[-empyre-] disinhibited mediation / inter-esse

[simon]

Dear <<empyreans>>,

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.

I am therefore, unlike Agamben, but open to his /Aperto/, 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,
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.

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, /and/ 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.

What grabs me here is thought, expression... and the possibility that 
the stone does in fact have a world, approaching, as Miró 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.

I have left out the most important piece of information: //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!

Best,
Simon

On 21/06/15 07:57, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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