Becoming Plant
Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682)
(abstract for postmedieval)
- "So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires; as an Animal is a Plant, or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume."
Packed into this short sentence -- from the dedicatory preface to Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682), the first botanical text to identify sexual reproduction in plants using microscopy -- is a theory of plants and animals as media circuits, both bound together and blocked by the book as a tool for disseminating scientific observations. Drawing on Leibniz's contemporaneous work on monads, vitalism and preformationism, as well as Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "becoming," this paper investigates how Grew's text and its accompanying microscopist plates (helped to) transform plants from living, signifying participants in the book of nature to objects of scientific inquiry, mediated through print.
The digital portion of this project takes up the metaphor of magnification to explore Grew's text alongside other seventeenth-century works of microscopy, such as Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665). Rather than reduce their significance to a series of now-prescient scientific truths, the digital invites us to recover the experimental (in all senses of the word) nature of these early works. For instance: what does Hooke's famous flea -- a plate that pops out of the page, inspiring Margaret Cavendish to dismiss it as a "lobster" -- have in common with Kafka's man-sized bug? When does the book's quired form metamorphose into Grew's blown-up plant plates, constructing new worlds -- new book-based morphologies -- in subvisible matter? And what can historical resemblance tell us about our own curious media ecology? For if medieval tropes such as the arbor inversa (the human as an inverted tree) or the screaming mandrake visualize a world teeming with plant-animal resemblances, the early microscope distances the human animal's eye from the dead, dissected plant tissue it observes, much as the screen both flattens and reanimates textual interaction. This digital wunderkammer seeks to revitalize these lost surface effects.
- Harkness Deborah. The Jewel House.
"surface effect" -- see Wilson [2] Wilson 1995 on microscope removing privilege of surface -- we only see surface, scenery, not hidden machinery behind it; also Deleuze, "Paradox of Surface Effects" [3] Deleuze 1990
affective history
metaphor of "COMPENDIUM", folding up of plants
Leibniz, Monadologie -- example of blowing up something, the way one would with a microscope, to see its operation -- these mechanisms never explain the being's consciousness/perception; also see 64, on divine technologies as being composed of machines ad infinitum
- "Each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond." (67)
- "And although the earth and the air separating the plants in the garden, or the water separating the fish in the pond, are neither plant nor fish, yet they still contain them — though they are usually far too small for us to be able to perceive them." (68)
see Bennett 2010 on vitalism, around 78; Dreisch's entelechy is an "intensive manifold"; Bergson's elan vital is "in the form of a sheaf" (see pg 78)
"The Gathered Text" conference: [4]
Thomas Sprat -- bishop of Church of England, historian of the Royal Society; but had a Reformation: "both have taken a like course to bring this about; each of them passing by the corrupt ccopies and referring themselves to the perfect originals for instruction; the one to Scripture, the other to the huge Volume of Creatures." (Sprat 1667 III.23, qtd in Eisenstein 668, Olson 1994 58)
Halliday traces grammatical style that condenses multiple ideas into a complex technical discourse to c17 science; turning verbs, actions, into objects through written language (Olson 1994 118)
see Eisenstein 1983, 187-8; medieval florilegia, gathering of spiritual flowers in a spiritual garden transformed by Thomas Browne's notion of "suck[ing] Divinity from the flower of Nature"; "the seventeenth-century writer appears to be rejecting rather than echoing the literary allegorical conventions which had been cultivated by generations of monks." (188)
Harpold 2009 -- Bush envisions Memex as gathering together a new book; question of interiority of book's gatherings vs. exteriority of trails leading outward, back into the world (36/1.41)
also Harpold 2009 61/2.37: plant structure -- slicing into stems -- slicing into language (Saussure, Lacan) -- Nelson's TextFace
see Johns 1998, 487, on Grew's catalogue for the Royal Society
see Johns 2009, 81; Grew, A Discourse made before the Royal Society ... concerning the nature, causes, and power of mixture (1675); also 88, Grew and piracy of his salts