In negotiating the conceptual and methodological terrain of a ‘post-human’ world, geographers have largely ignored the aesthetic. To an extent, this neglect can be explained by geography’s tendency to understand the aesthetic, following Kant, as a peculiarly human capacity. Despite stringent critiques of this project as enabling the further colonisation of the self, the rendering of the aesthetic (and especially its manifestation in artistic practice) as by and for the human has remained largely unchallenged within geography. And so it is perhaps unsurprising to find that: first, whilst diverse post-humanisms have explored both science and philosophy as a means of articulating the relationalities and commonalities that span species and even kingdoms, the aesthetic has itself been figured as a humanist ‘remain’; and second, that as part of this process the aesthetic import of work by key figures in a critical human geography, such as Agamben, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Grosz, and Haraway, for whom the aesthetic is always already more-than-human, has been marginalised as the ‘remainder.’  

Using empirics taken from a study of Adaptation, an ecology project undertaken by the Australian art/science collective SymbioticA, we draw out these various aesthetic impulses and the tensions between them. Studying the positionalities of the thrombolites of Lake Clifton, recognised as the ‘oldest evidence of life on earth,’ within Adaptation’s long term art projects we explore the aesthetic remaking of affective and inter-subjective communities. In doing so we argue that entwined within and around the genealogy of the aesthetic as key to ‘becoming human’ is a line of inquiry that firmly places the aesthetic as key to a ‘becoming animal’. In thinking through the aesthetic as a means of grasping and articulating the creative capacities of becoming human/animal/molecular bacteria, we explore the question posed within this session: what remains?