Olga Cielem cka,
Monika Rogowska–Stangret
Stigmergy as a Collective Research Practice
Introduction
In this article we aim at elaborating on the problem of developing collective research
practices and collective knowledge production in the context of contemporary academia.
We juxtapose the collectivity of such practices with the predominating individualistic
approaches undertaken in academic activities, especially in the humanities.
It is worth stressing that the need for collaboration in the humanities is noticeable,
the advantages of co–working can no longer be overlooked and new perspectives, potentialities and possibilities of co–knowing, co–writing, and co–thinking are emerging.
Both theorists and practitioners are underlining the assets of collective research practices
for introducing and stimulating social and environmental transformation.1 Others value
the support that researchers receive when acting in a group, the engagement developed
in group processes, and modes of co–knowing different from individual ways of knowing (Burchard, Lanou, Mathews, Peterson and Weldon 2013).
In this article we allude to the aforementioned collaboration, we derive inspiration
from established ways of doing theory together, and we appreciate the diverse directions
which open up for the humanities thanks to collective research approach. The study we
propose is immensely indebted to feminist new materialist theorists, whose work is devoted, among other things, to introducing the notion of the posthuman subject, bringing
humanities into a dialogue with the natural sciences, and putting in question the humanities themselves.
Bearing in mind this vast eld of inspiration, we would like to elaborate on the very
mode of collective research practices. It is for this aim that we use the notion of stigmergy.
We wish to pose the following questions: how can stigmergic research activities reformulate predominantly individual–oriented humanities? How could they transform
the object of the humanities? What changes would they bring to our understandings
of collaboration? In which direction should we rethink the humanities to make them
open towards this shift in values (from valuing individual achievements and ideas to appreciating collectivity and perceiving theory production in the humanities as an always
More on this topic: see a special issue of a Format P journal, “Niepos usze stwo. Teoria i praktyka”
(Roszkowska 2013).
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Olga Cielem cka, Monika Rogowska–Stangret
already–collective practice)? How may new trends, novel ideas and theoretical shifts
be introduced into the model of stigmergic research practices?
Our understanding of the idea of collectivity is based on two assumptions, the rst
one regards the ontology of the subject that we favor, the other concerns the understanding of cross–disciplinarity which we advocate. We aim to analyze them in greater detail
in the following sections.
Relational Subjectivity
First, agents engaged in research activities are understood as always already submerged
in multiple and dynamic relations into which they enter together with their constitutive
“outside”, be it the object of the study, environment, equipment, discourse, institutions,
the organic and inorganic, human, cultural, technological, economic or natural factors
and “collaborators”. That is, the subject is no longer an autonomous observer, but a “relational” participant and contributor. The idea of such a “relational subject”, as we have
named it (alluding here to a vast tradition of capturing the relational sense of the subject2), is inspired by the work of philosophers who have questioned the subject as being
autonomous, self–contained, formed predominantly by his voluntary decisions, and opposed to his environment and other others. This formulation is thus heavily inspired
by thinkers who capture subjectivity as something simultaneously forming and being
formed by power, knowledge, environment, biology and technology. In particular our
research is indebted to and inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Jakob von Uexküll,
Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti.
To exemplify this stream of inspiration we turn to Jakob von Uexküll’s research
and his concept of Umwelt, the self–centered environment or perceptual world of a being. Each being always arises at the intersection with its Umwelt, intimately connected
with everything that composes it. In order to illustrate this idea, let us turn to an example
provided by the Baltic biologist. In A Theory of Meaning he writes about the Umwelt
of a spider, whose “web is certainly formed in a ‘y–like’ manner, because the spider
itself is ‘y–like’. To be ‘y–like’ means that the body structure of the spider has taken
on certain of the y’s characteristics (...)” (Uexküll 2010, 190n). Therefore, evolution
is not about units (i.e. individual organisms) but about specic alliances: the spider cannot evolve alone, rather it must evolve together with the spider’s web and the insect
it “intends” to catch.
