Biopolitics
This entry introduces the context in which “phyto-conduct” might become a concept within the wider biopolitical discourse. This neologism is introduced in full recognition of its slogan-like ring and the risks of it not becoming a durable philosophical concept for this very reason. Consequently, I want to back into its formation sideways—and via certain dead ends within the theoretical humanities concerning the status of the “plant” within the biopolitical frame—and then address the challenge of theorizing the biopolitical as such within today’s academic climate. I do this in order to make good on Michel Foucault’s bid to find ever-new sites of counterconduct within biopolitical governmentality (the conduct of conduct) and begin to appreciate how the plant can do this work.
It’s worth noting at the outset that there’s no straightforward or easy way to see the relevance of the plant for biopolitical thinking within today’s ecosystem of High Theory. This is for a host of reasons, not least of which concerns the fact that the plant has been systematically excluded from biopolitical theory and attendant theoretical frames. From Foucault and Agamben to Derrida and Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, there seems to be little room for thinking “the plant” biopolitically (even if plants make their appearance from time to time). Jeffrey T. Nealon brings this into sharp focus in Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life,[1] perhaps the only book to take the plant question within biopolitics seriously. And his interest there is not simply to shift one’s gaze to include the plant within the remit of biopolitical theorizing (animals, plants, stones, etc.) but to trace what actually changes within the discourse on biopolitics if the plant were to make its way into the biopolitical frame, and how this inclusion might offset some of the laser-focused attention on the animal and biopower. For Nealon, the plant, and not the animal, or not exclusively the animal (pace Cary Wolfe), offers us a fuller range of nonhuman life in desperate need of theorization in our times of ecological crisis.
Still, despite this opening, it’s not at all clear that today’s theoretical landscape is equipped for such realignment. My hunch is that this has to do with a more general indifference, and sometimes hostility, toward the biopolitical as relevant conceptual framework. For instance: If, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, diagnosing neoliberalizing systems of biopolitical regulation seemed like it had a healthy, if small, academic audience, then today, by contrast, unmasking the distributed systems of biopolitical governance seems almost to date itself. This is certainly not because the mechanisms of biopolitical regulation have somehow miraculously disappeared—the COVID-19 pandemic certainly made their endurance abundantly clear—but for those of us paying attention to academic trends, and what seems to gain traction in the academic publishing market, there seems to be less and less faith that the “biopolitical” offers the kind of razor-sharp critical edge that many desire from their Theory.
I say this for a couple reasons. On the one hand, these same trends have told us that a Foucauldian, or God forbid, an Agambanian analytics of power has fallen out of fashion, and this is not only because of their explicit focus on Western power dynamics, which, naturally, doesn’t sit well with today’s Westernized identity politics. But it’s also because there’s a sneaking suspicion that these analytics no longer yield a better understanding of how life is governed and regulated today. No doubt, Agamben showed his hand in 2020, fully unmasking how far his sovereign power, coupled with its unrelenting opposition between bios and zoë, gets us in terms of the actual security of populations.[2] Of course, Agamben should not stand in for “biopolitcal thought,” or even Italian biopolitics, and neither should Foucault, but the incident in Quodlibetoffered the world an unfortunate caricature of a wider academic style of theorizing, which indexes the biological, and even makes it a centerpiece of its theoretical apparatus, but lacks any actual scientific knowledge concerning the living systems that are at stake. This is not a new criticism; it has been rehearsed many times, and it’s given shape to an STS-minded biopolitical thought—via Paul Rabinow, Nikolas Rose, and others—and it might serve as a partial, if ultimately insufficient, corrective to irresponsible theorizing.
