Abstract
The intent of Chapter 1 is to rectify the existing, human-centered discourses on the human–animal relation. If we ourselves are nature, as Bruno Latour, Gernot Böhme and some others allow, then we may study the unities and not the oppositions between humans and animals. First Donald Wesling proposes new concepts and terms for an animalist mode of interpretation; then he considers radical multispecies writers in science fiction (K.S. Robinson) and in the prose poem (László Krasznahorkai). Last in Chapter 1 he sets up Maurice Merleau-Ponty (d. 1961) as our best guide on the animal and human body as moving agent of perceiving and thinking. With terms from this phenomenological framework, literary readers may better attend to attention and may read more successfully for perceptual content.
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Notes
- 1.
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. xvii.
- 2.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Edited by Claude Lefort, Translated by John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 48. Merleau-Ponty wrote in more substantive, but gnarly, fashion about the shared expressive function of writer and painter: “There is… on both sides, the same transmutation, the same migration of meaning scattered in experience, that leaves the flesh in which it did not manage to collect itself, mobilizes already capitalized instruments for its own profit, and employs them so that in the end they become the very body it had needed while in the process of acquiring the dignity of expressed meaning” (48). To unfold the elements of that sentence is the role of chapters “Perception, Cognition, Writing”, “Attributes of Animalist Thinking”, “Animalist Thinking from Lucretius to Temple Grandin ”, and “Perception and Expectation in Literature”. The role of this chapter is to define terms and align perspectives, while showing animal studies at the center-point of these disciplinary spokes: intellectual history, philosophy, cognitive science, and literature.
- 3.
Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, Edited by Seamus Perry (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The notebooks of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir are also packed with exceptionally close noticing.
- 4.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biograhia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7:1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 117–118. My italics on the sentence on armed vision.
- 5.
Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978). See Chapter 1, especially the sections titled “What the Arboreal Eye Knows” and “Speech as the Summons to Images.”
- 6.
The quasi-object was named by Michel Serres, but forcefully developed as an idea by Bruno Latour. See Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993); for scientific fact as inseparable entanglement of what’s noticed and the instrument or method of noticing, see The Pasteurization of France, Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988). Actually, Latour started out defining the need for a Parliament of Things, but he has now made a deliberate shift to include all animals in the imbroglio: see especially, in our Bibliography for Animalists, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017), but also his article asking “Will Non-humans Be Saved” (2009), his Foreword to Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say…? (2016) and his intellectual leadership of and several contributions to the collaborative project titled Reset Modernity! (2016).
- 7.
There is another broad set of concerns in the middle, between the object and animal wings of an implied diagram of eco-critical types of writing, but our focus going forward will be solely on the line of the animals and amimalists. The best recent account of all the turns in the human-animal relationship, which studies the imbroglio without using that term, is by Matthew Calarco , Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
- 8.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, Translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 92. (Original Edition: Paris, Galilée, 2006.)
- 9.
Heidegger’s reprehensible phrase will soon return here, condemned by Jacques Derrida and by me. The trouble until now has been with the adjective “poor.” But “world,” that cover-all chestnut of Western intellectual history, brought into avoid long explanations, is with human and animal rather suddenly under suspicion. I shall use these three terms in this book, but every use must have an attached implied question mark. It is impossible to deny the force of Markus Gabriel’s logic in Why the World Does Not Exist (Polity Press, 2015): “the world itself is not found in the world” (12); “My view that the world does not exist… amounts to the claim that there is no such thing as the domain of all domains” (45); “Existence is… to be found not immediately in the world but in one of its domains” (50); Markus’s last paragraph: “… humanity is always changing in light of the fundamental structure of reality. The next step consists in giving up the search for an all-encompassing structure. Instead we should build communities that help us better understand the many structures in a way that is more creative and free of bias….” (221). For a very different reading of world, in a book that shares the same concern for communities, see Kelly Oliver, Earth & World: Philosophy After the Apollo Missions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 10.
To suggest the threat with the names of a few actual animals, here are some events in the biosphere for Summer, 2012. Scientists in Queensland, Australia showed that corals will be pushed out of their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 30 years; Arctic sea ice suffered a drastic melt, down to only 24% of the Arctic Ocean, a new low; elephants in Congo were dying in an epic frenzy, killed by poachers for their tusks–many killed by bullets to the top of the head, fired from helicopters; You Tube showed beaching of over 30 dolphins in a bay near Rio Janeiro; and the United States had the hottest July on record and the worst drought in 50 years, both driven partly by global warming.
- 11.
Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe, Kari Weil, Matthew Calarco, Leonard Lawlor and others have covered this territory already, in chapters and books, with incisive accounts of Derrida’s work on animality and human nature. However most of their publications fall before 2009 and the translation of the first volume of The Beast & the Sovereign (volume 2 of the translation was 2011), so there are few references to this grand elaboration in their writing. My account, indebted to them, expands the reach and says more about the literary side and the Seminar form of Derrida’s thinking.
- 12.
Martin Heidegger, lectures on world, finitude, and solitude that are The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).
- 13.
