21 - Speculative Fiction

Summary

Introduction

If you are what you eat, it stands to reason that it must be impossible to eat and remain unchanged. Routine exchanges of regulatory signals and genetic material between eater and eaten threaten the skin-encapsulated human self with contamination and corruption by the other from within. However, that same “persistence of others in the flesh” (Landecker, “Exposure” 169) also highlights how any subject, human or otherwise, can only emerge via relationships of corporeal intimacy with other species and other selves. To these ends, Donna Haraway engages the evolutionary theory of symbiogenesis – literally, “becoming by living together” – as an alternative origin story engendering new insights into the origins, dynamism, and diversity of Earthly life. A secular creation myth hinging not on “cooperation” or “competition” but rather “indigestion” (Haraway, “Symbiogenesis”), symbiogenesis unsettles atomistic understandings of the self, instead understanding subjectivity as fundamentally dynamic, entangled, and always-already multiple.

Speculative fiction has a long history of direct engagement with the theory of symbiogenesis (see, for example, Simak). One such work is Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989), a sf story centrally concerned with the power dynamics of eating. In Xenogenesis, symbiogenesis informs an ethic of non-violence that eschews hierarchy and mandates dietary veganism yet remains embedded in deeply uneven power relations of coercion and instrumentalization. This confluence of utopian impulses and the acknowledgment of the inevitable insufficiency of such impulses is a constitutive feature not only of Butler’s sf, but of veganism itself (Quinn and Westwood 1). Both sf and veganism share a quality of estrangement from social norms (Schuster 219); symbiogenesis has likewise been deployed as a stratagem of imagining otherwise. As such, Xenogenesis thickens and complicates configurations of species and subjectivities, acknowledging selves as protean multispecies assemblages while affirming the differential accountability of such selves to others, human and otherwise.

Symbiogenesis

Symbiosis describes the long-lasting corporeal intimacy – obligate or optional, parasitic or pathogenic – of differently-named organisms. Symbiotic relationships express their liveliest potentialities in the phenomenon of symbiogenesis, or “long term stable symbiosis that leads to evolutionary change” (Margulis and Sagan, Genomes 12). In symbiogenesis, separate species “form a symbiotic consortium which becomes the target of selection as a single entity” (Mayr xiii), leading to “the appearance of a new phenotype, trait, tissue, organelle, organ, or organism formed through a symbiotic relationship” (Hird 58).