INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 190

behaviour was purely mechanistic, 'an inborn predisposition, inseparable from the
animal' (Fabre, 1912: 75-76).
Although his works were less popular, Fabre's German contemporary - theoretical
biologist Jakob von Uexküll - seemed to deny such materialistic determinism. His
depictions of the sensory universe or Umwelt of animals - especially a 'detestable'
arthropod, the tick - later proved highly influential in reconfiguring subjectivity in
non-anthropocentric terms (Buchanan, 2008: 24-25). But despite depicting the
Umwelt in relational terms - as environments simultaneously sensed and brought into
being through each animal's interiority - Uexküll's arthropods remained mere vessels
for morphological and behavioural archetypes. Denying spiders any autonomy, he
asserted that their webs were successfully tailored to catch prey purely because 'an
original program exists for both the fly and the spider' (Uexküll, 1982: 43).
Fabre and Uexküll were in any case outliers, thoughtful observers marking
the end of a long century in which arachnids lurked below consideration. It might
seem that this disregard for arthropod intentionality was amended after 1900.
Consider the insect-creature's angst in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis , or the altruistic
spider central to E. B. White's Charlotte's Web . But such narratives operate via
anthropomorphism, as recently satirised in Tim Ingold's imagined debate between
Bruno Latour's ANT (Actor-Network Theory) and his own competing formu-
lation of animate agency, SPIDER (Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally
Embodied Responsiveness; Ingold, 2008: 209-215).
Less playful is the ethical mission of fostering trans-species identification that
underpins much contemporary scholarship in posthumanism and animal studies.
From Donna Haraway's dog to Jacques Derrida's cat, charismatic species remain
privileged animal subjects (Derrida, 2002: 369-418; Haraway, 2003: 11-17). In
recognising that animals also observe us, we do more than accept their alterity; we
acknowledge their sentient otherness, co-constituting us both as moral agents.
Indeed, critical ecological philosophers such as Val Plumwood require this con-
joint acknowledgement of non-reciprocal moral relationships to break down
anthropocentric subject-object dualisms (Plumwood, 2002: 178-184; Wolfe, 2010:
141-142).
As political projects, however, such schemas rely to a surprising degree on visual
exchanges between charismatic, binocular mammals. Even if not anthropomor-
phised, a subject usually requires a face. Arthropods - with their gleaming exo-
skeletons and multiple eyes - remain animate but alien. Les yeux sans visage . They
do not return our gaze.
My mission here is neither to grant spiders sapience, nor to extend to them the
moral sensibilities that Marc Bekoff ascribes to non-domesticated mammals, from
coyotes to red-necked wallabies (Bekoff, 2002: 120-132). Rather, it is to explicate
this historical absence of intersubjective identification with arthropods that has
constituted spiders - both morally and ontologically - as objects within ecological
assemblages.
Of perhaps the greatest ontological import, arthropods - as objects - are
fungible. It is a truism for invertebrates that each individual can stand in for, and