Nostalgie für das Ding

Dorothee Richter and Kim Novak as Gillian Holroyd in

Bell, Book and Candle (dir. Richard Quine, 1958)

 

 

According to Dorothee Richter, who - among other things - is a professor in contemporary curating at the University of Reading, nostalgia for the thing is always reactionary and, as such, makes her feel uncomfortable and unhappy [1]. 

Which is a shame. 

 

However, at the risk of adding to her discomfort and distress, I'm afraid that my fascination with das Ding - whether in the prose poems of Francis Ponge [2], the philosophical reflections of Martin Heidegger [3], or the psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan [4] - grows stronger by the year. 

 

Richter can't quite understand why there are thinkers - like Vilém Flusser [5] and Byung-Chul Han [6] - for whom the thing is still an alluring object, albeit one that is rapidly vanishing in this virtual age of Undinge: 

 

"Have we not been here before, and have we not, with good reason, rejected the auratic view of things? [...] Why is there this cyclically recurring nostalgia for the thing in its pure aspect?" [7], she asks.

 

And, yes, I suppose we have been here before. And perhaps there are good reasons to be suspicious of those who become too taken with the idea that things, including artworks and human beings, have a magical quality or essence. 

 

But, having said that, who wants to live in an entirely disenchanted world where everything has been dissolved and digitalised into quantifiable data to be processed by artificial intelligence? 

 

I don't. And, if I'm honest, it shocks me that anyone would.

 

When push comes to shove, I stand with the young witch I met recently at Treadwell's [8], who told me that when non-things beckon her to enter a virtual hell, she relies on the saving power of bell, book, and candle to summon her back to reality.           

 

Notes

 

[1] Dorothee Richter, '(Non-)Things or Why Nostalgia for the Thing is Always Reactionary', OnCurating,  Issue 45: click here. 

      This is a slightly modified version of an essay, trans. Judith Rosenthal, that was originally published under the title '(Un)Dinge, oder warum die Sehnsucht nach dem Ding immer reaktionär ist', in Interdisziplinäres Ausstellen, ed. Sabine Fauland, (Österreichischer Museumsbund, Vienna, 2016).

 

[2] Francis Ponge (1899 - 1988); French essayist and poet. Influenced by both surrealism and phenomenology, Ponge developed a unique style of writing in which he closely examined everyday objects. See Le Parti pris des choses (1942), a collection of 32 prose poems, translated into English by Beth Archer Brombert as Taking the Side of Things (1972) and as The Nature of Things by Lee Fahnestock (1995). 

 

[3] Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976); German philosopher. Considered to be among the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th-century.  In a series of post-War lectures delivered in Bremen, Heidegger discussed the question concerning modern technology and spoke about das Ding as a gathering place of the Fourfold. See Insight Into That Which Is, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012).    

[4] Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981); French psychoanalyst. Discussion of the thing constitutes one of the central themes of his work in 1959-60. He uses the French term la chose interchangeably with the German term das Ding. For Lacan, the latter refers to the thing in its dumb reality, entirely outside of language and the unconscious (thus ultimately impossible for man to ever fully imagine or describe). It remains, however, an object of desire to which we continually return; the unforgettable Other.   

 

[5] Vilém Flusser (1920 - 1991); Czech-born writer and theorist who lived for a long time in Brazil. Initially under the spell of Heidegger, Flusser developed his own take on the question of things and non-things; see Dinge und Undinge: Phänomenologische Skizzen (Hanser, 1993) and The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, (Reaktion Books, 1999); a series of insightful essays (translated into English by Anthony Mathews) on things including wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas, and tents. 

[6] Byung-Chul Han; South Korean-born philosopher and cultural theorist living in Germany. I have discussed (or referred to) many of his ideas and books on Torpedo the Ark. In a note to his recent work, Non-things, trans Daniel Steur, (Polity Press, 2022), Han writes: 

"There has been an increasing interest in things in cultural studies over the past few decades. This theoretical interest in things, however, does not mean that things are becoming more important in everyday life. On the contrary, the fact that they have become the explicit subject of theoretical reflection is a sign that they are disappearing. [...] Similarly, 'material culture' and the 'material turn' can be understood as reactions to the dematerialization and dereification of reality brought about by digitalization." [99-100]

I review and discuss this text in a two-part post published in June 2022: click here to go to part one.       

