Day 13 – Plant Thought, Tree women, Surface, and Hospitality
We started off looking at the phenomenon of non-human horror (continuing from our discussions of Thacker last week), noting a progression(?) from the plant horror of the 50’s (with summer reading recommendations of Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think, available as a free ebook andaudiobook along with Aldiss’ Hothouse, and John Cristopher’s Death ofGrass). There seems to be a general shift in horror: Plants –> Giant animals –> vampires –> zombies –> robots (?).
We had a great presentation, which explored the question of subjective participation and objective distance, drawing connections between Ulysses’ famous participation-by-passivity in his being tied to the mast of the ship to hear the sirens. Without objective distance, there is death. This moved into Kohn’s How Forests Think, which seeks to expand the “anthropological” outside of the anthropos. Some kind of articulation of thought is generally the divisional line between human and non-human things, but humans are always thinking within their contexts…as do animals…and forests. And this connects into the flower maidens in the Alexander legend: they exist in a network, but most notably, a closed network, where the observer is also a violation. What does it mean that their production is regenerative? And carrying into Dindimus, what gives him the ability to separate himself enough to analyze his own culture and relate it to Alexander? How is this correspondence possible? Or any, for that matter, in the case of these colliding networks of enclosure/meaning?
There is a problem of representation and interrogation in the Alexander stories, in which all beings are rendered as signs which one must know, or, bring into one’s own system of meaning, a further appropriation that underscores that of the material appropriation of plants that Micheal Marder explicates in Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. But there’s a problem here in that we are understanding action as performative, and performativity as linguistic (There was a Barad reference here, that I’m unread on). But essentially, it seems that this problem boils down to interaction as performativity or object-orientation, the space in between which plants seem to lie.
We started talking about challenging Harman’s withdrawal (dark, deep, cavernous, whatever) to a withdrawal that is withdrawal because of its surface-ness. McCracken’s reading of the flower-women, which can be downloaded here, leaves off (or adds, thus leaving off) something important in its translation of the Middle French, which adds that the women have the “form of a [human] body.” But no, actually, they have “des cors la figure,” that is, of the body a figure, or the figure of a body, which is even weirder, a body purely made out of its figuration, out of its surface.
And then the discussion of Alexander and Dindimus, in which Dindimus acts in the mode of standard medieval asceticism, withdrawal from the world, but is here doing so because he is rendering himself as part of the world. Hereis the question of what constitutes the human: Dindimus is more human because he is with and in the world, and Alexander defends his humanity on the basis of his ownership and “cultivation” of it. But Dindimus isn’t actually one with the world–what he wants is total distance from it, to be in the anthropological “outside,” inhabiting objective distance from the world and a distance from obligation. And also the problems of representing a king, as in MS. Bodl. 264 fol. 215r
