Gilles Deleuze on D. H. Lawrence's Three Manners of Relating to the Sun

Enculage (A Portrait of Deleuze and D. H. Lawrence) 

(SA/2025) [1]

  

'Men should group themselves into a new order of sun-men ... 

walking each in his own sun glory, with bright legs and uncringing buttocks' [2]

 

 

I.

 

The first thing to say is that Deleuze's writing is not always easy to understand. 

 

Even the Google AI assistant admits that his work is difficult due to its density and the fact that he employs highly specialised language, makes numerous obscure references to other philosophers and disciplines, and rarely bothers to explain himself to the reader who is left to think through his esoteric concepts as best they can (filling in gaps and making vital connections as they go).   

 

However, as with other French thinkers of his generation, I think one is rewarded if one only makes the effort and puts the time in to read Deleuze, carefully, and with a certain generosity of spirit. Of course there will be times when he'll make you roll your eyes or sigh with exasperation, but so too will there be moments of joy and revelation.  

 

 

II. 

 

From November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze gave a lecture-seminar series entitled Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought. 

 

In the 14th of these seminars (there were fifteen in total), he discusses the two definitions of the body given us by Spinoza: one concerned with the relation of movement (i.e., the kinetic understanding of the body) and one concerned with the power of being affected (i.e., the dynamic understanding of the body) [3]. 

 

Half way through the seminar, however, Deleuze digresses in order to consider writers and artists who share an obsession with the sun and asks how their solar-infused thinking might connect to the work of Spinoza. 

 

One of these writers is D. H. Lawrence and it's Deleuze's remarks on Lawrence - someone he names along with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Artaud as a true heir to Spinoza (whether he knows it or not) - that most interest me here ...

 

 

III. 

 

According to Deleuze, the body is composed not so much of organs, but of an infinity of extensive parts: 

 

"These extensive parts belong to me according to a certain relation, but these extensive parts are perpetually subject to the influence of other parts which act upon them, and which don't belong to me."

 

So, to give a rudimentary example, skin is something Deleuze considers his and which forms an important part of his body. But the solar energetic particles that act as heat upon his skin are external forces. Skin cells might act "according to a certain relation that is precisely characteristic" of his body, but SEPs "have no other law than the law of external determinations". 

 

Whenever one exclaims 'I'm hot!' one is admitting that an external body (the sun) acts on one's own body. To perceive that one's skin is beginning to burn is to become conscious of the fact that one inhabits a universe that is not mind dependent or under human control (and that one really should've applied some additional sunscreen).   

 

Okay: so far, so straightforward; but also, so what? 

 

Well, according to Deleuze, this example allows us to gain a concrete understanding of what is meant by pantheism - a concept found not just in the work of Spinoza, but also in the writings of D. H. Lawrence; an author who "constituted for himself a kind of English pantheism" and promoted his own form of sun-worship [4]. 

 

Deleuze wants to know how sun-loving pantheists like Lawrence live and feel and he posits that there are, "generally speaking, three ways of being in relation to the sun" ... 

 

 

IV.

 

Firstly, there's the wrong way: the way of the majority of modern holidaymakers. Those whom Lawrence thinks vulgar and contemptible; those who lie naked like pigs on fashionable beaches: 

 

"He finds that these people live poorly. There you have his idea. It was also Spinoza's idea that people live poorly, and if they are wicked, it's because they live poorly; fine. They live poorly, they dump themselves onto the beach, and they understand nothing about the sun. If they were to understand something about the sun, after all, says Lawrence, they would come out of it more intelligent and improved." 

 

As soon as they put their clothes back on, they are as grey and as filled with bitterness as before; "they lose nothing of their virtues and vices". Essentially, they remain at the most basic and naive level of knowledge and think of the sun as no more than some kind of tanning machine in the sky; or something that "makes the thermometer rise!" [5].      

 

 

V.

 

The second manner of relating to the sun is one that is a bit more knowledgeable, though not merely in a theoretical or abstract sense; these people have a "practical comprehension of the sun" and, at the same time, they know how to compose the relations of their body in greater relation to the sun.   

 

Such a person might be a 19th-century still life painter who goes out into nature:

 

"He has his easel; this is a certain relation. He has his canvas on the easel; this is another relation. There is the sun, and the sun does not remain immobile. Fine, so what is he going to do? What is it that I’m calling this knowledge of the second kind? He will completely change the position of his easel; that is, he is not going to have the same relation to his canvas depending on whether the sun is high, or the sun is about to set." 

