Myth

Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung) . . . Mythology is all of these.

—Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Simply to utter the word “myth” is to be positioned, always-already. In the first place, historically, myth signals a demotion to particular ways of knowing and being in the hierarchy of knowledge and the “Chain of Being.”^[1] And secondly, to utter the word “myth” is to stand on the wrong side of not one but multiple potential oppositions. “Myth” is an especially plastic word, and I would venture to say that it gets caught up in the logic of what Saidiya Hartman classifies as “selective recognition”; that is to say, the term “myth” slides across multivalent operations of inclusion and exclusion dependent upon its own positionality.^[2] Each utterance of the term “myth” operationalizes a localized opposition to one or more of the following (nonexhaustive): whiteness, the West, fact, science, technology, reason, logic, history, philosophy, objectivity, the literal, and the real.

The complex maneuvers of myth and its extensive history are largely missing from the dominant discourse in plant studies. Myth is simply assumed, portrayed in the commonsense understanding as a powerful imaginative story that advances a value system. If traditional Western myths have created plant blindness, so the argument goes, then new stories could amplify “plant voices” to (re)establish intimacy between humans and the plant world, which in turn would lead to the benevolent treatment of plants and the environment more broadly. Matthew Hall proposes that new myths about plants can “move imagination to will” and “ideas to action.”^[3]Gibson puts it this way: “Create the narratives of bio-rights and eventually the laws will change too.”^[4]

Hall’s The Imagination of Plants is exemplary of plant studies’ imperative to invent new myths.^[5]Given the planetary crisis, he argues, “we are in desperate need of stories that redefine our ecological relationships.” We must “become a culture of stories to develop our ecological literacy.” Myths have the potential to “challenge the ways humans currently relate to the plant kingdom and the natural world,” to “open up new ways of living,” and reimagine who we are. Likewise, Robin Wall Kimmerer offers “stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.”^[6]Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is “an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” Val Plumwood critiques decades of environmental movements that haven’t gotten us very far.^[7] She appeals to the humanities instead, specifically poetry and literature, emboldening writers to “have the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives.” She urges us to write about “experiences of nature as powerful, agentic and creative.” Language, she says, can “reanimate the world,” reshape humans, and enrich our “ecological community.” Plumwood suggests we invent vocabularies that refuse to segregate human from nonhuman: “We need new origin stories that can disrupt the commodity regimes that produce anonymity by erasing narratives of material origins and labour, and replacing them by narcissistic dreams of consumer desire and endless, consequenceless consumption and growth.”

Emanuele Coccia takes up Plumwood’s challenge to question scientific cultural narratives.^[8]Referencing myth as it appears in Hesiod’s Theogony, Coccia envisions Plant gods who breathe life into humans and emboldens us to bow down and sing their praises. “Intellection is breath,” says Coccia, which becomes a mantra for humans to remember that plants create oxygen for humans, who cannot survive without it. Honoring the Plant gods for Coccia is to acknowledge that knowledge only flows through an “atmosphere of life.” His “mythographic writing” scrambles disciplinary knowledges and invents a “biological hypothesis of philosophical imagination” because humans need it; he argues that “the physical world cannot be seen [ . . . ] except through an imaginative effort of this kind.” Through such an act of imagination, Coccia argues, new forms of knowledge can be invented. Circulating through the atmosphere of life created by plants, this new knowledge exceeds mere human knowledge, thereby posing a direct challenge to the “utterly human” natural sciences, and is capable of warding off forms of extractive violence.

Plant studies scholars utilize stories about plants—ancient, Indigenous, invented, and personal stories—not only to forge new relationships between humans and plants but also to implore other writers to jump on the bandwagon. The implicit argument here is that more myths add up to more power that can be harnessed for change. What does it mean for mythology to become routine in plant studies? The fulfillment of plant studies’ aims (inclusivity, care, nonviolence, non-extractivism, etc.) is largely dependent upon mythmaking. Myths are uniquely positioned to “correct” the omission of plants from contemporary life. These myths perform a double function in plant studies; on the one hand, myths are etiological and explain the origins of plants’ exclusion from human life. On the other hand, myths explain away by condensing the causal complexity of the history of colonizing capitalist extraction. Correctional mythmaking has become the routine background against which humans will resist the dominant mode of plant blindness, which is root cause of our planetary ills. In other words, not only is myth a key part of plant studies—it also functions as the founding gesture that serves to legitimize plant studies as a field. It seems to me that this echoing ensemble of voices in plant studies discourse crystallizes an origin story of its own. The founding myth of plant studies—if one were to write such a thing—would go something like this:

