Notes on The Life of Plants by Emanuele Coccia

(Polity, 2018)

 

I. 

 

As torpedohiles will be aware, I'm a big fan of plants and trees. And interested also in the latest philosophical speculation concerning our CO2-loving friends. Thus, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss - having finally read - a recent book by Emanuele Coccia, published in English as The Life of Plants (2019) [a]. 

 

One of Coccia's main points is certainly not new, but remains something that needs to be repeated as loudly and as often as possible: human exceptionalism is scientifically untenable - it's a theological prejudice. Thus, any system of rank that places mankind above all other animals is one that needs scrapping. 

 

Further, we should also abandon the idea that animals are a superior form of life than plants - or even radically distinct. 

 

For example, I don't know if plants have consciousness as conventionally understood. But, as a Deleuzean, I can happily subscribe to the idea that there are forces working through them that constitute microbrains, enabling plants not only to process information and make decisions, but contemplate the world by contracting the elements from which they originate [b]. 

 

Anyway, let's now look at Coccia's book in more detail ...

 

 

II.

       

Plants - like a lot of other things - have mostly been overlooked in philosophy, "more out of contempt than out of neglect" [3]. 

 

So it's an encouraging development that there has lately been a bloom of interest in them by philosophers such as Coccia and Michael Marder, who reject the metaphysical snobbery that would keep plants "in the margins of the cognitive field" [3] and forever outside the gate. 

 

In other words, the return of the photosynthesising repressed is to be welcomed. I particularly like the fact that this represents a challenge to the chauvinism of the animal rights brigade and is one in the eye of holier-than-thou vegans, who never stop to question their own positing of animal life over plant life.   

For what is animalism if not merely "another form of  anthropocentrism and a kind of internalized Darwinism [which] extends human narcissim to the animal realm" [4] ...? 

 

Not that plants care - they just keep on doing their thing with sovereign indifference, living a form of life that is "in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment" [5]. To imagine that they are poor in world is laughable: 

 

"They participate in the world in its totality in everything they meet. [...] One cannot separate the plant - neither physically nor metaphysically - from the world that accommodates it. It is the most intense, radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world." [5]

 

Ultimately, we need plants to live; but they don't need us: "They require nothing [...] but reality in its most basic components: rocks, water, air, light" [8], which they transform into life and into the world we inhabit. We call this god-like ability autotrophy - the capacity plants have "to transform the solar energy dispersed into the universe into a living body" [8].   

 

This is why it makes much more sense to worship a tree, than a deity made in our own image; we owe plants everything (something that the man next door, forever spraying weedkiller on his drive, should think about, as well as those who are wilfully destroying the world's rainforests). 

 

As Coccia writes, botany might be advised to "rediscover a Hesiodic register and describe all forms of life capable of photosynthesis as inhuman and material divinities [...] that do not need violence to found new worlds" [10]

 

 

III.   

For Max Bygraves, hands were crucial. 

 

But plants, as Coccia reminds us, don't have hands, they have leaves. But then plants don't need to brush away a tear or want to stop a bus, and the absence of hands "is not a sign of lack, but rather the consequence of a restless immersion in the very matter they ceaselessly model" [12] [c]. 

To think like this is, essentially, to revive the ancient Greek tradition of philosophy as a discourse not on ideas, but on nature [peri physeos]; i.e., philosophy staged as a confrontation with the objects of the natural world (something that plants do every moment of the day). 

People often like to say that nature is a cultural construct; but, actually, culture is a natural construct and, as readers of Nietzsche will recall, he always stressed that the former must be understood in terms of φύσις. 

 

For Nietzsche, culture possessed a spiritual quality, lacked by civilisation, which develops organically from within the conditions of existence and he affirms nature as a world of difference and constant becoming. As for man, the flower of culture: Der Mensch ist eine Mischung aus Pflanze und Geist ... [d]

 

Unfortunately, for centuries now - and certainly since the time of German Idealism - philosophy (with a few rare exceptions) stopped contemplating nature and left it up to other disciplines to speak of "the world of things and of nonhuman living beings" [18] [e].

 

Coccia, following Iain Hamilton Grant, calls this forced expulsion from philosophy of all traces of the natural world physiocide and suggests that it has had terrible consequences for philosophy, turning it into an "imaginary struggle against the projections of its own spirit" [19] and the ghosts of its past:

 

"Forced to study not the world, but the more or less arbitrary images that humans have produced in the past, it has become a form of skepticism - and an often moralized and reformist one at that." [19] 

 

Thus, Coccia's little book has a big goal: to rebuild philosophy as a form of cosmology via an exploration of vegetal life. In other words, he wishes to learn from the flowers, roots and - arguably the most important parts of the plant - the leaves ...  

 

 

IV.

