[-empyre-] nature's reserved camouflage

[Johannes Birringer]

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:]
>
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;
>

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 have 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