Plant Horror: Love Your Own Pod

The sixth chapter moves into the world of “plant horror” to explore the ways in which the plant becomes a figure for both cinema itself and for life under global capitalism, inspiring fear and desire all at once. The B movies examined in this chapter posit vegetality as the experience of all beings under capitalism. They visualize the dark side of a global modernity that is vegetal in essence, yet still generates human interest and even fascination. This critique of capitalism is coupled with an attempt to project a view of a purely material reality—that is, the reality of the plant on film. Such a projection represents not just a horrifying loss of human authenticity, but a pleasurable cinematic experience that foreshadows a new materialist approach to the interpenetration of bodies. This chapter presents an analysis of the two film versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (appearing in 1956 and 1978, respectively) to show how these films foreground vegetal alterity and challenge the basic premises of realism. Long interpreted as promoting paranoia, plant horror can instead introduce us to a world which does not recognize humans as individuals but nonetheless allows them to become affectively involved with it.

Plant Societies and Enlightened Vegetality

This chapter investigates the emergence, in the form of an enlightened plant, of utopian theories of vegetal sociability in the eighteenth century, at a time that witnesses the proliferation of schemes for botanical classification and physiological inquiries into plant life. These theories both herald and resist the development of classificatory systems and a biopolitics modeled on vegetal life. Authors Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754) and Tiphaigne de la Roche (1722–1774) create new narratives of liberal and rationally-governed societies by peopling them with plants. Yet these utopian visions are not only hopeful, they also bring into view a plant that troubles the very concept of society by existing in a state of utter indifference to need and human desire. Thus these works also make visible the possibility of an alternate conception of modernity in which the plant delivers a powerful critique of enlightenment itself.

Radical Botany: An Introduction

This chapter uncovers a tradition of radical botany in which plants participate in the effort to imagine new worlds and envision new futures. Offshoots of this tradition wend their way from the seventeenth century into the twenty-first, moving through different historical periods and cultural frameworks and gradually taking on global significance. In a context where modernity is often equated with the exploitation and brutalization of nature, the authors, critics, filmmakers, and theorists whose works are introduced here develop an understanding of vegetality as driving the production of technology, scientific knowledge, and new media forms. This chapter includes a survey of critical plant studies (including the work of Michael Marder, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and Natasha Myers) to show how, in this emergent field, plants remain partners with humans in modernity, even as both plants and humans find themselves under threat by forces that vastly outstrip their abilities to master, grasp, or model them.

Becoming Plant Nonetheless

The seventh chapter studies the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors and visual artists who seek to move humans toward a vegetal future. What might it mean to think speculatively with plants today? Can humans become plants in order to become critically postconscious, posthuman, feminist, and queer subjects? If so, this process takes place through assemblages with fiction and other technologies of embodiment. This chapter takes up the plant as an engine of speculation that still works to help humans negotiate their relationship to a late modernity that seems always on the verge of ending—a constant calamity that might nonetheless still enable a new way of living and being. The focus of this chapter includes contemporary plant theory, plant-oriented visual art, and plant fictions that generate a “virtual reality” of becoming plant.

The End of the World by Other Means

The fifth chapter investigates the way in which early avant-garde French cinema takes up the very forms of vegetal sentience and plant-inspired calamity that so terrified Edgar Allan Poe, thereby rewriting the plant once again as an opening onto new worlds. In these films the “inorganic” function of vegetality—as linked to and inspiring new forms of technology and new means of sociability—returns in the visual domain, generating an “electric plant” that retains its utopian dimensions and its power to deprioritize the human. Thus avant-garde vegetal cinema ties the plant once again to a tradition of speculation that extends into the production and creation of new media capable of apprehending and imitating the subtle materiality of vegetal being. The “electric plant” brings to fruition the concept of cinema as a form of pure movement. The French experimental cinema discussed in this chapter reinvents the project of imagining vegetal worlds, this time in cinematic contexts. While filmmakers and theorists Jean Epstein (1897–1953) and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) turn with excitement toward vegetality, other contemporaneous artists, including Colette (1873–1954), re-inscribe the plant into the domain of ordinary experience and human pathos.

The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his arabesque vegetality travels into the work of later writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Poe’s foregrounding of the eighteenth-century notion of “the sentience of all vegetable things” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) both responds to and undermines Romantic ideas about human affinities with plants. In “Usher,” Poe follows the Enlightenment analogy of human to plant to its logical conclusion in order to expose its aporias; for him, vegetal sentience cannot be contained within any hierarchy of being. At the same time, Poe destroys the Romantic fusional model—in which humans and plants commune within a shared physical world—by focusing on the destructive and rapacious qualities of the vegetal. The transcendental ideas of beauty and the sublime give way in Poe to a vegetality that invades the human consciousness. He suggests that humans might be horrified, rather than delighted, by the calamity that a vegetal modernity represents, even though (and perhaps because) they have no alternative to it.

Libertine Botany and Vegetal Modernity

The first western plant fiction appears with the waning of the Renaissance (and may be considered one of the earliest forms of science fiction more generally). While the Aristotelian endorsement of vegetal ensoulment gradually falls out of favor as a natural philosophical approach to plants, this chapter shows that the autonomous liveliness of the plant inherent in the Aristotelian notion of vegetative psūkē is reawakened from its scholastic slumber by two authors: Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641) and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), both belonging to a circle of libertins érudits. The authors investigate how the botanically oriented texts of La Brosse and Cyrano generate an eclectic combination of proto-scientific ideas, borrowed from traditions spanning atomism to alchemy, to significantly increase the animatedness of the plant. “Freed” from the confines of metaphysics by scientific thought, the plant penetrates into the domain of literature. The plant is thus not only present but takes pride of place at one of the points of origin of science fiction.