“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 13, 2015

Why Bees?

They are symptomatic of the murder-suicide culture created by the 12 000 year execution of the agrilogistical program. When they are finally wiped out by the "just keep swimming, just keep swimming" dynamic that has created DNA with pesticides in it, what will happen? (He asked, knowing what will happen.)

Like cats, they show up in the Excluded Middle zone, aka reality, the zone between rigid categories of Nature and Culture, to do the actual work (pollinating, killing rats) that keep the system working. They are uninvited participants, unlike the beings we have turned into prosthetic enhancements of agrilogistics (known as "cattle" or "chattel" or "capital"--same word, how cool is that?).

Cattle are protected insofar as they are property.

Bees and cats embarrass the anthropocentrism of agrilogistics and the rigid boundaries. As Derrida points out, the job of deconstruction is to multiply differences and show how the boundary region is neither thin nor rigid. Bees and cats have done that all by themselves. They are the intraterrestrial aliens; why else do pop culture aliens have insect or cat eyes?

Bees respond to the aesthetic display of flowers. They are part of the really "expensive" (from DNA's point of view) distributed dynamics of sexual display...defying the Easy Think way agrilogistics has separated appearing from being.

In other words bees are in fact not strictly analogies for hierarchical utilitarian agrilogistical society, as they so often are made to be.

One almost begins to wonder that they have been put in that conceptual box precisely to police how they show up on the agrilogistical radar.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bees in pretty much all philosophical inquiry too-- Aristotle etc.
Their dance, their system of society ... Everything.

And now in yours, and in its grief.