Forests as Markets: The Overstory, Neoliberalism, and Other Fictions of Spontaneous Order

Abstract

This essay argues for the deep affinities between neoliberalism and environmental thought that embraces such figures as fungi, swarms, and especially trees. While critics like Rob Nixon turn to trees to promote modes of cooperative biology and plant communication as blueprints for more symbiotic forms of sociality that offer alternatives to “hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption,” they share with neoliberalism a more fundamental ontology of what Friedrich Hayek (after Michael Polanyi) calls “spontaneous order.” Drawing on recent revisionary scholarship on neoliberalism, the first half of the essay argues that neoliberalism is less usefully thought of as an individualist anthropology than as a worldview that subordinates individuals to a nontransparent and distributed higher intelligence—that of the market. The second half of the essay illustrates the uncomfortable overlap between neoliberal and environmental imaginaries through a discussion of Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the novel has praised its power to embody the arboreal life cycle it represents, but it has remained curiously blind to the way the novel’s formal choices ask its characters to submit to the powers of a superior computerized intelligence—a gesture that is conspicuously close to the way neoliberalism compels individuals’ submission to nontransparent market forces. The novel and its critical reception, like particular strands in the environmental humanities more generally, show that the opposition between the environmental imagination and neoliberalism is neutralized by a shared commitment to fictions of spontaneous order.

Forests against Markets

Environmental humanities scholars often define the modes of environmental flourishing they promote in explicit opposition to neoliberalism. They counter the weakness of environmental actions “based on ‘the market’” with “environmental values” fostered by “forms of vital sociality that can explain and motivate change”; they critique the ways “neoliberal science regimes” capture the production of environmental knowledge; or they highlight how neoliberal extractive practices generate an Indigenous environmentalism that can provide inspiration for alternative modes of flourishing and forms of resource rebellion.¹ It is especially in approaches inspired by literary studies that the environmental humanities are called on to provide blueprints for non-neoliberal living—as when Anahid Nersessian upholds an environmentally attuned utopian minimalism as a counter to “the acquisitive dictates of neoliberal modernity” or when Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s material ecocriticism attends to “the agentic properties of material forms” to “induce a transformation in plotting . . . political, cultural, and ethical models.”² A key assignment for the environmental humanities is then imagining “less damaging ways to be human in a shared, living world” and “imagining new narratives and concepts that make necessary change attractive” in the face of the neoliberal fragmentation of knowledge and destruction of the shared lifeworld.³

Rob Nixon’s 2021 Environmental Humanities essay “The Less Selfish Gene” is a helpfully unambiguous statement of the environmental humanities’ ingrained anti-neoliberalism. While Nixon’s influential 2011 book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor homed in on indigent resistance brewing in “the underbelly of neoliberal globalization,” the 2021 essay shifts its focus away from “the environmentalism of the poor” to the field of cooperative biology.⁴ Nixon presents an opposition between the dreary realities of neoliberalism and what he calls “alternative modes of being . . . modes more accommodating of the coexistence of cooperation and competition in human and more-than-human communities.”⁵ The desire for such a more cooperative mode of organization, according to Nixon, explains the extraordinary popular appeal of plant communication and forest dynamics—the cooperation between plants, fungi, and trees in so-called mycorrhizal networks.⁶ The intricate filaments in such networks, which forest ecologist Suzanne Simard has influentially called the “wood wide web,” make it possible, for instance, for trees to “share water and nutrients” and to transmit “chemical and electrical signals through the mycorrhizal network to alert adjacent trees of impending threats.”⁷ In this way, Nixon explains, “cooperative biology” offers an alternative mode of sociality to neoliberalism: it shows that “the self is always already symbiotic, social, collectivized,” and in that way, the forest exemplifies “the science of resilience-through-sharing” rather than, as in the neoliberal worldview, through destructive competition.⁸

Nixon’s approach exemplifies a prominent strand in the environmental humanities: it is committed to a less destructive mode of living than the depraved reality neoliberalism has wrought, and it aims to find “blueprints” for such modes of being in nonhuman realms—in Nixon’s case, in the forest, which he sees as offering a mode of cooperative and interdependent living pointing “in the opposite political direction” from the competition fostered by the market.⁹ The title of Nixon’s essay reflects this ambition to achieve political change by switching metaphors: “The Less Selfish Gene” refers to Richard Dawkins’s 1976 “sociobiology blockbuster” The Selfish Gene, a book whose overriding metaphor promoted a view of nature as organized by ruthlessly selfish competition that was all too compatible with the then emerging neoliberalism of economists like Milton Friedman that was soon to be politically consolidated by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.¹⁰ For this emergent neoliberalism, Nixon explains, “the individual [is] the sacrosanct, foundational unit of existence” playing its part in “a culture of hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption.”¹¹

