Hustak e Myers - Involutionary Momentum. Affective Ecologies and The Sciences of Plant-Insect Encounters
Hustak e Myers - Involutionary Momentum. Affective Ecologies and The Sciences of Plant-Insect Encounters
Hustak e Myers - Involutionary Momentum. Affective Ecologies and The Sciences of Plant-Insect Encounters
Involutionary Momentum:
Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of
Plant/Insect Encounters
d i f f e r e n c e s 75
flowers and took this as a demonstration that even beautiful forms had
utilitarian, adaptive value. In this sense, his orchid book was to be read as
proof of natural selection and adaptation, indeed, as a study of the hardest
case (Browne, Charles; Desmond and Moore).
Researchers investigating plant pollination ecologies today
engage a set of evolutionary theories that have been modified signifi-
cantly since Darwin’s elaboration of natural selection in his 1859 Origin
of Species. Plant and insect behaviors are now grounded in deterministic
models that reduce interactions among species to the actions of “selfish
genes” geared to the task of reducing an organism’s energy expenditure
while maximizing its reproductive fitness for long-term species survival
(see Dawkins, for example). Such neo-Darwinian accounts are endemic
to the burgeoning field known as “chemical ecology” (see Dicke and
Takken, for example). Researchers in this field home in on the chemical
determinants that shape ecological relations, including the pheromones
and other signaling chemicals that organisms secrete to attract, repel, and
communicate with one another. If Darwin described the brilliant range of
colors, flexible forms, sensual textures, and sweet nectars that attracted
pollinators to orchid flowers, today chemical ecologists approach plants
with attentions and instruments attuned to the plumes of volatile chemical
attractants that plants synthesize and release into the atmosphere.
Neo-Darwinian logics are particularly pronounced in studies
currently being conducted on Ophrys orchids (see, for example, Vereecken
and Scheistl; and Vereecken et al.). Many of the numerous species that
comprise the Ophrys genus have the remarkable ability to lure pollina-
tors in spite of the fact that they do not offer the insects a nectar “reward.”
Chemical ecologists have found that Ophrys species can attract their pol-
linators selectively by exhaling volatile compounds that mimic the sex
pheromones of their insect pollinators. These volatile plumes can elicit
“typical” sexual behavior in male insects: for example, scientists have
observed excited male bees swarm around flowers, expose their geni-
talia before landing, and engage in “precopulatory movements” as they
feverishly try to mate with the flowers (Nilsson 257). In so doing, the bees
“inadvertently” participate in orchid fertilization. Recent studies track-
ing pollinator behaviors note that male bees will even “regularly attempt
copulation with small plastic beads scented with synthetic mixtures” of
both female sex pheromones and floral extracts (Vereecken et al. 330).
The aromatic lure of Ophrys orchids has become a textbook case of the
evolutionary strategy known as “sexual deception,” a form of “Pouyannian”
76 Involutionary Momentum
mimicry so named after the French botanist who first described the phe-
nomenon (Vereecken and Schiestl 329; Correvon and Pouyanne). Other-
wise known as “aggressive” mimicry, this strategy allows Ophrys orchids
to “exploit” male insects’ sexual proclivities for their own ends. Orchids
are figured in these accounts as “frauds” involved in a “sexual swindle”
(Nilsson 255; Vereecken and Schiestl). In this story, male insects’ “innate
behavioral responses” are exploited (Vereecken and Schiestl 7484). The
insects are identified as “dupes” that have fallen for a signal that fakes the
scent of their conspecific females (Vereecken and Schiestl 7486).
We offer this example of Ophrys mimicry to show how stories
emerging in the field of chemical ecology today constrain narratives of
interspecies relations. In this account, organismal behavior is rationalized
according to a calculating, functionalist logic. For example, according to
L. Anders Nilsson, insect arousal and orchid display must not exceed the
bounds of an economic logic bent on minimizing energy and resource
expenditures, and maximizing “reproductive output.” Anxious about the
effects of Ophrys mimicry on the conservation of male bees’ sexual ener-
gies, Nilsson goes so far as to reassure his readers that male bees can
actually tell the difference between flowers and females and that though
they get aroused, “ejaculation does not occur at flowers”: “Just enough
rather than full sexual excitement is at play, a level that prevents pollinator
exhaustion and sperm loss” (257). Following a neo-Darwinian formula-
tion, Ophrys mimicry must not be too effective, otherwise their pollinator
populations would decline (see also Vereecken and Scheistl). Note too how
any hint of interspecies intimacy is carefully policed in this account.
