Plantation Planet
After almost ten years without publication, The Laboratory Planet has just released issue 6. The English version will be presented on July 5 at Spore-Initiative in Berlin, to coincide with the launch of the “Planetary Peasants” program at the Werkleitz festival in Halle, and the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany. The French version will be distributed from July 17 at the Village de l’Eau of the Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth’s uprisings). The Laboratory Planet will also be Makery’s summer focus this year: here a first text, “Plantation Planet” by philosopher Federico Luisetti.
The journal can be downloaded here. The English paper version is available at numerous distribution points within the More-Than-Planet network: Projekt Atol (Ljubljana), Waag Future Labs (Amsterdam), Ars Electronica (Linz, At), Spore-Initiative (Berlin), as well as at Biwäscherei and Awareness in Art (Zurich) as part of the More-Than-Planet exhibition and the “Archipelago: Art and Science in Time of Unstable Knowledge” program. In the article below, philosopher Federico Luisetti, Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, discusses the notion of the “plantacionocene”.
The most enduring planetary laboratory is the Plantation, an institution and mode of existence that took hold of the Earth during colonial times and is still shaping soils, bodies, and minds across continents. As of today, the planet – in particular the Global South – is occupied by large-scale industrial monocrops for agro-fuels, animal feed and textiles, by palm oil and eucalyptus plantations, by tropical cash crops and monocultures of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice of a limited variety of genotypes, farmed by heavy machinery on chemically-engineered soils1.
We may not live in the Anthropocene, as recently decided by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of The International Union of Geological Sciences2, but we certainly inhabit the Plantationocene, a neologism introduced in 2015 by Donna Haraway3, at the culmination of decades of postcolonial histories of the agro-political world-order of plantation societies, which spread across the Atlantic and then in the rest of the world through a combination of monocultures and slavery4. The source of the Earth’s “colonial inhabitation”5 is the coerced labor of humans, plants, animals, and microbes in the plantations, the radical simplification of living natures, and the relocation of the genomes of breeding plants and animals across continents. Forced labor in the plantation has designed a planetary matrix of land grabs, massacres, land clearing, and the exploitation of reproductive forces of the living – instead of regenerative practices of farming and forestry, accelerated and forced reproduction of some species and the extermination of others.6
Terricide
The Spanish term used by activists of the Movimiento de Mujeres Indigenas por el Buen Vivir (Indigenous Women’s Movement for Good Living) to describe the effects of the Plantationocene is terricidio (“terricide”), a constellation of “epistemicides, genocides, ecocides, culturicides, femicides that have occurred throughout the history and the colonial present”: “With the word terricide we name our pain and the devastation suffered by the territories, our spirituality and our bodies, because in it all the ways of murdering life that the Western system has are encrypted.”7 For the ecofeminist activist Vandana Shiva, agribusiness and knowledge-based monocultures are one and the same, since ecocides and epistemicides go hand in hand, and “dominant knowledge destroys the very ‘conditions’ for existence of alternatives, just as the introduction of monocultures destroys the very conditions for existence of different species.”8 The plantation economy is inseparable from a “monoculture of the mind,” a one-dimensional system of thought based on Western principles of human exceptionalism and psycho-biological individuality, which the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter calls a “monohumanist conception of the human.”9
At the origin of the Plantationocene’s monohumanism is the ancient separation of persons and things, a poisonous gift of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity, ingrained in the fabric of European slave societies10. Western personhood has detached the persona from the res, with the goal of conflating humanity and ownership, personhood and mastery over slaves and their bodies, reduced to objecthood. Appropriation of something – that thus becomes a res – by someone who claims to be a subject – a persona – is the foundation of modern Western legal and political thought. In the Americas, the proprietorial persona has stripped Black, Native, and non-white people of their land and humanity, reducing an entire continent into terra nullius. The legal history of the Western persona reinforces the analytics of New World slavery laid out by Black and decolonial studies. For Saidiya Hartman, the order of knowledge to which personhood belongs is “enabled by proprietorial notions of the self: humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress.”11 The archetype of this view is John Locke’s theory of property. A beneficiary of the slave trade and the founding father of liberalism, Locke co-authored The Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina (1669) as secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, and he actively justified the link between individual personhood and private ownership. According to Locke, land cultivated in common by Amerindians cannot be considered appropriated until it is enclosed by the individual12. Personhood as a center of experience is inseparable from the juridico-political connotations of being an individual possessor who alienates other humans and non-humans from this essential freedom. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke is straightforward: “Person … is a Forensic Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs to intelligent Agents capable of Law, and Happiness and Misery.”13 Where decolonial activists see terricides, Locke perceives intelligent legal persons capable of law and happiness for themselves, and misery for others.
Soil Insurgency
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the monohumanist conception of personhood denounced by Sylvia Wynter has produced a biologized and economized account of the human, a bio-economic compound. Framed within Malthusian resource scarcity and Darwinian natural selection, “Western and Westernized global selves”14 functioned simultaneously as subjects of natural history and political economy. Through “biological liberalism,” a colonial constellation of scientific, legal, and cultural practices managed to produce what Maurizio Meloni portrays as an “unprecedented technology of isolation, privatization and protection of the body that makes of its inner milieu a source of freedom and individuality in the face of mutating external environments.”15 The biological rearticulation of liberal political philosophy has constituted a “threshold of biological individuality”16 that separates the modern Western body and its internal regulating system from an Outside that has become the Environment, the Non-Body of the Earth.