In the rest of this essay, I argue that Nixon’s essay overstates the opposition between neoliberalism and the modes of living fostered by the environmental humanities; and as that opposition is central to the field, this raises important questions about the field’s overt anti-neoliberal politics. While Nixon emphasizes the different values that neoliberalism and environmental thinking promote—competition versus cooperation—his essay obscures the more fundamental similarities between the ontologies in which they claim to ground their values. In the ontology of neoliberalism, as I show in the next section, individual actions are part of a world of irreducible complexity, uncertainty, and spontaneity in which individuals cannot possibly control the outcome of their actions. This ontology is very similar to the one Nixon finds in the forest. As I show, both imaginaries are animated by a fascination with spontaneous order—with modes of purposive action that are not dependent on individual choice or human control. While Nixon recognizes these similarities when he notes that cooperative biology and neoliberal economics “converge on the same systemic metaphor” of a distributed “megamind” (the forest and the market), he yet insists that the forest and the market present “radically divergent pathways” when we consider them as “blueprints for being.”¹² This formulation obscures that reading a “systemic metaphor” as a “blueprint” is inevitably a matter of imposing particular values (say, competition or cooperation) on reality rather than deriving them. Nixon brings these values to the forest—he does not find them there.¹³

One reason Nixon misses the overlap between neoliberal and environmental ontologies is that his case for forests targets the anthropology of neoliberalism—its investment in “the individual as . . . foundational unit of existence.”¹⁴ It is no coincidence that Nixon retrieves this anthropology from the 1970s. In Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith’s helpful periodization of neoliberalism, this period is called neoliberalism’s economic phase—which soon made way for its political phase under Thatcher and Reagan.¹⁵ In these phases, neoliberalism’s individualist anthropology still mattered, if only because it still had to be argued and conquer the world. The booming scholarship on neoliberalism in the last few years that I draw on in the next section, however, has yielded an understanding of neoliberalism that nuances the continued centrality of the earlier anthropology of the individual and has instead emphasized its nature as a rigorous and sustained project of legal, political, and social engineering that radically curtails the value of the individual.

For Huehls and Greenwald Smith, the present is marked as neoliberalism’s ontological phase. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has transformed itself from an anthropology of competitive individualism to an ontology that no longer really tries to program us as selfish entrepreneurs of the self—no longer tries to, because it no longer has to. In neoliberalism’s ontological phase, Huehls and Smith write, “the market’s neutral omnipresence” is not really interested in our beliefs and desires; it “only requires our presence, our being in and of it.”¹⁶ While this account of neoliberalism has been challenged for too easily naturalizing neoliberal hegemony and neutralizing resistance,¹⁷ it helpfully elucidates that the relation between neoliberal and alternative modes of being not only is a matter of asserting different values and divergent notions of the individual but is constrained by a more encompassing ontology that, I show, subordinates the individual to an epistemologically superior superorganism. Even if that superorganism goes under different names—the market, the forest, the wood wide web—it does not for all that entail a very different politics.

My argument comes in three steps: first, I draw on recent scholarship on neoliberalism to explain the crucial place that spontaneous order plays in its worldview; I then show how this investment in spontaneous order connects neoliberalism to environmental figures—not only forests but also fungi and swarms; and finally, I trace the uncomfortable proximity between environmental and neoliberal ontologies in Richard Powers’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 novel The Overstory—a novel that, as Nixon notes, is deeply inspired by the notion of the “wood wide web.”¹⁸ While criticism of the book has unanimously celebrated its environmentalist credentials and its imaginative and intellectual achievements, it has paid less attention to more sinister neoliberal themes and structures that make it hard to sustain a reading of the novel as anti-neoliberal. That the novel takes shape as “a branching, botanical tapestry” and performs “something like an arboreal life cycle as it unfolds,” I argue, is as much a measure of its neoliberal imaginary as of its environmentalist commitments.¹⁹

Neoliberalism without Neoliberals

It may seem counterintuitive to see neoliberalism as anything but the triumph of the individual—after all, major neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek proudly profess the “ideal of individual liberty”; Michel Foucault famously argued that neoliberal governmentality produces the individual as “entrepreneur of himself”; and vocal critics of neoliberalism like Wendy Brown have described it as the triumph of homo economicus—neoliberalism, for Brown, sees “human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.”²⁰ There is by now a vast library on the production of the resilient and adaptable neoliberal subject, which has in different ways interrogated the continuities and discontinuities between classical liberalism and neoliberalism and the idea that neoliberalism updates liberalism’s focus on rationally self-maximizing individuals who can be left to compete on the level playing field of the market.²¹

