TY - JOUR
AU - Terracciano, Emilia
AB - Early technological innovations linked to recording and communication, such as the radio and telephone, inaugurated research into the perception and cognition of vibrational continua connecting sound to infrasound, and other inaudible frequencies.1 These inventions also encouraged the belief that humans could access anomalous zones of transmission between the domains of human and non-human, of the living and the dead.2 The case of Bengali physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), who researched the physical behaviour of particles and pioneered the use of semiconductor junctions to detect and channel radio signals, is illustrative here. Credited with pioneering discoveries in microwave and wireless telecommunications, Bose’s research would contribute to the future development of satellite communication.3 The invisible and mysterious behaviour of microwave particles fascinated him most; specifically, the secret power of waves to elude (colonial) perception: to ‘pass brick walls, buildings’ and ‘transmit messages […] without the mediation of wires’.4 Knowledge of particle behaviour could also entail control of their movement: channelled waves could be made to traverse (colonial) bodies undetected, causing remote havoc and potential damage.5 Such experiments in the transmission of invisible particles were complemented by Bose’s prescient research into the physiological behaviour of plants.6 Amongst the first to advocate the view that plants are active and exploratory organisms, capable of remembering and learning from experience, Bose believed that humans and plants sensed and felt in similar ways under stress and stimuli.7 To support this intuition Bose fabricated the High Magnification Crescograph, a delicate recording instrument engineered to convey the ‘tremors of excitation’ and ‘the throbs and surges of life’ in a plant.8 He focused his experiments on tropical plants capable of rapid movements, the mimosa plant (Fabacea Leguminosa) and the telegraph plant (Codariocalyx Motorius).9 Composed of a series of minute clockwork gears and a smoked glass plate, the Crescograph recorded plant movement and magnified it up to 10,000 times through the use of two levers. Tracings inscribed on the glass plate at regular intervals (what Bose called ‘plant autographs’) (Fig. 1) calibrated the rate of growth of the plant under various stimuli (temperature, electricity, gas, and chemicals). These magnified sets of tracings were of course silent: the picture of the plant world remained mute. But Bose himself would transduce these graphic tracings into sound, quite literally giving ‘voice’ to the visual.10 This visual evidence was used to advance the study of plant behaviour and promote the view that the vegetal kingdom, although seemingly mute, was not passive, mere morphological stuff to be dissected by (colonial) botanists under the lenses of microscopes. Rather, ‘nature’ could ‘speak’ once equipped with the appropriate instruments.11 In Britain, Bose’s experiments with reanimation, and reawakening of mute (dead) nature, evoked contemporary parallels with the fictive figure of Viktor Frankenstein, protagonist of Mary Shelley’s eponymous Gothic science fiction novel. Scorned by English scientific peers, Bose’s transmissions to and from the realms of the human and the non-human disrupted visions of purity, questioning settled distinctions between these two domains. Described as an eccentric and obsessive visionary in British scientific circles, Bose and his work were mocked and, later, obscured.12 A small number of European (mainly German) supporters celebrated his research into the micro-dynamic processes of the plant world. Appealing to the primitivism of an initiated and nostalgic urban elite, Bose’s techno-animist studies mobilized an ancient, esoteric, ‘simple wisdom’ against the complex science of Europe – he indicated the ‘path to India’.13 Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Jagadish Chandra Bose, plant autographs, date unknown. Bose Institute, Kolkata. (Photo: E. Terracciano). This historical excursus into the curious instruments and technologies Bose developed to probe the mysterious workings of the physical and natural world provide exposition for contemporary resonances at play in the work of Lahore-based artist Mehreen Murtaza (b. 1986, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia).14 In our current computational age in which the proliferation of non-human networks and algorithmic intelligence compel one to question the assumption that humans are at the centre of life, Murtaza orchestrates sonic scenarios that prompt reflections about artificiality, virtuality, and censorship in and beyond contemporary Pakistan. Captivated by pre-digital recording and communication machines, Murtaza invites the listener to connect and access domains beyond those phenomenologically cognizable: what is invoked is not only what humans cannot hear, but also what they cannot understand. Removed from the pervading ‘visualism’ symptomatic of the history of modern scientific thought, Murtaza dramatizes the act of listening to inquire into the nature of the invisible, theorized by scholar Veit Erlmann as ‘the horizon of vision’.15 By overlapping the realms of sight and vision, Murtaza makes the mute more present in vision and yet inaugurates a space in which sight has no access.16 Listeners are invited to step into and become part of larger, unknowable dimensions of vibrational systems linked to sound that seek to unsettle the ‘disciplinary conceit of the monosensory’, and those binary constructions of human/non-human, presence/non-presence, audible/non-audible.17 Her imaginative contributions are used as a conduit to probe the limits of the perceivable, but also often of the plausible. Drawing attention to the possibilities contained in the realm of the imperceptible, and the not-yet or no-longer audible, Murtaza quibbles with rationalist legacies of modern philosophy. She draws attention to the struggles between the processes of thinking and listening, and of thinking and hearing, which shaped the contours of modernity. Moreover, she alerts one to the ocular bias that characterizes the human mind as a kind of mirror capable of recording precise representations of the world while remaining radically divorced from it.18 Sound – a physical wave phenomenon – and resonance – involving molecular particles, neural tissue, and electronic technologies – are used to amplify the process of listening. Defying questions of origins as physical phenomena, sound, and resonance are non-linear and stage conjunctive relations of adjacency and sympathy. Murtaza’s exploration of phenomena located at the threshold of the perceptible and the focus on the ‘“speakerly” or “speechly” substance’ of silence, can be made sense of implicitly in the contemporary context of Pakistan. Writing about silence in relation to totalitarian regimes, Roland Barthes suggests that the implicit (‘and the silence that works at its index’) forms a part of private and worldly combat.19 Religious persecution remains a silent feature of contemporary Pakistan, in which minority communities continue to be persecuted. Offences relating to religion were first codified by the British in 1860, developed in 1927, and inherited by Pakistan in 1947. It was during the military reign of General Zia-ul-Haq between 1978 and 1988 that several clauses were added to Pakistan’s laws to ‘Islamicize’ these, culminating in the legal denial of rights and excommunication of the Ahmadi community from Pakistan declared non-Muslim in 1974 by way of the second constitutional Amendment. Between 1980 and 1986, significant changes to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) were made as five provisions relating to blasphemy and further offences against religion were added to the PPC within a span of six years. While religion-related offences introduced by the British were not associated with any particular religion, blasphemy laws enacted in Pakistan during General Zia-ul-Haq’s era were specific to Islam. Between 1987 and 2018, almost 1500 individuals