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Language

To presume to write about plants, on the subject of plants, even with plants, is to reinforce certain conceptual beliefs about the political structures of relationality through the mere use of prepositions. Further, research into the possibility that plants have language can again, albeit inadvertently, take as decided what remains in question, namely, the specificity of what constitutes “language.” Although we can’t easily avoid or even recognize the rhetorical architecture and faith logics that quietly shape what makes sense to us, it seems important nevertheless to acknowledge this dilemma at the outset as a caveat against common sense: A degree of skeptical perversity, or even counterintuitive risk in what we choose to question, may well prove salutary.

If we are looking for a watershed moment when the general population began to recognize that plants are considerably more talented, socially motivated, physically agile, and surprisingly polyglot than we had ever imagined, we might choose David Attenborough’s documentary and book of the same name, The Private Life of Plants, both appearing in the same year.[1] In the very first episode entitled “Travelling,” we learn that seed dispersal includes technologies of propulsion and explosion as well as inventive packaging strategies whose layers are timed to unwrap in ways that suggest anticipatory planning. Attenborough goes on to illuminate the aeronautical resourcefulness of plants whose seeds are so exquisitely designed that their innovation captures the fine balance of glider, helicopter, and propeller alternatives. The biologist and natural historian is even moved to boast that the glider, with its little seed passenger, exceeds the abilities of human engineers: “Aircraft designers have tried to build a wing as efficient as this one but failed.”[2] 

This sense of intelligent design is also evident in the myriad tactics that plants deploy to spread their reproductive opportunities, as we see in the wide variety of seed morphologies that anticipate very particular forms of “postage” that target specific body parts on “animal carriers.” Uncanny, symbiotic arrangements between a certain seed and the one animal that can provide its ideal germinating habitat are not unusual, with such examples of ingenuity more the rule than the exception. In what sounds like the premeditation of human cunning, we learn that plants are not inclined to “rely[ing] on chance encounters,” preferring to “entice [animals]” with gifts and inducements that reward them for furthering their life chances.[3]Impressively, not only do plants strategize to travel far and wide and exploit dramatically different climates, but their ability to sometimes enter a state of suspended animation for thousands of years shows an attention to the vagaries of temporality that is surely remarkable.

I’ve opened this discussion with a risky description of the extraordinary capacities of plants: risky, because vegetal life is conventionally understood in terms of comparative incapacity, as we see when we liken a “vegetative state” in humans to a lack of conscious awareness, indeed, to a lack of any awareness at all. Although the accusation of anthropomorphism is meant to censure confusion between vegetal abilities and the creative sophistication of human subjectivity and cognition, we are left to wonder if this purported case of mistaken identity might deserve another look. It seems unremarkable, for example, to assert that humans are creative agents, able to invent ideational frames of reference that are so powerful in their ability to “world a world” that material reality is effectively “made over” or radically transformed. Consequently, we tend to understand the ability to engineer change as radically different from the substantive stuff that is changed, namely, nature itself. Accordingly, border crossings between nature and culture tend to incite prohibitive responses rather than curiosity and reflection, as if signs of ambiguity and uncertainty about what belongs where are necessarily mistaken. In sum, when words that denote intentional capacity and decision-making appear on the nature side of the ledger, a corrective is usually swift.

Why do we insist that a nonhuman nature must lack what human exceptionalism attributes to itself under the banner of culture? Indeed, the separation of nature from culture is a curious one, because it’s not that we lack an abundance of evidence that at least muddles, or entirely disputes, the reasons for the division, as we see in the Attenborough documentary. Does anthropomorphism’s threat of mistaken identity indemnify human exceptionalism against close critical examination? Because if this is the case, we then become alert to a battery of defensive maneuvers, such as the deployment of certain words to dismiss curiosity. The term “prescription,” for example, is regarded as a sort of predetermined, usually biological inevitability that is automatic and unthinking because before or outside what we discern as the ingenuity and play of human endeavor. Paco Calvo, a philosopher of science, notes that plant behaviors are routinely described as “instinctive,” “hard-wired,” or “mechanistic,” all words for “non-cognitive.”[4]Even when plant activity appears “intelligent by design,” showing evidence of apparent forethought and adaptive strategizing, the question implicitly posed is shut down with the simple retort “But it’s just a program.” Indeed, the very term “intelligent design” must be disassociated from both divine claims as well as natural capacities: Only humans can express godlike intention and inspired creativity.

