Plants in Science Fiction
Page 10
Necrorealism’s Roots
Necrorealism emerged in the late 1970s, surrounded by plants, in the forests near Leningrad (now St Petersburg), where members of the then unnamed group engaged in spontaneous fistfights. They were not interested in politics, living neither for nor against the state; instead, as Yurchak explains, the Necrorealists, like many other late Soviet artists, found such matters ‘boring’, preferring instead to occupy themselves with developing new, distinctly non-Soviet forms of living.11 Yurchak notes, ‘Instead of challenging the state by occupying an oppositional subject position, these people carved out a subject position that the state could not recognise in “political” terms and therefore could not easily define, understand, and control.’12 Their elusive political positioning allowed these artists to live on the margins of society, relatively unbothered by the state, leaving them free to pursue other philosophical and artistic interests.
The Necrorealists’ early forest fistfights, an encapsulation of the impulse towards irrationality and reverse heroicism that imbues their early work, was evidence of the artists’ attempt to move away from the discourses of pro- and anti-Soviet rhetoric that characterised much of twentieth-century Russian public life.13 As Yurchak argues, this shift towards non-Soviet subjectivity ‘was often accompanied by a growth of interest in biological existence and “naked” life as a strategy for reinventing one’s subjectivity in terms that were not commensurable with the political language of the state’.14 The Necrorealists’ spontaneous acts of irrational violence, performed upon each other for the sake of ‘dimwitted merriment’ (tupoe vesel’e) and ‘energetic idiocy’ (energichnaia tupost’), point towards efforts to emulate this ‘bare life’ by renouncing the rationality that would otherwise have rendered them legible to the Soviet state as political subjects.15 As Leon Trotsky wrote in 1924, the New Soviet Man – or, the ideal Soviet citizen – was one who would
make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.16
The Necrorealists instead crafted a subjectivity that rejected the Soviet emphasis on rationality and the conscious suppression of instinct, embracing a form of irrational vitality and bodily degeneration that represented ‘a form of politics, albeit one that refused to recognize itself in political terms’.17
As the group’s unique ethos of ‘heroic idiocy’ developed, so did their artistic ambitions.18 By the early 1980s, the group began to expand into other media, including painting, literature and cinema, and founder Iufit gave the group a name: Necrorealism, which, as Mazin observes, ‘points to death’s paradoxical presence in life. The word bespeaks a dead [νεκρός] realism, and it calls into question the possibility of any realism other than necrorealism.’19 That is, the name itself brings death into visibility, illuminating its presence within a Soviet context in which death was simultaneously omnipresent and emphatically denied. In the early years of the Soviet Union, the marginalisation of death reached a new pitch when massive health and hygiene programmes were implemented throughout the country, resulting in an ideological climate in which the health of the private body became a matter of public political concern.20 The politicisation of the healthy body was also effected through the ideological tenets of the state-sanctioned genre of Socialist Realism, which – although pervasive in the Soviet Union through the 1950s – never developed an adequate vocabulary for the depiction of death as a process.21 Though full of broken workers’ and soldiers’ bodies, the heroes of Socialist Realism were immortal, having sacrificed themselves for the Soviet cause.22 Necrorealism, then, undermines the ideological projects of the Soviet state and Socialist Realism by rendering death visible; as Olesya Turkina notes, ‘When Yevgeny Yufit, the movement’s founding father, coined the term necrorealism in 1984, the reference to socialist realism was perfectly legible.’23
The social and political contexts of Necrorealism’s emergence thus greatly influenced the thematics of the group’s practice, particularly their attraction to the liminal, dying body.24 By the late Soviet ‘Stagnation’ period, when Necrorealism was born, Soviet citizens had become accustomed to a recurring image on television: the funeral processions of high-ranking Soviet political officials, who – having been in power for many years already – were beginning to die in rapid succession.25 The processions and speeches were always the same, with the exception of the deceased’s name, and the politicians were quickly replaced, leading to both the familiar image of heroic Soviet death (the politicians were always lauded for their service to the state) and the pervasive impression of the ‘undead’ immortality of the Soviet regime.26 The Soviet system was dying and, yet, was popularly perceived as being immortal.27 As Turkina observes, ‘Every ideology generates its own image of death’; in the case of the Soviet Union, the ideological aesthetics of Socialist Realism perpetuated a cultural myth in which dying for the ‘just cause’ of communism, or in the service of communism, was of the highest honour.28 In this context, a heroic death, paradoxically, preserved one from the physiological experience of being dead. As Turkina explains,
