The English Garden Effect

Phyto-Performance, Plant Practices  & Vegetal Thinking

 

 

Caring for plants, or less patronisingly, concerning oneself withplants, in the practice of gardening say, might be to stray as far as one could imagine from an ‘Abandoned Practice’. Matthew Goulish some years ago in a wonderful performance with Goat Island called The Sea & Poison, was already tending to a runner bean, seeded on top of his head, well before I was thinking about what I have come here to say.

 

Certainly coming from the mouth of an Englishman the proposition that plantsmight offer us some insights to the abandoned practices that provide our frame for the coming three weeks might seem wholly contradictory.

 

We all know the English love their gardens, but more empirically, last year there were 86,000 people on waiting lists for an allotment, a modest plot of land to grow vegetables and flowers, in the UK. But in keeping with the original wellspring of this project, in the work of the philosopher and historian of science, Isabelle Stengers, one could perhaps make an argument for the reconsideration of plants along the following lines. Stengers encourages us to take seriously and resists a phenomena that she calls: eliminativism. We have chosen to give another name to this, Abandoned Practices and Endangered Uses, but what might such words mean in this vegetal context?

 

The first question Stengers always asks is: how can an event, such as this for instance, be correlated to the need and concern for ‘unity in struggle’ or the ‘production of the common’ as she calls it? Hers is a fundamentally political question at all times. For Stengers thisproblem of struggle, and you can add here struggles that you are absorbed by, should be addressed in materialist terms, as practicalones, not as a problemthe solution of which must be conceptually grounded and warranted. The plausibility of this idea may be related to the past polemical use of the concept of practice, when it was mainly in charge of the elimination of any transcendent source of authority, but was not a matter of interest or concern as such. This allows us not to ‘see’ the systematic destruction of practices, or of commons, as part and parcel of the power of capitalist expansion that both conditions that expansion, and feeds it.

 

The challenge, which Stengers deems to be a materialist challenge, is that whatever the mess and perplexity that may result, we should resist the temptation to pick and choose among practices – keeping those which appear rationaland judging away the others, tarot-card reading, for instance, or here vegetal practices, that might at first sight appear bucolic or romantic, or most dangerously for political purposes, utopian. The need for such a resistance is something naturalists have already learned, when learning to avoid judging animal species as either useful or pests, and as we will see, how botanists have sometimes but not always been able to avoid the presumption that something green, doing some mass-excluding across a vegetable patch, is a ‘weed’. This does not mean that some animal species or plants cannot be considered as destructive or dangerous. In the same way, some practices may well be considered intolerable or disgusting. In both cases, the point is to refrain from using general judgmental criteria to legitimate their elimination, and to refrain from dreaming about a clean world with no cause to wonder nor alarm.

 

Becoming able to take these questions seriously is connected to the challenge Stengers presents to us. Issues like ‘vulnerability’ and ‘protection’ were once a central part of practices the destruction of which has consensually signified the coming into adulthood of humankind, leaving behind superstitions and what was described as ‘belief in supernatural powers’. Is it not the case, indeed, that capitalism is exploiting to its own advantage any trust we may have in a conveniently settled perspective, turning it into an opportunity for new operations? Is it not the case also that conveniently escaping a confrontation with the messy world of practices through clean conceptual dilemmas or eliminativist judgments has left us with a theatre of concepts the power of which, for retroactive understanding, is matched only by their powerless-ness to transform? Stengers does not claim we should mimic those practices, but maybe we should allow ourselves to ‘see’ them anew, and wonder again.

 

Struggle must obviously be distinguished from the academic war games conducted around so many versions of what can be called ‘eliminativism’, but we will call abandonment. Stengers’ point here is not about what we know, and what we do not know, or refuse to know. Her point is that as soon as materialism is identified with eliminativism – with elimination of certain practices as an achievement in itself, accompanied by the proud opposition between those who ‘believe’ (you and me) and those who ‘know’ (bad scientists) – the connection with struggle is lost. It becomes a matter of mere rivalry for a very disputed title: who is the thinking brain of humanity?

 

Today, the relevance of such resistance has become a matter of public and political concern. Together with the wide protest and renewed struggle against the rapacious commercial development of Genetically Modified Organisms, it is the conception of living beings that dominates contemporary biology that has been turned into a stake in the dispute. The issue is not only the risks of biotechnology, or the problems of bioethics, or even patents, but the very mode of production ofscientific knowledge, with the certainties of laboratory biologists silencing those colleagues who work outside of the lab and ask different and perplexing questions.

 

The great voice of Vandana Shiva has been raised, consistently and under duress raised not only against bio-piracy and the privatization of life forms but also against the abstract definition of those life forms that is exhibited in the project of modifying them at will. In her work Staying AliveShiva writes in terms reminiscent of the eliminativist critique of Stengers: “I characterise modern western patriarchy’s special epistemological tradition of the ‘scientific revolution’ as ‘reductionist’ because it reduced the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding other knowers and other ways of knowing, and-it reduced the capacity of nature to creatively regenerate and renew itself by manipulating it as inert and fragmented matter.”It would be a catastrophic mistake, I believe, to recognize the importance of Vandana Shiva’s struggle against capitalism, but to associate her protest against the paradigm of contemporary biology with words like holistic, traditional or romantic. Hers is a call not for ‘an other science’, but for a relevantscience, a science that would actively take into account the knowledge associated with those agricultural practices that are in the process of being destroyed in the name of progress. I will call this a Plant Sciencein about an hour’s time at the end of this talk

 

The thesis I am defending – that materialism should divorce from eliminativism in order to connect with struggle – does not deny that elimination may have been utterly relevant when it entailed struggling against the allied powers of state and church, for instance. Today, by which I mean Wednesday July 11^th, however, the situation has changed. Elimination has become the very tool of power.It is not only a tool for capitalism, but also for what I would call: ‘bad science’.

