” Vegetal communication is not merely a linear, mechanistic response to stimuli. It is a change across or through a whole network. For example, when one cuts sagebrush, it gives off a volatile chemical that helps wild tobacco resist grasshoppers and cutworms. Each change is a change in the whole. The chemical language of plants does not have a fixed semiotic structure. Plants can use old chemical words in new ways or in new contexts with different meanings. The language of plants is a collective affair in which plants can eavesdrop on one another and use this shared knowledge to prepare themselves ahead of time for attacks. Underground communications travel through vast fungal mycorrhizal networks, affecting numerous bodies in the process.
Recent discoveries have even shown that plant relatives across a wide range of taxa can recognize one another using specific leaf gestures and light signals, and use this to work together cooperatively. Plant language thus always emerges in an embedded context and is not a fixed property of the organism or the chemical compound. Plant language is a material language. It is a performative kinetic act that changes in tension with the world and with or across other plants.
Plants can even use biochemical cues to summon the predators of herbivore insects that endanger them. They can regulate their root volumes in a tensional response to their neighbors. They can share and distribute nutrients among different plants. They can release chemicals into their leaves to ward off predators. Root apices even have brain-like sensitivities to all kinds of minerals and dangers that can affect the whole plant.
All of this trans-plant signaling and communication takes place through a material kinetic movement of volatile gases, chemicals, light, and electrical pulses that touch and move through a tensional network. Material signaling thus requires a tension in which different bodies hold together and apart in a network across which material signals flow.”
