Turning a Beady Eye on the Work of Liza Lou

The artist Liza Lou 

Photo by Mick Haggerty 

ropac.net

 

'Somehow, I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, 

the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything ...' [1]

 

 

I. 

 

If asked, I could probably name at least three culturally significant events that happened in NYC in 1969: Woodstock; the Stonewall Riots; and the birth of American visual artist Liza Lou. I believe there was also a huge ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts, but, like Picasso, I'm indifferent (if not hostile) to moon landings [2]. 

 

Best known for the use of glass beads in her sculptures and paintings, Liza Lou has a new solo show opening next month at Thaddaeus Ropac here in London [3] and I'm very much looking forward to going along and learning more about her work. 

 

For anyone who can transform a domestic setting such as a kitchen or backyard into a magical space [4] deserves respect and I'm interested in how her practice is grounded in labour and community, emphasising the material many-handed process of production rather than simply the conceptual genius of the artist.

 

But I'm also interested in how her more recent work - born of the solitude of the Mojave desert in southern California, rather than a studio in South Africa employing a large highly-skilled team of Zulu bead workers - is rather more personal in its expression. 

 

Or, as it says in the press release for the forthcoming exhibition, how Lou has "rediscovered her own individual mark, along with a focus upon colour as both subject and object" [5]. 

 

But while the material focus of her practice "has expanded to incorporate drawing and painting", she has, I'm pleased to see, remained "committed to the bead as the generative cell of her art" [6]. Because just as you take away his soul when you remove the hunchback's hump [7], Lou would strip her own art of its essential element were she to abandon the beads; "her signature unit of art making for more than three decades" [8].

 

 

II.

 

Etymologically, the modern word bead derives from an Old English term (of Germanic origin) for prayer: gebed (meaning to ask or entreat) - and one wonders what it is Lou is asking of herself and of us as viewers [9] of her new works combining (presumably mass-produced) glass beads and oil paint on canvas.

 

I don't have an answer to this question, but I like to think that we are being invited as viewers not simply to take something away, but give something back; to enter into an exchange with the artist of some kind (beads are thought to be one of the earliest forms of trade between peoples and bead trading may even have helped shape the development of human language [10]). 

 

I also like to think that this exchange is symbolic in nature rather than commercial; i.e. a non-productive and reversible form of exchange based on gift-giving, ambivalence, and reciprocity rather than economic value; a ritualised interaction that strengthens social bonds and directly challenges the capitalist system of consumption and commodification.  

 

Art should never be a one-way thing or a finalised transaction; as much as a work should challenge us, we should challenge and interrogate it. Great art criticism is not a form of appreciation, but of defiance and of daring the artist to go further in a game not so much of truth and beauty, but of life and death.  

 

Perhaps that's why Lou says that every brushstroke requires full fetishistic seriousness and every mark made upon a canvas becomes a holy shit experience. I don't know if this requires one to be heroic, or just a little bit reckless and foolish. Maybe a combination of all these things - not that there's anything careless or crazy in the pictures: 

 

"Lou uses her chosen material to denaturalise the spontaneity of the brushstroke, juxtaposing each painted drip and spatter with a process that demands painstaking care and precision. By translating fluid pigment into cell-like particles of colour, she forges a new experience of painting grounded in what she describes as the push and pull between 'absolute control and total abandon'." [11] 

 

 

III. 

 

Unfortunately, we now come to the problematic aspect of Lou's FAQ exhibition: 

 

"'These works are about amplification, about making things more ideal [...] in this body of work I'm using my material as a way to make paint more paint than paint.'" [12]

 

What Lou describes as ideal amplification is exactly the process Baudrillard discusses in his concept of hyperreality; a process wherein something is engineered to be more X than X, so that the real object or event can eventually be replaced by its ideal. 

 

What on earth does Lou hope to achieve by making paint more paint than paint - unless it is to make it more colourful, more vibrant, more perfect than the messy, unpredictable, slow-drying original paint which is just particles of pigment suspended in linseed oil. Such hyperreal paint would be a kind of lifeless version of real paint; cleaner, safer, even if more saturated with colour and productive of hi-res images perfectly suited to their digital reproduction and transmission on screens.  

 

Surely that's not what Lou wants; to turn glass beads into pixels (or hyperreal Ben Day dots)? I'm going to be disappointed if it is, but I suppose I'll find out next month ...

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, writing in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 10 August 1903, in Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee (Northpoint Press, 2002); lines that Liza Lou likes to quote. 

  

[2] I'm quoting Picasso who, when asked by The New York Times to comment on the moon landing replied: "It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care." His remark was published on 21 July, 1969, the day after Neil Armstrong simultaneously took his one small step and one giant leap.

      Some readers might be shocked by his lack of interest in technological achievement - and some interpret it as a sign of weariness and old age (Picasso was 87 at the time) - but I think it's more an affirmation of his privileging art over and above science; his way of staying true to the earth and the body, rather than thrilling to the thought of outer space and rocket ships.    

 

[3] Liza Lou, FAQ (10 April - 23 May 2026), at Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, Mayfair, London, W1. Click here for details. This exhibition marks the artist's sixth solo show with the gallery.  

 

[4] Lou first came to the attention of the art world with the 168-square-foot installation entitled Kitchen (1991-1996); a to-scale and fully equipped replica of a kitchen covered in millions of beads. 

      Rightly or wrongly, it has been given a fixed feminist interpretation; Kitchen is a powerful statement on the often neglected value of women's labour ... etc. It is also said to challenge boundaries (and hierarchies) of what does and does not constitute serious art. The work now belongs in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC). 

