Abstract

This essay asks about the fate of flowers in an age of colony collapse disorder and market-driven industrial agriculture. From human hand-pollination to the genetic selection of self-pollinating crops, contemporary responses to CCD bring to ironic conclusion certain tropes of flowers as figures of deceit, mortality, transience, and appearance without substance. Taking "flowers" to signify a special openness to contingency and potentiality, the essay examines the irony whereby global capital both disseminates this openness as "precarization" and threatens to destroy it by enforcing an ever more rigid monopoly on the reproduction of certain life forms.

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