Z-individuals, Contagion and Posthumanism: Embracing Vegetal Multiplicity
Throughout Silver Heads, Iufit and Maslov display various human and nonhuman lives which, though they share kinship with plant life, do not seek an appropriative relationship to it. Even the machine constructed to perform the experiment – an enclosed room in which the human body is penetrated by wooden stakes, a kind of wooden iron maiden – speaks to the openness of plant life, its receptivity to the Other.51 Indeed, the experiment itself works as a kind of ‘graft’, a process of transplanting living tissue from one plant onto another – or, in this case, from a tree onto a human body. Though the scientists desire to use the machine to ‘graft’ plant parts onto the human solely for anthropocentric gain, Marder suggests the inherent impossibility of such a process, writing, ‘Grafting … foregrounds the plasticity and receptivity of vegetal life, its constitutive capacity for symbiosis and metamorphosis, its openness to the other at the expense of fixed identities.’52 Dissolving the boundaries between self and Other, grafting creates ‘the possibility of a relation between two singularities, through which both are transformed beyond recognition and exceed the categories, systems of classification, or orders of being our thinking is accustomed to group them in’.53 The Z-individuals, produced by an ‘unidentified psychological mutation’ in an earlier failed experiment, point towards exactly this kind of transformation: as beings which are both tree and human, living and non-living, they exceed the classificatory systems in which the scientists aim to embed them. Their posthuman multiplicity signifies an openness to human and nonhuman lives, a state in which the body serves as a site of passage for the Other and in which both self and Other are irrecoverably transformed. As the experiment’s designer warns, ‘[The Z-individuals’] effect on other people is unpredictable.’
Although the scientists in the film attempt to exploit vegetal life for their own gain, Iufit and Maslov themselves are careful to highlight plant life as life throughout the film. Vegetal life is foregrounded from the very first shot, mentioned above, in which a variety of plant species cohabit in a field. It is only after the camera dwells upon them, showing them first and foremost as forms of life, that it pans left to show a solitary human figure, a woman brushing her hair near a shack. Vegetal life is often at the forefront of Silver Heads’s shots, where humans can often be seen only from between various plants; at other times, humans and Z-individuals are shown moving through and among plant life, suggesting figures embedded in wider ecological networks. Additional shots, too, reveal the importance of plants for other, nonhuman ecologies: in one scene, the camera lovingly lingers over a frog sitting on a lily pad along the bank of a river, suggesting the thoroughness with which plants saturate all ecosystems. The intimate relationships among humans, plants and nonhuman animals are depicted immediately and throughout the film, underscoring the film’s insistence that all beings are thoroughly enmeshed with nonhuman, vegetal life. The film’s opening sequence, which highlights this message extensively, is almost ‘wet’ with sound; as a little boy searches for his father, a forester who lives on the ‘border’ of the experimental zone (perhaps on the ‘border’ between Nature and Culture?), the sound of the boy’s feet making contact with plant life at every step is audibly highlighted – twigs are snapped, leaves shift and the stalks of tall grasses rustle in the breeze generated by his body. The film’s action takes place, then, not in an ‘uninhabited’ area, as the experiment’s designer refers to the experimental zone, but in an ecosystem teeming with human and nonhuman life.
The Z-individuals, both human and plant, are thus appropriate inhabitants of such a space. Uniting elements of ‘self’ and ‘other’ within one multiplicitous being, the Z-individuals offer a form of ‘plant-thinking’ conducive to resisting the totalising, appropriative and environmentally destructive attitudes towards plants exhibited by both the film’s scientists and, by extension, the Western humanist attitudes towards nonhuman life that they represent. As Marder notes, ‘Plant-thinking starts with the explosion of identity’, with our willingness to relinquish a system of metaphysical thought premised on opposition.54 With plants’ inherent multiplicity, their lack of any stabilising centre, their endless growth and their peculiar ontological positioning between the living and the dead, plants challenge the myth of a bounded, singular identity or an absolute separation between life and death against the reality of ecological interconnection. In order to practise ‘plant-thinking’, Marder contends that we must destabilise the metaphysical categories of Self/Other, Life/Death and Human/Nonhuman that have characterised Western thought for millennia – categories undermined, inherently, by both plants themselves and the Z-individuals of Iufit and Maslov’s film. In their non-cognitive vitality (a long-standing hallmark of Necrorealist non-corpses), the Z-individuals affront the Western emphasis on rationality as a marker of the human; in their ability to reproduce others like themselves through an ‘unidentified psychological mutation’, they violate philosophically guarded boundaries between self and other; and, because they ‘may have traits which neutralise social convention [obshchestvennoi obstanovki]’, they – like ‘plant-thinking’ itself – threaten to undermine the social structures which perpetuate the exploitation of nonhuman lives. The Z-individuals’ contagion, then, is one of thinking ecologically.
