Towards Plant Humanities: Changing Perspectives on the
Botanical World in Literature
Dr. Erfan K.,
Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
School of Humanities,
MIT Art, Design and Technology University,
Pune, Maharashtra, India.
Abstract: Humanities, as a discipline, conventionally centers on human
issues, now gesturing towards an interdisciplinary nature, has evolved to an
extent where it can even encompass discourses on non-human entities like
animals and plants. The development of ‘Plant Humanities’ as an academic field
underscores the inevitability of incorporating botanical life into
philosophical, cultural and ethical discourses. As an evolving
interdisciplinary field, due to the flourishing of fields such as ecocriticism,
environmental humanities, and plant humanities, the discourse on plant ontology
dispels the anthropocentric biases through the attribution of sensitivity and
agency to plant life. Theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Michael Marder offer
frameworks that problematise hierarchical dualism and reimagines botanical
existence beyond passive ontology. The literary representations in different
genres, especially poetry as a genre offers new perceptions in tandem with the
contemporary perspective on them, stressing the necessity for new ethical and
intellectual considerations in the vegetal world.
Keywords: Plant Humanities, Botany, Human-Centrism,
Environment, Literature
Introduction
Going beyond the traditional anthropo-centric views, plant
humanities contribute to the academic advancement of humanities, incorporating
vegetal world as rich domain of philosophical, cultural and ethical
enquiry. As it is an interdisciplinary
field, a convergence of ecocriticism, plant studies and environmental
humanities, it interrogates the idea that plants are passive and silent and
introduces that the plant world possess agency, activism and sensitivity.
Theorists like Deleuze, Guattari and Marder dismantle the Western metaphysics
based on binaries and hierarchical structures, introducing a new mode of
ontology based on rhizomatic structures. Literature, most importantly, the
genre of poetry plays a crucial role in reconceptualising the vegetal world and
its reciprocity with the human world. The researches in the field of plant
humanities open up intellectual, aesthetic and ethical ways to reconfigurate
human-nonhuman reciprocity in the time of ecological challenges.
Discussion
The discipline of ‘humanities’ originally is a human-centric
discourse, reviving of which is necessary as humans are alienated themselves
due to the overwhelming impact of technological intrusion to human affairs. In
such a juncture along with reviving human values, it extends its reach to an
extent where it can even accommodate non-human categories like animals and
plants. As a result of this integrated gesture, many concerned branches are
incorporated into the academic field and plant humanities is such a new label
which receives academic attention along with other related fields and
terminologies.
According to Caroline Cornish and Mark
Nesbitt: “Plant Humanities is thus an inherently interdisciplinary
project, where arts and humanities researchers are often in dialogue with
different ways of conceiving the relations between people and plants” (8). The interdisciplinary approach in the field
has received a renewed urgency in recent years due to the challenges ranging
from climate change, food security, biodiversity loss, and so on.
The new picture is that disciplines
in humanities engage in conversation with each other, like the interactions
between social science and natural science, which demonstrate the
interdisciplinary ambitions of the field. We recently witnessed the emergence of diverse fields in humanities
such as geohumanities, animal humanities, blue humanities, critical plants
studies and the like.
In the beginning, humanities included the animal discourses
into its fold and as an extension, the discourse of the vegetation and plants
was also annexed to it as a new domain of engagement. As Stark puts it, “while
much philosophical work on the nonhuman has focused on animals, objects,
forces, as well as the monstrous and the divine, it is only recently that
scholarly attention in the Humanities has been directed toward plants” (180).
Singer explains the reason behind the new
interest in animal discourses. In his words: “Attributing ideas of agency,
autonomy, percipience, and sentience to the non-human world strengthens the
standing of beings— including animals and plants—historically relegated to the
lower rungs of the chain of life” (Ryan 65).
