Advice to a Young Blogger: Be Consistent, Insistent, and Persistent

 

Advice to a young blogger just starting out [1] [2]:

 

 

1. Be Consistent

 

Not so much at the level of content or argument, but in terms of style; i.e., don't worry if your blog contains wild variations of subject matter and logical contradictions - consistency is not the same as identity - just ensure it maintains a certain look and feel and a certain level of intensity [3]. 

2. Be Insistent

 

Not on one's rightness - as Nietzsche said, it is nobler to declare oneself mistaken than to insist on being right (especially when one is right) - but insistent like the waves on the rocks; i.e., completely indifferent to the morality of your actions, but all the time shaping the coastline.    

 

3. Be Persistent

 

Just keep writing and keep publishing posts even when it is difficult, or tiring, or boring to do so - even when other people encourage you to stop. Persistence is a perverse virtue that pushes one beyond what others regard as normal or usual or even healthy; it's continuing to dig even when you're in a hole.   

 

Notes

[1] Funnily enough, this is the same advice that is given to gender diverse children who believe themselves to be born in the wrong bodies and wish to transition to a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth: be insistent, persistent and consistent and you just might persuade your parents and the health care professionals dealing with your case that you are genuinely transgender and not merely gender non-conforming or simply like dressing up and playing imaginative games.  

 

[2] Any would-be bloggers reading this - of any age (or gender) - might also like an earlier post (published in October 2021) offering untimely advice on how to develop an effective blog: click here. 

 

[3] Deleuze would probably speak at this point of forming a plane of consistency upon which concepts can arise from chaos, but I'm not Deleuze. 

 

 

For a follow-up post to this one - on establishing your blog as a plane of immanence - click here. 

Will Absence Make My Heart Grow Fonder of Byung-Chul Han? (Part 1)

(Polity Press, 2023)

 

 

I. 

 

Although Daniel Steuer's English translation of Byung-Chul Han's book Absence was only published last year, the original German text appeared back in 2007 [a], and so we can rightly think of it as one of his early works; more philosophical and less political in tone as it explores the Western obsession with essence in contrast to the Eastern (and deeply foreign) notion of absence.    

 

As Han rightly says: "The concept of 'essence', which unites identity, duration and inwardness, dwelling, lingering and possessing, dominates occidental metaphysics." [1] From ancient Greeks like Plato to German idealists like Kant, essence is the key and be yourself the melody. What is outside and inessential can stay there and remain that way.

 

Even Heidegger, argues Han, "despite his best efforts at leaving metaphysical thinking behind [...] remained a philosopher of essence" [4]. In wanting to let things be he wants things to remain true to their own essence. Ultimately, Dasein both dwells and endures. It does not wander too far from itself (even if it explores the odd woodpath from time to time). 

 

But in Daoism, the wise man is without fixed abode and never stops wandering; evading all substantive determination and having no stable identity, he leaves no trail or name behind him. Daoist wandering may not be the same as Zen Buddhist non-dwelling, "but the negativity of absencing connects the two" [5]. 

 

Ultimately, the "fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but the way [...] The way lacks the solidity of being and essence, which is what leads to the emergence of traces" [5]. Westerners talk about finding the way, but by that they really just mean finding themselves; the Eastern wanderer, however, becomes the way and doesn't hope to find anything (walking with neither intention nor direction). 

The Western philosopher wants his soul to blossom; the Eastern thinker, like the flower, doesn't have a soul (and remains nameless). They also remain rooted in the material world and care for the body; eating when hungry, sleeping when tired. Oh, and they also remain silent, still, and inactive.  

 

I have to admit, all of this appeals to me very much - and I say that as someone who has been hostile to (and dismissive of) Eastern thought in the past. It seems to me to that absence and emptiness and meaninglessness may very well lead "not to nihilism but to a heavenly joy [...] being without direction or trace" [13]. 

 

Kant - and those idiots who think happiness is all about being stuffed-full and satiated; all about having purpose and direction - wouldn't like this, but I do. Like Laozi, I'm happy to lead a life "without sense and goal, without teleology and narration, without transcendence and God" [14] - to be, as the Sex Pistols once sang, pretty vacant [b] and to find in this freedom, not spiritual deprivation [c]. 

 

 

II.

 

This is interesting: 

 

"Of course, postmodern thinkers also oppose ideas of substance and identity. [...] The negativity of these thinkers brings them closer to absencing and emptiness, but [...] Far Eastern thinking [...] is alien to them [...] The Far Eastern thinking of emptiness leaves deconstruction behind in order to achieve a special kind of reconstruction." [16]

 

This special kind of reconstruction is worldly immanence - "the 'this-is-how-it-is' of things" [16]. 

 

To be fair, I think Deleuze gets this when he transforms no-where into now/here. And when Derrida insists il n'y a pas de hors-texte - for isn't that similar to the Daoist notion that there is nothing above, beyond, or outside of the immanence of the world ...?

Anyway, the point is this: immanence is a crucial concept - as is "the painful charm of transience" [19] which allows for the development of an art and poetry of blandness, in which things fade out and blow away (again, this reminds me somewhat of Roland Barthes's theory of neutrality). 

 

 

III.

 

If essence is difference and a way of keeping things clear cut, then absencing is a form of indifference; one that un-bounds and makes indistinguishable. It's hard to see the outline of a white flower against a snow-covered backdrop (or a black cat in a coal cellar as others would say). 

 

The East is messy - things flow into each other: "Nothing imposes itself. Nothing demarcates itself from other things. Everything appears to retreat into an in-difference." [22-23]  The West, by contrast, likes strong boundaries and distinctions and closure.

 

Han continues:

"In-difference also fosters an intense side-by-side of what is different. It creates an optimal degree of cohesion with a minimal amount of organic, organized connection. Synthetic composition gives way to a syndetic continuum of closeness in which things do not come together as a unity." [23-24]

The cathedral is a space that is perfectly enclosed; even stained-glass windows are designed to keep the natural daylight out, which is why D. H. Lawrence preferred them in a state of ruin, exposed to the elements, etc. [d]

 

Han, however, seems to prefer a Buddhist temple that is "neither fully closed nor fully open" [26]. The spatiality of the latter "effects neither an inwardness nor a being-exposed" [26]. Doors of white rice paper are preferable to colourful stained-glass windows and standing light without direction is preferabe to a divine radiance from above that is intended to illuminate everything:

 

"The standing light, which has become fully indeterminate, in-different, does not emphasize the presence of things; it submerges them in absence." [27]    

 

It's almost as if white standing light brings a special type of darkness. You don't get that with modern glass architecture which marks the triumph of transparency. 

