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1Cet article a été initialement publié dans l’ouvrage Dispersion. Thoreau and Vegetal Thought (Ed. Branka Arsić and Vesna Kuiken, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 69-84).
If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government”
- 1 Most prominently, the “plant turn” is represented by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (201 (...)
2This essay responds to the emergence of a new subject in critical theory: the plant. The recent turn to plants in the humanities has already produced a robust body of work that branches out across a number of disciplines, from indigenous philosophy to anthropology to metaphysics.1 Beyond their significant differences, these works share the belief that the ecological calamities we face today (ecocides, climate change, mass extinctions) are in no small measure a byproduct of Western modernity’s epistemological indifference to the life of plants. Re-focusing our attention on vegetal life, they propose, might remediate the harm inflicted, not just to plants themselves but more broadly to entire ecosystems and to the populations who have historically entertained a more reciprocal, less exploitative relationship to the land and its productions. Yet despite the incontestable urgency of its concerns, and despite the clear ethical and political motives that animate it, this new “plant theory” is at first sight surprisingly demobilizing. Both Emanuele Coccia’s Life of Plants and Jeffrey Nealon’s Plant Theory, for instance, call for a suspension of action: the former enjoins his readers to cultivate a more “contemplative” disposition, and the latter to “slow down” in order to reconsider the question of life “from the ground up” (Coccia 5, Nealon xv). How are we to understand these odd injunctions in the face of looming and increasingly dire environmental issues?
- 2 Thoreau’s thoughts of plants and planting are disseminated throughout his entire work, but this sho (...)
- 3 All references to Walden and Civil Disobedience will henceforth be given directly in parentheses.
3To account for this paradox, I look to Henry David Thoreau’s botanical ruminations in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).2 Thoreau’s reflections on plant life trouble Nealon and Coccia’s claim that plants were being thoroughly expunged from Western scientific and political thought in the nineteenth century. Far from ignoring them, Thoreau explicitly asks himself whether he has the “right” to kill and use certain plants for his own benefit, and (not unlike our plant theorists) he invites his readers to adopt a “much slower” pace if they want to entertain a “much more intimate” knowledge of plants (Thoreau 1066, 105).3 But beyond a speculative epistemology and ethics of vegetable life, Walden devises a pragmatic politics of planting. This politics is largely specific to Thoreau’s time and place, responding to antebellum agricultural reforms and other governmental initiatives, but I will argue that it also models what a biopolitics attuned to plant life might look like.
- 4 “[G]overnment is not related to the territory”, Foucault notes, “but to a sort of complex of men an (...)
4Thoreau’s horticultural experiments at Walden Pond, I propose, make it clear that biopolitics—broadly conceived as the government of the living—does not renounce the sovereign “right to kill” so much as it subordinates it to a different calculus of power. As such, what Leo Marx called Thoreau’s “experiment in transcendental pastoralism” can be seen to complement Michel Foucault’s reflections on “pastoral power” (Marx 242). In his 1977-1978 lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault borrows the concept of pastoral power from the archaic model of the Christian pastorate to account for the profound mutation in the art of governing that occurs when technologies of power and knowledge take “life” as their subject. Predicated on the theological (and zoopolitical) example of the shepherd in charge of safely leading his flock to pasture, pastoral power “is not exercised over a territory,” Foucault asserts, “but, by definition, over a flock, and more exactly, over the flock in its movement from one place to another.” (Foucault 2007, 125) While the category of “territory” was key to the conceptualization of the older regime of sovereign power, it becomes much less central when Foucault turns his attention to the biopolitical management of populations, or “governmentality”. Government “in no way refers to territory,” Foucault asserts: “One governs things.” (Foucault 2007, 134 and Nemser 14) Thus, as Daniel Nemser observes, “space seems to disappear from Foucault’s work at almost exactly the moment that the biopolitics of population emerges.” In fact, the territory does not entirely “disappear” from Foucault’s lectures; rather, it becomes incorporated as one variable among many others into a complex network of relations that governments administer for the benefit of (certain segments of) the population (Nemser 14).4
5What Thoreau offers, I propose, is precisely a consideration of the territory that quite literally underlies Foucault “government of the living”. Thoreau shifts our attention from the mobile flock to the pasture, from the zoological to the botanical, making clear that pastoral power always implies what we could call pasture power: specific forms of care and knowledge and a certain notion of politics that address the life of plants, and not simply the longevity and health of (some) human lives or the mass-reproduction and management of (some) animal lives. Not only does Thoreau’s experimental gardening at Walden Pond help us assess the role that plants have always, if inconspicuously, played under biopolitics, but it unsettles the Eurocentric perspectives that subtend Nealon and Coccia’s lapsarian narratives, inviting us to amend certain assumptions in dominant biopolitical discourses by inscribing them within a broader imperialist landscape—specifically, if obliquely, within the context of settler-colonial implantation and the slave plantation economy.
6The first section of this essay, “planting,” is a brief overview of the theoretical tenets and political promises of plant theory. I focus primarily on Nealon and Coccia, whose work best illustrates the belief that altering the fundamental “unit of thought” of the sciences and philosophies of life—i.e., shifting their attention from animals to plants—would be ecologically less detrimental, or at least would offer a more apt heuristic for diagnosing the condition of our biopolitical age. The second section, “hoeing,” reads Thoreau’s “Bean-Field” chapter in Walden as a meditation on the ethics of weeding in order to consider what becomes of the sovereign “right to kill” when plant life is taken into account. The last section, “Harvesting,” shows how Thoreau’s acknowledgment of the violence inherent in tending his bean plot informs both his political critique of the alienation from the land wrought by settler biopower as well as his twin theories of resistance and civil government.
7On the face of it, the recent surge of theoretical consideration for plants is but the latest offshoot of posthumanist efforts to decenter the universalizing category of “the human” in humanistic discourses and epistemological practices by focusing instead on liminal figures like “the cyborg” and “the animal” or attending to “hyperobjects” like global warming or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Yet plant theorists do not view the turn to plants simply as a mere evolution, a new ground for the same old posthumanism; they present it as a radical departure from its previous ventures, as an entirely new project that promises to remake the world “from the ground up.”
- 5 Animals, Coccia asserts, can select their participation in the world: they can migrate, hide or ret (...)
8Two recent books in particular have put “vegetable life” at the center of their analyses to rethink radically the political landscape of Western modernity. Emanuele Coccia’s Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2016), takes modern Western thought to task for its inveterate zoocentric bias, and Jeffrey Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2015), laments that at the advent of biopower, animals eclipsed plants as the “image of life” and thus as the focus of politics. Coccia’s and Nealon’s books are very different, but they share the conviction that amending modern (bio)politics demands that we shake up the metaphysical or epistemological ground in which it is rooted. Both authors, moreover, have in common a strong aversion toward the recent field of animal studies, which they see as little more than a continuation of the old humanist project by other means. Concern over animal suffering, for Coccia, grows out of “an extremely superficial moralism” and a narcissistic inability for humans to empathize with such dissimilar beings as plants: “no one has ever wanted to question the superiority of animal life,” he bluntly asserts, “and the rights of life and death of [animals] over [plants].” (Coccia 4) Nealon is less hyperbolic, but he too asserts that animal studies, “far from constituting a critique of an all-too-humanist biopower (exposing the imperialism of human life over animal life), tends to function in fact as an intense extension of that very biopower.” Animal studies scholars, he contends, assume that animals became utterly marginalized in nineteenth-century Western cultures when in fact the role of “abjected other” was “played throughout the biopolitical era not by the animal, but by the plant.” (Nealon 11) Coccia and Nealon, in sum, embrace a lapsarian script according to which animals, over the last two centuries, have unduly upstaged plants in the natural sciences, and by extension in the cultural and political imaginaries of the West. Both lament that the paradigmatic subject of our philosophical, scientific, and political discourses is all too individuated, action-driven, and nomadic—in other words, all too animal.5
- 6 Coccia notes that the atmosphere comes from the leaf, the operator of photosynthesis; plants and th (...)
