Ding Dong! In Memory of Laura Bell (Queen of London Whoredom)

Detail from a portrait of Laura Thistlethwayte (née Bell) 
by Richard Buckner (1871)

"She had a small doll-like face, piquant and provocative, big blue eyes, a strawberry-and-cream complexion, 

cascades of glorious golden hair, the most shapely pair of shoulders in London, and a soft, persuasive voice. 

She was, in short, well-armed for her attack upon male susceptibility."

Irish-born beauty Laura Bell is a famous example not only of a good girl gone bad, but a bad girl discovering religion and becoming an ardent preacher against vice. I'm not sure which is the most interesting of these moral phenomena; the fall into sin, or the adoption of Victorian values and bourgeois conventions. Let's investigate ...    

Bell was born in Dublin, in 1829, but grew up in the village of Glenavy, Co. Antrim. As a bored teenager with something of a wild streak, she decided to leave home and find work as a shop girl in Belfast, supplementing her meagre earnings by also working as a prostitute. Finding that she derived more pleasure - and certainly made more money - from whoring rather than retail, Bell decided to move to Dublin and establish herself as a courtesan. Among her illicit lovers was the famous surgeon and author Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar).

Having successfully learnt all the tricks of her trade - and still only twenty years of age - Bell decided to head to London and try her luck amongst some of the richest and most powerful noblemen in Europe. Eventually, she would be known as The Queen of London Whoredom and ride daily around Hyde Park in a gilt carriage drawn by two white horses, with a young pageboy wearing a black and yellow striped waistcoat sitting proudly behind her. She wanted to cut a figure as a woman of sex, style, and substance and this she certainly succeeded in.      

It was whilst in the Royal Park that she met the Nepalese Prime Minister, Jung Bahadur Rana, who was immediately captivated by her and installed her in a beautiful house in Belgravia, showering Bell with outrageously expensive gifts during the three-month period they spent together.* Before he returned to Nepal, he presented Bell with a diamond ring and the promise that he would always be there for her should she ever need his assistance.

When Bell wrote to him in 1857, asking that he send forces to help the British crush the Indian Mutiny, it was probably not quite what he'd had in mind. Still, a promise is a promise - and Bell enclosed the diamond ring with her letter to remind him of it - so he duly sent troops. One wonders what other woman - apart from Queen Victoria - could've stepped into world political history in such a decisive manner at this time ...? 

I'm not sure when (or why) Bell chose to quit her lucrative and adventurous life as a courtesan; perhaps after she married Capt. Augustus Frederick Thistlethwayte in 1852 and moved into a new home in Grosvenor Square. Or perhaps after she found old time religion in 1856 and started referring to herself as God's Ambassadress.

From this point on she mostly hosted evangelical tea parties for high society (rather than orgies) and wanted to save London's prositutes (rather than reign over them)**; eventually forming a very close and long-lasting friendship with William Gladstone, who also had a thing for rescuing fallen women.

Because there is no God - or, if you prefer, because God is a cunt with a cruel sense of humour - just when Bell was at her most righteous and telling everyone who would listen about His Love, her husband - who liked to sermon the servants by firing his pistol into the ceiling - accidently shot and killed himself, leaving her a heartbroken and lonely widow for her final years.***

Bell died, seven years after Thistlethwayte's fatal accident, at her home in West Hampstead, in 1894. Many of those who knew her at the end of her life had no idea of how notorious a figure she'd been in her prime and most obituaries made only veiled references to her life as a prostitute, stressing instead her charity work and kindness to animals. 

Notes

* To give you some idea of just how outrageously expensive these gifts were - including the house in fashionable Belgravia - it's believed that Rana spent in the region of £250,000 on Bell during their brief affair; that's £21 million in today's money, making her one of the most expensive rides in history. 

** Having said this, there's evidence to suggest that Bell may have continued to have the odd affair; including one, for example, with the artist Edwin Landseer (best known for sculpting the lions in Trafalgar Square). 

