Critical Response to “The Intelligent Plant”

Summary

In his article, “The Intelligent Plant,” Michael Pollan summarizes the checkered history and current debate surrounding plant “neurobiology.” Amidst the countless and interesting examples of experiments and scientific findings, Pollan gives a critique of the debate itself. In profiling three scientists with diverging views on the prospect of plant intelligence, he reveals that a large part of the debate focuses on a disagreement about what kind of terms are appropriate for describing the data and hypotheses in relation to inanimate flora. Given that the current debate is mired in what boils down to a mere problems of semantics, it is quite telling that Pollan’s clear favorite among the three scientists was inspired by a science fiction story. Though never said explicitly, the article leaves the reader with the impression that the scientific community as a whole would benefit from the sort of intellectual exercise that only literature and poetry can provide. 

Some of the more compelling and productive examples of the research on plant intelligence include:

Plant roots seeking out water by “hearing” it flowing is especially interesting in relation to Shelley’s description of the sensitive plant’s dreams being filled with music, whilst the other plants dream of silence.

Plant roots and trees abilities to discern its relative kinship with nearby plants and trees, and the cooperative behaviors one engages in according to kinship…

Also with regard to kinship, the learning behavior exhibited by the Mimosa pudica, called “habituation,” is regarded as an elementary type, and the movement of root systems as explained by a Darwin ‘acts like the brain of one of the lower animals’. These two tidbits encourage us to see similarity across taxonomic boundaries.  It would be nice if Pollan’s piece offered any fodder for thinking about gardens in general since the context of the poem is a garden, and if it did it might be related to this point, but I can’t really see a clear connection…

The use of chemical signals which function as a kind of plant language, eliciting responses from flora and fauna alike… 

And most pertinent to the poem, the role time-relativity plays in confounding observation and understanding of plant behavior and intention… Similar to the problems differences in our experiences of time present, the idea of the chemical signals, of which there could be said to be thousands of individual ‘signs’, as a language presents the human observer with the impossibility of understanding these signals without the help of complex apparatuses. The poem ends by grounding the reader with a reminder of the limitations on our perception. 

There is a moment when the science seems to almost argue for a kind of legitimacy in personifying or anthropomorphizing the Mimosa pudica: “When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, PRESUMABLY TO FRIGHTEN INSECTS.” That last bit is terribly interesting for two reasons. (1) The plants must know what it is to be frightened in order to (2) have the intention of frightening a predator away. 

Especially with regard to Consciousness:

One scientist posits that there is ‘some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn’. This sounds more like the second definition of consciousness given later – “being awake and aware of one’s environment,” an “outward” kind of consciousness as opposed the “inward awareness of oneself experiencing reality” of the first definition.

Another Plant That Exhibits Human and Vampire-Like Behavior

This clip from Through the Wormhole focuses on the cuscuta parasitic vine.  The plant appears to intentionally problem solve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFvRpp02QKE&list=SP45749CB678E4340E&index=18

poem on plants

Here is a poem by Karen Solie that Jessica thought would be interesting to discuss in conjunction with both Buell's discussion of modern personification and the studies of plant consciousness we're talking about this week:

On the mysterious neural networks mentioned in the Pollan article

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/31/136495499/incognito-whats-hiding-in-the-unconscious-mind

I also found this Charlotte Brontë quote concerning Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice interesting in relation to the scope of this course.  I know we are reading Sense and Sensibility, but this might provide an interesting way to look at Austen's overall portrayal of nature.

In 1848, 41 years after Austen’s death, Charlotte Brontë picked up Pride and Prejudice on the recommendation of friend and literary critic George Henry Lewes. Brontë, author of the grim “romance” Jane Eyre, wasn’t backwards about coming forward with her criticism: “Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point,” she writes, explaining that she got the book after Lewes talked it up. “And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, high-cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

http://mentalfloss.com/article/32099/7-people-who-hated-pride-and-prejudice

Here is the link to the article about domesticating dogs and, in turn, being domesticated by them:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/do-the-eyes-have-it/1

