On Dialectics and Butterflies
Now in paperback:
The following is from the Preface to the book by Dave Wise.
Dialectical Butterflies’ was originally a website, which died of neglect when it broke down due to technical problems and the technical administrator we employed couldn’t be arsed to fix them at a time health problems prevented us from doing it ourselves. Perhaps the title of the late website and this book may surprise and bewilder. What on earth can it mean and why put dialectics and butterflies together as surely they have nothing in common? Isn’t this merely pretentiousness worthy of some glib, media obsessed air head and installation artiste?
The wording was proposed by a friend in casual conversation - an eco plumber who, a few years previously, when helping dig tunnels for the campaign against the proposed Newbury by-pass near Oxford, made contact underground - mud in hand - with dissident minor officials employed by Yorkshire Water who were desperately trying to rescue the image of its water capitalisation (and distribution) after the catastrophic Yorkshire drought of 1995. In a sense this was a dialectical process of negation leading to an action creating another imaginative intervention.
‘Dialectical Butterflies’ is a catchy term and raises questions of individual identity and of the being of butterfly as part of and interacting with that greater whole. Butterflies do not alter landscapes like beavers do. But, that said, theirs is not a strictly passive relationship; as the ever deepening insights of ecology tends to show. Aside from their obvious role as pollinators, they also serve as an indicator species. And though it involves a paradigm shift, their disappearance has an environmental and social impact even when we admit we seem powerless to do much about it.
We have tried to put forward something of Hegel’s ‘dance of the categories’. Inevitably too, we felt uneasy about the wording of the title as it recalled to mind one of the most notorious books in history, known as Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature; though to be fair it was just a notebook on the subject that he never published. It is hardly Engel’s fault that thirty years after his death, the Stalinists published it under that title, thus preparing the ground for its canonization by effectively eliminating the subject from history. The Dialectics of Nature is a philosophy of nature, and, like Hegel’s Logic, purports to be a ‘science of the sciences’, but fares rather worse because it is a universal materialist ontology, an objective dialectic without a subject. Reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature one is struck by the near absence of dialectic and triadic terms (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). He is certainly not forcing nature into the kind of a preconceived schema that Engels favours. Rather it is about the conquest of space by a being that is ideally equipped to do just that. Physical movement thus becomes an essential prerequisite of self determination. Once achieved, the mind develops through time i.e. history. We may chortle over the details but the ambitious sweep of the work and its overall conception still holds up after all these years.
Given the degree to which the natural sciences were fetishised in the Soviet Union it was hardly surprising it did become holy writ. Teams of philosophers were employed by the state to ensure that the facts could always be made to fit the theory, even if it did mean squashing them out of all recognition. And when theories of quantum physics hit the air waves and the bookstalls from the late 1920s onwards, wave/particle dualities had to be pressed in to a continuous/discontinuous objective dialectic. However this perverse, state-directed, search for the godhead of dialectical materialism, driven more by fear than a thirst for knowledge, was a massive diversionary tactic. As Henri Lefebrve said, 'What was really at stake was no longer in the forefront of people’s minds, which had been led as far as possible into the depths of nature and cosmological speculation’. The great terror was about to be unleashed and ‘communists’ were to be sent to Spain, not to fight fascism, but to kill anarchists.
What follows is both local and global; moving from acute daily observation of Lepidoptera to broader generalisations and back again: local in the sense that our Dialectical Butterflies project originally focussed on South and West Yorkshire (the latter in particular), covering the foothills of the Pennines, where amazing but frightening phenomena are taking place at an astounding pace, although to be fair, perhaps only a tad more than elsewhere in the UK. The cold winters of an immediate yesteryear are gone (for how long one may wonder) and these uplands have become a geographic arena for all kinds of species invasion and/or expansion.
This, then, is observation and theory where a certain emphasis has been placed on an accurate environmental, photographic record playing its part and set against the lie that has now become the essence of most contemporary, digitised photography. Our approach is Global in the sense the changing face of butterflies (and moths) must be placed in a wider context. A passionate and detached study of a particular field of natural history and science can no longer operate within its own paradigms - as in the past – to reveal much of the truth. Studying Lepidoptera is no exception. Such research must inevitably link up with other concerns forcibly impressing upon the simplest observations: ubiquitous Barrett Home’s type urbanism, chemical and emissions pollution, extreme weather more than ever conditioned by an ultra-commoditisation and an increasingly imperious law of value. The list is seemingly endless.
Dialectics today are dormant rather than dead; though they may never re-awaken from their present day rip van winkle of a sleep. And interestingly, cosmological speculation plays a similar role today: that of a diversion from the real problems. Only now the problem is not natural dialectics but relativistic cosmology and quantum mechanics (e.g. cyberspace and the very computer I am using to type this); with the exotic possibilities of space/time providing an illusory escape from an all but ruined planet earth (central to Our Final Century by Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal). Haldane was spot on when he wrote in the 1930s, ‘my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose’. That this very queerness would one day be used as able to provide an exit from the humdrum and terrible destruction was something that had to await our times. It gathered strength from the late 'seventies onwards, as all hope of changing the world faded.
The need to revive dialectical thought is more pressing than ever. And it was for this reason that we came around to choosing the title: to seeing there was a beauty and a succinctness to it that said more about butterflies than observation ever could. To amend the words of C L R James, ‘What knows he of butterflies who only butterflies knows’.