Jonathan G. Wald Ethics, Agency, and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene Berkeley, California April 17, 2015

Thinking About Morality With Orchids

Introduction

The only appropriate way to begin my argument is with an orchid, or at the very least the

image of one (slide 2). This is angraceum sesquipedale, otherwise known as “Darwin’s Orchid.”

Darwin was fascinated by orchids to such an extent that he dedicated an entire book to their

subject, On The Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by

Insects, published in 1862. Yet of all the orchids that drew Darwin’s attention, only this one has

the honor of being remembered as “Darwin’s” orchid.

This flower earned that distinction by playing a unique role in the development of

evolutionary theory. Darwin’s orchid has a long spur that can sometimes extend over a foot long.

The spur contains a small basin of aromatic nectar, yet its remarkable length prevents most

insects from reaching it. When Darwin received a sample of the orchids from James Bateman, he

was perplexed by this feature. The model of coevolution he had considered in the evolution of

plants required that some insect would be drawn to the nectar, thus carrying pollen from the

orchid to other plants and vice versa, facilitating pollination. However, at the time, naturalists

were not aware of any insect with a proboscis thin and small enough to find visiting Darwin’s

orchid worthwhile. Despite this mystery, Darwin theorized that such an insect must exist in order

to maintain the coherence of his model. This gap in knowledge remained until 1903, when

naturalists discovered xanthopan morganii (slide 3), a hawk moth with a foot-long proboscis,

that lived in Madagascar with the orchids and, in accordance with Darwin’s prediction, fed on its

nectar (Arditti et al. 2012).

I have started with this story to demonstrate the form of the argument I will make today;

namely that the form of a plant can provide clues to the existence of entities beyond itself. While

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Darwin used this fact to predict the existence of xanthopan morganii, I will argue that the forms

of contemporary orchids and corn provide clues about the moral values that shaped their

evolution. Consequently, identifying the biosemiotic impact of morals suggests that moral values

themselves may have importantly material elements. I will begin by laying out the basic

principles of biosemiotics as they may relate to normativity before proceeding to an analysis of

the two plants. In concluding, I will comment on the implications of this approach to the future

empirical study of morality.

Concepts

Biosemiotics is the study of biological processes and organisms through the concepts of

signification, information, and reference. Upon this understanding, all living processes

fundamentally interpret elements in their surroundings. This approach can include the study of

animal perception, as in Uexküll’s foundational elaboration on the concept of umwelt (Uexküll

2010), or examples like Darwin’s “reading” of orchids to understand something about their

ecosystem. Semiotics can elaborate species-level phenomenon like the evolution of an anteater’s

snout to fit the particular form of an anthill to the microscopic analysis of how hemoglobin’s

structure perfectly fits an oxygen molecule (Deacon 2013:9).

All of these features share what Terrence Deacon calls a “constitutive absence.” In other

words, “Such concepts as information, function, purpose, meaning, intention, significance,

consciousness, and value are intrinsically defined by their fundamental incompleteness. They

exist only in relation to something they are not.” (Deacon 2013:23) An anteater does not contain

an anthill. However, in order to make sense of the shape of the anteater’s snout, one must realize

that it is the negative image of the long, narrow passage of the ant’s tunnel (Kohn 2013:74).

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Biosemiotics thus arrives at a limited form of teleology. By reinscribing function into

biology, i.e. studying hemoglobin in order to understand oxygen transfer, biological entities can

be said to succeed or fail at a particular goal. For example, in the case of Darwin’s orchid, we

may realize that xanthopan morganii’s long proboscis serves the organism by allowing it to

access the orchid’s nectar. If a particular moth’s proboscis were too short or too wide, it would

be reasonable to say that the proboscis “failed” at its purpose. Over the course of prolonged

natural selection, “functional” or “successful” forms will be selected, leading to the inscription of

this ends-based teleology into the form of the organism.

Tantalizingly, a group of biosemioticians led by Kalevi Kull has labeled this process

“minimal normativity,” by which they refer to the way in which a biological organism can

succeed or fail to functionally represent their surroundings (Kull et al. 2009:171). Taking

Eduardo Kohn’s challenge to “situate morality ontologically,” (Kohn 2013:133), I will attempt to

see how far we can extend the concept of “minimal normativity” into the domain of moral

systems. If biological systems represent the world around them, what happens when human

interests, desires, and motivations constitute their world? In other words, how does morality

shape life itself?

Let me clarify what I mean by “morality,” as although this term has received increased

attention in anthropology, the discipline has not yet settled on a shared meaning. Like a number

of anthropologists of morality, particularly James Faubion and James Laidlaw (Faubion 2011;

Laidlaw 2014), I draw on the Foucauldian tradition in this regard, and thus implicitly on

Nietzsche as well. In this framework, “morality,” refers to “a set of values and rules of action

that are recommended to individuals through the intermediary of various prescriptive agencies

such as the family (in one of its roles), educational institutions, churches, and so forth.”