Despite the terrible ordeals they faced in life, the bodies of immortal heroes are not subject to decay and decomposition. Not only the dead but also ‘the living dead’ from communism’s vanguard were incapable of being covered with death spots and bloating after death. Like the cemetery’s native soil for a vampire, ideology enabled the preservation of the hero’s body: according to a principle of classical aesthetics, excessive suffering was unable to distort its beauty and harmony.29
For Turkina, Necrorealism’s principal project involved the deconstruction of this ideological immortality through depictions of death as a process, which relied on ‘representation of a person’s death during life and of bodily transformations after death’.30 For José Alaniz and Seth Graham, death formed not only the content of Necrorealist work, but also ‘a comprehensive, organising metaphor for an entire approach to visual representation’.31 The name ‘Necrorealism’ itself, then, signals a twofold commitment: to reincorporating the process of death back into one’s thinking on reality (a commitment to the realism of death and to realistic representations of death) and to deconstructing the ideological and bodily precepts of Soviet ideology through an inverse visual representation of dying as a process, a state of metamorphosis.
Though the Necrorealists themselves were a diverse group of artists who differed in their representations of and attitudes towards the processes of death, the movement as a whole utilised the denigration of the human body and mind, the hybridisation of the human with (nonhuman) animals, plants and inorganic materials, and a blurring of boundaries between life and death as core methodological approaches. Their principal figure, the ‘non-corpse’ (netrup), was a humanoid, hybrid being existing in a state of both life and death, a condition that could be described as one of permanent dying. In this condition, as Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar argue, the ‘necrosubject does not “live” but persists like a slow wasting disease or a decomposing object, and, in embracing this “impossible” state of living death, achieves a molecule of freedom’.32 For the Necrorealists, life as a ‘non-corpse’ was more than an artistic methodology; it was an ethos that they carried into their daily lives, creating a total ontological project of living otherwise and pursuing ‘experiments performed most of all on oneself as part of continuous experimental living’.33 As Yurchak explains,
By living this model one was changing one’s self, becoming someone else, a representative of a sociality and a form of life that were different from ordinary people – or, in Yufit’s preferred and much repeated phrase of that period, ‘life uncontaminated by human consciousness’ (zhizn’ neoporochennuiu chelovecheskim soznaniem). Necrorealist provocations, artwork, films, and behaviour were intuitive attempts to explore these alternatives
formed within the realm of bare life.34
The movement, then, represents an investment not only in ‘dying’, but also in ‘alternative forms of vitality’.35 Like plants, whose sessile, non-animal vitality have infused them, for Western metaphysics, with a simultaneous proximity to the organic and inorganic, the living and non-living, Necrorealist subjects are found only in such liminal, vegetal spaces, where alternative forms of vitality cut across and reshape our understanding not only of what it means to be alive, but also of what it means to be human.36
The Necrorealist non-corpse’s figuration as a being between human and nonhuman and between life and death – and thus ‘between the inside and outside of the boundaries drawn by Soviet authoritative discourse, in a zone that refused the boundary between bare and political life’ – places the non-corpse outside the binary schematics of Soviet Marxist-Leninism and, in the later films, post-Soviet humanism.37 Indeed, in Iufit’s post-Soviet feature-length evolutionary trilogy, such liminality is made even more explicit as scientists propose and enact alternative evolutionary experiments that hybridise the human with the nonhuman and the organic with the inorganic in order to achieve more unmediated forms of posthuman existence. Though these later films’ emphases on narrative differentiate them from Necrorealism’s earlier, more ‘plotless’ cinematic works, Iufit’s post-Soviet filmography should be considered, as Mazin and Turkina argue, ‘a sidestep onto a parallel path, a step still within the limits of the necrocontext’.38 Iufit and Maslov’s Silver Heads, then, forms a part of Necrorealism’s larger project of exploring new ontological and ecological possibilities for the human, existences closer to a ‘bare life’ divorced from the burden of human rationality.