For Han, then, the Buddhist temple is preferable to the Christian cathedral; the Greek temple; and the shiny American skyscraper of glass and steel. It's not just a question of spatiality and light, but asymmetry; "an aesthetic principle of Zen Buddhism" [29] which "breaks up presence into absencing" [29].

 

I suppose some might say that it's all a question of how one sees things. And this brings us on to the question of eyes:

 

"According to Hegel's philosophical physiognomy, the eyes should be surrounded by the elevated bones so that 'the strengthened shadow in the orbits gives us of itself a feeling of depth and undistracted inner life'." [30]

 

But Eastern eyes, of course, are flat:

 

"Hegel would explain this in terms of a lack of inwardness, that is, an infantile spirit that has not yet awoken to subjective inwardness and therefore remains embedded in nature." [30]

 

But what does Hegel know about the beauty of the absencing gaze ...?

 

 

IV.

 

D. H. Lawrence thought there was nothing more bourgeois than the unfading flowers of heaven. But the Kantian lover of the beautiful would probably delight in such; their "imperishable splendour would most likely [...] make him happy" [33].

 

For sure, he'd not like it if they were revealed to be fake flowers - their artificiality depriving them of "their teleological, even theological, significance" [33] - but their everlasting nature would only intensify his love for them. Plato too dreamed of a divine form of beauty that "neither emerges nor vanishes, neither increases nor decreases" [33]. 

 

But for someone who views the word from a Far Eastern perspective, the most beautiful thing of all about a flower is its transience; the fact that it loses its petals without any hesitation and is content to disappear. For such a person, the bare stem or twig is as beautiful as a flowering plant or tree in full bloom. 

 

In other words: 

 

"In the sensibility of the Far East, neither the permanence [Ständigkeit] of being nor the stability [Beständigkeit] of essences is part of the beautiful. Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful is not what stands out or exceeds but what exercises self-restraint or retreats, not what is solid but what hovers. Beautiful are things that carry the traces of nothingness [...] not full presence but a 'there' that is coated with an absence [...]" [33-34]   

 

The Japanese call this wabi-sabi - the art of impermanence that "combines the unfinished, the imperfect, the transient, the fragile and the unassuming" [34]. Even your favourite Clarice Cliff milk jug is made more beautiful by a tiny crack or chip; and every silver bowl is improved when it loses its sheen and begins to darken [e].    

 

Han writes: 

 

"Satori (illumination) actually has nothing to do with shining or light. This is another point on which Eastern spirituality differs from occidental mysticism, with its metaphysics of light. Light multiplies presence. Buddhism, however, is a religion of absence." [35]

 

In the West, people almost want to be blinded by the light; a light either from some transcendent source or an inner light that emphasises the presence of things. Han - like Tanizaki - seems to admire the magic light of absence; a light that does not disturb or dispel the darkness; a friendly light. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, a few brief notes on (i) food, (ii) flower arranging, (iii) rock gardens, and (iv) theatre ...

 

(i) It's funny, but one of the complaints of English people is that Chinese food leaves them feeling empty inside five minutes after eating. Han provides a possible explanation: "Emptiness and absence also characterize the cuisine of the Far East." [39] Rice is the perfect example of this; lacking colour, lacking taste, offering no resistance (providing nothing to chew).

 

"Far Eastern cuisine appears empty also because it does not have a centre [...] The meals lack the centre or weight of a main dish and the closedness of a menu." [40]  

 

Further, in the West we like to cut food up with a knife and fork; in the East they assemble food with chopsticks.

 

(ii) The Japanese art of flower arranging is known as Ikebana - which means bringing flowers to life: 

 

"It is, however, an unusual kind of invigoration, because the flower is cut off from its root [...] The flower is invigorated by dealing it a mortal blow. [...] This raises it above the process of slow withering, its natural death. The flower is thereby removed from the difference between 'life' and 'death'. It shines with a special vitality, a flowering in-difference  [...] that has its source in the spirit of emptiness." [40-41]

 

The flower radiates with an unnatural (and transient) vitality; the shining of absence. 

 

(iii) If you have ever walked round a Japanese rock garden, you might have come away feeling a bit disappointed that there wasn't much to see. But that's the point; they are designed as gardens of absence and emptiness. 

 

However, despite their absence and emptiness, "they radiate", says Han, "an intense vitality" [41] and visitors must learn to appreciate the flow of the lines raked into the gravel and the darkness of the rocks. 

 

The Japanese rock garden is another method of paradoxical invigoration: "It invigorates nature by completely drying out its soul" [42] and placing it in a state of satori. 

 

(iv) Traditional Japanese puppet theatre (Bunraku) is also radically different to the world of Punch and Judy, showing that the latter is not the only way to do it. The Western puppet theatre animates characters via funny voices; in Bunraku it's all about the gesture and the puppets remain soulless figures.    

 

Similarly, Noh theatre is a theatre of absence: the costumes and masks worn by the living, human actors are designed to make them look like puppet figures. Even when an actor appears on stage without a mask, "the uncovered face is expressionless and empty" [44]. 

 

And the narrative composition of Noh theatre also adds to the sense of absence; its hard to tell what is real and what is dream - what is past and what is present - things appear only to then disappear once more (probably best not to worry too much about the plot in such cicumstances) [f].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The German edition was published as Abwesen: Zur Kultur und Philosophie des fernen Ostens (Merv Verlag, 2007). In this post, page numbers refer to the English edition (Polity Press, 2023).  

[b] 'Pretty Vacant' was the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to watch the official video for the song (which was shown on Top of the Pops) and/or here to read my post written on the track and published on TTA on 30 July 2108.   

