Plans and Specters: Necropolitical Dynamics in a Hogweed Landscape

The hogweed landscape of Western Bohemia — a region that, from the second half of the 20th century onwards, has been heavily pervaded by giant hogweed, considered one of the most threatening so called ‘invasive alien plant species’. Hogweed has shaped this landscape not only as a biological organism and a symbol with near-mythical qualities and impacts but gradually also as an object of a specific form of discourse and governance. I refer to this as necropolitics, for unlike biopolitical ‘letting die’ so that others may prosper, its institutional design is directed solely at mandatory hogweed eradication, without any direct relation to other forms of human or other-than-human life. Despite decades of eradication efforts and hundreds of millions of Czech crowns allocated solely toward this goal, hogweed persists and continues to spread. The question that drove me into the field was: “How is this possible?” 

In my research, I aim to capture both sides of the equation—power and governance, and its weedy excess. The logic of the necropolitical apparatus, with its attempts at rational planning and securing control over the ‘invasive intruder’, reveals a complex choreography of strategies, techniques, and mechanisms meant to achieve it. Equally compelling, however, is the emergent, unruly vitality of the hogweed itself, which sprouts from a host of historical naturecultural entanglements as well as from the practical limitations and contradictions of the necropolitics itself. Matter (and the atmosphere animated by it) cannot be so easily subdued, yet efforts to not give in to this fact have shaped the hogweed landscape to the present day. Through the case of this charismatic plant, I illustrate the ambivalent effects and consequences of how a decidedly modernist ontology embodied in the so-called ‘war on hogweed’ materializes amid one small post-socialist Anthropocenic patch—as well as the lines of flight that lead (or might lead) out of it.