Radical Friends: Botany and Us

Erin Obodiac (bio)

A review of Meeker, Natania and Antónia Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction. Fordham UP, 2020.

In The Groves of Academe (1952), Mary McCarthy begins her campus novel with a Latin epigraph from Horace: Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum (and seek for truth in the garden of Academe, Epistle II, ii, 45). From its beginning, academia—the grove of sycamore and olive trees in Attica named after its original landowner Academus where Plato later conducted his lectures—thus fuses figures of man, plant, and philosophy. Yet Epistle II, ii, addressed to Julius Florus, is perhaps no less satirical about academia than McCarthy’s novel: having failed, amidst “so great noise both by night and day,” to deliver some florid verses to Julius, Horace observes dismissively that “poets love the grove, and avoid cities.” Apparently, the garden of academe, as well as the truth, is already beside the point in the first century BCE. At this late hour, nonetheless, professors Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari of USC speculate on the silvas itself, and wager that the classical monoculture of arborescent man and arborescent philosophy has been uprooted by modernity’s radical botany, which engenders both rhizomatic posthumans and rhizomatic philosophies. Bursting through the centuries-tilled exceptionalism of human life and logos, the strange vitality of vegetality—one that is peculiarly inorganic—animates the speculative fruits of modernity’s science, fiction, technology, and art, according to Meeker and Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction is therefore not merely a new academic book,¹ but a rear-guard action that mobilizes critical plant studies to re-imagine the cosmos and cosmotechnics of modern life.

Perhaps more modestly, Meeker and Szabari also envision radical botany as a practice that cultivates new modalities of research and collaboration within academia itself:

With our book, we affirm that there is a vegetal dimension to the practice of collaboration. While experimenting concretely with that practice, we were forced to accept that our work process and its outcome were no longer tied to an individual sense of self, nor did they affirm our limits or boundaries as individual scholars. (vii)

Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s precepts of “becoming-plant,” “rhizome,” and “follow the plants,” Meeker and Szabari pledge their allegiance to vegetal allies whose mode of being is “neither individuated nor autonomous but collective, swarming, multiple” (xi). This distributive, emergent, non-hierarchical assemblage (whether plant, insect, or technology) has become the familiar of many new materialist discourses in their attempt to invoke a mode of being and relation that deprivileges human subjectivity while expanding the confluence of actants. Is this philosophical shift from Academus the man to Academe the grove—which, according to Radical Botany, emerges in (specifically French) seventeenth-century early modernity—simply a celebratory “turn,” or, more soberly, a “catastrophe”?

The question can be reframed by taking a quick look at this “radical” of botany whereby plants are our allies and collaboration is itself vegetal. The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that radical is already and originally a botanical term: “Late 14c., in a medieval philosophical sense, from Late Latin radicalis ‘of or having roots,’ from Latin radix (genitive radicis) ‘root’ (from PIE root wrad ‘branch, root’). Meaning ‘going to the origin, essential’ is from 1650s.” We see that the word radical concerns the root, the chthonic origin, the essence; indeed, the radical concerns the essence of the word, “the root part of a word.” Radical botany is therefore botanical to the roots: there are no Persons, only Plants, in the silvas academi. This confluence of speculative substitutions and supplements is already reflected upon by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1782. In the Dialogues, he finds himself foregoing human friends for botanical ones, and laments that “he would have left the supplement for the thing, if he had had the choice, and he was reduced to converse with plants only after vain efforts to converse with human beings” (qtd. in Derrida 148). Suspecting the implications of this predicament over the supplement and the thing for Rousseau’s philosophy and philosophy in general—whether writing in lieu of speech or plant in lieu of human being—in Of Grammatology, Derrida writes: “that botany becomes the supplement of society is more than a catastrophe. It is the catastrophe of the catastrophe.” (148). The irrecoverability of the logos is radical; there is always already only supplement. In Derrida’s landmark reading of Rousseau, “writing will appear to us more and more as another name for this structure of supplementarity” (245) and any gesture to “separate originarity from supplementarity” (243 points to an “originary supplement.” That Rousseau has no choice but to supplement the human being with the plant suggests that the plant is an “originary supplement” or a “radical friend,” if we heed the botanical meaning of the word “radical.”² Although Meeker and Szabari follow Deleuze rather than being led down Derrida’s phyto-deconstructive garden path, they give to the plant a kind of radical priority that retrieves its peculiar vitality and animation from the margins (no longer mere Aristotelian threptikon or nutritive capacity of the vegetal soul) and dislodges the humanistic imperative from its lofty bell tower (the perpetual echo chamber of reason’s sovereignty). Going further, Radical Botany suggests that the “plant turn” is a companion vibrant materialism, one that signals an emergent phytocene in the wake of the anthropocene: “In its approach to the plant as a figure for the animation of matter in general, radical botany allows us to think the calamity (for us) of human insignificance together with the intensity of our desire for recognition and the dream of multispecies attachments and solidarities” (6). Despite the cosmic dimensions of the Plant Turn, Meeker and Szabari remain close to their disciplinary field and begin their account of radical botany thus “in seventeenth-century France with the gradual development of a botanically oriented thought that accords power and vitality to vegetal life in ways that trouble orthodox modes of classification” (1).