      Kitchen was followed by Backyard (1996-1999), a 528-square-foot installation of a garden featuring 250,000 blades of grass, which, upon closer inspection, are revealed to be tiny wires strung with beads.  As the threading process would have taken Lou 40 years to complete singlehandedly, she chose to invite public volunteers to assist her. Backyard is in the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain (Paris). 

 

[5] Press release by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press at Thaddaeus Ropac, London), p. 4. The press release can be downloaded as a pdf by clicking here.  

 

[6] Ibid.

 

[7] See Nietzsche, 'On Redemption', Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

 

[8] Nina Sandhaus, press release, as linked to above.  

 

[9] Nina Sandhaus addresses this question, telling us that FAQ proposes "a series of fundamental questions about the nature of art that Lou has returned to across decades: When is a painting not a painting? What constitutes a paint body? Can a brushstroke be more than a brushstroke - and colour more colour than colour?" Again, see her press release linked to above. 

[10] Interestingly, with reference to this last point, the works in FAQ are titled after figures of speech, thus highlighting, as Sandhaus says, "the analogy Lou draws between visual art and language". 

 

[11] Nina Sandhaus, press release. 

[12] Liza Lou, quoted in the press release for FAQ. 

Reflections on Two Recent Poetry Collections by Simon Armitage 1: Dwell (2025)

Simon Armitage: Dwell 

(Faber & Faber, 2025)

Jetzt wär es Zeit, die tiere träten / aus bewohnten Dingen ... 

I. 

 

As a Heideggerian, I was obviously going to be intrigued by a book with the title Dwell. 

 

For dwelling [wohnen] is one of the key ideas in Heidegger's later work and refers to the fundamental way human beings exist in the world; not simply occupying space like bumps on a log, but caring for, preserving, and finding meaning as earth-dwelling mortals beneath the sky and before the gods [b]. 

 

It's the antithesis of the homelessness that for Heidegger characterises modernity. But so too is it distinct from the Nazi idea of a life rooted in Blut und Boden (even if it has a Völkisch feel to it) and is tied to the Heideggerian ethic of letting be [Gelassenheit]. 

 

When we dwell, we allow other beings to be what they are in all their complexity and do not seek to dominate, manipulate, or exploit them as a resource. 

 

Poetically speaking - and Heidegger links dwelling explicitly to poetry - man learns how to inhabit the earth by acknowledging the sacred mystery of otherness (be that in the form of birds, beasts, flowers, or demons) and finding a new revealing other than the revealing of technology, which he terms enframing [Ge-stell]. 

 

He names this new revealing poiesis - a term that refers to the act of creation as a bringing-forth (or unfolding) into being.

      

 

II.  

 

So, then, to the collection of sixteen poems by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage (illustrated by Beth Munro); a work which attempts to illuminate and reimagine the dwelling places of animals native to the UK and particularly those that inhabit the Lost Gardens of Heligan [c]. 

 

Interestingly, and in a way in which I approve, distinctions between human and animal are curdled without ever denying their otherness. Similarly, Armitage blurs the distinction between natural and cultivated when it comes to dwelling places inhabited by creatures, such as the twig-and-leaf construction of a bird's nest. But he also "warns of the fragility of these spaces and their dwellers, exposed to relentless and sadly familiar environmental threats" [d].   

 

Just as even a small back-garden can provide refuge for whatever wildlife remains in this, one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, so too, hopes Armitage, can his poems "offer lasting homes to those who dwell within their lines" [e].

 

However, Armitage also notes that, as a bare minimum, actual flesh-and-blood creatures also need to eat and breed in the extra-textual world; "and to achieve those things they need the shelter of somewhere to live" as the "consequence of homelessness for most living things is extinction" (x). 

 

Unfortunately, "human dominance on Planet Earth has proved disastrous for the habitation needs of most non-human populations" (x). As a species, we are, at the very least - and it's a word I'm borrowing from Armitage - inhospitable.  

 

Because, ultimately, he's a humanist, Armitage soon says things such as this: animals should be valued because they "encourage the expansion of the human mind" (x) and "enhance what it is to be human" (xi). That's not my position: I try to think animality (and, indeed, vegetal life) outside of their value to us; to think of them as beings in their own right - but not beings that should be accorded rights by Man. 

 

As beings with irreplaceable singularity they exist independently of human evaluation or legal frameworks and should not be driven into extinction nor subjected to industrial scale slaughter. Armitage seems slightly uncomfortable at the use of the word genocide with reference to this, although he admits it has a "certain amount of justification" (x).

 

Finally, before we take a look at the verses themselves, let me quote what Armitage says re the topic of dwelling. Obviously, he's not Heidegger, but it still has some interest:

 

"If Dwell is about 'the garden' as a sanctuary or refuge, about the locations we must provide and safeguard if we are serious about co-existing with lives other than our own, its simultaneous meaning is an encouragement to slow down and spend time with ideas. [...] And the poems themselves are dwellings, too - constructions built from language and contemplation, places to enter." (xii-xiii)    

 

 

III. 

 

The short collection opens with a poem titled 'Pond'. 

 

That's a good place to start, as the word pond derives from an old English term for a confined space - particularly an enclosed body of water - which, of course implies a dwelling place, and Armitage mentions the newts that live there. 

 

However, rather strangely, he seems more concerned with the surface of the pond; "the glassy water's / two-way mirror" (3), which merely reflects life  - and that's a little concerning; as is the cinematic metaphor that follows, suggesting animals are but projections upon a screen. 

 

On a less troubling note, the verse is primarily about the fragile (but resilient) stillness of life, which Armitage (rightly) finds magical. Violent disruptions are inevitable, but the world eternally returns.      

