There seem to be two ways to seek peace with a world designed to connect with the human body and exploit its cognitive liabilities. One is to surrender, join with the network, plug in and turn oneself into a human cinema: the world playing on one’s surface. In short, one can embrace the outside and become. The other way leads inward, into the depths of the body and soul. Comprised less by disconnection than asceticism, the inward way resists connection by revisiting the constitution of the self. And what do we find when we look down into our depths?

Supposedly, there are little fish inside. What Neil Shubin calls ‘our inner fish’ is a canny way of referring the traces of the past which remain in our anatomy¹. For example, proper limbs first evolved during the evolutionary transition which enabled our ancestors to slowly migrate from an aquatic to a terrestrial habitat some 380 million years ago, but our bodies still possess most of the same adaptations with a number of downstream modifications. We are collections of past lives, deposited like sediments on a lake bed over the course of innumerable generations.

Shubin’s concept is a stratagem engineered for popular science communication and provides a simplified account of how ancestral features are preserved in animals. It still offers the perfect entry into a reflection on how humans can find rejuvenation in relationships and behaviors that strictly speaking belong to our history. Sometimes we perform these communions with our inner ancestors explicitly and sometimes they appear as implicit consequences of other actions. In both cases, conserved anatomical traits are recruited to perform an experimental call-back to the past.

Therianthropy and athletes

One way these time-travels can be carried out can be exemplified by therianthropes (also known as ‘therians’, adapted from Theria which is a group of mammals), which are people who identify as non-human animals. Some therianthropes seek to behave like their inner theriotypes by adapting suitable movement patterns, sounds, behaviors and even appearances by wearing masks or prosthetic limbs. Therianthropy is characterized by an involuntary feeling of identity with a non-human species which may or may not be extant (or even real). Crucially, therianthropes do not identify with their theriotypes, they identify as them. There is no question of being ‘like’ an otter or grizzly bear. Interpreting therianthropy in terms of converging with the image of the other is completely ruled out. The relationship is not analogical but literal. If identification is taken literally, it is still behavior that is used to express it. Howling as a wolf or leaping as a leopard is still the way to ‘cash out’ on primal identity. The process of turning into another is attached to a target and then routed via behavioral fiat. How should this be understood?

First, it is worth noting that transformations of this type are actually very common. For example, they also appear among a wide range of athletes pursuing their respective disciplines. Nascent climbers hoping to unlock apelike powers and martial artists connecting with their inner beasts are only two examples of unconscious attempts to recuperate lost potential within the confines of their own anatomical constraints. Second, widening the scope shows that despite the emphasis on recuperation and transformation, we are dealing with a set of ascetic practices because they are based on renouncing the specificity of one’s the current species. Becoming different involves renouncing aspects of the current self. Species are historical entities by definition. One does not become a wolf without having first passed through a shared ancestry. Identification can only follow a path that leads from the specific to the general and back to the specific. Under any other interpretation, therianthropy would immediately collapse into analogy, convergence or become reducible to mere ‘likeness’. In other words, our ‘inner fish’ mediates the possibility of identifying with a salmon.

Games of phylogenetic tree-climbing

The ascetic method of becoming otherwise by revisiting the past is central to what we may call games of phylogenetic tree-climbing. These are games not because they are especially funny but because they are defined by a set rules rooted in the use of concepts constructed on top of the current best approximations of the player’s phylogenetic past. Performing a genuine return to an evolutionarily prior state would, while perhaps not be strictly impossible, be a project carried out over many generations – infinitely more ambitious than a representational game of phylogenetic tree-climbing considered here. But the behavioral changes performed by therianthropes, gymnasts and other ascetics still have real effects on the human phenotype since they expand the behavioral repertoire of their practitioner.

The rules of a typical game can be summarized as follows: The board consists of an arbitrary section of a phylogenetic cladogram with branches and junctions corresponding to a section of our current best approximation of the history of life. The player begins the game on the outermost part of one of the most distal branches from the center or trunk, specifically the one corresponding to the player’s natural position on the tree. The player can move toward the trunk with a lot of effort through changing his or her behavior to resemble the behavior of the inferred last common ancestor appearing at a junction. Based on this generic behavioral complex it might under certain circumstances be possible to reach another branch downstream from the chosen ancestor. It is not admissible to jump from one branch to another – everything must go through the shared past. In other words, one can imagine making a move from Homo sapiens to the group Tetrapodomorpha by approximating the lifestyle of an unknown animal between the ancestor of Tiktaalik and Acanthostega. From this point, the player might attempt to approximate conserved behavioral patterns of other tetrapodomorphs. These distant cousins might be extant, extinct or purely theoretical but they are always reached from a common point of origin.

