NATASHA MYERS

Excerpt from Masters Thesis

‘Body-fullness’ in Biology: Feminist Environmentalism Meets Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
York University, 2001
CHAPTER THREE
THE DEVELOPMENTAL DANCE
A Phenomenological Biology of
Plant Bodies, Movements and Metamorphoses

Things are much more marvelous than the scientific method

allows us to conceive.
Barbara McClintock,
in Evelyn Fox Keller, 1983: 203.

Ivy climbing a castle wall.

Oban, Scotland
DISPELLING CULTURAL-SCIENTIFIC MYTHS ABOUT PLANTS
Plants are a challenging starting place for any discussion of the agency and subjectivity of
nonhuman creatures. This is because plants have largely been excluded from consideration as
active, sentient beings. Without eyes, mouths or a central nervous system, many people can’t
even imagine what plant consciousness might be like.

Many exceptions to this exist, of course. There have been several significant (though
irreproducible) attempts to provide scientific evidence for the active, perceptual, behavioural and
even emotive capacities of plants. Tomkins and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants (1973), builds
on J.C. Bose’s evocative studies of the movement responses of plants to wounding (see
Paramanhansa Yogananda, 1946), and other studies that showed the emotional responses of
plants to different stresses. Richard Attenborough’s fantastic 6 hour documentary film series,
The Private Lives of Plants, in which he scours the world for weird and wonderful plant stories,
makes an important contribution to changing cultural attitudes to plants. In literature, Ursula Le
Guin offers insight into plant consciousness in several of her science fiction stories, particularly
in her story “Vaster than Empires and More Slow”(1987).

Paul Simons’ book, The Action Plant (1992), is another fascinating addition to the scientific
literature on plant movements. While he takes up an extremely mechanistic approach to plant
motor behaviours, what’s interesting is that his work is inspired by Charles Darwin’s extensive
observational studies of plant movements. Even Darwin recognized the intricate movements of
plants as behaviours: in 1897 he published a book entitled The Power of Plant Movements. These
contributions elicit the question: what do those who do have intimate contact with plants (e.g.
gardeners, farmers, biologists, etc.), actually think about them?1

As a biologist studying plant genetics and development, Barbara McClintock was particularly
attuned to the active lives of plants. Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) documents McClintock’s intimate
1
I would love one day to do a project collecting plant stories, drawings, poetry, and other media which might
suggest that people do have a sense of plant sentience. I wonder how influential the broad generalizations and
blinkered vision of mechanistic thinking is over people’s conceptions of plant life? Might their experiences be
telling them something different? And which story do they believe?
appreciation of plant lives, in her biography A Feeling for the Organism. According to Keller,
“our surprise is a measure of our tendency to underestimate the flexibility of living organisms.
The adaptability of plants tends to be especially unappreciated” (199). In McClintock’s words:
Animals can walk around, but plants have to stay still to do the same things, with
ingenious mechanisms…Plants are extraordinary…They can do almost anything
you can think of. But just because they sit there, anybody walking down the road
considers them just a plastic area to look at, as if they’re not really alive…actually
within the restricted areas in which they live, they move about a great deal…
[Plants] are fantastically beyond our wildest imaginations (in Keller, 1983: 199-
200, emphasis added).

Despite such passionate contributions, plants continue to be categorized in biology (and

