Some lovely close-ups of ants on the BBC website (and more at AntWeb). My favourite one is Camponotus darwinii, which reminds me of a horse. Although this picture is not actually of the ant but a specimen of it on a pin. (Photographer: April Nobile, AntWeb)
As Latour would say, the ant had entered into another mode of existence:
Whatever your metaphysics, you would agree that there must be a nuance between being a horse and having a tiny fraction of the horse existence made visible in the Natural History Museum. The least provocative version of this crossing point is to say that horses benefited from a mode of existence while they were alive, a mode which aimed at reproducing and “enjoying” themselves — enjoyment is Alfred North Whitehead’s expression — and that, at the intersection with paleontologists, some of their bones, hundreds of thousands of years later, happened to enter into another mode of existence once fragments of their former selves had been shunted, so to speak, into paleontological pathways. Let’s call the first mode, subsistence and the second, reference (and let’s not forget that there might be many more than two modes).
Latour, B. (2006). “A Textbook Case Revisited – Knowledge as a Mode of Existence.” [PDF]
Tags: ants, modes of existence
