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

Justine Allen
Image 3: Octopus camouflage Justine Allen
…Darwin’s work offers a subtle and
complex critique of both
essentialism and teleology. It
provides a dynamic and openended
understanding of the
intermingling of history and biology
… and a complex account of the
movements of difference,
bifurcation and becoming that
characterize all forms of life.[xii]
We begin life as one cell, for a short period of
time, and after that, the sheer ubiquity of copying
and dividing abounds in life processes. Genes
replicate, albeit sometimes into imperfect copies.
Mimicry is another form of copying, mimicking or
becoming and performing Other than the self,
even if flawed. As Portmann reminds us:
“Camouflage implies a seeing eye from which to
hide.” In order to mimic, one needs to occupy a
sensory, perspectival point of view—to look out at
a world from another location in time and space.
World as Verbs
In her book, Meeting the Universe Halfway,
science studies scholar, Karen Barad, stresses that
“matter is an active participant in the world’s
becoming.”[xiii] Relations precede things; relations
emerge through specific intra-actions; and
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decisions about which “cuts” to make in the world
influence the material relations available to us,
and ultimately what counts as reality. Barad’s
theory of “agential realism” elaborates
philosophical quantum physics by converging on
questions about matter, meaning and discourse.
To simplify her theory, she uses Ian Hacking’s line:
“Reality is bigger than us.”[xiv] Like Haraway, Barad
warns against fixing a line between humans and
more than humans because of the possibilities
that are inevitably excluded. She defines agency
as “a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment,
not something that someone or something has.
… Agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ in its intraactivity.”[xv]
Her notion that everything is in
relation, and that those bodies in relation matter
more than objects, helps position an octopus in its
environment. Especially, as Barad insists (following
Henri Lefebvre) that “space is an agent of
change, that is, it plays an active role in the
unfolding of events.”[xvi] Mimicry is a performance
in space. In the theatre, actors often talk about
“persona,” which comes from the Latin word
meaning “mask.”[xvii] What is the persona a
mimicking octopus takes up?
Why is mimicry relevant to human-animal
studies? It matters to the animals. In terms of their
lives and deaths and all the time experienced in
between, mimicry makes a difference. The
material body of an octopus, for example,