Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance by Vincent Zonca (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance by Vincent Zonca
• Nicole Emanuel

Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance. By Vincent Zonca. Translated by Jody Gladding. Polity Press, 2023. 250 pp.

Once you begin read ing Vincent Zonca’s Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance, it is likely that you will start to notice these minute life forms everywhere you turn. You may be surprised by the abundance of lichens in poetry; they appear in the stanzas of Tomas Tranströmer and Pablo Neruda, not to mention in ancient Japanese haiku, as well as in recent writing by indigenous poets such as Joséphine Bacon and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. Perhaps you will observe lichenous imagery in visual art as well, in the surrealist work of Antoni Pitxot and Bernard Saby, for instance, or the immensely enlarged photographs of Oscar Furbacken. You may even find yourself contemplating lichen in music, if you are attuned to the patterns of growth and transformation that inform the aleatory compositions of John Cage or the organically evolving sonic textures of György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. Of course, once your eyes and ears are opened to lichen in art, you will almost surely also note their living likenesses in the landscapes where you dwell. You may discover vital patches of texture and color clinging to a tree or a cement wall that you had never previously examined.

All the writers, musicians, and artists mentioned above appear in Zonca’s book, and they [End Page 157] represent but a fraction of philosophers, scientists, and creators whose work he connects to the topic of lichen. As the variety of these inspirations indicates, Lichens is a wide-ranging text. It traces its subject from antiquity to modernity, traversing continents, epochs, epistemologies, and many diverse media along the way. Zonca revels in the motley assortment of sources his study takes in. In his own terms, “[e]ven more radically than the philosophy of science, ecocriticism, or anthropology,” Zonca’s approach brings “biology, literary and art criticism, ethnology, and philosophy all together at the same time in order to cultivate curiosity. This is the chosen stance of the undisciplined approach of the essay, the symbiotic functioning of lichen: joyously to blend the disciplines and extract the juices” (11–12). Zonca is committed to a lichenous praxis. Just as lichens make a mockery of taxonomic divisions by being simultaneously fungi and algae, Zonca’s writing embraces hybridity, plurality, and full-blown polymorphic possibility.

The border-crossing of Zonca’s methodology puts Lichens in the company of recent texts such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Thom van Dooren’s A World in a Shell (2022). Tsing’s and van Dooren’s studies—which focus on matsutake mushrooms and Hawaiian snails, respectively—are also similar to Zonca’s in that they draw attention to an organism (or suite of organisms) that is at once humble and ubiquitous. As Zonca writes, “Lichen is familiar to everyone, known to no one” (3). These scholars each, in various ways, make the case that there is much that humans as a species (and the environmental humanities as a field) might learn from careful study of organisms that play fundamental yet oft-overlooked roles in ecosystem functioning.

One might expect that an author who characterizes his own scholarship as “undisciplined” would produce a rather chaotic manuscript, but Lichens is in fact quite clearly organized. Zonca’s text is divided into four major sections, beginning with “First Contacts,” which serves to introduce readers to the world of lichens. This introductory chapter begins with some very brief reflections on Zonca’s own interest in lichenology, which he traces back to “the imaginary world of my childhood and adolescence” (2). The rest of this section introduces other ideas about lichens, which Zonca will tease out in more depth across the pages to come: their nature as symbiotic consortium organisms, their [End Page 158] confused place in scientific histories (and the challenge they pose especially to biological categorization), and their ability to thrive across a wide variety of habitats, particularly those that seem least hospitable to other organisms. Zonca also devotes significant space in...