Regeneration: The sense of spring, the sense of growth

Spring bursts into exuberance with the opening of the crocus. It intimates the gradual movements occurring all around us, oft without our notice. No passer of pollen present, I can sense the animacy unfolding within the scene. The seed germinated in one apt spot and found an opening amidst the grass beneath, as stem carried the weight of a crown of purple, revealing a luminous orange glow from within.

* * *

Cycling along the coast, I stopped to rest briefly on the strand and then walked across a park, where I was welcomed by these spring flowers. While grabbing my immediate attention with an array of colour, the unfurling of the petals signalled to me the powers of movement immanent to the plant. In the above image, the flower might well take centre stage and yet it inculcates the sense of growth, which literally outgrows the flower and frame, instilling the scene with an excess of living movement.

In my recent paper ‘Plant emergence: The aesthetics of plant Movement and the phenomenology of vegetal growth’, published by Environmental Values (King, 2025), I broach this topic of plant animacy and the sense of the phenomenon in detail. Responding to what has been called ‘plant blindness’, I challenge the presuppositions that often underlie the usage of the term. Namely, that being out of sync with the rhythm of plant life is something to bemoan and in turn eschew. While I think there is merit in emphasising our dissociation from the rhythm of plants, I portray these blind spots as something actually essential to the ways we come to appreciate the ‘sense’ of their gradual movements.

The above example is therefore such an instantiation of appreciating plant movement in situ, without the necessary aid of time-lapse technology, a representation of plant growth which has surged in popularity amidst the ubiquity of short form content. In lieu of relinquishing such technologies and their fecund contributions, I want to proffer a differential way of perceiving our blindness to plants, as a means to cherish the fruits of our perception, no matter how ostensibly out of sync with plant movement we are. This is why I invoke phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, whose writing, whilst relatively scarce on the subject of plants, is blossoming with many fruitful insights on the heterogeneous nature of movement as it is perceived. But first, some prickly comments on Hegel, whose work, whilst helpful for the purposes of my paper, falters on the subject of regenerative growth, a phenomenon I did not have room to explore.

* * *

Locomotive movement tends to be far more conspicuous than the movement of growth, which cuts across both plants and animals alike. The movement of growth is therefore not unique to plants as much, but manifests too in our hair and nails, or in the feathers and fur of an animal for example. In Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics, he declares that ‘Such covering’, including ‘prickles’ ‘pelts’ and ‘shells’ has forms drawn from the kingdom of plants’ (Hegel, 1975: 145). But these external and more superficial outgrowths for Hegel are an indication of a ‘deficient’ kind of movement, which amounts to nothing of the sort putatively achieved by locomotive movement or the powers of the human soul for that matter. Although Hegel mentions the ‘remarkable’ nature of cacti prickles (127), he ultimately seems to suggest that these features are mere adornments, or at best, protective mechanisms and as such, are not reflective of a plant’s ‘inner life’ but from ‘forms drawn from a lower stage than that of life proper’ (145).

By comparing the outgrowths of a plant to coverings of an animal, however, Hegel instills a false analogy which oversimplifies and undervalues the dynamic and sophisticated phenomenon of vegetal growth. The regenerative plasticity of a tendril or branch is therefore more like the extension of a limb than the extension of animal hair, as the plant reaches out to relate to its surroundings. A pollarded tree for instance, whose shoots begin to resprout from its chopped branches emerge with new leaves that soak up sunlight for food, proliferating mouths that can feed from multiple vantage points, soon to be digested by a cluster of stomachs. The neuronal-like strands of plant roots, intertwining with threads of mycelium also intimate the depth of relationality afforded by plant growth.

Hegel sees the human body as having a ‘tremendous advantage’ over and above the plant, namely for being a sensitive body. Unlike hair and nails, Hegel contends that the ‘skin is not hidden by plant-like unliving coverings’ (146). As he continues, ‘the pulsation of the blood shows itself over the entire surface ; the beating heart of life is as it were present everywhere over the body and comes out into appearance externally as the body's own animation, as turgor vitae, as this swelling life.’ Yet, once again Hegel arbitrarily venerates the human form at the expense of plants, erroneously suggesting that the plant’s coverings are unliving and in turn, overlooks the fact that the organs protected by the animal’s epidermis are themselves analogous to the regenerative growth in a plant. Unlike humans or animals, however, who move around and whose flesh protects their vital organs, plants remain sessile, not out of deficiency, but because their organs are regenerative and thus do not require locomotive movement and flesh to protect them, akin to the unique capacity of the liver, whose regenerative capacity is an exception to the rule in animals. Plant life thus swells with the turgor vitae that Hegel ironically deprives them of; especially given that the Latin term itself pertains to the pressure within plant cells that makes them rigid and upright, like blood pressure maintaining circulation in the animal body.

