Špela Petrič

Friday, 6th January 2017

Strange Encounters is the second piece of the Confronting Vegetal Otherness series, which looks at plant alterity to reassess subjectivation, ethics, and our attitude towards dividual multiplicity. 

I felt it crucial to address plant subjectivities as relational and to look for access - not to them (the plants) but to my human affects and responses in particular encounters with plants, reflecting what could be a fracture in our phenomenological (non)consideration of plant life. In fact, the word ‘plant’ groups together organisms as different as a single-celled algae, lemon grass or a birch tree; there is little these particular kinds of plants have in common beyond a similar cell plan (an analogous sublation would render a human somehow equivalent to a nematode). Thinking about ‘the plant’ is a form of racism, an unjust generalization that neglects the particular being. In an attempt to overcome my inherent bias, I sought situations of engagement that would lay bare my speciest presumptions and force a different consideration of each relationship to the vegetal. I aimed at instigating novel and strange circumstances, which would resist the subjugation of plants to raw material while ambivalently positing humans in a similar role, following Jeffrey Nealon’s insight “that the vegetable ... (is an) image of thought that far better characterizes our biopolitical present than does the human-animal image of life, which remains tethered to the organism, the individual with its hidden life and its projected world.”

In the deconstruction of plant-human relationships, I searched for modes of human existence that could be perceived as equivalent to plant life. Biotechnology’s alienating molecularization of living entities maintained in defined media and sterile plastic containers demonstrate the ‘human-as-material’ and support thinking about ourselves in terms we afford to plants. Much like algae increasingly employed in the production of biomass and pharmaceuticals, so too are human cells in culture becoming an essential component of our body maintenance program. They can be coaxed into the form and function of a multitude of organs, transplanted into pig embryos, genetically modified to eliminate diseases and selected for particular applications. As cells in culture we are fragmented, decentered, de-essentialised, outsourced, bettered, molded and viscerally spread over large areas. 

The mission became obvious - to arrange the extraordinary meeting of a human and a plant in vitro.

Comparing the ‘tech-riders’ of various plant and human candidates quickly narrowed the choice to the toughest, most resilient types of cells of each kind – Chlorella representing plants and carcinoma of the bladder representing humans. The genus Chlorella and its relatives are free living, single-celled photosynthetic algae populating a variety of ecological niches, from fresh and semi-salty waters to surfaces exposed to air such as roof tiles and recurrent puddles. It is both the smallest and the most abundant morphological form of a photosynthetic eukaryote. Cancer is a disease, but it also represents an actualization of the emancipatory potential of entities within the ecosystem of the body. Much like the single-celled algae, it is a pre-specialized assemblage of cells, an expression of the reproductive potential of a metastable cellular unit, allocating all available resources to indefinite multiplication. It’s also the most industrially productive form of mammalian cells – the raw material for research and vaccine/antibody production.

Their fate in my laboratory is uncertain. I am performing biopolitics, selecting, orchestrating, monitoring, documenting, narrating. The cancer and the algae negotiate the space I allow for them. Biopower penetrates the plant just as it does the human. 

I observe them, I observe myself. The human and the plant, in vitro.

Saturday, 7th January 2017
Death on my mind, ecology in my pocket

Vegetable designates a wild and potentially untamable proliferation and at the same time veers on the side of death in that it symbolizes immobility and torpor, not to mention the comatose condition, referred to as "persistent vegetative state, wherein life diminishes to a minimum hardly distinguishable from its opposite. ... The life of plants is situated on the brink of death. In the zone of indeterminacy between life and death.

Michael Marder, "Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Plant Life", Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 52 -53.

When I told people I had cancer, a common response was, "it's amazing what they can do these days", they being medical professionals. We want to believe that doctors can fix us up, and that illness only comes to people who are old or have not looked after their bodies. We want to believe that we can control death, and that we are effectively immortal. Cancer destroys all these illusions. James Patterson's study of cancer in American society concludes, "In a society that feared death over all things, no other illness was dreaded so much." In fact, cancer has become synonymous with death. Why do people fear cancer? "Cancer equals death. That's it," was the response of one member of a cancer support group. In our culture, death remains "the obscene mystery, the thing that cannot be controlled...It can only be denied." Paradoxically, our refusal to face death means we have an exaggerated fear of it. No wonder cancer is metaphorised as a diabolical enemy, which must be combatted with every offensive weapon available.

Cathy Altmann, “To use a metaphor at a time like this would be obscene”: a study of cancer, poetry and metaphor, Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique (15), 2008.

Chlorella has a bacterial infection. 

Fede is treating it with antibiotics before we mix the two cultures, the human and plant, together. Mateja Erdani Kreft from the Institute of Cell Biology said the presence of bacteria will skew the results, the human (and plant) cells would be reacting to this third presence. I phrased this as "a problem" to Mojca Kumerdej, who will moderate the Strange Encounters Freaktion Bar on Tuesday, when came to see our progress this afternoon. She looked at me in bewilderment, thinking my consideration was out of place: "An infection isn't a problem; the bacteria are a part of the algae culture, a part of the process". Why am I seeking a pure contact, observing the unnatural contract of plant and human in vitro? The idea of exploring plant principles through an instigated precarious proximity of human and plant units, indivisible particles constituting larger entities, undoing each other metaphysically and biochemically, hoping for a prolonged meeting. 

The becoming anew, a new community of incompatible kinds. Incompatibility, again, not as a rejection of the other, but because chance hasn't yet facilitated such a meeting, the desire couldn't coevolve. Strange Encounters performs this chance. Will cancer and algae like each other?

My scientific brain keeps hijacking the open-ended observation of relationships in becoming, desiring an outcome which realizes the idea of plant and human. Bacteria might be unintended guests in the medium, but they are also partners, agitators, opportunists, entities -- citizens of our plastic castles and prestigious environment (the media for human tissue culture are prohibitively expensive, not to mention of animal origin). So what role does bacteria play in the meeting? How can so much life spell death in my eyes?