 

OK, so that is some context for what I am going to say over the coming hour within a frame marked Abandoned Practices.

 

Phyto-centrism would in light of this marginalisation describe a project, and an opportunity, for something to happen by way of a small correction. At the very last one could say that as represented in a Botanical Garden such as this, surrounded by the City of Prague, Phyto concerns are by their nature defined by a degree of marginalisation to the city itself. But the degree to which a city inevitably asphalts over its Phyto past is rather obvious and we should attempt to deepen our discussion here between ‘city versus country’ binaries. The word ‘country’, in English of course comes from the Latin word Contra, meaning against something. In this sense it was only with the invention of the city that anyone cared to notice what the city was set against, it was set against something else that became called country, after the event of the urban you could say.

 

More interestingly than these binaries, Phytointerests, from the Greek word for ‘things that grow’,have most recently been championed by the Russian philosopher Michael Marder, in his book Plant Thinking. Phyto-thought you could call it, has been common to the Literary and Philosophical imagination and, well, vigorously spreading its tendrils, since Plato. It is now relevant to the philosophy of a number of thinkers whose broad interest is in vegetal life, a decentring of the human from plant perspectives, among whom the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work on the Rhizome would be the most obvious example. But that casually metaphoric use, and some might say philosophical and interpretiveabuse of plants,is not where I intend to take us in this talk either.

 

Rather, in thinking about some of our performanceconcerns: movement,awareness of the surrounding world, and life itself, we do not tend to associate withplants. We perhaps, if we think of them at all, think of plants ‘shrouded in obscurity’ to quote Thomas Aquinas. We perhaps fail to recognise ourselves in plants. And thus, plants provide us, perhaps unwittingly, with a welcome short-circuit in the anthropocentric machinery. That is the machinery that ceaselessly compares us with other animals and having found comparisons wanting, co-opts other animals in ourinterests for our instrumental ends. It is, perhaps therefore, a good thingthat we do not recognise ourselves in plants. I would stress here that this talk will have failed if you think what I have been promoting is an appetite to cast, to draft inplants to performance, to squeeze them for their pips, to mimic their movement or to transplant their roots.

 

But, I would suggest at the outset here, that a fresh approach to movement, to surroundingsand to life itself, might be recognised in plants if we look and listen carefully enough. And that might not be such a bad thing when we seek ways of performance that can draw upon abandonment for their nourishment. And that is why I offered you the modest challenge of finding your way here today. We are especially grateful to Vera Hroudva of the Botanical Institute who is hosting our visit and has kindly agreed to walk us through this magnificent experimentalsetting when I have finished speaking. As we go some of you might keep an eye open for performance opportunities in this landscape, as Vera and her colleagues are not averse to the possibility that one or two of you might wish to return over the coming weeks to seed something in this location. And others of you might wonder whether the last thing plants need is more performance, they might have had quite enough already. Ascertaining how we might gauge such a thing could be one of the challenges we take up here.

 

Just so we can check some of our zoological bias at the door, movement itself immediately throws up some problems for thinking phyto-centrically. Our ideal movement we might though have to admit at the outset, isan animal movement, by which I mean, wehave the capacity for locomotion. The whole rhetoric of human disability with regard to movement is based upon just such a spurious norm. In saying this, and celebrating human locomotion over other movements, we forget that plants move at their edges, their leaves, at their centre, their stem, and indeed, most voraciously, underground. Growth itself, though in its own time and always patient compared with our pre-emptive leaps and impatient spasms, is a kind of movement. Indeed, 2000 years ago, Aristotle included metamorphosis under his category of movement.

 

Image: Occupy

 

The human ‘ability’ to locomote, has when you think about it, impoverished some other things that we might do differently should we abandon locomotion: the possibilities of political protest for instance. Occupy showed this most forcefully at Zucotti Park in New york, at St Paul’s in London and elsewhere. A political movementno longer perhaps needs to demonstrate its presence by marchingthrough the streets but perhaps as with Occupy, puts down roots, demonstrates its curious, plant like capacity for vitality by growing and decayingat the same time. This has long been known in the most mainstream theatrical forms as well as the most politicised. Indeed they are sometimes the same when in as curious a work as Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahomais, you have the magnificent song ‘The Farmer and the Cowhand Must Be Friends’. A song that in one sentence sums up the historic tension in the Americas between those who travel for sustenance, the cowhand, and those who remain in one place for sustenance, the Farmer.

 

Thus the Occupy movement could be thought in just such a plant-like way, growing and decaying simultaneously. It is perhaps not wholly coincidental that the current uprisings in Turkey against authoritarian power began its life in another park, Gezi Park. You could say that the awareness of the environment of plants, within which this action arose, allows the protestors to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. An awareness of the environment is obvious in the ways that plants orientate themselves, if self is not too centred a term or a dispersed plant, despite lack of specialised sense organs. “What do plant’s know”, you might well ask? Well they are obviously responsible for complex decisions which might imply at least sophisticated knowledges. It would be absurd to evoke higher or lower forms of awareness since animals’ ways of knowing are quite different. Comportments are complex in the plant and I sense we might have largely abandoned such comportments at a certain point in our evolutionary history.

 

That said, it should be remembered that the life of plants arevirtually inaccessible to our senses. Plants were placed between dead things and living things in the classical orders for this reason. Logic does not allow philosophers to think life and death at the same time for instance, one of the extraordinary capacities of plants that we take for granted at our peril. An animal dies instantaneously, dead, or not dead, alive, as it is an integrated identity, whereas a plant can live anddie at same time. A lizard can shed a dead skin but this is an unusual zoological capacity for simultaneity. The troubled history of what is described somewhat inaccurately as a persistent vegetative state, for those such as Terry Schivo suspended for years between life and death requires medical practice and the law to legislate in the end on an ‘appropriate momentof death’ with the switching off of a life support apparatus.

