The Collective Person

A recent study indicates that the immune system of an individual being, in this case rhesus monkeys, is sensitive to social rank. Immune system responses and severity of tissue inflammation varied according to where the individual fell with respect to rank within its community.

The study raises two questions for me. One, to what extent can we identify individual persons given the extent to which an individual body appears to be connected to exogenous structures? Two, to what extent can we conceive and speak of collective persons, given that there seems to be an identifiable network of agency that lies outside of the body of a single entity?

Michel Serres has written of our inability or reluctance to acknowledge 'the swarm'. He made his observations quite some time ago, before public health and epidemiological studies began making the individual-collective connection, but on a general cultural level, his observation is still valid. Studies show that one's eating habits depend strongly upon the habits of one's social group, so measures aimed at controlling obesity, diabetes and other diet related conditions that focus only or primarily on individual agency are largely unsuccessful. We may understand this group dynamic scientifically, but culturally it seems we have still not formulated a working model of it.

Here is where the idea that plants serve as models for human behavior becomes instructive. Many people balk at the idea that plants are more like humans than we are wont to believe, but the idea that humans are more like plants seems to be received more readily. Among plants, the relation between individual and collective seems more normal and less problematic. The rhizome in its many forms: the lawn, the thatch, the grove, all seem to be understandable instantiations of nature. Grass, bamboo and oaks seem, in their sessile durability, easily clustered together. I have a family of cactus, presumably mamas and babies, firmly rooted in one corner of my front yard, that have so far resisted any interventions on my part to uproot them, having marshaled their collective adorability against my hostility. Parents often gain esteem from their children, but this is sometimes not acknowledged in a society that privileges individual over group, and especially familial, achievement.

I will have to revisit Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to see what insights he has into this notion.

Plant Liability and Legal Fictions

If we conceive of plants as persons, and I understand that there are good arguments against this position, we have to eventually consider what such a proposition means with regard to plant agency and, especially, plant liability. Such a concern stems from my conception of personhood as being defined by six parameters: agency, sentience, perception, consciousness, communicability and contractibility. To briefly summarize: agency is the capacity to do things, sentience is the capacity to sense things, perception is the capacity to cognitively process things, consciousness is the capacity to gather these cognitions into a synthesized awareness, communicability is the capacity to communicate with other things, and contractibility is the capacity to enter into agreements with other things. From my perspective, any one of these abilities is sufficient cause to designate personhood in an entity. It is a pretty broad view of personhood, I understand, but I feel that by using science and logic one can make a strong argument that plants are persons.

Where my argument gets even more difficult is when I start to consider liability in plants. From one perspective, it is quite easy get there as we do it all the time by creating what is considered to be a 'legal fiction'. If I park my car on a hill and another car comes along and hits it in such a way as to cause it to roll down a hill and smash into another car, I may be found to be not guilty in the event, in a legal sense, but I could very well be held liable, with regards to my auto insurance. Things happen, they are not my fault, but I still have to make amends somehow. In a literal sense I did not cause any of these things to happen, unless one considers my parking of the car to have conditioned, facilitated, allowed or made possible the string of events, but as a result of a system of laws and policies, and the legal fictions that are immanent to them, I bear some liability for them.

If we start to enfold nonhumans into this arrangement by enrolling them in our social and legal fictions, to what extent and in what manner can we assign liability to them? Medieval jurists had no trouble convicting animals of crimes, such as when a goat wandered into a bean patch and devoured a crop. Today, such a thing would be considered impossible because the legal fiction to which we adhere is that it is not the goat who is liable for its actions but the owner of the goat. In a modern court, one could not sue the goat but one could certainly sue the owner for such an act, on the grounds that he or she is liable for not restraining the goat properly and allowing it to wander onto another person's property. But it really was not the owner who ate the beans. It was the goat.