Given such ongoing prejudice, there has been a welcome shift over the last decade and a half, with significant research across the disciplines into the possibility of plant intelligence. Many intrepid pioneers have been exploring appropriate methodologies for both justifying and measuring plant cognition, and more philosophical approaches are asking how the specificity of the vegetal can be adequately represented.[5]Given the growth, complexity, and expertise of such research, this entry remains introductory, confined to just one aspect of cognitive ability, namely, language use. Together with the invention of technology, proof of language has become an accepted marker of intellectual sophistication, indeed, of human exceptionalism par excellence. However, as research in the natural sciences suggests that all of nature is involved in some sort of communicative chatter and technological adaptation, we are left with the problem of how to proceed.[6]

An understandable reflex regarding communication in nature is to take human language as the comparative departure point, and yet philosopher Emanuele Coccia bristles at what can only be a contentless heuristic. What do we make of “the domain of the nonhuman when it has not been specified either what ‘the human’ would designate (how can one have certainty on this matter, after Darwin?) or in what respect the nonhuman would oppose the human (reason? language? soul?).”[7]However, this confusion need not be read as a negative but as an opportunity for critical rigor and perhaps greater honesty about the questionable nature of our terms of analysis. Given the ambiguity of so many referential assumptions and their different crossdisciplinary understandings, perhaps the most important challenge is to explain how we delimit or evoke what counts as language.

For Ferdinand de Saussure, regarded as the father of structuralism and poststructuralism, the linguist’s goal was exactly this, “to determine the true and unique object of linguistics.”[8]Saussure first had to free himself from comparative and historical linguistics, which remained committed to nomenclature, a belief in the relative stability of an ahistorical and acultural referent (in nature) that could anchor meaning while acknowledging changes in vocabulary across time and space (culture). Interestingly, Saussure abandons the commonsense assumption that language communicates about a material reality that preexists language, instead likening what makes a sign meaningful to the way a commodity works in an economic system where value is generated from the wider context of social, political, and economic relations. As we see in the fluctuations of the stock exchange, the value of a particular commodity, even its recognition as a tradeable item, realizes the relational dynamic wherein external forces in-form a commodity’s (seemingly) intrinsic worth. Saussure’s counterintuitive appreciation that language works by somehow collapsing nonlocal systemic relations (inasmuch as they appear outside, or not present) with/in, or even as, what appears as a local and specific signification is again rehearsed when we try to define the basic analytical unit of language or the most appropriate starting point for our inquiry. If for Saussure a sign could be a phoneme, a letter, a word, a Braille dot, a squiggle, a vibration, indeed, any sense impression, then anything that carries value—and doesn’t this imply everything?—is an expression of “language.” In sum, what matters about an atom of signification is that it is sensed or “read,” and to do this is to reckon with the haunting of an invisible embeddedness—a systematicity—that in-forms (even as it disperses) the sign’s apparent coherence. With this in mind, we can better understand why Saussure claims that the basic truths of language are so profoundly interrelated that any one point of departure will logically arrive at all the others, and in a way that comprehends their implicit connectivity and consequences. In what we might call a holographic economy, where the whole is present in the parts and vice versa, Saussure perceived that its systemic “patternments”[9]could be generalized as a semiology, or what Jacques Derrida will further complexify as a grammatology that manifests in/as Life. We will return to this.

To consider the question of language as it might apply to the vegetal, we learn that plant interlocutors are myriad and apparently polyglot.[10] An interspecies activity, plant communication is enacted above- and belowground, running the gamut of socially supportive transmissions and self-sustaining strategies, as well as defensive/aggressive interactions. Plants “speak”[11]to insects and larger animals through the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that interact with both biotic and even abiotic conditions (i.e., not derived from living organisms). And specific morphologies, colors, and “social” locations also entice responses that imply communicative involvements of some sort. Further, plant roots enjoy a symbiotic liaison, indeed, an economic partnership, with mycorrhizal fungi that exchange nutrients and negotiate resource requirements that also enable plant-to-plant conversation.[12]

Interestingly, VOCs are also entangled with electrical signaling and therefore “wired” through complex cascades of information that interact with a plant’s different organs and microbiomes, helping to perform such things as transpiration, photosynthesis, and remembering previous situations and behaviors. Monica Gagliano et al.’s research on plant memory,[13]plus the ability of certain plants to detect the flow of water within a specific hearing range,[14]suggest that plant perception and memory retrieval can be likened to human forms of experiential literacy that involve reading purposefully to discriminate differences.

