4575 words
24/07/22 02:55 [ROT]
This thesis is about what I learnt about Listening from cows. When I started in March 2019, the goal was to study how cows communicate. Since then, I did lots of going to farms and hanging out with various farmers, herds and landscapes. Going to a place that is unfamiliar, or choosing to treat a place as unfamiliar, is the main tool for doing ‘ethnography,’ which is an academic discipline in itself. The greek roots of this word are ethnos, "folk, people, nation", and grapho, "I write". After my fieldwork came the time to write-up encounters I had with the people and critters of the farm. And that’s when I got stuck behind a question: “who am I writing this for?” I became very introspective about the power and privilege that comes with working in the way I do; standing in fields, sitting at a desk writing, occasionally speaking about what I’m working on and what I’ve learnt. In the Netherlands, where I live, cows are a serious subject and yet they are mute participants in heavy political discussions which affect the future of (international) food systems. This is a human-animal relationship that is fraught with tension and beauty, I wanted to approach it with sensitivity and so landed on a methodology to write with called auto-ethnography where I write about myself writing, which helped me to better articulate what I learnt from cows.
There is an emerging practice called ‘multispecies ethnography’ which delineates itself from ethnography because it sets its sights beyond the human subject in any environment. Its practitioners haven’t yet formulated an agreed upon way of going about de-centring the human from ethnographic study but several have found it important to work introspectively in the context of ‘multispecies’ encounters like the ones I had at farms.[^gillespie] A main motivation for this is to be humble about what we know of the worlds we are trying to describe. As someone that grew up in a suburb of London, I didn’t know much about agriculture and animals. What I did know though, being an intersection of multiple social categories like brown, working class and.. is that exploited bodies are the least understood, mainly because of the un-making, suppression or absence of conditions they are comfortable to speak into. And I’d never experienced cows speaking for themselves in any media except fictional cartoons. So, assuming that they can speak, I wanted to make sure my research didn’t take place at their expense, which connects with another important motive for multispecies ethnographers- which is an attempt to ‘de-centre’ the human being and allow more space for the concerns that nonhuman subjects of research might want to have exposed.[^hooks] However, to figure out what matters to cows, or other nonhumans at farms, I first have to learn to listen to them. So my auto-ethnography has a more meta goal than paying attention to the various ways in which I am entangled to nonhuman others.[^cowstudies] What I am doing is to study how I got better at Listening to them so that I could start figuring out which matters they might want to tell us about or work on with us. I want to tell a story of how my ability and understanding of Listening evolved because of them.
The question that ties together all the parts of my thesis is:
<aside> ❓ How did I learn to Listen at dairy farms?
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<aside> <img src="/icons/list_blue.svg" alt="/icons/list_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Chapters
methodology - decoloniality - ethnography/anthropology - embodied listening - autoethnography - positionality
assemblage - web - expression - intention - common world - semiotic repertoire - the relation and the inbetween - displacement of voice - agency of machines and materiality - thinging - confidence
feeling - missing - memory studies - emotions - becoming-with - entwinement - threads - inside of - body ontology - scale invariance - individualism - monism - holobionts -break ups - rhythm - timescapes - plants - choreographies - collaboration
ethics - queer phenomenology - mixture - human animal divide - the self in society - sedimentation - surrender - multimodality - discernment - storytelling - human exceptionalism - gestures- design
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Contents
[/gillespie]: See: Kirksey and Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography” and Gillespie, “For Multispecies Autoethnography” and Gillespie, “For a Politicized Multispecies Ethnography.”
[/hooks]: I am very influenced by bell hooks’ notions of taking up less space and speaking from/listening to the margins as a mode of de-centring, copied from “Choosing the margin as a space for radical oppenness”
Living as we did - on the edge - we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the centre as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and centre.
[/cowstudies]: Recent ethnographies with cows retain an anthropocentric focus. For instance: breeding cultures have been shown to shape human “professional identities” without delving into the impact their technologies have on cows’ bodies and lineages (Grasseni, Skilled Visions, p.48); what rural women from Rajasthan are expressing through sculpting cow-dung during Diwali is noted, but the role and motives for the cows who also perform in these ceremonies is left vague (Notermans, “Prayers of Cow Dung”). In each of these ethnographies, the responses of cows to human practices are not studied- my project seeks to contribute tools with which they can be captured and factored into any multispecies investigation.