 

So, while we might not be able to recognise ourselves in plants we perhaps, should be able to recognise the vegetal inside us. The otherness of vegetal life in us is a good antidote to anthropomorphism, we should begin here to recognise something of the plant in US, not us in them.

 

Image: Lascaux Laughing Man

 

The sustainable development of the earth relies on this inversion, of course. The assumption that it is up to human beings to sustainis deeply presumptuous. There is a grain of truth in this as humans have the most widespread impact on earth. But it is a delusional arrogance that it is humans that should be sustaining the earth alone. To be sure, as I will hope to make clear when I talk about weedsin a moment, plant life is, really, quite negligibly dependent on us. The possibilities of life lie elsewhere. What difference does it make to our thinking if we begin to consider that, compared to the significance of plants for the biosophere, human stewardship of the earth is almost superfluouswhen in our human centred realities we think we are the most essential. Early cave dwellers understood this marginality of humans, they pictured the first human in Lascaux as shamed by their separation from other species who were ‘like water within water’, to borrow Georges Bataille’s phrase.

 

There is an inequality in the sustaining and the sustained. Vegetable life, plants provide material sustainability, but there is ideal sustainability when the most superfluous being, the human declares, themselves central, the most essential thing imaginable. Material sustainabilities are thus preserved behind a veil of metaphysical abstractions, which bedevils the environmental and the ecological cause.

 

Are relations of instrumentality between humans and plants as straightforward as this? Do we just use plants? Do they use us? Is there feedback in this looping influence? Well, as Michael Pollan made clear in his book and film, The Botany of Desire, we work on the plants’ behalf without realising it. Where would the humble potato be if it had not been exported from the corners of the earth, by people not unlike us? Honey bees exploit the human love of sweetness. They make sense as part of a evolutionary framework. We perhaps largely overlook the subtle ways plants determine ourbehaviour.

 

Phytocentrism thus halts the anthropocentric urge of humans, that is for us to situate ourselves as central to a biosphere which got on quite well before us. The decentred nature of plants themselves then poses some interesting questions for us in performance. By putting plants in the centre do we not repeat anthropocentrism. Well not exactly, as they, plants that is, are not unified organisms. It is difficult to tell where a part of the plant begins and ends, it is difficult to pinpoint identity in vegetal life. The truth of the matter is that to place the plant at the centre of our life is to decentre the centre, the centre implodes along with the penumbra.

 

Remarks thus far are the background of Plant Thought in its most general sense, but what is Plant Thinkingaccording to the philosopher Michael Marder?

 

Well, in his recent book Plant Thinkingthe productive ambiguity of Phyto interests can be found in the term itself. It is a term that could refer to 4 different things, which I will take as the structure for my talk today:

 

Image: List

 

Plant Thinking:

 

1. Concerns non cognitive non imagistic, thinking without the head
2. Concerns human thinking about plants
3. Is interested in how human thinking might be dehumanised
4. Seeks to establish and explore symbiotic relations between this kind of thinking andplants

 

A sound philosophy of vegetal lifemust be based on all four of these coexistent features.

 

Image: 1. Thinking without the Head

 

So, one: thinking without the head. How are we to allow ourselves to be transformed by Plant Thinking?

 

There are some family resemblances between plant thinking and other ways of approaching things that we might already be familiar with.

 

1. Plant thinking is Nature thinking. The profession of a ‘love for nature’ often sounds suspect. When we are truly worried about something we do not generalise we specify. We do not say we are worried about: ‘plants in general’. That is not to say we should not remain open to the larger picture, but plants supple a specific point of reference and provide an experiential point of entry to our concerns for nature. Why do plants link with nature? Plant thinking is nothing but the meditation on this word From the early philosophical work of Plotinus this refers to growth, growing beings, and in this sense you might remember you, we, are growing too. Nature was, for the Greeks, the ability to grow. Phuto the plant and Phusis Nature. So, what is the connection? The Greek understanding of Nature which is alive and well in the West today suggests that plants are the mirrors of nature, they are growing beings. Plant Thinking isnature thinking.

 

2. Plant Thinking is thinking as such. The Greek for plant, Phutoshares the root of the word for ‘nature’ and ‘growth’, but also for ‘life’ and ‘force’. The plant is a movement of growth that comes out to light from the moist darkness of the soil. ‘Nature loves to hide’ as Heraclitus once said, it never fully dispenses with obscurity. The root is in the darkness of the soil when it is not exposed to theatrical lighting as was that runner bean on Matthew’s head in The Sea & Poison. What does thinking have to do with this? These movements from growth to light give us a clue perhaps? In western philosophy the move from unconscious to conscious has been consistently portrayed as emergence from darkness to light, the myth of the cave was one example of such depths to heights deployed by Plato. Philosophers such as Hegel saw this link and the ‘vegetable human’. Here we have a kind of movement into the open into the Light that strive to do away with obscurity. Plato and the European Enlightenment thinkers want a ‘transparent thought’.

 

3. But, caution, for to take Plant Thinking from its obscurity would be a violent displacement and deracination of the plant and would lead to nothing worthwhile. Metaphysical philosophy wants to move us from this obscurity. If we are to attune to the insights of plant thinking then this would not be sustainable. The relation of Plant Thinking to Platonism and Enlightenment is invidious. The search for a brighter sun would threaten to return us to the dark ages. The repression of darkness threatens to disconnect us from our roots. Freud is a great antidote to this metaphysical tradition, he was clearly aware that you could not do away with this obscurity. However much we try we will not bring all to the surface, Freud would be sensitive to plant thinking. Freud’s insistence that sexuality be recalled at the centre of human morphology is to recognise this.

