Justin Erik Halldór Smith

What Cave Art Means

I wrote an essay on Palaeolithic cave art for Art in America. To read the whole thing, go here.

... It is a coincidence, though it feels like something more, that the Dordogne region of France features not only limestone caves decorated with mammoths, aurochs, indecipherable tectiform signs and punctuations, but also, outside, splendiferous medieval cathedrals with stained glass, votive candles, statues, paintings, and myriad crosses. The cathedrals are often held to be the more formidable achievement, in part because they were built up by intention and will, while the caves were arranged by nature, and then only faintly modified with pigments.

You can discern the cathedral builders’ intention in the rule-boundedness of their constructions, in the angles and proportions and the relative uniformity of the individual sites over the course of several centuries. Every cave by contrast is unique, and there appears to be no rule governing an individual cave’s particular configuration. There are laws of geomorphology, but the shape or size of any given cavern is dictated entirely by the unrepeatable conditions of its singular formation.

The art inside the caves is, by contrast, remarkably uniform; transformations in style and technique are measured not in centuries but in tens of millennia. It is only when the artist happened to use charcoal, an organic residue, that absolute dating by means of carbon 14 is possible; when the artist chose ferrous oxide instead, for example, only a very rough date can be estimated, based on stylistic clues that now appear frustratingly stable. One wants change, if only in order to help establish chronology. If a key feature of art is innovation, then we might do better to see the Paleolithic figures of horses and lions not as art but as a natural manifestation of humanness, generated by an encoded species-specific behavior like avian nest construction.

One seriously regarded, if highly contested, theory of the origins of stone hand-axes or bifaces among our hominid ancestors (long before the cave art of our fellow Homo sapiens) has it that these were not tools at all, but rather an evolutionally determined universal behavior among male hominids, a product of sexual selection that signaled to females of the species, the makers’ selectively advantageous mastery of symmetrical forms. If they could produce a perfect biface in stone, then potential female mates might believe that they could also produce bilaterally symmetrical offspring. We see similar activity in the males of a number of bird species, whose members build special mating nests, the principal purpose of which is to impress females with their talent for symmetry, their ability to reproduce in artifice what is already written into the body of every vertebrate...

To continue reading, click here.

Grammatical Gender and Transgender Identity

Some English-speakers have been hailing the recent mainstream campaign to eliminate gender-specific pronouns in Swedish. A few Anglophones, though far from the mainstream, have also been seeking for some years now to implement neologistic gender-neutral replacements for ‘he’ and ‘she’. The Swedish case in particular has been held to be a reflection of that society’s relative progressiveness in the politics of gender. What is missed here, out of ignorance or wilful avoidance, is that there are many languages in which gendered pronouns have either gone extinct or were never used in the first place, and which are spoken in societies that are hardly known for their gender egalitarianism: for example, Persian or Turkmen. Somehow, even without access to ‘she’ or ‘her’, but only an all-purpose ‘he/she/it’, Iranian courts manage to sentence women to death by stoning for ‘adultery’. We might just as well predict that Swedish society would take up lapidation and anti-adultery laws as a result of the elimination of gendered pronouns, as that it would thereby draw closer to full gender equality.

Both predictions are absurd. And yet, this interest in gendered personal pronouns does at least remind us of a way of thinking about grammatical gender that is generally underemphasised by linguists and language instructors: that the masculine and feminine genders of pronouns, and more interestingly of nouns, reflects a division of the cosmos into categories that radiate out from the sexual dimorphism of human bodies. In English there is only vestigial gender for substantive terms for non-biological entities: ships, sometimes countries, sometimes sportscars, are ‘she’. In French, every noun is masculine or feminine, sometimes in ways that seem arbitrary. What is it, for example, about abstractions, such as those words ending in -ité or -tion, that is inherently feminine? And why is the word for ‘vagina’ masculine, or the most common slang term for ‘penis’ feminine? Yet there are also some ways in which the non-arbitrary ideology of gender is reflected in grammatical gender: the words for ‘father’, ‘son’ ‘god’, etc., are all masculine, which seems obvious of course, but which would not be obvious if, as we are sometimes told, there were no connection between grammatical gender and the presumed biological (or in the case of God, spiritual) sex of the entity in question.

In modern French the masculine has absorbed the neuter, which was the third gender in Latin, the principal ancestor language of French, as well as in Greek, Sanskrit, and Proto-Indo-European, and which remains the third gender in living Indo-European languages such as German and Russian. What is the neuter, and what does it reveal about the cosmology of those language-users who divide the world not just into masculine and feminine entities, but also into entities that are neither/nor? It may be that this category is not simply for the leftover entities that are neither masculine nor feminine, but rather is the vestige of an archaic system of noun classes in which the masculine and the feminine were only two instances of a much richer and more diverse way of carving up the world.

When I studied Old Church Slavonic with Boris Gasparov in the 1990s, he was actively interested in the noun-class system of the Niger-Congo languages, which include up to 22 nominal classes based on semantic hyperonymy in which more specific categories of being are grouped in more general nominal classes. Place, animacy, number, and so on exist alongside gender as basic noun forms. If I recall correctly, Gasparov was drawing on the work of some earlier formalist from Prague or Tartu who argued that the distinct declensions for animate and inanimate nouns in Slavic languages (in the masculine accusative singular for example) reflects an earlier system akin to the Niger-Congo languages in which masculine and feminine in no way exhaust the possibilities for carving up the world of things named by nouns, as they do, say, in modern French. On this view, then, the neuter could be the residue of what were once several different gender-like noun categories that unlike the masculine and feminine genders have not even a putative grounding in biological sex. These all could have been folded into the neuter gender in the same way that the neuter was in more recent times folded into the masculine in French.

Recent desultory clicking brought me to the website nonbinary.org. This organisation, I think, offers the purest expression I have seen of contemporary transgender ideology. I will make no secret of my inability to accept, or understand, certain elements of this ideology, nor will I hide my horror at the quickness with which inability such as mine is denounced these days as ‘transphobia’. I take it rather that the inability results from real inconsistencies in the ideology. In particular it is not at all clear to me how human social reality can be carved up into ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ if we are in fact committed to non-binarity. You can argue that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are just the tip of the iceberg, that one can also be, to take an example from nonbinary.org, ‘frostgender’. But if this is your view, if you think there are countless ways individual human beings might discover within themselves an inward affinity to some entity, process, or phenomenon in nature or in abstraction, and that the acknowledgment of such affinity is the only adequate account of gender, then don’t you dare tell me I’m ‘cis’. How on earth would you know?

It seems to me very plausible that such affinities are indeed the expression of a richer system of placing human beings within a cosmos of classes of entities than the one that divides everything into masculine and feminine. If it seems too fine-grained to believe that a person might truly be ‘frostgender’, by hyperonymy we might still be able to imagine a system in which some people affiliate with the class of water-based entities, or the class of cold things. Acknowledging our affinity to the animal world in particular, and expressing this affinity through our social identities, seems a particularly natural and appropriate thing to do. I am confident in fact that there is just as much sense in a human being saying that, though they were born in human form, it is to the class of jaguars or crows that they truly belong, as it is for, say, a human being born biologically a male to say that it is nonetheless to the class of human females that he truly belongs. At present the latter statement is supposed to command our full and unquestioning respect, while the former would be received at best with curiosity and most likely with unsanctioned ridicule. This distinction is arbitrary and culturally specific in the extreme.

The only social outlet the person who identifies with an animal has in our society is in outward affiliation to shabby sexual subcultures like the ‘furries’ or the ‘pups’. The profound truth that these subcultures skim seems to go unnoticed either by their members or by their mockers: that we are, not just in our ‘fetishes’ or ‘kinks’, but in our deepest natures, the kin of other living beings. Our historical bond with them is older even than sexual dimorphism, and it is not at all surprising that it moves some people to commit themselves in their social comportment to not just kinship, but inward identity, with a given animal kind. They do not need to go out and buy some rubber costume in order for the claim of identity to be veracious, either, any more than someone who claims to be frostgender needs to dress up as a snowflake. And mistaking the trouble one is willing to go through to manifest themselves socially as a member of this or that trans identity with trans identity itself is to mistake the trivial appearances for the fascinating and important metaphysics at work in human identity. We are, none of us, ‘cis’.

But back to grammar. There are vestiges in many languages of a vision of the world in which gender is largely ungrounded in biological sex: the vast majority of gendered entities —stars, houses, rocks, and so on— plainly have no biological sex at all. In languages such as English, gender has mostly retreated to those entities that are thought to have a sex, and until recently it was supposed that the classification in terms of gender was grounded in that sex. This grounding has been called into question in the past few decades, but if grammatical gender for pronouns withers away or is abolished by decree, this will only be the completion of a process of de-gendering that has already occurred for the vast majority of entities in the world. There was a time when stars and rocks could be masculine or feminine, with no expectation that this classification be grounded in biological sex. And now we have arrived at a point where even biological sex is not enough to ground gender, but what is forgotten here is that for most of human history, if natural language is any indication, there was no expectation of such a grounding.

Now we might say good riddance to grammatical gender, we might say that English is ‘more evolved’ than French to the extent that it mostly lacks gender. But we might also look back to richer systems of noun classes in other more distant languages as holding out for us a more adequate expression of the non-binarity we now claim to be seeking in the social expression of gender. What if we could find, in natural language, the elements for a conception of gender-like classes that do not stop at masculine and feminine, that presume no grounding in biological sex, and that help us to make sense of the sort of affinities, for example to entities in the natural world, that the new non-binarity is asking us to recognise? What if the best hope for progress is in archaicism, finding those old ways of speaking in which my inward affinity to another being can be expressed as true, even if my outward form is nothing like that being? Une étoile is not really feminine, and no human being is really a jaguar; it is also likely that no human being is a ’man’ or a ‘woman’ in any clear and incontestable sense. But these are all ways of talking, of making meaning in our human lives.

The Art of Moulting

[From a forthcoming essay]

... Nature’s signs, I mean, function ecdytically rather than mimetically. They work by way of identity rather than by way of representation. Our modest suggestion is that the human mimesis might best be seen as an outgrowth of this species of sign, rather than as a radical rupture --the human exception-- which would set human representations of nature up against nature itself, looking at it as if across a great divide.

Bridging the illusory gap between ecdysis and mimesis, on this account, amounts to a small but crucial supplementation of the broader project of Kohn, Ingold, and others, which consists in collapsing, to the extent possible, the distinction between nature and culture. The aim is not to prove that human beings are ‘just’ animals, that a Le Corbusier apartment bloc is ‘just’ like a termite mound or that a Modigliani sculpture is ‘just’ like a cicada husk. Wherefore this modifier, ‘just’? It obscures the project, and betrays the position of the opponent who invokes it as having been settled in advance.

