Flower Fisting

i. nature’s tropes

Even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs. Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all of the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft. . . . But even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla . . . after a very short period of glory [éclat], the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile—even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity—the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty, even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds.

Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers” (12)

How strange that the pollen and stigmatic surface of the same flower, though placed so close together, as if for the very purpose of self-fertilisation, should in so many cases be mutually useless to each other!

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (145)

In saying that the flower blooms and fades, we make the flower the thing that persists through the transformation and lend it, so to say, a personality [eine Person] in which both conditions are manifested.

Friedrich Schiller, Letters on Aesthetic Education (qtd. in Scarry, Dreaming by the Book 63)

The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94

In the program for the PMC conference from which this special issue of PMC has emerged, my title was initially misprinted as “Fisting Flowers,” a transposition I felt obliged to correct because this, whether taken as something we might visit upon flowers or flowers might do to us, seems just plain mean: vulgarly offensive, even unthinkably crude, given the incongruity between the brutality of the act and the delicacy of the substantive. Not that “Flower Fisting” isn’t just as crudely unthinkable, but here the hint of something self-reflexive in the present progressive’s hesitation between object and adjective evokes that peculiar self-pleasuring with which flowers are commonly associated. They give off this impression of sufficing to themselves by virtue, paradoxically, of their dual role as sites of openness allowing entry to the plant’s sexual organs, and concealment protecting these same organs from outside threats. This duality of function—access and enclosure—is especially evident in Stephen Buchmann and Gary Nabhan’s summary of the multiple and contradictory challenges to which specific floral architectures can be imagined as an evolutionary response:

At the same time the flower’s petals and sepals are protecting these organs, th ey must allow access so that pollen can come and go. More than that, the flower’s shape must increase the probability that pollen will arrive on receptive stigmas at just the right time. Then the flower must continue to protect the stigmas while the pollen grains send down pollen tubes containing sex cells that migrate downward through stylar tissues to eventually fertilize the ovules. Finally, closed flowers often continue to protect developing seeds from the range of stresses that plague flowers and fruits prior to their opening, from insect predators to drying winds.

(Forgotten 34)

Buchmann and Nabhan invite us to refine our sense not simply of the discrepancy between appearance and essence for which the flower is the trope par excellence, as in Bataille, but also of the mystery of why something so exposed to the elements should yield the illusion of self-enclosure, or why the flower’s surrender to and dependence on insects for reproduction should appear as self-sufficiency, however transient. If their account bears witness to a taxing of the same form by diverse functions worthy of Freudian “overdetermination,” it is Darwin who, in the chapter “Natural Selection” in The Origin of Species, traces the circular maze by which flowers achieve a redundancy of reproductive possibilities. In the paragraphs preceding the passage quoted above, he had discerned—or rather posited—the need for cross-pollination to explain what would seem to be an otherwise purposeless, indeed detrimental exposure to the elements, since “every hybridizer knows how unfavourable exposure to wet is to the fertilisation of a flower” (143). In a few short sentences, Darwin then describes the millenia-long co-evolution of bees and flowers as a dizzying dance of out-performance by which function is perfected only to be superseded, because the perfection of one means-to-an-end brings about a counter-move that in turns renders the original means purely ornamental, so that flowers finish by figuring onanistic self-pleasuring precisely because pollination is done for them. If they are open and exposed to wet, it is to guarantee fullest freedom for the entrance of pollen from another individual, and to prevent what would otherwise seem inevitable—the “self-fertilisation” from “the plant’s own anthers and pistil . . . stand[ing] so close together” (143). But if, as in the case of many flowers such as the great papilionaceous or pea family, it turns out that they have their organs of fructification closely enclosed, this is only the better to let the bees in: in such cases, “there is a very curious adaptation between the structure of the flower and the manner in which bees suck the nectar; for, in doing this, they either push the flower’s own pollen on the stigma, or bring pollen from another flower” (144).