From Aristotle’s de Anima onward, plant life has often been classified as poor in (or entirely without) intelligence compared to human life, and poor in (or entirely without) perception compared to animal life. Even so, this apparent catatonia and anesthesia have incited speculation that plants point to the limits of understanding life in anthropomorphic and zoomorphic terms. Vegetal lives, write Meeker and Szabari, “compel us to imagine an ingeniously animated and animating matter that we are never able to observe in all its operations. Within this framework, the plant becomes capable of unleashing speculative energies for envisioning and indeed participating in the world as other than it may appear to us” (3). The poverty of vegetal life incites our imagination to envision other worlds, or rather, becomes a nonhuman speculum that supplements human imagination. Meeker and Szabari observe both the “tradition that conceives of vegetal life as resisting representability” and the insight that plant life “participates in the production of new representational modes, including the novel, early cinema, and contemporary virtual reality, and new affects, including queer desires, feminist affinities, and ecological solidarities” (2). The birth of a “vegetal subject” hence occurs in arabesque tandem with a vegetal modernity that models a new representational framework for animated matter.

For seventeenth-century (French) materialist thought, plants offer “a mode of life that is entirely immanent,” that is to say, “without a hidden or transcendent animating principle” (16). Taking as their example satirical narratives (from libertins eŕudits such as Cyrano de Bergerac) that carnivalize the dignity of the human person via plant figures that are both scandalously libidinal and indifferent, Meeker and Szabari see these works as a kind of Copernican turn for the order of life, whereby the plant is the exemplar of an entity “both vibrantly alive and fully material” (16) that “not only works as a tool with which to undermine anthropocentric narratives but as a key figure for the material life of the universe” (29). Yet, in an ambivalent gesture that becomes a strategy for their book as a whole, Meeker and Szabari begin the early chapter “Libertine Botany and Vegetal Modernity” with the works of Guy de La Brosse, who founded the Jardin de Roi, a kind of research garden expanding the (human) knowledge of plant chemistry for philanthropic purposes (botanical remedies for the poor). We see that this garden of the king is not only tethered to the scientific, social, and economic order of its time, but that La Brosse “retains the notion of the soul as an animating force” (ascribed to each individual plant), which leads Meeker and Szabari to the half-hearted concession that his “position is not a materialist one” (34). Attempting to recuperate the botanist’s exuberant assertion that plants, “the daughters of the earth,” are the first living things to receive the cosmic shower of “divine benediction,” Meeker and Szabari insist that “[i]f La Brosse invokes a divine rationality for being, he does so in order to give plants priority over all other forms of life” (36). This priority not only concerns the plant as an animated (ensouled) being but an animating being: the incorruptibility and immortality of the plant soul is made manifest, claims La Brosse, in experiments with palingenesis. The spectral scene of the ghost plant resurrecting itself from the ashes is deftly interpreted and linked by Meeker and Szabari to future technologies of visual materialization: “if this scene looks back to a tradition originating in alchemy, it also looks forward to techniques of animation three hundred years in the making—the time-lapse films of late nineteenth-century science and early cinema that animate the plant in an electric form” (39). Although perhaps no twenty-first century observer would see experiments in pallingenesis as an exhibition of the immortal, incorruptible soul of plants, making them a precursor to cinematic animation poses some questions: does not a (revisionist/retroactive) reading that turns something into a precursor suggest a teleological conception of history (Hegelian unfolding of spirit, etc.)? Does not any regime of visual representation—whether ghost plant rising up from the ashes in a glass vial or electric plant blossoming forth in time-based media—rely on a transcendental signified?

