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The Noble Cabbage: Michael Marder’s “Plant-Thinking”

Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life : A Philosophy of Vegetal Life

author: Michael Marder

publisher: Columbia University Press

pub date: 02.19.2013

pp: 248

tags: Philosophy & Critical Theory , Science & Technology

Dominic Pettman on Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life : A Philosophy

of Vegetal Life

The Noble Cabbage: Michael Marder’s “Plant-Thinking”

July 28th, 2013 RESET - +

Triptych image: Antonio Adriano Puleo, "Untitled (41c)" 2013

“We ought still to be as close to the flowers, grasses, and butterflies as a child who
does not yet reach very far above them. We older people, by contrast, have grown
beyond them and have to stoop down to them; I think that the grasses hate us if we
confess our love for them.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

IN APRIL OF 2000, Michael Moore launched a campaign to help elect a ficus

plant to the Congressional seat in New Jersey’s 11th District. The joke was that a
ficus is more intelligent and dynamic than any of the highly partisan and corrupt
official candidates. After reading Michael Marder’s new book Plant-Thinking: A
Philosophy of Vegetal Life you may be convinced that plants are smarter than all
of us. Theoretical work in the humanities has been branching out for several years
now (if you’ll pardon the arborial pun), striving to go beyond the traditional human
subject in order to account for other types of existence and experience, including
animals and autonomous machines. A new field has emerged, loosely labeled “the
posthumanities,” which attempts to fill in the millennia-long blind spots caused by
our own narcissism. Such scholars are united in their efforts to expose or
deconstruct ongoing “anthropocentrism.” The latest off-shoot of such thinking —
known as Speculative Realism — goes so far as to consider objects like cameras,
stones, pillows, cartoon characters, or electricity grids as “agents” in their own
right.

It is interesting then that plants have, on the whole, been ignored in this intellectual
rush to lobby on behalf of non-human existence. And while Marder’s book is not
the first to broach the subject (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recent edited collection
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral [2012] is of special note, as is Francis Hallé’s In
Praise of Plants [2011]), it is possibly the most sustained study yet to emerge from
the rather esoteric world of Continental philosophy. Marder wants to forge an
encounter with vegetal life, all the while respecting the alien ontology of floral
ways of being. For while a shrub may not consciously “experience” the world in
which it grows, this does not, for Marder, mean that it is not thinking and doing in
profound philosophical, and even ethical, ways.

Martin Heidegger famously created a hierarchy of Being when he stated that the
stone has no world, the animal is poor in world, and the human is, at least
potentially, world-making. This reboot of a very traditional Aristotelian ranking
system has since become yet another source of Heideggerian infamy. Marder
points out that plants are rarely spoken of in contemporary philosophy except as
metaphors to bolster human activities and concerns (climbing the tree of
knowledge, finding our ethnic roots, witnessing the blossoming of a debutante,
sowing one’s wild oats, etc.). Let’s not forget, however, that we eat, drink, and
smoke plants. We write on them, read with them, wear them, sleep on them, and
live inside them. Vegetal life is an essential aspect of our own, intertwined in ways
that we have taken for granted for many centuries: something to which Marder
seems to take almost personal exception.
Plant-Thinking is a powerful and brilliant intervention in the wider posthumanist
discussion, and will be a key reference point in the landscape for many years to
come. Marder works hard to highlight the difference between mere observable
botanical behavior (which, following Heidegger, he calls “ontic”) and the kind of
a-subjective “experience” that any given plant may have (which he calls
“ontological”). Of course, this is the paradoxical crux of any project that seeks to
champion what Ian Bogost has recently called “alien phenomenology”: We will
never truly know what it means to be a tree. But does that mean that we should,
like Kant, relegate trees to the margins of our own discourses, treating them as
mute and ambient things-in-themselves, with no stakes in the present or future? Or
should we take up the challenge of somehow acknowledging and respecting the
radical alterity in the heart of our own thinking, and perhaps even render it
intelligible by some magical medium? “All we can hope for is to brush upon the
edges of their being,” Marder says of plants, “which is altogether outer and
exposed, and in so doing to grow past the fictitious shells of our identity and our
existential ontology.”

And yet this soft brushing on the edges of plant-being is enough to inspire Marder
to make all kinds of claims about plants that may appear somewhat extravagant to
the average reader. If the very phrase “vegetal ethics” or “vegetal democracy”
makes you snicker — or if the word “epistemophytology” makes your eyes glaze
over — then this is not the book for you. The first review on Amazon, for instance,
goes so far as to claim that this book can only be understood as a brilliant satirical
hoax, and that Marder himself is the Alan Sokal of the 21st century. And yet, those
more attuned to the history and vocabulary of posthumanist thinking will recognize
many valuable ideas here, sincerely presented.

