E-Co-Affectivity: Exploring Pathos at Life’s Material Interfaces

In her absorbing book E-Co-Affectivity, philosopher Marjolein Oele explores how humans, plants, animals and the soil can relate as a coaffective community. For anyone interested in seeing how interdisciplinary studies can be applied, I highly recommend this philosophically creative and intellectually challenging book, which could be valuable not only for philosophers but also for environmentalists and those across animal studies fields. Oele touches on biological, medical and evolutionary elements throughout her prolonged philosophical analysis. The writing is clear and poetic, so along with the thoughtful meditations it’s the kind of book that sharpens, as it has for me, a mental and visceral awakening to the material world. My review can give only a glimpse of the academic sophistication of this book, and I hope not to oversimplify some of the philosophically layered textures. The material factors of life, organic and inorganic, are “always emerging” (p. 2) in an ontogenesis via materiality created through affective states that recall the past and look to the future. Oele’s example is human skin, but she also includes soil. In this regard Oele does not see earth as a home ground as might Heidegger. Rather, dirt cells are rife with teeming, felt interfaces of living organisms and nonliving particles, large and small, here and now, there and past. This means that pathos-induced affectivity from forms of material life is a participatory exchange process and not simply a static effect, says Oele. Beyond merely taking in affects there is a release of thought, emotion and, perhaps, action. There is literal and figurative movement in life that includes matter and mind, affective and, often, ecological states of being. To distinguish herself from Heidegger, Oele is more concerned with communal becoming (p. 6) and not just individual being-in-the-world. The ethics implied in this stance should be apparent: responsibly permitting all life-forms the opportunity of existence in their respective communities and inclusive pathos with ecological contexts of the nonhuman. The so-called examined life should include a consideration of many carbon-based life-forms and even other inorganic elements. In addition to the ethical, clearly there are political dimensions to ecologically shared affectivity through, for instance, animal rights, biodiversity conservation and climate change.

In Chapter 1, Oele talks about the “constant ontogenesis” of plants since they are all around us in earth’s biomass and yet figuratively invisible to our sight and literally invisible in their complex root systems (p. 18). Seemingly passive, plants are quite adaptively active, communicating with their different parts and with other plants. They are rooted, but not; they are still, but not; they are situated, but not; they are becoming in the world. There’s no strict division, however, of passivity/activity for plants but what Oele refers to as the middle voice, a nondivisive alternative among the localities of roots and leaves. There is no true center in a plant, but that’s meant positively by virtue of its flexible transitivity in an environment of relations. Plants speak through photosynthesis, light and water absorption, and interactions where they feed themselves in affective processes of unity and not the hard duality of subject/object. Plants have no stomachs and feed in a distributive method, as if there are multiple selves spread across deep soil, topsoil and air in a coordinated and cooperative system of continual, unmitigated growth regenerating various parts. From this admixture we see that plants can epigenetically transmit as heritable material a sense of the bounty, or not, of their place in communities. Likewise, plants are known to graft naturally. Are plants enabled with a memory in response to environmental stress? Oele’s point is that plants occupy a middle space or mid-voice between life and death where they are ever growing without temporal fixity while testing spatial limits. Plants exemplify an eco-affective response to their environs.

In Chapter 2, Oele spends time talking about birds, specifically the tactility...