The aim is, rather, to regain, for nature, its lost share in what was once a vastly more capacious and ambitious science of aesthetics. Until the 18th century, culminating in Kant’s 1790 Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, the aesthetic regard was principally focused upon moss-covered rocks, tangled branches, leaves. Aesthetics, understood in Alexander Baumgarten’s sense as the science of perception, could not ignore the fact that living nature imposes itself on our senses in a particularly vivid, in a literally im-pressive way. Yet by the 19th century aesthetics has largely shrunken the scope of its interest to a small sub-class of human-made objects, those namely belonging to the ‘fine arts’. This shrinking had mostly to do with economics, with the increase of circulation of art objects as capitalist goods par excellence. But that system has largely collapsed, and now we are lurching around, trying to see what all we might be able to regard aesthetically besides the masterworks of painting and sculpture. We have tried out the aesthetic gaze on mass-produced objects, on object-less performance pieces, on celebrities lying in glass cases. Meanwhile nature --to invoke a medieval verb subsequently revitalized by Spinoza-- continues to nature, and to patiently await its rightful return, in a postcapitalist age, to the center of our aesthetic attention.

Political Animals, Continued

I was invited by Aeon Ideas to respond to the question, "Are human beings the only political animals?" Here, in part, is what I wrote in reply:

In the Politics, Aristotle famously identifies human beings as ‘political animals’. By this he does not mean that we are all, by our nature, interested in elections, or lobbying, or community organising, but rather that we all, by our nature, belong to the polis, which is to say to the city or to the city-state. It is a corollary of this view for Aristotle that if a person lives entirely outside of the bounds of human society, he or she cannot partake fully of what it is to be human; the proverbial child raised by wolves inevitably grows into a different sort of animal than you or I: non-political, and so not fully human.

There is not in the end such a sharp distinction between 'political’ in Aristotle’s sense and in the sense in which we usually understand it today (voting, lobbying, etc.). To live in society at all is inevitably to embody and enact social roles that have political significance. George Orwell understood this when he wrote that “in our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics’,” though in truth this was no less the case in classical Greece. 

But if all social life is political, won’t it be necessary to think of the designation 'political animal’ as a genus name, including many species, rather than as something unique to human beings? After all, and as Aristotle knew well enough, there are many highly social species of animals (not least, wolves). Even if we exclude simple gregariousness as being non-political, to the extent that it implies no distinction of social roles, there are still very many species that appear to have a complex system for the division of labor (ants), the capacity for collective planning (elephants), bargaining (apes), and so on. Since antiquity the evident complexity of beehives has led many authors to suppose that these insects are not only political, but that their social world might provide us the very model and ideal of political organization. Thus in the early modern period we see a proliferation of works blending elements of both political philosophy and practical apiculture, such as Samuel Purchas’s 1657 work, A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects, Wherein Especially the Nature, the Worth, the Work, the Wonder, and the manner of Right-ordering of the Bee, Is Discovered and Described. This title is not exceptional in its era, but only one of dozens of similar attempts to understand the nature of the polis through the world of the hymenoptera. 

If however we are looking for signs of intentional or willful 'right-ordering’ in animal society, there will always be some human skeptics for whom no evidence will count as decisive. Any appearance of complex intellectual or emotional activity in non-human animals can always be explained, or explained away, as mere instinct, and any argument to the contrary can be dismissed as naive or sentimental anthropomorphism. The reasons why intention and will are posited as requisites for any complex social behaviour among animals are seldom made explicit, and the fact that human beings for their part, and a fortiori human politicians, often seem to do what they do without giving any real evidence of reflection, does not seem to the skeptics to show that the very arguments used to deny a true political life to animals might well bounce right back at us. 

And yet there is another sense, much less often discussed, in which we might think of animals as political. We might, namely, ask whether there is any good reason to think of the boundaries of our own political life as extending only to the limits of our species, and no further. What if the domestication of livestock, the hunting of wild animals, our close community with pets, and so on, were conceptualised as fully and truly activities of interest to political philosophy? There is some minimal motion in this direction already; Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson’s important 2011 book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights is noteworthy here, as is the recent attribution to great apes of the legal status of 'person’ in a handful of countries. 

What is a person, anyway? Until the very most recent age, often vaguely called the 'modern’ period, humanity existed within a trans-species community of person-like agents: some of them human, some animal, some physical, and some spiritual. While it is indeed only since Darwin that we have come to think of ourselves as animals, for the great majority of history we imagined that the animals, themselves, were persons. They were not human persons, not homo sapiens, but they were fellow actors within a shared reality, in which bears and birds and human beings all moved within a complex web of reciprocal moral relations. 

Today we tend to imagine that we have progressed as a species from the naive world view of our predecessors, who saw themselves as having not just shared evolutionary connections with animals in the distant past, but also a shared community in the present. Yet this progress has come at a considerable cost. For one thing, modern adult humans are now cut off from the deeply ingrained patterns of thought that once helped us make sense of our place in the world through our relations with animals. These patterns are natural, seared in by evolution, and can only be trained out or suppressed with considerable harm to our sense of self, to our psychological well-being, and also, eventually, to our environment. Aristotle’s restriction of the attribute 'political’ to human beings goes directly against the way human beings actually experience the boundaries of community. As amply attested in literature, history, and mythology, and as confirmed in our own experience, community has always cut across species boundaries. 

Curiously, Aristotle also recognises that hunting is, as he puts it, “a form of war.” The hot war, so to speak, is one that human beings had decisively won already by the time of the rise of city-states, and the human relation to animals witnessed by Aristotle was in truth something more like an occupation of the animal kingdom by the overwhelmingly more powerful empire of humans. In daily life Greeks did not worry much about being eaten by lions, even if in the proverbial state of nature a lion would have decisive advantages in one-on-one battle. 

In the intervening millennia the overwhelming power of humans, at least over other megafauna, has only grown more unquestionable, and has led not only to the total absence of real danger from other animals, but also the complete annihilation of many species, and to the rise of great, efficient death factories for others. Animals might kill us yet, but they will not be the sort of animals that are visible to the naked eye.

War, one should not need to point out, is a supremely political affair. Our total victory in the war Aristotle describes, and our subsequent refusal to acknowledge the political and moral status of the defeated, does not alter this fact in the slightest. All animals are political animals.

 

*

 

After publishing this reply, I went back to verify what Aristotle in fact says. The argument in the Politics is that "man is a political animal more than any bee or any gregarious animal." Nature, he explains, "makes nothing in vain; and man alone go animals possess language. The mere voice, it is true, is a sign of pain and pleasure and to signify them to each other); but language is designed to declare the advantageous and the harmful, and so also the just and the unjust; for this is peculiar to men in comparison with the other animals, to alone have perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the like; and community in these things makes a household a polis" (I.2.1252-a7-18).

 

What this effectively establishes is that there is a direct connection between rationality and, as it were, politicality. It is not just that we are capable of rational deliberation, but that this capacity also ties us directly into the process of collective deliberation on which political community is based.

 

I disagree with this account of human uniqueness for basic reasons that I've articulated repeatedly. Here all I'm noting is that it's been with us a long time. Yet it is perpetually presented as a new insight. Just yesterday I came across this article from Yuval Noah Harari on "Why Humans Run the World." Like Aristotle, he sees individual human rationality, cut off from the collectivity, as offering no particular advantage over the capacities of non-human animals. Like Aristotle, too, the author finds special reasons to exclude the collective action of insects from the domain of the political in the full sense. Like Aristotle, he fully ignores plant life, of which contemporary science is increasingly confirming what many non-Western cultures have known all along: that it has its own rationality, and indeed one so complex that our ordinary metaphysical distinction between individuals and collectivities can make no sense of it.

 

As always, the ceaseless effort, going on now for over 2000 years, to establish 'the anthropological difference', the thing that makes us unique among beings, continues to look to me like just another species of provincialism.  

Rachel Dolezal and the Spectre of Trans-Species Identity

I try not to weigh in on ephemeral online outrages, but there's one thing I just can't resist the urge to bring up in connection with the recent flare of fascination with Rachel Dolezal's inner life and its outer expression. Not only are there plainly important parallels to questions of gender identity, in spite of all the overly anxious and hasty insistence to the contrary. Race and gender are themselves both just the tip of the iceberg.

There is massive evidence that for most of human history, in most human societies, claims of trans-species identity were taken very seriously, at least as seriously as Caitlyn Jenner's claim as to her true identity. That is, one could be outwardly a human being, for example, and inwardly a jaguar. The possibility of recognition as a trans-species person, moreover, was gradually squelched in 'western' society in a transformation that runs parallel to the suppression of transgender identities (Aristotle's Metaphysics marks an important moment in this transformation, while Ovid's Metamorphoses --which, I gather, young defenders of the fluidity of gender identity would prefer not to read!-- testifies to the endurance of a deeper layer). And in the one case as in the other, what we see is a suppression in the proper sense, involving persecution and violence.

Bear cults survived throughout Europe into the 12th century, and they were based on the belief that their members were ancestrally related to bears and could take on a visibly ursine nature in ritual circumstances. These traditions were broken up by force by the late middle ages, and now, today, western human beings think of themselves as existing across a vast ontological gap from other animal species, and regard non-western claims of trans-species identity as vestiges of comically unscientific, primitive ways of apprehending the world.

Poets still sometimes return to these ways, but when they do we assume they are just being poets. There are sexual subcultures ('Furries', etc.) that model themselves after identitarian movements, and end up, inevitably, looking like gross parodies of these movements. Important to note here, though, is that transgender identity has developed in our society from a seemingly parodical subculture ('trannies', etc.) into a form of souci de soi, of the practice of the art of becoming who one is, than which nothing is more respectable or urgent. What if the reduced and ridiculous expression of animality in current sexual subcultures is, similarly, a consequence of the way in which this dimension of human experience of our own embodiment is demeaned and marginalised?

Another important point of analogy here is the way in which these parallel experiences, of trans-gender and trans-species identity, have been clinicalized and pathologized in the modern period. A condition known as 'clinical lycanthropy' is well documented in the psychiatric literature. To what non-pathological premodern variety of human experience does this diagnosis testify? People used to transform into wolves and experience, in that condition, the truest and most exalted expression of who they really are. Now they turn into wolves, likely in a somnambulant state, and they are hauled off to psychiatrists and loaded up with meds.

