My Other-Than-Human

Offices are profoundly human. They are air-conditioned, sealed-off spaces, routinely cleaned by hordes of cleaners. Offices are also profoundly inhumane, in their exclusion of any kind of dirt or otherness. I have tried to open my office space for others to work. Inserting plants and fungi into the office is a way of rendering perceptible the zones of permittance and exclusion, and the kinds of work that other organisms could do if we allowed them to.

The most common office others are plants, adding oxygen and a sense of wilderness. As forms of wild growth plants also challenge the office space by directly countering its ordered cleanliness. When plants are allowed into the office they are therefore routinely contained. A plant is placed into a pot, which acts as an office within an office. Destabilizing plants from their designated position is a way of letting the vegetative grow beyond human control. A plant does not belong on a chair next to the desk so that its potential limbs could reach a keyboard. Yet, vegetating in front of a computer is a major part of office work, so why not allow a plant to type its vegetative thoughts?

The only place for fungi in an office is as edible mushrooms on a lunch plate. Even more so than a plant, fungi are harbingers of doom. If there is excessive humidity indoors, mold may ruin walls, furniture and become human health hazards. What we see as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the reproductive organs of fungi. If these grow out of an air vent, it is not enough simply to remove them, as fungal threads stretch inwards, and spores will be travelling in the air-condition system. Letting fungi grow indoors is an act of dispersal. Like exhibition documentation distributed online it is uncertain what such fungi may become, where and who they might reach.

Economist Robert Costanza has calculated the monetary contribution of organisms, estimating that ecosystems greatly exceed the yearly economic value added by human beings. Such conceptualizations of nature are intriguing for their ability to challenge preconceived notions of who and what is responsible for generating prosperity. This can help reorient from capitalocentric to ecocritical perspectives, to shift away from our current course towards climate catastrophe. Yet it is also a way of subsuming nature to economic regimes. It turns ecosystems into offices, rendering them a shared space of efficient administration, of economic rather than organic growth.

Is it possible to imagine an office that does not contain plants in pots or limit fungi to edibility, but allows organisms to radically come into being, through their own forms of growth? To escape the confines of the administrative requires undoing ideas of wilderness as something to be managed. Instead, other-than-human coworkers need to be unleashed, to regrow and reshape our institutions.