9Coccia and Nealon hope to bring plants back into the picture in order to promote an entirely different economy of relations with the natural world, inviting their readers to think and act botanically. Coccia, for instance, advocates vegetal values such as “immersion” over autonomy, “exposure” over immunity, and “contemplation” over action. He explicitly suggests that the plant is an ideal model for a more holistic eco-philosophy, for he describes plants as essentially non-critical beings that perfectly adhere to their surroundings. In fact and effect, for Coccia, plants are immersed in the world and thus make the world simply by existing: “Immersion,” he writes, “is first of all an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment.” (Coccia 37) For plants, in other words, there is no clear distinction between being and acting. Coccia contends that this lesson is generalizable to all living organisms, but that animals have forgotten it, mistaking mobility for independence. The moral, for him, is that “organisms do not need to go beyond or outside themselves to reinvent the face of the world [because they are part and parcel of it]; they have no need to act.” (Coccia 39)6
- 7 According to Wolfe, “discrimination, selection, self-reference, and exclusion cannot be avoided.” N (...)
- 8 Nealon follows Deleuze and Guattari, who, in their analysis of early capitalism’s capture of the la (...)
10Nealon, as for him, proposes that plants’ rhizomatic territoriality is better suited to address the complexities of biological life than the projected and overly organized human or animal “worlds” (“organized” in the sense of built and inhabited by bodies with organs, by organ-ized entities). For Nealon, plants offer a more productive paradigm for resisting various forms of control, especially as power has grown increasingly reticular and decentered under late capitalism. Yet if he urges us to “follow the plants” (Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation), he recognizes that the rhizome is little more than a diagnostic template that “doesn’t guarantee anything politically.” (Nealon 103-106) Here lies the main difference between Nealon and a thinker like Cary Wolfe, the only representative of “animal studies” with whom he engages in any depth. Nealon repeatedly rebuts Wolfe’s argument at the end of Before the Law that legal protection cannot indiscriminately be extended to all living beings. Wolfe is particularly wary of thinkers of biopolitics like Roberto Esposito who refuse “to take seriously the differences between different forms of life—bonobos versus sunflowers, let’s say—as subjects of immunitary protection.” (Nealon 110) Esposito’s proposition that all lifeforms are equally deserving of protection seems impracticable to Wolfe, who insists that we “must choose, and by definition we cannot choose everyone and everything at once.” (Wolfe 103) This requirement of choice, or decision, is precisely what Nealon challenges, especially as it involves, in Wolfe’s example, choosing animals over plants (“bonobos versus sunflowers”)7; Nealon concludes Plant Theory with a plea for more “undecidability,” arguing that “undecidability complicates decision; it doesn’t make decision impossible.” (Nealon 117)8
- 9 Foucault defines the population as “a multiplicity of individuals who are . . . biologically bound (...)
- 10 The management of biological subjects is made possible by their inherent susceptibility to environm (...)
11On the one hand, Coccia theorizes a mode of action that does not look like action, but that is not reducible to inaction; on the other hand, Nealon advocates a form of decision that does not look like decision, but that is not reducible to indecision. In other words, plant theory invites us to conjugate differently the two verbs that prevail in the political idiom of Western modernity: decide and act. This demand seems oddly paralyzing, even defeatist at times, but it offers a powerful counterpoint to the proprietary conceptions of life that prevail in classical biopolitical narratives. The invitation to amend the grammar of modern political thought is most useful when politics concerns itself not merely with human affairs, nor even with discrete living beings, but with the mesh of life itself. And in our age of ecological peril, it is all the more imperative to heed one of the most important lessons of biopolitics: that modern power is no longer predominantly expressed as the decision to interrupt lives—which, once taken away by the sovereign, paradoxically and retrospectively appears as an individual’s unalienable property—but rather as an investment in “life itself,” construed as a transindividual, unownable force. As we move toward pastoral power and away from the sensational and discontinuous violence of the sovereign, decisions and actions become more distributed and less localizable (which in turn facilitates the institution of gradual, unspectacular forms of what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence,” which disproportionally aggravate the vulnerability of already disempowered populations). Under pastoral power, lifeforms can be inhibited or encouraged by techniques that target not individuated living beings but rather “populations”9; these techniques work less visibly because indirectly, by altering the “milieu” in which these populations (are forced to) live.10
- 11 This is especially true of Coccia. For all its praise of compenetration and universal mixture, Cocc (...)
12Plant theory usefully reminds us that the milieu—of which plants make up a significant portion—is neither an inert background nor an abstract notion but rather, as Foucault defines it, “a set of material elements that act on [living individuals] and on which they act in turn.” (Foucault 2007, 37) Yet recognizing this runs counter to Coccia and Nealon’s claim that vegetable life became thoroughly jettisoned under biopolitics.11 I take issue with this botanical “repressive hypothesis” because assuming that plants were forgotten or neglected makes it difficult to account for what was effectively done to and with plants under biopolitics. Ironically, this is a point Nealon makes about animals: “modernity is not, as some animal studies thinkers would have us believe, born by jettisoning or abjecting animality but rather by fully incorporating animal desire into our definition of the human.” (Nealon 64) I would similarly argue that plants were not forgotten or abjected when life made its entrance on the political stage but rather made to play a vital if underrecognized and undertheorized role. It is more fruitful, I suggest, to understand biopolitics not as spurning plant life so much as assimilating its logic as a way to subject individuals to the dispersive logic of the population. In other words, biopolitics does not disappear plants; it vegetalizes animal bodies.
- 12 On this, see Diran and Traisnel, “The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Repre (...)
13Tellingly, Foucault discerns the lineaments of a concept of milieu in the writings of eighteenth-century demographer Jean-Baptiste Moheau, who states that it “is up to the government to change the air temperature and to improve the climate.” For Moheau, “a direction given to stagnant water, forests planted or burnt down, mountains destroyed by time or by the continual cultivation of their surface, create a new soil and a new climate,” which in turn create new subjects. Reflecting on how the Italian weather has become warmer since Virgil’s time, Moheau oddly attributes changes in climactic conditions not to natural phenomena but to political transformations: “if there has been so much change” between Virgil’s time and ours, Foucault comments, “it is not the climate that has changed; the political and economic interventions of government have altered the course of things to the point that nature itself has constituted for man . . . another milieu.” (Foucault 2007, 37-38) We understand how inconceivable an “event” like climate change becomes when nature has been fully translated into a milieu (when nature is politicized through and through, the idea that it could “change” of its own accord is heresy12). But when it is being rendered into a governmental technology, nature also becomes a privileged site of “resistance” for thinkers of civil government. Enter Thoreau.