 

Van Gogh is a good example of such (even if he was eventually driven a little crazy by the sun) [6]. 

 

It was by being out in the elements and by lying on the ground in order to get just the right angle to paint the setting sun that Vincent learnt how to compose relations and raise himself to "a certain comprehension of causes". And it was only at that point that he could begin to describe himself as a sun-lover (i.e., one posessing a genuine affinity with the sun, even if it leads to madness). 

 

This is the second kind of knowledge; a completely different state from the one in which the holidaymaker tans his hide in the sun:

 

"Here, at the second level, there is already a kind of communion with the sun. Peruse Van Gogh's letters; it's obvious that when he is painting these huge red suns, it's obvious that this is what he is. Not that the sun is brought down to him; it's he who begins to enter into a kind of communication with the sun."

 

 

VI. 

 

And what about the third manner of relating to the sun and the third kind of solar knowledge?

 

It's here that Deleuze turns to Lawrence's poetry and fiction in which the sun plays a central role and there is what might be called in abstract terms "a mystical union" between man and sun.  

 

For Deleuze, this union with the sun is not a religious metaphor and nor is it a question of identification, even if it allows one to affirm the sun as God and to become a sun-man or sun-woman, opening like a flower before the sun and able to announce: 

 

I am that I am

from the sun,

and people are not my measure. [7]  

 

Deleuze notes that only when one attains this third kind of knowledge, does one arrive at this mode of intrinsic distinction. And as a result of this: "the rays by which the sun affects me are the rays by which I affect myself, and the rays by which I affect myself are the rays of the sun that affect me". 

 

In other words, it's a game of solar auto-affection - not identification; "the internal distinction between his own singular essence, the singular essence of the sun, and the essence of the world" is maintained in Lawrence's work. 

 

Reading Lawrence's late texts on the sun, Deleuze informs his students, "can trigger an understanding of Spinoza that you would never have had if you had stayed solely with Spinoza". Which is why, of course, in order to understand any philosopher - not just Spinoza - one needs to read literature and study art and "accumulate a thousand other things as well that have value by themselves".      

 

VII.

 

And so, in sum ...

 

Van Gogh has unique experience with the sun, as proved by his paintings; and from Lawrence's writings we learn that he too had "a special involvement with the sun" (one that we might describe as  libidinal paganism).     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Deleuze uses the term enculage to describe his preferred method of engaging with other authors. This is usually translated into English as buggery, though I think I would use the more contemporary-sounding (if more vulgar) assfucking:  

      "I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important to me to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." 

      Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans, Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 6. 

 

[2] Lines from Lawrence's poem 'Sun-Men', in Pansies (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1929), pp. 149-150. 

      I thought they not only anticipated the text to follow, but also related to the sun-drenched portrait of Deleuze and Lawrence above, bearing in mind the title (explained in note 1 above) and Lawrence's use of the phrase uncringing buttocks.

 

[3] Gilles Deleuze, 'Spinoza: The Velocities of Thought' (Session 14, 24 March 1981), transcribed by Sandra Tomassi and Madeleine Manifacier, augmented by Charles J. Stivale, English translation by Timothy S. Murphy (for Web Deleuze); augmented by Charles J. Stivale. 

      All quotations from Deleuze in this post are from this work as it appears online. Click here to read courtesy of The Deleuze Seminars project, which aims to translate into English Deleuze's seminar-lectures given at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis, between 1971 and 1987, and to make them freely available.     

 

[4] See my essay 'Sun-Fucked', which is available to read on James Walker's Digital Pilgrimage website under the title 'Sun-Struck: On the Question of Solar Sexuality and Speculative Realism in D. H. Lawrence' (14 Jan 2019): click here. 

      For those who don't fancy such a long read may prefer to see the two short posts published on Torpedo the Ark extracted from the above essay: click here and here.

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Oh wonderful machine!', in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 554. 

 

[6] See the post written on Van Gogh's ear and the dangers of sun-gazing (25 Jan 2014): click here.  

[7] See the poem 'Aristocracy of the Sun', by D. H. lawrence, in Pansies (1929), p. 152. 

 

 

Yellow Yellow Blue: Notes on an Exhibition by Megan Rooney

Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue (2025)

Acrylic, oil, pastel and oil stick on canvas

(200 x 152 cm / 78.5 x 60 in) 

Photo by Maria Thanassa

 

'You spend your life as a painter developing a relationship to colour and then 

testing the limits of that relationship. It’s radical, it’s ever-changing - 

it can submit to you and it can betray you. It always seduces, always excites.'  

