Aeroponic gardens and their magic: Plants/persons/ethics in suspension

ABSTRACT

Out of the fire bombed ruins and food deprivation of the Second World War came one innovator’s prototype for growing edible plants, suspended above earth and requiring a minimum of water. His aeroponic apparatus would later be referred to as The Genesis Machine, from the movie Star Trek II. This paper travels with roots in air into different spheres where the relations of persons, plants, and technology conspire to place future – growing into ethical suspension. The aim is to open questions for an anthropocenic future: Are plants ‘for’ persons or persons ‘for’ plants? Is it ethical to separate growing plants from earth/Earth and from earthlings? Where might ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘innovative eclecticism’ find a place in post-genomic discourse? And might a commitment to a dividual ethics guide lives in co-becoming to devise (as Latour recognizes in like terms) a scitech-diplomacy capable of resisting the programmatic pressures of new climatic regimes?

KEYWORDS:

• Future Studies
• Interbeing Ethics
• New Climate Regimes
• Anthropology of Science and Technology
• Socioaesthetics
• Diplomacy

Acknowledgments

This paper began as a response to the brave invitation of organizers Mette High and Huon Wardle to contribute to a conference on Energy Ethics at the St. Andrews University Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. A visiting scholar residency at Cannonball, Miami, and conversations with artists Heidi Neilson and Andrew Horton deepened the inquiry. I am also deeply grateful for the often brilliant critical insights of Rafael Antunes Alemeida and of Matthew Watson, and for discussions of earlier drafts of this piece and of their own work with Alberto Corsin-Jimenez, Katherine Lepani, and Natasha Myers.

ORCID

Debbora Battaglia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8681-064X

Notes

1 I reference here an implicit dialog between scholars such as Strathern (2014), ‘People and Plants: Material and Immaterial Transactions’, Povinelli (2013), ‘Keynote: The Anthropocene Project. An Opening’; Tsing (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: Life in Capitalist Ruins; and Myers (forthcoming).

2 For theorization of ‘responsible innovation’ see Wynne (2005) ‘Reflexing Complexity: Post-Genomic Knowledge and Reductionist Returns in Public Science’; also, Macnaughton, et al. (2014) ‘Responsible Innovation Across Borders: Tensions, Paradoxes and Possibilities.’; For ‘innovative eclecticism’ in early environmental work in the anthropology of development, Scoones (1999) 'New Ecology and the Social Sciences: What Prospects for a Fruitful Engagement?'.

3 Latour elaborates an earlier turn to diplomacy in terms of a New Climatic Regime in his 2011 lecture. I have discussed a cosmopolitical diplomacy in Battaglia (2014)

4 As cited by Haraway in reference to crucially ‘participating in decolonizing generational practices’ (2014, 247).

5 From Caraballo-Farman's (2016) attentiveness to ‘After Life’ living, in ‘Synaesthetic Modalities for an Afterlife.’

6 For a general audience overview of plant biology breakthrough moments in outer space, see Zimmerman (2003).

7 For more about diplomacy in space as an element of U.S.–Soviet Cold War relations, see Battaglia (2012).

8 Intensive experimentation by local scientists is underway in other parts of Africa, in Singapore, and in India, notably, where solar panels can offset energy costs, but where start-up capital for any large-scale enterprise can be difficult to secure.

9 Examples from the scientific literature include glowing results from Malawi by Kondowe (2012) and a large literature is emerging from other Global South scientists.

10 I am grateful to Matthew Watson for this insightful observation, from a close reading of this paper in draft form.

11 He cites Iovion and Oppermann (2014). Anthropology takes up the point from another angle in arguing that technology, whether it inclines as an ‘onto-dispotif’ towards world un/making for the better or for the worse, cannot be excluded from ethnographic theory (Battaglia and Almeida 2014).

12 Note, however, that artificial lights hold other risks for humans exposed to their optical radiation.

13 Personal communication by Skype in 2010, with simultaneous translation by Luba Dyangar, who also translated Lebedev’s Diary of a Cosmonaut: 211 Days in Space (1989).