If the above assertion seems too much of a stretch, perhaps we need to reconsider our terms of analysis. Recall Coccia’s frustration with the inattention to such terms. Human linguistic capacity, for example, is defined by its symbolic sophistication, its re-presentational ability to “world a world” through signs that substitute for a material reality presumed absent. However, expressing a similar reservation to Coccia, the philosopher Jacques Derrida mocks the automatic separation of human from nonhuman and, by implication, the assumption that writing captures sophisticated abstraction whereas speech evokes an experiential immediacy, as it mistakes a political prejudice, an unexamined and unjustified hierarchy, for fact. Signs, for example, are interpretive, translative, analytical, and suggestive of thinking. Not surprisingly, literatures on plant language almost universally prefer the word “signal” to “sign,”[15]which suggests something programmatic, automatic—a mere reflex. A signal does not evoke interpretive complexity or mediation but instead something causal, immediate, direct, and transparently accessible. It has a more physical and causal connotation, such as how smoke signals fire or a particular VOC signals danger. Predictably again, if we are going to concede that biochemistry, electrical signaling, and energy transmission are an operational language, it will probably be located on the nature side of a binary, as if culture performs its intelligent abstractions in an elsewhere of exceptional complexity and intentional focus.

A question to consider is why the difference between vegetal language and what is considered uniquely human always maps so well onto the political economy of the nature/culture opposition. How are they so different? It will surprise many of us to learn that human biology emits over fourteen hundred VOCs via dermal and breath emission; are these a manifestation of language? Perhaps more persuasive for a rethink about the “what,” “where,” and “how” of language that at least begins to acknowledge its mystery is the simple fact, almost always disavowed, that symbolic systems, the myriad images that operate as linguistic signs that substitute for physical reality, or used to re-present it, are spoken and interpreted by that same physical reality. Put differently, I don’t simply have a body, the necessary support for my brain—the purported site of self—as Émile Descartes suggested; rather, my subjectivity, my ability to reflect, to deceive myself and others, to love and loathe, to be symbolic, to write this argument, is thoroughly corporeal. Biology is literate: It is not separate from what reads and contemplates. Hence, I am the literacy of meat, or to put it another way, it’s in the nature of nature to be cultural, political, inventive, even self-deceiving.[16] Indeed, it’s in the nature of nature to be human, and vegetal, and . . . ad infinitum. Importantly, the mystery and wonder here is that these quite specific ontological identities are not aggregations of individual things that already precede their “coming together.”

Of course, the statement seems absurd, as if I have things the wrong way around. The defensive reflex is to insist that I have confused perception’s raw input with its later, more abstract translation; nature, or biology, being the mere vehicle of a message whose cultural and intentional complexity should not be confused with the mode of its delivery. I could use the word “entanglement” to convey this confounding of seemingly different entities—electrical, chemical, hormonal, alphabetical, personal history, and so on—that inform a word. Or perhaps I should explain this mélange as an “assemblage,” which evokes the intimate involvement of many. However, it is precisely these popular representations of supplementarity as the addition of already-separate and identifiable entities that effectively prohibit something considerably more provocative, namely, the suggestion that the systematicity of “language” manifests as a holographic resonance of part with/in, or as, whole.

Can we remain comfortable with the assumption that communication, exchange, cause and effect, posit identities whose “in-itself” has no mode of production or history, such that relationality (“language”) occurs outside them rather than as the very production effect that enables their appearing? And can we explore the idea that perhaps the realization of an entity of whatever sort (person, word, cell, VOC, animal, plant, etc.) is an expression, or systemic differentiation, of a common involvement that was always at work? This would allow the question of plant language as many provocations and quandaries as we concede to human language.