The prejudice against experience of human life as continuous with other forms of animal life is the result of a distinct local history: the same local history that for so long insisted on an ethnographically anomalous binary gender distinction between male and female. Throughout this history, of the thriving and eventual suppression of the possibility of both trans-gender and trans-species identity, trans-race identity was not an issue, as race had not yet been invented. And yet, at the present moment, in the hyper-anomalous United States, a claim of trans-race identity seems to be much more audacious than a comparable claim of transgender identity, as it appears to bridge a vast ontological gap that in the case of gender has been broken down over the past few decades. It is the legacy of American anti-Black racism that makes the gap appear unbridgeable in the case of race. It is a result of the legacy of European anthropocentrism and anti-Indigenism that we don't even notice, for now, the massive, looming issue of our (real) shared identity with the rest of the living world, and the possibility of being inwardly a jaguar or a bear that this opens up. 

The Skeleton Garden of Paris

My latest in the International New York Times. Click here to read the pdf.

Against Orthophemism

Surely no one makes the case for orthophemism as a virtue of public speech more clearly than Cicero: "When you speak of the anus," he writes, "you call it by a name [‘anus’, i.e., ‘ring’] that is not its own; why not rather call it by its own [i.e., ‘culus’]? If it is indecent, do not use even the substituted name; if not, you had better call it by its own" (Epistolae ad familiares IX xxii).

This sounds like a reasonable enough demand: say what you mean, don't hide it, don't hold back. But notice what has happened in the languages that descend from Latin or that have borrowed heavily from its vocabulary: the straightshooting word (culus) has become a profanity (French cul, Spanish culo, etc.), and the word (anus) previously used for talking around what was really in question has moved in to serve as the orthophemism par excellence: doctors now say 'anus' to their patients to signal that they mean the actual anatomical region, with no cultural, moral, or aesthetic judgment implied; family members and other intimates will speak of their 'butts' or (Br.) 'bums'; prudes and kindergarten teachers say 'bottom'; while Lyndon B. Johnson, in celebration of his presidential might, proudly sings the song of his own 'bunghole'. 

There is a wide array of choices here, but one senses that none gets it quite right. One senses in fact that it is impossible to get it right. All you can do is speak of the thing in question at various registers, and the trick of communication is to be able to judge what the correct register is in a given situation.

Anus started out as a euphemism, one meant to bring to mind rings in general rather than that particular sphincter (thus the noteworthy similarity to words such as the Latin annus, the Spanish año, and the English annual: all suggesting a cyclical or ring-like motion of the seasons back to where they started). Anyone who thinks that bodily opening can always be adequately discussed in total abstraction from its cultural, moral, aesthetic, etc., implications is missing out on most of what in fact motivates people to turn to this topic of conversation. We are not proctologists. If we insist too hard on using the proctological orthophemism, we will find that it, too, starts to sound funny, and we'll have to move on to another supposed anchor of correctness. 

When it comes to words for the genital organs, the truth is I just don't know what to say. 'Penis' and 'vagina' are out of the question. These, too, like anus, started out as Latin euphemisms. 'Penis' for example derives from a word for 'tail', and thus, like the German Schwanz, originates as a euphemism of the most common sort: a terminological displacement to another slightly more acceptable bodily part, presumably rendered safer by the fact that it is a part human beings lack. It is hard also not to believe that it is this particular lexeme that prevailed, at least for a time, in part as a result of a fortuitous impression of onomatopoeia: penises pee, just as bees buzz. It's all so hopelessly diminutive, primitive, fundamentally unserious, notwithstanding its pretense of directness. 

'Penis', 'vagina': people never just use these words, without also wanting it to be registered that they are using them. You've surely felt this yourself, as a speaker or a listener: the way they hang in the air, the way they demand recognition, even as the official rule of the conversational game is that one must take them straightfacedly, like adults. Like urologists. 

As I've said, I just can't play along. Nothing seems to work. I go searching in foreign tongues: I speak of le sexe, le membre. I go looking for archaicisms, such as 'the yard', or I deploy poetical convolutions, like 'the mound of Venus'. But these overreach, and I retreat in embarrassment. I want to rewind and erase. I go searching instead in the dusty old files of vulgarities I learned in youth. But these are too low, now, and would give the impression of slumming (only 'cunt', I find, has any philological nobility). No, nothing works. Not the dysphemistic dick, nor the orthophemistic penis, nor yet the various high-brow talkings-around to which I have access thanks to my education in arts and letters. I just can't find the right register.

When I do say these words, against my very nature, they hang in the air like lies. 

Cicero missed the point, later established by solid sociolinguistic evidence, that any attempt to fix the right word once and for all will only send our imaginations elsewhere. This is what Eve Ensler has missed too, and all of our earnest young-adult friends in academic and self-styled progressive circles who use the language of urology. But there is perhaps a corollary point to the one Cicero makes: that if you wish to speak about something, you had better be sure you are ready to do so. On this line of thinking the fact that it is so hard to find the right register when it comes to the genital organs is a result of their, shall we say, particularly charged role in human life, in human imagination, phantasm, lore.

Academics, and other right-thinking people, imagine that it would be a mark of progress to drain the genitals of this charge. It seems to me however that the difficulty of finding the right register, and the essential instability of any elected orthophemism, could be a perfectly appropriate reflection of the significance of the domain of human life in question. Insisting on the clinical term neither deflates nor faces up to this significance, but in the end only constitutes its own sort of evasion. 

Aristotle at the Döner Kebap Stand

I have been saying for quite some time that one of the most useful windows into a culture's folk-ontological commitments is the unique way it variously applies mass nouns and count nouns to foodstuffs. Russians see potatoes as a mass: e.g., give me some potato. This is revealing, I believe, of many other things besides.

It is with respect to animals, in particular, that these folk commitments might be thought at once to carry with them significant moral implications. Ordinarily, animals are taken as individual beings par excellence, and this at least since Aristotle said, in the Categories, that what he means by 'substance' is really just 'this particular horse or man' (to paraphrase).

Animals lose their substantial unity in slaughter and preparation, yet even there they frequently maintain their conceptual unity: for Thanksgiving, e.g., a family has a turkey, and that is as much a single, individual entity as the living, strutting tom that preceded it. The further we move down the scale of ritual importance, it seems, the more likely the creature, following its slaughter, is going to be treated as a mass, or, ironically, as a 'substance' not in the Aristotelian sense but in the decidedly modern sense (of which the dreaded 'pink slime' is arguably a limit case, much like prime matter in Aristotle's scheme).

I have been noticing for a while now that 'chicken', long mass-produced on a scale rivalled by no othery poultry, and long considered a very low-status meat, has filtered into German to describe the end product of the process of deanimalization, which is at the same time a process of deindividualization. I think it was the Turkish döner vendors who first started using the word chicken in compounds to describe the stuff they scrape off of those massive mounds of flesh that spin around all day, like brontosaurus thighs, in their tiny sweltering Imbissstuben. I have even seen some döner joints, run by Turks bent on German hypercorrectness, who have taken the first bold steps towards Germanification of the spelling: Tschickendöner.

Now the German language is extremely promiscuous, or at least it has an ongoing unsavory relationship with English, and is often seen to import words for which it would be extremely easy to find a properly Germanic equivalent. Why, oh why, do Germans say Citycall and Departmentstore? Every time I see these abominations I think to myself: this is not what I came here for. These unwanted babies are the product of the same cultural uncertainty that has German parents choosing names like Kevin and Lisa, to the utter disappointment of those of us who have come looking for Heinrichs, Wolfgangs, and Hedwigs. But anyhow, it's a different story with French, and when an English word pierces through the thick membrane of pride that has grown up around their tongue, you will know this is for strong conceptual reasons: there was an idea there that had to be expressed, and only English could do the trick. Enter chicken.

As is well known, French law requires advertisers who use English to include an asterisked translation in tiny text at the bottom (other languages as well, but de facto 90% or so English; most Italian allusions, for tomato sauce and stuff, are taken care of by the suffixation of an -issimo to a proper French word, which does not necessitate an asterisk). The burger chain Quick (and remind me to write another note soon on the word quick and its connection to the word bios, and thus its surprising proximity to the issue currently at hand), has decided to sell a 'chicken' product, and was compelled by law to offer a translation of this word. What did they come up with? 'Chicken' is a 'fried preparation of poulet', where a poulet, in turn, is conceptualized as an integral animal.

As we see with anthropomorphized hot dogs and the like, animals rendered into pure masses can then be reconstituted into something that is conceptualized as an integral being. But chicken, in the continental European sense, seems to be essentially a mass. The implications of this sort of example are tremendous, I think, for the way language shapes our conceptualization of the community of beings (a conceptualization that is ontological and moral at once).   

A Fine Example of an Obnoxious Genre

Gregory Berns has published an 'opinion' piece in today's New York Times in which he opines that "Dogs Are People Too." Articles like this are a constant, unchanging fixture of science journalism, which always presents the evidence for animal emotional intelligence as something new and controversial. This journalism tells us something that was already perfectly obvious to paleolithic humans (even without the help of MRI's!), but that has been denied for the past few centuries, as if it were an exciting new debate still to be had. In fact this is a way of deferring change in the way people relate to animals, not of initiating it. 

Bébert

There is a cat that sits on the sidewalk in front of the bistro Chez Bébert near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris (I snapped his picture just yesterday). He does not greet visitors, but he does give them to know, in his silent occupation of that crucial space before the door, that this is his bistro, and that, whatever the surrounding humans may call him, he is Bébert. And anyone who has read Louis-Ferdinand Céline's infamous 1957 novel, D'un château l'autre [From Castle to Castle] cannot help but wonder, upon encountering this Bébert, whether here is not in fact a concrete instance of the well-known feline power of reincarnation.

Céline had been an unrepentant Nazi-collaborationist, a traitor, a bloody anti-Semite, and an otherwise all-around awful person. As the war was drawing to a close, he got it into his head to flee Paris, through the ruins of Germany, to Denmark. He had intended to take only his wife, but his beloved cat, Bébert, imposed himself, refused to let them go alone. So Bébert was stuck in a sack and hauled through the craters and bombed-out castles, and would eventually prove to be the only remotely admirable character in the author's subsquent fictional retelling of the odyssey. On arrival in Copenhagen, Céline was arrested (it is not at all clear why he thought the Danes would have wanted him), and Bébert seized. The cat had cancer, for which, rather remarkably under the circumstances, he was able to receive an operation. Eventually he was returned to France along with his owner, who died in 1961, after years, according to some sources, of eating nothing but noodles. Bébert himself is said to have lived only until 1952. 

Yet it seems somehow vulgar to stamp Bébert with a date of demise, to give him a necrologue and be done with it. For in surviving the war, in becoming the only steady weight and the only bastion of serenity in the most terrible and blazing work of 20th-century literature, Bébert came to stand for survival itself, and demonstrated why in the popular imagination the feline is indestructible (we call it 'reincarnation' and we number the lives at nine, but what we really mean is that there is some indestructible cat essence that just keeps pushing through all the gross violent things men do to cats and around them).

