Involutionary Momentum Affective Ecologies and The Sciences of Plant Insect Encounters PDF

carla hustak and natasha myers
Involutionary Momentum:
Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of
Plant/Insect Encounters
N aturalists have long been fascinated with the practices

through which plants lure their insect and animal pollinators. The orchids
are one large family of plants that have garnered significant attention for
the techniques they use to secure fertilization. Charles Darwin was among
a handful of nineteenth-century naturalists who invested extraordinary
time and attention documenting encounters among orchids and insects.
After years of intensive study, his 1862 treatise On the Vari-
ous Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects exclaimed:
“[H]ow numerous and beautiful are the contrivances for the fertilisation
of Orchids.” In his description of the species Orchis mascula, he insisted,
“[I]n no other plant, or indeed in hardly any animal, can adaptations of
one part to another, and of the whole to other organisms widely remote in
the scale of nature, be named more perfect than those presented by this
Orchis” (28). From the vantage point of his theory of natural selection,
orchid and insect bodies were perfectly articulated to one another, serv-
ing both orchid reproduction and insect nourishment. Darwin delighted
in his ability to discern the mechanical functionality and utility of orchid
Volume 23, Number 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1892907

© 2012 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
d i f f e r e n c e s 75
flowers and took this as a demonstration that even beautiful forms had
utilitarian, adaptive value. In this sense, his orchid book was to be read as
proof of natural selection and adaptation, indeed, as a study of the hardest
case (Browne, Charles; Desmond and Moore).
Researchers investigating plant pollination ecologies today
engage a set of evolutionary theories that have been modified signifi-
cantly since Darwin’s elaboration of natural selection in his 1859 Origin
of Species. Plant and insect behaviors are now grounded in deterministic
models that reduce interactions among species to the actions of “selfish
genes” geared to the task of reducing an organism’s energy expenditure
while maximizing its reproductive fitness for long-term species survival
(see Dawkins, for example). Such neo-Darwinian accounts are endemic
to the burgeoning field known as “chemical ecology” (see Dicke and
Takken, for example). Researchers in this field home in on the chemical
determinants that shape ecological relations, including the pheromones
and other signaling chemicals that organisms secrete to attract, repel, and
communicate with one another. If Darwin described the brilliant range of
colors, flexible forms, sensual textures, and sweet nectars that attracted
pollinators to orchid flowers, today chemical ecologists approach plants
with attentions and instruments attuned to the plumes of volatile chemical
attractants that plants synthesize and release into the atmosphere.
Neo-Darwinian logics are particularly pronounced in studies
currently being conducted on Ophrys orchids (see, for example, Vereecken
and Scheistl; and Vereecken et al.). Many of the numerous species that
comprise the Ophrys genus have the remarkable ability to lure pollina-
tors in spite of the fact that they do not offer the insects a nectar “reward.”
Chemical ecologists have found that Ophrys species can attract their pol-
linators selectively by exhaling volatile compounds that mimic the sex
pheromones of their insect pollinators. These volatile plumes can elicit
“typical” sexual behavior in male insects: for example, scientists have
observed excited male bees swarm around flowers, expose their geni-
talia before landing, and engage in “precopulatory movements” as they
feverishly try to mate with the flowers (Nilsson 257). In so doing, the bees
“inadvertently” participate in orchid fertilization. Recent studies track-
ing pollinator behaviors note that male bees will even “regularly attempt
copulation with small plastic beads scented with synthetic mixtures” of
both female sex pheromones and floral extracts (Vereecken et al. 330).
The aromatic lure of Ophrys orchids has become a textbook case of the
evolutionary strategy known as “sexual deception,” a form of “Pouyannian”
76 Involutionary Momentum
mimicry so named after the French botanist who first described the phe-
nomenon (Vereecken and Schiestl 329; Correvon and Pouyanne). Other-
wise known as “aggressive” mimicry, this strategy allows Ophrys orchids
to “exploit” male insects’ sexual proclivities for their own ends. Orchids
are figured in these accounts as “frauds” involved in a “sexual swindle”
(Nilsson 255; Vereecken and Schiestl). In this story, male insects’ “innate
behavioral responses” are exploited (Vereecken and Schiestl 7484). The
insects are identified as “dupes” that have fallen for a signal that fakes the
scent of their conspecific females (Vereecken and Schiestl 7486).
We offer this example of Ophrys mimicry to show how stories
emerging in the field of chemical ecology today constrain narratives of
interspecies relations. In this account, organismal behavior is rationalized
according to a calculating, functionalist logic. For example, according to
L. Anders Nilsson, insect arousal and orchid display must not exceed the
bounds of an economic logic bent on minimizing energy and resource
expenditures, and maximizing “reproductive output.” Anxious about the
effects of Ophrys mimicry on the conservation of male bees’ sexual ener-
gies, Nilsson goes so far as to reassure his readers that male bees can
actually tell the difference between flowers and females and that though
they get aroused, “ejaculation does not occur at flowers”: “Just enough
rather than full sexual excitement is at play, a level that prevents pollinator
exhaustion and sperm loss” (257). Following a neo-Darwinian formula-
tion, Ophrys mimicry must not be too effective, otherwise their pollinator
populations would decline (see also Vereecken and Scheistl). Note too how
any hint of interspecies intimacy is carefully policed in this account.
The event of pollination in these accounts is a decidedly “asym-
metrical” encounter (Nilsson 259). Recent statements in the literature
vociferously resist the term “co-evolution” to describe this phenomenon
in Ophrys. Since Ophrys orchids offer no nourishment for visiting insects,
the pollination event is not considered a mutually beneficial encounter;
rather, it is a phenomenon engendered through a “unilateral adaptation”
of the orchid to the bee (Vereecken et al. 330). In this account, orchids
are the only participants reaping a benefit from the encounter, and the
insects are rendered passive to the wiles of the plants. Though they are
granted the power to deceive, these plants are still figured as mechani-
cal actants: their near-perfectly attuned aromatic chemistries are not
cleverly concocted propositions; they are merely the blind effects of ran-
dom genetic variation subject to the selective forces imposed by their
Figure 1
Orchid/insect inti-
macies: Ophrys
orchids and their
pollinators. Illus-
trations by Inga
Thomasson.
Reprinted from
Kullenberg and
Bergström, “Hyme-
noptera Aculeata
Males as Pollinators
of Ophrys Orchids”
with permission
from John Wiley and
Sons, Inc.
pollinators. A neo-Darwinian economy, it seems, cannot admit pleasure,

play, or improvisation within or among species.
This essay proposes an alternate reading of plant/insect ecolo-
gies. Rather than reaffirming this neo-Darwinian story, we work “athwart”
dominant logics in plant ecology. We follow anthropologist of science
Stefan Helmreich’s approach, which identifies theories as both explana-
tory tools and phenomena in need of explanation (Alien). He claims that
“transverse, oblique,” or “sidewise” approaches to explanatory theories
“can produce compelling renderings of a real world” (23). We read against
the grain of neo-Darwinism to find other models for a science of plant
ecology. This requires reading with our senses attuned to stories told in
otherwise muted registers. Working athwart the reductive, mechanistic,
and adaptationist logics that ground the ecological sciences, we offer a
reading that amplifies accounts of the creative, improvisational, and fleet-
ing practices through which plants and insects involve themselves in one
another’s lives. In this essay we supplement evolutionary logics with an
involutionary mode of attention. We ask, What if the topology of insect/
orchid encounters were conditioned not just by a calculating economy
that aims to maximize fitness but also by an affective ecology shaped by

pleasure, play, and experimental propositions?
How, for example, would the story of Ophrys pollination change
if we were to rescript these relations in an involutionary mode? Ample clues
for an involutionary reading can be found in the literature. Field studies
of bee pollination of Ophrys orchids conducted in the 1970s emphasized
the tactility and physicality of orchid/insect sex. These studies showed
that the structure of the Ophrys labellum and the “stroking direction of
the hairs” on its epidermis are “essential” for the experience of the male
insect initiating “copulation” with the flower (Kullenberg and Bergström
20–21; Kullenberg) (see fig. 1). A long history of research into the touch
sensitivity of plants (see Bose; Braam; Darwin and Darwin, Power of
Movement) attests to the excitability of plant tissues, and as we will see,
Darwin’s experiments in the 1860s demonstrated that orchids can actively
alter their anatomies in response to insect visitors. More recent studies
attest to the importance of the microstructure of orchids’ petals and their
colorful displays and suggest that these features entice males to “indulge”
in the pleasures of pseudocopulation (see, for example, Bradshaw et al.).
A recent study on neotropical orchid bees even suggests that these insects
collect volatile chemicals from flowers and “store them” in “pouches” in
order to “later expose their ‘perfumes’ ” during courtship displays (Shork-
hopf, Mitko, and Eltz 953). Rather than advancing theories of “unilateral
adaptation,” these accounts frame orchids and their pollinators in a “co-
evolutionary” mode (Bradshaw et al.) that draws attention to the practices
that bring plants and insects together in an affectively charged, multisen-
sory partnership. In an involutionary reading, mimetic relations between
plants and insects take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies,
where affects and sensations are transduced through excitable tissues.1
In this sense the mimetic power of Ophrys’s seductive scents need not be
reduced to the outcome of the selective advantage of random mutations.
In an involutionary reading, mimesis is an effect and a constellation of
affects immanent to responsive, sensing, sentient bodies.
This essay draws attention to the affects, sensations, and prac-
tices that shape relations in plant/insect ecologies. Over the course of the
essay, we unpack the concept of involutionary momentum to explore a
feminist approach to interspecies relationality. We draw together feminist
theories of affect, difference, and responsibility to articulate what Isabelle
Stengers might call an “ecology of practices” (Cosmopolitics) among plants,
insects, and the scientists who draw their intricate relations into view.
We begin this analysis by visiting Darwin in his home outside

