Politics of Swarms

Translations between Entomology and Biopolitics

Bibliographic Data

ID7429228
AuthorsJussi Parikka (0000-0002-2248-6377, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume14
Issue3
Pages112-124
Publication date2008-06-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueParallax (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1353-4645 • E-ISSN: 1460-700X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13534640802159187
OpenAlexW1972251400
LanguageEN
Citations received12

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Guillaume Apollinaire, Bestiary, or The Parade of Orpheus [1910], trans. Pepe Karmel (Boston: David R. Godine, 1980), p.26. 2. See Nigel Thrift, Non‐Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008). 3. Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit. A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracry in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp.91–93. For an apt critique of their notions of distributed network and topologies of heterogeneity, see Tony Sampson, 'The Accidental Topology of Digital Culture: How the Network Becomes Viral', Transformations, 14 (2007), ⟨http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_14/article_05.shtml⟩ [01/03/08]. 5. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collége de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2007), p.276. 6. Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit, p.68. 7. Manuel Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York and London: Continuum, 2006). 8. Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit, p.67. 9. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee [1901] trans. Alfred Sutro (New York: Mentor, 1954), p.24. 10. Eugene Thacker, 'Networks, Swarms, Multitudes. Part Two', CTheory 18/5/2004, ⟨http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id = 423⟩ [20/04/07]. On biopolitics, animals and the birth of modern technical media culture, also see Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 11. Charlotte Sleigh, Ant (London: Reaktion, 2003), p.66. 12. Juan Antonio Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudí to Le Corbusier [1998], trans. Alexander R. Tulloch (London: Reaktion, 2000), p.28. 13. William Morton Wheeler, 'The Ant Colony as an Organism', Journal of Morphology, 22:1 (1911), pp.307–25 (p.321). 14. Eugene Thacker, 'Biophilosophy for the 21st Century', Ctheory, 9/6/2005, ⟨http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id = 472⟩ [25/03/08]. 15. Gilbert Simondon, L'individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 2007). 16. Eugene Thacker, 'Networks, Swarms Multitudes. Part Two.' 17. 'Insect Swarms', Science, September 15, 1893, p.151. 18. 'Vast Swarms of Locusts', New York Times, February 16, 1896. For another typical newspaper story, originally from the London Times, see 'A Destructive Insect', New York Times, August 26, 1880. Also consider this short newspaper description from 1903 that could as easily be from a much later science fiction film: 'The northwest part of this city [New Bedford] is suffering from an invasion never known before. Myriads of insects have suddenly appeared, and houses, barns, fences, and sidewalks and streets are literally alive with them. In some cases the insects are so numerous that it is almost impossible to tell the color of the houses'. 'Flies Invade New Bedford', New York Times, June 9, 1903. See also: 'They Come in Swarms', New York Times, October 19, 1894. The article focuses on germs, but underlines their dangers with a reference to insects: 'If you have ever seen a swarm of bees, you will realize how many insects it is possible to get within a small space. When you stop to think, though, that there are a million insects in an atom of air as large as the head of a pin, you will be able to understand what germs are'. 19. Charlotte Sleigh, 'Empire of the Ants: H.G. Wells and Tropical Entomology', Science as Culture, 10:1 (2001), pp.33–71 (p.46). Sleigh points out well how the discourse of entomology coalesced with that of colonialism. 20. From: Louis Figuier, The Insect World: Being A Popular Account of the Orders of Insects (London, Paris and New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., nd. [1868]) p. 303. Open copyright, ⟨http://www.archive.org/details/insectworldbeing00figuuoft⟩ [04/04/08]. 21. See Akire Mizilta Lippit, Electric Animal, p.13. 22. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, p.27. 23. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, [1980], trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p.263. 24. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, p.31. 25. See Thomas A Sebeok (ed.), Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Results of Research (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968); Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee [1953], trans. Dora Ilse (London: The Country Book Club, 1955). 