Marder’s undeniable strength lies in his deep understanding of the Western

philosophical canon. Through virtuoso readings of key figures, especially Aristotle
and Hegel, he guides us through philosophy’s most influential (and pernicious)
discussions of plants, taking careful note of where the archive leads us down the
garden path, and where certain dormant seeds are scattered for our own belated
cultivation. Aristotle is rebuked for basically treating plants as “defective animals,”
while Hegel is condemned for misreading profligate growth as an example of un-
self-conscious “bad infinity.” Plant-Thinking, by contrast, begins by positing the
“soul” of plants, understood in a secular or immanent sense pertaining to “the
elusive life” of flora: “its precariousness, violability, and, at the same time, its
astonishing tenacity, its capacity for survival.” The soul and the plant are
intimately connected by virtue of “their [mutual] exclusion from the purview of
respectable philosophical discourses in late modernity.” Since Aristotle, the book
argues, plants have been considered in terms of lack or privation: they lack eyes,
reason, speech, history, desires, etc. And yet, Marder emphasizes the overflowing
exuberance of vegetal life, which only seems bereft of essential qualities when
measured narrowly against our own. Plants have yet to be considered on their own
terms, as a “fugal, fugitive mode of being.” And plant soul is, “something non-
thingly within the thing, something that makes it alive and that does not quite fit
into the fully substantialized, rigid, and concrete panorama of reality.” Moreover,
there is an “elusive vitality” here which barely registered on the radar of Western
metaphysics, fooling the rest of us into thinking of plants as meaningless and inert
matter (and thus vulnerable to heedless and massive exploitation for our own
purposes). As Marder rightly points out, plants frequently serve as synecdoche for
Nature as a whole. Thus, to recognize the existence of something like a plant-soul
might help us ambitious mammals with the urgent task of fostering “a drastically
different comportment toward the environment, which will no longer be perceived
as a collection of natural resources and raw materials managed, more or less
efficiently, by human beings.”

Plants are such a seductive collective figure for Marder because their way of being-
in-the-world is so radically different from the sovereign human approach, in which
the self inhabits the foreground of existence, acting in instrumental and objective
ways on a passive background of mere “things.” In contrast, he argues, plants draw
no delusional and dangerous line between self and other. “Indifferent to the
distinction between the inner and the outer, it [the plant] is literally locked in
itself,” he writes, “but in such a way that it merges with the external environment,
to which it is completely beholden. In other words, it is absolutely other to itself
and, as such, transcends the relative and reciprocal distinction between sameness
and otherness.”

Marder not only attempts to conceive of and communicate what we might call the
ill-understood and under-appreciated plantness of plants, but also to hold the plant
up as an aspirational role model, one which operates in stark contrast to our own
self-centered activities. In this sense, Marder’s project stems (once again, the
foundational vegetal legacy of our own models becomes explicit in such language)
from the work of Derrida and Levinas, who challenged the more violent
assumptions of metaphysics, especially those based on the assertion of autonomous
possessive selfhood. Plants, in Marder’s book, are conscientious objectors — albeit
unconscious ones — to the human illusion of identity itself. They are thus engaged
in “passive resistance” to our rampant historical-nihilism (itself based on “the
fiction of a strong unitary origin”). According to Marder, homo sapiens have been
utterly incapable of registering “the constitutive vegetal otherness in ourselves,”
despite the fact that “[e]ven in our highest endeavors, we remain sublimated
plants.”

Before Aristotle’s dismissal of such a notion, Plato argued that plants are indeed
desiring beings; a philosophical insight that Marder would like to resuscitate,
specifically via the concept of “non-conscious intentionality.” “Plant life,” he
writes, “expresses itself both by means of biochemical signaling and in an
incessant, wild proliferation, a becoming-spatial and a becoming-literal of
intentionality.” From such a perspective, we humans are, in some sense, (also)
plants whenever we are hungry or thirsty. Indeed, “the plant is the most desiring
being of all, precisely because it is the one most dependent on exteriority.”
However — and this is key — “[t]he paradox is that the insatiability of nutritive
desire coincides, in the plant, with the nonexistence of an autonomous self to
which the other would be appropriated.” Contra Hegel, then, plants are ideal role
models precisely because they refuse to congeal into a stable identity. They are
“the passages, the outlets, or the media for the other,” and they “let the other pass
through them without detracting from the other’s alterity.” In short, the plant, like a
good Levinasian citizen of the world, has an “inherent respect for alterity.”