Throughout Silver Heads, Z-individuals are shown not as authoritarian figures, not as agents of control over nature and the environment, but rather as fully developed ecological subjects. Where the former human is frequently shown commanding and dominating other life-forms, the Z-individual is often juxtaposed against grasses, trees and other animals, and is by turns portrayed as a still component of a living environment or as a spontaneous, playful force. Where the former human is defined by rigidity, domination and an inflexible ego, the Z-individual dissolves into other life-forms and other Z-individuals, casting off an ego perceived as separating humans from nonhumans. Portrayed alternately as chasing each other, rhythmically beating sticks, ‘leap-frogging’ over one another, and lying still among grasses and trees, the Z-individuals emphasise what Marder calls ‘the play built into vegetal life, strangely indifferent to its own preservation’.55 Reinforced by the jaunty and at times off-key soundtrack that accompanies their appearances, the Z-individuals’ ‘non-thought’, or anti-rationality, is an important component of their potency as figures of ecological thought: it enables an ontological framework that does not actively differentiate between self and world, or, in short, an ecological form of ‘plant-thinking’. As Marder explains,
Mirroring the plants’ heteronomy, its ontological dependence on something other than itself, such as the light, plant-thinking is so closely entwined with its other (i.e., with non-thinking) that it does not maintain its identity as thinking. It rejects the principle of non-contradiction in its content and in its form, in that, at once thinking and not thinking, it is not at all opposed to its ‘other’.56
Thinking like a plant, then – thinking like a Z-individual – closes gaps between self and other, so that the dualistic patterns of thought that sustain Western metaphysical separations between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and life and death can be dissolved.
Iufit and Maslov’s Z-individuals and Marder’s ‘plant-thinking’ thus share much in common with contemporary posthumanist philosophies, which similarly push back against the Western humanist tradition that has historically dominated much of Russian philosophy, including Russo-Soviet ideology. While humanism has traditionally tended to consider the ‘human’ as a bounded, sovereign self that is elevated above nonhumans (Trotsky’s New Soviet Man is only an example of this logic taken to its extreme), posthumanism establishes itself against this human exceptionalist tradition by theorising the human as always already enmeshed in a wide system of relations not only with other humans, but also with technology, nonhumans and the environment. Posthumanism thus undermines the autonomous individual self of Western humanism by offering in its place an ethical c
onception of selfhood premised on human–nonhuman multiplicity. This concept is well-illustrated by Donna Haraway’s influential figure of the cyborg from 1985, which shares many affinities with Silver Heads’s Z-individuals. Haraway argues that the cyborg’s contradictory, hybridised ontology offers a perfect depiction of the twentieth-century political subject: ‘By the late twentieth century’, she writes, ‘we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.’57 Like the Z-individuals, Haraway’s cyborg revels in ontological contradictions and holds its hybrid parts in mutually productive tension, allowing new lateral connections to form in place of rigid vertical hierarchies. Under such an arrangement, she contends,‘[n]ature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world.’58
Like Haraway, Patricia MacCormack proposes an ethics for the posthuman turn that operates through relationality, recognises the specificity of each life and works towards a becoming-ahuman of the human. This ethics understands that ‘things are specific unto themselves and each interaction between things creates further specificity’, translating into a practice of posthuman ethics premised on the address, where becomings take place between bodies and relations between bodies form the site where ethics unfolds.59 MacCormack writes:
The posthuman as an ethical practice is a practice toward life itself, or rather, lives – real, singular and connective, uniquely emergent without predictable development and directly addressed lives for which we seek to expand the capacity to express. … Posthuman ethics sees the dividuation of life in opposition to identity, as it acknowledges the inevitable connection between living bodies as the point of ethical address and, in a seeming postmodern conundrum, the individual is constituted only by its connection to other individuals.60
By doing away with speciesism and other taxonomical systems that overprivilege categories rather than the specificities of individual lives, MacCormack’s and Haraway’s posthuman ethics of relationality connect neatly with Iufit and Maslov’s Z-individuals, who similarly emphasise the multiplicitous specificity of each being rather than the humanist and speciesist metaphysical categories of traditional Western thought. As Rosi Braidotti notes, in terms equally applicable to the Z-individuals, critical posthumanism
rejects individualism, but also asserts an equally strong distance from relativism or nihilistic defeatism. It promotes an ethical bond of an altogether different sort from the self-interests of an individual subject, as defined along the canonical lines of classical Humanism. A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others, by removing the obstacle of self-centered individualism.61
The film’s final scenes, in which a Z-individual (played by Nikolai Rudik) demolishes the hybridisation machine, point towards the Necrorealists’ rejection of both self-centred individualism and nihilistic defeatism. By destroying the machine, the Z-individual destroys not only the experiment, but also the scientific object that symbolically represents humans’ appropriative relationships with plants and other beings in an era widely defined by the biopolitical exploitation of nonhuman life. Through their uncompromising ending, in which all of the scientists involved in the experiment are transformed into Z-individuals, Iufit and Maslov suggest that once this destructive mode of human–vegetal relations is done away with, more ecologically mindful ways of relating to plants can emerge.