26. William Morton Wheeler, 'The Ant Colony'. For Wheeler, the ant colony was an individuated actant comparable to a cell or a person due to its ability to maintain 'its identity in space, resisting dissolution and, as a general rule, any fusion with other colonies of the same or alien species', p.310. 27. Charlotte Sleigh, Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp.70–71. 28. William Morton Wheeler, 'Emergent Evolution and the Social', Science, November 5, 1926, p.433. In a short text 'Contemporary Organicists', Wheeler also lists such research that resembles or comments on ideas of emergence. According to Wheeler, the idea that an organism as a whole is more than the sum of its parts can be tracked already in the early work of such writers as G.E. Stahl (1660–1734), J.C. Reil (1759–1813) and C.A. Rudolphi (1771–1832). More closely, Wheeler discusses nineteenth century physiologists du Bois‐Reymond and Claude Bernard, which both register the strange reality of the organism – constituted of material particles, yet differing from the world outside this singular organism. For example, Bernard presents in Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) this assembling as a process of summoning virtual elements that otherwise would remain imperceptible: 'In a word, when we unite physiological elements, properties appear which were imperceptible in the separate elements'. Quoted in William Morton Wheeler, 'Contemporary Organicists', in Emergent Evolution and the Social (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1927), p.44. 29. C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927), p.22. For a critical early evaluation of Morgan's idea, see Flora I. MacKinnon, 'The Meaning of "Emergent" in Lloyd Morgan's "Emergent Evolution"', Mind, New Series, 33 (1924), pp.311–15. See also Morgan's answer to Mackinnon: C. Lloyd Morgan, 'Emergent Evolution', Mind, New Series, 34 (1925), pp.70–74. 30. C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution, p.64. With Morgan there is however a constant danger of succumbing into a quasi‐mystical linearism where the human being is the end of evolution. Morgan does however try to, for example, deny that there is any kind of end to this kind of evolution, and is reluctant to see God as a substance‐like end point for emergent movements and differentiations. 31. William Morton Wheeler, 'Emergent Evolution and the Social', p.434. 32. William Morton Wheeler, 'Emergent Evolution and the Social', p.434. 33. William Morton Wheeler, 'Emergent Evolution and the Social', p.435. 34. Sociology beyond the human form was already practiced by Gabriel Tarde in his microsociology. Although the lessons in zoology, Darwinism, and even entomology of social insects were transported into sociological considerations – Herbert Spencer is naturally one of the key names of such ventures – more interesting are the parallels with the sociology of 'primitive processes' of Tarde. See for example, Tarde, Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology [1898], trans. Howard C. Warren (Kitchener: Batoch, 2000). 35. Kropotkin writes in Mutual Aid (1902): 'Sociability – that is, the need of the animal of associating with its like – the love of society for society's sake, combined with the 'joy of life', only now begins to receive due attention from the zoologists. We know at the present time that all animals, beginning with ants, going on to the birds, and ending with the highest mammals, are fond of plays, wrestling, running after each other, trying to capture each other, teasing each other, and so on. And while many plays are, so to speak, a school for the proper behaviour of the young in mature life, there are others, which, apart from their utilitarian purposes, are, together with dancing and singing, mere manifestations of an excess of forces – 'the joy of life', and a desire to communicate in some way or another with other individuals of the same or of other species – in short, a manifestation of sociability proper, which is a distinctive feature of all the animal world'. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Freedom, 1987), pp.58–59. 36. William Morton Wheeler, 'Emergent Evolution and the Social', p.436. 37. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), p.140. As Grosz notes, drawing on Bergson, this phenomenal and primordial intensity is, however, beyond the calculable: the Bergsonian duration, or virtual. 38. Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 2002). 39. Eugene Thacker, 'Biophilosophy for the 21st Century'. 40. Eugene Thacker, 'Networks, Swarms, Multitudes. Part Two.' 41. William Morton Wheeler, 'The Ant‐Colony as an Organism', p. 308

Biopower · Entomology · Animal and Plant Science Education · Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior · Plant and animal studies

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