                                                                                               - Megan Rooney

 

 

I. 

 

Sometimes you visit an exhibition because you know and admire the work of the artist and wish to be reassured of their genius and reconfirmed in the soundness of your past judgement and the continuity of one's aesthetic tastes.   

 

Sometimes, however, you visit an exhibition without any prior knowledge or formed opinion and in the hope that perhaps you'll discover something new not only about art, but about one's self ... 

 

And so to Thaddaeus Ropac, to see an exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Megan Rooney entitled Yellow Yellow Blue ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Probably it was the title of the show that first caught my interest: I like yellow and I like blue and in this body of work Rooney explores the chromatic territory that lies between yellow and blue (as well as the spectrum of green that emerges from mixing these two primary colours).   

 

Yellow I love for its emotional intensity (its joy, its vibrancy, its madness) [2]; blue for its profundity - for blue is the colour of the Greater Day and of the Void much loved by painters, poets, and philosophers; a colour which Christian Dior once described as the only one that can possibly compete with black, which remains the ne plus ultra of all colours [3]. 

 

But, having read the press release for the show, I was intrigued also to see how Rooney - said to be an enigmatic storyteller - manages to construct a dreamlike narrative indirectly referencing "some of the most urgent issues of our time" whilst also addressing "the myriad effects of politics and society that manifest in the home and on the female body" [4], simply by using colours, lines, shapes, and gestural marks on canvas in an almost entirely abstract manner.

 

For whilst I'm happy to accept that you can use purely visual elements to convey emotion or explore the formal qualities of painting as an art, I'm not entirely convinced (as a writer and philosopher) that you can adequately convey the kind of ideas mentioned above simply with such elements; ultimately, words - not colours - remain the primary tool for this. 

 

 

III. 

 

Located on the gallery's two floors, Yellow Yellow Blue presents pieces ranging from a dozen or so small works on paper (pretty enough, but not massively exciting) to large-scale (slightly overwhelming) canvases alongside a family of works in Rooney's signature wingspan format (i.e., equivalent to the full-reach of her outstretched arms). 

 

A bit like Goldilocks, I preferred these works; not too big, not too small, just right in size; for like D. H. Lawrence, I think it important that an artist acknowedge their limitations and the fact that they end at their finger-tips [5].

 

I liked the fact that Rooney clearly puts a LOT of work into what she does; constantly layering on paint, then sanding the works down and attempting to discover forms which might lie buried deep within the surface, before then slapping on more and more paint. 

 

By her own confession, Rooney often continues working on canvases right up until the opening; some seemed to be still wet in places and one could smell the canvases before even entering the room to view them - this was something else I also liked very much.   

 

Some works made one think of Monet and his water lilies and as I believe abstract impressionism is a thing, I don't think that's too crass or naive an observation [6]. Other works, because of their yellowness as an essential common feature, invariably made one think of Van Gogh. 

 

Still, as Rooney likes to talk of her paintings as having family connections - i.e., of being intimately connected to one another "as well as the lineage of paintings that precedes them" [7], I don't suppose she'll object to my seeing of similarities between her works and those of le dandy of impressionism and het gekke menneke of post-impressionism.  

 

 

IV. 

 

"Does anyone know, really, what a life is?" asks Emily LaBarge [8].    

 

As a reader of Deleuze, I suppose I could put my hand up and answer: Yes: a life is something inseparable from philosophy conceived in terms of pure immanence; something that has to be invented [9].   

But nobody likes a smart arse and I suppose it's essentially a rhetorical question - albeit one the answer to which just might lie in painting, according to LaBarge; an art form that captures something of temporal and spatial reality, even whilst painting does not quite belong to the same temporal and spatial reality of this world.  

Thus it is that: "As soon as we think we have identified something recognisable in [Rooney's paintings] - a copse of trees? a flurry of lilacs? a sunrise? a chimney? a rain-soaked evening? - it disappears ..."  

That's true - or at least, I think I know what Ms LaBarge means by this: All that is solid melts into light and colour, as Marx might have put it. 

 

The moment you grasp something concrete in Rooney's work, "it departs, skitters away, taking your heart with it, if only to throw it back to you [...] with the reminder that this image is also, first and formost, a painting: a made thing, worked and burnished [...] where luminous forms merge and fly like ghosts". 