* * *

The regenerative features of growth are invoked by Merleau-Ponty, when he refers to ‘Hydriodic polyps of the germs Tubuluria—a sort of sea anemone" which he says can regenerate its ‘flower or head’ when amputated (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: 231). The dynamism of this regenerative capacity is intimated by Merleau-Ponty, as he writes ‘by cutting the stalk at any point, we always get a regeneration of the head, which then is reborn from any region of the organism’. Without ascribing any teleological function to regenerative growth, he suggests that there is a certain level of ‘creativity’ when the organism ‘recompletes itself’ and that ‘the operation is also entirely independent of conditions given once and for all’,  and is therefore not merely predetermined (230). While not strictly speaking a plant, Merleau-Ponty’s reference to the hydrozoa is helpful for our purposes notwithstanding. Not only does the sea anemone resemble the plant in appearance, but its manner of regenerative growth is also analogous. Interestingly, sea anemones often harbour a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with single-celled algae, whose photosynthesis provides them with oxygen and other nutrients requisite for their survival, further evincing their plant like being. 

In my paper, I try to emphasise the ‘perceptual sense’ of plant movement, which needn’t be conceived in a Zeno-like fashion, as atomized units of time, which we have to visualise as the movements unfold such as in a time-lapse video, but rather as a ‘style’ of growth, which we can appreciate without having it spelled out to us. Merleau-Ponty foregrounds the fruits of our intuition in appreciating the many kinds of movement that manifest in our perception. As he asks, ‘What is the wind perceived? Someone? A thing? A phenomenon? It is all three at once: a continuation of movement without mobiles, of behaviors without subjects’ (99). The movement of the wind is not so much seen, but is smelt, heard and felt, especially potent when cycling across the coast. The sense of movement therefore is not circumscribed to its visible manifestation. On the contrary, movement is like an ungraspable aura that surrounds and envelopes all of our senses. The wind, as Heidegger intimates, is never really perceived as ‘a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises’; on the contrary, we hear the storm, he says, ‘whistling in the chimney’ or rather in the gentle swaying of the trees (Heidegger, 1975: 26). The movement of the wind has an invisible quality and yet it has a certain graspable sense. Without subjects as such, the movement of the wind is expressed and intensified by living movements, as seed and pollen is transported through the air and aromatic needles are flung from evergreens.

The non-living has a kind of movement of its own, whether it is the shifting of tectonic plates or undulating waves, yet there is something peculiar about the movement of the living, each with their own very unique expression. Merleau-Ponty hints at such a distinction, albeit never entirely clean cut, when he instructs ‘the collectivity of life to be specified relative to the architectonic of the sand dunes’ (Merleau-Ponty, 258). This collectivity of life can be thought not necessarily as a homeostatic whole, but as an array of entangled and interrelated roots. Invoking arboreal metaphors that go deeper than the tree, Merleau-Ponty defines ‘production’ in a schematic note as  "Not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together (ancient fauna (?) as divergent as our own—maybe all the types already realized for a long time)”. Much of what goes on in the world of the plant is underground and therefore always involves a degree of mystery. Yet beneath the soil where the crocus rests, lies the germ of something fecund, the sense unearthed without needing to uproot, as we perceive through the imperceptible and glean the sense of spring, arriving finally, at the sense of growth.

References

Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1. tr. T.M. Knox. Oxford: 1975.

Heidegger. The Origin of the Work of Art. tr. A. Hofstadter. New York: 1975.

Merleau-Ponty. Nature: Course Notes from the College De France. tr. R. Vallier. Illinois: 1995.

The perfect defect of decay: Ephemeral art in an ecological age

 

'It is not through a higher perfection that artworks separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming actual, like fireworks, incandescently in an expressive appearance.' - Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.