Here the apparent obstacle—difficulty of entry—turns out to favor the bee as if in anticipation of the doctrine of mutualism, or exclusive partnership between plant and pollinator, that twentieth-century entomologists would later espouse and in turn reject or modify. On the whole, however, the multiplicity of redundant possibilities recorded in Darwin’s prose is truer to the “loose, diffuse,” and shifting attachments, whose prevalence causes Buchmann and Nabhan to question the once-dominant assumption that “one-to-one relationships [are] the norm in the natural world” (70, 71). Following the work and lexicon of Judith Bronstein, Buchmann and Nabhan would rather we speak of “landscape patterns” than of partnerships between one p lant species and its corresponding insect species, so as to better recognize the reservoir of different methods of pollination and nectar-gathering drawn upon by flowers and pollinators such that if x is not available, y may be: “These landscape patterns inform us not only of the in teraction between beetle and spice-bush, but all the other flowers that beetles sequentially visit and all the other animals that visit spicebushes and their neighbors” (68). Reading Buchmann and Nabhan, it is impossible not to detect in mutualist assumptions an investment in heteronormativity, just as it is impossible not to inflect the alternative vision of plural and versatile accommodation with a certain polyamorous insouciance and easy non-committal. Originally selected for their non-selectivity, the generalist bees of late twentieth-century industrial beekeeping mimic this easy opportunism or openness to possibility even as the logic of large-scale, monocultural food production threatens to destroy it. If, according to Buchmann, “honeybees have the gr eatest pollen dietary range of any known pollinator” (62), his excitement about the many-colored mounds of pollen pellets in which he can read the different wildflowers they’ve visited, and his wonder at “the fine particles of bizarre materials other than pollen” that they are also known to collect (“mold spores, cheese mites, flour, coal dust, and sawdust”), finds its dystopian conclusion in the idea that such a diet, already extensive in range, might now be wholly without content—purely symbolic—insofar as samples of the pollen of commercial fruit crops (almond, plum, kiwi, and cherry) are now being termed “dead due to lack of soil nutrients.”¹ This irony, whereby for-profit industrial beekeeping ends up foreclosing on what it begins by exploiting —the bees’ own cheating and scavenging ways—implies that between “nature” and “industry” there is only a choice between whoring of one kind or another. The point is worth underscoring because a certain ideal of pure, uncontaminated species-being is so often attributed to “naturalist” critics of animal husbandry under late twentieth- and twenty-first-century capitalism. If anywhere, the notion of nature as fixed and unchanging until humans come along to disturb, modify, and rearrange it, belongs to the mutualist assumptions that Buchmann and Nabhan wish to contest because they invite the tendency to “look only at plant/animal pairs” while ignoring “the entire interplay of floral resources and pollinators in a habitat” (78). Their preferred “landscape pattern” evokes instead a stretchable but importantly finite range of neighboring possibilities; such capacity for context-specific variation and versatility seems least likely to survive under twenty-first century market-driven methods of industrial pollination.

Writing in the 1990s before the emergence of the honeybee crisis now known as “colony collapse disorder,” Buchmann and Nabhan were already warning that the complex co-evolutionary dance between insects and plants that so delighted Darwin might be coming to an end due to the equally complex interaction of a number of contemporary ecological stresses, including the disappearance of habitat, pesticide-heavy industrial monocultures, and global climate change. This essay explores the ways that contemporary responses to colony collapse disorder, from human hand-pollination to the genetic selection of self-pollinating almond trees, echo the long-standing literary association of flowers with deception and illusion and constitute a kind of ironic fulfillment of their status as figures of appearance without substance and of veiling without hiding. “[Metaphors] which primarily are encountered in nature demand only to be picked, like flowers” writes Derrida in a wittingly self-reflexive footnote to “White Mythology” (220n21), and the same might be said of the ready fund of literary and philosophical sources on the tropological nature of flowers and the floral nature of tropes: one has only to reach out and pick. I do so quite lightly and randomly here, skipping over much and landing on little (and even then only glancingly), mimicking the lightness of touch and easy give-and-take at issue in insect and human pollinator-plant relations.

To begin with a topos that I won’t pursue in detail but that informs the thinking behind this essay, there is rhetorical criticism’s account, in Derrida’s “White Mythology,” Glas, and elsewhere, of metaphor as the “flower” of all rhetorical figures and of flowers as the ultimate metaphors in the double sense of both definitive or exemplary, and last, final, or exceptional.² Always disponible or at the disposal of that which lacks a ready image, flowers become metaphors of metaphor, figuring only the movement of transference from one signified to another; at the same time (and as a result), they constitute auto-referential and self-evident exceptions to the figurative chain, without need of illumination from the outside by another image.³ William Empson, glossing Shakespeare’s lines “The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet, / Though to it self it only live and die,” describes this dialectic of self-concentration and exposure, effortless virtue and guileless deceit, by which the seemingly self-contained flower metamorphoses into something else: “It may do good to others though not by effort or may simply be a good end in itself (or combining these, may only be able to do good by concentrating on itself as an end)” (96). In her exquisite sampling of (mostly twentieth-century) floral discourses, Herbarium Verbarium, Claudette Sartiliot similarly emphasizes the metamorphic, mimicking, self-dissolving and self-cancelling movement of flowers across texts, taking her cue from Rousseau to describe the flower as a time signature, no more than “a making visible of the passage of time . . . from the time its corolla opens till the time it fades” (39).

