1-5: swarm ontology
As dance theorist Gabrielle Brandstetter suggests in her genealogy, "Swarms and Enthusiasts: Transfers in/as Choreography," swarm formations in nature have, much like the imminent threat presented by computer viruses, almost always been tethered to anthropocentric interpretations. For instance, in what she has aptly termed a tradition of "religious hermeneutics," Brandstetter uncovers an entire lineage of mapping human meaning and intentionality onto natural swarm forms: from the plagues of locusts in the Bible's book of Exodus to Native American shamans reading the flocking patterns of birds for signs of their fate.[12] United in their attribution of natural swarm phenomena to the act of a deity, this framing of the swarm as an act of authorship in many ways can be seen as an ideological precedent to the common narratives surrounding the computer virus, as they both follow a similar pattern of trying to contain aggregate, non-human agencies within the control of a "human subject." And yet, while the body of the divine subject has usually been imagined as more imminent than localizable in any traditionally embodied sense, and thus, is constantly in danger of collapsing the boundary between chaos and control much like the swarm, it also represents another attempt to manage complexity by placing it within the control of an "intelligent designer."
Throughout the history of political thought, there has been a similar recognition that the swarm presents a threat to the sovereignty of both individual leaders and hierarchical institutions in modern liberal democracy. According to Eugene Thacker, Aristotle contrasted insect swarms to the ideal political organization, just as Hobbes contrasted the "chaotic, subhuman threat of the state of nature" (also explicitly described in terms of insect swarms) to the modern social contract based in the transfer of rights to the sovereign and the creation of the Commonwealth.[13] Following in this tradition of opposing swarms to hierarchies, but on the side of more positive evaluation, post-Fordist theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have likewise posited the self-organizing, tactical, and networked "multitude" as the ideal form of resistance to neoliberal global capitalism, with the distributed models of dissent at the anti-globalization protests against the WTO in Seattle providing the prototypical example.[14] Thacker, of course, notes that the nuances and differences between all of these forms of political organization are important and deserve a detailed investigation of their own, but he also claims that there is also a remarkable consistency throughout in their explicit rhetoric of the swarm as the antithesis of both absolutism and modern liberal democracy.
![[12]](media/swarm-footnote-12.jpg){kind=link}
Throughout the history of political thought, there has been a similar recognition that the swarm presents a threat to the sovereignty of both individual leaders and hierarchical institutions in modern liberal democracy. According to Eugene Thacker, Aristotle contrasted insect swarms to the ideal political organization, just as Hobbes contrasted the "chaotic, subhuman threat of the state of nature" (also explicitly described in terms of insect swarms) to the modern social contract based in the transfer of rights to the sovereign and the creation of the Commonwealth.[13] Following in this tradition of opposing swarms to hierarchies, but on the side of more positive evaluation, post-Fordist theorists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have likewise posited the self-organizing, tactical, and networked "multitude" as the ideal form of resistance to neoliberal global capitalism, with the distributed models of dissent at the anti-globalization protests against the WTO in Seattle providing the prototypical example.[14] Thacker, of course, notes that the nuances and differences between all of these forms of political organization are important and deserve a detailed investigation of their own, but he also claims that there is also a remarkable consistency throughout in their explicit rhetoric of the swarm as the antithesis of both absolutism and modern liberal democracy.
![[13]](media/swarm-footnote-13.jpg){kind=link}
![[14]](media/swarm-footnote-14.jpg){kind=link}
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