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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Dear <<empyreans>>, <br>
<br>
I'm afraid that being a late entrant into the discussion and not
having had the time to engage properly with what Murat and others
have been saying, I will not be able to present Jakob von Uexküll
in a way that can offer any sort of mediation, to whatever extent
the Michael Marder review suggested to me the possibility of such
a mediation. All I can offer are isolated comments based on my
reading of Uexküll and, as you say, Johannes, informed by my
theatre practice, even as this has had to remain suspended while I
write the paper on Uexküll I committed myself to, with all sorts
of feelings of compromise in every direction, through signing up
to presenting at the Daughters of Chaos Deleuze Studies conference
within the week.<br>
<br>
I am therefore, unlike Agamben, but open to his <i>Aperto</i>,
putting Deleuze together with Uexküll not Heidegger. What is made
from the Heidegger, on the subject of translatability, is, in
translation to English, beset with monstrosities, neither botanic
nor even living--things like a "disinhibiting ring" and, Johannes,
yes, <br>
Merkmals- und Bedeutungsträger as "disinhibitors"--promising the
disinhibition of some form of intoxication? or chemical-botanic
perception-enhancement? Heidegger remains solemnly opposed to the
expression of worlds in non-human subjects, to mix the Deleuze in,
animals being either poor in world or lacking entirely and stones
not having. He doesn't seem to want to countenance the vegetal.<br>
<br>
Deleuze, on the other hand, enlists Uexküll, along with de Ruyer,
with whom I have no acquaintance, to push through with two
projects: one, the surpassing of ethics in ethology--which is
great, interpreting the latter as the study of affects, even to
the counting of the passional powers of organisms, the tick,
notoriously, presenting just three, sweat, hair-free skin and
blood-warm liquid to suck, in light of Spinoza, the human having a
few more; two, the music of nature! something which carries on the
great legacy of German romanticism, the Pan-ic of Mahler, the
ungrounding power of difference for Schelling, in counterpoints
like that of the spider with the fly, neither of which, you are
right, Johannes, know of the other, but both of which have
something about them of the other, such that the spider can map
the divisions of the fly's eye onto the web's divisions in order
to make it invisible, <i>and</i> in refrains, repeated motifs,
that separating themselves from their material contents find in
the immaterial signs of their expression--whether the song a child
sings, under her breath, to keep her safe in the dark; or the
diverging songs of sparrows in New York--means of (the
uncomfortable DeleuzoGuattarian word) deterritorialisation.
Heidegger's stone without world becomes in Deleuze and Guattari
the expression, stony, that is cognate with its material contents,
also stony, and the least dematerialised of all. And both of these
projects, as Uexküll's own, are, as Marder concurs, open (as
Agamben might want to say, but doesn't), to plant life and plant
thinking.<br>
<br>
What grabs me here is thought, expression... and the possibility
that the stone does in fact have a world, approaching, as <span
class="st">Miró</span> has it do, with his scumbling, like a
star, from the far end of the universe, from the beginning of
time, like the slightest involuntary gesture, full of meaning only
to the stone. Of a meaning secret to the universe. Known only to
the star.<br>
<br>
I have left out the most important piece of information: <span
class="st"><em></em></span>Uexküll opens the way for these
alien, planetary and interplanetary (as John Deely has it),
subjectivities, or subject worlds, by externalising as a sign in
its environment (Umwelt) that which has the subject coincide with
the object of its interest (inter-esse): what is butyric acid to
the tick but one of three factors on which its world is staked, a
world that goes beyond its short or long life (Uexküll records
keeping a tick dormant for 18 years) carried in each of the signs
from which it composes that world? A transcendental meaning
invested in the smell of sweat. Think then of the meaning of
chlorophyll!<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Simon<br>
<br>
On 21/06/15 07:57, Johannes Birringer wrote:<br>
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dear all
thank you for these very interesting responses that have come in, from Alana, and Murat, and thanks also to Simon from NZ for alerting us to the review
of Michael Marder's "What Is Plant-Thinking?: Botany’s Copernican Revolution" ...
[for example, the reviewer states:]
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<pre wrap="">The intelligence of plants is not merely a shadow of human knowing, and their behavior is not a rudimentary form of human conduct. After all, unlike animal and humans, for whom behavior is most often associated with physical movement, plants behave by changing their states, both morphologically and physiologically. An honest approach to the capacities of plants thus requires a simultaneous acknowledgement of the similarities and differences between them and other living beings.
...
we can imagine and work towards a creative symbiosis of philosophy and botany, where philosophical concepts would be destabilized upon contact with cutting-edge research in plant sciences, and where plant sciences would, in turn, resort to philosophy in their search for an appropriate theoretical framework. Such rigorously interdisciplinary thought would belong somewhere between a philosophy of botany and a botany of philosophy;
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This is very interesting stuff, and I wondered, Simon, given your theatre work, how you got seduced into reading on the vegetal, or are you interested in the comparisons, that have come up in the debate, between plants (as a medium) and performance (acting), or the performing with plants? I suppose you are more inclined to follow the thoughts that Murat so wonderfully expanded now on the other, the code of others, other language systems, and now I clearly see, Murat, waht you meant by "extraterrestrial" – except that I am not willing to follow all the way through to where you are heading. Perhaps Simon, or Alana as well now – after you spoke so interestingly of your performance interventions, how you understand them and what might interest you in the knowledge-revealing works, the forms of awareness you are trying to uncover, the trickster work, and the more community-engaged "social works" dimensions of, say, Restless Precinct, or your new health related work (Deep Earth..) – may
ave felt the same as I did when I wondered whether your notion of "the other," Murat (and you are now also including poetry and mathematics as othering systems?), tends to leave the ethical and political side of our relations unaddressed. Or do they?
So to discuss further, while your response to my bumblebee example is great, and you correctly discover a tendency perhaps for a scientific and measuring observation in the Wikipedia article (on the
bumblebee's 'anthropomorphized' actions) (while I was attracted to the choreography and the "dancity" of shared movements between bee and plant), the political economy sides, or the colonialist side if you want, and the psychological side (that Derrida, following Lacan, seems to address in his discussion of the other as the Subject, the Master) perhaps do not grant us an easy way out of the relationality, the responsiblity, and the possibility to translate codes, and mediate between systems. Your example of difficult or impossible-to-translate poetry worries me.
But Simon, perhaps there is something in Uexküll that can help to mediate? I always worried, not having read Jakob von Uexküll, whether I understood the spider / fly perception story correctly, the one told by
Giorgio Agamben (in one of the short chapters of "The Open"). He tells the story of how the spider builds a web that is perfectly tuned to catch a fly, but neither the spider, nor the fly, know each other's code or perception system.
he writes: "Uexküll’s investigations into the animal environment are contemporary with both quantum physics and the artistic avant-garde. And, like them, they express the unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences and the radical dehumanization of the image of nature (and so it should come as no surprise that they strongly influenced both Heidegger…and Gilles Deleuze…Where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to higher organisms, Uexküll instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score…Thus, Uexküll calls his reconstructions of the environments of the sea urchin, the amoeba, the jellyfish the sea worm and the tick…”excursions into unknowable worlds.”
Well, it seems he echoes Murat here. Agamben adds that "The fly, the dragonfly, and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us—or with each other—the same time and the same space...." . But then again, Agamben may have mistranslated the Merkmalsträger for the combined musical score....
Well, regarding plants I am wondering how gardeners would think about the mutually exclusive perception systems and how a botany of philosophy or of aesthetics would proceed to undermine the spider story, or Murat's 'difficulty of the translator.'
regards
Johannes Birringer
_______________________________________________
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