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The Sign (Honey-Production Machine) as Exoskeleton: Anyone for Honey?
And your Lord inspired the bee: take among the mountains homes in mountains and trees, and in they build for you. Then eat from all the fruits, following the paths of your Lord, precisely. From their bellies (B-T-N) comes a drink of different colors, wherein there is healing for the people. This is a surely a sign for people who reflect. (16:68-9)
The paths of the Lord here consists of meta-meta-illocutionary acts, the bee’s language, simultaneously a speech, a dance and a collection and consumption of fruit. Both a kind of active higher-order dance that maps out all dances and a language of languages from which derive the lower levels of reality, languages (metamodels) and forms (models) and speech (lived life). The body of the bees form a predicative shell at the highest realm of Lahut, of honey, standing as an overarching meta-metamodel over all language, all representation, all forms of life, all paradigms of seeing how things stand and, finally, all actual lived lives, all actual traces of signification.
The “belly” of the bee is an interior, like a womb, something concealed. As we have said, not an inner meaning, but a sexual tension with respect to its outer and a anticipation with respect to that which derives from it, in becoming, being unfolding. Bees have an interior from which honey emanates, emanation being an active becoming, a multiplicitous, many coloured becoming of differentiation, deriving its active paths in tension with both the outer shell of predication, in tension with the self-referential, exterior exoskeletal sign of this honey-production machine that is constituted exactly by this description you have before, and with those differentiated signs of healing (differential leads inevitably to healing, to resolution of the Romance) that are preempted and anticipated by this machine.
Very nice… however, worker bees secrete both honey and royal jelly through their mouths. So whilst it is quite true to say that ‘from their batin (interior, also belly, paunch, gorge) comes a drink of different colours’, this drink cannot really be described as emerging from a ‘womb’ – except, perhaps, in the most figurative sense.
The sexuality of bees is interesting here, too, because – whilst they are sustained by honey – it is only when they are nurtured in an environment of royal jelly that the otherwise sexless workers develop into the sexualised queen (a creature that, with its egg laying apparatus, could be described as having a womb).
Something similar could be said to happen in the case of the human being. The normal human upbringing, in which the infant is nurtured with love (honey), results in the emergence of the emotionally mature human adult. But it is only when a human being is nurtured with the human equivalent of the bees’ royal jelly – which we can call baraka – that a spiritually mature human being can emerge.
Indeed, here is surely a sign for people who reflect…