London and observing him as he documented the nuanced details of insect
and orchid anatomies. Where his 1859 Origin of Species saw him craft a
panoramic view of change in individual species across the broad sweep
of evolutionary time, his work on orchids wrapped him up in the daily
rhythms and mundane encounters of mingling species whose strange and
unfamiliar intimacies challenged assumptions about both bodily and spe-
cies boundaries. Indeed, as Darwin trained his attention on the intimate
encounters between orchids and their insect pollinators, his functional-
ist accounts of adaptation were sometimes muted by stories of affinities,
attractions, and intimacies. Darwin’s own experimental practice takes the
form of an ethology sensitive to plant and insect practices. As we track his
multisensory experimental techniques, we find him leaning into the event
of pollination to mimic both insects and orchids as he attempts to gener-
ate experimental proof of the mechanisms of fertilization. Along with the
insects, Darwin was caught in the orbit of these alluring plants. This essay
documents how his inquisitive, multisensory experimental practice got
him affectively entangled in the event of fertilization. 2 When we amplify
Darwin’s modes of attention and involvement in the daily rhythms of life
among insects and orchids, we find in his account the nascent contours
of an affective ecology forming the grounds for a science of interspecies
relations. 3
Darwin’s inquiry offers a counterpose to contemporary neo-
Darwinian accounts that reduce the complex relations among orchids and
insects in a way that stultifies both orchid and insect agency and renders
ecologies populated by blind, reactive automatons. Hoping to reimagine
ecology in an involutionary mode, we turn to the wider field of chemical
ecology to develop an involutionary reading of contemporary research on
plant signaling and interspecies communication. Researchers in this field
have taken a special interest in plants, and they are finding that these
organisms can catalyze entire ecologies by synthesizing and dispersing
volatile chemical cues. In the process, they are producing fascinating
accounts of plants as practitioners with the ingenuity and “know-how” to
“befriend” insects and “defend” themselves against herbivores. Pullulating
under the surface of chemical ecologists’ neo-Darwinian accounts, we find
the glimmerings of an affective ecology contoured by affinities and repul-
sions and teeming with articulate plants and other loquacious organisms.
The second half of this paper documents researchers inserting themselves
and their instruments into the middle of an effusive ecology filled with
the chatter of chemical signals. As a first step to gathering together these

disparate threads, we situate our tropic turn to plant ecologies in the
context of recent work on more-than-human lives and worlds.
A Tropic Turn to Plant Ecologies
Most often rendered as the static, aesthetic objects of still-life

paintings, plants are most frequently left at the bottom of those persistent
hierarchies of living beings that identify outward movement and action
as signs of agency and aliveness. Plants tend to get left in the under-
growth, relegated to the background against which the real action of the
world plays out. And yet, practitioners who work closely with plants offer
a refreshing perspective. Peter Ayrs’s The Aliveness of Plants notes that
Darwin is best known for his work on animals. Yet, this fame obscures his
long-term commitment to botanical studies, 4 a commitment he shared with
many members of his family, including his grandfather Erasmus Darwin,
famous for his animated poetic account of plant lives and loves. 5 Other
plant enthusiasts include Marie Stopes, a well-known early-twentieth-
century British botanist and birth control advocate, who recognized that
plants had been overlooked in the extensive attention given to animals in
evolutionary thought. In her book Ancient Plants, Stopes noted: “[S]o quietly
and so slowly do [plants] live and move that we in our hasty motion often
forget that they equally with ourselves belong to the living and evolving
organisms” (174; see also Hustak). Like Stopes, Nobel Prize laureate Bar-
bara McClintock had a “feeling” for plants’ dynamic lives (Keller). She
was a maize geneticist and spent her summers experimenting with corn
in agricultural test fields. She felt compelled to keep pace with her plants
as they grew in the hot summer sun. She saw past the static forms we nor-
mally register: “Animals can walk around, but plants have to stay still to
do the same things with ingenious mechanisms.” According to her, plants
can “do almost anything you can think of” and have immense capacities
for movement in ways that are “fantastically beyond our wildest imagina-
tions” (199–200). For Stopes, McClintock, and many of the practitioners we
document in this essay, plants are practitioners living active lives with
extraordinary sensory dexterities and a penchant for innovative behaviors.
In The Vegetative Soul, Elaine Miller contends that recent femi-
nist studies of the nonhuman continue to value the activity of the animal
over the apparent passivity of the plant. 6 Approaches to the nonhuman tend
to privilege the “encounter value” of organisms that humans can “hold

in regard,” that is, those animals with whom we can lock eyes (Haraway,
When Species).7 Yet, if attentions to animals can get researchers caught in
an affective circuit that loops iteratively and recursively between humans
and animals, we argue that inquiry into plants sends us running along
the rhizomes into an interspecies ecology. Plant bodies are extensive, dis-
tributed, and entangling: “[E]ven when they have roots, there is always an
outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind,
an animal, human beings” (Deleuze and Guattari 11). 8 Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari urge us to “follow the plants,” and what we learn is that to
track them one must dive into the soil, mingle with symbiotic fungi and
microbes, converse with the insects, and be lured along with other plant
cultivators, only some of whom are human. 9 One immediately finds oneself
in the thicket of interspecies relations, an affectively charged tangle of
“beings and doings” (Schrader). Plants’ distributed, decentralized bodies
can be seen to form a “node of durable action” around which other rela-
tions turn (Haraway, Modest_Witness 142). In this way plants can teach us
how to intensify the “encounter value” in any ecology. It is to Darwin that
we turn as we look for guides into this interspecies world.
Darwin among the Orchids
I have been very lucky & have now the many curious contrivances. I shall
examined almost every British Orchid never rest till I see a Catasetum eject
fresh, & when at sea-side shall draw pollen-masses, & a Mormodes twist its
up rather long paper on the means of column.
their fertilisation for Linn. Soc & I can- —Darwin
not fancy anything more perfect than
Over a span of about twenty years, Charles Darwin produced

six volumes dedicated to the study of plants. But it was the orchids, with
their ornate floral structures, colors, and scents that captured his fullest
attention. He confessed in a letter to J. D. Hooker on October 13, 1861, “I
never was more interested in my life in any subject than this of orchids.”10
In an earlier letter, he insisted he would “never rest” until he saw for
himself how these flowering plants engaged their incredible “contriv-
ances” to lure insect pollinators (9 June 1861). He was obsessed. Indeed,
he had spent years collecting orchid specimens and marveling at the art-
ful anatomies through which they lured insects to pollinate their flowers
(Browne, Charles).
When Darwin published On the Various Contrivances by Which

British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects in 1862, he considered
orchids a specific case to illustrate the broad evolutionary theory in the
Origin of Species (Browne, Charles 200). One of the tenets of this theory
was that species benefit from sexual reproduction with other members of
their species. One corollary of this theory was that self-pollination—the
production of a new generation from an individual that harbours both
“male” and “female” reproductive organs—is deleterious to maintaining
variation in a population. At the beginning of his work on orchids, Darwin
explains that Origin of Species “gave only general reasons for the belief
that it is an almost universal law of nature that the higher organic beings
require an occasional cross with another individual.” His text on orchids,
however, would demonstrate the fullness of this conviction through close
investigation of the intricate mechanisms by which these plants avoid
self-fertilization and ensure cross-fertilization with others (On the Vari-
ous Contrivances 1): “The diversity of the contrivances, almost all adapted
to favour the intercrossing of distinct flowers, seems to be exhaustless”
(158).11 He admitted that orchids’ ancestral forms may have reproduced by
self-crossing, but that their reproductive survival hinged on developing
relationships with insect pollinators that could facilitate reproduction via
cross-fertilization. Orchids, it turns out, were caught in a queer interspe-
cies assemblage that disrupted normative Victorian sexualities and species
boundaries.
Although his intention was to use orchids as a test case for
drawing out the local and particular details of evolutionary theory (Bur-
khardt), we read Darwin against the grain of his evolutionary logics. We
are interested in the moments of perplexity, excess, and affective pull,
moments when he got caught up in the energetic momentum that ingathers
organisms in complex ecological relations. His studies of insects fertil-
izing orchids offer us a high-resolution portrait of the kind of affinities
that he had alluded to in the famous metaphor of the “entangled bank.”
Indeed, it is in the conclusion of Origin of Species that he finds himself
“contemplat[ing]” the “inextricable web of affinities” of “an entangled bank
clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the
damp earth” (489). In the conclusion to Origin of Species, Darwin expands
his purview from the evolutionary trajectories of individual species to a
consideration of ecological relations. This “entangled bank” describes a
momentary milieu contoured by multiple species involving themselves in

one another’s lives.12 Just three years later, in his 1862 treatise on orchid
pollination, we catch a glimpse of him involving himself in an “inextri-
cable web of affinities” and offering the glimmerings of what might be
called an affective ecology of plant/insect encounters. Later sections of
this essay will examine the stakes of an involutionary reading of plant
ecology; but for now we will turn our attention to Darwin’s pollination
experiments.
Experimental Forms of Life
Living at Down House in the English countryside, Darwin

found not only a home congenial to an atmosphere of study but also a labo-
ratory. Michael Boulter’s Darwin’s Garden has recently focused attention
on the importance of Down House as “a place that might offer clues about
transmutation, different from what was then being offered in museums and
scientific societies” (23). Inhabiting this home and experimental labora-
tory were, among many other organisms, plants, pigeons, barnacles, and
Darwin’s collaborators, who included members of his family. Down House’s
inhabitants formed an affective ecology.13 Darwin and his children charted
the flight patterns of bees and their visits to the wild orchids that grew in
the nearby fields (Desmond and Moore 460; Smith 137). Close to his writing
desk, Darwin could conveniently turn to his insect collections and to his
plants. By the windows, he placed potted plants for careful observation of
the effects of light and darkness on plant tropisms and growth (Chadare-
vian; Darwin and Darwin, Power of Movement). While Darwin studied
many plants, his fascination with orchids has been well noted (Browne,
Charles 169). In their biography of Darwin, Adrian Desmond and James
Moore claim that after Darwin went through his barnacle phase and his
pigeon obsession, he got completely swept up in the ambit of orchids.14 In
his garden or some nearby glade, he would often concentrate on the same
flowers for extended periods of time. He insisted on catching the bees “at
work” and devoted specific attention to the precise geometry of interactions
among orchids and insects during pollination (On the Various Contriv-
ances 113).15 Stengers has used the concept of “achievement” to grasp the
collective participation of more-than-human agencies in a changing world
(“Including Nonhumans”). Darwin’s home and garden were experimental
spaces that provided a site for this kind of interspecies achievement.
Figure 2a
Anatomy of an
Orchid, Orchis
mascula. Illustration
by G. B. Sowerby.
In his experimental practice, Darwin entered into a sen-

