Possibilities of being with. On encounters between humans and small crawling beings.

If this essay is successful, it will open some doors in terms of thinking about being together in this world in the here and now. Maybe it sharpens your senses about what is around and maybe it opens up your mind a bit for what you can look for in encounters with others.
In some way this essay is about fear. It is about the fear of being alone and about the fear of being with others. It is about rehearsing feelings. It is about feeling something. It is about being in the world. It is about being concrete. It is about facing, it is about living, it is about being. And to some degree it is about being political. It is about a possible life with a possible future.

Relationships between humans and insects, arachnids and other tiny crawling beings.

There are humans. And other humans. And plants, rocks. And animals: mammals, fishes, starfish, birds, flies, butterflies, snails, and ants and worms and millipedes and woodlice. All of them interact with each other, in one way or another. All of them are connected in a globalised, entangled world, some directly, some indirectly. This interaction though is rarely questioned or thought through. I am interested in the (im)possibilities of being together in this world. What relationships exist, what additional ones are possible and which ones can we only dream of? How can we prepare for those interactions and how can we enter them? For several reasons I am especially interested in interactions between two particular groups of the ones mentioned above, one of them being humans. The reason for this is probably that I am human and therefore I am interested in the ways I as a human can or cannot interact with others. The main tool for researching these ways of interaction that I have is my thinking: How can I experience, remember, speculate or imagine being in this world with other beings? Concerning these other beings, I am interested in a diffuse grouping of actually quite different species. Amongst these are insects (flies, bees, butterflies, ants, lice, …), arachnids (spiders, mites, ticks, scorpions), millipedes and some crustaceans (like woodlice). This grouping is motivated by how I as a human perceive these animals and take actions towards them. Compared to my size they are small. They have between 6 and a thousand legs or no legs at all, but never two or four legs, like humans and other vertebrates that we empathise with. We often find them strange or uncanny. Their size doesn’t allow us to hold or to hug them. They don’t walk, they crawl (or fly, or dig, or jump) - tiny crawling beings. This essay is about relating, engaging and encountering. That means that this essay has an emphasis on verbs. I owe this approach at least in part to Tim Ingold.[1] He talks about “existence being”[2]. He argues, beings exist in the way they engage with other animate and inanimate actors. A being at its core is the specific way it relates to its environment and can never be an isolated entity.[3] To highlight this he proposes a change in grammar: not to say “humans exist”, but “humaning occurs”. Ontology then would not try to figure out what humans are at their core, but what actions humaning entails. Even though I won’t follow this grammar completely, I will focus on verbs and what they mean, instead of describing nouns. I will look at ways of relating that exist. I will try to emphasise some rarer ones that in my opinion deserve more focus. [1] Anthropology beyond Humanity (2013) YouTube video, added by Macquarie [Online]. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqMCytCAqUQ [accessed 10.02.2021]. [2] Ibid. [3] See also: Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being singular plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne; edited by Werner Harnacher and David E. Wellbery. 1st ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000.

Relational verbs that are part of being a human.