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(Foucault 1988:25). This understanding of morality is importantly distinct from “ethics,” which

refers to the manners in which a subject forms themselves in relation to moral injunctions.

Within the anthropology of morality, this ethical portion of self-formation has garnered a greater

degree of attention than the impersonal abstraction of morality.

In order to make the connection between “minimal normativity” and “morality,” it is

important to note that the Manichean concepts of “Good” and “Evil” are entirely secondary to

the more foundational sense of “morality.” Rather, as Nietzsche argues, the primordial binary is

between “good” and “bad” (Nietzsche 1989:40). If we take morality to refer to the diverse modes

by which individuals are prescribed sets of “good” and “bad” behavior, the concept of “minimal

normativity” appears to be a simple translation of morality into the generalized domain of life via

the modes by which an organism succeeds or fails to adapt to its surroundings. In cases where

these surroundings are primarily anthropogenic, this distinction fades.

Grains

To this end, few plants provide as detailed a test case as corn, the focal plant for much of

the development of modern agriculture. As Michael Pollan notes, “Few plants can manufacture

quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and

basic elements as corn.” (Pollan 2007:22). This peculiar quality has made corn a staple of

alimentary production as well as contemporary biotechnical research. However, the corn that we

all know so well is quite distinct from its pre-human iterations. As this comparison shows (slide

4), corn has been selectively bred far away from its close relative teosinte. Paleoethnobotanists

have long been aware of the ways in which corn has evolved as a result of human pressures in

order to maximize the production of sugars and other materials (Cummings 2014). The

importance of corn to contemporary biotechnology is due to a combination of these human

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interventions, but these alone would not explain why, of all plants, corn has risen to such

dominance in agricultural production.

In order to make sense of corn’s unnatural history, it is helpful to note the particular place

that agricultural grains have held in modern history. While biopolitics may have reached its end

with the gutting of social welfare programs, the end of the “social” as a domain of intervention in

favor of the “global” or the “individual,” and the development of new, neoliberal technologies of

governance (Rose 1996; Rabinow and Bennett 2012:157), there is little question that the forms

of biopolitics played an enormous role in the formation of contemporary modes of economic and

political governance. While many in medical anthropology have noted the strong links between

the genealogy of biopower, public health and sexuality, I would like to turn our attention towards

Foucault’s first example for the concepts of biopolitics: agricultural scarcity. In the second half

of the eighteenth century, “scarcity” appeared as a natural, artificial, and moral threat brought

about by environmental factors as well as human failures (Foucault 2009:30–31). Security, that

realist technology of power, initially arose as a technology in order to reduce the economic

uncertainty introduced by scarcity and was later expanded to include the apparatuses of the

police.

Obviously, Foucault was not an agricultural historian, and hence his brief foray into the

field quickly diverts into an analysis of the state. For my purposes, however, the securitization of

agriculture, understood as the realist strategies by which grain prices were regulated,

unmistakably appears in the legacy of corn evolution, both in the form of the plant itself and its

economic importance. In essence, corn has been intentionally made into a relatively easily

regulated plant, and the relative ease with which this project was accomplished accounts for its

widespread consumption (Cronon 1992:99).

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Consider corn’s metabolic pathway, C4 carbon fixation. In order to facilitate more

efficient photosynthesis, C4 plants uses an alternate enzyme to transport C02 through “bundle

sheath” arrangements in the leaf structure (slide 5). This process achieves the effective

production of sugars through a spatial rearranging of the cell but remains temporally static. So

long as light, air, and nutrients are available, corn is able to produce glucose. This trait makes

corn a quick grower and easily predictable in time, both traits that make it an exemplary crop for

the demands of regulated, securitized production.

In the contemporary period of biotechnological modification, engineers have been

working to extend these traits in corn. Contrary to the worries of “frankenplants” running

rampant with unpredictable modifications, one of the key tasks for genetic engineers has been to

reduce the pre-existing rate of genetic mutation in crops. In essence, the goal has been to make

plants more, not less predictable in order to regulate crop traits and farming methods (Murphy

2011). This process of regulating crop diversity corresponds with the trend towards the

“deskilling” of agricultural labor, a process begun in the last century that links with the

movement of knowledge of corn varieties from the tacit knowledge of the farmer to the

specialized knowledge of the biologist (Fitzgerald 1993). In short, corn is now an ideal crop for

economic concerns; it grows relatively reliably, efficiently, and with minimal specialized input.