The event of pollination in these accounts is a decidedly “asym-
metrical” encounter (Nilsson 259). Recent statements in the literature
vociferously resist the term “co-evolution” to describe this phenomenon
in Ophrys. Since Ophrys orchids offer no nourishment for visiting insects,
the pollination event is not considered a mutually beneficial encounter;
rather, it is a phenomenon engendered through a “unilateral adaptation”
of the orchid to the bee (Vereecken et al. 330). In this account, orchids
are the only participants reaping a benefit from the encounter, and the
insects are rendered passive to the wiles of the plants. Though they are
granted the power to deceive, these plants are still figured as mechani-
cal actants: their near-perfectly attuned aromatic chemistries are not
cleverly concocted propositions; they are merely the blind effects of ran-
dom genetic variation subject to the selective forces imposed by their
d i f f e r e n c e s 77
Figure 1
Orchid/insect inti-
macies: Ophrys
orchids and their
pollinators. Illus-
trations by Inga
Thomasson.
Reprinted from
Kullenberg and
Bergström, “Hyme-
noptera Aculeata
Males as Pollinators
of Ophrys Orchids”
with permission
from John Wiley and
Sons, Inc.
78 Involutionary Momentum
d i f f e r e n c e s 79
80 Involutionary Momentum
d i f f e r e n c e s 81
I have been very lucky & have now the many curious contrivances. I shall
examined almost every British Orchid never rest till I see a Catasetum eject
fresh, & when at sea-side shall draw pollen-masses, & a Mormodes twist its
up rather long paper on the means of column.
their fertilisation for Linn. Soc & I can- —Darwin
not fancy anything more perfect than
82 Involutionary Momentum
d i f f e r e n c e s 83
84 Involutionary Momentum
Figure 2a
Anatomy of an
Orchid, Orchis
mascula. Illustration
by G. B. Sowerby.
d i f f e r e n c e s 85
Figure 2b
Anatomical features
labeled.
86 Involutionary Momentum
d i f f e r e n c e s 87
Figure 3
Catasetum sacca-
tum, showing the
front view of the
column (A) and the
side view of the
flower (B), with all
the sepals and petals
removed except the
labellum. Anatomi-
cal labels: a. anther;
an. antennæ of the
rostellum; d. disc
of pollinium; f. fila-
ment of anther;
g. germen or ovar-
ium; l. labellum;
p. pollen-masses;
pd. pedicel of pol-
linium; s. stigmatic
chamber. Illus-
tration by G. B.
Sowerby.
88 Involutionary Momentum
Figure 4
Mormodes ignea
showing the lateral
view of flower, with
the upper sepal and
the near upper petal
cut off. Anatomical
labels: a. anther;
pd. pedicel of pol-
linium; s. stigma;
l. labellum; l s. lower
sepal. Illustration by
G. B. Sowerby.
pollen-masses, & a Mormodes twist its column” (9 June 1861). Both species
had ingenious mechanisms that allowed them to fling their pollen masses
with great force at visiting insects (see figs. 3 and 4). He got the opportu-
nity to observe these species when specimens were delivered to his home.
However, he had to subject the flowers to intensive experimentation before
he was able to witness the spectacle of pollen ejection:
d i f f e r e n c e s 89
Darwin was surprised. Other species proved much more sensitive. In one
species he had found that “a touch from the thinnest human hair suffices
to cause the explosion” that would release the pollinium (142). In the case
of Catasetum, he went to extremes to test the “nature of the excitement”
that caused the ejection of pollen (224). In five trials with one species of
Catasetum he “violently hit, bent, and pricked” its antenna. This aggres-
sive approach seemed to elicit no response. Then, when he touched the left
side of the flower with less force, the pollinium promptly “shot forth.” In
his sixth trial, Darwin dealt “a forcible blow on the right-hand antenna.”
This apparently “did cause the act of ejection,” from which he learned that
the orchid was “not completely paralysed” from its trials (228).