were accused under various clauses of the blasphemy law, with most cases lodged for desecration of the Koran. Amendment of the blasphemy laws has been on the agenda of many popular secular parties but little progress was made, mainly due to the sensitive nature over the issue but also because few major parties openly wished to antagonize religious party opponents. Subsequent attempts on the part of political party campaigners to change procedures of religious offences have foundered under pressure from religious forces as well as opposition political groups. Prime Minister Imran Khan, elected in 2018, vowed to uphold and defend Pakistan’s inflexible blasphemy laws, making little room for changes for fear of religious backlash. Recommendations for changes to these laws on the part of the law government department are yet to be made public. The ongoing struggles with censorship and control of expression has prompted intellectuals, lawyers, activists, and writers to devise ways to elude the oppression, dangers, and intimidations that come with the act of speaking. Vocal opponents have found ways to respond to threats by accepting, subverting, and tactfully ignoring aggressions.20 This article wants to resist tooling Murtaza’s practice as a simple critique of the state and its handling of the law. To turn her complex work into a reflective instrument stages another form of muting, a too simple settling and evening out of scores that have little to do with her work. Invoking the threshold of the perceptible, Murtaza uses the medium of sound to facilitate an act of listening that is reflexive, one that turns both herself and her willing audience into a medium or transmitter. Her 2013 sound score ‘Transmission from a Missing Satellite’ (TfMS), the acoustic component of her multimedia installation Score for a Film, is a work that engages with the spectral history of Pakistani Ahmadi Professor Mohammad Abdus Salam (1926–1996), his contributions, and exilic predicament (Fig. 2). Conceived as an ‘incantation, self-serving hagiography as well as embodying a sort of secular prayer’, Murtaza writes, TfMS is also about the state-orchestrated silencing of this Pakistani theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.21 Haunting, yet playful, the sonic composition makes sense of Abdus Salam’s fragile work and world as well as his violent erasure in contemporary history.22 Considered the founding father of modern physics in Pakistan, Abdus Salam acted as chief scientific adviser to the government between 1960–1979, and was the key promoter of the national nuclear programme as well as the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (Suparco).23 His research into the behaviour of elusive subatomic particles (the ‘God Particle’) would lead to the co-formulation of the electroweak theory. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s excommunication of the Ahmadi community and the unanimous passing of a Parliament bill declaring ‘Qadiyanis’ non-Muslim subjects – that is, heretic – spurred the Professor to flee the country in protest. He died in Oxford in 1996, and his body was returned to Pakistan for burial. In 1998, the atom bomb, largely inspired by his atomic research, was first detonated in Pakistan. A white, mushroom-like shape painted in 2014, following the orders of local authorities, clouds the word ‘Muslim’ on his tombstone. The defacement is a disturbance and a redaction – a silencing. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, installation view of Score for a Film, ‘Transmission from a Missing Satellite’, sound installation with Abdus Salam's collection of faux personal items, Kolkata, 2019. (Photo: Experimenter). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza and Experimenter. In the more recent iteration of Murtaza’s installation how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees, choreographed at the Bagh-e-Jinnah Gardens on the occasion of the Lahore Biennale in 2018, Murtaza selected a tree, wired it, and connected plastic black cables to Arduino devices, MIDI Shield boards, and amplifiers. During the course of the inaugural Lahore Biennale (LB01), groups of people, including this author, congregated around the trunk of the large banyan (Ficus Benghalensis), touching, talking, playing music, and whispering to it (Fig. 3).24 When touched, the banyan emitted inaudible frequencies and vibrations; instruments could pick these up and transform them into audible, synthetized, acoustic signals. how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees was choreographed as a gigantic, customized transmission machine mediating the realms of the human and the non-human. This article offers an invitation to listen out for the anomalous transmissions, ghostly echoes, and inaudible frequencies Murtaza orchestrates. The tensions, crackling sounds, and delays, which first accompanied the transmission of voice through early recording and communication technologies, are left unchanged: something is lost in the act of transmission. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, installation view of how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees, 2018, Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly Lawrence Gardens), Lahore Biennale 01. (Photo: Mehreen Murtaza, Sabeen Jamil, Komal Ghazaali and Ammar Siddiqui). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza. Lost in Transmission Is everything made of atoms? The voice at the other end of the antique dial phone is gentle, pensive, and crackles with soft static. Even thoughts? If not, what are they made of? […] What about atoms, can they think? If atoms could think would they be worried about overpopulation?25 Over the years, Murtaza’s research into extreme sound frequencies, frequencies that lie at the boundary of human perception (i.e. just below 20 Hz and just above 20 kHz), has informed the making of installations that play with and tease the empirical contours of the possible in science. Captivated by how the religion of Islam has contributed to the creation, imagination, and stimulation of science fiction and fantasy (the Arabic translation of ‘science fiction’ is khayal ‘ilmi meaning ‘scientific investigation’), Murtaza invests technology with a potential to chart processes ‘of invocation and erasure, pilfering and re-making, and the precarious subjective nature of shared histories’.26 Her installation TfMS is set up as a posthumous offering and homage to the remarkable and itinerant Abdus Salam. During his life Abdus Salam propounded the fundamental role of science in knowledge (the Arabic word which he invoked, ‘ilm, covers both), advocating for its development in the third world.27 Mindful of his role as scientific ambassador of Islam to the world, he took up the task of restoring the forgotten reputation of Muslim personalities in the pantheon of science. Such personalities operated as far afield as the Pyrenees in the west and Samarkand in the east, and from Toledo and Cordoba in Spain to Baghdad in the south.28 Amongst the scientists cited by Abdus Salam were figures who integrated scientific ideas from the west and from the east into learning; these included Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a leading member of the scientific academy of Baghdad under the Caliph al-Ma’mum in the ninth century. Al-Khwarizmi produced a novel technique for solving and codifying mathematical problems – ‘ilm-al’jebr (algebra), the science of combination or association. Moreover, he developed the concept of zero as number (sifr in Arabic, whence also our word ‘cipher’), the absence of which had crucially limited the possibilities for the development of mathematics.29 Abdus Salam espoused the view that for the early Muslim communities there was no conflict between science and religion, and advocated for the free-flow of scientific invention and innovation. The spread of Islam, Abdus Salam believed, unfolded alongside the ‘great advances in medicine, mathematics, physics, astronomy, geography, architecture, art, literature, and history… [T]he sophisticated instruments which were to make possible the European voyages of