Metaphysics of Clothing

Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography

“…Nealon (2016), for instance, proposes a biopolitics which embraces the vegetal, unpicking the position of plant life in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari in order to support his insistence that plants are the paradigmatic subjects of modern biopower (see also Stark, 2015). In an era of climate crisis, the plant provides a simultaneously radical and grounded figure with which to rethink and critique Life beyond the human (Nealon, 2016 – see also Coccia, 2019 for a discussion of plants as constitutive of atmosphere, and thus, of life).…”

“…Such a ‘multi-elemental’ ethics – for want of a better phrase – draws attention to the soil (Puig De la Bellacasa, 2017), to water, fire (Eriksen and Ballard, 2020) and to what Coccia (2019) refers to as the ‘ontology of the atmosphere’; the plant’s production of the world through its invisible atmospheric ‘labour’ in which ‘every living being is first of all what makes possible the life of others’ (p.47). Air is the fundamental commons which intimately ties us to plants, central to our ethical considerations of animals and plants alike through the universal exchange of breath (Irigaray and Marder, 2016).…”

“…Plant bodies are not contained within a finite skin, but can spread rhizomatically until we are not quite sure whether we can count ten primroses beneath the oak or only one; fifty aspens or one suckering clonal colony. Their permeable boundaries challenge assemblage thinking and fundamentally disrupt the lines drawn between subject/environment (Coccia, 2019; Tsing, 2015). In pursuing these provocations, (historical) geographers can borrow approaches from the flourishing body of work emerging from the intersections of literary ecocriticism and CPS.…”

Multi-species ethnography: methodological training in the field in South Africa

“…1. Also including other non-human sentient beings like plants. The sense making capacities of plants have long been underestimated, if not fully neglected (Mancuso, 2017; Coccia, 2019) but are now increasingly added to the “sentience turn” in many disciplines. In this article, I limit myself to non-human animals.…”

The respiratory drive.

“…Living is breathing, “from perception to digestion, from thought to pleasure, from speech to locomotion. Everything is a repetition, intensification, and a variation of what takes place in breath” (Coccia, 2019, p. 55). According to Coccia we are not inhabitants of the Earth but rather of the atmosphere, living in a constant exchange with an air-filled surrounding.…”