ABSTRACT
Contemporary investigations into plants’ signalling capacities have gradually begun to overturn conventional wisdom that would cast plants as essentially passive and noncommunicative entities (Gagliano et al. 2017). Given the abundance of outspoken plants that appear in areas as diverse as religion, mythology, art, literature, and film, it seems humans have long held some intuition of plants’ propensity for communication. Historical depictions of plants as speaking subjects who bear the traditional markers of human individuality prefigure more subtle forms of anthropomorphism that emerge within the contemporary study of plant signalling. However, while it seems abundantly clear that depictions of plants as vocal or talkative subjects rely on a dubious projection of human traits onto vegetal bodies, perhaps less obvious is the fact that portrayals of plants’ silence are also marked by anthropomorphic distortions. By exploring how a distinctly human mode of silence came to be ascribed to vegetation, this chapter offers an explanation of why the revelation of vegetal communicativity has left so many of us straining to make out a secret voice hidden within plants. The following pages will consider how the study of plant communication has fallen under the influence of a notion of silence still caught within the gravity of the human voice. This study represents a small contribution to a burgeoning field in the environmental humanities dedicated to enriching our understanding of vegetal agency and re-evaluating the stakes of human–plant relations.