This is only part of the story. The other part, which has deep ties to a kind of academic self-stylization, concerns the fact that the biological has become a geological force in the Anthropocene discourse. The biochemical and the geophysical are not isolated, and this fact has well and truly seeped into the popular academic imaginary. Whether it be through Dipesh Chakrabarty, Anna Tsing, and Amitav Ghosh, or Elizabeth Povinelli, Donna Haraway, and Tim Morton, the marching orders are clear: The bio- and the geo- must be critiqued, reimagined, or even mourned together. As Povinelli writes:
The emergence of the geological concept of the Anthropocene and the meteorological modeling of the carbon cycle, the emergence of new synthetic natural sciences such as biogeochemistry, the proliferation of new object ontologies (new materialists, speculative materialists, speculative realists, and object-oriented ontologies), all point to the perforating boundary between the autonomy of Life and its opposition to and difference from Nonlife.[3]
To be sure, the biological and the geological have never been separate, and a little freshman biochemistry makes this shockingly clear. If it’s taken humanities scholars many generations to wake up to this fact, then let’s not forget that it came at the cost of their most sacred object: “the human.” It was only once the human was at risk of extinction that new fetish objects could take its place: the “nonhuman,” the “more-than-human,” and more recently, the planetary or “planetarity.” To their credit, humanists, and I include myself among them, have got up to speed rather fast and have managed to turn the “entanglement” of biological and geological systems into another academic industry.
My point is not rag on the humanities and those who advocate a “critique of life” (Povinelli) but only to underscore that the biopolitical feels less and less like a relevant or meaningful analytical frame. If the flavors of the month are the “more-than-human,” the “planetary,” or the “geontological,” then there’s something decisively elided in the ways these discourses tend to level down the qualitatively different ways in which rocks, plants, animals, humans, and chat bots individuate. Such homogenizing theoretical gestures seem to leave little to no space for theorizing the materially and functionally distinct ways in which organisms develop and evolve, since focusing on these differentiations (for instance, the phasal transitions in matter that lead to mentation) would commit the mortal sin of excluding mentation, affect, and vitality from being distributed across all material and social registers.
The claim here is that there’s little to no space for the biopolitical in theory today because there is no space for the biological in the humanities, and this includes plant studies. I’m sure many would disagree and accuse me of overstating the case. Just look around: Biology is everywhere in the humanities—it’s in the environmental and blue humanities, in ecocriticism and materialism, bio- and ecomedia, and biophilosophy; and it’s surely present in animal and plant studies. Still, to theorize the biological is not as straightforward as shifting one’s gaze. If this were the case, then the humanities would be able to explain how, for instance, the genesis of biological form is both similar to and different from the genesis of physical matter—and do so without importing either a host of metaphysical assumptions or relying on secondhand science.
This is clearly not happening. When overcoming centuries’ worth of metaphysical baggage concerning nature/culture, mind/matter, and essence/appearance dualisms is at stake for so many in the humanities, then the hard sciences have come to the rescue. The recent turn to science in the “posthumanities” has been accompanied by a widespread embrace of the physical, geological, and biological sciences under the umbrella of “complexity,” as if somehow the sciences of complexity were able to magically bestow scientific rigor onto humanities-based discourses seeking to relate planetary history and human history. Through complexity, and the nonlinear causal networks they model, we can tell all kinds of stories about the relation between wildly different material and functional systems. All of a sudden, systems that were thought to be completely unrelated are now touching and entangled in an ecorelational holism. The metaphysics of relation now miraculously square with the latest work in the theoretical sciences.[4]
But here’s the trouble: In the hard sciences, theorizing the biological (as distinct from the physical) is done at the risk of one’s own career. In short: The organism’s ontogenesis is left largely untheorized. There are a host of reasons for this erasure, but among them we find an especially deep-seated desire to construct a “complete” formal description of physical (and by extension, biological) systems, a desire that’s as much present in the physics and mathematics of Laplace, Lagrange, and Hilbert as it is in recent work in gene editing with CRISPR-Cas9 technologies. This does not change with the rise of complexity conceived on a computational template. With the physico-mathematical language of nonlinear dynamical systems, an organism’s developmental and evolutionary trajectories can be equationally determined (through probability distributions), and this allows the genesis of biological and physical matter to be computed using the same formal methods. Despite the power of these computational tools, theoretical biologists are beginning to realize that the onto- and phylogenesis of an organism cannot be computed using the mathematical tools of complexity. This is because we cannot say in advance how an organism’s environment will affect what it does—how it will develop over time. While nonlinear dynamical systems require all possible trajectories to be prestated in adequate phase spaces, there are no predetermined phase spaces for organisms. Organisms create their own possibilities for onto- and phylogenesis as they develop.[5]
The mobilization of the sciences, and the use of advanced computational tools to generate quantifiable results, has dried up funding for and interest in asking tough and time-consuming questions about organisms. Is it possible to probabilistically factor the organism’s historicity into the phase space of its embryogenesis? This requires basic science, and the payoff for answering this question is certainly not clear. As it turns out, the organism’s historicity is incomputable, and we don’t yet have the mathematical language to describe ontogenesis when time is no longer a dimension but an operator.[6] Of course, this is slow and difficult work, and it’s at the very beginning stages of development, but it’s a genuine cold shower for those who wish to use the physico-mathematical language of dynamical systems as the formal language of biological organization.