I want to tell a speculative history of multispecies Listening inversely, through a very brief history of Language. According to prominent linguist, Noam Chomsky:
the faculty of language is a true species property.. there is no evidence of anything like human language or symbolic activities all together before the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens.. by far, the major use of language is internal – thinking in language.[^chomsky]
This is a common idea, and in the context of this thesis, highly provocative. Chomsky entrenches the idea that ‘language’ is an unlikely possession, far out of reach for the others we share the planet with. Accurately differentiating humans from animals has, for some reason, felt like an absolutely necessary first step for many Western philosophers since Aristotle produced his ‘Great Chain of Being’ - God then angels then humans, animals, plants, minerals. The search for things we do that the rest cannot lands on language. We can move and manipulate things in the world but so can they, we can make decisions from choices available to us but so do they. Something animals don’t seem to be able to do is find unique ways to express themselves. And, since they can’t, we can question if they are even thinking.
Pick up any book written by a philosopher and you will likely find similar statements about animals, normally right at the start of chapters or books. Here is an intense example from in the first book I picked up:
Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind. Between the clearest animal call of love or warning of anger, and a man’s least, trivial word, there lies a whole day of Creation- or in modern phrase, a whole chapter of evolution. All races of men- even the scattered, primitive denizens of the deep jungle - have their complete and articulate language… people who have not invented textiles, who live under roofs of pleated branches, need no privacy and mind no filth and roast their enemies for dinner, will yet converse over their bestial feasts in a tongue as grammatical as Greek, and as fluent as French.[^langer]
I have noticed that this way to ‘Represent’ language, as exclusive to humans, is prevalent amongst scholarship during ‘Modernity.’ If we try answering the question: how is it that we came to decide what language is? -defining the human-animal dichotomy would be a large part of the answer.[^pennycook] In every realm, Modernity’s empiricists and sharpened/ certified rational minds go hunting for primitivity so as to define themselves in opposition to it.[^plasticity] Language became the basest requirement for being human. It is what prevents people that live in filth and engage in cannibalism from being animals. The main strategies for producing hierarchies between black/white or man/woman typically portray animals as the most primitive life forms. To be represented as more-like-an-animal is to be distanced from an esteemed kind of human being, the white, male, eloquent, self-sufficient kind. To be an animal, or to be represented as one, is to be relegated from possessing language and therefore creative thoughts or unique forms of expression.
Rolando Vazquez connects Modernity to Representation via the “Coloniality of Aesthetics” which points towards
the erasure or devaluing of other worlds of sensing and meaning, towards the displacement, the exclusion and denial of other forms of representation and experience.
These are really important connections that shape the histories of Listening and Language. Colonialism has successfully mobilised a hierarchical metaphysics to, first, produce humans and then enable them to view animals, plants, land and nature as less than human and therefore ready to be instrumentally extracted from for human needs. This device of hierarchy is coupled with another, of denying and displacing the “historical reality of other worlds of meaning through forms of erasure, subjugation, destitution, disdain, violence... this devaluing brings about the erasure of worlds.” Displacing animals from having language, then subjugating some animals to confined agricultural spaces, and justifying this by representing their worldviews as absent of meaning since they cannot even express themselves in a ‘proper’ manner are ways of seeing that I am trying to avoid. I’ll be working with an assumption that cows have valuable things to say and should be treated as such. Vazquez’s switch from epistemology to aesthetics is a re-focussing from what we can know (what knowledge is) and who can know (expertise and hierarchy of mind) to how we see and thus opens questions of who can see and what they see.
Throughout my academic curriculum I was taught to see how my academic predecessors did. I can therefore assume I’ve been taught to see in ways that allowed the Western Modernity project -of which I am a part- to exert its power and make much of the world in whatever image it deemed most suitable, progressive or self-serving. People are confused and amused when I tell them what I’ve been doing, it hasn’t made sense to Listen to cows and other animals because their capacity for Language was erased. It doesn’t mean anything to Listen to cows because what they might do or say is so devalued, they are valuable for their milk, meat and labour, only.
