Postmodern Culture

In The Groves of Academe (1952), Mary McCarthy begins her campus novel with a Latin epigraph from Horace: Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum (and seek for truth in the garden of Academe, Epistle II, ii, 45). From its beginning, academia—the grove of sycamore and olive trees in Attica named after its original landowner Academus where Plato later conducted his lectures—thus fuses figures of man, plant, and philosophy. Yet Epistle II, ii, addressed to Julius Florus, is perhaps no less satirical about academia than McCarthy's novel: having failed, amidst "so great noise both by night and day," to deliver some florid verses to Julius, Horace observes dismissively that "poets love the grove, and avoid cities." Apparently, the garden of academe, as well as the truth, is already beside the point in the first century BCE. At this late hour, nonetheless, professors Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari of USC speculate on the silvas itself, and wager that the classical monoculture of arborescent man and arborescent philosophy has been uprooted by modernity's radical botany, which engenders both rhizomatic posthumans and rhizomatic philosophies. Bursting through the centuries-tilled exceptionalism of human life and logos, the strange vitality of vegetality—one that is peculiarly inorganic—animates the speculative fruits of modernity's science, fiction, technology, and art, according to Meeker and Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction is therefore not merely a new academic book,¹ but a rear-guard action that mobilizes critical plant studies to re-imagine the cosmos and cosmotechnics of modern life.

Perhaps more modestly, Meeker and Szabari also envision radical botany as a practice that cultivates new modalities of research and collaboration within academia itself:

With our book, we affirm that there is a vegetal dimension to the practice of collaboration. While experimenting concretely with that practice, we were forced to accept that our work process and its outcome were no longer tied to an individual sense of self, nor did they affirm our limits or boundaries as individual scholars.

(vii)

Taking up Deleuze and Guattari's precepts of "becoming-plant," "rhizome," and "follow the plants," Meeker and Szabari pledge their allegiance to vegetal allies whose mode of being is "neither individuated nor autonomous but collective, swarming, multiple" (xi). This distributive, emergent, non-hierarchical assemblage (whether plant, insect, or technology) has become the familiar of many new materialist discourses in their attempt to invoke a mode of being and relation that deprivileges human subjectivity while expanding the confluence of actants. Is this philosophical shift from Academus the man to Academe the grove—which, according to Radical Botany, emerges in (specifically French) seventeenth-century early modernity—simply a celebratory "turn," or, more soberly, a "catastrophe"?

The question can be reframed by taking a quick look at this "radical" of botany whereby plants are our allies and collaboration is itself vegetal. The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that radical is already and originally a botanical term: "Late 14c., in a medieval philosophical sense, from Late Latin radicalis 'of or having roots,' from Latin radix (genitive radicis) 'root' (from PIE root wrad 'branch, root'). Meaning 'going to the origin, essential' is from 1650s." We see that the word radical concerns the root, the chthonic origin, the essence; indeed, the radical concerns the essence of the word, "the root part of a word." Radical botany is therefore botanical to the roots: there are no Persons, only Plants, in the silvas academi. This confluence of speculative substitutions and supplements is already reflected upon by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1782. In the Dialogues, he finds himself foregoing human friends for botanical ones, and laments that "he would have left the supplement for the thing, if he had had the choice, and he was reduced to converse with plants only after vain efforts to converse with human beings" (qtd. in Derrida 148). Suspecting the implications of this predicament over the supplement and the thing for Rousseau's philosophy and philosophy in general...