A few days ago, I found myself in the company of a senior tree consultant, staring up through the branches of the 120-year-old Douglas fir standing by the porch of our recently purchased home in Portland, Oregon. He confided that although trees are expected to follow the same logic in how they grow and behave, they are in fact unpredictable. It had often happened during his forty-year career that a tree whose roots should not have been longer than twenty feet had thirty-foot roots and that these roots had taken detours and made decisions that could not be logically explained. Recounting further stories of dogged individuality, the consultant also warned me that trees do not like change. Even branch pruning alters weight distribution in ways a tree might not appreciate, with potentially dangerous results. Indeed, we had hired this consultant with similar fears about our own tree at the outset of some planned sewer repairs. He confirmed that the related trench digging would likely destabilize our eighty-foot fir, which, if it fell in the wrong direction, could demolish our home. This conversation not only heralded a new plan to reroute the pipe to the road—doubling the project’s cost and necessitating a Kafkaesque series of permits with likely delays of many months; it also brought with it a changed perception of our lives. The illusion of owning a sturdy old house buttressed by an age-old guardian tree was replaced by an image of a twenty-four-foot-wide net of roots entangling our piping system and encroaching on our home’s structural foundations. Whether we protect it or cut it down, the future impact of that tree on our lives is both inevitable and unknowable.

And so, it was triggering to watch the video documentation of Estado Vegetal today, more than two years after I first saw the play in person at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. The play’s insistence that our separation from plants and their well-being is an illusion we need to be rid of implicated me on a more personal level. The opening scene’s observation that trees move all the time, but so slowly that we do not anticipate the force of this operation held new meaning. Estado Vegetal renders the reality of planthood tangible to audiences that, like me, have predominantly been socialized through humanistic thinking. It shows us that plants are not under our control; that they are other; that they think; and that they act differently than humans, and we ignore or anthropomorphize them to our own detriment. The half dozen or so protagonists in Estado Vegetal—all played by the chameleonic Marcela Salinas — act out the external resonance of this shifting inner reality as their lives intertwine in ways that are circular, synchronistic, and plantlike. A firefighter who spends his days putting out forest fires crashes into a tree on his motorcycle ride home, leading to the vegetative state evoked by the play’s title. A child who talks to trees seems to be a younger version of the old woman who talks to her plants, as time and the sequencing of events become as encircling as a creeper vine.

In her recent work, Infante has processed philosophy’s nonhuman turn and object-oriented explorations, although she characterizes this engagement with “vital materialism” as an extension of her long-term commitment to feminist thought. In its exploration of plant intelligence and the plant as other, Manuela Infante’s play Estado Vegetal engages more specifically with plant philosophy and plant neurobiology, fields established over the past ten to fifteen years. Plant neurobiologists affirm that plants are cognitive organisms and thus intelligent beings. They “communicate” with neighboring organisms by releasing up to three hundred different chemicals to warn of danger, pests, or drought, among other insecurities.¹ Infante incorporates the findings of Stefano Mancuso—one of the field’s pioneers—as well as exploring the ideas of plant philosopher Michael Marder, who notes that “to recognize a valid ‘other’ in plants is also beginning to recognize that vegetal other within us.”² Rather than being a metaphor, this is an acknowledgment that human beings are made up partly of plant genomes. There is no division between internal and external when it comes to plant life.

Though all of this is fascinating material for theatre-making, we should not imagine that Estado Vegetal represents or reproduces academic knowledge emerging only from plant philosophy and plant neurobiology, however radical and engaging such an endeavor could be. Rather, to do full justice to what Manuela Infante is undertaking, we need to realize that she shares these disciplines’ interest in other ways of knowing—that she is thinking with them*.* As Marder points out, this has not been thought before. Plants have occupied “the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radar of our conceptualities” until very recently.³ Not only is this shared enthusiasm for unprecedented thought not readily available among plant studies scholars at mainstream universities⁴ but, crucially, through her practice as a maker, Infante is lending existing ideas on plant intelligence a new set of registers of knowledge that are connected to the material, embodied, and conceptual forms inherent to theatre itself. Infante embraces all the formal, sensory, comedic modes available through theatre to manifest plant-thinking as “a non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants,” as Marder describes in Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life.⁵