discovery, such as the astrolabe, the quadrant, and good navigational maps, were developed by Muslims’.30 In her article ‘Fictional Islam’, scholar Rebecca Hankins notes that such historical currents of Islamic scientific thought have become the focus of contemporary science fiction and fantasy writings by Muslim authors. The work Score for a Film participates in this resurgence of science fiction and fantasy in the Islamic world that has seen writers and artists examining the complex and dynamic intellectual currents of Medieval Islamic scientific thought.31 The installation puts fiction into science and invites the viewer to engage in a form of sonic time-travel that places renewed significance on traces of the lost futures inhabiting the present. Hauntological, it gestures to the persistence of Abdus Salam’s ghost, his societal haunting from beyond the grave, and stages the desire to confront the silencing and disappearance of man steeped in abstract theoretical speculation. As a theoretical physicist, Abdus Salam employed mathematical models and systems to rationalize, demonstrate, and anticipate natural phenomena: unperceivable, infinitesimal particles of matter, electroweak fields, neutron stars, and black holes. Score for a Film involves carefully choreographed components both aural and visual (Fig. 4). They include TfMS (12.40’) and a mock office set displaying Abdus Salam’s instruments and memorabilia: a mahogany desk, three Dictaphones, a briefcase full of papers, a telephone, and a glass of scotch (Fig. 2). A reworked, life-size photograph depicts three Imams before a large mixing-desk seemingly surveilling or eavesdropping the activities of the Professor (Fig. 5). Specifically relevant to what concerns us here is Murtaza’s inclusion of instruments pointing to various ways of measuring, recording, and storing acoustic data. TfMS combines music samples with synthesized sounds; overlaying soundwaves and manipulating them with filters and oscillators, Murtaza produces noises, crackling and hissing, and echoes, around Abdus Salam’s voice. Making the sound piece available to visitors through a set of earphones, she dramatizes a more private and intimate relaying of audio data processing, one that shields both listener and work in the gallery space.32 Mediating a fictional encounter with the Professor, Murtaza invokes space-travel; Abdus Salam discusses and speculates about the possibility of quantum communication, and ‘manipulating subatomic particles in order to literally converse across time itself’.33 Murtaza selects a potentially damaged or faulty outer-space station as the transmission vehicle through which to reanimate or bring back the Professor’s voice. Lost in space, the Professor is not only invisible; ultimately, his own voice transmission is lost to the silence of cosmic space. Such dematerialization reminds one that ‘sound comes “from silence” and “returns to silence”’.34 The underlining movement to and from the heard and the unseen raises the question of the visible: does experience always sound forth and ultimately, from the sonic presence of muted subjects, does silence constitute a voice?35 The installation seemingly collapses frictions between science, inter-galactic silence, and state-sanctioned muting – the latter being the modus operandi of authoritarian regimes: one can’t say anything because everything one says is being listened to, potentially recorded and stored for future recall, auditory scrutiny and forensic surveillance. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, installation view of Score for a Film, ‘Transmission from a Missing Satellite’, sound installation with Abdus Salam’s collection of faux personal items, Kolkata, 2019. (Photo: Experimenter). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza and Experimenter. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, ‘The Oligarchy of Hi-Tech Imams’, Hahnemühle, matte cotton photo rag, Dibond, 152.196 x 249.65 cm, 2019. (Photo: Experimenter). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza and Experimenter. The presence in the gallery display of archival material, including photographs and redacted newspaper cuttings, adds to the spectral status of Abdus Salam (Figs. 6 and 7). The Professor is defaced graphically, representations of static occlude his face and body. Murtaza alludes to an indeterminate source of physical interference: electromagnetic and atmospheric noise, possibly prompted by cosmic microwave background radiation or localized radio wave noise (as in the case of modern television screen static). TfMS moves between sound and silence provoking listeners to think about the importance of being able to listen for what is censored, left out, and why. By invoking absence it insists on presence, its recalcitrance, and sonorous hauntings. Murtaza would like the process of listening to make the invisible present.36 She appears to ask, what metaphysics belong to the act of listening? To the invisible? What of the status of Abdus Salam?37 Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, Score for a Film, ‘Daily Akhbar news clipping’, archival print on Hahnemühle rice paper, 21.03 x 25.4 cm, 2013. (Photo: Experimenter). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza and Experimenter. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, Score for a Film, ‘Symposium on Elementary Particle Interactions, Miramare Castle, Trieste’, inkjet print on Hahnemühle photo rag, 38.1 x 50.8 cm, 2019. (Photo: Experimenter). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza and Experimenter. how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees Conceived two years later, Murtaza’s installation how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees similarly invites the listener to engage in an act of transmission, opening up a series of questions concerning artificiality, virtuality, and vibrational continua. The installation is rooted in contemporary research dealing with the elaborate communicative sensoria of plants, including the work of plant neurobiologists studying kin-recognition, complex foraging strategies, intelligence and long-distance chemical, electric, and molecular signalling.38 This research casts plants as responsive, articulate, and crucial ‘vocal’ participants in interspecies ecologies. how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees is therefore intended to activate vital intimacies between the human and non-human, offering ways to think about the role of voice, political representation, and speech in the post-colony. The word ‘conduct’ implies both the manner of behaviour and the physical (embodied) transmission by conduction of a form of energy. The process of transmission is acoustic and technologically mediated. Electro-magnetic signals produced by stimulated plants are translated into sound.39 The plant becomes a transducer of affects and sensations, and embroils humans in this newly generated animate ecology. how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees was first set up at Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, in 2015 and Manchester Art Gallery in 2017–2018. In Manchester, cabled potted plants were situated in the hermetically sealed acoustic environment of the gallery space.40 Plants could be seen to reach the ceiling and to climb around and behind radiators. The construction of an elevated pergola allowed a limited number of visitors to perambulate through the artificial garden and ‘listen’ to the plants.41 At the 2018 Lahore Biennale, how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees was installed in Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly Lawrence Gardens), an urban public park surrounding present-day Quaid-e-Azam Library (Fig. 8).42 The choice of a large, sixty-year-old banyan located on top of a quieter hill was logistically opportune and suggestive. The banyan tree, a species native to the Indian subcontinent, is historically significant. The word ‘banyan’ derives from the Gujarati ‘banya’ meaning merchant; it is said that Hindu merchants sought shelter and shade beneath the tree to conduct business.43 Banyans moreover were