As this passage makes clear, for Coccia leaves are key:

 

"The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space [...] It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic, deciduous like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway beween the two. Our origin is not in us - in interiore homine - but outside, in open air. It is not something stable or ancestral, a star of immeasurable size, a god, a titan. It is not unique. The origin of our world is in leaves [...]" [28]

 

But, on the other hand, Coccia also loves roots - "the most enigmatic forms of the plant world" [77] - which are hidden and invisible to most animals as they move across the surface of the earth. Interestingly, roots are relatively a recent development in the evolution of plant life, which seems not to need them "in order to define itself, exist, or at least survive" [78]. 

 

Indeed, for millions of years, plants lived perfectly happily without roots and their origin is obscure:

 

"The first fossil evidence dates back to 390 million years ago. As in all forms of life destined to last for millions of years, their origin is due to fortuitous invention and bricolage more than to methodical, conscious elaboration: the first kind of roots were functional modification of the trunk or horizontal rhizomes deprived of leaves." [78]

 

That is fascinating, I think, and it gives one a new interest in roots; particularly in their extremely variable morphology and physiology. 

 

I know Deleuze always hated roots - primarily because Plato and Aristotle thought of them as analogous to the human head (and hence reason) and this idea was to have "an extraordinary success in the philosophical and theological tradition from the Middle Ages and up to the modern period" [79] - but nous somme ne pas Deleuzean [f]. 

 

Thus, we are free to say that roots rock and are perhaps not as bad as we thought they were, although Coccia's suggestion that roots "make the soil and the subterranean world a space of spiritual communication", transforming the earth into "an enormous planetary brain" [81] is not something I would write and doesn't help matters.

 

Personally, I prefer it when Coccia reminds us that roots are ontologiclly nocturnal and "swarming under the surface of the soil, nauseating and naked like vermin", as Georges Bataille so memorably put it [g]. Flowers face heavenward; but roots have no superterrestrial dreams or hopes; they remain true to the earth:

 

"The root is not simply a base on which the superior body of the trunk is based, it is the simultaneous inversion of the push toward the upward direction and the sun that animates the plant: it incarnates 'the sense of the earth', a form of love for the soil that is intrinsic in any vegetal being." [85] [h]

V.

 

Finally, having discussed leaves and roots, we come to Coccia's theory of the flower, or, if you prefer, his erotics, which posits sex as "the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us [...] to become other" [100] - which is as boring a definition as you could wish for.

 

And the flower? A flower is a cosmic attractor - "an ephemeral, unstable body" - which allows the plant to "capture the world" [100]. And thanks to flowers, says Coccia, "plant life becomes the site of an explosion of colours and forms and of a conquest of the domain of appearances" [100]. 

 

Flowers are not only beyond good and evil, they are beyond any "expressive or identitarian logic: they do not have to express an individual truth, or define a nature, or communicate an essence" [100] - they just have to look pretty and smell nice.   

 

But the flower isn't, for Coccia, just sex on a stem: it is also reason; "the paradigmatic form of rationality" [110], echoing Lorenz Oken, a leading figure within Naturphilosophie in Germany in the early 19th-century who wrote: 

 

"If one wishes to compare the flower - beyond sexual relation - to an animal organ, one can only compare it with the most important nerve organ. The flower is the brain of plants [...] which remains on the plane of sex. One can say that what is sex in the plant is brain for the animal, or that the brain is the sex of the animal." [i]  

 

What does that mean? It means, says Coccia, that "anthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from the linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality" [117]. 

 

And on that note, I think I'd like to close the post ... [j]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari, (Polity Press, 2019). All page references given in the post are to this edition of the text.

 

[b] Even Darwin speculated that plants might have tiny brains in their roots; see The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880). 

      Michael Marder, meanwhile, is adamant that plants do, in fact, have consciousness - albeit in a radically different way to ourselves; see Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013). Readers may recall that I published a three-part discussion of this book on Torpedo the Ark in November 2019: click here for part one and then follow links at the end of the post for parts two and three.

      Readers interested in this topic might also like to see F. Baluška, S. Mancuso, D. Volkmann, and P. W. Barlow, 'The "Root-Brain" Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin', in Plant Signaling and Behaviour, 12 (Dec 2009), 1121-27. Click here to read online. 

 

[c] This is not to downplay the importance of hands; see my post of 1 June 2019: click here.

 

[d] See Zarathustra's Prologue, 3, in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.    

 

[e] Of course, it was Socrates who first insisted that philosophy should disregard the physical universe and confine itself to a rational study of moral questions.   

[f] In other words, Deleze has a metaphysical objection to roots, which, as Coccia notes, are often still thought of in ordinary speech as "what is most fundamental and originary, what is most obstinately solid and stable, what is necessary" [80] - i.e., the plant organ par excellence. And yet, as Coccia goes on to point out, roots are actually the most ambiguous part of the plant. 