Impressions such as these, no doubt, inspired George Steiner to write:

It is Bébert I want to write about--Bébert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning... Bébert would be a joy to report on. Céline is not.

Is the cat really the spirit-animal of the French? We know, particularly from Robert Darnton, that the cat was the animal most excessively abused around the period of Revolutionary fervor, bound together and thrown onto bonfires en masse, so that the rowdies, unhappy about their labor conditions or something, could delight in the cats' screeches as a sort of next-best-thing to punitive justice. And we know of Chris Marker's obsessive attempt to impose the figure of the cat heraldically in place of himself, to dissolve the human into the feline. Marker's cat was a composite of the Japanese maneki-neko, Lewis Carroll's Cheshire (another peculiar French obsession), and his own domestic animal, who was called Guillaume. Like Bébert, Guillaume had many lives, and does not always appear to have been hosted by one and the same physical cat. Yet he was always Guillaume.

And then there is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who realizes at the very end of Tristes Tropiques that he did not have to go all the way to the tropics to have a primordial encounter, as there was one waiting for him right there in his apartment:

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to is in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers  in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.

I am not going to venture a theory of national character, or attempt to explain why it was left to a German to write Dog and Man (Konrad Lorenz, following Johan Huizinga, if I remember correctly, attempted to minimize the role of the cat in human society by arguing from medieval transfers of title to estates, which show that cats were always considered part of the property, like trees, while dogs always went with the previous owners; we know however that at least some cats will follow their owners through the apocalypse). But I do think Steiner is right about Bébert's symbolic power as the embodiment of a commendable --because silent-- will to survive, a symbolic power that makes sense only against the deep, deep background of folk beliefs about what cats are capable of. And I would add that if one is looking for national symbols, it is good that France has Bébert, and not only his human companion, who died most definitively in 1961, still a shit (a shit who'd just completed another, final masterpiece called Rigodon), still uninterested in serenity or forgiveness.

And I am convinced also that attention to the cat massacres of the 18th century; to Lévi-Strauss's turn away from the savage toward the feline; to the Cheshire graffiti that still covers Paris in memory of Chris Marker; and to Céline's misanthropic escape into cat-love, to the complimentarity of his anti-semitism and his philo-felinism: that all of this considered together (no doubt alongside other examples I haven't recalled) could tell us a great deal about the cultural and intellectual history of modern France. 

A Note on G. E. Lessing on Animal Tales

G. E. Lessing, the great critic and philosopher of the German Enlightenment, noted in his 1759 essay ‘On the Use of Animals in Fables’ that “the great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons.”[1] Lessing wanted to know what we could learn from this. My own view is that his conclusions are dead wrong, but that the question itself is one that it took a certain kind of genius to ask in the first place, and one that remains as urgent as ever to answer, not just for the sake of literary theory, but above all for the sake of our understanding of what animals are, and of the way our moral commitments to them flow from this understanding.

Lessing gives two primary reasons for the replacement of human beings by animals in fables. The first is that we all tend to recognize more readily the sort of character represented by an animal species than by a particular human being.  If one were to relate the historical tale of Nero and Britannicus, for example, it was already quite likely in the 18^th century --and is all the more so today-- that most listeners will have no idea what these characters are meant to represent. But if a fable has as its primary function the imparting of some moral principle or other, as Lessing supposes, it is far better to replace Nero with a wolf, and Britannicus with a lamb. Everyone, we might suppose, down to the most ignorant yokel, knows what these creatures represent, and how they stand in relation to one another. If the purpose is to communicate a moral principle rather than a history lesson, why let background knowledge of individual human actors stand as a prerequisite? It is the wolf and the lamb that require the least in the way of shared background knowledge, and thus that serve most directly the fable’s function of universal moral edification. 

Lessing adds another reason for the casting of animals in fables, one that he claims derives from his ‘sensibility’ --a common trope of the distinctly German reception of Enlightenment values-- rather than from logical conclusions. He maintains that nothing gets in the way of the teaching of a moral lesson moreso than the passions. He brings up the example of the avaricious priest in 2 Samuel 12, who wishes to take away a poor man’s only lamb. Lessing maintains that in this tale our passion of sympathy for the poor man is great, as is our passion of hatred for the priest. But if we substitute animals for the relevant actors, then, in so far as these creatures are ‘lesser’ than we are, the arousal of the passions in reading about them is thereby reduced, and we are better able to focus on the moral lesson at hand. “We sympathize with the lamb,” Lessing writes, “but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle.”[2] 

I find the first argument interesting, and the second one deplorable. I also find that Lessing’s engagement with the topic leaves a great many considerations completely unexplored.

The second argument seems to me patently false: even though we have strong species-based loyalties in our reasoned moral commitments, these loyalties are most likely to be suspended when, as in a fable, an anthropomorphized animal occupies a role that in another genre of story-telling would be held by a human being. The substitutability of an animal for a human in a fable brings with it, I think, the transferability of sympathy, as well as the other passions that some people, including Lessing, might ordinarily reserve, at least in their strongest form, for members of their own species.

---

[1] G. E. Lessing, “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel,” in Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schiften, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1996, pp. 43-47, p. 43.

[2] Ibid., p. 47.

At the Galerie de Paléontologie

Since the Paris World Fair in 1900, the Galerie d’Anatomie Comparée of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle exhibition has been housed together with the Galerie de Paléontologie, featuring the fossils of extinct creatures: the dinosaurs and outsized Pleistocene mammals that so enrapture the children, and that often compel them to pose some of their first philosophical questions about the nature of existence (dinosaurs do not exist, yet they are not, for that reason, fictional; how is this possible?). I feel more at home in Comparative Anatomy. It reveals a static, Polaroid-like slice of nature as it is at present. But nature is not really like this. Nature is always unfolding, and it is the Gallery of Paleontology that reveals the effort of the Muséum's founders (most of whom, again, were creationists) to take into account the entire film of it, so to speak, rather than only the single still that the present provides.  

Entering the Gallery of Paleontology from the north staircase, we immediately encounter three large dinosaur skeletons. All of these turn out, on closer inspection, to be casts made of metal, rather than skeletons of bone. The kids running around don’t seem to care. Successive waves of them flow by, all declaring that they are in the presence of ‘dinosaurs’: not bones of dinosaurs, let alone models of bones of dinosaurs, but dinosaurs. One of the three models, of the peculiarly named Allosaurus fragilis, is the only bipedal carnivore on display, the only one approximating the Platonic form of the dinosaur established for all time by the Tyranosaurus rex. Another of the three is the Iguanadon bernissartensis, a species whose gait, and the proper display of whose bones, has been the source of sustained controversy. Does it walk upright? Does it walk on all fours? The masses of six-year-olds are eager to know. Finally, the largest of the three is a cast of a Diplodocus Carnegii, a brontosaurus-like dinosaur, one of the lumbering, gentle vegetarians, given to the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle as a gift from Andrew Carnegie in 1908, who was at the same time building up one of the world’s great natural history museums in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A year earlier, Carnegie had been one of the principal donators to the French Muséum; like Jefferson to Buffon before him, the American continued to think of Paris as one of the great centers of natural history.

We also find the holotype of the Sarcosuchus imperator, not a dinosaur but rather a gigantic --as in, characterized by gigantism-- extinct relative of modern crocodiles dating from the early Cretaceous. A holotype is a paleontological specimen that is used for the original species-defining description. This means that at the Gallery of Paleontology one can see the Sarcosuchus imperator itself, the standard against which all subsequent finds are measured. In this respect modern paleontology retains a trace of Platonism, to the extent that there is an exemplary measure of what it is to be a member of a given kind. Yet rather than casting its exemplars into some otherworldly realm of transcendental forms, it locates them in actual fossils, than which nothing can be more concrete.

There is a cast of a pteranodon hanging nearby, and there are glass cases with a Pelagosaurus typus and a Lystrosaurus Murrayi. These names, I am finding, are exhausting and unevocative. Other than a few of the most well-known --T. Rex, bronto, sabertooth, etc.--, for obvious reasons extinct animals do not have popular names parallel to their binomial nomenclature. One of the most intriguing things about the ground floor of the gallery is the way the Latin binomials variously complement and contrast with the names that have bubbled up spontaneously for the animals in the vulgate (taupe, tatou, etc.). This is a possibility paleontology lacks, since for the most part it studies creatures that departed before there was language in the world.

There is a composite Cryptoclidus oxoniensis, pieced together from several representatives of this marine reptile species dug up in Oxfordshire. There is an Ichthyosaurus tenuirostris not yet removed from the rock in which it was found, and a Tarbosaurus Bataar, discovered, as its name implies, in Mongolia, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist who believed that evolution is a testimony to God's greatness.

Before coming to the half-way point of the main floor of the exhibition hall (the point at which, one floor below in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, the display of terrestrial mammal skeletons gives way to the Cetaceum), we begin to find remains of the great mammals that thrived throughout the last glacial period, particularly the skulls of gargantuan Rhinocerotidae. Only one of these is known by a folk name, the ‘woolly rhinoceros’, which is to say the Coelodonta antiquitatis. These various skulls are mixed in with a cast of from a triceratops, and other remnants of the Cretaceous period, which preceded the Pleistocene of the great mammals by 65 million years or so. But no one seems to notice the anachronism, and least of all the children, who are running about indiscriminately labelling everything they see a ‘dinosaur’. And it is hard to blame them, for the Rhinoceros megarhinus, the Acerotherium Persiae, and most of all the Arsinoitherium of the early Oligocene, with two massive blades for horns, do indeed appear nearly indistinguishable, in mass and in monstrosity, from the saurians. Sometimes, even their names are misleading, as is the case with the Dinoceras mirabile, an Eocene mammal whose name means ‘wonderful terrible-horn’. This creature is like the dinosaurs, in name, only to the extent that it is deinos, terrible, but its ceras has nothing to do with a saurus.

We are now half-way through. The second segment of the hall, directly above the Cetaceum, begins, from left to right, with a bloc ossifère, a fossil-bearing stone block, with scattered vestiges of the ancient horse known as ‘hipparion’; then a glass case with dodo bones (originally called by Linnaeus a Didus ineptus; was it out of respect for the departed that this name was subsequently changed?) on top of a wooden cabinet with locked and unlabelled drawers; then the complete skeletons of two extinct fossil species of manatee. Behind these, Cuvier’s own complete skeleton of a Megatherium Americanum, which translates simply as ‘great American beast’: a fitting name for this Pliocene ground sloth at least as large as any African elephant. It is a sort of prototypical beast, a hungry mound of fur, without many distinguishing features beyond this. Even the name ‘great American beast’ seems too specific for it.