The metaphorical transfer between the tropological and the biological is in this context seemingly unstoppable, as when botanist Jean-Marie Pelt happens to choose (but what else is there?) the metaphor of the postal service (itself already doubling as a metaphor for metaphorical transfer) to describe floral pollination: “One thus trusts the carrier and chance: something will always eventually reach its destination, provided a lot is sent. What does it matter if whole bags—bags of pollen, that is—are never delivered, never reach their destination. In the work of pollination, nature is not particular (in French, regardante); it trusts chance, neglects, squanders” (qtd. in Sartiliot 32-33). For the purposes of this essay, the ironies of this potentially airless rhetorical short-circuiting matter less than the easy slippage, evident in Pelt’s prose, from vulnerability to indifference, from doing everything to doing nothing to reproduce. Because poverty of means demands prodigious expense, dependence on chance is by turns expressed as weakness, by turns as sufficiency. Years ago, writing in an entirely different context, Empson provided a kind of literary equivalent to such a “landscape pattern” by tracing the double and contradictory senses of the word “honest” in Shakespeare’s writings—chaste and sexually reserved, but also frank, generous, and undisguised, and therefore corrupt, lascivious, and rank (137). These different valences of openness (from generosity to availability to exposure) are particularly worth emphasizing in light of the increasing precarity to which “generalist” workers are exposed under neoliberalism. “Precarization”—whether it means the making-temporary of work itself (which now may disappear at any moment), or the heightened expendability and disposability of the labor force, or the dismantling of structures of social support on which to fall back in the absence of employment—only captures one dimension of the reliance on another’s pleasure originally implied by the term “precarious”: “held or enjoyed by the favour of and at the pleasure of another person” (OED).⁴ Comparison with Pelt’s trails of floral negligence, however jarring, makes newly legible the disappearance or atrophy of a differently lived relation to contingency that coincides with the introduction of permanent insecurity into every area of life.⁵

Before turning to explore in greater detail this contradictory dynamic of fortified fragility, whereby new forms of capitalist enclosure leave nothing to the domain of chance or “nature” but also (and as a result) leave workers nothing to count on, I want to consider one more flower theorist who emphasizes their accommodation to the shape of human desires—not their naturalness or simplicity per se but their remaining within easy reach of mortal powers.⁶ Indeed, in her Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry seems to understand the special claims that flowers have on human imaginations—as readily imaginable objects and as images for imaginative work itself—in terms similar to the “trust” that Pelt attributes to flowers in their relation to their varied postal carriers. Here too my interest is less in debating the claims for evolutionary mutuality implied by Scarry’s somewhat astonishing assertion that flowers fit between our eyes in a way that Pegasus does not (46). Rather, I want to re-inflect her claims for the special capacity flowers have not to be special—not to tax but to remain adequate to imaginative powers—through the common association of flowers with promiscuity, easy availability, whoredom, transience, and commonness itself. For the pleasure of reading Scarry on flowers lies in her feel for the non-punitive skepticism or light-hearted doubt as to the sentience and even aliveness induced by the insubstantiality and speed with which flowers materialize only to disappear—yielding a closeness to illusion, another name for which is “imagination” because not experienced as error or fault. Hence the convergence between Schiller’s idea of the flower as no more than a convenient way to designate a blooming followed by a fading and Scarry’s idea of the convenience with which the flower can enter the mind “precisely because it is always already in a state of passage from the material to the dematerialized” (63). Drawing only on what is near at hand, flowers, according to Aristotle, can complete their cycle within a single day (60); such quickness of dissolution—easily interpretable either as praiseworthy local economy or fickle cheapness—interests Scarry only as evidence of all that makes “imagining . . . like being a plant—not-perception . . .[but] the quasi-percipient, slightly percipient, almost percipient, not yet percipient, after-percipient of perceptual mimesis. . . not sentience, but sentience rolled-back” (66-67):

Pre-image and after-image, subsentient and supersentient, the plant exposes the shape of a mental process that combines the almost percipient with a kind of transitory exactness. It is as though the very precision required to find the exquisitely poised actuality of the flower’s “vague sentience” manifests itself as a form of acuity.

(68)

As a kind of shadowy sentience that both intensifies and disperses actual perception, imagination for Scarry resembles photosynthesis, because she follows Darwin in understanding the latter as a responsiveness to light that anticipates and in some sense already constitutes vision or perception. Her reading culminates with an extraordinary account of Darwin’s experiments in tracking the motion of plants in response to light, experiments whereby he would attach to them delicate instruments that let them trace on pieces of glass their intricate movements “oscillating up and down during the day” (The Power of Movements in Plants; qtd. in Scarry 69).