Theatre as Knowledge: Placing the Unknown at the Center

The order in which things are imagined is important. I now see a house standing next to a tree, where I previously saw a tree standing next to a house. This changes how I move toward the future. It brings a different set of questions. It forces me to think; indeed, it makes new thought possible. By taking me out of my comfort zone, I am put into conditions that lend me a heightened awareness of my sense of reality as an image that can be shifted in profound ways by momentary experiences. Estado Vegetal, too, massages and works towards upending our grasp on reality. In fact, Infante was attracted to theatre because she felt it was a place in which philosophical questions and potentially new ways of thinking, could be tested. She describes theatre as a model world, an experimental world in which real-life forces can be used:

You can create a little model of a world that uses the same actual forces: time, space, human beings, things. It’s the real thing, it’s not even a replica of it. You can actually try out philosophical ideas and see what happens. I don’t think what’s happening is a representation, I think it’s an experimental world.⁶

Theatre offered Infante epistemological and creative intellectual possibilities for engaging with philosophical and political questions that could not easily be found in academic forms of knowledge production. This included the possibility to incorporate abstraction and what she first thought of as a sense of “mystery.”⁷ This intuitive grasp later developed into a keen sense of one of the underlying structural differences between academic and artistic thought, namely, that art puts the unknown at the center of operations, whereas academic research is premised on the notion that scholars build on existing knowledge. Academic exceptions include new disciplines, such as plant neurobiology, which must arguably think anew, and so it is particularly fertile territory to think with these disciplines as an artist.

Infante is not alone in perceiving theatre in epistemological terms. Her undertakings can be positioned in relation to the field of “artistic research,” which shifts conceptions of the arts away from the purview of entertainment and aesthetic exploration for its own sake toward an understanding that the arts are a form of knowledge production. The discursive reconfiguration of theatre in these terms is a relatively recent phenomenon. It takes place in parallel with comparable shifts in the visual arts that have become established over the past fifteen years, often in tandem with the development of the doctorate in fine art degree.⁸ Whether in theatre, visual art, dance, architecture, or music, there is growing recognition of the arts as exceptionally open-ended fields of creative intellectual enquiry, with various (material, embodied) registers of knowledge that open possibilities not available in traditional, corporatized university settings. And yet, owing to the embedded hierarchies in knowledge production, the acknowledgment of artistic research as research also brings potential misunderstandings. There lurks an assumption that the arts act as a supplement to academic research, illustrating it or creating a more accessible or entertaining form of conveying academic knowledge to the wider public. As I have argued elsewhere, this undermines the potential of the arts to offer not so much a supplement as a competing framework for how to think and how to research.⁹

When artistic research is viewed through the lens of academic research, the different registers of knowledge artists draw on and manifest in their work get lost in the process. Form is often separated from content, with content becoming the essential and overaddressed factor and form becoming a mere accessory, while the sensory experience of the arts is sidelined or even overlooked.¹⁰ Working in artistic fields that have predominantly distanced themselves from formalism-for-its-own-sake since the 1960s, it has been difficult for contemporary practitioners to articulate how form and research are entangled. This is indeed the most difficult aspect of creative practice to explain to those outside of one’s field who have not experienced how ideas might lie in gestures and movement, in sound and space, or in digital and hands-on forms of materiality. The public has little insight into how the intuitive nature of the artistic process allows these material-embodied ideas to co-shape and provide direction for the (theatrical) material in process. Rather than producing formal knowledge through this process, I consider artists’ work to produce what Georges Bataille, among other philosophers, has referred to as “nonknowledge.” This term evokes the active use of registers of knowledge that are “below the radar of our conscious thought” and “bypass our rational minds.”¹¹

Indeed, it is the form-based methodologies inherent in the arts that enable an opening out of this level of thought, which is always in flux and can be held open as a fluctuating entity through time-based media.¹² For Infante, formal experimentation through theatre goes hand in hand with experiments in thinking:

I’m a very big fan of formal exploration, so exploring the limits of what theatre can do is fascinating in its own right. I do a lot of work that is devoted just to that. In the 70s, the European avant-garde was able to explore formally what painting was, what theatre was, etc., and now we’re sort of “not allowed” to do that anymore, because art has become so instrumental to institutions and politics. I think theatre has become very utilitarian in that sense.¹³

Working with this mode of formal experimentation, Infante has sought ways to embody plantness with the body of the theatre piece itself. Drawing on plant neurobiology, she started to isolate certain concepts around plant behavior, such as modularity, ramification, polyphonic communication, photosynthesis, and phototropy. She was thinking about how to make performance and undermine theatrical norms in those terms. If we look more closely at Estado Vegetal*,* we can see how formal experimentation and the opening of new pathways for knowledge go hand in hand.