 

It is not for philosophy to establish relations between philosophy and plants. In Botany there are culture wars amongst a group of researchers who research plant intelligence and others who do not accept any such thing is possible. Rather I would like to ask here today: What can philosophy learn from botany and botany from philosophy? And how might performance relate to both? Plant thinking demarks this ‘in between’ space. Out of the crooked timber of humanity as Kant said, no straight thing can ever be made. Perhaps it is time now for philosophy to think beyond the human, but also beyond anthropocentrism.

 

To do this the second part of this talk will explore some human thinking about plants. In doing so, without losing sight of what I am saying, in this part I would like you to stay alert to ‘how’ I am saying it. If you want to be precise in your record of my phyto anxiety, my flora fear, you could keep a tally of my anthropomorphising, my giving human identity, to plant species as I proceed. I will get progressively worse as I proceed:

 

2. Delinquent Growth: Biological Expansion and Ecological Imperialism

 

Let us look at human migration between Europe and the Neo Europes as Alfred Crosby calls the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Tens of millions of Europeans left home and went to the Neo Europes where they reproduced voluminously. Very few indigenous peoples of the Americas, Australia or New Zealand ever went to Europe and had children there. This is not surprising as Europeans controlled overseas migration, and Europe needed to export not import labour. But other species reflect this flow and direction as well. But there were three particularly strong species that didprosper: weeds, feral; animals and pathogens. I will concentrate on the weeds here, though the part viruses play in this disproportionate development deserves its own session in a following Abandoned Practices Summer School as immunologyis one of the most critical figures of our current historical moment.

 

Of those weeds, the ‘tramps of our flora’ as Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker called weeds in 1864, were placed all the flora that lay beyond science. ‘Weed’ was not a scientific name, in botanical use the word simply describes something that spreads rapidly and outcompetes others on disturbed soil. Weeds can morph from one side to the other of this categorical divide: Rye and Oats were once weeds, now they are crop plants. And in the other direction both Amaranth and Crab Grass, both once crops treasured for their seeds, have both been demoted to weeds in the 20^thcentury (though Amaranth is making yet another come back during this decade).

 

Are weeds while in that category always a torment to everyone? No, indeed Bermuda Grass, once one of the most irrepressible tropical weeds, was extolled a century and a half ago as a stabilizer of levees along the lower Mississippi at the same time that farmers not far from that river were calling it Devil-grass. Weeds are not good, or bad, they are simply the plants that tempt the botanist to use such anthropomorphic terms as aggressive and opportunistic.

 

So not all weeds by our definition are obnoxious, but those that plague farmers tend to get the most attention and our statistics for those weeds are plentiful. Sixty per cent of the farmland weeds in Canada are European. Of the 500 equivalents in the US 258 are from the Old World, 177 specifically from Europe. The total number of naturalised plant species in Australia is about 800 with the majority coming from Europe.

 

This onslaught from Europe troubled American naturalists for more than a century, though most of those naturalists were of the same origin as the plants in question, and few if any really understood the significance of their spread. Something approaching an equal exchange of weeds between mother Europe and her colonies, or at least something in proportion to the sizes of their floras, is what most nineteenth century scientists expected. Indeed it was what we would expect: Old World Crabgrass for American Ragweed for instance. But the exchange has been as one sided as that of human beings. Hundreds of Old World weeds packed up, weighted anchor, set sail for the colonies and prospered there, but the American and other Neo European plants that crossed in the other direction died, unless given special quarters and pampering at homes for phyto exotica such as Kew Gardens.

 

Some naturalists muttered obscurely about the greater plasticity of Old World plants. Meaning what? Vulnerability? Others talked about European flora having the advantage over American flora because of being older, and still others because of its being younger. It was as though there was some invisible barrier as one botanist in the nineteenth century put it. Joseph Dalton Hooker referred to it as: “this total want of reciprocity in migration”.

 

Beyond these nationalistic squabbles, let us consider why weeds in general do so well, and where and when. They reproduce rapidly and in great quantity. Mayweed, one of those the writer and traveller John Josselyn recorded in seventeenth century New England, produces 15000 to 19000 seeds in each generation. Many weeds reproduce not by seed or not by seed alone, but from bulbs, pieces of root, and so forth. Wild garlic, a bane of wheat farmers in colonial north America propagates in six different ways. It is no wonder that weeds are so difficult to eradicate and can reproduce in solid masses. To cite two examples, Broadleaf Filaree in the San Joaquin Valley has been found in concentrations of 13,000 young plants to the square metre, and Fescue up to 220,000 per square metre.

 

Weeds are very efficient at getting themselves and especially their seeds distributed. This is essential because 220,000 plants in one space are their own worst enemies. Some weeds produce seeds so light, down to 0.0001 grams, that they float with any movement of air. Some, like Sow Thistle and Dandelion, provide their seeds with sail like filaments to further their travels down wind. Other weeds produce seeds that are sticky or have hooks to grab fur and clothing to hitchhike to new places. Others produce their seeds in pods that dry and explode, flinging their seeds out and away.

 

Weeds are very combatative. They push up through, shade out and shoulder past rivals. Many spread not by seed as much as sending out rhizomes or runners, along or just below the surface of the ground, from which ‘new’ plants sprout. Plants like this, Crouch Grass for instance, can advance in solid mats, smothering every plant in their way. The leaves of weeds often grow out horizontally, pushing back and supressing all vegetation. The dandelion, a bright spring flower in all the Neo Europes, is such an efficient usurper that a large one can produce a bald spot a third of a metre across on a lawn, bare except for its own expansive self.