Whether or not one concurs with Scarry’s account of the imagination, two aspects are worth underlining here: first, the way that flowers invite the persistent addition of a modifying adjective such as “almost” that qualifies, almost to the point of negation, the substance of what is asserted about them; second, the idea that sensitivity to light alone already constitutes for the seemingly motionless plant a mode of being in motion and in time—a point to which I return at the end of this essay. As Scarry’s work helps remind us, floral lives, by their strange quickness, possess a kind of acuity of achieved reality that is never far from passing back into possibility. In this close proximity to vanished and emergent potentiality, they are in some sense more real but just as importantly less real than the kinds of life intelligible to industrial agriculture: isolated, seemingly autonomous organisms (self-pollinating almond trees, single-function pollinators), to which life is decisively granted and then just as completely taken away.⁷ I turn now to this dystopian political narrative of enclosure enforcing an ever more rigid monopoly on the reproduction of that to which life is ever more rigidly given (or not), so as to trace in accounts of the causes of colony collapse disorder, as well as dominant responses to it, the remains, or flattened images in reverse, of flowers’ dance with possibility. Here too my aim is not to set up some sort of contrast between “nature” and “artifice” but, on the contrary, to juxtapose as much as possible different kinds of illusion, differentiating them on the basis of the contentment they may or may not afford with their status as illusion.

ii. floral enclosures

But let clear springs be near and moss-green pools,
A little brook escaping through the grass.
Let palm or huge wild olive shade the porch,
That, when the kings lead forth the early swarms
And young bees revel in the spring they love,
A neighbouring bank may tempt them from the heat,
Or tree embrace them in its welcome leaves,
Upon the water of the stream or pool
Cast willow branches and upstanding stones,
That they may have a bridge to rest upon
And spread their wings toward the summer sun,
In case the east wind sprinkle loiterers
Or sudden gust submerge them in the flood.
Let green spurge-laurel blossom all about,
Far-smelling thyme and pungent savory,
And beds of violet drink the freshening fount.

Virgil, The Georgics, IV.18-32

For all their efforts . . . humans have not succeeded in domesticating bees. A swarm escaping from a commercial hive has just as good a chance of surviving in the wild as a feral swarm, and the number of wild colonies living in trees still far exceeds the population living in accommodations designed for them by humans. The history of beekeeping, then, has not been a story of domestication, but rather one of humans learning how to accommodate the needs and preferences of the bees themselves.

James L. Gould and Carol Gould, The Honey Bee

“Colony collapse disorder” refers to the worldwide immune deficiency syndrome whereby entire hives of pollinating bees have been mysteriously disappearing without a trace overnight—a syndrome now likened to AIDS for bees because the corpses of those bees that do remain indicate they had been suffering from a variety of disease.⁸ Organic beekeepers are fond of claiming that colony collapse is only a symptom of a market-driven system of agriculture long since gone awry, and indeed, beneath the doomsday scenario of a Hollywood movie lie more interesting if less dramatic stories of ongoing political enclosure, ecological disruption, and aesthetic homogenization. In the passage cited above from Book IV of The Georgics, Virgil’s loving recommendations for how to provide bees with the choicest spot and otherwise tend to their well-being bear witness to the careful cultivation not just of the bees themselves but of the illusion of freedom from work, or rather freedom-in-work that defines bee-flower exchanges. Even the sleep-inducing murmur of the Hybla bees of Eclogue 1 owes its just barely audible utopian note to the intertwining of leisure and work in the thought of their wandering from flower to flower, an illusion predicated on the inarticulate assumption of their potential non-enclosure, even if they always wander the same fields and return to the same hives. This same permissiveness within limits is sounded by the repeated “Let”—at once permission and command—that recurs in the English translations of the Georgics. Any such illusion of easy, gratuitous give-and-take can hardly be maintained, however, in the face of the mass-flower fuck for which, long before 2006, bees of a certain breed were being pimped out, moved northward on interstate highways and then southward again, according to the strict demands of variously placed and timed industrial monocultures.

In her 2007 New Yorker piece, Elizabeth Kolbert describes how modern agriculture has itself evolved to depend on the services of Apis mellifera, a floral generalist—polyectic—not particular (1, par. 5). Kolbert’s term “evolved” itself repeats a pernicious naturalization of the hardly inevitable process by which “five-hundred-acre apple orchard[s]” have become the norm. In an orchard of such a size, according to Kolbert, “there simply aren’t enough indigenous pollinators to produce a commercial crop: either the yield will be too low or the fruit will be small or stunted” (1, par. 5), so farmers rely on mobile pollinating armies to do the work in a way that revives the longstanding mock-heroic comparison. Since, as Kolbert writes, “two men can easily move ten million bees into an orchard in a single day” (1, par. 7), the same bees may begin by pollinating apples in Pennsylvania, move on to blueberries in Maine, then to clover in New York, and back to pumpkins again in Pennsylvania.⁹ As commercial beekeepers like David Hackenberg, whose bees first began disappearing in November 2006, are quick to emphasize, the same economy of large-scale industrial monocrops that demands a ready supply of moveable pollinators also gives commercial beekeepers little choice to do anything else, since domestic honey cannot compete with cheap corn syrup or honey imports.

