TRANSPOSITIONES 2022 Vol. 1, Issue 1: Multiple Knowledges. Learning from/with Other Beings. Multiples Wissen. Lernen von/mit anderen Entitäten: Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Cultural Studies / Zeitschrift für transdisziplinäre und intermediale Kulturforschung [1 ed.] 9783737013826, 9783847113829

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

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Transpositiones, 1/2022, Jg. 1, ISSN 2749-4128 © 2022 V&R unipress | Brill Deutschland GmbH

Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Transpositiones Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Cultural Studies / Zeitschrift für transdisziplinäre und intermediale Kulturforschung

Chief Editors Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec (University of Warsaw) Paweł Piszczatowski (University of Warsaw) Editors Vera Faßhauer (University of Frankfurt) Piotr Kociumbas (University of Warsaw) Justyna Włodarczyk (University of Warsaw) Advisory Board Hannes Bergthaller (National Chung Hsing University), Agata BielikRobson (University of Nottingham), Jane Desmond (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Andrzej Elz˙anowski (University of Warsaw), Francesca Ferrando (New York University), Julia Fiedorczuk (University of Warsaw), Greg Garrard (University of British Columbia), Ursula K. Heise (University of California Los Angeles), Eva Horn (University of Vienna), Lynn Keller (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Adam Lipszyc (Polish Academy of Sciences), Aleksander Manterys (University of Warsaw), Axel E.W. Müller (University of Leeds), Susan McHugh (University of New England), Sigrid Nieberle (Technical University of Darmstadt), Ewa Szcze˛sna (University of Warsaw), Manfred Weinberg (Charles University in Prague), Urszula Zaja˛czkowska (Warsaw University of Life Sciences) and Evi Zemanek (University of Freiburg)

This journal is peer-reviewed.

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Transpositiones Volume 1, Issue 1 (2022)

Multiple Knowledges. Learning from/with Other Beings Multiples Wissen. Lernen von/mit anderen Entitäten Edited by Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec, Paweł Piszczatowski Justyna Włodarczyk and Piotr Kociumbas

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Contents

Editorial

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction to the first issue Multiple Knowledges. Learning from/with Other Beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Einleitung zur ersten Ausgabe Multiples Wissen. Lernen von/mit anderen Entitäten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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David Herman (Crescent Lake Research Lab) Experimental Writing as Autoethnography: Thalia Field’s Decentered Stories of Personhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Karen Eckersley (Nottingham Trent University) Becoming Indivisible: Exploring Boundless Human and Non-human Matter-Ings in Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist Oeuvre . . . . . . . . . . .

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Vera Thomann (Universität Zürich) „I do object, passionately, to being made eternal“: Vegetabiles Wissen nach Ursula K. Le Guins Direction of the Road . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Ines Gries (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) Tanzende Pflanzen. Eine posthumanistische Perspektive auf Goethes Kunstnatur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Mary Trachsel (University of Iowa) What is it Like to be a ‘Batty Telepathic Woman’? Considering Animal Communication in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Contents

Davina Höll / Leonie Bossert (University of Tübingen) “What Would a Microbe Say?”: Paving the Way to Multispecies Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Anna Pomyalova (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) Radio Mycelium (2018) – eine Jam Session mit Pilzen? . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Keitaro Morita (Rikkyo University, Tokyo) An Anti-/Anthropomorphic Approach to Plants?: A Reading of Works by Japanese Female Writers Yoshimoto Banana and Ito Hiromi . . . . . . . 137 Cosima Bruno (SOAS University of London) Animal Talk. The Sentient and the Sensible in Contemporary Chinese Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Julia Stetter (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Neumaterialistische Perspektiven auf eine Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen in der Literatur exemplifiziert anhand Stifters Hochwald und Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Dan Parker / Kylie Soanes / Stanislav Roudavski (University of Melbourne) Interspecies Cultures and Future Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Editorial

We are delighted to present our readers with the first issue of the new bilingual (English and German) journal Transpositiones. It is an interdisciplinary, biannual, double blind peer-reviewed journal for scholars from the humanities and is oriented towards interdisciplinary publications that transpose the classic research topoi of the humanities (such as the relationship between culture and nature, the different modes and media of the artistic representation of the natural world and cultural-historical reality as well as the multilateral relationship between human and more-than-human beings and their artifacts, social structures and communication systems) through the use of the latest methods and critical approaches to new fields of research. In the first issues of the journal, the theories and methods of posthumanism, new materialism and the environmental humanities will form the methodological basis of the explorations and determine the choice of the topic discussed. However, the journal also wants to remain open to subjects that go beyond the strict framework of posthumanism, towards crossborder studies, taking into account the intertextual, intersemiotic and transmedial nature of the products of human culture. The basic idea of the journal is the publication of content-related issues, each with a clearly defined thematic focus. In this way, we would like to maintain the coherence of issues related to the respective questions and – in a longer time perspective – to enable a variety of those questions. One could, of course, ask the question of why we consider a new journal necessary if there already are so many existing ones. There can certainly be many answers, but we would like to mention the features that make our project stand out among others and result in it filling a special niche. Transpositiones is primarily a journal that specializes in recent trends in research into the relationship between art, social conditioning and nature, humans and non-humans, posthumanism, the environmental humanities and related fields of research. The journal’s institutional roots are in Central and Eastern Europe, and this perspective will form an essential point of reference for its orientation. Through acknowledging our apparently “marginal” position, we

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would like to emphasize that current problems of civilization can be viewed not only from the hegemonic center – a position that is marked with traces of colonialism and paternalism – but also from the peripheral area of the other. Our purpose is to provide access to a holistic picture of the world and worldmaking as an entanglement of various modes of being. It does not mean that we will focus on the local view of global problems. On the contrary, we want to be part of international discourse. The topics in our journal correspond to global interdisciplinary trends. Our authors already come from a highly international context, and we hope that so will our readers. The articles are internationally reviewed, and publications are based on research carried out in different parts of the world. As the journal develops, we would like to retain this pluricentric perspective, not only in terms of interdisciplinary approaches to the topics discussed, but also in the cultural-geographical diversification of the questions and attempts at solutions. Secondly, we want to publish a journal that is not restricted to the field of posthumanist-oriented environmental humanities, but also, as already mentioned, wants to consider different historically relevant approaches to the interdependence of the physical and the imaginative in an interdisciplinary and transmedial context. Last but not least, we would like to address the problem of the non-anthropocentric approach to the issue of the culturally determined definition of subjectivity, which also opens our perspectives on the social sciences and takes a focus of postmodern ontoepistemology among other things with regard to the postcolonial appreciation of the biocentric imaginaries of the indigenous peoples. Our journal is prepared by a small international editorial board, which, however, differs in terms of the respective research fields of its members: from Germanic Medieval Studies to US-oriented animal studies. Such make-up of the editorial team expresses a wide range of scientific competencies. We aim to enlarge and internationalize the editorial board in the future. The Advisory Board already consists of well-known scientists from three continents and eight countries. The journal’s publication policy follows the basic premise of open access in the mode of publication and the possibility of using the texts freely. We see this as a real opportunity to de-commercialize research results in the humanities and to ensure an egalitarian medium of worldwide academic networking at the highest level of content. An additional assurance of the worldwide presence of the journal is its affiliation with the internationally acclaimed publisher Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, which is the German imprint of BRILL. We also attach great importance to observing precise ethical rules that all parties, authors, reviewers, and editors should follow.

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Editorial

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We invite you to follow our website https://transpositiones.uw.edu.pl/en/ news/, where you can keep informed about all the details of our publication philosophy and policy, as well as about the latest information on the published and upcoming issues. Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec and Paweł Piszczatowski Warsaw, December 2021

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Introduction to the first issue Multiple Knowledges. Learning from/with Other Beings

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. […] After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. […] But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world.1

The words used by Friedrich Nietzsche to begin his 1873 essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense can serve as the motto of the current issue of Transpositiones. Journal for Transdisciplinary and Intermedial Culture Studies. More than 150 years after the publication of this thought-provoking text about the inadequacy of epistemological usurpations revealed in supposedly stable linguistic constructions and identity constructs, the aim of the contributions presented here is to reiterate the question about the status of cognition and models of knowledge in a world that requires radical decentralization in response to the greatly endangered multiplicity of human and non-human beings and their discursive representations. The texts collected in the first issue of the journal use interdisciplinary and critical approaches to classic and alternative conceptions of cognition and sources of knowledge, oscillating between the paradigm of the empirical and heuristic intuition, the sense of human exceptionalism and the many types of sensory and extrasensory knowledge of other beings, which is unavailable to humans. The existence of these knowledges makes the authors question species boundaries and onto- and epistemological perspectives, in the process of learning no longer only about other beings but also from and along with them. Therefore, overcoming the anthropocentric perception of subjectivity is a significant element of this endeavor, as the abandoning of an optics based on 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 42.

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the dualisms of nature and culture, spirit and matter, subject and object, animate and inanimate nature, physis and techne, etc., which are so firmly entrenched in the Western intellectual tradition. Concepts stemming from new materialism – the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad or Jane Bennett – constitute an important reference point for the type of reflection presented in the essays. As the publisher of this issue, we are happy to be able to offer contributions from both distinguished researchers and young academics from different universities and research institutes. There was great interest in the proposed main topic of the issue, which resulted in proposals for contributions from almost all parts of the world, including Australia, Japan, India, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and the USA. Not all of them could be included in the first issue, but at this time we are presenting texts from seven countries and on four continents. We also hope that the articles published here will have a broad response in the international transfer of knowledge and will stimulate discussions and critical debates through the thoughts and research results presented in them. We hope that you enjoy the articles and find them insightful.

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Einleitung zur ersten Ausgabe Multiples Wissen. Lernen von/mit anderen Entitäten

In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Tiere das Erkennen erfanden. […] Nach wenigen Atemzügen der Natur erstarrte das Gestirn, und die klugen Tiere mußten sterben. – So könnte jemand eine Fabel erfinden und würde doch nicht genügend illustriert haben, wie kläglich, wie schattenhaft und flüchtig, wie zwecklos und beliebig sich der menschliche Intellekt innerhalb der Natur ausnimmt. […] Könnten wir uns aber mit der Mücke verständigen, so würden wir vernehmen, daß auch sie mit diesem Pathos durch die Luft schwimmt und in sich das fliegende Zentrum dieser Welt fühlt.1

Die Anfangsworte von Friedrich Nietzsches Essay Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn aus dem Jahre 1873 kann ein Motto des vorliegenden Heftes von „Transpositiones. Zeitschrift fu¨ r transdisziplina¨re und intermediale Kulturforschung“ sein. Fast 150 Jahre nach der Entstehung dieses frappierenden Textes über die Inadäquatheit von anthropo- und logozentrischen gnoseologischen Usurpationen, die sich in postulierter Stabilität der sprachlichen Identitätskonstrukte äußern, wird hier erneut die Frage nach dem Status von Wissen und Erkenntnis in einer Welt gestellt, die angesichts einer längst erkannten und vielfach bedrohten Mannigfaltigkeit und Diversität von menschlichen und nicht menschlichen Entitäten sowie ihrer diskursiven Repräsentationen einer radikalen Dezentralisierung bedarf. Die in dem ersten Heft der Zeitschrift versammelten Artikel stellen interdisziplinäre und kritische Auffassungen von klassischen und alternativen Erkenntniskonzepten und Wissensmodellen dar, die zwischen dem Paradigma der Empirie und heuristischer Intuition, zwischen dem Gefühl einer epistemologischen Besonderheit der Gattung Homo sapiens und dem mannigfaltigen, dem Menschen unzugänglichen, sensorischen und außersensorischen Wissen anderer Wesen oszillieren, sowie Fragen nach der Möglichkeit der Verschiebung von 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, „Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn“, in Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, hg. v. Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Bd. 1 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 873.