In the last few years we have been attracted to vigorous
debates on the position of plants in the human system, such as their cultural
life and their representations in the academic and popular discourses. Human relationship
with the plants has been examined from ethical, cultural, historical, textual,
political and philosophical angles. The shifting attention to plant discourse
in humanities happened against the backdrop of emerging interest in the
discourses on nonhuman beings/entities in disciplines like animal studies,
ecophilosophy and ecocriticism.
The last two decades witnessed the emergence of
environmental humanities due to unprecedented scholarly interest in the field.
The traditional humanities disciplines, such as geography, history, philosophy,
archeology, literature and language studies, were combined in a new
interdisciplinary way. The scholars who engage in the field addressed human
engagement with nature, disregarding the conventionally made Western dichotomy
of nature and culture. The major conviction that led scholars to engage in the
field was that it can address the existing environmental crisis, as a result,
can form a new environmental awareness and ethics.
Plant humanities raise the question how “humans profoundly
interact with vegetation - consuming it as food, using it as medicine,
decorating their homes and cities with it, studying it, etc. While the science
of ecology has long been interested in studying plants and plant communities,
scholars in the environmental humanities bring the human interaction with
plants into focus” (Sabine Brauckmanna and Dolly Jorgensen 4). Ryan puts it
explicitly, how human life is closely associated with the plant world, “Human
beings breathe with plants every moment of our lives through a kind of
perpetual embodied dialogue: oxygen in, carbon dioxide out” (Ryan 61). As Ryan
observes, even though plants have vital importance in biosystems and human
life, human-centric discourses often disregard plant-lives, their desires, and
comforts. Due to its sessility, and silences, the vegetal world is often
relegated/dismissed to the categories of unsensing objects and disposable
things. Shedding light into the sensitivities of the plant lives, which had
been subjugated and silenced human intellectual histories, new interest in
plant humanities asserts an interdisciplinary approach to devise an ethics for
the human interactions with the botanical world. These new ethical frameworks
counterpoise the conventional anthropo-centric tendencies to present plant life
as mere objects to human consumption and sensory appreciation of its beauty.
As Ryan observes, plants are highly sensitive organisms that
“perceive, assess, interact and even facilitate each other’s life by actively
acquiring information from their environment” (qtd. in 64). Referring to its
sensitivities, he says: “in one study, mimosas (Mimosa pudica) ceased closing
their leaves when they realized that a recurring disturbance—in this case,
being dropped—led to no actually damaging outcomes ... Such an experiment
confirms the ability of plants to memorize information and coordinate
behavioral responses” (Ryan 64).
Disregarding the human-centric/ anthropocentric ideas, Ryan
speaks on “vegetal mode of being can accommodate the messiness of
human-plant-earth-animal-biosphere-time entanglements. Such a dialectics—which
collapses the binarisms of nature/culture, cause/effect, us/them”(68). This
introduces an inclusive perspective which can accommodate and merge many
categories which had been treated separately and prioritised one over the
other. The integration of humanities and
science can open up new perspectives to understand plants, transforming the
existing notions on plants in art, literature, politics, and culture. Such an
interdisciplinary and encompassing perspective on the botanical world is
required to have a balanced and justifiable approach to the vegetal world.
The emerging works on plants not only address the
relationship between humans and plants,
but also what plants do to our philosophical and metaphysical systems,
specifically how we deal with human and nonhuman entities in our system. In
this case, the plant ontology literally troubles the existing metaphysics.
Hence, this thinking about plants challenges the Western metaphysics as it
invites the scholars to rethink human relation to other forms of beings. As
Marder puts it, “As soon as we are willing to let go of these oppressive
values, we will come to realize that from the position of absolute exteriority
and heteronomy, plants accomplish a living reversal of metaphysical values, or
what Derrida terms “practical deconstruction of the transcendental effect,” and
thus contribute to the destabilization of hierarchical dualisms”. (55-56).
