Metabolic Sublime(s)

This piece is a part of our series Metabolic Systems which looks into the cycles that underpin our cultures of consumption, from decay to digestion.

This piece was originally published in Syllabus. Founded in 2021, Syllabus is a weekly publication for nontraditional syllabi. The project invites writers, artists, and thinkers of all stripes to take the idea of a syllabus outside of an academic context, in order to experiment with the syllabus form and develop rogue pedagogies. 

Metabolism is the way by which humans interpret and represent systems of relations, exchanges, and any thing produced by those systems. Metabolism refers to not only biological energy systems, but broader gestures found in flows and exchanges of energy and resources of bodies, landscapes, and ecologies of all scales. A city has a metabolism with flows of resources and labor upon which its very existence is predicated. A single cell organism also has a metabolism which places it in relation to a slew of others’ metabolic systems, with the difference between its metabolism and the others’ being primarily one of relative scale. The single cell organism, in fact, might very well be a unit worth considering in a city’s metabolism, and vice versa. A metabolic understanding of the world can (perhaps sublimely) comfort as it unmoors our constructed identities as discrete individuals. By understanding ourselves as both metabolic systems and units in other metabolic flows, we might then generate a kind of solidarity with the other through the recognition of the ways in which any true distinction is mutable and unstable.

The ideal(-ized) metabolic system is a closed one, with energy swirling and every exchange and transformation accounted for. In actuality, metabolism is rife with rifts: holes through which energy spills and leaks, creating an effect that modifies the original system. Indeed, the scale of these rifts is not necessarily proportional. A disruption in a microscopic system (e.g metastasis of cancer) can have outsized and even permanent effects, while hiccups in a larger system (e.g a factory manufacturing luxury cars) may have an entirely different effect on the world and systems that surround it depending on the safeguards for disruption that are in place. 

The dialectical nature of the sublime becomes especially potent within these metabolic systems full of their own discrepancies, contradictions, and redundancies. In locating the sublime, there is a potential comfort or intimacy with the unfathomable, the contradictory, and the shifting systems which underpin our corporeal, material, and cultural existence. Identifying the metabolic sublime necessarily implicates us in it, adding us to the metabolic flow as active agents, organizers, or tinkerers in the system. The Sublime is another name for the inherent problem with representation: the closer one comes to a true representation, the more slippery and intangible the possibility of a true copy becomes. The Sublime names that space between a representation and a thing itself. This quality is perhaps most apparent in deeply entangled systems and ecologies, where the sheer quantity of individual actors renders the thing all but unfathomable. The supermarket, for example, houses products of virtually infinite processes implicating industry, agriculture, multispecies labor, technology, and aesthetic systems all represented to varying degrees of accuracy through highly designed modes of display. Pre-sorted apples, shipped from a great distance, are piled high in a carefully constructed cornucopia spill next to pre-slice containers of mango (also shipped, as are the plastic containers they are sold in) while egg cartons depict fields and sunrises no chicken in that facility has ever seen. Down a few aisles are shelves of cleaning products, engineered in labs, their plastic containers decorated with semi-fictionalized flowers and fruits meant to provide context for the aroma chemicals that differentiate one scent from the next. What an eye for the sublime reveals in the aisles of the Supermarket is the labor and landscapes implicated in the construction and maintenance of modern life.

In this syllabus, I have introduced somewhat artificial but culturally accepted categories of scale, leading us from the individual to the collective in a cumulative flow of information which might leave the reader with material to mold and repurpose as they wish. This syllabus then becomes a proposition for its own metabolic system of information and citation: an invitation to digest and be digested. 

Living individuals (human or otherwise) feel metabolism acutely. Metabolic process in the individual presents as intersecting energy flows and nourishment producing an actually sense-able metabolism. The unit of the individual can encourage a kind of closed circuit thinking, with defects and rifts identified as some level of disease (that is, an actually sensible unease). Metabolic rift, physiological or otherwise, in this context might then well be categorized as a kind of indigestion. There is, however, within the unit of the individual, opportunity to encounter oneself through manipulation of metabolic processes (e.g. diet and movement) and in so doing, open oneself up to an unfolding world of other metabolic structures and imperatives.

Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, 2000, John Bellamy Foster, Book

A foundational body of work in the ecological framing of Karl Marx, Marx’s Ecology introduces a materialist understanding of ecological systems at a time where a pseudo spiritualist or conservative approach reigned supreme. In particular, Foster’s centering of the idea of metabolic rift in Marx has provided a stable jumping off point for any materialist work on ecological topics.