 

 

IV. 

 

'Pond' is followed by 'Drey' which opens with the lovely description of a squirrel's dwelling place:

 

 

It's a twig-and-leaf crow's-nest squat

wombed with feather and moss

wedged in the fork of an oak. (6)

 

 

If it had been me, I'd've finished there; for it's kind of perfect as is and whilst the 26 lines that follow tell us what the poet thinks of the squirrel, they don't reveal anything of what the squirrel thinks of the poet.

 

I suppose, as a long-time reader of Lawrence, I was expecting a rather more ontologically insightful verse; to hear something of the vital, non-human otherness of the squirrel and not simply be told that squirrels have beady black eyes and are jumpy creatures which like to steal nuts from bird-feeders.  

 

Also, I don't mind a degree of anthropomorphism, but it has to remain critical in nature and not merely be a projection of human traits on to animals in an attempt to be humorous. And so, for the record; squirrels do not wear "soft work-gloves" (6) in order to tackle daily jobs and beavers - the subject of the following verse, 'Lodge' - do not watch cable TV, read House and Garden, or sip Earl Grey tea (8) [f]. 

 

If - as I've seen it said - Armitage wishes to satirise the Disneyfied manner we often think of animals by incorporating twee and sentimental images into his own poetry, then, unfortunately, I think he fails on this occasion. In other words, it's a self-defeating move that obscures the actual creature, creates a collision of tones, and takes away from the poem's ecological seriousness.

 

V. 

 

'Den' is a much harder and superior poem to 'Lodge' and 'Drey' - and I like it! One wonders: does Armitage prefer foxes to squirrels and beavers; do they more readily set his mind on fire? 

 

He certainly seems to have a greater degree of imaginative understanding and I was excited to encounter the Armitage fox emerging "out of ash and filth" into "a wet morning" and "dripping with flames" (13).

 

 

VI. 

 

'Hive' is one of my favourite poems in the collection - and not just because I love honey or "jars of sunlight / in edible form" (17), as Armitage writes.   

 

Of course, it's not just sunlight that can be devoured; the darkness too can provide vital nourishment - if you're a bat! And in 'Roost', Armitage speaks of that twilight hour when the sun "fizzles out" and bats "unhug themselves and fly" from their dwelling places ready to "eat the night" (19).  

 

 

VII.

 

If I liked 'Hive' and 'Roost' on the one hand, I hated 'Insect Hotel' on the other: a series of imaginary online reviews posted by six-legged guests on a site such as TripAdvisor. Obviously, it's intended to be comic, but, unfortunately, it isn't funny at all - indeed, it just may be, to paraphrase Comic Book Guy, the Worst. Poem. Ever.   

 

And considering that it's written by a Professor of Poetry whose work has received numerous prizes and awards - in 2018, for example, Armitage was even given the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry) - it's a poem that, if I were him, I'd seriously consider removing from the collection. 

 

It may have a place in a children's poetry anthology, but it does not belong in a book which is intended to address a painfully tragic situation: "Tragic for the plight of animals, of course, but also a pitiful reflection on our own attitudes and activities." (x) 

 

Armitage seems to think he can have it both ways: offering a profound poetic meditation on dwelling and animality on the one hand, whilst giving us anthropomorphic dad humour on the other; but he can't. There's nothing fun or wacky about ecocide and the extermination of wildlife (including insects) and not even Beth Munro's illustrations [h] can save you this time, Simon.  

 

 

VIII.    

 

It's an interesting philosophical idea to conceive of rabbits as the intelligence of the hillside: 'Warren' (31); i.e., to suggest that consciousness is just an epiphenomenal effect of non-sentient matter.  

 

I also liked the first six days of 'Deer Diary' (32-33), in which the distinction between animals and their environment was shown to be anything but clear cut; the narrator mistakes wood smoke, a heap of leaves, shadows, patches of snow, and heat haze for various deer. 

 

I could do without Sunday's unicorn (33), however; just as I could do without the young girl's angel in 'Nest Box' (36). 

 

Again, actual biological entities such as deer and barn owls, are magical and awe-inspiring in themselves - we don't need legendary creatures and supernatural spirits, ta very much. 

 

(At a push, if feeling generous, I'd concede that all objects are equally real objects and exist on the same flat ontology, but can't help feeling that here unicorns and angels add nothing and detract from the poetic realism of the work.)  

 

 

IX. 

 

Compared with 'Insect Hotel', 'Cote' is a masterful work: and at least it rhymes. 

 

But, again, for all its attempted witty word play, it's got that depressingly unfunny comic tone and so fails to do what it wishes to do; namely, challenge the idea that the value of birds is their symbolic significance for man.  

 

We may like to believe that a dove, for example, is a symbol of the holy spirit, or divine love, or peace, hope and purity, but such idealism degrades the actual being of the bird in all its avian alterity and complex biological nature.   

 

And it also fails to offer them any protection, which is why, for example, many populations of dove are in severe decline and/or critically endangered [h]. 

 

 

X.

 

I began this post by discussing Heidegger's notion of dwelling and I'd like to close with one of Heidegger's thought-poems [Gedachtes], which affords an interesting contrast in style and tone with Armitage's verses: 

 

 

Forests spread

Brooks plunge

Rocks persist

Mist diffuses

 

Meadows wait

Springs well 

Winds dwell

Blessing muses [i] 

 

Notes

[a] I'm reworking the famous opening lines of an untitled poem written by Rilke about a year before his death in 1926 (see Insel ed., II. 185), replacing daß Götter with die tiere, so that it reads in English: 'Now it is time that the animals emerge / from things by which they dwell'.    