Neoliberalism is neither a mere catch-all phrase for everything leftists don’t like nor the name of an avant-garde thought collective, but an eminently practical and coherent institution-building project that has, in the past decades, successfully mobilized the forces of the state, the law, and soft power to, in Quinn Slobodian’s words, “inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy”;²² it has reorganized society and governance to insulate markets from the mood swings of democracy and “to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior.”²³ Neoliberalism is as much opposed to the unpredictability of democracy as it is to the unfreedom of totalitarianism, and has instead condoned (if it has not actively promoted, as it did, for instance, in Pinochet’s Chile) an “authoritarian liberalism” that downgrades the political rights of individuals.²⁴ This focus on neoliberalism’s institutional project does not mean that the neoliberal production of a particular mode of individuality on which earlier scholarship focused becomes obsolete, but it does mean that the reprogramming of the individual becomes part of a more encompassing project in which the fate of the individual is dwarfed by the powers of markets and the impersonal interests of capital. Jessica Whyte has shown how neoliberal regulation and the workings of the market inculcate less a self-reliant attitude than a “submissive subjective disposition”;²⁵ as Melinda Cooper has shown, neoliberalism’s official rhetoric of personal responsibility is undergirded by a concerted conservative moral agenda that uses welfare reform and changes to taxation to police individuals along gendered and racial lines and to nudge them into misery or compliance.²⁶ Neoliberalism, in short, does not need convinced neoliberal subjects. It can do without neoliberals.

Neoliberalism’s challenge to the sovereignty of the individual is apparent not only in the individual’s political and moral disenfranchisement but perhaps most fatally in the individual’s epistemological degradation. If neoliberal skepticism over individual reason is arguably most apparent in the right-wing assaults on scientific expertise and public education, it found its most eloquent and influential early articulation in Friedrich Hayek’s famous intervention in the socialist calculation debate—a debate over the feasibility of economic planning.²⁷ In his 1945 essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek famously argued that in a complex society, there is no single mind—of a central planner, a politician, an academic expert—who can have all necessary knowledge to plan that society. That knowledge, he writes, “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”²⁸ Knowledge, in other words, is never present for one single consciousness but is contained in distributed form in the market. For Hayek, human individuals participate in the market not as rational and well-informed decision makers but as necessarily ignorant actors compelled to make essentially underinformed decisions, which provide the input for the rationality of the market. Rationality, that is, belongs to the market, and humans are epistemologically challenged actors providing data points for that rationality to process. Far from possessing sufficient knowledge, the individual merely reacts to price signals. As Hayek writes: “Prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan.”²⁹ Individual ignorance is a prerequisite for the efficient working of markets: “The most significant part about this system is . . . how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action”—“right” not because they have autonomously decided on the action’s rightness but because actions motivated by price signals are by definition the ones the market will sanction.³⁰

Hayek’s influential work is pervaded by a strict division between the disparaged epistemological capacities of individuals and the superhuman cognitive powers of the market. For Hayek, the market, in Philip Mirowski’s words, is “an information processor more powerful and more efficacious than any human being was or would ever be”; it is an “engine for epistemic truth” that coordinates the merely local and limited knowledge of its participants—that is, of all of us.³¹ Individuals need not aspire to such general knowledge; instead, Hayek promotes the contribution of what he calls “the man on the spot”: an actor who mobilizes his (the gendering is Hayek’s) tacit knowledge “on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surrounding” and of the price signals the market sends to him, but who in no way needs to grasp the bigger picture of how the world works.³² The workings of the market depend on individuals’ “submission to incomprehensible forces and the acceptance of [their] station in life as fate.”³³ This structural reliance on ignorance perversely means that individual ignorance, for Hayek, increases the more complex a society becomes—as he writes, the “very division of knowledge increases the necessary ignorance of the individual.”³⁴ This constitutes less a continuation than a reversal of classical liberalism: if for a classical liberal like Adam Smith rational individuals could count on the ministrations of the invisible hand to orchestrate their self-interested choices into the greatest common good, in neoliberalism, the market compels submission to dictates and compulsions that remain necessarily untransparent to individuals. The ontology of neoliberalism, again, does not require neoliberals.