philosophy and Western culture) as passive, sessile and mechanical creatures whose precarious
lives are completely at the mercy of external determinants for survival (i.e. availability of light,
water, nutrients). Plants appear relatively static and inert in contrast to the very apparent
mobility, activity and adaptive behaviours of animals whose “struggle” for the necessities of life
is readily visible to human eyes. Phenomenological biologist Hans Jonas plays right into such
preconceptions of plants in his essay “To Move and to Feel: On the Animal Soul” (1966). For
Jonas, plants are limited, evolutionarily unchallenged, sessile outgrowths that bathe freely and
unencumbered in their food and energy “resources.” What is very interesting about Jonas’s
conviction is that it comes directly out of his larger project to dismantle the Cartesian hierarchy
of humans over animals. His work nobly attempts the radical shift of “granting” the highest
faculties of “consciousness” and “intentionality” to animals. And yet the structure he puts in
place maintains this same hierarchy by excluding plants and other non-locomotive creatures from
this capacity for “soul-fullness.” Jonas’s argument for the animal “soul” is based on the
assumption that the “self” exists at a vast distance from the “other,” that there is a great divide
between subject and object in this world. This gulf for him is crossed only by the evolution of
locomotion, spurred on by the “great appetite” of metabolism. For him, this distance is crossed
only in hunger (pursuit by the hunter) or in fear (flight of the hunted). Movement evolves only as
a matter of necessity and survival. (For Jonas this distance between the hunter and the hunted is
also symbolic, generating the distant horizon that fuels the development of “desire” [for the
fulfillment of material necessity].)
For Jonas, this desire is satisfied by the evolution of perception, locomotion, and emotion; skills
developed exclusively in animals. He claims that plants do not experience this distance between
self and other. According to him, plants are bathed in all their metabolic needs, and thus never
want for sustenance, have no need for locomotion, perception (beyond a response to irritants) or
emotion. Because they are thought to passively absorb sustenance from their environment,
plants are considered “evolutionarily unchallenged” in comparison to animals. Caught up in such
binary oppositions as the dualism of mind and matter, the divine and the material, and subject
and object, he cannot conceive of plants as an active, sentient group of organisms. Jonas’s
conviction may have a lot to do with his lack of “experiential” evidence for the active lives of
plants, however it also shows a general lack of imagination to embrace the possibility. Needless
to say, I won’t be following Jonas’s example to explore the potential kinship between biology
and phenomenology.

PROCESS MORPHOLOGY: MOVING THROUGH PLANT METAMORPHOSIS

This denigration of plants to the (humanly constructed) world of objects is also reflected in
representations of plants in biology. Through its use of static, freeze frame imaging methods and
technologies, biology has upheld an “objectivist” view that inhibits our understanding of the
complexities, movements, dynamics and agency of plant lives. Indeed, as Neil Evernden points
out: “There are aspects of being a plant that science has not yet clarified, meaning that science
has not yet put into visual terms” (1985: 41, emphasis added). I agree. I find developmental
biology lacking in its ability to deal visually and conceptually with the more elusive aspects of
plant lives—those that lie beyond the visualization strategies and technologies that most
biologists employ.

The less visible aspects of plant life, those which might be more suggestive of their activity
rather than passivity, include the very slow movements plants enact throughout their growth
processes. Such slow movements cannot be captured, represented or communicated by the static
visualization technologies that biologists use. Rolf Sattler, a biologist (who has also actively
researched the history and philosophy of biology and a wide range of critiques of science [see
Sattler, 1986]), has developed a very different approach to the morphogenesis of plants that he
calls “process morphology” (1988; 1991; Sattler and Rutishauser, 1997). Sattler takes up the
idea that “form is process” (1988), with the implication that plant forms and structures are
continuously changing, growing, decaying, “differentiating” and “dedifferentiating” (1991: 708).
The static morphological concepts of “leaf,” “root” and “shoot” become obsolete with his
continuum approach that acknowledges the temporal dimensions of developmental change to
show the possibility that plant organs move through an extended series of structural
transformations throughout the course of their metamorphosis. Process morphology
acknowledges processes at all levels of organization, from genetic and biochemical, to structural,
environmental, temporal and historical, all of which are major influences in the genesis of form
(1991).

In taking up the approach of process morphology for this phenomenological biology, I am

challenged to move fluidly through the continuously morphing forms of a plant’s body that
change with time (see Colquhoun, 1997). Plant bodies are more commonly presented to human
experience in single slices of time. The fixed forms we normally see are mere moments of plant
existence. A temporal, process approach to plant growth, combined with a recognition of the
body-fullness, agency and subjectivity of nonhuman organisms, could provide much richer
insight into plant lives and livelihoods and reveal the unique temporalities of plants and their
extremely subtle, yet highly active, improvisational, communicative, and gestural engagements
with their worlds.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL NATURAL HISTORY OF PLANTS