What would a system of laws (within the ambit of a legal system) or policies (within the realm of insurance) that could accommodate plant liability look like? Could a tree carry insurance that would protect it in the case of an accident that it caused? I don't see why not. Such a policy could depend upon the idea that all agency and all liability devolved to the tree without involving the agencies of other persons or property, a scenario which raises the question of recognizing personhood for land, conceived as a unitary entity, which is another fiction in itself. One need only pay attention to the dispute in North Dakota over the installation of an oil pipeline to see a living example of land and its components, in this case water in particular, as an entity that deserves respect by virtue of its sacred nature, a sacrality that is alien to western thought but essential to the world views of Native American cultures and the societies that embrace them. At the risk of dissolving into a kind of naive philosophical conjecture, the quandary leads me to consider the fiction of truth and, more optimistically, the truth of fiction.

What a strangely animated world such a shift would portend for the modern industrial world. It would mean an entry into a system of relations already enjoyed by many people, a group that is great in wisdom but sadly small in number, and even worse, weak in power. One can hope that the power - and beauty - of their ideas eventually wins out.

EXCERPT: Davos (2)

Here are the next two paragraphs of Davos, the first book in the Franco Fasiolo series, which recounts the adventures of its eponymous protagonist, who is a forensic botanist and reluctant cosmopolitan. I hope you enjoy them!

The road up out of the valley had an annoying grade, steep enough to make walking hard but not steep enough to make it exciting, just a long low incline that took the energy out of Franco's center without ever making itself known. They called it the Valley of Tears, which while unoriginal was not inaccurate, and therefore a description that Franco accommodated with a resigned complicity. His strides seemed tiny, as if he were merely lifting his feet and putting them down in almost the same place, hardly advancing at all against the road's invisible slope, like a mountaineer who had gone so high as to have immersed himself in a new register of gravity.

Finally he reached the border. The guard smirked at him with a handsome face when Franco told him where he was going. Davos? Long way away! Franco just stood and said nothing, like the donkey. What does the guard do? Sit in his silly car, or on his obnoxious motorcycle? How far has he ever walked? No more than a few hundred meters, if that. The guard handed Franco back his passport and smiled again with perfect facial hair. Funny how it just grew like that, not like Franco's beard, which was fuller and less angular. He looked like a lad of the Renaissance, not from around here, not like Franco, who was born and bred in the valley. Still, the guard was very likable and Franco was sad to go, adding him to his already long list of heartbreaks: the goat, the cow, the pig (remembered from another walk), the donkey, the slide, the smiling realtor, the fig tree.

The Wisdom of the Harpedonaptae

While I work my way through several pieces of plant research, as well as a book that I had overlooked, I offer for consideration a couple of paragraphs from a forthcoming publication, which I have modified slightly for the sake of comprehensibility:

The idea of making a pact with nature seems impossible at first. How can two agents strike an agreement when one of them clearly cannot even talk, let alone think, or act consciously, at least when viewed from a human perspective? The point is irrelevant, Michel Serres argues. After all, the social contract is tacit and unspoken and so should be the natural one. Son of a bargeman and a former merchant marine, Serres extols the ability of peasants and sailors to read nature not through words but through lines, noting that the English word “draft” works as both a noun and a verb, referring to contracts as well as the act of pulling, and the lines, of words and of fiber, that make each one possible. The administrators, managers and scientists who currently run the world have long lost their capacity to understand nature because they are no longer in daily contact with it, no longer dependent upon it, and no longer capable of negotiating with it. They have let loose the strings that once connected them to it and can no longer feel, let alone understand, the chordal vibrations through which nature speaks. Channeled into narrow fields of expertise and attentive to immediate needs, modern administrators form bonds with nature that are instrumental and temporary rather than mutual and enduring. With the onset of climate change and growing human acknowledgment of it, these cords have reappeared and the skeins of discourse have multiplied and thickened, but not nearly to extent needed to avoid global catastrophe, in Serres’ opinion. A better vision might now be in place but the old mechanisms at hand are still inadequate to achieve it. Serres recommends fuzzy sets as the proper model as they offer the needed flexibility and mutability in their many interstices and gaps. Strength lies in the plurality and uncertainty of their form, which is more like a rope than a rod.

