Covert Plants

COVERT PLANTS Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) Covert Plants Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World Edited by Prudence Gibson & Baylee Brits Brainstorm Books Santa Barbara, California covert plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an anthropocentric world. Copyright © 2018 by the editors and authors. This work carries a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform, and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors and editors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2018 by Brainstorm Books A division of punctum books, Earth, Milky Way www.punctumbooks.com isbn-13: 978-1-947447-69-1 (print) isbn-13: 978-1-947447-70-7 (epdf) lccn: 2018948912 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Interior design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover art: Jackie Cavallaro Cover design: Shant Rising Contents Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson Introduction: Covert Plants � 11 ❧ Part I — Express, Present, Represent Prudence Gibson Interview with Michael Marder � 25 Stephen Muecke Mixed Up with Trees: The Gadgur and the Dreaming � 37 Paul Dawson Lover Nature � 45 Andrew Belletty An Ear to the Ground � 47 Luke Fischer Gardening / Grasshopper in a Field � 59 Tessa Laird Spores from Space: Becoming the Alien � 61 ❧ Part II — Thinking Plants Baylee Brits Brain Trees: Neuroscientific Metaphor and Botanical Thought � 81 Dalia Nassar Metaphoric Plants: Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants and the Metaphors of Reason � 99 Tamryn Bennett Icaro / Heyowicinayo � 121 Ben Woodard Continuous Green Abstraction: Embodied Knowledge, Intuition, and Metaphor � 125 Lisa Dowdall Figures � 151 ❧ Part III — Political Landscapes Prudence Gibson The Colour Green � 163 Monica Gagliano Persons as Plants: Ecopsychology and the Return to the Dream of Nature � 183 Justin Clemens Rooted � 195 Lucas Ihlein Agricultural Inventiveness: Beyond Environmental Management? � 197 Susie Pratt Trees as Landlords and Other Public Experiments: An Interview with Natalie Jeremijenko � 213 Jennifer Mae Hamilton Gardening out of the Anthropocene: Creating Different Relations between Humans and Edible Plants in Sydney � 221 ❧ Contributor Biographies � 253 Introduction: Covert Plants Baylee Brits and Prudence Gibson Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthro- pocentric World is an anthology of interdisciplinary essays and creative works, which charts the transformation in the conceptual and ethical status of plants in an era of changing climates. It presents a range of academic and creative perspectives from evo- lutionary biology to literary theory, from philosophy to poetry, at a time when a call for restorative care and reparative action has been sounded for the environment. The anthology contributes to the emerging field of Critical Plant Studies, at the crossover of plants and philosophy,1 literature,2 and arts,3 with a focus on the non-human components of our world.4 The essays in this anthology engage with new discoveries in plant science and evaluate how these changes affect the humanities and the arts. Art, literature, and philosophy have the capacity to mediate dif- ficult issues of climate change and present a new perspective on human–plant interactions, just as new plant science transforms these practices and disciplines. Plants are often considered of secondary importance to ani- mal or even insect species, even though they are equally threat- ened by rising temperatures and changing ecologies and function 1 Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 2 Randy Laist, Plants and Literature (Boston: Brill-Rodopi, 2013). 3 Prudence Gibson, The Plant Contract (Boston: Brill-Rodopi, 2018). 4 Richard Grusan, The Non Human Turn (Massachusetts: University of Minnesotta, 2015). 11 COVERT PLANTS as cornerstones of any given ecology. Plants are vital resources for understanding current and future ecologies, and our parallel human culture and society. We hope to contribute to the revalu- ation of the significance of plant life through foregrounding the importance of vegetal life for humanistic enquiry across disciplines. This requires updating our perception and understanding of plant life, by keeping abreast of ongoing discoveries in plant science and registering the philosophical effects of knowledge. The conceptual regimes that dictate the relations between objects, subjects, and the ‘natural world’ have stifled a vocabulary and theoretical apparatus that might emerge from the vegetal world. We need to develop strategies to think, speak, and write about plant life without falling into human–nature dyads, or without tumbling into reductive theoretical notions about relations between cognition and action, identity and value, subject and object. Although the humanities have had a close historical link with the representation of vegetal life, this has frequently involved har- nessing plant analogies to sustain an intellectual position, often obscuring the diversity and nuance of plant behaviour and the implications of vegetal life for thought. We hope that the essays gathered in this anthology begin to mitigate this through their interdisciplinary approach. We believe it is critical to respond to and express Critical Plant issues through cross-disciplinary scholarly and creative praxes. These kinds of interventions into con- ventional scholarly writing are a risky and provocative means of interrogating the effects of new plant discoveries. Goethe’s 1790 Metamorphosis of Plants is a search for an Ur- pflanze, one archetypal pattern in nature from which all vegetal matter springs. In many ways, this volume attempts the oppo- site. We are instead discovering the multiple tendrils of vegetal being that have emerged from new knowledge that plants have greater sensory capacities than previously thought. While these concepts have precedents in the past, recent scientific develop- ments allow them a new valency in terms of distributed thought and as non-human actors. Each of the contributors to this volume addresses vegetal life to better comprehend their own artis- tic and academic genres. Although we can’t ‘speak plant,’ we can seize the opportunity to interrogate the absence of an appropri- 12 INTRODUCTION ate lexicon to discuss the vegetal world. We can envisage a future where plants lead us to new models of thinking, better solutions, better collaborations and better adaptive potentials. As Michael Marder and Luce Irigaray suggest in their 2016 book Through Vegetal Being, we can give our writing back to plants.5 This is plant writing: an openness to sentience, sapience, and forms of life that are distinctly botanical. The aim of this anthology is to contribute to discourse on the implications of new plant knowledge for the arts and culture. As such, a full view of this shifting perspective requires a ‘stereoscop- ic’ lens through which to view plants but also simultaneously to alter our human-centered viewpoint. Plants are no longer the passive object of contemplation, but are increasingly resembling ‘subjects,’ ‘stakeholders,’ or ‘performers.’ The plant now makes unprecedented demands upon the nature of contemplation it- self. Moreover, the aesthetic, political, and legal implications of new knowledge regarding plants’ ability to communicate, sense, and learn require investigation so that we can intervene in current attitudes to climate change and sustainability, and to revise human philosophies to account for a better plan–thuman rela- tional model. The ethics and aesthetics of plant life are also af- fected by new plant knowledge, because we now must ask: how should we alter our approach to farming, conservation, cultiva- tion, and consumption based on new information about plants’ sensory reactions? The critical work of this anthology’s chapters seeks to re-orient human relationships with plants and to redress their relationship to the law, theories of agency, and intelligence, and the role of aesthetics for these ecologies. Michael Marder, responding to Prudence Gibson’s questions in the interview in this volume, suggests that new aesthetic en- gagements with plants are better thought of in terms of ‘expression’ rather than ‘representation.’ Unlike representation, expression implies a projection, discarding the subject–object divide inherent in representation. Expression, for Marder, then allows for a ‘decentering’ of the ‘vegetal’ work done by the arts, whereby the object is not totalised

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