*** Actually, this isn't quite the case; Bell's marriage was not a happy one and she and her husband had largely lived separate lives; she hosting lavish parties in London, while he spent his time hunting in Scotland. One of the main bones of contention between them was the fact that Bell liked to spend way beyond her means and had no concept of living sensibly on an allowance. By 1870, she owed her creditiors £25,000, much to Thistlethwayte's chagrin.

Those interested in the lives of famous 19thC prostitutes might like to read a sister post to this one on Cora Pearl: click here. See also 'Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt': click here.

    

In Memory of Cora Pearl (La Grande Horizontale)

Emma Crouch (aka Cora Pearl) 
(1836 - 1886)

The story goes that, ignoring her grandmother's warnings about taking up with strange men, the young Cora (then known by her birth name of Emma Crouch) one day accepted the advances of an older gentleman who approached her on the street and persuaded her to go with him to a gin palace, where he proceeded to get her drunk and then take her virginity.

She was around nineteen at the time and later confessed that this encounter left her with an instinctive horror of all men. However, it also left her with five pounds in her pocket - which was a significant sum in 1856 - so she decided not to return home, but rent a room for herself in Covent Garden and embark on a career in the sex trade.

Emma soon made the acquaintance of Robert Bignell, proprieter of a notorious West End music hall, The Argyll Rooms, that was a known haunt of prostitutes (it even provided private rooms for those punters who weren't interested in the legitimate entertainment provided).

A keen observer of the world around her, Emma quickly realised that the life of a common prostitute was a hard and often tragic one - certainly not something she desired for herself. Thus, she determined that she would only provide her services to a select group of protectors with the financial means to keep her in a life of splendour. 

Her involvement with Bignell ended after they took a trip to Paris together. Emma immediately fell for the City of Light and after he returned to London she decided to stay on in the French capital. It was at this time that she adopted the fanciful pseudonym Cora Pearl and set about refining and broadening her skills as a courtesan (under the watchful eye of a pimp, Monsieur Roubisse, who set her up in suitable quarters and taught her the rules of the game).  

By the early 1860s, Cora was one of the most celebrated prostitutes in Paris. Her first lover of real distinction was Victor Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling. The same age as Cora, he was besotted by the English beauty and happily supplied her with money, jewels, servants and even a private chef. He also bought her a horse (to whom, it was said, she was kinder than to him) and Cora soon became an accomplished rider.

Whilst she accepted the duke's devotion and generosity for five years, she was also sharing her favours with other notable figures, including the heir to the throne of the Netherlands (William, Prince of Orange) and the half-brother of Emperor Napoleon III (Charles, Duc de Morny).  

What, one might ask, was the secret of her charm?

Obviously, she had sex appeal. But she also understood the importance of style; Cora always dressed in a manner designed either to shock, seduce, or scandalise and liked to dye her hair in a bright range of colours. Her make-up too was bold and striking and her face powder was tinted with silver or pearl in order to give her skin a shimmering transluscence.

I'm tempted to describe her as a proto-punk; the sort of woman who would cause a sensation at a masquerade party attended by the elite of Parisian society by turning up naked and saying she was the new Eve; or surprise her dinner guests by having herself served as the main course on a huge silver platter, garnished with parsley, and inviting those assembled to tuck in.  
 
Always happy to display her physical charms to an appreciative audience and known for her outrageous theatricality, it's not surprising to discover that in 1867 she accepted the role of Cupid in Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld. Again, many members of the French nobility were present for the opportunity to see Cora performing semi-naked on stage.

She was, during the years 1865-1870, at the very peak of her success: she had several beautiful homes; her clothes were made for her by the English fashion designer Charles Frederick Worth (the father of haute couture); and she had a jewellery collection said to be worth over a million francs. Gifts from her suitors became increasingly extravagant and she cleverly pitted one against the other in a game of potlatch.

It was said that to spend just one night with her would cost 10,000 francs and there was even a popular drink inspired by her legend, called des larmes de Cora Pearl. She was literally the toast of Paris. But of course, nothing - least of all such glittering success - lasts forever and in 1872, now aged thirty-seven, Cora's luck ran out thanks to l'affaire Duval ...      

