Sylvan Rhetorics:Roots and Branches of More-than-Human Publics

Abstract

Trees have instructed students of writing and rhetoric since long before Aristotle evoked them to illustrate hyle and telos. In recent times, Bruno Latour’s case study of the Amazon forest helped influence rhetoric’s new materialist turn. Trees are also remarkable exemplars of nonhuman communication networks. From the exigence of recent ecological studies of mycorrhizal networks, this article defines sylvan rhetorics through a study of trees in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, examining roots and branches of new materialist and more-than-human rhetorical theory.

Notes

¹ I am deeply grateful to RR reviewers Kellie Sharp-Hoskins and Kyle Vealey for their recommendations for revision, as well as the generous support of the editor, Elise Verzosa Hurley. I would also like to thank Sidney I. Dobrin, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Jacob Greene, Lee Rozelle, Derek Ross, and Raúl Sánchez who helped in the early stages of drafting this article.

² Michal Marder explores the historic relationship between plants and philosophy in The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium.

³ In “Reading Tree in Nature’s Nation: Toward a Field Guide to Sylvan Literacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Degan Miller demonstrates that in “the nineteenth-century U.S., a tree was rarely just a tree” but also part of “a specific lexicon of sylvan symbols” that were “in a constant process of renegotiation” (1115; 1118; 1120).

⁴ Hyle referred to wood or timber that had a particular (human) purpose in the works of Homer, Thucydides, and Xenophon (Pflugfelder 453). Hyle was wood with a specific purpose, such as cut logs or a forest which would be cut.

⁵ In Witness Tree, Lynda V. Mapes spends a year in the Harvard Forest recording her experience with a single century-old oak tree. She describes the messages, recorded in the heartwood of old trees, that scientists are reading to understand climate change. Similarly, witness trees have been used to determine possible historic conditions of century-old forests for restoration ecology (Thomas-Van Gundy and Strager).

⁶ Parish describes rhetoric in strictly animal terms: “[T]he intentional communicative act of an animal whose purpose is to inform, or to manipulate the behavior of, one or more members of a real or imagined category of hearers called ‘audience’” (48). While a number of rhetoricians have discussed a wider array of actants, such as yeast, hops, and malt as rhetorical aspects of craft beer networks (Rice; Pflugfelder), the majority of rhetoricians interested in nonanimals still tend to privilege those which interact with humans as hyle (in terms of raw material), such as plants which humans can eat or feed to livestock (Frye and Bruner).

⁷ Building from ecocriticism and object-oriented philosophy, Rivers argues for reconceiving of nonhumans as capable of rhetorical agency. Rivers terms these nonhumans “wild objects,” which we perceive as what Timothy Morton calls the “strange stranger,” referring to the sense of irreducible complexity that ecological thinking produces when thinking about nonhuman agency.

⁸ Clary-Lemon examines the planting of “a monocultureed tree in a forest ecology” in order to “consider the discursive and rhetorical realm of silviculture, [which] remains unremarked in favor of social, environmental, the economic, and geographical realms” (2). Clary-Lemon uses silviculture to connect ecological and new materialist methodologies, bringing the “rhetorical and the human in tandem with their interaction with other inanimate and non-human bodies” (4).

⁹ The ages of the original Toomer’s Oaks were inflated as high as one hundred and thirty years old, but when the dead oaks were cut down, they were dated at around eighty years old. David Housel, Auburn’s Athletics Director Emeritus, has attributed the tradition of rolling the trees to a scatological joke involving longtime rival Alabama in the game known as “Punt Bama Punt.” An Auburn player’s threat to “beat the No. 2 out of them” (Bama’s ranking at the time) came to fruition, and the victory was celebrated with toilet paper streamers.

¹⁰ Using the open-source software project MassMine, I pulled data from Twitter to collect a limited sample of the virtual-actual event of the Toomer’s Oaks fire (Van Horn and Beveridge). Drawn from the keywords “auburn-lsu fire,” “toomer fire” and “auburn oak,” figure 3 visualizes Twitter data for seven days following the fire.

¹¹ In its study documenting racial terror lynchings in Southern states during the period between reconstruction and World War II (1877 to 1950), the Equal Justice Initiative lists four victims of lynching in Lee County, where Auburn is located.

¹² Timothy Morton discusses the conflation of biological terms in concepts of race and species as part of the formation of the category of “human” as distinct from the environment, closing the Kantian gap “between what a thing is and how it appears” (Dark Ecology 16).

¹³ Trees have long helped humans define writing and lent their arboreal qualities to many postmodern thinkers, such as Saussure, who first defined his concept of sign, signifier, and signified using tree and arbor as his example (67). Beyond these uses of trees, which Dobrin and Weisser critique—as topics, signs in human language, or as part of hierarchical knowledge—theorists like Kohn have explored writing with nonhumans and argued for the impossibility of bifurcating humans from nonhumans or nature from culture. Building from the work of Dobrin and Weisser as well as Kohn, sylvan rhetorics understand publics as constructed through a strange assemblage of many relations.

¹⁴ In dense forests, tall tree species reduce sunlight, but other species adapt to grow faster or to benefit from lower light conditions. Over time, this competition produces the stability of old growth forests. Trees demonstrate a remarkable ability to coexist, participating in numerous adaptive behaviors such as crown shyness, where leaves of some trees avoid touching leaves of other trees. The gaps that form between them in the canopy are likely a convergent evolutionary feature which may benefit forest ecology by reducing the spread of insects or preventing over-competition for light. Older trees, known as hub trees, provide nutrients to younger trees in the understory.

¹⁵ As Tsing points out, the fungi which is detrimental to wooden houses is also essential for breaking down dead wood into the hummus which feeds future forests (143). Alex Reid uses mushrooms to explain remix and digital writing, building from Gregory Ulmer’s use of the saprophyte in his essay “The Object of Post-Criticism.” Reid compares remix to “trees and mushrooms [which] share points of connection that allow one to flow into the other. Similarly, electronic files share formatting information, which allows entry into their data, the mixing of data, and the composition of new media” (133).

¹⁶ Melissa Lane offers a compelling description of the relationship between polis and psyche in Ecorepublic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living. From this relationship, she argues for new ways of thinking with Platonic theory to reimagine ethos, polis, and pleonexia.

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Madison Jones

Madison Jones is a PhD candidate in rhetoric and writing studies at the University of Florida. His research explores the role of places and environments in networked writing. He teaches courses in digital rhetoric, composition, and professional writing. His scholarship and teaching intersect the fields of ecocomposition, creative writing studies, public advocacy, and digital rhetoric. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Kairos, Enculturation, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. For more information, visit his website, madisonpjones.com, follow him on Twitter @mpjonesiv, or email him at [email protected].