White Coat & Blackened Praxis: A Biologist's Posthumanist Autoethnography

Strahinja Đurić has published a preprint of a new autoethnographic paper, "White Coat & Blackened Praxis: A Biologist's Posthumanist Autoethnography", which introduces and defines the original theoretical concept of cold matterphor as a material metaphor that charts the resonance of coldness across ontological strata. Cold matterphore operates as a reducer of the potential for eventfulness, describing a state where matter's capacity to affect is diminished, unlike its capacity to be affected. This concept is developed by Strahinja Đurić as a central tool of melancology (Wilson), a critical framework intersecting black metal theory and ecology. Using a hybrid epistemology, the paper applies the cold matterphor to analyse the shared affective states between laboratory praxis and the aesthetics of black metal. Ultimately, the work frames this as an act of death activism (MacCormack), connecting material ecocriticism and ahumanism with artistic inquiry into science. Extended Abstract Capitalism's anthropocentric order tends to turn science into a commodity; even fundamental disciplines like biology are promoted predominantly under a utilitarian guise. Within such a 'system', the ecocentric biologist becomes an endemic species, lost in the white-mantled world that studies life only to serve humanity. Paradoxically, researchers of nature themselves perform ecocidal and malzoan practices—mistreatment that ontologically reduces living beings to mere objects of study. Amidst this multitude, the minority voice is barely heard; it is systematically suppressed, forced to mutate until it learns the dominant song, becoming codified and disciplined. Compelled to adopt an insider's perspective, the ecocentric biologist develops a hybrid autoethnography, recalibrating its critical lens away from the self—towards the world and, by extension, the universe. To analyse the autoethnographic data, the paper forges the 'cold matterphor'. Said material metaphors map a state where matter's capacity to affect is diminished (unlike its capacity to be affected), tracing the great silence left in the wake of energy's passage across three strata: the material (the laboratory environment), the affective (the researcher's body), and the aesthetic (the soundscape). Cold matterphors thus map the ontological resonance between a thermal state (coldness) and an affective condition, on the scale of a seemingly non-relational cosmic stasis—indifference. This is achieved through a hybrid epistemology that intersects phenomenological, empirical, and aesthetic evidence, operating within Scott Wilson's (2014) melancology, a critical discourse at the nexus of ecology and black metal music that embodies a form of 'cosmic pessimism' through 'environmental writing'. The research presents the autoethnographic data as scenes from laboratory practice, with a prose poem serving as their creative correlate—an 'epistemic thing' in itself. Charting cold matterphors during ecocritical analysis 'in and through' the data, the paper culminates in a performative transmutation: from blackened laboratory into blackened creative praxis, drawing (dangerously) molecular 'lines of flight'. Through the creative text as a machine for desubjectification, this performative synthesis enacts what Patricia MacCormack (2025) terms 'death activism': a non-violent, ahuman praxis aimed at dissolving the anthropocentric Self through reconciliation with the eventual extinction of the human species. As one of the first studies to connect ahumanism and material ecocriticism with artistic inquiry into science, it offers a generative framework for affirming and understanding more-than-human life forms. By performing a critique of anthropocentrism 'from below'—akin to unleashing a respiratory burst of free radicals in phagosomes—it suggests novel applications across natureculture fields, from bioethics to astrobiology, demonstrating the wide relevance of its endemic niche conditions in the unravelling of the Anthropocene. For to dissolve ourselves into compost is to catalyse the creative praxis of becoming-cosmic through the abolition of humanity's ontological position: cooling down the Self to warm up the Other. The pre-print is made publicly available to establish public and intellectual priority over the original theoretical framework developed within.