Deleuze and Guattari’s works provide great insights on plant
thinking. Their metaphor/figure of rhizome which is introduced in A Thousand
Plateaus is vegetal in every sense. The rhizome introduces a new mode of
being/ontology in the world. The rhizome introduces a conceptual
pattern/structure which ensures transversal connections, and in its absence, it
could have appeared as disparate things. This figure from the botanical/vegetal
world provides us with new structure which can show new connections between
dissimilar things. The plants can take different forms through their growth,
metamorphosis and entropy through the process of taking new offshoots and forms
and it is referred to as “wisdom of plants” by Deleuze and Guattari.
The resonance of Deleuzian ideas could be seen in Marder’s Plant
Thinking. Marder explores the idea of plant thinking and how humans
can participate in plant-thinking. He
says that plant’s thinking is non-essential, dispersed, non-representational, and
immanent. This version of thought is similar to Deleuze’s rhizomatic and
dispersed thinking so that it does not appear anthropocentric in nature.
Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas like the figure of the rhizome, in their model of
thinking, offer us a vegetal philosophy. One of the initial contributors in the
field, Marder takes a radical philosophical position in the case of plants. He
observes that plants had been historically treated as passive, inert,
background objects so that they were considered as lower life forms. This
thinking gave humans the validity and justification for their subjection and
consumption easily. Marder’s endeavor here is to challenge human conviction
that plants can unreservedly be exploited for human requirements.
As Marder himself suggests, it is impossible to get complete
access to the world of plants. Actually, the encounter with plants is an
encounter with alterity, hence, the transactions in the plant world remain
untranslatable for humans. All that we can do is engage with the edges of their
being. The ethical discussions on plants also bring debates on food politics.
Similar to the habit of eating meat in the West and the rest of the world, eating
plants is also a habitual practice and avoidance of which is somewhat
impossible. Marder’s position in this regard, as Stark puts it, is that we are
not supposed to stop eating plants but we need to create a habit to “eat like a
plant”.
Conventionally, in literature, plant life had been portrayed
as passive and stationary being. As a result of new discourses, the question on
plants’ agency and complexity emerged as a topic of debate which was overlooked
due to the prevailing anthropocentric perspectives. Studies in the botanical
field show that rapid and targeted actions are visible in some of the plants.
As white mulberry tree releases explosive pollen. New discourses in the field
undermine the age-old stereotypes of the plants as static and unresponsive
ontologies, demonstrating the vitality of the plant world.
Literary Treatments of Vegetal/Botanical World and Possible
Plant Discourses in Humanities
The contents in literary texts and their analyses can
provide new insights in the field of plant humanities. Among different literary
genres, poetry is one of the effective genres which can capture plant lives in
different perspectives. Poetry as a genre which enjoys the privilege of poetic
license, capable of representing the vegetal interactions/ transactions better
than any other genre can do. As part of analysing the treatment of plants in
literary texts, we can compare and contrast the treatments of plant life as
cases in Mary Colborne-Veel’s poem “Song of the Trees”and Toru Dutt’s “Our
Casuarina Tree”.
In “Song of the Trees”, Mary Colborne-Veel gives agency to
trees and unfolds the narrative from trees’ perspective. The initial
declaration in the poem –“We are the Trees” (105) -- marks a departure from human poetics and
provides trees’ narrative. The first stanza of the poem expresses trees’ unique
existence and communion with earth, sun and seasons which introduce an
ontological unity of these entities transcending human experience. Lines like “Our dark and leafy glade/Bands the
bright earth with softer mysteries” (105) reveal cosmological interconnections
of the vegetal world. Specifically, the use of “softer mysteries”(105)
indicates the mysterious relationship of trees with other elements in the
universe.