This is one of the central claims of Plant-Thinking, and yet I had difficulty
squaring it with my own (admittedly inexpert) knowledge of “actual” plants. No
doubt vegetal life is in many ways “unity in flux.” But does that mean it is also
always already a gift of “primordial generosity”? Consider just a few examples
from the plant “kingdom”: poison ivy, toxic sap, stinging nettles, sharp thorns,
poisonous spines. Some plants employ deceptive mimesis in order not to be eaten
or colonized. Orchids punk wasps into thinking they’ve just had sex. Some even
play dead. Others, like bracken, have themselves colonized entire valleys of
Europe, thanks to their powerful cyanide-based toxins that can cause blindness and
even cancer. Carnivorous plants, like the famous Venus flytrap, are not above
kidnapping and murdering their meals. During the week when I was writing this,
the BBC News Science page featured headlines such as “Perfumed Plant Lures in
Mammals,” and “Plant Chemicals ‘Manipulate’ Ants.” Even when not being
outright aggressive or duplicitous, some plants require a quid pro quo from their
pollinating insects, or passive-aggressively trap them for the night, for the benefit
of their selfish genes. Trees fight to the death for access to light. Acacias and
rattans enlist ants to defend their sovereign territory. The mistletoe and dodder
plant are downright vampiric.

No doubt Marder would object that this list of tyrannical flora is just so much
“ontic” botany, overlaid with deceptive anthropomorphic narratives. Self-
preservation, he might say, is not an evolutionary tenet, but a projection of human
hubris. But given the many and varied ways in which plants protect their territory,
or invade others’, the ontic/ontological disconnect may be so large as to be
untenable. The Derridean “hospitality” which the author sees in all plant-being
appears more like skewed rhodopsin in the eye of the beholder. Marder
occasionally seems aware of his overreach, as when he writes, “Even if a plant (for
instance, milkweed) produces toxins to ward off pests or insects, it does not,
strictly speaking, do so to protect itself (or better yet, its ‘self’).” Why on earth
not? The difference between an animal defending its territory, and a plant
defending its territory, is never addressed. And while there is a certain decadent
romance to a life-form which flourishes “only in ‘falling apart,’” this description
surely doesn’t apply to the strangling fig tree, so named for its tenacious will-to-
flower. To label all plant-life as inherently generous is to also imply that mice are
“generous” to cats. In short, I would have liked to see more agon.

Don’t misunderstand me: Having myself been profoundly influenced by late 20th-
century philosophical discussions of “inoperable/coming/unavowable
communities” (Nancy, Agamben, Blanchot), I am highly sympathetic to “the
principles of inherent divisibility and participation.” But the degree to which plants
really do traverse “all other modes of living while preserving their differences” or
give themselves “without reserve ... free of any expectations of returns from the
other” seems highly questionable, given the general economy of ecology, which
includes cacti, nettles, and vegetal parasites of all kinds. I kept wishing there were
more examples to support this particular argument, rather than the sheer weight of
assertion, as if this facet of the vegetal world were generally understood to be the
case. Our grids of identity are certainly complicated when we consider plants, but
that doesn’t mean they are abolished. Indeed, the strongest critics of this
Levinasian fancy would probably be the object-oriented ontologists, many of
whom insist upon the withdrawn, monadic aspect of any given (individuated)
entity. The organic commons here can look pretty hostile and dangerous when
viewed in slow motion.

In Marder’s second chapter, entitled “The Body of the Plant,” he notes the close
historical collusion between Western metaphysics and capitalism, arguing that
“loss of plant varieties and biodiversity is a symptom of a much more profound
trend — the practical implementation of the metaphysics of the One.” Going back
to Plato’s description of the human as a creature with aerial roots extending into
the sky, Marder insists that such a foundational metaphor gets things upside down,
and leads to an uprooting of the human from earthly concerns. Consciousness and
spirit are henceforth associated with the light of the heavens, and measured by their
distance from the dirt, no matter how nourishing or life-sustaining in actuality.
Marder’s “vegetal anti-metaphysics” tries to counter-balance this originary mistake
by claiming that “the plant materially articulates and expresses the beings that
surround it; it lets beings be and, from the middle place of growth, performs the
kind of dis-closure of the world in all its interconnectedness that Heidegger
attributes to human Dasein.” Plants are to be applauded for their “non-
objectification of the real” which precludes any possibility of domination, or even
self-assertion (since, as we have seen, there is no “self” to assert).