To its left is the complete skeleton of a Hipparion mediterraneum, and behind it a complete Equus hemionus (a ‘half-ass’) and a cast of a Hippidion principale. The horse lineage does not seem to have exhibited the diversity of the rhinoceroses or even the elephants: all equids seem, more or less, to be horses. There is another sort of ground sloth behind them, and to their right two skulls of the Pleistocene Hippopotamus major, and also a complete Glyptodon asper, to which we will return shortly. There are scattered skulls, jaws, and tusks of extinct proboscidians; to the left a composite skeleton of an Archaeobelodon, and to the right a rather small skeleton of a juvenile Mammuthus primigenius. In the middle rear of the hall, directly above the fin whale one floor below, is the Pleistocene pièce de résistance, a complete Mammuthus meridionalis skeleton, a behemoth extracted out of deepest, coldest Siberia. Even its skeleton seems woolly, somehow. Surrounding the mammoth are various casts, of a saber-toothed tiger (known in the nomenclature by the evocative name of Smilodon, which unfortunately has nothing to do with smiling); and of a Diprotodon australis, a sort of rhinoceros-sized wombat. There is a cast of a male Irish elk, and a skeleton of a much smaller female.

In the middle, behind the great mammoth, there are two glass cases. One contains the skeletons of three cave bears (Ursus spelaeus), two lions, a wolf, and a hyena, all displayed, though skeletons, in the middle of some species-specific activity (rearing up, scavenging). The rearing cave bear is the only display in the Gallery, on either floor, that has been able to induce in me a frisson of fear. Behind these creatures is another glass case, filled with extinct ‘ratite’ birds (giant, flightless, ostrich-like), including the shockingly large Aepyornis maximus, along with five of its watermelon-sized eggs. These do not invoke fright, as does the cave bear, but a much more familiar feeling from other encounters in the museum: a sort of wonder mixed with queasiness, a sort of fascinated nausea. It is peculiar that there is no word for this.

As at the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, here as well there are glass cases surrounding the exhibition floor. In the Gallery of Paleontology though they are much more haphazard; the numbering, as one moves clockwise around the hall from the north entrance, is odd, going up to 115 at the other end of the hall, at which point one arrives at an even 116 and begins to count down from there to cabinet number 2. Many of the cases are empty, and many contain models made of styrofoam, felt, and what look like fishing lures, the sort of re-imaginings of the Jurassic one might find at a high-school science fair. There is extensive information, often presented on what looks like construction paper, about various excavations that took place in France in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Cabinets 59 through 67, running alongside the hipparion skeleton on the main floor, tell of the evolution of equids; and on the opposite side cabinets 106 through 98 run through the history of primates, and feature a cast of the Lucy skeleton, whose original is on permanent display in Addis Ababa. Cabinet 86 features the still furry and gristly leg and face of a Siberian mammoth; cabinet 18, the still scaly fossil of a Lepidotus laevis fish. Cabinet 10 teaches us, in cut-out construction paper, that among fish it is a mark of advanced evolution to have fewer and softer bones; as the French puts it, ‘ossification regresses’ in fish evolution.

And there is much that I missed besides: the skull of an Odobenocetops, a sort of tusked Pliocene whale; a display on the neoteny of stegocephalids; the Ichthyosaurus platyodon skull found by Mary Anning, Cuvier’s English correspondent from Dorset, who from 1826 until her death ran a small shop, Anning’s Fossil Depot, near the Blue Lias cliffs in Lyme Regis, where she sold devil’s-fingers and the fossils of 'verteberries': her own spontaneous folk term, a sort of diminutive, for ‘vertebrates’.

More Notes on Humans and Animals

I am growing increasingly convinced that people who believe  we have an absolute moral duty to see to the well-being of all other human beings, to install water-purifying equipment in villages on the other side of the world, etc., and who, at the same time, happily contribute to the ongoing mass slaughter of animals, are really just picking and choosing their causes. There simply is no compelling reason why I, or anyone, should suppose that all and only human beings are the worthy targets of moral concern. This is not to say that you should care about animals. It is only to say that there is nothing natural or obvious or conclusive about your belief that you should care about all and only human beings. Your belief is a prejudice, characteristic of a time and place, and not the final say about where the reach of moral community ends.

We have an extremely peculiar ontology, from which we suppose our moral commitments flow. It is unlike anything in human experience prior to the rise of the modern West. In all other places and times, since the appearance of the human species, there has been a presumption of some sort of shared socio-natural community that extends well beyond the boundaries of the species. This sounds like an exaggeration, and it attributes to many groups of people views they have left no explicit record of having supported. But from the explicit record, anyway, there is not a shred of evidence of any culture ever supposing, prior to our own, that moral community is defined by the boundaries of our species.

There is a well known rift in the feminist and anti-racist movements, between those who are willing to consider their plight in relation to the way we treat animals, and those who think that the very suggestion that the two questions could have anything in common is offensive. See this comment thread at the website Feministe, for example, for a cascade of mockery of the very suggestion that there might be a connection between masculine domination of women and human domination of animals.

To refuse to pay attention to the obvious parallels is to remain willfully ignorant. Inequality in human society emerge in direct conjunction with the domestication of animals. You can not understand the one without understanding the other. The very fact that consideration of one's own plight in relation to the plight of an animal can seem degrading to, say, a feminist, only shows how thoroughly successful the human domination of animals has been. But if you are looking to understand things, rather than simply looking after your own, then you have to take the wide-focused view, and consider humanity within the community of beings, to which we have uniformly and without exception believed ourselves to belong for the vastly greater part of the history of our species.

When we try to imagine what belonging to such a socio-natural community is like, what we usually do is to think about how much we care about our pets, or how much we enjoy bird-watching, or zoos, and we suppose that primitive Amazonians, say, must have done a lot of this sort of stuff. Thus we stay all the while in our moral-intellectual comfort zone of modern anthropocentric individualism, projecting back onto people in the distant past a caricatured version of our own token and fleeting attention to beings beyond the bounds of our species. In fact, though, this entirely misses the sort of difference we are attempting to understand; it is as off-target as if we were to suppose that hunter-gatherers, out collecting berries or fish, conceptualized their activity as 'a good line of work'.

It is, principally, the work of anthropologists that enables us to think our way into the world of people who inhabited a socio-natural community with non-human beings, and to do this without simply projecting onto these people our own ontology. Philippe Descola, in his monumental Par-delà nature et culture, has done much to reconstruct the non-anthropocentrist ontologies of societies outside the modern West. 

The Makuna, for example, say that tapirs groom themselves with roucou before dancing, and that peccaries play the horn during their rituals, while the Wari' suppose that peccaries make maize beer and that the jaguar takes its prey back home for his wife to cook. For a long time, this sort of belief was taken as testimony of a sort of thought that is resistant to logic, incapable of distinguish the real from dreams and myths, or as simple figures of speech, metaphors, or word play. But the Makuna, the Wari', and many other Amerindian peoples  who believe this sort of thing are not more myopic or credulous than we are. They know very well that the jaguar devours its prey raw, and that the peccary ruins maize crops rather than cultivating them. It is the jaguar and the peccary themselves, they say, that see themselves as carrying out acts that are identical to those of humans, who imagine themselves in good faith to be sharing with humans the same technologies, the same social existence, the same beliefs and aspirations. In short, Amerindians do not see what we call 'culture' as an appurtenance of human beings, since there are many animals and plants that are held to believe themselves to be in possession of it, and to live according to its norms (187-88).

Similarly, when a hunter sings a song to his prey in order to woo it into 'giving' itself, it is not that he has been unable to make the empirical observation that animals do not ordinarily respond to human natural language in the same way human speakers of that natural language do. Rather, every stage of the hunt, including the tracking and the slinging of darts, and other acts that can be recognized by an outside observer as expressions of practical reason, is embedded within a cosmology of perpetual exchange between all domains of the natural world. Descola asks rhetorically:

When an Achuar hunter finds himself within shooting reach, and he sings an anent to the game, a supplication intended to seduce the animal and to assuage his mistrust with captious promises, does he suddenly lurch from the rational to the irrational, from instrumentalized knowledge to chimera? Does he completely change his register following the long period of approach in which he knew full well how to mobilize his ethological expertise, his deep knowledge of the environment, his experience as a tracker, all those qualities that enabled him to bring together almost by instinct a multitude of indices into a single thread that led him to his prey?

It is not that the hunter suddenly shifts from practical-rational action to the merely 'ceremonial' at the moment he begins singing, but rather the singing flows seamlessly from the same rationality that gives rise to the practices, and that is based on a belief in the constant cycling of immaterial life principles between the human and non-human domains. We can recognize and measure this cycling from the outside within the very limited terms of calories, but from within the cosmology that supposes that this exchange is itself constitutive of both individual human beings as well as of humanity itself, there is no reason why it should not also be manifested in verbal exchange, or communication in the usual sense, across domains.

The constant cyclical exchange rests, generally, on a metaphysics of the individual according to which every natural being, including every human being, is constituted out of the life principles of other natural beings. The predicament of the eater, and also what puts him most in danger of deep transgression through cannibalism, stems, as an Inuit informant put it to Knud Rasmussen, "from the fact that the nourishment of men consists entirely in souls." If this suggests to the student of Western philosophy a metaphysics of nested corporeal substances, she or he may not be entirely off track. Interestingly, Descola, following the precedent of Viveiros de Castro and, before him, Durkheim, sees Leibniz's metaphysics as providing a point of access to this sort of animist ontology. Leibniz, like the Makuna and the Wari', supposes that "est sujet qui se trouve activé ou 'agenté' par un point de vue" (197), and thus that the discontinuity of forms in nature is underlain by a deeper unity, and is explained by a difference of perspectives. Perspectivism, Descola explains, "is thus the expression of the idea that every being occupies a point of view of reference, and thus finds itself situated as a subject" (197). Descola, following Viveiros de Castro, concludes that a Leibnizian perspectivism is "an ethno-epistemological corollary of animism" (202). Every being, on this view, is an expression of exactly the same rational order. But heterogeneity or discontinuity of forms arises at the corporeal level. Different beings have different bodies, and so also different phenomenologies, since their perception of the world takes place through their bodily sense organs. This means also that they must conduct themselves in the world differently, that they will be non-identical with respect to their agentive means, even if at a fundamental level all in the end have the same rational ends. Animals are pursuing fundamentally the same ends as humans, even if the different conformation of their bodies requires them to do this differently. There is no ontological gap between them and us, only circumstantial differences, or, to speak with Leibniz, different poitns of view.

