Octopus Imaginaries

“What a world is this we have stumbled across,” thinks the microscopic hive-mind from Andrew Tchaikovsky’s novel Children of Ruin, as it is making itself comfortable in the brain of its hapless human vessel. Bodies are entire worlds to this organism, worlds to be explored, and conquered from the inside. But there are other, more benign ways to explore such 'body-worlds' – for example through fiction, play, and scientific research. Perhaps the strangest and most alien of all worlds is that of the octopus. Cephalopods “are much more familiar as metaphors and in representation than as living animals” writes Helen Tiffin in an article that lists the many cultural representations of the octopus: from sea monster to sex object. Our closest common ancestor was a worm that lived some 600 million years ago. Since we parted evolutionary ways both of our species have managed to develop eyes, nervous systems, and surprisingly big brains. With some effort, we can use those big brains of ours to imagine what it is like to be an octopus: to have eight tentacles that can do much of their own thinking and decision-making, to have a skin like a canvas that emotes the  slightest nuance of our subconscious thought, and to live in a watery world full of hidey holes, snacks, and predators.

Melissa Bianchi argues that videogames can aid us in rediscovering our kinship with cephalopods. Octodad: Dadliest Catch, for example, “trouble[s] the conventions of anthroponormative play” by simulating the ungainliness of octopus physiology on land, making challenges of dexterity out of normal human acts like walking, dressing, and interacting with items. Moreover, Bianchi argues that videogames foster a kind of tentacularity (a term she borrows from Donna Haraway), by asking the player to distribute their subjectivity across a number of different digital platforms and avatars, thereby calling attention to the nature of videogames as player-machine assemblages (147). “Playing as Octodad offers a sort of speculative experience,” facilitating a becoming-animal that decentres anthropocentrism (138).  

Such speculative experiences can also be gleaned from science fiction novels. Children of Ruin, the sequel to Children of Time, adds a sentient octopus civilization to a multispecies intergalactic partnership that already includes spiders, humans, ants, and AI. Extrapolating from their unique biology, Tchaikovsky constructs an octopus society that is both like, and unlike our own. Because of their decentralized nervous system, there exists a massive chasm between the seat of their conscious mind, “the Crown,” and the “sub-minds” of the tentacles, which form a “black market of calculating power” called “the reach.”  The Crown demands and the Reach delivers. This is one way in which octopus society echoes our own, if we take the Reach to stand in for the power of personal computing – after all, most people do not understand how their smartphones work, they just expect them to obey.

Other aspects of octopus society are decidedly more alien. The octopuses are natural terraformers, and they take to virtual environments with the same ease with which they slip into, and form themselves after, physical environments (by the grace of what Bianchi would call their tentacularity). Their malleableness also informs their politics.

“This, then, is octopus governance: an assembly of whoever feels inclined to turn up, organized into dozens of factions whose boundaries are infinitely permeable – literal floating voters moving from one allegiance to another constantly without their disloyalty being seen as anything exceptional or worthy of shame”

As a result of their unstable social and political networks, the octopuses soon run into environmental trouble. Their cities become overpopulated and they lack the political infrastructure to tackle problems of this scale. Instead they encroach on the forbidden zone, where a disease carrying space ship once crash-landed, and was quarantined. Living as they do with not much thought about either the past, or the future, they disturb the site and unleash the virus: the microscopic hive-mind I mentioned earlier. The entire planet becomes infected, but because the decentralized subjectivity of the octopuses resists the singularity of the virus, instead of becoming puppets, the octopuses tear themselves apart and dissolve into formlessness, and neither species is left in charge.

Looking down on the watery planet from up in space, Helena, a human character, tries to grasp the scale of the catastrophe – a global environmental crisis caused by the myopia of an imperious species. Sounds familiar does it not? Throughout the series questions of scale are essential. How do individual traits and decisions scale up – from biological instinct, to social policy? How do species become geological, even cosmological forces? Helena can hardly comprehend it - which gets at the heart of the challenge posed by the Anthropocene. She sees "things, vast, unformed, like the decaying carcases of leviathans," and ultimately she can make out "something of a face [...] trying to vomit forth meaning before collapsing back into formless nothing." Putting a face on the Anthropocene, on the actions of a single species, creates an image that dissolves almost as soon as it takes shape - back into the more appropriate writhing mess of tentacles and slime. 

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

Bianchi, Melissa. "Inklings and Tentacled Things: Grasping at Kinship through Video Games." Ecozon@ vol. 8, no. 2, 2017, pp. 136-150.
Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Children of Ruin. Pan Macmillan, 2019. (Ebook, hence no page numbers).
Tiffin, Helen. "What Lies Below: Cephalopods and Humans." In Captured: The Animal Within Culture ed. Melissa Boyde. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Image
The Belly's Ocean by Matt Rota (https://mattrota.com/Belly-s-Ocean)