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

Roger Hanlon
Image 4: Octopus camouflage Roger Hanlon
The question of distributed consciousness looms
large with octopuses and is the subject of further
work—they appear to have mindfulness in their
brain, their arms, their skin—a collaborative,
distributed mind. Octopuses have big brains,
excellent vision, skin that can taste and see, and
eight arms that can operate separately from
each other and from their complex brains. I
wonder if a unified sense of intelligence is really
necessary for the mimic octopus to thrive, or for
any of us for that matter? Indeed, does our
attachment to the idea of a unified
consciousness make us unconscious of other
more environmentally relational possibilities?
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Roger Hanlon and his Woods
Hole colleagues for the generous sharing of their
underwater photographs.
Notes
[i] Christine Huffard, Farnis Boneka and Robert Full,
“Underwater Bipedal Locomotion by Octopuses in Disguise,”
Science 307 (2005): 1927.
[ii] Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf (New York: Routledge,
2000) 106.
65
[iii] Adolf Portmann, “Colour Sense and the Meaning of Colour
from a Biologist’s Point of View,” trans. Lee Jennings. Color
Symbolism: Six Excerpts from the Eranos Yearbook 1972,
(Dallas: Spring Publications, 1977) 14.
[iv] P. Vignon as cited in Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and
Legendary Psychasthenia” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger
Caillois Reader, trans. ed. C. Frank (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003) 103.
[v] Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” in
The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, trans. ed. C.
Frank (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) 96.
[vi] Caillois, Mimicry 97. With intrigue, on the same page,
Caillois writes about “mimetic magic according to which like
produces like, and which is more or less the basis of all
incantatory practice. …The law of magic, Things that have
once touched each other stay united, corresponds to the
principle of association by contiguity...” On the next page,
Caillois writes: “Mimicry could then accurately be defined as
an incantation frozen at its highest point and that has caught
the sorcerer in his own trap.” 98
[vii] Caillois, Mimicry 99.
[viii] Caillois, Mimicry 100.
[ix] As a fan of Elizabeth Grosz, it is important to note that
while tracing Caillois’ influence on Lacan she discusses but
doesn’t critique his mimicry as psychosis position in Space,
Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995) 88-91
[x] Roger Hanlon, “Cephalopod dynamic camouflage,”