Have you
considered
a garden?

In this text, I offer notes on gender, dualism and ecology, in an attempt to unfold and disentangle the rootedness of oppressive dualist discourse in what we essentially call the Global North, and the places its colonialist tentacles have reached. Quartering this body of dualist thought, laying bare its ubiquity, without taking it as foundational, or holding it in place. My carrier bag The common narrative of human history is that of the spear, our first tool, used by the male hero, taking home his prey—the now lifeless animal flung over his shoulder. In her text Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction1, Ursula K. le Guin rewrites this narrative by proposing that the first tools humans used were bags, sacks, carriers, shells. These objects were not weapons, but containers for all the things we collected. The story of the womb hereby replaces the story of the phallus. To an indifferent person this might seem unimportant (who cares what our first tools were if we have suits now and macbooks and electric bicycles sugar covered peanuts penicillin false eyelashes and cinema), but the retelling of our history as gatherers, instead of killers and hunters, is of crucial cultural significance. As Le Guin states, it is not the story of the single, but rather that of the collection, the collective. A significant difference: it is not one sharp spear–headed murderous arrow of time, but a sack full of stories and histories.

My bag is a collection of things I consider to be valuable, the things I take on my journey. At this moment, I just bring everything I think I will need. At some point I might leave some things behind, or maybe I find things along the way. Just like any bag I bring, in this bag I have some essentials, some stuff that I have borrowed or stolen, some random objects that gathered over the years at the bottom (an old receipt some small hair clips a crochet hook some coins something that used to be a single wrapped cookie but now could be better described as cookie dust an earring I found on the floor at a café oh and another receipt but this one is from Italy), some things that I shouldn’t have put in the bag, some things that weigh the bag down, and I might even have something in my hand that did not fit in the bag anymore and I presumably forgot something on the kitchen table that should have been in my bag. It is my collection that I call thesis.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes)

there was this american guy that lived like 200 years ago and i find it strange that these words perfectly describe how i feel when there seems to be so little that we have in common. or maybe i underestimate how much we have in common since apparently we both are so large and contain multitudes and now i contain his poem too.2

My bag–shaped text rejects the dominance and deceitful power of a singular narrative; I reject the arrow and nestle myself in the warm timeless safety of the womb. I hear the distant and gentle rhythm of a mother’s heartbeat, every thump replacing the mechanic ticking of a clock, beating fast beating slow but always beating beating beating.
moves from and beyond the garden, A garden is a planned and designed space: its etymological origins refer to an enclosed space, hence making gardens “something that is closed off.” The history of gardening is closely related to the history of agriculture, and the practice of cultivating plant species began some 12.000 years ago. The garden, closed off from wilderness, was a place of human control over nature. Dutch seventeenth century gardens illustrate this longing for order in the natural environment particularly well: symmetry, measurement and order are key identifying features. Bringing in new species, cultivating, weeding, the use of toxins, deforestation—these attempts at achieving authority over the natural environment only contribute to the destruction of these ecosystems.

Figure 1. View of Zeist House with its gardens and plantations belonging to the Count of Nassau, Amsterdam, N. Visscher, ca. 1700.

“The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is control.”24

Figure 2. The Physic Garden, Chelsea: men botanizing in the garden, near the statue of Sir Hans Sloane, 1750. Wood engraving by T. W. Lascelles after H. G. Glindoni, 1890.

Let us go all the way back to A and E in the G of E in the big book B. After eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Life, Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden, and into wilderness. It was here they had to work and plow the thorned and thistled ground for sustenance (or more accurately; Adam had to plow the ground Eve “just” had to have some babies but to make it fair to Adam who had to do such hard hard work God made sure labor hurt like hell). But this wild place Adam and Eve were expelled to is now frequently likened to the Garden of Eden itself.

“Have you considered a garden?”[21]

unnaming, A famous line from Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet suggests that the names of things do not affect what they really are:

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”19

To me, the sentence leaves a romantic, sticky sweet but naïve aftertaste. It seems true and untrue at the same time. Do names really not matter? The names we give things influence our relationship with them.

This brings my mind to the Ursula K. le Guin story She Unnames Them. We find ourselves all the way back to the tale of Adam and Eve. In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam the task of naming all the animals, and so he did. When Adam was sleeping, God took from him a rib and created Eve. Adam called her woman, since she was created from a man. In Le Guin’s rendition of the story, Eve starts unnaming all animals previously named by Adam, and finally, she unnames herself. For Eve, names and words are ways to categorize and control others, and the act of unnaming is the rejection of these oppressive powers of language. Through Eve, Le Guin illustrates the hidden politics and power relations behind the act of naming.