[g] Georges Bataille, 'The Language of Flowers', Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 13. 

      An interesting post written by Michael Marder on Bataille and his vegetal philosophy, can be found on The Philosopher's Plant (his blog for the LA Review of Books): click here. 

 

[h] Having said that, Coccia warns against blind fidelity to the earth if that means forgetting the sun: "Geocentrism is the delusion of false immanence: there is no autonomous Earth. The Earth is inseparable from the Sun." [91] 

      That's true, of course, but I'm not sure I understand what he means when he goes on to argue that to "the lunar and nocturnal realism of modern and postmodern philosophy, one should oppose a new form of heliocentrism, or rather an extremization of astrology" [92] - with the latter understood as a universal science. Coccia seems to think there's a correlation between us and the stars; that because we are of an astral nature (and the earth a celestial body), that we can influence the stars (just as they influence us). 

      Predictably, this way of thinking very quickly leads to a theological conclusion: "Everything [...] that occurs is a divine fact. God is no longer elsewhere, he coincides with the reality of forms and accidents." [94] 

      Ultimately, it's important to realise that whilst Coccia loves plants, he's not an ecologist, he's a sky-worshipper. That is to say, for Coccia it's not the soil or the sea that is the ultimate source of our existence, it's the sky, and what plants teach us is not to remain true above all else to the earth, but to make life "a perpetual devotion to the sky" [94], whilst, of course, remaining rooted in the earth. 

      He concludes: "The cosmos is not the inhabitable in itself - it is not an oikos [a home], it is an ouranos [a sky]: ecology is no more than the refusal of uranology." [96]   

 

[i] Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, 3rd edition, (Friedrich Schultheisse, 1843), p. 218. Quoted by Emanuele Coccia in The Life of Plants, p. 108. The quotation is trans. Dylan J. Montanari.

  

[j] Readers should note that The Life of Plants does have an epilogue, consisting of two short chapters; the first on speculative autotrophy and the second on philosophy as a kind of atmospheric condition, rather than a distinct discipline. To be honest, as interesting as his remarks are, I'm not sure why he felt the need to add them to this particular text (unless attempting to fend off criticism of his work from more traditional philosophers).  

On Marriage, Adultery and Slut Shaming (With Reference to the Case of Lady Chatterley)

Illustration by Flavia Felipe for an article on 

slut shaming in Teen Vogue (3 June 2016)

 

 

I. 

 

Slut shaming is the practice of denigrating a young woman for acting in a manner that violates social norms regarding sexually appropriate behavior. 

 

It's not something I would normally condone or engage in, but, in the case of Constance Chatterley, who, arguably, is one of the most selfish and conniving figures in 20th-century literature, I'm prepared to make an exception ...

 

 

II. 

 

By the author's own admission, Lady Chatterley's Lover is "obviously a book written in defiance of convention" [a]. A book which not only elevates profanity to the level of a phallic language, but lends support to the idea that adultery is justified if at least one spouse is bored or sexually frustrated. 

 

"Far be it from me to suggest that all women should go running after [...] lovers" [b], says Lawrence. 

 

But, actually, that is precisely what he suggests. That because her marriage to Clifford is sexless, it is therefore an empty sham and Connie is entitled to seek her pleasure elsewhere and stage a passionate revolt against her wedding vows to love, honour and obey her husband, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, etc. 

 

This may or may not make her a slut - and, as indicated, it's not a word I would normally use (or feel comfortable using) - but it certainly places her amongst those who experience "an intense and vivid hatred against marriage [...] as an institution and an imposition upon human life" [c].  

 

Although, according to Lawrence, that's because Connie is one of those unfortunate modern women who only know counterfeit marriage, i.e., marriage that is personal rather than phallo-cosmic [d]. 

 

And that's why she's justified in cheating on Clifford and running off with another man; because her marriage is false (based on an affinity of mind and shared interests), whereas her relationship with Mellors is authentic (based on fucking and shared passion).   

 

 

III.

 

Constance Chatterley is the sort of privileged young woman who, when considering the terrible consequences of the war, only thinks of how it brought the roof crashing down on her hopes for the future. 

 

Never mind the forty-million casulties, including her own husband, Clifford, who was shipped back to England from Flanders more or less in bits and paralysed from the waist down. After all, he could wheel himself about quite happily - but what was she going to do? For she was still young and despite her teenage love affair with a sulky musician in Dresden before the war -  twang-twang! - her body was full of unused energy ... 

 

And so this bonny Scotch trout with big blue eyes and "rather strong, female loins" [e] finds herself a lover; a successful young Irish playwright, called Michaelis, whom she fucks in her parlour at the top of the house, then seeks his assurance that he'll not let on to Clifford - because what her husband doesn't know can't hurt him. At no time does Connie consider her adulterous behaviour immoral.  

