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'This article is an extension of what I have called “ethological poetics” or the study of creative practices of composition and inscription in nonhuman creatures. Until now, however, my research has focused primarily on what are perhaps more obvious forms of nonhuman creativity, namely birdsong.1 But relatively little research in animal studies deals with insects, even though the world’s eight thousand bird species are easily outnumbered by close to 1 million species of insect. In this article, I propose that analysis of insect poetics—specifically, the poetics of leaf-cutter ant societies—produces a fecund encounter with a complex, nonhuman ontology. Importantly, the size and complexity of leaf-cutter societies, coupled with the fact that they are predominantly subterranean, means that any understanding produced by our encounters can only be partial; they constitute ideal examples, therefore, of Wendy Wheeler’s dictum that we cannot know things simply by looking at them.2 Indeed, leaf-cutter communities encourage us to acknowledge that extreme forms of lucidity and objectivity can detract from our understanding of complex systems, where scrutiny of a particular detail might undermine our ability to conceive of the entity as a whole.3 As such, leaf-cutter ants provide an excellent opportunity to imagine alternative forms of creativity, creative practice, and its analysis. Leaf-cutter poetics demands a decidedly materialist, multispecies theory of composition, in which multiple actors of different forms, sizes, and species work in close concert with an array of materials. What populous, social insects propose is a potentially infinite source of variations within vague, though meaningful, parameters, or an experimental machine with the complexity of a swarm. In this, leaf-cutters provide insight into life as intensive, creative, and with an innumerable array of subjectivities. Before analyzing leaf-cutter systems in more detail, however, I will first outline a path from human to insect, and from insect to ant. This will provide the necessary ontological context with which to pursue a discussion of leaf-cutter poetics.' (Introduction)