Alexandre Duval was an exteremly wealthy young man who became obsessed with her, squandering his entire fortune on sustaining their illicit relationship. Alas, when the money ran out, she lost all interest in him. Unable to accept what had happened with good grace, he went to her home carrying a loaded pistol and intent on killing her. The plan - and the pistol - backfired, however, and Duval was seriously wounded. The subsequent scandal obliged the authorities to take action and Pearl was (temporarily) expelled from Paris.

Essentially, the times had changed in France. Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War saw the old order collapse and the establishment of the Third Republic; aristocratic privilege declined and bourgeois values were in the ascendant. Cora was forced to liquidate her fortune and whilst not exactly destitute, by the early 1880s her financial situation was serious enough that she was obliged to return to common prositution (taking a small apartment on the Champs-Elysées).

Any money she made was soon gambled away and Cora died in the summer of 1886, shortly after publication of her memoirs, the central motif of which had been je ne regrette rien. Touchingly, one of her former lovers agreed to (anonymously) pay for her funeral costs. And, if it were up to me, I'd put her picture on the new £50 note ...


Note: those interested in the lives of famous 19thC prostitutes might like to read a sister post on Laura Bell: click here. See also 'Love Blinds: The Shocking Case of Jeanne Brécourt': click here.

Notes on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life by Michael Marder (Part 3: Vegetal Existentiality)

Michael Marder (2011)

II. Vegetal Existentiality

The existential domain (of time, freedom and wisdom) is usually reserved for man alone. But if plants were also to have some experience of these things, then their "ethical and political status [...] will need to be revised in order to reflect their purchase on life [... and] the positive dimensions of their ontology" [90].

(1) The Time of Plants ...

Time, as Boy George once said, won't give us time. But time makes plants, like lovers, feel they have something real and if we are to have a close encounter with vegetal being "we will need to rethink temporality as the mainspring of the plant's ontology" [94].

Unfortunately, however, time is one of those questions in philosophy that I cannot get my head around and feel little inclined to try and do so now. Readers who want to understand vegetal temporality and the manner in which plants "spatially express time" [96] in depth will have to read Marder's work for themselves (I suggest you brush up on your Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger first of all).    

Having said that, I suppose the key point is that time is not proper to the plant itself but derivative from the other; "whether this 'other' is a part of the organic world or a synthetically produced chemical mix, whether it pertains to the temporality of nature or to that of culture" [101]. The downside of this is that it makes the plant naturally vulnerable; "its potentialities are left vacant for infinite appropriation by anything or anyone whatsoever" [101] - it's a natural born victim of circumstance and agro-capitalist technologies.

What this means - and this presents a real challenge to all those who talk about the exploitation of nature - is that  "techno-cultural and economic phenomena do not negate a preexisting 'natural' condition but interject themselves into the place of the plants' other" [102] and thus determine ontophytology.

This isn't to say that "the positing of the human and capitalist temporalities in the place of the plant's hetero-temporality" [102] isn't exploitative or non-violent, but it's hard to imagine the plant cares as long as it flowers and comes to fruition. That isn't quite Marder's conclusion - he still thinks it important to resist this subsumption - but he recognises the futility of appealing to its nature in order to do so, "since the potentialities of the plant are never completely its own" [102].

Ultimately, the plant is not just non-contemporaneous with us, it's not even contemporaneous with itself, in that it's a "loose alliance of multiple temporalities of growth [...] and in that it does not relate to itself, does not establish a self-identity" [104]. Again, that's why it's forced to obey the time of the other and why Marder finds himself up an ethical junction.

How does he get out? By reversing into ethical assertion: "The hetero-temporality of vegetal existence is the most telling instantiation of the ethical injunction for openness to the other." [107] I'm reminded of something I once wrote in my Illicit Lover's Discourse: "The polymorphously perverse nature of the Prostitute explains her generosity of spirit and openness to all."