Notes


[1] David Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants (Princeton University Press, 1995); David Attenborough, writer and presenter, The Private Life of Plants, episode 1, “Travelling,” January 11, BBC, 1995. The claim can certainly be disputed. In The Secret Life of Plants (Harper and Rowe, 1973) for example, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird garnered considerable interest in plant complexity, to which the later documentary of the same name, directed by Walon Green (1978), contributed. Nevertheless, as many of their claims have been criticized as unsupported pseudoscience, the recognized scientific and technological sophistication of Attenborough’s oeuvre, as well as the sheer size of his viewing audiences, explain this choice of origin story. No doubt there are many.

One further qualification is the need to recognize the considerable knowledges that First Nations peoples around the world have continued to share with vegetal life, long before this new wave of contemporary fascinations.

[2] Attenborough, Private Life of Plants (series), 13:15.

[3] Attenborough, Private Life of Plants (series), 22:54.

[4] Paco Calvo, “The Philosophy of Plant Neurobiology: A Manifesto,” Synthèse 193 (2016): 1324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229–016–1040–1.

[5] I mention just a handful of names here: Anthony Trewavas, Stefano Mancuso, Michael Marder, Monica Gagliano, Jeffrey Nealon, Emanuele Coccia. For broader references, one might begin with the journal Critical Plant Studies, which covers research in the humanities and social sciences. And for more scientific references, there are large databases in plant sciences.

[6] Regarding language and communication in living systems, we could begin with the literature in biosemiotics, an interdisciplinary field that considers signs, signals, messages, and communication as immanent to all of life. See, for example, the work of Jakob von Uexküll, Thomas Sebeok, Claus Emmeche, and Jesper Hoffmeyer.

[7] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Polity Press, 2018), 129.

[8] Saussure in Françoise Gadet, Saussure and Contemporary Culture, trans. Gregory Elliott (Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 66. I’ve conflated language and linguistics here, something Saussure questions in his later work when he subsumes linguistics to an appreciation that there are generalized structures throughout cultural life, whose inherent “language” he describes as a “semiology.”

[9]The linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir used the word “pattern,” “points in a pattern,” and “form” to suggest that language works relationally through/as gestalt. I have used the word in this shorthand representation because Sapir’s word is potentially more suggestive and evocative of the myriad riddles that attend what Saussure struggled to define. Ironically, and unfortunately, the difficult ontological and operational questions that Saussure pursued appear transparent and easily resolved in the very word “language”; we all assume we know what it is. The same problem holds today.

[10]References to plant communication are myriad. A good starting place is Vieira, Gagliano, and Ryan’s The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lexington Books, 2016) and Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira’s The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

[11] Michael Marder encourages us to carefully reconsider what counts as speaking. See “To Hear Plants Speak,” in Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira, The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). [12] This field of research is currently under critical review. Despite this, fungal communication with tree roots is largely conceded, albeit to different degrees and effects. See Luke Taylor, “Do Trees Communicate via a ‘Wood Wide Web’? The Evidence Is Lacking,” New Scientist, February 13, 2023.
[13] Monica Gagliano et al., “Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters,” Oecologia 175 (2014): 63–72.

[14] Monica Gagliano et al., “Tuned In: Plant Roots Use Sound to Locate Water,” Oecologia 184 (2017): 151–60.

[15]Although I suspect that Michael Marder might appreciate this point, he nevertheless believes that the language of plants involves an inherent “in-itself” whose “self-signification” (in Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira, The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature [University of Minnesota Press, 2017], 105) alludes to human attempts to comprehend it—exemplified by science’s presumably failed deployment of “numbers and numeric codes.” Accordingly, the human attempt to translate this essential “something” becomes a significant compromise if it cannot attach to the lifeworld. However, Marder’s turn to Derrida via Levinas to consolidate this point (119) is seriously misguided. For Derrida, “originary writing” undoes any appeal to the elementary autonomy of identity as a coherent departure point, an intact “something”—here, nature—that preexists its later transformation. Importantly, Derrida’s work contests the very notion that the lifeworld is entirely separate and essentially different from what Marder views as culture’s “sheer abstraction.” Surely the suggestion, for example, that mathematical calculation must be alien to nature (e.g., fractals, Fibonacci, concentric circles such as tree rings that time date, hexagon hive cells, etc.) requires a rethink. See Derrida’s Life Death, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (The University of Chicago Press, 2020).

[16]See Derrida’s Life Death for a fascinating argument that challenges the difference between a language of nature, such as genetics, and cultural or “natural languages,” spoken by humans.