Donna Haraway, Eduardo Kohn, and Colin Dayan: Keynote Conversation

Oh staged a keynote conversation and if you liked a challenge form gonna read off some introductions of the folks here but many ways don't need much introducing trying in the left and so Donna Haraway is distinguished professor of Merida history of consciousness department at the University of California Santa Cruz her work explores the stream of robots tied by feminist theory Science and Technology studies and animal studies she earned her PhD in biology at Yale and makes it 72 and she taught biology at the University of Hawaii in is an history of science at the Johns Hopkins University her books include when species meet crystals fabrics wheat fields metaphor size shape of embryos primate visions gender race and nature in the world of modern science simian cyborgs and women the reinvention of nature is truly an incredible nice work Eduardo cone is an assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University oh I can't have invented this for you Edward now she study of these relationships can have for rethinking anthropology the empirical context for this work is his ongoing long-term research on how the Quechua speaking Runa of Ecuador's upper Amazon inhabit the tropical forests and engage with its beings he is the author of how forests think towards an anthropology beyond the human force coming and like really forthcoming great yeah like September imminent arrival okay um Colin Diane if the Robert Penn Warren professor in the humanities and professor of English at Vanderbilt University she's also the author of fables of mine and in Koreans post fiction he's history in the gods the story of cruel and unusual and most recently the laws of white dog really wonderful book which was selected as a top 25 quote outstanding academic book of 2011 she was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science so this is our plane each of us is going to take 10 minutes to propose a situated story that somehow gets at the way world inhabiting and dying or at stake with other critters and ourselves and we're going to ask each other questions and talk to each other for about a half hour then we're going to open it up so that it's a kind of enlarging sadder a set of string figures or patterns and I am particularly happy to be set up in this kind of conversation this kind of keynote conversation with Eduardo and Colin in particular because I have felt profoundly informed and shaped by them for each of them for a long time around questions of dispossession and the law and what it is to be interpolated into personhood and non personhood under conditions of dispossession and conquest what it is both which both Eduardo and Collins work in relation to other animals and also in relation to people have been situated both of them have have had their work situated in that context and both have also been profoundly consumed with questions questions of semiosis in semiotics language communication both representational and not with questions of making meaning across the profound differences of species of conquest of history of a world in so that I was privileged to blurb each of their recent books and therefore made collections of quotes in order to do these little commercial acts of promotion not on the ways that we shape each other through communication really are quite endless ok so again I've informed also by another one of us who is not here but who is part of this larger community Tom Van Doren who is part of the Australian ecological humanities world and who with Debbie Bird Rose asks a particularly powerful set of questions of what it is to write in a time of extinctions exterminations and I add genocides and permanent war what it is to write what it is to world in a time of profound iterate iterative extinctions and exterminations which I believe is the situation of living and dying of flourishing and failing to flourish that joins animals and other critters on this planet together these days we call this love of our peril you know that the the questions that often come under the label of the Anthropocene that is to say the accelerated rates of extinction the accelerated writing writing into the waters into the earth itself into the fossil record into the gases into the species assemblages into the molecules the accelerated writing of the earth in accelerated extinctions and accelerated threats of serious system collapse of all sorts truly is the situation in which human beings and other critters must figure out how to ask each other how or if to go on all these are not sentimental questions though I'm not against sentiment nor against the sentimental novel as a rhetorical form I think it is underrated as a rhetorical form there's much to be said but the question that joins us today is I think posed by Tom Van Doren and Devi Rose what is it to write in a time of extinctions and exterminations and iterative conquests and permanent war and genocides at all sorts of scales that include other critters mind you I am NOT saying animals that include other critters as well as human beings other critters are an indefinite cat Gouri they they certainly include beings that are not usually considered animals and don't depend on criteria of consciousness whether hierarchically considered or not but do depend on issues of semiosis which Eduardo will get out of in a book how forests think not do for us think as if it were still a question but how they think and then he goes about for many hundred pages actually rather few and disciplined a few hundred pages to outline precisely how forests think he and Ursula the grim understand how forests think Avatar doesn't have a clue pretty good in a lot of ways um now tom has also written another recent book which is an absolute presence from my 10 minutes and it's called flight ways and I want to plagiarize shamelessly from his little piece on whooping cranes in his new book flight ways which will be appearing any minute now but I also got the blur but and so knew about it in advance blurbing is a great way to be fed I unbelievable I mean talk about treats dogs have no idea what it's like to be fed all by the in a really vital work of one's colleagues and all you have to turn in is a little piece of commercial prose you know to get your liver treat so anyway Tom endurance flight ways and his whooping crane traffic chapter he asked throughout that book what is it to hold open space for others in a time of accelerated extinctions where extinction is not an amine a pump toll event but an extended temporality there is not an edge of extinction so much as a shelf of extinction extinction is a protracted process it's not a single event so what is it if a motive response ability among us is to figure