I. No Exit?

Aprogrammatic piece of Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses devoted to “flora and fauna” confronts the difficulty of writing about the vegetal world: “Fauna moves, while flora unfolds to the eye. An entire type of animate being is directly assumed by the ground.” Ponge's prose poem, mimicking its object, paratactically assembles observations about plants, seen increasingly as an “infernal” self-containment: “They only express themselves by their poses. & No gesture of their action has any effect outside of themselves. … Despite all their efforts to ‘express themselves,’ they can never achieve more than to repeat a million times the same expression, the same leaf. … One cannot get out of the tree by means of a tree.”

Ponge's poems are self-allegorizing; their reference to the Lucretian world of external nature also one to the self-conscious making of artifacts. It is thus not much of a stretch to see Ponge's flora as also an allegory of culture, something that has proven equally hard to observe, and from which one can also not escape via its own means. Like culture, plants are, for Ponge, performative—bound each to their own “pose”—and iterative (much as in Butler-inspired gender theory). At the same time, the allegory ought to give one pause.