In arguing that the trouble now expressing itself as colony collapse disorder began long ago, the point is not to mourn the denaturalization of beekeeping as if there were a time before three-way, human-animal-plant manipulation, but to measure of the differences between two types of cultivation—differences now so great there is no good reason, whatever the genetic identity, to call these creatures honeybees. Documentaries such as The Vanishing of the Bees and articles like Kolbert’s impressively catalogue the changes in working and living conditions on which such a claim might rest, each one of which jolts the pastoral illusion of relative autonomy. Constant transportation, for example, not only stresses the bees—Kolbert’s informant tells her “he expects to lose ten per cent of his queens simply as a result of the jostling” (par. 7)—but leaves them no time to make sufficient honey to feed themselves or their young, so that their diet has to be supplemented with the very sweeteners that have turned them migrant workers in the first place. According to Gunther Hauk, modern beekeepers will not in any case risk a gap or interval by letting the queens die; those following the conventional manuals automatically replace the queen in at most two years, a process that each time requires reintroducing the worker bees to a new queen on a shorter and less flexible time cycle than they would ordinarily follow.¹⁰

More than simply technical solutions to difficult physical conditions, measures like these not only presuppose the equivalence of different temporal cycles but evince a general mistrust of leaving things to chance, a desire to supplement and secure so-called instinctive animal behavior, and a willingness to do things for the bees continuous with Virgil’s loving directives. Yet there is no direct path from letting “beds of violets drink from the trickling spring” to the artificial insemination of the queen bee and her automatic retirement and human-selected replacement. In between lies the unfortunate feedback loop by which certain forms of domestic exploitation create conditions of helplessness and dependence that in turn elicit further disregard and undervaluation of the colony’s formerly more autonomous powers. Embêtissement (bestialization/stupefaction) might have been Derrida’s term for the process whereby it becomes all too easy to tell who is using whom, as mutual accommodation and two-way manipulation flatten out into one-sided exploitation and control.¹¹ The Goulds’s now perhaps antiquated claim notwithstanding, it is tempting to evoke in this context Paul Shepard’s critique of domestication as “infantilization,” even if it concerns domesticated mammals and although I remain wary of Shepard’s tone-deafness to the complicated gender politics overdetermining these terms, especially when used synonymously with one another:

These changes [brought about by captivity and domestication] include plumper and more rounded features, greater docility and submissiveness, reduced mobility, simplification of complex behaviors (such as courtship), the broadening or generalizing of signals to which social responses are given (such as following behavior), reduced hardiness, and less specialized environmental and nutritional requirements. The sum effect of these is infantilization.

(38)

As if in echo of Shepard, Hauk goes so far as to want to vindicate the bees’ right not to be spared the labor of making their own wax: according to him, the comb of most modern honeybee hives is supplemented with man-made wax so the bees can get on with the business of making honey instead. Studies show, Hauk claims, that when bees that have been so supplied are once again allowed to use their own wax, it can take up to two to three years for them to relearn “the art of building a good comb” (24).

If true (and it should be remembered that Hauk is a maverick writing for a non-specialist readership), his critique uncannily echoes postcolonial critiques of the erasure of indigenous knowledges. The question of whether we can speak of practical memory loss among nonhuman species also deserves to be thought alongside Bernard Stiegler’s Derridean-inspired re-appraisal of Plato’s critique of writing (and other mnemotechnologies) as ironically more destructive than preservative of local memory. If by proletarianization Stiegler means the loss of knowledge and know-how that workers and consumers suffer as a result of the exteriorization of memory, what might it mean to extend the concept to nonhuman actors?¹² The idea that humans have struck a bargain similar to that of domesticated animals, paying for an enhanced material existence and protection from death (parasites, disease, cold, etc.) with a reduced set of individuated skills and transfer of knowledge to a collective archive, continues to resonate, in however strange and contradictory ways, in the renewed currency of Foucault- and Arendt-inspired critiques of the “elevation of life” as the “ultimate point of reference” and “highest good” that marks modern societies as “biopolitical.” The words are Hannah Arendt’s in The Human Condition, but I borrow them from Gil Anidjar, who in his recent essay “The Meaning of Life” paraphra ses Arendt’s discontent with a modernity that subjects “life to the rhythm of the new and renewed, the rhythm of the biological” (710).