A Response to Mary Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant

It is easy to say that The Sensitive Plant is complex at best. However, some background on Mary Shelley herself can help add some illumination to the text. As a woman who suffered miscarriages, who was unable to produce a child with her husband, it might be somewhat understandable that Mary Shelley would be attracted to writing about the plant Mimosa pudica which is hermaphroditic and can reproduce all on its own, giving it a self-sustaining quality. The sensitive plant is also given the status of a kind of pariah. It is an outsider. It exists in a vibrant garden full of beautiful flowers including narcissi, lilies, hyacinths, and roses. In fact, Shelley writes about these flowers by referencing very passionate and erotic Greek myths The narcissi obviously references the famous Greek myth of Narcissus, the beautiful man who wasted away after falling in love with his own reflection. The lily of the vale if compared to Naiads which help facilitate youthful sexual experience. Hyacinths refer to the Greek myth in which a love feud catapults Apollo into Hyacinth, slaughtering him. Apollo turns his blood into a beautiful flower. And then, the wand-like lily is compared to Mæned, a devotee of Bachus, the God of Wine. The sensitive plant, being a plant with “No bright flower (Part 1, Line 75) is not a part of this botanical erotic passion. It is alone, something Mary Shelley was familiar with in her childhood. Shelley’s mother died giving birth to her, and her father remarried. Mary never got along with her step mother, and she felt like an outsider in her own house. It seems then no wonder that the sensitive plant would be the “favorite” (Part 1, Line 114) despite its lack of beauty and fragility. Perhaps it is the sensitive plant’s rarity that gives it value above the all the other beautiful plants in the garden.

Q: On line 114, the sensitive plant is described as “the favorite.” To whom? 

The Elegant Garden

In the short introduction to "The Sensitive Plant" the reader is told biologists of the late-eighteenth century found the Mimosa pudica particularly fascinating as a bridge between plant and animal. Mary Shelley seems to share this same fascination, and in this poem develops the bridge-like quality of the plant as a sort of entanglement between it and the woman who is the Soul of the garden. The sensitive plant exists as a kind of pineal gland, connecting the woman and the garden. They share a key quality of being self-sustaining when it comes to love, like a perfect conservation of energy. She has “no companion of mortal race” (part 2, line 13), and the hermaphroditic Mimosa pudica is likewise described as “companionless” (part 1, line 12). Similarly, another of Newton's laws is reflected in the phrase “groan for groan” (part 3, line 16) as Shelley describes the dying of the garden in reaction to the death of its godlike caretaker. Drawing out the hidden physics in Shelley's small universe further, the final lines containing a revelation that the garden and the lady never truly died, but only seemed to by our limited perception, illustrates a conservation of momentum- all live on (conclusion, lines 15-24). In addition to their relative wholeness, the woman and the sensitive plant share an elevated kind of consciousness. This plant's dreams contain music (part 1, line 108-109) while the rest of the garden inhabitants' dreams are silent (part 1, line 103); the woman's dreams “were less a slumber than a Paradise” (part 2, line 16).

Questions: What do we make of the spirit or angel that attends the woman? What is the meaning of the line “It was felt like an odour within the sense” (part 1, line 28)?

Post for Week Three: "The Thorn" and "The Sensitive Plant"

Because we didn’t get to it last week, I thought I would examine Wordsworth’s “The Thorn,” specifically as it relates to Shelly’s “The Sensitive Plant.” As we briefly mentioned at the tail-end of class last week, Wordsworth seems to rightly peg the miserable heroine of his poem as a universal trope. We were able, quickly, to come up with a few similar fables and stories across the globe, including the legend of La Llorona and Medea. But what I’m most curious about is Wordsworth’s scope of the tale. He writes that “she is known to every star.” The interesting push here is the total universality of the weeping woman’s condition. The thorn, of course, is the stand in for the woman, and WW goes to great length, describing the thorn's condition progressively wearing into the morbid, knobby figure lurking atop the mountain. This puts in my mind of Shelly’s “Sensitive Plant” in that, here too we have a sympathetic, seemingly miserable central botanical stand-in for the human. The sensitive plant is a waste by the end of the play, as is its caretaker, the myth-seeming, universalized “Lady.” The most surprising turn in “Sensitive Plant” is the Lady’s death. The Lady, on first brush, seems almost to be the immortal mother earth balance to the Father sky. This predictable trope is thankfully turned on its head when the woman dies, alone it seems, and nobody is left to tend to the garden. What can we make of the timeless seeming decomposition in both plays? Is the lesson/idea the degeneracy of life, the transcendent possibilities of the material, or something else? And does the scope of each poem serve in its function?     

