Media, Modernity and Dynamic Plants in Early 20th Century German Culture by Janet Janzen (review)

With so much scholarship devoted to animal studies in recent years, Janet Janzen's contribution to the much less active field of plant studies is very welcome. Both areas of inquiry are related to posthumanism and environmental studies. But they share many questions of concern unique to them: how is the essence of what it means to be human—consciousness, rationality, language, suffering, soul—defined via the exclusion of animals and plants? How can we know about the consciousness of another species? How do we avoid the instrumentalization of them if they do possess consciousness? How may we communicate with them? What boundaries do we as humans set up between ourselves and other species? How might animal or plant being interrupt our complacency and self-satisfaction? How can we avoid anthropocentrism? When these questions are applied to literature and art, the answers to these questions involve what lies at the heart of imagination: how can the literary and visual arts address their silence—as well as reflect on our own linguistic shortcomings? Many of these questions are taken up by Janzen in a book that has appeared as the second in a new series, Critical Plant Studies: Philosophy, Literature, Culture. To my knowledge, it is the only series out there in the field. Its editor is Michael Marder, author of the path-breaking book that created the field, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013). In this seminal work, Marder distinguishes animal from plant studies by saying that the yardstick for comparison with the human and hence for ethical consideration is not sentience (as Jeremy Bentham so famously maintained) but the finitude of being. Offshoots of plant thinking for an ethical being in the world would involve a different conceptualization of time: for instance dedication to the slow movement. Plant thinking, as Marder puts it, means "to cultivate a way of thinking not only about plants, understood as epistemic or moral objects, but also with them and, consequently, with the environment, from which they are not really separate" (181).

Although Janzen's study of "dynamic plants" and modernity stems from her McGill University dissertation, its scope far exceeds that typical of the genre and even of a first book. Typical of a dissertation is an introduction that provides a succinct, up-to-date overview of the status of research; indeed, Janzen's book does that. But atypical is that she also brings into play an impressive panoply of discourses through which she demonstrates her truly interdisciplinary approach. The reader learns much about the life sciences beginning in Romanticism, their continuation throughout nineteenth-century vitalistic movements (including the influence fifty years later of the mid-nineteenth-century scientist Gustav Fechner, who wrote on the cosmic soul), trends in biology and morphology in the closing decades of the 1800s, and the way new technologies, especially time-lapse photography, revolutionized how one thought of plant life at the start of the twentieth century. The authors Janzen cites are wide-ranging, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and Friedrich Schelling to Hans Makart, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Maurice Maeterlinck, not to mention scores of biologists and botanists, from Ernst Haeckel to Jakob von Uexküll and Raoul Francé.

Janzen begins with discussion of a film from 1898 shot by the German biologist Wilhelm Pfeffer, who developed time-lapse photography to show the growth and movement of tulips and other plants. Insofar as the new technology illustrates the intelligence of plants, it serves nature and is not pitted against it: film brings the observer closer to nature. Janzen then compares this technological novelty and the immersive experience it provides with the more famous Lumière brothers clip of the arrival of a train at a station. As she remarks, how plant vitalism can be seen via the cinematic apparatus is no less a revolutionary mediation than the Lumières' short.

Janzen...