PLANT MOVEMENT AND TIME
Plants move. Most visibly, plants can be seen to dance in animate winds. Their leaves shouting,
shivering, shimmering, harmonizing with the wind that catches tree limbs in its sway. More than
just by wind, plants can move their own bodies. Leaves lilt and lift with light and darkness, and
flowers open and close with the coming of dawn and dusk. Plants reach their bodies towards the
sunlight. Sunflowers, arching their massive blooms, follow the arc of the sun to capture its light
over the course of a day. The seed pods of touch-me-nots spring open wildly when lightly
brushed, propelling their seeds, flying, flung, great distances beyond. Seeds themselves are great
travelers, explores of distant lands. Seeds are infinitely mobile young plants who fly, swim,
stream and hitch rides on great voyages to distant soils. Plants move with their breath: infinite
numbers of paired cells on the undersides of their leaves form pores that open and close in
intimate exchanges of air and water vapor. All these movements suggest that plants are active
and mobile despite their rooted statures.2 Yet these plant behaviours and movements are too
evident, almost too obvious for my purposes. I would like to push this concept of agency further
towards a recognition of the more subtle movements of plants, who in the very processes of their
growth, are caught up in a improvisational “dance” with the world through many dimensions of
space and time.

A phenomenological study of plants reveals them as animate, intentional and exploratory

creatures who articulate the spaces they inhabit though the movements of their growing limbs
and unfurling leaves. A plant’s material form is a historical record of its life processes over time.
Form and process meet in the dynamic, slow moving, ever changing bodies of plants. From
seed, to shoot, leaf, flower and fruit, plants are engaged in an ever-unfolding process of
becoming.

Form is a dynamic interplay between the “inner” forces of biological “memory” and the plant’s
intimate relationships with the “external” environment and other organisms. And yet, inner and
outer are continuously blurred in the plant body, which is always in a process of opening its inner
flesh outwards, and drawing the outer world in. In a physical and material sense, “plant flesh” is
a responsive, reflexive, reversible tissue that folds, bends, breaks, and bears the marks of all its
interactions in the world as its bodily shapes and scars.

Plants can be seen to sculpt themselves, creatively paint their places in brilliant pigments,
communicate and connect intimately with other beings and the worlds they inhabit. These
markings are records of the intimacy that inheres between plants and their environments,
between plants and other plants, between plants, animals, insects, bacteria and fungi, and
between plants and people.

2
Paul Simon (1992) documents all kinds of ‘motor’ movements in plants. His approach is still very mechanistic,
yet some of his language, and his enthusiasm for these marvelous creatures, suggest that he has a very strong sense
of plants as active, agential creatures.
A complete “ethnobotany” (read: the study of culturally specific plant knowledge) would include
all the cultural, social and ecological roles of plants in both human and nonhuman lives. Plants
are major actors in extensive networks of all human, social, economic and political relations
(think biotechnology, think agriculture, think forestry). At the same time, animals and insects
are also major “cultivators” and plant breeders, whose lives shape and are shaped by plants.
Plants, more than any other creature embody the idea of “reversibility.” At the centre of all life,
plants can be seen as both the agents and objects of environmental, social and cultural change.
Plant bodies are expressions across wide scales of co-evolutionary time: their magnificent
multiplicity of forms, behaviours, and gestures are shaped by and continuously shaping their
relationships with all the incredibly diverse organisms who participate in pollinating, harvesting,
dispersing and consuming them. “The flesh” is thick between plants and all other creatures.

A phenomenology of plant growth is a phenomenology of plant movement through time. For

plants, growth is movement. The slowness of “plant time” is not immediately apparent to human
eyes. The life movements of plants play out on a trajectory of time so slow and so fast, that their
active lives normally elude our perception. The solid, visible forms of plants that we do see are
only ever single slices of time, still “photographs” of their dancing bodies, which are always
growing, unfolding, receding, and seeding themselves. A phenomenological awareness of this
slowness demands that I let go of my “common sense” structures of time, in order to explore the
unique temporality of plant life. Such an appreciation of plant temporality requires a
phenomenology attuned to the “process morphology” of plant growth and development. And
yet, I want to take Sattler’s model further than he may have intended. Not only do I want to
suggest that plants move by growing, but I also want to show that they move and grow with
intention.