sory partnership with his experimental subjects.16 Jonathan Smith has
commented on the distinctiveness of Darwin’s botany, describing it as
“experimental and physiological without smacking of the laboratory”
and as “theoretically informed but carefully descriptive” (139). Smith
emphasizes the sensory dimensions of Darwin’s scientific observations.
Figure 2b
Anatomical features
labeled.
Reprinted with per-

mission from John
van Wyhe, ed. 2002-.
The Complete Work
of Charles Darwin
Online (http://
darwin-online.org
.uk/).
We find that Darwin’s method refuses to emulate the idealized model of a

disengaged, impartial, scientific observer.17 He participated actively with
his experimental subjects, to such an extent that he moved with and was
moved by them.
Darwin’s account of the fertilization of orchids focuses particu-
larly on four anatomical parts: the insect proboscis, the long tongue with
which it laps up nectar; the orchid’s rostellum, the tissue separating the
female from the male reproductive organs, which often contains a viscid
liquid; the labellum, a petal that often serves as a landing spot for insects
and serves to guide them to the nectaries; and the pollinia, sacs that con-
tain pollen for fertilizing other flowers. He investigated the anatomies of
hundreds of orchid specimens, paying close attention to color, texture, the
strength, pliability, and elasticity of tissues, and the viscosity, scents, and
tastes of its fluids. Darwin’s original text was illustrated with intricate
drawings that diagrammed anatomical features of each species he exam-
ined. Figure 2a illustrates the anatomical features of the Orchis mascula;
it was among the first figures to appear in his text.18
Darwin focused intensely on zones of interaction where bees

and orchids got involved in one another’s lives. He avidly watched insects
sucking nectar, noting how some would lap at the nectary for upward of
two to three minutes. He took special note of each species’ labellum, that
special petal that extends out of the flower like a platform and “affords”
both an “excellent landing-space” (On the Various Contrivances 98) and a
“good standing-place” (57) for the insects. In one species, he showed how
its “two prominent ridges, sloping down the middle” acted as a “guide”
to lure the insect toward the nectary. The insect’s “flexible body” would
allow it to reach the nectary and contact the pollinia (25). However, it was
not enough to simply claim that the insect used the labellum as a platform.
He wanted to understand how the labellum “induced” an insect “to alight”
(77). To do so, he noted the pleasures of taste that might attract the insect.
In one case he noted, the labellum secreted enticing drops of nectar at a
distance from “the true nectary” (77).
Darwin identified the orchid’s labellum as one of the many
contrivances that lured insects toward its reproductive organs. He was
most impressed by the ways orchids ensured that visiting insects left their
flowers with pollen sacs attached to their bodies. He watched the flowers
day and night and carefully observed insect visitors, noting especially
which flowers had lost their pollinia and which insects carried these
pollinia away with them. He found that as insects foraged for nectar, an
orchid would often actively “deposit” its pollinium somewhere on the
insect’s body. In some cases, orchids would go to great lengths to ensure
that the visiting insect left with pollen. In his 1877 revision of On the
Various Contrivances, he noted that in some species the labella did not so
innocently invite the insect to rest. These orchids were “extremely sensi-
tive or irritable” and the labella held within them a spring-like capacity
that was triggered on contact. In such cases, a “touching insect” that
happened to alight on the flower was “temporarily imprisoned within the
otherwise almost completely closed flower” when it sprang closed (2nd
ed. 87). The labellum would remain “shut from half an hour to one hour
and a half, and on reopening” would again be “sensitive to a touch” (88).
Orchid tissues were for Darwin excitable, and these remarkable plants
could actively alter their anatomies, twisting, turning, and torquing their
forms in response to insect visitors.
In his letter to J. D. Hooker quoted in the epigraph above, Dar-
win insists that he would “never rest” until he saw a “Catasetum eject
Figure 3
Catasetum sacca-
tum, showing the
front view of the
column (A) and the
side view of the
flower (B), with all
the sepals and petals
removed except the
labellum. Anatomi-
cal labels: a. anther;
an. antennæ of the
rostellum; d. disc
of pollinium; f. fila-
ment of anther;
g. germen or ovar-
ium; l. labellum;
p. pollen-masses;
pd. pedicel of pol-
linium; s. stigmatic
chamber. Illus-
tration by G. B.
Sowerby.
Reprinted with per-

mission from John
van Wyhe, ed. 2002–.
The Complete Work
of Charles Darwin
Online (http://
darwin-online.org
.uk/).
Figure 4
Mormodes ignea
showing the lateral
view of flower, with
the upper sepal and
the near upper petal
cut off. Anatomical
labels: a. anther;
pd. pedicel of pol-
linium; s. stigma;
l. labellum; l s. lower
sepal. Illustration by
G. B. Sowerby.
Reprinted with per-

mission from John
The Complete Work
of Charles Darwin
Online (http://
darwin-online.org
.uk/).
pollen-masses, & a Mormodes twist its column” (9 June 1861). Both species
had ingenious mechanisms that allowed them to fling their pollen masses
with great force at visiting insects (see figs. 3 and 4). He got the opportu-
nity to observe these species when specimens were delivered to his home.
However, he had to subject the flowers to intensive experimentation before
he was able to witness the spectacle of pollen ejection:
Several [Catasetum] flowers were sent me by post and by the

railroad, and must have been much jarred, but they had not
exploded. I let two flowers fall from a height of two or three
inches on the table, but the pollinia were not ejected. I cut off with
a crash with a pair of scissors the thick labellum and ovarium

close beneath the flower; but this violence produced no effect.
Nor did deep pricks in various parts of the column, even within
the stigmatic chamber. (On the Various Contrivances 24)
Darwin was surprised. Other species proved much more sensitive. In one
species he had found that “a touch from the thinnest human hair suffices
to cause the explosion” that would release the pollinium (142). In the case
of Catasetum, he went to extremes to test the “nature of the excitement”
that caused the ejection of pollen (224). In five trials with one species of
Catasetum he “violently hit, bent, and pricked” its antenna. This aggres-
sive approach seemed to elicit no response. Then, when he touched the left
side of the flower with less force, the pollinium promptly “shot forth.” In
his sixth trial, Darwin dealt “a forcible blow on the right-hand antenna.”
This apparently “did cause the act of ejection,” from which he learned that
the orchid was “not completely paralysed” from its trials (228).
When species of Mormodes arrived at his home, he faced simi-
lar challenges. He spent arduous days with these specimens, conducting
trial after trial in his attempt to figure out their peculiar mechanism. At
first he met with little success: “I pricked deeply the column in different
parts and the stigma, and cut off the petals, and even the labellum, without
causing the ejection of the pollinium” (260). He took drastic measures: “A
drop of chloroform, of spirits of wine, and of boiling water placed on this
part of the rostellum produced no effect; nor, to my surprise, did exposure
of the whole flower to vapour of chloroform” (261). He admits candidly: “At
the close of the twelfth trial I was in despair” (261–62). Yet, he persevered
and eventually found that “a minute hinge” that “articulated” the anther
to the column “a little way beneath its bent filamentary apex” was, in fact,
“sensitive to the touch”:
I tried four times and found that I could touch with some force
any other part; but when I gently touched this point with the
finest needle, instantaneously the membrane which unites the
disc to the edges of the cavity in which it is lodged, ruptured,
and the pollinium was shot upwards and alighted on the crest of
the labellum [. . .]. Now let us suppose an insect to alight on the
crest of the labellum (and no other convenient landing-place is
afforded), and then to lean over in front of the column to gnaw or
suck the bases of the petals swollen with sweet fluid. The weight
and movements of the insect would press and move the labellum
together with the bent underlying summit of the column; and the
latter, pressing on the hinge in the angle, would cause the ejec-
tion of the pollinium, which would infallibly strike the head of
the insect and adhere to it. (259–60, emphasis added)
In the absence of a gnawing, sucking insect, Darwin inserted himself into

the scene of pollination to demonstrate how orchids actively modify their
anatomy in response to insect activity. He was particularly taken with the
force with which these species eject their pollen. In the case of Catasetum,
he remarked that its “combined forces suffice to eject the pollinium with
considerable force to the distance of two or three feet. Several persons have
told me that, when touching the flowers of this genus in their hothouses,
the pollinia have struck their faces. I touched the antennae of C. callosum
whilst holding the flower at about a yard’s distance from a window, and
the pollinium hit the pane of glass, and stuck by its adhesive disc, to the
smooth vertical surface” (On the Various Contrivances, 2nd ed. 186). The
“utility of so forcible an ejection” is to fasten the pollinia securely to the
flying insect, “driving” the “soft and viscid cushion of the disc against
the hairy thorax of the large hymenopterous insects which frequent the
flowers. When once attached to an insect, assuredly no force which the
insect could exert would remove the disc and pedicel [. . .] and thus the
balls of pollen might readily be left on the adhesive stigma of the female
flower” (192).
Through sometimes violent, sometimes clumsy, and some-
times tender interventions, Darwin can be seen experimenting with
varying intensities of contact. As he leans into and gets involved in the
event of pollination, he participates by remodeling himself as insect pol-
linator. In each of his experiments, he finds new ways to simulate the
insect and stimulate the flower as a means to determine the degree of
its sensory attunement to insect penetration. In the process, he learns to
gauge perceptual differences across organisms and to arouse a response
from the plants.
Moving in time, space, and sensory relation with orchids and
insects, Darwin took up the roles of pollinator and pollinated. While
experimenting with a species of Mormodes, he used his finger to mimic
an insect’s movements: “I tried by placing my gloved finger on the summit
of the labellum, with the tip just projecting beyond its margin, and then
gently moving my finger it [sic] was really beautiful to see how instantly
the pollinium was projected upwards, and how accurately the whole viscid
Figure 5
Darwin’s
experimental tools.
Reprinted with per-