Taxonomic and further description of the plant itself

http://www.kew.org/plants-fungi/Mimosa-pudica.htm

When Disaster Strikes, On the Wordsworth and Clare Poems

All of the poems relate to the themes of nature and culture by using personification of natural objects and processes, and also metaphor and simile, to speak to cultural issues. In particular, “The Thorn” describes the tragedy of a woman who is overcome by disasters of both natural and cultural origins. The Broom, in “The Oak and the Broom,” speaks optimistically of “disasters” as events universal to all. Robert Burns likewise makes a claim on the universality of disaster by likening the fates of a mountain daisy, a maid, and a bard, and John Clare’s speaker says to a weedling, “Come…/My fate shall stand the storm with thine.”
Reminiscent of Spanish folklore’s La Llorona, mystery surrounds the two possible disastrous, tragic fates of the woman of “The Thorn”: After overcoming a brief psychosis and giving birth, either the baby dies of natural causes or, as the townsfolk believe, she kills it. The theory that she killed her baby is supported with supernatural evidence, and since the supernatural is out of place in a poem comprised totally of imagery from natural objects and processes, it seems unlikely that a murder took place. The natural disaster of the loss of a child is then compounded by the culturally constructed tragedy of any unwed mother; the defamation of character merely adds to the suffering. In another poem by Wordsworth, the Broom speaks against “haunting [the] heart with terrors.” If natural disaster is universal to all, why should we allow culture to beat us down even lower, rather than raise each other up?
Is this sense of tragedy what is meant by “feeling” in the title of this first unit?

Buell and Poems in Conversation

How are we supposed to view the narrator of “The Thorn,” whose telescope marks him as a man of empiric observation? How are aspects of the world of science viewed within in the lyric itself, and how does that mesh or clash with the history the Buell has outlined?

In part of Buell we didn’t read for class, he goes on to discuss the ambiguities of the “mother earth” trope, which can be both an image of power or submission. He quotes the anthropologist Sherry Ortner, who “argues for the universality of the equation ‘man is to woman as culture is to nature’ as an instrument of dominance worldwide” (216). In what ways are the Wordsworth poems engaging this equation?

Buell mentions the idea of an “ethics of aesthetics” (188) in relation to the Romantics’ growing skepticism regarding viewing the nonhuman as merely a framework for exploring the human: can we see this question or struggle playing out in Wordsworth’s poems? “The Waterfall and the Eglantine” and “The Oak and the Broom” appear to be more neoclassical than “The Thorn,” whose nature, while mediated through the narrator’s leading gaze, is not overtly imbued with a will until the closing stanzas.

In Karen Solie’s poem “The World of Plants,” I think we can see aspects of an ecopoetics as defined by James Engelhardt, whose manifesto says ecopoetics must combine aspects of both responsibility and play. I’m wondering where Solie might fit in our spectrum given by Buell. Does she enact the claims he makes for Carson and Booth, or is she doing something else?

Plant learning 2.0

A recent study (ie. published Jan. 5) argues that the Mimosa pudica has the capacity for learned behavior. This makes for a very interesting context for reading Shelley's "The Sensitive Plant" and Chamovitz popular book on plant "thought."

Here the news release; I've posted the scientific study to our Blackboard site. I'd also suggest reading the comments section on the news release. 

Summary of Buell's "Nature's Personhood" and possible questions for discussion

In “Nature’s Personhood” Buell explores the concept of “kinship between the nonhuman and human” (180) from the Romantics to the Modernists. If we look to the lyric alone, we may be tempted to conclude that as poets sought “an increased commitment to literal fidelity as an issue of aesthetic ethics,” (188), any sense of kinship was strained, or perhaps even severed. Buell locates this nadir in the modernist period, with Wallace Stevens as the primary critical imagination. Yet, Buell also frames Stevens’ resistance as a form of anxiety revealing doubts about the efficacy of such a rhetorical stance. This stance is further troubled by the way nature essayists and other writers remained deeply engaged (some might say entangled) in that very notion of kinship. Buell traces how these two tendencies emerged, and looks at how a relational emphasis has continued to manifest itself.

Even as a materializing Judeo-Christian consciousness insisted on the separation between humankind and the environment, “classicism had kept alive the imagination of an interanimate cosmos” (183). This fed the neoclassical emphasis on treacly anthropomorphism, which, however, led to the Romantic project of “the dignification of the overlooked” (184). Concurrent with Blake’s “pietistic sentimentalism” (186) was “the route of natural history,” (186) whose materialist aims were often complicated by anthropomorphic tendencies. As later Romantic poets engaged the natural world, they sought to correct the excess of the neoclassicists. Darwin’s close discoveries, rather than widen the schism between the nonhuman and human, in some ways lessened it, and this Romantic/scientific ferment was the gestalt for the Victorian nature essay as practiced by Burroughs and Muir.