After the 1940s, Hayek’s work in economics made way for more wide-ranging reflections on the evolution of culture, the role of law and institutions, and political philosophy.³⁵ The notion of “spontaneous order,” which Hayek adopted from polymath Michael Polanyi and which has a venerable pedigree in traditional liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment, takes a prominent place in Hayek’s social thought.³⁶ For Hayek, social order is, in the title of an important 1967 essay, “the results of human action but not of human design.” In his trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek opposes what he calls “constructivist rationalism”—basically, any theory that believes society can be shaped through human deliberation. Instead, Hayek holds that social order emerges spontaneously as the unintended effect of human actions. Through processes of trial and error, “elements have acquired regularities of conduct conducive to the maintenance of order.”³⁷ Order always emerges in particular contexts and is always shaped by the constraints and affordances of the circumstances: “The spontaneous order arises from each element balancing all the various factors operating on it and by adjusting all its various actions to each other.”³⁸ What this means, for Hayek, is that governments should refrain from local interferences, so as not to derail these autopoietic processes; governments should restrict themselves to designing and (if necessary) revising “general rules,” so that spontaneous order can flourish within the parameters of those rules.³⁹

Providing a free space within which different entities interact spontaneously to achieve a livable nonhierarchical equilibrium: this is not all that different from the “wood wide web” that Nixon holds up as an alternative to neoliberalism. Nixon’s focus on the market as a “megamind” and the forest as a “superorganism” slightly misrepresents the market as merely an information processor; Hayek’s later work makes clear that the circulation of information is also a matter of organization and coordination and constitutes the very flesh of society—the market is, in other words, an embodied superorganism in its own right.⁴⁰ Nixon’s opposition between a deeply interconnected forest (“where does the individual tree end and the tangled web of non-tree life begin?”) and a neoliberalism that “den[ies] such connectivity” does not hold: neoliberal subjects are fundamentally enmeshed in the circuits of information that make up society. Such a conflation of biological and semiotic processes is deeply attractive to progressives, inside or outside the environmental humanities; as Jessica Whyte notes, even a progressive political theorist like William Connolly has embraced Hayek’s “embryonic appreciation of spontaneity, creativity, and uncertainty inside freedom.”⁴¹ Accounts of self-organizing systems have historically thrived on a “homology between the human and the nonhuman worlds”—indeed, they typically portray human societies as “a subset of the broader phenomenon of ‘emergent order,’ examples of which can be found on scales ranging from the microscopic to the cosmic.”⁴² As Orit Halpern notes, Hayek’s theory of the market “embodies a new form of environmental intelligence—which is to say a notion of cognition and decision-making dispersed into the world and possessed by entities outside of the human.”⁴³ There is nothing intrinsically anti-environmentalist in the neoliberal vision of spontaneous market order, just as there is nothing intrinsically anti-neoliberal in the environmentalist appeal to mycorrhizal networks. These are two ways of imagining human-nonhuman entanglements that subordinate the agency of the individual to nontransparent forces. This overlap between environmental and neoliberal imaginaries makes an all too neat opposition between the two unsustainable.

Environment and Spontaneous Order: Forests, Swarms, Fungi

The idea of spontaneous order thrives on an analogy between information processing and systemic flourishing. In his synthetic late work Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek explicitly proscribes what he calls “organismal analog[ies]” for his idea of spontaneous order: such analogies, he argues, are too specific, and the different parts of an organism are too firmly localized to render the spontaneity and creativity he is interested in.⁴⁴ Hayek is working with a very static notion of the organic world that, even as Hayek was writing, was being overhauled by the more dynamic ecological account of the environment that emerged in the postwar period. In their book The Environment: A History of the Idea, Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin show that to even imagine something like the environment, to even think environmentally, people needed “a way of imagining the web of interconnection and consequences of which the natural world is made.” And while the notion of “ecosystem” had already emerged in a 1935 paper, it thrived in the postwar period in the context of cybernetic attempts to deploy analogies from thermodynamics to map the natural world.⁴⁵ It was especially in James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis that environmental thought developed concurrently with cybernetic systems theory.⁴⁶ Given Hayek’s own evident debt to cybernetics and control theory—evident in the analogy between the market as an information processor and society as an emergent entity—such ecosystemic accounts of the environment can obviously serve as analogues for the neoliberal account of society.⁴⁷ The affinities to cybernetics show that neoliberal and environmental thinking are not only conceptually but also genealogically implicated with one another.