 

And that's the beauty of abstract art; it doesn't just present on a plate like representational art - it gives, takes back, and gives once more - or, more precisely perhaps, it shows and hides and then shows some more in a provocative game of tease: It always seduces, always excites!

 

And if it fails to satisfy, that's arguably the point and it tells us something crucial not only about pleasure, but about the allure and withdrawal of objects in a way that a still life cannot.  

 

     

Megan Rooney photographed in her studio 

by Eva Herzog (2023)

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] Megan Rooney: Yellow Yellow Blue at Thaddaeus Ropac (London) 12 June - 2 August 2025: click here for details. 

      See also Megan Rooney's page on ropac.net: click here, or visit her own website: megan-rooney.com   

 

[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here. 

 

[3] I have written several posts on the colour blue in art and literature; click here, for example, for a post dated 1 April 2017 on Rilke's blue delirium; or click here, for a post dated 2 April 2017 on the work of Yves Klein.  

 

[4] From the exhibition press release written by Nina Sandhaus (Head of Press, Thaddaeus Ropac London).  

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 1985). pp.191-198. 

      Lawrence argues that every man or woman - artist, philosopher, poet, or scientist included - ends at their own finger-tips and that this is a simple, but profoundly vital, truth. We may draw sustenance and stimulation from outside ourselves - from sights and sounds and smells and ideas, etc. - and these may allow us to change, but it's the living body upon which these things act that remains the most important. 

      Rooney appears to share this view, which is why she (mostly) likes to keep her canvases roughly 200 x 152 cm in size; i.e., in relation to her own reach, her own body. Thus, as it says in the gallery's press release: "The body has a sustained presence in Rooney’s work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her [...] practice."   

 

[6] Abstract impressionism is an art movement that originated in New York City, in the 1940s, the term apparently being coined by the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning and then popularised by Louis Finkestein (initially to describe the works of Philip Guston). 

      I'm not sure Rooney would wish to be associated with the term, but there is something lyrical in her canvases and although resolutely abstract, her works "contain fleeting suggestions of recognisable forms [...] ladders, beehives, clouds, trees, skies and tombs weave through the exhibition, like fugitive glimpses of a half-dreamed world". Again, see the gallery press release by Nina Sandhaus available to download from the Thaddaeus Ropac website.

 

[7] Nina Sandhaus, press release for Yellow Yellow Blue.  

 

[8] Emily LaBarge, 'Like the Flap of a Wave', written for the catalogue to Megan Rooney's exhibition Yellow Yellow Blue (Thaddaeus Ropac London, 2025). All lines quoted in this section of the post are from this text unless stated otherwise. 

      The title of the piece refers us to the possibility that if you squint hard enough and long enough at Rooney's large canvases you might just imagine, as LeBarge did, "Virginia Woolf's London as described by her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, on a fresh morning in spring [...] when everything seems [...] to be happening all at once, the past and present kaleidoscoping in a work of art".      

[9] See Gilles Deleuze, 'Pure Immanence: A Life', in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, Intro. by John Rajchman, trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2005). 

 

 

For a follow up post to this one - 'More Yellow, More Blue!' (29 June 2025), please click here.    

 

 

Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo

 

SJ Fuerst: Crab (2025) [1]

Oil paint on stuffed PVC toy, mounted on oil painted board

 

And a crab one afternoon in a pool, / An old crab with barnacles on his back, 

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him. - T. S. Eliot [2]

 

 

I. 

 

I know that, as a rule, crabs are not as fascinating to artists as lobsters [3]; as evidenced, for example, by Salvador Dalí's surrealist telephone (1936) and Jeff Koons's stainless steel sculpture (2007-12). 

 

But when, as a child, I went to the seaside for the day, I enjoyed searching for the former on the beach and will always remember coming across a large crab living (or perhaps temporarily sheltering) inside an old paint can, with his thick shell, ten legs, and large pincer claws that he waved in warning when I tried to get hold of him. It was an encounter 200 million years in the making and it made a real impression on my young mind.   

 

And so, I have a fondness for crabs - even whilst conceding that lobsters have a philosophically richer (and more perverse) symbolic history. I was pleased, therefore, to see that SJ Fuerst has got a new work currently on display entitled 'Crab' (see image above) ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Executed in her usual fine style with contemporary materials, Fuerst's work has been inspired in part by the decapods frequently depicted in Roman frescos and mosaics; one thinks, for example, of Cupid, the winged god of love, riding on the back of a harnessed crab [4].