Language systems are based on definition. Naming something is an act of differentiation: it is one thing but not the other. The act of unnaming takes away this definition, it takes away the classification, the yes–or–no of a thing. Unnaming opens a portal to the unknown: a wild west of identity and perception. Nothing that permanently impacts the environment (like a certain large canyon), but small streams that form on a car window in the rain, constantly moving, changing, without changing the nature of the glass window. Maybe roses smell sweeter without a name.

“What is needed then is a way of thinking about the nature of differentiating that is not derivative of some fixed notion of identity or even a fixed spacing.”20

Maybe unnaming is the screenless glitch I am looking for. It breaks the language, the code. I misspell a word; I misplace a comma, or a semicolon, or I add a letter for a laugh, and it breaks. But I can’t just go around cherry picking the words I don’t like and say from now on that’s not a word whenever I hear somebody use it! Now, that would be silly!
the wild, The notion of Wilderness as something outside of civilization—something opposite to civilization—as an apolitical place where we can escape the daily whims of late–capitalist reality, again, takes the human out of the natural. Wilderness is not an untouched, virgin and pristine landscape. To William Cronon, an environmental historian, “the myth of wilderness is that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage.” The idea of wilderness as “a place without people” excludes those indigenous cultures that have been living in “the wild” before we called it wild. In the Yupik language—a language spoken by a group of indigenous peoples of western, southwestern, and southcentral Alaska and the Russian Far East—there is no word for wilderness. It is simply the place they live in. Attempts at “protecting” the wild often drive native cultures out of their place of settlement, after it has been decided that this wild is too fragile, not suitable for human habitation, or that the hunt for certain animals should be prohibited. The results of these attempts at preserving wilderness are the promotion of healthy landscapes and the survival of as many species as possible, except for humans.22 But if Wilderness is the place where we are not,23 the place untouched by human presence, the place opposite to Civilization with a capital C—where does that leave the Garden? snail intimacy, Our carefully controlled gardens are full of queer critters25 breaking down our synthetic boundaries tearing through the tracks eating away at our symmetrical saplings foundationally fucking up our dualist systems at the roots, leaving behind a fractured and uncultivated wilderness. One of these unwelcome critters is the snail, which does not fit in our landscape overgrown with heterosexist views of nature and the biosphere. Most terrestrial snails are known to be hermaphroditic, meaning they have reproductive organs that are categorized as both male and female. They can reproduce with any member of their species and are able to switch back and forth between motherhood and fatherhood multiple times during their lifetime. Since snails are nearly blind, they find each other through taste and smell—leaving behind a useful slimy path. When they find each other, they often circle around each other for hours, occasionally with full–body contact, until they are ready to fire their love dart (not a euphemism for penis). A love dart (or gypsobelum) is a sharp calcareous dart some species of snails use prior to copulation, in order to favor the outcome of the courtship. Since snails are hermaphrodites, they can become either mother or father, and since motherhood is more difficult (i.e., it requires more time, energy, resources), they prefer fatherhood. The love dart is covered in a mucus that carries a hormone with the ability to reconfigure the recipient’s reproductive system. The organ that digests sperm gets closed off, and the canal that leads to the sperm storage is opened. During this ritual the snails’ reproductive organs find their way outward, and after the firing of the darts, their two penises enter their two vaginas. The snail that fired their dart most successfully, has higher chances of paternity.

Figure 3. Love dart of leptaxis erubescens.
Figure 4. Love dart of cepaea hortensis.

But snails are only one example of queerness in nature. To say that exclusively a male/female divide is natural, is not to look at nature at all. Eighty percent of plant species produce both pollen and ovules which they can give and receive, making them hermaphroditic, like snails.

“The simplification of nature has created dualities that reflect our current societal norms and world views.”26

So, this garden of ours is a queer wonderland ( w i l d e r n e s s ? ). A place full of unknown, unclassified, entangled realities: a nature that exists between categories. The phrase “acts against nature” suggests that the “acts” in question are so nefarious that Mother Nature herself is left undignified, victimized, wronged. One would think such acts against nature are of the caliber similar to the routine impregnation of cows the taking away of their young only days after birth milking them until they have to be impregnated again their whole life lived on a couple square meters until they are no good and can be processed as meat for consumption. But rather, as Barad argues, the phrase is aimed at acts of queer (or in some cases heterosexual) pleasure: “it is particular sexual acts that are criminalized and labeled immoral, while the mass extermination of animals (...) is normalized, naturalized, and sanitized.”27

But looking at nature, we see that queer acts are far from unnatural. Paradoxically, on the one hand (the thing closest to) the natural is that which is subordinated. On the other, the natural is seen as a greater good, some holy pristine virgin land.