PLANT MOVEMENT AND “INTENTIONALITY”

I describe as purposive a great deal of animal movement, not only in certain of the higher
animals whose movements are actually called actions, but also that group of movements
which, in view of their constancy and coherence, are usually referred to not as actions but
as instincts or reflexes. From these to the movements of plants which turn either towards
or away from the light is a very short step, and it is only one step further to describe as
purposive also those movement of growth which create out of the germ the complete
organisms of animals and plants in a typical succession
Hans Driesch, 1914:2, emphasis added.
Hans Driesch categorizes the growth movements of plants as purposive and teleological. While
I do not agree with his conception of “entelechy,” wherein matter is conceived to be animated by
an external vital force, I want to extend his idea of the “intentional,” directed nature of
developmental movements to an organicist framework that draws mind and body together in a
recognition of the organism as an embodied being. To achieve this I extend Merleau-Ponty’s
exploration of movement (as the human body’s intentional and directed engagement with the
world) to the bodies of plants. The notion that plant growth movements are directed, intentional
movements, rather than the reiteration of a predetermined genetic programme, may have
important consequences for our cultural-biological understandings of plant life.

Intentionality is a major concept in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. He draws on Husserl’s

distinction between intentionality as an act of “taking up a position” or judgement, and the idea
of an “operative intentionality,” which extends the notion of “intent” to include the ways that we
engage our bodies in relationships with the world (1962:xvii-xviii). He recognizes that
consciousness is “perpetually directed” towards the world, and suggests that consciousness itself
is a manifestation of an operative intentionality (1962:xvii). For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology
aims towards building up an understanding this aspect of the intentionality of being:

Through this broadened notion of intentionality, phenomenological

‘comprehension’ is distinguished from traditional ‘intellection’ which is confined
to ‘true and immutable natures,’ and so phenomenology can become a
phenomenology of origins [i.e. genesis, morphogenesis?]. Whether we are
concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to ‘understand’
is to take in the total intention—not only what these things are for representation
(the ‘properties’ of the thing perceived, the mass of ‘historical facts,’ the ‘ideas’
introduced by the doctrine)—but the unique mode of existing expressed in the
properties of the pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events of a
revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher (1962: xviii, emphases added).

Merleau-Ponty insists that to understand both things and beings we must “take in” its “total
intention,” which for him includes the “the unique mode of existing” that it expresses. He
suggests that this extended notion of intentionality takes phenomenology beyond the study of
fixed or “immutable natures.” Phenomenology becomes a “phenomenology of origins.” Here, I
read him as suggesting that the total intention includes the intention as it is formed over time,
from its very genesis, through to its morphogenesis and transformation. The metamorphosis of
an organism then, the emergence and expression of its “unique mode of existence,” could be
studied phenomenologically as the unfolding of its intentionality in the world. It is in this
profound extension of intentionality to the realm of nonhuman existence that Merleau-Ponty’s
work becomes extremely useful to my project. Specifically, I wish to apply this notion of
intentionality to the metamorphic movements and momentum that propels plants into being and
into sentient, perceptive and communicative relationships with the world.

For Merleau-Ponty, movement is basic intentionality (1961, p.137-143). Merleau-Ponty