The Structure of Thought

My oversight of the living reality of the eighty-foot Douglas fir at my doorstep seems not an unusual state of affairs. Marder argues that our taking for granted of plants, their sheer inconspicuousness and our lack of attention to them in landscaped urban settings, matches their marginalization in philosophical discourse.¹⁴ In the absence of a philosophical tradition proper to planthood, there is a necessary search for ways of thinking the multiplicity and multidirectionality of planthood, which has nothing to do with linear narrative or rational humanistic ordering. To think with plants, therefore, one must imagine or forge a way of thinking that is differently structured. How is it possible to develop such thinking? The conventional structures of academic writing do not lend themselves to such a possibility because they are predicated on a singular rational unidirectional logic.¹⁵ They are formulated in such a way that associative, multidirectional thinking, multiple parallel truths or existences and their inherent contradictions, are difficult to manifest. Here the open-ended thinking and formal experimentation within artistic research can lend other possibilities, as we can see in Infante’s work.

One of the exceptional achievements of Estado Vegetal is its vegetal structuring of narrative, which lends the play a different shape with which to hold thought, making space for plants’ alternative structuring of reality. Moreover, the play’s repetitive rhythms, which echo the modularity of plant structures, build on each other to produce otherwise unseeable points of tangential connection and subtle differentiation. The almost obtuse repetition of everyday phrases containing plant-related terms in Estado Vegetal, such as “rooted,” “planted,” and “leaf of a book,” takes on force when entire phrases are rearticulated by different characters, creating a circular narrative structure. “I can’t move,” a statement uttered by a firefighter as he lies on the ground following the motorcycle accident, is later whispered by plants contemplating the dangers of their inherent immobility. These subtle variations and loops echo Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Plays, with Infante’s foregrounding of the medium of writing creating a comparable metadrama. Yet, Infante derives this branching structure from the study of plants, noting how they have evolved within a modular system, with each subpart being different but repeating basic systems—such as breathing apparatuses—to make them more sustainable. This reflects the long evolution of plant DNA, which is older than human DNA. Infante’s engagement with these thinking structures is not so much an illustration of how plants think as the opening of new pathways for thought that might enable us to think with plants.

Much of Estado Vegetal was not conceived or “written” in an academic or literary fashion but rather evolved using different kinds of improvisation as research tools, in close collaboration with the play’s sole human actor and coauthor, Marcela Salinas. The development of the play’s structure is the result of a formal experimental process and thus a characteristically open-ended but rigorous form of artistic research. Infante describes their process as follows:

We did the whole thing using improvisation, but there were a lot of different kinds of improvisation. For example, I would practice branching in a narrative with Marcela. . . . I said to Marcela: “Tell me a story, starting with any character you want, and whenever you quote somebody else in the story, whenever another human subject comes into the story, you need to branch off into that person.” We would practice this branching for hours and hours. Many of the characters came from those branching improvisations. . . . Many things happened through these really simple exercises. If Marcela said things that I liked, I would write them down, and I was seeing how this branching thing worked so that later I could write it.¹⁶

As we see from Infante’s account, the improvisation process forces new thought, opening a space that is indifferent to the coordinates of given reality, a kind of no-man’s land for thought and materiality in which the unforeseen can be made manifest.¹⁷

Although the process might appear to be “really simple,” its success builds on decades of practice-led knowledge, which manifests as artistic intuition. The conditions for such work also need to be set in place for such an intuitive and open-ended process to be fruitful. Among other aspects, Infante notes the importance of finding collaborators with this level of connection to intuitive knowledge:

I always work with actors that are able to allow their consciousness to flow. I need them to be able to produce material, and not to be second-guessing themselves. I always look for people that I know can follow their gut feeling and speak it, and not be afraid. A lot of the work starts with creating an environment to be able to make that happen.