Decolonial aesthesis implies a re-orientation, a turning, a conversion. It signals for us an epochal movement from the age of enunciation (the control of representation and the owning of the world) to the age of listening. The age of enunciation is the ordering directed towards the control of representation and the owning of the world-historical reality -the time of modernity. Whereas the age of listening speaks of the practices of wording historical reality through forms of reception, of owing and caring for Earth, the communal and the elders. Decolonial aesthesis has another disposition; it moves away from the paradigm of representation in favour of reception.[^vazquez]
For animal Language to be considered in fresh ways, I think Listening has to be divorced from its History. By interrogating my own ability to Listen, I will keep a distance between Receiving/Listening and Representing/Communicating. I don’t want to expend more institutional academic energy in arguing that nonhuman living things like animals can speak. I would rather explore the possibilities of Listening to them as the humans that we are. This suits my hesitancy with writing for fear of importing cliches and anthropomorphisations that are careless and entrench Modernities norms (anthropomorphisation is unavoidable when we are using words to describe). I’d like to remove the pretence of being the best candidate to Represent. Too much text has been produced and disseminated under the pretence that the printed form lends ideas authority. I’ve tried to produce this text in a way that you can receive, with me, what happened, and cross-examine how I produce my textual descriptions, explanations and concepts. I’m deeply grateful to my supervisors for giving me lots of space and time to explore how I could write in a way I am comfortable.
I’m also grateful for having had the time to deepen into my sensory capacities. During my fieldwork, I Listened using my body and all its senses: sight, smell, touch, hearing, rhythm. Being born to deaf immigrant parents and growing up trilingual to understand them for myself and for others has meant that I always understood Language as being more than words or vocalisations. My duty as an interpreter has prepared me well for reading the bodies of cows. My long-standing reliance on listening by noticing emotions, affect and reading others’ intentions has prepared me for receiving and noticing communications taking place in dimensions where others wouldn’t. By watching cows be so engrossed in touching the earth and plants, I started to learn to do the same for myself. Acknowledging that not only humans, or cows and other mammals, but also plants and the earth, have things to say was a huge turning point in my thesis, and another reason why I don’t like to speak on their behalf. I’d rather convey my nearly-inexplicable experiences of the sacred connection between “place, non-human and human in an effort to access the ‘pre-colonial mind’” for which, me with my Western, Modern but Muslim mind struggles to find words.[^watts]
<aside> ❓ What are the resources with which I received the expressions at dairy farms?
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[/chomsky]: Chomsky and Polychroniou, “Interview: Noam Chomsky on the Evolution of Language.”
[/langer]: Susanne K Langer is the first woman to be recognised as an American Philosopher. Her PhD was supervised by her friend and main mentor, Alfred North Whitehead, an important philosopher of the life sciences for his view on life as ontologically processual. By contemporary philosopher, Iris van der Tuin, Langer is lauded for “her disrespect of the philosophical cannon.” But a chapter titled “Language” (1959) betrays an adherence and un-creative regurgitation of Modernity’s representation of what language is. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p.103
[/pennycook]: Pennycook. Posthumanist Applied Linguistics.
[/plasticity]: The plasticity of the dark skinned/ animal/ Other can be seen most sharply in Modernities onset, when black African slaves lost the right to earn their freedom back and the whites kept theirs. Both groups were already dehumanised by being enslaved, but the black slaves were remodelled as being more brutish and animal like. Achille Mbembe and Sylvia Wynters's studies of race have three major resonances; the concept of blackness, the plasticity of blackness and the process of 'becoming-black' are all socially constructed technologies that redraw the limits of the human and inhuman for each social epoch. Zakiyyah Iman Jacksons’ treatment of Blackness as a formless yet fleshy substance that is remoulded as though it is plastic provides an ontological spin to race that evades the metaphysic of genes and opens itself up to scrutiny on social, epistemic and historical dimensions.