It's insatiable promiscuity that bring the world's of vegetation and vice together. And it's "monstrous growth and immoderate proliferation" that have always been "unspeakably terrifying for philosophers" who have always sought to establish the proper limits of desire and police these limits "against potential transgressors" [107-08], whether they have green leaves or black fishnet stockings.  

(2) The Freedom of Plants ...

Contrary to what the Cockney Rejects insist, not only is there freedom for human beings, there's also freedom for plants, says Marder, thereby challenging a metaphysical tradition which would foreclose this latter possibility.

Admittedly, it's difficult to think of freedom in relation to a being devoid of selfhood and literally rooted to the spot. But perhaps if we think of freedom in terms of insouciance and indifference, for example, then the plant might be said to be freer than any of us. But can a plant be free in the ontological sense of being other than it is? Let's find out ...

Part of the problem when it comes to thinking about the freedom of plants, is that nature has been so thoroughly tamed: "Vegetal torpor is the aftermath of civilization; it is what remains of plant life after its thorough cultivation and biotechnological transformation ..." [128]. Marder continues - and I think this is a true and important observation:

"If upon encountering a plant, we fail to be impressed with the exuberance of its growth and uncontrollable efflorescence, this is because its current conceptual framing is the outcome of a long history that discarded and invalidated numerous interpretative possibilities for our relation to 'flora'." [128]

In other words, the plant is given a fixed metaphysical shape and in this way made into something that can be stuck in a pot and put in the corner of even the most respectable living room. Even Heidegger is happy to keep plants lodged in their own environment, denying them a place within the clearing of being (i.e., world).

Marder rightly interrogates such thinking and considers the freedom of the plant in relation to our own freedom. But again, that's not easy when vegetal being is so dissimilar to human (and animal) being. Plants are, in a sense, closer to being gods. For both gods and plants like to play in a carefree manner, whereas man prefers to work and to worry. Only when at his most imaginative, does man become playful like a plant; "imagination is the echo of vegetal freedom in human beings" [146].

In order to let the plant flourish in us, we need, therefore, to give free reign to the imagination (or aesthetic play-drive) and abandon ourselves to art as Dionysian intoxication; "'seizing on what is new and startling [...] what is violent and wild'" [146], as Schiller once described (and denounced) it.

Having said that, we must at the same time "be on our guard against the all-too-prevalent idealist illusion that vegetal life is the realm of purity and innocence. The plant's ontological indifference and lack of concern bespeak its freedom from conscience, but it is an anthropomorphic projection alone that codifies these qualities, as well as everything connected to play, in terms of innocence and lightheartedness." [146]  

I have to admit, I'm pleased to hear Marder say this - though isn't it just as much of an idealist illusion to still speak of the struggle for emancipation and to posit vegetal life an important role in this (once plants have been liberated, of course, from "the political and economic conditions responsible [...] for their oppression" [149])?   


(3) The Wisdom of Plants ...

Whilst frequently borrowing from Derrida throughout this work, here Marder admits that his reflections on vegetal intelligence "ought to be taken as a footnote to Nietzsche's provocative suggestion" [151] in The Will to Power about the sagacity of plants being a good starting point for the revaluation of all values.  

In a sense, we're moving from ontophytology to epistemophytology; although, when it comes to plants, being and thinking are so closely bound together that in order to discuss the latter you need to reckon also with the former.

What soon becomes clear is that one needs to overstep "the bounds of the conventional theories of knowledge" [152] towards a postmetaphysical thinking that is "fluid, receptive, dispersed, non-oppositional, non-representational, immanent, and material-practical" [152]. Marder describes it as the non-conscious intenionality of vegetal life.

Again, I'm not entirely sure I know what that means - even after reading Marder's explanation - but it amuses me to think that this idea might irritate some followers of Levinas.

And I do like the idea of plants having memories, which, as temporal beings, I suppose is a reasonable expectation (albeit these memories will be imageless, or non-representational). Further, recent findings in molecular biology seem to confirm that plants can retrieve information stored in cells. Whereas we might remember the things revealed by the light, they, plants, physically remember the light itself (they might not have minds, but they certainly have bodies). 