 

Whether Fuerst also had in mind Van Gogh's oil painting of two crabs, thought to have been made soon after his release from hospital in Arles in January 1889, I don't know [5]. 

 

However, judging by the title of the exhibition - The Rabbit Hole Collective #1 - I'm guessing she had a more literary point of reference; namely, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  (1865); readers may recall the old and young crabs that gather on the shore of the pool of tears [6].   

 

 

III.

 

Whatever crab one chooses to reflect upon - be it real, fictional, or a plastic inflatable - the Spanish approve. They even have a popular expression to explain to foreigners that a siesta is not merely an opportunity to idle the early afternoon away after lunch, but, rather, allows time to contemplate important philosophical questions and think about the immortality of the crab ...

 

This sounds humorous, but our poets recognise the importance of such metaphysical daydreaming: José Emilio Pacheco, for example - regarded as one of the major Mexican poets of the second half of the 20th century - understood that the beauty of the crab lay in its ability to eternally return as ruler of the beach, despite the fact that crabs make up over twenty per cent of all marine crustaceans caught, farmed, and consumed worldwide by human beings, amounting to 1.5 million tonnes annually.

 

In the opening stanza of a short verse, Pacheco writes:

 

Y de inmortalidades sólo creo 

en la tuya, cangrejo amigo.  

      Te aplastan, 

te echan en agua hirviendo,  

      inundan tu casa. 

Pero la represión y la tortura 

de nada sirven, de nada. 

 

The English translation in Selected Poems (1987) is given as:

 

Of all the immortalities, I believe in

only yours, friend crab.

      People break into your body, 

plop you into boiling water, 

      flush you out of house and home. 

But torture and affliction 

Make no apparent end of you. [7]

 

Which is really just as well, for as the Spanish writer and philosopher Miguel Unamuno once said: If the crab should ever die in its entirety [i.e., become extinct], then we too will die for all eternity ... [8] 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This is one of three works by SJ Fuerst currently being exhibited at il-Kamra ta‘ Fuq (Mqabba, Malta) as part of a show entitled The Rabbit Hole Collective #1, curated by Melanie Erixon. The exhibition runs from 25 April until 11 May, 2025. 

      For more details please click here, or visit artsweven.com. See also my post of 13 April 2025 on artistic and philosophical rabbit holes: click here.

 

[2] T. S. Eliot "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", in Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (Faber & Faber, 2002). To read online via the Poetry Foundation, click here.

 

[3] See the post entitled 'Lobster Variations (I - IV) (7 Feb 2021): click here. 

[4] This work, from Pompeii, is now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples: click here. 

      Whether this playful image is intended to suggest love's triumph over power is debatable, but I rather suspect it is. That's irritating enough, but even more annoying is how the Ancient Greek god of primordial desire, Eros [ἔρως], is infantalised and reduced to being no more than a chubby little cherub; whilst the mighty figure of Carcinus [Καρκίνος] - the giant crab who inhabited the lagoon of Lerna and battled with Heracles at Hera's command - is tamed and turned into a pet on a leash. 

 

[5] Van Gogh was probably inspired by a woodcut by the Japanese artist Hokusai which featured in the May 1888 issue of Le Japon Artistique, sent to Vincent by his brother Theo in September of that year. Van Gogh's canvas, simply titled Two Crabs, can be found in the National Gallery (on loan from a private collector): click here for further details.

 

[6] See chapter 2 of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). 

      Alice also encounters crabs in chapter 5 of Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and seems to be fond of them: 'I should so like to see a little crab to take home with me!' That's exactly how I felt as a seven year old on the beach at Southend.

 

[7] See José Emilio Pacheco, 'The immortality of the crab', in Selected Poems, ed. George McWhirter, various translators, (New Directions Publishing, 1987), p. 163. 

      Usefully, this is a bilingual edition, so one can check and modify (if need be) the English translation of the Spanish text (although I made no such modifications here, I have to admit I was very tempted to do so).     

 

[8] See Miguel de Unamuno, Inmortalidad del cangrejo [The immortality of the crab]. This poem - along with Pacheco's verse - can conveniently be found on the Wikipedia page devoted to the idea of thinking about the immortality of the crab: click here.   