out how to hold open space for another for each other for us somehow getting on together where the US isn't all human and perhaps even humans aren't human in any way that we know how to recognize properly what is it to hold open space for another that's the ethical question all that concerns me these days and he asks it in relation to whooping cranes and he does it by asking with a searing detail what it costs to be a value in a species recovery program there's this whooping crane is something who's which female whooping cranes are in life long captivity so as to accelerate their egg production such that their eggs can be incubated by a non endangered species in this case the sandhill cranes such that human beings dressed as sort of odd-looking whooping cranes so is to prevent imprinting because of the knowledge since Konrad Lorenz that to allow other critters to imprint on you is an act of violence that will shape their reproductive histories for failure forever after that will that will shape them behaviorally in such a way that they will forever after have a kind of sociality that sets them up for giant trouble unless the human being remains accountable to them for life which very human being very few human beings not counting our rabbit lady who really inspires me she is capable of being responsible for life in my view very few people are you know in terms of the critters that we take on into our lives are we really responsible to them for as long as it takes big question okay so human beings have learned not to let other critters imprint a responsible human beings good scientists in this case have learned to try to block imprinting even as they are raising baby birds for release in this thing called the wild which is a highly managed I mean what what are critters can be released into is no small question on the on the Shelf of extinction I wish I I wish it Metcalf hadn't had to stay away this morning it had talked about the de-extinction with the passenger pigeon the passenger pigeon released into what what sort of world is a species recovery plan about whether it's for an extinct species are an extinct extant species including each other and there are kinds of invulnerability for what is Futurity being produced what kinds of future futures so little possible habitats are tested by releasing again sandhill cranes or other birds to subject them to the resident predators to see how well they survive before the reproductive really highly valued Birds the endangered species critters could be risk in such an environment because their deaths as kind are what's at stake so that an extraordinary workforce of human being scientists dressed up like whooping cranes and really you know condensing a very complicated into fascinating story including scientists who build little light fliers and fly migratory whooping cranes on their first migratory flights so they know where to go following these little light fliers you know you remember the popular film that was released a few years ago well these the the amount of the extraordinary inventiveness and creativity and vitality and ethical intrical commitment and suffering and love that goes into building the technologies that might just maybe produce some futures for critters that otherwise wouldn't have them but in the course of doing that are quite clear that they are involved in practice of extracted labor coerced reproduction multiple kinds of killing as well as nurturing who will live and who will die in a species recovery plan is a very carefully worked out matter okay so is a species recovery plan a good thing to do well that's a situated question of great complexity right for whom at what cost who lives and dies what kind of future is opened up whose sorts of lives and deaths I dare any responsible critter person to be a pro-life activist I dare you anyway to do it one cannot approach these questions from a philosophical premise of pro-life any more than one can approach the relatively simple question of human pregnancy seven billion and Counting sterilized as law never mind I didn't say that I am on a tear these days about babies it really I'm not saying this forget what I well anyway but I am serious about not regarding reproductive freedom as the be-all and the end-all of thinking ethically even about feminist questions of reproductive freedom much less about what we owe the other critters if we're serious about opening up space on this on the edge of them of extent on the multiple forms of accelerated killing that aren't afoot among us okay is my big picture that's used that's plagiarizing from Tom Van Doren to ask a really complicated question by telling you what it takes to fledge a whooping crane chick okay how much surrogate surrogate reproductive labor how many whooping cranes subjected to accelerated ovulation cetera Sarah what does it take to open up a future through an endangered species big question now little question little story to end my piece of this has to do with the trip I took in the southwest with my dog cayenne it was all too well trained you think you're embarrassed by not being a good talk dog trainer the shame that comes from being a good dog trainer I'll match any day I only have teasing MS goody-goody and me and my husband went on a car trip and Miss goody-goody who is an agility performer and who earned her championship and agility and who taught me an incredible number of shameful things over the dozen years we competed with each other taught me about breakdown power sadism pleasure joy I'll tell ya the lessons are really endless and she also taught me about whom I admire in dog world's which is to say the folks who actually figure out how to live with their actual dogs as opposed to their fantasy dogs or their actual rabbits or their actual horses or their actual crickets the people who actually get redone by having made a life-changing commitment that is not optional to somebody who is not you I think parents occasionally do that but rarely I just think it's got that hard and I'm not calling it love something else so that the folks who actually learned in agility this really weird competition and involves thousands of hours of training actually learn to run with their actual dogs as opposed to their fantasy dogs those people got my my respect in spades so there's cayenne and me and my husband person at the Hopi cultural center on second Mesa in the packing lot and I undergrad creatures of empire I know that Cayennes ancestors herded sheep in US conquest territory after the Civil War and that the whole reason Australian Shepherds exist by the way they're an American dog not an Australian dog the whole reason they exist is to herd the commercial sheep that replaced the Spanish ruff sheep the churro sheep I know