Metabolic Thought
Metabolic processes are what “interrelate us with the world,” be it through breath, the conversion of ingested sugars into caloric energy, heart rate responses to exertion, or body-temperature regulation. [1] Metabolic processes are the chemical exchanges that occur within all living organisms to sustain life functions. At the scale of the biosphere, the Earth cycles carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, as well as several additional elements, constituting a Planetary Metabolism. Beyond the purely organic, metabolic processes are also imbued in our infrastructures, sustaining collective forms of life, from the “water treatment plants that process urban waste [...] to data server cooling systems that allow for the logistification of food systems”. [2] What the instances of organic and inorganic metabolism have in common is their autonomic quality, meaning that these processes are largely unconscious, or that we’re rarely aware of them, despite their fundamental role in maintaining life itself.
From the perspective of political economy, already in the early stages of Industrial Capitalism Marx offered ecological critique, largely based on his research into soil chemistries at the time (informed by Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry from 1862). [3] By understanding the degeneration of soil ushered in through industrialized agricultural production, Marx wrote of a “metabolic rift” between humans and the natural environment in his notebooks, gesturing to this rift as the “fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production”. [4] What Marx equally foresaw is that transforming/intervening in our material environment with the sole purpose of capital value accumulation is not only ecologically perilous, but that it erodes the material requirements for human social betterment.
[1] Desiree Förster, Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes, (Lüneburg, Meson Press, 2021), 13.
[2] Louise Carver, Jamie Allen, Filipa Cruz, Manuela Bronze and Orlando Vieira Francisco, “Editorial,” in HUB Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society, Issue #3: Metabolic Media, 2024. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3286462/3286463
[3] Kohei Saito, “Marx’s Ecological Notebooks,” in Monthly Review, 2016. https://monthlyreview.org/2016/02/01/marxs-ecological-notebooks/
[4] Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 13.
Author: Patricia Reed