mission from John
The Complete Work
of Charles Darwin
Online (http://
darwin-online.org
.uk/).
surface of the disc struck my finger and firmly adhered to it” (On the Vari-
ous Contrivances, 2nd ed. 259). His experiments got him fully involved in a
kind of role-playing activity where he engaged his body and an extensive
array of instruments to mimic the movements of insects to see if he could
elicit the same response as they. With a feather, a brush, or even the tip of a
pencil (see fig. 5), he would set himself in the position of the insect so that
he could get a feel for the tensions and elasticity in the orchids’ responsive
tissues. Observing the species Orchis pyramidalis, Darwin described one
“pretty experiment” that saw him pushing a “fine bristle straight into the
narrow mouth of the nectary” so that he could
observe how certainly the narrow elongated viscid discs, form-

ing the roof, stick to the bristle. When the bristle is withdrawn,
the pollinia adhering to its upper side are withdrawn; and as
the discs form the sides of the arched roof, they adhere somewhat
to the sides of the bristle. They then quickly become depressed
so as to lie in the same line with the bristle,—one a little on one
side, and the other on the other side; and if the bristle, held in
the same relative position, be now inserted into the nectary of
another flower, the two ends of the pollinia accurately strike the
two protuberant stigmatic surfaces, situated on each side of the
mouth of the nectary. (81)
Darwin showed how in the moment of encounter, the insect’s “flexible

body” would be able to fit into the narrow contours of the nectary (25). This
allowed the orchid to affix its pollen masses on the insects’ body so per-
fectly that when the insect departed to visit the next flower, it would deliver
pollen directly to the new flower’s stigmata. Flexibly extended through
the bristle, Darwin found a way to participate in the event of pollination.
By inserting himself into the kinaesthetic and affective rela-
tions of insects and orchids, his experimental practice took on mimetic
form. Darwin’s penchant for imitation and his cultivation of affections and
sympathies for his experimental subjects through intimate encounters are
well documented by Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots. Beer notes that Darwin
was extraordinarily responsive to a range of phenomena: “He responds to
the moment of a leaf’s twirl and to the immense slow passages that raise
escarpments. So he is sensitive to the quiver of a tendril but also to rocks
and fossils” (246). This responsivity gave him a “capacity for empathy”
that “allowed him to appreciate the aesthetic choices of earthworms, the
erotic explorations of orchids, as well as the anger of other primates” (254).
His acts of mimicry are, for Beer, forms of “intimacy and enactment” that
serve as experimental “means to proof” (253). And yet, Darwin’s intima-
cies and empathic relations were not innocent; they were grounded in
the violent bodily transgressions of biological experiment.19 Beer tends
to downplay this violence in her efforts to make the point that Darwin’s
acts of mimicry “reverse” the signifying relations we typically associate
with “anthropomorphism” (253). In this sense Darwin’s experiments with
orchids resonate with what science studies scholar Sara Wylie has explored
in the context of researchers’ early experiments with insect hormones. She
notes the “irony typical of mimetic relationships” wherein “the humans
who took this step” themselves “became strangely like insects” (15).
By imitating flowers and insects, Beer suggests that Darwin
decenters and displaces the human. In so doing, the human is no longer
the measure for the nonhuman; rather, the forms and movements of ani-
mals and plants reinscribe human sensibilities. But this wasn’t always so
obvious. Take, for example, what looks like an explicitly anthropomorphic
comparison of different species of Catasetum:
The position of the antennae in this Catasetum may be compared

with that of a man with his left arm raised and bent so that his
hand stands in front of his chest, and with his right arm crossing
his body lower down so that the fingers project just beyond his
left side. In Catasetum callosum both arms are held lower down,
and are extended symmetrically. In C. saccatum the left arm is
bowed and held in front, as in C. tridentatum, but rather lower

down; whilst the right arm hangs downwards paralysed, with
the hand turned a little outwards. In every case notice will be
given in an admirable manner, when an insect visits the label-
lum, and the time has arrived for the ejection of the pollinium, so
that it may be transported to the female plant. (On the Various
Contrivances 235)
On first reading, this may appear as a typical anthropomorphic restag-

ing that models the flower on the anatomy of a man. 20 However, we read
Darwin here as conducting a “body experiment”—an embodied twist on
the well-known “thought experiment”—that finds him exercising his
kinaesthetic dexterities in order to figure out differences in Catasetum
anatomy. 21 The man behind this analogy is not just any man; it is Darwin
moving his body in order to model it on the distinct anatomy of each orchid.
Rather than imposing human form on the plant, he has entrained his body
to the peculiar shapes of these flowers. And once this body experiment is
inscribed in text as it is above, it can be read as a protocol for readers to
conduct their own body experiments and try on these orchidean postures
for themselves.
In his orchid texts, Darwin can be seen giving his body over to
his experiments. This practice recalls anthropologist Michael Taussig’s
reading of mimesis as a “sensuous moment of knowing that includes a
yielding and mirroring of the knower in the unknown” (45). Where Beer
does not dwell on the violence of Darwin’s mimetic proclivities, Taussig
brings it to the fore. In his meditation on Darwin’s remarkable penchant
for mimesis, Taussig documents a young Darwin in the midst of his
Beagle voyage, flush with excitement miming “primitives” on the beach
at Tierra del Fuego. Taussig’s account of Darwin’s diary entries forces us
to acknowledge the violence of mimesis and to think carefully about the
asymmetrical relations of power that enabled Darwin to move “bodily into
alterity” (40). 22 So while Darwin’s sometimes violent, sometimes tender
mimetic experiments attuned him to the sensibilities of both orchid and
insect, we must appreciate the forms of power that contour this ecology of
mimetic becomings. His “capacity for empathy” and his love of the orchids
was expansive, yet his leap into the midst of the becoming-orchid of the
insects and the becoming-insect of the orchids was not benign.
And yet it was through an experimental form of life contoured
by both love and violence that Darwin’s inquiry gained its traction. His
reciprocal capture in an affectively charged mimetic tangle of bodies

allowed him to cultivate the attentions of an ethologist able to keep pace
with both plant and insect practices (Stengers, Cosmopolitics). 23 And as he
documented the tensions, affinities, and rhythms of “intra-acting” bodies
and becomings (Barad, Meeting), he produced more than a functionalist
account of evolutionary adaptations. Darwin’s embodied, multisensory
experiments thus offer an opportunity to explore involutionary momentum
in an affective ecology that also includes the scientist. It is to the task of
unpacking this concept of “involutionary momentum” that we now turn.
From Evolution to Involution
This reading of Darwin draws on the insights of many feminist

scholars who are turning to biology to theorize difference and material-
ity. 24 Perhaps surprisingly, it is Darwin who is receiving the closest atten-
tion in recent scholarship. This marks a significant shift that pushes up
against what Griet Vandermassen, in Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin?, has
called a tradition of “biophobia” in feminist theory. Recently, Elizabeth
Grosz has explored Darwin’s evolutionary theories for new trajectories
in feminist thought. Grosz argues that feminists can find promising new
directions in Darwin’s ideas of variation, sexual selection, and the kinship
among humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and other organisms. 25 She is
encouraged by Darwin’s commitment to a “concept of temporal becoming”
(Nick of Time 8). In her view, Darwin “creates a science in which history,
and thus the eruption of unexpected events, is central.” From this perspec-
tive she interprets the aims of contemporary life sciences quite generously,
suggesting that they are “irremediably linked” to the “unpredictable, the
nondeterministic, the movement of virtuality.” Grosz is also inspired by
the “random,” “mechanical,” and “fundamentally mindless and direction-
less” aspects of Darwin’s evolutionary views and sees these as generative
terms for feminist theory (Time Travels 17–18). This, however, is where
our reading diverges from Grosz’s. Indeed, these are the very terms that
neo-Darwinists have seized on and through which they produce such
reductive accounts of ecological relations. We hold out for accounts of
ecological relations that contoured by different logics.
It is of course crucial to make a distinction between Darwin’s
approach to evolution and the reformulation of his theories in neo-Darwin-
ian form. Evolutionary biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin
laud Darwin for his “pluralist” approach to evolutionary change (Gould
and Lewontin). Indeed, Gould notes that Darwin was often ambivalent
about the mechanisms of speciation, and in some contexts even verged
toward Lamarckian accounts of evolutionary novelty that envisioned
organisms inheriting acquired traits. In light of the openness of Darwin’s
wavering convictions, Gould is critical of today’s evolutionary theories that
appear to have clamped down on a “fundamentalist” version of evolution,
a theory that fetishizes natural selection as the sole mechanism of evolu-
tion. Quite unlike Darwin, these “ultra-Darwinian” approaches maintain
unwavering “faith in the power of natural selection” as the single “opti-
mizing agent” in evolution (Gould and Lewontin). Rather than analyzing
organisms as “integrated wholes,” these “adaptationist” accounts break
organisms’ complex anatomies and behaviors into “unitary traits” in order
to tell “adaptive stories” for each trait “considered separately” (Gould and
Lewontin 581). This satisfying “just so” story of evolutionary change seems
to satiate the “deeply engrained” modern desire for accounts that identify
an ultimate function for every trait. Moreover, these are the stories in
which adaptations are made legible as rational choices in an economic
logic that aims to maximize fitness advantages while calculating the
lowest energy expenditures. These logics have become hegemonic in the
contemporary life sciences.
Darwin traced life’s diverse forms and behaviors along the
branches of a genealogical tree (Helmreich, “Trees”). Neo-Darwinian
accounts amplify this genealogical form. For them, diverging branches
signify evolutionary change through random genetic mutations accrued
in populations of individual species. Organisms have little agency in these
accounts that attribute evolutionary momentum to the wiles of “selfish
genes” struggling to keep their host species branching out in a competitive
field structured by many enemies and few allies (for example, Dawkins).
Neo-Darwinian approaches overdetermine the temporalities
that are deemed relevant to the study of life. In the tracing of evolution-
ary trajectories, beings and doings get blurred across the longue durée of
changes experienced by entire species and averaged out over generations
and populations. In this frame, the temporal arc of evolutionary change
is inscribed by a strategizing telos of species struggle and survival. In the
process these accounts lose track of particular bodies and of local and
ephemeral differences. Practices that fall outside the domain of repro-
duction or survival, including organisms’ improvisations and playful
experiments, do not record themselves in evolutionary memory; deemed
irrelevant, they are rendered invisible in these broad sweeps of time.
But not all evolutionary ecologists share these views. In honor