Jacques Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 1, Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, Translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 331.
- 14.
The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 24.
- 15.
The Animal That Therefore I Am: quotations in this paragraph from pp. 34, 34, 39, 92.
- 16.
The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 29.
- 17.
Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity & the Humane in Ancient Philosophy & Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 18.
Most of the writers studied in this essay are animalists in a generous definition, but Luc Ferry and Dana Phillips are two defenders of reason who find it ridiculous to let non-humans speak (as in Derrida), to make contracts with other species (as in Michel Serres), or to write metaphor-loaded essays about experiences alone in outdoor settings (as in Barry Lopez and David Abram). For these two, animalists are guilty of lazy thinking, over-reliance on analogy; for them animalists need severe logic and more hard science: animalists should man up and recognize the cruelty in nature and human nature. Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order (1992); Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (2003).
- 19.
Quoted in Kate Rigby, “Gernot Böhme’s Ecological Aesthetics of Atmosphere,” in Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Edited by Axel Goodbody and KateRigby (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 140. See also Böhme’s 2014 interview with Zhoufei Wang: www.contemporaryaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=713.
- 20.
However a thinker in the line of Latour and of Derrida, Timothy Morton, has produced a discourse at the limit of eco-skepticism, with an ironic take on the environmental movement and the new animal studies field that derives from it. Morton prescribes irony as a cure for environmentalism, for otherwise animals and all strangers are in danger of exclusion, even disappearance. From Ecology Without Nature (2007): “I often think that the trouble with posthumanism is that we have not yet achieved humanity, and that humanity and posthumanity have no time for what Derrida called the animal that therefore I am.” From The Ecological Thought (2010): “Denying that humans are continuous with nonhumans has had disastrous results. Yet declaring that humans are ‘animals’ risks evening out all beings the better to treat them as instruments. Humans may be ‘animals,’ but animals aren’t ‘animals.’” Plainly, facing up to the logical-moral complexities, Morton manages to take a stand while refusing to take a side. See my article on “Placing the Work of Timothy Morton Within Material Ecocriticism,” in the Polish e-journal of animal studies Zoophilologica (Katowice: University of Silesia Press), Issue #1, 2016. Morton’s most recent book takes a more sympathetic attitude toward actual animals under the designation “nonhuman people”: Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017).
- 21.
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (New York: Orbit Books, 2012).
- 22.
I directed Robinson’s doctoral thesis on Philip K. Dick, which has been published as a book by University Microfilms: The Novels of Philip K. Dick (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1984). Fredric Jameson’s most extensive writing on Robinson occurs in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso Books, 2005).
- 23.
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, Translated by Janet Lloyd, Foreword by Marshall Sahlins (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- 24.
László Krasznahorkai, Animalinside, Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (Paris: Sylph Editions, Cahiers Series, Center for Writers & Translators of the American University of Paris, 2010). Since there are no page numbers I only refer to section numbers.
- 25.
In the novel Seibo There Below (Hungarian 2008, English translation 2013), more recent than the texts under consideration here, I find a change in topic in Krasznahorkai, toward the international scene in Japan and toward praise for the practice of art and the creative imagination. This involves a move beyond the negativity of the earlier, Hungary-centered stories.
- 26.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Portraits (Situations V), Translated by Chris Turner (London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009), p. 268.
- 27.
A selective survey of issues and influences since the 1960s may be useful to point a direction for future literary work in Merleau-Ponty’s line. This can be keyed to the Bibliography for Animalists, for details beyond publication dates. An immense effort of scholarship followed the philosopher’s death: posthumous works; radio talks; studies of phases of his thought; collections of essays mostly of exposition but occasionally of principled dissent. Especially: the publications of Alphonso Lingis, his translator, then his expositor, then one who made original works on and of perception in his line. (I discuss Lingis at some length in chapter “Animalist Thinking from Lucretius to Temple Grandin”.)
Increasingly since the 1990s M-P’s thought has found philosophical and literary allies in the emergent community concerned with ecology. Prominent in this set of writers: Ted Toadvine (2003, 2009), Suzanne K. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (2007), Louise Westling (2006, 2014, 2014, 2016), Timothy Clark (2014), Annabelle Dufourcq (2016).
At the intersection of literature and philosophy are essays in French edited by Anne Simon and Nicolas Castin (1997), and also a study of Rilke and phenomenology by Luke Fischer (2015) and the elegant books of David Abram (1996, 2010) with their accurate summaries of the philosopher’s positions coupled with I-narrator descriptions of forays into the wild.
Rhythm as “a structure that binds the past and present, subject and object, ideal and sensible” is a leading term in a book on art, literature and music after M-P, by Jessica Wiskus (2013). Most valuable is her exposition of how to use M-P’s analytical term, non-coincidence.
Three international philosophers treat M-P with utmost seriousness, in hopes of shaping the future of the field with his example: Judith Butler (USA, 2015); Claude Romano (France, translation 2015); Andrew Inkpin (Germany, 2016).
- 28.
Translation by Guy Davenport. All we have of Herakleitos’ book On Nature is the quotations from it by other ancient writers, and this is all we have of Herakleitos. That title must influence our reading of what we do have.