When species of Mormodes arrived at his home, he faced simi-
lar challenges. He spent arduous days with these specimens, conducting
trial after trial in his attempt to figure out their peculiar mechanism. At
first he met with little success: “I pricked deeply the column in different
parts and the stigma, and cut off the petals, and even the labellum, without
causing the ejection of the pollinium” (260). He took drastic measures: “A
drop of chloroform, of spirits of wine, and of boiling water placed on this
part of the rostellum produced no effect; nor, to my surprise, did exposure
of the whole flower to vapour of chloroform” (261). He admits candidly: “At
the close of the twelfth trial I was in despair” (261–62). Yet, he persevered
and eventually found that “a minute hinge” that “articulated” the anther
to the column “a little way beneath its bent filamentary apex” was, in fact,
“sensitive to the touch”:
I tried four times and found that I could touch with some force
any other part; but when I gently touched this point with the
finest needle, instantaneously the membrane which unites the
disc to the edges of the cavity in which it is lodged, ruptured,
and the pollinium was shot upwards and alighted on the crest of
the labellum [. . .]. Now let us suppose an insect to alight on the
crest of the labellum (and no other convenient landing-place is
afforded), and then to lean over in front of the column to gnaw or
suck the bases of the petals swollen with sweet fluid. The weight
and movements of the insect would press and move the labellum
90 Involutionary Momentum
together with the bent underlying summit of the column; and the
latter, pressing on the hinge in the angle, would cause the ejec-
tion of the pollinium, which would infallibly strike the head of
the insect and adhere to it. (259–60, emphasis added)
d i f f e r e n c e s 91
Figure 5
Darwin’s
experimental tools.
surface of the disc struck my finger and firmly adhered to it” (On the Vari-
ous Contrivances, 2nd ed. 259). His experiments got him fully involved in a
kind of role-playing activity where he engaged his body and an extensive
array of instruments to mimic the movements of insects to see if he could
elicit the same response as they. With a feather, a brush, or even the tip of a
pencil (see fig. 5), he would set himself in the position of the insect so that
he could get a feel for the tensions and elasticity in the orchids’ responsive
tissues. Observing the species Orchis pyramidalis, Darwin described one
“pretty experiment” that saw him pushing a “fine bristle straight into the
narrow mouth of the nectary” so that he could
92 Involutionary Momentum
allowed the orchid to affix its pollen masses on the insects’ body so per-
fectly that when the insect departed to visit the next flower, it would deliver
pollen directly to the new flower’s stigmata. Flexibly extended through
the bristle, Darwin found a way to participate in the event of pollination.
By inserting himself into the kinaesthetic and affective rela-
tions of insects and orchids, his experimental practice took on mimetic
form. Darwin’s penchant for imitation and his cultivation of affections and
sympathies for his experimental subjects through intimate encounters are
well documented by Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots. Beer notes that Darwin
was extraordinarily responsive to a range of phenomena: “He responds to
the moment of a leaf’s twirl and to the immense slow passages that raise
escarpments. So he is sensitive to the quiver of a tendril but also to rocks
and fossils” (246). This responsivity gave him a “capacity for empathy”
that “allowed him to appreciate the aesthetic choices of earthworms, the
erotic explorations of orchids, as well as the anger of other primates” (254).
His acts of mimicry are, for Beer, forms of “intimacy and enactment” that
serve as experimental “means to proof” (253). And yet, Darwin’s intima-
cies and empathic relations were not innocent; they were grounded in
the violent bodily transgressions of biological experiment.19 Beer tends
to downplay this violence in her efforts to make the point that Darwin’s
acts of mimicry “reverse” the signifying relations we typically associate
with “anthropomorphism” (253). In this sense Darwin’s experiments with
orchids resonate with what science studies scholar Sara Wylie has explored
in the context of researchers’ early experiments with insect hormones. She
notes the “irony typical of mimetic relationships” wherein “the humans
who took this step” themselves “became strangely like insects” (15).
By imitating flowers and insects, Beer suggests that Darwin
decenters and displaces the human. In so doing, the human is no longer
the measure for the nonhuman; rather, the forms and movements of ani-
mals and plants reinscribe human sensibilities. But this wasn’t always so
obvious. Take, for example, what looks like an explicitly anthropomorphic
comparison of different species of Catasetum:
d i f f e r e n c e s 93
94 Involutionary Momentum
d i f f e r e n c e s 95
and Lewontin). Indeed, Gould notes that Darwin was often ambivalent
about the mechanisms of speciation, and in some contexts even verged
toward Lamarckian accounts of evolutionary novelty that envisioned
organisms inheriting acquired traits. In light of the openness of Darwin’s
wavering convictions, Gould is critical of today’s evolutionary theories that
appear to have clamped down on a “fundamentalist” version of evolution,
a theory that fetishizes natural selection as the sole mechanism of evolu-
tion. Quite unlike Darwin, these “ultra-Darwinian” approaches maintain
unwavering “faith in the power of natural selection” as the single “opti-
mizing agent” in evolution (Gould and Lewontin). Rather than analyzing
organisms as “integrated wholes,” these “adaptationist” accounts break
organisms’ complex anatomies and behaviors into “unitary traits” in order
to tell “adaptive stories” for each trait “considered separately” (Gould and
Lewontin 581). This satisfying “just so” story of evolutionary change seems
to satiate the “deeply engrained” modern desire for accounts that identify
an ultimate function for every trait. Moreover, these are the stories in
which adaptations are made legible as rational choices in an economic
logic that aims to maximize fitness advantages while calculating the
lowest energy expenditures. These logics have become hegemonic in the
contemporary life sciences.