of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, the late
microbial ecologist Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) organized a symposium at
Balliol College in Oxford in the United Kingdom, which she called Homage
to Darwin. 26 In her lecture, which followed addresses by Richard Dawkins
and other prominent evolutionary thinkers, Margulis homed in on Darwin’s
insight “that all life” shares “common ancestry”: “It’s a brilliant insight of
Darwin, that we can laud. But the concept that the tree is the right topology,
I think is very wrong” (“Symbiogenesis”). For Margulis, this is because “a
tree assumes that the lineages continue to branch, and branch, and branch
from a common ancestor.” Margulis pointed to recent work that demon-
strates the “movement of genetic material from one branch to another”
and insisted vociferously that this movement “makes the topology a net, a
web, and no longer a tree.” If images of trees stand in for phylogeny, filial
loyalty, and the defense of the family line, Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory
accounts for evolutionary innovation in the dense tangle of branches, as
she elaborates in Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. 27 In her view, new forms of
life arise from intimate minglings in the webbed relations among species.
Endosymbionts are constituted by acts of what Margulis’s coauthor and son,
Dorion Sagan, and others have called acts of “ingestion without digestion”
(see “The Human Is More Than Human”). Margulis and Sagan’s numer-
ous collaborative works describe forms of evolutionary change that are
initiated by interspecies affinities. 28 Their evolutionary theory is founded
on an affectively charged community ecology shaped less by genealogical
lines of descent and filiation than by rhizomatic associations and daring,
improvisational leaps across species lines.
Rather than the formation of new species through endosym-
biosis, what we aim to track in this essay is the very momentum through
which organisms reach toward one another and involve themselves in one
another’s lives. If, as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, evolution
is a “rolling outwards,” a kind of speciation through divergence in the
shape of branching trees, we approach involution as the “rolling, curling,
turning inwards” that brings distinct species together to invent new ways
of life (oed). Caught in the affective ecologies of plant/insect encounters,
we turn from evolutionary trees toward other models of relationality and
“becoming with” across difference (Haraway, When Species). We use the
concept of momentum less in the sense supplied by Newtonian physics and
more in the sense of what dancers may feel as they lean into and follow
through on a movement; that is, as “an impetus” and as the “continuing
vigour resulting from an initial effort or expenditure of energy” (oed).

Involutionary momentum helps us to get a feel for affective push and
pull among bodies, including the affinities, ruptures, enmeshments, and
repulsions among organisms constantly inventing new ways to live with
and alongside one another.
Deleuze and Guattari’s “creative involution” inspires an
approach that amplifies relations constituted through affinity (see also
Bergson). 29 In their view, becoming “is not an evolution, at least not an
evolution by descent and filiation”: it “concerns alliance” (238). They insist
that the inward foldings of involution should “in no way” be “confused with
regression” (238). A Thousand Plateaus illuminates involutionary modes
of becoming through the repeating refrain of plant/insect intimacy: the
“wasp-orchid.” Instead of two autonomous, clearly demarcated individual
organisms engaging in a sexual encounter, the wasp-orchid is an “intra-
active” phenomenon. More than a joining of plant and insect, this wasp-
orchid is bound in an unparsable “block of becoming” (238). This does not
“link the wasp to the orchid, any more than it conjugates or mixes them:
it passes between them, carrying them away in a shared proximity in
which the discernibility of points disappears” (294). 30 The event involves
a “becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (10).
Stengers identifies such inextricable becomings as forms of
“reciprocal capture” (Cosmopolitics). Consider, for example, the Ophrys
orchids described at the beginning of this essay. An involutionary reading
would work to destabilize stories grounded in the “unilateral” capture of
the bee by the “sexually deceptive” orchid, describing, rather, the orchid
and its bee-pollinators as mutually constituted through a reciprocal cap-
ture from which neither plant nor insect can be disentangled. It is in con-
versation with this wasp-orchid that we track the involutionary momentum
that ingathers plants and insects in acts of pollination and communication.
If evolutionists tend to fetishize economic logics, random muta-
tions driving generational change, and functionalist accounts of adapta-
tion, involutionists amplify other dimensions of ecological life. They are
awake to the fleeting and contingent forms of life happening “now,” and
“now,” and “now.” In so doing, they draw attention to practice and to the
momentary improvisations of multispecies practitioners caught together in
affectively charged ecologies. Reading Darwin as an involutionist expands
our scope for theorizing affect, more-than-human materiality, and dif-
ferences that matter. 31 So here, even if we work to unhinge the legacy of
Darwin’s evolutionary logics, we still find promise in his involutionary
natural history of orchid pollination, an account that maps interspecies

enmeshments and intimacies and unsettles notions of the natural fixity
of species boundaries and normative accounts of sexual reproduction and
sensuality.
In what follows, we move beyond the mimetic tangle of pol-
lination events to examine other modes of involution among plants and
insects. As we investigate the phenomenon of plant/insect communica-
tion, we discover further evidence that these are relationships with some
serious chemistry.
Chemical Ecology
If Darwin involved himself haptically in the affective anato-

mies of orchid/insect sex, then in our contemporary context we find sci-
entists sniffing out the subtle ecologies of plants’ and insects’ chemical
propositions. The studies of the attractive chemical lures of Ophrys orchids
recounted in the introduction to this essay can be recognized as one small
area of research within a larger and growing field known as chemical
ecology. Where orchid pollination research specializes in the evolution-
ary problematics of mimetic chemistries, chemical ecologists take up
wider questions of communication and study a range of relationships
within and among species that are catalyzed through molecular excita-
tions. Like pollination, communication, expression, and articulation are
practices through which organisms involve themselves in one another’s
lives. Consider the following story as a glimpse into the subtle chemical
ecologies that researchers in this field are trying to parse today: Inspired
by the aroma of wood smoke from lightning strikes, wild tobacco seeds
take root and their first fine leaves break through the dry soils of the Utah
desert. Their stems thicken and elongate, and their leaves unfurl to drink
in the hot sun. They pull water up from the soil and draw it through their
filigreed vessels, releasing it as cooling vapor. They exhale an atmospheric
cloud of volatile molecules that mingle with the other gases that hover
around their leaves.
Grasshoppers arrive to feed and ravage its leaves. A moth hov-
ers nearby and lands on one of the plants, looking for nectar and a place
to lay her eggs. Later in the season when her eggs hatch, out emerge the
tobacco hornworm larvae, delighted to discover their proximity to this
favorite meal. They climb the tobacco stems with bodies bent on feeding
and begin their rhythmic ingestion, slicing into each leaf with hungry jaws.
But these tobacco plants don’t passively give their bodies over to
these hungry herbivores. Their cell membranes are sensors that transduce
excitations through their tissues: they can feel insects climbing their stems
and leaves and can taste insect saliva to discern precisely who is feeding
on their leaves. In response to a feeding caterpillar, one tobacco plant
propagates electrical currents through its distributed body and synthesizes
a fresh batch of potent chemicals. Soon, cells in its roots, stems, and dis-
tant leaves are producing toxins that slow down the caterpillar’s growth
by impairing its nervous system and digestion. But the plant doesn’t stop
there. It calls for help. It synthesizes and releases a concentrated plume of
volatile chemicals that can disperse widely. Plants growing nearby hear
the call and activate their own defense responses to ward off predators.
Downwind a predatory insect picks up telling notes in a specially crafted
bouquet, and as it homes in on the source, it discovers that the plant has
offered it up a gift: a tasty hornworm larva.
This is a story that Ian Baldwin has long labored to tell. Bald-
win, an American scientist, is head of the Chemical Ecology Research
Institute at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, where he directs
a laboratory and massive greenhouse dedicated to studying plant/insect
communication. He also runs a large research station in Utah, where he
studies the chemical ecology of wild Nicotiana plants. His research team
is producing evidence that plants have several strategies for defending
themselves against predators. They do this not only by interfering with an
herbivore’s growth and digestion through the active synthesis of toxins in
plant tissues but also by synthesizing volatile chemicals that lure preda-
tory insects hungry to feed on plant pests. Remarkably, plants appear to
have the ability to elicit support from a “third tropic level,” that is, from
predatory insects that can prey on these herbivores.
The field of chemical ecology is founded on the general prin-
cipal that species have evolved complex ways to use chemistry to attract,
repel, and collaborate with one another. One textbook with a sense of
humor calls it the “ecology of body odor” (Dicke and Takken), yet this
definition doesn’t begin to account for organisms’ active and creative
use of chemistry. Researchers in this field pay extraordinary attention
to organisms’ sensory dexterities, their communication skills, and their
interpretive powers to make sense of one another’s chemical emissions.
Some of the earliest studies in this field focused on “intra-specific” sig-
naling among insects, including the widely known example of male moth
attraction to female moth pheromones. Today, interspecies signaling has
become a very active site of research, especially with developing interests