 

Connie and Mick meet whenever possible after this for what in modern parlance is known as a quickie - and it is quick, because he was "the trembling, excited sort of lover whose crisis soon came, and was finished" [29]. 

 

Thus, Mick fails to satisfy Connie (even though she eventually learns how to keep him inside her after he has come, just long enough so that she can achieve her own orgasm) and they soon break up (even though he does ask her to divorce Clifford and marry him, promising a good time). 

 

After their final act of illicit coition, however, Michaelis turns on Connie and attempts to shame her for bringing herself to climax after he has already ejaculated:

 

"When at last he drew away from her, he said, in a bitter, almost sneering little voice:

      'You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show!'" [53]

 

Unsurprisingly, this shocks and humiliates Connie; she was "stunned by this unexpected piece of brutality" [54] - especially as it was due to the unsatisfactory nature of his own performance that she was obliged to be active [f]. If she's a slut, then he's something far worse and Connie is well-shot of this irritating little prick. 

 

Her next lover is her husband's gamekeeper - Oliver Mellors; the ultimate Lawentian bad boy who despite having certain physical advantages over Clifford and Michaelis - and able to write a fine letter when he wants to - remains a thoroughly bad son, bad husband, bad father, bad employee, bad citizen, and - unless one likes it rough and Greek style - a bad lover [g].          

 

 

IV.

 

Connie's affair with Mellors is so-well known, that I needn't go into explicit detail here. Although we are told that, after Michaelis, Connie's sexual desire for any man collapsed, it isn't long before she seeks out a bit of rough in the woods, initially engaging in a spot of voyeurism as she spies on Mellors washing himself, "naked to the hips, his velveteen breeches slipping down over his slender loins" [66]. 

 

This, apparently, is a visionary experience for Connie; one that hits her in the middle of her body and which she receives in her womb. And so, that night, she takes off her clothes and stands naked before the huge mirror in her bedroom, admiring her bottom - where life still lingered - but mostly feeling sorry for herself and resentful of Clifford. She was unloved and old at twenty-seven and married to a man with crippled legs and a cold heart. The injustice of it all! 

 

And so to the keeper's hut ... where she seduces Mellors with her tears, allowing him to fuck her on an old army blanket spread on the floor. Then she hurries home in time for dinner, with no real afterthought about what she's done. 

 

The next evening, she returns to the woods and to Mellors, telling him that she doesn't care about anything; her marriage, her status, her reputation ... She just wants him to fuck her again - and quickly, so she can be home once more in time for dinner.

 

The affair blossoms and Connie begins to weave her web of deceit; something that isn't too difficult for a woman to whom lying comes "as naturally as breathing" [147]. Only Mrs. Bolton guesses what's going on and she's full of admiration for Connie being able to lie to Clifford with such brazen nonchalance.

 

Before long, Connie's pregnant; which, arguably, had been her intention all along - Mellors simply being a convenient means to this end, like a stud animal (which he suspects, but Connie denies; see p.169).  

 

Connie plans a trip to Venice, partly to provide a cover story for her pregnancy; Clifford can believe she had an affair with a wealthy gentleman abroad, or her old artist friend Duncan. Her sister, Hilda, is told about Mellors - much to her outrage. She tells Connie: "'You'll get over him quite soon [...] and live to be ashamed of yourself because of him'" [238] [h].

 

Ironically, when Hilda meets Mellors, he tries to make her feel bad about herself as a woman, telling her, for example, that whilst a man gets "'a lot of enjoyment'" [245] out of a woman like her sister, she would fail to sexually satisfy any man, being, he says a sour crab-apple, in need of proper graftin'. Until then, he adds, she deserves to be left alone. 

 

Afterwards, even Connie complains that he was rude to Hilda, but Mellors is unapologetic. In fact, he suggests that what Hilda had needed was not only a good fucking, but a beating: "'She should ha' been slapped in time'" [246] to stop her becoming so wilful. 

 

One might have expected Connie to object to this remark also. But, actually, she finds his anger and violent misogynistic fantasies sexy and obediently retires to the bedroom at his suggestion, allowing Mellors to fuck her up the arse in order that she may discover her ultimate nakedness and overcome all sense of shame:

 

"It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled, and almost unwilling [...] Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations [...] burning the soul to tinder. 

      Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. [...]

      [...] She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. [...] She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory!" [247]

Now, I used to think that was unquestionably a good thing; that Nietzschean innocence involves the defeat of all bad conscience (i.e., involves becoming-fearless, guilt-free and devoid of shame). But now, living in a brazen, barefaced, shameless society that has forgotten how to blush, I'm not so sure. 

