Jacques Derrida reminds us, however, that archivisation ‘produces as much as it records the event’,50 or, put another way, archivable meaning itself ‘is also and in advance codetermined by the structure that archives’.51 Although Derrida is explicitly addressing the emergence of psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, including his speculations upon how the discipline could have developed had such twentieth-century technologies as credit cards, tape records, computers or e-mail been available, he could just as easily have looked at other nineteenth-century developments to further his argument that an archival technology ‘no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conversational recording, but rather the very institutions of the archivable event’.52 For example, the London Zoo’s scientific collection first opened in 1828, but it wasn’t until 1847 that the general population could wander in this archive and bear witness to the zoological collection that compels animals ‘to be visible in circumstances in which everything that would enable them to appear as fellow beings with their own perspective on the world and on us … has been stripped away’.53 Archives of knowledge such as the London Zoo have therefore helped us envision and assess animals historically ‘in terms of the benefits or drawbacks they bring to human knowledge, experience, and comfort, not as beings with an independent right to existence’.54
At the same time, Derrida also might just as easily have turned to ‘the Ornithological Society [that] incorporated the British Society for the Acclimatization of Animals, Birds, Fishes, Insects, and Vegetables, placing Kew Gardens, London, at the centre of the empire-wide distribution of plants’.55 Quoting Lucile Brockway’s Science and Colonial Expansion, Bristow goes on to write: ‘Kew Gardens “regulated the flow of botanical information from the metropolis to the colonial satellites, and disseminated information emanating from them” [and] this is how the very first discourses of the capital resources of herbaria (forerunners to seed banks) dominated our cultural framework.’56 The limitations embedded in this cultural framework have been instrumental in the archivisation of the vegetal world, helping contribute to the Aristotelian plant blindness that Gagliano decries as counter-factual to scientific evidence. For example, Verity is consistently enraptured by the Flowers’ petals unfurling to track the sun’s progress across the sky. This is called phototropism, which Gagliano describes as ‘a process wherein plants orient their leaves and stem in a purposeful manner in response to a light source’.57 In spite of the growing wealth of research and the observation of such phenomena as phototropism dating as far back as a Theophrastus of Eresus (371–c.285 BC), however, plant passivity and insensitivity have become the default view of the vegetal world.58 More recently, Marta Zaraska reports for Scientific American on research that strongly suggests flora ‘may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects’.59 Nevertheless, Gagliano continues to report ‘plants are still generally considered to be passive and insensitive organisms, or, worse, simply not important’.60 Case in point: Gagliano points to an egregious example when ‘arguably the most prestigious of all scientific journals, [a 2009 issue of Nature] forgot the plant kingdom when compiling a resource aimed at the wider general public and designed to explain the empirical evidence for the process of evolution by natural selection’.61 Plant blindness and plant (in)sensitivity therefore contribute to how the vegetal world is archived and, by extension, the archive itself – i.e., the scientific and philosophical disciplines and their concomitant annals that have in turn shaped Western science and philosophy – that defines and decides the vegetal world’s archivable content in the first place. These examples (among many) highlight how vegetal and animal worlds are produced and recorded as befits archivisation’s codetermining function and exemplifies Derrida’s logic: the archive produces as much as it records the objects it consequently archives. The question of the vegetal and the question of the animal in Queen City Jazz can therefore offer its readers the opportunity to think more broadly on the question of the archive – i.e. ‘the question of the politics of archiving and archival codeterminations of materiality and meaning’62 – as it relates to archival knowledge about nonhuman forms of life on this planet.
In Queen City Jazz, Verity is experiencing first hand the complexities of the ‘technologies of the archive … [that] make us what we are [and] allow us to be social, cultural, and historical creatures in the first place’,63 evident in her ongoing attempts to figure out her identity, get her bearings in the Flower City, and fully understand her connections to the archive. Part of Verity’s disorientation, however, is that the Flower City is archiving what Jeffrey Fisher would call dead information. In his critiques of Arthur Kroker’s celebration of archivalism’s power ‘“to download the body into data, to screen the body electronic, to file, delete and recombine the body in its virtual form as a relational data base [sic] into new configurations”’,64 Fisher points out that ‘[t]he archival moment is thus a negative moment. The archive, self-remembered as data, negates the body, history, memory itself’,65 all of which Verity gradually re-accesses as the novel continues. Verity’s resistance to Abe Durancy’s corrupted vision of the Flower City is therefore founded upon her ability to grow and become something more than the instrumentalism of dead information: she gradually emerges as more than merely a product and record of the archive to become instead a posthuman subject that embraces the body, history and memory denied by the archive. This emergence begins with Rose, Abe Durancy’s first-cousin, romantic interest, and genius programmer in her own right. Rose recognised Abe’s shortcomings and seeded a counter-programme into the Flower City; as a result, only Verity has the power to activate Rose’s secret programme, loosening ‘the activated replicators, which had only to meet the receptors that were embedded in the very fabric of the matter of Durancy’s City for the change to begin. The change to Rose’s sane City.’66