[c] Is this also Han's view? It's hard to know. For whilst here he writes that the world "has no narrative structure" and is therefore "resistant to the crisis of meaning" [14], sixteen years later he will publish a book entitled Die Krise der Narration (2023) in which he seems to argue strongly in favour of narratives that anchor us in being and subscribe to a form of Catholicism informed by Martin Heidegger. Anyway, readers who are interested can click here to access the first part of a three-part post on this recent text. 

[d] See the post 'Believe in the Ruins: Reflections of a Gargolyle ...' (16 April 2019) in which I discuss Lawrence's thoughts on religious architecture: click here.

[e] Han at this point refers us to Tanizaki's famous essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows (1933). I have mentioned this work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark (click here, for example) and it partly formed the basis for a paper delivered at Treadwell's Bookshop in September 2023 on occultism in the age of transparency (an extract from which can be read by clicking here). 

 

[f] For the record: I find all theatre irritating and tedious; I do like the tranquility of a Japanese rock garden, but enjoy also the colourful chaos of an English wildflower meadow; and, if obliged to choose, I'd prefer to have steak and chips for dinner than a bowl of egg-fried rice. 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here.

 

 

Reflections on Vita Contemplativa by Byung-Chul Han (Part Two)

Cover of the original German edition

(Ullstein Verlag, 2022) [a]

 

 

I.

 

One of the key paragraphs in the opening chapter of Vita Contemplativa is this one:

 

"The dialectic of inactivity transforms inactivity into a threshold, a zone of indeterminacy that enables us to create something that was not there before. Without this threshold, the same keeps repeating itself." [17]  

 

In other words, the threshold of inactivity engineers difference and produces the new. For example, only silence enables us to say something previously unspoken and unheard of [b]. Madonna's insistence that we all express ourselves may be accompanied by a funky upbeat dance track, but the message is inherently fascist, ensuring conformity and sameness [c]. 

 

Jamie Reid was right: pop music keeps young people under control [d] and pop stars like Madonna are merely the "sexual organs of capital, the means of its procreation" [20].

 

Or, as Byung-Chul Han writes: "The compulsion to be active [...] turns out to be an efficient means of rule. If revolution is inconceivable today, that may be because we do not have time to think." [18] 

 

Perhaps if young people listened to less music and read more poetry, they'd be able to liberate "the immanence of life from the transcendence that alienates life from itself" [21]. Whether this results in bliss is debatable, but, who knows, it might at least rescue them from the abyss of the virtual and the hell of the same.  

  

II.

 

I have written several posts on Torpedo the Ark that refer to Cézanne's work - click here and/or here, for example - but I've never come across the notion that his canvases construct a landscape of inactivity in which things are wedded to one another until now.  

 

It's a nice idea. Or, at any rate, I like the idea of things falling in love and entering into "frank relations with one another" [24]; of tables and trees and bowls of fruit all interacting in a friendly manner whilst shining in their own singularity; "liberated from human intentions and actions" [24]. 

 

Cézanne's landscape of inactivity: "cuts ties with humanized nature, and restores an order of things that is not anthropomorphic, in which things can be themselves again" [24-25]. His apples, for example, are not merely fit for consumption, as D. H. Lawrence recognised [e]. 

 

This is at the heart of Cézanne's greatness; the fact that he allowed objects to "have their own dignity, their own radiance" [25] and didn't put himself into every picture. Indeed, he knew that a painting only succeeds when the artist makes himself absent.

 

 

III.   

 

Because he essentially comes out of the German Romantic tradition, it's no surprise to see that Han loves nature and posits the "reconciliation between humans and nature" as the "final purpose of a politics of inactivity" [26].   

 

He coninues: 

 

"The Anthropocene is the result of the total submission of nature to human action. Nature loses all independence and dignity. It is reduced to a part of, an appendix to, human history. The lawfulness of nature is subjected to human wilfulness and to the unpredictability of human action." [31] 

 

What can be done? 

 

Heidegger famously concluded that only a god can save us [f]. But for Han what is needed is an angel of inactivity to "arrest the human action that inevitably becomes apocalyptic" [33]. It's reflection that will lead us back from the edge of catastrophe and to that dwelling place where we have our being (on the earth and beneath the sky).  

 

Reflection - and learning to wait: "'Waiting is a capacity that transcends all power to act. One who finds his way into the ability to wait surpasses all achieving and its accomplishments'" [35][g] - which, arguably, is simply a Heideggerian version of the English proverb: Good things come to those who wait.

 

Han seems perfectly okay with this delving into folk wisdom, but I have to admit it troubles me; what next - should we write in praise of common sense and popular opinion ...? I do like reading Heidegger. And I do like reading Byung-Chul Han. But you have to be in a certain mood to do so ...

 

 

IV.

 

Funny enough, Han speaks about mood in Vita Contemplativa ... Being-in-a-mood, he says, precedes the being of consciousness and allows being-there to find expression. But mood is not something of our choosing or at our disposal: "It takes hold of us [...] we are thrown into it" [36].

 

And that's a good thing, as it reveals that our being-in-the-world is determined less by activity than by primordial ontological passivity. Actions are never thus "entirely free or spontaneous" [36]. And even thinking, says Han (following Heidegger), is grounded in mood. 

 

Thus, AI doesn't really think because it isn't capable of extracting thoughts out of mood: "Contemplative inactivity [...] is alien to the machine" [37], even when you switch it off. For the machine, to think is simply to produce data - it's certainly not about expressing gratitude.  

 

 

V.  

 

To return to the question of how to save the natural world, clearly we need a radically transformed relationship with the latter and this requires thinking through. That doesn't mean not doing anything, but it does mean questioning the will to activity that has brought us to where we are today:

 

"There can be no doubt that the determination to act is necessary in order to rectify the catastrophic consequences of human intervention in nature. But if the cause of the impending disaster is the view that what is absolutely fundamental is human action - action that has ruthlessly appropriated ad exploited nature - then we require a corrective to human action itself. We must therefore increase the proportion of action that is contemplative, that is, ensure that action is enriched by reflection." [ 40-41]   

 

It also means learning to breathe again ... for the compulsion "to be active, to produce and to perform. leads to breathlessness" [41]. That's certainly true. I've been slowly suffocating for the last eight years and very much hope that taking time to reflect a bit more carefully will, in future, allow me to finally catch my breath ...

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Although this is the cover of the original German edition, please note that page numbers given in this post refer to the English translation of Byung-Chul Han's work by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024), entitled Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity.  

