Concepts of Society that Include the Nonhuman

One of the key ideas involved in considering plants as persons is a concept of the social that includes not only nonhuman beings but also inanimate entities. As for the first group, nonhuman beings, the idea is really not that strange if one thinks of how thoroughly integrated pets, especially cats and dogs, are integrated into family life. So many mundane signs, from the postcard from the vet addressed to the dog of the family, complete with first name (Rusty in my case) and last name, reminding him of his upcoming appointment, to those little stickers on the rear windows of automobiles depicting each family member in white silhouette, pet included, normalizes the idea that our pets are part of our social network, along with our parents and children, often in a more intimate sense, especially if one considers the attenuating significance of aunts, uncles and cousins in modern social life. In contrast, the importance of animals seems to be on the rise, especially with regard to people who are otherwise single and/or childless. A particularly mean-spirited and obnoxious version of this attitude appears on bumper stickers that are all too common in the San Francisco Bay Area, which read something along the lines of 'My Dog is Smarter than Your Honors Student'. It may be meant in humor, and as a poke at the overly achievement oriented culture of high octane places such as Silicon Valley, but I am not sure the medium conveys it effectively.

But enough about animals. What about plants? And speaking of humor, one of the best representations of the 'plants as social actors' discourse, to convey the idea rather stiffly, came to me in a presentation on Guarani society society. A research self-deprecatingly related a dressing down that he received at the hands of two women who said something like: 'Oh no, brother, trees are people, don't you forget it. We may not know what's going on with them most of the time, but they are people just like you and I are'. I loved the lack of pretentiousness and preciousness in this exchange. Who knows what those trees are thinking! But we respect them just the same.

So here is a great example of what Michel Serres calls the 'natural contract', a version of Jean Jacques Rousseau's social contract, except that it is made between humans and nature rather than solely among humans ourselves. Serres' point is that the social contract is tacit, and as such it really does not depend upon a sophisticated line of communication among all signatories to it. In fact, there are no signatories because there really is no contract as such, merely a highly abstracted idea that there is or should be a bond among people, read homo sapiens, that conditions daily life. Well, Serres suggests that the same bonds once existed between human beings and nature, but that through industrialization and modernization, those bonds have been broken and need to be reformed, lest disaster ensues. And so we must return to the Amazon, or in Serres' illustration, ancient Egypt, specifically the Nile Delta, and figure out once again how to give nature, including its inanimate features, the respect it deserves.

What would such a model of society look like? How would our culture accommodate it? I will attempt to answer these questions in future posts.

REVIEW: Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life, by Jeffery T Nealon, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016

One of the latest offerings, in what I identify as the plant ontology and personhood discourse, is Jeffery T Nealon's Plant Theory. His approach, to begin with a consideration of the explosion of animal studies over the past decade or so and then suggest that it is now time for plants to share the spotlight, is logical and appealing. His specific lens is Michel Foucault's concept of biopower and the way in which certain entities are excluded under this regime. I found it to be more accessible than Michael Marder's work, in that it is more conversational and informal in the way it works its way through its arguments.

Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben all mention animals in their engagements with the theme, but in every case plants fade into the background as animals take precedence in their studies. According to Nealon, Cary Wolfe and Gary Francione have been even hostile in their dismissal of the relevance of plants to investigations of nonhuman life, betraying a form of intellectual dishonesty in their willingness or insistence in drawing a line that separates animals from plants, a line that is not convincingly supported by scientific findings which underscore how certain biological processes, and related phenomena such as sentience if not also consciousness and intelligence, run through all forms of life. Explorations of the divide between human and animal life are fascinating, Nealon offers, but they are really just the beginning, and of course I agree with him.

All of the old villains emerge: the ancient and more modern western philosophies and practices that chopped up the world using classifications and taxonomies based on criteria such as modes of reproduction, into ever finer schematics to create the abstracted groupings of species, genus and so on, severing ecological connections in favor of lineal descent. It is a point which Donna Haraway has made exquisitely, drawing a rich skein of conclusions from the biological and ecological to the social and political. There are of course good intellectual and rhetorical reasons for concentrating on the human/animal divide: plants are just too strange to serve as figures in a critique of modern society. To argue that humans are being (mis)treated as animals has purchase in everyday relations between the two categories of beings. Substituting plants for animals in the comparison does not allow for a sharp critique since to identify a human as having become a vegetable, a term that has been outdated for at least fifty years, produces more sympathy than outrage.

But if we can steer through the murk to the point of seeing plants as fellow beings, Nealon offers, our efforts will be dramatically rewarded. One can see his admiration for Marder's work in this position, and in his embrace of it, as well as that of Agamben. He  seems to favor a shift from biopower to a form of deep ecology, which in its greater inclusivity is a stronger lens through which to assess the current state of relations among humans, animals and plants. I would go so far as to include stones and water, so as to avoid Judith Butler's 'embarrassed etc', which Nealon nicely notes in his introduction, but that is an undertaking for future posts.