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Gattungsgrenzen und ontoepistemologischen Perspektiven stellen, nicht mehr hinsichtlich des Lernens über andere Entitäten, sondern von und mit ihnen. Ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Erörterungen bildet demnach die Überwindung der anthropozentrischen Auffassung der Subjektivität und die Überschreitung einer Optik, die auf den in der westlichen geistigen Tradition verankerten Dualismen fußt, also den Dichotomien von Natur und Kultur, Geist und Materie, erkennendes Subjekt und Objekt der Erkenntnis, belebter und unbelebter Natur, physis und techne usw. Zu einem der wichtigen Bezugspunkte avancieren dabei Konzeptionen des Neuen Materialismus im Sinne von Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad oder Jane Bennett. Als Herausgeber_Innen dieses Heftes sind wir froh Beiträge veröffentlichen zu können, die von sowohl anerkannten Forscher_innen als auch jungen Nachwuckswissenschaftler_innen aus unterschiedlichen Universitäten und Forschungsanstalten. Das Interesse an dem vorgeschlagenen Leitthema des Heftes war sehr groß, was darin mündete, dass Beitragsvorschläge aus fast allen Teilen der Welt eingereicht wurden, darunter aus Australien, Japan, Indien, Deutschland, Norwegen, der Schweiz, Frankreich, Großbritannien und den USA. Nicht alle konnten aufgenommen werden, aber immerhin präsentieren wir Texte aus sechs Ländern und auf vier Kontinenten. Wir hoffen auch, dass die hier publizierten Artikel eine breite Resonanz im internationalen Wissenstransfer haben und Diskussionen und kritische Auseinandersetzungen mit den in ihnen dargestellten Denk- und Forschungsergebnissen stimulieren werden. Wir wünschen Ihnen eine erkenntnisreiche Freude an den Artikeln!

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

David Herman (Crescent Lake Research Lab)

Experimental Writing as Autoethnography: Thalia Field’s Decentered Stories of Personhood

Abstract In Personhood (2021), Thalia Field explores the double-sided nature of narrative vis-à-vis human-nonhuman relationships. On the one hand, the author demonstrates how stories can be used to highlight the devastating consequences of failing to acknowledge otherthan-human ways of being in the world; on the other hand, she also suggests that ideas about human specialness grow out of and feed back into the desire for consoling tales, and in particular narratives that reaffirm anthropocentric value hierarchies. To negotiate this dialectic, Field decenters stories, in three, interconnected senses of that term: by engaging in textual play to resituate narratives in wider discourse ecologies; by using such recontextualized stories to extend the scope of personhood beyond the human; and by leveraging these strategies, in turn, for what can be called “storywork,” in which the writer works with, on, and through narratives to probe the broader cultural implications of different ways of telling. Keywords: anthropocentrism, cultural ontologies, human-animal relationships, literature and anthropology, narratology and narrative theory

In Personhood (2021), the experimental writer Thalia Field continues the project of interrogating human-animal (and, more broadly, human-nonhuman) relationships that she initiated in previous works, including Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010) and Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction (2016). In particular, Personhood furthers Field’s critique of how storytelling practices can both unmask and help consolidate the species hierarchies that humans have used to legitimate their self-serving attitudes toward – and destructive treatment of – other animals as well as the larger biosphere. Thus, even as Bird Lovers draws on the resources of animal autobiography to imagine the life of the last exemplar of a now-extinct species of sparrow, the text also highlights how Konrad Lorenz spun stories to advance the anthropocentric project of ethology.1 Likewise, Experimental Ani1 Thalia Field, Bird Lovers, Backyard (New York: New Directions Books, 2010), 31–41; 61–92. For a more detailed discussion of this text, see David Herman, Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 233–48.

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mals leverages counter-stories – about Fanny Bernard, Francis Cobbe, Anna Kingsford, and other women who helped initiate the animal-rights movement – to offset the patriarchal, human-centered narrative through which Claude Bernard promoted the practice of vivisection, one of the speciesist legacies of modern medical science. In a similarly dialectical fashion, Personhood uses stories to explore how the costs of narrative can undercut its benefits when it comes to negotiating human-nonhuman relationships. Although it draws on narrative to highlight the devastating consequences of failing to acknowledge other-than-human ways of being in the world, it also suggests that ideas about human specialness grow out of and feed back into the desire for consoling stories, for narratives that reaffirm assumed value hierarchies. According to the hierarchies in question, only humans – indeed, only the subset of humans deemed fully functional – qualify as knowing subjects, as selves or persons in the strict sense. In response, Field evokes the possibility of multiple species of knowledge, and projects the knowledges of multiple species, by decentering stories – in three senses of that phrase. In the first place, the author toggles between narration, argument, reports of scientific findings, lyric poetry, playscripts, and other modes of discourse to call into question the status and authority of the storylines adumbrated across the ten “chapters” of this self-reflexive assemblage of texttypes. Part of the point of Personhood is to reconsider the place of stories in a wider discourse ecology, in order to defamiliarize – and thereby disrupt – established narratives about other-than-human worlds and human-animal relationships. In this way, Field highlights how experimental writing can help foster more open and inclusive attitudes toward larger biotic communities. She uses a collage of text-types to suggest how a polycentric approach to forms of writing can displace dominant narratives, which all too often tell the story of human dominance. This last remark points to a second decentering move in Personhood: namely, drawing on stories and story-fragments that explore the boundaries of the category of person and extend it across species lines, thereby denying Homo sapiens preeminence or centrality among other creatural kinds. This aspect of the text resonates with a strand of recent anthropological research that has been described as the ontological turn.2 Researchers participating in this turn profile cultures in terms of the kinds of beings that, for the members of the cultures in question, populate the world. At issue are the qualities and abilities that different 2 See, for example, Matei Candea, “Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture,” Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2010): 172–73; Eduardo Kohn, “Anthropology of Ontologies,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44, no. 1 (2015): 311–13; and Pauline Turner Strong, “A. Irving Hallowell and the Ontological Turn,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1 (2017): 468.

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beings are taken to embody – including attributes linked to personhood – and how the beings included in various categories and subcategories relate to those categorized as human.3 By suggesting grounds for according the status of persons not only to humans but also to parrots, elephants, and streams and rivers, so that concepts such as habeas corpus, home, and the right to thrive take on transhuman resonance; by drawing out parallels between incapacitated humans on the threshold of death and other beings treated as nonpersons; and by exploring how terms such as resistance bridge humans’ sociopolitical activities with the immunological characteristics of plants and nonhuman animals; Personhood leverages narratives to imagine the world otherwise. It uses stories to project an ontology marked by prolific allocations of personhood across species boundaries as well as the animate-inanimate distinction. Third, and related to its disruption of anthropocentric worldviews, Field’s text uses accounts of attitudes and practices surrounding human-nonhuman relationships to decenter the culture whose traits it documents. In this respect, Personhood can be aligned with another strand of research in contemporary anthropology: namely, autoethnography, which Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe define as “cultural analysis through personal narrative.”4 Here it should be noted that anthropologists’ recent focus on ontology as “just another word for culture”5 can be traced back to the work of A. I. Hallowell, who used the term ethno-metaphysics to describe “the nature of the world of being as [the members of a given culture] perceive it.”6 From this perspective, in practicing au3 On perspective taking and personhood, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 476–77. Philippe Descola, in The Ecology of Others, trans. Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013), arguing that “for anthropology, no ontology is better or more truthful in itself than another,” defines ontologies as “schemes of coding and parceling out phenomenal reality by means of which [people] have learned to couch and transmit their experience of things, schemes issuing from historical choices that privileged, at a given time and place, certain sets of relations to humans and non-humans, in such a way as to allow for the combination of these relationships into sui generis ensembles – already constituted before the birth of the individuals that actualize them – to be experienced as naturally coherent” (66–67). 4 Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe, “Introduction,” in Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, eds. Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2016), 17. 5 Candea, “Ontology,” 172. 6 A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in Culture in History, ed. Stanley Diamond (New York: Octagon Books, 1981 [1960]), 20. Using terms directly relevant for the present analysis, Hallowell writes that “While in all cultures ‘persons’ comprise one of the major classes of objects to which the self must become oriented, this category of being is by no means limited to human beings […] Since in the Ojibwa universe there are many kinds of person-objects which are other than human but have the same ontological status, these, of course, fall into the same ethnoseme as human beings and into the ‘animate’ linguistic class” (21; 24).

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toethnography, analysts aim to unearth, through accounts grounded in personal experience, the native ontologies of their own cultures. The autoethnographer decenters a culture of reference by using stories to hold it up for scrutiny and explore how it embodies one ethno-metaphysics among others, thereby undercutting the ability of that native ontology to function as an unquestioned foundation for judgments about what is and is not the case – including judgments about the applicability of the category of person to other-than-human beings. Personhood resists being read as a “personal narrative” in the sense in which Boylorn and Orbe use that term, though portions of the text do combine aspects of the personal essay with features of what Max Saunders calls autobiografiction, or “fictional works in auto/biographical form.”7 As Gioia Chilton and Patricia Leavy discuss, however, fictional discourse can itself be described as a means for arts-based social research, i. e., inquiry into the sociocultural contexts from which such discourse emerges.8 An autoethnographic focus on lived experiences vis-à-vis the cultures in which they unfold thus remains relevant for experimentally hybridized texts like Field’s. This is a work that, by drawing on the resources of fiction as well as nonfiction, reflexively explores the person-related ethno-metaphysics associated with contemporary Western cultures, probing the criteria for and implications of personhood via the discourses of the law, ethology, philosophy, religion, ecology and population biology, mathematics, American history, and other domains. In what follows, I explore in more detail each of these three dimensions – discursive, ontological, and autoethnographic – of Field’s decentered stories of personhood. I argue that the three dimensions are interlinked and mutually shaping. The reconsideration of the place of stories in wider discourse ecologies facilitates a rethinking of the ethno-metaphysics surrounding the nature and scope of persons. In turn, Field’s experimental autoethnography provides a context for using textual play to engage in this sort of ontological inquiry, even as the form and functions of the author’s discourse carry implications for autoethnographic practice itself.

7 Max Saunders, Self Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. 8 Gioia Chilton and Patricia Leavy, “Arts-based Research Practice: Merging Social Research and the Creative Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Patricia Leavy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 409–10.

