13900 words

In this chapter, I will write about how I listened to dairy cows using theory. I'm going to tell the stories of what I saw at the farm when I approached with a borrowed lens. A lens made-up of a theoretical framework and methodology innovated by my supervisor, Leonie Cornips. The lens is made-up of many connected theories and concepts, so it’s not easy to describe in a really simple way. I’ll increase in complexity slowly and mix the theory with stories to show how this lens does its works.

I attempt to answer the questions below, and by the end start wondering how my body became part of the assemblage in such a way that I was able to notice the other bodies that were part of the cows’ semiotic assemblage.

<aside> ❓ Considering the array of material and immaterial or organic things that can make-up a semiotic repertoire, to what extent, and in which way, is X agential in the expressions of cows?

</aside>

<aside> ❓ How does an assemblage theory of Language help me to discern farm expressions?

</aside>

Contents

2.1 introducing the Assemblage

04/11/22 12:29 [ROT]

The theory I’m about to describe starts with an assumption that non-humans do speak, and anything that can speak will try its best to do so. So the kind of theory that will help me to listen has to point out to me: What does this speaking thing do to express itself? My strategy is to start with a belief that cows do speak, and then hunt for theories that provide concrete ways to see or receive what they might be saying.

This movement from an abstract belief to a search for concrete manifestations is a movement that French theoreticians Deleuze and Guattari rely on to explain why the world is built the way it is. They are heavily inspired by the early-modern Dutch philosopher Spinoza (1632 - 1677) who reckons there is a very thin separation between intention and what could exist, suggesting that there is a constant co-creation between the ideas that minds project, and the stuff that exists in the world.[^spinoza] Ideas by minds are constantly shaping the world in different ways. The cows want to speak, they have ideas in their mind that want to be said, so they will find a way to say it.

Being able to let out what is inside is an important theme in my thinking over the last year. An important question has been, What are the conditions we require to let out what is inside? How do they (we) say anything? Because I don't know yet how cows speak- I need to imagine how they might go about trying.

Following Hannah Arendt, we try to speak because we need to appear to each other in the common world. What keeps us together, or reminds us of where we are -where we belong- is the effort we put into appearing before others.[^arendt] And to appear to others, we rely on a structure that exists outside of us, in the common world. Although what happens inside of yourself when you're alone in your bedroom is important, you don’t need to share it. However, once you step outside into the ‘commons’, you have to make an effort to communicate it, that’s when you become aware of what's in-between you and others; how you are separated and what you can do to overcome it. It’s this effort that is interesting to me.

If we view cows as participating in a private realm as well as a common world where they appear and speak in public that humans are also members of- I can focus on How they appear? and which framework they use to express themselves in attempts to be understood. Often there are rules of engagement or ways to express, and these rules allow us to characterise and compare social realms. The ways in which cows appear to other cows is different to How? humans have to appear to other humans, or How? cows appear to humans. But appear we must.

A method for noticing the concrete appearances of expressive acts is offered by Alastair Pennycook, who makes use of a concept that Deleuze and Guattari (DG) formulated. The ‘assemblage’ is a wicked tool with which to answer How? questions. ‘Assemblage’ is the word translated by Brian Massumi from the French term “agencement,” which could also mean 'to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, or to order.' Because of how assemblages have to constantly adapt, another translator of DG’s complicated text thinks we should think of an assemblage as a ‘working arrangement’.[^agencement] I’d like to notice what things are part of the working arrangement that cows use to express themselves, so this concept seems to be a good framework to start with.

Assemblages can be understood as the constellation of matter which gathers to explain How an intention manifests itself. They are not static networks but intersecting processes that exist due to some purpose.[^process] What are they made-up of? According to DG, the main ingredients are “lines and measurable speeds,” not the actual things that we see as having been arranged or collected.[^abstraction] This is unexpected because, for DG, assemblages depend more on these lines, which are connections, than the things which are connected by them, which are secondary or after the fact. This is how the Idea of.. something can survive even when the arrangements of matter that makes it up come and go.

Speaking plainly, an assemblage can be seen as an intentional gathering (verb) of related things. It’s not an accident. It’s not a static ‘set’ or ‘group’ of things. It evolves and adapts.

