Incorporating Nonhuman Subjectivity into World Society: The Case of Extending Personhood to Plants

Puleo Thomas J, Incorporating Nonhuman Subjectivity into World Society: The Case of Extending Personhood to Plants, in Jung D, Stetter S (eds): Modern Subjectivities in World Society, Palgrave Studies in International Relations, 2018.

Plant Consciousness

The science just gets clearer and clearer:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousness-anesthesia.html

Separation

Separation is the theme today. You see it everywhere: in the dog behind a gate, separated from his pack, in the Latin binomials used by Carl Linnaeus and others to abstract individual beings from their ecologies, in agriculture, in urban planning . . . everywhere. I am not saying anything new, of course; Freud and others discussed this in various discussions of modern life, and it is the crisis that marks the meaning of the first book of the Christian bible.

Is some separation good? Probably. The nuclear family shows major weaknesses but I am sure its logic was clear to those who suffered within the extended family, but like many things it is probably more the result of aggressive marketing with corporate profit as its ultimate motive and motif. Separating the words in a sentence? The medieval habit of writing sentences with no spaces between individual words seems awkward now but maybe it was not such a hardship for readers of the time. A few days ago I was puzzling out an inscription carved into a stone baptismal font, the entire perimeter containing an unbroken chain of letters. The task left me deeply immersed in the text. I wonder if, by making the assumption of written language easier, the scribes who inserted spaces between their words did not also lessen the power of their writings. There does not seem to be an appreciable spacing between spoken words. So why was it deemed necessary to render written language this way?

The most marked change I have experienced since moving from an American city to the Italian countryside has been my reemersion in the nonhuman world. First it was the forested mountains above Lake Como, now it is the more rural Alpine valley of Chiavenna. Trees dominated the first landscape, animals the second, although both features obtain in both places.

Without a doubt, the reconnection with the nonhuman environment has made me more of a human, or at least a better human. The hunter-gatherer tribe, the family farm . . . it is easy to romanticize these configurations but it is clear that we lost something essentially human when we moved away from them, although one can make the argument that agriculture was the beginning of the end. I suppose I speak in relative terms.

Our cities are social and environmental disasters, precisely because they separate us from our fellow nonhuman residents. Inserting plants and animals into them is just a cruel deception and abuse. Trees do not thrive, aligned like soldiers along a boulevard; they need to congregate in their natural ecologies, ecologies that no doubt have space, and a need for, human beings.

Irony and Play in Nonhumans

I have the great fortune of sharing a living space with a very playful dog named Fulmine. He is small and quite possibly the fastest dog in the world, hence his name, which translates as ‘Lightning’ in Italian.

He likes to play a game with a crushed yellow plastic bottle, the classic one where I throw it and he goes to get it. More often though, the game involves him grabbing the bottle in his mouth, and then getting my attention by jumping up on the backs of my legs. When I turn around to grab the bottle so that I can throw it, he quickly turns and takes a step or two away so that it is out of my reach. As I said, he is extremely fast, both in reflexes and on foot, and there is no chance that I can ever get anywhere close to grabbing the bottle. In fact, my efforts are so pathetic as to be comical, I am sure.

So here’s the question: Why does he offer me the bottle only to snatch it away? He must be aware of the irony in the gesture, hence its capacity to constitute a game. He is only pretending to give me a bottle, and he knows he is pretending because it is more fun that way. If he were an earnest human toddler, or a little puppy, I imagine (he’s about two), he might trot up with the bottle and gently lay it at my feet, which would be adorable, but not ironic, and not playful, at least not in this teasing sense.

There are times when he wants to be vigorously petted, and I am good at that, but I am afraid that he is getting bored with me as a sporting challenger. He even slows his reaction so that the game becomes more of an even match, but even then I disappoint him.

It is easy to read dogs. (Sorry, all of you behaviorialists who say we make too much of canine personalities, you are just dead wrong on this). It must be much harder to read unicellular organisms. Perhaps their ontologies are just too far out of reach for us. But I am convinced that the trajectory of animal studies is putting us on a path that will lead us to greater understanding of nonhuman personalities and personhoods. I have never seen a news item in which it is announced, for example, that, ‘you know what, folks, parrots aren’t as bright as we thought they were’. No, it is always in the other direction, towards greater recognition of the sophistication of nonhuman sensibilities.

Agency, Consciousness and Irony

A new study indicates that ova exert influence over sperm selection; that is, to some extent, an ovum can choose which sperm fertilizes it. This is a clear example of agency, but does it indicate that the ovum is conscious?