- 13 A few paragraphs later, Thoreau confesses to having tasted his beans, but he still asserts himself (...)
14In Walden, Thoreau conducts biopolitical experiments that actively and decisively engage plants, not as an inert backdrop for human life, not simply as a means by which power acts on its subjects, but as subjects of knowledge and power in their own right. In a famously tedious chapter of Walden, Thoreau describes the cultivation of his bean-field in painstaking detail, framing his experiment in husbandry as an economic project: “Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it chiefly with beans.” (36) Significantly, his beans are introduced from the start as a form of currency (although one incompatible with the abstraction of something like a gold standard, as Thoreau’s beans derive their value from being worked by his own hand). His is not a dream of self-sufficiency and retreat from the world of commerce; he makes it clear that he does not plant in order to eat. He claims he will not partake of his beans because of his Pythagorean allegiances,13 but he will happily exchange them for rice or grow them for their poetic yield (“for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day” [108]).
- 14 See for instance Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism.”
15For Eric Sundquist, the tie Thoreau establishes between writing and cultivating is far from innocent: “Thoreau’s cultivation of Nature yokes literal seeding with insemination by the letter in a precise way, for his whole project involves implanting himself in the midst of Nature while at the same time concealing the injury generated by that act.” (Sundquist 66) Yet Thoreau does not conceal the injury he is inflicting on the land and its occupants; in fact, he draws attention to the violence inherent in his agricultural enterprise on multiple occasions. He describes battle after battle with weeds, fought to protect his cherished bean-crop: “A long war . . . with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead” (108). Thoreau acknowledges that his annexation of the bean-field entails the conquest of the “native” plants that grew there before, and he explicitly asks what “right” he has to kill some plants (weeds) to the benefit of others (beans). He is equally aware of the collateral damage occasioned by this interminable war, knowing full well that the weeds are a “granary” for the local birds, and that his gardening is destroying that resource (111). Not only does he relish describing his mock-heroic war on weeds, but he implicitly compares his own conquest of the bean-field to the Europeans’ conquest of the land. He repeatedly notes the arrowheads he turns up while hoeing his beans, which he reads as living indices of an “extinct nation” that planted beans long before he did (104). And after all, what is Walden if not a narrative of settlement? As Stanley Cavell notes, Thoreau recounts “the building of a house, that is, the finding of one’s habitation” (Cavell 1986, 112), while knowing well that one’s entitlement to the land is never that of a rightful “owner” but always of a temporary “squatter” (34). In contrast to settler colonialism, which rhetorically and materially attempted to “naturalize” its legitimacy,14 Thoreau plainly admits that his agricultural labor displaces people and plants indigenous to Massachusetts—in his own words, his hoeing amounts to “levelling whole ranks of one species [to] sedulously cultivate another” (108).
- 15 Thus Thoreau’s manual labor makes him aware of the land itself as a record of violent history, whic (...)
16He kills and displaces weeds even as he questions his license to do so: “what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up [worms and woodchucks’] ancient herb garden?” (104) The question remains unanswered, but it is not rhetorical. His decision to remove the weeds in no way annuls their right to flourish. This right is simultaneously recognized and violated by the farmer, whose decision is shown to be rooted not in a pre-established hierarchy of value but in a set of relative interests: What can I grow in his climate? What can I sell to my neighbors? What crop will make a worthy parable? As such, Thoreau’s horticultural experiment effectively reconceives decision, which is neither a wholly volitional or proprietary act that presumes an autonomous subject nor a legal verdict predicated on abstract principles of equality; rather, decision involves a pragmatic, economic calculation. To the repetitious monotony of Jacksonian agriculture, which purposely prevents any true kinship with the land and its productions,15 Thoreau opposes the no less tedious iteration of his hoe, which demands intimacy with what will be recognized a weed: “Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds,—it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor,—disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe” (108). Decision—epitomized by the incision of the hoe, the critical instrument par excellence—ought for Thoreau to be local and finite, lest it alienate the farmer from his land and from his own self.
- 16 “Thoreau here renounces both the definitive knowledge of individual varieties and the systematic an (...)
- 17 Tellingly, Thoreau uses the word “plant” eleven times as a substantive and twenty-two as a verb in (...)
- 18 Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 789. Foucault and Austin are both committed to rethinking what i (...)
17Heeding the contingent nature of hoeing is a way for Thoreau to acknowledge the ordinary violence inherent in his practice. There is no ontology of the weed; weed is what has been designated such. Case in point: Thoreau calls beans “this weed which I had sown” (105). Likewise, there is no fixed essence of the plant, no such thing as “the plant.”16 Is plant what is planted; for Thoreau, plant is a verb before it is a noun.17 And plant is a verb whose ostensible transitivity Thoreau likes to call into question, as he does when he writes that his hoe makes “the earth say beans instead of grass” (106). Thoreau’s planting is a perlocutionary act, to borrow from J. L. Austin’s typology of performatives, insofar as it brings something about without addressing a direct order or a request to an interlocutor interpellated as a fully intentional subject (the perlocutionary act can be seen a linguistic counterpart to Foucault’s conception of pastoral power, a form of government that does not act directly on subjects but “acts upon their actions,” as I will discuss shortly18). Thoreau’s performative gardening finds an echo in Potawatomi biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s description of a vegetable garden as a place where “you can’t say ‘I love you’ out loud, [but] you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans.”( Kimmerer 127) In both Kimmerer and Thoreau, speaking in seeds entails having faith in the soil and the countless determinants that contribute to the beans’ growth. Thoreau continually evokes the participatory nature of husbandry, which requires not acting directly on something so much as activating it by controling its environment. The true farmer does not rule by fiat but must acknowledge the limited and ancillary role he plays in the economy of nature. He will not be tempted to turn nature into his garden unless if he ignores that “the sun looks on our cultivated fields and on the prairies and forests without distinctions . . . In [the sun’s] view the earth is all equally cultivated like a garden” (111, emphases mine).
- 19 I borrow the idea of “vegetable locomotion” from Julien Nègre, L’Arpenteur vagabond, 298.
18Hence Thoreau’s determination to refute the notion of spontaneous generation in his late study on “The Dispersion of Seeds,” which attends to the unlikely phenomenon of vegetable locomotion (seeds “run,” “fly,” “sail,” “go off like pistols on the slightest touch”).19 This work can be classified alongside Eadweard Muybridge’s protocinematic experiments on “animal locomotion” a decade later, except instead of slicing up a movement too rapid for the human eye, Thoreau reconstitutes the invisible journey of seeds too slow, too small, or too dispersed to be registered in real (human) time. Wind, water, jays, and rodents count as “the principal agents in this planting.” (Thoreau 1993, 80) The desire to connect the growth of plants to a multiplicity of unheeded causes is present already in Walden, for Thoreau catalogs the cultivator’s many “auxiliaries”—the sun, the dew, worms and squirrels, etc.—to advance a more distributed, less individuated but still “invidious” understanding of his own farming practice. He insists on seeing the farmer as a transitory means in the larger “economy of living,” which has little to do with the “political economy” taught in New England colleges (35). He concludes the bean-field chapter with a homily about the “sacred” labor of the “true husbandman” (etymologically, the one who is “house-bound,” the manager of an estate), who never works solely for his private interests. Lamenting the deritualized economization of modern agriculture, which sacrifices to Plutus instead of Ceres or Jove, Thoreau condemns the “grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property” (111). This is not a moral judgment so much as a pragmatic call for de-habituating oneself, for re-forming oneself so as not to “deform” the landscape (111).