 

 [7] Dorothee Richter, op. cit. 

      By the thing in its pure aspect, I think Richter is referring to the thing as a thing-in-itself [Ding-an-sich] with its own unique presence in time and space. This latter is what Walter Benjamin termed its aura - dismissed by Richter as merely a bourgeois attempt to spiritualise the object and give it aesthetic value or abstract beauty outside and above any political history or meaning. For Richter, all such thinking is mythologizing and there are no objects outside of language; a tree, for example, is a concept, not a thing (in itself) - indeed, the entire universe is mind-dependent. As an object-oriented philosopher, I don't subscribe to this correlationism.  

[8] Treadwell's is a bookshop located at 33, Store Street, Bloomsbury, London, WC1. It specialises in esoteric titles and stocks various herbs and ceremonial oils used in occult practices and/or modern pagan witchcraft. It was opened in 2003 (originally in Covent Garden) by proprietor Christina Harrington. I have given over thirty papers at the store: click here for details. For further information visit: treadwells-london.com

 

 

I, Too, Dislike It: Thoughts on The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

Fitzcarraldo Editions (2020) 

fitzcarraldoeditions.com

 

 

I.

 

Any work with the word hatred in the title is likely to catch my attention. 

 

For hatred is a poorly appreciated passion, often understood purely in reactive terms as love on the recoil, as if the latter were the great primary term or essential prerequisite and the former lacked its own positivity or dynamism. 

 

The fact is, however, that whilst love makes blind and compromises judgement, hatred activates areas of the brain involved in critical evaluation. Thus, whilst love may seem to promise human salvation, it's hate which has enabled us to survive as a species [a].  

Still, we're not here to discuss hatred per se, but, rather, Ben Lerner's essay from 2016 in which, paradoxically, he uses his hatred of poetry to construct an interesting defence of the art and craft of which he is himself a skilled practitioner [b].

 

 

II. 

 

Lerner opens with the revised (shorter) version of Marianne Moore's 'Poetry':

I, too, dislike it.

    Reading it, however, with a perfect

      contempt for it, one discovers in

    it, after all, a place for the genuine. [c]

 

And that's a clever place to open and a clever little poem to open with, although I must confess to being uncomfortable with the final word; one that not only refers us back to ideals of truth and authenticity, but retains echoes of a concern with paternal origins and racial purity.

 

Still, we're not here to discuss the etymology and politics of the word genuine: it's the unforgettable first line that matters most; a line that has been on repeat in Lerner's head for even more years than Bartleby's I would prefer not to has been in mine [d]. I know exactly what Lerner means when he speaks of a refrain having either "the feel of negative rumination" or "a kind of manic, mantric affirmation" [e]. 

 

There is, then, something about poetry that makes us all dislike it - even if we continue to read it, write it, and wish to safeguard it. It's an art form which, as Lerner points out, has been defined for millennia by this rhythm of denunciation and defence. Maybe, he suggests, that's because poetry always fails to deliver what it promises to deliver; i.e., it always at some level disappoints. 

 

This probably has something to do with the limits of language. For language can never quite capture the transcendent impulse that often inspires great poetry and, as Nietzsche says, we posit words where feeling ends. 

 

Thus, whilst poetry clears a space for something, it isn't the thing itself. At best, poetry is a kind of approximation or simulation and this irritates a lot of people who want the real deal and demand the impossible from language (that it describe the indescribable, for example). The song of infinitude, writes Lerner, "is compromised by the finitude of its terms" [13]. 

 

This means that the poet is a tragic figure - someone gripped by a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, filled with recurrent dreams and imaginative fantasies and repeating the same errors over and over again. In my view, the sanest poets learn to climb down Pisgah and attend, like Francis Ponge, to the nature of things as actual objects. To substantiate mystery is the task of the artist and their concern should be with immanence, not transcendence. 

 

But that's just my view: it's not necessarily Lerner's view. For even if he admits of the impossiblity of genuine poetry - and confesses that he can't hear the planet-like music that the Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney claims to hear - I sense that he still admires those who attempt to project existence into the fourth dimension of being and place individual experience within something bigger - something like Humanity, for example. 