A very common way for humans to approach animals is using them. Insects are surprisingly prominent in warfare. Several species have been forced into human against human fights even in the more recent history of humanity: In the second world war Japan attacked China with plague infected fleas and cholera infected flies.[1] Germany researched Colorado beetles to destroy the enemy's crops.[2] In the cold war, the USA considered using yellow fever mosquitoes against the Soviet Union.[3] Using is a standard approach of humans towards everything and it is far from being thrilling, promising and worth nourishing. Other approaches humans are used to taking towards tiny crawling ones are observing and scientific research. If you deal with someone who is hard to reach and difficult to read, the obvious impulse is to observe them closely, follow their movements and impulses, to try and figure out what they are up to, how they are behaving and why. You become a stalker, not asking for an actual encounter anymore but removing yourself from the scene, making room for the ones you focus on. In “Thinking Plant Animal Human: Encounters with Communities of Difference” David Wood proposes a quite similar way of encountering: ““Giving” a voice to other beings would then mean noticing, attending, and acknowledging their status as communicative beings.”[4] What he calls giving voice to other beings is mostly an exercise of listening. He points out how animals spoke long before we (humans) appeared in the history of this planet. The aim of his listening is driven by a strong political motivation. Listening or giving voice are understood as legal instruments in the democratic encounter of fighting climate change and making possible earthly survival. David Wood is just one example of a rising awareness within the humanities for climate change and a moral discussion about how to listen to and account for other beings in a struggle for a just and fair, or maybe just ongoing world. Strong voices argue for making space for other beings in the discussion about how to proceed.[5] To make this possible, we need to refuse the question of how we benefit from preserving these beings, how we can use them. Alternatively, one could counter-ask: why would we want to be alone on this planet, or on a planet with a drastically reduced number and variety of beings? Or also: how do we justify actively and passively killing and wiping out such huge numbers of individuals, populations of ecosystems of other beings, including other humans. David Wood asks us to listen, or as he calls it “giving a voice to” other beings with the aim to include them in democratic, legal, political processes ensuring their rights and needs are heard and responded to in the struggle for a shared living on this planet as well as earthly survival. In this sense he is advocating for a shared future, a goal I am in support of, but I don’t understand why we don’t share the present already. How can we speak for beings in the political struggles that started a few decades ago and will form our future, how can we speak for beings in these struggles if we only listened to them in the way humans listen, in carefully observing, noting down? The relationships at stake are intertwined, those beings bug us every day, there are more of them in the same building with us than other humans. Discussions for including non-human beings into climate justice discussion sometimes seem to be vulnerable to the following question: Why should we give them a piece of the cake in a time where there is hardly enough for us. Why do we try to save species instead of saving the planet? The problem is: it is not our cake to share, we are burrowing through the same cake as everyone else. We don’t need to save any being; we need to stop killing them. But listening and finding ways to include the voices of non-human beings into a conversation between humans still seems to work in the logic of giving them a piece of our cake. Following this logic, I want to look for ways of experiencing that our relationships are intertwined, that we share a present, that we are burrowing through the same cake all together without anyone owning it. I want to look for ways that make our shared existence experienceable. I don’t want to diminish the work of David Wood and Bruno Latour. We operate through human systems that work through analysis and listening, observing, documenting and the actions concluded from these activities. And as long as we operate through them, these instruments are a promise to make things fairer. But we won’t realise the intertwined and involved relationships we are in if we don’t make space to experience them from within. Can you recall how many humans you passed by today? Can you recall how many tiny crawling ones you passed by today? You are most likely to recall a certain number of humans and if at all a much smaller number of tiny crawling ones. You probably saw, felt or met much more tiny crawling ones though, depending on your geographical location and the weather. I want to propose to look at two artworks that both aim at making a shared existence experienceable: In his work “Love motel for insects” Brandon Ballengée uses attraction as a way of engaging with tiny crawling ones. He montages bright blue canvases in different shapes somewhere outside and lights them with UVB-light when it gets dark. The light attracts insects that then can be observed by the audience. The artist, as the title suggests, claims to help the insects come together so they can mate. “Although the basic structure of Love Motels for Insects remains consistent, the installation never appears the same way twice. At each site, visitors observe local insect behaviour and engage with landscape, biodiversity, and science in ways that are different every time.”[6] In the work there is an interesting approach of meeting the insects. It is questionable though how far it can count as an encounter that goes beyond the distanced observing we humans are so used to. The insects are exhibited, their mating is displayed. They don’t need an artist to put up fabric and light it with UVB to find their mates. We humans, once again, are just bystanders. In another artwork, Augmented Fish Reality by Ken Rinaldo,[7] Siamese fighting fish are placed in big flat fish bowls. These are mounted on robotically driven wheels. Around the fishbowl are sensors that measure a fish’s movement. If the fish swims to the edge of the bowl, the whole apparatus moves in the direction the fish is looking. The bowls can move as close as one inch from each other so that the fish can visually interact with other fish. It may be questioned whether the fish actually operate this mechanism. Interesting in this work though, is that it accounts for the specific reality the fish are in, it takes actions of the fish and enhances them thus allowing the fish to coexist and move amongst humans in a gallery space. This project is very clean and highly mediated. Humans observe the outcome of human algorithms attached to human machines fed by the behaviour of Siamese fighting fish in a human created and very unnatural surrounding. I am wondering if there is something more direct, maybe even archaic, something more every-day, maybe even more rude. I believe there are simpler, older, less exciting ways to talk to, be with, have a dialogue with non-humans. In her Companion Species Manifesto Donna Haraway describes very involved, direct, not distanced, sometimes rude and not always careful and peaceful interactions between humans and other species. She writes about humans and dogs and their living together across the borders of different species. According to her, there is a long “history of companion species, a very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.”[8] “The relationship is not especially nice; it is full of waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance and loss, as well as of joy, invention, labor, intelligence, and play.”[9] A careful distance, a calm observing fails to match the difficulties, cruelties and existential ways of being together that happen each and every day. So how to get involved, how to get real with each other?