Wheatfield with Crows and Drones

Vincent van Gogh: Korenveld met kraaien (1890) 

Oil on canvas 50.5 x 103 cm 

Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)

Many people like to believe that Wheatfield with Crows captures the violent turmoil of Van Gogh's mental state at the time and that it was the final canvas he produced; i.e., a picture painted a year-and-a-half after the Xmas ear cutting incident in Arles, but only moments before he shoots himself in the chest with a revolver in Auvers-sur-Oise, a commune on the outskirts of Paris, in the summer of 1890.

 

But that's a cinematic fiction invented by the makers of Lust for Life (1956); a biographical film directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Kirk Douglas as everybody's favourite Dutch artist (although it was Anthony Quinn who won the Oscar for his performance as Gauguin).  

I don't know why he shot himself - dying in bed a couple of days later - but it wasn't due to his annoyance with the birds and, as a matter of fact, he finished several other works after completing Wheatfield with Crows [1].  

However, as I've said many times, people believe what they want to believe, particularly if their Romantic version of events has been reinforced by a Hollywood movie. And the fact remains that this elongated double-square canvas is rightly regarded as one of his greatest works, albeit one weighed down by critical interpretations of a depressingly predictable and simplistic psycho-symbolic character.

 

 

II.   

The above is intended as art historical background to the work I really wanted to comment on; Ai Weiwei's playful (yet deadly serious) reimagining of Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows using coloured interlocking plastic toy bricks, or what most of us now generically refer to as Lego [2]. 

 

Replacing some of the crows of the original painting with far-more menacing drones, Ai Weiwei has produced a powerful comment (I'm guessing) on the war in Ukraine; a country known for its pale golden wheatfields and its strategic use of advanced aerial technology for the purposes of reconnaissance, surveillance, and precision strikes against Russian targets, transforming modern warfare and battlefield tactics in the process.  

As the press release for his new show at the Lisson Gallery (London), puts it: "This transformation highlights the ongoing relevance of historical artworks, revealing how they can serve as mirrors reflecting our current societal challenges." [3]

I think that's probably true, although I'm less convinced by his claim that an individual life can be conceived metaphorically as a building brick, or, indeed, as a series of pixels belonging to the digital plane, but that's something to be discussed another day ... 

 

Here, then, is Ai Weiwei's reworking of Van Gogh; along with a close-up to allow a better view of the brickwork in detail:   

 

Ai Weiwei: Wheat Field with Crows (2024) 

Toy bricks (WOMA) 320 x 160 cm  

Lisson Gallery

 

 

Notes

[1] Van Gogh's letters indicate that Wheatfield with Crows was completed around 10 July 1890 and predates such paintings as Auvers Town Hall and what is probably his final work, Tree Roots. He died on the 29th of July. 

[2] As pretty much everybody in the world knows, LEGO is a brand of plastic building blocks that snap together to create models of objects, manufactured by the LEGO Group; a Danish company founded in 1932. Whilst the LEGO Group actively discourage the use of the word 'Lego' as a generic term for any interlocking brick toy, it is, of course, commonly used as such in everyday language. 

      For the record, the bricks used by Ai Weiwei in his work are manufactured by Woma Toys; a Chinese company that produces custom designed building blocks.     

 

[3] This press release, written entirely by Chat GPT4 at the artist's request (apart from a few clarifications and the insertion of quotes taken from an unpublished text in which Ai Weiwei explains how Lego bricks allow a new method of artistic creation), can be found on (and downloaded from) the Lisson Gallery website: click here. 

      Photos of works included in the exhibition - Ai Weiwei: A New Chatpter [sic] - can also be found on the gallery's website. The show, which opened on 7 February, runs until 15 March 2025.

 

 

Reflections on 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I. 

 

The American author and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) is perhaps best remembered today for a (semi-autobiographical) short story written after she suffered a severe bout of postpartum psychosis and first published in 1892: The Yellow Wallpaper ... [1]

 

 

 

II. 

 

The (possibly unhinged and certainly unreliable) narrator is a married woman who keeps a journal. Her husband, John, is a doctor and "practical in the extreme". 

 

By this she means: 

 

"He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures."

 

Rightly or wrongly, she resents the fact that he will not believe she's physically unwell and blames him for thereby retarding her recovery. And, to be fair, I can see how this might be troubling. 

 

For it's bad enough when one's useless GP insists there's really nothing wrong. But when one's own spouse - who just happens to also be a physician of high standing - "assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression", that must be really maddening. 