As art is anchored more and more by the orbit of our ecological age, transience and impermanence find themselves being more aesthetically significant than perhaps ever before. One only has to think of Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch, a cluster of ice blocks which travelled from glacial Greenland all the way to the Tate Modern, where they slowly met their inexorable end, as patches and puddles that would soon dribble into the nearby Thames. This aesthetics of the ephemeral can be contrasted with the Hegelian glorification of art as a truer expression of the beauty of the spirit, when compared to mere 'nature', engendering a historical lament from environmental aestheticians, as longevity and the putative infinity of cultural beauty is praised over and above the transience of its natural manifestation. This is encapsulated in Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art, where he comments on the ways that art dialectically morphs into 'its infinite form' out of its 'immediate natural and sensuous existence', as 'humanity' putatively 'constitutes the centre and content of true beauty and art'. Humanity therefore acts as the requisite conduit for the manifestation of true and in turn infinite beauty, which purifies, according to Hegel, 'the defect of finitude'. Finitude as defect might well be what constitutes the cleavage between art and nature in many respects, hence why the preservation of art works is such a indispensable part of aesthetic appreciation, certainly in the context of a gallery or museum, and why the conservation of nature can only last so long. This sentiment is reflected in the work of notorious 'YBA' artist Damien Hurst, for example, whose preserved tiger shark embodies the Hegelian sprit of art with the name 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.' This formaldehyde filled apex predator was caught by a commissioned fisherman in Queensland, Australia, ultimately funded by businessman Charles Saatchi, whose opulence bolstered and fuelled Hurst's career. Eschewing the defect of finitude was seemingly consolidated in the foregoing artwork, transforming this mere 'natural and sensuous' existing and decaying creature into a ostensibly permanent and in turn lucrative object.

The sheer permanence of art, however, is always tenuous, fickle like the value of stocks and shares. As Theodor Adorno delineates in his book Aesthetic Theory 'Artworks have no power over whether they endure'. As he continues 'For that can only take place at the cost of the work's relation to those contexts in which permanence is exclusively constituted'. In a world of ecological demise, Hurst's tiger shark leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as this epoch loosely termed the 'Anthropocene' makes the sanctitude of the infinite appear less and less tantalising and indeed convincing. The willingness to preserve now seems like an ill conceived effort to eschew the powers that ultimately envelop all living things. As Adorno puts it 'Through duration art protests against death' and yet 'as soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death.' There is something ailing about striving for permanence, especially when these formaldehyde corpses are denied of their own death. In heavy contrast to Hegel's desire for the infinity of beauty, Schiller writes 'Weeping that Beauty must pass, what is most perfect must die', a line that expresses a nascent aesthetics of finitude, congruent for our ecological age. The finitude of beauty for Adorno 'holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hieroglyphic but for everything composed of beauty and of what according to its traditional idea was meant to be unchangeable, the constituents of form.' If beauty must die, one is paradoxically provoked to smash the glass panel display case that Hurst's tiger shark is encaged, letting it go to die its death freely in the pacific ocean. Of course, such wishes might seem trivial in the context of 'real' sharks endangered across our seas, but the freedom to live and the liberty to die are not as incommensurable as they might seem. Death is not just an event, but a process like life, as the body disintegrates like the gradual decay of an apple.

Apples are it would seem, at least culturally so, to be at the bedrock of our very concept of finitude, as famously represented in Genesis, whereby Eve's hedonistic shaking of the apple tree's bough sends fruit flying down onto the primordial couple's heads, turning their halcyon fantasy into shameful naked timidity, with Eve being the finite body and Adam being the infinite mind. A curtain of apples hang from the ceiling of a capacious room in Margate's Turner gallery, emitting a fetid aroma of death and decay, with a hint of bitter and sultry cider, fermenting into something living and dying, abject and yet desirable. Anya Gallaccio's exhibition 'Preserve' encapsulates Schiller's aphorism, as the preservation of beauty always leads to its inevitable end. Filled with organic objects including decaying trees, whose branches are slowly wilting from the weight of moss and lichen, as well as melting candles and chalk, Gallaccio creates a space that is alive and yet concurrently dead. It is an eerie, multisensory environment, but not some contrived 4-D space that forces an engagement with the senses beyond the ocular. Rather, it is one that seamlessly infiltrates the membrane of our bodies as we sense and breathe in the atmosphere of these living and dying objects. Are these apples artificial, I speculate? Upon closer inspection, I can see and smell the fungi and maggots burrowing into their tart dwellings. The finitude and decay of the organic is intuitive, not intellectual. This is a process that is as natural as our perception of the waxing and waning of the moon. We are not like David Hume, waiting for the sun to rise across the Scottish peaks to know that it will. We know this apple is dying and decaying and will one day disappear, only to leave a trace that is spectral yet not spiritual, in the way that Hegel might see it for instance. Here in this gallery, laying on the foundations of the British tradition of landscape paintings which are tirelessly preserved, is a sweltering cesspool, one that is leaking through the earth, as organic materials splinter off into minutia. This is the defect of decay, the beauty and perfection that must die if we are to truly live through this ecological age.

References

Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. Bloomsbury: London. Tr. R. Hullot-Kentor. 2024.

Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1. tr. T.M. Knox. Oxford: 1975.