(From the liner notes for the Eyedrum Improv session called The Politics of the [un]usual')

The Insect Politician
Fehta Murghana

"Come together / right now / …. over me"
The Beatles

"To [Aquinas] the 'mystical body' appeared not as a super-natural foundation, but as a gift of nature. His major premise was that 'everyone is [by nature] part of a social community, and therefore also a member of some mystical body' That is, man is 'by nature' --not by 'grace' -- also part of some mystical body, some social collective or aggregate, which Dante a little which later would easily define as 'human kind.'"
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies

The slime mold (myxomycetes) is neither social nor political as a human would term it, but it is nevertheless composed of separate constitutive parts in the early part of it's life cycle which then come together into one organism at the end. Or, which starts it up at the beginning again, depending on how we view the part/whole distinction. Is it a whole, complete, entire organism when 'it' is composed of separate cells roaming around the forest floor? Is it complete when all cells have coalesced and formed its towering stalk structure, which subsequently, forming itself into spermatazoic types cells at its highest peak, exploding spores back into the environment? ("When conditions become unfavorable, these slime molds form sporangia - clusters of spores, often on the tips of stalks …. Spores from the sporangia are dispersed to new habitats, "germinate" into small amoebae, and the life cycle begins again.") Apparently chemical clues in conjunction with environmental changes signals when convergence is to take place.

It's very difficult not to read this phenomena in terms of many other energy dispersal/gathering mechanisms among both humans and, other life forms, and even supposedly inanimate material itself, but fitting loosely into what is often called the 'politcal.' Even the philosophies of nominalism and it's antagonistic platonism seem to participate in this wandering between margins and centers, circumference and axis, empire and barbarism, anarchy and totalitarianism, from the body of Mother Church to the lance of the father's hunting party in the Negev, from the raining of water, to its streaming into pools and even further into adventures of supposedly inanimate matter. (Even though 'modern consciousness' hates pool partners in this case).

'Politics' both hampers and simplifies thinking of things thinking, the thinking of subjects as things observant of notions of gathering and dispersal, even though stochastics and demographic studies have made a shambles of many notions of 'responsibility', autonomous decision making by individual agents, and intentionality. Every one and thing is apparently susceptible to this almost oceanic pulsation of coming and going, almost as if an absolute substance was gearing everything to the pulsions appropriate to that movement.

The one exception to that rhythmic empire seems to be the machinic realm of techne and mechanical extrapolation. If 'politics' seems to be the formalized human incarnation of such pulsations (especially if viewed over the long duration of human development), then the mechanical world seems to be a rider onto the clause of human variance, almost as if it were a separate entity which forms at the intersection of human consciousnss and materiality. The mechanical has also been seen in terms of the insect world: a mindless, swarming, a mass of undifferentiated units, which are forever on the verge (and sometimes over) of flooding the human world with its proliferation of identical units. (This often forms the basis of many horror films and stories; the great Unfathomable Beyond somehow manifests itself as entities which in turn all seem to be One Entity, but nevertheless a force for de-differentiating human individuation. It was the same for the Communists in the fifties, the same of Islam now: all seen as a force for reducing the carefully won Christian singular subjectivity into a slithering, squeaking, hissing blob.)
It could be the case however that the 'insectoid' horde much feared by modern western scientific thought inhabits the region on which it has become the most dependent, the machinic , and that technology will usurp the role of politics.

The 'state of exception', which only the head of state could institute according to National Socialist jurist Cal Schmidt and which put all rules in suspension, now has to work intimately with the imbricated world of technology. In fact, techne' becomes the state of exception itself, the parasite which consumes the host, leading to total breakdown of the resources of the host but also leading to the release of new forms of relationship between matter and consciousness which have potentially little or no relationship to the old forms. (Walter Benjamin's idea of the aura, or halo effect, is the substantiation or potentiation of this rendevous with matter, the virtualized but illustrative perimeter around a central core, necessary perhaps for human survival but of little use for a fully mechanized culture, the simultaneity of nearness and distance being both the touchstone of the aura and the electronic tool.) One theorist has stated in fact that the hope many have is that the machine it pulls away from and supercedes the human universe. Acquina's mystical social body becomes torn apart and fitted back together -- or not. Perhaps a true nominalist politico-social order based on the machine would not require the forms of previous clumping, only a surgical dispersal…perhaps the time of the great dis-aggregation is approaching, the time of the insect, a revaluation of nihilism.