[1] Lockwood, Jeffrey A. Six-legged soldiers. The Scientist, October 24, 2008 [Online]. Available at http://www.the-scientist.com/news/print/55104/ [accessed 23.12.2008]. [2] Lockwood, Jeffrey A. Bug Bomb. Boston Globe, October 21, 2007 [Online]. Available at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/10/21/bug_bomb/ [accessed 23.12.2008]. [3] Ibid. [4] Wood, David. Thinking Plant Animal Human: Encounters with Communities of Difference.University of Minnesota Press, 2020. [5] See for example: Latour, Bruno. Politiques de la nature: comment faire entrer les sciences en démocratie. Paris 1999. [6] Nadir, Leila Christine. Invitation to an Insect Rendezvous. American Scientist, March–April 2014, Vol. 102, No. 2 (March–April 2014), pp. 146-149, p. 148. [7] Rinaldo, Ken. Augmented Fish Reality. Portfolio entry on the artists website [online]. Available at https://www.kenrinaldo.com/portfolio/augmented-fish-reality/ [Accessed 09.08.2021]. [8]  Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, p. 5. [9]  Ibid. p. 12

to interact to observe to imagine being to pretend being to imagine feeling aka compassion to kill to imitate to mirror to fail someone to listen to to touch to start a conversation to sing with to communicate telepathically to mourn to be annoyed by to talk over the phone to greet to introduce to hurt to heal to smell to remember to have sex with to flirt with to be afraid of to really want to meet to be a fan of to annoy to approach to ask questions to attract to body cavity search to meet in a group to confront to defame to distract to follow to ignore to judge to kiss to long for to lick to look down onto to mislead to show off to signal to to spend time with to startle to tickle to be with

Proposals.

Proposal 1: Being with. Be with another one. Spend time together and be aware of each other's presence. It is possible to react to each other but that's not a requirement. But try to be ready to react to each other. Being with might seem rather unspectacular. It seems like there is not much to it. The level on which being with is an experience at all worth noticing seems to be connected to the interest the ones who are being have for each other. It is also crucial how close one lets the other into their personal sphere. There might be small talk going on pleasantly for hours and hours and then there can be moments when something really happens. Are you afraid of being with certain ones? When you are with someone, are you running away from being alone or are you actively deciding to be with someone? When you are alone, are you running away from being with someone or are you actively deciding to be alone? Proposal 2: Imagining being. What if the two of you don’t speak the same language? You can imagine being with each other. Imagining very clearly is not being with each other but rather a mixture of being with the other and being with one self. Can you make room for the other one to change the way you imagine them? Can you adapt imagining, confront imagining with reality? Observing plays into this. It is still a one-sided movement, but it can be a tool for getting closer. One way of imagining being can be to imitate. This is imagining being with your body and with your behaviour. Imitating is one way of incorporating observing. But since you and the one you are imagining might have a big difference in how your body is built, the scale and temporalities you live in, other forms of imagining might be required. What do you face when imagining being someone? Does it make you less alone? What are you rehearsing while doing this? Proposal 3: Flirting. Flirting is a way of developing and further exploring ways of being with. Can you friendly flirt with another one, make room for the other one, can you incorporate the possibility of rejection as something very natural? This makes it less painful when it happens. Friendly flirting is more a way of listening than pushing an agenda. Depending on the flirting ones, you can sometimes rely on customs and social codes of how to start into the process of being with each other, but for some ones, there is no such prefiguration, so that you have to build structures of being with each other out of nothing. This can be very exciting, this can be very scary, this can be frustrating. How does it make you feel? What are the political dimensions of your flirting behaviour? Proposal 4: Attracting. Attracting is an attempt to get the other one’s attention. It is a very useful tool if you and the other one don’t share the same codes of communication. If you want to be with someone but you are not sure if you have their consent and/or you are not able to ask them for consent, you can just try to attract them and wait for their response. A summer afternoon. A table, somewhere at the rim of the city or maybe in a park, outside. A group of people sits around that table. In their middle a bowl with sugar water. They sit there for an hour. Maybe some wasps will come and visit. A summer afternoon. A table, somewhere at the rim of the city or maybe in a park, outside. A group of people sits around that table. In their middle a smelly dead fish in the sun. They sit there for an hour. Maybe some flies will come and visit. Proposal 5: Longing. Longing for someone might be the reason to attempt most of the other things. Longing happens inside of you no matter if you are successful and no matter if the other one is present. Longing for is less distant than observing since you risk yourself and put yourself forward. At the same time, it is further away from the other, since it does not require the other at all. It can bring you closer to the other if the longing is channelled into other actions. What are the future possibilities of your present longings? What future do you long for? How do you live with your longings? These five proposals: being with, imagining being, flirting, attracting and longing are human actions. Possibilities for humans to engage with others, potentially with small crawling beings. Small crawling beings and humans are very different, behave differently and therefore also have different ways of encountering and relating to each other. Since an encounter is always at least two sided, how do small crawling beings encounter humans?

