Soil, Ground
At the opening of The Overstory, Richard Powers addresses the human in the voice of a plant: “Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere.”[1] The teachings of the vegetal, according to Powers, have to do with the differences between soil and ground. More specifically, the ground structures human knowledge and experience in segregating ways that leave soil out of the picture, and we would be gravely mistaken if we think we know soil because we know the ground. The vegetal, on the other hand, know soil through their roots. Soil thus belongs to the knowledge of the plant world. This staging of soil against ground brings afore two terms that could be of interest to our thinking today. As concepts such as “the terrestrial” and “the planetary” have come to organize key lines of arguments in contemporary debates surrounding environmental crises and human survival, the relationship between knowledge and land, philosophy, and the “geo” have drawn renewed attention. If, like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro claims, “Geophilosophy must be a concept that points to both the earth as the ground of all thinking and to the extramodern Terran philosophers that keep on thinking other thoughts,”[2] what can we learn about the earth from the plant world? How might soil muddle the ground?
In existing plant studies, observations and statements involving soil mostly render it a background entity as it is commonly understood: the material medium where plants grow. When plant illustrations care to include the underground, sometimes a single horizontal line is drawn to indicate the spatial separation between a plant’s shoot and root systems. In other words, representations of soil have rendered it interchangeable with the ground.
Ground is a line and a surface. Its existence is neat, flat, and solid. We can hold it or break it. Otherwise, it remains stable on its own. Soil, on the other hand, is material, volumetric, uneven, pliable, and shapeless. The formal trouble of soil makes the geometrical taming of it into a line convenient and appealing. Ground orders spaces: foreground and background, aboveground and underground. As humans, we live, walk, travel, and play on the surface of land, above the ground. While human societies have long speculated in myths and fictions about the origins of the earth, imaginations about the underground such as that which produced Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) only emerged as modern geology rose to reign as popular science in the nineteenth century. Thanks to modern engineering, we now travel underground on a subway, through tunnels, yet for most of us, time spent below the surface of the land counts toward a minimal portion of our experiences. We see the earth as a surface that we are universally attached to. Maybe because our biological growth is tending away from the ground, we have come to measure our aspirations and abilities by the upward distance away from the ground as well. “Higher!” proclaims the Olympic motto. Athletic competitions are only possible given the a priori of the sameness and stasis of the ground, which is where and how the reasoning is grounded. The ground therefore has come to stand in for objectivity, causation, and strict order. “Grounding” suggests determination, often coupled with a source of objective reality. Framed as the basis of truth, the notion of ground is less about questioning and more about reliance. When questioned, grounding is not so much about what or who grounds but that which appeals to a ground and that which is grounded.
The equation of soil to ground then serves a conceptual utility in plant literatures. As some of our seed words have implied, there is a preoccupation to make the plant a transcendental entity. The figure of the plant emerges when the complex agency of soil is pushed into the background and ignored, or when soil is reduced to a mere condition of possibility for the agency of the plant. The omission of soil in plant literatures thus becomes a generative grounding, and this is no more clear than in the studies of plant roots.
Studies and philosophies of the vegetal have assigned distinct significance to what is in it: roots. Charles and Francis Darwin, for example, were particularly drawn to the workings of the root apex and the phenomenon of geotropism. After having documented in The Power of Movement in Plants a whirl of activities in which the plants live, but only in their slow pace, the father-son duo conclude the book with a daring speculation that “the tip of the radicle [is] thus endowed [with sensitivity], and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals.”[3] This “root-brain” hypothesis, which would continue to energize studies on plant neurobiology, as Emanuele Coccia reminds us, partakes in a long history of fascination with the brain-root analogy. Philosophers from Plato to Guillaume de Couches compared the human head to plant roots to emphasize the significance of the brain as the sole source of reason and spirit. For them, humans were “a plant of the sky,” and the gesture of relating human to plant serves the end of framing and illuminating the human condition. But then a different way of thinking emerged. Carl Linnaeus “reverse[d] the direction of the analogy, speaking of the plant as an upside-down animal.”[4] Thinking the vegetal institutes what Coccia astutely observes as a reversal of orientation. It turns things upside down. The movements of thought now tend toward two opposite ends instead of one. In doing so, it draws out an additional dimension and a vertical line through the ground. To study land, it is no longer sufficient to have a “solid centre and expanded wings” and “march like an army” as we go on its surface.[5] The model of surface and depth, as it arises in Martin Lister’s[6] mineral identification from layers of different colors of topsoil and William Smith’s theorization of strata,[7] would become a principle of orientation as geology formed its disciplinary profile.
However, the concept of depth and verticality quickly proves to be inadequate. Observations of root activities, such as their averting hard rocks and growing toward water sources, led the Darwins to the proposal of the root apex having localized sensitivity. This sensitivity is responsible for not only seeking sustenance but also sensing gravity. The tip, they claim, “is sensitive to the attraction of gravity, and by transmission causes the adjoining parts of the radicle to bend towards the centre of the earth.”[8] Plant roots are unruly, their forms multiple. If, instead of being a universal force that affixes everything to its surface, gravity’s pervasiveness operates through reception by localized sensitivity in an organization as diffuse as plant roots—like Darwin’s plants are suggesting—then what we have is an account of geophysical forces quite different from the claims of classical Newtonian mechanics. In other words, the argument of gravity as a deterministic equalizer for further deduction, and in the same breath its methodology, can no longer hold its ground.
By now, we should begin to recognize the reflexivity of soil. Once we are in it and willing to acknowledge its many dimensions, soil shows us our assumptions and limits like a mirror. Again, we are facing a call for different techniques of orientation.