about the extermination of a Navajo churro sheep of 1930s and the progressive New Deal era erosion control under carrying capacity ideologies that Trump to throw a know too much okay so there's cayenne and me both white creatures of empire she is of course also white which helps but you know really miss goody goody on her dog creatures of empire in the parking lot Hopi Cultural Center and I'm saying what would constitute good manners to walk around the villages with my dog on leash or just plain bad manners because I wanted to be polite and the guy at the Hopi Cultural Center is really amazing he looked he's as well you know he says it's really not about the people they're perfectly fine with you walking around with your dog and you know whatever just it's actually about the reservation it's actually about the other dogs because they are not on leash as you can plainly see in the parking lot and your dog doesn't have the cultural savvy to hang out with these dogs and their cultural savvy they're not especially aggressive not going to hurt you everybody is saying there are way too many of these dogs no one admits to owning them but a whole lot of people are feeding them because they're they were to a dog rather pudgy you know my dog's ribs show to the exact degree of millimeter depth for a healthy athletic dog you know I mean she's been subjected every health discourse in sight these are fat goddammit no nobody admitted to owning them you know it's really more they're unemployed because the Hopi are buying their sheep dung from the Navajo or by and large are raising too many sheep because Padel are more profitable and a whole lot of things are going on you know and there we are in the parking lot with these fat reservation dogs whose puppies by and large don't make it they don't recruit their own populations because their puppies are by and large don't make it because they get eaten by coyotes and killed by Ravens and that it won't make it through the winter and one thing and another but you know if you make it you are sitting pretty so what I'm really doing this is the end of my story this one actually ends with being a creature of empire never ends there was cayenne and me and the guy in the Hopi Cultural Center in the craftsperson with the crap booth and those particular dogs who know and claim to have names for but I don't believe it for a minute I just didn't know their names that the the story of the iterative inheriting inheriting being living in a white separate colony where sovereignty issues are absolutely still very much being lived out and re seized where the dogs are part of that conversation too and so that the the hurting dog of the conquest west and the reservation dogs who looked like kind of purebred time purebred f1 none of them was going to make it as a Navajo herding dog these were all these were dogs who had more than a nodding acquaintance with the AKC in their lineage ancestry these reservation dogs I assure you they were quote mutts close quote of the f1 generation for the most part or even of the first generation or needing rescue by anybody and I know that puppies are wisely I mean eaten by Ravens and coyotes whatever I'm saying that my sense of curiosity embarrassment tourism knowledge deciding what the dogs really get to meet each other or not this is the ongoing inheriting of being a member of a flight settler colony that is full of all sorts of people who aren't white settlers thank you that it on goes that it isn't over and that it's really interesting and the devil is in the details that's it thanks I'm gonna I want to build on this question that you were circulating in our in our emails building up here and I'll just repeat it what you've already mentioned it but uh this question that Donna asked both of us what does it mean to hold open space for other living beings in times of extermination extension extinction and genocide and my response is to ask how can thinking with forests help us think about this as Harlan mentioned I've been working for some time in a region of Ecuador's upper Amazon with the teachers speaking Luna who live quite intimately with a whole host of creatures in the forest animals plants fungi but also spirits ghosts the dead and all of these in some ways people one of the densest thickets of life on our planet and so that's sort of you know where I'm coming from in my remarks and I want to sort of preface this by saying that we anthropologists or social theorists or humanists critical theorists we've gotten really smart at thinking with other people and that's our that's what we do what we've done but these other people that other people actually think with the world and part of that world thinks the living world also thinks so my work for the past few years that has been concerned with exploring ethnographically how it is and I mean this quite literally that forests think and how we can learn to open ourselves to these Sylvan thoughts in ways that change our thoughts including our thoughts about what it means to think so my interest is in what I call an anthropology beyond the human and I do I'm interested in this anthropology beyond the human in large part by exploring thought beyond the human so in addressing Donna's prompt I want to think about two things today first the first thing I want to think about is how can thinking beyond the human change our understandings of relationality and the second thing I want to think about is how do multi-species relations become important sites for cultivating and ethical practice these are the two things I want to I want to think about today so first just a very very brief two-second background concerning how I think about relation I'll develop this a little bit more in my brief paper tomorrow but here goes we can't think about relation without thinking about representation because relational ties are semiotic ones that sounds really weird but it's actually not controversial whether or not we're explicit about it we already see relation as representation we academics social scientists humanists we already see relation as representation because human language is our model for understanding relationality whether or not we admit it or not whether we think in terms of social cultural historical or discursive context hidden genealogies or even the networks of a nap after Network Theory the relation contingent conventional systemic co-constructed is always like that among words in human language but my what I'd like what I'm trying to argue is that relation is actually something broader and stranger than this because semiosis is signs exist well beyond the human and these signs are not always word like thinking with those who think with forests and allowing the forests thoughts to think their wild