Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. “It happens, but I’m not there.” “I cannot realize it, but it goes on.” Motherhood’s impossible syllogism.40

  Through the image of pregnancy as a temporally fluid graft, this passage connects a phenomenology of human pregnancy with what Marder and others call ‘plant-thinking’. Grafting is the horticultural technique of joining tissues from two different plants so that their vascular tissues fuse and continue to grow together. The technique of bud-grafting, in which a bud from one plant is inserted under the bark of a different plant, visually echoes the swelling of the pregnant mammalian body around the foetus. The temporal extension of the graft as a process is relevant here as well: it is over time that the graft will succeed or fail, will take or die. The horrific charge of Myrrha’s dyschronic pregnancy comes from the image of a perverse or corrupted graft, originating in incest. As a figure of temporalised pluralism, grafting reminds us of the two-in-oneness of pregnancy as opposed to the autonomous, unified, and pure body-subject; it allows philosophical discourse to recognise the uncanny intimacy of two different beings in one body.41

  If the graft is a useful early figure of the strange hybrid, paradigms of embodied co-being that take us far beyond this are now on offer in post-Darwinian biology. More complex understandings of mammalian pregnancy challenge our assumptions about anatomical, genetic, developmental, immune, physiological, and evolutionary individuality. Consider recent work on trans-placental exchange: whereas early natural philosophers imagined the relation between the pregnant body of the mother and the developing foetus as resembling that of vessel and content, with the foetus a separate unit within the mother’s body, we now know that chemical and hormonal signals along with biological material are continually exchanged between foetus and mother, traversing the placenta in both directions. Discussing feto-maternal ‘microchimerism’, Margaret McFall-Ngai explains that every human subject is – are? – plural, since during pregnancy ‘cells from a fetus pass through the placenta and take up residence in the mother’s body, and vice versa … If you are a youngest child, not only will you receive your mother’s cells, but you will also receive all of your siblings’ cells’.42 The result is that ‘each one of us is a chimera of sorts, our bodies containing cell lines of others. We are thus not what we thought: every “I” is also a “we”.’43 Mendel’s and Darwin’s maps of the one-way ‘vertical transmission of genetic traits’ will have to be redrawn to accommodate the new postmodern synthesis acknowledging horizontal gene transfer as an element of ‘human nature’: no longer based on trees, instead our maps will trace the webs and networks of dynamic, multi-directional, trans-kingdom exchanges.44 Artists and data visualisation specialists are already imagining these new models.45

  Even as biologists lay out new models for chimericised life, writers of speculative fictions of all sorts will help us navigate both the dyschronicities of inter-species beings and also the ethical implications they embody. As this congeneric reading has shown, whereas Lavondyss presents Tallis as literally experiencing arboreal transformation and alternative parturitions, The Vegetarian uses narrative strategies compatible with realist fiction to create a similar experience of temporal and subjective fluidity, so that Yeong-hye’s fantasy of a radically innocent botanical reproduction presses against the framework of consensual reality and of a human-indexed temporality. Fusing human, plant and animal natures and agencies, both texts create an entangled understanding of personhood and reproduction that is far more complex than the conventional unitary subject of Western metaphysics. Both texts ask us to consider more temporally expansive understandings of what it means to be, and through this of the ethical bases on which we interact and communicate with human and non-human others.

  Two implications of these expansive understandings of time and nature emerge: first, the possession and expression of agency and subjectivity do not constitute the exclusive basis of what it means to be human, with the corollary that humans who don’t possess or who reject agency do not thereby lose their identity as human. Secondly, agency and subjectivity are not the exclusive property of humans, and non-human beings may have forms of identity and agency, as well as temporalities, that we as humans don’t (yet) recognise. These texts urge us to conceive of agency not as embedded in individual subjects, but as a networked and distributed – what Jane Bennett describes as a non-individualised ‘agency of assemblages’ such as ecosystems.46 Human/arboreal assemblages enable writers to imagine human nature and human futures in other terms, and in doing so to propose new ways of being human. Taking plant-thinking as the basis for a new ethics, Holdstock’s and Han’s texts show what we can learn about being human from taking the vegetal other seriously.47

