Phytomorphizing performance: plant performance in an expanded field

ABSTRACT

This essay embraces the possibilities offered by the “nonhuman turn” (Grusin vii) in the humanities and social sciences, and forwards the claim that plants are performers. In so doing, the essay analyzes the common claims about the ontology of performance, demonstrates how plants meet a strict rubric of evaluation for consideration as performers, and offers potential repercussions and opportunities for performance theory, if a plant performance is seriously considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• posthumanism
• plants
• natureculture
• nonhuman

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I draw this “Eastern”/“Midwestern” shorthand from McKenzie’s Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, wherein he documents the informal categorical slang that pervaded Performance Studies during the 1980s and 1990s. The “Eastern” variety – associated with NYU, and theatre studies – was seen to be distinct from the “Midwestern” variety, associated with Northwestern University, and Speech Communication. As McKenzie argues, this distinction may be unworkable in this twenty-first century disciplinary moment (47).

2 Full disclosure: I was one of the organizers and editors of this particular special issue.

3 As one reviewer helpfully pointed out, this argument is very much a type of straw-man argument: a simplified version of a more complex argument, designed to be easily conveyed and potentially abused. I would argue however that the type of speculative work undertaken by this article requires a certain amount of tilting at windmills, insofar as there simply are not many (if any) critics of the idea of plant performance with which to engage. Making educated inferences about the nature and content of potential objections necessarily requires the invention of a sort of straw man, though I have endeavored – in the spirit of that most popularly famous of straw men – to propose a scarecrow that’s already in possession of a halfway-decent brain.

4 It is worth unpacking the genotype-phenotype distinction. An organism’s “phenotype” is the name given to the observable, composite characteristics or traits of an organism. This includes its morphology (body shape, color, size, etc.), development, behavior, biochemical properties, and the products of its behavior. An organism’s “genotype” is the total genetic inheritance, meaning its genetic information, as well as environmental influences upon the expression of those genes (epigenetic factors). The phenotype, therefore, results from the expression of a genotype, mediated by interactions with the environment (broadly defined). For more on the performative nature of genetics, and the relationship between genotype and phenotype via performance, see Sikes, “The Performing Genome: Genetics and the Rearticulation of the Human.”