[b] This is an idea found in the work of Deleuze, which Han acknowledges by quoting the following passage: 

      "So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." 

      See Gilles Deleuze, 'Mediators', in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 129. 

[c] I have written about this song by Madonna and the socially corrosive effects of insistent self-expression in a post dated 6 August 2023: click here.

[d] The artist Jamie Reid is best known for his work with the Sex Pistols. His Stratoswasticaster design was intended to alert people to the oppressive nature of the music industry. Click here to view on artnet.

[e] See Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 182- 217. 

      For Lawrence: "Cézanne's apples are a real attempt to let the apple exist in its own separate entity, without transfusing it with personal emotion [...] It seems a small thing to do: yet it is the first real sign that man has made for thousands of years that he is willing to admit that matter actually exists." [201]

[f] This phrase - which, in the original German reads Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten - comes from an interview given by Martin Heidegger to Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for Der Spiegel magazine in September 1966, but not published until after his death in May 1976. 

      The interview touched on many aspects of Heidegger's thinking, including the relationship between philosophy, politics, and culture. It was translated into English by William J. Richardson and published in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, (Transaction Publishers, 1981), pp. 45-67. 

 

[g] Han is quoting Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, (Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 147. Heidegger goes on to say: "In waiting, the human-being becomes gathered in attentiveness to that in which he belongs." Something I try to remind myself of when at the bus stop. 

 

 

Part one of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part three of this post on Byung-Chul Han's Vita Contemplativa can be read by clicking here.

Fragmented Remarks on Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life - Part 1: Lost Futures

Zero Books (second edition, 2022)

 

 

For some reason, the spectral figure of Mark Fisher continues to haunt my imagination [a]. 

 

And, what's more, his name continues to crop up in conversation. Just the other night, for example, a young woman asked me if I had read his 2014 essay collection Ghosts of My Life and I had to rather shamefully admit I hadn't. 

 

So, at Mariam's insistence that I really should do so - and despite certain reservations [b] - here goes. 

 

But, note at the outset, what follows is not an attempt at a review (still less an overview). 

 

Think of this more as an attempt to occupy the space of thinking that Fisher opens up and to engage with some of the ideas encountered, moving from text-to-text but not stopping where the material is outside my field of knowledge or experience, or simply void of any interest. I won't, for example, be saying much - if anything - about the various genres of dance music, such as Jungle, that seem to so excite Fisher's imagination [c].    

 

Note that all page references to (the second edition) of Fisher's book are given directly in the text.

 

 

I.

 

Many people talk about the cancellation of the future, but I admire Fisher for being the one who (like the Italian Marxist Franco Beradi) emphasises the slowness of this process. 

 

It's something that (gradually but relentlessly) creeps up on us (like old age): one day everything seems fine and there's plenty to look forward to, the next ... Suddenly, all we are left with is the past - or more precisely, our memory of the past and even this dims over time. 

 

Luckily, we have photographs and videos and thanks to YouTube it seems that everything we ever watched or listened to is made available: "In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost." [2]

 

 

II.

 

It's clever how Fisher (retrospectively) reads Sapphire & Steel in relation to the work of Harold Pinter and John Le Carré. But I remember how, at the time - the series ran from 1979 to 1982 - my friend and I would often laugh at it's absurdity and pretension. 

 

Now, however, I'd view this pair of interdimensional operatives whose job it is to repair breaks in time so as to ensure temporal continuity with a good deal of philosophical hostility. For what are they if not defenders of the myth of progress (i.e., linear development) and ideals of smoothness, purity, and temporal good order ...?

 

Personally, I quite like anachronisms and chronological inconsistencies. It's not these things which lead to stasis - on the contrary, things which puncture equilibrium also keep things moving. 

 

Without wishing to completely destabilise the Western concept of time, I'm happy to celebrate its periodic disturbance; to allow for a certain chaos (or openness); for untimely events that produce divergent becomings; for lines of flight which produce wild disruptions.

 

I say this as a reader of Deleuze, but also as a reader of Lawrence who writes in Apocalypse: "Our idea of time as a continuity, as an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly" [d].

 

Hopefully I've not misunderstood what Fisher is arguing, but I get the impression that, like Sapphire and Steel, he wants to straighten everything out and prevent cultural time folding back on itself, so that we might once again be able to make a clear distinction between past and present (and we'll all know what's what and when and where we are).

 

 

III.

 

Fisher likes to use a term borrowed from his pal Simon Reynolds - dyschronia - to describe the "current crisis of cultural temporality" [14] as he experiences it. 

 

And, to be fair, it's a nice term - one that can be added to all those other dys- terms which people seem to like using today (from dyslexia and dysmorphia to dysphoria and dystopia). I even referred to the concept myself in a recent post on the Beatles [click here].        

 

But I can't quite get as worked up about it as Mr Fisher, who at one point cries out: "Where is the 21st-century equivalent of Kraftwerk?" [9] A passionate cri de coeur no doubt, but one that made me almost spit my tea. For this may be a question concerning the time in which we live, but it's hardly a question for the ages. 

 

Although, having said that, perhaps Fisher has a point when he asserts that the fate that has befallen popular music is "in many ways paradigmatic of the fate of [wider] culture under post-Fordist capitalism" [16].

 

 

IV.

Despite appropriating his term hauntology, Fisher claims to find Derrida a "frustrating thinker" [16] and he makes clear his hostility to deconstruction: 

 

"As soon as it was established in certain areas of the academy, deconstruction, the philosophical project which Derrida founded, installed itself as a pious cult of indeterminacy, which [...] made a lawyerly virtue of avoiding any definitive claim. Deconstruction was a kind of pathology of scepticism, which induced hedging, infirmity of purpose and compulsory doubt in its followers. It elevated particular modes of academic practice - Heidegger's priestly opacity, literary theory's emphasis on the ultimate instability of any interpretation - into quasi-theological imperatives." [16-17]  

 

So what's not to love? 

 

Well, to be fair, I share some of Fisher's frustration when it comes to Derrida and I've never read his work with the same kind of pleasure or excitement as that of his contemporaries, such as Deleuze. 