Burroughs sought to express a love of nature via empirical means—he diagnosed himself intellectually modern, emotionally retrograde. Muir “never considered the ‘pathetic fallacy’ might be fallacious” (192). His material experience was spiritual. Second-wave nature writers post Burroughs and Muir tended toward anthropomorphism in part because they were often writing toward turn-of-the-century concerns that resulted in perceptions of nature being used to explore various “social codes.” As mentioned, the Modernist lyric increased the “separation of mind from nature” (199), but did so anxiously, and coincident nature writing was in some ways erasing that same divide with “an incipient ecocentric ethics” (199). Ecology, according to Donald Worster is “‘inescapably a relational discipline speaking a relational language’” (200).

This continued relational emphasis is embodied in Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, the recognition of scientific myths of representation, and the rise of legislation that allows non-humans legal rights or protections, which continue to muddy the waters. Scientific knowledge has not destroyed our inclination to see or construct affinities with the nonhuman world. How has this situation influenced the literature? One effect has been to move the human to the periphery or, correlatively, to explore the natural world’s affective possibilities in relation to humankind.

Questions

On page 190, Buell quotes Burroughs: “Nature works ‘always in a blind, hesitating, experimental kind of fashion,’” which, he suggested, is opposite the method of science. To what extent do you find this juxtaposition problematic? How does our understanding of creative processes also relate to this idea?

As I was writing this summary, I kept thinking about the idea of domesticity, which made me think of theories that propose that some plants or dogs, for example, domesticated humans as much as humans domesticated them. Is it interesting or fruitful to think about this affinity for kinship in the same way?

On page 200, Buell says that both creative and empirical voices want a “properly demythologized myth of kinship” and that “‘ecology’ has supplied that myth.” Do you think such a myth-free myth is possible?

The passage we read concludes with two excerpts that Buell uses to show how literature may intersect with more contemporary notions of interconnectedness. What are your thoughts on these examples? Do they confirm or resist your expectations? Do you find them good choices? 

Post for Week 2 Burns, Clare, Buell and Wordsworth

Reading the material for this week I was struck by how many of the authors (poets and ecocritic) were engaging in identifying and conceptualizing the boundary of nature-culture. In Burns’s poem we see man on a rampage, ruining a flower even though we’re all matter - “Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fat, / That fate is thine.” In Clare’s poem “To an insignificant flower,” we get repeated references “I” and “me” as Clare constantly compares and equates himself with plant life. However, the gesture seems to come from a place of distance. This connects with Buell, in that he notes on page 198 that animal rights protectionism began in the nineteenth century, born out of a industrialized alienation from bio-systems. Felstiner pointed out in our reading last week, something that I’ve read before, that some of the greatest nature writing arose during the largest systemic change in America’s ecology and was perhaps was precluded by it. A troubling thought, maybe, when negotiating nature/culture, and it connects with Wordsworth. In all three poems this week we have hints of danger, destruction and violence. In the “The Waterfall and the Eglantine,” WW upends the “Circle of Life” narrative (beating it by two hundred years), narrating not that perfect, sustaining narrative of “nature” as a communist utopia, but one of betrayal and strife. His “Oak and the Broom” equally contends the notion of a wise “nature” in that it’s ephemeral beauty that survives in the end. How can we, in the twentieth century, co-propagators of climate change and environmental injustice, talk about nature/culture with a vocabulary that includes the facts of biology, but with the purpose of shaping a more just world? Or is the lesson that we’re kidding ourselves?

Course description

A 2009 book by John Felstiner poses a rather odd and surprising question: Can Poetry Save the Earth? In this course, we’ll explore why someone would ask this question and what assumptions about poetry, nature, and environmentalism are encoded in it. We’ll begin with a survey of recent arguments that trace origin of modern ecological thought to poetry of the Romantic period, roughly 1780-1830. On the cusp of the industrial revolution and in the midst of political turmoil and war, authors from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Mary Shelley and Jane Austen explored the idea of a more integrated and sustainable relationship between human beings and environment—a relationship conditioned by scientific and technological developments, an awareness of ecological change, and ideas about human consciousness and will. This course is designed to serve three purposes: first, to engage in sustained and detailed analysis of major authors and texts of British and American Romanticism; second, to introduce and analyze major debates and secondary sources in modern environmental studies and ecocriticism; and third, to bring these fields into conversation by reading literature through an ecocritical lens, but just as importantly, by reading current debates against and through Romantic literature.