describes a kind of “motor intentionality” (1962: 110) which carries our bodies into relationships
with others. Movement underlies all perception and communication, because it its by means of
movement that we can aim our bodies at things and take in our surrounding world. Movement
“provides us with a way of access to the world” (140): we move in order to engage with the
world. Merleau-Ponty resists “objectivist” and “intellectualist” descriptions of movement that
relegate it to the domain of physiological mechanism or mentally “calculated” activity.
Movement, for Merleau-Ponty, is not “thought about movement and bodily space is not space
thought of or represented” (1962:137). Our bodies understand the world without recourse to our
“cognitive” functions. Our brains don’t need to perform complex mathematical calculations to
determine our physical orientation in some grid-like Cartesian space. This information is not
merely translated through linear networks of synapses to effect bodily action in response to some
cognitive intention or external stimulant (140-141). The body carries knowledge of its spatiality
and relationship with other things and beings as an open, ever expanding “memory,” that
constantly acquires and incorporates new movements and gestures with new perceptions and
intentions. Once again, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding that consciousness is
intimately entwined with perception, and that perceptual consciousness is “being-in-the-world,”
or “existence” (1962: 351). All beings then, move consciously and intentionally within a
thickness of flesh that inheres between all the doubly “sensible and sentient.” In emphasizing the
non-cognitive aspects of motor intentionality, he invites (willing or not) the recognition that plant
growth movements are directed movements. Thus, though they have no centralized nervous
system, or known cognitive “mechanisms,” plants might be considered as intentional beings.
Extending his notion of intentionality to plants I envision plant movements as their means of
perception, communication and expression, and each moment of their metamorphosis as stage in
their “perpetual movement towards a world” (145).

Intentionality then, can include the movements and gestures of the “developmental dance” of
organisms growing themselves throughout their life cycles. Applying this recognition to plant
life, I begin to get a sense of the fleshy integuments that connect the plant through gene,
symplasm and dancing form, to the sentient and sensible world which it inhabits. The plant body
becomes a sentient body, its whole being taken up in perception and communication. There is a
“knowing” in these movements of growth. I can no longer conceive of plants as genetically
programmed entities whose responses to external forces are simply reactionary mechanisms. I
believe that plants can make sense of the worlds they inhabit at the same time as they transform
them. Their growth, movements and forms are relational gestures of their conversations with the
places they inhabit and the organisms they encounter there.

Plants “understand” gravity and orient their bodies relationally. Plants move towards the light
with “eyes” for food and energy. Their roots run, diving down into the earth, they swim through
the ground in search for water and nutrients. From this perspective, the genetically determined
mechanisms of plant development become merely the means for existence. Such explanatory
systems fall short of providing a sense of the agency of the living plant. The “momentum” for
existence, the intentional force that is being-in-the-world, and that brings organisms into being,
emerges through a phenomenological study of plant movements and “plant flesh.” In working
from such an understanding, the focus of a “phenomenological biology” might then return to
questions of what it is that plants do in the world: how it is that they fill their spaces and occupy
their time creatively, playfully and expressively.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PLANT BODY

A conscious being must have some awareness of its body as an integrated “whole” in order to act
and respond to the changing worlds it inhabits and co-creates. Merleau-Ponty’s elaboration of the
phenomenological body extends that sense of consciousness and integration through the concept
of the “body image”:
 My whole body for me is not an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space. I am
in undivided possession of it and I know where each of my limbs is through a
body image in which all are included (1962: 98).

In a similar way, I would argue that plants have a “body image,” and that like ours, the plant
body is not a fragmented body of discrete and autonomous organs, but an intersensory whole.
This might be a contested concept, given the nested, segmented nature of plant forms: the leaves
of plants can be easily detached from their branch, branches from limbs, petals from flower; and
seed from encapsulating fruit. Moreover, fragments of a plant can be propagated to create whole
new plants, whole new bodies, blurring the very concept of individual being, Being, self or what
body-fullness might mean for plants. More difficult to grasp might be how a rhizomous plant,
which can clonally propagate itself thousands of times to generate a “many-treed-body” from a
single root, might be able to hold onto an undivided sense of its whole being. In an example of
one such rhizomously propagated tree, an “individual” trembling aspen is known to have grown
into a 43-acre forest that shares a single root system. This trembling aspen “forest” is possibly
the largest living organism on earth. And yet, all the leaves of this massive being shift into their
autumnal colours in synchrony (Margulis and Sagan, 1995). How does this “extended” plant
being achieve this kind of bodily awareness, when its body is distributed across such vast space
and through such extensive time? How do the limbs of a plant grow and dance in relation to one
another? How is the weight of a tree’s limb balanced by the strength and depth of its roots?
Beholding the great surging limbs of an ancient beech tree, I am overcome by the sense that its
branches reach out for one other, and wrapping their limbs around each other in this slow,
choreographed dance, they tie themselves into love knots, so to be held in wondrous embrace.
And yet how can a “simple” plant achieve such awareness of its body?