 

[b] Heidegger refers to these elements - earth, sky, mortals, divinities - as the fourfold [das Geviert] and argues that dwelling is a harmonisation of these things (it's not just about constructing a shelter - even if that shelter happens to be a Black Forest hut). 

      The important essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking' (1951) can be found in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1993), pp. 343-363. Or in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1975), pp. 143-161.   

 

[c] Armitage was invited (i.e., commissioned) to write a series of poems for the Lost Gardens of Heligan; a large garden restoration project and major tourist attraction, in Cornwall: "Protected and carefully managed, the Gardens also provide a haven - both intentionally and inadvertently - for wildlife." 

      See the 'Welcome Note' to Dwell supplied by Armitage, p. xii. All future page references to this book will be given directly in the text.   

 

[d] Quoted from the publishers blurb found on their website and on the inside of the book's front cover.  

 

[e] Ibid.   

 

[f] I did like the description of beavers as teeth "that have grown bodies and tails" (9) and, again, there is little wrong with Armitage's description of a beaver's lodge, as "a kindling hut" held together "with sludge and stones" (8); a description which made me think of Heidegger's little three-roomed cabin in the Black Forest and known as die Hütte. 

      Readers who are interested in the latter might like to see Adam Sharr, Heidegger's Hut (MIT Press, 2006), a work which explores the intense relationship between a man and his environment and how thinking is related to dwelling.    

 

[g] Beth Munro is a hybrid printmaker and illustrator: click here to visit her website. It might be argued that Munro's complex and clever illustrations add a necessary extra layer of philosophical seriousness to Dwell - the images are certainly not just decorative.

 

[h] The European turtle dove, for example, is on the brink of extinction in the UK, its numbers having fallen by 99% since the 1960s, due to intensive agricultural practices, habitat loss, shortage of food, and shooting for sport by the French, Spanish, and Portuguese.   

 

[i] See Martin Heidegger, 'The Thinker as Poet', in Poetry, Language, Thought ... p. 14. 

      Readers who wish to read more should also get hold of Martin Heidegger, Thought Poems, trans. Eoghan Walls (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021). 

 

 

For reflections on another cleection of verse published in 2025 by Armitage - New Cemetery - please click here.

 

 

Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) - Part 1: Propositions 1-120

 Jonathan Cape (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do also have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which Christian Dior identified as the only one which can possibly compete with black: blue. 

 

This includes, for example, the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; the blue of the Greater Day that D. H. Lawrence writes of; and my fascination with this colour extends to blue angels, blue boys, blue lenses, and blue lagoons.  

 

Thus, no surprise then that I should eventually get around to reading Maggie Nelson's wonderful little book Bluets ...

 

 

II. 

 

First published by Wave Books in 2009, Bluets consists of 240 numbered propositions arranged not so much randomly, but with what we might term considered whimsicality to create the illusion of logical precision and continuity à la Wittgenstein. Each proposition is either a sentence or a short paragraph; none exceeds two hundred words in length.

 

The book documents not only the author's bowerbird-like obsession with the colour blue, referencing many famous figures along the way associated with the colour, but also provides an insight into Nelson's understanding of love and mental health and examines what role - if any - beauty plays in times of heartache or depression.

 

In 2016, she won a MacArthur Fellowship - known to many as the genius grant - and, on the basis of this one book alone I think that Nelson is indeed one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical.  

 

The title doesn't refer us simply to those small and delicate blue flowers belonging to the genus Houstonia, but also to a triptyque by the American abstract artist Joan Mitchell, Les Bluets (1973), which Nelson describes as perhaps her "favourite painting of all time" [a]

 

Here, I would like to provide a commentary on the book, picking up on some of the things that particularly resonate with me or pique my curiosity to know more. Hopefully, in the course of doing so I can demonstrate why the author and critic Hilton Als was spot on to praise Bluets as a "new kind of classicism" that, whilst queer in content, remains elegant in form [b].     

 

 

III.

5

 

Are we to understand that when, like Mallarmé, one replaces le ceil with l'Azur - "in an effort to rinse references to the sky of religious connotations" - one ceases to be a crypto-theologian and becomes a poet-philosopher? 

 

Is it true to say: whereof one can perceive blueness, thereof one cannot imagine God ...     

 

 

18

 

"A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck."

 

For a moment I thought I was reading Young Kim's A Year on Earth with Mr Hell (2020). 

 

But then I read the three sentences following: 

 

"Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my seceret. It was a smear of the quotidian, a bright blue flake amidst all the dank providence."  

And realised I wasn't.  

 

20 

 

"Fucking leaves everything as it is." 

 

This is a very un-Lawrentian sentence; perhaps the most un-Lawrentian sentence you could imagine. 

 

For Lawrence insists that, on the contrary, fucking is transformational of the individual - changing the very constitution of the blood - and that a politics of desire, founded upon the act of coition, has revolutionary potential. 

 

Like Nietzsche, Lawrence believes that the lover is richer and stronger than those who do not fuck; that lovers grow wings and possess new capabilities. And there arises, he says, a post-coital "craving for polarized communion with others" [c] - not just for cigarettes. 

 

 

26 / 31

 

Nelson says that she's heard that "a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression" and I couldn't help wondering if that's true; if feeling blue ironically makes the world seem greyer ...?

 

Well, apparently, it is: depression lowers the production of dopamine and this can impair neurotransmitters in the retina, making the world appear less vibrant and colourful. 

