Natasha Myers, plant feelings, and the internal language of science

As much as I complain about Twitter (and as I finally, after years, get a better hang of the site I do it less), it brings me some wonderful stuff, particularly along academic and activist lines. The following came across my feed a week or so ago about teaching a course in STS.

I finally got the ok to teach this intro to STS course this Fall, so I’m going to be slapping together the syllabus in like a week if anyone has any advice or examples to share!

— Chad J. Valasek (@chadjvalasek) September 17, 2019

Now I’m trying to label myself as having some at least moderate academic expertise in STS, so when another of my follows, @allergyPhD, replied with the following, I dug into the syllabus she posted.

u love 2 see it https://t.co/ffIWcr7lKP

— Danya Glabau (@allergyPhD) September 17, 2019

Much of the content I was already familiar with (WHEW!) but a couple sources caught my eye and I decided to follow up and read them. The one which most caught my attention was this paper from Natasha Myers on “plant feelings.”

The paper is worth a read on its own merits, and I can particularly recommend its approachable style and language. Notably, Myers gets into, on the one hand, the ways in which plants sense their environment and respond to it, and on the other hand, the ways win which botanists and ecologists who study those plants talk discuss these subjects in terms of “plant feelings,” and how anthropomorphic language plays into those conversations.

Myers’ initial forays into these conversations, as she documents in the opening pages, are met with suspicion and hostility at first. At first read, this appears to be a kind of defensiveness of internal scientific language and a desire to not be judged for being silly scientists, or perhaps a bit of hypocrisy, dismissing anthropomorphic language in non-scientists while practicing it themselves.

What Myers uncovers, in a credit to her generous and careful ear, is something quite different. As Myers notes,

She taught me how hard it is for these researchers to speak about their work on plant sensing without stumbling into what they saw as the ‘trap’ of anthropomorphism at every turn. This conversation tuned me in to what it was that these researchers wanted me to hear them saying, and what—in spite of what they actually said—they did not want me to hear them saying. In this process I also had to confront what it was that I wanted to hear them say, and what I wanted to make their research mean. Moreover, these conversations helped me see that anthropomorphism is not always a trap; rather, in Isabelle Stengers’ (2008) sense of the term, anthropomorphism can, in the right hands, also be a ‘lure’, one that ‘vectorizes’ research attentions, inspires new questions, and propels inquiry. (Myers 2015, 39-40)

To do the article full justice in summary would make this blog post far longer than it needs to be, so I’ll just note a few high points here.

Much of the work I do that touches on STS subjects gets to the notion of non-human agency, as expressed in actor-network theory, as well as affective ties. Myers’ touch here deftly demonstrates the power of looking for both of these. The following paragraph highlights how examining the relationship of the scientist to her subject matter, with neither an attempt to force the relationship into that of a hyper-rational structure nor to judge it as falling short of a scientific ideal, illustrates how complex and contextual the process of strong knowledge creation can be.

In these encounters, I found myself feeding on scientists’ wonder, awe, and excitement about the marvelous worlds of plant sensing and behaviour, and exploring how far they were willing to go with their stories of the ‘uncanny’, ‘amazing’, and ‘crazy’ things plants can do. Conversations with these practitioners revealed all kinds of productive ambiguities, slippages and ascriptions of agency to nonhuman organisms. There was a remarkable wavering between enchantment and disenchantment in the stories they told. They seemed to be pulled between near- numinous stories of the marvelous sensory dexterities of plants and the disenchantments enforced by a reductionist and mechanistic ‘thought style’ that resists imputing any agency to nonhuman organisms (see Fleck 1979). The enchantments in their stories often showed up when they extended their vocabularies and imaginations about forms of plant agency and intentionality. These were the moments when they let down their guard against anthropomorphic descriptions of plants and when they revealed the promise of crafting analogies for inspiring new ways of thinking. In spite of their ardent attempts to constrain their language and adhere to the conventions of their scientific publications, the plants in their stories refused to be contained. Plants, I learned, have memory, and the capacity for learning and anticipation. They have the wherewithal to get interested and involved in worlds they actively make and unmake; and they have a kind of intentionality, curiosity, and ‘interessement’ that allows them to articulate their sensory dexterities as they learn how to articulate and register finer and finer differences in wordly phenomena.7 Plants in these stories appear to be more than mechanical bodies reacting automatically to external stimuli. These scientists described the vegetal sensorium as open, responsive, excitable, and attuned to a world full of other interested bodies. (Myers 2015, 42-43)

Anthropomorphism as expressed by the scientists, then, is not an imputing of human emotions onto non-human actors. Rather, it is the hard, mind-bending, emotive work of understanding the agency and experiences of the plants through the best lenses the human mind has to offer, entering into deep emotional bonds with some plants. Further, as Myers notes, the scientists repeatedly insist that a less trained, more naive anthropomorphism is inappropriate not because plants don’t have “feelings” of a sort, but rather because it is wholly inappropriately human-centered to simply impute the human experience onto plants, because it privileges the human experience of feeling over the, in the scientists’ view, equally valid plant-centric experience of feelings.