Every being is therefore structured through, and together with, its environment,
through intra–active, intercorporeal entanglements and chiasms that fashion it. It is a relational subject, ineluctably submerged in a web of material and worldly gurations
and its agency is always/at the outset, to borrow Stacy Alaimo’s term, a transcorporeal
one (Alaimo 2010).
What consequences and impact could this approach have on rethinking research creation and scholarly collaboration? Eschewing the individualistic approach in the humanities, we put forward the model of doing research and participating in research projects
One salient strand of reection on the relationally of the subject that is worth mentioning emerges from
the feminist epistemologies, in particular from feminist standpoint theory (Harding 2004 and 1991;
Haraway 1988; Braidotti 2013).
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Stigmergy as a Collective Research Practice
53
as a way to substitute the Man (i.e. the modern subject) with a plethora of superorganismic intertwinements, a collective subjectivity woven by manifold agents, subjectivities
and factors which form and transform it.
Natural Sciences and the Humanities
Second, we are inspired by the natural sciences and the possibility — demonstrated
by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2007 [1980]), Elizabeth Grosz
(2004, 2005, 2011), Karen Barad (2007) — to use its methods, terminology and arguments in humanist scholarship. Bridging the humanities and the sciences may encourage the creation of new elds of inquiry and help delimit new horizons for research.
It could open a possibility to envision the future of the humanities beyond its current
crisis. By advocating multi– and cross–disciplinary research practices in which concepts
originating from biology, physics, or computer sciences and others can be interwoven
into the self–understanding of the humanities and help form their strategies, we offer
a vision of the humanities in which these embrace their transitory, “undone” character
and abandon the intention to circumscribe their own and proper eld of inquiry.
Inspired by Elizabeth Grosz’s (Grosz 2011) research on the human subject, “eeting
humanity” and the Darwinian idea of evolution, we would like to depict the humanities as an “evolutionary project”. The humanities, along with the concepts it is based
on — the human subject and humanism — evolves. It constantly transgresses its own
limitations, risks its “identity” to become something else. It “adjusts” to the changing —
social, economic, technological, and ecological — reality. We advocate the idea of (post)
humanities which allows for natural and applied sciences to affect its shapes, problems
and language by embracing change and the mutation brought by them.
Taken from this perspective, the problems, methods, and concepts that were traditionally situated within the realm of the humanities create “diffractive patterns”3 by entering in contact with other elds of scholarship, methodologies, languages and scientic
disciplines. Their encounters are productive, innovative and engaged in the world.
Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge that the praxis of collaboration and co–creation has shifted immensely in the last few decades. Research practices in the sciences rely
on a collective effort undertaken by teams of scientists, younger researchers and laboratory
staff, as well as non–human agents involved in observations, experiments and measurements. On the other hand, the digital culture of cognitive capitalism is dening and transforming ways in which research results are disseminated and shared within the scientic
community. They redene the ways in which we understand ideas such as intellectual
property, patents, the individual (notions such as these of the genius, the individual epiphany or the uniqueness and solitary nature of a discoverer becoming obsolete ideas) versus
the common, the scientic and the commercializable. Today’s humanities should recognize
these tendencies, and approach them from both critical and creative positions.
It is recognized that the dated idea of an author/subject is challenged and substituted
by a collective effort and multiple agents’ roles in the research. The humanities cannot
“Diffraction” is a term borrowed from physics, it refers to various phenomena which occur when
a wave encounters an obstacle or a slit. Since 1990, within feminist theories it has been used as a metaphor to describe methodological approaches (Barad 2007; Haraway 1997; Tuin 2011).
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Olga Cielem cka, Monika Rogowska–Stangret
isolate themselves from the surrounding world by rejecting the mission to offer socially
responsible solutions, design strategies and produce social innovations.
For these reasons, in our proposition of a model of collaborative practices in humanistic research we experiment with the use of a biological concept. We dwell on the idea
of stigmergy and its potential uses outside the biological context.
What Is Stigmergy?
