Insectopedia (31 page)

So he is cautious. The bees have “language” but never speech. They do not talk (though he listens and understands). And when he describes Lindauer’s research in Asia and Africa on the evolutionary lineage of bee communication as a “comparative philology” of
Apis
“dialects,” he is pursuing the established plot. The terminology is descriptive, the comparisons will not reach beyond the honeybees, and the Latinate pretensions evince more than a little self-mockery.

But, although sometimes he seems like a scientist from a different era, he is also accomplished in the registers of theoretical biology, so distinct in tone and ambition, and he can wield them to address a different set of abstractions. In 1965, for example, he completes
The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees
, the summary statement of his research. Forced by the occasion to confront the ontological question in its fullness, he uses the preface to affirm unequivocally the limits of analogy: “Many readers may wonder whether it is proper to call the communication system of insects a ‘language.’ The use that is made here of this word must not be misunderstood, as though what bees inform one another of were to be regarded as the equivalent of human speech. In its wealth of concepts and its articulate mode of expression the language of man stands on quite a different plane.” The language of the bees, he concludes in his clearest statement on the matter, though “unique in the whole animal kingdom,” is actually a “precise and highly differentiated sign language.”
⁵⁹

But this may be less restrictive than it at first appears. Von Frisch was writing at a moment when sign language promised a key to the otherwise inaccessible nonverbal mind. In this spirit, he introduces to the hive a wooden bee—his own prosthesis—and manipulates its movements, hoping that if he speaks their language, his bees will respond. The object’s followers express curiosity, but they are not fooled. “The model,” von Frisch acknowledged, “evidently lacked some significant characteristic without which it could not be taken seriously.”
⁶⁰
The bees know it is an alien. They attack and sting it repeatedly.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the psychologists R. Allen Gardner
and Beatrix Gardner, preoccupied by the evolution of cognition, were preparing to welcome Washoe the chimpanzee into their Nevada home, to raise her as their human girl child and teach her American Sign Language. In an attempt to render vulnerable to empirical investigation Wittgenstein’s insight “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,” the Gardners reversed von Frisch’s procedure and set out to prove that nonverbal animals can acquire human language and use it to communicate with one another and with their trainers.
⁶¹

But Wittgenstein’s lion, as the animal philosopher and trainer Vicki Hearne pointed out, is not without language; he is just “not talking.”
⁶²
His muteness proposes an irreconcilable difference, an indifference that refuses to be tamed, a fullness, not a lack; a “consciousness that is beyond ours,” Hearne called it.
⁶³
And yet this phenomenological abyss is exactly what von Frisch dared to cross—though less by code breaking than by the projection of his (and Lindauer’s) most intimate longings. Because when forced to succumb to the language of science, to surrender the language of bees, he, too, was reduced to speaking in code.

Honeybees, like Wittgenstein’s lion, don’t talk to us. Instead, von Frisch taught us how to eavesdrop on them. And—in a whisper—he told us, too, that even if their “dance language” exhibits the automatic quality of the code, we should not assume that those signals we can access encompass their communicative world.

Of course this isn’t merely a struggle over what the animal means; it is a struggle over the meaning of the animals themselves. And it is a battle long fought on the terrain of language. Though no philosopher, von Frisch understood this only too well. Language—the absence of language—continues to define the subor-dination (rather than simply the difference) of the animal in post-Enlightenment Western philosophy, a tradition remarkably Cartesian on this question.
⁶⁴
Could von Frisch be clearer? This “dance language” is restitutive, an appeal to an ethic of mutuality and recognition, a call for respect for the nonhuman animal—for the animal in general and the astonishing honeybee in particular.

“It took some ten years of patient observation,” wrote Jacques Lacan in the wake of the Brunnwinkl experiments, “for Karl von Frisch to decode … [the bees’] message, for it is certainly a code, or system of signaling, whose generic character alone forbids us to qualify it as conventional.”
⁶⁵
As code is to language, Lacan wants us to understand, so nature is to culture and animal is to human. Hardwired, hard-pressed, the bees stand for a programmed, mechanical nature in vivid contrast to the complex spontaneity of human culture.
⁶⁶
Indeed, they enable this line between animal and human, between nature and culture, to be drawn with some severity.

The argument is not new: animals can sign, but they cannot lie. They can react, but they cannot respond.
⁶⁷
They can communicate, but they cannot participate in the second-order metacommunication so familiar to humans. They cannot signify about signifying, think about thinking, and nor, for that matter, can they “dance about dancing.”
⁶⁸

It is a conventional claim, this humanist insistence on language lack in the animal. And its framing in such irreducibly human terms makes it impossible to disprove (though not to dispute: in the cooperative setting of the hive, for example, it is difficult to imagine why a bee should be moved to dissemble about the location of a feeding site, and, anyway, wasn’t it the bees’ “honesty” that so appealed to Lindauer?).

But the point is not to make the bees speak, to have them tell us their secrets as the Gardners would have liked poor Washoe to tell them hers. Nor is it to imagine that the little honeybees are somehow just like us, that their world somehow corresponds to ours, that to be a bee is somehow equivalent to being a human equipped with a different sensory apparatus. That somehow our shared evolutionary origins, our intertwined deep histories, provide us also with a shared ontology.