 

Shame may be an unpleasant and negative emotion, but perhaps it's a vital one after all if it enables us to act with restraint and a little modesty; enables us, paradoxically, to take pride not only in what we are and what we do, but in what we're not and what we don't do. To transgress boundaries and violate norms isn't always admirable; it can, in fact, just be despicable and dishonourable behaviour 

 

This is not to say that Connie should have a scarlet letter A sewn on her clothing à la Hester Prynne, but I'm not sure she should be held up as a role model either; she's selfish, narcissitic, snobbish, deceitful, and shameless.   

Even so, Clifford goes a bit far when Connie finally reveals the true details of her affair; telling his wife, for example, that she ought to be "'wiped off the face of the earth!'" [296] and despairing of the "'beastly lowness of women!'" [296].

 

Her desire to marry Mellors and bear his child proves, says Clifford, that Connie is abnormal and not in her right senses: "'You're one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue.'" [296] 

 

Which is perhaps the last word in slut shaming insults ...     

 

     

Notes

 

[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 334. 

 

[b] Ibid., p. 308. 

  

[c] Ibid., p. 319. 

 

[d] Although Lawrence suggests that "at least three-quarters of the unhappiness of modern life" can be blamed on marriage, he then goes on to make a passionate defence of it, agreeing with those who consider marriage the greatest contribution to social life made by Christianity. 

      Crucially, however, he wishes to re-establish marriage as a sacrement "of man and woman united in the sex communion" and place it back within a phallo-cosmic context, so that the impersonal rhythm of marriage matches the rhythym of the year. For there is no marriage, asserts Lawrence, which is not "basically and permanently phallic, and that is not linked up with the sun and the earth, the moon and the fixed stars and the planets [...] that is not a correspondence of blood" (blood being the substance of the soul within Lawrence's philosophy). 

      On the other hand, there is counterfeit marriage; marriage that takes place "when two people are 'thrilled' by each other's personality: when they have the same tastes in furniture or books or sport or amusement, when they love 'talking' to one another, when they admire one another's 'minds'". This is "an excellent basis of friendship between the sexes, but a disastrous basis for marriage". Such personal marriages, lacking blood-sympathy, always end in "startling physical hatred".    

      See 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', op. cit., pp. 319-326.

[e] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, op. cit., p. 19. Note that future page references to the novel will be given directly in the post. 

[f] Later, however, this complaint against modern women as either frigid or sexually wilful, is repeated by Mr. Tenderness himself, Oliver Mellors, in an infamous and prolonged rant against his ex-wife and former girlfriends, that leaves Connie in no doubt about his views on female sexuality: women should be sexually receptive (though not passive) and at other times active, though not too active and certainly shouldn't grind their own coffee; they shouldn't be too pure, but neither should they be like old whores with beaks between their legs; they shouldn't make a man come too soon or in the wrong place (the vagina being the only right place to ejaculate); and, finally, they should absolutely never ever display any signs of lesbianism, either consciously or unconsciously. See chapter XIV, pp. 200-203. One imagines that Connie must have been mortified to hear all this and reminded of what Michaelis had said to her, although she simply says: "'You do seem to have had awful experiences of women'" [204].  

[g] See the lengthy character analysis of Oliver Mellors published on Torpedo the Ark on 6 July 2020: click here.

[h] This is an interesting remark. For it shows that it's not only men who practice slut shaming as a form of regulatory criticism; women will also slut shame a peer or, as in this case, sister, if they dress a little too provocatively, behave a little too promiscuously, or otherwise transgress accepted codes of conduct or boundaries of class, for example. Thus Hilda later tells Connie: "'But you'll be through with him in a while [...] and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can't mix up with the working people." [240]

      Without wishing to oversimplify matters, we might say that when men slut shame, they are usually just being sexist pigs playing a game of double standards which benefits them; when women do it, however, it seems to betray some form of intrasexual competitiveness and be a more visceral reaction. Perhaps this is why Connie is so happy to escape the dominion of other women: "Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women. How awful they were, women!" [253].     

Gone Fishing

Recreational cruelty: Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse 

proudly showing off a catch on their popular TV show, 

Gone Fishing, as the poor carp struggles to breathe 

 

 

All of a sudden, there seem to be a shoal of programmes on TV that involve the gentle art of fly fishing, with even elderly comedians Mortimer and Whitehouse getting in on the act [1]. 

 

Only it's not such a gentle art - certainly not for the fish, who is subject to the violence of being hooked, reeled in, and manhandled. Despite recent research indicating that these beautiful and intelligent creatures experience fear and react to pain in similar ways to birds and mammals [2], there are still anglers who dispute or deny the cruelty involved in their recreational pursuit [3].  