Figure 1 shows a possible game of phylogenetic tree-climbing. Starting from Homo sapiens, a player can move to any of three generic nodes, from where it is possible to turn into a bonobo (Pan paniscus), a wolf (Canis lupus) or a salmon (Salmo salar). Additional branches can be added to the game at the player’s will.

Figure 1 A game of phylogenetic tree-climbing (made using PhyloT and visualized in ITOL using data from NCBI Taxonomy).
Games of tree-climbing can even be understood as a symbolic way of performing Stephen Jay Gould’s wish to replay ‘life’s tape’² by drawing on behavioral complexes partly compatible with the physiology of the player. In our example, the field of experimental potential is limited to the total group of Tetrapodomorpha which presupposes behavioral modifications in line with not yet having fully developed forelimbs or necks. From these anatomical focal points, it may be possible to recreate later tetrapods by letting arms ‘sprout’ from fins and the neck ‘elongate’ to enable terrestrial feeding mechanics until further specificity is attained.

Inverted hysteria

Adherents of Freudian theory might liken the opening moves of a game of tree-climbing to so-called regressions in which a person finds safety by returning to the logic of a developmentally prior state – this link being deserved whenever regression is synonymous with ‘return’ without any attached value judgment. The psychoanalytic connection seems particularly salient because we are necessarily talking about an indirect return. No human can alter their physiology to become a fish. Compared to the developmental regressions most often talked about by Freud, tree-climbers dive into evolutionary time. Practices and actions that restore a link to our phylogenetic past can also be called regressive, but there is a tendency to assimilate these to the logic governing regression into developmental time by default. We also ought to join later writers in breaking the link between regression and pathology by appreciating the diversity of outcomes that can derive from regressive behaviors ranging from safety, liberty, knowledge and entertainment to self-realization and peace of mind.³ Escaping into prior states can open opportunities seemingly missing from a threatening, lifeless, boring or overwhelming present for example by establishing feelings of kinship with the total group of animals designated by the game or by engendering a sense of contentment with one’s own body. Older, highly conserved features like spines and brain cases can be allowed to pass into conscious focus as derived anatomical features such as fingers, toes and the facial traits at the heart of human beauty standards are allowed to lose their centrality in everyday life.

Across our different examples, behavioral regressions are reactions to encounters with deep history. The regressing subject faces something from their forgotten past and changes themselves to correspond with the encountered facts. The encountered object can be a feeling or a historical fact. In either case, the subject’s reactions are akin to structural inversion of the early theoretical construction of hysteria. In the context of early psychoanalysis hysteria resulted from repressing painful memories which led to their subsequent transformation or ‘conversion’ into physical symptoms affecting the patient’s body and motility.⁴ Sándor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s close friends, termed these processes ‘materializations’ since they were irreducible to hallucinations and illusions: they were neither mistaken beliefs nor misinterpreted perceptions.⁵

Ferenczi posited that the process through which repression led to bodily symptoms involved a regression to a physiological state of a less agential ancestor. For example, the production of ‘hysteric’ motor reactions

presupposes also a fixation of the reality-sense at a given period of development at which the organism does not yet endeavour to adapt to reality by a modification of the external world, but by that of its own body—by magic gestures; and the hysterical language of gesture may indicate a regression to this stage.⁶

In other words, Ferenczi believed there to be a type of neurosis in which the patient adapts itself to a developmentally prior state incapable of meaningful actions on the environment. True action would be replaced by motor patterns without inherent end or function for the patient, taking the own body as the only object of possible change. The phylogenetic counterpart of these ontogenetic regressions, mentioned in passing by Ferenczi, can also be seen to comprise a return to a state of relinquishment, be it through flailing ‘fins’ or limp muscles ‘attached’ to non-existing limbs. But where the hysteric’s involuntary retrieval of the deep past involved a repression of a painful memory, the tree-climber retrieves an imprint of a memory by acting according to the state it signifies. Phylogenetic tree-climbing is a type of action-driven materialization initiated by a recollection rather than a repression.