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From Story to Situation: Unsettling Dominant Narratives – and Narrative Dominance – through Polycentric Textuality In interviews focusing on some of her previous works, Field has called attention to the dangers as well as the possibilities of narrative. As she remarks in one interview, because “We don’t spend a lot of time in the awareness of our world without [seeing] ourselves as tragic heroes of it, […] larger timeframes or scales rarely occur to us.” In consequence, “literary practice is due for a deep revision of our relationship to the world and to ‘selves’ in it.” Engaging in this revision will be made possible, in turn, by developing “an aesthetics [in which] the narratives and imagery, the events and the dispersal of ‘selves’ across a wide climate of consciousness, all participate in a chaotic nonhierarchical system of interdependence.”9 In another interview, Field acknowledges that “For me, on some emotionally structuring level, story is photo/stasis, a small history of an order concocted. The more forthright narrative language comes, I think, when I’m in need of small comfort, of the possibility that things are as you’ve been told they are.”10 By contrast, to foster a writing practice based on “a willingness not to know, to question without expectation,”11 Field seeks to offset “cinematic” styles of representation that are limited to human-centric temporal and spatial scales, writing against the grain of narrative modes “where everything is tidy and psychologically or symbolically closed.”12 Associating such modes with what she calls “consumer narrative,” which involves a sanctification of “syntaxes and predictable forms, implying a predictable world of dulled attention,”13 Field instead aspires to an anti-anthropocentric literary practice premised on “a different definition of subject, object and action” that “results in work where the normative human-hero-centered conventions of representation are replaced by more polycentric, polyrhythmic, or stochastic processes.”14 In Personhood, this emphasis on polycentrism assumes the form of a multiplicity of text-types or discourse genres; thanks to frequent shifts among these modes across and within chapters, neither narrative fiction, nor the nonfiction essay, nor lyric/narrative poetry, nor the playscript format, nor any other type of

9 This quotation as well as the preceding excerpts are taken from Thalia Field and Miranda F. Mellis, “Interview with Thalia Field,” Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture 18 (n.d.): para. 2. https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interview-with-thalia-field/. 10 Thalia Field and Eric P. Elshtain, “An E-mail Interview with Thalia Field,” Chicago Review 47, no. 3 (2001): 103. 11 Thalia Field, et al., “An Interview with Thalia Field,” Seneca Review 38, no. 1 (2008): 7. 12 Field and Mellis, “Interview with Thalia Field,” para. 8. 13 Field and Elshtain, “An E-mail Interview with Thalia Field,” 106. 14 Thalia Field, “Writing as Experimental Practice,” in Handbook of Creative Writing, 2nd ed., ed. Steven Earnshaw (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 327.

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discourse can solidify its status as the orienting frame or dominant mode of the work taken as a whole. Thus, over the course of the text, Field quotes from legal briefs filed by the Nonhuman Rights Project that argue for the recognition of (the rights of) nonhuman persons, as well as from debates about how to construe the term animal in legal terms; recounts stories about the lives of particular animals held in captivity; ekphrastically describes the placement of animals in old-master paintings; evokes biblical traditions in which Adam was “born of a word and raised in amorphous fantasies of extreme specialness,”15 as well as stories about elephants, and about humans reborn as animals, in the Buddhistic tradition; and cites scientific research on animal intelligence, including work on species’ “encephalization quotient” or relative brain size and on the Mirror Self-Recognition test, which equates intelligence with the capacity for self-consciousness. Furthermore, she stages, in “Turns before the Curtain,” quasi-dramatized scenes that feature invasive plant and animal species as well as the insidious spread of nurdles, i. e., the small plastic pellets used in the manufacture of plastic products, throughout the world’s oceans and waterways. Meanwhile, in “True Crime/Nature Fakers,” Field uses a mix of narration and speculative analysis, together with the species-spanning concept of home, to explore the accusations of anthropomorphization that shaped the “nature fakers” controversy in which Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, William J. Long, Jack London, and others became embroiled in the early twentieth century. In “Liberty/Trees,” she organizes the text into verse paragraphs that trace crossspecies and transhistorical linkages between (among other entities and events) the elm trees on which participants in a pre-revolutionary resistance movement in America tacked up anti-British effigies and dolls, the trees later used for lynchings in the American South, the insect-borne Dutch elm disease that killed most American elms, and the rhetoric of rotting roots used in anti-Communist propaganda in the mid-twentieth century in the United States. In “The Health of My Stream or the (Most) Pathetic Fallacy,” Field echoes while also ironizing Thoreau’s Walden; the chapter takes the form of a personal-experience narrative documenting the teller’s attempts to safeguard the fish that she (he?) spots swimming in a stream on the piece of rural property that she has recently acquired. Later chapters include “Patients,” which juxtaposes Buddhistic traditions surrounding death and rebirth against one or more end-of-life scenarios in a modern hospital setting, and “Irrational/Situation,” which uses possibly apocryphal stories about the life and death of Hippasus, a pre-Socratic philosopher in the Pythagorean school who is credited with the discovery of irrational numbers, to engage in metanarrative reflection on the problems and possibilities of narrative itself. As this partial list suggests, the sheer diversity of discourse 15 Thalia Field, Personhood (New York: New Directions Books, 2021), 4.

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modes included in Personhood affirms a comment made by Field in one of the interviews cited previously: “Cut open to expose the human-centered narrative for its arrogance and ignorance, the complex impartiality of the world without cinematic point of view makes for disorienting, broken, beautiful frames.”16 Disorienting, broken, beautiful frames – these are the hallmarks of a polycentric aesthetics. But the epistemology of polycentric textuality also needs to be taken into account. To this end, Field includes a passage in “The Health of My Stream” that reflexively probes the effects of placing a narrative frame around humans’ interactions with their surrounding environments. The narrator asks: Would it change the understanding of the stream, the fish, my obsession with rakes and rocks, if I revealed that just before clearing the banks and spotting the fish, I suffered a betrayal of the most devastating kind? Would more story inform the flow of it, make it gain or lose power, render it all banal? Would more information change the question of where the stream begins and ends?17

Here the narrator broaches the possibility that using human-centric narratives to “explain” her interest in and engagement with the stream might obscure, rather than clarify, the events being recounted. In a similar vein, “Irrational/Situation” suggests that insisting on moving from situation to story – from a given multiplicity of circumstances to a storyline in terms of which those circumstances can be reported and interpreted – parallels the risks of a Pythagorean insistence on denying the existence of irrational numbers. Thus, whereas “Pythagoras’s gang assumed that all angles (of things, disputes) should be orderable, reducible (one question, one answer, one story),” and whereas they “liked pairs of rules and sides (or arguments, shapes) that could perfect each other through ratios of integers,” Hippasus is reputed to have shown “that the diagonal of a square with the measure of 1 produces incommensurable sides that are both even and odd.”18 Along these lines, The square root of 2, the hypotenuse of the subsequent triangle (the diagonal of that ill-behaved square), thereby became the first irrational, a number uncontainable, spinning off magnitude from the divinity of Number, producing a decimal that wouldn’t repeat and wouldn’t ever end. Only death would stop it, or so they thought, as they tossed Hippasus into the sea, a traitor to all things which numbers, in their marketability, had done for them […] But Hippasus is a stand-in; he’s just a guess. History leaves so many guesses, the first proof of the incommensurable unmappable inquiry (situation) where any diagonal crossing the shape of it is unmatchable with any side.19 16 17 18 19

Field and Mellis, “Interview with Thalia Field,” para. 2. Field, Personhood, 84. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 97–98.

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In this context, it should be recalled that the word narrative itself derives from the Sanskrit gna via the Latin gnarus – meaning “knowledge.” Field’s suggestion here is that stories, in their bid to establish what is known, aim to close off, to delimit, the multiplicity of potential understandings of historical circumstances by (in effect) killing off other possible interpretations of what has transpired. In the end, however, stories are undone by the circumstances of which they purport to give a final account, a narrative being something that flowers off the bat and spreads easily, reproduces regularly, a curve with an equation, you know, the sort we’re familiar with […] we thought we could make this lovely shape, but it slips like a fetid leftover into an irrationality whose non-repeating infinities won’t go away […] Competing and always equally complex realities may be the only reality ( just as there are greater and lesser infinities) and stories gain advantage at the direct expense of situations.

This verbal combat, the smiling one-ups, the subtle growling maneuvers, florescence, the many fractured ways grammar can put others in their places, and finally what it means to be put in a place (0, 0) – this is the subtle violence of story. But being put in a place is only the ratio of one reality to the infinite circumference of the whole situation, and is itself irrational.20 From this perspective, the multiplication of modes of discourse in Personhood reflects Field’s commitment to a textual practice that resists moving from situation to story, the potentially narratable to the definitively narrated, without giving due attention to what may be lost in the process. This same commitment translates into local formatting techniques, including the author’s use of bracketed material in “True Crime/Nature Fakers,” as well as elsewhere in the text. This chapter begins as follows: Consider if [definition: house] is not the same as [5 synonyms for house] or any of [6 words used for the living spaces of animals]. Recall [3 things we see when a hand draws a frame], and then [10 things outside the frame] – especially if there is a [definition: animal] in it, or outside it. Consider [4 signs of drought], [3 forms of environmental degradation], and [10 recent large-scale disasters]. Consider [3 kinds of animals that break into houses]. Consider [definition: “criminal”].21

By explicitly using placeholders in lieu of key story elements, the author not only highlights the template-like status of narrative, the way it can be used to trace a line through any number of circumstances, but also refuses to impose that 20 Ibid., 99–100. 21 Ibid., 43.

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template in order to frame or map out the human-animal and animal-environment relationships being explored in this chapter. More generally, refusing the “small comfort” that might be offered by a smooth transition from situation to story, Field’s text enacts, both through local-level formatting and through globally polycentric organization, a process by which attempts to establish narrative order give way to the recognition that they are just that – attempts. But to what larger thematic goal does this decentering of narrative, this insistence on acknowledging the dialectical interplay between story and situation, lend support in Field’s text? Coming to terms with this issue requires shifting from epistemology to ontology, from questions about narrative and knowledge to questions about narrative and culture.

Ontological Inquiry via Strategic Storytelling: Transspecies Personhood in the Weave of Narratives As the title of Personhood itself suggests, Field’s project of decentering of stories in general contributes to an unsettling or disestablishment of a particular class of stories that is more or less dominant across modern cultures. These stories assign members of the species Homo sapiens an exceptional position within their wordly environments, casting humans as the only beings with an unequivocal claim to the status of persons. Accordingly, even as she uses polycentric textuality to circumscribe the place of narrative within larger discourse ecologies, thereby restricting the reach of accounts that might otherwise be treated as absolutely authoritative, the author continues to draw on stories and story-fragments to probe taken-for-granted assumptions about the scope and limits of the category of personhood. In other words, rather than trying to do away with stories altogether because of the risks they pose when it comes to consolidating humancentric worldviews, the text uses narrative strategically for purposes of ontological inquiry; it projects story-based scenarios through which the person-related ethno-metaphysics of contemporary Western culture(s) can be modeled, analyzed, and evaluated. To this end, Field creates a narrative weave whereby biocentric stories – i. e., narratives that assume a fundamental continuity between human and nonhuman forms of life – cut across other, anthropocentric storylines, which are premised on a hierarchical separation between human beings and the rest of the biosphere, and according to which only (some) humans warrant inclusion in the category of persons.22 In using stories and fragments of stories to juxtapose biocentric and 22 For an account of the history of biocentrism after Darwin, see Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1–25.