I found Nealon's discussion of rhizomes to be especially edifying. It is perhaps this aspect of plants that promises the most productive line of inquiry into plant life, and the one that could be the formation of a new model of the social that includes them. Thinking of social life in terms of collections of individuals certainly has validity, but it oversimplifies the nature of social connection and relation as it favors the organismic (with reference to biological life) and the mechanistic (when considering inanimate agents) over a more enchained and diffused concept of agency. Understanding the rhizome might offer important insights into the nature of ecologies that not only include humans, animals and plants, to offer three clunky and problematic categories but also, and perhaps more importantly, an infinite number of permutations among them. It is this aspect of ecology - and society - that is most in need of investigation.

That might be more my idea than Nealon's. When a writer succeeds in producing such limpid and engaging work, I find it difficult to identify the point at which his or her offering stops and my response begins. This is especially apparent in Nealon's work because he writes with an informality and humor, evident in clever and engaging asides, for example, that open nurturing spaces of warmth and generosity among his more rigorous passages of intellectual expression.

What more can I say? Plant Theory provides yet another stepping stone to advance the discourse on the social consideration of plant life.

If plants have rights, what is a vegan to do?

Is this where a consideration of plant ontology and personhood leads us? We have to eat something, so the best response is to be as aware as we can when we decide what to eat, including when we decide to eat animals.

I like Michael Marder's answer to the question. Eat plants, as you must, but do so in a way that entwines your life with theirs as much as possible, so that when you eat them, you do so mindfully, fully aware of what you are eating and what impacts your choice has on all entities concerned.

He recommends eating rhizomatically, a term that has received a great deal of attention in academia over the past twenty years or so, especially from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their emphasis seems to be on the capacity of plants to reproduce asexually by sending out roots and shoots in various directions, while Marder seems most interested in the ability of these growths to engage everything in their proximity: soil, water, stones, and other plants, for example. For both Deleuze and Guattari and Marder, plants are the great translators or the world, a capacity that is made possible or enhanced by their ontology that is neither that of habitat nor habitant, but existing somewhere in between, or simultaneously in, these two realms. In addition, plants perform the great act of translation, in the sense that Michel Serres uses it when discussing parasites, when converting sunlight into chemical energy that fuels their cellular growth, the single most important process that occurs in our environment.

Let me give you a live example. In the garden of the house where I live, under the soil, exists a root that is the diameter of a coffee can and ten or twenty meters long. It might lie in a more or less single line but I suspect that it is in fact a system of branching roots of a more complex configuration. It used to be attached to a tree that was a good fifteen to twenty meters tall that stood at the back of the property. When that fell over one day several years ago, I had someone come in, cut it up, and haul it away.

I thought I was done with bay laurels at that point - sadly, because I liked them. It was tall and leafy, and the leaves were of a pleasant shade of green, abundant, and nicely shaped, as was the tree itself. Little did I understand at the time that the tree was only a product of the root, that the plant, the real plant in a sense, was what was underground. The enormous tree that had fallen down was merely an offshoot, something that was secondary to the root itself.

Over the past decade, the root has sent up a constant line of replacements, popping up sometimes in the yard in front of the house, in the middle of a concrete planter, sometimes on the side of the house, just in front of a dining room window. Each time one pops up, I take it down, fearing that if I leave it alone, a manageable sapling will become a giant tree in a few years, in a place where the property just cannot accommodate it.

I remember returning home one evening to find that a six-foot tree had sprouted, seemingly overnight, just to the right of the steps leading to my front door. As busy and stressed as I was at that time, I simply reached out, grabbed the tree by its trunk, and yanked it out as if it were a stalk of corn. I was surprised how easily I was able to do it. Others have proven to be much hardier, requiring digging and chopping to extract them from the soil. But no matter how thorough my local interventions have been, the root itself never dies.

While doing work in the garden that required digging a hole about two feet deep, I actually came across the root itself. I dug around it to see if I could eventually free it from the soil. My ax merely bounced off of it, as if it were made of a particularly hard and resilient type of rubber. I put an iron bar under it and tried to pry it out, encouraged by my success with the one sapling, but I might as well have been trying to lift a car by its bumper, and even that comparison does not do justice to the force with which this plant clung to its place in the earth. In fact, and here is where rhizome-as-translator becomes clear, I could not tell where the root ended and the soil began, so entwined were the main root and its countless subroots in the surrounding medium.

So what does all of this have to do with eating? Bay laurels are not edible, at least not by human beings, so we should be thankful for the relative hand full of plants that are, particularly because in addition to being edible they are also easily domesticated. The rhizomatic ontology of some plants is so different from human experience as to seem alien. So it is by recognizing this difference that we come to respect plants, as Peter Singer says of animals, 'as strange people'. They are like us in some ways (more on that later) but also unlike us in other ways, and it is this unlikeness that makes them such precious parts of the world in which we live.

So when we eat plants, we are sustaining ourselves with a life form that is so vastly superior to us in so many ways that we should find the act humbling, and it is this humility that should supply the prevailing tenor to our understanding of who we are in the grand system of life on Earth.