This independent existence as rational agents pursuing rational ends in their own way, becomes difficult to conceptualize with the rise of domestication, when we know what animals are doing in their 'private' lives, because we are in control of their lives. They are standing in the barn, or they are tied to a post; they are not at home with their families, cooking and making beer. Culture continues to be attributed to animals in limited spheres of human imagination, such as children's tales. But it does not define our primary, 'grown-up' understanding of what it is animals are like, of what their natures are.

When, in our society, people attempt to win back for animals a degree of sensitivity, of social attachment, and so on, it is now always conceptualized as a sort of lesser approximation of the richness of human social life. Animal-rights advocates will point to the social bonding of a given species, and anthropocentrists will predictably respond: so what, that is only a distant shadow of what human beings are capable of. Animal-rights advocates, just like the most committed speciesists, remain anthropocentrist to the extent that they are measuring animals' capacities, and implicitly or explicitly their moral relevance, by a human yardstick.

We need anthropology, zooarcheology, and related disciplines in order to adequately understand the problem of human-animal relations, and in order to even begin to make normative claims that can have any kind of purchase on us about how we should be interacting with animals. We need these disciplines much more, in fact, than we need neurophysiological research on animals, scientific research on the very narrowest understanding of science, that tells us the objective truth about what animals are capable of feeling and thinking. In spite of what animal-rights advocates never stop hoping, telling the public about the findings of this research changes nothing: it makes no difference to people with an a priori commitment to the non-membership of animals within our moral community to tell them that animals are capable of feeling pain. They're capable of feeling pain, yes, but they're animals that are capable of feeling pain, is the implicit response. So so what? The boundaries of our moral community were not established in the first place based on a misinterpretation of the empirical data about what the inner lives of animals are like. There is therefore no reason why an improvement in the adequacy of the empirical data should be expected to result in a modification of the boundaries of our moral community. 

The way we think about animals, rather, flows from a fundamental ontology, characteristic of a society that is structured in a certain way. This society, with its associated ontology, has been 10,000 years in the making; it begins with pastoralism, and culminates in our current system of factory farming, in which animals, now conceptualized as pure commodities, exist entirely outside the bounds of moral community. Efforts to bring them back into that community are based on weak and unconvincing appeals to sentiment, dressed up in the language of objective science, on the part of a small minority of people: Look how much this turkey cares for its offspring! Look how this pig can operate a joystick! They're just like us! Except that they're not just like us, since on the reigning ontology a pig operating a joystick is an entirely different matter from a human operating a joystick, and again, nothing that pig does with the joystick is capable of budging this fundamental ontology.

Of course this ontology is not entirely a priori. It has a history. And if there is to be any hope of displacing it, this will be through uncovering and examining this history, and not through treating the question --as all Anglo-American philosophers have until now-- as if it were a simple matter of learning from science what sort of entities animals are.

A Tasty Treat for the Slime-Mold: More Inane Reporting on Animal Cognition

It's been a busy few weeks for announcements about how smart non-human life-forms are. First there was the talking beluga in California, then there was the elephant in Korea who could articulate a few words, then, finally, the report on a lowly slime mold's ability to make sophisticated decisions. All three of these reports repeated many of the conventional tropes for talking about animal intelligence; all trumpeted as wholly new and unheard-of the sort of data that have long been a staple of science reporting; and all are sure to leave everything exactly the same: with anti-anthropocentrists shouting see! See!, and with those who believe that human beings are something special in the cosmic scheme insisting that anything they are shown can be explained in terms of mimicry, stimulus, and other automatisms.

The irrelevance of empirical data for deciding the matter, in fact, long precedes the very existence of science journalism: it defines a clear rift already in 17th-century philosophy, while the 'new' discoveries themselves are for the most part only variations of what was already well documented in Aristotle's Historia animalium. And yet, the journalists always report as if until yesterday we were all fully committed to a hardcore version of the bête-machine doctrine. At the same time, however, they ensure that the topic will remain perpetually new by reinforcing, willy-nilly, the very doctrine their news item is supposed to be calling into question.

What do I mean by this? Consider the report from the New York Daily News, in which Koshik the Korean elephant is described as 'parroting' human speech. Parrot speech, again, at least since Aristotle, has been easily bracketed as non-speech in view of its presumed automatic or (to project back our own technological analogies) recorder-like character. The great authority on elephant cognition, Christine Roberts (whose day job is as a reporter for the News), tells us that although Koshik is vocalizing by putting his trunk in his mouth, nonetheless "he is only mimicking the noises, not speaking them." Mimicry, or 'aping', as it's sometimes called, is so far from serving as a corroboration of the reality of animal cognition to those who have an a priori commitment to not believing in it, that in fact it has generally only served historically to reinforce the conviction that nature is a very impressive, and deceitful, producer of simulations. This is why humans hate apes (or generally have hated apes): because they look like they can do many of the things we explain in humans through the possession of a soul, and yet we know that only humans have souls. The language has been updated, but this remains the take-away point of the reporting on Koshik the elephant.

Though it concerns a variety of protists, and not animals, reporting on the slime-mold follows much the same pattern. None of what is described will strike the skeptic as in any way indicative of anything like cognition. The 'ability' to trace the shortest line between any two points, for example, thus 'simulating' the work of a city planner designing an underground rail system, is easily and obviously explicable in terms of the mundane principles of optimality that govern the behavior of catenaries and other systems in the physical world. But what is particularly interesting here is the condescension in the language used to describe what a slime-mold does. What I describe as 'condescension' will of course be explained by others as an attempt to make the news fun, or kid-friendly, or something, but the fact remains that no one would think to describe the behavior of either a human being taking an IQ test or the behavior of gas molecules in a vacuum as if they were describing a diminutive cartoon character. In a PBS video about the slime-mold, we've already been told that this species has no brain, or nervous system, and presumably therefore no taste-buds; and yet we are expected to play along when the protein-carbohydrate blend it gets for performing its little trick is described as 'tasty'.

 

It is by such cute little words ('yummy' is the one that is usually invoked in science journalism to describe the rewards given to test subjects) that we are meant to understand that whatever amazing behavior an animal has just exhibited, in the end it only did it for the treat. This sort of system of rewarding, we are meant to recall at least subconsciously, is, since Pavlov, the touchstone of the classical-conditioning theory of animal motivations, and also by extension of behaviorism, both of which rest on the presumption that there is no real cognition of interest going on in the animal's mind. The fact that we can only introduce the possibility of intelligence in a brainless slime-mold by simultaneously taking it away with reassuring cutesiness about the yummy treats the scientists are giving it shows, I think, how anxious we really are about seriously considering the possibility that non-human creatures have rich, not cute, internal lives. 

I make no secret about being a pananimist. I am fairly convinced that it is minds, or mind-like principles, that govern the activity of all natural beings, and that there is nothing fundamentally different in my intelligent behavior from what we observe in a slime-mold. I am happy whenever new attention to the rationality of creatures such as slime-molds is paid, but (i) I think that it is something we knew about all along, but which we have preferred of late to ignore; and (ii) I am very wary of the conventions we have for talking about it, as I believe they carry with them a built-in mechanism for self-deflation.

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Balzac's Ass

Whether species all emerged from the same origin, each representing slight variations on the same underlying type, or whether, to return to Buffon’s view, they are timeless variations on the same underlying type, related not by ancestry but only by their conceptual proximity in the mind of God, remained a contested matter at the Muséum long after the demise of Buffon and of the ancien régime. The two positions were well represented in the controversy between the Gallery’s two most prominent members in the early 19th century, Georges Cuvier and Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Geoffroy was a disciple of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the evolutionary theorist best known as the pre-Darwinian who got it all wrong, supposing, as the high-school biology textbooks often caricature him, that the necks of giraffes grew longer because giraffes themselves made such an effort to stretch their necks and to reach the leaves at the tops of trees. Cuvier would criticize this theory as holding “that efforts and desires may engender organs.”

Cuvier succeeded Louis Daubenton as ‘professor of the natural history of organized bodies’ in 1800, and two years later was made chair of animal anatomy at the Muséum. A devout Protestant, he believed that it was befitting God’s power and wisdom to have created all beings at once, and to have outfitted them with every part and every function they would ever need to survive. He held that there were four basic classes or embranchements of animals --the vertebrates, the articulates (or exoskeletal animals), the molluscs, and the radiates--, and that their parts were so ingeniously designed to function together as integral wholes that from any one part the existence and conformation of the others could be inferred with a high degree of accuracy. Thus he says of the skeleton that “the number, direction, and shape of the bones that compose each part of an animal’s body are always in a necessary relation to all the other parts, in such a way that --up to a point-- one can infer the whole from any one of them and vice versa.” He also believes that it is unworthy of the creator’s dignity to suppose that there should be any continuity or contact between these classes, to suppose, in effect, that God should have created a messy order of nature, where one category of thing bleeds into the next.

Mummified animals recently recovered from Egypt (by Geoffroy) seemed to confirm for Cuvier his doctrine of species fixism: the fact that cats, oxen, and the once sacred ibis had not changed at all since the Pharaonic period could only mean that members of a species are eternally bound to one another in a closed generational series. Geoffroy had accompanied Napoleon as the resident naturalist on the general’s 1798 expedition to Egypt, and may have felt that Cuvier’s speculations about mummies were an unjustified usurpation. Geoffroy’s mobility contrasted with Cuvier’s stationary career: the latter remained as fixed in Paris as he supposed animals were in their lineages. It is difficult not to notice, here, that theories of species transformation had long been held by Europeans to be richly confirmed in Africa, and in particular along the banks of the Nile. The ancient motto Ex Africa semper aliquid novi (‘Out of Africa there is always something new’), cited by Aristotle and nearly every natural historian after him, originally had to do with the idea that on that unknown continent the ordinary laws of reproduction do not hold, as animals regularly generate hybrids by mating with members of other species. The Nile, in turn, was held to possess the ideal balance of heat and moisture for the spontaneous generation of unusually large animals. Rather than being limited to bringing forth frogs, eels, and geese, as was thought to happen in the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine, in Egypt even crocodiles could be spontaneously generated from expansive bubbles of Nilotic slime. In Italy, the Renaissance freethinker Lucilio Vanini had his tongue torn out by the Inquisition for suggesting that human beings could be produced this way as well.