a sacred place of meditation for Hindu ascetics or holy men of whom English traveller and historian Thomas Herbert wrote in 1634: ‘Some of this Sect adore the Trees, and adorne them with Streamers of silke Ribands and the like’.44 To cut down a banyan was considered a crime equivalent to killing a Brahmin or member of the priestly caste. In the specific case of the installation, the tree selected by Murtaza offered more prosaic, and vital, solace and shade to the urban homeless who congregate around the trunk during the intense heat of the summer months. The tree also displayed intricate roots above and below the ground, recalling the spectacular description of a banyan in India written in the tenth century by Arab historian Masudi: [The banyan is] one of the marvels of nature and prodigies of the vegetable kingdom. It spreads over the ground with interlaced branches of the most beautiful appearance and richest foliage; it reaches up in the air to the height of the tallest palm trees, then its branches curve down in the opposite direction, forcing themselves into the earth… then they reappear with new branches, which rise up like the first, descend and open a passage into the earth… If the Indians did not employ men to prune them, and for religious reasons having to do with the next life, look after these trees, they would cover the country, completely invading it.45 Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, installation view of how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees, 2018, Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly Lawrence Gardens), Lahore Biennale 01. (Photo: Mehreen Murtaza, Sabeen Jamil, Komal Ghazaali, and Ammar Siddiqui). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza. Wiring the tree involved a complex process. Murtaza and a team of collaborators wired cables to the tree trunk, roots, and branches; drilling conducted on upper branches to fasten speakers raised ethical concerns amongst more sensitive viewers.46 For others, who lamented the tree’s vocal lassitude, the installation amounted to an Indian rope trick intended to dupe a gullible public about the plant’s alleged animacy.47 During the Biennale, images documenting the installation were regularly uploaded by the artist to the internet; they depicted members of the public interacting with the tree both individually and collectively.48 The installation also yielded a carefully edited ‘Concerto’ in which singer Maham Suhan and the cabled tree performed for listeners present and virtual.49 The image theatrics posted on the internet readily evoked the trope of the tree worshipper, a figure also associated with the Chipko, a Hindi word for ‘tree hugger’. A rural, non-violent movement, the Chipko andolan historically involved women and children linking arms around trees slated for felling to halt the government-backed logging in Uttar Pradesh.50 But Murtaza has suggested that the Bagh-e-Jinnah iteration of how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees was intended as a public and open-ended pedagogical process, one that encourages parallels with other historical initiatives: among others, the environmental scenarios set up by polymath and Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan, West Bengal, at the Visva Bharati University.51 Founded by Tagore in 1921, Santiniketan was choreographed to facilitate a ‘tuning in with nature’ and class teaching was regularly conducted outdoors, that is, in the company of trees. In his 1930 collection of writings The Voice of the Forest (Banabāni), the poet brought out the ancient existential bond between nature and humankind. In this literary ecology, he invited readers to listen to nature rather than to simply observe it. Such pedagogical initiatives were a means to retrieve culture from the brutal impoverishment of metropolitan, colonial life and to provide a sheltered platform for students to engage freely in creative activities. Santiniketan proposed com-participation in a spiritual ecology, one urgently needed to rescue imperilled humankind from its predicament in the anthropocene. For Tagore, who drew on the teachings of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the same consciousness that we experience as human beings permeates the entire natural world and the cosmos.52 Humanity awakens to its liberating destiny as a witness to the sentient order of creation when it is in tune with the environment and listens out for it. how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees resonates with the humanistic concerns propounded by Tagore and, further, draws attention to the sceptical reception that still attends scientific knowledge surrounding plant intelligence. Until recently, plant neurobiological findings were typically received with scepticism by the scientific community, accruing an increased New Age stigma of esotericism. Deemed parapsychological, rather than scientific, research into plant sentience fomented speculations about cellular awareness and sentience connecting all living organisms.53how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees operated at the threshold between ‘qualified and unqualified’ scientific knowledge, occupying a space that encourages thinking about the world in speculative ways.54 To give the plant a voice was not about ‘the intellectual feat of abstraction in interpreting the values themselves’ but rather ‘about an immediate form of communication via acoustic signals’.55 The title itself gestures to an acoustic orchestration moving from the study of plant response to stimuli to the enhanced behaviour of humans exposed to the presence of the tree. This sonic indeterminacy and openness fuels speculation about the feasibility of conduits linking the articulated and unutterable in human and non-human networks of perception. Moreover, it displaces language and description, gesturing to a world harbouring phenomena and interactions that we are unable to cognize. Can the Plant Speak? Nature as Subaltern The strategic ambiguity of how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees highlights the problematics of advocacy – of speaking for, and giving voice to, the mute – a concern famously submitted by scholar Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak in the seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’? published in 1988.56 In that essay, Spivak advanced the view that to represent and speak on behalf of the subaltern (here, the good Hindu wife), is always to carry out a form of ‘epistemic violence’ that ‘[constitutes] the colonial subject as Other’.57 After a complex critical articulation of the risks and rewards underpinning any academic pursuit of subalternity, Spivak concludes that the subaltern cannot speak, yet ‘representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a task which she must not disown with a flourish’.58 Environmentalist scholar Astrid Neimanis reiterates Spivak’s cautionary argument about muting ‘the Other’ where nature is often cast as ‘subaltern’.59 She asks: ‘What are the ethics and politics of humans who position themselves as spokespeople or translators of non-human matters?’60 Following Spivak, Neimanis submits that representation can never be ‘bypassed’, rather it is a matter of addressing the mechanisms of power that cast beings as ‘either representable or unknowable’.61 For Neimanis the fact that the subaltern cannot speak has more to do with the human addressee or their spokesperson not being able to hear, initiating a process of erasure, a rendering nature passive, or mute, ‘a silencing’ or ‘secondary missingness’.62 Murtaza’s installation cautiously averts the problematics surrounding the debate around subalternity refocusing on the question advanced by Neimanis on the auditory ability of humans: how do humans listen, or better, how can they learn to? These are the questions that how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees provoke to convene new auditory politics.63 The emphasis on ‘voice’ has indeed placed scientists studying plant intentionality in a dilemma. In her book The Vegetative Soul, philosopher Elaine Miller contends that