 

And why aren’t weeds covering the globe? Because they can survive almost everything, but success. As they take over disturbed ground they stabilize the soil, block the baking rays of the sun, and for all their competitiveness make it a better place for other plants than it was before. Weeds are the Red Cross of the plant world, they deal with ecological emergencies. When the emergencies are over they give way to plants that may grow more slowly but grow taller and sturdier. In fact, weeds find it difficult to elbow into undisturbed environments, and they will usually die out if disturbance ceases. Weeds thrive on radical change, not stability. That in the abstract is the reason for the triumph of European weeds in the Neo Europes. Weeds were crucially important to the prosperity of the advancing Europeans and Neo Europeans. The weeds, like skin transplants placed over broad areas of abraded and burnt flesh, aided in healing the raw wounds that the invaders tore in the earth. The exotic plants saved newly bared topsoil from water and wind erosion and from baking in the sun. And the weeds often became essential feed for exotic livestock, as thee in turn were for their masters. The colonising Europeans who cursed their colonising plants were wretched ingrates.

 

So, that is the historical and neo colonial context of the weed in motion and perhaps appropriately given its subject matter it is a history that is riddled with anthropocentric assumptions. To link parts 2 and 3 of this talk, Thinking about plants, and Can human thinking be dehumanised via plants?, we could ask a different question of the weeds. One that is inevitably prone to misunderstanding so strange s it seems. The question is: Could we hear them if we listened hard enough?

 

While walking later in this garden we will experience a whole symphony of sounds: the chirping of birds, the soft rustling of the breeze in the leafs, the flowing of water in a creek… In the midst of this rich acoustic ensemble of organic and inorganic nature, the plants themselves appear to be silent. As French poet, Francis Ponge simply expresses this in “Fauna and Flora,” “they have no voice”, ils n’ont pas de voix. Ponge’s statement, confirmed by our experience of a promenade in a forest, is so obvious, and yet so far from the truth!

Indeed, besides the audible sounds from plant leaves and branches as raindrops touch them or the wind sways them, plants generate their own cacophony of sounds mostly emitted at the lower and higher ends of our audible range, hence making them very difficult or simply impossible to detect by our ears. Some of these sounds are thought to be the incidental by-products of the abrupt release of tension in the water-transport system of plants following cavitation (formation of cavities in liquids), particularly in drought-stressed plants. But many others are not caused by cavitation disruption, and in fact, recent evidence now indicates that plants generate sounds independently of dehydration and cavitation-related processes. We do not know how plants produce all of these acoustic emissions, or whether the latter contain any information for other plants or organisms, and, finally, what message they convey, if any. Yet, the fact remains that plants do have their very own “voices,” to which we are only beginning to attune our performance, scientific and philosophical ears. In trying to discern these voices, we ought to be careful not to overwrite them with the sounds that are familiar, let alone pleasing, to us. Although the “music of plants” conveys, in a very palpable way, the sensitivity of these living beings, it robs them of their own voice.

Our attempts to register the subtle movements of plants fall into a similar predicament. Time-lapse photography can speed up vegetal growth to such an extent that its rhythms would match those of the human consciousness. Some of the earliest experiments in this photographic technique involved plants, and Aristotle’s notion of growthitself as a kind of movement found its empirical beginnings. As a seedling germinates, for example, the elongation of its stem is accompanied by rotation around its own axis (the so-called “nutational movement”). Imperceptible in real time, stem nutation can be, to some extent, synchronized with the human perception of mobility thanks to a technological mediation that breaks down, spaces out, and recomposes the temporality of our experience.

Nonetheless, filmic alteration of the plant’s own rhythms, made to coincide with that of human temporality, is not free of violence that takes place whenever alien frames of reference are imposed on a given form of life. If we are to believe Heidegger’s thesis that the meaning of being is time, then denying the plant its own timeamounts to robbing it of its being. It also elides the potential of testing our own patience, which we will come to.

To return to auditory perception, the temptation to translate everything in the world into musical scales has a long history. It permeates the history of Western thought, from the ancient “music of the spheres,” meant as an auditory expression of divine harmony, to Schopenhauer’s transposition of the musical scale and instruments onto the metaphysical hierarchy, with the basses representing crude materiality and the strings making audible the highest aspirations of spirit. Consequently, actual beings are idealized as so many notes in the score of Being. Those who truly heed the phenomenological injunction “Back to the things themselves!” will have to listen to—and hear—the things themselves, without drowning their voices in ideal musical harmonies.

Francis Ponge was the poet of such possibilities and I quoted him earlier. To complete this section and move to the next it might be good to listen to one of Ponge’s poems in their entirety.

The Blackberries

OK, so part three of my talk refers to how human thinking might be further dehumanised but with very special attention being given to just one example of the human aestheticisation of vegetal life.

3. Plant Order: The English Garden Effect

 

I want now to move onto the frictions occur when plant thought is thought within material limits. Hence, our visit to this place today. This is a sensitive area when it comes to a discussion with North Americans for who Henry David Thoreau spanning the nineteenth century created such an image of ‘virgin nature’. As he wrote in The Maine Woods: “This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever.” Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916, p. 78

 

Well, Thoreau detested gardens, the geometric garden was anathema to him, he celebrated those who burnt fences on behalf of the forest. Thoreau’s deep intelligence understood that paradise was always ‘paradise lost’, his was a reaching for nature in its wholeness not in its picturesque, aestheticised scenery. But it is precisely that scenery I want to develop now in the third part of this talk which has the title: The English Garden Effect.

 

The title comes from a short story by the American writer Walter Abish, who in turn borrows it from a verse by the language poet: John Ashbery. In that story Abish writes: “Remnants of the old atrocity persist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts of scenery, a sort of “English Garden” effect to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope.” I am interested in what such an English Garden Effect might mean for us here, as artists, outsiders, visitors, to this place, perhaps looking for a way to work in this very place that eschews the opportunistic occupational mode of the site specific, and thinks itself into site in a more responsive and responsible fashion?

 

In Abish’s short story, an American writer visits Brumholdstein, a German new town built on the site of a former concentration camp. The writer carries with him on his visit a child’s colouring book and some pencils. There are some in your pack. For an interview he is finding out how the local citizens have familiarised, neutralised and reified both the past and their present worlds as well. The narrator, this writer says: When one is in Germany and one happens not to be German one is confronted with the problem of determining the relevancy and to a certain extent the lifelikeness of everything one encounters. The question one keeps asking oneself is: How German Is it? And, is this the true colour of Germany?”

