Sympoietic Art Practice in Co-expressive Re-worlding with Hegel’s “Vegetal Subject”

Lin Charlston and David Charlston
Additional contact information
Lin Charlston: Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
David Charlston: University of Liverpool, UK

Journal of Posthumanism, 2021, vol. 1, issue 2, 153-166

Abstract: “Sympoietic art practice”, construed as co-creative making-together-with plants, contributes to posthumanist discourse by forming cross-species partnerships which re-configure exploitative relations with plants. The posthumanist commitment of sympoietic practice to live equitably with the more-than-human world is inherently opposed to the tradition of anthropocentrism widely associated with Hegel’s idealization of reason and culture. But when Hegelian philosophy comingles with the radically different assumptions of sympoietic art practice in this exploratory paper, a co-expressive “worlding with plants” emerges. A transformative re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature reveals that the English translators have smoothed away the vibrant concept of a “vegetal subject” explicitly used by Hegel in the original German. The resulting interpretive fissure makes space for a creative scrutiny of human exceptionalism, humanist and posthumanist conceptions of plant subjectivity and human-plant relations. Our transdisciplinary article concludes with a performative knitting together and composting of shreds of Hegelian text with vibrantly participative strands of living couch grass.

Keywords: Co-creativity; Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature; Plant-human relations, Plant subjectivity; Sympoietic art practice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.tplondon.com/jp/article/view/1326/1373 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mig:jpjrnl:v:1:y:2021:i:2:p:153-166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://journals.tpl ... ormation/librarians/

DOI: 10.33182/jp.v1i2.1326

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Posthumanism is currently edited by S meyra Buran, agdas Dedeoglu, Yunus Tuncel and Pelin K mbet

More articles in Journal of Posthumanism from Transnational Press London, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TPLondon ().