Verity’s central role, however, is much more than simply her ability to activate Rose’s counter-programming. Namely, while Verity may initially be an archived posthuman who, upon emerging from within the storage banks, looks like Rose and offers hope to the citizens of the Queen City, a great deal of her strength arises from having been raised outside the archive in the Shaker Hill community. As a result, Verity comes to embody an excess that defies complete and total archivisation by the archive-as-dystopia. This excess is symbolised in her ability to Dance, a kinetic skill that is explicitly connected to species reciprocity. Throughout her years growing up in Shaker Hill ‘Verity felt the Great Blessing echo through her body, unfolding like a flower of light which drew brilliance from the air around her straight into her body, and then it gathered into the center of her bones, concentrated, bright, and rushed upward through her spine until it flowered somewhere above the top of her head.’67 The floral imagery in the above quotation is unmistakable, but Goonan deftly merges vegetal and animal worlds in the description of the intensifying Dance: ‘[Verity] heard Blaze begin to play once more, as if from far away, a melody which hummed like a swarm of bees, then burst like bright flowers within her vision.’68 Verity’s vegetal-animal Dancing – ‘swarms of bees’ and the ‘bursting of bright flowers’ – proves beneficial for her resistance to the archive-as-dystopia and is instrumental in freeing the Flower City. Namely, when Verity was growing up, her fellow Shakers ‘had found that they were of one mind about her Dances. Sometimes, during Meeting, one of them would rise, and dance a few steps, and the others, remembering exactly, would join in, and for a time they would be part of something larger.’69 This instinctual ability to Dance and shape her Shaker family into a more complex body (of knowledge) proves beneficial later when Verity encounters other archived versions of herself in the central beehive, located in the Museum of Bees at the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. Verity must Dance70 in order to defeat the demented Queen Bee, a.k.a. Abe Durancy’s mother India, or at least a faulty, more childishly impetuous version of India t
hat had been only partially uploaded into the Flower City at its earliest inception. In Dancing, Verity ‘had a new story for them. A new direction.’ Yet, unlike Abe Durancy’s instrumental vision of utopia, Verity’s Dance offers ‘[a] direction, she realized, pausing as she did, toward Nothingness, for it was all new, and completely unknown even to her’.71 The Dance’s symbiosis of swarming bees and bursting bright flowers informs Verity’s ontology and stands as a metaphor for subjects of knowledge that are not easily or readily subjected to archivisation’s dual function of simultaneously producing and recording the event. In other words, Verity may be both produced and recorded by the archive, but there is something more that escapes the material codetermination that is endemic to archives and largely responsible for corrupting the Flower City.
By the end of the novel, Verity recalls her life lessons among the Shakers, and the Dance allows her to embody the evental nature lost within seed banks and repressive beehives. It is this excess that allows her to ‘move betwixt and between unstable definitions of the human’ and helps fuel Jenny Wolmark’s assertions that ‘hierarchies of being that sustain the distinction between self and other, human and inhuman, the natural and the unnatural, can no longer be sustained’.72 While Verity is therefore a character modelled after a species trifecta – i.e., vegetal–animal–posthuman – we might also consider her an example of what Rosi Braidotti calls a post-anthropocentric posthumanism, which she defines as a posthuman articulation that destabilises ‘species supremacy, but it also inflicts a blow to any lingering notion of human nature, anthropos and bios, as categorically distinct from the life of animals and [vegetal] non-humans, or zoe’.73 In other words, Queen City Jazz advances a post-anthropocentric posthumanism in excess of archivalism’s limited ability to produce and record archivable content as nothing more than the instrumentalism of dead information that relies on fixed categories and the species hierarchies constraining our lives. And since the archiving imperative is far from over – Douglas Barbour points to ‘the explosive developments associated with computerisation, the world wide web, Artificial Intelligence, and the new grail of nano-technology … [that] allow for an imaginative construction of ever more complex technologies of knowledge, retention, and communication’74 – what is at stake in Queen City Jazz’s handling of the question of the vegetal, the animal, the archive is ‘as much the collection, storage, and transmission of data as the construction of meaning and by extension material instantiation itself’.75
In conclusion, sf in general is what Gerry Canavan calls ‘our culture’s vast, shared, polyvocal archive of the possible’, and this archive of the possible can (co)determine ‘the sorts of systemic global changes that are imminent, or already happening, and [begin] to imagine what our transformed planet might eventually be like for those who will come to live on it’.76 At the same time, Braidotti notes: ‘[w]e need new genealogies, alternative theoretical and legal representations of the new kinship system and adequate narratives to live up to this challenge.’77 If we’re therefore looking for what Nealon calls an ‘ironically organicist posthumanism’78 to fulfil our search for new genealogies and new kinship systems, we need look no further than Goonan’s Queen City Jazz, a novel inspired by very real organic networks and species reciprocity that subtly erode persistent attitudes or views of the vegetal and animal species as nothing more than insensitive, passive or unsuitable for living as subjects in their own right. At the same time, Queen City Jazz also subtly challenges the fundamental precepts of an archival process that continues to hold significant power in the twenty-first century. In its envisioning of radical nanotechnological change and the question of the vegetal, the animal, the archive, Queen City Jazz therefore emerges as that kind of thinking Anna Gibbs extols as ‘a practice that should extend us beyond the known forms of the subject’,79 forms that include exploring and establishing new connections among differing species and the very process by which archivisation produces and records knowledge and meaning about the species with whom we share the planet. Queen City Jazz shows us that ‘[l]ife is an interlocking assemblage of forms and processes … [and] not a hidden world possessed by an individual organism’,80 and interrogating the question of the vegetal, the animal and the archive means that we will (hopefully) extend our critical interrogations and refoliate our cultural imagination to help think more broadly about posthumanism in the twenty-first century.
