Evolution
How does plant theory contribute to notions of evolution? For the plant theorists Michael Marder,[1]Matthew Hall,[2] and Robin Wall Kimmerer,[3]evolutionary science (by which they mean Western evolutionary science in general) is problematic. They argue that it perpetuates a hierarchical schema that places humans above animals and plants based on the criteria of intelligence and organizational complexity. Accordingly, they contend, evolutionary science poses an ethical problem for plant theorists. By assigning plants to a lower evolutionary status compared to humans and animals, we exclude them from philosophical discourse and reduce them to mere biological resource for exploitation. The ramifications are significant. Marder, Hall, and Kimmerer argue that the devaluation of plant life in evolutionary science and the corollary ethical neglect of plants has enabled extractive industries that are contributing to the rapid transformation of the planet into an expansive dead zone. Each of these thinkers aims to address this ethical neglect through a philosophical recalibration that draws inspiration, in part, from nonmodern Indigenous knowledge. Kimmerer highlights the adaptive creativity of plants in their environments and emphasizes the coevolutionary dynamics between plants and animals (including humans);[4]Hall focuses on similarities in movement and sensation shared between plants and humans, arguing for recognizing plants as individuals and relational kin rather than mere resources for human use.[5]While both scholars thus aim to dismantle the human/plant hierarchy, they inevitably reconstruct a new hierarchy around the modern and premodern, with the latter constituting a more authentic human/plant relation. By contrast, insofar as Marder’s work is not without reference to nonmodern Indigenous knowledge, his intervention seeks to traverse problematic human/plant and modern/premodern binaries by invoking the notion of a “vegetal soul.”[6]The vegetal soul is Marder’s way to begin thinking about shared facets of existence between humans and plants in the form of modalities of being and becoming that define both human and plant without collapsing the space of difference between them. His objective is to bring plants back into the philosophical fold in a way that generates novel concepts and insights for human beings while resisting the impulse to reduce plants to human sentiments and values or relegate them to a position of radical alterity. The vegetal soul emerges in Marder’s work as an anti- or nonmetaphysical and profuse life energy animating the “exuberance of growth” together with “spectacular decay” in the perpetually unfinished expansive motion of plants.[7] Such growth and decay constitute continuous renewal of an existing form but also change and adaptation, making it recognizable as an expression of evolution. Consequently, the vegetal soul encompasses more potential than is conventionally associated with evolution, which tends to be thought of in respect to the linear development of a single species. Marder describes it as generating uncentered momentum, propagating outward without the centripetal burden of an identity or self to which it is forced to return;[8]it also makes the plant incorporative, forging alliances within and across different individuals (organic and inorganic). Marder suggests that by means of the latter, plants act as “passages,” by which he means a kind of changing medium that “[lets] the other pass through them without detracting from the other’s alterity.”[9]
What might the evolutionary potential of the vegetal soul look like? Marder’s thinking aligns to a certain extent with Gilbert Simondon’s formulation of evolution as a process of transduction that involves “integration and differentiation” with a given milieu.[10]In contrast to Marder, whose work remains highly cerebral and focused on epistemological concerns (despite his entreaty to resist over-theorizing plants and expose our thinking to the “logic of vegetal life”), Simondon’s ontogenetic focus provides a more tangible avenue for thinking about the evolutionary potential of the vegetal soul. I want to stay with Simondon’s notion of transduction briefly in the following before turning finally to a speculative instantiation of a vegetal soul in science fiction.
When Simondon presents evolution as transduction, he shifts our focus from evolution as a specifically organic process—in which a fertilized egg produces individual development and change within a species—to the idea of evolution as a genesis of individuated beings, broadly conceived as physical, organic, technological, and social.[11]Similarly, transduction broadens greatly what we understand as life by re-delineating the threshold between living and nonliving individuals, and the corollary developmental or evolutionary processes. In short, transduction encourages us to think of evolution in terms of a genesis and ongoing ontogenesis that can traverse and enfold physical, organic, and social individuations. To understand this, we need to understand what is at stake in the term.
Simondon describes transduction as “an individuation in progress.”[12]Individuation, in this regard, delineates an analogous process of form-taking across but also between physical, biological, and mental, or social domains. In each case, individuation is initiated from a metastable condition, a falling out of phase and ensuing tension of a preindividual reality. That “falling out of phase” is provisionally resolved through “integration and differentiation” with a surrounding processual milieu, and the process effectuates the genesis of an “individual” in what Simondon calls an “individual-milieu coupling.”[13]By “integration and differentiation,” Simondon is pointing to a process whereby a form of communication is established between an individuating process and a milieu. This results in the integration with the milieu that also leaves a space of distinction or difference with the milieu. In other words, the individual and the milieu individuate together while nevertheless remaining separate. The process of communication may involve the transmission of signals and meaning, as in instances of communication across mental or social domains. But communication is also not limited to these registers. It can involve a nonsemiotic, material force, as in instances of physical individuation, such as with a crystal or brick.