My point here is that the political and economic regulation of scientific work is such that, today, theorizing the organism functions both discursively and practically as the “outside” of Science (capital S). What we’re witnessing, in short, is the crystallization of a dispositif that actively excludes theory from the remit of fundable Science. But with this constructed externality, the very life of the organism, the life that scientists and humanists are so concerned with saving, is already dead. In short: There is no living organism within the bioscientific landscape of mobilized Science. Geological, social, economic, and biological systems—they’re functionally equivalent systems. For all the power of complex nonlinear dynamics, they mask the difference that makes the difference between the living and nonliving. This erasure has been absorbed by the nonhuman turn within the humanities and their attendant claims about the complexity of physical, biological, and sociopolitical materials.
What’s overlooked in the humanities’ irreverent leveling of difference is the fact that their claims are derived from a scientific dispositif that constructs the organism as its outside. The organism’s externality in science is what conditions a style of theoretical work in the humanities that sees little value in theorizing the organism as having distinct properties—for fear, I suspect, of slipping back into the metaphysical Dark Ages, which looks like endorsing essentialisms about “nature,” “life,” “vitalism,” “spirit,” and so on. It’s no wonder, then, that there’s little space for the biopolitical in the humanities today—the life of the organism has gone out of fashion. The claim here is that much of what passes for work in posthumanism (and I include new materialism and the proliferating speculative realisms, rationalisms, and accelerationisms under this heading) is an effect of a biopolitical dispositif in the sciences that has managed to eliminate the critical tools humanists need to interrogate their own biopolitical production. This, I want to insist, has everything to do with the erasure of theoretical work and, by extension, the organism itself, within the biosciences.
Plant studies fit squarely into this dispositif: Whether it’s the vague metaphors about plant communication and consciousness hijacked from computational linguistics and neuroscience or it’s the dubious metaphysical claims about the plant as a medium for planetary connectivity (whose modes of individuation mesh so seamlessly with other geological, chemical, mental, and spiritual ones that any qualitative difference is elided), dominant trends in plant studies seem to almost systematically disavow the life of the plant—its singular phylo- and ontogenesis—in order to subsume it under an already-established conceptual frame. What needs interrogating, then, is how the plant functions within the posthumanities as a symptomatic of the wider dispositif that places the biological under erasure. It would be in this context that a phyto-conduct might be imagined: where the plant is at once related to every other system but materially and functionally irreducible to them.
Notes
[1] Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford University Press, 2015).
[2] Giorgio Agamben, “Clarifications,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, originally published on Quodlibet, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia (2020a); and Giorgio Agamben, “The Invention of an Epidemic,” European Journal of Psychoanalysis, originally published on Quodlibet, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia (2020b).
[3] Elizabeth Povinelli, “Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories,” E-flux 81 (2017).
[4] Adam Nocek, “Epimedial Landscape,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 3 (2020): 24–40.
[5] Giuseppe Longo and Maël Montévil, Perspectives on Organisms: Biological Time, Symmetries and Singularities (Springer, 2014).
[6] Longo and Montévil, Perspectives on Organisms.