top of page

Seedless Fruits

10 de out.
4 min de leitura

Atualizado: há 2 horas

When looking at plants as inspiration for thinking about new forms of society, biologist Stefano Mancuso analyzes the phenomenon of seedless fruits. He states that the plant universe has a very advanced organization, which he calls the “nation of plants.” In the laws of this nation, each part of a plant has a main function, but because it is a decentralized system, there are no borders or hierarchies, so the parts also act and influence the whole. The seed is the part of the plant responsible for the future. A single seed contains a mysterious infinity of futures, because a seed can generate a new tree that will generate many seeds, which will generate many trees, and so on.


Mancuso calls seeds time-travel capsules. This is because the seed is made up of an embryo protected by many layers, which make it capable of surviving extreme conditions for enormous amounts of time. In the book The Incredible Journey of Plants, he describes the most absurd conditions that some seeds survived and managed to propagate the species. Some crossed oceans through the stomachs of birds, which ate the seed on one continent and defecated it on another, already perfectly fertilized. Some took root around the first steam locomotives and, besides traveling the world with the train, also received the heat and nourishing humidity of the steam; not to mention their success in seed dispersal, as they flew with the force of the winds from the chimneys and the movement of the train.


However, a very efficient but equally dangerous form of seed dispersal was collaboration with human beings, who, after a long period of industrialization and urbanization, began to pay little attention to nature in their daily lives in large cities, except when it becomes an obstacle, as is the case with fruit seeds. The fruit comes from a decentralized society where it is multidisciplinary, but in hyper-specialized human society, its only function is to be food, and therefore, what is a seed doing in the middle of our food?


Mancuso says that by associating with man, the plant signed a pact with the devil: “Deprived of the ability to produce seeds, a plant is no longer a living being; it becomes a simple means of production in the hands of the food industry, which decides how, when, and where to reproduce it. [...] By producing daughter plants that are genetically identical to the mother plant, genetic diversity disappears, and only a few individuals are propagated millions of times.” (The Incredible Journey of Plants, by Stefano Mancuso)


As Mancuso does at other moments in his books, we can draw a parallel between plants and technology. Technological evolution has reached such a high speed that the only way to keep up with the hurricane of transformations, without overloading our senses, was to change the way we communicate, making language more visual, superficial, and fragmented. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says, in the book The Brain in the Digital World (O Cérebro no Mundo Digital), that the result of years of chopped-up and accelerated information was a brain with difficulty concentrating, reading, and interpreting, as well as a serious literacy problem. Accelerated audio, shorter songs, Instagram carousels with objective phrases and captivating images, restaurant recommendation videos narrated by a voice with a singsong intonation just like children’s content, emails written in ChatGPT, TikToks and Reels with eight simultaneous sensory stimuli, voice effect, rapid image cuts, rapid image cuts, rapid image cuts, a moral lesson in one minute, or else movies to “watch with your brain turned off,” which do not have an open ending, do not require much thought and, if possible, you can check your feed every now and then. A self-premonition that became the standard for the way of relating to art and constructing meaning in the digital world: in a shallow, simplified, digested, easy-to-understand way.


Language being driven by lubricated meanings that must slide without causing friction, but because they do not cause friction, they do not provoke rupture; they do not break with old ideas and make the creation of new ideas difficult. Little by little, the way of thinking becomes like a seedless fruit: genetically identical and reproduced in a laboratory by people and tools to which we do not have access and, therefore, we do not know how they work nor can we make changes; in addition, of course, to not being able to plant new fruit trees ourselves with our own hands.


Continuing with the analogy, the seed in the fruit can be seen as disagreement, the idea that is difficult to interpret, or the unexplained element in a work of art, whether a painting, book, or film. It is like a question that, instead of generating an answer, generates new questions and, just like the seed in the fruit, can be frustrating for not fulfilling the initial intention (eating the fruit or having the question answered). However, it does something much greater: it generates new futures.





Referências


Comentários

bottom of page