12/27/2023 0 Comments Interspecies strife definitionThe primary objects of study in this essay are works of art exhibited in major public art galleries. 4 Between these two imaginaries-one, a fictional triangulation between human, nature, and machine and two, a philosophical argument for sympathy-I locate a collection of art objects. Writing at the same time as Butler, the philosopher Henri Bergson used wasps and caterpillars to illustrate his definition of sympathy, in which sympathy is a transformative form of “feeling-knowing” that has the very real potential to provoke cultural understanding. The complementary half of my method also draws on insect imaginings via affection and sympathy. My suggestion here is that Butler’s description presents one half of a possible method to think about how to use the imaginative tools of writing and contemporary art to understand human, animal, and machine relationships in the context of species extinction. 3 How we imagine and represent these events has a critical part to play in the ways in which we might respond. Climate change and the rapid loss of biodiversity are cultural as much as scientific events. By interweaving a story of humans and machines with insect life, Butler points to a broader “imaginative web” 2 of interspecies and machinic relationships. In the current context of rapid species extinction, the metaphorical connection that Butler makes between the human, the aphid, and the machine extends beyond the fictional into our broader cultural imaginary. At the same time, studies of the loss of aphid biodiversity are used to demonstrate the magnitude of global co-extinction and the “synergistic, or combined, effects of habitat fragmentation and climate change.” 1 Aphids are simultaneously a symbol of the expansion of monoculture crops and a useful measure of the impacts of predator extinction across plant and animal species. Agribusiness holds aphids responsible for devastating crop loss and creates prophylactic machines of mass aphid extermination. Likewise, the aphid’s experience of the machine is mediated through economic structures. In the current climate it is machines rather than humans that are understood as parasitic. ![]() Machines have been known to steal jobs from the poor while the everyday activities of the wealthy rely on the designer objects of wonder these laboring machines produce. Locked in combat, hardened individual machines and humans vie in their service to capital. Today’s dominant human to machine relationship remains unaffectionate and quite unlike Butler’s parasitic interspecies and machinic understanding. Samuel Butler’s imagined world of humans as affectionate machine-tickling aphids never really took off. By entering the spaces of the art gallery and locating ourselves in the place of others, sympathy read alongside machinic evolution suggests a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction. In looking back at Bergson and Butler through contemporary art, I suggest that the art gallery gives us a sympathetic space in which we can encounter the knowledges of Bergson and Darwin, temper them with the imaginings of Butler, and ground them with the transformative living machines created by Huyghe, Lislegaard, and Fowler. In very different ways Huyghe, Lislegaard, and Fowler use the art gallery to demonstrate how humans might sympathetically engage with ecological transformation, and thus the confronting possibility of our own extinction. Contemporary artists Pierre Huyghe, Ann Lislegaard, and Hayden Fowler use video and installation art to explore interspecies relationships in time and space. ![]() By interspersing a story of humans and machines with insect life, Butler pointed to a broad imaginative web of interspecies and machinic relationships. Samuel Butler took Bergson’s ideas to an absurd extent by mixing them with readings of Charles Darwin and claiming a vital impulse for machines. At the turn of the previous century Henri Bergson suggested that sympathy offered a way to understand interspecies relationships.
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