2.1.1 introducing the Web

I have a very visual way of thinking, and ‘assemblages’ are very visual tools to think with. The word ‘web’ appears in many descriptions of assemblages in the theoretical literature. So we can start making a diagram of any assemblage as basic sprawl of lines. All the things that make-up an assemblage will have lines drawn between them depending on the character of their relationship. A metaphor of a spider’s web suits well.

DG themselves work with the figure of a rhizome, which is the underground sprawl of connections that fungi form to mediate information and nutrient flows between very different entities like trees, microbes, and dying leaves.[^rhizome] One thing, and any thing, is connected to anything else through many intermediary lines. One line will stop when it touches another, and then one or more lines will start at that point.

The web strategy has important features which I’ll make use of in this chapter. It’s already worth noting that there is a strong transience in this visualisation. The lines between certain points are always at risk of being torn, or decaying and being replaced. One point can be connected to another point through various combinations of lines. It becomes hard to remember how things were once connected, and because of that, we may not even bother to remember. What matters is what the web diagram can show us now. It tells us how all the related things are related now.

So we have built a picture of a web of lines that connects anything that cows might use to express themselves with: words, gestures, and who knows what else.. Going onwards we’ll think about what else might have a part to play in this web.

[/spinoza]: This is my interpretation of Book 2 in the Ethics, which I read with a group of friends and fellow students in a reading group I founded (2022 Utrecht).

Spinoza gets rid of the difference between the artificial and the natural by arguing that everything that exists is co-produced by minds and the material world. (See: Gabbey, “Spinoza on the Natural and the Artificial.”) Artificial things evolve in the same way natural things do, they all stem from ideas that are had by minds. There is one original mind from which all other minds follow and that is God. Likewise, all ‘ideas’ are contained in one fundamental Idea, which is God. The only eternal, complete truth about the way the world is is known to God. This means that many things come about in the world due to the activity of minds that do not have a clear understanding of the Ideas they are having, so the Ideas do not realise themselves fully. So the things that follow from incomplete or imperfect ideas are bound to change in substance even if the Idea is the same. DG pick this up in their assemblage concept by letting the intention, or the idea of something, contain the necessary structure that material, social and affective elements are arranged around- making the change in elements the reason why things appear different from one moment to the next.

Metal filings ‘gathered’ by a magnetic core

[/arendt]: The concept of the ‘social’ or ‘commons’ is key for justifying a similarity between humans and cows. The common world the way I understand it is what happens in-between persons.

The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.

Arendt, The Human Condition, p.55

[/agencement]: Assemblage is a concept that has become important to many theorists remotely aligned with ‘post-humanism’ (which is a network of academic practitioners interested in de-centring the human or looking elsewhere than the human in human-ities disciplines). It appears in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, and its translation is critiqued and nuanced in Buchanan, “Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents.”

[/process]: I’m nodding to the deep process philosophy of biology developed contemporarily and captured in the following quote:

The view that life is composed of distinct entities with well-defined boundaries has been undermined in recent years by the realisation of the near omnipresence of symbiosis. What had seemed to be intrinsically stable entities have turned out to be systems stabilised only by the interactions between a complex set of underlying processes.

Dupré and Guttinger, “Viruses as Living Processes.”

[/abstraction]: In this sense, ‘assemblage’ isn’t equal to a local material system like a machine or a body or ecosystem, but instead it’s a tool that the researcher can use to do abstraction. The main use-case DG saw for agencement was power, or structures of authority, that had to be treated abstractly before they could be made sense of in their contemporary, fleeting context and arrangement. For example, the Idea of how a power structure should look will spawn an assemblage that arranges the material and social worlds to fit that Idea. This is a reversal of Marxist materialism, which starts with an analysis of how value is made which is built up to produce a picture of an economic system called Capitalism. DG would argue that the reverse is true, the principles of Capitalism produce the way that value should be made, communicated and thought about.

[/rhizome]: From ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Captured from a graphic found on an artist-researcher friend’s website https://www.sandipan.nl/#home

2.1.2 Semiotic Assemblages

18/12/21 [UTR] - 04/11/22 [ROT]

2.1.3 Introducing the Dynamics of the Relation

25/04/22 10:48 [ROT]

2.2 Displacement of Voice

Stills from my camera entering the open wall of the cowshed.

2.2.1 Intruder story

2.2.2 the Intervention

20/05/22 17:48 [ROT]