Here too the ironies may be too many for the brief space of this essay, but it is worth noting how Arendt’s still unsurpassed pages on labor in The Human Condition help make intelligible the contradictory process whereby modernity’s almost exclusive concentration on the expansion and prolongation as well as reproduction of the material conditions of existence succeeds in rendering the labor of making life live both endless and effortless. (As developments in technology make labor “more effortless than ever,” it becomes, according to Arendt, “even more similar to the automatically functioning life process” [116]). Thus what Gandhi once called the “exaggerated importance” that “the West attaches to prolonging man’s earthly existence” (qtd. in Devji 269) can take the form of investing in the disposable and replaceable parts of ever-shorter cycles of production. The lengthening of life and the speed with which the tools (whether themselves living or not) required to maintain it expire, express the same terror of decay. At the same time, this elevation of “life on earth” as the “highest good of man” goes hand in hand with diminished practical know-how of what it takes to make such life possible—an impoverishment itself all too evident in the simplistic reduction of the “biological” to a single rhythm of renewal. It is impossible not to cite in this context as a kind of satire on the Arendtian monolithic view of “natural life” her own satiric account of Marx’s vision of post-capitalist society as “a state of affairs where all human activities derive as naturally from human ‘nature’ as the secretion of wax by bees for making the honeycomb; to live and to labor for life will have become one and the same, and life will no longer ‘begin for [the laborer] where [the activity of laboring] ceases'” (89n21). We may indeed be approaching, in the most dystopian of ways, a state in which there is no difference between living and laboring for life, but by then bees will have long since stopped making their own honeycomb.

iii. painted blossoms

How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 93

Perhaps the most obvious and cruelest irony in colony collapse disorder consists in the transformation of the flower into a kind of deferred poison for the bee and the way this again both revises and extends certain long-standing tropes of the flower as a dangerous (because substanceless) deceiver whose passing show can never match its final remains. Writing in 2009, former EPA analyst Evaggelos Vallianatos offers the following lurid image of the bee ingesting its own slow-release poison in the form of pollen-size nylon bubbles containing the nervegas parathion. The flower is made into a time-bomb, as if in dramatic realization of the floral phobias recorded in Shakespeare’s sonnets or Bataille’s writings:

What makes this microencapsulated formulation more dangerous to bees than the technical material is the very technology of the “time release” microcapsule. This acutely toxic insecticide, born of chemical warfare, would be on the surface of the flower for several days. The foraging bee, if alive after its visit to the beautiful white flowers of almonds, for example, laden with invisible spheres of asphyxiating gas, would be bringing back to its home pollen and nectar mixed with parathion.

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson was already warning of the lethal if unintended consequences of pesticides on pollinating insects, yet ironically it is the switch, undertaken in part in response to Carson’s critique, from the earlier, heavily toxic chemical sprays of the Cold-War era to the more recent, and supposedly more enlightened, benign forms of “systemic pest management” that has exposed bees to the greatest danger. Thus one hypothesis about the most immediate causes of colony collapse disorder (as presented in the Vanishing of the Bees) blames systemic insecticides like Bayer’s imidacloprid, introduced as recently as 1994. Because imidacloprid (known under the trade name gaucho) is constantly present in the plants and soil, beekeepers can no longer protect their bees by removing them from the fields and orchards at the special times of spraying, as they did with first-generation post-War insecticides. Debates over gaucho—now banned in France thanks to the efforts of militant unionized beekeepers but still legal in the United States—seem to hinge on the difference between lethal and sublethal; Bayer-sponsored studies show bees are not mortally affected, while other studies show immune deficiency appears only with the second generation, in the young bees who have been fed imidacloprid-laced pollen. Recognition of these deferred and chronic effects requires opening the experiments out onto longer temporal frameworks. Even without the expertise to weigh in on this particular debate, the literary scholar, as a student of metrical and other units of time, will be struck, as well, by how the logic of systemic insecticides appears to take no account of the difference between permanence and periodicity, between ceaseless emission and periodic reiteration, such that one is always at the same, eternally repeating “now” with no possibility of either development or decay.

