Storying the synanthropic spider: making home in the liminal space between human and animal, fascination and repulsion, relation and detachment.
Summer is an excellent time of year for spotting spiders around the home, as warm weather and bouts of rain provide an optimal climate for inbound insects upon which spiders feast. In addition, during June and July, female spiders scurry about finding suitable spots to lay their eggs to be hatched in August. The most common female house spider, Theridiidae, has up to 200 eggs in her sac at one time and, if fertilised, she will distribute these eggs securely amongst a tiny universe of complexly constructed webs. The giant house spider, Tegenaria Duellica, for whom I am least kindly disposed to, will have only 60 spiderlings and, though not condoning such behaviour, I am somewhat relieved that their cannibalistic predilection reduces this number significantly. Then, in late Summer following the birthing season, the Gossamer Days are upon us as spiderlings from the genus Linyphiidae will begin their quest to find shelter; weaving a sea of intricate webs that are taken away in the tide of the winds in search of security for winter cold-hardening or hibernation.
During this time from June to September our human spaces are a sanctuary for this synanthropic species. For some humans this is a horrifying truth; the feelings of repulsion and fear induced at the thought - let alone the sight - of these beings goes unrefuted. In fact, spiders are amongst the most feared phenomenon in the US and UK, and responses such as screaming, squirming or squishing seem justified in the face of common cultural depictions of spiders as monsters, aliens, tricksters or beasts. When asked what makes spiders so fearsome, many will refer to their physicality which, so dissimilar to our own, offers not a single chasm through which to find resemblance. Nevertheless, I have always indulged in films like Eight Legged Freaks, found wisdom in the Greek myth of Arachne, awed at the spider sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, and sympathised with the kind, mothering spiders in some of my favourite children's books, notably Miss Spider in James and the Giant Peach, but not forgetting Charlotte of Charlotte’s Web.
Whether monsters or mothers, spiders have seldom been seen as companion species, despite our intimate, domestic and everyday cohabitation together. This implicit connection through spatial proximity may provide only limited rationale for an attunement towards arachnids, especially sociologically, and yet during the summers of 2020 and 2021 my own perception of space and the social was significantly changed in lieu of government enforced lockdowns due to the Covid-19 global pandemic. As a start, limited interaction with my human companions catalysed a reorientation in my social world towards my animal acquaintances, while the stay-at-home directives led me to consider how I navigate home as a place of safety and comfort. These effects, coupled with wider questions surrounding the perceptions and treatment of animals as vectors of illness, and the humbling reminder of my own mortality in the face of the virus mean that I can no longer simply squash the spider with the same satisfaction that I used to.
While Covid-19 offers a pertinent counterpoint to global anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism at large, I found that at a more modest level my mundane ecological entanglement with spiders forced me to reconsider the precarity and practicality of our collective existence; acknowledging the effects spiders had on my everyday practices, routines, movements, and modalities in our “subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (Haraway, 2008: 4). While acknowledging that tending to everyday relations with seemingly insignificant beings can appear extraneous, if not reverous, among more discerning ecological, social and political issues, I maintain that it is here that we are affected and in turn affect, and thus where our practical ethical responses towards all species are germinated.
For many multispecies researchers, an attunement to the everyday or domestic is not unusual, but has traditionally been directed towards common pets, such as dogs, cats, or horses, whose participation in our human lives is unarguable. Invertebrates, however, remain a grey-area, despite being both ubiquitous and compelling. While such neglect serves to reveal how the domestic is constructed primarily as a discursive space, I contend that where species meet is as valuable to these interactions as when, why and how. Accordingly, this research sought to extend the ‘domestic’ to encompass the material, alongside the discursive, in efforts to opens up the frame of reference for what can and should be included in our ‘contact zones’ (Haraway, 2008). The result; a reformulation of ‘home’ as a space made meaningful and co-constituted through multispecies relations.
Look, I know what you're thinking and yes, perhaps it would be naive to assume that a spider would, could or should be drawn into these relations with humans given the more common preference for detachment. Thus, acknowledging both the socio-cultural (discursive) and embodied (material) monstrosity of the spider, this research explored why this extension posed difficulties for humans as it involved dialectically navigating between human/animal, relation/detachment, repulsion/fascination. Nevertheless, it is the spider's unique monstrous liminality that, I believe, weaves a way out of such dichotic thinking; demonstrating possibilities for transgression that fundamentally undo a Western, humanist ontology delimited by hierarchy. Accordingly, the resultant heterogeneous interaction between human and spider may better be expressed using the spider web as an apposite heuristic of an assemblage precariously balanced, open to altercation, and delimited by space.
True to the etymology of the word ‘monster’, meaning ‘to demonstrate’ or ‘reveal’, I also sought to explore what the spider, as monster, might offer as something that is not just good to ‘live with’ but as a methodology and a mode of doing. Accordingly, I adopted a ‘monstrous’, non-representational approach to the study of domestic human-spider relations in the form of a remote storying task, which takes impetus from story completion methods and animal performativity. Storytelling has been heralded by a number of posthuman and animal researchers and yet, while theoretically postulated time and again, little human-animal research has embraced these approaches in practice, especially as participatory forms of social research. Nonetheless, both the practice and the stories produced offer much to their endeavours; primarily as they allow us to imaginatively and affectively conceptualise and connect to phenomena that lie beyond the limits of intelligibility, whilst simultaneously remaining committed to that phenomenon’s irreducibility and strangeness. This is done not through the hubris of mere projection, but in the generation of a novel opportunity for humans to sensitively, empathetically and diffractively engage, or ‘co-author’ with the domestic spider, in much the same way that more traditionally interspecies ethnographies aspire to do. Accordingly, storying was mobilised as a way to productively interfere with the research subject; rendering spiders more affective and the everyday, mundane encounter more fantastic.
The following zine was made by myself as researcher, using the stories submitted by participants as they narrated the spider and responded to the question, 'When the spider speaks, what does it say?'.
Enjoy!
You can download the zine as a PDF by clicking here.