Once upon a time, humans lived in harmony with the natural world. However, having left the garden to gather in cities, humans became surrounded by technology, digitization, and capitalist consumerism. In exchange for progress, humans sacrificed their knowledge of, experience with, and respect for plants. Nowadays, they are blind to their pl/an(t)cestors. But the plant-gods have curative powers, and they are calling us back to the world. Deep in the forest lives a sage who hears the call; he knows that if our souls are turned around toward the vegetal world, we will recollect our originary unity. Listen! Slowly humanity will reawaken to welcome its ancient kin and will smile upon plants once again.

And what’s more, the profundity and effectiveness of mythmaking cannot be questioned, for to question the relevance of myth would be to fall prey to the very rationalist, scientific, and colonialist discourses that must be overturned.

Still, I believe it’s worth highlighting several tensions associated with the construction of

myth as a founding gesture. The first tension lies in the relation between language and power. Myths are largely dependent upon the human faculty of imagination and human arts, such as poetry, literature, and narrative. Human language is granted exceptional causal and persuasive powers. And yet this unique human power to transform the world is at odds with the posthumanist framework that attempts to dethrone such human exceptionalism. In plant studies’ mythmaking operations, the human imaginative faculties still reign supreme. It is also strange that the vegetal turn should be so dependent upon the power of language, since it maintains strong connections to other contemporary theoretical turns in the humanities that attempt to overcome the impasse caused by the linguistic turn. In an atmosphere where “language has been granted too much power”^[9]and there is widespread hostility toward poststructuralism, why bestow such linguistic power onto myths about plants?^[10] Why now? In the same breath, plant studies claim to listen to plants but announce the urgent need for new human “terminology, metaphors and representations” and “diverse environmental imaginaries.”

Another related tension lies between two different understandings of mythical language that are left undifferentiated in plant studies: On the one hand, plant studies engage with the Western, anthropological notion of myth as metaphorical and symbolic and therefore as carrying representational power; on the other hand, plant studies engage with Indigenous storytelling traditions that are not metaphorical. For example, Hall points to the Australian Aboriginal Yanyuwa system of kinship between plants, animals, and humans. He demonstrates how their concepts of consubstantiality, intersubjectivity, and incorporeal interpenetration promote reciprocity and mutual care. When a Yanyuwan woman says the mangrove is her “husband,” Hall reminds us, “she is not speaking in metaphors or symbols, but describing actual kinship.”[11]How shall we reconcile Hall’s simultaneous demand for more (metaphorical and imaginative) language that would reignite (nonmetaphorical) plant-human kinship relations? After all, the field of plant studies maintains that much of its work is invested in the metaphorical, allegorical, and fictional work of storytelling but simultaneously embraces aspirational Indigenous examples that are, in fact, not metaphorical.

The problem is not merely linguistic but also invites questions around the challenges involved in the coproduction of knowledge with Indigenous communities, the habit of homogenizing Indigenous knowledge, the decolonization of attribution and citation practices, the fundamental incongruities between physical property and metaphysical land, and the neoliberal frameworks that underlie settler/Indigenous partnerships.

Additionally, the responsibility to write these myths mainly falls to humans who must speak on behalf of nature. The myths are deployed not as metaphysical but rather as instrumental: New language is put in the service of staving off the climate crisis. There are, of course, a number of attempts to let plants speak for themselves and to enhance humans’ ability to hear nonhuman voices—for example, Marder’s articulation without saying, Dennett’s wisdom of the wing, Plumwood’s mindful matter, Trewavas’s plant signaling, and Gagliano’s Pavlovian plants.^[12]But what does it mean to “listen” or “give voice” to plants or to “awaken to the wiles” of plants?^[13]Do some humans have an unmediated and authentic relationship to nature’s noises, while others require training? Might some never acquire the ear for it? If humans can “hear” plant voices (I assume voice to be multiple), then in which key, through which rhetoric, or framed through which lens are these humans able to “hear” them? Plant neurobiology, biometrics, comparative communication models, and a notion of plant language “itself” each suggest alternative modes of expression for plants and therefore different modes of human listening. Which plant voices will be heard or silenced? This is not, strictly speaking, a critique about nonhuman agency but rather a question about the politics of nature’s articulation. Foucault’s “rituals of speaking” require us to consider the positionality of the speaker and the discursive context of what is being spoken. Whatever way we decide to accept that plants in some way “speak,” speaks more to a particular human regime of truth than to the plant “itself.”