For Simondon, the terms “physical,” “organic,” and “social”/“collective” designate the degree to which an individual maintains a “margin of indeterminacy,” which leaves it open to further individuation, rather than a hard boundary between so-called living and dead matter. Physical individuals (crystal or brick) exhaust their internal tensions at some point and thus their potential for further transductions—further “individual-milieu coupling.” By contrast, an organic individual maintains an active interior of tensions, making it a “system of individuation, an individuating system, and a system that is in the midst of undergoing the process of individuating.”[14]A technological individual can demonstrate a “becoming organic”[15]in the sense of maintaining an ongoing capacity for transduction.
To reiterate an essential point, there is nothing to say that transduction cannot enfold organic and nonorganic individuals, as long as there remains a margin of indeterminacy that leaves an individual open to further individuation. In other words, thinking transductively entails a dissolution of conventional boundaries. What we call “life” is no longer delimited by vital organic processes or energies. The term “organic” simply delineates an expansive potential for ongoing individuation, an ongoing potential for evolution in the manner of becoming with. This is an exciting but perhaps equally unsettling possibility in that it asks us to reimagine the nature of boundaries between plants, animals, humans, and technical ensembles. Suddenly, we are faced with the need to recognize the possibility of plant/people, techno/plants, and so on, with the slash marking the communicative channel of integration and differentiation of an individuating associative milieu. This possibility also brings us full circle: Kimmerer, Hall, and Marder all write from a sense of urgency to correct what they identify as an ethical neglect of plants that has contributed to our current global environmental catastrophe. With this discussion of transduction, I am suggesting that what might be necessary, in this regard, is not the leveling of evolutionary hierarchies (Kimmerer and Hall) or the identification of shared facets of plant and human life (Marder) but rather an embrace of the backslash toward a different kind of evolution. Leave it to a plant to show us what this means!
As the story progresses, Stevland spreads out only territorially while integrating into every aspect of community life and ultimately its technological infrastructure. This urge to become with his milieu sits in contrast with his position as a bounded and rational individual community participant. We are made to suspect that Stevland might simply be dissembling the latter to gain rapport with the colonists. At best, he may simply be humoring his human companions, and at worst, Burke wants to intimate far more expansive plans. This suspicion is strengthened by Burke’s choice of bamboo as the earth analog flora to describe Stevland. Bamboo is more like an extremely aggressive woody grass than a tree, making it hard to think of Stevland confined to any particular space or singular form. Indeed, Burke seems set on conveying the impression that Stevland might be out of control. He embodies unprecedented and unrestrained protean multiplicity; he is everywhere and anything all at once, irreducible to anything so ontologically confined as an individual with a center and personhood.
Burke appears uneasy with the transductive potential that she has bestowed on Stevland. While she works to build our suspicion, this quality of Stevland is also what is most fascinating. He is able to evolve/transduce at will when necessary rather than be confined to anything that resembles a slow process of evolution through sexual reproduction and mutation, he is able to develop new fruit with medicinal or psychotropic qualities when needed, and he is also constantly adapting to changes in the surroundings and social conditions in ways that emulate other beings, producing sensory organs to act like eyes or ears and even something like a mouth with which to speak. Burke takes this to yet another level in Interference, the sequel to Semiosis, where Stevland’s evolutions enfold technological communication systems, spaceships, and mainframe computer matrixes.[17]Via this machinic order, Stevland embodies not reproduction out of control but rather a kind of wild involution, in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, as a creative if not monstrously transgressive coupling toward a thickening internal complexity.[18]Stevland becomes plant/animal, plant/machine, and plant/planet. Importantly, it is by virtue of these transductions that Stevland saves the human and nonhuman community of colonists and, eventually (as hinted in the preview for the third volume in the series), Earth. What this asks us to envision is the possibility that, contrary to Marder, Kimmerer, and Hall, plants might not need the benefit of our philosophical uplift to be saved. Rather, it is we—we humans—who require an uplift to realize our evolutionary vegetal potential.
Notes
[1] Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013).
[2] Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (State University of New York Press, 2011).
[3] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013).
[4] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 124.
[5]Hall, Plants as Persons, 138.
[6]Marder, Plant-Thinking.
[7]Marder, Plant-Thinking, 38.
[8]Marder, Plant-Thinking, 41.
[9]Marder, Plant-Thinking, 42.
[10] Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
[11]Simondon, Individuation, 185.
[12]Simondon, Individuation, 13.
[13]Simondon, Individuation, 3.
[14]Simondon, Individuation, 7.
[15] John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (MIT Press, 2008), 7.
[16] Sue Burke, Semiosis (Tor, 2018).
[17]Sue Burke, Interference (Tor, 2019).
[18] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238–39.