Beyond the macroscopic movements of plants, plants use less “visible” means to communicate
and interact with their environments. Plant bodies are extremely sensitive to all kinds of
“stimuli” including touch, heat, cold, and wounding. An insect chewing on one leaf of a tree,
may be “sensed” in a distant limb, enabling a full-bodied, integrated response to the “predator.”
When plant leaves are wounded by herbivores, there is a systemic response so that the whole
plant “knows” what has happened. And indeed the whole plant community soon learns of the
attack.3 Plants produce volatile chemical signals (like sweet smelling jasmine) that can warn
other plants of the presence of pathogens or herbivorous attack. These chemicals alert
neighboring plants to produce enzymes that can defend their bodies against predators. These
proteins can inhibit the digestive capabilities of their predators, and thus limit herbivory (e.g.
Farmer and Ryan, 1990). Incredibly, cotton plants have been shown to produce a certain
combination of volatile terpenes when under “attack” by feeding beet army worms who drink
their sap. These volatile chemicals have been found to attract wasps who lay their parasitic eggs
on the bodies of the beet army worm larvae, destroying the larvae, and in effect, protecting the
plant. Indeed, plants find incredibly clever ways to communicate across species and trophic
levels to protect their bodies from predation (Paré and Tumlinson, 1997; for other plant-insect
interactions see de Moraes et. al., 2001)

Problematically, these investigations into plant life processes are easily reduced to the study of
mechanisms of gene action as reactionary responses to external events and forces. In the
language of such research findings, the plant is rendered a passive machine “programmed” to
defend itself chemically. Such research follows a Cartesian system for seeing that fragments the
plant into its genetic and chemical elements so that the data no longer as a sense of its “body.”
The coherence and meaningfulness of plant responsiveness is lost. Plant bodies remain mere
matter motivated only by gene activity. What is missing from this research is an admission of the
possibility that plants have volition, an admission that could, if imagination permitted, suggest
that plants are active beings who use their bodies and chemistry to communicate with the world.
Drawing such discoveries into a phenomenological understanding of plant lives could change the
stories biologists tell considerably.

PLASMODESMATA AND THE PHENOMENON OF THE SUPRA-CELLULAR ORGANISM

A Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of plant bodies may contribute greatly to a recognition of the
animacy of these processes and rediscovering the agency and aliveness of plant beings. Diverse
studies have shown that plants have the capacity to transmit chemical and electrical signals
throughout their bodies in ways remarkably similar to the “mechanisms” of human
neurophysiology. This process is facilitated by tiny channels called plasmodesmata which
3
See my paper, “Tai Chi for Plants” [unpublished] for an extensive literature review of current physiological and
molecular genetic research into plant “defense” responses.
connect each cell within the plant to the next to form a symplasm continuous throughout the plant
(Overall & Blackman, 1996; Mezitt & Lucas, 1996; Lucas, 1995; Lucas, et al, 1993).
Plasmodesmata make it possible to conceive of the plant as a web of synaptic connections. The
plant, in this model, becomes a supracellular organism: a single sensing, perceiving
communicative cell that moves out to meet the world. Plasmodesmata make the supracellular,
sensory, perceptive, communicating, creative plant possible because they ensure that the plant
body is maintained as an integrated whole. These tiny structures open up our imaginations to
conceive of this possibility.