Memory, then, is a primal quality - before consciousness - and is found in mimosa as well as man. It's a key component  "of the vibrant and multidimensional intelligence of plants" that can be mapped on the "ever-shifting continuum of sensibility-irritability" [156] (plants might not feel much, but just enough to know when they are getting pissed-off and to ensure their survival).     

Importantly, any attempt to think plant-thinking must always remember that vegetal being revolves around non-identity; "understood both as the plant's inseperability from the environment wherein it germinates and grows, and its style of living devoid of a clearly delineated autonomous self" [162].

No wonder their thinking is so restless and agitated! No wonder that becoming-plant is so difficult! What it ultimately requires of us is something we are not easily convinced to do: close our eyes and affirm the darkness, "while refraining form the indiscriminate repudiation of light" [178].

Notes

Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2013). All page numbers in the above post refer to this wok. 

To read part one of this post, on encountering plants and ethical offshoots, click here.

To read part two of this post, on vegetal anti-metaphysics, 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.

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.

 

On Textual Cruising (with Reference to the Case of Camus)

Photo of Albert Camus by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1944): 
with his upturned collar, cigarette, and slicked back hair, 
Camus embodied the essence of French cool in this period

One of the (many) ideas I've absorbed from Roland Barthes is that of textual cruising as a key component of the art (and erotics) of reading. 

To cruise the body of a text is both to slowly drift through it in an aimless but pleasurable manner and to make oneself sensitive to the play of signs and those few details, preferences, and inflections (what Barthes terms biographemes) that seem to reveal something of the author and "whose distinction and mobility might go beyond any fate and come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion".*

I mention this, because I do often wonder not only about the (intertextual) relationship between written works, but also about the (homotextual) relationship between myself and those authors for whom I feel a good deal of affection and which is absolutely not based on any intellectual appeal.

Take Camus, for example. He's by no means a favourite writer and I have only a very casual relationship with his work. But I'm fond of him nevertheless, in a way I never could be about Sartre - monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo - and it makes me wonder if it isn't simply due to the fact that Camus was so damn good-looking and his biographemes so seductive ...?**

* See: Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (University of California Press, 1989), p. 9.  

** I'm not simply trying to be funny here: one commentator recently described Camus as "the Don Draper of existentialism" and several others have remarked on his physical attractiveness and beautiful writing style. See Adam Gopnik, 'Facing History: Why We Love Camus' The New Yorker (April 2, 2012): click here to read online.

Learning to Love the Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

Isabelle Adjani: Pull Marine 
(music video dir. Luc Besson, 1984) 

Click here to watch

I think the first work I tried to read by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray was Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was published in English translation (by Gillian C. Gill) in 1991, when I was doing my MA at the University of York and spent a lot of time hanging around with members of the women's studies department, including Liz DeLoughry, who is now a professor at UCLA and who, if I remember correctly, lent me the book.  

Unfortunately, I couldn't make head or tail of it and I found Irigaray's lyrical-poetic style antithetical. It should be noted that this is not offered as a criticism of her thinking or mode of writing, but is more a reflection upon my own limitations as a reader at this time. Indeed, it might partly explain why I'm not a professor at UCLA ...

However, here we are in 2019, almost 30 years later, and I'm strangely tempted to give it another go, having just come across this very beautiful line by Irigaray in another work: The plant nourishes the mind that contemplates the blooming of its flower.   

That's not to say I don't still have limitations as a reader - don't we all? - but I'm hopefully a little less limited than I was in '91 and have, in the years since, often myself adopted a writing style that attempts to dissolve the distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy. So, fingers crossed I'll get more from my re-encounter with l'amante marine de Friedrich Nietzsche ... 

See: Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill, (Columbia University Press, 1991). 

Notes:

Originally published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Irigaray interrogates the feminine as conceived within modern philosophy from an elemental perspective; in the case of this book, as the title makes obvious, it's water that is used to cleanse Nietzsche's writings of their phallogocentricity and freshen up his ideas. But Irigaray does so not as an enemy, but as an imaginary lover who engages in an amorous dialogue with the latter. 

