the Wasp and The Orchid

Remarkably, the Western Stream Orchid (pictured) has found a home at the 49 Palms Trail near Joshua Tree National Park. No one really knows what wind blew the seeds here so long ago, or if this is a relict population from the good old days of water wonderfulness during the Pleistocene, but it doesn't matter because the system still works, and that's a fancy enough piece of naturalness as it is. And speaking of that which no one really knows, how the heck do I relate this to Literature? Hmmm.

Consider:
(from a paper I just turned in)

In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari describe the process of what they call “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” that occurs when a wasp lands on an orchid. “The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing, of the wasp,” they write; the flower steps out of its botanical plane, its territory (which we human beings have assigned it with language) to genetically connect using the wasp as its carrier of pollen (Deleuze 10). The wasp is deterritorialized, that is, inserted into another territory of meaning, by “becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus,” but it reterritorializes the orchid by responding to the flower as an insect, and by inserting its function into the reproductive system of the orchid (10). This instance of natural cooperation between heterogeneous processes, animal and plant, they call “rhizomatic,” an interconnection that emerges not out of structural elements that constitute essential principles of each organism, but out of intense interconnection of multiple possibilities in functions, in flows of matter-energy that are open to different planes of analysis. The relationship between the orchid and the wasp is an example not only of the material flows that occur in nature but of psychic flows that occur in our thought processes: we may think of the orchid as a result of its genealogical roots, evolved over millennia of responses to environmental milieus into a stratified state of orchid-ness that just happens to look like an alluring wasp; we may also think of a wasp as a nomadic bit of genetic flowing, populations of which have evolved the most effective way to gather nectar, which just happens to be to make virtual love to a flower.



These matter-energy flows and the functions that integrate with them constitute Deleuze’s and Guttari’s ontology, which attempts to describe structural types of morphogenesis, of becoming, and these types can be applied, notes Manuel Delanda, to a wide variety of contexts (Delanda 500). These structural processes Delanda positions into two types: strata, which “are composed of homogenous elements” that may be considered in terms of territorialization, a process that is hierarchical and moves toward stasis, and “meshworks” (what Deleuze and Guttari call “self-consistent aggregates”), which “articulate heterogeneous elements as such” (500). The genealogical evolution of a wasp or an orchid, expressed as a historical “tree,” is a strata, a species; the network of processes that make up the parallel evolution of wasp/orchid, expressed as a “rhizome,” is a meshwork, an ecosystem. The strata proceeds towards deterritoriality, becoming heterogeneous; the meshwork proceeds towards territoriality, becoming stratified. Delanda and others who study this ontological method insist that these ways of knowing describe actualities in fields such as geology, biology, socioeconomics, linguistics; Delanda believes that “a deep, objective, isomorphism underlies the different instantiations of strata and meshworks” (501). So the description of the wasp and the orchid describe not only a metaphor for accessing actual structures, but the structures as they are actually formed and evolve.

The syrphid fly is the most probable pollinator of the stream orchid, near as anyone can tell.

Sources:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus
Manuel Delanda, “Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 96 (1997): 499-514.
Photos:
syrphid fly--High Plains Integrated Pest Management http://highplainsipm.org/
orchid--Gerald and Buff Corsi © California Academy of Sciences
rhizome--some place called "the grange" in australia I got off the internet