ways through us teaches me this so today I want to briefly explore one kind of relation play and and an element of it and also an element so I want to explore play on the under category I'm in the section of relation I want explore play is a kind of relation and I also want to explore an element of relationship that we don't usually notice which is absence so I'm going to think about these two things so first play by play I mean a space in which previously tightly coupled means ends relations are relaxed some such that's so that something new can emerge and I think here a lot of Donna Haraway work may hurt the example that I always come back to in the companion species manifesto of cayenne and her dog and her got her dog guy and her godson Marco learning to be in the same game together learning not to respond in the old ways so that something new can emerge but one of the things I want to in in focusing on play I want to remind us that means ends relationships are not bad they are actually in the living world it's not just something we humans impose on it when I say that life is semiotic and I and that forests think I'm also saying that function representation purpose and Telos part and partial of the living world but if we think of means and ends is tightly coupled as transitive as deductive there's no room for something new no room for growth no room for flourishing which of course is also central to life growth and thought as Hannah Arendt teaches us although in a humanist register each requires play in this sense so what happens I asked when in Levy Strauss's formulation we don't ask thought for a return this is the kind of play I'm interested in which gets me to the problem of crisis in times of crisis we tend to forget about play this is as evident in radical politics as it is in the neoliberal takeover of the university of which I have first-hand evidence as an ethnographer McGill University where I teach where budgets cut budget crises accountability benefit to society calculations are closing closing down spaces for play in ways that kill thought and thought and politics have an uneasy relationship as Maryland's return noted being intellectually radical can lead to political conservativism but political but being politically radical can lead to intellectual conservativism we can't question too much if we are to act and that just how things are but I think that Donna suggests another way our response to crisis to war extermination extinction and genocide is not just to respond because what our response is is to struggle to hold open a space for play a space where Colin responds need no longer be the only operative logic so this leads me to absence and it's often ignored role in relationality what does it mean to hold open to make room for how is it that a lap for kasha Silverman or a carrier bag for Ursula Le Guin tell as Ursula Quinn or Ursula Gwynn tells us how do these things hold open and by doing so by holding do something what kind of doing is this and here I think of Gregory Bateson who writes that in the world of mind and by mine he he's not talking about human minds only that which is not can be a cause this AB central feature as Terry Deakin calls it essential to life and thought so much of my thinking in thinking with forest has been about the strange productive power of absence what does a bag do it holds open a space delimited constrained divine defined not by what is what is in the bag we don't know what's gonna end up in that bag but but what but by what is not what what is kept out what doesn't come in and I should note that bodies are also bags that make room for selves life is full of absences the not-yet futures to which we all orient ourselves the absent dead who make our lives possible who no longer who by no longer being here make room for us so I mean there's I mean it's not just about being pro-life is about being pro-death yeah we need to die to make especially yeah so all of these absences are very important in my thinking but absences also take the form of not noticing of confusion and this too is central to the living thoughts of the thinking forests dogs might confuse mountain lions with deer with disastrous with disastrous results but results nonetheless ticks confused dogs with mountain lions and deer and the Jaguars we might encounter in the forest might if we respond correctly not notice our differences and treat us as one like them Puma which I should note is it is a key to a term it's the key to return for Jaguar really it doesn't mean Jaguar the species it means predator or even more accurately it needs something even bigger more up central it means an eye a person one that is not dead but indebted to all the dead that one is not the eye is a not absence one that is haunted by and held by all the dead so absences create kinds tics confuse humans deer and dogs and the process there emerges a kind of being the kind through which for example Lyme disease travels and becoming with also involves than a kind right becoming with also involves becoming a kind I should say an anthropology beyond the human is then also an anthropology of the general that is it's certainly in anthropology of the mud but it's also an anthropology of the clean logic is not a bad word it isn't bad but parson Park part and parcel of the living world of the living world generals or generals are real signs have certain formal properties so in that sense logic is not a bad word but it isn't just a word logic isn't something that we just that just wheel and linguistically and out humans impose on the world so my thin my thinking about the general I've thought a lot about the realm of spirits of the forest the something that comes up time and again in my ethnography and my work on the forests in the area where I worked are haunted by powerful spirits these spirits are often white sometimes they're also pre-hispanic Chiefs the dead ancestors and there also are those that are no longer present on the landscape like white-lipped peccary that have been overly locally out hunted and deep inside those forests are also lies a Quito Ecuador is the capital of the Ecuadorian state and one of the things I'm struck by not I hope it can come out in the conversation is the way that another ecology a legal one the one that Colin writes about so much so beautifully how this ecology the legal ecology is also haunted by all the ghosts of our colonial past so I'm very interested in this parallel and I want to I want to bring in someone else in this the work of Eduardo debate Jose Castro he suggests something interesting in a recent piece about fear I should just a quick aside I don't think ethnographically only I mean I don't only think through what people say in the Amazon as an Amazonian do but