Hereafter the Kneading: Shakespeare, Symbiosis, and Yeast
Hereafter the Kneading: Shakespeare, Symbiosis, and Yeast

Summary/Abstract: This essay argues that fermentation offers a historically grounded logic for reading early modern natural philosophy alongside contemporary anxieties about artificial intelligence and the boundaries of human agency. Drawing on Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s correspondential cosmology, Paracelsian chymistry, and George Ripley’s alchemy, the essay demonstrates how Renaissance texts frame transformation as slow, relational, and mediated by unseen agencies – processes materially familiar through brewing and bread-making and dramatised across Shakespeare’s works. Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist is read as a satire of the speculative economies that correspondence thinking generates, while Francis Bacon’s doctrine of the idols diagnoses the cognitive distortions that proliferating correspondence produces when unmoored from method. The essay connects this fermentative imagination to modern accounts of symbiogenesis and biosemiotic agency, proposing yeast as a figure for distributed, emergent intelligence that operates beneath the threshold of perception yet determines the character of the systems it inhabits.

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