 

But I might be mistaken here; for Lerner, like many contemporary poets, expresses acute hesitancy about the desire to speak for everyone and is sceptical of the Whitmanesque fantasy of a poet who could "unite us in our difference, constituting a collective subject through the magic of language" [60] [f]. 

 

 

III. 

 

There are many reasons to dislike Plato. But, to his credit, he didn't take any shit from poets, as Larry David might say. 

 

The irony of Plato's dialogues, however, is that "they are themselves poetic: formally experimental imaginative dramatizations" [26]. And Socrates might even be thought of as "a new breed of poet" [26]. The further irony, is that by attacking poetry as he did, Plato makes it seem sexier - more powerful, more dangerous - than it really is:

 

"How many poets' outsized expectations about the political effects of our work, or critics' disappointment in what actual poems contribute to society, derive from Plato's bestowing us with the honour of exile?" [28] [g]

 

This mistaken attack on poetry has continued in one form or another down the ages. One suspects that the Romantics were very much aware of something that Nietzsche later formularises: what doesn't kill a thing makes it stronger. Thus they secretly revelled in the attacks upon them: It is better to be hated than loved ... an idea which Malcolm McLaren would later subscribe to.   

 

 

IV.

     

Lerner tells us that his favourite poet is Cyrus Console, his boyhood friend from Kansas (which may be true, or may simply be a touching gesture on his part). And he confesses that he's "never found Keatsian euphony quite as powerful as Emily Dickinson's dissonance" [46], to which one can only reply: moi non plus. 

 

In fact, I'm fairly sympathetic to Lerner throughout this work and mostly in agreement with what he says; even if I suspect he'd characterise my hatred of poetry as a defensive rage against all otherworldliness (that is to say, as a form of reaction, whereas I tend to see this as a form of active nihilism or a negation of the negative).   

 

I certainly share Lerner's "refusal of modernist nostalgia for some lost unity of experience and [...] rejection of totalizing ideologies" [97]. That  would serve as a fine description of my own postmodern project (even if Lerner says it with reference to Charles Orson's 1949 verse 'The Kingfishers', and not Torpedo the Ark).

   

I'll close this post, if I may, with what might (and should) have been Lerner's own conclusion: Poems are like the meterological phenomenon known as virga - i.e., observable streaks of water or ice crystals trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they ever reach the ground. 

 

In other words, poetry is a shower of rain "that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth" [100] [h].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I say more on the advantages of hatred in a post published in November 2014: click here. 

 

[b] As well as three highly acclaimed novels, Lerner has also published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Angle of Yaw, (Copper Canyon Press, 2006); and Mean Free Path, (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). These three volumes, plus a handful of newer poems, have been brought together in No Art (Granta Books, 2016).

      For more information on Lerner and to read a selection of his work, visit his page on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[c] See The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, (MacMillan, 1967). 

      The original (longer) version of 'Poetry' was published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, (Nicholas L. Brown, 1920) and can be read on poets.org by clicking here.

 

[d] I have always had an ambivalent relationship to Bartleby the scrivener; sometimes I hate him, sometimes I am taken with his strange beauty and negativism beyond all negation. See one of the very earliest posts on TTA (31 Jan 2013) in which I discuss Melville's great anti-hero: click here. 

 

[e] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 9. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.   

[f] Lerner provides an excellent discussion of Whitman in The Hatred of Poetry, see pp. 61-70. His conclusion is clear: "the Whitmanic program has never been realized in history, and I don't think it can be" [67]. In other words, poetry is incapable of reconciling the individual and the social; of transforming millions of individuals into an authentic people. Later in the text, Lerner describes the desire for universality as a form of white male nostalgia (see pp. 78-85) and veers towards identity politics in a fairly lengthy discussion of Claudia Rankine's writing (pp. 87-96).    

[g] Lerner provides an interesting discussion of poetry and politics - particularly in relation to the idea of being avant-garde - later in his work; see pp. 53-57. 