Instead, can it be enough to point out that the honeybees’ repertoire exceeds functional explanation and biochemical predictability, that the more researchers find out about honeybee cognition and behavior, the less appropriate and effective is the metaphor of the machine? In this instance, at least, it seems that language (or its absence) is an inadequate marker of interiority. And it seems that the assumption that language, human language, is “an unprecedented inferential engine” is itself a product of linguistic circularity—a product that tells us more about the
making of the animal in language than about the living animal that is the ostensible subject of science.
⁶⁹

What, in such terms, can we make of the bees’ “spasmodic dance,” which is “more the expression of a dancing mood than an effective signal”? Or of the “trembling dance,” which according to von Frisch “tells the bees nothing” yet manifests in times of stress and appears to mark some kind of “neurosis”? Or of the “jerking dance” that he considers “an expression of joy and contentment”?
⁷⁰
Or, indeed, of the nest dances described by Lindauer, each of which intervenes in a larger social process of decision making?

But these are murky waters. Like von Frisch, I prefer to avoid this treacherous and much-debated question of language and cognition. The terms are too literal. The cards too stacked. The conflation of difference and deficiency too pervasive.

Like so many others, Lacan holds fast to the promise of that boundary between code and language, the promise of escape, a way to leave behind the animal to arrive as a thoroughly human subject. And in the inclusive corner, Griffin’s cognitive ethology, with its principled determination to restore dignity, agency, and consciousness to the animal through methodological and theoretical humility, arrives at a troubling humanism of its own, a “giving speech back,” conferring minority rights on the animal as on the thinking child, an uncanny recapitulation of the history through which colonial hierarchies were made.
⁷¹

Such is von Frisch’s dilemma. He knows his bees do not speak as humans; he knows their “language” is less but also more than his own. And he knows his new discipline allows space only for the less. Where within the rationality of his science could he find a language to express the profound commonality of life and the irredeemable fact of shared mortality? Where could he find its double, a language to communicate a difference for which no words exist? And where could he find a language in which to understand the absence of language as something other than a lack?

(Pity the animal that lives only as a shadow of the human, the animal forced to react rather than respond, the animal whose task is to give flesh, spirit, and meaning to the human, the animal whose melancholy fate is to be humanity’s other.)

“There is really no reason to suppose,” says W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, “that lesser beings are devoid of sentient life.”
⁷²
Remembering childhood nights, he wondered, Do moths dream? Do they know they are lost when, misled by the flame, they enter a house to die?

What was von Frisch’s question: Can the honeybee speak? No, that wasn’t it. First he thought, There is really no reason to suppose that honeybees are devoid of language. And then he asked, My little comrade, what does she say?

Pity the honeybees. Pity and protect them. In this, too, their indifference is of no avail. So trapped in language. The honeybees and us, held together, pushed apart. Even von Frisch, even Lindauer, who loved them so dearly, who found in them redemption from the brutish horrors of their times … Well, do you remember what they’d do to prove their little ones’ capacities?

But enough paradox. To give them language was simultaneously to celebrate their difference and to doom them to impossibility, to condemn them to the merely imitative, at which they could only fail, to (mis)take “linguistic self-referentiality [as] the paradigm for self-referentiality generally.”
⁷³
But of course the failure is human (a specific scientific human, perhaps, but human nonetheless), this failure of being able only to imagine sociality and communication through something language-like and to grant ourselves its apogee. What foolishness to judge insects—so ancient, so diverse, so accomplished, so successful, so beautiful, so astonishing, so mysterious, so unknown—by criteria they can never meet and about which they could not care! What silliness to disregard their accomplishments and focus instead on their supposed deficiencies! What pitiful poverty of imagination to see them as resources merely for our self-knowledge! What sad, sad, sad sadness when language fails us.

For a long time I thought only of bees. They crowded out all the others, and this book became just for them. A book of bees in all their bee-ness. All the physical capacities, all the behavioral subtleties, all the organizational mysteries, all the comradeship. All that golden beeswax lighting up the ancient world. All that honey sweetening medieval Europe. All those bees, timeless templates for the most diverse human projects and ideologies. Bees took over.

But then a plague of winged ants invaded my living room, and after they left I began thinking of locusts and then beetles—all those beetles!—and then caddis flies and crane flies and vinegar flies and botflies and dragonflies and mayflies and houseflies and so many other flies. Then one thing led to another, and I came across field crickets and mole crickets and Jerusalem crickets, and then Jessy sent me a weta from New Zealand. And then the seventeen-year cicadas emerged in Ohio, and I discovered the thrips and the katydids, remembered the aphids on California roses and the summer wasps drowning in water-filled jam jars, and then termites and hornets and earwigs and scorpions and ladybugs and praying mantises sold dry in packets in garden-supply stores. And then there were the mosquitoes with long legs and the mosquitoes with short legs and far too many butterflies and moths of all kinds. And I remembered what we all already know: that insects are without number and without end, that in comparison we are no more than dust, and that this is not the worst of it.

There is the nightmare of fecundity and the nightmare of the multitude. There is the nightmare of uncontrolled bodies and the nightmare of inside our bodies and all over our bodies. There is the nightmare of unguarded orifices and the nightmare of vulnerable places. There is the nightmare of foreign bodies in our bloodstream and the nightmare of foreign bodies in our ears and our eyes and under the surface of our skin.