 

Over the years, however, my appreciation of Derrida and Derridean concepts, such as différance and hauntology, has increased and I think his main point that nothing enjoys a purely positive existence - that presence requires absence; that being rests on non-being - is absolutely crucial. 

 

And I'm pretty certain that Fisher - indebted as he is to Derrida - would be more generous to him were it not for the fact that the latter's not quite lycanthropic enough for those influenced by Nick Land [e]. 

Anyway, Fisher asks the question that many readers have probably asked themselves: "Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is just a figure of speech?" [18]

 

He answers by saying: 

 

"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing." [18]

 

That's a nice (easily understood) definition and I agree with Fisher that many of the great thinkers of modernity - not least of all Marx and Freud - "discovered different modes of this spectral causality" [19]. 

 

As did Nietzsche, of course, when he spoke of posthumous individuals ...

 

The key thing is that we can distinguish in hauntology between the no longer and the not yet:

 

"The first refers to that which is (in actuality) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic 'compulsion to repeat', a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)." [19]

 

 

V.

 

Nodding to both Freud and Derrida, Fisher also provides an excellent definition of (and distinction between) mourning and melancholia:

 

"In Freud's terms, both mourning and melancholia are about loss. But whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawl of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared. For mourning to properly begin, Derrida says in Spectres of Marx, the dead must be conjured away [...]" [22]

 

I think that's true: which is why the dead must bury the dead and the living must live; remembering their loved ones, but also letting them go. The dead can't rest in peace if we won't allow them to do so: and haunting, then, "can be construed as a failed mourning" [22] - a refusal to give up the ghost (and thus the ghost's refusal to be quiet). 

 

For Fisher, what's at stake in 21st-century hauntology is not the loss of a loved one or the disappearance of a particular object, but the vanishing of a certain trajectory that he names popular modernism and which produced such things as public service broadcasting, Penguin paperbacks, and postpunk ... 

 

In a passage that makes clear the aim of his book, Fisher writes:

 

"In popular modernism, the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated. At the same time, popular culture definitively established that it did not have to be populist. Particular modernist techniques were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of producing forms which were adequate to the preset moment was taken up and renewed. Which is to say that [...] the culture which shaped most of my early expectations was essentially popular modernist, and the writing that has been collected in Ghosts of My Life is about coming to terms with the disappearance of the conditions which allowed it to exist." [22-23]  

 

Perhaps, in a sense, that's also one of the aims of Torpedo the Ark. 

 

Ultimately, it comes down to a refusal to give up; "a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call 'reality' - even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time ..." [24]

 

Of course, as Fisher recognises, this raises the question of nostalgia once more: "is hauntology, as many of its critics have maintained, simply a [new] name for nostalgia?" [25]

 

Clearly, Fisher doesn't think so and I agree with him that "comparing the present unfavourably with the past is not automatically nostalgic in any culpable way" [25]. The fact is, the 1970s was a more creative decade - and people were happier - than today; this isn't falsely overestimating (or falsely remembering) the past and readers who weren't alive to experience the '70s will just have to take my word for it [f].  

 

The popular modern culture that was unfolding back then "was by no means a completed project" [26] and it was, admittedly, a time of "casual racism, sexism and homophobia" [26] - not to mention football hooliganism, strikes, blackouts, and flared jeans. But, nevertheless, the decade was, in many respects, "better than neoliberalism wants us to remember it" [25]. 

 

What is being longed for in Fisher's work (and perhaps also in mine) is not the return to a certain period, but the resumption of an abandoned project (which he calls popular modernism) and the summoning of a lost spirit, although Fisher and I obviously disagree as to the political guise of this spirit - I'm not an acid communist.  

Still, acid communist or not, I can agree with Fisher that the key thing is ultimately about dismantling identities which are for the most part poor fictions: "Culture, and the analysis of culture, is valuable insofar as it allows an escape from ourselves." [28]

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I have written recently about Mark Fisher and his work in several posts on Torpedo the Ark; see here and here, for example. 

 

[b] I am always a little wary of writers like Fisher who, via unrestrained enthusiasm for certain ideas (often brilliantly expressed) attract a cult following amongst readers who, like Fox Mulder, so want to believe in the existence of truth lying out there (beneath the falsifications of capitalist realism).    

 

[c] This isn't to say that Fisher's analysis of, for example, Rufige Kru's Ghosts of My Life EP (1993) isn't excellent, it's just that I know more (and care more) about the actress Goldie Hawn than I do about Goldie the music producer and DJ. 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 97. 

      Lawrence continues: "The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge."  

[e] I'm referring here to Nick Land's essay 'Spirit and Teeth', in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Sprit, ed. David Woods, (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.

     The essay can also be found in Nick Land's Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, (Urbanomic, 2011), pp. 175-201.

 

[f] Readers don't have to take my word for how shit things are in the 21st-century in comparison to the 1970s. Consider this statement from Fisher: "It's clear to me now that the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised - not in the far distant future, but very soon - as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s." [Ghosts, 29] 

      Arguably, things have only got worse - much worse - in the ten years since this was written. 

 

 

Part 2 of this post - The Return of the 70s - can be read by clicking here.

 

Part 3 of this post - on hauntology - can be read by clicking here.   

Nietzsche Popped My Cherry: Reflections on Heidegger's Hymen

Artwork by Wesley Johnson

 

The hymen is neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiling, 

neither the inside nor the outside. It is that which stands between; 

the intimate binding middle that brings together two bodies whilst holding them apart.

 

 

Someone from Wisconsin - America's dairyland - who, when not making cheese, likes to read European philosophy and listen to old school punk rock, suggests with reference to a recent post that perhaps what Heidegger means by the phrase Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht is that Nietzsche was the one who took his philosophical innocence or purity - his virginity, if you will - and that the phrase might productively be read in relation to Derrida's thinking on the hymen [1].      

 

That seems to me to be a clever and helpful insight. And I do like the idea of Heidegger being broken by Nietzsche in the sense of being fucked and fucked hard (or fucked up and fucked over). One can't help recalling Deleuze's interpretation of the history of philosophy in terms of penetrating (and being penetrated by) those authors who move us most (something that ultimately results in monstrous offspring) [2].

 

The key thing is that inspiration comes not from above, but from behind and below and that there is no immaculate conception; there is, rather, pain, violence, bloodshed ... Philosophy is not an ideal love of wisdom, but a perverse form of libidinal materialism. 