Curiously, Geoffroy’s principal interest throughout his career was the classification of fossil species of Crocodylia, and here he flatly rejected Cuvier's vision of discrete and non-overlapping kinds. Geoffroy believed that there is a ‘unity of composition’ throughout nature, that all species are, so to speak, variations on a single theme. The full spectrum of these variations, Cuvier believed, can be observed in fetal development. A descendant of this view would later be expressed in Ernst Haeckel’s famous 19th-century dictum that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, that is, that the stages of development of a fetus are substantially the same as those of the species of which the fetus is a member. Of course, in order to believe that the development of the fetus duplicates the history of the fetus’s species, one must believe that a species emerges over time, and that God did not create it once and for all as it is in its current state. This belief also transforms embryology into a vastly more important endeavor than it otherwise would be: to observe and describe the development of a fetus is to witness in nuce the entire history of a species. Accordingly, the study of ‘misfires’ in the course of embryogenesis, of so-called ‘monsters’, would come to be seen as a source of insight into how evolutionary branching might occur. Geoffroy thus sets himself up as the founder of a new discipline, teratology, or the study of monsters, which yields his classic 1812 work on the Essay on the Classification of Monsters. A curious new taxonomy emerges: there are ‘g monsters’, which have two heads and are fused at the torso; and there are ‘l monsters’, the reverse, having a single head but two bodies. There are ‘thoracodelphic chickens’, that is, chickens with brother chickens emerging from their thorax; and ‘derodymous ducks’, a designation whose meaning, I admit, I have not been able to unravel. There are also the elegantly named monstres simples, ‘simple monsters’, such as the ‘cyclops pig’ with a single eye in the middle of its head. All of these are on display, in formaldehyde, at the rear end of the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy. 

The conflict between Cuvier and Geoffroy on the question of the unity of the animal kingdom caused a sufficient storm to be discussed, often very critically, well outside of the European scientific community, even leaving its mark in the French literary canon. In his Guide-Âne à l’usage des animaux qui veulent parvenir aux honneurs [Beginners’ Guide for Animals Seeking Acclaim], which appeared serially between 1840 and 1842, Honoré de Balzac set out to demonstrate the asininity of the men of science who build their reputations on claims about the organization of the animal kingdom. The story centers around a man named Adam Marmus, who arrives in Paris accompanied by his donkey, scheming to gain fame and fortune however he can.

The donkey is obliging; he seems sensitive to the vanity of all human endeavors, and as a good beast of burden is more or less happy to go along with them when called upon. From their first arrival in the capital, the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes represents for Marmus’s companion a sort of paradise on earth, “where the animals are so well cared for,” and “where one drinks and eats without fear of being beaten.” Will you ever, he implores the garden, “open up to me your twenty-square-foot steppes, your Swiss valleys thirty meters in size? Will I ever be an animal that lies upon the grass of your budget? Will I die of old age among your elegant trellises, labelled under some number, with the words: African ass... Will the king come to see me?”

Marmus and his donkey check in at a flop-house. The beast is stabled outside, while inside its owner discusses with the other lodgers the best way to become rich and successful as a scientist. Together, they cook up a new science of ‘instinctology’, which holds that instinct is in animals the equivalent to thought in human beings, and according to which it is an animal’s instinct, rather than “its bones, its tarsals, its teeth, or its vertebrae,” that is most useful in determining the nature of a given animal, since “although instinct undergoes modifications, it is one in its essence, and nothing will better prove the unity of things, notwithstanding their apparent diversity.”

The scheme really begins to come together only when it is revealed that Marmus has an animal companion waiting outside. “You have a donkey!,” one of his interlocutors exclaims, “we’re saved!” They devise a plan to “make of it an extraordinary zebra, which will draw the attention of the learned world to your system of comparative instincts, by a certain singularity which will disturb the classifications. Learned men live by nomenclature, so let us overturn the nomenclature.” Marmus’s donkey is worked over by the lodgers. The newspapers will soon report that “a courageous traveller, the modest naturalist Adam Marmus, who crossed Africa by going right through its center, has brought back... a zebra whose peculiarities plainly unsettle the fundamental ideas of zoology, and prove right the illustrious philosopher [i.e., Geoffroy] who does not admit any difference in animal organization, and who proclaimed, to the applause of the learned men of Germany, the great principle of one and the same contexture for all animals.”

This is not just any zebra. Its stripes, we quickly learn, “are yellow and they stand out from a black background.” The new creature is also peculiar in its behavior, with a giraffe-like gait, and this is taken to show, in favor of Marmus’s new science of comparative instinctology, that “the instinct of animals is modified according to the environments in which they find themselves.” And from this modification derives “a new theory of the greatest importance for zoology, one that threatens to overturn the reigning doctrine of the great ‘Baron Cerceau’ --a thinly veiled representation of the historical Georges Cuvier--, according to which “each class (is) an organization unto itself.” Now, it turns out, as a result of the yellow-striped, giraffe-like zebra, that “the oyster, the polyp, the coral, the lion, the zoophyte, microscopic animalcules, and man, are all the same apparatus, simply modified by means of organs that are elongated more or less.” Marmus will accordingly declare, at the height of his fame, that “my zebra is no longer a zebra, but a fact that engenders a science.” More correctly, the zebra has engendered a rift in the scientific community, with Cerceau losing ground to the defenders of ‘zoological unity’. The Baron is soon betrayed by a disciple who converts to Marmusianism, and who offers a course of comparative instinctology, opening it up even to women and to curious members of the bourgeois public. Various intrigues ensue, and eventually the ‘zebra’ ends up in the zoological garden of London (“France was not able to hold onto the most curious animal in the world”), from where he recounts the story of Marmus and Cerceau.

Balzac allows the disguised donkey, telling its tale from London, to serve as a mouthpiece for his own, the author’s, dire assessment of the machinations of learned men: the only thing that has been learned from the great French zoology wars of the early 19th century, the author thinks, is that ‘imbeciles are ready to give money and acclaim to intriguers’. The donkey exhorts his fellow inmates at the London zoo to accept their lot, indeed to realize (in reference to the tale’s French title) that to live out one’s days in a menagerie is precisely to ‘make it’ [parvenir], and that his parvenu companions should banish the thought of rebellion or protest. He imagines a future in which jardins des plantes multiply in every country, and animals are free to live out their lives “behind gilded trellises, at the cost of the state: a bunch of Marmusian sinecures.” For him, as for the Rhinoceros of Versailles and so many other animals, the mortal end of this charmed life represents only a transition from the menagerie to the gallery of comparative anatomy: “Think about it,” he implores them: “after my death I will be stuffed and preserved in the collections, and I doubt that we would be able, in the state of nature, to achieve such an immortality. Museums are the Pantheon of animals.”

This is all very good satire: where else but in satire’s inverted world could an ass appear, to invoke Buffon's categories, as the most noble figure, and the humans the most degenerate? After all, as Edward Topsell tells us in his 1607 Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, the ass is nothing if not “slow, burthen-bearing, back-bearing, vile, cart-drawing, mill-labouring, sluggish, crooked, vulgar, slow-paced, long-eared, blockish, braying, ydle, devill-hayred, filthy, saddle-bearer, slow-foot, four-foot, unsavoury, and a beast of miserable condition; beside many other such titles in the Greeke.” (Curiously, however, one of Buffon’s most elegiac passages, cited above, in which he encourages us to “admire equally the magnificence of the execution and the simplicity of the design,” occurs in the section of his Histoire naturelle on ‘The Donkey’). Yet the satire only works on the presumption that animals do not deserve their own Pantheon. On one way of reading Balzac’s tale, human beings only debase themselves when they attribute too much importance to learning about the order of nature, and about their own place in that order. Marmus’s intrigues are permitted because the Parisian world, sustained by the fleeting enthusiasms of bourgeois women and men, is ready to be taken by storm at the sight of a new sort of creature brought out of the depths of Africa. They are so ready, in fact, that they are able to let a painted donkey overturn everything they had previously believed about the principles behind nature’s organization.

I have never been to the real Panthéon, the pantheon of French humans, though I have crossed in front of it countless times, when I was a visiting student in Paris. I had next to no money, and was obliged to do my grocery shopping at an oddly placed branch of Picard les Surgélés, a store specializing in down-market frozen foods, at the Place du Panthéon, inserted among some of the world's most distinguished real estate. (If my mood had been slightly different this summer, I could very well have ended up writing a book about Picard and its elegant aisles of chunky white plastic sacs, filled with frozen spinach pellets and curled-up little shrimps.)  I gather the Panthéon is a great gallery filled with busts of a number of the heroes of the French Republic. I can't help but note, though, that this is already a sort of profanation, an intentional crossing of ontological boundaries that were once carefully guarded. A pantheon, after all, is a place to revere gods, and not men, and once the gods have been chased out of a culture’s imagination, it is not at all surprising that attention turns to animals: for heaven’s sake, we need to revere something besides other humans.

If Balzac is right, that the modern natural history museum is a Pantheon for animals, this could mean that the banishment of the gods in the modern era has in fact led to a sort of retheriomorphization of divinity, a return to the idea, last embraced in full in ancient Egypt, that animals themselves are gods. Certainly, no Buffon or Cuvier would ever say as much. They would acknowledge at most that animals are, so to speak, divine wisdom congealed. Yet that basic insight driving Buffon and Cuvier, it seems to me, is the same insight that motivated Aristotle to say, of the study of living beings, ‘here too dwell gods’. This insight is nothing to ridicule. The Gallery of Comparative Anatomy is a Pantheon of animals, and it is not only an ass who would suggest they deserve to have one if humans do.

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Our Animals, Ourselves

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 27, 2011. To read the entire essay, go here.

When I was very small I lived on a defunct chicken farm. There was a house with a yard, and these together took up half an acre. To the north there was a long, thin chicken coop, empty of chickens, and behind it lay the back pasture, which occupied one acre. Perpendicular to this, to the west, there was the side pasture. Steers dwelled in the back pasture, ate hay, shat, sculpted odd forms on the salt lick (until we had them shot and butchered). As far as I know, these were actually existing steers. But the side pasture was inhabited, I imagined for a long time, by a fox. When I went there by day, I felt I was entering upon its territory; and when I lay in bed at night, I was certain it was out there, in its burrow, dwelling. It lived there like a human in a home, and was as real as any neighbor—except that I had myself brought it into existence, likely by projecting it out of a picture in a book.

The fox did not need to exist in order to function in my imagined community, one which must be judged no more or less real than that of, say, Indonesians, or of humanity. It was enough that there be foxes at all, or creatures that fit that description, in order for me to conjure community with the imaginary fox in the side pasture. And it was no mere puerile phantasm that caused me to imagine this community, either. It was rather my thinking upon my own humanity, a condition which until very recently remained, over the course of an entire human life, embedded within a larger community of beings.

These days, we are expected to grow out of that sort of thinking well before puberty. Our adult humanity consists in cutting off ties of community with animals, ceasing, as Lévi-Strauss put it, to think with them. When on occasion adults begin again to think about animals, if not with them, it is to assess whether animals deserve the status of rights-bearers. Animal rights, should there be such things, are now thought to flow from neurophysiological features and behavioral aptitudes: recognizing oneself in the mirror, running through mazes, stacking blocks to reach a banana.

