Transecology?

This keyword is inspired by P. Staff's multimedia art installation Conjunctions (2021).1 They write, “a conjunction of / touching you as the end of you—” with a curious syntactical slash between the preposition of and the gerund touching. As two planets conjunct—from our eye, a citrine stud pricking the darkness above our blue curve—they invent, over and again, their relationship. One unlivable. The other becoming so. What do they whisper to each other? Astrologers will tell you, but only because they do not know. And still, in the silence between these celestial spheres, they touch. Just as your hand gropes in the dark toward your lover. There is lust in touching—that reach which disturbs. Even the sentence “my finger slides into his moist asshole” is lustful, touching within touches. How verb and preposition luxuriate with adjectives and nouns: our language wants fucking. Within the texture of conjunction—a connective grammar of and, but, if—that holds meaning together, lust buckles language. But, what can we bare to know?Can trans mean anything to ecology? If so, what?To start: is it trans ecology or transecology? Trans ecology is an adjectival intervention; trans describes ecology—both terms remain operative and distinct. They do not require the other to mean, and yet they produce a meaning through a relationship that confirms their values. Transecology is different, is prefixal; this trans‐ is hyphenated and as such attaches and reforms the meaning of ecology—the noun itself—leaving neither word intact but fused into something other. The implications seem pedantic. But, within trans politics, a space, a hyphen, or a suffix—the leaves and shoots of a word—can carry an awesome power. Alliances and attacks have happened in the using of ‐ed or ‐ing, or the inclusion of an asterisk (*). Politically precarious, perhaps, but it also illustrates that trans may be more about the act of relation (a space of transit that cannot fully bind or be translated) than its overdetermined attachments (sex and gender, for instance). After all, what is the wanted relation that is identity language?Within the weedy figuration trans*(s)ex, for example, a politics of relation—an ecotone—is proposed, however tenuously. In its most reductive form, trans and sex are coupled, indexing an intervention in sex.2Trans, then, presumes to work on sex to make trans meaningful as an intervention; which is to say, it requires the beingness of sex to do work and, as such, be. (The paradox of resistance is this double bind, psychoanalysis teaches.) The asterisk, or *, in its politically liberal orientation aims toward inclusion. This inclusion, though, is predicated on the intervention trans made meaningful through sex as order. More simply, the act of inclusion is a confirmation of the problematic. The parenthetical s, or (s), is itself a curious hedge: on the one, the parenthesis is an addition (transsex), it makes trans‐ prefixal to sex, two s's propped synecdochally (they function as meaningful in their separateness, but together produce another, if related, meaning); on the other, the parenthetical (s) is a subtraction (transex) such that the word is mutated, losing its reference (which original word authors the neologism, is the unanswered question the word provokes). So many competing meanings crowd this imagined word—trans*(s)ex—crowd into a space of proposed being. Just as the word is occupied and arrogated—a momentary glimmer at what beingness might be, might feel like—it is abandoned, distorted, or retooled in the seemingly endless procedural demands of ontology. But what is hidden in the overgrowth of ontological maneuvering, what is in the texture of wording, the grain of syntax, is something that threatens the project of bodily beingness, of being sexed: sexuality.Not the identity work of sexuality (what is often called a social bond), but sexuality as that which is anarchic (in the Freudian sense), causing upheaval for the self and the social owing to its disruptive character. So what at first is a yearning in language (identity is a project) that then disambiguates into an argument—working with the figural dimensions of naming—is the force of sexuality undermining language, disturbing the groundwork, the earthwork that held the meaning of being (for the individual and the collective) together. While trans*(s)ex aims toward the work of sex (as ontological), inscribed in the making of that word or position is an enigmatic more‐ness (sexuality) that cannot be reconciled or metabolized into an ordered state of being.But what does this syntactical thicket have to say about trans ecology or transecology?What is ecology? In 1873, oecology, the “branch of science dealing with the relationship of living things to their environments,” was coined in German by zoologist Ernst Haeckel as Ökologie, from the Greek oikos, or “house, dwelling place, habitation” (from the Proto‐Indo‐European root weik‐ [clan]) + ‐logia (study of). The relational, for Haeckel (1904), was a mode of romantic progressivism, shaped by scientific racism and eugenics. Within the development of the embryo (ontogeny), he supposed, the organism moves through successive stages of evolutionary life (phylogeny). His biogenetic law, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” organized his ecology, which already harbored clannism (weik‐). Staying with syntax, environmental relationality—which was constitutive of his embryogenesis—was adumbrated by clan exclusion that made the familial dwelling (a refrain for life's capitulations). The epistemology and work of ecology, then, is predicated on an exclusion of like and kind (clannish, effectively racialization) of the reproductive family (house).3 Haeckel's explicit racism is underscored by syntax. Consequently, even in its urgent political formation—environmental activism—clannism and reproductivity are installed through futurity and preservation, and in slogans of “Save the Earth, Save Ourselves,” “Mother Earth,” and “Conserve What Our Children Deserve.” Ecology—both in its etymology and practice—aims at advancing the supremacy of biologically ordered life (reproductivity) over and against sexuality into larger units (clannism's work) called ecosystems. Clan logics as sex subtends its empiricism.To think trans with ecology requires careful consideration: if trans is an operation of ontology—an investment in gender/sex as a state of being—then trans can only amplify ecology's problematic, its biocentrism and its racial and reproductive epistemologies. Trans, then, aims toward anti‐sexuality and clannism (racism). If, however, trans marks the work of sexuality—is interested in understanding its conditions of impossibility—then trans might help us feel out the ways sexuality is at work in ontological orientations (sex, and the restrictive logics of biologism that order these categories—including ecology). It would be interesting to ask—but may be too unsettling to answer—if trans marks the work (trans‐lation) of sexuality in sex through gender (as compulsive, aggressive, symptomatic), might it also mark the role of sexuality in biology, ecology, and science more generally? Not reproduction—already the provenance of biologism—but the presence of sexuality in the language (and logic) that govern these epistemologies. Transecology? Which is to ask—and here I am thinking about P Staff's Conjunctions—how might trans (and not trans alone) mark a negativity, that is, a disturbance built into ontological investing, and in so doing reveal how ecology (and its associates) work to repress the unimaginable space (death as sexuality, that destruction) of what we call life? More narrowly—and maybe more useful for ecologists and trans studies scholars—what would ecology become if it were attentive to the work of sexuality in its own claims of reproductivity and biocentrism? What if trans is a temporary assignment (however compromised, however lived) in sexuality? But, in attempting to answer these already difficult questions, the magnetic force of ecology's biologism, its implicit racism—even in adversarial arguments and orientations—may prove too irresistible for trans. For now, the keyword “transecology” remains written with a question mark, an eroteme: Transecology?