 

We don't keep the fish out of the water for long and always put them back unharmed, is the familiar line of argument. But this ignores the trauma that the fish suffers and overlooks the fact that the hook used to catch them often causes damage to the mouth, thus making it difficult (and painful) for the fish to feed after their release.

 

Of course, Nietzsche would point out that just because something causes suffering that's no reason not to do it; i.e., the fact that pain hurts is not an argument [4]. Further, there might even be wisdom to be found in pain (as in pleasure); fish, for example, might have learnt something from the experience of being caught over the centuries by anglers which has ultimately helped them survive as a species. 

 

But surely fish experience enough danger in their daily life under the water to keep them on their guard, without human beings adding to their fear, stress, and suffering. Nietzsche makes a good case for the non-alleviation of natural hardship and danger, but that doesn't mean we should go out of our way to increase or intensify the pain felt by other animals.  

 

Otherwise, we must say yes to badger-baiting, fox hunting, and bullfighting as well as what Byron described as the cruellest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretend sports - fishing [5].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] To watch episodes of Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing go to BBC Online: click here. 

      The series has received widespread praise for its warmth, charm, and gentle humour. Many critics even find it poignant as the two comics reflect on their own mortality (both men having recently undergone heart surgery). No one, as far as I can see, stops to give a thought to the fish whose participation in the show, whilst central, is non-consensual and one might ask if the real joy of the show is listening to two old friends reminisce about the good old days, whilst contemplating the beauty and tranquility of their surroundings, then why do they need to also catch fish for our entertainment.   

[2] Whether fish experience pain in the same way that we do is a contentious issue (especially amongst those who subscribe to some form of human exceptionalism). But it seems fairly obvious, both from observation and from knowing what we do about their brains and nervous system, that they certainly don't like having sharp metal hooks pierce their mouths and being hauled out of the water into an environment in which they cannot breathe (and which can cause their gills to collapse).   

 

[3] It's worth remembering that fishing litter left behind by careless anglers also presents a danger to other forms of wildlife, including birds and small mammals.  

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV. 318. 

[5] For the record, I'm not - unlike members of PETA - arguing for fishing to be outlawed. But I do think people should be actively encouraged to treat fish with care and respect, even if - as D. H. Lawrence says - we may never know their gods. I develop this idea in a post published last year on the intelligence of fish: click here. 

 

Thanks to David Brock for inspiring this post.

 

  

Take a Walk Into a Future of Diminished Reality with Amy Webb ...

Photo of Amy Webb 

by Elena Seibert (2018)

 

In a recent video released on Twitter by the World Economic Forum, three leading futurists predict what the world will be like after the Great Reset has been accomplished and human life completely enframed within technology ... [1]

Stuart Russell, the British computer scientist known for his contributions to the field of AI, predicts that the age of manual labour will finally come to an end, freeing us up to engage in more fulfilling activities that make greater use of our abilities (such as online shopping and video games, presumably). 

 

Mike Bechtel, on the other hand, who is chief crystal ball gazer at the professional services network Deloitte, looks forward to a world in which ambient technology is integrated into the environment and ever-ready to lend support and obey our commands, enabling us to live without discontinuity or disruption (never losing our connection to the network again).

 

But it is a remark made by the founder of the Future Today Institute, Professor Amy Webb, that really caught my attention ... [2]

 

After predicting the increased use of gene editing technologies in order to redesign organisms for beneficial purposes (which sounds sinister enough), Webb went on to speak of diminished reality glasses, which would allow the wearer to remove unwanted objects from their field of view - such as garbage or other people.

 

It's nice to discover that Professor Webb equates her fellow human beings - or is she only referring to those who, in the future, haven't been genetically enhanced? - with waste material and how she finds the world so unsightly and distracting that she wishes not to see and not to know. 

 

I suppose diminished reality glasses work best when worn with noise-cancelling headphones and an old-fashioned peg on your nose, so that you can be virtually deaf as well as virtually blind, and not have to smell the garbage or other people either ...  

 

Notes

 

[1] The Great Reset refers to a fundamental transformation of society, leading to the zen fascist utopia in which no one owns anything (but all are happy), as dreamed of by Klaus Schwab (Chairman of the WEF) and others who subscribe to his globalist agenda. To find out more, go to the WEF Great Reset website: click here. To watch the video I refer to on Twitter, click here.

 

[2] Those interested in knowing more about Amy Webb can visit her website: amywebb.io / Those interested in knowing more about the Future Today Institute should click here.  

 

Believe in the Ruins: In Praise of Hayat Nazer

We make art lest we should perish from the truth ...

 

 

I.

 

I don't know if Muslims, like Christians, believe that God moves in a mysterious way, but I suspect they probably do. 

 

So one assumes the more devout citizens of Lebanon were prepared to accept this as an explanation for why, one year ago, God allowed a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate stored at the (state owned) Port of Beirut to explode, killing over two hundred people and injuring many thousands more (not to mention causing extensive property damage and leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless).    