they would find the theme of this conference strange because the operative in some ways the operative relational concept for us is love you know we have our lovers we have our partners we God is love for Amazonians the the operative other is the enemy the kind of relational ecology that I write about is a predatory one it's not exactly the kind of it's not my go to cosmology for for the kind of politics I envision but you know it does provide its you know an interesting counter to think why we want to always think about love and and whether that is has certain kinds of roots cultural roots and historically situated roots that that we might want to question to anyways Eduardo viedos of cash from a recent piece about fear suggest something really interesting that I think speaks to Colin's work and how it relates to mine and he says that the correct parallel for Amerindian relations to those spirits of the forests to the supernatural is not our religion or our supernatural you know our interest in ESP the paranormal or new-age shamanism as my students always want to insist that's not the correct parallel it's the parallel is our everyday experience of existing under a state that's the parallel to the supernatural and when the Amazonians are dealing with the spirits of the forest and I'm not only talking about a colonial inflected relation but also that there are in some ways relating to something not unlike the supernatural or the ghosts that haunt our relationship to the state so with these thoughts about relationality I want to just turn really briefly and I'm going wrap up in two seconds about the kinds of ethical practices we can and should cultivate with other kinds of beings and this is where I'm sort of at the limits of my thinking I'm posing I'm gonna pose a question but I don't know if it's a it may be just a non-problem so let me just put it out there so I approach this this question of what obligations what responsibilities responsibilities as Donna calls and we have toward non-human beings in two ways but the problem is that these two ways I'm going to lay out here very briefly don't exactly meet and this is one of the things I want to talk about so the first one one can think of the moral as thinking about the good of others that are not us right and so this immediately poses the question who counts as another and why should we have obligations to them so one of the things I think is so productive and interesting about multi-species thinking is that we can really come to recognize that non-human living beings count as others other selves other beings and I would like to say that's because there are things that are good or bad for them for their survival that that good or bad is intrinsic to their being there's something that's good for a dog you might not exactly know but there is something that's good for a dog and and we can't really say that about a rock now because multi-species relations involve radically other others as opposed to non others or non beings they become a privileged site for an ethical practice in which we're thinking about another that really isn't us right so this of course doesn't really tell us how to act why is one other better than another why is growth and flourishing in general not just our growth in flourishing why is that a good thing so that's the first way in which I think about multi species relations as an ethical practice the second one is this and it's a slightly different one and I both I agree with both but then I get stuck in trying to combine them the second one is this us quote unquote is larger than us humans right we are part of a larger we so think of our microbiomes the mayors from which we extracted our hormone hormone supplements even gaya perhaps maybe we can debate that so the moral must surely involve care for all of those us to whom we are related in finite mortal knots but it if so isn't our responsibility to those ultimately about us rather than not us maybe this is a non question maybe it's just my difficulty but I can't seem to think my way out of that thank you I am so glad to be feeling there's so many things that I've been worried about too serious about perhaps so when Eduardo wrote us and say he was going to talk about play I said well I'm gonna have a hard time so I want to just begin with the point that I guess we're all thinking through and that's we're living in the time of extinctions so I wanted to begin by asking how we might begin to even speak about what I'm calling commonplace slaughter and I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be aware what Donna calls responsibility and the thing that has most been unsettling me recently and this is just a small story is the ethics that humans believe in and the cruelty that it allows a dog becomes violent bares its teeth and forces my friend to back up against a wall the dog was rescued from a brutal owner loved to death by my friend only to be killed by her in order to save it from itself so I'm up against a problem and thinking about what it means to know about how superiority is enabled and I think most of all thinking through Eduardo's work and honors or the ruses of rationalisation and i think what's really important in both their words and what I admire most is the kind of overtly material bias even the ghostly is amazingly powerful every heart is a bit of matter and this forces us then I think to asks what do we mean when we say something is extraneous what do we mean when we say something can be disposed so I am again quite worried about certain problematic places when we ask the question what is it to hold open space for others and as you said who would those others be for me it goes back to worrying about attacks on rural folks who chained their dogs in their yards I ask myself is a long chain cooler than a plastic crate what kind of sensibility demands punishment for the persons and their dogs who happen not to have the money to purchase crates or decide that dogs free to run in smiff and walk on the earth is better than confining them to a crate these are questions that lead me to pick up on what Stefan Pommier the anthropologist has called a moral typology what he means by that is that there is always in these kinds of choices and these kinds of questions a problem about wherein we should find our ethics and one of the things for me that I'm also troubling now it's I'm thinking a great deal about night as always 19th century abolition and making connections between that and certain kinds of animal welfare strategies what they both have in common it seems to me is a certain kora of nature and this is something that someone like Herman Melville understood very well I'm thinking about Moby Dick and it's one of the most difficult encounters in the