Flattening the World: Natural Theology and the Ecology of Darwin's Orchids

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Acknowledgements

A heavy debt is due to my colleagues at the University of Southern California, as well as the marvelous staff of the Huntington Library, and their generous reproductions policy. I want to especially acknowledge the gifted support of botanists Joseph Arditti, Tim Yam, John Elliott, Ken Cameron, and John van Wyhe, for their extraordinary help, both by phone and through correspondence, in learning more about the Darwin's work on orchids, the history of their cultivation, and especially the captivating Cycnoches. And deep thanks is due Narin Hassan, Nicole Lobdell, Lynn Voskuil, Deanna Kreisel, and Jesse Oak Taylor for reading, commenting on, and greatly improving an early version of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] All further references given parenthetically by page number.

[2] As I will argue later in this essay, while each of these thinkers argue for a “flat ontology” that includes both living and inert matter, Darwin's ecological vision implies a flattening of nature that is specific to living beings, as they are subject to the universal operation of natural selection (De Landa; Bennett; Morton).

[3] Latour's understanding of scientific objects as “actants” within scientific practice continues to evolve, but was formatively set out in Science in Action (Latour).

[4] Recent work on Romantic botany has called attention to the significance of “botanizing” for contemporary theories of aesthetics and sexual difference (Kelley; LaFleur).

[5] In exploring the “intent” of orchids and modeling their behavior, Darwin is not simply mapping our linguistic “forms of life” onto other life forms (as Stefan Helmreich has suggested of biological research in general) (Helmreich 6). By “forms of life” Helmreich engages Ludwig Wittgenstein's enigmatic discussion of linguistic custom and culture in his Philosophical Investigations (Majetschak).

[6] The emphasis on beauty helps Bateman align the orchids with the mechanisms of social discrimination and rank, restoring a sense of thickening distinctions. This can be read as a requirement of subscription publication for the Orchidaceae and its assiduous dedication to aristocratic order. The subscription list that introduces the work fronts this structuring conceit; subscribers are ranked hierarchically with royalty at top (headed by Queen Adelaide), then greater nobility, landholders, and last, “booksellers.” Bateman articulates this system of distinction to plant life; making the orchids themselves, as “air-plants,” a celestial rank above other herbs: “while other plants are compelled to seek their coarse subsistence from the ground, our Orchidaceae, like unearthly beings, are enabled to live solely upon air” (5). Bateman reinforces this sense of higher order with a confidence in its divine providence; the beauty and variety of orchids, he argues, “were designed … solely to afford us high and innocent enjoyment” (5). The alliance between social and natural rank firmly established, Bateman can entertain the changefulness of orchids without risking social implications, as when he archly observes, with respect to the Cycnoches egertonianum, that despite the possibility that the orchid changes sexes, the flower “was named in honour of Sir Philip Egerton, before any of its eccentricities had been discovered, otherwise the complement might have been deemed a dubious one” (Bateman and Cruikshank tab. xl).

[7] Recent work on Darwin's relation to natural theology reconsiders his divisive influence and argues its importance to the theory of natural selection (Ruse; Ayala).

[8] Darwin uses the language of natural theology to explore what Jacques Monod has termed “teleonomy”—the naturally-evolved characteristic of “being … endowed with a purpose or project” (Monod 9).