      For the avant-garde, writes Lerner, "the poem is an imaginary bomb [...]: It explodes the category of poetry and enters history. The poem is a weapon - a weapon against received ideas of what the artwork is, certainly, but also an instrument of war in a heroic, revolutionary struggle [...]." But of course, ultimately poems are bombs that never go off - much to the annoyance of those who hope to achieve real political change via poetry. 

[h] It's unfortunate that this isn't Lerner's closing remark; that he goes on to qualify it, thereby undermining the strength of his own argument:

 

"I hope it goes without saying that [...] poems can fulfill any number of ambitions [...] They can actually be funny, or lovely, or offer solace, or courage, or inspiration to certain audience at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community; and so on." [101-102]

Lerner then provides a kind of postscript in which he attempts to explain how that can be; i.e., how poetry as a linguistic practice might overcome or bypass the internal contradictions he's been describing. Lerner thus ends his book not with an interesting comparison between poetry and a weather event, but with a (slightly nauseating) plea for the genuine and hate's sublimation:

"All I ask the haters - and I, too, am one - is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love." [113-114]

For an earlier review of The Hatred of Poetry - one which I had forgotten writing back in October 2016, until kindly reminded by a friend of mine - click here. 

 

 

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 2: Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics)

Front cover design by Evan Gaffney

In part one of this post I discussed the introduction and epilogue to Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking. Here, and in part three, I'd like to discuss the five chapters that are divided between two main sections: Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics and Vegetal Existentiality.

As there's quite a lot of material to deal with, I hope I'll be forgiven for simply selecting out the bits that particularly resonate with my own philosophical interests as a floraphile ...

I. Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics

(1) The Soul of the Plant ...

 As Marder recognises:

"Modern readers are likely to greet positive references to 'the soul of plants' with suspicion. This is not only because it seems absurd [...] but also because we have grown deeply mistrustful of the heavy metaphysical and theological baggage weighing down this paleonym." [17]

That's not going to stop him, however, from using a phrase that combines the most ethereal with the most earthly of things, if only because Marder is happy to position himself outside (or on the margins) of "respectable philosophical discourses" and, more importantly, because he believes it is the conjunction of these two terms - soul and plant - that allow for a "point of entry into the post-metaphysical ontology of vegetal life" [18].

I'm not entirely sure how that might work, but Marder insists that each term importantly transforms the other: "the plant confirms the 'truth' of the soul as something, in large part, non-ideal, embodied, mortal, and this-worldly, while the soul, shared with other living entities and construed as the very figure for sharing, corroborates the vivacity of the plant in excess of a reductively conceptual grasp." [19]

In other words, plant keeps the soul real; whilst soul stops the plant becoming purely an object of scientific analysis (i.e. cut and dried) - it keeps the plant alive in all its obscure and exuberant otherness. Again, this might be nonsense, but it's seductive nonsense on a cold, wet afternoon in November - even if, like Wilde, I prefer to relate the beauty of the flower to a condition of soullessness.

Still, as long as the soul is being seized by the scruff of her neck and kept down amongst the plant pots, I'm prepared to go along with it, though do feel a little happier thinking plant life in terms of obscure non-objects, rather than vegetal soul; "obscure because it ineluctably withdraws, flees from sight and from rigorous interpretation; non-object, because it works outside, before, and beyond all subjective considerations and representations" [20].

One should also mention the virtual immobility of plants - that too is surely a crucial aspect of plant being. Fichte, as Marder reminds us, refers to this barely perceptible motion as das erste Prinzip der Bewegung in der Natur. Watching a plant grow or reposition itself (without the aid of time-lapse photography) isn't as boring as watching paint dry, but for a fast-moving, impatient mammal such as ourselves, it certainly requires a huge amount of discipline.

