Reviews and Comments

Monica Gagliano has written a unique book. It is a memoir of a kind describing her experience of learning from the voices of various plants: Socoba (Bellaco-caspi), Tobacco, Corn, Ayahuasca and others. The voices tell stories and help direct her scientific research.

The first half of the book is brilliant. It is fluid and calm, poetic and playful. Despite Gagliano's blinkered view of her own privilege (she writes as if everyone has the freedom to travel freely around the world and work in universities), it reads wonderfully and creatively and she constructs a philosophy that is like an intersection between Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, although not calling on either. Instead she calls on various plants, supported in her conversations by humans who understand their world. The plants suggest experiments that she should follow, and she listens. This theory and process is magnificent, adventurous and wild, and very brave.

However, when the experiments begin, they are not particularly nuanced and we only see the ones that support the claims she is making. While the ideas are terrific and the results are exciting, there is a lack of scientific rigour. For example, an experiment works on peas in isolation, showing how they can be trained to respond to stimuli like Pavolv's dogs, but there is no follow-on to see if this might work in other conditions. It probably would, and I would love to believe it, but claiming success in such experiments only repeats the mistakes that Gagliano criticises in science, where there is a blindness to other results, particularly those you do not want to see. Further to this, there is a lot of anger against the academic world on the later pages (sometimes justified, at other times harsh) and repeated claims to have 'discovered' truths that have already been presented by many theorists and artists over the past few hundred years (and likely much longer).

In the end, the plants speak, and Gagliano listens, but it feels like if she had listened to some more humans she might have an even broader story to tell. Maybe someone else will take on this mantle, and hopefully will be inspired by some of the wonderful work that is presented here.

The island of Mingheria plays host to a doubly deep deception by the master storyteller Orhan Pamuk. The book opens by telling us it is written by a fictional historian, followed by an introduction to the fictional Mediterranean island where the history takes place. The events surround a spread of plague on the island in 1901, and its social and political consequences. Interestingly, Pamuk began writing it with the advice of epidemiologists before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but it echoes many socio-polotical events of that period.

While the character elements of the story are a little hollow, the book is flawless when it deals with the entangled machinations of political intrigue. The author (both the false narrator and the authentic writer) show a keen sense of how politics, religion and social norms entwine in and around events like an epidemic, quarantine measures, and public health. More than this, Pamuk takes many satirical shots at nationalism and nationhood, employing as a punchline the fictional island nation of Mingheria at a time when nation states were becoming a way of politically understanding territory in many parts of the world.

Simone Weil is sometimes seen as a contentious philosopher, although I often wonder if that is mostly because she died young in a fraught time. Had her ideas developed, with a broader context, they might have resolved into more complete arguments.

This short compilation of three essays from the 1940s is a good example of her brilliance, her contentiousness and her unresolved ideas. The title essay is a thoughtful deep dive into how power is maintained through language, focussing on the dominant communist-fascist dichotomy of the time. The second essay, Human Personality considers individual and collective personhood, but makes broad claims about individuality that miss glaring counter-arguments that seem obvious, at least in today's philosophies. The third essay, The Needs of the Soul is from Weil's magnum opus, "The Need For Roots", and even in that book it felt unresolved. It deals with how rootedness and moral philosophy are entangled.

Overall, this is a good selection of Weil's work and a nice book to consider some of her ideas with, and to understand why she is both revered and derided by philosophers today.

This novel by Ocean Vuong is told from a first-person narrative as an autobiographical story written to the protagonist's mother. But using this as a device, it tells multiple stories simultaneously. Each is almost a parable, and none is independent of another. It takes place in the USA primarily.

The protagonist relates his coming into the world, his childhood, his first love, his violent youth, his grandmother's love for him (and her past life in Vietnam), and his experiences of grief. Entangled are the acts of violence of the Vietnam War, the estrangement of the protagonist from his two nations, drug addiction and abuse, philosophy and thoughts on how words find meaning. The story alone is uncomplicated, and ticks along at a pleasant pace, but the poetic undertones and masterful weaving of story with concept make it a wonderful experience. To paraphrase Vuong's words: This book is not created from the violence of the past, but in spite of it. It is created from beauty, and it is beautiful.

This is a very exciting tome. It is about 'Distributed Autonomous Organisations' (DAOs) in the arts. DAOs are essentially a method of leadership of organisations with distributed leadership among members, often using technologies like blockchain to help decision-making. The book has so many ways to be used that it's hard to know how to describe or review it. It is simultaneously an artwork about distributed leadership, a guide to establishing and running DAOs, a philosophical and theoretical exploration of radical friendships, a documentation of existing projects and a more-than-human object that speaks beyond itself. It is really wonderful.

Radical Friends is divided into essays, artworks, conversations and other short sections. It is wonderfully edited and laid out, and is very beautiful throughout – the tarot card deck Hexen 2.0 by Suzanne Treister divides the book sections, and other artistic and aesthetic/design choices are perfect.

Naturally, with so many voices in many chapters, there are things that I didn't agree with or didn't particularly enjoy, including a very blithe conversation featuring an NFT artist, but as an object the book is magnificent and a great achievement for the editors Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty. Hard to pick a highlight, but Rafferty's own essay The Reappropriation of Life and Living is extraordinary, as is Cassie Thornton's contribution.