Darwin traced life’s diverse forms and behaviors along the
branches of a genealogical tree (Helmreich, “Trees”). Neo-Darwinian
accounts amplify this genealogical form. For them, diverging branches
signify evolutionary change through random genetic mutations accrued
in populations of individual species. Organisms have little agency in these
accounts that attribute evolutionary momentum to the wiles of “selfish
genes” struggling to keep their host species branching out in a competitive
field structured by many enemies and few allies (for example, Dawkins).
Neo-Darwinian approaches overdetermine the temporalities
that are deemed relevant to the study of life. In the tracing of evolution-
ary trajectories, beings and doings get blurred across the longue durée of
changes experienced by entire species and averaged out over generations
and populations. In this frame, the temporal arc of evolutionary change
is inscribed by a strategizing telos of species struggle and survival. In the
process these accounts lose track of particular bodies and of local and
ephemeral differences. Practices that fall outside the domain of repro-
duction or survival, including organisms’ improvisations and playful
experiments, do not record themselves in evolutionary memory; deemed
irrelevant, they are rendered invisible in these broad sweeps of time.
96 Involutionary Momentum
d i f f e r e n c e s 97
98 Involutionary Momentum
Chemical Ecology
d i f f e r e n c e s 99
But these tobacco plants don’t passively give their bodies over to
these hungry herbivores. Their cell membranes are sensors that transduce
excitations through their tissues: they can feel insects climbing their stems
and leaves and can taste insect saliva to discern precisely who is feeding
on their leaves. In response to a feeding caterpillar, one tobacco plant
propagates electrical currents through its distributed body and synthesizes
a fresh batch of potent chemicals. Soon, cells in its roots, stems, and dis-
tant leaves are producing toxins that slow down the caterpillar’s growth
by impairing its nervous system and digestion. But the plant doesn’t stop
there. It calls for help. It synthesizes and releases a concentrated plume of
volatile chemicals that can disperse widely. Plants growing nearby hear
the call and activate their own defense responses to ward off predators.
Downwind a predatory insect picks up telling notes in a specially crafted
bouquet, and as it homes in on the source, it discovers that the plant has
offered it up a gift: a tasty hornworm larva.
This is a story that Ian Baldwin has long labored to tell. Bald-
win, an American scientist, is head of the Chemical Ecology Research
Institute at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, where he directs
a laboratory and massive greenhouse dedicated to studying plant/insect
communication. He also runs a large research station in Utah, where he
studies the chemical ecology of wild Nicotiana plants. His research team
is producing evidence that plants have several strategies for defending
themselves against predators. They do this not only by interfering with an
herbivore’s growth and digestion through the active synthesis of toxins in
plant tissues but also by synthesizing volatile chemicals that lure preda-
tory insects hungry to feed on plant pests. Remarkably, plants appear to
have the ability to elicit support from a “third tropic level,” that is, from
predatory insects that can prey on these herbivores.
The field of chemical ecology is founded on the general prin-
cipal that species have evolved complex ways to use chemistry to attract,
repel, and collaborate with one another. One textbook with a sense of
humor calls it the “ecology of body odor” (Dicke and Takken), yet this
definition doesn’t begin to account for organisms’ active and creative
use of chemistry. Researchers in this field pay extraordinary attention
to organisms’ sensory dexterities, their communication skills, and their
interpretive powers to make sense of one another’s chemical emissions.
Some of the earliest studies in this field focused on “intra-specific” sig-
naling among insects, including the widely known example of male moth
attraction to female moth pheromones. Today, interspecies signaling has
d i f f e r e n c e s 101
d i f f e r e n c e s 103
d i f f e r e n c e s 105
Openings
“contestable practice[s]” in which “the partners are never set once and for
all” (314). As Darwin’s penchant for mimesis reminds us, asymmetries of
power between partners in these experiments cannot be overlooked.