Death in a Posthuman Era
In concluding this chapter, I would like to briefly reconsider the corpse as a nexus point through which this chapter’s main concerns – Necrorealism, plants and ecology – each pass. Indeed, it is the figure of the corpse and its attendant Necrorealist associations with death, irrationality and the evacuation of meaning that have opened up Necrorealism to charges of nihilism and even pathology: as Alaniz and Graham remark, ‘The nihilism of the Necrorealists has its basis in a culture drained of transcendent meaning, a utopia gone to rot, where all is negative energy, a social living death.’62 Indeed, to borrow Domanska’s phrase, ‘dehumanisation through decomposition’ – entering the liminal spaces between life and death – is a central tenet of Necrorealist practice, perhaps even its most salient and defining feature. However, as Domanska reminds us, the corpse is not only an emblem of lost meaning, a site of human departure from this world. Like the living body, which is always comprised of, home to, and in circulation with other species, the corpse also marks a point of entry into a wider sense of kinship with nonhumans. Domanska writes:
While dehumanisation in the symbolic world of culture denotes exclusion from the dominant, human collective, in an organic multispecies environment it means inclusion into a much broader collective of beings, of which only some are post-human in the sense that they were once human. The dehumanisation of the dead body (when considered as a post-human existence) is … the sine qua non of its incorporation into a multispecies collective.63
Similarly, as Braidotti has argued, death is not a limit point, but another phase of becoming, in which the shedding of ego allows for a merger into ‘the radical immanence of the earth itself and its cosmic resonance’, thereby enacting ‘the becoming-imperceptible of the posthuman subject’, or becoming merely one of many interconnected beings.64 It is in death – in becoming-corpse – that plants help us relinquish our organic materials back into circulation; that we become homes for a new multispecies collective of necrophages; and, in time, that we become incorporated into new organic beings, only some of which will be human. As Marder notes, ‘Mindful of such complexity, vegetal democracy does not advocate a naïve vitalism that would insulate life and the living from death; quite to the contrary, it situates “participation in life” in an intimate relation to mortality.’65 A truly ecological thought, then, cannot turn away from death but, instead, must incorporate the dead body into its sense of life. It is on such life–death continuums – where bodies flourish, decay, dissolve and rise again – that the flowers of Necrorealist thought bloom.
5 Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling, and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction
T. S. Miller
‘Forded several Plashes where flourished lascivious Shrubs.’
— John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia, 16981
Pre-modern botany, guided by the overriding Aristotelian doctrine of the tripartite soul, insisted on the subordination of vegetal life to other forms of being, positioning plants as in possession of only the most basic of vital forces, encompassing growth and reproduction. Even so, according to this proto-scientific Aristotelian system, plants, animals and humans continue to share that faculty of being which in humans expresses itself as sex and sexuality in all their complexity. Crucially, classical and medieval thought denied plants any capacity for sensation, feeling and emotion: in fact, the Middle English word ‘feling’ is one of the words most frequently used as the technical term for that capacity which plants lack in contradistinction even to animals. For instance, John Trevisa, in translating the encyclopaedic text known as the De proprietatibus rerum, writes that plants grow and reproduce but without ‘feling’: ‘In trees is soule of lif … but þerinne is no soule of feelynge. And so it feeliþ no sore whan it is yhewe other ykutte, nouþer slepeþ nouþer breþeþ inward nouþer outward, noþer haþ oþere condiciouns þat longeþ to þe soule of felynge’.2 In other words, Trevisa’s plants drink without thirst, grow without perception, exist without sensation. At the same time, medieval texts such as the bestiary and the herbal insist upon the role that plants can play in engendering emotions in other beings, particularly those related to sex and reproduction. For instance, in several medieval accounts the mandrake plant transgressed the Aristotelian hierarchy of being – said to resemble the human form with two d
istinct genders and to scream in pain upon being pulled from the ground – and Mandragora was not simply a creature of fancy but rather a part of the medieval pharmacopoeia, a plant closely associated with desire as a supposed aphrodisiac.3 Of course, the idea that plants might express and inflame human desire is as widespread as our most common cultural traditions and as old as our most ancient stories, from the freshly cut flowers given on Valentine’s Day all the way back to the forbidden fruit in Eden. In medieval romance, too, the isolated garden space becomes the site of many an amorous tryst. If plants are so interconnected with human desiring, why has it taken so long to take seriously the possibility that plants might desire? Can plants express themselves, or only ever us?
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