Communing with our inner seas

It is interesting to note that Ferenczi also wrote a theory of sexual intercourse, arguing that coitus is a symbolic restoration of the ancestral aquatic environment.⁷ Ferenczi does not limit himself to positing an ontogenetic regression aimed at restoring the intrauterine environment (i.e. returning to the mother’s womb). During coitus, the male sexual organ enacts a symbolic form of the cetacean solution to terrestrial life; abandoning land in favor of a return to the long lost milieu of the sea.

The basis for Ferenczi’s theory lies in the biological reality of internal fertilization which is obviously achieved via coitus. The possibility of internal fertilization is part of the historical solution to the problem of reproducing outside of an aquatic environment. Both viviparity and the thickened shells of egg-laying amniotes are solutions to another component of the same problem since a developing embryo requires access to a wet environment throughout its ontogenetic course to prevent desiccation. To reproduce in the terrestrial world it is necessary for animals to carry with them pools of water which are differentiated from the oceans only by energy canalized to resist the equalizing pull of gravity. As patently outlandish as Ferenczi’s theory of seaward regression sounds, it is rooted in real physiological solutions to the problems involved in past environmental transitions. It effectively connects the ontogenetic and phylogenetic reference points of regressive practices to a ground given by environmental history. The human genome and anatomy forms a record of the past, meaning that it is also a flawed record of past relationships to the adaptive pictures of the past. Mutations which proved viable in the ecological context of the ocean have in many cases been passed on to ourselves where they may have retained their function or been repurposed for other uses. An overly narrow view of phylogenetic tree-climbing as an act of biological commemoration is at risk of missing the indelible environmental implication. Insofar as we possess inner fish, they always swim in an inner ocean.

Regressive practices are in reality attempts to restore the significance of a past environment with the resources possessed by the extant body. From this viewpoint, it is not the prostheses or even the behavioral transformations of therianthropes and other tree-climbers that comprise the core of their practices: it is the relationship to the environment these practices enable, firstly by re-enacting an old environment with the present body and, secondly, by creating a new relationship to the present environment in the course of re-enactment. What first masked as an exclusively physiological game now turns out to have a geographical continuation that uses human anatomy as its principal medium.

The deepest regressions are neither restorations of the traditional tetrapod gait at the zero point of the mammalian revolution⁸ nor even returns to the sea. Some ascetics go so far as to copulate with the Earth itself, circumventing behavioral transformations and sacrificing all bodily independence to join with the planetary ground. Children’s stories and folk tales are full of examples of terrestrial incorporation as Ferenczi also notices:

In many nursery tales we have the direct transference to the earth of the love for the mother which has been renounced in the passing of the ɶdipus complex, acts of coitus carried out through the digging of holes in the earth, or an attempt at, as it were, total regression by creeping bodily into a hollow in the earth.⁹

It is no longer a specific environment that is the target of identification but an amorphous Earth that contains everything. This slope toward an increasing degree generality continues tree-climber’s return to a less derived past in which species were perhaps fewer and less sorted into narrow niches and some physiological traits did not have the specificity they have today. The subject’s plasticity increases proportionally to its loss of agency.

Earth-bathing

The same type of terrestrial return also appears in the conclusion of Sabina Spielrein’s thought on the connection between sexual reproduction and self-destruction. Citing such biological examples as mayflies and mantises which give their lives during reproduction to perpetuate the species,¹⁰ Spielrein also identifies a series of cultural narratives that tell of the restorative power of the soil. She effectively links the biological relationship of sexual reproduction to symbolic themes in human culture to create a general theory of creative destruction, valid across biology and human symbolic thought:

Christ dies on the Tree of Life; he is nailed to it and hangs there as though he were its fruit. As with fruit, Christ perishes and is placed in Mother Earth as a seed. This fructification leads to the formation of new life, to the resurrection of the dead. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, Adam’s guilt is atoned.¹¹

Destruction breeds creation, but the new is only added to the old which lays dormant as if waiting for the arrival of an archaeologist to delve into it. Sacrificing the present is the condition for liberating the potentials contained in the overcoded past. Through Spielrein, far-off ancestors are finally removed as intermediary targets of identification to establish a direct connection between humanity and its generative terrestrial backdrop. The great cycle of nature is wound back to its origin where the distinction between inside and outside no longer matters: where all there is is undetermined nutritional conditions for life (which is also to say an absence of life). Beyond regressions to ancestral states; beyond even references to equally ancestral environments, we finally encounter the roots of regression as total dissolution into the environment.