Capital Volume One, Chapter 7, Part III, Karl Marx, Book Chapter

A section in Capital which articulates the specific relationship between humans and nature or perhaps more precisely, the environment and metabolisms surrounding humans. It outlines systems by which humans encounter and transform the non-human and vice versa. This extract, and Capital in general, provide a materialist basis for understanding human constructed metabolisms through the mediating force of labor.

Hyper-colonialism and Semio-capitalism, 2024, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Essay

In this recent text, Berardi posits an extension of capitalist and colonial forms of extraction into a deterritorialized sphere of production. The colonial project has attempted to wrest labor from its situated contexts, further abstracting the material metabolisms at play and our roles within them.

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, 1980, Werner Herzog, Film
A documentary film directed by Les Blank depicting director Werner Herzog following through on his (alleged) vow to eat his own shoe if then philosophy student Errol Morris completed his film, Gates of Heaven: “if you ever manage to actually make a film, I’ll eat my shoe.” In the documentary, Herzog prepares his shoe at Chez Panisse with the assistance of Alice Waters and performatively eats it as an accompaniment to a lecture. Herzog uses the shoe and its preparation (and perhaps cooking in general) as a form of mending of a rift between himself (the artist) and the material world, sublimating the shoe into an artistic register and himself into a visceral one.

Metabolism, 1899, Edvard Munch, Painting

One of many works by Munch exploring metabolisms and pictorial approaches to representing human’s relationship and interconnectivity to nature. The human body in life and death features prominently in describing the relationship, with the images oscillating between symbolic and diagrammatic.

Twelve levels of recursion, Cybersyn model, Image

An application of a system devised by Stafford Beer who applied theories of cybernetics to management structures. This particular model and computational system, named Cybersyn, was generated for the then socialist Chilean government to account for nested systems of production and accountability within government.

Shifting scales of and within metabolic systems is what renders them sublime, the contradictory difference between the many and the large, efficient spurts and long sustained efforts. The microbial world is defined by its metabolic relationships, with the specific morphologies of tiny organisms being streamlined to consist mainly of metabolic structures. They privately consume and transform their worlds with their effects magnified and rendered visible through the resulting products. Humans overcome illnesses, grape juice turns to wine, and waste turns to compost. These microbial sublimes are present in, and foundational to, the territorial and vice versa. Forests and cities rely on their respective metabolic systems while also cohabitating in a larger common one. The relative discrete-ness of units shifts between systems and perpetually reveals units to be ever further implicated in metabolic relations. 

The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, 2015, Robert Doran, Book 

Doran manages to synthesize a shifty (by design) definition of The Sublime and how it functions through its various permutations. 

Handbook of Fermented Functional Foods, 2008, Edited by Edward R. (Ted) Farnworth, Book

To serve (up) concrete examples of biologic metabolic systems, this handbook breaks down fermentation processes within food products. Fermented foods provide a useful bridge between nature and culture and help to describe how human and non-human metabolisms intersect and shape one another.

Landesque Capital, 2016, N Thomas Håkansson and Mats Widgren, Book

Focusing on metabolisms at the scale of a landscape, this volume defines and expands on the idea of “Landesque Capital”: the investment of resources, energy, and labor into land on a time scale that exceeds that of the individual human. It effectively places human labor within a so-called natural scale and vice versa with specific examples of agriculture and land management that showcase the profoundly interconnected metabolisms implicated therein. 

Image from Ecological Civilization, January 2011 Monthly Review, Fred Magdoff, Article

A succinct representation of oil-plant-animal-atmosphere metabolic interactions.

Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology, 2019, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, Article

Addressing a specifically anthropological audience and context, this text attempts to provide a spatial dimension to the Anthropocene to better understand the visible and invisible relations that produce and perpetuate the epoch. The authors write, “Tracing the multispecies socialities and histories that both shape and become shaped by such landscape differences, we argue, is the best starting point for an anthropology of the frenzied, accelerated conditions of anthropogenic life sometimes called the Anthropocene.”

Clément’s drawing of symbiosis, Gilles Clément, Drawing

Gardener and garden theorist Gilles Clément writes, gardens, diagrams, and draws about and with the various agents involved in what he calls The Planetary Garden. His writing and gardens are worth seeking out as more complex representations of the dynamics he works with, but his diagrams and drawings offer a succinct view into his conception of responsibility for and solidarity with the non-human and the planetary systems that shape them (and us.)

Comparison of dynamic patterns in nature to ancient settlements, Constantine Doxiadis, Image

A poetic example of ekistics, the study of human settlements. This particular study posits an inherent similarity in the congregation and self-organization of humans and non-humans.

View of author’s sourdough starter through a microscope, 2024, Image

A personal representation of a metabolic system I had, up until this point, only observed the effects of. Through the microscope I was able to all but directly greet the yeasts I have been feeding for years.

