A different point of view. The Secret Life of Plants

In 1973 Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote a book titled The Secret Life of Plants, which opened a new perspectve towards the vegetal world. This book gathers different scientific experiments about the relation of plants and mankind. [1]
One of these experiments was done by Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation specialist who, in 1966, hooked a galvanometer to the leaf of a Dracaena he kept in his office. By doing it, he realized the needle of the polygraph machine would move whenever he thought in burning the plant. How could that be? “Could the plant have been reading his mind?" Asked Tompkins and Bird.
Astonished, he proceeded to do many different experiments. In 2003, he published the book /Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells/ describing 36 years of research in biocommunication, observed electrical responses in plant life and other living organisms [2]. In his research, he concluded that plants have an awareness of their surroundings which also involve an ethical dimension.

By laying film or plate in contact with an object to be photographed and passing through the object an electric current from a high-frequency spark generator which put out 75,000 to 200,000 electrical pulses per second, the Kirlians had come across a way of photographing this "aura" or something akin to it.
Leaves from plants, sandwiched with film between the electrodes of their device, revealed a phantasmagoria hitherto restricted to clairvoyants, a micro-universe of tiny starry points of light. White, blue, and even red and yellow flares were pictured surging out of what seemed to be channels in the leaves. These emanations, or force fields round a leaf, became distorted if the leaf was mutilated, gradually diminishing and disappearing as the leaf was allowed to die. The Kirlians were next able to magnify this luminescence by adapting their photographic processes to optical instruments and microscopes. Rays of energy and whirling fireballs of light appeared to shoot out of plants into space. [4]

Another experiment was popularized for discovering what it was called the aura of the plants. Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was an electrician who, together with Valentina Kirlian started to build a new equipment which is now a days known as Kirlian Camera:










The Kirlians even tried to photography leaves from healthy and sick trees, being able to show the difference between them.

Despite the fact that Backster’s experiments could never be successfully replicated, the book tapped into a long-standing, and seemingly widespread desire, to connect with our vegetal companions. [3]

[1] Peter Tompkins, Christopher Bird, /The Secret Life of Plants/, (New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers India, 1973)
[2] Cleve Backster, /Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells/ (California: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003).
[3] Giovanni Aloi, /Why to Look at Plants/, (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2019), 185
[4] Tompkins, Bird, /The Secret Life of Plants/, 202
[5] Thathachari, Y. T., And S. Pushpa. “The Kirlian Phantom Leaf.” /Current Science 45/, no. 6 (1976): 207–10. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24080008.
[6] /The Secret Life of Plants/, directed by Walon Green, (USA: Infinite Enterprises, 1979)
[7] Úrsula K. Le Guin, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics in Fellowship of the Stars (New York: Terry Carr, Simon & Schuster, 1974) https://xenoflesh.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ursula-k.-le-guin.pdf
[8] Aloi, /Why to Look at Plants/, XX
[9] Aloi, /Why to Look at Plants/, 183
[10] Donna Haraway, /Seguir con el problema/ (Bilbao: Consomni, 2019), 1
[11] Aloi, /Why to Look at Plants/, 184

These experiments, among others, were filmed and they can be watched in the documentary /The Secret Life of Plants/ directed by Walon Green in 1979, which can be seen
Tompkins and Bird’s boom, although it was criticized due to lack of scientific facts, situated plants in a totally different perspective. That opened a crack and speculation came through.
What if plants can really read our thoughts? What if they can feel and react to emotions as we do? What if they are more intelligent than we thought? What else we unknow?
What if...?




What if pointing out these experiments can help us to fins new strategies in order to devise new, speculative approaches capable of decentring fictitious anthropocentric imaginaries that have led us where we are today.
It might proportionate us new approaches to decentre our point of view, to rethink from the boundaries and to avoid what Aloi describes as Plant Blindness: “essentially is our cultural inability to conceive plants beyond the prefixed cultural schemata. It is what which simultaneously reduces them to resources or aesthetic objects.” [8]
This distancing from life leads us to not be surprised when we see everyday thousands of plants abandoned in the trash of supermarkets because they represent a "surplus" for the neoliberal market. It makes us no to be surprised, nor concerned, when we see hundreds of little Christmas trees abandoned at the streets after winter holidays, ready to be piked and transported to the garbage.
It leads us to the supermarkets, to the plastic packaging that distances us from the origin and the
treats it as a taboo. Which politics are hidden behind invisibility?
Recognizing ourselves into an intertwisted and interdependent multispecies net implies to wander which "ethical dimension involved in the possibility of discarding a living being in the garbage, like any other inanimate object”? [9] . How can we establish a new order of things where humans, non-humans and more than humans were we all recognized equally?
We can start with our near sorroundings. With which lives are we sharing our everyday life? How are we recognizing, for example, house plants or gardens?
In a confusing moment we must learn to establish connections which can help us to experiment other temporalities and ways of living and dying in this dense present. Our task is to generate trouble, to trigger powerful responses to devastating events, calm troubled waters and rebuild calm places. [10]



Focusing our attention on plants, then, may can offer us a way to open new, more transversal, relational and affective subjectivities. To inhabit the world with a conscious coexistence and to understand that we always affect and are affected.

Tompkins, Bird, /The Secret Life of Plants/.

"To explain the phantom leaf effect the Russians are said to have postulated the existence of an “energy body” or “bioplasma” associated with living objects. It is as if the Kirlian technique brings to light the “energy body” which would otherwise not be recognized by our sense
In other words, the “energy body” corresponding to the cut away portion of the leaf persists for a while after the excision; it is not perceived by our normal sense but is revealed in the Kirlian image. The question, however, is: is there any compelling necessity at the moment to postulate concepts like “bioplasma” that do not fit in with the accepted ideas of contemporary science? Have we exhausted alternate, simpler explanations based on known principles?
According to Tiller, the luminous cap may be due to discharges from the ionized gas emissions from the solid leaf. These emissions may (a) be caused by vaporization by the arc channels and (b) by a complex process, be confined to the area of the excised portion. We are looking for an explanation in terms of the shape of the air gap around the cut away portion without invoking gaseous emissions from the solid leaf. However, as of now, these suggestions do not account for the shape and size of the luminous cap and as such, do not amount to a concrete explanation. We do hope that further work in our laboratory and elsewhere will soon lead to a better understanding of the nature and significance of this interesting phenomenon."

“Because plants exist on a different time-scale than our, spending time with plants constitutes one of the few access points we have at our disposal to build an emphatic relationship with them, and the domestic sphere can provide a useful opportunity to do just that. [11]

It makes death invisible and

“Do you realise,” the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, “that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?” And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.