19Concluding on the farmer’s duty to be more squirrel-like and “relinquish all claim to the produce of his fields” (112) seems at first sight to contradict his whole enterprise, which started as a means to “to earn ten or twelve dollars by some honest and agreeable method” (36). Turning a profit, however, is not incompatible with the cosmological perspective Thoreau adopts at the end of the bean-field chapter so long as it does not become the farmer’s primary motivation. The true husbandman’s operations must not be construed as a series of discrete acts aimed at accumulating private wealth but instead as a laborious, iterative, and endless praxis with countless beneficiaries:
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them,—the last was the hardest of all,—I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o’clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. (108)
- 20 In the conference he gave for the Tanner Lectures on Human Value, Cavell notes that Walden “deals i (...)
- 21 Historian Robert A. Gross argues that the bean-field chapter is a “hoax” that targets the agricultu (...)
- 22 The bean-field chapter explicitly stages the metamorphosis of its author: “It was no longer beans t (...)
20The polysyndeton and the accumulation of gerunds (“planting, and hoeing, and harvesting…”) perform the very grammar of action that Thoreau puts into practice in his bean-field: sporadic but continuous, finite but interminable.20 This chapter does not simply critique the agricultural innovations promoted by the Federal Government, as Robert A. Gross has argued;21 rather, it effectively rehearses (from the Old French rehercier, to re-harrow) a different type of culture as cultivation—a cultivation, remarkably, not of the beans themselves, but of his “long acquaintance” with them. This new type of cultivation, I will now argue, is best understood within a biopolitical frame, for it involves both a reconception of the exercise of power (from a right over the living to a right of the living) and a transformation of the self (from subject of law to subject of interests). But it is crucial not to reduce the bean-field to a metaphorical training ground for what Bennett calls, in Foucauldian fashion, a “technique of self.” (Bennett 48) 22The bean-field is primarily a living milieu in which humans, animals, and plants are all “equally,” albeit differentially and invidiously, subject to forms of gardening, or “governmentality.” In Thoreau’s (writings on his) farming experiment we find the lineaments of a biopolitics attentive to plant life.
- 23 Arsić shows that in Thoreau, life is not the opposite of death but a principle of mutability that r (...)
21In her magisterial Bird Relics, Branka Arsić argues that Thoreau’s idiosyncratic vitalism has “nothing to do with what, in the wake of Foucault’s analysis, became known as the biopolitical organization of power.” The early architects of biopolitics, she explains, were not philosophers of life but political thinkers primarily invested in the preservation of the liberal body politic. When they invoked life as a model for their politics, these thinkers construed it in immunological terms, as that which “protect[s] itself from what is foreign and . . . unsafe” (Arsić 141)—an approach that implies a deeply normative and hierarchized perception of life used to justify the killing (or letting die) of deviant lifeforms. Ultimately, Arsić shows biopolitics to be overly organized, and centered around individuated units, whereas life as Thoreau conceived it defies organicity and troubles established boundaries between species (human/animal) and kingdoms (animal/plant/minerals).23 The only way to reconcile Thoreau with biopolitics, she posits, is to embrace what Roberto Esposito calls “affirmative biopolitics,” a politics “no longer over life but of life, one that doesn’t superimpose already constituted (and by now destitute) categories of modern politics on life, but rather inscribes the innovative power of a life rethought in all its complexity.” (Arsić 142) From this perspective, “any thing that lives needs to be thought in the unity of life,” Esposito asserts, which means “that no part of it can be destroyed in favor of another.” (Arsić 142)
- 24 Pace Nealon, I would say that biopower posits life as absolutely unownable and fugitive. Insofar as (...)
22What, then, of Thoreau’s deliberate destruction of weeds in favor of his beans? How can we reconcile Esposito’s nonsacrificial injunction with Thoreau’s oblative recommendation? I do not think that Thoreau’s decision to oust weeds (and the justificatory violence of designating some plants as weeds) is incompatible with his vitalist proclivities, but I do think it reveals him to be a biopolitical thinker. At the end of Plant Theory, Nealon remarks that Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics is in principle hospitable to plants, but he immediately concedes that it “contains no particular policy implications.” The value of Esposito’s trans-individual ontology of life is primarily heuristic, only giving “a picture of how something like life works”: life can no longer appear as the “property of an individual organism,” as biopower “seems to have decided”24; instead, when we “follow the plants,” we are able to think biopower beyond the immunological model. We realize that life “is not something that’s owned by an organism, something hidden deep within it, to be protected against the outside at all costs; rather, life is the territory for the emergence of . . . assemblages of heterogeneous processes.” (Nealon 118-119)
- 25 Arsić shows that the paradigm for Thoreau’s vitalist ontology is the leaf, which, following Goethe, (...)
- 26 In the 1840s, Thoreau was already familiar with Asa Gray’s Natural System of Botany and Edward Tuck (...)
23Thoreau knew this. His philosophy of life was deeply informed by his understanding of plants—his avid engagements with the major botanists of his time,25 and more importantly his experiments in husbandry (“I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans” [75]).26 More than a speculative epistemology of plant life, Walden sketches a pragmatic politics of planting—a method of husbanding a new “generation” (indeed, a new type) of citizens:
I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil . . . Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities which I have named, which we all prize more than those other productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating in the air, had taken root and grown in him. . . . We should never cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there were present the kernel of worth and friendliness (110, emphases mine).
24These new citizens would, in turn, create a new kind of political garden. Indeed, Thoreau uses this image for American politics, urging ambassadors to import the seeds of “truth or justice” to US soil and distribute them freely. As with most of Thoreau’s ideas, this one is rooted in empirical observation, for he knew that John Quincy Adams had requested ambassadors to send rare seeds to Washington and that the Congressional Seed Distribution Program, begun in 1839, dispatched seeds to farmers to stimulate and diversify US agricultural production.
- 27 Mather’s words—excerpted from this sermon on the Salem Witch Trials, The Wonders of the Invisible W (...)
25Thoreau’s germinal imagery points toward the future—the political harvest produced by proper planting and diligent hoeing—but it is rooted in the long imperial history of “planting,” in the archaic sense of establishing a colony. Indeed, the word “plantation” should be heard literally in the Puritans’ “Plantation of the Lord” and the plantation economy, as both imply transplantation of deracinated populations, the former semi-voluntary, the latter forced. Cotton Mather’s lament “that never were more Satanical Devices used for the Unsettling of any People under the Sun, than what have been Employ’d for the Extirpation of the Vine which God has here Planted,” for instance, takes on a more factual dimension when we consider Mather’s pioneering work on plant hybridization, and even more so when we situate the Puritan jeremiad in the larger context of New World colonization.27 Indeed, the colonies were literally “‘planted’ with people,” as Sylvia Wynter observes, “not in order to form societies, but to carry on plantations whose aim was to produce single crops for the market.” (Wynter 95) For economic reasons, plantation zones were structured in ways that favored monocultures and proscribed the formation of “societies,” nipping in the bud anything that looked like a diverse culture. “That is to say,” Wynter continues, “the plantation-societies of the Caribbean came into being as adjuncts to the market system; their peoples came into being as an adjunct to the product, to the single crop commodity—the sugar cane—which they produced.” (Wynter 95) Anna Tsing also chooses the example of the sugarcane to correlate the treatment of plants and persons in the colonies. Just as the sugarcane, “imported to the New World, had few interspecies relations,” so too the enslaved Africans working in plantations “had no social relations and thus no established routes for escape.” This represented a great advantage from the planters’ perspectives: “Like the cane itself which had no history of either companion species or disease relation in the New World, [African slaves] were isolated. They were on their way to becoming self-contained, and thus standardizable as abstract labor.” (Tsing 39)
- 28 Evelyn recommends experimenting with “artificial compositions” of soil and “to modify the air aroun (...)