 

Gardens have been more or less abandoned in the art historical and aesthetic canons. I have just completed a book called Theatre in The Expanded Fieldin which I pick up this peculiarity but with a specific art historical focus that I hope you won’t find too limiting in this bounteous setting. I take Rosalind Krauss’s famous essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field as a framework for that book. The essay was written in 1979 making Krauss’s name, almost immediately, and illustrates how during the rise of sculptural minimalism towards the end of the modernist epoch, certain works were produced precisely to contest and expand the traditionally constituted limits of sculpture. At stake were some dichotamies that had articulated previous artistic production: for instance monumentality and sitlelessness, the built and the unbuildable, site specificity and the nomadic. The last could perhaps be summed up again, with reference to that famous song in Oklahoma, the farmer and the cow-hand must be friends. The one who farms, rooted in place sowing seeds is at odds with the cattle steer who travels.

 

Image: Krauss Grid

 

Attempting to portray all possible terms of this expanded sculptural field, Krauss constructs a mind boggling analytic grid that circumscribes all the logical and phenomenological possibilities of sculptural construction. The terms of the primary grid shown here are defined by ‘landscape’, ‘architecture’, ‘not landscape’ and ‘not architecture’. The expanded grid proffers meditations of these terms: landscape and architecture are mediated by ‘site construction’; ‘landscape and not landscape’ by ‘marked sites’, architecture and not architecture by ‘axiomatic structures’ and not landscape and not architecture by ‘sculpture’.

 

Krauss adds: “Though sculpture may be reduced to the neuter term of the not-landscape plus the not-architecture, there is no reason not to imagine an opposite term, one that would be both landscape and architecture – which within this schema is called the complex. But to think the complex is to admit into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibited [abandoned?] from it: landscape and architecture.” (Rosalind Krauss, S in the Ex F, 1979.)

 

The fact that the conjunction of landscape and architecture should be used to expand the sculptural in a mode defined a site construction presents an intriguing categorical irony. For there is indeed no reason as Krauss suggests ‘not to imagine an opposite term – one that would be both landscape and architecture.’ But this term need not be imagined or renamed as it already exists, as landscape architecture, a synonym for garden in its full aesthetic and structural complexities. Of such a complex, constituted by the mediation of landscape and architecture Krauss claims: “Because it was ideologically prohibited, the complex had remained excluded from what might be called the closure of post-renaissance art. Our culture had not before been able to think the complex, although other cultures have thought this term with great ease. Labyrinths and mazes are both landscape and architecture. Japanese gardens are both landscape and architecture.” Ibid

 

But Zen gardens are dry gardens, esoteric and precisely sculptural to our eyes, they cannot ne entered and natural growth is kept to a minimum, while what might be added and what might be removed is strictly constrained by sculptural protocols. They are the most obviously sculptural of gardens and give a clue as to what constitute gardens in the modernist Eurocentric sense of that term.

 

Image: Field

 

The reason that it is structurally impossible for gardens in their full scope to appear in this schema is because gardens are precisely the existential ground of the schemaitself. This is even tacitly suggested in the very title of Krauss’s article, where one would only need to replace the metaphoric expanded field with a field, by which I mean a more or less green thing, in order to thematize the problem here. The field itself cannot be included in the grid precisely because it is tantamount to the grid. It is the dissembling, rich ambiguity of the term field that epitomises the problem of contemporary landscape architecture: the exclusion, the abandonment dare I say it here, of the gardenis necessary for the very sculptural specificity of the grid. For to include the gardens in this field would entail the collapse of the entire grid and the consequent conflation of its constituent terms with their very ground, thus obviating the usefulness of the categorisation.  Whence the need for ‘site construction’, which is more than mere circumlocution: it sets limits to a group that necessarily restricts its component works to something lessthan gardens. In parallel the category landscape is inadequate to the complexities of landscape architecture.

 

My interest in this particular semantic grid is extreme because what it excludes or displaces necessitates recognizing the garden as a principal site of heterogeneity. The exclusion of gardens as a term in this diagram is explicable because of all the modes of sculptural production, only that of landscape architecture can serve as the inclusive, if not totalising site of aesthetic heterogeneity – as its ontological ground. The physical existence of the expanded field would thus be equivalent to the garden.

 

To thus ground the expanded field would be to place the garden within a paradigmatic position, as a ‘total work of art’, a gesamt-kunstwerkas Wagner called it, which is another way of thinking the complex. A paradigm, or perhaps an apparatusas we will move onto in a while. To rethink the garden in this manner, increasingly polymorphic, polyvalent and equivocal, might well explain the historic exclusion of landscape architecture from the fine arts, precisely due to its potential role as the unstated site of heterogeneity itself, as the syncretizing site of all sites.

 

Therefore the expanded sculptural field must in turn be problematized by considering the virtual field of the garden as the heterogeneous ground that permits the direct confrontation, conjunction and recombination of the disparate elements of this grid, establishing sites no only for sculpture but for the other arts as well. What is critical in this kind of work is its dialectical nature where the significance of every term depends upon the existence of all other terms, and where each category is transformed as it is situated within the garden complex.

