From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution
From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene: Designing gardens for plant/people involution
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从人类世到人类世：为植物/人类内卷设计花园
DOI：
10.1080/02757206.2017.1289934
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
0.7
通讯作者：
Natasha Myers
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Natasha Myers
黛博拉·巴塔格里亚的文章打开了通往整个世界的门户，这些世界围绕着植物，在这些世界中，人们及其随之而来的技术、技术和魔法被困在植物生物和行为的螺旋式漩涡中。植物就像它们的根一样，缠绕在一起。具有营养、芳香、敏感和感官的植物吸引其他生物的整个生态系统参与到它们的护理和繁殖中：它们拥有吸引他人服务于它们的节奏、它们的诡计和欲望的技术(Hustak和Myers 2012)。事实证明，人类可能是所有其他生物中装备最好的，可以对他们的每一个突发奇想做出反应。正如巴塔格里亚的故事所证明的那样，这些植物/人之间的亲密关系通常是通过技术和技术实现的--甚至是增强的：一根简单的杆子支持植物转向光线；直径微米的营养薄雾解渴最稀薄的根毛；选择光源刺激植物的光合器官；这里竖起神奇的棱镜，那里朗诵咒语。一个精心照料的花园，无论是在水桶里还是在空间站上，都为植物和人类提供了一个展示他们纠缠不休的力量的舞台。花园是可以感受到推动人们参与植物生长的动力的场所。进化描述的是那些发现物种彼此分化的长期事件，而进化提供了一种方式来讲述正在进行的、即兴的、实验性的相遇，当像植物和人类这样不同的生物参与彼此的生活时，这些相遇形成了(Hustak和Myers 2012)。内卷化描述了一种“互惠捕获”(Stengers 2010)，它将植物和人结合在一起的项目中。在热带地区，植物和人类都在花园等地生长。花园对我来说是一个令人心酸的地方，人类学研究人们与植物之间的各种关系--无论这些关系是亲密的、提取的、暴力的，还是工具化的。巴塔格里亚对花园的描述--实验性的、表现性的、资本密集型的、神奇的、古老的、现代的、城市的和轨道上的--可以教我们重要的教训，告诉我们在这个不确定的时代，人们今天是如何与植物建立关系的。花园设计很重要。植物确实牢牢地控制着我们的生活(想想食物、燃料、饲料、纤维、药品等等)，以至于人们甚至可以说，“我们之所以存在，只是因为它们存在”(Myers 2016)。然而，在植物/人的力量关系中，人类仍然是起草设计的人：我们有水桶、推土机、混凝土、玻璃、金属、化肥、杀虫剂、土壤分析、脚手架、收获技术、饥饿和审美欲望。对我来说，人种学问题变成了：人们如何选择与植物的关系？我们甚至可以问：什么是给定的花园
Debbora Battaglia’s essay opens portals to entire worlds that turn around plants, sites in which people and their attendant techniques, technologies, and magic get caught in the spiralling whorl of plant beings and doings. Plants are, like their roots, entangling. Nourishing, aromatic, sensitive, and sentient, plants entice entire ecologies of other creatures to participate in their care and their propagation: they have the know-how to entrain others in service of their rhythms, their wiles, and desires (Hustak and Myers 2012). And, as it turns out, people might be the best equipped of all other creatures, to respond to their every whim. As Battaglia’s stories attest, these plant/people intimacies are often mediated – and even enhanced – through techniques and technologies: a simple pole supports a plant’s tropic turn to the light; nutrient mists microns in diameter quench the thirst of the thinnest root hairs; select sources of light excite a plant’s photosynthetic organs; a magical prism erected here, an incantation recited there. A well-tended garden, whether in a bucket or on board a space station, provides a stage for plants and people to perform their entangled powers. Gardens are sites where it is possible to get a feel for the momentum that propels people to involve themselves with plants. Where evolution describes those longue durée events that find species diverging from one another, involution offers a way to story the ongoing, improvised, experimental encounters that take shape when beings as different as plants and people involve themselves in one another’s lives (Hustak and Myers 2012). Involution describes a ‘reciprocal capture’ (Stengers 2010) that binds plants and people in projects of co-becoming. Turning tropically to one another, plants and people are both in-the-making in sites like gardens. Gardens are for me poignant sites for anthropological inquiry into the various ways that people stage relations with plants – whether these relations are intimate, extractive, violent, or instrumentalizing. Battaglia’s accounts of gardens – experimental, exhibitionist, capitalintensive, magical, ancient, modern, urban, and in orbit – can teach us important lessons about the ways that people are staging relations to plants today, in these uncertain times. Garden design matters. Plants surely have such a firm hold on our lives (think food, fuel, fodder, fibres, pharmaceuticals, and more), that one could even say that ‘we are only because they are’ (Myers 2016). And yet, in the plant/people power nexus, humans remain the ones who draw up the designs: we have the buckets, bulldozers, concrete, glass, metal, fertilizers, pesticides, soil assays, scaffolding, harvesting techniques, hunger, and aesthetic desires. For me, the ethnographic question becomes: how do people choose to stage their relations with plants? We could even ask: What is a given garden