- 29 On the endurance of Crèvecoeur’s botanical framework in nineteenth-century works, see Forbes, “Vege (...)
- 30 Susan Scott Parrish explains that eighteenth-century European colonists were invested in the “subje (...)
- 31 The racist logic of what Nemser calls the “uneven distribution of vulnerability” perdured well into (...)
- 32 Foucault, The Order of Things, 143, qtd. by Nemser, 136.
- 33 For Nemser, the “fetishization of ‘things themselves’ and the erasure of context” in the classical (...)
26Thoreau knew well that plants are not simply resources for governments (colonial or modern) to accumulate but “actants” that have significant effects on the land’s occupants. And he was well aware that agriculture was a powerful instrument of colonial domestication when he referred to the seventeenth-century horticulturist John Evelyn’s treatise Terra: A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, Relating to the Culture and Improvement of it for Vegetation, and the Propagation of Plants, which advised members of the British Royal Society on how best to “endenizon” plants to the cold climes of England.28 Altering landscapes and climates was theorized by Evelyn as an efficient and necessary (if indirect) mode of governing colonial subjects. Thus the lexical field of seminality cultivated by Thoreau harkens back to the botanical model by which the premodern era theorized the influence of the climate on mores and customs. “Men are like plants,” Crèvecoeur famously wrote in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782): “The goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey…”29 (Crèvecoeur 32). The economic stakes and ideological underpinnings of Crèvecoeur’s analogy—a well-known feature of late Enlightenment epistemology—are more discernible when viewed from the colonies.30 The correlation between people and plants, however, was more or less strict depending on the “kind” of population it referenced, as Daniel Nemser observes. Certain bodies were believed to be more susceptible to environmental determinants, which led to the construal of racial difference as a function of a population’s assumed vulnerability to external factors. The differential analogy between “plants and (certain kinds of) people,” Nemser argues, implied the invention of an imperial “program of research” with far-reaching epistemological, political, and economic implications (Nemser 133-134).31 This program did not simply inventory plants in tidy classificatory tables to apprehend the “things themselves,” as was the ideal of classical taxonomy according to Foucault32; rather, it understood plants to be dependent on a number of environmental factors (type of soil, temperature, altitude, humidity, etc.). For Nemser, this attunement to what specific conditions nonnative plants—and, by extension, displaced populations—needed in order to thrive or simply survive was forged in the colonies and first theorized in Alexander von Humboldt’s early work on plant geography, not in the Paris laboratory of Georges Cuvier.33
27Although at first sight Thoreau’s parable of the sower appears to recycle an obsolete colonial epistemology, it bespeaks an attention to the discreet persistence, indeed the becoming “infrastructural,” of the logic of what Nemser calls “imperial botany.” If Thoreau recognizes humans’ constitutive susceptibility to environmental management, however, he rejects any kind of racial hierarchy or climactic determinism, demanding instead that space and time must always be left for indetermination (which is why he refuses to use manure to hasten the growth of his beans, favoring instead the “continual motion” of the hoe). Thoreau insists that government should not force men against their nature precisely insofar as this “nature” is pervious to external influences and never fully fixed in advance. Hence in his most explicitly political essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” which he composed at the same time as Walden, Thoreau writes:
I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man. (237)
28The word “destroys” denotes a degree of violence, though speaking of violence seems absurd since there is no conscious decision involved in the destruction; there are only seeds following their natural dispositions as they interface with external events and “perchance” managing to thrive at the expense of another seed. Yet if we take Thoreau at his word, as Arsić has taught us, the form of “government” he calls for is one that ought to be observant of the internal “laws” of every one of its human and nonhuman constituents, even though it will ultimately prove unable to guarantee “that no part of it can be destroyed in favor of another,” as Esposito has it.
- 34 Pastoral power, for Foucault, is a kind of “everyday government” that doesn’t say its name: a natur (...)
- 35 “Resistance to Civil Government,” 224. A Few paragraphs below, Thoreau makes this explicit: “But, t (...)
29In the first sentence of “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau famously declares that he “heartily accept[s] the motto,—‘That government is best which governs least,’” a motto he immediately glosses as “That government is best which governs not at all” (224). This is, in a way, a restatement of Thoreau’s ideas about garden politics, and in it I hear an echo to Foucault’s analysis of pastoral power, which he defines as “the art of not being governed quite so much.”34 The governmental formation that Foucault names pastoral power, whose establishment in the West he situates at the end of the eighteenth century, embraces this idea of the “least state” (Foucault 2007, 53) by positioning itself as temporary, as a stopgap; acting as a mere “intermediary between the flock and pasture,” pastoral power offers itself as a power working toward its own abolition insofar as it does not exercise any authority “imposed from above” but “pegs its action to the truth.” (Foucault 2012, 173) If “men were to govern according to the rules of evidence,” Foucault argues, “it would be things themselves, rather than men, that govern.” (Foucault 2012, 14) As such, pastoral power appears to be in keeping with Thoreau’s notion that “government is best which governs not at all”. Note that Thoreau does not advocate the suppression of government but calls for the advent an idle or nongoverning government, a government that “governs not at all”35.
- 36 On the question of resistance in Foucault, see Lazzarato, “From Biopower to Biopolitics.”
- 37 Thoreau first wrote “Civil Disobedience” as a lecture he delivered in Concord in 1848. The text was (...)
- 38 In the plantation context, writes Wynter, history is “itself, fiction; a fiction written, dominated (...)
- 39 On the “paradox of the shepherd” who “must keep his eye on all and on each,” see Foucault, Security (...)
30Does this mean that Thoreau falls prey to the lure of this new governmental reason that operates by enlisting “the truth” (e.g. that purports to do nothing but follow the “natural” laws of the market)? Does Thoreau believe that there could exist a form of government that would truly conform to the “nature” of its subjects? Here we must remember that for both Foucault and Thoreau, “resistance” is never external to the practice of government but an integral part of it, necessary for the health of both government and those it governs.36 In other words, subjects must labor to produce a government in harmony with “their own laws.” This is precisely what is at stake in “Resistance to Civil Government”—the alternative title for “Civil Disobedience.”37 Thoreau’s “best” government is one whose laws conform with the nature of its subjects. But these subjects are not naturally disposed to accept this government, as is demonstrated by the majority’s acceptance of a government that enslaves a sixth of the nation’s population (227); they need to be “prepared,” they need to “cultivate a respect” not just for the law but “for the right” (225, emphasis mine). The men that best “serve” their government are those who actively “resist” its tendency to conflate the right and the lawful and to pass off as natural fact a fiction sanctioned by colonial interests.38 The very last sentence of Thoreau’s essay aligns the proper state with the vegetable action of nature, asserting that a “State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen” (243). Conjuring up a government that would treat each individual as a “higher and independent power, from which all its [the government’s] own power and authority are derived” (243), Thoreau sums up the aporia of pastoral power as a power caring equally for each and all of its subjects at the same time.39 This impossible equation begins with the care of the living, not from sovereign right to take life.
