John Law, on what insects might have to do with the social life of method

They asked me to review a book: Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia. (New York, Pantheon, 2010). Raffles is an anthropologist and his book is a wonderful collection of essays on practices in which people and insects overlap. Organised (as its title suggests) as an A-Z, its essays are variously anthropological, historical and anecdotal. So there are chapters on (for instance): locusts in the Sahel; cricket fighting and gambling in Shanghai; the Holocaust (Jews, lice and anti-Semitism); Karl von Frisch’s research on bees and their dances; a dedicated scientific illustrator, Cornelia Hesse-Honneger who has meticulously drawn the deformities of insects that have the misfortune to live near nuclear facilities; and a form of sexual pleasure (for men) which involves crushing insects under (women’s) feet. In short it’s about practices where people and insects in some way come together. The book is beautifully written, marvellously erudite, extensively illustrated, and easy (indeed compelling) to read. It is in every way a tour de force.

So what has it to do with the social life of method? The straightforward response is: nothing. Though he writes like a dream (think of the best kind of popular science book), unless you’re interested in entomology, the history of science, and/or the anthropology of nature and culture then it’s not an obvious bedside book. But then again (or so it struck me), it’s all about the social life of method too. I’m not sure whether Raffles has a core concern here, but if he does perhaps it’s about the many different ways that we can know insects, and about how we can know them well. So his stories are about some of the many varieties of ways of knowing insects. They may (to put it differently) be known by ‘methods’ that are scientific, economic, poetic, environmental, political, psychological, industrial, emotional and/or erotic to name but a subset of the possibilities. Nothing much fixed here. So, for instance, important to Raffles is the issue of wonder. How do different forms of ‘affect’ (to use that currently popular expression) intersect with ‘science’ or forms of ‘rational’ knowledge? Do they exclude one another? And what is it that gets lost if we professionalise our science?

So that’s the first way that insects – or at least this book – have (or has) to do with the social life of method (SLOM). We learn that there are many methods for knowing insects, and we wonder about what they do and how they relate. But then as I think about this I begin to notice that Raffles also pushes the pieces around in a very SLOM-like manner. This is in part because it’s the practices for knowing that he describes, in all their nitty-gritty specificities. But what is that they do, those practices? The answer is that in part they generate knowledges, or representations, and therefore subjectivities too. In part they generate the objects that are known: insects are simply different in different practices. Then again, they imply and reproduce different kinds of expertise and forms of authority (who has rights to know, and why). And finally, they resonate with diverse kinds of institutions that afford space for particular ways of knowing. In short, if I read his book in this way Raffles is telling us that different knowledge practices simultaneously imply different kinds of representations, subjects, objects, expertises, authorities and institutional forms. As he puts these into interaction with one another the result is a delight – but also a lesson in the social life of method.

If you want a longer review you'll find it here, But better still, check out the book itself:

Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, New York: Pantheon, 2010.