Analogies between information processing and biological flourishing are omnipresent in the environmental imagination. Nixon’s forest-thinking as well as Suzanne Simard’s notion of the “wood wide web” and the notion of “mycorrhizal networks” deliberately conflate information transfer and the circulation of biomatter. That conflation also characterizes popular environmental notions, of which the swarm and fungi are two examples. In environmental thought, the swarm is a useful figure for rendering distributed agency—as when Jane Bennett urges us to think of action as not simply caused by a subject but by “a swarm of vitalities” or when plant scientist Stefano Mancuso argues for plant’s “swarm intelligence” that allows social interactions to solves cognitive problems “in a way that would be impossible for isolated individuals.”⁴⁸ The notion of the swarm, as Jussi Parikka has noted, flourished in the 1920s in debates over political sovereignty to grasp how entities (like groups of insects) could be “amorphous but coordinated.” Talk about swarms, then, thrives on a cultivated ambiguity between control and spontaneity, between sovereignty and multiplicity; a swarm, unlike an entity bound by the rules of deliberation, is marked by “relationality, dynamism . . . and the fact that it is always ‘more than the sum of its parts.’”⁴⁹ Swarms, like forests, and like neoliberal markets, are instances of distributed knowledge that combine the capacity to process information in supra-individual ways with a kind of unmistakable but hard-to-locate embodiedness. The way the swarm transforms local interactions into delocalized intelligence gives it what Eugene Thacker calls “the life-like properties of emergence and self-organization.” As agency is distributed between individual, collective, and environment, Thacker writes, “the locale of agency is never clear-cut.” The swarm, then, is a fiction of spontaneous order where “global patterns emerge not from a central control, but from aggregates of localized interactions and decisions.”⁵⁰ This self-organizing capacity is as attractive for neoliberals as it is for environmentalists.

The uncomfortable entanglement of neoliberal and environmental ontologies also informs the environmental humanities’ increasing interest in fungi. While it is arguably too early to speak of a veritable “mycological turn,” an imaginative investment in fungi as utopian alternatives to plant- and animal-based biological imaginaries has definitely marked the (reception of the) work of the anthropologist Anna Tsing, and especially her book The Mushroom at the End of the World.⁵¹ Tsing’s work is less beholden to what Nixon calls “systemic metaphor”—it does not inflate mushrooms into a blueprint for living.⁵² Indeed, such a resistance to imaginative inflation is integral to Tsing’s anthropological method. She describes anthropology as “the discipline that pays special attention to learning about the social by ‘being there.’ . . . We learn other socialities by experiencing them, not through blueprints, but as ways of life.”⁵³ Tsing’s practice foregrounds a limited and localized kind of knowledge—a kind of knowledge not too different from the tacit knowledge that informs the decisions of Hayek’s “man on the spot.” Tsing emphasizes that living with mushrooms requires very specific knowledge on where to find them: as she writes, “You visit the spot enough, and you know its seasonal flowers and its animal disturbances; you have made a familiar place in the landscape.”⁵⁴ If for Hayek, it is the individual entrepreneur who intuitively reads the signals of the market on the alert for business opportunities, for Tsing, it is the forager who embodies the ideal combination of (local) know-how and (systemic) ignorance that should also inform the attitude of the anthropologist as she develops “critical descriptions” of “more-than-human socialities [that] are being made, with or despite of clearly formulated human intentions.”⁵⁵

For Tsing, the anthropologist embraces her epistemological limitations in the face of the overwhelming complexities of the human-nonhuman interactions that make up the life of the matsutake mushroom. Tsing’s meticulous descriptions of the lived reality of mushroom foraging and trading operate under the rubric of what she calls “nonscalability”: elements that resist replication and expansion but are inevitably localized and rooted in particular relationships, encounters, and in what she calls “the indeterminacy of transformation.”⁵⁶ If modernity is rooted in the naturalization of expansion (exemplified, for Tsing, in the paradigms of the plantation and the factory), understood as extension without transformation, Tsing’s work on fungi valorizes “nonscalable forms”—realities that threaten to be recuperated, denied, and erased by the violence of upscaling, and that Tsing’s fungi anthropology brings into relief.⁵⁷ This epistemological modesty in the face of “the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest” fosters an account of the world where homogenization is always countered by difference and locality—a reality where local knowledge matters and totalization is impossible.⁵⁸ Like Nixon’s forest-thinking, like the imagination of swarms, like the neoliberal market, then, Tsing’s anthropology projects an ontology where the human individual can only gain limited knowledge and not even the illusion of control in a multiply scaled and irreducibly complex world. If these worlds feel, smell, and taste differently, they do not for all that belong to different ontologies.