 

The Gesamt-kunstwerk was thematized at the same time as synaesthesia in the mid nineteenth century. That is the neurological condition in which stimulationof one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. And since the 1950s at the very least and the concerted actionof 1952 at Black Mountain College the possibility of such aleatory combinations of art forms has been prevalent in performance thinking. As Krauss was resisting at all costs the idea of the totalising, the idea of the totalising garden had to be kept from view, you could say abandoned or at least excluded when it might have been most useful. We are recovering it here in our own small way. Indeed from the Renaissance on the garden is both spectacle and stage, existing simultaneously as an artwork in itself and as the site of the representation, conjunction and synthesis of all the other arts. My own work on Inigo Jones between 1610 and 1640 where I work at Somerset House in London bears this out, but larger still the gardens of Versailles the creation of which was a collaborative effort between the king and his gardeners, sculptors, hydraulic engineers, surveyors were the site of vast festivals combing all the arts into a grandiose spectacle of royal inspiration and divine right.

 

We are constantly reminded that the garden is not merely a visual spectacle, as the abstract theorisation of so many art historical studies focused mainly on design would seem to suggest. Rather the aesthetic logic of the garden necessitates and instantiates a synaesthetic melange of all the senses, guided by a specific, highly symbolized use-value, and culminating in an aesthetic experience that is greater than the sum of its sensory, sensual, symbolic and historic parts. It is this richer experience, combining art and magic, fascination and observation, history and mythology that offers a model for understanding the limits of landscape architecture, baroque in dynamism and complexity, classic in formalism and elegance.

 

Throughout the twentieth century the notion of what constitutes landscape architecture was problematized by the subversion, ironic or otherwise, of the genius loci. The debate is typical of the avant gardewhere every practical and theoretical limit is contested: no sooner is a limit set than it is transgressed in word or work. One might imagine that fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology could no longer be legitimately avoided in the history and theory of landscape architecture: yet the discourse of this domain has, for the most part remained impervious to much of the theorisation that has informed the other arts.

 

Modest in practice but daring in conceptual reach the works themselves better describe landscape architecture at this fecund moment.

 

Image: Psychogeography

 

The radical situationist analysis of urbanism based on the notion of psychogeography established a libidinal/political critique utilising mental cut ups of the city scape. Here the botanist of the asphalt and the asphalt itself came into question.

 

Image: Ian Hamilton Finlay

 

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden of Little Sparta in Scotland proferred the prototype of conceptual gardens including a quasi militarist sculptural presence that both comments on the symbolic history of the French formal garden and demands a reconception of the relations between myths of nature, power and art.

 

Image: Hans Haake

 

While Hans Hake stated the obvious, in his wonderful work, Grass Grows, of 1969

 

Image: Michael Snow

 

Michael Snow’s film La Region central (1970-71) consisting of 190 minutes of the camera rotating nearly 360 degrees at different speeds and different focal lengths during day and night in an empty Canadian wilderness – alternately transforms the scene into both static landscapes and lines of abstraction.

 

Image: Michael Heizer

 

Michael Heizer’s transformation of the ha-ha, a ditch cut from the ground to protect the country house from grazing cattle without interrupting the view from the house of the landscape, into art work in his trench-like incisions redefine the word landscaping.

 

William Furlong

 

While William Furlong takes the same conceit, of the Ha Ha, and sutures it with the garden, in his work of 1993, The Garden: HA HA.

 

Image: Mark Dion

 

As does Mark Dion’s A Meter of Jungle, rationalise the undergrowth in an equivalently mock empirical fashion.

 

Image: Ana Mendiat

 

Ana Mendiat’s body imprints in the earth examined notions of femininity and traditional earth symbolism.

 

Erik Samakh

 

Erik Samakh’s ultra minimalist and ecologically sensitive trompe l’oreille sound installations, utilizing recorded and displaced natural sounds in garden environments offer models of minimal intervention and ambiguous significance.

 

Kutlag Ataman

 

One very recent work deserves some special recognition here for Kutlag Ataman’s video installation at Tate Britain, The Four Seasons of Veronica Read. Special for me perhaps simply because my mother’s name was Veronica Read, and she was someone, who widowed very young when my father died before I was born, did not have the excess available to her that the subject of Ataman’s great film, Veronica Read, lavishes on an apartment full of the same species of plant.

 

Image: Avital Geva

 

And lastly and bridging me to my last section of this talk, there is the work of Avital Geva whose Greenhouseproject of 1977-1996 deploys the material and form that best connects the human centric and phyto-centric tensions that have run through this talk

 

As a brief conclusion to the vast variety of contemporary landscape transformations and constructions, interventions and interferences, fantasises and follies, one further trope from the myriad available to us in this totalising work might be judiciously mined here, and that is the use of glass in the landscape – not glass that decorates, frames, magnifies and focuses, all functions of representation, but glass that traces marks signals and signs. For it is the case that we both see and see according to a work of art, if the garden is both artwork and site, then the use of glass, with its variable and alternating transparency and reflectivity, offers an appropriate allegory for the history of gardens – especially in the light of the expanded notion of the garden s a syncretizing field.

 

Part four of my talk explores an on-going symbiotic relation between this kind of thinking andplants

 

1. Plant Science: Atmospheres of Democracy

 

OK we have taken plants in general, and plants specifically, gardens in general and gardens specifically. We have taken plants for themselves and aestheticized plants. But could we combine these movements in the short colonial history of the glass house and the emergence of what I would like to call Plant Science?

 

If plants remind us of anything it is of the power to wait, both the ability to wait, and the capacity to let others wait. Hence the dissatisfaction I expressed earlier with the clichéd time lapse photography associated with plant growth representation. The Pitch Drop Experiment running for 86 years at the University of Queensland during which time only eight drips have fallen from the pitch in the glass vessel, would be nothing if it was more responsive to the needs of the news and its schedules.

 

Democracy could be said, or at least Peter Sloterdijk said it, to be based on a proto architectonic ability to build waiting rooms, and perhaps glass housesare just the antithesis of such things. Yes they allow humans to wait for plants, but their controlled environments represent a strategic quickening of natural growth.