Silver Heads and the Technoscientific Appropriation of Vegetal Life
Given Necrorealism’s intimate and multiple explorations of the spaces between life and death – the spaces of bare life – it is appropriate that Iufit’s post-Soviet evolutionary trilogy, which considers the porousness of human–nonhuman boundaries, should begin by foregrounding plants. In the opening sequence of Silver Heads, tall grasses quiver in a field, shot in sepia; towards the bottom left section of the frame, plants proliferate in a shaded corner, drawing the eye immediately towards their presence. Iufit and Maslov thus commence their exploration of bare life with perhaps the most ‘bare’ of all lives: the plant. As Marder notes,
After we strip life of all its recognisable features, vegetal beings go on living; plant-soul is the remains of the psyche reduced to its non-human and non-animal modality. It is life in its an-archic bareness, inferred from the fact that it persists in the absence of the signature features of animal vivacity, and it is a source of meaning, which is similarly bare, nonanthropocentric, and yet ontologically vibrant.39
Long associated with death in Western philosophy, plants have occupied the margins of Western thought, banished early on by Aristotle to a low sub-stratum of Being only slightly above non-living, inorganic minerals: an early configuration of bare life, stripped of any claim to political consideration.40 Plants occupy a dual, almost paradoxical meaning in Western thought; they are a body out of control, a body that proliferates and reproduces endlessly, and yet are simultaneously perceived as a ‘frozen’ body, a body defined by passivity, rigidity and immobility. As Marder writes,
‘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 the living and the dead.41
In their peculiar proximity to both life and what we think of as death – their occupation of the ‘bare’ nexus between life and death – plants parallel Necrorealist non-corpses. What is more, like Necrorealism, plants make death visible. Dwellers of soil, plants inherit elements broken down by decomposers and returned to the soil in the form of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus; returning these elements back into circulation within wider ecological networks, the plant ‘makes them live again’.42 In their dwelling space between the living and the dead, plants bring us into a constant, intimate relationship with our own mortality. A realism of death – a ‘necrorealism’ proper – must therefore take plant life into account.43 Coming to terms with mortality means coming to terms with plants.
The marginalisation of plants in Western thought is, I argue, largely associated with the marginalisation of death. As Ewa Domanska writes, ‘We live in a world in which death … faces discrimination. By discrimination I mean the particular privilege granted living beings while at the same time marginalising that which we consider non-living or dead.’44 Though recognised as living beings, plants’ seeming immobility has rendered them ‘lifeless’ to Western humanist thought, a form of ontological vitality perceived almost as its opposite: a living death. For Aristotle and his descendants, such non-mobile vitality ‘casts their life in the uncertain terms of a mere appearance, a matter of seeming: they only “seem to live”.’45 In the Soviet Union, the marginalisation of plants was also effected by large-scale technological and scientific efforts to banish illness, poverty and famine, a process aligned in early Soviet rhetoric with the necessity of conquering ‘nature’, thereby furthering associations between plants and death.46 For early Soviet ideologues like Trotsky, ‘nature’ was what limited human beings; surpassing biological limitations, including death, became a principal aim of early Soviet science. As Trotsky proposed in 1924,
Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.47
Like the other films of Iufit’s evolutionary trilogy, Silver Heads makes use of the generic conventions of science fiction (sf) to concretise the Necrorealists’ earlier aims of pursuing nonhuman forms of existence and to destabilise the ideological framework of what Iufit calls ‘military zooanthropotechnics’.48 In this trilogy, in which scientists construct experiments to hybridise humans with nonhumans, Iufit tests these ideas in a more ambitious narrative environment, using sf ‘not merely as a critical commentary on biotechnoscience, but as a mode of thinking with science about the future of (human) life’.49 Iufit and Maslov’s Silver Heads thus utilises sf not only to extend Necrorealism’s ideological critiques of Soviet technoscience, including Trotsky’s New Soviet Man and the grandiose efforts to perfect human biology pursued by scientists in the USSR, but also to reflect on the appropriate place of human life in an era of widespread technoscientific manipulation of nature – a manipulation that, in the Soviet context, had been intimately associated with the banishment of death.