Forests as Markets: Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Literature provides a good testing ground for the discomfiting overlap between neoliberal and environmental imaginaries. It is especially the genre of the novel that has traditionally bolstered the idea of the liberal individual—to the extent that Nancy Armstrong has famously written that “the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same”—but that has also helped inculcate the idea that individual flourishing requires a certain accommodation with social forces.⁵⁹ The considerable scholarly literature on neoliberalism’s impact on contemporary literature has traced the renegotiation of the relation between the individual and the aggregate in contemporary fiction, but it has not yet linked that renegotiation to the contemporary novel’s increasing attention to environmental themes, whether under the rubric of cli-fi or of Anthropocene fiction.⁶⁰ While more environmentally attuned novels have, like significant strands in the environmental humanities, tended to oppose symbiotic and cooperative modes of living to desultory models of capitalist growth, the unacknowledged affinities between the environmental and neoliberal imaginaries complicate that project in ways that have not yet been fully explored. In the rest of this essay, I want to trace that complication in what is arguably the most ecstatically received work of environmental fiction (at least since Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road), Richard Powers’s 2018 novel The Overstory. The novel has won several prizes—most notably the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ William Dean Howells Medal. It has, in the years since its publication, also occasioned a remarkable number of academic responses, which invariably celebrate the novel’s formal and thematic ambitions and achievements.

The Overstory is an unapologetically—and, for its author, characteristically—ambitious novel. It interweaves the stories of nine different characters, all of whose lives are deeply marked by encounters with trees. Five of these characters will meet on the American West Coast in the 1990s as part of a group of activists opposing deforestation; four of them go on to live their lives after their actions end in violence, killing one of them. The other four characters are a female biologist who devises an account of plant intelligence that is directly inspired by Suzanne Simmard’s “wood wide web” (the biologist’s book is read by most characters in the novel); a middle-aged couple living mildly unhappy suburban lives for whom “trees mean almost nothing” until their reading of the biologist’s book—after a stroke leaves the husband paralyzed—somehow opens their eyes to trees;⁶¹ and finally, there is Neelay, an Indian American programmer who lost the use of his legs in a childhood fall from a tree that yet inspired him to develop a massively successful multiplayer video game. The novel describes how Neelay is not so much the autonomous designer of the game as a medium through which environmental forces generate a form of artificial intelligence that will, at the end of the novel, be a match for the complexity of the planet and address the environmental crisis in a way, as the plot shows, that merely human design and activism can’t. Neelay, the novel notes, in one of the many instances where agency shifts from individuals to nonhuman entities, follows “a plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.”⁶²

Plant intelligence not only plays a thematic role; it also structures the novel: the novel is divided into four parts named after the parts of a tree—“Roots,” “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” If the first part still juxtaposes the individual lives of the characters, the “Trunk” part shows how their lives, as the criticism on the novel ceaselessly repeats, “interweave,” “entwine,” and “interknit” until they appear as part of what one critic calls “a branching, botanical tapestry.”⁶³The Overstory, in the words of another critic, performs “something like an arboreal life cycle as it unfolds”; it is the structure it describes and celebrates.⁶⁴ The novel’s “dendriform structure” underscores its ecological message: the insight that human life is deeply entangled with other life-forms and, crucially, that individual human cognition is decidedly inferior to the distributed intelligence of plants.⁶⁵ The novel explicitly echoes the belief—familiar from cybernetics, and informing both neoliberal and environmental imaginaries—that patterns of organization not only structure life but also generate knowledge. “Trees,” the novel remarks, “are doing science. Running a billion field tests”; late in the novel, when Neelay has developed a massive artificial intelligence infrastructure that uses satellites to study the planet, it notes: “In the time it takes the man to form one self-judging thought, a billion packets of program pass over.”⁶⁶ In the novel’s ontology, it matters less whether this distributed intelligence is located in forests or in computers than that it generates a form of knowledge that no human design can match.

This emphasis on the epistemological insignificance of the individual, the intangible qualities of distributed intelligence, and the complex entanglement of all things is as close to environmental as it is to neoliberal ontologies. As the existing readings of the novels have emphasized its environmental orientation, I want to highlight a few elements that resonate with neoliberal commitments. While the novel’s thematics are clearly environmentalist, its key formal features—notably characterization, temporal organization, and narrative perspective—show how it is inescapably a novel of the current ontological phase of neoliberalism; The Overstory, in other words, is pervaded by neoliberal notions and commitments that prevent it from making the case environmental humanists like Nixon want it to make.

Neoliberalism, I have argued, is marked by a tense combination of an official exaltation of individual freedom and the individual’s moral, political, and epistemological degradation. The Overstory, in a comparable way, combines the downgrading of individual and collective human intelligence with a sustained formal commitment to individual character: no less than nine characters are afforded a deep and meticulously rendered interiority; their feelings, thoughts, and motivations are shown to matter, in a way that hedges the novel’s overriding disdain for individual intelligence. In his reading of the novel, Paul K. Saint-Amour has noted that The Overstory “brushes the individualism of the novel against the grain”;⁶⁷ for Adam Grener, it “juxtapos[es] realist and human-centered conventions” with an “arboreal chronotope” that somehow never fatally cancels the human scale.⁶⁸ The novel remains deeply invested in the individual fates of nine characters, and that feature alone balances out its official biocentrism. The Overstory, in other words, continues to be marked by the tension between the bourgeois individual and the larger patterns under which that individual must be subsumed; the fact of that subsumption is not altered by identifying that pattern as a forest.