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anthropocentric perspectives, and to suggest how narratives associated with these conflicting worldviews can sometimes become entangled, Personhood resonates with work by anthropologists who engage in the comparative study of ontologies. Bruno Latour, for example, has shown how a notionally modern ontology – one that posits a divide between nature and culture, things and persons – is belied by complex networks spanning human and nonhuman actants, including institutional arrangements, computational devices, and built structures.23 Other theorists have zoomed in on human-animal relationships in particular, exploring the way different ontologies allocate possibilities for selfhood – and hence personhood – more or less prolifically across the species boundary. Thus, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explores the ontology projected by Amerindian peoples, for whom “the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from different points of view.”24 In accordance with a process that Viveiros de Castro terms “cosmological deixis,” the Amerindian words which are usually translated as “human being” […] do not designate humanity as a natural species. They refer rather to the social condition of personhood, and they function (pragmatically when not syntactically) less as nouns than as pronouns. They indicate the position of the subject; they are enunciative markers, not names […] Amerindian souls, be they human or animal, are thus indexical categories [and] Amerindian ontological perspectivism proceeds along the lines that the point of view creates the subject; whatever is activated or “agented” by the point of view will be a subject.25

Aligned with Latour’s account of the contest of ontologies within the ostensibly singular cultures of modernity, Field’s text also highlights the relevance of Viveiros de Castros’s ideas for stories of transspecies personhood. Her text exposes a fault line between parsimonious and prolific allocations of the possibility for personhood beyond the human, by employing narrative itself to decenter accounts that are based on and in turn promote human-only ascriptions of person status. For example, early on in “Hi Adam!” Field uses second-person narration to foster readers’ imaginative transportation to a former chicken-factory farm that has been repurposed as a parrot sanctuary. Her narrator tells how “You visit the sanctuary, the long, low-ceilinged barracks […] where there are almost a thousand ‘exotic’ refugees,” even as “You wonder how to conceive of this place: an 23 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10–12; see also Descola, The Ecology of Others, 32. 24 Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis,” 469. 25 Ibid., 476–77.

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old-age home, a foster home, a nursery, a hospital, a way-station, a final resting place, a zoo, a rehabilitation center, a place-holder, a parenthesis, a pale excuse, a last ditch, an asylum.”26 Subsequently, with the author having anchored the storyworld in this disturbingly ambiguous locale, the chapter goes on to contrast anthropocentric accounts of human-animal relationships with narratives grounded in the parrots’ observed lifeways; these anti-anthropocentric narratives, which underscore the disparity between human and parrot perspectives on the world, are contextualized via ideas from the field of behavioral ecology and vivified by the told-about scenes of encounter. A key human-centric storyline running through the chapter involves the biblical tradition according to which God grants Adam the power of naming and thereby constituting the identity of the earth’s other animals. Field juxtaposes this tradition, which stands in for a range of narratives used by many of the parrots’ one-time “owners” to explain and justify their abandonment of the animals over whom they have dominion, with a storyline centering on a female parrot herself named, ironically, Adam. The story of Adam the parrot, in turn, explains the self-injuring behaviors of the birds living in this sanctuary that “is offered, not taken” – a problematic sanctuary where “Parrots who would never meet on any map or in any forest are bunked close with nowhere to hide, with everything hellishly visible, and everything to hide from,”27 and where those same birds, what with their attested need to engage in life-long pair-bonding, suffer from depression and anxiety caused by their abandonment by humans. Noting that Adam was already forty years old when she arrived at the sanctuary, and that “As a baby bird, either wild-stolen, trafficked, or hand-raised, she responded to her human ‘owner’ as a parent” and only later fell in love with him or her, the narrator notes that When the well-intentioned “pet owner” leaves to go shopping, or to go on vacation, to work, to grow ill, to grow old – it is merely a parting. To the parrot it’s betrayal of a soulmurdering kind. To Adam there was one rule: we are one. But too busy and overextended to think that way – our time with Adam is one obligation of many. We need to go [out], see friends, travel! […] When we’re there for a few minutes, okay […] calm […] but for the rest of the day Adam is alone, desperate. She can’t believe we don’t see how lonely she feels. So she hurts herself to show us. Maybe we wake up and her stomach’s plucked. Or a wing. She writes a love-letter in mutilated skin and bloody feathers. “I’m moving”; “I’m getting married”; “I got a new job” – “What will I do with Adam?” Adam makes herself hideous.28

26 Ibid., 2. 27 Ibid., 6. 28 Ibid., 10.

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At the same time that Field encourages empathetic identification with the birds by recounting their struggles in the wake of broken pair-bonds, the author’s parrot stories ironize research that has been used to limit “how guilty we feel about what we as humans might owe other beings.”29 For instance, work in support of the so-called encephalization quotient attempts to measure numbers of neurons in animals’ brains “to sum up who is more or less consciousness and intelligent,”30 drastically restricting how many kinds of beings might be seen as embodying the complex emotional lives, reasons for acting, and perspectives on the world that would warrant their inclusion in the category of persons. The narrator, however, questions the pertinence of this line of inquiry, grouping humans, parrots, and other animals together as a collective “everyone” that the research does not recognize as such, and that accommodates species-specific variety as well transspecies commonality: “who can make sense of neurons across species-worlds? What common problem can everyone solve? What common problem does everyone have?”31 Ultimately, “Hi Adam!” falls back on allegory to suggest how anthropocentric cosmologies have blocked the recognition – and thus hindered the formation – of more-than-human communities, whose distribution and make-up cannot be measured through neuron counts. The chapter concludes with a mock creation story patterned after the one presented in Genesis, with a human (“the big guy”) cast in the role of a domineering God, and the life narrative of Adam the parrot fusing with that of Adam the first human person: “And the big guy got angry because the [parrot’s] screams and the bloody biting were upsetting the family. Banishing the bird to the basement was not enough, so he said, Let Adam go forth from the house, and mate-less and heartbroken will be his days.”32 “Happy/that You Have the Body (the Mirror Test)” likewise uses strategic storytelling to engage in ontological inquiry – more specifically, to suggest the need for revising taken-for-granted concepts about the scope and limit of personhood. Situating human-animal relationships in a nexus of legal, scientific, conservationist, religious, and other discourses, the chapter opens with references to a lawsuit brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) in an effort to free Happy the elephant from the small, solitary pen in which she has lived at the Bronx Zoo for more than forty years, “despite the fact that elephants are herd animals and female elephants form life-long bonds.”33 The chapter uses quota29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17. A timeline of the legal case, links to relevant court filings, and Happy’s biography can be found on the following website maintained by the NhRP: https://www.nonhumanrigh ts.org/client-happy/.

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tions of legal briefs filed by the NhRP to create a discourse environment marked by what H. Porter Abbott calls “narrative contestation,”34 in which conflicting accounts of Happy’s characteristics, circumstances, and relationship to humans clash with each other; indeed, these competing accounts are adjudicated in court. Here, too, Field uses a weave of incompatible stories to decenter human-centric ontologies, and to show how animal rights discourse can, at least in some instances, become entangled with anthropocentric attitudes and assumptions. On the one hand, the defense for the Bronx Zoo presents Happy as “‘comfortable there. They [those affiliated with the NhRP] are trying to move Happy to some place that they would rather see her […] they seek to make persons out of animals in a variety of species, and it really has very little to do with Happy’s own circumstances.’”35 On the other hand, the lawyer representing the NhRP, noting that “‘In 2005, Happy became the first elephant to pass the mirror self-recognition test, considered to be the true indicator of an animal’s self-awareness,’”36 treats such self-awareness as grounds for orienting to Happy as a nonhuman person: “‘It doesn’t matter whether Happy – they think Happy is happy […] Happy has been in prison in the Bronx Zoo for forty years [and] everything about who she is as an elephant is being impinged by that every single day […] And this is not a matter for the legislature. Habeas corpus is a matter of common law.’”37 As the chapter makes clear, the defense’s arguments are aligned with definitions of animals as personal property; past attempts to protect animals through the legal system have used these definitions to advance arguments about the malicious destruction of property, such that “Cruelty done to a living thing becomes […] a sort of ‘property-plus.’”38 By contrast, the plaintiff draws on research surrounding the mirror self-recognition test to argue that the writ of habeas corpus, which bans the unlawful imprisonment of persons, warrants Happy’s immediate release. Animals, from this perspective, are not property but persons. Field’s narrator, however, weaves a third storyline together with the accounts presented by the opposing attorneys. This third narrative line concerns how the mirror-self recognition test, on which the lawyer for the NhRP has based his argument about Happy’s claim to personhood, is, as such, informed by anthropocentric assumptions: Who deserves a person’s relief ? Through the man-made looking-glass, creatures get tested against reflective surfaces, to see ourselves as we see them, and if they’ll clean their faces as we mark them [i. e., clean the X mark placed on animals’ faces to see if they 34 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 175–91. 35 Ibid., 21. 36 Ibid., 20. 37 Ibid., 22. 38 Ibid., 25.

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notice or attend to that mark when looking in a mirror], we proclaim they’ve mastered our Mirror Self-Recognition test (MSR), and so possess some elusive potential. Young human children often don’t want to clean their faces, and fail the test […] How many others were marked and failed to touch the X, or joked around in the mirror because it all just seemed absurd?39

As this group of excerpts suggest, decentering an ontology via strategic storytelling entails, not formulating a single, simple counter-story, but rather contexualizing both story and counter-story in a larger universe of narrative possibilities. That narrative universe may include, for example, storylines revealing how a given counter-story recuperates and reaffirms the ontology against which it is ostensibly opposed. The resulting dynamic might be described in terms of narrative proliferation rather than narrative contestation. In Personhood, proliferating stories work in concert with Field’s tendency to uncouple narrative from certain knowledge, her use of textual play as a means for avoiding any temptation to resolve situations into definitive accounts. In turn, by virtue of such narrative proliferation, the defense’s reliance on the MSR test as a basis for conferring nonhuman personhood on Happy – and hence for arguing in favor of the applicability of habeas corpus to the present case – can be viewed as a kind of ontological shortcut. Thanks to this shortcut, even though Happy is included in the charmed circle of persons or at least person-like beings, her inclusion comes at the cost of our “look[ing] to [the] law to diagnose selfhood, confirm our brand, crown us CEO of all species.”40 Narrative proliferation – in this instance, the generation of multiple storylines bearing on what kinds of beings should be grouped within the category of persons – is not only a way of denying default status to particular ontologies, however. It is also a way of linking Field’s project in Personhood with contributions to the domain of autoethnography, where analysts engage in storywork, as it might be called, to investigate the founding assumptions of their native cultures.