Orchids

Orchids, on the other hand, could hardly be more different from the image of corn. While

grains have figured centrally in the formation of modern economics and have evolved into their

counterpart, orchids have long been something of agriculture’s “other.” Personally, I began this

research out of a sense of surprise. I had gone to Brazil hoping to understand the motivations

behind agricultural biotechnology, and in my first month there, I found myself surrounded by

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orchids. While trying to find people working in biotechnology, I more or less stumbled across

three different centers for orchid cultivation (slides 6-8). The first image is from the greenhouse

for the Sociedade Orquidófila de Belo Horizonte, housed in a public park and open to anyone

interested in cultivating orchids. The second image is the orchid veranda at Inhotim, an art

museum and botanical garden, funded by the mining company Vale. Finally, I had a chance to

speak with biologists studying orchids and other plants at a research greenhouse at the

Universidade Federal do Minas Gerais.

It is immediately apparent how orchids have garnered so much attention over the years.

Even the highly trained and professional biologist I spoke with at UFMG would stop speaking

occasionally just to admire the aesthetic beauty of the flowers. Without much difficulty, I can

imagine Darwin acting in the same manner, nor is it difficult to see why author Susan Orlean, in

her bestselling book The Orchid Thief, notes that orchids “seem to drive people crazy. Those

who love them love them madly.” (Orlean 2000:50) The orchids themselves, through their

beauty, draw people into the study of botany, thus securing their position as one of the early

plants to attract biological interest.

As I tried to make sense of this attraction, or why I kept finding orchids when I was

looking for biotechnology, the more I realized that diversity appears as a pattern throughout the

biology of orchids. While famous for their beauty, not all orchids are much to look at. Some

contain only tiny, barely visible flowers. Some grow on the sides of trees like vines, with their

roots dangling in the air, while others stay low and close to the ground, easily mistaken for a

weed. Some have thick, trunk like features, while others spread out like moss. To my untrained

eye, nothing about orchid morphology appeared regular.

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Orchids are also notoriously difficult to cultivate. Some species can take up to seven

years to flower, while many who have tried to cultivate them have been frustrated to find that a

slight change in light, temperature, or humidity can spell the difference between an orchid

growing or dying. Many species of orchid only grow symbiotically in complex ecosystems

within highly specific biomes, down to the species of bacteria that live within their petals.

On the molecular level, orchids are also quite unusual (slide 9). Unlike most plants that

use C3 or C4 pathways, orchids are one of the rare plants to use CAM photosynthesis. This

process conserves water in arid regions by differentiating the plant structure not only spatially, as

in the C4 pathway, but also temporally. Orchids engage in different portions of the

photosynthetic pathway at night than they do during the day.

The intense diversity of orchids has resulted in them playing two primary roles in human

interactions. First, they are an ornamental and aesthetic plant. Botanists frequently hybridize

orchids in a style of art. For example, all of the orchids at Inhotim, the botanical garden, are

hybrids selected for maximum brilliance.

Second, orchid diversity opens up a number of possibilities for biologists attempting to

understand the diversity of botany. From their molecular structure to their phenotypical variation,

orchids have been a wealth of information for modern biology. It is no accident that Darwin, the

founder of modern biology, used orchids as one of his first test cases. In more recent years,

genomic technology has seized on orchids for their genetic diversity, especially hoping to

determine their rare procedure for CAM photosynthesis (Cai et al. 2015).

As a biologist was guiding me around UFMG’s orchid greenhouse (slide 10), she

explained that unlike the public gardens, the research centers avoided hybridization in order to

maintain genetic distinctions between the strains and to maximize the possibilities for research.

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To this end, I noticed as she swept the dust-like pollen from a flower through the cracks in the

worn metal grate. While this kept the invading pollen away from the tagged and marked

specimens, I could not help but notice that an unruly green carpet littered the floor (slide 11),

remnants of past experiments. It struck me that this verdant laboratory stood in a chain with

sanitized workbenches in more typical laboratory settings.

While the aesthetic and scientific values of orchids may be conceptually distinct, there is

little doubt that the current orchid research owes much to a past of aesthetic valuation.

Throughout the history of colonialism, naturalists scouted conquered landscapes and reported

back about the rare and exotic plants they found (Grove 1996). The enormous capital

investments required to maintain museums like Inhotim or a public orchid greenhouse are only

the most contemporary legacy of orchid’s beauty garnering them a place before our gaze.

Furthermore, their delicate preservation and documentation, due to the valuation of their

appearance, has resulted in orchids maintaining a high degree of genetic and morphological

diversity in contrast with the biopolitical standardization of grains (slide 10).

Conclusion: Morality

Two very different plants united by the shared fact that they have simultaneously drawn

in human interests and bear the stamps of those interactions; corn in its high regularity and

simplified growing process, orchids in their fragile ornateness and diversity. If biological

systems really do symbolize their world, it is clear that these two organisms exist in worlds

populated not only by environmental conditions and genetic heredity, but also “sets of values and

rules of action” pertaining to their cultivation, preservation, and modification. In other words,

they are in part the products of moral systems.

