Plant Agency: A Critical View

Recent years have seen an explosion of work in theoretical biology and philosophy of biology on the concepts of the organism, biological agency and biological autonomy, leading to the so-called ‘agency’ perspective in the plant sciences especially. Over much the same period some researchers in the plant sciences have argued that an adequate interpretation of the results of experimental work with whole plant organisms and plant ecologies, especially, requires new theoretical frameworks and concepts to describe the processes of plant life and plant behaviour. These concepts include ‘agency’ and ‘autonomy’, but also – and more controversially – ‘intelligence’, ‘cognition’, ‘sociality’ and ‘kin-recognition’. Some believe that this constitutes a ‘new paradigm’ in and for the plant sciences. Although the interpretation of plant behaviour in these terms is very controversial in the plant sciences, with some dismissing it completely, its claims are often received quite uncritically in parts of the humanities and social sciences and are often communicated to lay publics as if the claims represented established and uncontested scientific views. Recent years have also seen the emergence of a new area in philosophy: plant philosophy. Unlike philosophy of biology, which is concerned with general biological questions relevant to all living organisms, plant philosophy is concerned to conceptualise the specificity of plant life and with the implications of a proper acknowledgement of this specificity. Some aspects of plant philosophy, more than philosophy of biology, also seem to resonate with the understanding of plants in some traditional ecological knowledge, as, according to some, does the ‘new paradigm’ in the plant sciences. Some also see the acknowledgement of plant agency as an important – perhaps even necessary – part of environmental struggles and environmental justice. Although they are very different, the discussions of agency in philosophy of biology, in the plant sciences working from the agency perspective, and in advocacy of the ‘new paradigm’ for the understanding of plant life, can all be understood as critical reactions to the dominant ‘reductionist’ tendencies of twentieth-century biology and they all, in different ways use a concept of agency. In this chapter I this ask: can we identify, from a comparison of these areas which concept of agency is most appropriate for thinking plants philosophically? I argue that although philosophy of biology and in the ‘agency perspective’ in the plant sciences these allow for the extension of agency to plants, they subsume plants within a general philosophy of biology that has nothing to say about plants per se. Although the specifically vegetal concerns of the ‘new paradigm’ in the plant sciences might suggest the possibility of a more fruitful relation to plant philosophy, I argue that the ‘new paradigm’ does not resist the kind of anthropomorphism against which plant philosophy ought to be defined. So where can we find an appropriate concept of agency for plant philosophy? Drawing on John Dupré’s work on the nature of biological concepts I argue that there is no one ‘correct’ concept of agency for plants, in either the sciences or philosophy, although we can identify some of features that a concept of agency for plants specifically would require. As some of these features are characteristic of the concept of the actant in Actor-Network-Theory I end with a critical consideration of that, concluding that while it cannot provide plant philosophy with the concept of a specifically vegetal actant, it does help us to see the main problem and thus to identify the form – but not the content – of a possible solution.