 

Heidegger isn't merely stimulated by Nietzsche's ideas, he's ravished and broken by the insistence with which Nietzsche imposes himself; Nietzsche infiltrates, inseminates, and impregnates. Which is why Zarathustra's instruction to his followers to lose him and find themselves, isn't so easy. Once the hymen has been torn - and one's virginity is lost in the very act that proves its existence - there's no going back; one is fatally wedded to Nietzsche for life.      

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Unfortunately, my knowledge of Derrida is very limited; as far as I understand it, hymen indicates both proximity and separation; i.e., the relation and the difference between two bodies. But what this tells us - or how we are supposed to think la logique de l'hymen in relation to the Nietzsche/Heidegger relationship - I'm not quite sure. 

      For Derrida's description of the hymen as a kind of mediating space, see 'The Double Session', in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 210-215 

 

[2] See Deleuze, 'Letter to a Harsh Critic', in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

Reflections on Frances Wilson's 'Burning Man'

(Bloomsbury, 2021)

 

 

Anyone setting out to write a new biography of D. H. Lawrence has two initial problems:

 

Firstly, they have to find something to say that wasn't said in the three-volumed Cambridge Biography (1991-1998), written by professors Worthen, Kinkead-Weekes, and Ellis. These three wise men managed to stretch Lawrence's short life out over two thousand pages, which doesn't leave much room, one would have thought, to manoeuvre.

 

Secondly - and perhaps even more problematically - Lawrence himself provided an account of his own life in his essays, articles, travel writings, poems, and - not least of all - in his thousands of letters. What's more, he also gives us an autofictional version of events in his novels, plays, and short stories. 

 

In an attempt to try and get round these inconvenient facts, Frances Wilson does two things:

 

Firstly, she follows Lawrence's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work and gives greater roles to those who usually are considered of minor import in his life. Thus, we get to hear a lot about Maurice Magnus, for example, and an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's Memoir of the latter. As someone who likes shadowy figures and random events and is obsessed with marginalia, footnotes, early drafts, unpublished or obscure texts, this is fine by me.

 

Secondly, Wilson reads Lawrence's astonishingly productive mid-period in relation to (or in terms of) Dante's Divine Comedy, dividing her study into three main sections: Inferno (England, 1915-1919); Purgatory (Italy, 1919-1922); and Paradise (America, 1922-1925), with each section divided into three parts. 

 

Wilson's book thus has a nice neat structure, provided by a novel literary device - or, what might better be described as a cloaking device; i.e., one designed to disguise the fact that, actually, there's really very little new to say about the life of D. H. Lawrence: those who know the facts, faces, places, dates, and key events know these things already and those who don't probably aren't all that interested. 

 

The real problem I have, however, is that, ultimately, it's the work - not the life - that matters (although Wilson claims she is unable to distinguish between life and art). And we still await the readers that Lawrence deserves; i.e., readers who will do for him what a number of great French thinkers (such as Foucault and Deleuze) did for Nietzsche; violating his texts from behind and below, in order to produce monstrous new ideas and unleash strange new forces and flows.

 

Wilson, sadly, is not such a reader. Like Geoff Dyer, she seems to think Lawrence needs rehabilitating rather than sodomising and, in order to achieve this, she is prepared to concede all his faults and failings and dismiss some of his major works as mad and bad, including The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, and even Women in Love, which, in my view, is the greatest novel of the 20th-century (but then I have the mentality of a teenager: click here). 

 

Having said that, her book is well written and (for the most part) fun to read; she clearly still cares for Lawrence a great deal, even if a little embarrassed about her youthful devotion and too readily apologetic when confronted with those issues, such as racism, that drive modern readers into a moral frenzy.

 

Again, for me, it's preferable that Lawence remain a countercultural hate-figure regarded with hostility and contempt, than become a ludicrous figure of fun or remade to suit the prejudices of a contemporary readership. As Malcolm McLaren repeatedly said: It is better to be hated than loved - and better to be a malevolent failure than any kind of benign success. 

 

The greatness of Lawrence resides in the fact that, like Nietzsche, he would rather be a satyr than a saint and that his writing expresses an acute form of evil, with the latter understood as a sovereign value that demands a kind of Übermorality (i.e., beyond conventional understandings of good and evil). 

 

Wilson doesn't seem remotely interested in any of this; she's far more concerned with the minutiae of Lawrence's everyday life than metaphysics; with telling tales and passing the word along, rather than critically evaluating ideas. 

 

Of course, to be fair, she doesn't claim to be writing an intellectual biography and I rather suspect that, like Ottoline Morell, Wilson regards Lawrence's philosophical writings as deplorable tosh - the ravings of whom she calls Self Two; i.e., the Hulk-like Lawrence she finds tiresome and whose reactionary hysteria often "smashed the genius of Self One to smithereens". 

 

The thing is - if we must indulge the untenable fantasy of a dual nature - it's the green-skinned alter-ego rampaging around the world out of sheer rage that often produces the most astonishing work, rather than the pale-faced Priest of Love indulging in Romantic soul-twaddle. As even Wilson acknowledges towards the end of her book: "Good haters are better company than [...] lovers [...]". 

 

 

See: Frances Wilson, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence, (Bloomsbury, 2021). Lines quoted are on pp. 302 and 386. 

 

For further reflections on the above book, please click here. 

 

 

Make Way For Pengallan!

What are you all waiting for? A spectacle? You shall have it! 

And tell your children how the great age ended. Make way for Pengallan!

I.

It can never be stressed enough: a novel is one thing and a film is something else; even the most faithful of screen adaptations is a radically different work of art and can only be analysed in and on its own terms. Thus, whilst it can be amusing to compare and contrast the book with the movie - or the movie with the book - it's a largely pointless exercise.

I was reminded of this whilst recently watching Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn (1939), his version of Daphne du Maurier's novel published three years earlier, based on a screen play by Sidney Gilliat and Joan Harrison.    

