphosing? bruce clarke: Yes, a continuous loop would conform to my idea here. However, that such a continuous loop and its essential components are indestructible is not the Gaia conception as I understand it. Matter and energy enter the state of living form, and the components of living systems are always re-forming and breaking down again. Their elements are renewable, but their forms are not indestructible, and the system carries out the continuous creation and de-creation of the productions of the system. That would be one way to state Gaia's circular logic. Moreover, Gaia itself is not indestructible, but it makes sense to think that it has maintained itself in operation since it got going some two and a half billion years ago. A time will come when cosmological conditions are no longer sustainable for this planetary system, at which point the continuation of life will cease. As for a fixed volume, this is the issue of material closure [Barlow and Volk 1990]. The planet is thermodynamically open to the flux of solar energy, of course, even while it is essentially closed to the influx of matter from beyond the Earth, just because this amount is negligible in relation to the total mass of the Earth. So basically, the planet does have a fixed volume of geological matter to be brought into the recycling dynamics that sustain the Gaian system. Gaia itself is also evolving as part and parcel of the interlocking of geological and biological evolution. Gaia continuously...