At the end of this essay I return to the question of how this monotemporal norm works as a denial of the principle of alternation that is basic to meter and seasonal work alike, but for now, further evidence of such temporal homogeneity may be adduced in contemporary responses to colony collapse disorder that treat it as simply a matter of the increasing unavailability of pollinators and so decide to do without them: in the last two years Zaiger Genetics has introduced into California, which has the largest share in worldwide commercial almond crops, a new variety of self-pollinating almond trees fittingly called Independence™.¹³ If Independence™ catches on commercially, the circle will be complete because the same monocultural orchards whose extensive size has necessitated the rental of pollinating bees, thereby creating some of the conditions for colony collapse, will now be independent of them.¹⁴ This vision of our postmodern earth as a totally enclosed space or global hothouse promises to fulfill the dream of overcoming the need for sex for reproduction and of becoming free of what Darwin called the “inter-crossing of individuals” with all its heteronormative baggage, but only at the cost of also foreclosing the possibility of fortuitous chance encounters and denying ongoing relations of interdependence. The contradiction to be pondered further is why the insistence on the porousness and manipulability of species-boundaries (you can equip the flower with its own bee by making it “self-compatible”) should simultaneously coincide with a terrifying impoverishment of interaction between species and an investment in careful immunization from temporal evolution (as if the norm for each creature were to be under quarantine from others).¹⁵

Yet such a vision would not be complete if it did not include its seeming antithesis. Even as large orchard growers in California have begun to import their bees from abroad while waiting for genetically selected, self-compatible tree varieties to become viable, pear orchard keepers in the Sichuan province of China have been resorting since the mid-1980s to hand pollination because heavy pesticide use has wiped out the local insect pollinators and beekeepers now refuse to rent out their pollinating colonies to the region. This labor-intensive process relies on what may itself be a temporary condition in a rapidly urbanizing Chinese economy—the ready availability of human labor, with thousands of villagers in the trees carefully hand-pollinating blossom by blossom. In its segment on the issue, the PBS documentary The Silence of the Bees pauses over the incredible slowness of the process: it takes humans four hundred hours to do what bees could do in an afternoon—a comparison that retroactively transforms the disappeared bees into a pre-image of mechanized labor. Its complement would be the disconcerting image of humans—mostly women since they are considered better pollinators than men—in trees laden with white blossoms but now eerily rid of the hum of insects (as if turned from actual trees into three-dimensional realizations of purely visual representations), dipping sticks made of chicken feathers and cigarette filters into plastic bottles of pollen collected just days before from the “pollinizer” trees, and then touching with pollen about twenty to thirty flowers at a time.¹⁶

The riot of details here reflects and derives from a hybridization not of plant or animal species but of what one might reductively suppose to be incompatible cultures and economies: pre- and postmodern, organic and industrial, the global market and the rural village. Perhaps especially worthy of note, given the dystopian ecological and labor conditions in which it occurs, is the more than physical intimacy—the acute attention to the look of each flower and to specific temporal or meteorological conditions—required to do the job: whereas bees only inadvertently drop pollen in the right place and at the right time in the course of doing something else (gathering nectar), hand pollinators cannot afford to leave accurate timing to chance and must first learn to tell the stigma’s receptivity to pollination by the color of the anthers or (which is easier) by the degree of openness of the petals. According to differing weather conditions, this window of receptivity will be over within three hot, sunny days (in which case the rate of pay will sometimes double) or last up to ten (if cloudy and cool). Such responsiveness to minimal variation affords a kind of pastoral reprieve within the very logic of homogenization and reliance on a single market that is expressed by the pear orchards—a cash crop now being planted in former rice paddy fields and rapidly displacing all other kinds of cultivation. If more self-compatible varieties such as Yali trees are introduced, as growers wish (there is apparently little interest in bringing back the bees), these thirty-odd years of hand-painting flowers will no doubt themselves constitute no more than a temporary and residual interlude in the grand march of capital.

iv. coda: shifting flow’rs

[Mohavea confertiflora]: “ghost flower” [so named because it looks so much like another flower—sand blazing star—that] even bees are sometimes fooled. Whereas sand blazing star provides nectar and pollen for bee visitors, ghost flower offers nothing. But by the time a bee has worked its way into the floral tube of a ghost flower and has discovered that the blossom contains no nectar and little pollen, the bee has already inadvertently pollinated the flower.

