The Mediated Plant

Jean Epstein, “Photogénie de l’impondérable” (1935), in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 1 (Seghers, 1974), 250.

Val Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice,” Australian Humanities Review, no. 46 (2009): 127–28.

I warmly thank Margarida Mendes: it was during one of our many discussions on plant life that the notion of the “mediated plant” appeared to me. The exhibition Plant Revolution!, curated by Mendes, opens at Centro Internacional das Artes José Guimarães on October 19, 2019.

Val Plumwood, “Review of Deborah Bird Rose’s Reports from a Wild Country,” Australian Humanities Review, no. 42 (2007): 1.

See, among others, Harriet Ritvo, “On the Animal Turn,” Daedalus 136, no. 4 (2007); and Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (Columbia University Press, 2012). See also the “Animal Turn Collection” at Michigan State University Press.

See Val Plumwood’s Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (Routledge, 2002) for an instructive comment on the environment’s backgrounding and denial as a major rationalist strategy.

I’m thinking of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Greystone Books, 2016); and of New Zealand’s 2014 move to grant legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest, which now owns itself. Countries such as India and Colombia have granted rights to rivers, and in 2008 Ecuador conferred rights upon nature in its constitution.

See, among others, Mathew Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (SUNY Press, 2011); Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013); and Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Polity Press, 2018). Marder rejects the idea of a “formal plant-intelligence,” preferring to envisage the “non-conscious life of plants” as a “kind of ‘thinking before thinking’” (p. 154). For an ethical and political discussion of the forest, see Jean-Baptiste Vidalou, Être-forêt: Habiter des territoires en lutte (Éditions la Découverte, 2017).

On chlorophyll transfusions, see the Spanish collective Quimera Rosa’s performance “May the Chlorophyll Be With/In You” →. Austrian artist Georg Tremmel and Japanese artist Shiho Fukuhara reverse engineered a genetically modified variety of a carnation, the blue Moondust, designed by Japanese brewing company Suntory (The Common Flowers Project, 2009).

See Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013), whose title refers to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s classical How Natives Think (1910); and Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).

“Plant neurobiology” is associated with the work of Italian biologist Stefano Mancuso, who currently runs the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence, founded in 2005. See, among others, his book with Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (Insland Press, 2015). On the idea of plant “awareness,” see Daniel Chamovitz’s What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). The author prefers the notion of “awareness” to “intelligence,” which he considers a “loaded term”—which British biologist Anthony Trewavas embraces in Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford University Press, 2014) and which French biologist Francis Hallé comments on in the more conventional In Praise of Plants (Timber Press, 2002). In French, see also Jacques Tassin, À quoi pensent les plantes? (Odile Jacob, 2016).

Jeremy Narby, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge (Penguin, 2005).

As Davi Kopenawa’s words on the forest perfectly show—see Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Belknap Press, 2013).

Peter Skafish, “The Metaphysic of Extra-Moderns: On the Decolonization of Thought—A Conversation with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” Common Knowledge 22, no. 3 (September 2016), 412.

Catherine Lenne, Olivier Boudeau, and Bruno Moulia, “Percevoir et bouger: les plantes aussi,” Pour la Science, no. 438 (April 2014), 47.

In 2008, a restaurant in Kamakura, Japan, hooked a sweetheart plant called Midori-san to sensors recording the plant’s temperature and levels of light and moisture received throughout the day. An algorithm then translated the information into sentences posted on a blog. See →.

See Monica Gagliano, Michael Renton, Martial Depczynski, et al., “Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters,” Oecologia 175, no. 1 (2014): 63 →. Chamovitz also discusses “plant memory” in his What a Plant Knows.

Wendy Djin Geniusz, Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings (Syracuse University Press, 2009); and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2015).

Marder, Plant-Thinking, 153–62.

Paul Bert, Recherches sur le mouvement de la Sensitive (Mimosa Pudica, Linn.) (Baillère et Fils, 1867).

Women, whose upper-class representatives were eventually allowed to study botany during the nineteenth century after endless debates on the appropriateness of Linnaeus’s highly sexual classification system to the decorum of the “female mind,” were generally limited to the collection, preparation, and drawing of botanical specimens, with British botanist Henderina Victoria Scott providing at least one example of a female scientific film pioneer.

Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants (John Murray, 1880), 573.

See Biocentrism and Modernism, eds. Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel Wünsche, (Routledge, 2011).

The German plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer made four time-lapse films between 1898 and 1900, corroborating some of Darwin’s contested ideas on plant sensitivity and irritability. The films are viewable at →.