In Lieu of a Conclusion: Storywork and Autoethnography in Personhood For Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, autoethnography is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural ex39 Ibid., 19; 23. 40 Ibid., 24.

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perience (ethno). This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others […] and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act.”41 Both a process and a product, autoethnography, for the coauthors, stems from reframing social science as a discipline closer to literature than to physics, of which stories rather than theories constitute the stock in trade.42 Along similar lines, Christopher N. Poulos, who defines autoethnographies as ethnographies of the self that “link the personal to the larger cultural, social, political, and academic world-matrix in which the autoethnographer participates,”43 suggests that “A key focus of the autoethnography is on the engagement and craft of writing as a central process of discovery. In other words, autoethnography treats writing itself as a method of inquiry.”44 Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis, and Stacy Holman Jones, for their part, assert that autoethnography serves several key purposes, including articulating insider knowledge of cultural practices, giving an account of everyday experiences that cannot be captured through more traditional research methods, and writing against the grain of (and providing alternatives to) dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts, stories, and stereotypes.45 Taken together, these definitional statements underscore the autoethnographic relevance of Field’s experimental writing practices in Personhood and in her oeuvre more generally. At root, these practices can be grouped under the rubric of storywork, in which the primary concern is not so much telling about experiences as working with, on, and through stories to explore the implications of different ways of presenting the experiences in question. More specifically, through storywork like Field’s, experimental writers can explore how various narrative engagements not only reflect but also have the potential to reshape broader cultural presuppositions and norms in which told-about experiences are embedded.46 Ellis, Adams, and Bochner remark that the materials of autoethnography typically consist of “intense situations” and “effects that linger – recollections, memories, images, feelings – long after a crucial incident is supposedly finished.”47 The storywork of Personhood centers on intense situations and lingering effects of just this sort: images of elephants imprisoned, for 41 Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 36, no. 4 (2011): 273. 42 Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, “Autoethnography,” 274. 43 Christopher N. Poulos, “Autoethnography,” in Reviewing Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences, eds. Audrey A. Trainor and Elizabeth Graue (New York: Routledge, 2012), 44. 44 Poulos, “Autoethnography,” 46. 45 Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis, and Stacy Holman Jones, “Autoethnography,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, eds. Christine S. Davis and Robert F. Potter (New York: Wiley, 2017), 3–4. 46 Herman, Narratology beyond the Human, 235; 247–48. 47 Ellis, Adams, and Bochner, “Autoethnography,” 275.

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decades, in solitary confinement, memories of encounters with parrots dying because humans have failed to reciprocate their love and respect, feelings that shadowy fish glimpsed below the surface of a stream have restored or reinstated one’s authentic self. The text uses such situations to trace out what is entailed by embracing biocentric versus anthropocentric storylines, which both reflect and give rise to prolific versus parsimonious allocations of possibilities for personhood beyond the human. Field’s storywork, by leveraging narrative to probe the ontological implications of ways of telling, thus provides, first, a method of investigating what Hallowell describes as the cultural structuring of phenomenal fields, or how what is encountered is shaped by assumptions concerning the scene of encounter.48 But second, it illuminates how particularly powerful or resonant encounters can alter such shaping assumptions, including ones about the scope of the category of person. In consequence, if students of experimental writing can bring new perspectives to bear on their chosen texts via ideas from the domain of autoethnography, by the same token students of autoethnography can benefit from considering the various kinds of storywork effectuated by experimental writing. Chilton and Leavy have stressed that literary writing can be viewed as a means for doing social research.49 Experimental works like Personhood, however, provide grounds for taking this argument a step further. Field shows how texts that reflexively focus on the powers, limits, and entailments of narrative can create pathways for new, transhuman ethnographies, and hence new insights into what it means to be a person.

Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Adams, Tony E., Carolyn Ellis, and Stacy Holman Jones. “Autoethnography.” In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, edited by Christine S. Davis and Robert F. Potter, 1–11. New York: Wiley, 2017. Boylorn, Robin M., and Mark P. Orbe. “Introduction.” In Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life, edited by Robin M. Boylorn and Mark P. Orbe, 13–26. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2016. Candea, Matei. “Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture.” Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2010): 172–79.

48 Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology,” 20. 49 Chilton and Leavy, “Arts-based Research Practice,” 408–10.

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Chilton, Gioia, and Patricia Leavy. “Arts-based Research Practice: Merging Social Research and the Creative Arts.” In The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Patricia Leavy, 403–22. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Descola, Philippe. The Ecology of Others. Translated by Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013. Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 36, no. 4 (2011): 273–90. Field, Thalia. Bird Lovers, Backyard. New York: New Directions Books, 2010. –. Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction. New York: Solid Objects Press, 2016. –. Personhood. New York: New Directions Books, 2021. –. “Writing as Experimental Practice.” In Handbook of Creative Writing. 2nd ed., edited by Steven Earnshaw, 324–30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Field, Thalia, Ashley Butler, Tom Fleischmann, April Freeley, and Riley Hanick. “An Interview with Thalia Field.” Seneca Review 38, no. 1 (2008): 1–7. Field, Thalia, and Eric P. Elshtain. “An E-mail Interview with Thalia Field.” Chicago Review 47, no. 3 (2001): 99–110. Field, Thalia, and Miranda F. Mellis. “An Interview with Thalia Field.” Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture 18 (n.d.). https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interview-with-th alia-field/. Hallowell, A. Irving. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Culture in History, edited by Stanley Diamond, 19–52. New York: Octagon Books, 1981 [1960]. Herman, David. Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Kohn, Eduardo. “Anthropology of Ontologies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44, no. 1 (2015): 311–27. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Poulos, Christopher N. “Autoethnography.” In Reviewing Qualitative Research in the Social Sciences, edited by Audrey A. Trainor and Elizabeth Graue, 38–53. New York: Routledge, 2012. Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Strong, Pauline Turner. “A. Irving Hallowell and the Ontological Turn.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7, no. 1 (2017): 468–72. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–88.

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Karen Eckersley (Nottingham Trent University)

Becoming Indivisible: Exploring Boundless Human and Non-human Matter-Ings in Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist Oeuvre

Abstract Dorothea Tanning’s exclamation that she does not “see any real divisions” in her work is an apt introduction to the manner in which her surrealist oeuvre anticipates Stacy Alaimo’s insistence that matter is the “vast stuff of the world and ourselves.” This article argues that the way in which Tanning recurrently explodes anthropocentric culture/nature boundaries positions her as a prescient new materialist thinker where surreal visions of humans entangled with botanic life in her paintings speak to the agentic liveliness of matter that cannot be neatly divided. The overlap in the timeline of her paintings resonates with the materialist collisions exhibited in her art, where her references to the “indelible stains” that surge forth on her canvases are evolutionary markers that anticipate what physicist Karen Barad coins “intra-actions” with other matter. Keywords: Trans-corporeality, Intra-action, Surrealism, New Materialism, Posthuman feminism

During an interview with art critic and poet Alain de Jouffroy in 1974, surrealist Dorothea Tanning refutes his suggestion that her body of work can be rigidly categorised into three distinct periods consisting of “surrealism,” a “semi-abstract” phase and one that is concerned with the themes of “returning to reality” via a representation of physical sensations.1 Tanning is quick to contradict his analysis, communicating a perception of her own artistic output as more of a processual continuum: I don’t see any real divisions. Every one of my paintings is a step on the same road. I see no break or detour, even temporary. The same preoccupations have obsessed me since the beginning, the same surfaces, indelible stains […] My pictures – and lately, my sculptures – are always part of the same search.2

Tanning’s proclamation that she does not “see any real divisions” in her work provides a fruitful introduction to the subject matter of this article which in1 Victoria Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning: Transformations (London: Lund Humphries, 2020), 7. 2 Ibid.

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vestigates how her art, and the philosophies underpinning it, anticipate the new materialist frameworks of Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo. Such material, temporal seepages speak to a boundlessness in Tanning’s art, where phenomenal overlaps are palpable, meaning that her paintings and sculptures do not sit in epistemic categories, but rather exhibit shared moments of transition and collision. Not only does Tanning overthrow any anthropocentric concepts of a linear temporality here, she also communicates a tangible materiality in her references to the “surfaces” and “indelible stains” that emerge in her work. Such indelibility demonstrates how Tanning understands that matter makes its mark and continues to surface in ever becoming processes, as it interacts with other matter over time. In this way she articulates and immerses herself within an entanglement of relations that moves beyond the visual to instead evoke and explore the phenomena that lie beneath. This article investigates more specifically the manner in which Tanning’s paintings, Daphne (1943) and On Avalon (1987), demonstrate that matter is “the vast stuff of the world and ourselves,” as Alaimo insists.3 In spite of the forty-four year gap between these works, they exhibit an entangled interconnection that demonstrates Tanning’s belief that her work cannot be epistemically mapped. In this way we witness in her art how matter is an ongoing historicity that is constantly open to further metamorphosis, where the “indelible stains” of one work surface in another. Crucially, my analysis suggests that the material entanglements manifested in her paintings speak to a feminist ecology which affirmatively anticipates a creative, post-human landscape. I explore how overlapping, entangled human and non-human nature in Daphne and On Avalon conjures the lively inter-actions of all phenomena, displacing Cartesian presumptions about matter’s inertia. Rather, in Tanning’s surrealist configurations, I posit that her paintings point to the agentic vibrancy of all matter in the way that new materialist Jane Bennett calls for, implicating the human as a phenomenon within a contingent tableau of material assemblages which constantly interact and metamorphose together.4 These New Materialisms that eschew human mastery as a ruling principle, forge an enabling and creative feminist politics in Tanning’s surrealist (re)visions, where in embracing a materially entangled ontology, female identity erupts from the myopia of a reductive, Cartesian framework. This article begins by outlining the new materialist philosophies which underpin it, investigating how Stacy Alaimo’s mode of trans-corporeality provides original 3 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1. 4 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Bennett points to the agentive participation of nonhuman forces in events. She urges a recognition of the vital materialities that implicate humans and nonhumans in a rich web of collective matter.

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interpretations of the visibly entangled landscapes in Tanning’s oeuvre which implicate all human and more-than-human-life. To this end, I examine Tanning’s paintings as examples of what physicist Karen Barad describes as “intra-actions,” which speak not only to matter’s complex and agentive liveliness, but also to its ongoing multiple and collective interconnections. In the spillages which occur between human and more-than-human materialities in Tanning’s surrealist visions, I argue that she exhibits an “ethics that is not circumscribed by the human but is instead accountable to a material world that is never an external place but always the very substance of our selves and others.”5 As a result, I explore the extent to which her materialist cartographies evoke a feminist perspective in their affirmative estrangement from androcentric presumptions that nature and matter are blank spaces awaiting human inscription; modes which investigate and develop post-humanist Rosi Braidotti’s postulation that “feminism is not a humanism.”6

A Feminist and New Materialist Framework A key tenet of new materialist thinking is that “matter” is multiple, self-organising, dynamic and inventive, shifting between nature and culture, the animated and automated, corporeality and its environment. In Barad’s words, matter is “a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than […] a property of things.”7 Materiality is, therefore, always already open to, or rather entangled with, “the Other.” In her essay “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding Of How Matter Comes To Matter” (2008), Barad warns against the continual perpetuation of the nature/culture binary for feminists, urging a more material approach to the world which recognises that they are co-existent, mutually implicated phenomena rather than a choice to be made. Instead, Barad argues for a posthuman account that questions the given-ness of human and nonhuman categories altogether, examining how “the world is an ongoing open process of mattering through which “mattering” itself acquires meaning and form in the realisation of different agential possibilities.”8 Referring to what she coins “intra-activity,” Barad further argues that not only are humans phenom5 Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 158. 6 Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. Richard Grusin (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 21. 7 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 224. 8 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 135.