“What is needed then is a way of thinking about the nature of differentiating that is not derivative of some fixed notion of identity or even a fixed spacing.”28
glitch, The perception of the so–called real and the virtual as separate can be added to the ever–growing list of dualisms dominating contemporary daily life. The legacy of mind–body dualism lives on in times of the virtual, simultaneously deepening and widening, like the Colorado river ever so slowly eroding the Colorado Plateau, irreversibly impacting the landscape now best known as the Grand Canyon. IRL (in real life) is a term used to describe time spent offline. Would IFL (in fake life) then logically be IRL’s opposite? Is the online life not real, or less–than–real? I would like to suggest that time spent in “virtual space” is simultaneously time spent in “physical space”; it exists in one and the same time. The differentiation of life online and life offline creates a dichotomy (and hierarchy) where none is needed. Media theorist Nathan Jurgenson criticizes this digital dualist notion, and suggests looking at life as one big, augmented reality. “We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, ala The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits”.15 We experience real life everywhere, all of the time, no rgb’s can take that away from us. Just like minds and bodies, our language adopts the dualisms we create, and we give it the power to reify them.

The construction of the digital is inherently binary: ones and zeroes dominate what we see on screen. But binary code is a representation of text, instructions or any other data; it is a simplification of reality, encoded so computer systems can interpret it. It is a representation of reality, existing in and of reality. What is in¬–between: the error prompt. Broken code. A misplaced semicolon. The glitch takes this binary world and turns it on its head.

But what does this glitch give us if we take it out of the computer and into the so–called real? How do we glitch binaries that aren’t ones or zeroes? What is a glitch in a system of norms and values that have been chiseled by centuries of beliefs (something like a Grand Canyon perhaps)?

“However, if we assume that Audre Lorde’s 1984 declaration that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” still holds true, then perhaps what these institutions—both online and off—require is not dismantling but rather mutiny in the form of strategic occupation. The glitch challenges us to consider how we can “penetrate… break… puncture… tear” the material of the institution.”16

The glitch can be used to think through these dualist and binary systems—an analogy picked up from computer science and activated in spatial matter to describe the in–between, the possibilities. A glitch is thunder, lightning. The stroke of lightning is not, as commonly believed, a top–down happening in which the earth, tree or other entity struck is a passive victim, but it is a two–way communication. There is some “stuttering chatter”17 which anticipates the actual stroke. The path lightning takes is both upward and downward in direction; objects on the ground can initiate a strike.18 Glitch is like lightning, some sort of unknown unexpected communication, a stuttering chatter.
philosophy’s big boys (Plato, According to big daddy Plato’s Dialogues,3 the deceptive materiality of the body keeps it from attaining real knowledge. Essentially, real, true knowledge is only attainable through the soul, since the soul can ascend to the world of Forms, and the body is stuck in the Cosmos—the temporal physical world. The Cosmos is filled with distractions and bodily temptations, dragging the souls down from the beautiful orderliness of the world of Forms, to their imprisoned existence in the material world. Knowledge is thus not attainable through (the material world of) the Cosmos and, specifically women do not know things beyond the prison of the material world.4 Plato here emphasizes the destructiveness of the body on the soul, not that a woman’s soul is less than that of a man. It is just, he argues, that a woman spends her life manifesting the worst traits a human could have, which is being tied to an imperfect and passive body.

In his Symposium,[5] Plato illustrates the nature of beauty. Essentially, he argues that beauty is not something deriving from the natural world, but that real beauty can only be known to the soul (this, again, only exists in the world of Forms). Surely, things can be beautiful, but real beauty has characteristics that cannot be found in the Cosmos. It is a shared beauty—known to the souls—and “our changing, decaying bodies only can put us in touch with changing, decaying pieces of the material world.”6 In the dialogue between Socrates and Agathon, Plato teaches us about the nature of love (Eros). The nature of love, too, praises the soul over the body. Love for the body can only be a stepping stone to loving the soul, and if not, it is vulgar and useless. The love for one body should teach us to love every body. From recognising that every body is beautiful and worthy of love, one can love all forms. The end of Socrates’ “ladder of love” is the love for the soul, an eternal love from the world of Forms.