sensitive feminist scholars concerned with the non-human continue to privilege in their writings the activity of the animal over the plant. Such approaches treat plants as passive and mechanical, conferring greater value upon organisms that humans ‘can hold in regard’.64 Specifically, they privilege the ‘encounter value’ of those animals with which a human can ‘lock eyes’. But the focus on animals can often tie up researchers in an ‘affective circuit’ that triggers iterative and recursive loops between humans and animals.65 Plants, by contrast, are ‘extensive, distributed and entangled’ and push the inquiry about sentience along ‘rhizomes into inter-species ecologies’.66 As Guattari and Deleuze put it: ‘[E]ven when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else – with the wind, an animal, human beings’.67 Murtaza encourages listeners to move away from the agentive locus of voice to the activity of listening, a state that can make the invisible present and the mute visible.68 Probing the limits of the perceivable, the installation, moreover, draws attention to the vococentrism, a condition linked to our inherent deafness to nature, as the counterpoint to state-sanctioned denial of voice. The earlier focus of Murtaza’s TfMS was voice – or rather the absenting of voice, and the installation set up a platform through which to transmit Professor Abdus Salam’s ghostly spirit. By extension, it alerted one to Abdus Salam’s right to speech and a hearing in the legal sense of the term. This process of voice recognition is staged in the context of silencing through state-induced censorship, a form of muting. Such emphasis on the missing voice of the Professor and its purported recreation becomes more relevant when we connect ‘voice’ to the legal realm in the case of the vegetal world. Voice, particularly the human voice, has been central to the formation, mediation, and practice of the law. The Aristotelian idea that speech governs our understanding of what makes an animal ‘political’, that is, able to communicate moral concepts like justice, still underpins contemporary legal discussions.69 In a well-known and debated passage from the Politics Aristotle writes: whereas mere sound is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and the inexpedient, and likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust and that the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.70 Linking voice production to an animal’s capacity for sensation and ostensibly locomotion, Aristotle postulated that the voice carries explicit demands to elicit attention from others; in other words, it is a call. Produced in the pharynx, ‘voice’ can be produced by an embodied being endowed with the capacity for imagination.71 The coupling of voice with justice and law (‘jurisdiction’ being composed of ‘juris’ meaning ‘right’ and ‘diction’ meaning ‘speech’), raises important questions about the meaning of sentience in the case of humans in a vegetative state.72 Attributing the behaviour of a Sceptic colleague to a state of vegetal regression, Aristotle at once silences and chastises his opponent. Moreover, he re-inaugurates the space of the human voice, of speech, as the only possible normative one in which to conduct a rational discussion. Only those within its range of perceptibility – or audibility – are subject to jurisdiction and authority. In this scenario, only the public trial (forum) can allow one to comprehend how the voice energizes certain forms of governance and control.73 The state of ‘vegetating’ – a behaviour that signals inertia, incapacity for speech and thought – enjoys no legal status: to be stripped of rights is also to have been denied the right to a voice and to a hearing; to live a ‘bare life’ is to live a life that has become politically vegetative in the more sinister Agambian conjunction.74 The phonocentrism of our legal frameworks has been at the heart of debates about ‘legal animism’ and the rights of nature in Europe from the nineteenth century onwards.75 In the ground-breaking manifesto titled Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects, law professor Christopher Stone critiques the anthropocentric logic of our legal (capitalist) regimes. In an often-quoted passage, Stone writes: It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities… One ought, I think, to handle the legal problems of natural objects as one does the problems of legal incompetents – human beings who have become vegetable.76 Stone’s essay on non-human rights has become a key text for theoretical debates on environmental law.77 Specifically significant to us here is how Stone, through tracing historical connections across law, ethics and politics, relates the issue of the rightlessness and lack of voice of the vegetable kingdom to the jurisprudential history and objectification of humans. Stone cites the legal status of black slaves; in the modern jurisdictional system, slaves were held right-less, reduced to inanimate, voiceless things or property commodities, up until the late nineteenth century.78 Under Stone’s account, a thing devoid of interests or will of its own can be a bearer of legal rights. Moreover, the rights of a thing cannot be reduced to interests of other beings. Rather, for the thing to have rights it must occupy a position in a shared legal system, which implies that any injury to it must be assessed (with judicial discretion) and, finally, that there is a case for redress whenever injuries occur. Voice ought not to be the standard through which the possibility of being damaged and thus the requirement to seek legal redress are judged.79how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees does not purport to ventriloquize the plant. Rather, it seeks to offer a conduit through which to facilitate the performance of plant intentionality for the benefit of slow and attuned listening. Sonic Equivocations: To Keep Quiet as Worlding Tactic اس طرح اپنی خامُشی گونجی گویا ہر سَمت سے جواب آئے My silence resonated in such a way as if seeking answers from all directions.80 Murtaza’s exhortation how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees highlights the possibility for abundant equivocation in the sense used by Amerindianist anthropologist Viveiros de Castro. In the writings of De Castro, equivocation does not impede a relation , but founds and impels it: a difference in perspective.81 Murtaza’s cyberneticist approach to the vegetal kingdom treats the plant as a stimulus-responsive organism with a memory of sorts; data is fed to the plant by way of sense impressions. Yet the translation of electromagnetic data into sound presumes that the possibility for ambiguity always exists: translation is inherently fuzzy. Exonerated from the quandaries of representation, how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees proposes an ethical and political problem. In the words of theoretical physicist and feminist scholar Karen Barad, ethics ‘is not about right response to a radically exterior/ised other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’.82 This also means desisting from dreams of intimacy and mastery. If commonality may not entail being subsumed, how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees acknowledges the risk of colonization. The installation only involves an act of translation that is equivocal: electrical impulses are not quantified as measured values but simply rendered musically to convey an aesthetic experience.83 This means that rather than being about representing and therefore silencing the other through a presumption of univocality, transmission communicates with differences and embraces the idea that what the ‘Other and We are Saying’ are incommensurable.84 Questioning what it means to respond, and promise in return as response in communication, Murtaza relinquishes control or mastery over the plant to revoke principles of reciprocity, propriety, and commensurability.85how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees gestures towards the possibilities inherent in the act of listening itself. Vegetal encounters are staged to highlight difficulties of perceptual commonalities