 

But then Nelson reminds us of the case of Mr Sidney Bradford, who had his vision restored in his fifties (having lost his sight as a baby) and saw the world at last in full-colour:  he died of unhappiness due to disappointment soon afterwards [d].      

 

35

 

"Does the world look bluer from blue eyes?", asks Nelson, before concluding that's probably not the case. 

 

But, like her, I like to imagine it does.

 

 

56

 

When reminded of Saint Lucy - patron saint of the blind, who was tortured and put to death by the Romans in 304 CE - I can't help thinking of Simone, the teenage erotomaniac at the heart of Bataille's notorious short novel L'histoire de l'œil (1928). 

 

For whilst Lucy didn't - as far as I know - insert the eye of a murdered priest into her vagina, she is often depicted in "Gothic and Renaissance paintings holding a golden dish with her blue eyes staring weirdly out from it".   

 

Depending on what sources one refers to, Lucy's eyes were either gouged out by her captors, or she removed them herself in order to avoid male attention and prove her religious devotion. For as Nelson writes, there are numerous stories of women "blinding themselves in order to maintain their chastity" and to demonstrate their fidelity to God (i.e., the fact that they 'only have eyes' for Christ).   

 

 

62

 

Nelson's definition of puritanism: the exchanging of corporeal reality for ideal representation. Not something that appeals to her: 

 

"I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses ..."  

 

Fair enough: but this is still an image conjured up with words, is it not? And as Merleau-Ponty pointed out: Words do not look like the things they designate [e].  

 

 

71 / 72 

 

Hard to find dignity in loneliness; easier to find it in solitude. A pair of propostions of such high truth value that we may for all intents and purposes declare them true.  

 

 

101

 

When Nelson's friends were asked "how much time they would grant between 'a blinding, bad time' and a life that has simply become a depressive waste", the consensus was "around seven years". 

 

I suspect - based on my own experience between April 2016 and February 2023 - that that's probably about right; that the seven year mark is the limit. Perhaps that's why when a person goes missing there is a presumption of death after seven years. 

 

(As for how long it takes to fully recover having reached one's limit, that's a question to which neither Nelson nor her friends provide an answer and I suspect it might take longer to retreat from the edge of the abyss than it does to get there.)

Notes

 

[a] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Jonathan Cape, 2017), Prop. 145, p. 57. Note that I will henceforth only give proposition numbers (in bold) in the post.      

 

[b] Hilton Als, 'Immediate Family', The New Yorker (11 April, 2016): click here. 

 

[c] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 135. 

      Later, in proposition 201, Nelson does acknowledge the truth of change, newness, and becoming-other: "I believe n the possibility - the inevitability, even - of a fresh self stepping into ever-fresh waters [...]" (p. 80).

[d] This is a real case, although Nelson is taking artistic license with her conclusion. For whilst Bradford did admit to finding the world visually disappointing following corneal grafts - and did die two years afterwards - he also had chronic health issues and no specific cause of death was entered on his death certificate. 

[e] Nelson quotes this line herself in proposition 70. It can be found in the essay 'Cézanne's Doubt', in Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, ed. Thomas Baldwyn (Routledge, 2003). 

 

This post continues in part two (selected propositions from 121-240): click here. 

Melody Blue

Photo of Jane Birkin by Tony Frank used for the sleeve of 

Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971)

 

 

As long-time readers of Torpedo the Ark will know, whilst, as a nihilist, my default position is always paint it black, I do have a philosophical fascination with a colour much loved by painters and poets and which French fashion designer Christian Dior once described as the only one which can possibly compete with black: Blue [1]. 

 

This includes the lyrical blue celebrated by Rilke and Trakl; the deep blue invented by Yves Klein; and the blue of the Greater Day that Lawrence writes of. 

 

So, no surprise then, that I should also adore the light blue used as a background colour by the photographer Tony Frank when shooting his iconic image of Jane Birkin for the cover of Serge Gainsbourg's seven-track concept album, Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) [2].

 

Birkin, who would have been twenty-four at the time - and pregnant with Gainsbourg's child - was playing the part of the red-haired, rosy-cheeked 15-year-old with a penchant for blue jeans, a pair of which Birkin can be seen wearing in the photo, whilst clutching a toy monkey to her bare chest. 

 

It's a good look - albeit a slightly pervy one, with its Lolita-esque overtones. Birkin not only gets away with pretending to be an adolescent, but she has an androgynous thing going on in the photo that adds to her appeal. 

 

By staring directly at the camera - one assumes at Frank's suggestion - Birkin reveals Melody's innocence and vulnerability. But she also challenges the viewer to accept her gaze and question their own position vis-à-vis the question of a middle-aged man desiring (or actually entering into) a sexual relationship with an underage girl [3].            

 

Anyway, whatever one's thoughts on this, the fact is Frank's image of Birkin on the cover of Histoire de Melody Nelson has become as celebrated as the album itself and - according to the photographer at least - some people have even started to describe the background colour as Melody Blue [4].  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have written several posts on the colour blue. See, for example, 'Blue is the Colour ... Notes on Rilke's Blue Delirium' (1 April 2017) and 'Blue is the Colour ... Yves Klein is the Name' (2 April 2017).

 

[2] Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson was released on 24 March, 1971 (Philips Records). It tells the tale of an illicit romance which develops between the middle-aged narrator and a sexually innocent 15-year-old called Melody Nelson. The album is considered by many critics and fans to be Gainsbourg's most influential and accomplished work (despite only being 28 minutes in length). To play the second track from the album - 'Ballade de Melody Nelson' - click here. 