 

The blast was so big and so loud, that it was felt across the entire region and heard in Cyprus, more than 150 miles away. American geologists recorded it as a seismic event measuring 3.3 and it is considered one of the most powerful artificial (and non-nuclear) explosions in history.  

 

Obviously, the 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate shouldn't have been kept in a warehouse without proper safety measures - and alongside fireworks - for the previous six years. But, even so, God could've stepped in and stopped the disaster, if only he weren't so damn mysterious.

 

And the Lebanese officials who repeatedly ignored warnings could also have prevented the disaster, if only they weren't so corrupt and incompetent. 

 

Fortunately, apart from feckless politicians and an enigmatic deity, Lebanon is blessed with Hayat Nazer ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Born in Tripoli, this 33-year-old former UN humanitarian worker turned full-time artist, has produced a magnificent sculpture from the twisted metal and broken glass, thereby reclaiming the ruins and redeeming the suffering caused by the Beirut blast.

  

The untitled female figure stands nine feet in height, with her right arm raised and a stopped clock at her feet, showing the time of the explosion: 6.08. It is everything - and does everything - that Ian Rank-Broadley's statue of Diana, Princess of Wales, standing in the Sunken Garden of Kensington Palace, isn't and doesn't do.  

 

For whereas Nazer's piece embodies the gritty resilience of the Lebanese people, Rank-Broadley's symbolises the sentimentality and aesthetic awfulness that the British pride themselves on (one is only relieved that the children standing with Diana aren't all holding teddy bears). 

 

Finally, it might be recalled that Nazer has used debris in her art before; previous works include the figure of a phoenix made from pieces of the tents erected by protestors during the October Revolution (2019) which were destroyed by the authorities, and a heart-shaped sculpture assembled from rocks and empty teargas canisters, collected during clashes between protesters and the security forces. 

 

She's an idealist, of course; acting in the name of Love. And that's unfortunate and problematic. But she's also talented, courageous, and beautiful, so I'm prepared to overlook her philosophical shortcomings.

 

 

hayatnazer.com

 

 

Note: for an interesting article on Hayat Nazer and her work, by Fizala Khan, in The Kashmiriyat (1 Nov 2020), click here. 

 

 

And What are Chickens For in a Destitute Time?

Hühnergeist (SA/2021)

 

 

A sub-species of a good-looking bird from Southeast Asia known as the red juglefowl, chickens were originally reared for fighting or ceremonial purposes and there are numerous references to them in myth, folklore, and literature. Indeed, once upon a time, such sacred animals had greater divine status even than man and only they were worthy of sacrifice [1]. 

 

But then someone had the idea of eating them ...

 

And now they are reared and slaughtered in their billions as a cheap source of food and the intensively farmed chicken has just about the most miserable (if mercifully short) life of any bird on the planet - hardly a day goes by without some fresh horror being revealed (to a largely indifferent public). 

 

These intelligent and sensitive creatures are not just killed, but negated as beings in their very birdhood by the system within which they are enframed. That's what Heidegger meant when he suggested a metaphysical equivalence between mechanised food production and the manufacture of corpses in Nazi extermination camps [2]. 

 

And it's surprising, I think, that there are critics who still find this idea morally insensitive and/or philosophically absurd. What would it take, one wonders, to have them acknowledge the essential sameness that reduces all life - be it avian or human being - to raw material ...? 

 

To argue, like Žižek, that there is no malevolent will to humiliate and punish birds by the farmers - whereas this plays a key role in the treatment of prisoners prior to their murder - may or may not be true, but I don't see that intentionality alters anything; you still end up with a lot of dead chickens [3].

 

I can't help hoping that, one day, the spirit of these birds will come home to roost ... Then we'll understand that our destiny has never been separate from theirs [4].    

  

       

Notes

 

[1] See Jean Baudrillard, 'The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses', in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Farier Glaser, (The University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 129-141. The line I'm paraphrasing is on p. 133. Later in the text, Baudrillard develops this point and writes: 

 

"Whatever it may be, animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to an experimental dissection. Even domestication is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to industrial breeding." [134]  

 

[2] See Martin Heidegger's Bremen lecture of December 1949 entitled Das Ge-Stell in volume 79 of his Gesamtausgabe (1994). The English translation of this volume, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, is published as the Breman and Freiburg Lectures, (Indiana University Press, 2012), and the above text appears as 'Positionality'.   

 

[3] In other words, we should speak of impact rather than intention.

 

[4] Jean Baudrillard, 'The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses', Simulacra and Simulation, p. 133.   

What's-a-Matter Midge? (Hey!)