novel the grand armada chapter he demonstrates how sympathy can simply substitute one hierarchy for another that the hunter is the sympathizer who takes pity on and performs charity for what is being hunted the animal still gets killed and mercilessly so it's almost as if in thinking of this open space the notion of sympathy is something like icing on the cake of cruelty it might hide this is a big question can it hide its effects in an excess of feeling I'm thinking of some of these problematic places because of for example the question of terminology its history its effects and I'm thinking also of the issue of terminology in terms like cruel or vicious are just and kind because these kinds of transactions are so complicated and Eduardo's extraordinary call for a place of interaction that might not disqualify taxonomy but rather transform our understanding of it seems to allow for a permeability that might lead us to a thoroughgoing Reid consideration of the ethical life but the invocation of the ethical leads me to again a concern with the hard surfaces of life that find articulation in our response to unfamiliar cultural forms often in my teaching especially in undergraduate seminars I experienced discomfort both for me and my students when teaching about a ritual practice that I know as a thoroughgoing discipline of mind and a reaching for ethics not morality that I've ever known and that is animal sacrifice my experience of it is in Haiti no one wants to watch a bull chased in a sacred compound in Maya Darren's footage of ceremony in the 1950s are a goat tethered to a tree waiting for its throat to be slit the question however is whether or not this emotional what what Tommy calls a moral typology separates us closes us off from other modes of being of thinking through marginality or thinking through what we think of as barbaric and so I'm really troubled these days by as I've always been actually but terminologies like civilised in barbaric this dichotomy has always bothered me in working with pit bulls type dogs and seeing the kinds of exterminations that the state is running in order to remove not so much certain pit bulls but their owners um I begin to think that maybe we do as Donna says so beautifully carry on our backs iteratively an imperial a place of privilege and I think this place of privilege is experienced in places we might want to avoid or would care most not to hear about and so I want to end simply by saying that in my opinion thinking through the ghostliness that the state creates no none other than Blackston understood the social contract itself was a killing off of everything that made you you so that you could become spectral but in reasonable consensus I just want to end by saying ethics I am just putting this on the table for us to discuss might be something that no longer would cause us to think in ways like right and wrong that we would somehow ethics would have a meaning that is less abstract less coercive it would seem to me to have something to do with locale with the proximity of varying kinds of person hoods together and what is distinctly unfamiliar what is definitively outside our place of comfort might be something that can help us to know what it means to be ethical which is to know how to locate ourselves into in relation to what we do not know perhaps maybe a world that is not our own whereas it seems to me that morality in the way that I'm meaning it is an experience of non relation that doesn't exactly demand us to experience something just tasteful sadly okay with all that said and all that these issues that I wanted to raise with you today let me just say one more thing I do think that maybe humanism are human as we've been saying is we've been hearing in the talks today it is really a problem even an evil and that we might want to start thinking about the nuances of animality and so I want to end with a bit of a poem that has always interested me it's William Carlos Williams Patterson it is a remarkable failure in what it attempts to do he knows that there's more to the idea of a dog than an Eliot's dog you know digging in the dirt and he wants to demonstrate throughout Patterson I think that death and dogs bring us to another way of cognition and to a certain extent he understood how for him at least we could learn something rock bottom's about how we come to know and when we ought to care so it's a poem that questions human cruelty and poetic mastery by embracing as he says the phallus and he fills patterson with dogs they're alive they're peeing in the park that prohibits them and he has these amazing dark and ellipses across his pages that it are definitely people I mean you know they're turds they do to the poem what a piece of might do to a nice and elegant artifact the poem begins with a preface that recalls a great deal that I think all of us have been saying to make a start out of particulars and make them general rolling up the sun' by defective leads sniffing the trees just another dog a lot of dogs and then he ends listen forest the pouring water the dogs and trees conspire to invent a world gone bow-wow so if you read I was thinking that initially the three of us the time compression will be different but just the three of us should have a chance to speak a little bit to what we said and then immediate then then open things up quickly to a larger conversation folks here okay then I'll start and ask you done yeah what happened did you walk with cayenne I decided that cayenne and I both were too ignorant about the civet the questions of civil encounter and that the the dogs in the parking lot so-called reservation dogs lived there and belonged there and were savvy and might not particularly appreciate how I rather feel fearful elderly dog and her rather fearful elderly human mediated by leash so we decided to enjoy the dogs in the parking lot and not subject kyon and them to each other and I think all the people were relieved about that decision if we were there a longer period of time and when that might be a different issue but this was no we we didn't and I dogs have histories it isn't just you know there's not such thing as dog nature and then only people have histories but dogs have histories which is part of the response to that which by which I mean they and we are shaped by the histories of the land and people and we are shaped by many temporalities of living and that Cayenne and I not kidding when I say we are creatures of empire and that is not a statement that evokes guilt it's a statement that asks very particular questions about the practice tourism in 2013 in the Navajo Nation Indonesia in Donita in the Hopi mesas with all those who live there and watching what happens when the Hubble Trading Post becomes a particular