From Plant-Diagnosis to Plant(other)ness: Around the Performance I’m Not a Plant

In this text I take Aleksandra Skotarek’s performance I’m Not a Plant: A Stream of Consciousness (Nie jestem rośliną. Strumień świadomości) as my starting point for considering how reflection on the relationship with the vegetal can contribute to understanding disability. Can we think of these kinds of relations – which, following Haraway, I refer to as relations with significant otherness – as cripping the received semantic field and ideas by activating a perspective combining critical plant studies and Haraway’s or Braidotti’s feminist materialism? This perspective corresponds with the notion of plant(other)ness invoked in the text. At the same time, Skotarek’s performance makes us consider the barriers that reflection on posthuman relationality runs into in confrontation with identity politics that seek the recognition of subjectivity, and how a specific experience of disability reconfigures the field of performance that explores relations with the non-human.