2.41
If we approached phenomena with this kind of questioning attitude, what might, for instance, an animal respond? Well, there’s no essence of animals, let alone of the animal. And yet, we can say that non-human animals are other ways of being.
Other animals show us ways of being in the world: they show us possibilities for navigating the world; they show us what our orientation could be like if we were in their place — which is a way to see from our place how our orientation could be. — But don’t say that all (non-human) animals do is orient themselves to sex, food, predators, shelter, and so on! And it doesn’t help to say that these are what, at root, we do too because the problem is the reductive abstraction. While it explains something, it over-generalizes and passes over lived particularities and reduces worlds to externalities. These problems are connected as one.
First, this kind of reductive abstraction draws a connection across diverse ways of being—otter, oyster, orangutan—and lumps variegated behavioural phenomena into a small number of categories (e.g., ‘predator’). In doing so, it risks foreclosing on investigation, for one thinks ‘what more is there to know about otters? They’re like all other animals, aside from some details, which we can now work out’ — but the exactitude of the otter’s predator isn’t a ‘detail’! As though you have ‘the animal’ in the skin of the ‘otter’ and all the rest falls into place.
Second, world is reduced to externalities. To understand this, let’s think about structuralism. Structuralist anthropology, for instance, claimed we could investigate other groups and say, ‘here’s what they think they’re doing, but in reality, they’re doing X’ (a similar gesture to Marx, insofar as we distinguish consciousness or ideal superstructures from real material conditions or some other such basis). What this amounts to, then, is the claim that ‘we can know from outside, externally, what’s really going on better than those who are inside.’
While undoubtedly this is a way to think about things and interesting patterns have been observed, this doesn’t mean that the ‘inside perspective’ should be discounted. What we have here, at the very least, are two contexts of explanation butting heads: ‘don’t you see, this is what you are really doing?’; ‘no, I mean, while that may be interesting, that’s not what we’re really doing…the reason we do X is because of Y.’ In other words, this way of looking at things reduces worlds to externalities: to observations from ‘outside.’
My concern is not to think of inside/outside, necessarily. What I’m gesturing to is the disclosure of worlds; this is what I mean by ‘contexts.’ There’s a meaningful horizon within which things make sense, and in anthropological work we see a conflicting and confluence of two such horizons.
And so, in the case of non-human animals, the claim runs analogously: non-human animal worlds are reduced to externalities. People may use as justification here that non-human animals lack language, for without language we seem to have only one context of explanation. And yet, we ask: what is language? Do only humans have it? Why would that be the case? — How do I know that you have language? You use it, you respond to my use of it. Well, when dogs bark back and forth, are they not responding to each other? And are we not, if sensitively attuned to the situation involving the dogs, also drawn into a glimpse of a realm where we could respond to this take on things? Why would a bird chirp if not to be heard?
Language is a way of projecting possibilities into the world that make sense (can be sensed) by those properly attuned. Languages are ways of being-together meaningfully, of gesturing towards and meaningfully responding to world and things, even if not in the form or style of a statement or assertion. Likewise, non-human animals’ behaviour, which is responsive engagement, shows us the same. Humans show, display, and say how things are for them. So, too, do non-human animals: they show, display, and say—as with humans—‘through’ their way of being.
There are languages extending in various directions, like so many streams of moss.
The reduction of externalities is related to over-generalization: in not paying attention to the particularity of what’s in question in both cases, we miss the phenomena. Our concepts float free.
And yet, generally, I’m also not trying to merely ‘give back’ to non-human animals a subjectivity we’ve denied them. This isn’t merely addressed, then, by conceiving of non-human animals as, for example, conscious subjects. Instead, I’m questioning a model of subjectivity. This also isn’t addressed by conceiving of non-human animals as perspectival centres. Yes, there’s a way that they’re perspectival centres, but this term would just become another category brushed broadly over all animals (or even over all beings). We need to avoid a complacency and co-option in which other animals are brought into our likeness insofar as they are subjects, perspectival centres, have worlds, and so on: there’s a way that other animals are also not like us, and this mysteriousness and this gap should reverberate to our core.
Other animals show us a way of being in the world. And yet, this statement isn’t sufficient. Not sufficient how? It, too, is insufficiently general, and is simply intended to point us in a better direction.