It is, then, perhaps ironic that, given Trotsky’s associations of nature with death and the long-standing associations between plants and death in Western discourse, the scientists in Silver Heads’s own opening scenes foreground plants’ relationship not to death, but to longevity. As the lead experimental scientist declares, the goal of their experiment is the creation of ‘a new human substance … a physiologically more perfect being’, a human being who will not be as vulnerable to death. As has already been mentioned, trees have been selected for this hybridisation experiment owing to their long ‘temporal duration’, their ‘solidity’ and ‘unconditionality’, and their ‘high level of resistance to negative environmental effects’, qualities which the scientists hope will improve the biological stock of Homo sapiens. The scientists themselves, however, seem almost squeamish about the experiment: although their goal is to hybridise humans with trees by impaling their bodies with wooden stakes, one scientist becomes concerned after receiving a splinter before the experiment begins. In a cold and detached tone, another scientist responds coolly,
‘Use pincers’, highlighting that their goal is not a full integration with another non-human being, but rather the preservation of the human self. Although the scientists seemingly attempt to bridge the gap between humans and nature, professing that they want to create one ‘ecologically ideal essence [sushchestvo]’, they do so in appropriative ways: their goal reflects the instrumental relationship to nature demonstrated by earlier Soviet scientists, who attempted to remould the human into a more perfected, environmentally transcendent being – or, in Trotsky’s memorable phrase, ‘a higher social biologic type … a superman’.50 Plant lives here are viewed as a resource to be utilised in this endeavour, lives to be consumed in the service of human superiority, not as lives in their own right.
The instrumental relationship with vegetal life exhibited by the scientists is not limited to the elite few chosen for the experiment. Iufit and Maslov suggest that this view is endemic to the sciences as such; indeed, in one of the film’s opening scenes, the designer of the experiment (played by Nikolai Marton) declares to a room of scientists that, ‘in the sheer abundance with which she provides specimens having a single physiological basis, nature herself suggested the topic of our research’. The scientist reflects an appropriative view of vegetal life by viewing plants first as ‘specimens’, instruments for scientific research, and only then as lives; their scientific purposes are emphasised over and above any ontological value they already possess. Further, although the scientist’s declaration demonstrates a dismissive and unscientific attitude towards plant life by conflating various species of plants together as though they truly possessed one ‘single physiological basis’, his statement is greeted with widespread applause, reflecting general agreement with his views. Through the lack of controversy generated by his statement, Iufit and Maslov suggest that science – at least in its biopolitical varieties – serves anthropocentric and not ecological ends. Although the scientist is later murdered by so-called ‘Z-individuals’, failed products of earlier experiments in the hybridisation of plants and humans (in whom Necrorealist connoisseurs will immediately recognise the ‘non-corpses’ of earlier Necrorealist work), Silver Heads should not be read merely as an attempt to reverse the Western hierarchy between plants and humans by demonstrating the superior intelligences or abilities of plants. Instead, Iufit and Maslov utilise the familiar sf plotline of ‘mad science’ and the kind of anti-metaphysical ‘plant-thinking’ called for by Marder to deconstruct the notion of a bounded human identity, offering a more ecological configuration of the human – or, perhaps, posthuman – in its place. For Silver Heads’s Z-individuals, it is not appropriation that defines their relationships with plants, but kinship.