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Whatsapp Philosopher and performer Undine Sellbach says we can learn a lot from the lives of insects.

Though they might be unsettling, insects can provide a muse for deep reflection in an environmentally compromised world. Philosopher and performer Undine Sellbach tells Joe Gelonesi about the necessity of contemplating the lives of small, instinctual animals.

Insects don’t seem to count for much. They bite, buzz around, and wreck picnics. They don’t trigger our moral sensibilities in the way that higher order animals might. In fact, for some, insects generate downright moral revulsion. Yet these small presences are closer to our lives than we care to consider.

Not only are they in the rooms we inhabit, but also in our food. At a special event held at the Melbourne Museum in 2012 diners were given an unusual menu. Courses at Bugs for Brunch included scorpions, mealworms and crickets. Also on the menu was a packet of polenta, described as containing ‘up to 10 insects per packet’ and a chocolate bar with ‘up to 80 microscopic insect fragments’.

The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post.

In the audience that day was Launceston-based philosopher and performer Undine Sellbach. For her, it was the start of some big thinking on small things.

‘What fascinated me is that what appeared to be an event about science and philosophical argument had this very powerful other level where children and their parents were connecting disgust with ambivalence, making new connections and affinities with the bugs,’ she says.

In this moment of realisation a strange reversal came into view, which Sellbach terms an ‘upside- down ethics’.

‘None of this is understandable from the traditions of animal ethics. It wasn’t clear whether it was definitively right or wrong to eat the insects. And none of this is being picked up in philosophical argument.’

So, an ingenious, albeit slightly unnerving, meal led to a new intellectual project combining biology, philosophy, children’s literature, and the performing arts. It also led Sellbach to retrace the steps of a forgotten ethologist.

Read more: David Papineau on conciousness

Listen: Edible insects

Jakob von Uexküll was a German scientist of Baltic descent who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries. He worked on muscular physiology, animal behaviour studies, and the cybernetics of life. He is sometimes described as a biophilosopher.

Uexküll’s work on insects was ground-breaking, but has been somewhat forgotten in the decades since his death. Although Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz is thought of as the ‘father’ of ethology, Uexküll was already setting disciplinary boundaries some years before Lorenz’s forays into animal behaviour.

Crucially, Uexküll understood that small life requires a special observational relationship that should aim to understand the ‘bio-semiotics’ of life at that level.

The vital cues that insects rely on can be few in number though decisive for survival. Uexküll made it his business to understand this crucial fact of instinctual life. His description of the almost claustrophobic world of the tick illustrates perfectly his approach:

This eyeless animal finds the way to her watch-point [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post ... and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm ... then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood.

Sellbach admires the depth of originality in Uexküll’s work.

‘He tells this story of the life cycle of the tick almost in the form of a fairy tale. The fairytale becomes stranger and stranger as Uexküll discards what is significant for us and highlights what is significant for the tick.’

Writing around the same the time as Uexküll, renowned French bug-watcher Jean Henri Fabre also posited the importance of passionate observation. Like Uexküll, Fabre understood that it takes deep immersion to properly understand the entomological cosmos. As Fabre wrote in his classic Souvenirs Entomologiques:

When shall we have an entomological laboratory for the study not of dead insects steeped in alcohol but of the living insect; a laboratory having for its object the instinct, the habits, the manner of living, the work, the struggles, the propagation of that little world with which agriculture and philosophy have most seriously to reckon?

We don’t know whether Uexküll consciously set on a path to answer Fabre’s question but his work very much took up the cause.

Uexküll’s master move was to identify what he termed the umwelt—the sensory and perceptual world of the small organism. One has to lower oneself into the umwelt to properly understand the force of instinctual life. For Sellbach, coming to grips with the umwelt is crucial to any philosophical treatise worth its wings.

‘The umwelt is the life-world: a place of perceptions and sensations where certain parts of the lived environment become incredibly important, and where other parts of the environment drop away and become indeterminate. This adds up to a holistic practice of biology which refuses to bracket-off the inner life of the creatures in question.’

Like Uexküll, Sellbach attempts to enter this umwelt through creative engagement alongside empirical observation. A good example is her cabaret Mistress O & The Bees, devised and performed with her collaborator Stephen Loo, a professor of architecture in his other life. It is, she says, ‘A fairy tale about a girl who swallows some bees, told in the form of a story with songs and gestures, projected drawings and mobile making.’

The show made it to a philosophy and ethology conference at University College London in 2010. In 2012 it was performed at the Sydney Biennale as part of Erin Manning's relational work Stitching Time.

Her approach is reminiscent of the entertaining and educative internet vignettes pioneered by Isabella Rossellini in her Green Porno series. Sellbach is an admirer.

‘What Rossellini is doing is showing the incedible diversity that exists, and it breaks down simple presumptions we have about other animals. What I love in her work is the conjunction of animal biology with acted abstract accounts of small instinctive creature life.’

Rossellini uses the sex-lives of insects as a way in, and it works to perfection. It’s hard to look away, though it does feel that one has stumbled across something on the edge of illicitness, driven less by the sexual content than the mere fact that it’s insects we’re being asked to imagine. It’s here that the relationship shows itself to be the strange thing that it is. Insects, as much as they are driven themselves by instinct, rouse the same feelings in us: some shuddering, some unnerving, some just strangely indeterminate.

The philosophy of insects Listen to The Philosopher's Zone to hear about what the world's tiniest creatures can tell us about ourselves.

This led Sellbach to think about Freud and his landmark essay Instincts and their Vicissitudes. In it, Freud attempts to understand that which seems to mysteriously overcome us, like the intensity that wells up when a cockroach scrambles in the half light of a door.

‘Human instinct isn’t just an internal state,’ says Sellbach. ‘It’s in debt for its power to external forces; human, environmental, and social. For Freud sometimes these connections are genuinely accidental, but I think that in another sense these connections have power because they return to us the sense that an organism is not a whole thing but has edges. It’s an unsettling quality, unravelling the neat boundaries we draw around ourselves.’

Between the naïve-style ethology of Uexküll and the uncanniness of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Sellbach crafts a deepening sense of insect life.

At this moment she is developing a grasshopper cabaret with Loo, which she will take to a theatre and philosophy conference at the Sorbonne. Not surprisingly, it’s based on Uexküll’s attempts to summon up the umwelt of a grasshopper.

Tubes, booths, bells, microphones and speakers are assembled in a quest to imagine what’s most important in the grasshopper’s world. Grasshoppers play their part, as do audience members.

‘We invite our audience to perform our experiment with us. In the spirit of Uexküll’s improvised biology, we use everyday things in the room and some small things we bring along to set the scene of a strange kind of cabaret.’

It’s a strange kind of cabaret indeed that asks an audience to scrape little combs in unison to help create the sound of the grasshopper life-world. However, for ardent observers like Sellbach, Loo and those who came before, once bitten by the bug there can be no other way.

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