Salinas is the coauthor of Estado Vegetal, and the symbiotic relationship between actor and director in this one-person play is evident throughout. Their intuition-led process of exchange brings unforeseen material to light that cannot be “thought up” or “thought” prior to the unfolding of this artistic process. This collaborative improvisational structure has a particular function here because plant life is “radically inconceivable” using conventional singular modes of being or thinking.¹⁸ Plants contain multiple internal variations like male and female branches and different leaf shapes or sizes that depend on physiological allocations.¹⁹ Infante and Salinas create an unprecedented space to explore the multiplicity of these “semiotic selves” within plant life.²⁰ Their working methods generate a discursive structure centered on multiple, branching and mutually entangled human experiences, creating difference within repetition and thus a homology with the structural reality of plant experience as a multiplicity.

Beyond Otherness: Embodied Knowledge

It is notable that the formal and philosophical multiplicity of Estado Vegetal is at odds with the post-Enlightenment humanism that underpins mainstream academic knowledge production. Infante remarks that “ ‘human’ is a concept that has always excluded [her], as a woman, as a lesbian, as a South American.”²¹ The play’s posthumanism consciously facilitates a restructuring of discursive space “to find a new centre, which is not the white straight heterosexual thinker.”²² The play’s characters, which emerged during the improvisation process, were all people who are often considered “less than human.” “There’s a weird little girl, there’s a guy that doesn’t live in the city, there’s a woman who’s a mother. It wasn’t conscious, but I think we chose characters that were all marginal humans in a way.”²³ Challenging the fundamentally hostile grounds of dominant knowledge, Estado Vegetal leads the audience to the borders of what constitutes “normality,” with the intention of inviting reconsideration of the implicit boundaries between “being human” and “being other.” It asks us to straddle the zones of indistinction between the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.

Incorporating crosscutting representations of disability, of aging, and of neurodiversity, Salinas’s and Infante’s human characters more specifically draw us in to engage with zones of potential otherness as an embodied experience. Gestures and facial expressions move through states of delinquency, infantilism, senility, and mourning. Salinas’s often twitchy and jerky movements invoke these states of mental unease. Her transitions from one character to another feel like permutations of the self. They bring home the deep imbrication of plant life within the body through borderline human ways of holding and moving the body in space. In turn, the “vegetative state” in the play’s title can be taken to refer to planthood as a vegetative state of being, or as a reference to a brain dysfunction in which a person shows no signs of awareness, recalling the motorcycle crash victim central to the narrative. By creating this ambiguity, the title teases out the borderlines between being and a nonhuman state, a state of total otherness. In doing so, it makes space for unknowability.

The play’s title alludes furthermore to the protagonist of Rey Planta (2006), an earlier work by Infante and Teatro de Chile in which a prince who, in a vegetative state following a suicide attempt, is made king and forced to rule without speaking or moving. Infante divided the actors into “the body” and “the voice,” with the voice present only via a small monitor or TV set. This experimentation paved the way to later enter multiplicity in Estado Vegetal. Infante goes on to explore the voice as a foremost arena of otherness within the human experience. Rather than being a source of human expression, it is embraced as a zone of embodied nonknowledge at the border of the unknowable. Salinas’s use of her voice acts as a container for much of this insoluble material. In her breathing and vocal sounds, she alludes to the existence of nonanthropocentric languages. Sometimes she draws on the facial expressivity of mime, which can capture moments just preceding articulation or material that is on the brink of being representable. Estado Vegetal is a Spanish language play, accompanied by projected subtitles in English. Yet this language barrier is not an obstacle to this immersive experience, perhaps because Salinas’s words offer only a fraction of the play’s expressive interest. Indeed, the intonation and pitch of Salinas’s voice approach whistling and birdsong at times, even as she is “speaking.”

This multiplicity of voice–body relations echoes the polyphonic nature of plant communication, which involves chemical messages that can be “smelled” by other plants. At several moments, Salinas harmonizes her voice through a layering that gestures toward plant communication. Hence “the chemical polyphony translates in the show as breaking into musical harmony.”²⁴ Infante, who is also a musician, sees theatre per se as a bringing together of music and philosophy because “it happens as an unfolding of rhythm through time and space.”²⁵ By extension, the sound effects she developed for this play are not only theatrical but, in addition, manifest distinct philosophical possibilities. Among them, the use of a looper pedal makes the actor’s voice reflect the inherent multiplicity of vegetal structures, rather than affirming individualized existence. This technologically mediated device offers a way of thinking that has a nonlinear relationship to time. During the writing process, Infante asked herself, “What does it mean to write in layers? Piling time onto each other instead of moving forward.”²⁶ Materialized using artistic tools like the looper, the multiple circular narratives in Estado Vegetal reject progression. This is an act of philosophical and political refusal, which invites other approaches, not only to narrative in playwriting, but to thinking as such.