 

[3] Technically, Melody was not underage as the (heterosexual) age of consent in France at this time was fifteen, as established by an ordinance enacted by the French government in 1945. Interestingly, however, an article within this ordinance forbade anal sex and similar relations against nature with any person under the age of twenty-one (an attempt, one assumes, to discriminate against homosexual lovers).   

 

[4] Readers interested in this post will be pleased to know that Tony Frank has assembled photos, contact sheets, behind-the-scenes imagery, and slides from the shoot with Birkin, into a 96-page book entitled Bleu Melody (RVB Books, 2018). In the book, Frank also recounts his memories from the time.

 

Notes on Byung-Chul Han's 'Non-things' (Part 2)

Byung-Chul Han: author of Non-things,

trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2022).

Page references given in the post refer to this work.

 

 

Note: This post is a continuation. To go to part one (sections I - VI), click here. We continue our reflections on Byung-Chul Han's new book by discussing things in their evil and magical aspects ...

 

 

VII.

 

Han argues that things have lost their malevolent or villainous character; that objects, if you like, no longer seek revenge upon subjects - even when those subjects are cartoon mice or silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin. Material reality has become a safe space and offers no resistance or dangers. 

 

Things, in short, are now subordinate to our control and "even Mickey Mouse leads a digital, smart and immaterial life [...] and no longer collides with physical reality" [47]. Now there's an app for everything and a quick solution to all life's problems. Objects behave themselves; even if we build our world upon their backs, they'll no longer attempt to shrug us off. 

 

But, just in case those pesky objects are still up to no good when we're not around to keep an eye on them, we have invented the Internet of Things: "The infosphere puts things in chains. [...] It tames things and turns them into servants catering to our needs." [49]

 

In the past, we accepted the independence of things; the kettle might start whistling before we were ready to make the tea; the door might start creaking or the window begin to rattle in the middle of the night, keeping us awake. 

 

Even Sartre remained familiar "with what it means to be touched by things" [50] and this filled the protagonist of Nausea (1938) with terror. On the other hand, for Rilke things emanated warmth and he fantasised about sleeping with his beloved objects. 

 

But then things cooled down and no longer warmed us, touched us, or seduced us. And now, things are not even frigid: 

 

"They have neither cold nor warmth; they are worn out. All their vitality is waning. They no longer represent a counterpart to humans. They are not opposing bodies. Who, today, feels looked at, or spoken to, by things? [...] Who feels threatened or enchanted by things?" [52].

Perhaps a handful of object-oriented philosophers and a small number of objectum sexuals - but that's about it. It's a bit depressing to realise just how poor in world we have become as we sit staring at screens (and this has nothing to do with the so-called cost of living crisis or rising inflation):

"The digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality. [...] Things lose their gravity, their independent life and their waywardness" [52], says Han. And he's right. 

 

Right also to argue the impossibility of forming a genuine relation with a world that consists more and more of digital objects (or non-things). People talk about a mental health crisis, but depression is "nothing other than a pathologically intensified poverty in world" [53].   

 

VIII.

Han argues that we perceive the world primarily through (and as) information. Information not only covers the world, but "undermines the thing level of reality" [56] in all its intensity of presence. 

 

One way to counter this would be to establish a magical relationship with the world that is not characterised by representation, but by touch (an idea that will appeal to witches and Lawrentians alike). This is really just a question of greater attentiveness paid to things as things and forgetting of self for a moment or two: "When the ego gets weak, it is able to hear that mute thing language." [57] 

 

This may of course be disturbing, but Han wants human beings to be disturbed by the world; to be "moved by something singular" [58], to be penetrated from behind and below, so that we are thrown into a condition of radical passivity and presence is allowed to burst in. This is what creates epiphanic moments (as well as erotic joy). 

Apart from magic, there's also art ... At its best, art creates things, or material realities that are born of handwork, as Rilke says. 

 

A poem, for example, has a "sensual-physical dimension that eludes its sense" [60]. And it is because a poem exceeds the signifier and isn't exhausted by its meaning, that it constitutes a thing. One doesn't simply read a poem - any more than one simply drinks a glass of fine wine - both invite one to experience and enjoy them (to know their body, as it were).

 

Unfortunately, art is - according to Byung-Chul Han - moving away from this materialist understanding of its own practice. And what is particularly depressing about today's art "is its inclination to communicate a preconceived opinion, a moral or political conviction: that is, its inclination to communicate information" [64].  

 

In brief: "Art is seized by a forgetfulness of things [...] It wants to instruct rather than seduce." [64]  

 

Artworks today lack silence, lack stillness, lack secrecy; instead, they shout and insist that we interact with them. This probably explains why I would now rather sit in my backgarden amongst the daisies, than visit a bookshop, gallery, or theatre.   

 

 

IX.

I'm going to refrain from commenting at length or in detail upon sections in Han's new book dealing with Kakfa's struggle against ghosts and the philosophical importance of the hand in the work of Martin Heidegger (something I have previously discussed in a couple of posts published in June of 2019: click here and here).   

 

However, I very much like Han's observation that, were he alive today, the former would reluctantly resign himself to the fact that "by inventing the internet, email and the smartphone, the ghosts had won their final victory over mankind" [54] [a]. 

 

And it's always good to be reminded how the latter raised his hand (and stomped his foot) in a vain attempt to defend the terrestrial world against the digital order. He was a bit of a Nazi, but it's hard not to admire many aspects of Heidegger's thinking. But, as Han concedes, human beings have long since stopped dwelling between Earth and Sky:

 

"Human beings soar up towards the un-thinged [unbedingtheit], the unconditioned [...] towards a transhuman and post-human age in which human life will be a pure exchange of information. [...] Digitilization is a resolute step along the way towards the abolition of the humanum. The future of humans seems mapped out: humans will abolish themselves in order to posit themselves as the absolute." [72]

 

There will be no things close to our hearts - but that won't matter, for we won't have hearts, nor hands, feet, or genitals in the disembodied time to come. 

