Reading 5

Taussig Michael, The Language of Flowers, Walter Benjamins Grave, The University of Chicago Press, 2006 pp. 189-218

Michael Taussig has a PHD. in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is a professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his engagement with Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism especially in the work of Walter Benjamin.

The Language of Flowers is a wide ranging piece that discusses the history of botanical fetishes such as the mandrake, associations with the Acephale group, the myth of The Little Gallows Man and a discussion on hanging and sexual pleasure. This background is used to discuss Columbian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria and his series Corte de Florero - photographic works of human bones in flower like arrangements commenting on the history of state violence in Columbia.

As an overview of the state of nature and violence of the state, Taussig reminds us that Walter Benjamin said capital punishment was a re-enactment of the state’s founding violence. The inherent violence of humans is noted as he wraps up by returning to animator Chuck Jones who had commented ‘it’s easier to humanize animals than humanize humans’. (p189)

Echavarria is humanizing flowers in his use of human bones. But I am not sure if Chuck Jones’ comments are correct that it is easier to humanize animals. Bugs Bunny and Road Runner although treated with violence in his cartoons never die and never suffer. Is suffering only a human condition?

While reading this article I was caught by Echavarria’s purpose of creating something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it and then once they realised what it was something would click in the viewers head. (p190) This of course is a commonly used technique of film-makers and writers , especially when presenting topics that may have a degree of compassion fatigue(1).

It particularly made me think of J.M Coetzee’s novel Disgrace(2), and the subsequent film. Disgrace presents the conundrum of violence in Africa, post pre and post apatite. Woven into this story is a refuge for dogs in which the main character humanely puts down the many abandoned and mistreated dogs. He finds a kind of solace in this work. It is worth noting because this is something not normally featured in movies, that animals suffer because of human treatment. Coetzee is a dedicated vegetarian, his small book The Lives of Animals(3) tells the story of a lecturer, Elizabeth Costello who uses the various academic speaking engagements to talk about the suffering of animals. This was born of Coetzee himself wanting to talk about animal rights at the Tanner Lectures in Princeton and wanting to engage rather than shame his audience. He now reads the book at such lectures, because it is a story and read as a story representing the thoughts of Elizabeth it is not a ‘lecture’.

In the book Elizabeth’s son dreads the moment when his mother is asked what made her become a vegetarian as the response is always the same. ‘ You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh, I for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds’ (p38) (4).

In this way Coetzee cleverly introduces a controversial topic in a conversational way. Elizabeth can also afford to insert an intellectual element into the discussion, on animal consciousness . .’No awareness as far as we can make out of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness – therefore-. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognise that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpublished?’

1. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue, How the Media sells Disease Famine War and Death. Routeledge, 1999.
2. Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. Secker & Warburg 1999.
3. Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. Princeton University Press 2001.
4. These quote originally come from Plutarch, c. 46 – 120 AD, a Greek historian, biographer and essayist.