from Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

“There is really no reason to suppose,” says W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, “that lesser beings are devoid of sentient life.” Remembering childhood nights, he wondered, Do moths dream? Do they know they are lost when, misled by the flame, they enter a house to die?

What was von Frisch’s question: Can the honeybee speak? No, that wasn’t it. First he thought, There is really no reason to suppose that honeybees are devoid of language. And then he asked, My little comrade, what does she say?

Pity the honeybees. Pity and protect them. In this, too, their indifference is of no avail.  So trapped in language. The honeybees and us, held together, pushed apart. Even von Frisch, even Lindauer, who loved them so dearly, who found in them redemption from the brutish horrors of their times… Well do you remember what they’d do to prove their little one’s capacities?

But enough paradox. To give them language was simultaneously to celebrate their difference and to doom them to impossibility, to condemn them to the merely imitative, at which they could only fail, to (mis)take “linguistic self-referentiality [as] the paradigm for self-referentiality generally.” But of course the failure is human (a specific scientific human, perhaps, but human nonetheless), this failure of being able only to imagine sociality and communication through something language-like and to grant ourselves its apogee. What foolishness to judge insects- so ancient, so diverse, so accomplished, so successful, so beautiful, so astonishing, so mysterious, so unknown – by criteria they can never meet and about which they could not care! What silliness to disregard their accomplishments and focus instead on their supposed deficiencies! What pitiful poverty of imagination to see them as resources merely for our self-knowledge! What sad, sad, sad, sadness when language fails us.