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enal matter that inhabits the natural world as much as a cultural one, but that we are also implicated in the universe’s ongoing “becoming” in our continually evolving dynamic with multiple phenomena around us; phenomena that are both human and nonhuman: Phenomena are entanglements of spacetimemattering, not in the colloquial sense of the connection with intertwining of individual entities, but rather in the technical sense of ‘quantum entanglements’ which are the (ontological) inseparability of agentially ‘intraacting’ components. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’ which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) marks an important shift, reopening and refiguring foundational notions of classical ontology such as causality, agency, space, time, matter, discourse, responsibility and accountability.9

Barad dispels with Humanism’s “classical ontologies” in her intra-active and post-humanist visions, where the foregrounding of all phenomena’s materiality – including the human’s – enables the feminist identity to emerge from the nature/culture trap altogether; a mode that I suggest is palpable in Tanning’s work examined in this article. The concept of intra-action is central to Barad’s New Materialism and to the movement generated in an encounter of two or more bodies in a process of becoming different. In the context of her work, the term “entanglement” refers “not simply to be(ing) intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence.”10 Entanglement, therefore, indicates how entities are always relational and how such relationality is fundamental to the constitution of entities; an affirmative post-humanist mode that I argue is demonstrated in both Daphne and On Avalon. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost further explain, New Materialism is a provocative and timely lens with which to understand a world that finds itself impacted by an anthropogenically affected climate crisis. Whilst they acknowledge the materialist philosophies of the nineteenth century and how they were influenced by developments in the natural sciences, Coole and Frost insist however that “the new physics and biology make it impossible to understand matter any longer in ways that were inspired by classical science.”11 They add: While Newtonian mechanics was especially important for these older materialisms, for post-classical physics matter has become considerably more elusive […] and complex, suggesting that the ways we understand and interact with nature are in need of commensurate updating.12 9 Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Que Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 125. 10 Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, ix. 11 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 12 Ibid.

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Updating our understanding of matter and our own relationship with it, as Coole and Frost call for, involves eschewing seventeenth century Cartesian ideas about materiality which posited it as “uniform and inert.”13 This Cartesian-Newtonian understanding of matter forged the human subject as its opposite number, and so ontologically other than material phenomena in our alleged contrasting agency. The evolution of New Materialism, however, begins to recognise matters’ emergent and generative powers beyond that of human choreography and presumed mastery. Whilst Gilles Deleuze was not necessarily categorised as a materialist, he was emphatic, as Coole and Frost signpost, that everything he wrote was “vitalist.”14 Similarly, posthumanist Rosi Braidotti has pointed to Spinoza as a key force in stirring a vital, and vitalist, move away from Cartesian thinking; one that understands his central concept that “matter, the world and humans are not dualistic entities structured according to principles of internal or external opposition.”15 A Spinozist account, then, can in many ways be seen as a pre-cursor to the intra-actions that Barad’s new materialist physics directs us towards; a mode that clearly resonates with the trans-corporeal ontologies that Stacy Alaimo’s feminist and posthuman philosophy similarly maps as I explain here. Alaimo similarly wishes to distance feminism from nature/culture dualisms, which fruitfully illuminates Tanning’s depictions of nature and our own material composition. Key to reconfiguring a Cartesian appraisal of matter and nature is to view it as something agentic that “acts” where “those actions have consequences for both the human and nonhuman world.”16 Recalling Barad, she construes the human ontology as a dynamic one in a manner which implicates its resonance with nature and culture, rather than simply one or the other. Alaimo proposes a “trans-corporeal feminism”: a map of transit which traces the “routes from human corporeality to the flesh of the other-than-human and back again,”17 pointing to the intrinsic interconnectivity of all life. Alaimo’s modes of entanglement emphasise the porosity of all bodily boundaries in a manner which threatens the presumed inherent wholeness of the human, thus fracturing the hierarchical frameworks of Cartesian, humanist models which prize individualism. She explains this as a potential strategy for feminist thinkers in her essay “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature” (2008): 13 14 15 16

Ibid. Ibid., 9. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 56. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 4. 17 Stacy Alaimo, “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” in Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 253.

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Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human-world, underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ It makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background for the exploits of the human since ‘nature’ is always as close to one’s own skin […] By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between human corporeality and the more-than-human.18

Such “interchanges and interconnections,” which are manifest in the entangled bodily visions of Tanning’s work discussed here, unsettle androcentrically mapped Cartesian boundary lines, and harness a kinship with nature and lively matter; not simply as a passive refuge from humanist phallocentrism, but as a dynamic and kaleidoscopic space providing a portal out of its reductive confines. In this way Tanning’s visions of trans-corporeal interconnections speak to a post-anthropocentric space which demonstrates how we are inextricably entangled with the non-human, affirmatively eschewing unilateral humanist identity politics and intimating instead a feminist post-humanism. In particular, I examine how Tanning’s paintings demonstrate the human body’s radical openness to its environment, where it can be re-vised and reconfigured by other bodies in the manner that Alaimo’s trans-corporeality and Barad’s “intra-actions” highlight.

18 Ibid., 238.

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Daphne (1943)

Fig. 1. Dorothea Tanning, Daphne (1943). Copyright: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021

Tanning’s oil on glass painting Daphne speaks to her processual approach to her art in its clear evolution from an earlier work Untitled (1942) that she etched the year before. In this earlier incarnation, we witness a hybrid female creature exhibiting human form but at the same time displaying a body whose limbs are suggestive of tree branches and foliage. Tanning’s urgent pencil strokes speak to her subject’s metamorphic and dynamic form, as though her shape-shift is still in

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progress. Daphne similarly depicts the vision of a female figure entangled with a laurel tree in a manner which demonstrates Tanning’s belief that her art is “always part of the same search” without “any real divisions.” It is a painting which captures the iconographies explored by Tanning during this period, speaking to her fascination with fairy tales and Gothic tropes, as well as her familiar recourse to literary and cultural references. As Victoria Carruthers explains in her book Dorothea Tanning: Transformations (2020), Tanning frequently “reflected on the theme of nature versus nurture” in her visual art often forging female figures who burst out of domestic realms via magical motifs of metamorphoses. Tanning’s preoccupation with a collision between worlds, described by Carruthers below, provides a fruitful introduction to her early visual art, as well as the manner in which it can be aligned with new materialist thinking: Many of the pictures from the 1940s […] illustrate Tanning’s exploration of the way in which the natural world collides with the so-called ‘civilised’ world, creating breaches in the fabric of our everyday reality into which slip imaginings of the other-worldly or ‘unnatural.’19

Such “breaches” are indicative of Tanning’s recurrent trans-corporeal modes exhibited in her painting Daphne (Fig. 1) where a young woman is in the process of organic transformation, thus criss-crossing ontologies. The painting details a young woman whose thighs are entwined with, and become, the long, sinewy roots of the laurel tree. The top third of the painting is dominated by golden, fairytale hair which surges upwards as if flowing in the direction of a watery current. The purple fabric of her clothing suggests a regal heritage but is also of a texture which mirrors the smooth roots of the tree with which she is entwined; a human-non-human entanglement where the manner that botanic life and the human protagonist become bound with one another in an enabling dynamic. As Carruthers explains, there is the suggestion in the painting that “to be human is to be at once both flora and fauna, an inseparable part of nature.”20 Further motifs of hybridity and trans-corporeal slippages are also manifest in the manner that the image alludes to the Daphne figure of Greek mythology; a Naiad nymph who is transformed into a laurel tree by her earth Goddess mother Gaia in order to escape the predatory pursuits of god Apollo. By drawing upon this Greek mythical heritage, there is the sense of a cultural cross-over but also of a maternal presence being evoked, with its motifs of nurturance and replenishment. In the work of Tanning discussed, I suggest that the maternal figure is not merely a background spectre situated in a confined temporal, past space but one who drives and creates in tandem with nature; an iterative and kinetic force that 19 Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning, 31. 20 Ibid.

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speaks to a feminist New Materialism rather than representing nature as a passive refuge for female identities. In the example of Greek mythology’s Daphne, there is the implication that the under-water world of nature provides a safe haven from the seductive advances of Apollo – however, Tanning conjures a woman empowered by such a union, rather than one who becomes subordinated and categorised as hunted prey, forging the natural landscape as an affirmative and enabling space with which she is kin. Tanning invokes the shared ontologies of the Daphne figure and this nature in the mirrored swirls and textures of their corporealities implicating them as collective and lively matter which “intra-act” together, showing how bodies “enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage.”21 Daphne is presented as an on-going force or process like the generative natural world with which she is entangled, where she is mobile and inter-relational rather than rooted and static. The granular detail of the mossy foliage which rises behind her speaks to the agentive significance of all matter, implying that an anthropocentric lens must be refocused to notice the detail at hand. In the same way as this botanic life surges around the female figure, her hair swirls similarly in a lively manner appearing to be a force in its own right. Hair as a transformative entity is a recurrent motif in Tanning’s work, symbolising subversion and rebellion as well as erotic power, in the manner that paintings such as Children’s Games (1942) and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) attest to. In these works, the female figures’ supernatural intensity is in part charged by hair which appears to be electrified, thereby empowering them and so threatening the domestic realm which oppresses their identities. Carruthers explains the power of hair as a symbol in Tanning’s work in a manner which chimes with New Materialism’s insistence upon the body’s agentive potential for a feminist politics: Hair is considered potent, sensual, bodily and even dangerous, in the sense that for women, it must be covered in order to show respect to God […] In all cases, hair is indicative of a subversive potential, associated with a sense of wild abandon and monsterish transformation. It has simultaneously come to signify something that is both desirable and dangerous, uncontrollable and uncontained.22

Daphne’s hair is depicted as a force which is “uncontrollable and uncontained” in the manner that Carruthers describes, surging on whilst intra-acting with the natural currents with which it co–mingles. It is also presented as something desirable and beautiful, recalling Rapunzel’s locks thrown down from the tower in which she is imprisoned. There is the sense however, that Daphne is not trapped like Rapunzel, but is in fact liberated by this agentive landscape which

21 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23. 22 Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning, 47.