31As mentioned in passing in the introduction, Foucault’s model for this fundamentally “benevolent” form of power is not vegetable but zoopolitical. Pastoral power, he writes, “is not exercised over a territory but . . . over a flock, and more exactly, over the flock in its movement from one place to another.” (Foucault 2007, 125) However de-territorialized, Foucault’s flock is still reliant on “fertile grasslands,” “prairies and pastures”—the temporary but necessary stations sustaining the mobile flock (Foucault 2007, 126-127). The advent of pastoral power, Foucault suggests, reconceptualizes the rather static category of territory into the more dynamic concept of “milieu,” the space to which populations are “biologically” tied, but which itself is susceptible to change and management. Granted, Foucault pays more attention to the flock than to the pasture, but he does warn against the shepherd who treats the pasture only as a resource to feed his flock (and by extension his wallet): the “bad shepherd only thinks of good pasture for his own profit, for fattening the flock that he will be able to sell and scatter.” (Foucault 2007, 173) Similarly, Thoreau concludes the bean-field chapter by lamenting that the bad farmer sacrifices to Plutus instead of Ceres and treats nature “as a robber” would (111). Both thinkers invite us to integrate plants in our thinking as part of the modern imbrication of life and of politics. Foucault does this implicitly by relating modern governmentality to the regulation of milieus—not an isolatable element or a constant but a living “field of intervention” (Foucault 2007, 36); Thoreau more literally by championing constant renegotiation between the cultivator and the land. This interminable process of mutual cultivation is emblematized by his preference for the hoe, which links him intimately to the land and his beans. Thoreau’s “continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade” is not without violence, not without decision; the hoe still represents the gardener’s power to spare life or decree death. But Thoreau estimates that it allows for a more truthful and commensal relation to the pasture, which is neither a passive backdrop for human action nor a mere fund awaiting extraction but an invaluable “auxiliary” that actively contributes to the squatter’s temporary implantation.
32Reading Walden as a practical counterpart to “Resistance to Civil Government” helps us to understand plant theory’s recommendation to “slow down,” even in the face of climate emergency, indeed because the situation is so critical, and has always been critical for some more than others. Potawatomi philosopher and environmental activist Kyle Powys Whyte warns against wielding the discourse of emergency because it is likely to “justify solutions that ultimately harm indigenous peoples,” as colonial power has in the past. He is fully aware that developing relationships of trust and reciprocity between indigenous nations and other parties takes time, and that “the slow onset of achieving these relationships forecloses the global capacity to avoid climate disruptions.” Yet he also knows that it is “the establishment of kinship that will make it possible, at some point in the future, to behave urgently when the need arises.” (Whyte) Accounting for vegetable life, likewise, prepares the way for a more capacious and rightful, though no less decisive biopolitics. But we must refrain from adopting lapsarian narratives that overlook the discreet but foundational place that plants have occupied in the settling of Western politics. Recognizing planting, hoeing, and harvesting as critical features of modern governmentality is the condition for activating resistance to unjust governments.
- 40 Emerson, “Life of Henry David Thoreau,” in Walden, 407.
- 41 On the political import of Thoreau’s huckleberry-picking party, see Imbert, 76-77.
33And perhaps, despite the enduring perception that Thoreau is an individualist thinker, for building coalitions and organizing resistance. Borrowing Thoreau’s hoe is modest point of departure, but it “is difficult to begin without borrowing,” as Thoreau acknowledges in the first chapter of Walden: “Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines” (16). For him, it is the borrower and not the lender who is generous, for he enables his fellow-man “to have an interest in [his] enterprise.” From the outset, his solitary enterprise is shown to be rooted in collaboration, and Thoreau is careful to return the axe “sharper than [he] received it” (16). Moreover, upon his release from jail, after he is incarcerated for refusing to pay his taxes in protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War, Thoreau writes that he “joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct” (239). The political dimension of the word “party” eludes Emerson, who laments that his friend’s “contemplative” genius prevented him from having any political ambition. “Wanting this,” Emerson deplores, “instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!” (Emerson 407)40 But beans are never just beans for Thoreau, and his flight from the city to the huckleberry field, where “the State is nowhere to be seen” (239), is not a desire to return to some utopian pastoral state; rather, it must be read as a necessarily oblique indictment of the pastoral nature of the modern State, and as an act of true resistance.41
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Notes
Most prominently, the “plant turn” is represented by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking (2013), Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), Jeff Nealon’s Plant Theory (2015), Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants (2016).
Thoreau’s thoughts of plants and planting are disseminated throughout his entire work, but this short essay will focus primarily on his most explicitly political text, “Resistance to Civil Government,” and on Walden’s “Bean-Field” chapter, which Thoreau composed around the same time.
All references to Walden and Civil Disobedience will henceforth be given directly in parentheses.
“[G]overnment is not related to the territory”, Foucault notes, “but to a sort of complex of men and things. The things government must be concerned about […] are men in their relationships, bonds, and complex involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on.” (Security, Territory, Population, 134)
Animals, Coccia asserts, can select their participation in the world: they can migrate, hide or retreat in the face of danger. Plants, on the other hand, “have no selective relation to what surrounds them.” Space is not up for negotiation: “Plant life is life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment” (Coccia 5). Nealon also notes this difference as he distinguishes between the concept of animal “world”—which, for him, is a “backdrop” for (and thus phantasmatically preexists) the emergence of individuated living beings—against the plant “territory,” which “co-appears with individuation” (86). I do not have the space to develop this point here, but I want to register a hesitation about this narrative: Nealon and Coccia, it seems to me, fail to genealogize the figure of “the animal” itself, which is a biopolitical concept that can only be conceived as fugitive, as disappearing, insofar as it is a being wholly dependent on its milieu and invested with a life over which it can claim no real ownership. Foucault shows this when he demonstrates the centrality of the concept of “conditions of existence” to the new field of biology, which conjugates every individual life in the conditional, making its flourishing contingent on certain internal organic functions or on a given environment.
Coccia notes that the atmosphere comes from the leaf, the operator of photosynthesis; plants and the world are thus coextensive, irresistibly imbricated in one another. Immersion is not just a spatial determination but a metaphysical principle: “to be immersed is not reducible to finding oneself in something that surrounds and penetrates us. Immersion . . . is first of all an action of mutual compenetration between subject and environment.” The notion of immersion leads to a “formal identity between passivity and activity,” the “radical identity of being and doing” (37). This is where the difference with Thoreau starts showing: by postulating an absolute nonseparability of plant and atmosphere, a perfect material coincidence between the two, Coccia leaves no room for action: “organisms do not need to go beyond or outside themselves to reinvent the face of the world; they have no need to act . . .: through the simple act of being they already fashion the cosmos” (39). Later, he claims that to “recognize that the world is a space of immersion means . . . that there are no real or stable frontiers” (43). This is a profoundly ahistorical and depoliticizing account, in stark contrast with Thoreau’s insistence on “fronting” the world (Bennett 35).