The pace and rhythm of plant life is simply "too subtle for our cognitive and perceptual apparatuses to register" [21] and that explains why we often think of them as being closer to inanimate objects than living animals. Because the cactus in the corner doesn't leap about like the cat, we think it is less vital, or that it only seems to be alive. Two-and-a-half millennia after Aristotle, D. H. Lawrence was still pushing the same line; insisting, for example, that there is a hierarchy of life in which the fast-moving little ant is superior even to the pine-tree, because more vividly alive:

"We know it, there is no trying to refute it. It is all very well saying that they are both alive in two different ways, and therefore they are incomparable, incommensurable. This is also true.    
     [...] Truly, it is futile to compare an ant with a great pine-tree, in the absolute. Yet as far as existence is concerned, they are not only placed in comparison to one another, they are occasionally pitted against one another. And if it comes to a contest, the little ant will devour the life of the huge tree."* 

The inferiority of plants is just how things are in nature; it's not something to lament over or try to reform. Only in the fourth dimension of being do things become nonpareil; i.e., perfect beyond comparison. But in the realm of existence, says Lawrence, plants are subject to and less vital than animals (though he admits that daisies were here before us and will continue to flower long after even our mightiest monuments have crumbled into dust). 

It's precisely this kind of thinking - rooted in a theo-fictitious vitalism - that Marder is attempting to overturn. He wishes to know more of plant-soul in all its "non-human and non-animal modality" [22]. Our leafy friends may not dance and may not have eyes, but they're not ontologically lacking, defective, or incomplete.

However, plants should not be fetishised, says Marder; by which I think he means wrapped in myth and venerated and whilst I don't much like his use of the term in this manner, I'm glad he's alert to the danger of worshipping plants as magical objects invested with sacred spirit. 

If plants don't move much or very quickly, they do of course grow and as Marder points out:

"The dunamis of the vegetal soul, its capacity for growth but also for decay and the assimilation of nutrients, sets itself to work in a seemingly limitless extension in every conceivable direction, not just in a heliocentric tending toward the light." [37]

In other words, plant life expresses itself via a spatial becoming that is also a becoming-literal of intentionality; by the putting forth of new leaves, the extending of roots, and the fading of its flowers, the plant exercises and enacts the capacities of its soul "without ever fully actualizing or accomplishing them" [38].

I suppose a Nietzschean might at this point speak of the plant's will to power and ask if it's really all that different from that found in animal and man; a desire to become-more (to blossom) and to experience the feeling of power via a (paradoxical) expenditure of energy. Like Plato - but unlike Aristotle who vehemently resisted the idea - Nietzsche accepted plants as desiring beings, but he uncoupled his concept of desire from the negative connotations of absence and lack. Marder, however, isn't very happy with Nietzsche's "reductive view of the plant as a vegetal manifestation of the will to power" [40].

Partly, this is because he buys into Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as an inverted Platonist and the last metaphysician. And partly, it's because Nietzsche robs vegetal life of its "multiple semantic layers" [41] and obscurity: "besides projecting anthropomorphic feelings and behaviours onto plants, he [Nietzsche] includes them under the concepts of sameness and identity ... [ignoring] the fact that in the absence of a clearly demarcated space of psychic interiority, they [plants] are incapable of incorporating anything in their souls which merge with the materiality of their bodies" [41].

I think what this means is that, for Marder, Nietzsche is guilty of an insensitive imperialism that still hinges upon notions of self and non-self, with the latter existing only to be conquered or appropriated. In his own post-metaphysical philosophy, in contrast, the plant's "inability to establish an identity with itself by means of the other" [41] is a prerequisite for a radical understanding of difference and becoming. 

It's a bit harsh: and, in fact, it's quite simply false to say, as Marder says, that will to power is all about accumulating power to the self and that Nietzsche "does not entertain the hypothesis that the phenomena of life [...] often preclude the hoarding of power" [42]. Nietzsche scorned the ideal of self-preservation; he thought it at best an indirect consequence of a living being's desire to discharge and even to squander its strength.   

The thing is, for onto-political reasons, Marder doesn't want plants to be selfish and aggressive beings; he desperately wants them to be caring, sharing members of a vegetal democracy, whose "inherent respect for alterity" [42] is key:

"Positively understood, the dispersed life of plants is a mode of being in relation to all others, being qua being-with [...] vegetal democracy is open  [...] to all species without exception." [51-52]

And in some sweaty, subtropical wetland or godforsaken jungle, I can hear a Venus flytrap begin to laugh ...


(2) The Body of the Plant ...