  PART 3

  Accord

  7 Sunlight as a Photosynthetic Information Technology: Becoming Plant in Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume

  Yogi Hale Hendlin

  Tom Robbins’s paean to plants Jitterbug Perfume tenders flora as the protagonists ushering out the waning animal age (represented by the evanescing Pan) to make way for the age of sunlight. The sharp and subtle tones of the plant world’s aromas, Robbins encouragingly says, grow into catalysts for human evolution, permitting humans to enter into a halcyon Satya Yuga of plant-being.1 One of the delights of this work of speculative fiction is that Jitterbug Perfume does not create an unbelievable world, instead interspersing the ravings of genius characters and slightly mythological spirits, places and happenings into the familiar surroundings of New Orleans, Paris and the ancient East. In Robbins’s novel, characters from three cities become linked across millennia through a magical-realist narrative, whirling around the mysterious olfactory inducements of the red beet, the secret to the sublime base note in the perfect perfume.

  Scent – the least attended to of the senses for the contemporary human organism – for many animals and kingdoms like plantae serves as a metonym for the invisible molecular trafficking network primary to their species-specific mode of signification. The world of a dog, or an acacia tree, orients through essential environmental signals in wafting experiences of volatile organic compounds that we might anthropocentrically name the faculty of smell. The fantastical journey of Jitterbug Perfume suffuses a believable speculative realism of plant consciousness through the double-edged vehicle of aroma, acknowledging that to enter the plurality and porosity of plant existence requires sacrificing the animal grip of muscle tension and the anxiety of the flesh for the chlorophyllous translation of light into life.

  Indeed, perhaps because aromatic chemicals often work on us unconsciously, and often all too powerfully in the cases of pheromonal eros or disgust, smell in contemporary industrialised societies is cordoned off to a narrow range of socially acceptable, artificial masking compounds of car air fresheners and synthetic cleaning solvents. The full-bodied musk of fresh earth, of flowers and faeces, of petrichor and sweltering summer nights, resonate precariously with that part of us overflowing our sheltered humanism and connecting with the more than human world inside and around us.2 The spontaneous mental and emotional states induced involuntarily through the nose disrupts much discipline and training, for better or worse, that otherwise constrain certain aspects of our sense awareness. Scent awakens slumbering instincts previously tidily tucked away in rectilinear rational orders. It makes us sensitive to how our environment impacts us viscerally, emotionally, and disrupts the clenched certainty of unbending resoluteness and fixed rationality. With its ability to unpredictably induce subaltern states and drives, scent is subversive.

  In addition to physically yanking us out of abstraction into the material and mundane, scent often unannounced disabuses us of the comfort found proceeding along linear time orders. The arresting and expansive presence of sme
ll can transport the imbiber from metric-regulated khronos into the elastic temporality of kairos, directly connecting the brain and its mischief with subtle long-wave frequencies reverberating harmonically with the local environment. Olfaction breathtakingly roots us in our body, the moment, and the surrounding sources of smell, breaking down the barriers between self and other in an imploding immediacy. Simultaneously, the kairos of aroma recalls and presages other moments, recompiling memories into new assemblages, delivering the smeller along a through line across time and space, connecting and integrating previously fragmented vignettes. Such scent-provoked awe propels Robbins’s human protagonists Kudra and Alobar to hunt down the anchoring fragrance over centuries and continents that guides them back to each other in Jitterbug Perfume.