in plant/insect communication.
In addition to studying plants’ use of chemistry for sex and
reproduction, as we saw in the case of orchid pollination, chemical ecolo-
gists try to parse complex relations between predators and prey, as well
as hosts, parasites, and parasitoids. They investigate organisms’ inventive
strategies both to protect themselves from predation and to seek out nour-
ishment in the context of complex, interspecies ecologies. This research
is thus a significant “first step towards appreciating the involvement of
chemical information in the ecological context of food webs” (Dicke and
Takken 2). There are currently several journals, textbooks, and laboratory
manuals, as well as large institutes and research stations in Europe and
the United States, dedicated to research in this area.
According to Baldwin, Kessler, and Halitschke, “[P]lants are
masters of gas exchange, not only literally building forests from gases
taken from the air but also releasing complex bouquets of volatile organic
compounds back into the air” (1). It is this volatility that gets read as a
kind of vocality, a way of speaking in a chemical vocabulary. Plants emit
volatile compounds continuously. Some are exhaled “constitutively” while
others are “induced” by notable events, such as the detection of an her-
bivore’s saliva in wounded tissues (Arimura, Agrawal, and Bruin; Birke
and Hubbard 21; Dicke et al.; and Felton and Tumlinson). Working in an
involutionary mode, we interpret the large and growing literature on plant
signaling and communication to suggest that plants articulate (Latour)
their experiences and desires in an aromatic atmospherics (Choy; Sloter-
dijk) of volatile chemicals through which they have developed ingenious
means to seed and respond to long-distance conversations between other
plants and insects. 32
In print at least, chemical ecologists are more guarded. Like the
orchid scientists, chemical ecologists rely extensively on a neo-Darwinian
logic that constrains adaptive behaviors to those that have been ampli-
fied and entrenched in genomes through the forces of natural selection.
Moreover, in their hands, ecology tends to be configured as a militarized
economy: plant communication is modeled on cybernetic information
flow; plants have defense budgets; they recruit “bodyguards” (Sabelis and
De Jong); and they can apparently conduct cost-benefit analyses of energy
expenditures and resource use. In these accounts, plants conduct a kind of
“chemical warfare,” and their airborne signals are treated like botanical
versions of Morse code. These metaphors are made explicit in a recent

popularization of chemical ecology that appeared in 2000 titled Thieves,
Deceivers, and Killers: Tales of Chemistry in Nature (Agosta).
Working athwart this dominant logic, we read chemical ecolo-
gists as involutionists, that is, as practitioners whose inquiry involves them
in an affective ecology, one that is in this case excited by volatile chemistry.
We read their scientific research papers generously and find other narra-
tives of relationality pullulating beneath neo-Darwinian discourses. What
might an involutionary reading of chemical ecology look like? Here, we
examine some openings for a feminist theory of difference and responsi-
bility grounded in an involutionary reading of the contemporary sciences
of plant/insect communication.
The Chemistries of Plant/

Insect Communication
An early mentor recruited Baldwin into this field to make use

of his skill in climbing trees (Abbot 887). Once high up in the canopy,
Baldwin was able to rig up an experimental apparatus to collect data on
the volatile compounds released among tree leaves exposed to insect pre-
dation. This work gave rise to a highly controversial 1983 paper, the first
to propose that by communicating through chemical scents, plants can
alert their neighbors to the immanent arrival of predators (Baldwin and
Schultz). The press picked this up as a sensational story and dubbed the
phenomenon “talking trees.” The near scandalous suggestion that plants
could engage in conversation with one another incited a series of debates
that pushed members of the plant-signaling community to recalibrate
their metaphors and think long and hard about what they meant by the
terms “signal” and “communication” (Baldwin, Kessler, and Halitschke;
Baluška; Fowler and Lawton). Years later, Baldwin and his collaborators
insist on a modification: “This phrase [‘talking trees’] seems unfortunate,
because selection most likely favors plants that ‘eavesdrop’ on vocs [volatile
organic compounds] released from neighbors and respond by tailoring
their phenotypes to enhance their own fitness” (Baldwin et al., “Volatile
Signaling” 812, emphasis added). Under pressure he mobilizes an evolu-
tionary logics to restage the story. “Eavesdropping elms” offers him an
alliterative alternative that doesn’t incite so much dissent (Baldwin et al.;
Baldwin, Kessler, and Halitschke; and Paschold, Halitschke, and Baldwin).
What, then, counts as a signal for these researchers? What

would communication mean among such slow-moving organisms that
don’t have eyes, mouths, or what most would recognize as a brain?33 Bald-
win acknowledges that communication is “a loaded term,” but insists on a
minimal definition that allows for “information to be exchanged, regard-
less of ‘intent’ ” (Baldwin, Kessler, and Halitschke 1). Early accounts of
interspecies communication identified the volatile compounds that plants
exhaled into the atmosphere in response to predation as “infochemicals”;
that is, chemicals that carry information about the state of the plant (Vet
and Dicke). But what constitutes a bit of information? And for whom and
under what conditions does this count as a signal? These are questions
with which chemical ecologists struggle, and the ontological and epistemo-
logical stakes are high. Do plants intend to communicate with other plants
and insects? In the context of plant/insect signaling, researchers can
swerve around this knotty terrain; after all, it is easy to argue that insects,
with their well-documented sensory systems and adaptive behaviors, have
cleverly learned to read plant emissions for signs of a tasty meal.
The case of plant-to-plant (intra- and interspecies) signaling is
more difficult to navigate, and according to one participant in the debate,
“Few topics in plant ecology have inspired so much excitement and con-
troversy” as the suggestion of “communication between plants” (Agrawal
446). Indeed, plants have to be able to receive the signals, to learn how
to “listen” to one another and to have the capacity to act on propositions
made by other plants. So if Baldwin insists that plants can listen in on
one another’s conversations, others are less convinced: “The emission of
volatile chemicals has been referred to as the ability of plants to ‘talk,’ that
is, to emit information about their state of attack. Although the behavioral
responses of plant-inhabiting animals to such chemical information have
reached textbook status, there are continuing expressions of skepticism
about the ability of plants to respond to damage-related signaling from
their neighbors. Plants are still often thought to be ‘deaf’ to the chemical
information emitted by neighboring plants” (Dicke, Agrawal, and Bruin
403).
For those who adhere to the persistent hierarchy of being that
renders plants blind and mechanical, it is not possible to utter the ques-
tion “Can plants speak?”; the best they can do is ask “Can they hear?”34
Plant intentionality is troubling terrain for chemical ecologists, who are
wary of the charge of anthropomorphism. And yet their research raises
important questions about what precisely constitutes a subject or a sign
in what appears to be an effusive ecology overflowing with messages and

meanings.
Chemical ecologists are careful to qualify what they mean by
communication and shy away from the terms “symbol,” “sign,” and “behav-
ior” (Schenck and Seabloom 2). They seem to have settled on “signal” as
the basic unit of communication. A signal is for them “a detectable physical
quantity or impulse by which messages or information can be transmit-
ted,” and communication is a “process by which information is exchanged
between a signaler and a receiver through a common system of signals.” In
an article on the evolutionary ecology of plant signals, H. Jochen Schenck
and Eric W. Seabloom look to Gregory Bateson’s cybernetically inspired
definition of information to help them parse the complexities of plant sig-
naling and communication: “Information is any difference which makes a
difference in some later event” (Schenck and Seabloom 2). The authors go
further: “Information comes in the form of answers to binary questions
such as self or non-self, male or female. Continuous information can be
expressed as a series of binary choices. This means that the amount of
information can be measured in bits.” This informatic model of commu-
nication, which so readily fits into the calculating logics of a militarized
economy, may itself be read as a defensive strategy that protects research-
ers from breaching the constrained forms of agency permissible inside
neo-Darwinian models of evolution.
Other narratives pullulate beneath the surface. In spite of
attempts to keep talk of plant agency contained, descriptions of their
loquacious habits continue to disrupt a more restrained scientific dis-
course. For Baldwin, heavy cultivation has disabled otherwise adept
plants. They have been rendered “deaf” and “mute” through intensive
agricultural practices and pesticide use (Paschold, Halitschke, and Bald-
win). By contrast, he hints that wild varieties still know how to “scream”
out for help from their insect allies. 35 In spite of their best efforts to con-
strain their discourse, researchers like Baldwin seem to be caught in
an evocative and productive synaesthetic tangle of anthropomorphisms.
And though they smuggle in some very human assumptions about ability,
disability, and vocality, there appears to be ample room in their stories
to read relationality anew.
Articulations across Difference
Plants out there are listening

and responding.
—Agrawal
An involutionary reading would require us to begin with the

assertion that we don’t yet know what a signal is or what it can do, let alone
what constitutes cross-species communication. The concepts of signal and
communication have specific histories that constrain how plants’ chemical
utterances are read in the context of an evolutionary ecology. We follow,
here, the dense tangle of sensory anthropomorphisms and unintentional
intentionalities that keep tripping these chemical ecologists up as they try
to formulate ways to talk about plants’ uncanny abilities to converse with
one another and with insects.
In an involutionary view, plants are alchemists who turn sun-
light and carbon dioxide into volatile utterances and innovate forms of
atmospheric media amenable for long-distance expression. They are arti-
sans who craft mimetically responsive anatomies. They are also keenly
attuned sensors whose bodies can register the subtlest difference in tem-
perature (Bose and Das, “Researches”), the slightest brush of the wing
of a passing insect (Darwin, On the Various Contrivances; Shteir, “Sensi-
tive”), and who can discern small differences in herbivores by detecting
distinct substances in their saliva (Alborn et al.). Their roots and rhizomes
form a network of connections as complex as an animal’s nervous system
(Baluška, Lev-Yadun, and Mancuso; Trewavas), and they move actively in
response to their ever changing world (Bose, Life Movements; Darwin and
Darwin, Power of Movement).
Plants’ sensory systems are, in Bruno Latour’s evocative phras-
ing, articulate; that is, they are like an expert perfumer’s “nose” trained to
discriminate differences in scents. A nose for Latour is “someone able to
discriminate more and more subtle differences and able to tell them apart
from one another, even when they are masked by or mixed with others”
(207). Latour suggests, “It is not by accident that the person is called ‘a
nose’ as if, through practice, she had acquired an organ that defined her
ability to detect chemical and other differences.” Even more subtly attuned
than our trained noses, plants have incredible capacities to articulate dif-
ference, that is, to discern subtle differences in their worlds. This capacity
to articulate worldly difference also renders them articulate in the sense
that they can express themselves and respond to their changing worlds by
inventing new kinds of chemical propositions. Latour builds on Stengers