 

What was that line from Proverbs again ...? [b]

 

 

X.      

 

Why do so many people have headaches today? (I have one now.)

 

Could it be because the world is so restless and noisy; because no one knows how to keep still and stay silent; because no one can close their eyes or shut their fucking mouths for a moment?

 

As Arthur Fleck says: "Everybody is awful these days. It's enough to make anyone crazy. [...] Everybody just yells and screams at each other. Nobody's civil anymore. Nobody thinks what it's like to be the other guy." [c] 

 

But you don't have to be a mentally ill loner to recognise this - Byung-Chul Han pretty much tells us the same thing: "Hypercommunication, the noise of communication, desecrates the world, profanes it." [76] 

 

Learning to listen is a crucial skill; as is learning to be still if you wish to know the transcendent joy of the Greater Day and gaze with wonder upon the immensity of blue (this includes the blue of the sky, the blue of the sea, or the blue of a butterfly's wing, for example). 

 

But, paradoxically, learning to gaze also involves learning how to close one's eyes and look away, because gazing has an imaginative component. And that's important, for as Han writes:

 

"Without imagination, there is only pornography. Today, perception itself has something pornographic about it. It has the form of immediate contact, almost of a copulation of image and eye. The erotic takes place when we close our eyes. [...]

      What is so ruinous about digital communication is that it means we no longer have time to close our eyes. The eyes are forced into a 'continuous voracity'. They lose the capacity for stillness, for deep attentiveness." [79]

 

Staring at a screen is not the same as gazing at the sky; if the latter produces wonder, the former results only in eyestrain and a slavish inability not to react to every stimulus (which, as Nietzsche pointed out, is symptomatic of exhaustion and spiritual decline). Noble and healthy souls know that doing nothing is better than being hyperactive; that philosophy, for example, is born from idleness. 

 

Han terms this ability to do nothing negative potentiality:

 

"It is not a negation of positive potential but a potential of its own. It enables spirit to to engage in still, contemplative lingering, that is, deep attentiveness. [...] Stillness can be restored only by a strengthening of negative potentiality." [82] 

And where is all this leading? Towards the loss of identity - the surrender of self - towards happy anonymity: "Only in stillness, in the great silence, do we enter into a relation with the nameless, which exceeds us [...]" [83]

 

 

XI.

Byung-Chul Han closes his book with an excurses which begins with him falling off his bicycle (talk about the villainy of things) and then falling in love with a jukebox (talk about things close to the heart).  

Han likes old jukeboxes from the 1950s; they are erotico-magical things to him which "makes listening to music a highly enjoyable visual, acoustic and tactile experience" [87]. The records played on the jukebox give him "a vague sense that the world back then must have been somehow more romantic and dream-like than it is today" [88].  

Admitting that Heidegger would probably not have been a fan of the jukebox, Han insists nevertheless that apart from playing tunes, it imparts presence and intensifies being, which is something Alexa can never do.

 

This does kind of hint at the fact that Han awards thing status to whatever objects he happens to favour: J’aime, je n’aime pas - Oh, Miss Brodie, you are Barthesian ...

 

  

Notes

 

[a] I keep telling members of the D. H. Lawrence Society that whilst Zoom is extensive it lacks intensity and that being connected is not the same as being in an actual relation. Like it or not, digital communication negates physical presence and "accelerates the disappearance of the other" [55]. 

      Unfortunately, they either do not listen, do not understand, or do not seem to care. To read my post on this subject: click here. 

[b] I'm referring to Proverbs 4:23: "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life." According to Byung-Chul Han, this was placed above the front door to Heidegger's house. 

[c] Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Arthur Fleck (Joker) speaking to Robert De Niro's character Murray Franklin (shortly before shooting him) in Joker (dir. Todd Philips, 2019): click here to watch on YouTube. 

 

 

Musical bonus: as Byung-Chul Han loves French singers and jukeboxes so much, here's Serge Gainsbourg on TV in 1965 performing Le claquer de doigts.

 

    

Notes on the Case of Caterina Sforza

Lorenzo di Credi: Portrait of Caterina Sforza 

 (c. 1481-83)

 
Se io potessi scrivere tutto, farei stupire il mondo!

 

 

I. 

 

Nietzsche's critique of nineteenth-century feminism is a simple one: it marks a loss of style and a surrender of intelligence:

 

"There is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a real woman - who is always a clever woman - would have to be ashamed from the very heart." [1]  

 

Often mistakenly thought of as a misogynist, Nietzsche seemed to have a thing for strong, smart, stylish, women who do not aspire to become more like men or demand equality, but affirm themselves as singular beings in their own right. 

 

Women, for example, like Lou Andreas-Salomé, who not only charmed Nietzsche to the extent that he asked for her hand in marriage, but also captivated Rilke and Freud. And women like Caterina Sforza, about whom I wish to speak here, with particular reference to an astonishing incident mentioned by commentators including Machiavelli and Valentine de Saint-Point ...

 

 

II. 

 

Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) was an Italian noblewoman, raised in the refined Milanese court who, from an early age, was noted for her bold and impetuous nature. For whilst, like her siblings, she received a classical education from her tutors, her grandmother encouraged Caterina to also take inspiration from the notorious condottierri from whom she was descended. 