“[A]s soon as ethics sheds its humanist camouflage,” Marder writes, “the human
subject will join plant life in a self-expropriating journey toward the other.” Once
again, we hear a strong echo of Levinas. But measuring any and all beings by their
capacity for “self-expropriation,” and then using this prioritization of the Other as
the only true criterion of ethics, is a problematic approach in the contemporary
moment. By now, this modus operandi has become itself a kind of abstract mantra,
which does not map on to matters “on the ground” in any consistently legible way.
The infinite hospitality of any given individual is a lovely idea, and perhaps even
an asymptotic ideal. But it is also a notion that floats so far above the political fray
that it paradoxically leaves actual ethical encounters up to others. It is a
philosophical dead end, which — even before the thorny question of application —
functions more as the flipside of a coin stamped with the stern features of Ayn
Rand. Marder’s unqualified celebration of plants reminds me of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s romantic notions about tribal peoples of the Southern seas, who live
harmoniously with and within nature, and from whom we moderns must learn pre-
lapsarian lessons. (“The noble cabbage,” anyone?)

Which is not to deny that there is much of value in Plant-Thinking for any reader
interested in passionate arguments carefully designed to help us detox from our
own humanist arrogance. The chapter which attempts to account for the time of
plants — their specific hetero-temporality — brilliantly guides the reader through
the various seasonal rhythms of vegetal life, which unfolds within the continuity of
nourishment and the discontinuity of germination. Agro-business is figured here as
the commodification of the plant’s other-directed time and radical passivity, a
blithe betrayal of the headless heeding of pure potential: “the plant, with its non-
conscious affirmation of repetition, prefigures the affirmative movement of the
Nietzschean eternal return, with its acceptance of the perpetual recommencement
of life.” In a particularly deft series of pages, Marder takes Deleuze and Guattari to
task for valorizing roots, grasses, and rhizomes while dismissing trees as arborial
structures that seduce humans into hierarchical thinking. The two deterritorializing
Frenchmen “forget that the leaf is not an organ of a larger whole and that it is far
from being a derivation from the original stem–root structure.” Thus their own
injunction to “Follow the plants!” should logically include trees as well.

Indeed, Marder is at his best when allowing his own organic prose to breathe,
rather than getting entangled with the rather tortuous vocabulary of post-
structuralist thought. For every dense thicket in search of a machete, there is an
elegant observation: “Whereas humans remember whatever has phenomenally
appeared in the light, plants keep the memory of light itself.” Or “In the desert,
void of plants, the earth and the sky are therefore disarticulated, ceasing to be
themselves. Today’s intensifying desertification of the earth signals the earth’s, as
well as the sky’s, un-becoming.” Given these literary flourishes, I wonder why
thinkers in registers other than orthodox philosophy were left out of the picture.
Surely a side-glance at literary writers such as Whitman or Thoreau might have
suggested an alternative narrative to the absolute neglect of vegetal life that Marder
sees everywhere in the Western tradition.

Indeed, I found the most compelling and persuasive chapter to be the one on “The
Wisdom of Plants,” which builds on Nietzsche’s belief in the sagacity of flora. For
Marder, “plant-being and plant-thinking are the same,” and since “life and
consciousness are subsets of invention or creative activity, the non-conscious life
of plants is a kind of ‘thinking before thinking,’ an inventiveness independent from
instinctual adaptation and from formal intelligence alike.” This section’s key
concept of “non-conscious intentionality” overlaps with the recent work of Steven
Shaviro and Ben Woodard, who have both discussed the remarkable case of slime
molds, which seem to “remember” previously taken pathways, without any
memory cells with which to accomplish such navigations. Here we seem to have a
case of “non-intentional thought.” But Marder does not engage with this alternative
perspective. Nor does he really consider the vast world of the fungi, which are a
completely distinct kingdom from that of plants, but which form complex
assemblages with them, to the extent that scientists have recently claimed that trees
use fungi as a communication system to warn neighbors of aphid attacks, not
unlike an organic internet. (If a tree falls in the forest, it seems, the other trees will
soon hear about it.)