9 Queer Ingestions: Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction
Alison Sperling
What would it mean to write and think in a vegetal – if not a vegetative – state, having left one’s head behind or walking on one’s head? What is the outcome of our approximating the locus of vegetal being?
— Michael Marder1
Introduction: Weird Embodiments
Weird fictions, both old and new, are fecund grounds out of which to speculate on the vegetal and the fungal.2 As a genre, mode or aesthetic, the weird involves (among other things) the exploration of twisted forms of time and unusual spatial conceptions, and of strange forms of embodied transformation – particular qualities that this chapter will also locate in the many imaginative plants and fungi in Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In part because weirdness points to the radically unfamiliar and the limits of the knowable, plants especially seem to have secured a place in the imaginations of weird fiction writers since the early twentieth century.3
Of course, plants are also ubiquitous and foundational to all life on the planet, making them in many ways as familiar as they are foreign. Writing about the ways in which weirdness is experienced, Mark Fisher has claimed that it ‘brings to the familiar something which normally lies beyond it’.4 The ‘familiar’ is what might have been understood as one’s human-ness, which, through weird encounters, is suddenly revealed to be less familiar and therefore less human. Fisher goes on to write that ‘the weird de-naturalizes all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside’.5 Fisher’s inside/outside dialectic of the weird, or more precisely the ways in which the weird breaks down the contaminations between inside/outside, is central to this chapter, as it helps to conceptualise how weird fiction plays with the boundaries (or lack thereof) between the self and the world ‘outside’. Perhaps it is in part this relationship between the familiar and unfamiliar, and the ways in which plants both weird the human and are weird-ed by the human, that writers like VanderMeer have found most alluring to explore in fiction. I would go so far as to say that it is plants themselves that are foundational to the weirdness across much of VanderMeer’s work.
VanderMeer has described the New Weird – a literary genre emerging in the early 1990s out of the same combination of the influences of the so-called old weird, science fiction, steampunk, horror, surrealism and the fantastic – as having a continued emphasis on ‘transformation, decay, or mutilation of the human body’, one that is arguably explored throughout more than a century of weird writing.6 The weird therefore poses challenges to the imagined boundaries of the human body during a particular moment of planetary crises through a queer ‘desire to persist’, revealing the body to be a wilful object open to unexpected entanglements. As Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano write in their co-edited GLQ special issue on ‘Queer Inhumanisms’,
we are marking a specific kind of situation – a desire to persist in the face of precarity – as the primary catalyst for queer thought in general. That situation … is particularly generative for queer inhuman thought, since the intensification of precarity in particular contexts tends to push putatively ‘human’ subjects to the critical edge of that category.7
The editors suggest that queer ecological engagements with the non-human emerge ‘as a response to precarity, as the effects of climate crisis extend that condition to encompass all of humanity’,8 and that in this context ‘queer’ itself must expand past its conventional resonance in order to ask ‘what “sex” and “gender” might look like apart from the anthropocentric forms with which we have becomes perh
aps too familiar’.9 What I call ‘weird embodiment’ is thus evocative of possible reconfigurations of intimacy, embodiment and weird reproductions, while also marking moments and bodies that deconstruct standardised, heterogeneous, often Western notions of the self and of subject-hood.10 Weird embodiment works with expanded, nonhuman conceptualisations of queerness, expanding the self while threatening or precisely in order to threaten to undo it.
For this chapter, I am especially interested in the ways in which weird fiction transposes unlike things to create weird embodiment, creating what Fisher calls ‘montages’ that fasten things together that don’t otherwise belong.11 I will consider a number of plant–human-body ‘montages’ across VanderMeer’s fiction, and explore how these forms of weird embodiment de-familiarise and speculate on how the (so-called) human will continue to respond, adapt or transform to the conditions of the Anthropocene. For although it is common knowledge that plants nourish many other forms of life and render the atmosphere breathable for species that require oxygen, plants arguably remain on the margins of comprehensible subject-hood and thus difficult to imagine as intertwined with the bodies of humans. Plants’ and fungi’s decentralised and often non-individuated bodies, their unique temporalities and the difficulties inherent in communicating with them in any kind of standardised, normative mode, render plant and fungal beings ‘other’ in unique and important ways. Each presents us with complex questions about and models for a more distributed and responsible concept of agency and subjectivity, especially during a moment of heightening ecological crisis, when it has become more important than ever to think beyond the hierarchies of being that have for too long privileged the singular, individualised human over other forms of life.
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