Becoming Plant Nonetheless

Abstract

The seventh chapter studies the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors and visual artists who seek to move humans toward a vegetal future. What might it mean to think speculatively with plants today? Can humans become plants in order to become critically postconscious, posthuman, feminist, and queer subjects? If so, this process takes place through assemblages with fiction and other technologies of embodiment. This chapter takes up the plant as an engine of speculation that still works to help humans negotiate their relationship to a late modernity that seems always on the verge of ending—a constant calamity that might nonetheless still enable a new way of living and being. The focus of this chapter includes contemporary plant theory, plant-oriented visual art, and plant fictions that generate a “virtual reality” of becoming plant.