The sublime quality of any metabolic system or process is magnified by the masses of agents and activity at play within them. Applying a framework of labor to these agents can serve to de-naturalize the processes and give these metabolic flows a referent in human-constructed systems. Supermarkets, again, provide an excellent example as they force a broad swath of metabolisms into a single banal structure. By seeing the supermarket as a web of systems of labor rather than a collection of products, the walls of the supermarket fall away and the distinction between market, field, and factory becomes muddled. Labor can provide significance to the interstitial moments within these flows in that it describes agents and agencies as dynamic. Labor also forces a reckoning of assumed categorizations of who/what is productive vs unproductive. 

The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, 2019, Cara New Daggett, Book

Cara New Daggett presents a history of capitalist and industrial appropriation of energy through thermodynamics and its lasting impacts on how we labor. Through a proposed “genealogy of energy” she urges a decoupling of waged labor from energy so as to better strategize for sustaining life in a post-industrial world. 

Wasteland: A History, 2014, Vittoria Di Palma, Book 

An account of wastelands and their conception and perpetuation as a category throughout history. For Di Palma, the wasteland describes humanity’s categorizations and valorization of productivity and the disgust and fear constructed around the unproductive.

The Sweatshop Sublime, 2002, Bruce Robbins, Article

A description of the profound interconnectedness of production and an introduction of the Sublime as a way to explain the unwieldy contradictions and obfuscations inherent to global production. “To contemplate one’s kettle and suddenly realize, first, that one is the beneficiary of an unimaginably vast and complex social whole.”

Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers), 1989, Jorge Furtado, Film

A short film tracing the path of a tomato from the field, to the shop, to an affluent home, to the dump where it is gleaned by the poor inhabitants of the island  Ilha das Flores. The film merges its content with its mode of representation through the wry use of mid century info-film vernacular and voiceover. Its displaced vantage point further emphasises the alienation from systems represented in the film.

Image from Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, 1968, Richard Scarry

An example of what is essentially a production flow chart in the context of a children’s book with the organising principle of labor.

Baroque and complex diagrams of cycles and flows are the most common representations of the metabolic—sublime in their own way with ever finer lines and arrows intersecting and weaving as warp and weft to produce exponentially specialized meanings. Shifting the gaze from the interstitial spaces and connective tissue, stores of energy and resources come into focus. Accumulation does not, after all, mean hoarding at the expense of others. The Commons provides us an anthropocentric and labor-based name for some of these stores. Systems rely on excess and surplus in the event of a rift or change, and who or what controls these collections or Commons defines a system’s potential  to persist. 

The Eaters and the Eaten, 1976, John Berger, Essay

Written more or less contemporarily to Berger’s trilogy ‘Into Their Labours’, this essay works specifically to describe relations between the peasant and bourgeoisie classes through their respective approaches to eating and consumption more broadly. Material undergirdings of dining conventions become an effective and sense-able way to describe the inequalities consumerism engenders.

The Metabolism of Cities, 1965, Abel Wolman, Article

In this paper, Abel Wolman first published an estimate of U.S. urban metabolism which necessarily accounted for the elaborate and vast material inputs and outputs of a city’s metabolic system. 

Re-enchanting The World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, 2018, Silvia Federici, Book

Silvia Federici compiles work exploring the reproductive dimension inherent to a feminist understanding of the Commons. The book spans Federici’s work on capitalist enclosure, debt, and possibilities for sustained and newly re-enchanted Commons in the face of a highly motivated and relentless system of extractive capitalism.

Commons against and beyond capitalism, 2014, George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, Article

A more focused essay from Federici alongside George Caffentzis that explores the Commons specifically as a site for observing developing resilient alternatives to increasingly alienated and extractive systems. They also touch on the Commons’ vulnerability to appropriation by these very systems.

Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons, 2019, Ugo Mattei, Olivier De Schutter, Tomaso Ferrando, and Jose Luis, Book

A diagram pulled from studies of food as commons to present the Commons as a system and model for a sustainable metabolism.

Sample Viable System Model, Image

Another product of the work of Stafford Beer, the Viable System Model or VSM is the application of the perceived logic of living metabolic systems to generate autopoetic fabricated management and production systems. The result tends to be highly ornate diagrams of flows of energy, labor, and ideas all presented as equivalently influential even in their inconsistent materiality/immateriality.

The Gleaners and I, 2000, Agnès Varda, Film

A still from Varda’s film The Gleaners and I which documents systems and subcultures of gleaning in France. Gleaning, being the practice of gathering unwanted produce or materials from the leftovers of commercial enterprises.