The second stanza
onwards, the poem deals with trees’ reciprocity with humans. The tree as a
speaker in the poem expresses how trees “grow for man’s desire” (105),
providing humans their “shelter, and food, and fire” (105) ensuring fruits and
dwelling for humans. The tree is presented in the poem as a provider and humans
as receivers and the trees are portrayed as companions of humans throughout
their life. This idea is clear in the lines: “We are the Trees/ Who travel
where he goes” (105). The line – “he wins through us” (106)-- denotes that
everything that humans acquire happens through trees, as the narrative in the
poem claims, even the well-built cities enormously employ wood of trees for the
construction and furniture. The lines “ we, his comrades still, since earth
began, / Wave mournful boughs above the grave of man, And coffin his cold breast” (106) manifest
the reciprocity of trees with humans from time immemorial and how trees even
intervene in different phases of an individual. Thus, trees in the poem become
characters who have close companionship with humans which extends even to the
grave. Through these descriptions, Colborne-Veel’s
ideas align with Marder’s ‘plant thinking’ and vegetal endurance which
dismantle the notion of human exceptionalism, anticipating an ecological ethic in
tandem with evolving ideas of plant humanities.
Toru Dutt’s Our Casuarina Tree similarly dramatises
human relationship with the botanical world. The thematic concern of the poem
is the poet’s childhood memories, loss of beloved ones and vitality of the
casuarina tree. The tree depicted in the poem is a symbol of remembrance in
which the past lingers a great amount.
The descriptions and images that Dutt provides on Casuarina
tree in the poem is like that of a living entity. The poem demonstrates the magnificent
and gigantic figure of the tree as a being that is surrounded by a lively
ecosystem consisting of birds, bees and flowers: “The giant wears the scarf,
and flowers are hung /In crimson clusters all the boughs among, / Whereon all
day are gathered bird and bee”(Our Casuarina). Though the poem is distinctive
for its description of its magnificence, its anthropo-centric intentions
surface in the later part of the poem. The anthropocentric attitude of the poem
becomes evident when the speaker says: “But not because of its magnificence/Dear
is the Casuarina to my soul:/ Beneath it we have played; though years may
roll,/ O sweet companions, loved with love intense,/ For your sakes, shall the
tree be ever dear”(Our Casuarina). As it is clear from the lines, the tree
becomes only a prop/background to showcase human relationships and emotions.
These blunt anthropocentric descriptions on the tree are against the general
positive attitude of the poem in its representation of the plant world.
Though in the form of a poetic exaggeration or metaphor, the
poem provides the tree a mode of agency as it considers it a speaking subject.
Through the description of the tree’s lament in the poem – “It is the tree’s
lament, an eerie speech/, That haply to the unknown land may reach” (Our
Casuarina)-- the poet attributes human emotions with the tree. The idea that
aligns with the new outlook of the plant ontology in the poem is the
dismantling of the conventional trend of caricaturing trees as stagnant and
immobile entities, without having any qualities of living beings.
These two poems, though involving anthropocentric viewpoints
and misrepresentations, showcase the importance of the literary genres in
demonstrating plant thinking. Similar analyses of literary texts in different
genres can demonstrate relevance of emerging academic fields like plant
humanities. As evident from the analysis, the literary field can contribute a
major share in advancing plant humanities as a solid academic field with more
serious literary engagements in the field.
Conclusion
The evolving discourses on plant humanities demonstrate a
paradigm shift in our conceptualisations of human-nonhuman reciprocity.
Disregarding the anthropocentric paradigm, the domain problematises the
dichotomies between nature and culture, agency and passivity and mobility and
fixity. The philosophical and
theoretical engagements with the vegetal world from Deleuze’s rhizomes to
Marder’s plant ontology provide insights on the responsive and dynamic being of
them. This new insight not only redefines the plant-human exchanges but also
urges for a reconsideration of their ecological responsibility and ethics.
Eventually, the Plant Humanities opens up new possibilities for integrating
humanistic and scientific perspectives, enabling a more inclusive and
ecologically directed intellectual tradition, which can even provide a
botanical framework to re-visit traditional and contemporary literary texts.
This new epistemology of the botanical and vegetal world resists anthropocentric
biases.
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