Uncommon Fruits

“How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.”

As the sun shone brightly for the first time this past week, we started thinking about the tasks we need to tend to outside our houses. The sun exercises its authority over people, inviting us under its protection, into the spaces under the empty sky. It is necessary to turn the soil in the garden and finally venture into the forest to check the condition of the surrounding wooden temple. And we must observe with great precision the metamorphosis that will begin to take place before our eyes: the growth of greenery, the sprouting of sprouts, the formation of flower buds. We always say that we need to take care of our abilities to observe the world and carefully upgrade them. When we will begin to truly admire nonhuman others, we will also begin to treat them more ethically. But the theory of the refinement of our sensory apparatus, which should consequently lead to the refinement of our mental apparatus, rests on the thesis that there is such a thing as a subject that observes and an object that is observed. Michael Pollan, the American author, the writer of the famous book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2002) tackles this topic with a forceful thesis: There is no need at all to change our sensory apparatus. What interests the plant is only its genetic copying. It just wants to multiply. She has no problem with industrial agriculture, because it means more and more plants of her kind. The fact that we humans have perfected some of the species, given their fruit that right sweetness and appearance that invites more and more people to bite into her fruit, is in accordance with the plan of plant species: to reproduce. “The ancient relationship between bees and flowers is a classic example of what is known as “coevolution.” In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors: food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn’t enter into it on either side, and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.” Pollan also adds that there is no essential difference between man and this bee. So who is to blame for planting a specific type of lettuce and tomato in the garden? Pollan claims that lettuce and tomatoes are to blame: “These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them.” So why should we change? Certain successful plant species are happy in monoculture oases. Even if humans have genetically modified plants, this is all just part of a secret plant plan to rule the world. The plant works through us, man is a means of its self-affirmation. In an interesting way, the idea connects two worlds that we like to separate, the world of nature and culture, into a single natureculture. The two worlds are one, says Pollan. Even the human function of reasoning, of which we are so proud, can be understood in the way that nature itself created a machine to think for it. A nature that thinks itself to spread itself.

The voice is a cognate expression with the act of breathing. In human voice, sound emanates by the flowing of air through the lungs, throat and mouth - the same organs engaged with inhaling and exhaling. According to Adriana Cavarero,“In the uniqueness that makes itself heard as voice, there is an embodied existent, or rather, a “being-there” [esserci] in its radical finitude, here and now. The sphere of the vocal implies the ontological plane and anchors it to the existence of singular beings who invoke one another contextually. [...] In this sense, the ontological horizon that is disclosed by the voice — or what we want to call a vocal ontology of uniqueness — stands in contrast to the various ontologies of fictitious entities that the philosophical tradition, over the course of its historical development, designates with names like “man,” “subject,” “individual.””¹
What would be the analogous display of uniqueness through sound — or voice — in the realm of plants? A candidate for this correlate expression in vegetal anatomy lies in leaves, since these are both concerned with respiration and with the emission of sound. The whispering of foliage vibrating in the wind seems to exceed semantic signification as we conceive of it. However, this type of sound emission is one of the aspects which characterizes the singularity of context. Among other things, entering an orchard is a wholly different experience from entering a forest because of the acoustic sphere surrounding the air. Plants manifest their ontology of uniqueness through many dimensions beyond spatiality, and, if we were to listen to their voice, we might apprehend part of their being through the sense of hearing.

Bees do not build straight lines. Their combs swell and bend, responding to warmth, to proximity, to invisible needs. Even when beekeepers insert ordered frames into hives to maximise productivity and control, bees often resist. They rebuild, reshape, override — creating forms that emerge from within rather than conforming to an external plan. Their labour is sometimes not obedient to imposed geometry, but attuned to the living dynamics of the hive itself. This wild, adaptive architecture offers a lesson in how space can be organised immanently — not by top-down abstraction, but from within a body or community. It echoes what Gilles Deleuze describes as a logic of composition based on affective encounters rather than transcendent laws — an ethics of arrangement born from within life itself. There are striking parallels between this mode of spatial resistance and how the people of Benečija/Valli del Natisone navigated the border that divided areas once connected through economic, social, and familial ties. The people of Topolò and the inhabitants of nearby villages on the other side of the border, such as Livek and Livške Ravne, had to invent new ways of being together when the state severed their shared pastures, cut off family relations, and imposed an arbitrary line through their landscape. Much like bees, they reorganised space according to their own needs — and in doing so, disobeyed the logics of control and separation. Smuggling basic goods became not just an act of necessity but an act of solidarity — an insistence that life would continue to be lived together despite the border. These gestures, however small, can be read as forms of what Walter Mignolo calls epistemic disobedience: the refusal to accept the spatial and epistemic order imposed by modernity and the nation-state. Both bees and border communities model a different way of knowing and inhabiting space — one that resists enclosure, fragmentation, and productivity-driven control in favour of relational, living arrangements. Their quiet insistence on building otherwise shows that another kind of spatial order is not only imaginable — it is already being practiced.