Stigmergy is a biological mechanism described and named by the French zoologist
Pierre–Paul Grassé (Grassé 1959). Grassé was interested in mechanisms that determine
emergence, coordination and control of activities in social insects and he observed certain patterns in animal behavior. He sought to understand how animals such as ants
and termites manage to coordinate their collective actions. During his observations, he
noticed that the trace left in the environment by an action of an individual insect stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, whether by the same agent or a different
one. As a result, subsequent actions tend to boost and build on each other, leading to
the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity. This mechanism
allows ants to build complex networks as they mark their way back to the nest with
pheromonal message once they have found food. Termites, on their part, build their
enormous hives by marking mudballs with hormones which attract other termites to
drop their mudballs on top of those already deposited on the ground. The zoologist used
the term “stigmergy” to refer to this mechanism of communication mediated through
environmental modications (Marsh and Onof 2007).
Without apparent hierarchies, commands, coercion, planning or task assignment,
insects manage to communicate, collaborate and co–create. There are creative actions
emerging from their chaotic individual activities. This “pheromonal literacy”, or “superorganismic creativity” as Vicki Kirby aptly calls it (Kirby 2011, 41), this insectal
synchrony reveals a fascinating complexity of the animal world; but it is far from limited
to the animal kingdom. The notion of stigmergy can and has been applied to understand
human communal behaviors, to analyze a variety of phenomena from weather conditions
to trafc jams, and to construct technological devices — stigmergic compositions can
be traced in various phenomena ranging from internet search engines and Wikipedia to
the economy and stock markets.4
How Does It Work?
By making reference to two suppositions outlined above, we would like to describe
research activities in the humanities as a form of collective projects evolving along
the lines of stigmergy.
The reason why we insist on the concept of “stigmergy” as a theoretical model for
understanding research activities is that “stigmergy” emphasizes the intertwinement
of multiple beings with their environment, and the performative, agential character
of their encounters in the world. That means that the notion of stigmergy helps us to
See a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research dedicated to the topic of “Stigmergy in the Human
Domain” (Doyle 2013).
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Stigmergy as a Collective Research Practice
55
recognize a multilayered engagement that reveals itself in research practices. It is thus
impossible to single out individual researchers from their research collectives and overlook their embeddedness in the material world, whether this be their collaborators, microbes dwelling in the researchers’ bodies and inuencing their moods, modes of thinking and behaving, technological devices such as a computer or the internet, the work
of others (books, classes, discussions, lectures, workshops), the fact that they are located
in a specic material context, living experience or life situation, geopolitical situation,
weather conditions, habits, etc.
Moreover, stigmergy allows us to grasp the idea of the nonhierarchical modes of self–
organization, co–operation, and advocate the idea of being attentive to the changes that
occur in the world as each action is always already situated within the material world that
is created and lived by active beings. That means that agency is relational, always founded in the lived, material world. Taken from this perspective, co–working is a perpetual
practice of responding to other agents, of taking them into account, merging our voices,
ideas and concepts in the search for what is new, unexpected and not yet thought of.
Stigmergy enables us to think of research activity as an activity performed in a network of interrelated forces forming subjectivities that act and react together in response
to the actions and reactions of others. The subjectivities forming networks or emerging
as networks are vulnerable; by their actions they open up to others’ reactions which are
unpredictable, may be surprising, harmful, may boost our creativity or inhibit it.
Stigmergy also highlights the fact that decisions made in the process of research activity are not entirely voluntary but are rather effects of a swarm of factors, of sudden
attunement with something that caught our attention, resonated with us, affectively led
our thoughts in a different direction.
We use the notion of stigmergy also as a model of a new kind of research strategy
which would question the divisions between the arts and sciences, nature and culture
(as objects of investigation of sciences and the humanities, respectively), and theory
and practice. Here a theorist is always already a practitioner and thinking is understood
as acting in the world, inuencing it, transforming it and taking care of it. We believe
that this shift from the theory–practice opposition to theory as always–already practice
unlocks a sphere of an encounter between the humanities and sciences.