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Ultimately, my argument is not for botanists attempting to understand plants, but for

anthropologists, philosophers, and other attempting to understand the nature of morality. If traces

of morality can be found in non-human, non-symbolic biological systems, then anthropologists

of morality must broaden their focus away from linguistic instances of evaluation or

anthropocentric conceptions of virtue and instead observe the ways in which morality itself

shapes a variety of different worlds populated by a plenitude of different beings. In other words,

my goal with this argument is to begin the task of opening our tools of moral thinking beyond the

confines of purely humanist anthropology. While moral values indisputably rely on human

agency to gain effect, I have shown that they may take on a material, enlivened existence as a

trace of their former instantiations and that the biological systems themselves may offer

possibilities and resistances to human moral actions. Biosemiotics provides only one conceptual

tool for the task of moral anthropology in that it opens the conceptual view to the ways in which

life itself adapts to the polyvalent world around it. Our task now is to determine the form and

content of those worlds.

Works Cited Arditti, Joseph, John Elliott, Ian J. Kitching, and Lutz T. Wasserthal 2012 “Good Heavens What Insect Can Suck It”– Charles Darwin, Angraecum Sesquipedale and Xanthopan Morganii Praedicta. Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 169(3): 403–432. Cai, Jing, Xin Liu, Kevin Vanneste, et al. 2015 The Genome Sequence of the Orchid Phalaenopsis Equestris. Nature Genetics 47(1): 65–72. Cronon, William 1992 Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Cummings, Linda Scott 2014 Corn Cob Phytoliths as Indicators of Genetics and Environmental Conditions. In Ancient Plants and People. Marco Madella, Carla Lancelotti, and Manon Savard, eds. Pp. 292–300. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press.

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Deacon, Terrence W. 2013 Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. 1 edition. W. W. Norton & Company. Faubion, James D. 2011 An Anthropology of Ethics. New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, Deborah 1993 Farmers Deskilled: Hybrid Corn and Farmers’ Work. Technology and Culture 34(2): 324–343. Foucault, Michel 1988 The Use of Pleasure. Robert Hurley, tran. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books. 2009 Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978. Michel Senellart, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson, eds. Graham Burchell, tran. New York: Picador. Grove, Richard H. 1996 Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Kohn, Eduardo 2013 How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kull, Kalevi, Terrence Deacon, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and Frederik Stjernfelt 2009 Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology. Biological Theory 4(2): 167–173. Laidlaw, James 2014 The Subject of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, Denis J 2011 Plants, Biotechnology and Agriculture. Wallingford: CABI. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 1989 On the Genealogy of Morals. Walter Arnold Kaufmann and R. J Hollingdale, trans. New York: Vintage Books. Orlean, Susan 2000 The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. New York: Ballantine Books.

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Pollan, Michael 2007 The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin. Rabinow, Paul, and Gaymon Bennett 2012 Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press. Rose, Nikolas 1996 The Death of the Social? Re-Figuring the Territory of Government. Economy and Society 25(3): 327–356. Uexküll, Jakob von 2010 A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning. Joseph D. O’Neil, tran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Maize Orchid

Phenotypical Modification

Minimized (Engineering) Maximized (Hybridization)

Photosynthetic Process C4 (regular, spatial differentiation)

CAM (cellular and temporal differentiation)

Ecology Monocrop Symbiotic

Economic Interests Agriculture, “glucose economy”

Aesthetic, research

Temporality Annual, regular Slow to flower

Labor Deskilled, mechanical Skilled, individualized

Image Sources• Slide 2: Orchid Corner. 2009. Ursula’s Page. http://www.kammlott.net/Jan2009.html.

(Image)Slide 3: Xanthopan Morganii Praedicta• Slide 3: N.d. Encyclopedia Britannica.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1315526/Xanthopan-morganii-praedicta, accessed March 31, 2015. (Image)

• Slide 4: 2015 Zea (Genus). Wikipedia. http://www.faculty.umb.edu/yvonne_vaillancourt/Biology/C3%20C4%20images.htm

• Slide 5: Vaillancourt, Yvonne. 2014 C3 and C4 Images. University of Massachusetts Boston. http://www.faculty.umb.edu/yvonne_vaillancourt/Biology/C3%20C4%20images.htm.

• Slide 7: A., Marcio. 2014. Vandário – Foto de Inhotim, Brumadinho - TripAdvisor. http://www.tripadvisor.com.br/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g1747395-d1743976-i94993263-Inhotim-Brumadinho_State_of_Minas_Gerais.html, accessed April 4, 2015.

• Slide 9: Armstrong, Wayne P. 2005. Ecological Principles #2. Wayne’s Word. http://waynesword.palomar.edu/lmexe10a.htm.