A Superorganism Story or the Appetite of Matters

I started writing this text after three years of co-running an art school that set out to produce together with the community. For some time now, I have been trying to understand the complexity of being a “we,” and the tensions that come up between theory and practice in the process of becoming a “we.” As I do this, I still wake up every morning with a great love for this school and the question of how I can make it better. At the same time, I ponder how I can look at this work from a more realistic place, and how I can keep this school sustaining without getting lost in romanticism or wearing myself out under a mountain of paperwork.

As I was trying to do this, on one of those days when I had made everything personal and gotten into long, winding arguments inside my head, we discovered a termite problem underneath the oak floorboards of my home. The fact that it showed up right at that moment was almost funny, as if I had been missing just one more metaphor. Partly because I wanted to take a break, and partly because I wanted to let the subject wander somewhere else for a while, I immersed myself in oaks, floorboards, and termites. First, I went to Berlin’s oldest oak and touched it, expecting to feel something profound. I didn’t. Then I thought about making small wall installations out of the floorboards. I was very excited at first, but then I remembered that Fatma Belkıs had made a similar work and sat back down on my ass. One midnight, I turned off all the lights in the house and, under the blue glow of the computer screen, listened to the sounds of videos of termites eating wood; I became convinced that this was how termites ought to be listened to. But all those attempts had dead ends, and after a few weeks of this soap-bubble period, I had to go back to writing.

The most real part of all this is that life does not stop while I am struggling with this text. What each day brings sometimes shows me all kinds of shiny possibilities, and suddenly I find myself feeling completely estranged from the whole text. At the point I am at now, I have decided to describe what I have been writing, borrowing a phrase from Anna Tsing, as “experiments in collaboration.” If I had come up with the phrase myself, I would have said “experiments and stumblings,” because there is a relationship between the acts of coming together, producing together, and becoming a “we” that seem to have something to do with collaboration, and I still cannot quite figure it out. Sometimes it feels as though, if I could only see the nuance between these three acts that seem so close to one another in every situation, I would finally understand collaboration in its clearest form.

In these texts, which will continue as a series, there are parts where I talk about myself as a fictional character. In some places, that person is me, until they are no longer me.

The unpleasantness of my encounter with the termites opened up doors for me that refused to be simple, sometimes metaphorical and sometimes completely straightforward. I owe them a lot; in return, they owe me a sixty-year-old oak floor, the most beautiful part of the house. Now they are gone, and I am still here. But when I am gone, they will once again, and still, be here.

Chapter I: A Superorganism Story, or the Appetite of Matters

That morning, Ekrem spotted a termite slipping into a tiny hole in one of the floorboards on the garden side of the house, and he realised they could no longer dodge the question they’d been avoiding for so long: just how bad was the termite problem beneath the original 60-year-old oak flooring in their new home?

He took a sip from his coffee, and decided to pull up the floorboard closest to the garden door. What lay beneath it was a colony far more crowded than you’d expect, even for an expected problem. He pulled up the second board, just to the right of the first, then the next, then the next… By the time he had stripped nearly a quarter of the room’s flooring, he had to admit it: the termite problem wasn’t just inevitable, it was now impossible to put off. The matter was out in the open now. And once the boards were up, there was no way to put them back, which meant they had to keep coming up, one after another, each one exposing more that had to be cleared.

No one had mentioned the possibility of a termite infestation when they bought the house. The previous owner, the estate agent, the engineer who was required to carry out the inspection, none of them, nor any of the paperwork, had anticipated this encounter.

After taking a deep breath, Ekrem picked up the crowbar with a faintly neurotic expression on his face.

*** 

That same morning, Pina had stopped by the supermarket to pick up some snacks for the picnic, then headed to the lakeside for a session with her friends from the PhD program. They were going to meet by the lake and work on their thesis proposals together. The weather was perfect, for writing, for picnicking, and, for the brave, even for swimming.

When Ekrem’s message arrived, Pina was in a quiet but bubbling state of excitement, chasing a flicker of inspiration, one that might or might not lead anywhere. She was thinking about how The Life of The Bee might be a good source for her PhD thesis.

She found herself thinking about a sentence a historian of philosophy had once said during a talk years ago: A single bee is no bee. Bees only make sense as a whole, as a colony. You can’t explain a bee by studying one in isolation, empathising with it, or trying to understand its individual behaviour. Its existence, its behaviour, even its “identity” emerges through its relations with the other bees in the hive.