Naturally, this part will include more questions and less statements. Again, I can only use my human ways of thinking, assuming and describing. These verbs (verbs of a human language) are thought through with human notions, from a human writer for human readers. The exercise of the following will be to try to grasp/understand/imagine a part of another one's reality by looking at relational verbs I think are part of insecting, arachniding, millipeding, … As an invitation to try and place oneself in another one’s position I will use a suggestive YOU. This should not hide the fact that this operation is an impossible one. Sensing/observing. It is crucial to clarify who observes whom and why. Do you observe out of pleasure? Do you observe by accident, because there is nothing else to do and nowhere else to look? Do you observe rationally or instinctively? Do you observe because you try to figure something out? What do you try to figure out? Do you observe to figure out whether the other is an existential threat? Do you observe to figure out whether the other is a potential prey? What do you sense while observing? Sound? If you sense sound then what is the spectrum of sound you are able to sense: Does it include ultrasound? Smell? Vibration? Heat? Moisture? Light? If you are able to observe light, what spectrum of light are you able to sense? Can you see in colour? Can you see at night? Ignoring. You might ignore someone for several reasons. Maybe you are just not interested, maybe you are afraid. Ignoring is different from overlooking. Ignoring includes sensing and manifests through the decision not to react. Ignoring can be a very strong response. Often ignoring is more strenuous than to just reject, respond or engage. Ignoring someone can give the ignored one the hope that they just didn’t try hard enough, they just need to push a little more. Mistaking for. Could you think I was a butterfly, dear human? Could you think I was a flower, dear butterfly? You will realise your mistake long after our kisses started to burn and at that point it won’t matter anymore. We will have mingled and if we have survived getting there, what else can we survive? We will survive the world with all its problems, we will survive dark chapters to come and the darker chapters gone already. We will make sparks happen that the world hasn't seen. We won’t care who else made it alongside us. Our love can fill a universe.[1] Mistaking someone or something for someone or something else can happen for many reasons. It can happen accidentally. You looked for something, you thought you found it but you actually found something else. Then you might be disappointed, you could also be surprised. You could realise that you weren’t looking for what you thought you were. Maybe you don’t find what you are looking for. Maybe you are exhausted looking for something, so you make a mistake on purpose. Maybe you are curious for what you end up with when against better knowledge you pretend you have found what you were looking for. Maybe someone else wants you to mistake them for what you were looking for. Maybe you get trapped. Maybe you fall prey to someone and maybe you find something or someone so valuable that you could have never asked for it. A mistake makes you vulnerable, interrupts your intention and forces you to reorient yourself. Mistakes are risky, but they can be chances. These three relational verbs are just three out of a whole universe of verbs for naming relational actions of tiny crawling ones. They for sure cannot sufficiently draw a comprehensive picture. Rather they can be a sketch of what a catalogue of being together could look like.

[1] I never had this situation with butterflies but I have walked through nature, wearing brightly coloured clothes finding myself attracting tiny black bugs. Since this usually happens with intense green or yellow colours and the only flowers I have seen these bugs sit on are yellow Ranunculus species (buttercup), I think they mistook me for food.

to suck blood to escape to sting to walk on/ sit on/ use as space to attack to bite to eat to sense/ observe to chase to ignore to lay eggs onto/ into to hang out inside of to be trapped in the space of to mistake human phenomena for natural ones to suffer from to benefit from to coevolve to kill to work for/ be abused by to symbiose with to parasite to transmit diseases to interrupt