[-empyre-] nature's reserved camouflage

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Johannes, I am very happy that I was able to clarify my basic argument.
They do have sympathetic parallels both with Agamben (who has connections
to W. Benjamen, a thinker who is crucial to me) and Deleuze (his concepts
of the animal as discussed in his essay on Kafka and of time as it reveals
itself in the medium of film).

Let me specifically respond to two comments you made:
"," 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?

Seeing poetry and mathematics as othering systems does not preclude them
from having political dimensions. Finally, before technical or ideological,
othering is a conceptual argument. It has to do with breaking down of the
given without replacing it with an alternative. It is an open ended
breaking down which, I think, may have enormous ramifications in all
directions. It creates doubt-- which is anti-ideological, but non
non-political. For instance, considering mathematics to be maybe the most
subjective of human creations (an activity that modern western thought,
particularly science, has associated with objectivity) may affect the
position mankind assigns to science in the total spectrum of human
activity. It may not necessarily answer the question: if not mathematics,
then what? But it creates doubt (the way Hume did in relation to the idea
of necessity) doubts about the absolute equivalence of mathematics with
"truth."

"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.'"

I am a translator, of poetry, despite seeing each language as an inherently
other. (By the way, my translation of the Turkish Poet Ece Ayhan's *A Blind
Cat Black and Orthodoxies*, which was first published by Sun and Moon Press
in 1997, is being republished intact by Green Integer Press. The book will
come out by the end of this month. Sun and Moon Press was closed down
several years ago.) The communication among languages occur through what I
call "misreadings" that erode/break down their autonomy in the translation
while they still retain it. Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the
Translator" is enormously important to understand this contradiction and, I
think, may have relevance discussing the relations between human and
plant/animal/mineral languages. In that essay Benjamin says that--a point
that is missed or misunderstood by most readers--a translation that not
involve a movement from point A to point B (a transfer between "specific
modes of intention"); rather, a movement by both point A and point B to
point C (a synthesis, what Benjamin calls "ideal language"; what we today
may call a hypertext). In a translation, both the original and target texts
get transformed by breaking down/opening up, thereby, revealing inherent
potentials "suppressed" in them. If any one interested, we can discuss
these points further.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 3:57 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> 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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> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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>
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