And the song? It's an absolutely beautiful track written by Serge Gainsbourg and released as a single from the album Isabelle Adjani (Philips, 1983). 

Agnès Gayraud: la philosophe de la pop

Agnès Gayraud / Photo: Vincent Ferrané

It's hard not to love the French philosopher and singer-songwriter Agnès Gayraud; she's French, she's a philosopher, and she's a talented singer-songwriter - so what's not to love?

At any rate, I like her (even if some of her records are a tad too arty and sophisticated - or Simonesque - for my tastes) and I'm very tempted to read her new book, Dialectics of Pop (2019), in which she explores the many paradoxes of pop music and calls for it to be recognised as a modern, technologically-mediated art form that fully deserves to rank alongside film and photography.* 

Oh, and she also delights in taking on the Frankfurt School's chief bore, Theodore Adorno, famous for his dismissal of popular culture; particularly popular music; particularly American forms of popular music, such as jazz. According to her publishers:

"Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive art form that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking 'against itself'."

Pop music may never quite achieve the status that Gayraud wishes for it - and she may struggle to convince many of her fellow philosophers that Kylie should be accorded the serious critical attention given to Kant - but hers is an interesting attempt to make the case.   

Notes

Agnès Gayraud, Dialectics of Pop, trans. Robin Mackay, Daniel Miller, and Nina Power, (Urbanomic, 2019).

* For those less tempted to read Gayraud's 464 page book, there's a convenient 11 minute interview with the author on YouTube in which she discusses the work and summarises her main arguments: click here. 

Play: La Féline, Comité Rouge (Official Video With English Subtitles): click here. Taken from the album Triomphe (Kwaidan Records, 2017), this, I think, is a good example of her work as a singer-songwriter. 

Notes on Vegetal Philosophy and Literature

I.  All Flesh is Grass [Isaiah 40:6]

"Plants", says Randy Laist, "play a vital role in the experience of being human" [9].

It's not just the fact we like to keep a cactus on the kitchen windowsill and utilise plants in an ornamental and symbolic manner; we also consume them, fashion clothes out of them, inhabit structures built with plant materials, and - let's not forget - exploit our green-leaved, photosynthesising friends to manufacture drugs, medicines, and cosmetics.    

Archaeologists might like to speak about the stone age, iron age, and bronze age, but we have always essentially lived in an age (and a world) dominated by plants:  

"Not only has agriculture always been the primary source of bioenergy that has allowed human populations to balloon so prolifically, but the weaving of plants into baskets, the carving of trees into floating vessels, and, possibly, the use of plant-based psychotropic substances to provoke dream-visions have all played a crucial role in the emergence of modern globalized human beings." [9]

Our intimate relationship with plants has also shaped our evolution; the hand - so beloved by Heidegger and which he thinks of as unique to human beings - wouldn't be what it is were it not for the branches and twigs it evolved to grasp and manipulate as tools. It's worth remembering that, according to Genesis, God created plants three days before he bothered to create man and that ultimately all flesh is grass.   


II. On the Defoliation of the Cultural Imagination

Having said all this, ultimately Laist's critical interest is in the long and intimate relationship between plants and literature; a relationship that has been in serious decline for some years now, despite our over-fondness for the prefix eco. Laist notes:

"When one scans contemporary culture for evidence of plant-based narratives [...] the most dramatic meta-phenomenon is the defoliation of the cultural imagination." [My italics, indicating not only that I love this phrase, but that I fully intend to use it henceforth.] [10]

Even as recently as a hundred years ago, writers shared a botanical vocabulary with readers who had a deep familiarity with the appearance and properties of a wide variety of trees and plants. Arguably, that's simply no longer the case. For not only do most readers prefer tarmac and technology to woodland and wilderness, but most authors no longer know the names of the remaining flowers growing by the roadside - and nor does this particularly bother them.     