Against this monoculture of the mind, Sylvia Wynter advocates for a return to the teachings of Frantz Fanon, who contested “liberal humanism’s biocentric premise of the human as a natural organism and autonomous subject.”17 Fanon’s decolonial overcoming of Western humanism converges with multispecies ecologies, which politicize the awareness that biological life is not an autonomous kingdom of competing species surrounded by dull matter. Biologically, we have never been individuals. As Anna Tsing puts it, “human nature is an interspecies relationship,” life is animated by subtle relations that cross the inorganic conditions of human existence, soils, fungi, plants, and animals. Geochemical processes, co-evolution, and multiple involutions of species constantly dissolve biological boundaries and individualities.
Despite centuries of monohumanism and plantations, the body-territory of the Earth has not been fully reduced to bioeconomic units. As an alternative to the Plantationocene, decolonial activists embrace the forces harboured in the pluriversal bodies of the Earth, the modes of existence of nonhuman subjects, of earth-beings unencumbered by the biocentric normativity of monohumanism18.
The protagonist of the decisive struggle for re-existence in the Plantationocene is soil, the cradle and grave of organic life, where bodies and inorganic matter meet and exchange their properties, nurturing and destroying each other in a restless process of decay and regeneration19. Populated by beings of all kinds – stones and leaves, insects, roots, water, air – soil is the stage on which the planetary drama of life and nonlife has been unfolding for the last 450 million years.
When soil is not destroyed by chemical agriculture and plantations, earthworms act as geo-activists and earth-designers, as was already clear to Charles Darwin, who dedicated his last published work to these crawling, digging, and swallowing earth-beings: “All the vegetable mould over the whole country has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canals of worms.”20 Thanks to the digestion of earthworms and their “mental power”21, the planet is not a pure geological being of crystalline rocks. Organic matter and stones flow downwards, decomposed by earthworms into nutrients for life.
Whereas Charles Darwin celebrated the subjectivity of earthworms after observing pots that he kept in his home near London, Vandana Shiva places soil care at the core of Navdanya farm, an agroecological research and activism hub in Uttarakhand in the foothills of the Himalayas. In her decades-long battle against the Green Revolution, Vandana Shiva has allied with a “soil community” of “over one thousand species of invertebrates that may be found in a single m2 of forest soils” and “millions of individuals and several thousand species of bacteria” that dwell in a single gram of lively soil22. In Karl Marx’s reflections on the colonization of Irish soil23 and Amilcar Cabral’s political agronomy in Guinea-Bissau24, in contemporary agroecologies and food sovereignty movements, it is a soil insurgency that liberates the Earth from Western and Westernized global selves.
Notes
(1) Monocultures cover 80% of the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of arable land.
(2) http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/
(3) D. Haraway, N. Ishikawa, S. F. Gilbert, K. Olwig, A. L. Tsing & N. Bubandt, “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos, 2015.
(4) See E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, 1944 and G. Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World, Oxford University Press, 1972.
(5) M. Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World, Polity, 2022.
(6) A. Hopes & L. Perry, Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, Edge Effects Magazine, Nelson Institute, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2019.
(7) Campamento Climático: Pueblos contra el Terricidio organizado por el Movimiento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir, in “Deliberó en el Lof Mapuche Pillán Mahuiza el Campamento Climático Pueblos contra el Terricidio”, Revista Resistencias, 18 feb 2020 (translation by Arturo Escobar). Latin American indigenous and feminist movements speak of Cuerpo-territorio (“body-territory”), an indissoluble assemblage of individual and collective, physico-affective bodies.
(8) V. Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, Zed Books, 1993.
(9) Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. K. McKittrick, Duke University Press, 2015, 21. My understanding of the connection between monohumanism, terricide, and pluriversal ontologies owes to the work of Arturo Escobar, in particular to his forthcoming article entitled Planetary Universalisms / Planetary Terricide: A Pluriversal Perspective.
(10) R. Esposito, Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View, John Wiley & Sons, 2015.
(11) S. Hartman, Scenes of Subjections. Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford University Press, 1997, 5–6.
(12) B. Arneil, “John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism,” Oxford University Press, 1996, 141.
(13) J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Thomas Basset, 1690, II. Xxvii, 26.
(14) Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, 67
(15) M. Meloni, “Provincializing Metabolism,” Somatosphere, January 18, 2020.
(16) Ibid.
(17) S. Wynter, 1492: A New World View. In V. Lawrence Hyatt and R. Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse and the Origins of the Americas, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996, 44.
(18) See F. Luisetti, Nonhuman Subjects. An Ecology of Earth-Beings, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
(19) See J. F. Salazar, C. Granjou, M. Kearne, A. Krzywoszynska, M. Tironi, eds. Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
(20) C. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits, John Murray, 1881, 4.
(21) Ibid. 3.
(22) V. Shiva, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change, Synergetic Press, 2022, 105.
(23) E. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization of Irish soil” (MUSSI Working Paper No. 3), Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute, 2018.
(24) F.M. Carreira da Silva & M. Brito Vieira, “Amilcar Cabral, Colonial Soil and the Politics of Insubmission,” Theory, Culture & Society, 2024.
This article was first published in The Laboratory Planet N°6.