In The Overstory, that subsumption is largely shaped by the narrative perspective and the temporal organization of the story. The story is told by a nonovert omniscient narrator who effortlessly penetrates the minds of the protagonists. The ease of this omniscient access is underscored by the novel’s remarkable (but little remarked upon) use of the present tense as it moves through and connects the lives of its characters. This sustained present tense is combined with a structural prolepsis, as the omniscient narrative instance intermittently indicates that it knows the fate of the characters—Neelay, the programmer, for instance, is introduced as “the boy who’ll help change humans into other creatures”—a characterization that anticipates the ending of the novel.⁶⁹ As Mark Currie has shown, such instances of narratological prolepsis inform a certain “depresentification” of the recounted events, which are robbed of their open-endedness, as the reader is reminded that characters’ fates have already been decided.⁷⁰ For Currie, the open-endedness of characters’ fates is always overshadowed by the fact that their story, by the time we read it, has already been written and is already foreclosed; The Overstory’s narrative technique, then, already cancels the illusion of freedom during the experience of reading the novel. The individuals in the novel are not free: the omniscient narrator has the power to make them present, but it intermittently reminds the reader that it has also always already decided what is going to happen to them. At times, The Overstory indulges the omniscient narrator’s sovereign power—its freedom to roam, to access, to decree—for instance, when it slows down one of the characters’ stroke to three excruciating pages, or when it dispassionately relates the death by electrocution of one of the characters, only to resurrect her a few pages later, in an extravagant display of narrative power.⁷¹ If the novel officially celebrates symbiosis and cooperation, there is also something deeply antihuman, even misanthropic, about the way it presents the lives it connects.

The Overstory’s sustained concern with the relation between epistemological privilege and superhuman power points us to its uncomfortable affinities with neoliberalism. In the ontology of neoliberalism, remember, individuals are merely necessarily ignorant participants in systems that transcend them; their main use is as individuals “on the spot” mobilizing their local and tacit knowledge to provide input for the superior information processor that is the market—an information processor that can be left to its own devices once a set of general rules has been put in place. Throughout, The Overstory is obsessed with denigrating human ways of knowing while the computerized processing power of nonhuman knowledge is celebrated, as when it opposes literary knowledge to computerized data science; celebrates “the planet’s supreme intelligence” that leads it to produce signs and inscriptions that humans cannot read; complains that occasional human insights dissolve when you “step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo”; and designates humans as the wrong kind of creature to read “this antique, illegible almanac” that is the forest.⁷² As Marco Caracciolo has remarked, on the level of plot, where human activism fails and artificial intelligence rules, the novel puts forward a fundamental hierarchy between the cognitive powers of a “symbiotic network of plants and fungi” and “the human characters’ failed attempts at coordinating their actions.”⁷³

The impossibility for human intelligence to transcend its local ignorance is figured in the novel through the feeble elevated constructions the activists design to oppose deforestation: there is a fragile lookout hammock “which won’t stop rocking” and where one of the characters, a graduate student, discovers the limitations of his scientific methodology as he aims to interview the activists he will later join.⁷⁴ The construction, it turns out, far from providing epistemological advantages, is as frail as the trees the activists aim but fail to protect: while they talk, “a tree as thick as [the grad student] is tall rips away and smashes down the slope below”; “needle and pulverized wood cloud the air.”⁷⁵ A little later, the tripods they have erected are destroyed by an excavator; a crow’s nest—another all too human contraption for superior vision—falls down and injures one of the protestors.⁷⁶ Later on, when he is in prison for his ecoterrorism, one of the characters finds himself in what the novel describes as “a cell larger than the platform he once shared with two other people two hundred feet in the air.”⁷⁷ The illusion of elevated or even adequate human knowledge is erased by the superior power of the state: “The state takes charge of him.”⁷⁸

If man-made fantasies of elevation are debunked, the computerized processing power of nonhuman knowledge is celebrated. Near the end of the book, Neelay loses control over the gaming company he created and devotes himself to the creation of algorithms that can gain knowledge of the complexity of life. These algorithms have the power to “swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns.”⁷⁹ The algorithms deploy satellites that “head off to scout the globe” and read the signs of planetary life that human life is too ignorant to read or coordinate.⁸⁰ So what becomes of human individuals in this fantasy? The most enlightened individuals—the coders hired by Neelay—provide the general rules within which the “learners,” as the algorithms are called, can perform their epistemological magic (“the codes tell the listeners nothing except how to look”; Neelay cannot control the algorithm, “but he has nudged it along”)—not unlike neoliberal lawgivers providing the legal framework within which market forces can be left to themselves.⁸¹ The rest of us are merely there to live by the dictates of the market and to provide the data that superior information processors can put to work.