According to Wolfe, “discrimination, selection, self-reference, and exclusion cannot be avoided.” Nealon repeatedly returns to Wolfe’s bonobo vs. sunflower example as evidence that plants are consistently spurned by animal studies scholars. Nealon retorts that if “we are, in fact, to rethink the question of life from the ground up, we can’t go into the discussion having chosen what already counts as life and what doesn’t—bonobos yes, sunflowers no” (Before the Law, 110). Wolfe’s point is not that sunflowers are not alive, of course, but that all forms of life are not equally in need of the same type of care and protection, or more precisely that we cannot and should not indiscriminately provide care and protection to all forms of life simply on account of their being alive. I return to this point in the last section of the essay.
Nealon follows Deleuze and Guattari, who, in their analysis of early capitalism’s capture of the land, use a germinal metaphor to designate the “undecidable [as] the germ and locus [le germe et le lieu] par excellence of revolutionary decisions” (A Thousand Plateaus, 473).
Foucault defines the population as “a multiplicity of individuals who are . . . biologically bound to the materiality within which they live.” (Security, Territory, Population, 37).
The management of biological subjects is made possible by their inherent susceptibility to environmental influences. Kyla Schuler has shown how nineteenth-century biopower managed populations through their powers to be affected by and to respond to external stimuli, and how these “powers” were differentially distributed along racial and gender lines. “Racial and sexual difference were not assigned the role of immutable, static qualities of the individual body in the nineteenth century,” Kyla Schuller explains. “Rather, race and sex functioned as biopolitical capacities of impressibility and relationality that rendered the body the gradual product of its habit and environment, differentially positioning the claims of individuals and races for belonging in the nation-state. The notion of impressibility developed in the nineteenth century in conjunction with the emergent framework of the population, an entity governed by the processes of contagion, probability, and risk” (The Biopolitics of Feeling 5-6).
This is especially true of Coccia. For all its praise of compenetration and universal mixture, Coccia’s book is surprisingly binaristic in its strict opposition between the rightful metaphysics of plant life—which came first, and upon which us animals depend for life—and the fraudulent, if dominant, metaphysics of animal life—illegitimate because derivative, unconsciously driven by the heterotrophic nature of the metaphysician (heterotrophy denotes the “uprooted” life of animals, which feed on complex organic substances; autotrophy, on the other hand, designates plants’ ability to feed themselves by turning inorganic substances into nutrients). Coccia subordinates heterotrophy to the autotrophy, justifying this move both temporally (plants came first) and functionally (there cannot be animal life without plant life), but he treats it as a matter of ontological superiority: he relishes the fact that plants can live without us, but we cannot live without plants. In other words, he does not rethink the hierarchy he denounces so much as he inverts it.
On this, see Diran and Traisnel, “The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation.”
A few paragraphs later, Thoreau confesses to having tasted his beans, but he still asserts himself a follower of Pythagoras, who forbade his disciples to eat beans—possibly because of their undesirable effects on the eater, possibly because they were a higher form of vegetable in which human souls could migrate after death, but more likely, as Plutarch suggests, as a warning against the temptation to take part in public life (beans were used as voting ballots) (Plutarch, On the Training of Children, 29).There might still be another explanation if we remember that the Pythagorean tradition modeled a prototype of pastoral power antithetical to the Platonic conception of politics. The Pythagoreans, Foucault notes, derive “nomos, the law, from nomeus, that is to say the shepherd. The shepherd is the lawmaker insofar as he distributes food, directs the flock, indicates the right direction, and says how the sheep must mate so as to have good offspring. . . in this Pythagorean type of literature, there is the idea that the magistrate is not characterized by his power, strength, and decision-making ability so much as by the fact that he is above all the philanthrōpos who loves those under his jurisdiction” (Security, Territory, Population, 188, my emphasis).
See for instance Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism.”
Thus Thoreau’s manual labor makes him aware of the land itself as a record of violent history, which tends to elude Yankee farmers. “Antebellum agriculture seemingly erodes any trace of an Indian past,” notes Ross Martin, whereas “Thoreau sees arrowheads erupting with each rake’s blow, and so flying forth to volley thoughts upon farmers” (“Fossil Thoughts,” 439).
“Thoreau here renounces both the definitive knowledge of individual varieties and the systematic and exhaustive description of a universal order,” writes William Stowe. Plants, in other words, are by no means unknowable or unnamable, but knowing and naming are acts, forms of participations that do not presume a nature passively awaiting discovery. Thoreau’s is an “epistemology of contact,” as Laura Dassow Walls’ explains, where knower and known are co-produced (Seeing New Worlds, 143).
Tellingly, Thoreau uses the word “plant” eleven times as a substantive and twenty-two as a verb in Walden.
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 789. Foucault and Austin are both committed to rethinking what it means to “act” on another person, materially and discursively. When Austin attempts to parse illocutionary acts from perlocutionary acts, indeed, he admits that “the notion of an act is unclear.” The concept of “perlocutionary act” enables him to view acts from the point of view of their consequences and without returning acts to the intention of the actor (How to do Things with Words, 106).
I borrow the idea of “vegetable locomotion” from Julien Nègre, L’Arpenteur vagabond, 298.
In the conference he gave for the Tanner Lectures on Human Value, Cavell notes that Walden “deals in endless repetition” in order to capture the oddness of the everyday (105). Elsewhere, however, Cavell interprets the apparent “obviousness” of the bean-field chapter as a way to deride the century’s tendency to turn nature into parables (Senses of Walden 21). As Cavell sees it, Thoreau referred to writers like John Evelyn (whom Cavell presents as a moralist and a pseudo philosopher [22]), only mockingly. But there is little “moralizing” going on in Evelyn. On the contrary, Thoreau values him for his philosophy grounded in practice. The lesson he derives from reading Evelyn is that there is “no compost or lætation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the spade” (Evelyn, qtd. in Walden). Plants, Evelyn explains, “are nourished by things of like affinity with the constitution of the soil which produces them, and therefore it is of singular importance to be well read in the alphabet of Earths and composts” (Terra 49). Following Evelyn, we can see that hoeing (or repastinating) does not serve as a metaphor for writing, as Cavell suggests, so much as it is the tediousness of Thoreau’s writing—and of Walden, which, Cavell concedes, “sometimes seems an enormously long and boring book” (20)—that best translates the monotony of tilling one’s garden. Evelyn’s Philosophical Discourse of Earth is primarily a compendium of the types of soil in which plants flourish, the kinds of dungs one can use as fertilizer (grass-fed cattle, sheep, swine, horse, pigeon), etc. Its repetitious structure is reminiscent of Thoreau’s later work on the dispersion of seeds.
Historian Robert A. Gross argues that the bean-field chapter is a “hoax” that targets the agricultural reformers of the time, who campaigned for a most intensive use of the land (modeled on English agriculture, which worked with little space). “By contrast, Thoreau claimed to have done just the opposite. He started with exhausted, barren land, did nothing to improve it, obtained little from it, and announced himself quite content.”