(“Constructivist Reading”) to argue that the world is full of “propositions”
waiting to be registered by interested bodies. Those who invest their ener-
gies in attuning themselves to others can learn over time to discriminate
increasingly subtle differences in one another’s utterances.
Consider that communication need not be limited to contexts
where individual packets of binary data are both sent and received. Per-
haps plant propositions bear no relation to our models of semiosis and
syntax. Perhaps they are not “representations” that attempt, success-
fully or not, to name or mirror a preexisting world (Barad, “Posthuman-
ist”; Latour). In an involutionary reading, signal-response mechanisms
give way to livelier ontologies and intra-active worldings. The question
becomes, How are affectively charged energies and chemistries transduced
within and among bodies? When we begin with plants, we quickly come
to understand that organisms can learn how to attune their sensory bod-
ies to the ongoing improvisational rhythm of differences that make up the
world. Plants in this sense are difference generators; they constantly run
experiments to improvise new ways to articulate themselves, to register
new kinds of differences in the world, and to invent new ways to make a
difference in the world.
Our involutionary reading of plant/insect encounters thus
germinates an affective ecology, one in which ecological niches and the
milieus that contour the gaps between bodies teem with energies, affects,
and propositions. A milieu in this formulation is never a passive or empty
space between bodies. In the context of plant/insect articulations, the air
hangs heavy with significance.
Openings
In “The Promises of Monsters,” Donna Haraway reminds us

that articulation has another meaning, one that indicates practices of
joining together and building alliances, affinities, and connections (see
also Hall). To “articulate with” is to join with others, and this is precisely
what plants and insects do in their involutionary modes. Darwin and the
chemical ecologists also articulate themselves with others by inserting
themselves into the energetic momentum of plant/insect encounters. In
the Latourian sense, their experiments generate ways of articulating dif-
ference and making these differences articulate. However, as Haraway
reminds us, these joinings are “noninnocent”; they are cultivated through
“contestable practice[s]” in which “the partners are never set once and for
all” (314). As Darwin’s penchant for mimesis reminds us, asymmetries of
power between partners in these experiments cannot be overlooked.
By leaning into Darwin’s experiments, hovering with insects
as they lap at floral nectaries and feeling ourselves pulled by the label-
lum’s lure and the tobacco plant’s volatile plumes, we can begin to tell new
kinds of stories. As we hitch a ride on this involutionary momentum and
draw attention to the rhythms of these intimate relations, we can disturb
the militarized and economic logics that pervade the sciences of ecology.
And though involutionary readings cannot erase or fully undermine these
logics, they do offer a supplement that amplifies otherwise muted views.
It is in encounters between orchids, insects, and scientists
that we find openings for an ecology of interspecies intimacies and subtle
propositions. What is at stake in this involutionary approach is a theory of
ecological relationality that takes seriously organisms as inventive prac-
titioners who experiment as they craft interspecies lives and worlds. This
is an ecology inspired by a feminist ethic of “response-ability” in which
questions of species difference are always conjugated with attentions
to affect, entanglement, and rupture; it is an affective ecology in which
creativity and curiosity characterize the experimental forms of life of all
kinds of practitioners, not only the human ones. We will need this mode
of ecological thinking in order to do more effective work in challenging
the status quo of ecological irresponsibility.
This essay is dedicated, in loving memory, to Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), involutionist

extraordinaire.
We extend our thanks to Sophia Roosth and Astrid Schrader for the invitation to contribute
to this special issue of differences and to Elizabeth Weed for her generous support through
the writing and revision process. Many thanks also to Etienne Benson, Donna Haraway,
Stefan Helmreich, Kelly Ladd, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Hugh Raff les, Catriona Sandi-
lands, and Joan Steigerwald for their close and generative readings of earlier versions of
this essay. Many thanks to Martha Kenney, Rusty Shteir, and participants in the Politics of
Care in Technoscience Workshop at York University, for their generous comments on this
essay. Thank you also to Dani Pacey for translations and transcription. The writing and
research of this essay was made possible by a generous grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
carla hustak received her doctorate in history from the University of Toronto in 2010.
She has two essays in press, one forthcoming in the Journal of Transnational American
Studies and one in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Recently awarded a two-year
Figure 6
Lynn Margulis.
Photo credit
unknown.
Courtesy of Lynn
Margulis Archives.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, she is

currently revising her dissertation, titled “Radical Intimacies: Affective Potential and
the Transatlantic Politics of Love in the Sex Reform Movement, 1900–1930,” as a book
manuscript.
natasha myers is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the program
in Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto. Her work has appeared in
Body & Society, Social Studies of Science, and Science Studies. She is currently completing a
manuscript on visual culture and modes of embodiment in the contemporary life sciences,
which will be published by Duke University Press. Her new project, “Sensing Botanical Sen-
soria,” is an ethnography of the arts and sciences of botanical experimentation. A Research
Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
provided generous funding for the research and writing of this essay.
Notes 1 On the transduction of affects Hardt; Massumi), science and

through excitable tissues, see technology studies (Murphy;
Myers, “Dance Your PhD” and Myers and Dumit), and geogra-
Molecular Embodiments; and phy (Thrift). We are moved by
Myers and Dumit. Deleuze and Guattari’s response,
in A Thousand Plateaus, to Spi-
2 On the “affective entanglements” noza’s question, “What can a
of inquiry in the life sciences, see body do?” They find in bodies the
Myers, “Animating Mechanism” responsive power to affect and
and “Molecular Embodiments.” be affected, a capacity that holds
bodies in responsive relation.
3 Here we draw on theories of affect
taking shape in recent work in 4 Darwin’s botany is currently
anthropology (Stewart, Taussig), drawing close scholarly attention.
cultural studies (Clough and
See, for example, Ayrs; Bellon; 10 See Darwin’s correspondence

Endersby; and Hoquet. online at http://www
.darwinproject.ac.uk/.
5 Erasmus Darwin offered a
remarkable portrait of plants’ 11 Darwin extended this discus-
agency in his 1789 poem “The sion of the evolutionary stakes of
Loves of the Plants.” See, for sexual reproduction in the 1868
example, Browne, “Botany for publication of The Variation of
Gentlemen”; and Schiebinger. Animals and Plants under Domes-
tication. In this text, he suggests
6 Miller argues that plants offer that hermaphroditic flowers form
a productive site for reorient- “illegitimate unions” and that
ing feminist theory, and she “the act of impregnation is less
approaches the turn to plants in assured, and the fertility slightly
terms of feminist investments in less, when the pollen and ovules
disturbing active/passive dichoto- belong to the same flower, than
mies where the male is coded when belonging to two distinct
active and the female passive. individuals of the same form”
Miller turns to the plant in con- (113). He recalls orchids’ remark-
junction with philosopher Luce able anatomies and notes that
Irigaray’s ideas of efflorescence some orchids “acquired so pecu-
to suggest a productive but hith- liar a constitution that they can
erto neglected site for feminist be fertilised more readily by the
analysis. pollen of a distinct species than
by their own” (117). According
7 See, for example, Derrida; Har- to Darwin, this is “exactly the
away, When Species; and Wolfe. reverse of what occurs with all
See also Haraway’s forthcoming ordinary species” (117).
essay, “Sowing Worlds,” for new
ways of thinking relationality 12 In Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer
with plants. offers a generous reading of Dar-
win’s metaphor that amplifies the
8 “Plants with roots or radicles roles of “affinity” and “entangle-
may be rhizomorphic in other ment” in his approach to natural
respects altogether: the question history and evolutionary theory.
is whether plant life in its speci- According to Beer, “There may be
ficity is not entirely rhizomatic” a punning cross-play in Darwin’s
(Deleuze and Guattari 6). insistence on ‘entanglement’
in his theory and his metaphor.
9 In a recent special issue of Social
The primary meaning given to
Text, Julie Livingston and Jasbir
‘evolve’ in the 1826 edition of Dr.
Puar make a similar argument
Johnson’s dictionary in Darwin’s
for an “interspecies” approach to
library is ‘To unfold: to disen-
the nonhuman. Our approach also
tangle’ ” (19). See Hagen on the
resonates with Eben Kirksey and
metaphor of the entangled bank
Stefan Helmreich’s recent call
and the relationship of evolution
for a “multispecies ethnography.”
to ecology.
Though we do begin with plants,
we hope also to push past the spe- 13 Peter Sloterdijk might call this
cies concept, with an appreciation a “greenhouse democracy,” a
of the significance of the milieus, view that suggests that humans
the in-betweens, that contour and nonhumans in enclosed
ecological relations at so many environments can become sen-
different scales. sitively attuned to one another’s
presence.
14 If orchids and insects were 19 Beer describes one remarkable