By leaning into Darwin’s experiments, hovering with insects
as they lap at floral nectaries and feeling ourselves pulled by the label-
lum’s lure and the tobacco plant’s volatile plumes, we can begin to tell new
kinds of stories. As we hitch a ride on this involutionary momentum and
draw attention to the rhythms of these intimate relations, we can disturb
the militarized and economic logics that pervade the sciences of ecology.
And though involutionary readings cannot erase or fully undermine these
logics, they do offer a supplement that amplifies otherwise muted views.
It is in encounters between orchids, insects, and scientists
that we find openings for an ecology of interspecies intimacies and subtle
propositions. What is at stake in this involutionary approach is a theory of
ecological relationality that takes seriously organisms as inventive prac-
titioners who experiment as they craft interspecies lives and worlds. This
is an ecology inspired by a feminist ethic of “response-ability” in which
questions of species difference are always conjugated with attentions
to affect, entanglement, and rupture; it is an affective ecology in which
creativity and curiosity characterize the experimental forms of life of all
kinds of practitioners, not only the human ones. We will need this mode
of ecological thinking in order to do more effective work in challenging
the status quo of ecological irresponsibility.
We extend our thanks to Sophia Roosth and Astrid Schrader for the invitation to contribute
to this special issue of differences and to Elizabeth Weed for her generous support through
the writing and revision process. Many thanks also to Etienne Benson, Donna Haraway,
Stefan Helmreich, Kelly Ladd, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Hugh Raff les, Catriona Sandi-
lands, and Joan Steigerwald for their close and generative readings of earlier versions of
this essay. Many thanks to Martha Kenney, Rusty Shteir, and participants in the Politics of
Care in Technoscience Workshop at York University, for their generous comments on this
essay. Thank you also to Dani Pacey for translations and transcription. The writing and
research of this essay was made possible by a generous grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
ca rl a husta k received her doctorate in history from the University of Toronto in 2010.
She has two essays in press, one forthcoming in the Journal of Transnational American
Studies and one in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. Recently awarded a two-year
d i f f e r e n c e s 107
Figure 6
Lynn Margulis.
Photo credit
unknown.
Courtesy of Lynn
Margulis Archives.
natasha myers is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the program
in Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto. Her work has appeared in
Body & Society, Social Studies of Science, and Science Studies. She is currently completing a
manuscript on visual culture and modes of embodiment in the contemporary life sciences,
which will be published by Duke University Press. Her new project, “Sensing Botanical Sen-
soria,” is an ethnography of the arts and sciences of botanical experimentation. A Research
Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
provided generous funding for the research and writing of this essay.
d i f f e r e n c e s 109
d i f f e r e n c e s 111
30 The line or block of becoming that they become more articulate, that
unites the wasp and the orchid is, better able to utter clear state-
produces a shared deterritori- ments about these differences.
alization: of the wasp, in that it
becomes a liberated piece of the 33 In fact, many in the growing field
orchid’s reproductive system, of “plant neurobiology” would
but also of the orchid, in that it argue that plants have something
becomes the object of an orgasm in like a brain. Researchers point
the wasp, also liberated from its to electrochemical homologies
own reproduction. A coexistence between animal neurons and
of two asymmetrical movements plant physiologies and have sug-
that combine to form a block, gested that the filigreed network
down a line of f light that sweeps of plant roots and the conductive
away selective pressures. The tissues that run through plant
line, or the block, does not link shoots, stems, and leaves form a
the wasp to the orchid, any more coordinated system of cells that
than it conjugates or mixes them: may enable the plant to act as a
it passes between them, carrying nervous system (Balušca, Lev-
them away in a shared proxim- Yadun, and Mancuso; Stahlberg;
ity in which the discernibility of and Trewavas). These research-
points disappears. (Deleuze and ers draw on a long history of
Guattari 293–94) inquiry into plant excitability,
beginning with J. C. Bose’s early-
31 See, for example, Barad, Meeting twentieth-century research into
the Universe; Butler; Castricano; plant nerves in Bengal, India (see
Clough and Hardt; Hird; Parikka; Cinti; and Myers, “Sensing”) to
and Whatmore. argue that plants have cognitive
powers and potentially a kind
32 In his essay “How to Talk about of consciousness (on plant con-
the Body?,” Latour develops the sciousness, see also Doyle; and
concept of articulation in the dou- Trewavas).
ble sense of the term, both clear
speech and the discrimination of 34 See Roosth for a discussion of
differences. He uses the example similar problems associated
of kits used to train “noses” in with attributions of cellular
the perfume industry. Trainees subjectivity.
have to learn how to articu-
late finer and finer differences 35 On nonhuman “screams,” see
between scents. In the process, Roosth.
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