The potential of theatre as a form of thinking that encompasses the logic of rhythm and sensory registers of knowledge more broadly speaking is evident across the three plays and the sonic opera that Infante has created since Estado Vegetal. Eloquence (2019), her sonic opera, delves more deeply into electronic live processing and layering of voices to produce soundscapes.²⁷ Metamorphoses (2021), a “noise play,” investigates the voice, not an expression of human agency but a “more-than-human thing” that “entangles humans and non-humans in endless ventriloquisms, refrains and echoes, without ever belonging to either.”²⁸ With Noise (2021), Infante has investigated “what is heard in the background and what is heard in the foreground—and what eludes this classification.”²⁹ Each of these works further elaborates a music-philosophical exploration of the borders between living and nonliving entities through sound. We see theatre here opening the way for thinking that is not conceptual but an embodied knowledge that bypasses thought as such.

Moving into other sensory realms that exceed the limits of language, Infante extends Estado Vegetal’s experimentation with plant intelligence to include several other aspects that exceed human narrative structures. Let me briefly highlight how the play also shifts us away from conventional human motor responses to light and space, leaving behind theatrical conventions of lighting always following the protagonists’ actions. Infante collaborated with the play’s designer, Rocío Hernández to develop a lighting plan that was closer to plant thinking:

We talked a lot about phototropy, about how plants are always moving towards the light, whereas in theatre the light follows the actors. We made a rule that the light would move when the actress was still, and the actress would move when the light was still so that they never happened together. We did silent improvisations to try out this idea of light changes. We practised it a lot, and the best moments came out of that practice.³⁰

Through their collaboration, Hernández and Infante open a space that cannot be thought as such. By taking up light as a means to explore phototropy, they materialize some of the possibilities for new ways of thinking invoked by posthumanist thinkers like Bruno Latour, who asks in Reassembling the Social, “When we act, who else is acting?” and “How many agents are also present?”³¹ Throughout her work, Infante applies these questions quite literally to acting, showing theatre’s epistemological potential as an experimental space in which real-life forces can be used.

Humor and Nonknowledge

Exceeding our rational conception, we tend to react physically when we pass momentarily into the truly unknown. This leads us to the affective force of theatre, and the arts at large, which often contain nonknowledge—knowledge that has difficulty making a home in the environment of academic thought. In an essay titled “Nonknowledge, Laughter and Tears,” Bataille proposes that nonknowledge cannot be examined independently of the effects it produces, which are more likely to be affective or bodily reactions than rational thoughts.³² He has brilliantly observed the role of laughter as a signal of this movement from a state of knowing to a state of unknowing. Infante, too, understands the agency of such moments. She observes, “Laughing is just the body being moved from one place to another. I use laughter as a very strong tool to know what to keep. I use other tools but when I’m in rehearsal and I’m laughing, I follow that path.”³³ It’s often through absurd and even slapstick humor that the performance digs into and hacks at humanist self-conceptions and a widely shared underestimation of the importance of plants to planetary well-being.

Toward the beginning of Estado Vegetal, Salinas momentarily becomes an old woman who converses and flirts with her houseplants with the intimacy of a “real” relationship. This hilarious episode takes an unexpected turn toward the absurd when the plants start to make demands, beginning with the insistence that their pots be placed on the ground. Her subsequent removal of all the floorboards to enable the plants to root in the earth leads to her home’s ultimate disappearance in a jungle of weeds. The laughter provoked in the audience by such tales is not only a response to tragicomedy, however. Though the same narrative told as an individual concern might appear as a personal tragedy, Infante never allows her audience to separate the personal from the political. Given the marginal status of the human beings involved, as well as the looming threat of planetary collapse informing the narrative at large, the play’s humor relates more closely to a mode that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as “minor.” Exemplified for them by Kafka’s work, “minor literature” burrows out paths within dominant modes of writing to deny the apparent space between individual and political expression.³⁴ Infante uses it to create modes of thinking that seek to incorporate excluded positions for knowledge production.