kind of federal monument run by the by the Navajo tribal government while Goulding's is still a commercial enterprise with very different relations and all of this involves the Sheep the people the dogs the acts of ordinary tourism so no we didn't and it had to do with trying to figure out how to be a tourist inheriting all of that in the flesh both of our flesh and not just ours everybody in that parking lot was inheriting these multiple histories of pastoral economies hurting economies will commercialism the relationships of dogs to the whole scene and then the current massive problem of overpopulation of reservation dogs which has among other things to do with lots of jobs for those very dogs no we decided not to walk in that scene so my my challenge I'm I completely agree with that way of seeing things of seeing all of us these relationships and placed in a very complex history but my challenge I mean the challenge for me in thinking this way is to also recognize that there are also certain kinds of relations that don't have history in the sense of saying what's an example for you an example for me an example let me let me that's the right way to answers with an example but we'll do that later what I mean by this is to say that it's true that we're made in in in in context in these sorts of ways but there are other things that happen that emerged that aren't context made histories in that as you in this way are of the product of context like phenomenon that's but there are certain kinds of communicative response communicate forms of communication that aren't historically latent yeah of course we live then I mean you can't just make that history go away and you certainly you can't you certainly can ignore it at your peril I mean that's a danger the danger is is to ignore that history so I hope so so I appreciate that we have to do this kind of work but and in doing that work I think we also have to sort of make room for the possibility of things that aren't held that way like for example I can't imagine a place where you could have an experience that wouldn't I mean I would think I mean nothing's I'm in the realm of the hypotheticals but I would think that there are certain things in that parking lot that are not just historically made certain relationships between cayenne and those dogs that were happening that are not always in this at the same time that they also are we're using the word history differently we've become we've introduced an ambiguity in the key word because and I would agree with you in that and that's meaning as I hear it that a whole lot of things were going on in that parking lot that had to do with what let's just take thirteen and a half year old you know a little bit hard of hearing you know very human focused traveling dog and a community of dogs who live there who were free and curious and hanging out and not being sure what would happen and not really wanting anything bad to happen for anybody's sake right the dogs are going to be communicating with each other through sand site of their social there's social history with each other in that place or a lack of same all sorts of things that don't have anything directly to do with the way I told the history of pastoralism in that particular place sort of but then then the question of of a human is I'm not anti humanism but a humanism immediately enters the issue of what counts as history so if the I agree with you for example about logic and formalism and the formal properties of communicative acts and so on and so on and I think they are enabled by the evolutionary history of bacteria I think that anything interesting that that language is the possibility of recognition itself recognized and the possibility of linguistic difference is a bacterial gift to the planet because they're semiotic exuberance is absolutely out of control and has been for a few billion years ecstasy but there's almost no that the elements that have been recombined ever since including in the the active sites on the recognition sites of neurons the various emergent properties of brains the the various when one of our speakers earlier didn't know whether to call something smell it was Neil because of the way those molecules are wafting around and the tips of Aunt Annie on those mosquitoes do you call that smell well it depends upon whether you are singing a hymn to the chemical exuberance of bacteria who invented these molecules for recognition in the first place then that have been recombined ever after with a few new ones it's true there have been a few things that that have you know that there's new stuff on the planet but that kind of constantly reworking the bacterial inheritance complex cells themselves developmental programs probably the fact that we're placental mammals rather than not on and on we go in the evolution of language itself is a bacterial gift well why not call that history why why reserved history for those things that human beings do so you think you asked about how forests think and I asked about and I'm serious to how for us to history by which I don't just mean the arrival of the Spanish or the etc etc or but I actually mean the evolution of the chemosensory apparatuses of some trees compared to others and the way that gets worked into the socialities of let's say the the various species of these who might be in play in that particular region and what happens to their honey's and who makes use of which resources and they're going to be all kinds of formal properties in that give me some functionality some non functionalities they're going to be zones of that they're gonna be degrees of freedom call that holding open space for blaze and it's an insistence thinking I'm really really interested in taking the key feminist terms thought history you know the key feminist lexicon and being serious about doing it EMA in a crowd of critters in a tree and we're transfection is the name of the game I'm really really interested in what goes on transit where a course lineage matters but it's a wrinkle on a much more transy story okay what happens if kinship is the linear kinship is the exception right and the rule is the formal properties of transit the rule is the apparatuses of transit which bacteria gifted us with you know etcetera and so on so I mean so in that sense say no we really need to learn how to make history in another sense oh yeah of course can I say something so I guess I think there's one maybe one way one way to think about history and this larger not just human a census to say that we obviously we need to be aware of so many effects of the past of the present or contingency in making the presence of the past in the present the ongoing yes yes and it's not an it yeah but there but in that I don't it all