In the epilogue, Marder finally addresses the giant pumpkin in the room: the
question of how to eat ethically, if even vegans are obliged to face the fact that “the
loss of a single plant is tantamount to the passing of an entire world.” “Plant-
thinking does not oppose the use of fruit, roots, and leaves for human
nourishment,” this final section claims:

Rather, what it objects to is the total and indiscriminate approach to plants as

materials for human consumption within the deplorable framework of the
commodified production of vegetal life … [I]nstead of “What can I eat?” we
should inquire, “How am I to eat ethically?” To put it succinctly, if you wish to eat
ethically, eat like a plant!

Ultimately, this logic leads to a rather unsatisfying locavore and/or food co-op
argument: “we enter into a rhizomatic relation with it [the vegetal other] when we
eat locally grown fruit and vegetables, heeding the wisdom of the plant, whose
‘reach cannot exceed its grasp.’” Such an ethos is, it must be said, often the
privilege of the urban upper middle class: a slim, largely North/Western, minority
who can afford to procure “organic” and genetically unmodified sustenance. Of
course this doesn’t mean we should surrender to the convenient rhetorical mandate
of “Feed the World!” when pushed by cynical multinationals. But it also means we
have to factor in more real-world issues pertaining to geography, politics, and
economics. Philosophy, when pure and uncut, makes an important contribution to
our more general ways of thinking and doing — but only up to a point. And it is at
this point where it must defer to its disciplinary others, including the so-called hard
sciences. (One of Marder’s footnotes mentions that a sequel is in the works,
entitled Plant-Doing, which may go a long way to addressing some of the issues
already mentioned, in terms of what we might call a “radicle politics.” Indeed, the
author’s official title — Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country — makes me think he is one of
the most well-placed people to take on such an ambitious task.)

A few more quibbles. I kept wondering how Marder’s narrative might be nuanced,
even challenged, by including a figure as important to the legacy of plant-thinking
as Epicurus. After all, this ancient philosopher inspired a host of Garden Schools
across the Mediterranean, which mindfully tied thinking and ethical pleasures to
the cultivation of diverse forms of flora. I would also like to know how an
engagement with the much more recent thought of Bruno Latour could have
productively complicated things, given Latour’s belief that “[i]n order to enroll
animals, plants, proteins in the emerging collective, one must first endow them
with the social characteristics necessary for their integration.” Moreover, there is a
particularly notable absence of women’s voices in the book itself. While this is a
common criticism in the field — and while it is inevitable that one will encounter a
majority of Dead White Men when discussing the lamentable legacies of Western
metaphysics — not one female writer is mentioned in the body of the book (with
the exception of a single line from Luce Irigaray). A handful of other female
theorists are relegated to off-stage citations in the footnotes: hardly a good example
for a book which explicitly seeks to “liberate sexual difference from its
confinement to a binary opposition of the two sexes and breathe new life into the
phenomena of dispersed, perverse, and non-productive sexualities.” One hopes and
trusts that this will be addressed in the sequel as well, where the apple may fall a
bit further from the canonical tree.
Nonetheless, Marder’s book heralds an impressive and singular new voice,
prompting a slew of new questions around different ontologies and shared
ecologies. It succeeds in expanding the circle in which, to gesture to Donna
Haraway, species meet. Marder’s work brings out the profound pathos
underwriting a generation that has more experience growing digital carrots and
apples in Farmville than cultivating actual fruits and vegetables. The sheer number
of couch potatoes and human YouTubers cannot be underestimated, and I hope this
author’s subsequent work also considers the relationship between technology and
vegetal life. (This book is, of course, printed on dead plants, and I wonder if the
author considered an ebook-only option. Then again, ebooks are predicated on the
vegetal energy required to power the internet itself…)

“Plants are the weeds of metaphysics,” Marder writes, “devalued, unwanted in its
carefully cultivated garden, yet growing in-between the classical categories of the
thing, the animal, and the human.” The time is ripe to cultivate such anti-weeds
with care. In the final analysis, Marder certainly succeeds in transforming the
current spring here in the Northern hemisphere into a far stranger and more
interesting season than it was last year, at least to my eyes. I have a new
appreciation for our vegetal cousins, and no longer quietly resent the potted plants
in my apartment for monopolizing the precious light in my living-room window.
Indeed, I am longer concerned that they don’t pay rent for such a privilege, since
my lungs would have little to inhale without them and their siblings. Nor do I
giggle with such anthropocentric smugness when I recall the insult from the great
cult film Withnail and I, that vegetables are superior representatives of the plant
kingdom, given that flowers are “mere prostitutes for the bees.”

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