Estado Vegetal’s comic effect is not always immediate; rather, it lingers when the significance of passing, often absurd words is digested. When the old lady asks her plant, “If we were to sing the national anthem now, where would you put your hand?”, language leaves behind its representative function and moves instead towards its extremities and its limits.³⁵ As it moves, it effects a deterritorialization of thought and, by extension, the conditions for (political) representation. The embedded humor shares minor literature’s claustrophobic relationship to politics, its critical political stance and “revolutionary” potential.³⁶ The specter of revolution is heralded directly on occasion via seemingly silly questions, such as “If we were to decapitate you, where would we cut?” This imagery of decapitation is, in the first instance, political. At the same time, being “headless” offers a metaphoric return to epistemological possibilities. Marder devotes several pages to analyzing how the headless existence of plants invokes a Bataillean invocation of the headless discourse production of dense non-sense.³⁷

The parodic undoing of sense is at other times wordless. In a later monologue, Salinas comments on human mortality, observing how “everything that lives eventually has to die” and asking “if you never die, how can you say you are alive?” Yet, though the words appear serious and normative, she speaks them while absurdly dressed as a fake plastic plant. This parodic humor eats into and destabilizes the inherent humanistic thinking, constituting space for nonknowledge to enter the equation. We are led to laugh at ourselves, and through this means, we are prepared for the reality that plants “silently deconstruct metaphysics,” as Marder observes in Plant-Thinking*.*³⁸ Rather than viewing the internal shifting brought about by laughter that is simultaneous with nonknowledge as a self-contained happening, this unfolding is a continuous operation of loosening parameters that have become fixed. It utilizes the malleability of thought as a form and, by extension, the formability of institutions; it renders tangible the fluidity of private beliefs that manifest in public and political structures.³⁹ Indeed, the distributed organization of tasks in planthood offers an alternative model of organization and governance, which is constantly inferred.

Nonknowledge, after Thought

Looking out at the 120-year-old Douglas fir that pushes my thoughts in unexpected directions, I realize that the unexplainable detours and durations of plant growth are simply a reflection that plants do not follow a logic imposed by human systems of understanding. In this light, the word knowledge seems to evoke something too easily discernible relative to Estado Vegetal’s nomadic furrowing into plant life’s multiple depths. Consciously extending the parameters of Estado Vegetal beyond rational thinking, Infante insists that “there’s a lot of space for obscurity, for things you can’t access or make sense of,” aiming to foreground “that which cannot dissolve into human knowledge.”⁴⁰ What Infante produces through Estado Vegetal is thus not so much knowledge in the standard conception of the term as a journey to and beyond the limits of knowledge. As Bataille has observed, if you engage deeply with the domain of knowledge in any field, you come to reach its limit and arrive on the other side of that knowledge into a kind of nonknowledge. What lies on the other side of that limit is not only what is not yet known but also what is unknowable.⁴¹

We are never far from the purview of academic thought, however. Nor does Infante hide her interest in philosophy per se, which emerges most strongly in the firefighter’s monologue on the relationship between language and planthood. However, she invokes her struggle with the citational logic of academic thought structures: “As if the words themselves were leaves, citations of other leaves.” Nonknowledge always signals these limits of formal knowledge production, yet one “re-enter[s] categories of knowledge while straddling nonknowledge.”⁴² If we consider the arts and theatre’s broader relationship to knowledge in this manner, we start to understand why artistic research might overlap with research in other fields yet not provide supplementary knowledge; rather, artists offer contributions that distinguish themselves both in their aims and in their outcomes, often posing questions about the frameworks of existing discourses. Following Aristotle, Marder argues that “the human who thinks like a plant literally becomes a plant since the destruction of the classical logos annihilates the thing that distinguishes us from other living beings.”⁴³ In turn, the human being in an estado vegetal*,* a vegetable-like state, “is not one who no longer thinks but, in a more nuanced formulation, one who thinks without following the prescriptions of formal logic and therefore, in some sense, thinks without thinking.”⁴⁴ The intuitive and imaginative aspects of Infante’s Estado Vegetal are difficult to articulate in words, precisely because they bring us off the radar of think-able territory. As Deleuze observes more generally, what matters in art is “never what is known but rather a great destruction of what is already known, in favor of the creation of the unknown.”⁴⁵ It is this creative-destructive act that lends Estado Vegetal a haunting force that not only changes our perception of planthood but bears the potential to affect the way we think about or engage with the unknown and unknowable within and beyond any subject.