between the human and non-human realms; to hear the plant ‘speak’ is to accept that we may never comprehend its message. One is encouraged to see how ‘subjectivity, identity, and even more fundamentally, vitality do not arise in opposition to one another, but in a process of ongoing, renewed mutual becoming’.86 Moreover, one is compelled to listen out for those beings who are ‘unmissing’, that go unnoticed to some, or barely register, and therefore are always, and already missing.87 In a technical system of communication, the aim is to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio, to attain the most perfect possible transmission of the message, but the installation proposes that ultimately ‘we don’t know yet what a signal is or what it can do, let alone what constitutes cross-species communication’.88 In this scenario, no technical system is perfect and there are no messages free of their accompanying characteristic forms of noise or interference. Wary of the challenges of anthropomorphism, Murtaza’s installation prompts us to ask what kind of practices can meaningfully engage and interact with communities, individuals and civic society. Similarly to the acoustic intervention TfMS, how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees probes the very meaning of the term communication: transmission and communication rarely, if ever, add up. As Derrida puts it in his well-known book Signature, Event, Context, ‘even a provisional recourse to ordinary language and to the equivocations of natural language instructs us that one can, for instance, communicate a movement or that a tremor [ébranlement], a shock, a displacement of force can be communicated, that is, propagated, transmitted’.89 Communication may not be controllable, univocal, transmittable, and finally, communicable; this may mean letting go of communication as vehicle, and allowing for the possibility that non-semantic movements do not always amount to linguistic exchange. Violence and rampant extremism in the case of contemporary Pakistan may compel individuals to remain silent, or defer to apparent silence, becoming plant-like or rhizomatic in the process. Such tactics may of course point to the need to destabilize oppressions, intimidations, the dangers of speaking of the ‘locutio’.90 But ultimately, Murtaza’s suspension of language, invites an open questioning, a discussion, both open and yet to come, that is ethical. It is a discussion that makes sense of the experience of violence and of one’s relation to the law, as Derrida puts it.91 In seeking to remove the listener from the pollution of speech – man as the ultimate (cacophony) noise in nature – Murtaza prompts one to listen out for the right to silere, not the right to tacere as Barthes writes in relation to nature and ecological movements.92 Directly addressing the proposition how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees, Murtaza entrusts herself to the listener. In this process, she also invites one to conduct, enhance, and improve their ability for conducting (Fig. 9). Crackling sounds, static, rumour, and gossip will interfere: something is gained through something lost in the act of transmission. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Mehreen Murtaza, installation view of how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees, 2018, Bagh-e-Jinnah (formerly Lawrence Gardens), Lahore Biennale 01. (Photo: Mehreen Murtaza, Sabeen Jamil, Komal Ghazaali, and Ammar Siddiqui). Courtesy: Mehreen Murtaza. Footnotes 1 For more on the intriguing connections between sound and speculative thinking see Eleni Ikoniadou, Steve Goodman, and Tony Heys (eds), AUDINT: Unsound/Undead (London: Zone Books, 2019). 2 AUDINT: Unsound/Undead, p. xii. 3 Nada Raza, The Missing One, 27 October 2016 – 15 January 2017, Exhibition Booklet, The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (Oslo: OCA, 2016), p. 11. I am grateful to Nada for sharing this booklet with me. 4 Ashish Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 5 Jagadish Chandra Bose, qtd in Visvapriya Mukherjee, Builders of Modern India: Jagadish Chandra Bose (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1983), p. 21. 6 V. A. Shepherd, ‘At the Roots of Plant Neurobiology: A Brief History of the Biophysical Research of J. C. Bose’, Science and Culture, May–June, vol. 78, nos 5–6, 2012, p. 196. 7 In May 1901, Bose had concluded his Royal Institution lecture by noting that the responsive process seen in life was ‘foreshadowed’ in non-life. Six years later, he asserted that both animals and plants possess a nervous system, and that animal behaviour was ‘foreshadowed’ in that of the plant. Jagadish Chandra Bose, Plant Autographs and Their Revelations (New York: Macmillan, 1927), p. 2. See also Ashim Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Colonialism, Nationalism and Scientism: A Study of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose (Kolkata: KP Bagchi, 1995), p. 208. 8 In 1895 Bose gave his first public demonstration of invisible electromagnetic waves. He ignited gunpowder and rang a bell remotely using millimetre-range wavelength microwaves at the Calcutta Town Hall. Witnesses to the public demonstration included Lieutenant Governor Sir William Mackenzie. Although encouraged by contemporary peers, Bose chose not to patent or benefit from his inventions. See Emilia Terracciano, ‘The “Plant Autographs” of Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose’, in Sita Reddy (ed.), ‘Ars Botanica, Refiguring the Botanical Art Archive’, special issue of Marg: A Magazine of the Arts, vol. 70, no. 2, December 2018 – March 2019, pp. 94–7. 9 The High Magnification Crescograph was originally called briddhiman meaning ‘growing crescent’ in Sanskrit. Bose changed the name to accommodate Anglo-Saxon scientists who had no knowledge of Sanskrit. 10 Terracciano, ‘The “Plant Autographs” of Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose’, Marg, pp. 94–7. 11 Terracciano, ‘The “Plant Autographs” of Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose’, Marg, pp. 94–7. 12 On Bose’s Vedantic science see Nandy, Alternative Sciences. 13 Martin Hürlimann, ‘Jagadish Chunder Bose: Das Leben der Pflanze’, Atlantis, vol. 3, no. 1, March 1929, p. 177–9. (Author’s translation from the original text in German). 14 Mehreen Murtaza gained familiarity with Bose’s writings and plant experiments in 2015 when invited to contribute to the exhibition The Missing One, curated by Nada Raza, at OCA, Norway, 2016–2017. 15 Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, p. 51. 16 Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, p. 6. 17 Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, p. 6. 18 Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, p. 15. 19 The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. R. Krauss and D. Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 24. 20 I am deeply grateful to Zunera Shahid, Deputy Director/Reprieve Fellow at Foundation for Fundamental Rights Pakistan for sharing thoughts and discussing the complex history of the PPC with me. Shahid in conversation with the author (email dated 15 June 2020). 21 Mehreen Murtaza, ‘Score for a Film: How about we meet and I tell you about music notations?’, Tumblr, 14 May 2015, n.p. <https://scoreforafilm.tumblr.com> [accessed 18 November 2019]. 22 Oindrilla Maity Surai, ‘Kolkata: A Score the for the Uncharted’, Take on Art Magazine, Photography Issue, vol. 3, no. 12, September 2013, p. 150. 23 Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. Salam won for his contribution to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interactions between elementary particles. He was the first Pakistani national to be awarded a Nobel Prize and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize. The Ahmadi community takes its name from its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in 1835 and was regarded by his followers as the messiah and a prophet. Ghulam Ahmad saw himself as a reformer of Islam and claimed to have been chosen by Allah. In 1947, the community moved its religious headquarters from Qadian in India to Rabwah in Pakistan. In 1953 orthodox Muslim groups in Pakistan came together to form what they called the ‘anti-Qadiani movement’. Riots against Ahmadi communities in Pakistan also began in 1953. At this time, Salam left for Saint John’s College at the University of Cambridge, taking up a position as professor of mathematics in 1954. 