Experimenting with the Yet Unthought–of
One of the key concepts to think over the practice of stigmergic research activities is experimentation due to the fact that it engages with a concept crucial for knowledge production, namely novelty. We cannot think of (and we do not want to imagine) the humanities
without novel ideas, theoretical shifts, terminological innovations. Its vitality emerges
from introducing new paradigms, initiating revolutions, nding new paths in apparently–stable theoretical frameworks, raising fundamental questions anew, setting up redesigned horizons or shedding new light on issues developed earlier.
Experimentation is per se engaging oneself with the unknown and as such it lies at
the heart of stigmergic research practices. Experimentation opens up the stigmergic process of knowledge production to the new. Stigmergy is not about stable structures that
are mechanically reproduced, it is not about the will to introduce a given, xed modus
operandi for a scholar or researcher, nor about the quest for basic, sustainable assump-
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Olga Cielem cka, Monika Rogowska–Stangret
tions on how to produce knowledge collectively. Stigmergy is rst and foremost an effort
to get out of a rut in the search for novel ideas, inspirations and concepts.
How then can one embrace the concept of the yet unthought–of using the model
of stigmergy? How can one engage with the future of research? How can one stimulate
the innovative approach?
To answer these questions, we need to recall briey what was previously stated
in terms of understanding the subject that serves as a background for understanding
research practices as stigmergic. The relational subjectivity that emerged as a swarm
or a mosaic of different organic–in–organic, human–non–human factors is agential,
it is a “ow of agency” (Barad 2007, 140). As Barad puts it, “Agency is not an attribute
but the ongoing recongurings of the world” (Barad 2007, 141). This multifactor entanglement brings together different modes of action and different modes of agency. There
is no room here for mechanical repetition or a mechanical reaction, because agency
opens up these entanglements to the unpredictable response of different factors that form
an entanglement and are formed by it in return.
There is a risk attached to this, however, namely the risk of making oneself vulnerable in the face of the new, which in fact cannot be limited or controlled, but may both
stimulate novel concepts and inhibit them. Any openness might become a threat (in biopolitical terms, of excessive, but still seemingly invisible control and scrutiny), it might
also be a chance, an opportunity to engage with the world differently, to nd a new path,
to experiment.
The agential entanglements that are both in the world and of the world form nets of response–ability and com(mon)passion. There is no possibility of the new without the eld
of response–ability, thus the ability to response in an unpredictable, yet responsible,
way, without being overwhelmingly harnessed by strict rules, guidance and directives.
The boundary between being responsible for the actions and withdrawing the oppressive
character of responsibility to enable unthought–of actions, to enable response–ability or
an eagerness to respond spontaneously should stay open to negotiation. Com(mon)passion is another crucial notion that helps us rethink knowledge production and research
practices as a common matter deeply interwoven in the structure of affect, resonance,
passion, emotional engagement and the will to engage oneself in research practices as
always–already care practices.
Conclusions
By putting forward the idea of stigmergic research practices we are searching for such
models of collaboration, work organization and research creation which overcome
the highly individualistic approach adopted in the humanities. Collective research creation assumes responsiveness to the needs, ideas and voices of others; it takes all collaborators into account in research activities. Furthermore, it enables the emergence of new
ways of channeling the creational and productive processes that are seen as “organic–
like” growing structures that emerge from cooperation and communication.
The crisis of theory and the crisis of the humanities, which have been spelled out
by many intellectuals (see Braidotti 2013), enforce the need for new forms of knowledge,
new ways in which we can create it, disseminate it and apply it, and also for a transformation of both research practices and academic institutions. We wish to renew the hu-
Stigmergy as a Collective Research Practice
57
manities by thinking about theory as a practice of being engaged in the world, a practice
of taking care of the world. Stigmergy is offered here as a potential path to achieve
this goal. It reformulates the relation between the knower and the known, the subject
and the object. From this perspective, research practices and academic institutions are
seen as both dialogical and material nets formed through engagement, encouragement,
trust, risk, responsibility, and com(mon)passion.
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