But what is forgotten here is that the animals are being tested for re-admission to a community from which they were previously expelled, and not because they were judged to lack the minimum requirements for the granting of rights. They were expelled because they are hairy brutes, and we learned to be ashamed of thinking of them as our kin. This shame only increased when Darwin confirmed our kinship, thus telling us something Paleolithic hunters already knew full well. Morality doubled up its effort to preserve a distinction that seemed to be slipping away. Since the 19th century, science has colluded with morality, always allowing some trivial marker of human uniqueness or other to function as a token for entry into the privileged moral universe of human beings. "They don't have syntax, so we can eat them," is how Richard Sorabji brilliantly reduces this collusion to absurdity...

Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.

G. E. Lessing, "On the Use of Animals in Fables" (1759)

I had wanted to use just one passage from Lessing's short essay in an article I am supposed to be writing on the way our moral commitments, or lack of them, towards animals flow from an ungrounded folk-ontology that equates kinds with individuals. I ended up translating the entire essay, and in doing so I've both stalled and complicated my own project. It was Lessing's final point, the one he arrives at through his 'sensibility' rather than through logical conclusions, with which I disagreed most, and wanted to use as a foil. But the middle paragraphs, with the various substitutions of, e.g., 'Nero', 'wolf', and 'priest', I think are very interesting, and do not leave much to object to. Anyway, the article is still to come. Here is Lessing's essay.

*

The great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons. What is to be learned from this? Is it an essential feature of fables, that the animals in them are elevated to the status of moral beings? Is this a device that shortens and eases the author’s intended point? Is it a usage that in fact has no real purpose, but that has been conserved in honor of the person who first invented it, if only because it is funny—quod risum movet? Or what is it?

In brief: that animals and other lesser creatures have language and reason is presupposed in fables. It is assumed, and should not at all be understand as miraculous. When I read in scripture, “Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam…” etc. (Numbers 22:28), I am reading something miraculous.  But when I read in Aesop, “Back in the days when animals still spoke, the sheep said to its shepherd….,” it is quite evident that the fabulist does not wish to relate anything miraculous; but much more, rather, something that he supposes, with the permission of his reader, to have been perfectly in accordance with the common course of nature at that time.

And this is so easy to understand, I mean, that I should be ashamed to say anything more on the subject. I shall come rather at once to the true reason --or which I take to be true, anyway-- why the fabulist often finds animals more convenient than humans for his purposes. I place it in the widely known constancy of their characters.  I suppose that it would also be easy to find an example in history in which this or that moral truth makes itself known. [But] will it be able to be recognized in the example by everyone, without exception, even by those who are unfamiliar with the cahracters of the people of interest here? Impossible! And how many people are so widely known in history that they need only to be mentioned so that at once the notion of the way of thinking that is particular to them, as well as of their other properties, is immediately awakened in everyone? In order thus to avoid circumstantial characterization, in which it is never more than doubtful whether it calls forth the same ideas in everyone, it was necessary to confine oneself to the reduced sphere of those beings about which we reliably know that even for the most ignorant people this [or that] idea corresponds to the mention of them, and no other. And since these creatures are in their nature completely unable to take on the role of free beings for themselves, we preferred to expand the boundaries of their nature, and made them able [to take on the roles of free beings], under certain presumptions of probability.

We hear ‘Britannicus and Nero’. How many of us know what we are hearing? Who was this one? Who the other? In what relations do they stand to one another? But then we hear: ‘the wolf and the lamb’, at once we all know what we are hearing, and we know in what relation the one stands to the other. These words, which straightaway awaken within us their particular images, convey the perceptual knowledge that is prevented by those names [Britannicus and Nero], through which even those to whom they are not unfamiliar nonetheless certainly do not think exactly the same thing. If here the fabulist is not able to rustle up any rational individuals who portray themselves in our faculty of imagination through the mere naming of them, it is still permitted to him, and he has recourse and right, to seek out their equivalents among the animals or among lesser creatures still. If in the fable of the wolf and the lamb we were to place Nero in place of the wolf, and Britannicus in place of the lamb, the fable at once would lose what had made it a fable for the entire human race. But if we put the giant and the troll in place of the lamb and the wolf, it already loses somewhat less, for the giant and the troll are also individuals whose characters are alreadly largely explained without further additions by their being mentioned. Or we can even transform it into the following human fable (2 Samuel 12): “A priest came to the poor man of the prophet and said: ‘Bring your white lamb before the altar, for the gods require a sacrifice’. The poor man replied: ‘my neighbor has a great herd, and I have only this one lamb’. ‘But you made a vow to the gods’, the priest replied, ‘for they blessed your fields’. ‘I have no field’, was the answer. ‘But that’s how it was before, when they healed your son of his illness’. ‘O,’ the poor man replied, ‘the gods took my son himself as a sacrifice!’ ‘You godless man!,’ the priest scolded, ‘You blaspheme!’ And he tore the lamb from his arms…” etc. And if in this transfomation the fable has lost still less, this arises simply from the fact that the character of avarice is unfortunately even more quickly associated with the word ‘priest’ than the character of blood-thirstiness with the word ‘giant’; and through the poor man of the prophet the idea of oppressed innocence is more easily awoken than through the troll.

Indeed, I would like to venture to ascribe yet another purpose to animals and other lesser creatures in fables, to which perhaps I never would have come through [logical] conclusions, if my sensibility had not brought me to it. The fable has as its aim our clear and vital recognition of a moral principle. Nothing obscures our recognition more than the passions. Consequently, the fabulist must avoid the excitation of the passions as much as possible. But how else can he avoid, for example, the arousal of sympathy, than by making the objects of it less perfect, and by putting animals or lesser creatures in place of men? Let us recall again the fable of the wolf and the lamb, as it was transformed above into the fable of the priest and the poor man of the prophet. We sympathize with the lamb, but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle. How is it by contrast with the poor man? Does it only seem so to me, or is it really true, that we have so much sympathy with him, and we feel much too much indignation against the priest, for the intuitive knowledge of the moral principle to be able to be nearly as clear as it is in the other case?

The 'Catalog of Meats' vs. the Historia Animalium; Or, Why There Is No Sanskrit Zoology

Francis Zimmermann's 1982 work, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue [The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine] is a remarkable thing. Ostensibly, it is a study of Ayurvedic medicine by a student of the great ethnographer Louis Dumont, but it would be more correct to describe it as a contribution towards the anthropology of natural science, and in this respect to be an important precursor to works such as Scott Atran's Cognitive Foundations of Natural History of 1991.

While Atran focuses on an explicit comparison between folk-taxonomical systems, on the one hand, and on the other the Linnaean system at the foundation of scientific taxonomy, Zimmermann instead seeks to explain why there is nothing like zoological taxonomy in the Indian tradition. His answer is that zoology is effectively edged out by pharmacy, but that pharmacy, in turn, needs to be understood as implying both a cosmology and an epistemology based on 'qualities' (guṇa) and 'savors' (rasa). Understood this broadly, it is not surprising to find 'meats' among the things listed in the Indian pharmacopoeia, nor to find that it the 'cataloguing of meats' comes to play the role in the Indian tradition that the classification of animals would play for Aristotle.

There is, Zimmermann writes, an "exclusion of even the possibility of a botanical or zoological classification: the beings themselves are no longer of any interest, only their dietetic and therapeutic qualities" (130-31). This divergence is surprising, given the tremendous overlap between other aspects of Greek and Indian life science: "From a comparative point of view, in the domain of physiology the theory of vital breaths and the theory of the humors constitute remarkable points of convergence between Indian medicine and Grek medicine; nevertheless, a deep divergence separates the two when it comes to methods of classification. On the one hand, in the Greek tradition, natural history; on the other hand, in the Ayurvedic tradition, the inclusion of taxonomy in pharmacy and the subordination of pharmacy to a complex interplay of savors and curative properties, which envelops the inventory of the flora and fauna in a welter of synonyms, redundancies, enumerations, division, and cross-references" (132-33).

The richest catalog of meats given in the Sanskrit corpus is found in the Suśrutasamhitā, or Suśruta's corpus, which dates most likely from the 12th century of the present era. This text, Zimmermann writes, "represents a corpus of knowledge about... fauna, knowledge not set out as such bult slipped into the mold of discourse intended for the use of medical practitioners" (98). One particularly vivid passage of the corpus illustrates how, from an initial distinction that appears taxonomical in an Aristotelian sense (as between plants and animals), we are quickly diverted into a potentially infinite branching of sensible qualities (and insensible too, since in the Ayurvedic tradition a 'savor' need not be detected in order to exist; it is something closer to an 'essence' actually inhering in the world):

Food is seen as a single category from the point of view of its object, the category of what can be eaten; byt from the point of view of its sources, it is double since it is composed of both immobile and mobile beings; it is also double from the point of view of its action, if one makes a distinction between beneficent and harmful effects. It is quadruple with regard to its mode of employment since it can be drunk, chewed, crunched or sucked; sextuple with regard to its savors, since there are six savors; vigesimal with regard to the qualities which are, successively, heavy/light, cold/hot, unctuous/dry, sluggish/lively, solid/liquid, tender/hard, dessicant/lubrifying, smooth/rough, subtle/crude, viscous fluid. They are innumerable in respect of its varieties because there exist a multitude of possible combinations and preparations for all these substances.

Field Mice on Trial

From E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, London, William Heinemann, 1906. Appendix C. To read the original German, click 'keep reading' below.

[Stilf, South Tyrol, 1519]

The Allegation

Schwarz... made his allegation against the field mice on the grounds that these harmful animals have brought him great and notable misfortunes, so that if these harmful animals are not chased away, [he] would not be able to pay his annual rent to the feudal manner, and would be forced to move away, since in such circumstances his family would not be able to feed itself.

The Replication

Grienebner prosecuted the matter, and gave this answer and submitted it to the court: he understood [the complaint] against the little animals, but said that it is well known that in general they afford a certain contribution and utility... For their sake, he is hopeful that today their usefulness and their contribution will be recognized, and that there will be no judgment against them. If however the judgment is made that [the mice] must move, he is hopeful that another accommodation and another location will be given to them, in which they will be able to maintain themselves. During this removal they should also be given free passage, safe from their enemies such as dogs, cats, or other enemies. He is also hopeful that, if one of them should be pregnant, she should be allowed to stay until she brings forth her young, and only then should she move out.

The Judgment

In view of the allegation and the replication, the address and the counter-address, and in view of the testimony that has been made and of all that is right, it is by judgment and by rights recognized that the harmful little animals, as the field mice are called, are to vacate the fields and meadows of Stilf within 14 days of the complaint, and are never to return again. If however one or more of the little animals is pregnant, or is unable to be removed because it is too young, these shall be given refuge for 14 [more] days; but those that are able to move must vacate within 14 days.