During Pleistocene glaciations, pressurized sheets of glacial ice refracting deep blue light advanced through great plains, damming rivers, creating lakes, leaving boulders behind and deepening channels to form hummocks, mountains, and valleys. They shaped conditions for networks of forests, animal territories, and millions of years later for human accretion at Pittsburgh’s three river’s edges as sites of colonization and industry, of smoke, steel, and soot that would block out midday sun and coat buildings for hundreds of years; signaling progress, alienation, civilization, and transforming landscapes into a Hell with the Lid Taken Off (Parton 1868) that would later become carbon dioxide domes entrapping particulate matter at rates that have kept Pittsburgh in the top ten most polluted cities in the nation, disturbing rhizospheric nutrient transfer, and increasing risks of lung disease and asthma in long-term residents (Breathe 2018).

The historical dynamics leading to Pittsburgh’s contemporary landscape, while bound up in human logics of resource extraction and Rust Belt revitalization, can simultaneously be read as dynamic expressions of geology, of organisms and how they divide space, of habitations and formations that encompass more than the exclusive “little provincial space defined by the drives and interests of a single species” (DeLanda 2005, 103). Deleuze and Guattari discuss expression in A Thousand Plateaus as autonomous, alloplastic distributions that are “able to bring about modifications in the external world”(Deleuze and Guattari 2014, 60), whether they originate organically or inorganically. The expressive body is not just a thing but “a coding, a dynamic structuration, a dynamic formation”(Ibid. 61). Expressivity is both a declaration of identity and a communication with environment that selects and composes boundaries and arrangements, altering fields of intensities to create superorganismic entities which emerge and dissolve as they navigate the world.

The superorganism is related to the theories of ecological niche, augmented by a fluidity which transforms conditions of identity, action, and response into conditions of embodiment, communication, form, and relation. Expressivity frees the superorganism from the inertia of being primarily a container for animate organisms by focusing on them as things with metabolisms, behaviors, properties, and sentience all their own: irreducible selves that are permeable, highly unstable, and deeply connective.

ACSA 107th Annual Meeting: Black Box conference publication.