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brims with lively matter; she is not a figure planning to meet a prince as Rapunzel does, but one who finds resonance in her trans-corporeal communion with the natural world; a materialist landscape that erases the nature/culture binary which Humanism insists upon, where the human species’ inherent material make-up is demonstrated in a manner which enables a feminist politics. In her essay, “Dorothea Tanning: On the Threshold to a Darker Place” (1981), Paula Lumbard suggests that Tanning was one of a number of women surrealist artists who expressed a sense of kinship with the natural world. Acknowledging that Tanning “does not like to classify herself as a surrealist, nor has she suggested any other title”,23 recalling her refusal to be categorised, Lumbard explains that nonetheless, she exhibits many parallels with her female surrealist contemporaries in the interconnections she intimates between woman and nature: Dorothea Tanning’s imagery is linked not only in a simultaneous time frame with the work of Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, but also shares their use of plants, animals, metamorphic beings and the female image, combining elements of nature with the human life cycle. Mythic creatures appear in environments where a vast energy seems to enliven objects that normally appear dormant. Images of flowers, eggs and mirrors are called upon to represent and reflect the presence of the female archetype. Altered states of consciousness become interchangeable with reality.24

Lumbard’s analysis demonstrates how other women surrealists harnessed an empowering vision of nature to project a feminist archetype; one that had the potential to reconfigure the male surrealists’ penchant for the femme-enfant who was characterised by her passivity. Whilst there are clear parallels about the connections that can be made between the women surrealists’ work and an early eco-feminism here, I suggest that Lumbard begins to speak to the manner in which their oeuvre also signals an anticipation of contemporary new materialist frameworks. She explains how nature gives voice to a “female archetype” whilst at the same time implicitly recognising new materialist strategies – suggested in her reference to a “vast energy” in the surrealist work that “enliven(s) objects that normally appear dormant”; modes which speak to Barad’s intra-active theory, where an already agentive entity catalyses another in the ongoing process of their entangled dynamic. Tanning’s surrealist visions of the natural world, which assert a kinship between botanic life and female corporealities, embody Alaimo’s suggestion that “Feminist theories, politics, and fictions […] can ‘play nature’ with a vengeance by deploying discourses of woman and nature in order to subvert them”; in doing so, Alaimo argues that such discourses and visions, “can 23 Paula Lumbard, “Dorothea Tanning: On the Threshold to a Darker Place,” Woman’s Art Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring/Summer, 1981): 52. 24 Ibid., 50.

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destabilize the nature/culture divide whilst constructing feminist alliances with postmodern natures”25 – a praxis that I suggest Tanning deploys in her surrealist and presciently new materialist landscapes. We witness such an approach in the painting Daphne, where the female figure is not passive prey to be consumed by Apollo, but dynamic intra-active matter who takes a trans-corporeal, material fusion with her environment as her cue; a vision that I suggest Tanning develops further in her later more figurative painting, On Avalon (1987).

On Avalon (1987)

Fig. 2. Dorothea Tanning, On Avalon (1987). Copyright: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021

Whilst Tanning’s painting On Avalon (Fig. 2) was completed forty-four years after Daphne, it retains the themes which pre-occupied her in the early part of her career and demonstrates a continued interest in subject matter which similarly fascinated fellow women surrealists. It is a clear example of her move towards abstraction but shares with Daphne the new materialist motifs of trans-corporeality and transformation as well as the fusion between human and botanical life, in spite of the decades which pass between the two works. Tanning’s belief in the temporal boundaryless-ness of her oeuvre, discussed in the introduction to this article, intimates Barad’s notion of a “spacetimemattering” which eschews Humanism’s insistence upon linear chronologies. 25 Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 136.

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The surfacing materiality that emerges over time in Tanning’s art speaks to how an entity’s evolutionary markers, forged via its intra-actions with other matter, cannot be erased but always have a way of bursting forth regardless of human interference; the idea that “matter is an ongoing historicity”26 as Barad insists and is therefore open-ended, as Tanning’s reference to an ongoing “search” further suggests. In this way, we witness how a material border crossing occurs, not just within individual works like Daphne and On Avalon, but rather is similarly exhibited across her oeuvre suggesting Tanning’s prescient belief in a material continuum. In this way, Tanning’s paintings demonstrate how there is no phenomenon which magically erupts out of a vacuum; rather, that its ontology is part of the wider materiality within which it is already compositely embedded. Seams and boundaries are exposed as anthropocentric fictions which delineate in a way which both stifles and subordinates those outside of their phallocentric parameters. It is this positioning which communicates a feminist New Materialism in Tanning’s oeuvre and erupts most explosively in the melding continuities of her more abstract and figurative visions which I investigate here. On Avalon portrays the most vivid, visual example of a trans-corporeal female mode, as though Tanning dispenses with boundaries altogether in the latter part of her career. Eschewing with the discernible seams between human and the nonhuman, Tanning forges a mistier slippage across them, where pulsating female corporeal forms meld with the wild swirls of white poppy heads which dance out of an inky night sky. These metamorphic and dynamic figures, intimated by Tanning’s tremoring, urgent brushstrokes, are conspicuously indistinct from one another with their headless and faceless identities inferring a collective and entangled anonymity. They dispense with Humanism’s identity politics and the male surrealists’ femme-enfant figure, thus forging a feminist New Materialism. The poppy heads of the painting are as auto-poietic as the humans’ corporeal bodies, thereby conflating the agency of all matter – human and non-human – and speaking to what Rosi Braidotti imagines as entities “endowed with intelligent flesh and an embodied mind”;27 a thinking that situates the brain as embodied matter as much as the rest of human corporeality. The fact that Tanning replaces the human heads with botanic life is an affirmative dismissal of humanist rationality as the driving force of all life forms, instead prioritising the agentive thrust of nature and matter in this dynamic scene. Similarly, Tanning describes the materiality of the painting itself as an ongoing processual project; one which exhibits its own metamorphic potential. In the following interview, Tanning describes the process of painting On Avalon in a manner that mirrors the agentic praxis that she conjures within the subject matter of the picture itself: 26 Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 139. 27 Braidotti, “Four Theses,” 39.

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I began in 1984 to paint on a large canvas, in greens and whites, something I felt about those spirits, which may have been flowers but also novas, tears, omens, God knows what, contending with our own ancestral shape in a place I’d give anything to know. During the painting of the picture, a matter of three years, it went through a number of transformations.28

Tanning’s deliberate obliqueness regarding what she calls the “spirits” of the painting, speaks to her malleable and thus new materialist approach to identity, perceiving it as a term in flux by nature of its ongoing enmeshment with a shifting environment, thus intimating a post-human approach to subjectivity in the way the Braidotti argues for.29 The painting, and her analysis of its production above, situates it as a site of spiritual, and yet earth(l)y communion. In this way Tanning evokes a prescient posthuman landscape in its eschewal of Cartesian boundaries of logos and reason as well as its grounded location in an earthy milieu. The “transformations” that Tanning speaks of characterises both On Avalon, but also, the whole body of her visual art which recurrently portrays female figures and identities in the process of transition, as we witness in Daphne. In On Avalon, Tanning conveys an open-ended relationship with her painting, where she acknowledges the white swirls could be flowers, but that they could also be anything from “tears” to “omens,” eventually concluding they could be in fact “God knows what.” Key to emphasising Tanning’s new materialist approach is the fact that she suggests that the flowers contend or connive with “our own ancestral shape” speaking to an entanglement that thrusts the painting outside of humanist boundary lines which separate human and matter, and arbitrarily confer human identity as the ruling principle. In an interview, Tanning makes her eschewal of identity politics even clearer, insisting that “Woman artists. There is no such thing – or person”30 instead suggesting “Doesn’t the paint say it all?”31 Tanning troubles the boundary lines that define such categories in her art, thereby forging and reconfiguring Cartesian identities in the manner that Alaimo proposes. In this way, she moves forward with a feminist project which does not necessarily name itself. Key to unsettling such boundary lines is recapturing a sense of kinship with nature’s and matter’s agency, not as a passive refuge which reaffirms a dichotomous humanist approach but as a dynamic and kaleidoscopic space providing a portal out of anthropocentric confines. The hybrid figures’ smudgy assemblage in 28 Carruthers, Dorothea Tanning, 207. 29 Rosi Braidotti describes post-human subjectivity as a becoming process which is “not predicated upon a stable, centralized Self” but rather rests upon a “non-unitary, multi-layered, dynamic subject.” Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 118. 30 Alyce Mahon, Dorothea Tanning (London: Tate Publishing, 2019), 22. 31 Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 326.

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On Avalon speaks to Tanning’s eschewal of a humanist identity politics where deprioritising a Cartesian fixation with subjectivity is a facilitative manoeuvre enabling overlooked, material ontologies in the more-than-human world to affirmatively emerge in her art. Tanning’s belief that “Everything is in motion” and that “behind the invisible door (doors), another door,” is realised in On Avalon where the seamless connectivity forged between all matter in her painting attests to her belief that “There is no showing who one really is.”32 Rather, in this painting’s example, Tanning perceives the white flowers and human figures, not as discrete, autonomous forces but agents implicated in a wider, entangled materiality. The dark background is an affirmative portal that speaks to the agentive unpredictability of a material landscape that dethrones Cartesian presumptions about human’s hierarchical control over all nature and matter. In this way Tanning conjures trans-corporeal contact zones where matter collides and intra-acts in unpredictable ways; where her work speaks to Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter, which conveys “the sense of a strange and incomplete commonality with the outside”33 in an implicitly feminist manoeuvre.

Conclusion By employing New Materialism as a lens through which to read the work of Dorothea Tanning in this article, I have sought to unearth original analysis of her oeuvre in a manner which evokes a material feminist ecology. I have suggested that the paintings investigated here speak to the liveliness of matter, presumed dead and inert by Cartesian humanists, reconfiguring the manner in which the anthropocentric eye/I perceives their immediate landscape and beyond. In these surrealist visions, I have argued that Tanning rekindles human perceptions of the vibrancy of matter and our inter-relationship with it, as well as the way in which “we too are phenomena” as physicist Karen Barad explains. More specifically, I have identified how Stacy Alaimo’s mode of trans-corporeality highlights humans’ and non-humans’ shared ontologies, where our make-up as matter forges a necessarily entangled dynamic, collapsing the Cartesian dichotomies which arbitrarily enforce hierarchical divisions. As both Alaimo and Barad explain, materialist overlaps extend to our perceptions of space, but also to time where material spectres surface and show through in a manner which upsets Humanism’s belief in a linear chronology. I have investigated manifestations of Barad’s so-called “spacetimemattering” in Tanning’s oeuvre, where temporal past traces as well as visions of future becomings in her work present a continuum of possibilities rather than 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 17.