In order to manage the complications that arise in a materialist reading of the plant as a vegetal subject and the emergence of a vegetal modernity, Meeker and Szabari mobilize speculative fiction as a genre and methodology. They designate “speculative fiction—narratives of life and sociability that go beyond anthropocentric and anthropomorphic limits” (48)—as vital materiality’s genre and the plant “as a key figure for the material life of the universe” (29). Yet Cyrano de Bergerac’s fantastic tale of the talking cabbage, for instance, though it might mock the dignities and illusions of the human person, does not make the “truth” of matter or vital materiality accessible.³ We might also see the peculiar vitality accorded to plants as more properly linguistic: according to Barbara Johnson’s Persons and Things, talking cabbages serve better to demonstrate the way rhetorical strategies like apostrophe, prosopopeia, anthropomorphism, and personification turn things into persons (and constitute human persons, in the first place). Radical Botany‘s chapter 3 sub-section “Plant-Human Analogies in the Eighteenth Century” directly addresses rhetoric by observing that eighteenth-century botany tends to anthropomorphize plants in order to put into question the hierarchies and categorization of various orders of life. The physiology and function of plant parts are likened to those of animals, suggesting “the development of a radical materialism that attacks ontological distinctions among life-forms as contested matters of belief rather than accepted truth” (58). And yet, in order to do so, botanists of this period had to give to the plant what belongs to the animal, particularly movement. This recuperative gesture did not go ignored by eighteenth-century materialists like Denis Diderot. Meeker and Szabari remark that the “tendency to privilege free will and autonomy of movement as sources of superiority is reconfigured by Diderot as a symptom of our inability to ascribe value to life-forms that do not resemble us” (59). In signature fashion, the structural arc of Radical Botany redoubles its own analysis: as early modern (French) speculative fictions turn to plants to explore the material life of the cosmos, they institute, on the one hand, a trajectory that includes cinematic animation as a form of life, and reinstitute on the other the manifest behaviors (primarily movement) of animal life as that which makes plants “alive.” This ambivalent framework helps to account for the disciplinary fractures and sutures of Radical Botany: for Meeker and Szabari, the early modern libertins eŕudits premediate early 20^th century avant-garde cinema even as their materialist fictions remediate the philosophical terms and principles of classical philosophy (distinctions between plants and animals, materiality and immateriality, organic matter and inorganic matter).

What mediates this double premediation and remediation? The chapter on “The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden” tells us, unsurprisingly, that Romanticism provides the mediation, configured as mutuality. The Romantic botanist imagines a “plant life that is vibrant on its own terms yet exquisitely responsive to human interests and preoccupations” (88). Taking Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Sensitive-Plant” as exemplary, however, Meeker and Szabari suspect that the Romantic plant’s sensitivity may be more of the order of photosensitivity than affective affinity for the human being: the wild and indifferent vitality of weeds runs amuck after the tandem expirations of gentle Lady Gardener and her cultivated garden companions. Vegetal life cares naught for the human person, but shares proximity with “modes of animation and vitality unrelated to and undefined by organisms and the life that they embody” (86). The photon-sensitive-plant will, by the twentieth century, find its true soul mate in the techno-photosynthesis of the cinema. Meeker and Szabari trace this alliance by way of a “detour through a North American tradition of speculative botany. … [Edgar Allan] Poe’s texts in particular will be of inspiration to French symbolism (including the poetic arabesques of Charles Baudelaire) and, through this line of transmission, early avant-garde French cinema” (87). In The House of Usher, Poe takes heed of the dark side of the plant—its creeping excess, its slimy vitality, its evil flowers, its horrifying indifference—which casts an alien shadow on any sense of human temporality, achievement, or society. The crowning glory of human reason is no match for “the sentience of all vegetal things” (Poe, qtd. 98), which invades the human kingdom, penetrating even its inanimate structures and artifacts, engendering a vital mineralogy. In Poe’s macabre view, plants represent not only an inhuman vitality, but an undead or inanimate one as well. The uncannily green luminosity of the swamp bespeaks the electric glow of the emergent cinema and shares in its phantasmatic animations. As the “inorganic life” of the vegetal overtakes the house of Usher, Meeker and Szabari observe that, “[un]like much Gothic fiction,” this villain does not represent a “paternal authority turned cruel and terrifying but a force or mode of life that dissolves this authority altogether. In the process, vegetality is revealed as the agent of the disintegration of genealogies that should otherwise preserve distinctions according to a familial logic” (109). Meeker and Szabari see the fall of the house, the oikos, as ushering in a potential phyto-politics, one with feminist possibilities.