 

In the first to decades of the nineteenth century English garden architects started creating houses, not unlike the ones I am showing you close to my home at Kew Gardens, that were hybrids of glass and cast iron dedicated exclusively to housing a population of extremely sensitive plants. It is well known as Peter Sloterdijk points out, that this marked a clear caesura in the history of building. The first so called hot house initially obeyed only the principle of whim, because the prosperous inhabitants of the British isles indulged in the imperialist caprice of declaring their country a place to which plants that were sensitive to the climate could immigrate. If one here could be accused of politicising the fate of plants it would surely be in the spirit of Bruno Latour’s encouragement to expand the collective.

 

The immigration of plants to Europe in the nineteenth century can be read as a pattern for a new politics of trans human symbiosis. The engineers concerned themselves with the problem of climatic structures in light of the contradictions of polar radiation quite some way north of the equator. The invention of bent glass helped them decisively in this regard as did the introduction of prefabrication based on standardised elements. The latter was technology eminently suited to enabling the erection of large scale ensembles in a very short space of time, consider the adventure of Crystal Palace which despite it being by far the largest structure built to date of its type took just 10 months to build.

 

Only gradually did nineteenth century minds grasp the paradigmatic significance of constructing glasshouses. Such edifices took into account that organisms and climate zones reference each other as it were a prioriand that the random uprooting of organisms to plant them elsewhere could only occur if the climatic conditions were transposed along with them. The Imperial Englishman had of course noticed that some of the most beautiful plants had the irritating habit of only wanting to flourish under non British skies, and some creative thinking was necessary if one wished to welcome these gusts to the British Isles. If for instance you really want to make a Palm Tree unhappy, then force it to spend a winter in England without the protection of an artificial sun that shrouds it in its native climate. British politeness excluded this ugly hypothesis and instead enabled the mass immigration of palms form an early date by creating a new type of building, namely the palm house, something that to this very day could be considered one of the most beautiful achievements of world architecture.

 

Wherever we now encounter such buildings, (be they the classical palm houses of Kew or the neighbouring greenhouses for Victoria Regia, that most famous of water lillies) we likewise encounter the materialization of a new view of building by virtue of which climatic factors were taken into account in the very structures made. Modernism in architecture has always also implied the transition of the climatic into the age of its explicit presentation and production. Architecture responds with its means to a new form of mobility that now includes not only human and animal movement but also plant migration as we saw with the survey of weed mobility earlier.

 

Following the initial breakthroughs in devising an elaborate system for harbouring plants alien to their local climate, it was to be another two to three generations before theoretical biology responded on the conceptual level to the new practices of uprooting plants. It bears considering that it was the aforementioned exercise of granting plants hospitality that first created the conditions under which it became possible to formulate the concept of environment. Environment began its modern life not just thinking of the natural habitat of plants (and animals) but also for the procedures for the technical reproduction of that habitat in alien surroundings. It was initially this reconstructiveimperative that we have to thank for the fact that a general concept of the environment was formulated. From the historical viewpoint the destructive imperativewas no less significant, because modern warfare (such as commenced with the introduction of gas as a weapon in Ypres in April 1915) was likewise based on the insight that the enemy’s environment, the space occupied by him or by her, could be destroyed.

 

This link between propagation and extermination was brought home to me as we moved this Greenhouse across London as part of the recent Plant Scienceinstallation where I work at King’s College in London. In the spirit of the pursuit of Abandoned Practices I have been working over the last two years identifying a series of sites across the King’s College campuses in central and south London, that have either been marginalised, closed down or as in the case of  the Plant Science building at 62 Half Moon Lane, plain forgotten. For twelve years a building that had once been a jewel in the University’s portfolio, the home of the Nobel Prize winning pharmacist James Black, had been left to deteriorate. On the eve of the destruction of the building we moved into the deserted spaces to recognise a plant history in this extraordinary place, itself a plant,dedicated to plant sciences.

 

We built the resulting installation in the neo classical Inigo Roomswhere I run the Performance Foundation, just off the Strand and a minute from Covent Garden, an appropriate name for this talk, around the most evocative of the recovered items. For instance the Hartley 10 Glasshouse, that you will find on page 10 of the catalogue, that was drawn up for the disposal and sale of the premises in a public auction. The disposal and auction was of course a performative conceit, there was never going to be a sale despite the many requests we had to buy the variety of beautiful objects that we put on display.

 

The Catalogue you have is bulging with paraphernalia, apparently outmoded devices, anachronistic shells of what we could call again endangered uses. The poignancy of this motley collection is the tension it does not so much display, as revealto the curious eye willing to spend some patient time within its bric a brac jumble, that is a tension between the purpose and focus of much of the research that took place within this long abandoned building and a critical need that the world faces now that should these very props to survival not have been discarded as so much waste might have inaugurated a critical recovery of the great homeopathic traditions. With synthetic drugs routinely now failing to better proliferating, and ever mutating viruses, the pharmacognosy movement that James Black led within this centre, under the curiously emphatic title of ‘Plant Science’, was one that had natural cures drawn from herbal remedies at their heart. At the time this highly unfashionable resistance to the speed of chemicals, an organic approach to healing that required extraordinary patience in both experimentation and deliberation, simply lost out in the empirical race for funding against quick fit chemical solutions that has now been exposed as so many quack delivery systems that bacteria have so speedily out manoeuvred pharmaceutical companies who are themselves returning to the very pharmacognosy principles developed by Sir James Black and his team in this building.

 

The installation of these abandoned practices did not have a hint of pedagogy or didacticism about it, but were rather built upon three practiced, comportments to learningthat suited both the human studying the plant and the plant being studied by the human. These were the Laboratory Bench, the Glass House and the Propagation Bed. Perhaps there would be worse places to finish this talk dedicated to Phyto Performance that on that propagation bed, together with plants, somewhere between the human and the plants. You will fin this text, written by the artist Forster and Heighes, on page 15 of your Plant Science Catalogue:

 

Read from Catalogue

 

Thank you for listening and for looking.