Many critics dislike this film; Michael Medved lists it in his fifty worse movies of all time, which, I think, is ridiculous. Having said that, Hitchcock himself was far from happy with the work and du Maurier was also less than pleased with the adaptation. [1]

Personally, however, I think Jamaica Inn has much to recommend it and contains some memorable scenes, all of which involve Charles Laughton as the astonishing figure of Sir Humphrey Pengallan, the amoral (and possibly insane) mastermind behind a gang of murderous shipwreckers working the Cornish coast who uses the proceeds from the sale of the stolen goods to fund his lavish and decadent lifestyle.


II.

When asked to make a toast to the ideal of Beauty by a guest at his dinner table, Pengallan instructs his butler, Chadwick, to bring him his favourite porcelaine figurine, so that he may be inspired. When challenged by the same guest  - "But Sir Humphrey, it is not alive" - he replies that it's more alive than half the people round his table and fondles it with fetishistic fascination, like a genuine agalmatophile. 

Pushed to provide an example of living beauty, Pengallan decides to introduce his beloved Nancy: "The most beautiful creature west of Exeter." This turns out to be a fine-looking horse, rather than the young woman anticipated, much to the bemused astonishment of his guests. One thinks of Caligula and his horse Incitatus ...  

Pengallan, is, however, also partial to young women. No surprise then when he takes an immediate shine to Mary Yellan, played by the lovely nineteen-year-old Irish actress Maureen O'Hara. When Mary arrives unexpected and uninvited at his house, he half removes her coat in order to admire her exquisite shape, as if she too were a prized object or animal. Keen to display his literary leanings, Pengallan then quotes to her from Byron:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes [2]

Unimpressed, Mary amusingly responds: "Thank you, sir, but I didn't come for poetry, but for a horse."

My favourite scene between Mary and Penhallan happens towards the end of the film, however, when the latter kidnaps the former, ties and gags her, and tells her that he plans to make her his own now that she has no one else in the world. He drives her, still tied up and covered by a heavy cloak, to the harbour, where they board a ship bound for France. It's what's known in BDSM circles as a Sweet Gwendoline scene. [3]  

But my favourite scene of all comes at the climax of the movie and involves Pengallan jumping to his death from atop a ship's mast rather than surrender to the authorities. Addressing the crowd below, he says: "What are you all waiting for? A Spectacle? You shall have it! And tell your children how the great age ended. Make way for Pengallan!"

If and when I jump to my own death - which, as a philosopher, would be my preferred method of suicide (thereby continuing a noble tradition which can be traced from Empodocoles to Gilles Deleuze) - these are the lines I shall recite.   

Notes

[1] Although when interviewed Hitchcock referred to Charles Laughton as a charming man, one doubts he was happy with the latter's meddling with the film's script, casting, and direction, which, as a co-producer as well as the lead actor, Laughton doubtless felt he had every right to do, insisting, for example, that his own character be accorded greater screen time and that O'Hara be given the role of Mary. Laughton's method of acting - described in some quarters as ham and in others as camp - was also a problem for Hitchcock, though, again, I love his portrayal of Pengallan as a dandy libertine mincing around to the beat of a German waltz. 

As for du Maurier, she was so disappointed by the adaptation that she briefly considered withholding the film rights to Rebecca which, as film fans will know, Hitchcock directed the following year, 1940, to great critical acclaim (and du Maurier's complete satisfaction).  

[2] Byron, 'She Walks in Beauty' (1814). Readers who wish to read this short lyrical verse in full can click here to access it on the Poetry Foundation website.

[3] Sweet Gwendoline is the chief damsel in distress in the works of bondage artist John Willie, who first appeared in Robert Harrison's girlie magazine Wink from June 1947 to February 1950, and who invariably finds herself tied up and in need of rescue. I am aware, of course, that in this era of #MeToo such scenes of sexual sadism involving violence against women are no longer viewed in the same way. 

Readers who are interested in watching Hitchcock's Jamaica Inn can do so on YouTube by clicking here. The scenes I mention above are are at 9.30-14.50, 1:26-1:28, and 1:37-1:38.  

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 1: Encountering Plants and Ethical Offshoots)

I.

Sometimes, despite having the best of intentions, it can take five or six years to get around to reading a book and Michael Marder's Plant Thinking (2013) is a case in point. Not only have I been wanting to read it for ages, but, as a floraphile with a philosophical interest in all forms of nonhuman life, including our CO2-loving friends, I really should have read it by now.

Still, better late than never ...   

II.

Firstly, I should say as sympathetic as I am to Marder's project, I'm not entirely convinced that re-thinking our relation to plants and raising various ethico-ontological concerns to do with vegetal life significantly helps in the task of deconstructing metaphysics, or overthrowing the "capitalist agro-scientific complex" [184]. That's over-egging the philosophical pudding and marks the enlisting of plants to the revolutionary cause of hermeneutic communism (it's no surprise to discover the foreword to Marder's book is written by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala).  

And I'm certainly not of the view that his book will - to paraphrase ecofeminist Vandana Shiva - help plants threatened by human activity whilst enabling us to better understand the sanctity and continuity of life and our own place within the Earth Family. That's just quasi-religious vomit.    

Anyway, here are my thoughts first on the Introduction to Plant-Thinking, followed by responses to the Epilogue (I shall deal with the body of the text - divided into five chapters across two main parts - in parts two and three of this post) ... 


III. To Encounter the Plants ...

It's true, I suppose, that - in comparison to other living beings - plants have been given the shit end of the stick by philosophers (though, due to their penchant for manure, one might have assumed they'd not find this particularly objectionable). Even animals, which have themselves suffered marginalisation throughout the history of Western thought, suddenly seem very rich in world compared to plants; the latter are the poorest of the poor, populating the "zone of absolute obscurity" [2].

Vegetal life was simply not regarded as question-worthy by the vast majority of theorists and critical thinkers and this has allowed for their ethical neglect, argues Marder, who wishes to give plants their due and let them be in their own right. And he aims to do this by staging an encounter with plants in all their leafy otherness.

This might seem problematic (even impossible), but Marder insists human beings have "a wide array of possible approaches to the world of vegetation at their disposal" [3] and that, alien as they are, they are also curiously familiar to us in our daily lives, even if "the uses to which we put vegetal beings do not exhaust what (or who) they are but, on the contrary, obfuscate enormous regions of their being" [4].