Midge Ure and Joe Dolce photographed in 1981 -

guess who has just scored the number one single

 

 

I.  Schadenfreude (n);  pleasure derived from another's misfortune or humiliation ...

 

I have to admit, it amuses me to discover that - even after all these years - singer-songwriter Midge Ure is still pissed off by the fact that Joe Dolce beat him and his synth-pop combo, Ultravox, to the number one spot in 1981 [1]. 

 

Let us remember the time, reminding ourselves (and explaining to younger readers) who the principle protagonists of this little drama are, beginning with one of Scotland's greatest musical exports ...

 

II. Midge Ure (He'll Love You Forever and Ever)

 

Midge Ure may now just be one of those talking bald heads who regularly appear in rockumentaries on Sky Arts and be better known for his charity work, but, back in the day, he was a flash young fucker from the outskirts of Glasgow, with good-looks, bags of talent, and responsible for some big hits in the '70s and early-mid '80s.

 

He started off as a member of Slik - who were a bit like the Bay City Rollers - and so impressed Malcolm McLaren that, prior to auditioning Johnny Rotten and giving him the job, Midge was offered the role of lead singer with the Sex Pistols in 1975. 

 

Obviously, he turned it down, but, two years later, he would link up with bassist Glen Matlock (after the latter was fired from the Sex Pistols and replaced by Sid Vicious), to form the Rich Kids, releasing the glorious pop-punk anthem Ghosts of Princes in Towers in August 1978. 

 

Leaving the band due to musical differences, Midge next formed Visage, along with Rusty Egan (who had also been in the Rich Kids) and Steve Strange on vocals. Their second single, Fade to Grey (1980), was another top ten hit written and produced by Ure.   

 

But, arguably, it's Ultravox with whom Midge is most associated and best remembered. Replacing John Foxx as the lead singer and guitarist in November 1980, he revitalised the group and ensured they had massive commercial success, including seven top ten albums and seventeen top forty singles, until finally disbanding in 1987. 

 

This included the title track from their fourth album, released as a single in January 1981, Vienna ...     

 

 

III. Austria 2 Italy 1

 

I have to admit, despite its haunting notes and pizzicato strings, Vienna means nothing to me - it's way too mystic and soulful for my tastes. 

 

But it's regarded by the people who do like this kind of thing as one of the finest examples of the new romantic synth-pop genre and became Ultravox's signature song; one which Midge proudly continues to perform to this day (even though, apparently, when he first heard the classical-sounding orchestration he was hesitant about its use in a pop song, fearing it might be a bit too much even for a band that was proud of its own grandeur).  

 

Vienna was one of the best-selling singles of 1981 and voted Single of the Year at the Brit Awards; it reached number one in Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, but it never made the top spot in the UK charts. Initially, Vienna was held in the number two position by John Lennon's Woman. But then, hilariously, Joe Dolce's comic masterpiece, Shaddap You Face, kept it there for a further three weeks.

 

Although known as a novelty record, the fact is people all over the world loved to sing along with Dolce's song (and still do). Not only did it get to number one in fifteen countries, but there have been numerous foreign language cover versions and the original single has sold over six million copies since its release. 

 

So hats off to Joe Dolce, an Italian-American-Australian singer-songwriter who is now highly respected as a poet and essayist. Maybe, one day, Midge will even agree to meet him - having turned down the opportunity to do so when in Australia a couple of years back - and the two will produce a song together ... I think that would be kind of nice.

   

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm basing this on recent press reports, including this one in the Scottish Mail on Sunday, by John Dingwall (18 Oct 2020): click here. 

      To be fair to Midge, I can imagine it would be irritating to be forever asked about Joe Dolce and subject to mockery throughout the last forty years - such as in this scene from the sixth and final episode of the BBC sitcom Filthy, Rich and Catflap (Feb 1987), featuring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson: click here.  

 

Discography: 

 

Slik, 'Forever and Ever', single released from the album Slik, (Bell Records, 1975). 

 

Rich Kids, 'Ghosts and Princes in Towers', single released from the album Ghosts and Princes in Towers, (EMI, 1978). 

 

Visage, 'Fade to Grey', single released from the album Visage, (Polydor, 1980). 

Ultravox, 'Vienna', single released from the album Vienna, (Chrysalis, 1980). 

Joe Dolce Music Theatre, 'Shaddap You Face', (Full Moon Records, 1980).

Readers interested in Midge Ure can visit his official site: midgeure.co.uk

Readers interested in Joe Dolce can visit his official site: joedolce.net

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

Fitzcarraldo Editions (2020) 

fitzcarraldoeditions.com

 

 

I.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

II. 

 

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

I, too, dislike it.

    Reading it, however, with a perfect

      contempt for it, one discovers in

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

III. 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

IV.

     

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

 

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

 

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

   

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

 

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

 

 

Notes

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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