Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  3. Alexei Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non Soviet’, Current Anthropology, 49/2 (2008), 199– 224, p. 207.

  4. Viktor Mazin, ‘The Foundations of Necropractice’, trans. Thomas Campbell, in Nelly Podgorskaya (ed.), Necrorealism (Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 56–65, p. 65.

  5. Mazin notes that Iufit’s films tend to take place in liminal zones, particularly spaces like forests, railroad tracks and suburbs (all heavily populated by plants), but does not extend the discussion beyond the setting to consider the significance of plant life in Iufit’s work. See Mazin, ‘Yufit’s Liminal Experiments’, trans. Thomas Campbell, in Nelly Podgorskaya (ed.), Necrorealism (Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 68–9, p. 69.

  6. The phrase ‘alternative forms of vitality’ is drawn from Alexei Yurchak. See Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 211.

  7. Ewa Domanska, ‘Dehumanisation Through Decomposition and the Force of Law’, trans. Paul Vickers, in Zuzanna Dziuban (ed.), Mapping the ‘Forensic Turn’: The Engagements with Materialities of Mass Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2016), pp. 83–98, p. 84.

  8. Evgenii Iufit frequently used this phrase (in Russian, ‘zhizn’ neoporochennuiu chelovecheskim soznaniem’) to describe the life the Necrorealists were attempting to attain. See Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 210. The translation is Yurchak’s.

  9. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 18 (emphasis in original). For more on ‘plant-thinking’, see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook’s chapter in this volume, which also engages plant-thinking’s capacity for facilitating ethical, nonanthropocentric thought.

  10. Cook’s chapter in this volume explores similar themes with regard to Robert Holdstock’s Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region (1988) and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007), noting that human–tree assemblages allow writers ‘to imagine time in other terms … and in doing so to propose new hybridised ways of being and becoming human’ (p. 129).

  11. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 214.

  12. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 200.

  13. According to Yurchak, ‘Necrorealists … emulat[ed] the raw biological vitality and energetic activism of the socialist-realist hero but disassociat[ed] it from meaning, speech, and personhood’, thus demonstrating a kind of reverse heroicism marked by what the Necrorealists referred to as ‘energetic idiocy’ (see below). See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 253.

  14. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 201.

  15. See Yurchak’s ‘Necro-Utopia’, p. 202. The translations are Yurchak’s.

  16. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957), pp. 255–6.

  17. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 199.

  18. The term ‘heroic idiocy’ was used by associated ‘parallel’ artist Igor Aleinikov to describe the group’s antics. See José Alaniz and Seth Graham, ‘Early Necrocinema in Context’, in Seth Graham (ed.), Necrorealism: Contexts, History, Interpretations (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, 2001), pp. 5–27, p. 9.

  19. Mazin, ‘The Foundations of Necropractice’, p. 56.

  20. As Tricia Starks notes, ‘[I]n Russia – and later in the Soviet Union – utopian ideas, political objectives, and a different interpretation of the divisions of public and private led to an application of health programs at a more invasive and pervasive level than elsewhere. Health activists, cultural revolutionaries, and major political figures treated issues of home, body, life, and leisure as public concerns essential to the Soviet project.’ See Tricia Starks, Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p. 5.

  21. This was true also of non-Socialist Realist Russo-Soviet art, literature and cinema. As José Alaniz and Seth Graham note, ‘As in Western films, the vast majority of characters who die on the Russo-Soviet screen … do so quickly and – in terms of the visual consequences of the death – without a trace.’ See Alaniz and Graham, ‘Early Necrocinema in Context’, p. 6.

  22. See Olesya Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’, trans. Thomas Campbell, in Nelly Podgorskaya (ed.), Necrorealism (Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 6–15; and Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

  23. Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’, p. 7.

  24. See, for instance, Alaniz and Graham, ‘Early Necrocinema in Context’; Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar, ‘A Shock Therapy of the Social Consciousness: The Nature and Cultural Function of Russian Necrorealism’, Cultural Critique, 34 (1996), 185–203; Alexander Borovsky, ‘The Necrochallenge’, trans. Thomas Campbell, in Nelly Podgorskaya (ed.), Necrorealism (Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 46–55; Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’; and Yurchak, Everything Was Forever and ‘Necro-Utopia’.