deny that I mean I'm yes but the one thing I want to hold out for is things that aren't always made that way and I think I now you know to get into formal properties i I think and this is is much more not a form that I did I know it Sara yeah I strive to do it ethnographic Lee when I mean that the graphic is engaged with the world I don't eat it so my point is that there are things that I think that there are certain formal properties of semiosis that would happen on other planets with other contingent Hathway other contingent histories that might that would give the same formal properties would come out not that that is the only interesting thing it certainly is not and to produce things of that would be I think that's analytically true I think one but I'm interested I want ask Colin did come in on that in the question of proximity yeah the I agree that these are and that these are abstractions these formal properties that are aquas that are precious acquisitions you know that that abstractions are built they're incredibly precious achievements abstractions that can make those analytical moves no no another community our analytical moves or abstract or analytical moves the forests analytical moves the world's the world's really you know and and we linguistically produce or no we're an automatically produce formal apparatus for writing it down right now right right but we didn't invent the move yes but the proximities did I think yeah I think that the problem is I would try to I mean from the ground up I mean I think that the framework is what I have to take issue with but no your question I don't us wanting to hold on to a turn like history I think is so crucial because of the idea of holding on to the things that might seem inimical to the project and about given that we are in a space where those terms really do have to be in some sense reinvented or questioned so they that fake system yes the a paid most attention takes you know that the idea of finding in ethics and what might seem to deny it it seems to me very very important in situations or country you know the concrete missus I think what Donna was speaking about in my opinion me when I was thinking when she said well we're carrying this history we're not gonna walk down the street you know because energy history it's in whatever you're thinking sensing whatever Donna could feel in her mind at that point it was shared with cayenne and it put them in a very distinct place from what they were entering into so that you know I I just think my experience with training is it different kind of on the ground so when I'm thinking of an ethics I'm trying to arrive at a place where we actually kind of let in the problem into the space of an academy that conceptually dfangs thought I mean so you know much of what you were saying about thinking beyond the human the mud but that doesn't mean that there's not you know that you have mud but that doesn't mean that there's not something clean as well you know it's something you were saying earlier about taxonomy seemed to me very very important we're really uncomfortable with the idea of hierarchy and we want to negate it or remove it but as you show in your work the hierarchy is so is there but it's not the way we mean it you know you were uncomfortable initially you told that funny story you were initially uncomfortable with play and as being a really central thing and yeah and then you went on to that but you went on to characterize ethics as that kind of somehow inhabiting these proximity Zhai without the surety of right and wrong they kind of that ethics is it is a profoundly experimental ambiguous an experimental practice with consequences and that there's no way to to engage ethics foundationally but only proximal you're only from within the proximities and it seems to me that that there's a way I want to propose this as a way of tying the three of us together and then throwing it open it's by going to Marc Bekoff who argued that the evolutionary possibility of ethics is rooted in play in that prohibition specifically that critters who play and many critters play and often across species difference inappropriate play is especially in because it exposes critters to vulnerabilities that they might not normally experience in their heteronormative developmental windows but an event that critters costs species play is often particularly interesting because predators and prey predator and prey critters might play with each other adult predator and prey critters might learn to play with each other as adults and what happens in that invention he thinks such things are the at the evolutionary root of ethics by which he means these engaging in you know from the repertoire you know isn't there something about that encounter that isn't about history from repertoires that are there maybe from by mainly bio behavioral history and chemical history and so forth history from the repertoire that were put into play in the birthing of those critters and they're growing up in those situations and then they met each other and something something like a question who are you and so who are we was worked out in taking the risk of a play battle to an inappropriate creature and that inappropriate critter responding appropriately enough to allow a chase that resulted in something we may as well call joy rather than lunch that something happened a space was held open for something that was not yet and that something that was not yet was invented in it never existed on that plant on this planet before it really hadn't been on earth before something new happened and out of that the playing critters build rituals bill languages build repertoires build further vulnerabilities build languages build ethics out of out of that risk of play the possibility of seriousness with each other in difference not carrying it on our backs but indifference is just maybe barely possible something not yet may yet happen in the face of ongoing extermination and extinction that's my only sense of optimism right okay call that holding open the space for play and it's a system property yeah yeah I mean there's an interesting I think it's Peter Wilson who wrote on domestication for him the demand domestication is creating our enclosures they're like carrier bags where you create a animal domestication where there's certain I'm not see ya I'm not sick but there's a sense of holding open a space as if we're an appropriate cohabitation call that domestication something like that no we should anyway we should open it up its own make my glasses Carlin you should control them that questions

Channel: CSTMS Berkeley

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Length: 70min 8sec (4208 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2013