  Jitterbug Perfume’s distinctive rumination on the power of plants’ scents, connected with unlocking previously scuttled instincts, provokes a rearrangement of Linnaean categories and the barricades of reason. Robbins’s speculative fiction suggests that human olfactory instinct, especially those aspects that parallel our plant cousins’ capabilities, supplies a form of intelligence more suited for the exigencies of our zeitgeist. Dissolving the modernist divorce between emotion and reason, body and mind, the lesson from plants in Jitterbug Perfume indicates that the fear arising from the bodily separateness inherent to animals as individual membrane-bounded beings is overcome through connecting with our plurality as (metaphorical) photosynthetic beings to grow queerly, much like the rhizomatic and asymmetric growth of plants. Rather than hunkering down in the symmetrical and hierarchical ordering of our animal bodies, or more extreme yet, attempting to excise mind from body and seal our brains in digital vats, inhabiting the conceptual space of our plant self and body permits the expansion of the shut human fontanel to open to the light of the sun and reach our legs down into the fertile soil and moisture of connectedness.

  I investigate how Robbins’s novel illuminates what it means for humans to access our plant aspect. Intertwined with Michael Pollan’s thesis in The Botany of Desire on plant agency reversing traditional anthropocentric causation, Jitterbug Perfume encourages a closer look at plant biology as well as what Michael Marder names phyto-phenomenology, accentuating the superficiality of plant-thinking as an unexpected strength that might also benefit human comportment.3 In valuing the immediacy of plant experience and the porosity of self and environment, the significance of smell as discussed by Nietzsche and Simmel hooks back into the morphogenesis of plants. Whereas other philosophers such as Kant or Freud see scent as dangerous, undermining uniquely human agency, Nietzsche and Simmel understand the rare affordances among the senses that scent presents for honing human intuitions beyond ordinary cultural filters. In entering into relations with plants by drinking in their smell, this inebriation enables humans to bypass the separation of self indicative of discrete animal bodies and empowered to grow-with the inter-species intelligence animating shared environments. Rife with humour – the lightness characteristic of plant being – Jitterbug Perfume simultaneously proffers a serious, compelling fantasy that chafes against the primacy of anthropocentric sensing for accessing and assimilating information.4

  Information Technology: A Plant’s Point-of-View

  Robbins’s embrace of plant consciousness offers a refreshing future imaginary in contrast to contemporary digital dystopias of becoming gods over machines for that brief moment before they make slaves out of their makers. The coming age of plant consciousness the novel promises, presents us with a fantastic evolution of non-domination, realising humanity’s full capacities by tapping into the abundance of energy from the sun, an elemental pairing restoring our evolutionary radicles. Rather than a digital notion of infinite copies, a plant’s unfurling is portrayed as an analogue process far from the totalitarian sameness of a standardised artificial intelligence. Jitterbug Perfume offers a utopian vision of the animal brain’s potential when connected to its latent plant brain. As our human brains focus more on smell, the story goes, we unlock more memories and our capacity for memory, enabling immortal life through an olfactory sublime.

  This next evolutionary stage for humanity heralds an age of the floral brain, for the story’s wunderkind perfumer Marcel LeFever. He is a queer character indeed, epitomising this cosmology by declaring that ‘flowers have a direct line to God that an evangelist would kill for’.5 LeFever’s understanding of information technologies is thoroughly biological and coalescent compared to the mimetic and acquisitive variety fawned over in Silicon Valley. He expounds:

  We live now in an information technology. Flowers have always lived in an information technology. Flowers gather information all day. At night, they process it. This is called photosynthesis. As our neocortex comes into full use, we too, will practice a kind of photosynthesis. (p. 321)

  Transpositioning the scala naturae so that plant processes become aspirational and superior to current human abilities resonates with recent hotly contested discussions of ‘plant neurobiology’ amongst plant biologists. Plants’ root system hormone auxin has controversially been compared as the plant analogue to human neurotransmitters, and plant roots to our human dendrites.6 If plants have their own versions of brains, then what might plants know that we have yet to conceive?