24 The inaugural LB01 took place for a fortnight in March 2018, and attracted over a million visitors. Initiatives such as LB01 have benefited from government backing, especially that of Prime Minister Imran Khan who vowed to boost the culture and tourism industry of Pakistan. The government eased visa policy for foreigners which played a huge role in attracting large number of foreign tourists. 25 Mehreen Murtaza, ‘Transmission from a Missing Satellite with stereo imaging’, Soundcloud, 2015, n.p. <https://soundcloud.com/mehreen-murtaza/transmissions-from-a-missing-1> [accessed 19 April 2019]. 26 Murtaza, ‘Score for a Film’, [accessed 18 November 2019]. 27 Gordon Fraser, Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam – The First Muslim Nobel Scientist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 12–13. 28 Fraser, Cosmic Anger, p. 12. 29 Fraser, Cosmic Anger, p. 12. See also Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zeb Books, 1991); Salim Mahmood (ed.), ‘Elm-e-Falkiat’, published proceedings of International Seminar on Quran and Science (Karachi: Pakistan Association of Scientists and Scientific Professions, 17 June 1987); Ziauddin Sardar, Science, Technology and Development in the Muslim World (London: Routledge, 2018); M. A. Anwar and A. B. Abu Bakar, ‘Current State of Science and Technology in the Muslim World’, Scientometrics, vol. 40, no. 1, September 1997, pp. 23–44; Yusuf Nuruddin, ‘Ancient Black Astronauts and Extra-terrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology’, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 127–65, 57; and Rebecca Hankins, ‘Fictional Islam: A Literary Review and Comparative Essay on Islam in Science Fiction and Fantasy’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, vol. 38, no. 105, Spring 2009, pp. 73–91. 30 I. A. Ibrahim, A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam (London: Darussalam International Publications, 1997), p. 57. Such instruments are entwined with the expansion of the literary heritage of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative writing on a global scale. See, for example, Reuven Snir, ‘The Emergence of Science Fiction in Arabic Literature’, Der Islam: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East, vol. 77. no. 1, January 2000, p. 279; Yusuf Nuruddin, ‘Ancient Black Astronauts and Extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic Science Fiction as Urban Mythology’, Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, November 2006, pp. 127–65, 138. 31 Hankins, ‘Fictional Islam’, p. 74. 32 Score for a Film is yet to be exhibited in Pakistan. It has enjoyed international circulation, including: Frieze Art Fair, London; Grey Noise Gallery, Dubai; and Experimenter, Kolkata, in 2013; and Generator Projects, Dundee, in 2014. 33 Mehreen Murtaza, qtd in Adam Learmonth, ‘To Sail Beyond the Sunset’, Dura Dundee, Dundee University Review of the Arts, 2014, n.p. <https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2014/12/20/to-sail-beyond-the-sunset/> [accessed 12 March 2020]. 34 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (New York: State University of New York Press), p. 223. 35 Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, p. 54. 36 In relation to the muteness of the visible see Ihde, Listening and Voice, p. 51. 37 More recently, Murtaza has produced the installation Prohibited Enlightenment first shown at Hall 14, Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig in 2019. The installation reflects on transnational restrictions linked to the distribution and circulation of books containing ‘Islamic’ content. The exhibition is about ‘the empty bookshelves that murmur and whisper excerpts from books that failed to reach Leipzig from Lahore’. Murtaza in conversation with the author (email dated 14 April 2020). Experimenter Repost @Mehreen Murtaza, Facebook, ‘HALLE 14 – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst’, 11 January 2020, n.p. <https://www.facebook.com/ExperimenterGallery/posts/2789006781179885/> [accessed 29 May 2020]. 38 See for example, the experiments conducted by Professor Monica Gagliano at the Centre for Evolutionary Biology at the University of Western Australia between 2015–2019. 39 Maham Suhan, ‘Jam w Plants (Voice Stimulus to Botanic Electromagnetic-Sound-wave Conversion)’, Tumblr, 2019, n.p. <https://soundcloud.com/maham-s/jam-w-plants-voice-stimulus-to-botanic-electromagnetic-sound-wave-conversion> [accessed 27 December 2019]. 40 how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees was on view at Manchester Art Gallery from Saturday 30 September 2017 to Sunday 4 February 2018. ‘New North and South’, was a three-year programme (2016–19) of co-commissions, exhibitions, and exchanges across a network of 11 arts organizations from the North of England and South Asia. Supported by public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England’s Ambition for Excellence programme, the network showcased the work of Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and British artists. It included new artistic commissions, exhibitions, and performances in Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool and in Colombo, Dhaka, Lahore, Karachi, and Kochi. 41 Projected on the gallery wall was also a video of two slugs mating on a continuous loop from a David Attenborough BBC documentary Life in the Undergrowth (2005). In addition, the installation included a display table with a curated selection of fungi and spore specimens donated by Manchester Museum; each parasitic life-form exhibited a specific symbiotic nature. 42 Concern for the potential injuries incurred by the tree were not taken into consideration during the performance, prompting some viewers to question the very feasibility of the project. According to one observer, the tree was drilled repeatedly. Anonymous in conversation with the author, Courtauld Institute of Art, 5–7 April 2018. 43 Frances Carey, The Tree: Meaning and Myth (London: The British Museum Press, 2012), p. 101. 44 Thomas Herbert qtd in Carey, The Tree: Meaning and Myth, p. 102. The most widely revered banyan is the Ficus Religiosa, peepal tree or ashvattha in Sanskrit, and the Bodhi tree in Buddhism. The Bodhi tree is associated with the Buddha’s meditation and supreme enlightenment (bodhi), which took place beneath the tree toward the end of the sixth century BC in north-eastern India. 45 Masudi, The Meadows of Gold (London: Penguin Great Journeys, 2007), p. 47. 46 The analog synthesizer was called Ants! by Plankton and the digital synthesizer was a Blofeld by Waldorf. Murtaza in conversation with the author (email dated 15 April 2019). 47 For more information about the evocation of the myth of The Indian Rope Trick in contemporary art, see my article ‘On Being Crafty: Mrinalini Mukherjee, Sleight of Hand and the Politics of Fibre Art (1977–1994)’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, August 2020. 48 Participants included a physicist, telecom operators, students, couples, housewives, guards, and reiki practitioners. 49 Suhan, ‘Jam w Plants’, [accessed 27 December 2019]. 50 Thomas Weber, Hugging the Trees: The Story of the Chipko Movement (New Delhi: Viking, 1988); Haripriya Rangan, Of Myths and Movements: Rewriting Chipko into Himalayan History (New York: Verso, 2000); Chandi Prasad Bhatt, A Chipko Experience: Forest Conservation by People’s Participation (Chamoli: Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandal, 1988). 51 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2012). 52 Aseem Srivastava, ‘An Ecology of the Spirit: Rabindranath’s Experience of Nature’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Shukanta and Aseem for sharing this paper with me. 53 Mehreen Murtaza, Follow Fluxus… how will you conduct yourself in the company of trees, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, 2015, and Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, 2016, n.p. 54 Murtaza, Follow Fluxus. 