Parasitic and Symbiotic -- the Ambivalence of Necessity

Abstract

This issue of Semiotic Review began accidentally, when, in 2010, we began talking about the possibility of parasites and anthropology for the purpose of putting together a panel for the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, it came out of mulling over the recent turn to 'multispecies' anthropology, and reflecting on the role of Anthropology in the contemporary American university. Our interest at the time was to bring together anthropologists from across the field to consider parasites of all sorts: the organic and inorganic, the individual and institutional, the actual and the virtual. What our panelists - many of whom are represented in this issue of Semiotic Review - brought us were papers that did precisely that work, and much of their analyses were soundly within the tradition of semiotics, which opened up the possibility of translating that panel into this issue, and to open up the conversation to others interested in the parasite and its figurations. In this brief introduction, we review our thinking that led to the panel and eventually this issue, thinking that stems from trends in anthropology regarding multispecies analysis and the place of Anthropology more generally. We conclude by offering some suggestions on how parasites might help us thinking about societies, subjects and semiotics. One of the problems we had begun to pay attention to in multispecies analyses of human societies is the largely anthropocentric and humanistic turn in our attention to human relationships with non- humans, however ironic this might seem: are we avoiding human/non-human relationships that unsettle the agentive role of humans in the world? Where, we wondered, were the multispecies ethnographies of tapeworms, ticks and bedbugs? One of the early promises of multispecies scholarship was to displace the figure of humans at the core of so much social analysis (Haraway 2003, 2008); instead, we've found that humans - if not Man - have bounced back and established themselves at the center of a post-Copernican universe where the sun may not rotate around us, but microbes, baboons and mosquitoes surely do (Mitchell 2002). At the same time we wondered whether particular non-human agencies were being over-represented. Historians have long noted the deterministic agency accorded some technologies, e.g., trains, electricity and information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Marx 1964; Segal 1994; Urry 2009). These agencies are often figured as utopian or dystopian -- while some viewed trains as precipitating peace through travel, others have viewed them as bringing destruction in the name of progress; while some have accepted ICTs as ushering in a new age of social connectivity, others have argued that ICTs are alienating and fragmenting (Turkle 2011). Separated, abstracted and rationalized, have, in Haraway's classic formulation, become disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert (Haraway 1989). Or, rather, some of us have become more lively - the neoliberal subject, for which selfish genes serve as proxies, develop along multiple rational- choice axes, while the rest of us, rendered supine, are buffered by their endless proxies: selfish genes, corporations, information and communication technologies. Parasites, we thought, might more appropriate capture the powers of these non-human actors; parasites might also restore the potency of the posthuman critique to multispecies scholarship by embracing harmful or negative relationships between actors. Simultaneously, and due to quite different concerns, we began to think through our discipline's role

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