14 See John Hartigan’s account (2013) blog where he discusses experiencing the tower gardens at Chicago's O'Hare airport, the first in-airport vertical garden. The system recycles any unused water. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/19/chicago-airport-debuts-ae_n_970222.html.

15 Discussing issues of ‘enframement’ in The Question Concerning Technology Heidegger’s exemplary site was a networked grid for delivering electrical power to clients from a source at a distance from the site of consumption. This position outside of the field of course elides the labour and sense-based human–machine contact that shape the experience of technology from within.

16 Steven Shaviro (2013) pioneers accelerationism. His argument is compelling for aesthetics, less so as a politics envisioned as bring about the collapse of a capitalist value system.

17 Talks at the University of Alberta, Research-Creation Think Tank, 25 March 2014.

18 Crapanzano (1980) introduces the concept in his powerful critique of rites of passage.

19 David Reason (2015) discussing ‘flows and connections between pasts and futures’ in speculative fiction, as the built environments under discussion in this paper in some sense are.

20 The now almost too-common term was first used by Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s in reference to the effects of human industry on the planet's ecosystems. However, Howe and Pandian argues that the term Anthropocene scarcely leaves a mark on such mediascapes as a condition ‘not-yet visible’ in its full expression, as meanwhile stand-in ‘–cenes’ proliferate in academic discourse, ‘tilting away from the epochal impetus to stress some other feature … by way of defining … our ecological implicatedness’.

21 For an overview of anthropocenic literature, see Olson and Messeri (2015).

22 White (1998) quotes orbiting astronauts transformed by the ‘overview effect’ of Earth’s stunning uniqueness; cosmonaut Lebedev (1989) describes the effect in his ethnographic diary, the first written on orbit; and Valentine (2016) engages its significance for ethnographic theory.

23 Orthodox science is taking an interest in the ‘sensible’ plant hypothesis, from NASA studies in which the plant recoils from a bee stick approaching to artificially pollinate it, to empirical evidence that ‘plant signaling systems may possess memory, and exhibit brainy behavior in the absence of brains’ (Pollan 2013). The capacity of plants to respond to external stimuli has been noted as occurring on the level of molecular experimentation (Niinemets, Kannaste, and Copolovic 2013), and further experimentation along these lines is ongoing as I write (see, especially Myers 2014, 2015b).

24 The construct sources to Heidegger (1977, 229).

25 See Battaglia (1986, 1997a, 1997b).

26 This is something that Malinowski points to also in describing how magicians ‘intertwine’ (1935, 110) ‘magical’ and ‘technical’ labor (1935, 110), and Lepani (2016) does from a neuroscience approach in ‘Witches and Wonder: Turning to Science for Plausible Explication,’ while demonstrating a lack of interest by contemporary Trobrianders in the ‘predominantly Western ontological framework’ which is dismissive of ‘beliefs’.

27 Damon (personal communication) notes that Muyuw gardens, ‘which are analogized as boats, do move over the course of time, around units called tasim, which translates to cut (ta) and island. These are patches of high forest purposefully left in garden areas. It is explicit that over time gardens move about them like boats must sail around islands and reefs’.

28 Ethnographers since Malinowski (1935) have offered sometimes incompatible accounts of gardening relations and patterns of distribution in the Trobriand Islands (Weiner 1976; Hutchins 1980; Young 1998 Mosko 2009; Lepani 2012) and in neighbouring islands (Munn 1992 [1986]; Damon 2016).

29 Malinowski would refer to Bau as the ‘pariah’ lineage, in part for its reputed role in bringing sorcery to the islands.

30 Fassin (2014) in critiquing Laidlaw (2014) makes a provocative contribution to the discussion of responsible versus irresponsible innovation, inclusive of a possible virtue for wicked pleasures.

31 For visions and issues of Pacific futures, see Rollason (2014).