 

A skilled huntress, Caterina also loved to dance, conduct experiments in alchemy, and involve herself in the complicated - and violent - politics of her day. Invariably, this brought the independent-minded and free-spirited woman into conflict with some powerful men, including Cesare Borgia, who at one time had her imprisoned.     

 

Following her marriage to Girolamo Riario, Catarina went to live in Rome with her husband, who served his uncle, the Pope. Upon her arrival, in May 1477, the fourteen-year-old Caterina found the city buzzing with cultural fervour and political intrigue; a city in which material interests and the desire for power far exceeeded spiritual matters.

 

Although Caterina's husband told her not meddle in affairs of state, thanks to her extroverted and sociable character she quickly integrated into aristocratic Roman society, becoming much admired for her beauty and highly respected for her intelligence. Before long, this young woman became an influential intermediary between Rome and other Italian courts, particularly Milan.   

 

Unfortunately, following the death of Sixtus IV, in 1484, the lives of Caterina and her husband were thrown into turmoil ... Riots and rebellions spread throughout Rome and their home, the Palazzo Orsini, was looted and almost destroyed. 

 

Then, worse, in 1488, Girolamo was killed and Caterina found herself at the mercy of her enemies, which leads us to the incident that I wanted to discuss in particular ...

III.

 

According to legend, Caterina was besieged inside a fortress and when her enemies threatened the lives of her children whom they held captive, she stood on the walls, exposed her lower body and, pointing to her cunt, cried: Do it! Kill them in front of me if you want to! I have what's needed to make more! 

 

Now, true or not, this is an astonishing act not only of defiance, but of what Baudrillard terms seduction. 

 

For the effect of this genital display was to render her enemies uncertain of how to respond. Not knowing how to reply, or what to do, they backed down and backed away, sparing her children. Caterina had effectively stripped them of their power and agency, reducing them to impotence. Baudrillard also describes this as the revenge of the object. 

 

Caterina was one of the few women discussed at length by Machiavelli in his writings: if he only briefly mentioned this act of genital defiance in The Prince, he recounted the story at some length and with a certain vulgar relish, in both his Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories.   

 

And, four centuries later, Valentine de Saint-Point also recalls the story in her Manifesto della Donna futurista (1912) [2]. 

Arguably, what this demonstrates is that prior to our epilated culture of feminism, digital pornography, and labiaplasty, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Indeed, even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency.

      

Sadly, however, the cunt has now been rendered null and void having lost much of its monstrous beauty and magical capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of sexual emancipation and and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism [3]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), Pt. VII, §239.       

      Nietzsche continues in this important section for an understnding of his sexual politics: "That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more 'natural' than that of the man, her genuine cunning, her beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger's claws beneath the glove [...]." I don't know if Nietzsche was thinking of any woman in particular here, but it's interesting to note that Caterina Sforza was nicknamed La Tigre.   

 

[2] See the recent post on Valentine de Saint-Point and her two Futurist manifestos: click here.

 

[3] I'm self-plagiarising here from an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark, entitled Anasyrma: Upskirt Politics and Vulva Activism (15 Nov 2013): click here. 

 

Readers interested in knowing more about the heroic women of the Renaissance - rulers, philosophers, artists, saints, consorts, courtesans, etc. - might like the following site on Tumblr: Fuck Yeah, Renaissance Women! Several posts on Caterina Sforza can be found here.

 

For a (kind of) follow up post re: vulva activism and the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, click here. 

 

Ailurophilia: On Baudelaire's Erotic Fascination with Cats

Théophile Steinlen's 1896 design for the famous 
Parisian nightspot Le Chat Noir

Poets, like witches and philosophers, love cats and many have written odes to their mysterious companions, including Rilke, who imagines himself suspended like a prehistoric fly in the golden amber of his cat's eyeball.* However, it's Baudelaire who is perhaps most famous for his obsessive love of cats.**

And it's Baudelaire who best understands not only their Satanic-nocturnal nature, but also their undeniable eroticism, equating the feline with the feminine (and vice versa) until it becomes impossible to know at times if he's writing about his favourite pet or his favourite mistress.

Either way, both seem to promise those things he valued most: poetic truth and sensual pleasure; the former being something that develops out of the fleshy materiality of the latter, rather than pre-existing as some kind of disembodied ideal.      

Here's one of Baudelaire's cat poems that hopefully illustrates what I've been attempting to say, followed by my own attempt at a translation into English that invariably loses something in the process, but which, hopefully, adds something that isn't found in other translations ...

Le Chat

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


The Cat

Come not with claws, beautiful cat,
As you leap into my affection;
Allow me to plunge into your eyes
Of metallic crystal.

When my fingers gently stroke along
Your head and supple spine,
My hand thrills with the pleasure
Of touching your body electric.

I sense the same spirit as in Her: her gaze
Like yours, dear creature, is one of cold
Intensity, piercing like a banderilla.

And, from head to toe,
A subtle yet dangerous perfume,
Envelops her dark skin.


Notes

* See Rilke, 'Black Cat' in Duino Elegies (1923): click here to read online. 

** If memory serves me correctly, Baudelaire devoted no fewer than three poems to cats in Les Fleurs du mal (1857) and they make appearances in many of his other poems too. As might be expected, therefore, the theme of Baudelaire's cats has proved a popular - and fertile - one amongst literary critics and theorists (Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss famously co-authoring a structuralist reading in 1960, for example).

To read an online edition of Les Fleurs du mal provided by Project Gutenberg, click here. 

Alternatively, visit fleursdumal.org - a site dedicated to Baudelaire and his work that not only contains every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal, but a selection of English translations (for those, like me, whose French isn't very good). 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

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.