"What does metaphysics have to do with plants? What can this group of heterogeneous beings [...] tell us about being 'as such and as a whole', let alone about resisting the core metaphysical values of presence and identity that the totality of being entails?" [54]

One can imagine how a sceptical reader might well reply ... But I'm intrigued by what Marder has to say; particularly his claim that the loss of plant varieties and biodiversity is symptomatic not just of capitalist economies, but "of a much more profound trend - the practical implementation of the metaphysics of the One [...] in human and non-human environments" [55].

This monolithic and monomaniacal enframing is something that has long concerned me, but I've not stopped to consider (until now) that plants might have "a crucial role in the ongoing transvaluation of metaphysical value sysytems" [55], precisely because they have been so shut-out of traditional philosophy and its political-economic avatars.

From the position of absolute exteriority, "plants accomplish a living reversal of metaphysical values [...] and thus contribute to the destabilization of hierarchical dualisms" [56]. Or at least that's Marder's fantasy; a green deconstruction carried out in perfect silence (apart perhaps from the rustle of leaves) that we might think of as a sort of Derridean day of the triffids.  

The familiar narrative in European philosophy goes like this: blame it all on Plato! And Marder doesn't disappoint us by going off-script; the inception of Western metaphysics, that privileges the onto-theological status of the human, is rooted in Plato's thinking. And yet, amusingly, Plato also considers man as a kind of heavenly plant with both head and roots located in the sky above (i.e. the eidectic sphere).

We are literally nourished by ideas and Western metaphysics begins with "the inversion of the earthly perspective of the plant, a deracination of human beings uprooted from their material foundations and transplanted into the heavenly domain" [57]. This has been disastrous for mankind and also produced a "correlatve devaluation of the literal plant, mired with its roots in the darkness of the earth as much as in non-conscious existence" [57].

No wonder then, that modern thinkers, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, who are anti-Platonic and wish to deconstruct Western metaphysics, tend to side with the plants and exploit vegetal metaphors in their writings. For both, man (and culture) blossoms only when rooted in the soil.

Now, there are, admittedly, problems with such organic thinking, but I'll not address these here; suffice it to say that I agree with Marder that "the first targets of the transvaluation of values are the transcendental ideals now brought down to earth, back to their concealed roots in the sphere of immanence" [59] and that all vegetal materialisms are, to some degree or other, an inversion of Plato's own inversion of reality.   

I also agree that it's important to remember that "germination commences in the middle, in the space of the in-between" [63]. In other words, "it begins without originating and turns the root and flower alike into variegated extensions of the [de-centered] middle, in marked contrast to the idealist insistence on the spirituaity of the blossom and the materialist privileging of the root" [63]. 

Thus: "The root and the flower are neither essential nor radically indispensable, having lost their metaphysical status as the spiritual culminations of vegetal being." [64] And for Marder, this makes plants onto-politically ethical; "they cover the earth but do not dominate or conquer it; they seek their 'place in the sun' but do not usurp the place of others" [66]. Again, I can hear the laughter of jungle plants at this point ...

I mean, plants may do all kinds of wonderful things - including mediating between the living and the dead - but I'm extremely wary of sentences like this: "While plant existence is ethical, post-metaphysical ethics is vegetal." [69] That's just too morally convenient to be true and the radical dependence of plants on its environment shouldn't be mistaken for altruism or unconditional generosity. 

But of course, it's hard to know; if only because plants themselves remain silent on the issue; and the silence of plants is "unbreakable and absolute" [75]. That's not to say they don't find other ways to communicate - chemically, for example - but, as even Prince Charles might concede, talking to plants is not the same as speaking with them. Indeed, as Pardner discovered, when you talk to the trees, they don't even listen to you ...

Despite this vegetal rudeness, for Marder, the language of plants belongs to a "hyper-materialist tradition" [75] that is about posturing and spatial relations and relies as much on the poetic thought of Francis Ponge as it does Walter Benjamin's language of things. Ultimately, each and every tree or plant has it's own unique language - which is why the destruction of each and every tree or plant "signals the obliteration of the meaning that it is in the extended materiality of its posture" [76].  
 
