Just Another Manic Monad: Of Glass, Bees, and Glass Bees

The Garden in the Machine

We are all haunted by the possibility that there may be some hope for the future.

—Ernst Jünger

Coal mines have canaries, but aboveground we have bees.¹ Colony collapse disorder is often considered a sign that the entire ecological machine is about to seize, sputter, and die. As with the global economy, the environment appears at once fragile, in peril, mysterious, vengeful, and somewhat numinous. It transcends our ability to think it holistically even as it affects our lives in very tangible and direct ways. Given the extent to which human industry impacts climate and species, the very distinction between economy and ecology—itself a modern phenomenon—may soon seem impossibly quaint. The bees, who are as industrious as any entrepreneur, seem to be the latest sacrifice to our Malthusian economic overlords.²

Beginning in the 1930s, Austrian naturalist Karl von Frisch opened humanity's two meager eyes to the honey bee's remarkable society. Over a lifetime of painstaking experimentation and observation, Frisch realized that bees communicate both food sources and potential new hive sites through an alien choreography he dubbed "the waggle dance." Suddenly the presumed human monopoly on symbolic communication was under threat, as bees were observed conveying information "by social convention, tacit agreement, or explicit code."³ In his brilliant book Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles peels back the complex scientific, political, historical, and ethological layers around Frisch and his enigmatic buzzing objects of study. Raffles highlights the paradoxes and ambivalences of a scientific mind persecuted by the Nazis (Frisch refused to allegorize the hive for the propaganda purposes of national socialism). But he was also perfectly comfortable with mutilating hundreds of individual bees—a creature he was inordinately fond of—in sadistic experiments designed to yield their collective secrets. On occasion, Frisch would become disappointed with specific subjects or an entire colony when they did not reveal enough or appeared to prefer "resting" than diligently performing for his interspecies ethnography. On other occasions, the bees seemed almost too obliging in respect to his hypothesis to the extent that Frisch would begin to suspect that his own presence helped create "a sort of scientific bee."⁴

Born in 1895, nearly a decade after Frisch, novelist, soldier, and entomologist Ernst Jünger also became interested in bees, especially scientific ones.⁵ Whereas Frisch once put a Trojan wooden bee in one of his observation hives, only to watch it be stung mercilessly by the real inhabitants as an alien intruder, the erudite warrior wrote a novel about a near future featuring a swarm of glass bees, superseding their organic models. Written in 1957, Jünger's The Glass Bees uncannily predicts and depicts the cybernetic world in which we find ourselves today: a world in which "we are all watched over by machines of loving grace" (to quote Richard Brautigan).⁶ While others have written on the specific place and significance of this novel within Jünger's biography, philosophy, and dynamically evolving thinking about the nature of war, technology, and, well, "nature" itself, I am more interested in the ways in which this singular text "speaks to" the present with its own voice and with its own uncanny urgency. (This uncanniness is amplified by its proleptic descriptions of today's dispirited Zeitgeist, in terms of neoliberal labor practices, technocultural arrangements, domesticated eschatologies, [post]historical impasses, interpersonal reifications, managed affects, and ecological dread. The world that Jünger depicts is a somewhat abstract portrait of a serene bucolic work campus shot through with distributed dystopian moments and materials.) What follows is not a historicist literary analysis of The Glass Bees, even as it takes "history"—as the name for a certain type of collective exhaustion or foreclosure—to be one of the book's primary themes. Rather, it is a discussion of the ways in which this text anticipates and "premediates," in Richard Grusin's sense, the stagnant form of accelerated pseudoprogress embodied and even celebrated by our technocratic telepresent.⁷ Jünger's unsettling vision will help us craft some lenses with...