In building up a dialogue between the “technoscience” of plasmodesmata and a

phenomenological awareness of plant bodies, some interesting questions are raised. Is it possible
to phenomenologically comprehend plasmodesmata which conceptually, exist only in electron
micrographs of specially prepared samples of plant tissue, and other technologically mediated
modes of representation? Is it possible to incorporate the concept of “plasmodesmata” within a
phenomenology of plant being? Or does this inclusion of technoscientific “objects” render this
phenomenological pursuit fantastical? How does one move in between the languages of
technoscience and phenomenology without tripping up on the necessary tensions in between
them? However rough this terrain might be, and however technologically mediated their
presence, plasmodesmata could present a plant structure which totally revolutionizes our
understanding of plant life. This cellular structure makes it possible to conceive of the whole
plant being taken up in the act of communication, as a “coherent,” complex and conscious body
extending out to meet the world. In the development of a theory of the agency of plant bodies,
plasmodesmata become exceptional actors in a drama that could tell an old story differently.
Plant bodies, in this light, can take on the fleshiness of animal creatures, and plant consciousness
can be imagined to extend throughout their flesh. Bearing witness to the active, “body-full” lives
of plants can transform our relationships with them so that we can come to recognize plants as
beings. And phenomenological plant bodies can teach us about the capacity for consciousness
embedded in our very own materiality.

PLANT GESTURES
A biology of “plant gestures,” as a different “taxonomy of being,” is currently being explored in
the work of several “Goethean Scientists” including Jochen Bockemühl (1998) and Margaret
Colquhoun (Colquhoun & Ewald, 1996; Goodwin & Colquhoun, 1997). These biologists have
drawn from Goethe’s scientific studies of the metamorphosis of plants (trans. Mueller, 1952) to
develop a qualitative approach to plant development. Their interpretations of Goethe’s work
have given rise to a biological appreciation of the movement and gesture of plant life and a
realization that the perception of plant movement requires a “fluid,” temporal and process
approach to seeing and thinking (Amrine et al, 1987; Bortoft, 1996; Brady, 1987; Holdrege,
1996; Colquhoun & Ewald, 1996). Such insights have given me “new eyes for plants”
(Colquhoun & Ewald, 1997).4

Exploring the intentionality and agency of plant movement suggests that plant beings unfold
from their seeds with a momentum that fuels their movements and expressions through space and
through time. Their gestural movements carry meanings. They aim their bodies at the world.
And the world unfolds towards them. There is an ongoing conversation between the plant body
and its rich and changing environment, full of other animate beings, shaping, breeding, feeding
(and being fed by) the plant. Plants communicate with the wind. Their shapes are their
conversations amassed in wood over time. They carve space with their limbs, and are carved by
the “uprooted” animal bodies who move in betwixt and in between. Flowers are slowly
unfolding paintings, gestures that unfurl from deep within. Flowers are expressions aimed at
their “lovers”—the pollinating birds, butterflies, insects, and people. In this close dance of co-
evolution, butterflies can be seen as flower petals taken flight. And the flowers themselves
become paintings of butterfly wings, strewn along the migratory paths of these travelling nectar-
drinking pollinators. So too, are orchids gestural mirrorings of their highly specialized insect
“lovers.” These enticingly sensual flowers mimic the shapes, scents, and pheromones of their
pollinators, so as to lure members of the same species into an intimate and overtly sexual

4
I must acknowledge the influence that these Goethean Scientists have had on my thinking about plant growth and
movement. My first encounter with the ‘developmental dance’ came during a course at Schumacher College with
Brian Goodwin, Margaret Colquhoun and Henri Bortoft. I am very interested in the way that Goethe’s work has
been taken up and interpreted by these scientists, who promise a way towards a “science of conscious participation
in nature” (Bortoft, 1996) and a methodology for ‘beholding nature’s agency.’
embrace. Flowers may be the gestural manifestation of generations of such encounters with their
pollinators. For what is co-evolution but a prolonged conversation between the flesh of beings?

Plant gestures are expressive of their species-being (“species gestures”), of their relationships
with other beings (“communicative gestures”), and of the qualities and histories of the places in
which they dwell (“gestures of place”). Species gestures can be thought of as the many different
ways that plants have found to manifest their bodily beings. Each species sculpts their bodies
differently, so that each species’ gesture is unique. These gestures of plant species, genera and
families could contribute to a very different taxonomy of beings. Communicative gestures may
take the “shapes” of smell, of colour, or of line drawn by an individual plant. These gestures are
often not directed towards human “eyes.” This is clear in the example of the ultraviolet
patterning of flower petals which are visible only with eyes the likes of butterflies’ that are
sensitive to ultraviolet light. Other gestures may be “read” as the plant’s expression of the place
in which it dwells. For, plants are their dwelling places; their whole bodies are taken up in a
spatio-temporal gestural expression of the places they inhabit.5 Whether on hillsides or deep
within forests, in woodland or in prairie, on mountain sides or strewn across the plains, each
place is manifest differently in the plant body (Holdrege, 1996). Plant bodies are fleshy
expressions of their experiences dwelling in particular spaces over extended durations of time.