In a way, we find an answer in Theodor Schwenk’s water studies. Schwenk argues for a treatment of the wave as the archetypal movement across the organic and the inorganic. After having demonstrated that vortex formation should be considered the archetypal phenomenon in the forming of organic structures, he writes:
A similar process akin to the formation of organs must have taken place in the great stages of development of the planet earth. [Forms of archetypal movement] are to be found in many places in the mountain ranges, or inside the earth—for instance in excavations. They point to youthful stages in the development of the earth, when it was obviously still permeated by living organic processes.[9]
Indeed, the ground also wrinkles like plant leaves. Similar to the wave-like bulges in plants that appear at the growing tip that would “later fold over and develop into leaves which open up into the air,”[10] the surface of the earth and its diverse topographies are produced by geological folds as seen in the curvature in strata. We can also reverse this analogy and say that a plant moves like the earth, because as it turns out, the term “fold” has a geological etymology. Its modern meaning actually is derived from folde, which in Old English refers to the surface of the earth.
The point here, of course, is not to chase the originary but to find new ways to think forces, as the “geo” asks us to. Through the method of formal analogy, Schwenk is able to conceptualize geo and bio forces without the necessity of external agents or chains of deductive reasoning. Organization then can be thought in terms of self-organization, and higher levels of complexity begin to emerge. The perception of such complexities and relations, through a model of thought instead of concrete sensory organs, is also the kind of active and expanded perception of nature that Ernst Kranich seeks in Planetary Influences Upon Plants. By “look[ing] at the entire plant in its formation” and “the sphere of the planets in its rhythms and its structure” at the same time,[11] Kranich interprets the movements and forms of plants through diagrams of celestial bodies. Inflorescences of the Umbelliferae, for instance, mirror “the spheres of Mars and Jupiter containing the sun.”[12] For Kranich, to perceive cosmic relations in the image of the plant as such is not to establish certain causality between the two, as the title of the book might misleadingly convey. He disputes the effectiveness of cognitive process in proceeding from specifics to generalities in the interwoven realm of nature.[13] Instead, to study the interrelationship of forms between the vegetal and the cosmic is to comprehend cosmic forces as an unseen “reality present in the plants.”[14] Kranich seeks to build an archetypal plant, like Goethe, but with cosmic relationships. Kranich argues that the plant is not a collection of aggregate parts and characteristics but “a supersensible entity permeating its individual organs.”
Schwenk and Kranich’s geo-cosmologies, terrestrial and planetary, both find in plants a scalar apparatus with what Adam Nocek aptly describes as an “ability to link vastly different scales of organization.” It is exactly for this dynamism of connection that the technique of formal analogy proves to be energetic and rewarding. But, if we strive to “remain true to the earth,”[15] like Nietzsche urges us to, we might ask: Are the organisms and forces at work here as symmetrical and mappable as they are made out to be? If Schwenk and Kranich’s formal schema are speculative representations not to be taken as ground truths, what is the lesson for us in the sacrifice of mimesis?
In Circulating Reference, soil sampling provides Bruno Latour a limit case of disciplinary paradigm versus praxis in sciences. In the Amazon Forest, scientists in botany, pedology, and geomorphology offer conflicting interpretations of a strange case of forest-savanna transition in Boa Vista. The mysterious phenomenon of an ecological complex on the move leads the scientists to reevaluate and negotiate their respective methods. Their sampling turns complicated systems of soil into signs and index. As samples travel through measurements, labeling, and boxing, the scientist’s position must also transform with technical changes. What governs this process is not resemblance between, say, the pedocomparator and the soil of Amazonia but alignments between one set of reference and the next. Reference, Bruno Latour says, “is our way of keeping something constant through a series of transformations. Knowledge does not reflect a real external world that it resembles via mimesis, but rather a real interior world, the coherence and continuity of which it helps to ensure.”[16]What is at stake, then, is the reflexive task to upholding continuations. In other words, the ecological question of a moving boundary was never about whether the plant or the soil is responsible but rather how we describe where the plant starts and the soil stops in the first place.
Notes
[1] Richard Powers, The Overstory (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 4.
[2] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Metaphysics as Mythophysics: Or, Why I Have Always Been an Anthropologist,” in Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, ed. Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 268.
[3] Charles Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 573.
[4] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants (Polity, 2019), 79. Coccia’s note: Carl von Linné, Philosophia botanica in qua explicantur fundamenta botanica (Ioannis Thomae Trattner, 1763), 97: planta animal inversum veteribus dictum fuit (“the ancients said that the plant is an animal upside down”).
[5] Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Alexander von Humboldt in his journal in 1845, “Humboldt” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Miscellanies [vol. 11], 457. Emerson’s description of Humboldt: “The wonderful Humboldt, with his solid centre and expanded wings, marches like an army, gathering all things as he goes. How he reaches from science to science, from law to law, folding away moons and asteroids and solar systems in the clauses and parentheses of his encyclopedic paragraphs!”
[6] Martin Lister (1638?–1712), British naturalist and physician.
[7] William Smith (1769–1839), British geologist.
[8] Darwin, The Power of Movement in Plants, 4.
[9] Theodor Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water & Air, trans. Olive Whicher and Johanna Wrigley (Rudolf Steiner, 1990).
[10] Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos, 41.
[11] Ernst Michael Kranich, Planetary Influences Upon Plants: A Cosmological Botany (Bio-Dynamic Literature, 1984), 3.
[12] Kranich, Planetary Influences, 117.
[13] Kranich, Planetary Influences, 170.
[14] Kranich, Planetary Influences, 11.
[15] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (The Common Library, 1930), 6.
[16] Latour, “Circulating Reference,” in Pandora’s Hope: An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies (Harvard University Press, 1999), 58.