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.
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.
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