  25. See Borovsky, ‘The Necrochallenge’, p. 47.

  26. ‘As a system’, Viktor Mazin writes, late socialism ‘was more dead than alive, and although few believed that the corpse of this system would soon be buried, everyone understood that it no longer showed signs of life, evidenced by the gerontocracy, the death of one general secretary after another, the stagnation in the economic sphere, the negligible number of adherents to the ruling ideology, the absence of any sort of collective enthusiasm, and the demise of the aesthetic principles of socialist realism. Thus, confidence in the stability of the system was based entirely on its immobile character, its failure to demonstrate any signs of life or death.’ See Viktor Mazin, ‘From Cabinet of Necrorealism: Iufit and Viktor Mazin’, trans. Maria Jett, in Seth Graham (ed.), Necrorealism: Contexts, History, Interpretations (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, 2001), pp. 28–52, p. 37. In this context, the preserved body of Vladimir Lenin, which is still on display in Moscow, is especially suggestive.

  27. See Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.

  28. Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’, p. 6.

  29. Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’, p. 7.

  30. Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’, p. 7.

  31. Alaniz and Graham, ‘Early Necrocinema in Context’, p. 8.

  32. Berry and Miller-Pogacar, ‘A Shock Therapy of the Social Consciousness’, 189.

  33. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 208.

  34. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 210.

  35. Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 211.

  36. In her discussion of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in her chapter in this volume, Cook similarly observes that ‘to be human necessarily entails understanding hybrid configurations that challenge a linear temporality oriented to reproductive futurism’ (p. 134).

  37. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, p. 249.

  38. Olesia Turkina and Viktor Mazin, ‘Para-Necro-Blockbuster or Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads’, trans. Seth Graham, in Seth Graham (ed.), Necrorealism: Contexts, History, Interpretations (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Russian Film Symposium, 2001), pp. 53–9, p. 59, n. 1.

  39. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 22.

  40. Matthew Hall argues further that the ‘dogmatic acceptance of plant passivity and insentience can also be detected in the development of Enlightenment philosophies, which are pinpointed by environmental philosophers as being at the heart of destructive Western attitudes toward nature’. See Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), p. 47. See also T. S. Miller’s chapter in this volume, which expands upon this intellectual history.

  41. Marder, Plant-Thinking, pp. 52–3.

  42. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 67.

  43. Indeed, the Necrorealists recognised this early on: members Andrei Mertvyi and Debil once wrote a study for the journal Cine Fanon titled ‘The Flora and Fauna of Graves’ ‘in which they filled in the gaps of film-makers’ knowledge of necrophages and cemetery plants’. See Olesya Turkina, ‘Necrorealism’, p. 1
0.

  44. Domanska, ‘Dehumanisation Through Decomposition’, p. 87. Claire Colebrook similarly argues, ‘Cultural production … reinforces this unquestioned affirmation of life … all external criteria give way to the value of life itself. At first glance it appears that the enlightenment project of removing all forms of transcendent justification – Church, State, privilege and prejudice – has been achieved, and now there is nothing other than life. And yet, such a frenzied surge in an unquestioning insistence on the value of life is accompanied … by an inability to confront the imminent demise of life.’ See Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014), pp. 185–6.

  45. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 22.

  46. For instance, Trotsky advocates a dominant relationship to nature (including biology), as in the following excerpt from 1924’s Literature and Revolution: ‘The effort to conquer poverty, hunger, want in all its forms, that is, to conquer nature, will be the dominant tendency for decades to come … The passive enjoyment of nature will disappear from art.’ Trotsky’s faith in the Soviets’ ability to reshape nature was directly linked to contemporaneous developments in technology and science. In a passage that explicitly invokes his attitude towards forests and other important habitats for vegetal life, he writes, ‘Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. … Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain.’ See Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, pp. 253 and 252.

  47. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, pp. 254–5.

  48. As Mazin comments, ‘Military zooanthropotechnics is technoscience’s quintessence. It is the focus of Yufit’s interest in zoology, anthropology, primatology, genetics, cryptobiology, forensic medicine, and paleopsychology. On the one hand, science provides the framework for today’s symbolic matrix. On the other hand, this framework inevitably requires the discharge of what does not fit within it. Military zooanthropotechnics is focused on the production and exploitation of bare life, which cannot result in anything other than death.’ See Mazin, ‘Yufit’s Liminal Experiments’, p. 68.

  49. Tom Idema, ‘Toward a Minor Science Fiction: Literature, Science, and the Shock of the Biophysical’, Configurations, 23/1 (2015), 35–59, p. 38. Also quoted in Domanska, ‘Dehumanisation Through Decomposition’, p. 94.

  50. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, p. 256.

