Man-Moth Tongue
In the section of “The Interpretation of the Spider’s Web” in “Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning”, Uexkull suggests an intra-action between the spider and the prey. Uexkull writes that the spider’s web needs to account for the fly before ever seeing one, and parallels this fly image to the sensory reality we perceive the world in. He then expands this idea of Urbild, or primal image, through the example of the pea weevil and the pea, whose very progeny requires an external foresight. In the spider or pea weevil’s primal image, they approximate the subjectivity of their prey for sustenance. There is an inborn intra-activity between the biological function of the spider to create a web that is invisible to the fly’s perception that it ends up trapped in it. Human beings have a similar condition as well in the biological acquisition of language. While we likely experience the world in different aspects than the insect, thoughts and meaning connection, or other values that we attribute to humans, are perhaps tied together through language just like the spider web as well. In a sense this almost divides each individual human as a race of its own, but does not fall into solipsism because language allows the intra-action of human beings; there is never a separate and definite I, the I is always the world. There is a comfort in this reaffirmation of our condition, yet at the same time the primal image suggests an incompleteness in the Gödel sense that this condition can be valid while unable to be proved. The example of the pea weevil has the biological out in this situation through the explanation of mutations, but can the same be said for the human subject? Certainly, one such realization would not cause reality to break down and the world to collapse into disarray, but rather than simply accepting this “thrownness” of our condition, it would help the human subject better to come to terms with a greater understanding on a being’s eerie preternatural ability to approximate the Other.
In the study of communication and the complexity of the means of it, the chapter “The Macy Meanings of Meaning” within the book “Six Legs Better : A Cultural History of Myrmecology” might offer a safer, more digestible form of our communicative spider webs through looking at bees and ants. Sleigh writes of the studies investigating the connection between the complexity of the bee’s dancing, a language equivalent for humans, and their communicative specificity. He then juxtaposes the insect with another observation of a group of stray ants that has lost their communicative cues which ended up causing them to circle around endlessly until they starved to death. Reconsidering this observation for language, is it possible the effectiveness of reaching out to the other human subject also depends on the complexity of the device or tool that this intra-action manifests? In an inverse sense of linguistic determinism, the complexity of abstraction in language, and by extension literature, might enhance the communicative effectiveness of human beings. In the studies around bees dancing, the issue of accounting for the fullness of their Umwelt became a point of contention. In a similar Derridean way the issue of accounting for the multitudes of outside-text exists for us as well. Yet is it possible that language, at a certain point of abstraction gains validity in describing itself? In the sense that literary writing becomes a second degree of approximation that forms a world of its own to allow for nigh-total communication between subjects. This however seems to regress into the same issue when this text requires the context as the unlocking key. In an idealist way, would such a secondary, absolute text be possible?
(And yes, there are spider pictures and spider videos in our section. I am aware that a spider is technically an arthropod, not an insect. The initial learning of this fact in my childhood had filled me with a gladness; there is a certain calculating elegance in the spider, and the distinction between this species and the more generalizing insect race has always elevated the spider in my mind. The slowness of their movements gave them a languorous, composed beauty even if their spiny legs still stands my hair from time to time.)
References
Uexküll Jakob von. “The Interpretation of the Spider’s Web.” A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 157–161.
Sleigh, Charlotte. “The Macy Meanings of Meaning” Six Legs Better A Cultural History of Myrmecology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 167-173