 

And when one's own brother - also a highly respected doctor - concurs that one is simply exhibiting signs of a slight hysterical tendency ... Well, it would be enough to make anyone want to scream and tear at the wallpaper (whatever the colour or pattern). 

 

It's an unfortunate fact that doctors and others working in the healthcare professions, are often not what one might expect or hope for. And experience over recent years has taught me to be wary of accepting their diagnoses and prescribed treatments. 

 

And so I'm sympathetic to the narrator of Gilman's story; even if, as I say, she may be unreliable on occasion and a little too romantic and overly sensitive to queer vibrations for my tastes (sometimes, a draught is just a draught and you really do just need to close the window).  

 

And I do see that John is a patronising and paternalistic prick; I wouldn't want to be married to him, that's for sure.     

 

As for the wallpaper:

 

"I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. [...] The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."

 

I know a lot of people dislike wallpaper: and I know a lot of people hate the colour yellow - although I'm not among their number and have, in fact, just painted my kitchen in a lemon zesty colour full of enough sunshine to make Van Gogh proud [2].  

 

Still, she has a point: one should be happy - or, at the very least, not unhappy - in one's domestic surroundings. 

 

And it's wrong of her husband to laugh at her about the wallpaper. Just as it's wrong not to appreciate that Wilde was perfectly serious when, lying in his wretchedly furnished Paris hotel room, he declared that he and his wallpaper were fighting a duel to the death: One or the other of us has to go.

 

The fact that Wilde died shortly afterwards proves that home furnishings can have a malevolent - even fatal - influence on our lives and that aesthetics deserves to be taken very seriously as a branch of philosophy. 

III.

 

Like the narrator, I also used to lie awake as a child and extract a mixture of terror and entertainment out of the objects of my little bedroom. She remembers how kindly the knobs of a big old bureau were, whilst I remember the scary faces and figures made of leaves that appeared in the curtains - and that returns us to the yellow wallpaper:  

"This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn’t faded, and where the sun is just so, I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to sulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design." 

 

Despite this, the woman grows very fond of her room; in spite of the wallpaper, or perhaps - somewhat perversely - because of the wallpaper: "It dwells in my mind so!" She spends many hours trying to follow the pointless pattern:

 

"There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit." 

 

She particularly dislikes it at night, when the moonlight shines on the undulating wallpaper and gives her the creeps: 

 

"The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move [...]" 

 

Her husband tells her to go back to sleep and not be silly. But she doesn't. Instead, she lies there in the darkness "trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately". 

 

If the colour of the paper is bad enough, it's the pattern - with its purely random design that seems to change depending on the light and time of day - that really tortures her mind:

 

"You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in following, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you." 

 

In the end, she decides the female figure she sees behind the pattern is a prisoner; trapped and desperate to escape. And she determines to learn her secret, even if she still can't stomach the yellowness of the wallpaper which makes her think "of all the yellow things I ever saw; not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things". 

 

Oh, and did I mention the paper's unique smell: 

 

"I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair." 

 

"Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad - at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather it is awful. I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house - to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell." 

 

 

IV.

 

And so, we approach the end of Gilman's remarkable tale ... and the narrator's further descent into madness. 

 

She decides, for example, that the pattern of the wallpaper really is moving; that the trapped woman is making it move as she crawls around and shakes the bars of her prison, desperate to break out. Unfortunately, "nobody could climb through that pattern - it strangles so".   

 

But, having said that: 

 

"I think that woman gets out in the daytime! [...] I’ve seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. [...] I see her [...] creeping along, and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines. I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!" 

 

Finally, there's only one thing for it - she has to strip the paper off the walls: 

 

"As soon as it was moonlight, and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper." 

 

The next day, when alone in the house, she attempts to finish the job, keeping a rope close by just in case the woman gets out and requires restraining. But peeling off the paper isn't easy and she grows increasingly angry and frustrated. She also now totally identifies with the woman and believes that she too has emerged out of the wallpaper:   

 

"I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. [...] For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way."

 

At this point, her husband John comes home and discovers her creeping around the room:

 

"'What is the matter?' he cried. 'For God's sake, what are you doing!' I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder. 'I’ve got out at last,' said I [...] And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!'" 

 

In horror and despair, her husband collapses: 

 

"Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!" 

 

Is that final line a triumphant assertion of female agency and independence - or the confession of a lunatic? 

 

Maybe both: I don't know. 