  51. Thomas Campbell notes a different set of associations for Silver Heads’s wooden machine: ‘This powerful (and powerfully funny) emblem is multilayered. In it, we see combined a parody of the Russian spiritual and aesthetic attachment to trees; an allusion to the tree as a symbol of hierarchical organization (as opposed to the Deleuzian rhizomatic “an-organization” represented by the film’s renegade mutant “Z-individuals”); a reference to trees as the source of the paper that the textual component of the state’s authoritative discourse is printed on (in this sense, the scientists turn their bodies into parchments for the state’s word); and the tree as the phallus, the transcendental signifier. For Iufit’s scientists, discipline entails masochistic, orgiastic submission to the phallus – as figured by the wooden stakes of the chamber, which penetrate their “docile bodies” from all sides.’ See Thomas Campbell, ‘The Bioaesthetics of Evgenii Iufit’, KinoKultura, 11 (2006) http://www. kinokultura.com/2006/11-campbell.shtml (accessed 23 April 2019) (para. 9 of 29) (emphasis in original). See also Turkina and Mazin, ‘Para-Necro-Blockbuster’, which further discusses the film’s sexual imagery and connotations.

  52. Michael Marder, Grafts: Writings on Plants (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016), p. 15.

  53. Marder, Grafts, p. 16.

  54. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 43.

  55. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 130.

  56. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 164.

  57. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), p. 150.

  58. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 151.

  59. Patricia MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 2.

  60. MacCormack, Posthuman Ethics, p. 4.

  61. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), p. 49–50.

  62. Alaniz and Graham, ‘Early Necrocinema in Context’, p. 11. See also Mazin, ‘From Cabinet of Necrorealism: Iufit and’, pp. 49–50 (n. 24) and Yurchak, ‘Necro-Utopia’, 207, who discuss the scandalised reactions from Soviet psychologists and TV viewers to the first televised screenings of early Necrorealist short films on the program Fifth Wheel in 1989. As Yurchak notes, ‘A panel of professional psychologists whom the program invited to discuss the footage dismissed it as the work of sick psychopaths, necrophiliacs, and sadomasochists; a few TV viewers called the station to protest the disgusting horror it broadcast.’

  63. Domanska, ‘Dehumanisation Through Decomposition’, p. 90.

  64. Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 137.

  65. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 52.

  5. Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction

  1. John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia (London: 1698), p. 243.

  2. John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum: A Critical Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975–88), p. 885.1–5.

  3. On the mandrake’s properties as documented and debated in various medieval botanical sources, see T. S. Miller, ‘“[I]n plauntes lyf is yhud”: Botanical Metaphor and Botanical Science in Middle English Literature’, forthcoming in Heide Estes (ed.), Medieval Ecocriticisms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press).

  4. Recent books that summarise some of the findings from such fields include Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015); Richard Karban, Plant Sensing and Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). The concept of ‘plant neurobiology’ has obviously received far more pushback than, for example, simple ‘plant perception’.

  5. I alternatively offer up the term ‘phytofiction’ as possibly more accurate and inclusive. ‘Phytofiction’ has the advantage of an etymological foundation in ‘physis’, or growth, a reminder that nonanimal life has been deemed that which grows but does nothing else, and I do not mean to exclude from this category narratives of fungus, unicellular algae, etc. – in part because classification schemes have been fluid over the past several centuries, and also because my belief is that any ‘critical plant studies’ should lead us to a consideration of nonhuman life more generally, chloroplasts or no chloroplasts. Indeed, I take Jeffrey Nealon’s critiques of animal studies as a given here: ‘[A]nimal studies’ blanket refusal to consider vegetable life within its biopolitical frame seems to function as a subset of an old practice: trying to close the barn door of ethical consideration right after your chosen group has gotten out of the cold of historical neglect.’ See Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. xii.

  6. Outside Michael Marder’s ever-growing body of philosophical botany, Matthew Hall’s book Plants as Persons probably remains the most sustained meditation on the question of how and why we might extend ethical consideration to plants. See Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).

  7. John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969), p. 28.

  8. I do not mean to suggest that Marder’s voluminous writings on plants in the pas
t few years do not address the subject of plant feeling or desiring. For just a few examples of his thinking on the subject and its recurrence in philosophical thought, see the discussion of plant desiring via Nietzsche and Pseudo-Aristotle in Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 38 and passim; also Michael Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 11–15.

  9. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 5.

  10. The ongoing work of Catriona Sandilands has perhaps done the most to suggest bridges between queer theory and plant studies; for a starting place, see Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, and Bruce Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Greta Gaard has also spoken of the possible interest that plant studies holds for queer theory in light of ‘queer theory’s fluidity of identity, sexuality, and community’: see Greta Gaard, Critical Ecofeminism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), p. 31.

  11. It is no coincidence that one of the first edited collections dedicated to the subject of plants and narrative has taken horror as its more specific organising theme: see Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Horror does occasionally seep into various of the essays in the earlier and more general volume assembled by Randy Laist (ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013).

  12. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, p. 70.

  13. The final sentence of The Great Derangement expresses hope for a new generation able to ‘rediscover their kinship with other beings, and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature’; see p. 162.