- 29.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from The Primacy of Perception, as quoted by Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 418.
- 30.
Merleau-Ponty, who once spoke of “the man-animality intertwining” (in The Visible and the Invisible), is an animalist thinker according to four attributes I have explained below in chapter “Attributes of Animalist Thinking”: Creativity: the senses are creative as they continually bring in new materials for cognizing and saying; Embodied Mind: the Pre-supposition of Merleau-Ponty’s whole phenomenology is that the body as part of nature participates in the showing of things; Dialogism: philosophy is minute description of the many betweens, including me-other, perceiver-perceived, feedback-calibration; and Amplification of Affect: the premise of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics (in his commentary on Proust, Debussy, Cézanne) is non-coincidence: expectation organizes feeling in the way discontinuities in perceiving make for rhythm.
- 31.
Erazim Kohák, “An Understanding Heart: Reason, Value, and Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, Edited by Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 23–24.
- 32.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Translated by Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012; paperback 2014). This supercedes the Colin Smith translation (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). Landes includes a Foreword by Taylor Carman, an essay on the philosopher by Claude Lefort, and a translator’s introduction by Landes, with a useful Bilingual Table of Contents and abundant translator’s Endnotes. Also included are up-to-date bibliographies on works cited by Merleau-Ponty and by Landes, and a detailed Index of the main text. The re-translation, with expanded apparatus, is evidence of recent intensifying interest in the philosopher. Henceforth this edition will be cited as Phenomenology of Perception.
- 33.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, Edited by Claude Lefort, Translated by Alfonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 274. Henceforth this edition will be cited as The Visible and the Invisible.
- 34.
Claude Romano, At the Heart of Reason, Translated by Michael B. Smith and Claude Romano (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015): this and the next quotation from p. 527.
- 35.
Henry James, from Book Eleventh, Section IV of “The Ambassadors,” in Henry James: Novels 1903–1911 (New York: The Library of America, 2011).
- 36.
“A full reading.” From the editions and commentaries in Note 27, a network of Merleau-Ponteian terms may be coordinated, relevant to a heightened consciousness of what we do when we read. We might try for this more capacious reading, in order to practice more carefully the feedback loop between perception and cognition. That’s the meaning-germ in the phrase with which we started, nascent Logos; so, as we uncover the roots of rationality by studying our own habits of attention, we are always already within rationality. Working from the particular to the general in a Merleau-Ponteian scheme, I find six modes of attention and three powers of attention, where very likely these powers control these modes. The attached descriptive terms paraphrase M-P, and can do no more than suggest a path forward.
Modes of Attention. (1) Movement. Perception as a direction; motricity is an original intentionality; my mobility compensates for, surveys from above the mobility of things; (2) Depth. Depth is pre-eminently the dimension of the hidden, also the dimension of the simultaneous; is the experience of the reversibility of dimensions; in depth things envelop each other, while in breadth and height they are juxtaposed. (3) Chiasm. A me-other exchange; between the perceiving and the perceived; chiasm binds ensembles of obverse and reverse, unified in advance of their being differentiated. (4) Reversibility. The glove turned inside-out; an opening-out, not a closure; the seer exposes herself as visible, and thus exposed to the other person, thrown into the world; as analogue, the reflexivity of literary language. (5) Non-Coincidence. Shift from monocular to binocular perception; perceptual depth unfolds from experiential space behind this non-coincidence; overlapping or encroachment of my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching. (6) Rhythm. Change form or place, and you change rhythm; meaning of phrase inseparable from its rhythm or melody; rhythm consisting precisely in what’s not heard—the interval between articulated sounds; an ongoing, dynamic process that looks back, forward; “words turning back upon words to disclose what had remained silent between them” (Wiskus).
Powers of Attention. (1) Interrogation. Since world is a wild being which none of its representations exhaust, philosophy is interrogation, or concern for the open-ended as value. Philosophy installs itself at the edge of being, at the joints, where the many entries of the world cross. (2) Description. This kind of thinking involves not explaining or analyzing, but describing; what’s described is the things themselves, by trying to return to the world prior to knowledge. Perception opens the horizons within which all knowledge is established. (3) Disclosure. The focus will be on our basic awareness of things, not an intellectual end product. We uproot objective philosophy in order to draw the picture of wild being, through disclosure of unfamiliar perspectives: the invisible behind the visible.
For literary study the leading concept is disclosure, and what’s disclosed is the complex value delivered by movement occurring in a body, which when perceived relates inner and outer. Disclosure is revelation, through movement in time and space, of the unseen hidden in the seen, the silence that comes before and after articulate speech. Disclosure is the most prominent, effective expression of the big-hearted rationality we have seen praised by Claude Romano in a book that takes M-P as a central figure in the redemption of continental thought; it is also the major category that Andrew Inkpin learns from M-P, so powerful he puts it into the title of his study.
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Wesling, D. (2019). Imbroglios of Humans and Nonhumans. In: Animal Perception and Literary Language. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04969-0_1
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