Like other gestures in Radical Botany, grounding a feminist politics upon the vibrant materiality of the vegetal is pursued with speculative ambivalence. Taking up a short story influenced by Poe—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Giant Wistaria” (1891)—Meeker and Szabari propose that

continuities between Poe’s and Gilman’s writings suggest that the materiality of the vegetal can contribute to the speculative invention of feminist topographies that do not necessarily have recourse to the privileging of female or feminine identity. Within the limits of a critique shot through with white supremacism, Gilman nonetheless suggests some of the promise Poe’s vision of vegetal contamination could hold for feminism. (111)

Attention must be given to this word “nonetheless,” which occurs in Radical Botany 171 times, most tellingly in the title of the final chapter, “Becoming Plant Nonetheless.” The term habituates a recuperative strategy that is rhetorically innocuous in some cases—serving to uncover the compatibility of apparently incompatible alternatives—and politically charged in others. In the above example (the term’s twentieth deployment in the book), “nonetheless” allows for a problematic salvaging. Many readers have learned that phrases like nonetheless, in spite of, or nevertheless mask a more consequential “because of.” We may wonder why Meeker and Szabari’s analysis doesn’t take a different path—perhaps mapping out any link between the materiality of the vegetal and racism—or worry that only a white feminism could ever salvage a critique enmeshed with white supremacy. The “promise” of the transfer of vegetal vitality from the non-human to the human in new materialist discourses is a speculative performance that we should keep both our eyes on. Meeker and Szabari appear to have one eye on the situation when they write:

The figure of the horrific plant, both supporting and dismantling the house, suggests a feminist rewriting of Poe’s “Usher,” but it is important in this context to acknowledge the racist and classist aspects of Gilman’s corpus, including the fact that her public critique of patriarchy remains imbued with xenophobia. (111)

If the promise of radical botany has fraught political limits, it (nonetheless?) retains speculative and critical energies with regard to “scientific, technological, and mediatic engagement with vegetal life” (113). Meeker and Szabari regain a note of hope when the final chapters of their book turn to early twentieth-century experimental French cinema (Jean Comandon, Jean Epstein, and Germaine Dulac), which “takes the possibility of a vegetal sentience and transfigures it, suffusing it with transformative affect, to make it once again a joyous and galvanizing object” (113). The sign of this vegetal sentience is plant movement made visible with such techniques as time-lapse cinematography. The cinema not only animates the plant in this fashion, but also shares with it a kind of inorganic life: “[t]he ‘electric plant’ brings to fruition the concept of cinema as a form of pure movement” (115) and “the movement of the plant comes to stand for cinema’s ability to show (and transmit) the liveliness of the universe” (116). The cinema is itself a form of vegetal life, which is paradigmatic of vital materiality for Meeker and Szabari. As we have seen, however, the indifferent vitality of vegetal life can easily take root in politically problematic narratives: indifference is not a condition or consequence of equality. So when Meeker and Szabari deploy another “nonetheless”—this time with a chapter that begins its exploration of “the vegetal moment” in cinema with Abel Gance’s critical and commercial failure La Fin du monde, a film about the Earth’s collision course with a comet that “only features plants tangentially” (115) but is “nonetheless a spectacular exploration of the social repercussions of the impending cataclysm” (114)—readers might be keen on understanding which disavowed narrative or framework embeds this recuperative nonetheless.

