Lessons from soil on being different and staying weird

and the philosophy of curiosity

Busy times drawing to the end of summer! While a few other posts ferment in the draft box, I wanted to repost this, originally shared by the wonderful newsletter Radicle at the end of last year.

Soil is weird. It is never exactly what we expect. Even if you love it (which you should) and have learnt all the jargon (‘aggregates’, ‘exudates’, ‘microarthropods’ etc.), it’ll surprise you every time. The configuration of life down there is just so vast, with so many permutations of bacteria, fungi, cilia, roots, insects, and invertebrates (the list goes on and on), that each handful is entirely a world unto itself. This is true of soil everywhere but especially so for us who live around 50 degrees north of the equator (as we do in the UK). At these latitudes, we have some of the most varied soil in the world, equal in biodiversity to the Amazon rainforest. One square meter contains thousands of different species from all the major branches of life. And this is excellent news.

That a vast, subterranean enterprise of multicellular worldbuilding has survived (and is right here!) beneath our feet is a source of hope as well as practical inspiration.

What might soil teach us about how we could live differently? How might we too build thriving fugitive communities? Could ours also resist the onslaught of accumulation, acceleration and colonisation?

Perhaps, because of its radical interconnectedness, soil can draw us into thinking about how things unfold and relate rather than their separate parts; its abundance might insist on a rethink of our dominant scarcity approach to the world; its ability to host so much life all at once gestures towards the Zapatistan ideal of the pluriverse: a ‘world in which many worlds fit’. All the while, it goads Western epistemology: it makes itself fascinating while refusing to be fully known.*

Right now, I feel particularly drawn to this last characteristic of soil, and all the billions of life forms which build it: it can exist fully only in the dark. Once we dig it up to have a look, much of its life will have fled or died. Because of this evasiveness, scientists can barely agree on a definition of what soil is or how to definitively measure it. They estimate that we have identified about 10% of the life forms that live there. In this way, it remains opaque. Its specificity resists generalisation. And in this opacity -if I can be a bit presumptuous- I’d say it is arguing that if relationships are to thrive, opacity must be respected.

This lesson matters most obviously to soil itself. Over a half-century of industrial-scale ploughing is killing it. All of the relationships that bind soil, making it such a productive force, can only withstand being torn apart year after year for so long. As the No Dig movement advocates, soil life needs to be left alone.

The idea of opacity, however, resonates well beyond conservation. It is at the heart of an important anticolonial concept that (as far as I can tell) first emerged in the mid-20th century with the brilliant Martinican poet Edouard Glissant. While writing from Paris, much of Glissant’s work (brilliantly built upon by Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman and Lola Olufemi among others) focuses on the question of how to explore difference (or Otherness) without destroying it. At the centre of this theory of curiosity, he placed the (soily) ‘Right to Opacity’.

This right, which should be afforded to everyone, is necessary to resist the culture of the coloniser’s craving for ‘transparency’. This craving, according to Glissant, demands everything explains itself, makes itself legible, judgeable and, crucially, measurable. The result is the eradication of difference, the reduction of complexity and a flattening of the world.

Now a quick reading might see this as a stifling of curiosity. I can imagine it conjuring a vision of a world of isolated people, ignoring one another in order to respect their right to difference. But Glissant’s project is rooted in discovering the sources of a beautiful, but respectful, interest in the otherwise.**

It’s no coincidence that his ideas resonate so much with the character of soil. He was heavily influenced by his contemporaries Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and their idea of the rhizome (a root structure which lives in soil) as a new metaphor for how to understand reality’s relational nature. What the comparison tells me is that the cultivation of curiosity is central to so much of the processes of decolonisation (alongside the redistribution of stolen resources). If we want difference and complexity to exist in the world we have to defend the ‘right to opacity’, the right to escape reduction, generalisation and conclusion. What applies between humans, applies between all life.

Like Glissant, soil warrants an attitude “that tries to conclude” with “a presence that concludes (presumes) nothing.” It resonates with Eric Fromm’s idea of a love which facilitates understanding outside of the ‘desperate urge’ to know by complete control, which inevitably turns people into ‘things’ and ‘possessions’, and destroys what is different. This kind of curiosity is one that can lead away from appropriation and apprehension, towards solidarity.

We could stop there, but all this gets a bit deeper when we turn these ideas towards ourselves. What Glissant knew and wrote about extensively -spurred on by his own contradictory colonial position- was that the relationship between the self and the other also exists inside of you. We have parts of ourselves that are strange. And the right to opacity should apply just as much to them.

In the words of Werner Herzog, “We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained.” There are weird parts of ourselves that don’t want to be excavated. “We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore.” We need to protect them from the harsh glare of a scrutinising self and a scrutinising (online) culture.

We have kinship with soil in this way. Like soil, our inner worlds have a simultaneous invitation to be understood, a seductive, dazzling complex beauty, constant gifts, a changeable nature; and there is something there to be left alone, remaining in the dark and unwritten. This is where life begins and regenerates, undisturbed by the light.

---

* With the help of some great writers I expanded on these in this zine I made earlier this year (digital version here).

** I’m referring mostly to Glissant’s 1990 work Poetics of Relation, translated from French by Betsy Wing.