55 Murtaza, Follow Fluxus. 56 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), p. 271–313. 57 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, pp. 280–1. In relation to this particular argument, see Shela Sheikh, ‘The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics’, Kronos: Southern African Histories, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 156–7. 58 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, p. 105. Qtd in Astrida Neimanis, ‘No Presentation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself)’, Somatechnics, vol. 5, no. 2, September 2015, p. 143. 59 Astrida Neimanis, ‘Nature Represents Itself: Bibliophilia in a Changing Climate’ in Vicky Kirby (ed), What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 179–98. 60 Neimanis, ‘No Presentation without Colonisation?’, p. 139. 61 Neimanis, ‘No Presentation without Colonisation?’, p. 143. 62 Sheikh, ‘The Future of the Witness’, p. 157. 63 Numerous scholars including Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the ‘post-representationalist anthropology’ of Anna Tsing or Marisol de la Cadena, as well as actor-network theory proponents, Bruno Latour among others, are centred around the ‘constitution of new politics’. 64 Elaine Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002). 65 Natasha Myers and Carla Hustak, ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, p. 81. 66 Myers and Hustak, ‘Involutionary Momentum’, p. 81. See also Natasha Myers, ‘Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field’, NatureCulture, special issue ‘Acting with Non-Human Entities’, vol. 3, 2015, pp. 35–66; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); see also Haraway’s ‘Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others’, for new ways of thinking relationality with plants in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 67 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 11. 68 Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, p. 54. 69 Christopher Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects’, Southern California Law Review, vol. 45, 1972, pp. 450–501. 70 Aristotle, Politics, Books 1–2, J. K. Acrill and L. Judson (ed.), T. J. Saunders (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Aristotle Series, 1995), 7 (1253a 7–18), p. 3. 71 Aristotle, De Anima, 2, 8, 420b1-421a1: The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, trans. J. Barnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 670. Although the philosopher postulated that a plant possesses a ‘vegetal soul’, and therefore has the capacity for growth and reproduction, it is not able to receive and respond to sense impressions, nor capable of rational thinking. The ability to maintain conscious breathing was essential for humans to develop the ability to speak. Other primates do not speak because physiologically they are unable to hold their breath voluntarily. The range of sounds that humans can produce is the result of the ‘descent of the larynx’; the only other animals known to have this feature are the dugong, sea lions and walruses. 72 For an analysis of the etymological meaning of jurisprudence see Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘Aural Contract: Forensic Listening and the Reorganization of the Speaking Subject’, in Eyal Weizman (ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), p. 71. 73 Abu Hamdan, ‘Aural Contract’, p. 67. 74 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 18. 75 On this point see Kath Weston, Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 4, 25–6. Weston chastises author Jane Bennett who, shortly after the publication of her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things in 2010, shied away from the term ‘animism’. Weston proposes and advances a cogent case for re-engaging with the concept of ‘animism’ in the twenty-first century. 76 Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, p. 464. Stone adds that ships, still referred to by courts in the feminine gender, have long held an independent jural life. In the docu-fiction film All That Perishes at The End of Land, first screened at the 2018 Lahore Biennale, film-maker Hira Nabi endows a 148.723-ton ship called Ocean Master, with a voice. The battered ship speaks to the viewer in a siren-like, mellifluous voice. Built in 1995 in Korea, the ship shares its tales of woe and sorrow with the indentured migrant labour crew dismantling its parts. 77 Paulo Tavares, ‘Nonhuman Rights’, Forensis, pp. 552–72. See also Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’, p. 568. Articles dealing with the question of non-human rights abound in recent literature: Robert Macfarlane, ‘Should this tree have the same rights as you?’, The Guardian, ‘Books’, 2 November 2019, n.p. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/trees-have-rights-too-robert-macfarlane-on-the-new-laws-of-nature> [accessed 18 November 2019]. 78 The British officially abolished slavery in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act taking effect in 1834. The thirteenth amendment to the US constitution was implemented in 1865. 79 Stone’s theory could be defined as courtroom-led environmental policy which is normatively premised on the guardianship model, one rooted in the idea that those things that are not able to defend themselves against human offenders and who lack a voice should have a watchdog as a protector. Stone’s manifesto has been hugely influential for writers and scholars affiliated with Forensic Architecture. See Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. 80 Faiz Ahmad Faiz, ‘Aye kuchh abr kuchh sharab aae’ (‘Let some cloudy weather come, and let us relish some wine’), Nuskha ha-e Wafa (Lahore: Maktaba e Karvan, 1985), p. 173. Many thanks to Hira Nabi and Iftikhar Dadi for providing me the needful reference during the pandemic. 81 Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Methods of Controlled Equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 3–20. 82 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 393. 83 Murtaza, Follow Fluxus. 84 de Castro, ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Methods of Controlled Equivocation’, p. 10. 85 Murtaza has been inspired by the example of English Mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace who created the Analytical Engine around 1837. Murtaza in conversation with the author (email dated 14 March 2020). I am grateful to Mehreen for introducing me to the work of Sadie Plant. See Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). 86 Murtaza, Follow Fluxus. 87 Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 5. 88 Myers and Hustak, ‘Involutionary Momentum’, p. 104. (Emphasis in the original). 89 Jacques Derrida, Signature Event Context, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1977), p. 1. 90 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 23. 91 Derrida, ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’, in Signature Event Context, p. 111. 92 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 23. Acknowledgments I am grateful to artist Mehreen Murtaza for sharing readings, works, and much more during the long and slow making of this article. Thank you to editors Pamela Corey and Wenny Teo for detailed comments and feedback on earlier drafts. This article builds upon research currently undertaken on the topic of ‘Agrofuturism’. Coined by me in April 2019, ‘Agrofuturism’ is a concept concerned with the historical development of anti-colonial struggles rooted in the technological domestication of the environment orientated south of the future. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved
TI - Sounds of Silence: Conducting Technology and Nature
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcaa014
DA - 2021-05-03
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SP - 261
EP - 279
VL - 43
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DP - DeepDyve
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