Submission to the incomprehensible compulsion of market forces is central to the neoliberal appeal to spontaneous order;⁸² because the workings of the market cannot be made transparent, order relies on individuals accepting their ignorance. It is no coincidence that Maidenhead, the one character who dies during the protests, is also the one character who has what one critic has called “a wide-angle view of planetary interdependence,” as she hears “the utterances of a botanical intelligence unavailable to most human animals.”⁸³ Maidenhead is sacrificed, as if the novel refuses to sanction such immodest claims to deeper knowledge. The final scenes of The Overstory provide an almost too eerily perfect image of how Hayekian “men on the spot” assemble to allow the superior cognitive forces of the market to comprehend the complexities of planetary life. One of the former ecowarriors meets what turns out to be a Native man in the forest—and this “native” status, it seems, indicates tacit and place-bound knowledge. The men, we read, “don’t trade names” but accept their job of anonymously assisting the algorithmic program of superior reading.⁸⁴ The ad hoc crew works together assembling the remains of dead trees into shapes for the satellites to read—into “a gigantic word legible from space.”⁸⁵ “In the blink of a human eye,” the superhuman learners recognize this word as “the word life has been saying, since the beginning.”⁸⁶ The human assemblers, crucially, are denied the power to read this planetary message: we read that they “regard the design,” they “gaze . . . on the message,” they “half grasp . . . each other’s chants”—they grasp and stare but do not understand. As Garrett Stewart notes in his reading of the novel’s culminating scene, it leaves the reader with “a cross-hatch of vegetal legibility ultimately available only from satellite vantage.”⁸⁷ The individuals, like the reader, are only spectators witnessing “the fallen trunks of trees . . . fashioning their own message.”⁸⁸ This moment emblematizes the fantasy of submission that informs this final scene and more subtly permeates the novel as a whole.

Remarkably, the critical scholarship on the novel has emphasized how, once readers filter out the novel’s all too explicit environmentalist editorializing, the novel’s complexity positions the reader in a position of submissive incomprehension. Garrett Stewart understands the novel’s undeniable complexity as a way to “attune [the reader] to the secret ‘semaphores’ of forest life”;⁸⁹ rather than engaging the reader in an act of communicative address, the book discloses “arboreality’s own elusive communicative system.”⁹⁰ Such disclosure and attunement crucially rely on the reader’s ignorance: as Stewart writes, after pointing out a striking number of resonant textual details, “If it all seems too much to hold in mind at once, it is.”⁹¹ Paul K. Saint-Amour, in his reading of the novel, makes a similar point, as his reading depends on revealing a metalepsis so subtle that it is almost impossible to capture on a first reading of the novel.⁹² If, as Nixon has it, we turn to the environment to find “blueprints” for living, The Overstory powerfully suggests that those blueprints are not ours to read, only to live. The actual reading and understanding is the job of superior forces—algorithms, markets, wood wide webs, or other fantasies of spontaneous order.

Coda: Living Tapestries

In his case against what he sees as neoliberalism’s ingrained individualism, Rob Nixon, in the essay with which I began, dutifully quotes Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”⁹³ Nixon counters with a quotation from The Overstory, where a character declares: “There are no individuals. There aren’t even species. Everything in the forest is the forest.”⁹⁴ I have shown how this declaration of connectedness does not amount to an anti-neoliberal politics. What further collapses the distances between neoliberal and environmental imaginaries is a little-known restatement of Thatcher’s point, which follows only a few lines further in the Woman’s Own interview where she denied the existence of society: in this iteration, Thatcher states that “there is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people.”⁹⁵ No society, then, but a “living tapestry,” or a web, or a “wood wide web”—or any other organic metaphor that can help us imagine spontaneous coordination beyond the individual. Environmental humanities scholarship, among other things and against scholars’ own intentions, often functions as a portfolio of such images—images that furnish, to quote Thatcher’s continuation of her restatement, “the beauty of that tapestry.” Nixon ends his essay with a return to his organizing opposition: “As neoliberalism rends the social fabric and the web of life, forest defenders are reaching out to build vital coalitions of repair.”⁹⁶ In the current, ontological phase of neoliberalism, that web is the world we all inhabit, and it merely perpetuates itself through a dynamic of rending and repair. The environmental humanities have perhaps been less useful in showing us how to unweave that web than in training us to admire it.

Notes

References