 

But I do know Gilman's work fully deserves the multiple readings from many different perspectives that it has had over the last 130 years. H. P. Lovecraft was not wrong to recognise it as a classic tale which powerfully (and cleverly) delineates the madness which can overtake any one of us (whatever the colour of our wallpaper) [3].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I am reading (and quoting) from Gilman's tale as published in eBook form by Project Gutenberg in 1999. Click here to read free online.  

 

[2] See the post 'How Beautiful Yellow Is' (1 May 2024): click here. 

 

[3] See H. P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', a 28,000 word essay published in The Recluse (1927): click here to read on the H. P. Lovecraft Archive. 

 

Thanks to Síomón Solomon for suggesting this post.

 

How Beautiful Yellow Is

 

Vincent van Gogh: The Yellow House (1888) 

Oil on canvas (72 cm x 91.5 cm)

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 

 

Apparently, yellow is not a popular colour amongst 21st-century Europeans and Americans who, when surveyed, placed it way behind blue, red, and green. In fact, more people named it as their least favourite colour than their best-loved.

 

That surprises me, as I've always liked the colour yellow and all the things that are coloured yellow; from stars to sunflowers, ducklings to daffodils. 

Painters too have always had a thing for yellow and it was one of the primary colours used in prehistoric cave art; the yellow horse of Lascaux was painted 17,000 years before Franz Marc gave us his famous blue horses. 

 

If the English Romantic painter Turner was one of the first 19th-century artists to use yellow to suggest moods and emotions, it's the great Dutch post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh who is probably the painter most associated with the colour. 

 

During his period in the South of France (1888-1899), Van Gogh celebrated yellow in all its shades, from pale lemon to bright sulpher yellow. He even famously lived in house painted yellow and - it is believed by some - once attempted suicide by consuming yellow paint.

 

I don't know if that's true; and nor do I know if Van Gogh suffered from a rare medical condition - xanthopsia - which can alter perceptions of colour and give the world a yellowish glow. I doubt it. And I prefer anyway to think that Van Gogh, who was well-versed in colour theory, simply loved yellow for its emotional intensity (its joy and vitality). 

Perhaps, in the end, too much yellow - like too much sunlight and too much reason - can become overwhelming and end in madness. But a world without yellow would be immensely poorer and duller. 

 

And so that's why I'm going to paint my kitchen yellow ... 

A Lick of Yellow Paint 

 (SA/2024)

 

On D. H. Lawrence's Sandals

D. H. Lawrence's sandals 

Manuscripts and Special Collections, 
University of Nottingham

Photo: D. H. Lawrence Society (2019)

I.

There's an interesting post on the D. H. Lawrence Society website, by Kate Foster, concerning Lawrence's favourite footwear; namely, a pair of primitive-looking, thong-style sandals of tan coloured leather, that he either picked up on his global travels, made for himself, or was gifted by his friend Earl Brewster.

Well, I say interesting, though, as a matter of fact, I have no interest, personally, in a pair of old shoes held in the Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham as if they were a bona fide religious relic; i.e., the personal effects of a saint.

For whilst Lawrence's books certainly deserve to be read with close critical attention and his astonishing achievement as a writer should be acknowledged, he was no saint or person deserving of religious veneration and the way we show our indebtedness to singular individuals like Lawrence is - as Zarathustra teaches - by losing them and finding ourselves; not by attempting to follow in their footsteps or by putting (proto-hippie) footwear on display in a glass case.  

II.

Having said that, there's no denying that shoes are, of course, objects of great cultural significance (and, for some, fetishistic fascination). They are not simply worn to cover or protect the feet and allow us to walk about more easily. They are worn also as indicators of class, gender, and identity and tell us something about a person's values, tastes, and even sexual preferences.   

So the fact that Lawrence chose to wear sandals is, I suppose, not without interest; they betray his bohemianism, for example, and the fact that he loved to go a little bit native when in sunny foreign climes.   

And, I suppose, if one wanted to get a bit Heideggerian, one might suggest that Lawrence's sandals have something of the same aura about them as a pair of Van Gogh's boots; they enable us to genuinely encounter a shoe as a shoe. That is to say, as something worn and rich with life and equipmentality - that primordial modality of existence via which we are intimately involved with the world.

In other words, when we reflect on Lawrence's sandals, we are obliged to ask not only what are they made of and where did they come from, but what is their purpose and what world do they open up and belong to ...

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.