“So, then, one has no hope of understanding the nature of knowledge, reality, goodness, love, or beauty unless one recognises the distinction between soul and body; and one has no hope of attaining any of these unless one works hard on freeing the soul from the lazy, vulgar, beguiling body”7

The soul now has a purpose: understanding the structure of the universe and freeing itself from its mortal body to get to the world of Forms. This requires a domination of the active mind over the passive body. A soul is greatly disturbed by the burden of the body and will think best when dissociated from it. The body, in Plato’s view, can be understood as a violent yet passive materiality, not a calculated evil, but a heavy weight, dragging down the mind.
Descartes), Descartes doubted everything until he found something indubitable. He could doubt everything, even the existence of his body, but he could not doubt that he was thinking (something something cogito ergo sum9 something something). In his view, the body could not think, only the mind could. He believed that mental and physical activity takes place simultaneously, but separately. This is generally known as the Cartesian split between mind and body. His mind–body dualism has had a lasting impact on Western philosophical thought, medicine, social sciences, and society at large.

“Domination is rooted in a common ideology based on the control of reason over nature, and the separation of our being into soul and body.”10

Normative dualisms, with mind–body dualism at their core, conceptually organize the world in binary relations, wherein one is attributed superiority. It is an exclusionary mode of thought, firmly critiqued by Val Plumwood in her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, in which she attributes Western culture’s alienation from and domination of nature to the master model: a “dualized structure of otherness and negation”.11Plumwood goes on to explain that the side of the dualism that is considered to be closer to nature (the “other”), is often the oppressed. The superiority of the self is used to justify the subordination of the other.

“To be defined as “nature” in this context is to be defined as passive, as non–agent and non–subject, as the “environment” or invisible background conditions against which the “foreground” achievements of reason or culture (provided typically by the white, western, male expert or entrepreneur) take place. It is to be defined as a terra nullius, a resource empty of its own purposes of meanings, and hence available to be annexed for the purposes of those supposedly identified with reason or intellect, and to be conceived and moulded in relation to these purposes.”12

The superiority of humans is used to justify the subordination of nature.
The superiority of the mind is used to justify the subordination of the body.
The superiority of reason is used to justify the subordination of the erotic.
The superiority of the active is used to justify the subordination of the passive.
The superiority of white is used to justify the subordination of non–white.

So, how to argue that mind and body are one thing, when we have words for the mind and body and they don’t mean the same thing?13 How do we put the ghost back in the machine?

“Reality comes as this undivided whole, then for practical reasons, we differentiate it into concepts so we can deal with it. And the minimum unit of difference you can slice through a singular totality is one line. One difference. Duality.”14

I do not propose we can live think act beyond dualisms. As the quote above illustrates, we need language and concepts for practical reasons: we divide the wholeness of reality into smaller and smaller bits to be able to communicate. The smallest reduction of reality we can make is a dualism, which could simultaneously be seen as the biggest reduction of reality, since it uses the smallest number of concepts to describe a complex whole. Something about the one thing being not that different from infinity.
and vulnerability. An unknown territory, a place without a name, a wilderness found in the everyday. Glitch is unknown, unnamed, erroneous, new, uncategorized, vulnerable. Hidden spaces become visible, new spaces come into existence. There is wild in every garden. There are nameless creatures hiding in every corner, under every stone that is left unturned (let’s leave them unturned) in the skies and in the waters in the houses the fences the borders the railroads the trees the benches between every brick of the pavement behind every skyscraper in the horizon and in every palm of the hand.

We are both garden and wilderness, both mind and body, both named and nameless, all at the same time. We are so large (we do be containing multitudes). We are the single and the infinite, we are Adam and we are Eve and we are the garden the snake the apple the God.

I use all these concepts and words and thoughts and beliefs when I am not even sure of my own name. I find comfort in the space between words, it is here I learn from the snails that slowly glide between them, between me and you, between garden and wild, between minds, between bodies. After considering the snails, the Canyon, the so–called real, the binary, the Cosmos and the garden, I’m left somewhere in–between, doubtful.

But I confidently doubt. Doubt is truthful, honest, vulnerable. Vulnerability is my glitch. It is not 1 and it is not 0, it is unexpected, nameless. To be vulnerable is to wander within wild landscapes, moving around in the dark with your arms in front of you, going forward, backward, sideways by touch. Stumbling around in this darkness, gathering roses by any or no name, collecting the words to best describe that in–between. You are looking for the fence, the wall, the lock, unsure of where you have left the key (or if you had one in the first place). You fumble around in the collection of words in your heavy bag, and find it was empty all along.

“Well, goodbye, dear. I hope the garden key turns up.”29

It is my undertaking at constructing a layered, non–linear understanding of all these interrelated concepts and phenomena, without forcing them into one single narrative, since—essentially—I am arguing against clear–cut definitions and one–sided accounts of history that have dominated our discourses. It is multi–vocal, multi–directional and incomplete. It is a plea for the chaotic, for disorder, for vulnerability and for the collection, since a longing for order and control is what got us into this mess in the first place.