As Oliver Gaycken puts it with regards to early time-lapse cinematography on plant motion, “The revelation of seeing plant movement accelerated to the point of visibility via a technical device opened up new pathways for thinking about the relationship between plants and animals, and thus provided evidence for an argument for a kinship previously posited but never before apprehended.” Oliver Gaycken, “The Secret Life of Plants: Visualizing Vegetative Movement 1880–1903,” Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 1 (February 2012): 58.

Boris Bilinsky, “Le costume,” in L’Art Cinématographique (Félix Alcan, 1929), 56.

Epstein, “Photogénie de l’impondérable,” 251.

Jean Epstein, “Intelligence d’une machine” (1946), in Écrits sur le cinéma, vol. 2 (Seghers, 1974), 285.

Raoul Heinrich Francé, Les Sens de la plante (1911) (Adyar, 2003), 93.

Colette, “Cinéma (Magie des films d’enseignement)” (1924), in Colette et le cinéma (Fayard, 2004), 369.

The film, entitled The Strangler (1930), can be watched here: →.

Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice,” 127.

Aude Michelet and Charles Stépanoff, “Comment l’anthropomorphisme nous a rendus humains: L’anthropomorphisation des animaux et des nourrissons et ses impacts dans l’évolution,” Persona: Étrangement humain, ed. Aude Gros de Beler (Actes Sud / Musée du quai Branly, 2015), 45–46.

Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 59.

Skafish, “Conversation with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,” 410.

I’m referring to the recent DC Comics web television adaptation of The Swamp Thing saga. The Swamp Thing is a vegetal monstrous body, whose shape resembles a male human body. It can communicate with “the Green,” a sort of vegetable consciousness connecting all plant life in the universe.

Natasha Myers, “Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonizing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000 year-old NaturalCultural Happening,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3, no. 2 (2017): 7.

Michael Pollan, “The Intelligent Plant,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2013 →.

Arthur W. Galston and Clifford L. Slayman, “The Not-So-Secret Life of Plants,” American Scientist 67, no 3 (May–June 1979), 337–44.

Retallack mentions in her book having been intrigued by Franklin Loehr’s The Power of Prayer on Plants (1959).

Listen to “Same Old Story” here →.

Among other places, this comeback is evident in the contemporary art scene, as illustrated by two different group exhibitions inspired by the book/film/Stevie Wonder record: “The Secret Life of Plants,” held at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Melbourne, in 2009 →; and “The Secret Life of Plants,” held at Freight + Volume, New York, in 2017 →. British artist Will J. Robinson has also conceived an installation inspired by Backster: “The Backster Experiment.”

On films such as The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951), It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), From Hell It Came (Dan Milner, 1957), The Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman, 1960), The Day of the Triffids (Steve Sekely, 1963), etc., see Adam Knee, “Vegetable Discourses in 1950s Science Fiction Film,” in Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, eds. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016); and Joni Adamson and Catriona Sandilands, “Thinking Plant Politics with The Day of the Triffids,” in The Language of Plants, eds. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). To my knowledge, an essay focusing on the caricatured gender dimensions of some of these films has yet to be written …

This expression was preferred over “extrasensory perception” by “communist scientists,” according to a CIA report on Soviet and Czechoslovakian parapsychology research, dated April 15, 1975 →. See also Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, a 1970 compilation of weird stuff by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder (Prentice Hall).

Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants (Avon Books, 1974), 81.

The experience is documented in Walon Green’s film. It’s interesting to compare Mrs. Hashimoto experiment with John Baldessari’s 1972 video piece Teaching the Alphabet to a Plant (an exercise in futility and the absurd). See also Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky’s 2017 film Conversation with a Cactus.

See Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936,” Social Text, no. 11 (1984).

See Denise Grady and Jan Hoffmann, “States Turn to an Unproven Method of Execution: Nitrogen Gas,” New York Times, May 7, 2018 →. With regard to Chile’s nitrate fields, see Daniel A. Gross, “Caliche: The Conflict Mineral That Fuelled the First World War,” The Guardian, June 2, 2014 →.

Matthew Vollgraff, “Vegetal Gestures: Cinema and the Knowledge of Life in Weimar Germany,” Grey Room, no. 72 (Summer 2018). On The Miracle of Flowers see also Janelle Blankenship, “‘Film-Symphonie von Leben und Sterben der Blumen’: Plant Rhythm and Time-Lapse Vision in Das Blumenwunder,” Intermédialités, no. 16 (2010).

Plumwood, “Review of Deborah Bird Rose,” 1.