Plant gestures “speak” a different language, suggesting a whole new language for biology in
which moving matter carries meaning, and beings are recognized as perceptive, expressive and
creative. Humans may not be able to understand all plant gestures, for many are not aimed
towards us. Meaning and significance are situated phenomenon. Gestures are drawn forth in a
relationship between beings, and communicated in languages that are “understood” both bodily
and “cognitively” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 184-190). Humans may not perceive the gestures
plants extend to other plants, or to non-human creatures. The subtle alchemy of scents that
plants use to communicate beyond their bodies may be out of our perceptual (or conceptual, or
imaginary) “range,” and thus remain unacknowledged by humans. Because plants don’t speak in
languages we can comprehend “cognitively,” we must extend the subtle sensitivities of our
5
I am reminded of the words of an oral poet, Masud Taj, whose poetry of plants is a phenomenology of being. In
his (unwritten) poem called Green he says: “To be is to dwell, to reside and preside simultaneously.” (from a
performance of The Crystal Collective Dance Project, Fringe Festival of Independent Dance Artists, Toronto,
August, 2000.)
bodies and imaginations to come to a much more visceral understanding of theirs. As Merleau-
Ponty suggests, learning or incorporating new “habits” requires that our bodies remain open to
otherness and different ways of being. He says,
To get used to [things] is to be transplanted into them, or conversely to
incorporate them into the bulk of our own body. Habit expresses our power of
dilating our being-in-the-world, or changing our existence by approaching fresh
instruments (1962: 142).

CONCLUSION
Merleau-Ponty explores the openness of human bodies to learning about “otherness.” The care
that a biologist might take to share in the unique temporality of another creature—to “dilate”
their own bodily awareness and “try on” the movements of another creature—could dramatically
change the ways that nonhuman organisms are perceived. I would like to see such ontological
shifts change both the questions and the practices that direct developmental biology research, in
the hopes that the relationships between biologists and the organisms they study might also be
transformed in the process.

My ideas experiment with the potential openness and “mobility” of our bodies, subjectivities,
and ways of being and for learning about the bodies of “other-than-human” beings. At the same
time such embodied knowledge projects must accept the limitations of our always partial,
positioning as humanly bodied-beings. Yet, even with our skilled capacity for mobility and for
“diffracting” our perspectives, it is still necessary to admit the anthropomorphism and
subjectivity of this phenomenological practice. I am not interested in misleading attempts
towards some pure, unmediated translation of plant life, or deflecting to some false “objective”
or unlocatable perspective. Instead, my aim is to work towards generating more “body-full”
accounts of nonhuman organisms, that can account for the agencies of both the bodies of the
observer and the observed. Understanding the world from another’s perspective requires mobility
and reflexivity and what Haraway calls “loving care” (1991: 190). I interpret “loving care” to
encompass the intent to work towards better translations of the world with an elevated level of
respect within and across species difference, knowing always that the knowledge that we
generate will be situated knowledge.

In closing, I want to suggest that trying on “plant flesh,” by “dilating our being-in-the-world”
might be one way to gain an appreciation for the possibilities of consciousness and agency in
nonhuman organisms. Plants, their bodies, livelihoods and life histories, are radically different
from both those of humans and animals, not to mention the enormous diversity that exists among
plants as well. Theorizing from the starting point of “plant flesh” (rather than “human” flesh)
reveals very different insights into embodiment, perception, consciousness and communication;
insights which may extend our recognition of the immense diversity of human and nonhuman
subjectivity and possibilities for difference, to a broader appreciation for other ways of “being-
in-the-world.”