For example, there's the aesthetic approach - think Van Gogh and his sunflowers - which seems "to be more propitious to a nonviolent approach to plants than either their practical instrumentalization or their nominalist-conceptual integration into systems of thought" [4].

I agree with that: artists and poets have a crucial role to play in the encounter with plants* and if philosophers are to think plants, they'll need to learn from the above and perhaps adopt a quasi-aesthetic approach of their own (easy enough for European philosophers, but problematic for those who belong to an Anglo-American (analytic) tradition and don't quite know what it might mean to "save singularities from the clasp of generalizing abstraction and [...] put thought in the service of finite life" [5]). 

I'm not sure Marder particularly cares about the latter, however, whom he regards as disrespectful toward vegetation. It's weak thinking postmodernists, feminists, and non-Western philosophers with their rich venerable traditions who are "much more attuned to the floral world" [6] (apparently). So I suppose we'd all better get reading Irigaray and learning Sanskrit if we want to interact with plants in a manner that doesn't negate their otherness and at least entertains the hypothesis "that vegetal life is coextensive with a distinct subjectivity with which we might engage" [8]. 

Developing this latter point, Marder writes:

"This is not to say that human beings and plants are but examples of the underlying universal agency of Life itself; nor is it to plead for an excessive anthropomorphism, modeling the subjectivity of vegetal being on our own personhood. Rather, the point is that plants are capable, in their own fashion, of accessing, influencing, and being influenced by a world that does not overlap the human Lebenswelt but that corresponds to the vegetal modees of dwelling on and in the earth." [8]

In other words, rather than talk (like Heidegger) about having or not having world, it's better to say we have our world and they, plants, have theirs.

Thus, whenever a man or woman meets a sunflower, "two or more worlds (and temporalities) intersect" and to accept this is "already to let plants maintain their otherness, respecting the uniqueness of their existence" [8]. We can't and probably shouldn't try to enter their world (even though they certainly intrude into ours); rather, the challenge is "to allow plants to flourish on the edge or at the limit of phenomenality" [9].

We might also admit that we ourselves retain vestiges of the inorganic and of ancient plant life; that we have a common evolutionary origin after all. Thus, Deleuze's notion of becoming-plant might be said to involve the activation of long dormant and long forgotten molecular memories. The challenge that plant-thinking sets us, therefore, is this:

"Are we ready to take the initial, timid steps in the anamnesis of the vegetal heritage proper to human beings, the very forgetting of which we have all but forgotten?" [13]  

IV. The Ethical Offshoots of Plant-Thinking

It was certainly new to me to be told that in 2008 the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Nonhuman Biotechnology released a report titled 'The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants'.

As Marder explains, for perhaps the first time in human history, "a government-appointed body issued recommendations for the ethical treatment of plants" [180]. Vegetal life was said to deserve to be treated with the same consideration accorded all other living beings. Henceforth, fucking with plants and subjecting them to arbitrary harm was not okay; they had rights.

You'd think Marder would be delighted by this - and he does, in fact, describe the report as admirable and praise its revolutionary potential. But he also points out that it failed to "inquire into the being of plants, into their unique purchase on life" [180]. In other words, it lacked any ontological insight or philosophical depth and continued to privilege mankind as supreme moral arbiter. It was ultimately an attempt to absorb the vegetal world into the all too human world of law and order.  

What was needed, rather, was "the cultivation of a certain intimacy with plants, which does not border on empathy or on the attribution of the same fundamental substratum to their life and to ours" [181]. We must go beyond being plant-like in our thinking alone; we must allow this thinking to bear upon our actions, says Marder, before outlining a series of offshoots that suggest how we might best form an ethical relationship with plants.

These offshoots tell us, for example, that ethics is "rooted in the ontology of vegetal life" [182] and that plants deserve respect in the Kantian sense of the word (which is "not to be confused with a quasi-religious veneration" [183] - please note Vandana Shiva). I don't know if either of these ideas is true, but it's certainly fun to have them on the table for consideration.

How one might show respect to a weed, for example, is an interesting question: don't immediately uproot or spray it with herbicide might seem to be an obvious place to start. But it's going to be difficult to convince my next-door neighbour - who prides himself on his decorative brick driveway upon which not even a fallen leaf shall come to rest - that the loss of even a single plant "is tantamount to the passing of an entire world" [183].   

It might be even more difficult to persuade the local greengrocer that whilst plant-thinking "does not oppose the use of fruit, roots, and leaves for human nourishment" [184], plants should not be harnessed to a particular end that ontologically exhausts them.

In other words, Hegel was mistaken to assert that "vegetal beings attain their highest fulfilment in serving as sources of food for animals and humans" [184] and Marder objects to "the total and indiscriminate approach to plants as materials for human consumption within the deplorable framework of the commodified production of vegetal life" [184].    
   
It's not a question, therefore, of not eating broccoli or Brussels sprouts with your Christmas dinner, it's a question of not disrespecting other facets of ontophytology and of eating with ethical concern - which, for Marder, is eating like a plant! He explains:

"Eating like a plant does not entail consuming only inorganic minerals but welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavouring to swallow up its very otherness in one's corporeal and pyschic interiority." [185]

That's something the even self-righteous vegans and vegetarians stuffing their faces with chickpeas and tofu might like to consider. For when it comes to the ethics of eating conceived from the perspective of plant-thinking, "what is required is a complete and concerted decommodification of vegetal life, a refusal to regulate the human relation to plants on the basis of commodity-economic logic" [185]. 

Ultimately, despite their being silent and non-conscious in the usual manner, plants are alive and therefore worthy of at least some degree of ethical consideration; indeed, I would extend this even to non-living objects - everything should be handled with care.  


Notes

* As Marder asks in the epilogue to his text: "How, for instance, could one ethically regret the fading of flowers, if not, as Rilke does, in the language of poetry, which does not represent anything and which, itself, verges on [the] silence [of plants]?" [186-87]

See: Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page references given in the text are to this work.

See also an interesting debate to do with plant ethics between Michael Marder and the legal scholar and animals rights author Gary Francione in the online magazine Berfrois (15 June, 2012): click here. Note that the image above of a thinking plant was taken from here.

Part two of this post - on vegetal anti-metaphysics - can be accessed by clicking here. 

For part three, on vegetal existentiality, click here.