  A first step in overcoming anthropocentric notions of intelligence is to privilege the previously overlooked intelligence of other species, and allow that their particular manner of composition and mode of comportment, however strikingly different from our own, may not necessarily be inferior.7 But the next step, which turns notions of ‘“neural” upside-down’, goes beyond the extensionist framework of intelligence reliant on (the Vitruvian) Man as the impossible and abstract standard.8 The plant biologists František Baluška and Stefano Mancuso stress that ‘we should be aware that any living unit equipped with complex sensory systems and organs is “constructing” its own world-view which might be radically different, but principally not better or worse, from our human-specific world views’.9 In their estimation, the particular nervous system and brain structure that mammals employ are expressions of the fundamental neural capacities of all life from bacteria to plants. The adaptive behaviour and learning constitutive of even ‘basic’ single-celled organisms in deciding which items are food (or not), predators, and the like, suggest that neural structures can be composed in potentially infinite ways. The human brain, mighty as it is in creating, abstracting and hypostatising, then becomes but one model for achieving the functions it performs. In differing levels of complexity, ‘brains’ of all sorts permeate the bodies of organisms, often and probably necessarily indistinguishably, even if their decision-making parts look nothing like ours.

  Terence McKenna once opined that ‘animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around’. Such a perspective digests vestigial pretensions of hierarchy in the tree of life. The controversial claims in plant neurobiology that the ‘neuro’ aspect privy to animals (and especially humans) situated safely in the brains we all know and love (and can easily identify as brains) also extend analogously to the root systems of plants (including overlapping neurotransmitters between the two kingdoms),10 is curiously inverted in perfumer Marcel LeFever’s insights in Jitterbug Perfume. Rather than plants being incomplete animals, as Aristotle had it, animals are incomplete plants.11 For LeFever, our brains are on the cusp of awakening our true plant nature, but this is only possible through overcoming our animal brutishness and embracing the floral potentials of our aromatically enhanced plant selves.

  As glimmers indicative of this photosynthetic age, microbiologist Øjvind Moestrup has commented how the ‘division between plants and animals is collapsing completely’ as new ‘hybrids’ such as the newly discovered species Mesodinium chamaeleon that Moestrup helped classify are neither clearly animal nor plant, but contain elements from both kingdoms.12 The vertiginous bewilderment of hybrid, plural beings, fractalises not just through biological discoveries, but ramifies throughout conceptual systems. Mard
er’s methodology of ‘weak thought’ – the ability to philosophise diagonally without relying on the metaphysics of a steady and unbreakable gilded cage couched in a single author’s conceptual system or final cosmology13 – is indicative of the nature of plant-thinking. Weak thought, or il pensiero debole, resists the systematisation of thought into grand architectonic schemas.14 Such lockdown systems perpetuate ‘violence’ through ‘metaphysical impositions, which aim to submit everything to their own measures, standards, and agendas’.15 Weak thought’s progenitor Gianni Vattimo favours synthesising epistemic models, or what he calls a generative ‘contamination of thought’ (pensiero della contaminazione).16 Weak thought proposes that the very recognition of our already ensconced and porously plural self lays the possibility for the emergence of a genuine subject.

  This growing sense amongst plant biologists that plants inhabit a sentient space in their habitats,17 making meaning of their surroundings through their unique sensory structures, is borne out in the central role in which beets organise time and space in Robbins’s novel. The beet itself acts as a strange attractor guiding human action, rather like Michael Pollan’s phenomenological treatment of plants cultivating humans to propagate them.18 The tale of four plants in Pollan’s Botany of Desire inverts subject–object relationships between plants and people to highlight the agency plants have in appealing to human desires and drives to lure us into doing their bidding. This Pollanian notion of plants commanding their own motivations and desires, following their own telos, intentions, and purposive action infuses Jitterbug Perfume’s iterations of humans’ own plant-like future. In a soliloquy, LeFever explains: ‘There is also the possibility that all of what we call mental telepathy is olfactory. We don’t read another’s thoughts, we smell them’ (p. 325). The central question Robbins poses then becomes: What are humans like when our primary encounter with the world and ourselves is, like a plant’s, through smell?