Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Justine Allen
Image 2: Octopus camouflaged with mottled pattern Justine Allen
forms and life processes) are inseparably
entwined and always subject to historical forces. I
begin my work, already entangled with Donna
Haraway’s idea about “naturecultures” and her
critique of the violence of Othering, because as
she puts it: “so many fundamental
epistemological starting points are from this
enmeshment where the categorical separation of
nature and culture is already a kind of violence,
an inherited violence anyway.”[ii] The legacy of
Heidegger’s claim that animals are “poor in world”
also contributes to the violent exclusion of animals
from particular forms of agency and worldmaking.
Delving into the lives of mimic octopuses,
I will argue that to mimic is to extend one’s
agency into changing environments and to
participate in an ecology of relationships: making
worlds along the way.
Mimicry
The word mimicry derives from the Greek
“mimetikos” or imitative. Some animals have
developed the ability to imitate other life forms
(abiotic or biotic) as an adaptation, with any luck
as a selective advantage in survival—to hide, to
obtain nourishment, or to deceive. It is important
to heed the advice of the phenomenological
60
biologist, Adolf Portmann, who warned: “Whoever
seeks to understand appearance structures must
find a broader standpoint than the severely
limited one of functional and selectional
thinking.”[iii] Perhaps, mimicry is a kind of
showiness in nature, exceeding even the need for
camouflage; ostentatious as that may sound, P.
Vignon believed mimicry served an aesthetic
goal, while Alphonsus Lingis (1983) would say that
subjects are enjoying themselves with visual
delights.[iv] For now, mimicry can be defined
inclusively as lived bodily experiences
experimented with and impersonated over time,
through spatial relationships with recognized
environments and their participants.
Early in his career, French sociologist,
Roger Caillois was fascinated by insect mimicry,
and took a decidedly anti-utilitarian approach to
it. He rejected the idea that mimicry
combinations were a result of random chance,
believing instead in the “fact of their mutual
arrangement, their reciprocal mapping.”[v]
Caillois considered mimicry a “dangerous luxury,”
invoking the example of Phyllidae moth
caterpillars, which are known to eat one another,
mistakenly identifying other Phylidae for leaves;
“this could almost be viewed as some sort of
collective masochism … with the imitation of the