----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
dear all
this is part 2; I am following up on a comment made by Murat
after Patrick wrote:
what I was trying to ask is whether our turn to the nonhuman actually
dislocates the human as the center of our inquiry. Or is a turn to the nonhuman
just another symptom of the human? To Murat, I love
the way this project challenges our current ideology (by altering our
prevailing ideas about language and perception).
Murat then suggested (June 6):
when I said "humanist" or "humanism" are ideological terms, I meant that the terms come with their
own (quite specific and historical) sets of assumptions. "Extra-terrestial" is a term to break down those
assumptions. It may need to point to new understandings (necessarily ultimately still human), new territories, a
consciousness Rimbaud calls "l'autre," Ahab's subverting the prescribed purposes of his ship (to kill sperm
whales
for their oil to light houses) for a different undefined purpose (whiteness),
an activity basically a-social but still human.
Whereupon Amanda, at the beginning of the week (refering to text titled
*Plants: The Ultimate Alien*) proposed:
However, there are still great limitations to this [media "translations" of plants],
what I mean by that is that we are really only talking about translating the processes that
have similarities to our own processes; for example plants are said to have a highly developed
method of chemical communication, but how can we even capture let alone translate this data? I
think that this is where art comes into the picture; that we are not trying to produce
scientific results, but engage with them, and with philosophy, with the unknown-ness of plants,
challenge our anthropomorphic, anthropocentric tendencies and imagine what they are capable
of.>>
I question the idea of translating plants.
Thus I guess I am wondering what plant art does; and i also would like to
engage further, and take a closer look, at these ideas of the extraterrestrial
(which as I mentioned earlier, makes no sense to me), the other, the ultimate
other, the alien, etc. I think Amanda wisely cautions us about the media
applied to plants, and the capture and the usage.
What is indeed interesting I suppose to philosophers who have engaged "Zoontologies" ,
animal-machines and plant-machines (Zoontologies is a book I found on my shelf edited by Cary Wolfe, for the
Univ. of Minnesota Press in 2003, including a dense essay by Derrida from his lectures on "L'Animal
autobiographique", entitled 'And Say the Animal Responded?') may well be the question of the other –
what Murat calls l'autre. Yet Murat thinks, in one of his examples, that the fictional character of
Melville's book on Moby Dick subverts the ideology of the whale ship by taking up a personal revenge? Or is
the whale, that strange "animot" (why can't Derrida not pun on words?) enacting the revenge and
responding, so to speak, to perverted ideology and capitalist industrial expropriation business?
The animal, Derrida writes, does not know evil, lying, deceit. It may not have the
"dansity" of feinte, tromperie, camouflage, pretense..... the capacity to
pretend and deceive by a kind of dance, lure, or parade.
And say the plant responded?
have we not heard of biomimicry and camouflage amongst plants and animals? and
thus perhaps plants collaborate as well, react or respond, allowing us to
ponder what the distinctions might be between reaction (as in on-off
interactive systems) and response (as in responsive behavior and speech worlds?)
(I was watching today, in the garden, for some time, the dance of a beautiful vigorous
"bourdon" as it flew from tiny plant to tiny plant, balancing acts in a series of strange
dances that delighted, steady rhythm, unperturbed by my presence, continuous, solid. the bumble
bees, I gather, tend to "visit the same patches of flowers every day, as long as they continue
to find nectar and pollen there, a habit known as pollinator or flower constancy. While foraging,
bumblebees can reach ground speeds of up to 15 metres per second (54 km/h). Biting open the stem of
a flower... ...and using its tongue to drink the nectar a bumblebee is 'nectar robbing' a flower.
Bumblebees use a combination of colour and spatial relationships to learn from which flowers to
forage. They can also detect both the presence and the pattern of electric fields on flowers, which
occur due to atmospheric electricity, and take a while to leak away into the ground. They use this
information to find out if a flower has been recently visited by another bee......"
(wikipedia).
rather amazing, the more i read. in the garden, I got distracted by a more
violent noise high above me in the old oak tree, two crows seemed to engage a
mating ritual, I watched a rigorous flapping of wings and then only saw the
motion of wings, high up, as branches and foliage seemed to be sprayed and
scattered, amongst the shrieks of the ecstatic birds.
The bourdon did not note any of this; and I cannot be sure what kind of dansity
I witnessed above me, and on the ground level, where the tiny plants opened
themselves to the robber, ever so gently.
How then do plant scientists approach plants and humanists, Murat? And are sets
of assumptions about plants changing (sets about otherness? about the code of
the other?)
regards
Johannes Birringer
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