Some artists have represented the road toward this extreme in literal terms, often with a focus on the destructive side. Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States depicts a psychologist in pursuit of a drug-induced attempt to recollect ancestral states during repeated immersions in a sensory-deprivation tank.¹² Predictably, the experiments misfire and the psychologist is fantastically transformed into an apelike ancestor who rampages through the research facilities as though they were a jungle. Things only escalate from there on, as the increasingly unhinged psychologist is propelled further and further backwards to a point where life loses its meaning.

Although no one will actually undergo a physiological transformation of this kind, there are some who would never let reality prevent them from giving it their best. The tropes of physiological renunciation and subterranean rejuvenation had already been combined in the late 18th century as part of a highly specialized remedy invented by James Graham – an infamous specialist on human fructification.

Earth-bathing, a therapeutic process during which patients would be submerged up to their neck in specially dug holes and surrounded by dirt, was presented by Graham as a cure for most diseases (including scurvy, dog bites and ulcers)¹³. Applying soil to the body could even temporarily obviate the need to eat while benefitting one’s appetite in the long run. When ‘a man is planted full among fresh earth, or has it even partially applied to his body or limbs, he is sufficiently nourished, there can be no real hunger, thirst, or want of any kind’¹⁴. As long as a person is immersed in soil, the good earth will provide nourishment in the same way it nourishes carrots, potatoes and other things that grow. There is no need for dinner with delicious peas. At this moment, we have come face-to-face with an ultimate regression, an ascetic practice of the second order in which the ascetic, rather than simply renouncing a given desire, has given up the physiological basis of desire as such. The last traces of animal behavior have been surrendered in favor of the logic of passive nutrimentation and an indeterminate identification with everything.

Beyond the vegetal limit, the distinction between inside and outside is rendered obsolete as the world loses the last traces of teleological sense and is restored to a state of generalized osmosis. Everything has blended into everything else in a soup-world without interiority and purpose. Having relinquished his inherited powers to the natural gradations created by the local conditions on Earth, we must imagine the starving Graham, buried up to his neck in soil, happy and calm.

Concept design for Ian Margo’s “third extension”

Shubin, N. (2008). Your Inner Fish. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful life: The Burgess shale and the nature of history. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
For example, R. D. Laing argued that many regressive phenomena could be interpreted as inner journeys rather than pathologies. He reports one patient as telling the following story: ‘At one time I actually seemed to be wandering in a kind of landscape with—um—desert landscape—as if I were an animal, rather—rather a large animal. It sounds absurd to say so but I felt as if I were a kind of rhinoceros or something like that and emitting sounds like a rhinoceros and being at the same time afraid and at the same time being aggressive and on guard. And then—um—going back to further periods of regression and even sort of when I was just struggling like something that had no brain at all and—as if I were just struggling for my own existence against other things which were opposing me’. We will soon see just how poignant this narrative is. Laing, R. D. (1967). The politics of experience and the bird of paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 123-4.
Breuer, J. and S. Freud. (1955) Studies on hysteria (The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. II)). Translated by J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, p. 206.
Ferenczi, S. (1980). Further contributions to the theory and technique of psycho-analysis. London: Maresfield Reprints, pp. 95-6.
Ibid, p. 90.
Ferenczi, S. (1968). Thalassa: A theory of genitality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Wimberly, A. N., G. J. Slater, and M. C. Granatosky. (2021). ‘Evolutionary History of Quadrupedal Walking Gaits Shows Mammalian Release from Locomotor Constraint.’ Proc Biol Sci 288, no. 1957: 20210937.
Ferenczi, Thalassa, p. 48.
Spielrein, S. (1994). 'Destruction as the cause of coming into being', Journal of analytical psychology 39(2), p. 156.
Ibid, p. 178.
Russell, K (dir.). (1980). Altered States. Distributed by Warner Bros. The film was based on screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky.
Graham, J. (1793). A new and curious treatise of the nature and effects of simple earth, water, and air, when applied to the human body: how to live for many weeks, months, or years, without eating anything whatever. London: Printed by Richardson and Hookham.
Ibid, p. 6.

S02 Format Statement & Technical Logic For A Body That Remembers
Format s02 emerges centered on these practices, seeking to reconceptualize and reconcile the operative possibilities—both aesthetic and theoretical—within the conditions of digital culture, situating its inquiry at the limit, the edge, the frame, the frontier