The answer depends, in part, of course on how you define consciousness. The psi group considers everything to be conscious: when a photon hits a carbon molecule and the molecule reacts, that is a sign of consciousness, and I think it is a valid argument. Social scientists are more likely to look beyond agency to something like perception or self-awareness to identify the presence of consciousness in an entity or being, but again, it depends on how you define, and empirically investigate, these terms and characteristics.

Again, I like the psi understanding of consciousness, with mere agency being sufficient to determine its presence, but maybe the social scientists, and natural science behaviorialists, would find this proposal intriguing: if it could be demonstrated that an ovum selected a sperm ironically, would it not indicate the presence of consciousness rather than mere agency? For example, if the ovum secreted a fluid that inhibited sperm A but assisted sperm B, even though sperm B would lead to the development of an entity with greater evolutionary fitness, would that not provide evidence for consciousness?

I suppose it would depend on whether the action was considered an error or dysfunction, and in this case a statistical study would be helpful. Evolutionary biology does not explain all, or even most, behavior. Understanding the role of irony in behavior would be helpful. How one would conduct a study to examine this is a puzzle. Perhaps a greater ecological study of ova that routinely choose the evolutionarily disadvantaging spermatozoa would shed light on the issue.

Garden

The ultimate plant fiction, that points toward beauty (see how the themes come together?), is the garden. Like a novel, for example, it is made of characters, put in place by an author, who then begin to exert their own agency, in a time register that is all their own, a remarkably nonhuman slowness.

And their rootedness marks them as particularly integrated placemakers, radically (if you will excuse the pun) different from anything known to animal ontology. A nearby fir tree, the tallest in Europe if I remember correctly, recently fell over, maybe as the result of a storm. The same day I read about its demise, I happened to read a quote from Saint Francis of Assisi, in which he warns against counting on trees for assistance because they, like all temporal beings, will die; only divine help is eternally dependable. I read the quote in Italian, and I cannot find (instantly) an English version at my fingertips, but the word in Italian, that indicates the tree’s death, is ‘seccare’, to dry out. It is a word that evokes a remarkable insight into the relation between plants and water: plants don’t die in the way that animals do - they dry out. I suppose some plants, including trees, rot in the way an animal’s body would (forgive the image), but it seems that plants, being both simpler in composition and closer to water in relation, in comarsion with animals, exhibit less transformation, and less trauma, in death. And while I suppose animals also eventually dry out, returning to dust seems to be easier for plants.

So this fictional garden, authored by a human being, offers a comfortable transition between humans and the globe they inhabit. I would think a poet would not like gardens for this reason - they interfere with the relation between writer and world. I suppose, however, that the garden itself is a kind of poem, or short story, or novel - do gardens have genres? - should the author choose to look at it that way. And why not, words are overrated. Whitman might have composed his work with real leaves of grass, rather than metaphorical ones.

Fiction

The word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin ‘fingere’ which means ‘to form’ or ‘to contrive’. So when Jorge Luis Borges entitled his collection ‘Ficciones’ I am thinking that his intention was not so much to indicate that the stories were untrue, but that they were formed, without making any comment, necessarily, about their veracity, which really is not relevant or important. As Michel Serres notes, ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek for ‘creation’, without any connotations of untruthfulness. Similarly, I do not think that anyone considers fictional literature to be in any way fake. The academic discourse on cultural production seems to be aimed at making the point that things considered natural are really culturally produced and therefore, viewed in the most antagonistic sense, fake or false. There are more nuanced threads in the discussion that focus on determining the history and origins of culturally produced phenomena, but too often the message is that because a certain feature of a society is culturally produced it must be in some sense invalid; but of course, anything considered valid was also culturally produced. There is no escaping it.

My aim in this post is to focus on the use of fictions, of creating fictions, as a way of managing dissonant scales. In this sense, any human relationship, for example, is a fiction. A family is a fiction, that is rendered to make the world livable, for it is very hard to live as a resident on earth without having some kind of mediating scale, or a set of mediating scales, between a person and the world. Ask any poet.

Plants must serve this purpose. I was watching a documentary on beauty yesterday in which several anthropologists made the point that certain features of the natural landscape are considered beautiful because they provided evolutionary assistance: running water, green plants, and other similarly life-assisting things. There is also the discourse on symmetry of features, waist to hip to shoulder ratio, and other body parameters, that relate to fertility.

Fair, enough, as far as it goes, but there were some dissenters. They dissented not so much by saying that this evolutionary understanding of beauty is wrong, but that it is insufficient, that it does not account for less instrumental postures and engagements of the human mind. I wonder, therefore, if it might be possible to tease out the various reasons why humans find plants to be beautiful. I will have to think a bit more on this and write about it in the next post.