Just as Pina picked up her phone to read more about bees, she saw Ekrem’s message:

– I’ve got bad news.

The message was followed by a photo: about a quarter of the original 60-year-old floor in the garden-side room, the one Pina had decided would be her study, had been ripped up.

She imagined just how sour Ekrem must be feeling.

– Oh no… not unexpected, but I hope they didn’t eat too much.

– Vallahi, the last time I saw something this eaten up was Ersoy’s grandma.

Pina let out a small, muted laugh, then returned to the mission she’d picked up her phone for in the first place: the life of bees.

The AI website she consulted directed her to the concept of the superorganism: “A superorganism is a holistic system in which individual units, like bees, ants, or termites, come together to function as a single living entity. In other words, the living thing is no longer the ‘individual,’ but the colony itself, as organism.”

To act not as an individual, but as an organism. It was difficult even to imagine. Especially in her own field, where art and research were at the centre, the only way to succeed was to stand out from the others. She let her eyes wander over the concentrated faces of her friends, each of them focused on their own text. There were five of them, all of whom had gone through primary school, high school, university, a master’s degree, or whatever those things were called in their countries, running in all kinds of races before ending up around the same table. Once they submitted their theses, these five people would start competing with one another for the even fewer postdoc positions available. Even now, among the people she was competing with, without even knowing who they were, for the opportunities, scholarships, and grants provided by academia, some of them might be these very people.

A single bee is no bee, she thought again. What about us? The system had been consciously designed from the very beginning around the idea of being the one bee. She would regularly have intense discussions with these people, with whom she took such pleasure in being together and feeding one another, and they would deepen those discussions through their own identities, their own background, and the diversity of the subjects they worked on. Then they would be scattered into the capitalist art market, or have their sharp edges smoothed out by the machinery of academia. She thought about the people she had become the same as throughout her entire education, reading the same things, following the same curriculum, going to the same place every day. The places where education had made room for diversity had either been what came after school, or the cracks they had created within school itself.

She turned back to the book lying open in front of her: “How does a gathering become a ‘happening,’ that is, greater than a sum of its parts?”

The answer in the text was contamination. Something became greater than itself when things contaminated one another and created collaboration. The person she was reading was also a professor at an important university. They had taken a concept that might have seemed out of place in the sterility of academia and considered it together with diversity, asking why the diversity of contamination did not have a greater place in the ways we come to know the world. How could the school, one of the places that shapes our ways of knowing most, be part of a system that did not make us all the same? How could justice be achieved in this field without making everyone the same? This was what Pina was working on. Diversity could be complicated, difficult, even ugly at times. This is the sentence we are terrified to say, she thought. Diversity was accepted as long as it provided some benefit in the market where it had been turned into a commodity. The system created categories of good diversity and bad diversity, and placed them on a scale of usefulness. Even among superorganisms, bees were good and termites were bad.

***

Ekrem was in the garden at the time. He held each of the floorboards he had pulled up to the light, looked into its holes, then put it through some kind of balance test that no one but him could understand. He had made two piles: good floorboards, bad floorboards. A juggling act awaited him over the coming days, between the time it would take to have the boards straightened, the money he would have to spend on new ones, and his wish to renovate the house while staying as faithful to the original as possible.

Takkkk.

The bad pile grew.

***

Without thinking much, Pina went back to her conversation with Ekrem:

– Can you wait until I get there? I want to take photos of the termites.

– What are you gonna do with the photos?

– I’m starting a piece on superorganisms.

– Well, tbh, I don’t think they’re that super.

That day, Ekrem cleaned up roughly a million termite larvae with a bottle of bleach in hand. Pina kept thinking about superorganisms, collaboration, and education. She had no idea what doors the inspiration she had called back from years ago would open. Ekrem had no idea that when he picked up the crowbar and lifted the first floorboard, he was opening up a hole onto the entire floor, and from there onto a whole network of thoughts.

***

The oak and the termite, habitation and appetite, had happened to fall into the same sixty years, moving along the same timeline, unaware of one another. Nothing had been planned in advance. When the termites started eating, they hadn’t even seen what it was they were eating. We don’t know what kind of perception wood has.

A floor opened up, a notebook filled, a colony was cleared out.

It all happened.