Emily Bowers, 100 Desert Wildflowers of the Southwest

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan takes as axiomatic that “the one big thing plants can’t do is move, or, to be more precise, locomote,” and wants his readers to reimagine the “great existential fact of plant life”—the “immobility of plants” (xx)—as the basis for a different kind of action and agency—a mode of action that, hardly worthy of the name, can only seem to locomotors such as ourselves indirect, oblique, passive, and fictive—or worse, back-handed, deceptive and manipulative.¹⁷ After all, what except passive aggressive would we call a person who, like the flower, tricks an unsuspecting fellow into carrying her goods for her?¹⁸ “How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow, / If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show,” Shakespeare writes of the young man of the sonnets in Sonnet 93; yet it is the young man’s flowerlike impudence— the sense that his appearance will never betray him and that he cannot begin to look like the demon he may be within (because he cannot bring together “inside” and “outside” and cannot help promising love by his looks)—that the Shakespeare of the Sonnets both loves and hates in him. The point at which he is flowerlike is also where he is most mortal, vulnerable, and exposed to and dependent on the world without. “Ghost flower” is presumably so named because it is a pale copy, all show and no substance, of a “real” flower. But Shakespeare would teach us just the contrary: precisely by troping on what ordinary flowers do, by signifying to the bee “flower” without actually doing what a flower is supposed to do for a bee, “ghost flower” may be more of a flower than most. In fact, “ghost flower” may represent flower-being at its purest according to Pollan’s claim that flowers were “nature’s tropes” before us (69), from the start figurative beings whose truth has been to lie: to figure, to shadow, to image the absent thing itself, whether this be the fruit to come or the other flower.

A purely visual account of floral tropics might end here, leaving relatively unchallenged the monotemporal norm whose increasing hegemony and grip on species possibility I have been critiquing throughout this essay. Flowers such as “ghost flower” and their insect counterparts— bees known as “thieves” because they visit flowers for nectar and pollen without going near the stigmata—would seem to outdo in their artifice the mimicry of the self-pollinating flowers of genetically selected and copyrighted orchard trees. They would also seem to anticipate the inventive resourcefulness of the sterile-fruit-bearing, “Blossom-set”-treated hothouse varieties for whom hormones have “ghosted” the work of pollination. Useful reminders that there is neither direct correspondence nor necessary relation between feeding and pollination, “thieving” bees would also seem to set the example for the complete dissociation of these activities that has become the norm for the sugar- and corn-syrup-fed commercial pollinators of today’s interstate hives—a dissociation wholly continuous with the separation of form and function that produces the aesthetic as a separate sphere. But, as I have argued, such mimicry of the mimic pollinators and flowers is still not mimicry enough, for what is being lost is the diversification and richness of temporal and spatial possibility necessary for the formation of a “landscape pattern”: what is disappearing is the versatility evident in the example of Mentzelia decapetala—robbed of nectar by bees in the late afternoon only to be pollinated by moths later that night.

If this sensitivity to time and with it the capacity for context-specific variation are indeed now threatened with permanent extinction, by way of elegiac conclusion on their behalf, I’d like to return to the question of floral temporality that I left suspended along with Darwin’s graphs of the constellations drawn by the light-determined motion of plant radicles. Whereas the premise of The Botany of Desire is that plants can’t move, in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s sonnets, at least, flowers can move in the sense that they can occupy different positions metrically, and their syllabic count can shift from one to two or two to one, as Paul Kiparsky and Kristin Hanson have illustrated in their work on elision and metrics in the sonnets. According to Hanson, because Shakespeare strictly adheres to the rule of one syllable per metrical position (strong or weak), the word “flower” is sometimes two syllables—flower—sometimes one —flow’r. “Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered” is the line from Sonnet 124 Hanson cites to make this point, a line gorgeously apposite to the concerns of this essay.¹⁹ At the level of meaning, the line offers nothing by way of the Darwinian sexual reproduction and propagation of species with which “the desire” of the protagonists of Pollan’s Botany is always ultimately identified. Here there is only sterile semantic repetition or verbal confusion, a doubling of sameness as one image of indistinction—”weeds among weeds”—is followed by another—”flowers with flowers gathered.” But at the level of the iambic line’s alternating pattern of weak-strong-weak-strong beats, change already occurs within the first phrase “weeds among weeds,” because the first “weeds” is in the odd or offbeat position while the second falls clearly on the down beat.²⁰ Similarly, the first “flowers” in “flowers with flowers gathered” is elided, since the word “with” provides all the breathing space needed—and indeed allowed—between the two strong beats of “flow” and “flow,” while in the second instance, “flowers” must be lengthened to two syllables to space out the returning down beat on the first syllable of “gathered.”²¹ Such animating metaphors of relief, breathing space, rests, or intervals of down time might give pause to a generative linguist such as Hanson, but I use them deliberately here to emphasize the point I made earlier: such a capacity to play with time or, rather, to work with its lengthening and shortening through elisions, pauses, and rests, makes possible an extraordinary variation within minimal space. Accommodating itself to and making do with the most reduced semantic materials, such a fertility might be called tropic rather than biological, and it is precisely this playful relation to micro- as well as to macro-temporal contexts for which the new (but hardly changed nor changeable) generation of ever defensive, self-compatible monocrops will be poorly equipped, however fortified.