Agency of the Ignored
A reflection on the close reading of Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard A Fly Buzz — When I Died” revealed a subversion in relation to conventional thought processes of insects. The poem, which is about death cannot shake away the presence of the fly and as result, questions came into mind about the ontology of humans and what it meant to insects. The answer is that insects could care less about the psychological workings of human. In the case where death is the most climaxing feature of one’s life, the fly only has the capacity to respond by eating the rotting flesh left behind it. It does not have the ability to sympathise. Here, we begin to get a glimpse of Massumi’s “pure mechanism” whereby the fly can only considered as “an innate condensation of ancestral wisdom passed from generation to generation.” It has no thoughts of us allowing it to disrupt such solemn procedures as funerals.
While it can be agreed that insects have no opinion of humans, that does not mean we should condemn them for lack of sympathy. The metamorphosis in our understanding and interpretation of insects continued with the donning of perspective in the form of photo essay. Particularly in the case of the hummingbird moth, and the spider-web, the intra-actions that take place within their spectrum shapes the perception about them. More specifically, the phenomena of the hummingbird moth is resulted from intra-action of adaptation, allowing it to inherit the instinctive agency of the actual hummingbird. The written in second-person, choose-your-own-adventure style writing, attempts to capture the intra-relationship between moth, hummingbird and human. In essence, the photo essay makes an effort to relay the experience of a variety of insects outside the focalisation of humans.
The short film focuses on the sympathy gained from drawing connections between humans and insects through seemingly the mimicry of insects by humans. The construction of human communities bears resemblance to an ant colony in many ways. With a change in perception, an appreciation for insects connecting our existence to them even though we are arguably hindrance to their survival. We can find an awareness to them that’s not just expressed from an onomatopoeic buzz.
References
Grusin, Richard, editor. The Nonhuman Turn. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt13x1mj0.