The bean-field chapter explicitly stages the metamorphosis of its author: “It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans.” For Cavell, the interest of the chapter lies in the continual re-birth of Walden’s paltry “hoer-hero,” who battles weeds and woodchucks (Senses of Walden, 22). Jane Bennett likewise reads this chapter as Thoreau’s treatise on individuation, which “requires a certain orientation to human and nonhuman others.” Both scholars note that the singularity of the Thoreauvian self—the kernel of Thoreau’s politics—is paradoxically produced by habitual repetition. The self is not a given but the product of an endless process of self-making, of deciding. Bennett remarks that in order to “grow character,” “one must cast the weeds aside in favor of those thoughts, ideas, images, and inclinations specific to the idiosyncratic experience that is one’s own life” (Thoreau’s Nature, 34.) But that which works at becoming a self is, by definition, not (yet) a self. On what ground, then, are these decisions to be made, since one does not yet have a life of “one’s own”? This decision can only be made following laws that are in part extrinsic to the self: since one cannot posit that the self knows itself before it grows into being, one must imagine a self that is by nature “eccentric” (ibid., 32)—that exists at the boundary of the self and the world. Stranger still, the “wild” outside does not preexist the self but co-emerges with it in a perpetual confrontation between self and nonself. This confrontation is not innocent, hence the martial lexicon of the bean-field chapter: Thoreau “acknowledges injustice and falsity as elements within discriminations and valuations, but these elements neither exhaust these practices nor counsel him to abandon them” (37). Thus Thoreauvian politics for Bennett will be found in and founded on an ethos of measure: on the one hand, a form of reserve or “continence” toward wild instincts, and on the other, a caution not to “overcultivate” one’s self for fear of exhausting one’s wild nature.
Arsić shows that in Thoreau, life is not the opposite of death but a principle of mutability that runs through human, animal and vegetal bodies alike (as well as through seemingly inert substances). What separates different states of animacy are not degrees of liveness but of health. The pathological body is no “less alive” than the healthy one: “Never dead yet never healthy, life is made of two forces that never reconcile yet remain inseparable” (Bird Relics, 243).
Pace Nealon, I would say that biopower posits life as absolutely unownable and fugitive. Insofar as it acts indirectly on bodies, biopower must recognize that organisms are not hermetic and self-same but eminently porous and susceptible to change. It is in light of this strange power of life (to vanish, to elude capture) that a less deleterious biopolitics can be envisioned.
Arsić shows that the paradigm for Thoreau’s vitalist ontology is the leaf, which, following Goethe, Thoreau “elevated into the pattern of all life” (229). Insofar as it continues to live even after it is detached from the tree, the leaf instantiates a life in constant mutation: “the fragile protraction of life in decaying leaves becomes for Thoreau an emblem of the immortality of all vegetal life” (ibid. 232). “There is nothing inorganic,” Thoreau exclaims in Walden in front of a heap of fallen leaves. In his diary for the first voyage on the Merrimack, Thoreau describes nature as “a vast manufactory of leaves,—the leaf is her constant cipher. It is grass in the field . . . it flutters on the oak,—it springs in the mould upon a jar—and in animal, vegetable, and mineral—in fluids and in crystals—plain or variegated—fresh or decayed, it acts a principal part in the economy of the universe” (Journals, qtd. By Richardson, 157).
In the 1840s, Thoreau was already familiar with Asa Gray’s Natural System of Botany and Edward Tuckerman’s study of lichens, and he had already begun engaging plants in a more systematic fashion by the time Walden was published. However, when he hoed his beans at Walden Pond, he still lived by the motto “learn science & then forget it” (Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 129-130).
Mather’s words—excerpted from this sermon on the Salem Witch Trials, The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693)—reference Jeremiah’s lamentation: “Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?” (Jeremiah 2:21). On the role played by the jeremiad in Puritan communal life and the American body politic more broadly, see Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad. On plant hybridization, see Mather’s 1717 “Curiosa Botanica,” a letter to specimen collector and Royal Society fellow James Petiver, in which he describes experimenting with Indian corn of two different colors. His account is said to have influenced Linnaeus’s binomial system of classification based on floral reproductive organs.
Evelyn recommends experimenting with “artificial compositions” of soil and “to modify the air around” plants in order to transplant exotic fruit like oranges, figs, pomegranates to colder climes, i.e. to have them be “endenizoned amongst us, and grow every generation more reconcileable to our climate” (Terra, 50). “Endenizon” designates the process by which a foreigner adopts the laws of a new country. We also find the term in Locke’s “Letter for Toleration,” written around the same time as Evelyn’s Terra.
On the endurance of Crèvecoeur’s botanical framework in nineteenth-century works, see Forbes, “Vegetative Politics from Crèvecoeur to Hawthorne.”
Susan Scott Parrish explains that eighteenth-century European colonists were invested in the “subjection of matter,” but they also believed that bodies were deeply susceptible to environmental influences: “Nature was thus not only understood as a potential stock of resources or a plot of property . . . it was also breathed in, drunk, eaten, absorbed under the skin, and incorporated into one’s faculties.” (American Curiosity, 78). “Many colonial writers,” Monique Allewaert observes of eighteenth-century American planters, “described how people, like plants, entered into vegetative states in the plantation zone” (Ariel’s Ecology, 34.). See also LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality, esp. chapters one and four.
The racist logic of what Nemser calls the “uneven distribution of vulnerability” perdured well into the nineteenth century and beyond, as Kyla Schuller shows in The Biopolitics of Feeling.
Foucault, The Order of Things, 143, qtd. by Nemser, 136.
For Nemser, the “fetishization of ‘things themselves’ and the erasure of context” in the classical age prompted “the rise of institutional collections like botanical gardens.” But already the global circulation of plants was challenging this tidy taxonomic ideal: “imperial botany never entirely ignored external determinants—temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, latitude, and so on—in either theory or practice. On the contrary, these factors too were abstracted and quantified, converted into precise measurements alongside those of the plants to which they were linked” (Infrastructures of Race, 140).
Pastoral power, for Foucault, is a kind of “everyday government” that doesn’t say its name: a natural, or naturalized, government, predicated on the idea that “each individual … from the beginning to the end of his life, and in his every action, had to be governed and had to let himself be governed” (“What is Critique?” 43).
“Resistance to Civil Government,” 224. A Few paragraphs below, Thoreau makes this explicit: “But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”
On the question of resistance in Foucault, see Lazzarato, “From Biopower to Biopolitics.”
Thoreau first wrote “Civil Disobedience” as a lecture he delivered in Concord in 1848. The text was first published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government” in a collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Peabody in 1849. About the text’s two titles—“Civil Disobedience” and “Resistance to Civil Government”—Michel Imbert notes that in the first the adjective “civil” is attached to disobedience, and in the second to government. This reversibility suggests that Thoreau is not simply opposed to government.
In the plantation context, writes Wynter, history is “itself, fiction; a fiction written, dominated, controlled by forces external to itself. It is clear then, that it is only when the society, or elements of the society rise up in rebellion against its external authors and manipulators that our prolonged fiction becomes temporary fact” (“Plot and Plantation,” 95).
On the “paradox of the shepherd” who “must keep his eye on all and on each,” see Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 174-175.
Emerson, “Life of Henry David Thoreau,” in Walden, 407.
On the political import of Thoreau’s huckleberry-picking party, see Imbert, 76-77.
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