From object to trash

Bees are natural beings that have always made their homes in objects and spaces they find inhabitable. When introduced in the human landscape, or in other words, when bees were adapted into the human landscape, they have been transformed from living things that produce their own natural habitat, into being exiled into man-made things, such as the beehive. What defines a beehive? A home; a natural element; a production factory; an object, or is it simply just a thing? Darwin explains things as found and made, that they have population, its actions facilitate and drives pollination, the very thing that sustains all living things, whether they are human or non-human.

‘We need to accommodate things
more than they accommodate us’ – (Grosz, 2001)

Bees produce their habitats through the act of their bodies, using natural materials. Humans produce things through the invention of other things and technology, through unnatural materials distanced from their bodies. The human meta production of things (the beehive) with the help of technology, or ‘the production of things that produce things, a second-order production’ (Grosz, 2001) can cause a type of alienation against the object created, thus not taking full account of the actions measured against the object, such as violence, neglect and destruction of beehives, or as Grosz argues ‘the objects which surround my body reflects its possible action upon them’. Giving attention to less humankind types of materials Bennett calls ‘thing-power’, she explores this through ‘the possibility that attentiveness to (non-human) things and their powers can have a laudable effect on humans.’

 

‘Too much stuff in too quick
succession equals the fast ride from object to trash.’ – (Bennet, 2012)

 

Producing things, through the aid of technology and not our bodies, distances us from our actions upon the things we create. This can manifest in actions, such as destruction of beehives and lead to a consequential outcome for humans and nature.

 

Antonia Myleus

 

References:

Image (Modified)
WOLGAST TREE FARM, (2011), Bear Damage [ONLINE]. Available at: http://www.wolgasttreefarm.com/farm-news/of-bears-and-bees-and-electric-fences-at-wolgast-tree-farm/ [Accessed 11 April 2018]. 

Text
Bennett, Jane. ‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter’, in Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004, 347-372.
Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘The Thing’ in Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, 167–83, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

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