That's a profoundly beautiful point; one that those responsible for the destruction of the rainforests - or, indeed, for casually cementing over their front gardens so they can conveniently park their cars - are never, ever going to understand. But, in the long run, it's vegetal life and not human life that's probably going to have the last laugh and the figure of the plant which "furnishes the prototype for post-metaphysical being" [90].  

* Note: D. H. Lawrence, 'Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 357. 

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

Part one of this post - encountering plants and ethical offshoots - can be accessed by clicking here. 

To read part three - on vegetal existentiality - click here.

Reflections on the Snail

Henri Matisse: L'Escargot (1953) 
Gouache on paper, cut and pasted on paper 
mounted on canvas

The Little Greek hates snails, because they eat her plants. But I like them ...

Perhaps it's because I grew up watching The Magic Roundabout and had a particular fondness for Brian. But it's also because, like other molluscs, they seem to me to be fascinating creatures, gastropodding about in the dampness of the garden and leaving a silvery slipstream of mucus in their wake, an ephemeral trail that points the way for the beaks of birds that love to eat them. 

The fact that snails have little tentacles on their head, a primitive little brain, and possess both male and female sex organs (i.e., are hermaphrodites), also inclines me to view them favourably; they are both alien and perverse when considered from a human perspective. 

I particularly like the tiny baby snails, newly hatched, with a small and delicate shell already in place to conceal their nakedness. They are very pretty and very sweet. Francis Ponge speaks of their immaculate clamminess. The fact that people can kill them with poison pellets without any qualms is astonishing and profoundly upsetting to me. 

To her credit, the Little Greek only tries to dissuade the snails from eating her plants by using (mostly ineffective) organic solutions, such as coffee granules and bits of broken eggshell sprinkled around. Alternatively, she sometimes rounds 'em up and relocates the snails to the local woods - though this enforced transportation of snails also makes me a little uneasy, as it's all-too-easy to imagine little yellow stars painted on their backs.   

Not that this prevents me from eating them, prepared with a garlic and parsley butter when in France, or cooked in a spicy sauce when in Spain ... 

Note: the Francis Ponge poem to which I refer and from which I quote is 'Snails', trans. by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau, Poetry, (July/August, 2016). Click here to read in full on the Poetry Foundation website.  

Rilke: Letters on Cézanne (Some Brief Remarks)

Rilke is one of those poets I should probably appreciate more than I do. But, if I'm honest, I find the lyrical intensity and the mysticism of his verse a bit much. Even his Dinggedichte are not quite concrete and thingly enough for me; push comes to shove, I prefer the work of Francis Ponge.

Similarly, Cézanne is an artist I should also admire more than I do; the only modern painter that Lawrence officially endorses - not so much because of his achievement as because of his struggle and his willingness to admit that material objects actually exist. But, if given the choice, I'd rather have a Picasso on the wall.
      

Reading Rilke's Letters on Cézanne, however, has made me want to learn how to love the work of each man more ... 

Rilke wrote the letters to his wife, Clara, during the autumn of 1907, following repeated visits to an exhibition in Paris of paintings by the great French artist, with whom he felt an increasingly powerful sense of kinship. It was such a decisive encounter in terms of impact that, after this date, Rilke often cited Cézanne as the most formative influence on his poetry.

However, as the letters also reveal, Rilke felt dismay as well as delight before the paintings; Cézanne causing him to reflect upon his own inadequacies and shortcomings as an artist. Did he really have what it takes to produce greatness and to devote himself exclusively to his craft? Could he accept the challenge that Cézanne throws down to all those who come after him, which is to know the apple in all its appleyness and smash what Lawrence terms the optical cliché?

Crucially, Rilke recognises that Cézanne's work is a fundamental turning point - and not only within the history of Western art; Cézanne's oeuvre is a wider cultural and philosophical event that challenges Plato's Idealism. This is why he, Cézanne, is not only impossible for old ladies, but offensive to all those good bourgeois corpses who secretly feared and hated him.      


See: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee, (North Point Press, 2002).

See also: D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 

And for an alternative - more empassioned, much better illustrated - reading of the letters, see 'Being Your Work's Bitch' - a blog post on The Musing: click here.