At the very least, speaking for the Other should give us pause. Plant studies rely on the human faculty of imagination and glorify the good in kin-making with plants. Even if we allow that narratives have the power to reconfigure relational ties, beneficial effects don’t necessarily follow from them. As Graham Harvey notes, goodwill is only one mode of relating: “aggression, repression and degradation must also be seen as ways of relating.”^[14]In Becoming Human, Zakiyyah Jackson offers a different story of inclusive kinship relations. She argues that granting subjectivity is “not the antidote to violence, but a way of extending and codifying.”^[15]Sria Chatterjee clearly shows that the widespread ethical belief that “destabilizing human-nonhuman binaries intrinsically lends itself to [ . . . ] environmental justice” is flawed.^[16]She gives strong evidence against causal relations between art, kinship, and justice with numerous examples of failed attempts to promote empathy and view plants as moral subjects. She warns against imagining spontaneous relations between subjectivity and moral considerability, arguing that this relation tends to feed the extractive mode of production, promote new forms of neoliberal labor, and erase the colonial histories of power and domination. Plant studies’ naive belief in the power of myth to create empathy is also part of the non-innocent fantasy of colonialism. Rather than a guarantee of goodwill, empathy should be understood as a projection of one’s own personality and emotions onto an object, which does not lead to inclusion but rather to displacement. As “a violence of incorporating the other,” empathy uses the “captive body as a vessel for one’s feeling and self-awareness.” As we learn from African American studies scholars, empathy is a fantasy of the self, a phantasmic universal that is a key “component of domination that casts itself as benevolent and ethical.” Echoing Hartman’s critique of empathy, Jackson shows how this “idiopathic identification” of the newly incorporated Other obscures and negates the suffering of others.^[17] Perhaps, then, it is the belief in the myth of a benevolent and inclusive universalism that plant studies need to critically assess, since these forms of inclusivity amount to an imperial position that tend to reinstall the very hierarchies they seek to overthrow.

Notes

[1] Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (Beacon Press, 1992).

[2] Saidiya Hartman Scenes of Subjection (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022).

[3] Gagliano’s Thus Spoke the Plant (2018) might be an exception. While she never defines myth explicitly, she does adopt an approach to myth in her attempt to marry different ways of knowing (David Abram’s scientific and spiritual, Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey).

[4] Prudence Gibson, The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life (Brill, 2018), 11.

[5] Matthew Hall,The Imagination of Plants: A Book of Botanical Mythology (State University of New York Press, 2019).

[6] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013), x.

[7] Val Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (Routledge, 2014).

[8] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (John Wiley & Sons, (2019).

[9] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 132.

[10] On the need to move beyond poststructuralism see Coole and Frost (2010), Hekman and Alaimo (2008), van der Tuin and Dolphijn (2012), Braidotti (2019). For an alternative reading, see Ahmed (2008) and Hemmings (2011).

[11] Hall, The Imagination of Plants.

[12] Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013); Daniel C. Dennett, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” The Sciences 35, no. 3 (1995): 34–40; Val Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (Routledge, 2014); Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018); and Anthony Trewavas, “What is Plant Behaviour?” Plant, Cell & Environment 32, no. 6 (2009): 606–16.

[13] Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books 2018).

[14] Graham Harvey, “Environmentalism in the Construction of Indigeneity,” Ecotheology: Journal of Religion, Nature & the Environment 8, no. 2 (2003): 207.

[15] Zakiyyah Iman Jackson,Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York University Press, 2020), 46.

[16] Sria Chatterjee, “Political Plants: Art, Design, and Plant Sentience,” Cultural Politics 19, no. 1 (2023): 88.

[17]Jackson, Becoming Human, 54.