Laist suggests that the situation is a little different with poetry; that there are still a number of contemporary poets fighting a rearguard action "against encroaching mental defoliation" [11], but I struggle to think of a poet who knows the world of flora in the astonishing and intimate manner that D. H. Lawrence experienced it.

And would any poet today define poetry as Blanchot once defined it: the attempt to protect and preserve in speech a voice in which the silent suffering and joy of flowers might come to expression? I doubt it.   


III. On the Uncanny Ontological Potency of Plants

In his introduction to Plants and Literature (2013), Laist also makes the following interesting point:

"The scarcity of plant-life in the cultural canon of the contemporary West is particularly striking when contrasted against the ubiquity of stories that feature animals [...] Despite the fact that urbanization has taken human beings just as far away from animals as it has taken them from plants, the fewer animals there are in the wild, the more seem to crop up on television [...] and on YouTube." [11]

Not only that, but within academia animal studies has recently developed alongside women's studies, queer studies, and black studies. But as Laist rightly argues:

"Animal studies is essentially an extension of human studies; it is relatively easy to imagine the subjectivity of animals. Animals may be shaped differently than we or pursue a different mode of life, but the basic coordinates of human existence and animal existence are identical in many respects." [11]

Reminding us of Aristotle's extremely influential (but limited) characterisation of plants, Laist continues:

"When it comes to plants [...] we encounter a much more significant barrier to our imagination. Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life-cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms." [12]

You might think that Aristotle's positioning of plants at the borderline between inanimate objects and living beings lends them uncanny ontological potency, but it seems that for many writers - primarly concerned as they are with the human, all too human and the personal, all too personal - they're of almost zero interest. 

If I may mention the name of D. H. Lawrence once more, one of the reasons for his greatness - and one of the reasons for my continued fascination with his work - is that he never forgets that human life unfolds within a non-human and inhuman context that is completely depersonalised; a context in which dark pansies and lilies of corruption blossom.

Lawrence understands that the power of plants is not merely symbolic, that they have ontological import all of their own and provide a way of life that is alien, beautiful and soulless; that they challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to be a living thing and our anthropocentric conceit.

The brute force and environmental destructiveness of man may crush many plants or push them into extinction, but, writes Lawrence, the plants will rise again and all our mighty monuments and great cities will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  

See: Randy Laist (ed.), Introduction to Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, (Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9-17.

Philosophical Reflections on Self-Partnering

Emma Watson
Photo: Action Press / Rex / Shutterstock

As members of the Hollywood set are amongst the most self-absorbed, self-obsessed, and self-indulgent individuals in the world, it came as no surprise to hear Emma Watson speak in an interview with Vogue about self-partnering [click here to read online].

Of course, such a single-positive proposition is really nothing very new: we could trace out a long and fascinating history of self-partnering from Narcissus to Jerry Seinfeld; "Now I know what I've been looking for all these years - myself. I've been waiting for me to come along. And now I've swept myself off my feet!"*

And although some people seem to react with hostility to the idea, there's really nothing to get angry or judgemental about. In fact, I would encourage people to be happy for Ms Watson - particularly as she seems to be so content with the arrangement.

Ultimately, self-partnering is better than sitting around moping like Bridget Jones, or complaining about not having met your soulmate - that special someone who will complete you as a human being (as if Aristophanes's amorous fantasy was anything other than that).**

I also agree with Foucault that care for others shouldn't be put before the care of oneself; that the latter is ethically prior due to the fact that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior. ***    

The only problem comes when you grow tired of the arrangement and seek a conscious uncoupling; i.e., a releasing of oneself from oneself  - 'cos breaking up is hard to do (comma, comma, down dooby doo down down).  

Notes

*Dialogue from Seinfeld, 'The Invitations', (S7/E22, 1999), written by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, episode dir. Andy Ackerman. Click here to watch a clip on YouTube.

** Plato, The Symposium, ed. M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. M. C. Howatson, (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

*** Michel Foucault, 'The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom', in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and Others, (The New Press, 1997).

Readers who enjoyed this post will probably find an earlier one on sologamy also of interest: click here.