In a strangely passing remark, Meeker and Szabari mention the “deeply eurocentric idealism” (114) of the film “even as” it “harkens back to an Enlightenment universalism” (114). It appears that the void carved out by the cataclysmic impact of the comet enables a “newly universalist political order” that leaves “an Edenic earth from which most human life has been erased” (115) and is, in effect, a eurocentric void. As Meeker and Szabari proceed to their presentation of the vegetal moment in interwar French cinema, they intend “both to embrace and to rethink the social project with which cinema is so clearly invested in La Fin du monde,” stating that “vegetal life often does the work that the comet is meant to undertake in La Fin du monde: bringing about momentous social transformation” (115). Readers may wonder: does the opening up of the vegetal world by early (French) cinema with its delightful time-lapse photography (etc.) happen by way of a racialized excavation? In the case of the electric-plant, the carving out of its life-world might not happen “in spite of” a framing narrative of white supremacy or eurocentrism—more likely it happens as a technological determination of the cinematic apparatus—yet we may recall Walter Benjamin’s observation that cinema prepares the human being for cybernetic relations of all sorts.⁴ A machinic mode of animation informs the inorganic life of the cinema as well as the plant. For instance, Meeker and Szabari poetically express the way time-lapse techniques “create an ‘electric vegetable,’ a filmic ghost that moves and gesticulates in uncanny but compelling ways. A phantom of the cinematic apparatus is thus born, a stunning animated plant” (120). Making visible the slow movements and temporalities of the vegetal, the cinema does not turn the plant into an animetaphor, but unveils the machinic animism of the cosmos. If the heliotropic opening of daisies, the dandelion blooming, and the germinating grain of wheat—movements performed without volition, perception, or consciousness—share an affinity with the animating movements of the cinematic apparatus, they also signal “the dramatic loss of the world of human experience” (144).

The penultimate chapter, “Plant Horror: Love Your Own Pod,” attends to the anxieties concerning this plant takeover and a planet absent of the human being. Shifting their focus from interwar French cinema to post-WWII American horror movies set in Southern California (in particular, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers franchise), Meeker and Szabari up the ante with their strategy of the nonetheless: in a world of vegetal and flat ontologies, what does it matter if you are a human being or a pod-person? Bypassing a possible racial allegory in the takeover of suburbia by alien pods, the authors set forth a materialist valuation of the merits of becoming-pod. In a world that is always already capitalist, neoliberal, and global,

the world of the replicas, or bad copies, is not just alienating or melancholic—a zone of nostalgia for an absent original—but is a fully material world capable of transforming, producing, and reproducing itself. The pods are thus not only representatives of the workings of an increasingly rhizomatic capitalism. The film preserves a materialist aspect, in which matter is not only instrumentalized but also world-making in its own right. (165)

This vibrant matter releases human inhabitants and

redeems them from a drab existence. It is the latter experience that our materialist reading of the film underscores. Gradually, the images of flaccid, plantlike humans are reinjected with an excess of life, thanks to the invasion; the alien beings bring with them the promise of not only biological vitality but a vigorous efflorescence that can be substituted for the failed utopia represented by the multiethnic and multicultural but well-policed and ultimately fairly homogenous San Francisco. (165)

This failed utopia concerns the university as well as the city: in the silvas academi, posthuman and nonhuman materialisms like radical botany promise to reinvigorate dialectical, historical, and other “outdated” humanistic materialisms. Yet if “coanaesthesis” (124) is the modality of collaboration modeled by vegetal life, do we really want to be anaesthetized together, living in synaesthetic oblivion like peas in a pod, Body Snatcher style? Is not this Green Coma or Green Catatonia just as disturbing as the eco-fascist human-plant symbiosis exhibited in the recent Swedish film Midsommar or in the 1973 American film Soylent Green? Doubling down on its speculative optimism, Radical Botany leaves us with the chapter “Becoming Plants Nonetheless,” and one can’t help but wonder from where it derives its amiable buoyancy: as long as it is plant-based, I may want to try some myself.

Erin Obodiac Erin Obodiac received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine and has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Leeds, SUNY Albany, Cornell University, and SUNY Cortland. She currently lectures in the UC Irvine-Dalian University of Technology joint program. Her writings assemble residual questions from the deconstructive “legacy” with emergent discourses in technics and animality, media ecology, and machinic subjectivity. She is completing a book called Husserl’s Comet: Cinema and the Trace, which repositions deconstruction within the history of cybernetics and machinic life.

Footnotes

1. As scholars of French literature, Meeker and Szabari don’t mention that the German word Buch comes from the word for beechwood trees.

2. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida follows this predicament of the “o my friends, there is no friend” (2).

3. Catherine Malabou’s recent critique of speculative materialism and new materialism notices that matter is the new transcendental signified.

4. Benjamin writes: “Film serves to train human beings in apperceptions and reactions caused by the interaction with technology [Apparatur] whose importance in their lives grows almost daily” (qt. in Hansen 314).

Works Cited

• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, Fortieth Anniversary Edition, 2016.
• —. The Politics of Friendship. Translated by George Collins, Verso, 1995.
• Hansen, Miriam. “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 2, Winter 1999.