The Object is Poetics

Jean Dubuffet, Personnage Hilare 

(Portrait de Francis Ponge), 1947

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 

In a text entitled The Object is Poetics, Francis Ponge correctly points out that the relationship between man and object is not at all limited to possession or use. Our soul is transitive, writes Ponge. By which he means it needs "an object that affects it". For man is a curious body "whose centre of gravity is not in itself". 

We have our being, in other words, in the infinite number of things outside ourselves. There are thus as many ways of being as there are objects and relationships. Arguably, the artist understands the multiple and decentred nature of man best of all; understands that the world is not only populated with other human beings, but with birds, beasts and flowers - and, indeed, with objects belonging to the inanimate world:       

"The world is peopled with objects. On its shores, we see their infinite crowd, their gathering, even though they are indistinct and vague. Nevertheless, that is enough to reassure us. Because we also feel that all of them, according to our fancy, one after the other, may become our point of docking, the bollard upon which we rest."

But, in order for this to be true, we must choose true objects, says Ponge. By which he means real objects that exist as such, with their own weight, mind independently. All too frequently we become enthralled by our own ideas: "Most often, man only grasps his emanations, his ghosts. Such are subjective objects". 

These pseudo-objects endlessly sing the same dreary song - the song of a triumphant humanity. True objects, however, exist outside of our own thoughts and desires and are not merely decorative or background features. They emit a black noise, inaudible and alien ... 

See: Francis Ponge, 'The Object is Poetics', in The Sun Placed in the Abyss, trans. Serge Gavronsky, (SUN Books, 1977). 

Note: this post forms part of a longer (as yet untitled) project on Ponge, poetry, and object-oriented philosophy being worked on in collaboration with Simon Solomon.  

   

Upskirting with Francis Ponge

Photo of Lindsay Lohan, by Terry Richardson 

(Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, 2012)

It's no great revelation that Frenchmen like to look up the skirts of pretty young girls; France, after all, is the country that gave us The Swing, the cancan, and the story of Melody Nelson being knocked off her bicycle.

Even so, it came as something of a surprise to discover prose poet Francis Ponge comparing the pleasure of viewing a frilly white carnation to that of glimpsing a pair of fine-cut lace knickers worn by a maid who attends to her linens. 

Ponge goes on to add - and here one is uncertain whether he refers to the flowers or the undergarments - that they continually emit the sort of distinct perfume that threatens such pleasure that one is brought to the verge of a violent spasm (such as a sneeze or an orgasm). 

And so we observe how panty-fetishism is a complex phenomenon involving not just the eyes, but also the nose - even if some snobby psychologists like to insist it's not a true paraphilia.   

    

Black Noise (On the Poetry of Francis Ponge)

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) 

Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I'm not sure I fully understand what physicists and audio engineers mean by the term black noise - I think it refers to a noise whose frequency is located close to zero (or what is commonly known as silence) on a spectrum of sound - but I like how philosopher Graham Harman uses the same term within his work to describe the background hum of mysteriously muffled objects hovering at the fringes of human intelligibility.  

Perhaps it's this gentle and virtually-inaudible sound of things that the French prose-poet Francis Ponge was able to attune his ear to ...

Known as the poet of things, Ponge explored the fascinating universe of actual entities - from pebbles to cigarettes, and flowers to bars of soap - in the (admittedly anthropocentric) belief that all objects, whilst remaining fundamentally withdrawn, nevertheless yearn to express themselves and await the coming of a speaking-subject who might hear them and find some way to articulate their near-silence, thereby revealing something of their hidden depths and weird, inhuman otherness.

What I love about Ponge - apart from his object-oriented ontology - is the fact that he avoided all the tired conventions of poetry; such as empty symbolism and allegory, self-indulgent lyricism, or obvious appeals to emotion. He declared himself an enemy of both the drabness of the dictionary and the transcendent posturing of poetry and sought to combine description and definition with the power and purity of elementary language.

His principle aim, therefore, was to defeat the Stereotype and to do so with a form of speculative realism and something extremely rare amongst artists - intellectual integrity.  

Notes

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, (Open Court Publishing Company, 2005).

Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses (1942). This collection of 32 short to medium length prose poems is available in several English translations, including, most notably, those by Lee Fahnestock, Robert Bly, and Beth Archer Brombert.