already sites of fascination for experiment that finds Darwin
Victorians (Browne, Charles; imitating the peculiar actions of
Clark; Desmond and Moore), one female baboon whose “capa-
Darwin’s intensive inquiry into cious heart” found her adopting
orchids displayed them in a new the young of many other species
light. Darwin’s work on pollina- (252). Darwin conducts an experi-
tion took shape at a time when ment in order to dispel his critics’
women, sex, and botany were doubts that this baboon could
linked in Victorian popular cul- have bitten off the claws of a little
ture. This, as many have shown, kitten that she had adopted in
is a trend that dates back to the order to prevent it from scratch-
advent of the Linnaean sexual ing her. His experiment involves
system of classification (Camp- him “aping” the baboon “to prove
bell; George; Kemp; Schiebin- his point”: “I tried, and found
ger; Shteir, Cultivating Women; that I could readily seize with my
Teute). own teeth, the sharp little claws
of a kitten nearly five weeks old”
15 See Raffles for an involutionary (253).
account of Karl von Frisch’s early-
twentieth-century studies of bee 20 See Alison Syme’s A Touch of
communication and behavior. On Blossom, a marvelous account of
Darwin and bees, see also Davis. anthropomorphized flowers in fin
de siècle painting.
16 See environmental historian
Carolyn Merchant on the concept 21 See Myers, “Dance Your PhD,”
of partnerships with nature. for more on “body experiments”
as affectively and kinesthetically
17 See, for example, Harding; charged modes of inquiry in the
Haraway, “Situated Knowl- life sciences.
edges”; and Myers, “Molecular
Embodiments.” 22 Taussig develops his concept of
mimesis in conversation with
18 Darwin took considerable care Darwin to remind his readers of
to select his illustrators and the noninnocence of mimesis,
ensure the published renderings especially in colonial contexts
were precise. George Sowerby contoured by racism and skewed
illustrated the flowers in Dar- power relations. In Taussig’s
win’s book on orchids. Darwin account, Darwin attempts to
confronted several challenges “mime the (Fuegian) mimers”
in botanical and horticultural (80). Taussig likens the sounds
illustration. He faced the specific they make upon greeting Darwin
challenge of visually depicting and his shipmates to the sounds
the mechanisms of cross-fertil- Englishmen make when they
ization. His illustrations high- imitate the clucking of chickens,
lighted orchids’ sexual organs noting that these are the sounds
by frequently removing sepals “Englishmen use not merely to
and petals to expose them. John imitate animals but to control
Ruskin, a staunch opponent of them, and Darwin, in describ-
Darwin, wrote the book Proser- ing the speech of the Fuegians—
pina in response to Darwin’s ren- whom he catalogues as the lowest
dering of orchids’ sexual organs. grade of man in the world—not
Ruskin deliberately obscured the only compares their speech to
flowers’ sexual organs behind this imitating-controlling habit
petals. See Smith. and vocabulary of ours vis-à-vis
animals [. . .] [H]e himself [. . .] and Krumben, Chimeras and

imitates these sounds—he imi- Consciousness.
tates the imitation in order to
better imitate the imitators” (80). 29 The concept of involution has
For more on the violence and rac- been taken up by several oth-
ism of mimesis in the context of ers. Richard Doyle develops the
colonial relations, see Bhabha. concept to explore plant-assisted
consciousness expansion in his
23 See Stengers, Cosmopolitics, on recent book Darwin’s Pharmacy.
reciprocal capture. See Deleuze’s For Doyle, “involution” is
writings on Spinoza and Jakob the difficult and joyful rec-
von Uexküll in Spinoza for an ognition that one is immanent
account of this approach to to the system one is observing:
ethology. Welcome to the noösphere, where
focused attention brings forth
24 See, for example, Alaimo; Alaimo transformations of the biosphere.
and Hekman; Barad, Meeting the Both the mechanism of a f lower’s
Universe; Bennett; Braidotti; But- enchantment and its chain of asso-
ler; Birke and Hubbard; Grosz, ciation with an exogamous system
Becoming Undone, Nick of Time, of aesthetically mediated sexual
and Time Travels; Franklin; Har- reproduction suggest a subject
away, Modest_Witness, Simians, who is subject, even or especially
and When Species; Irigaray; and in its experience of interiority, to
Subramaniam. an ecology of highly differential
and thoroughly dynamic prac-
25 See Grosz, Becoming Undone, tices. As both form and content of
Nick of Time, and Time Travels. a capacity for transpecies link-
While Grosz looks to Darwin to age, f lowers figure and, indeed,
think the generation of differ- actualize the physical connectiv-
ence, the promise of variation, ity necessary to any recipe that
and the production of identity, would experience the ecological
Elizabeth Wilson rereads Dar- collectivity of a self,
win’s Expressions of the Emotions
of Man and Animals and incorpo- one that is “becoming aware that
rates his evolutionary concepts it lives” in dynamic entangle-
into a feminist account of the ments with all kinds of others
nervous system. (84). Diane Chisholm’s “Biophilia,
Creative Involution, and the Eco-
26 The Homage to Darwin lectures logical Future of Queer Desire”
are available online at http:// offers another approach to involu-
www.voicesfromoxford.com/ tion. She documents nature writer
homagedarwin_part2.html. Ellen Meloy’s affective entangle-
ments with bighorn sheep, pear
27 See Helmreich, “Trees,” for a cactus, and the red paintbrush
discussion of evolutionary trees flower. In ways similar to the
and studies of horizontal gene analysis we develop here,
transfers that constitute new evo- Chisholm develops Deleuze and
lutionary topologies in the forms Guattari’s adaptation of Bergson’s
of webs and nets. concept of “creative involution”
to investigate the “conjugations
28 See, for example, Margulis and of affect” among organisms in a
Sagan, Acquiring Genomes, ecology that includes the nature
Microcosmos, and What Is writer (Chisholm 360).
Life?; and Margulis, Asikainen,
30 The line or block of becoming that they become more articulate, that
unites the wasp and the orchid is, better able to utter clear state-
produces a shared deterritori- ments about these differences.
alization: of the wasp, in that it
becomes a liberated piece of the 33 In fact, many in the growing field
orchid’s reproductive system, of “plant neurobiology” would
but also of the orchid, in that it argue that plants have something
becomes the object of an orgasm in like a brain. Researchers point
the wasp, also liberated from its to electrochemical homologies
own reproduction. A coexistence between animal neurons and
of two asymmetrical movements plant physiologies and have sug-
that combine to form a block, gested that the filigreed network
down a line of f light that sweeps of plant roots and the conductive
away selective pressures. The tissues that run through plant
line, or the block, does not link shoots, stems, and leaves form a
the wasp to the orchid, any more coordinated system of cells that
than it conjugates or mixes them: may enable the plant to act as a
it passes between them, carrying nervous system (Balušca, Lev-
them away in a shared proxim- Yadun, and Mancuso; Stahlberg;
ity in which the discernibility of and Trewavas). These research-
points disappears. (Deleuze and ers draw on a long history of
Guattari 293–94) inquiry into plant excitability,
beginning with J. C. Bose’s early-
31 See, for example, Barad, Meeting twentieth-century research into
the Universe; Butler; Castricano; plant nerves in Bengal, India (see
Clough and Hardt; Hird; Parikka; Cinti; and Myers, “Sensing”) to
and Whatmore. argue that plants have cognitive
powers and potentially a kind
32 In his essay “How to Talk about of consciousness (on plant con-
the Body?,” Latour develops the sciousness, see also Doyle; and
concept of articulation in the dou- Trewavas).
ble sense of the term, both clear
speech and the discrimination of 34 See Roosth for a discussion of
differences. He uses the example similar problems associated
of kits used to train “noses” in with attributions of cellular
the perfume industry. Trainees subjectivity.
have to learn how to articu-
late finer and finer differences 35 On nonhuman “screams,” see
between scents. In the process, Roosth.
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carla hustak and natasha myers

N aturalists have long been fascinated with the practices

Volume 23, Number 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1892907

pollinators. A neo-Darwinian economy, it seems, cannot admit pleasure,

that aims to maximize fitness but also by an affective ecology shaped by

We begin this analysis by visiting Darwin in his home outside

the chatter of chemical signals. As a first step to gathering together these

A Tropic Turn to Plant Ecologies

Most often rendered as the static, aesthetic objects of still-life

to privilege the “encounter value” of organisms that humans can “hold

Darwin among the Orchids

Over a span of about twenty years, Charles Darwin produced

When Darwin published On the Various Contrivances by Which

momentary milieu contoured by multiple species involving themselves in

Experimental Forms of Life

Living at Down House in the English countryside, Darwin

In his experimental practice, Darwin entered into a sen-

Reprinted with per-

We find that Darwin’s method refuses to emulate the idealized model of a

Darwin focused intensely on zones of interaction where bees

Reprinted with per-

Reprinted with per-

Several [Catasetum] flowers were sent me by post and by the

a crash with a pair of scissors the thick labellum and ovarium

In the absence of a gnawing, sucking insect, Darwin inserted himself into

Reprinted with per-

observe how certainly the narrow elongated viscid discs, form-

Darwin showed how in the moment of encounter, the insect’s “flexible

The position of the antennae in this Catasetum may be compared

bowed and held in front, as in C. tridentatum, but rather lower

On first reading, this may appear as a typical anthropomorphic restag-

reciprocal capture in an affectively charged mimetic tangle of bodies

From Evolution to Involution

This reading of Darwin draws on the insights of many feminist

But not all evolutionary ecologists share these views. In honor

vigour resulting from an initial effort or expenditure of energy” (oed).

natural history of orchid pollination, an account that maps interspecies

If Darwin involved himself haptically in the affective anato-

become a very active site of research, especially with developing interests

versions of Morse code. These metaphors are made explicit in a recent

The Chemistries of Plant/

An early mentor recruited Baldwin into this field to make use

What, then, counts as a signal for these researchers? What

in what appears to be an effusive ecology overflowing with messages and

Articulations across Difference

Plants out there are listening

An involutionary reading would require us to begin with the

inventing new kinds of chemical propositions. Latour builds on Stengers

In “The Promises of Monsters,” Donna Haraway reminds us

This essay is dedicated, in loving memory, to Lynn Margulis (1938–2011), involutionist

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, she is

Notes 1 On the transduction of affects Hardt; Massumi), science and

See, for example, Ayrs; Bellon; 10 See Darwin’s correspondence

14 If orchids and insects were 19 Beer describes one remarkable

animals [. . .] [H]e himself [. . .] and Krumben, Chimeras and

Baluška, F. Plant Communication from an Ecological Perspective. Berlin: Springer, 2010.

. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter

Bose, Jagadis Chunder. Life Movements in Plants. Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1918.

Bradshaw, Elizabeth, et al. “Comparative Labellum Micromorphology of the Sexually Decep-

Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge:

. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Chadarevian, Soraya de. “Laboratory Science versus Country-House Experiments; The

Choy, Timothy K. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong.