The world of insects appears throughout Hugh's book as a world apart but accessible. Access depends on - and in turn cultivates - certain sensibilities and practices of care, communication, and curiosity. For insect lovers the world of insects is a variously a refuge, a world of fancy, a domain of wonder and a site to discover truths. The book itself manages to capture and co-produce this effect, and as a result, I feel that the sort of reading it demands is not the one I was able to give. The book is the sort that Calvino might say sits nicely on a shelf and calls for attention, for visits, and for quite consultation. It isn't asking for the sort of weekend read to which I too often subject my books. There are then, certain similarities between the book's world and the insect worlds it describes: a form of presence that tempts engagement but refuses prescriptive articulation; an evocation of excess and multiplicity that requires rekindling relationships as opposed to sustained interrogation; participating in a world apart, within, alongside, dispersed and concentrated amidst the others. Doesn't the book require similar forms of care and communication from its reader as do the insect worlds within it? It does, and it (or at least a more carefilled reading of it that I had a chance to give) teaches us something about the possibilities and stratgies for care and communication across worlds and differences.
Prof. Raffles’s book was fascinating, funny, and most of all delightful, though I have to wonder if by placing it after Serres on the syllabus he was stacking the deck. Perhaps, on the other hand, it’s only my own inclination toward the empirical that made his many essayistic stories of people and their bugs seem so much more compelling than the theoretical parasite. What struck me most of all about this book was the range and depth of feeling; like Lingis, Prof. Raffles manages to weave theoretical and intellectual questions, personal reflection, poetic images and language, and concrete “thick description” together with thoughtfulness and feeling.
By probing the way people and insects relate, and especially the way that people try to think into the lives of insects, Prof. Raffles opens up questions and meditations that make both bugs and the people who love them seem at once more human and more strange. I would have to return to the text to draw out a thesis more explicit than “humans have rich, multifaceted interactions with insects,” but argumentation seems secondary to the description and recurring motifs of how humans turn toward the insect realm in highly emotional (and cultural) ways. The section that makes me think most about the structure of the book is the chapter “On January 8th, 2008, Abdou Mahamane Was Driving Through Naimey…,” regarding the locusts in Africa, because in a way it seems like this chapter drops the engaging and complex theme of the imaginative leap into the insect’s umwelt and gives us a simpler relationship, wherein the insects are both food and foe yet “ontologically” separate from the human. This is notable mostly because it highlights for me how slippery and interesting are the other chapters, where we are invited to imagine alongside von Frisch, Hess-Honager, Dunn, Mitsuya, Prof. Raffles and the many other picturesque characters in this book as they try to plumb, in-itself and for-itself, the bugness of the bug.
This book is a celebration to an ultimate other (maybe The ultimate other), our insect friend. What a breath of fresh air after Serres! (Not to say The Parasite wasn’t fun). How wonderful and inspiring to read, be reminded and experience again (with kawaii-filled mushi eyes) these little, and amazingly impressive creatures we try so very hard to forget when we are sleeping snug in our beds. I don’t know about all of you, but I am letting the covers on my bed touch the floor again tonight. It all feels quite free.
With so much to work with here, I somewhat randomly want to point out the ethics/the torn individual/the contradictorian. A few examples: Though a great admirer of insects, the noise of the cicadas drove Fabre nuts (47)? And von Frisch, who so lovingly observed his bee friends, so calmly explains that if you cut a bee in two, it continues slurping up sugar water (286)! What about Professor Raffles and Michael and their “ethical suspension”? They were so caught up in the moment, so excited, so filled with life that they completely lost the other half of themselves—forgetting, not caring, not worrying that this was cricket slavery, or at the very least cricket cruelty. And as Professor Raffles appropriately writes, this suspension was not surprising for “the affinities are not so visceral; these are insects, after all—no red blood…” (88).
But visceral affinities or not, insects move, they are busy, indifferent, but powerful (6). They are disciplined organized and intelligent (On locusts, 198). They deserve our respect, even if we have to kill one or two of them. Evoking the old ways of Shintoism (Korean shamanism or any form of animism for that matter) the doors have swung open once again, allowing us to consider how we might share a world with them. But, with so many of them, where do we begin? With the crickets? The spiders? The bees? Who is more important?
I am ready for those Zzzzzzs (of Zen and the art of), but only because I’ve moved through so many ideas, sentiments, memories, histories… I agree with Jacob. It’s not the kind of book to read over a weekend… Yet, I am happy that my mind is buzzing. I am reminded of my own insect intimacies, fears, interactions, and stories. I think about Yoichiro, an entomology student acquaintance who purposefully held an insect to his neck to release the eggs of a botfly, so that he could feel closer to this animal as it grew under his skin (he happens to be Japanese… insect lover?). And then I remember how this same kind of larval release caused such extreme anxiety for a family, their horror as they watched the parasite grow in the cheek of their little girl. Yes, there are parallel worlds, paradoxes (or confusions), that are multiple and interactive. The Illustrated Insectopedia does not just inspire storytelling, it also generates information and theory, and networks. It follows paths of seeing, hearing, feeling and remembering, translating, exploring and collecting desires and difference through the people, animals, and sentiments that emerge and reemerge.
Raffles explores intimacies, revealing and complicating ethics of management and desire, through ambiguous relationships that include experimentation, collecting, translating, witnessing, killing, loving. This Insectopedia brings scale into focus through identification and difference, the links and associations between beings and qualities of being, and the actions that result from blurred boundaries, mirrors, stand-ins, metaphors, subjects and objects for and of nightmares, terror, joy and connection… And I was gladly infested/infected, with just one place of confusion (for now): the Shanghai cricket and the San Diego fly cannot really be compared, can they (106)? Can even the lab and the gambling casino? Or the crickets in Niger, and Jiminy cricket? These are different animals, contexts, that can exist as multiple, in relation, as is shown otherwise, throughout the book. I like how they exists next to each other, like Maria Sibylla Merian’s dynamic interactive worlds, in relation to the other scientist-artists, theorists-animal lovers… we are brought in to these worlds, and implored to go deeper (smaller).
The Illustrated Insectopedia renders a densely populated world where creatures big and small work in concert (albeit not always intentionally) to variably demand attention, cultivate love, precipitate disaster, insist their way into recognition, and show gratitude for the acknowledgment. Toying with the notion of the comprehensive, the text's A-Z systematicity undoes itself at every turn. “My nightmares” signaled by “M”, “Ex-Libris” announced by “X”, The Illustrated Insectopedia simultaneously thwarts and takes seriously basic referent/reference relationships by pointing to the inadequacy of the category “insect”, introducing the reader to some of the many friends, foes, and counterparts that are both known and unknowable within it, and drawing attention to its many places in a variety of worlds. From the start, the text beckons us to take notice of these worlds, not so that we can “give voice,” nor so that we can pretend some kind of undifferentiated sameness, and not as some shallow celebratory endeavor: “There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes” (14). Acting sometimes as a guide, sometimes as a provocateur, and sometimes as a participant in shared mysteries, author-Hugh weaves us through tales of human-insect relations that implore us, finally, to genuinely encounter.
Traveling among the insects and humans in The Illustrated Insectopedia, as they perform in art in Germany or production in Shanghai, I am struck most by the notion of transcendence. There is the physical elevation of Glick’s flying moths (11) or the Aristotleian placement of insects at the outer realms(113); the temporal locating of Hoefnagel’s 1561 dragonflies (120); the spiritual/moral references throughout the text (108, 121-141, 249 among others). The physical, historical, and spiritual realms where insects can be found culminate to a realization of absence: an incredibly well-researched point that the insects, with whom we cohabitate, escape us.
Raffles writes, “Unease has a stubborn source, unfamiliar and unsettling. We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures. The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or redemption.” (41) The text is an exploration into ethical understanding, reanimating this “deep dead space” through those whose focus is the insect - through proximity or choice.
Jacob asks what kind of book Hugh’s Insectopedia is. “The book is the sort that Calvino might say sits nicely on a shelf and calls for attention, for visits, and for quiet consultation.” A reference book, then? An encyclopedia?
The Enlightenment science --and its master book, the Encyclopedie-- opposed reasoned classification to the dangers and impurities of wonder, marvel and enthusiasm: the very spirit of the Insectopedia. I liked how the book played with the forms and desires making up encyclopedias. There is the the urge to include everything (“I’m trying hard to include them all”, 323) and the realization that it will never be possible, at least not if the method values intimate knowledge and enthusiasm over statistical modelling and disinterest. Insectopedia is an appreciation of chance encounters (human-human, and human-insect), idiosyncracies, biographies and histories; it performs the wonder and multiplicity of the insect worlds by simultaneously indexing classification and resisting it. There can be no “I for insects”.
(As we know from Borges, animals can be classified as follows: “(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”)
Just as Derrida impugned the category of “the animal” at large, Raffles is offended and troubled by how unfortunate and mischievous is the category of “insects” too. How much diversity gets compressed and swiped off in a single word, he comments, and especially worse, when, for the most part, this taxonomical category has played the role of the negative referent!
Hugh's enchantment with insects brought forth a peculiar and delightfully crafted artifact: an insectopedia. Every entry has a story line of its own, pictures of and words on bees, crickets, moths, lice, flies, and others (I’m missing many but can’t remember their names in English, sorry) are accompanied by fascinating short biographies of “insect-people”. It is a voyage through different ways of relatedness, convivial and hostile, between people and insects. As Julienne pointed out (and Mateusz too for what I just read), there is a play (or tension?) with the encyclopedic style here. Through out the book there are constant references to the limits of rigorous scientific abstraction while at the same time the equivalence of multiple ways of knowing and living is rescued, appreciated, valued. The message is important, one of the many: it is about rediscovering our connections and empathies towards insects without forgetting that there are points of deep disconnection and yes, irritation. Difference is recognized.
How do you write about insects without framing the text within an established taxonomy or within a singular category of ‘Insects’? How do you write about insects and humans, insects and history, insects and politics, insects and art, insects and fear, insects and religion, insects and culture, etc.?
From “Air” to “Zen and the Art of Zzzzzs,” each chapter speaks to its theme/subject and the presence of insects (in each chapter) becomes the common thread that ties the book together. Reading The Illustrated Insectopedia, I was amazed at how much I was reminded of not only my encounters and memories of cicadas, beetles, ants, flies, maggots, and so on, but of histories, politics, fears, experience, etc. For example, reading about Fabre’s popularity in Japan reminded me of his popularity in Korea which linked this similarity to the colonial history of Korea (that officially began in 1910). For me, this relationship between insects and history opens up new ways of thinking about history (a new approach to history). It offers an entry point in which different kinds of narratives become possible (i.e. a narrative that is not centered on an ‘event’ or a narrative not dependent on linear temporality) and also points out that which was ‘unseen’ but always present. Suddenly noticing the presence of insects within these narratives, I can’t help but think that all things are related in the world and that there are more ways of approaching and writing about it where things and beings, such as insects, do matter. On the other hand, I am not sure what this all means. What does it mean (or does it mean anything) that I will be thinking about Hugh thinking about Kikuo Itaya (who lives among cockroaches) when I kill a cockroach?
Halfway home from the library, in the early hours, having just read the last line of The Illustrated Insectopedia, I stop. Take my headphones from my ears, stand still for a moment, and do my best to look and to listen. What else was there, audible through the rushing Manhattan traffic, visible past the flashing lights of the city? That “there are other worlds around us”, Raffles insists, is “the first thing not to forget” (14). I scold myself. Had I already forgotten? On further thought, and having continued on my way, I find some solace in remembering what else the book seems so strongly to advise: be patient. Hesse-Honegger, Fabre, Von-Frisch didn’t build their insect-relationships without careful hours, months, years of squinting through microscopes, painting bees, laying on the ground, absolutely still, lens in hand. In a world in which we are all “too often…contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations”, an ontological rupture of the kind Raffles moves towards takes work, thought, patience (14).
The hardest thing of all, it seems, is understanding these other worlds not only in relation to ours – the bees are intelligent, like us; crickets feel pain, like us; insects enjoy sex, like us – but on their own terms. And indeed, Raffles grapples with questions of language, of intention, of perception: “can these tiny insects truly speak for themselves?” (166). In the face of rigid epistemological divides, which Raffles’ multitude of insect-loving characters are seeking tirelessly to cross (art/science, poetics/science, social/biological science), it is ultimately the breadth and intimacy of ethnography, utilized with such rigor and such tenderness in The Illustrated Insectopedia, which provides ontologically subversive answers, fascinating epistemological insights, “opens up entire worlds” (323).
Being so steeped in critique that too often borders on denunciation, and theoretical frameworks that are rendered inaccessible to so many even as they speak about our connections and relatedness, Hugh's book is, to echo what others have said, a breath of fresh air. Alongside provocations to learn from and wonder about the many small, distinct creatures with whom we inhabit this world - and his urgings that we question the grounds upon which we establish those co-habitations - there is a persistent generosity towards all the actors involved in these intimate (and sometimes intimately violent) encounters. Talking so other students about the book, someone (not from our class) asked, "What kind of, you know, intervention is he making?" I couldn't quite answer. It seemed so reductive in comparison to the care with which he attends to the paradoxes and difficulties of trying to live with (and live differently with) insects. The pleasures of reading a well-crafted text, as we've talked about, can open up other forms of dialogic practices that aren't simply focused on pulling out and articulating arguments. Yet that isn't to say that Hugh is not making an "intervention," of course. At least part of this intervention is to encourage humans to think and act more generously, more attentively, towards humans and nonhumans alike, about our differences from one another and our deeply entwined histories and livelihoods - and, as academics, to produce this same kind of generosity and attentiveness in our analyses.
In the spirit of all things insects, I wonder if people have seen Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno series of short films? Season one is on the sex lives of insects. Reading about the language of bees especially reminded me of the bee one:
"How shallow are our questions"? I think this is a wonderful text, and one of the things it accomplishes is to make us see the world in light of insects as, and our intimate relationships to them. Insects are among the many things that often get left out of our picture of the world, as seen through ethnography at least and the pieces are very effective at creating a strong visual presence of how dense they are. I know Hugh was reticent about letting us read his text, and I will agree with other who have posted that it is quite good: a fun read. However, I also wanted to ask a few questions of Hugh.
I think that the way in which you weave yourself into the book is quite wonderful and I am curious about how you see yourself as “ethnographer” and who are your subjects? Mostly, I am concerned about you addressing the question that you asked us a couple of weeks ago about how we might read a certain text as being “ethnographic”. How do you consider this to be ethnographic? Or maybe, a better question would be to ask how do you want people to read it ethnographically, and what do you hope it offers to ethnography? In your mind was there any sort of minimum criteria of that you felt like you needed to address?
"The Illustrated Insectopedia" presents humans and insects as inhabiting the world together, not as equals through human eyes, perhaps, but existing within each others domains. Insects appear within our vocabularies as labels and descriptions, decorative inspiration (or as decorations), or even entertainment. What this book effectively depicts is how humans include insects, along with other animals, within a pool of human interests and human knowledge. We will kill a member of a species (for instance the plane with tacky paper) just to study its anatomy or display it in a museum. Crush films fetishize the killing of insects and small animals, raising moral and ethical questions, yet we squash spiders everyday without qualm.
What a book like "...Insectopedia" illustrates are questions as to whether insects are 1) intelligent enough engage communication with other species. Also, 2) does their indeterminable awareness of existence warrant our ethical consideration, 3) why do we even feel a need to debate whether insects are intelligent? What purpose is served by assuming human ascendancy over other forms of life? 4) Why does an insect's difference in body or consciousness devalue their lives?
In a sense, the veneration, fear, and disregard of insect life is reinforced by our inability to directly communicate with them. And yet, we infuse their lives into our own, as if insects were physical parts of our language and our way of imagining the world. In a way, by titling the book "The Illustrated Insectopedia," humans are drawn into the insect's world.
First and foremost, aesthetics: the prose was meticulous and lucid, it made the whole book much more accessible (and that much more enjoyable), and I appreciate that. In addition, invoking the alphabet (structurally) as a methodological tool really allowed for a diverse movement between sites of application, themes of conversation- and it really reminded me of Deleuzean ‘schizoanalysis’. This movement, held together by the ethnographic narrative (which gave me a sense of continuity, as if I were traveling through the book, through each ‘site’), was effective in continuously de-centering/ disrupting (maybe like Hesse-Honegger’s work) the position of the observer- such that each letter, each site opened a new space of visibility, a new perspective, a new experience. Particulars: One line resonated pretty deeply when I think of the position of the observer with regard to nature, animals, et al., or better still the position of nature itself- “I at once thought I was hearing him identify a quality in wildness that I like to hold onto, an ineffable, holistic quality that escapes molecular logic.” [77] Usually, I tend to dismiss such statements as romantic, maybe somnambulant, or maybe just symptomatic of a particular method’s limitations. But lately, I’ve been inclined to be more open to such a proposition, and again it conjures connections to Heidigger’s ‘poor in world animal’. What I was thinking was that this ‘ineffable quality’ really reminded analytically of something caught in between Serres’ milieu and Jacob von U.’s umwelt: a ‘quality’ that was, in functional terms, a combination of sensation and mediation, a system of uniqueness, intervention, and action (within all things, ‘holistic’). And if we consider the unidirectional flow of Serres dynamic parasitic system, we know that additionally “As soon as the medium intervenes, the ray of light wanders about the world.”- Serres [p.70]. What I think then is this: I think there is a hope, and more so a realistic (i.e. real) instantiation that there exists such an ineffable quality in the wild of the world, but I wonder if considering such is an assumption to bracket within a method is proper with respect to the mechanics of the functional world. What I mean is that human systems organize, name, neuter, etc. so much of the topographical world, and in effect, have affected structures and other systems (non-human) to such a degree, that this ineffable quality is only a ‘hope’, that to reanimate such a quality (for I fear it faces extinction in a Virillio styled-accelerating fashion) would mean to acknowledge that the animal is poor, and from here we start revaluation (think Neitschze). But can revaluation even take place? Can we remove the distinction of poverty from the animal once it has been reified? I think thats the real question, because to do that, we have to acknowledge the sociality of the animal to remove it. It seems counterintuitive, like Derrida appealing to ethics after deconstructing human action with respect to animal representation.
The world of insects appears throughout Hugh's book as a world apart but accessible. Access depends on - and in turn cultivates - certain sensibilities and practices of care, communication, and curiosity. For insect lovers the world of insects is a variously a refuge, a world of fancy, a domain of wonder and a site to discover truths. The book itself manages to capture and co-produce this effect, and as a result, I feel that the sort of reading it demands is not the one I was able to give. The book is the sort that Calvino might say sits nicely on a shelf and calls for attention, for visits, and for quite consultation. It isn't asking for the sort of weekend read to which I too often subject my books. There are then, certain similarities between the book's world and the insect worlds it describes: a form of presence that tempts engagement but refuses prescriptive articulation; an evocation of excess and multiplicity that requires rekindling relationships as opposed to sustained interrogation; participating in a world apart, within, alongside, dispersed and concentrated amidst the others. Doesn't the book require similar forms of care and communication from its reader as do the insect worlds within it? It does, and it (or at least a more carefilled reading of it that I had a chance to give) teaches us something about the possibilities and stratgies for care and communication across worlds and differences.
ReplyDeletem is for migration
ReplyDeletehttp://www.learner.org/jnorth/monarch/
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/mexico/html/ButterflyTrees.html
Prof. Raffles’s book was fascinating, funny, and most of all delightful, though I have to wonder if by placing it after Serres on the syllabus he was stacking the deck. Perhaps, on the other hand, it’s only my own inclination toward the empirical that made his many essayistic stories of people and their bugs seem so much more compelling than the theoretical parasite. What struck me most of all about this book was the range and depth of feeling; like Lingis, Prof. Raffles manages to weave theoretical and intellectual questions, personal reflection, poetic images and language, and concrete “thick description” together with thoughtfulness and feeling.
ReplyDeleteBy probing the way people and insects relate, and especially the way that people try to think into the lives of insects, Prof. Raffles opens up questions and meditations that make both bugs and the people who love them seem at once more human and more strange. I would have to return to the text to draw out a thesis more explicit than “humans have rich, multifaceted interactions with insects,” but argumentation seems secondary to the description and recurring motifs of how humans turn toward the insect realm in highly emotional (and cultural) ways. The section that makes me think most about the structure of the book is the chapter “On January 8th, 2008, Abdou Mahamane Was Driving Through Naimey…,” regarding the locusts in Africa, because in a way it seems like this chapter drops the engaging and complex theme of the imaginative leap into the insect’s umwelt and gives us a simpler relationship, wherein the insects are both food and foe yet “ontologically” separate from the human. This is notable mostly because it highlights for me how slippery and interesting are the other chapters, where we are invited to imagine alongside von Frisch, Hess-Honager, Dunn, Mitsuya, Prof. Raffles and the many other picturesque characters in this book as they try to plumb, in-itself and for-itself, the bugness of the bug.
This book is a celebration to an ultimate other (maybe The ultimate other), our insect friend. What a breath of fresh air after Serres! (Not to say The Parasite wasn’t fun). How wonderful and inspiring to read, be reminded and experience again (with kawaii-filled mushi eyes) these little, and amazingly impressive creatures we try so very hard to forget when we are sleeping snug in our beds. I don’t know about all of you, but I am letting the covers on my bed touch the floor again tonight. It all feels quite free.
ReplyDeleteWith so much to work with here, I somewhat randomly want to point out the ethics/the torn individual/the contradictorian. A few examples: Though a great admirer of insects, the noise of the cicadas drove Fabre nuts (47)? And von Frisch, who so lovingly observed his bee friends, so calmly explains that if you cut a bee in two, it continues slurping up sugar water (286)! What about Professor Raffles and Michael and their “ethical suspension”? They were so caught up in the moment, so excited, so filled with life that they completely lost the other half of themselves—forgetting, not caring, not worrying that this was cricket slavery, or at the very least cricket cruelty. And as Professor Raffles appropriately writes, this suspension was not surprising for “the affinities are not so visceral; these are insects, after all—no red blood…” (88).
But visceral affinities or not, insects move, they are busy, indifferent, but powerful (6). They are disciplined organized and intelligent (On locusts, 198). They deserve our respect, even if we have to kill one or two of them. Evoking the old ways of Shintoism (Korean shamanism or any form of animism for that matter) the doors have swung open once again, allowing us to consider how we might share a world with them. But, with so many of them, where do we begin? With the crickets? The spiders? The bees? Who is more important?
Nina Mehta
ReplyDeleteI am ready for those Zzzzzzs (of Zen and the art of), but only because I’ve moved through so many ideas, sentiments, memories, histories… I agree with Jacob. It’s not the kind of book to read over a weekend… Yet, I am happy that my mind is buzzing. I am reminded of my own insect intimacies, fears, interactions, and stories. I think about Yoichiro, an entomology student acquaintance who purposefully held an insect to his neck to release the eggs of a botfly, so that he could feel closer to this animal as it grew under his skin (he happens to be Japanese… insect lover?). And then I remember how this same kind of larval release caused such extreme anxiety for a family, their horror as they watched the parasite grow in the cheek of their little girl. Yes, there are parallel worlds, paradoxes (or confusions), that are multiple and interactive. The Illustrated Insectopedia does not just inspire storytelling, it also generates information and theory, and networks. It follows paths of seeing, hearing, feeling and remembering, translating, exploring and collecting desires and difference through the people, animals, and sentiments that emerge and reemerge.
Raffles explores intimacies, revealing and complicating ethics of management and desire, through ambiguous relationships that include experimentation, collecting, translating, witnessing, killing, loving. This Insectopedia brings scale into focus through identification and difference, the links and associations between beings and qualities of being, and the actions that result from blurred boundaries, mirrors, stand-ins, metaphors, subjects and objects for and of nightmares, terror, joy and connection…
And I was gladly infested/infected, with just one place of confusion (for now): the Shanghai cricket and the San Diego fly cannot really be compared, can they (106)? Can even the lab and the gambling casino? Or the crickets in Niger, and Jiminy cricket? These are different animals, contexts, that can exist as multiple, in relation, as is shown otherwise, throughout the book. I like how they exists next to each other, like Maria Sibylla Merian’s dynamic interactive worlds, in relation to the other scientist-artists, theorists-animal lovers… we are brought in to these worlds, and implored to go deeper (smaller).
The Illustrated Insectopedia renders a densely populated world where creatures big and small work in concert (albeit not always intentionally) to variably demand attention, cultivate love, precipitate disaster, insist their way into recognition, and show gratitude for the acknowledgment. Toying with the notion of the comprehensive, the text's A-Z systematicity undoes itself at every turn. “My nightmares” signaled by “M”, “Ex-Libris” announced by “X”, The Illustrated Insectopedia simultaneously thwarts and takes seriously basic referent/reference relationships by pointing to the inadequacy of the category “insect”, introducing the reader to some of the many friends, foes, and counterparts that are both known and unknowable within it, and drawing attention to its many places in a variety of worlds. From the start, the text beckons us to take notice of these worlds, not so that we can “give voice,” nor so that we can pretend some kind of undifferentiated sameness, and not as some shallow celebratory endeavor: “There are other worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes” (14). Acting sometimes as a guide, sometimes as a provocateur, and sometimes as a participant in shared mysteries, author-Hugh weaves us through tales of human-insect relations that implore us, finally, to genuinely encounter.
ReplyDeleteTraveling among the insects and humans in The Illustrated Insectopedia, as they perform in art in Germany or production in Shanghai, I am struck most by the notion of transcendence. There is the physical elevation of Glick’s flying moths (11) or the Aristotleian placement of insects at the outer realms(113); the temporal locating of Hoefnagel’s 1561 dragonflies (120); the spiritual/moral references throughout the text (108, 121-141, 249 among others). The physical, historical, and spiritual realms where insects can be found culminate to a realization of absence: an incredibly well-researched point that the insects, with whom we cohabitate, escape us.
ReplyDeleteRaffles writes, “Unease has a stubborn source, unfamiliar and unsettling. We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures. The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or redemption.” (41) The text is an exploration into ethical understanding, reanimating this “deep dead space” through those whose focus is the insect - through proximity or choice.
Jacob asks what kind of book Hugh’s Insectopedia is. “The book is the sort that Calvino might say sits nicely on a shelf and calls for attention, for visits, and for quiet consultation.” A reference book, then? An encyclopedia?
ReplyDeleteThe Enlightenment science --and its master book, the Encyclopedie-- opposed reasoned classification to the dangers and impurities of wonder, marvel and enthusiasm: the very spirit of the Insectopedia. I liked how the book played with the forms and desires making up encyclopedias. There is the the urge to include everything (“I’m trying hard to include them all”, 323) and the realization that it will never be possible, at least not if the method values intimate knowledge and enthusiasm over statistical modelling and disinterest. Insectopedia is an appreciation of chance encounters (human-human, and human-insect), idiosyncracies, biographies and histories; it performs the wonder and multiplicity of the insect worlds by simultaneously indexing classification and resisting it. There can be no “I for insects”.
(As we know from Borges, animals can be classified as follows: “(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”)
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ReplyDeleteJust as Derrida impugned the category of “the animal” at large, Raffles is offended and troubled by how unfortunate and mischievous is the category of “insects” too. How much diversity gets compressed and swiped off in a single word, he comments, and especially worse, when, for the most part, this taxonomical category has played the role of the negative referent!
ReplyDeleteHugh's enchantment with insects brought forth a peculiar and delightfully crafted artifact: an insectopedia. Every entry has a story line of its own, pictures of and words on bees, crickets, moths, lice, flies, and others (I’m missing many but can’t remember their names in English, sorry) are accompanied by fascinating short biographies of “insect-people”. It is a voyage through different ways of relatedness, convivial and hostile, between people and insects. As Julienne pointed out (and Mateusz too for what I just read), there is a play (or tension?) with the encyclopedic style here. Through out the book there are constant references to the limits of rigorous scientific abstraction while at the same time the equivalence of multiple ways of knowing and living is rescued, appreciated, valued. The message is important, one of the many: it is about rediscovering our connections and empathies towards insects without forgetting that there are points of deep disconnection and yes, irritation. Difference is recognized.
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ReplyDeleteHow do you write about insects without framing the text within an established taxonomy or within a singular category of ‘Insects’? How do you write about insects and humans, insects and history, insects and politics, insects and art, insects and fear, insects and religion, insects and culture, etc.?
ReplyDeleteFrom “Air” to “Zen and the Art of Zzzzzs,” each chapter speaks to its theme/subject and the presence of insects (in each chapter) becomes the common thread that ties the book together. Reading The Illustrated Insectopedia, I was amazed at how much I was reminded of not only my encounters and memories of cicadas, beetles, ants, flies, maggots, and so on, but of histories, politics, fears, experience, etc. For example, reading about Fabre’s popularity in Japan reminded me of his popularity in Korea which linked this similarity to the colonial history of Korea (that officially began in 1910). For me, this relationship between insects and history opens up new ways of thinking about history (a new approach to history). It offers an entry point in which different kinds of narratives become possible (i.e. a narrative that is not centered on an ‘event’ or a narrative not dependent on linear temporality) and also points out that which was ‘unseen’ but always present. Suddenly noticing the presence of insects within these narratives, I can’t help but think that all things are related in the world and that there are more ways of approaching and writing about it where things and beings, such as insects, do matter. On the other hand, I am not sure what this all means. What does it mean (or does it mean anything) that I will be thinking about Hugh thinking about Kikuo Itaya (who lives among cockroaches) when I kill a cockroach?
Halfway home from the library, in the early hours, having just read the last line of The Illustrated Insectopedia, I stop. Take my headphones from my ears, stand still for a moment, and do my best to look and to listen. What else was there, audible through the rushing Manhattan traffic, visible past the flashing lights of the city? That “there are other worlds around us”, Raffles insists, is “the first thing not to forget” (14). I scold myself. Had I already forgotten? On further thought, and having continued on my way, I find some solace in remembering what else the book seems so strongly to advise: be patient. Hesse-Honegger, Fabre, Von-Frisch didn’t build their insect-relationships without careful hours, months, years of squinting through microscopes, painting bees, laying on the ground, absolutely still, lens in hand. In a world in which we are all “too often…contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations”, an ontological rupture of the kind Raffles moves towards takes work, thought, patience (14).
ReplyDeleteThe hardest thing of all, it seems, is understanding these other worlds not only in relation to ours – the bees are intelligent, like us; crickets feel pain, like us; insects enjoy sex, like us – but on their own terms. And indeed, Raffles grapples with questions of language, of intention, of perception: “can these tiny insects truly speak for themselves?” (166). In the face of rigid epistemological divides, which Raffles’ multitude of insect-loving characters are seeking tirelessly to cross (art/science, poetics/science, social/biological science), it is ultimately the breadth and intimacy of ethnography, utilized with such rigor and such tenderness in The Illustrated Insectopedia, which provides ontologically subversive answers, fascinating epistemological insights, “opens up entire worlds” (323).
Being so steeped in critique that too often borders on denunciation, and theoretical frameworks that are rendered inaccessible to so many even as they speak about our connections and relatedness, Hugh's book is, to echo what others have said, a breath of fresh air. Alongside provocations to learn from and wonder about the many small, distinct creatures with whom we inhabit this world - and his urgings that we question the grounds upon which we establish those co-habitations - there is a persistent generosity towards all the actors involved in these intimate (and sometimes intimately violent) encounters. Talking so other students about the book, someone (not from our class) asked, "What kind of, you know, intervention is he making?" I couldn't quite answer. It seemed so reductive in comparison to the care with which he attends to the paradoxes and difficulties of trying to live with (and live differently with) insects. The pleasures of reading a well-crafted text, as we've talked about, can open up other forms of dialogic practices that aren't simply focused on pulling out and articulating arguments. Yet that isn't to say that Hugh is not making an "intervention," of course. At least part of this intervention is to encourage humans to think and act more generously, more attentively, towards humans and nonhumans alike, about our differences from one another and our deeply entwined histories and livelihoods - and, as academics, to produce this same kind of generosity and attentiveness in our analyses.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of all things insects, I wonder if people have seen Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno series of short films? Season one is on the sex lives of insects. Reading about the language of bees especially reminded me of the bee one:
http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/
"How shallow are our questions"? I think this is a wonderful text, and one of the things it accomplishes is to make us see the world in light of insects as, and our intimate relationships to them. Insects are among the many things that often get left out of our picture of the world, as seen through ethnography at least and the pieces are very effective at creating a strong visual presence of how dense they are. I know Hugh was reticent about letting us read his text, and I will agree with other who have posted that it is quite good: a fun read. However, I also wanted to ask a few questions of Hugh.
ReplyDeleteI think that the way in which you weave yourself into the book is quite wonderful and I am curious about how you see yourself as “ethnographer” and who are your subjects? Mostly, I am concerned about you addressing the question that you asked us a couple of weeks ago about how we might read a certain text as being “ethnographic”. How do you consider this to be ethnographic? Or maybe, a better question would be to ask how do you want people to read it ethnographically, and what do you hope it offers to ethnography? In your mind was there any sort of minimum criteria of that you felt like you needed to address?
"The Illustrated Insectopedia" presents humans and insects as inhabiting the world together, not as equals through human eyes, perhaps, but existing within each others domains. Insects appear within our vocabularies as labels and descriptions, decorative inspiration (or as decorations), or even entertainment. What this book effectively depicts is how humans include insects, along with other animals, within a pool of human interests and human knowledge. We will kill a member of a species (for instance the plane with tacky paper) just to study its anatomy or display it in a museum. Crush films fetishize the killing of insects and small animals, raising moral and ethical questions, yet we squash spiders everyday without qualm.
ReplyDeleteWhat a book like "...Insectopedia" illustrates are questions as to whether insects are 1) intelligent enough engage communication with other species. Also, 2) does their indeterminable awareness of existence warrant our ethical consideration, 3) why do we even feel a need to debate whether insects are intelligent? What purpose is served by assuming human ascendancy over other forms of life? 4) Why does an insect's difference in body or consciousness devalue their lives?
In a sense, the veneration, fear, and disregard of insect life is reinforced by our inability to directly communicate with them. And yet, we infuse their lives into our own, as if insects were physical parts of our language and our way of imagining the world. In a way, by titling the book "The Illustrated Insectopedia," humans are drawn into the insect's world.
First and foremost, aesthetics: the prose was meticulous and lucid, it made the whole book much more accessible (and that much more enjoyable), and I appreciate that. In addition, invoking the alphabet (structurally) as a methodological tool really allowed for a diverse movement between sites of application, themes of conversation- and it really reminded me of Deleuzean ‘schizoanalysis’. This movement, held together by the ethnographic narrative (which gave me a sense of continuity, as if I were traveling through the book, through each ‘site’), was effective in continuously de-centering/ disrupting (maybe like Hesse-Honegger’s work) the position of the observer- such that each letter, each site opened a new space of visibility, a new perspective, a new experience.
ReplyDeleteParticulars: One line resonated pretty deeply when I think of the position of the observer with regard to nature, animals, et al., or better still the position of nature itself- “I at once thought I was hearing him identify a quality in wildness that I like to hold onto, an ineffable, holistic quality that escapes molecular logic.” [77] Usually, I tend to dismiss such statements as romantic, maybe somnambulant, or maybe just symptomatic of a particular method’s limitations. But lately, I’ve been inclined to be more open to such a proposition, and again it conjures connections to Heidigger’s ‘poor in world animal’. What I was thinking was that this ‘ineffable quality’ really reminded analytically of something caught in between Serres’ milieu and Jacob von U.’s umwelt: a ‘quality’ that was, in functional terms, a combination of sensation and mediation, a system of uniqueness, intervention, and action (within all things, ‘holistic’). And if we consider the unidirectional flow of Serres dynamic parasitic system, we know that additionally “As soon as the medium intervenes, the ray of light wanders about the world.”- Serres [p.70]. What I think then is this: I think there is a hope, and more so a realistic (i.e. real) instantiation that there exists such an ineffable quality in the wild of the world, but I wonder if considering such is an assumption to bracket within a method is proper with respect to the mechanics of the functional world. What I mean is that human systems organize, name, neuter, etc. so much of the topographical world, and in effect, have affected structures and other systems (non-human) to such a degree, that this ineffable quality is only a ‘hope’, that to reanimate such a quality (for I fear it faces extinction in a Virillio styled-accelerating fashion) would mean to acknowledge that the animal is poor, and from here we start revaluation (think Neitschze). But can revaluation even take place? Can we remove the distinction of poverty from the animal once it has been reified? I think thats the real question, because to do that, we have to acknowledge the sociality of the animal to remove it. It seems counterintuitive, like Derrida appealing to ethics after deconstructing human action with respect to animal representation.