The cords of relation that Serres envisions as the clauses of the natural contract serve three purposes: they attach, they inform and they delimit. Imagining the harpedonaptae of the Nile River delta, the rope-stretchers who would measure and mark agricultural fields following each flood, he sees cords as the perfect instruments. Hanging loosely they connect human subjects and contain the law that binds the social world. Stretched taut they transfer that law to the earth and therefore attach the natural world to the social one. But the bonds are flexible. The harpedonaptae knew they could do their work only after the river flooded and receded, so they made the cords slack and taut accordingly, knowing that the soft power of relations was more durable than the hard power of technology; knowing when to give (loosen) and when to take (tighten) was essential. Levees and damns inevitably give way to the forces of nature, permanence having been mistakenly ascribed to them. Much more durable is a recurring social-technological system of partitioning and the cords that facilitate it, the flexibility and mutability of the instrument matching the flexibility and mutability of the relation between people and river. The ways of nature may be ultimately unknowable, but Serres sees an elegance in not knowing. In place of total knowledge and total mastery, he suggests a system of ignorance with acceptance, a relation characterized by polite indifference being preferable to a prying intrusion. His is a call to respect the unknown, to have a cautious relation to the obscure.

In the Median

I mean, come on! Sorry to not offer a photo to illustrate my point, but I felt that it would just be one more layer of exploitation to heap upon the poor flowers, who some government landscaper planted in a small plot on the left-hand side of the the freeway offramp I take to get to my house.

So, apologies for the title, which is somewhat misleading, since the plants I am talking about are not in the median strip of a boulevard. The effect is the same, however. Am I overreacting? Maybe. Maybe these plants are quite indifferent to the sound and noise pollution caused by hundreds of thousands of cars passing them everyday. But I doubt it. Furthermore, I am sure that no one would think twice about seeing a dead plant that had been relegated to a roadside plot, even though it would be the very conditions of that treatment that caused its demise. Would the observer regard the scene the same way were the entity a kitten? Of course not.

I can only hope that improved scientific understanding of the lives and sensibilities of plants will change our cultural attitudes toward and treatment of them.

Trees as Social Mediators

A murder of crows has taken residence in a fir tree behind my house. There are maybe a half a dozen of them, and they often put on a great show that involves throaty cawing as they swoop in and out of the tree's branches. Sometimes they stage their display around a nearby telephone pole, but in the mornings, it is most often the fir tree with, on this occasion, the graceful, high altitude gliding of a seagull, somewhat more inland than usual, apparently the cause for excitement.

The tree must provide a wealth of support and stimulus, a green and growing framework for the crows' daily efforts. Tall, it must serve as an excellent perch that provides both security and great visibility, both in the sense of maximizing the extent to which they can see as well as the extent to which others can see them. I see them duck inside the branches from time to time, often with something in their beaks, but mostly, when I see them, they are swirling around the crown with great acrobatic skill, and seemingly having a fantastic time.

I feel comfortable when they are in the tree. When they stage themselves on the telephone pole, they can get a little threatening, and visions of Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds, come to mind. They actually chased me into the house the other day, as they were so excited and noisy I thought they were going to attack. The telephone pole is both lower and more skeletal, so without an interior into which they can disappear, as is the case with the fir.

I wonder, then, if the arrival of telephone poles, being what they are materially, and having the effect they do on crow behavior, or on what is possible for a group of crows, or at least my perception of it, represents an important change in the local ecology, for the crows, as well as the people, and of course for the trees. With regard to the last one, perhaps the tree is indifferent to the presence of the crows, but such a conjecture suggests the need for further research. With more droppings falling on fallow concrete, as I witnessed yesterday afternoon, and keeping in mind that crows are large and hardy creatures as far as birds go, I think the consequent displacement of nourishing manure should have some kind of measurable effect, even if in the end it proves to be inconsequential.