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a fixed and stable entity anchored in history. Thus, I have argued that recognising human and non-human’s shared materiality in the manner that Tanning effuses, demonstrates how her work serves as a horizontalising force, not simply exhibiting a reductive feminism defined against a male Anthropos, but one enlivened and enabled by an embrace with our kinship with all matter.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature.” In Material Feminisms, eds. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 237–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. –. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. London: Cornell University Press, 2000. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 1–19. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Barad, Karen. Meeting the University Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. –. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Que Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 121–58. –. “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 120–54. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism.” In Anthropocene Feminism, edited by Richard Grusin, 21–48. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. –. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. –. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. –. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Carruthers, Victoria. Dorothea Tanning: Transformations. London: Lund Humphries, 2020. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Grusin, Richard. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Lumbard, Paula. “Dorothea Tanning: On the Threshold to a Darker Place.” Woman’s Art Journal 2, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1981): 49–52. Mahon, Alyce. Dorothea Tanning. London: Tate Publishing, 2019. Tanning, Dorothea. Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

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Vera Thomann (Universität Zürich)

„I do object, passionately, to being made eternal“: Vegetabiles Wissen nach Ursula K. Le Guins Direction of the Road

Abstract “I do object, passionately, to being made eternal”: Vegetal Knowledge according to Direction of the Road by Ursula K. Le Guin Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story Direction of the Road (1974), the following essay traces how the narrating oak tree produces alternatives of narrative time, space, and focalization, i. e., an arboreal poetics. By presenting itself as an ever-moving living being, the oak not only reworks a narrative “Order of Things,” but also exposes the production of knowledge with plants and their representations as a fundamental component of knowledge orders. As I will argue, the arboreal poetics that arises in Le Guin’s short story thereby challenges a tradition of epistemology that immobilizes plants and creates fixed taxonomies. Consequently, Le Guin’s ever-moving oak tree questions any theory that assumes the immobility of trees in time and space – trees of knowledge as well as tree representations in theoretical works by Ferdinand de Saussure or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Keywords: plant studies, phytopoetics, plant-human relationship, representational knowledge, arboreal theory

Immer wieder kommt die Erzählinstanz in Ursula K. Le Guins Kurzgeschichte Direction of the Road auf die Ordnung der Dinge, „the Order of Things“,1 zu sprechen. Der analytische Reflextest würde der narrativen Stimme sofort eine poststrukturalistische Sensibilität zuschreiben, handelte es sich nicht um eine Eiche, die in der 1974 erstmals erschienenen Kurzgeschichte als Erzählinstanz figuriert. Die Haltung der Eiche ist dabei eine dezidiert widerständige – sie protestiert laut eigener Aussage mit Leidenschaft dagegen, als ewig und damit als unsterblich oder leblos verkannt zu werden: „I do object, passionately, to being made eternal.“2 Gleichzeitig fühlt sie sich verpflichtet, ihr Wachstum, ihre Bewegung und mitunter ihre Lebendigkeit zugunsten einer herrschenden Ordnung aufrechtzuerhalten. Die Perspektive des Baums vermag es so, nicht nur Klassi1 Ursula K. Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, in Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. Stories (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 272. 2 Ibid.

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fizierungsprozesse oder die Grenzen der Repräsentation, sondern Ordnungen des Erzählens selbst in Frage zu stellen. Le Guins Kurzgeschichte fungiert im Folgenden als Anlaufpunkt, um die Ordnung der Dinge aus der Warte der Eiche aufzurollen und dabei nach einer Poetik des Pflanzlichen zu fragen, die das epistemische Potenzial fiktionaler Texte dahingehend nutzt, eigene und neue Formen des Wissens über Pflanzen und Pflanze-Mensch-Verhältnisse zu entwickeln. Pflanzen bilden erfahrungsgemäß einen blinden Fleck in den Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften, notieren Joela Jacobs und Isabel Kranz.3 Ihre Geringschätzung äußere sich darin, dass sie als „margin of the margin“ ausgeblendet werden,4 in literarischen Texten nur als Folie, Hintergrund oder Inspirationsquelle dienen und abwechselnd „silent bystander, ornamental backdrop, or mere symbol“ darstellen.5 Die unmittelbare Folge davon ist, dass Pflanzen selten als lebende Akteure wahrgenommen werden, die über „intentionales Handeln“, „Sprache bzw. Sprachfähigkeit“ oder gar „ein psychisches Innenleben“ verfügen könnten.6 Die Passivität, die Pflanzen damit traditionell zugeschrieben wird, lässt sich einerseits mit Eigenheiten in den Bereichen „Sensorik, Kommunikation, Nahrungsaufnahme, Fortpflanzung, Zeitrhythmik“ kontrastieren,7 die Pflanzen im Allgemeinen auszeichnen und die durchaus nach einer spezifischen PflanzenOntologie verlangen. Andererseits wird im Kontext von Klimawandel und Artensterben sowie ausgehend von theoretischen Forderungen in Ecocriticism und Ecofeminism auch das Mensch-Pflanze-Verhältnis gegenwärtig neu kontextualisiert: Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse, Hierarchien und Verwandtschaftlichkeit werden ebenso diskutiert wie ein Recht der Pflanzen auf das Überleben ihrer Arten.8 Somit besteht die Tendenz, nicht nur Handlungsmacht, sondern auch Körperlichkeit („embodiment“) und Bewusstsein („conscience“) als pflanzliche Eigenschaften anzuerkennen.9

3 Vgl. Joela Jacobs und Isabel Kranz, „Einleitung“, in Das literarische Leben der Pflanzen. Poetiken des Botanischen. Literatur für Leser 2017/2, hg. v. Joela Jacobs und Isabel Kranz (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), 85. 4 Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 2. 5 Vgl. das am 30. September 2016 stattfindende GSA-Panel „The Literary Life of Plants: Agency, Languages, and Poetics of the Vegetal“, abgerufen am 15. September 2021, https://www.the gsa.org/sites/default/files/GSA_program_16.pdf. 6 Urte Stobbe, „Plant Studies: Pflanzen kulturwissenschaftlich erforschen – Grundlagen, Tendenzen, Perspektiven“, in Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 4 (2019): 101. 7 Ibid., 102. 8 Ibid., 96. 9 Vgl. Patrícia Vieira, Monica Gagliano und John C. Ryan, The Language of Plants. Science, Philosophy, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 10.

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In scharfem Kontrast zu der von Stobbe angeführten „Pflanzenvergessenheit“10 in Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft steht derweil die Verwendung von pflanzenartigen Denkbildern in der Philosophie und Kulturtheorie. Bäume werden dabei oft als Metaphern für Ordnungssysteme angeführt; angefangen beim Baum des Wissens (die arbor porphyriana oder arbor scientiae), dem Baum der Wissenschaft bei René Descartes, dem Baum als exemplarischem Zeichen der Zeichentheorie in Ferdinand de Saussures Grundfragen der Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, den Bäumen der generativen Grammatik von Noam Chomsky bis hin zum Baum als Vertreter einer überholten Ordnung in Gilles Deleuzes und Félix Guattaris Rhizom. Wenn nach Jacobs und Kranz gewisse „Kulturtechniken, die aus dem Bereich der Flora stammen, wieder auf ihre vegetabile Herkunft“ hin befragt werden sollen,11 dann gilt dies auch für theoretische Perspektiven, die sich einer Logik des Pflanzlichen bedienen. Insbesondere stellt sich die Frage, ob vegetabile Ordnungen in der Theorie pflanzliche Eigenheiten in Betracht ziehen, oder ob für die theoretische Reichweite und Applikationsmöglichkeit auf die den Pflanzen traditionell zugesprochene Passivität abgestützt wird. Da die Eiche in Direction of the Road eine alternative Ordnung der Dinge offenlegt, für die ihre spezifische Vitalität essenziell ist, bietet sich Le Guins Kurzgeschichte deshalb nicht nur für die Betrachtung von vegetabilen narratologischen und poetischen Eigenlogiken an, sondern auch für die Erörterung der theoretischen und politischen Implikationen einer Logik des Pflanzlichen.

Vegetabile Poetik Eine erste Transformation der erzählerischen Ordnung anhand einer pflanzlichen Logik erfolgt in Direction of the Road durch die Pflanzen-Zeit, welche die Erzählzeit und die erzählte Zeit direkt tangiert. Die Eiche beginnt ihre Erzählung mit einer retrospektiven Beschreibung einer temporal nicht definierten Vergangenheit. Einzig ihre Größe dient als Anhaltspunkt – „seventy-two feet“ (21 Meter) groß ist sie zum Zeitpunkt des einschlägigen erzählten Ereignisses,12 „sixty feet tall“ (18 Meter groß) ist sie zu jenem früheren Zeitpunkt, an dem ihre Erzählung einsetzt.13 Wenn man von einem für Eichen durchschnittlichen Wachstum ausgeht (ca. 1–1.5 Fuß / 0.3 Meter im Jahr), weist das Wachstum der Eiche auf eine Zeitspanne hin, die ungefähr sechseinhalb bis zehn Jahre umfassen 10 11 12 13

Stobbe, „Plant Studies“, 92. Jacobs und Kranz, „Einleitung“, 87. Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 273. Ibid., 267.

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könnte. Die erzählte Zeit ist damit effektiv nur anhand des Wachstums der Eiche messbar, während die Erzählzeit, gefasst in knappe sieben Seiten Text, wesentlich kürzer ausfällt. Von einer Zeitraffung zu sprechen wäre allerdings zu kurz gegriffen, denn Direction of the Road entwirft keine lineare Zeitlichkeit der Erzählform, die Erzählzeit und erzählte Zeit anhand geläufiger Parameter in Bezug setzt. Vielmehr muss von einer vegetabilen Heterotemporalität ausgegangen werden, deren Messung – in Form einer literarischen Dendrochronologie – einzig und allein der Erzählinstanz und ihrem Wachstum unterliegt. Ausgewiesen wird jedoch, dass die Eiche zur Zeit der in der Kurzgeschichte beschriebenen einschlägigen Veränderung – dem ersten ihr begegnenden Automobil – bereits 132 Jahre alt ist. Der Horizont der Erzählinstanz ist folglich explizit nicht-menschlich und vermag es, der Erzählzeit einen Zeitraum von knapp eineinhalb Jahrhunderten als Erfahrungsreferenz voranzustellen. Auch wenn sich die Eiche auf menschliche Zeitparameter beruft – „yearly […], weekly, daily“, „those days“14 – verbleiben die kategorialen Aussprüche undatiert und in ihrer Unbestimmtheit experientiell. Ersichtlich wird hierdurch erneut, dass ein relatives Verhältnis zu der Zeit entworfen wird, das der Lebenszeit der Eiche und ihrem Verständnis von Zeitlichkeit entspricht. So kann sie mitunter für Stunden oder Nachmittage stillstehen – es handelt sich aber um „a relative stillness“,15 da menschliche Zeitparameter im Verhältnis zu ihrer Lebenszeit keine wirksamen Vergleichsmomente bilden. Deshalb, dies verdeutlicht die am Wachstum bemessene Erzählzeit, versteht sich die Eiche durchaus als in Bewegung befindlich, wenn auch „bei prinzipieller Ortsgebundenheit“.16 Die Pflanzen-Zeit im Text generiert so eine alternative Ordnung des Erzählens, die nicht nur von einem explizit nicht-menschlichen Zeitverständnis ausgehen muss, sondern die Relativität des Zeiterlebens gleichsam als poetisches Mittel nutzt, um das Erzählen und das Wachstum der Eiche in der Zeit zu verbinden. Die Eiche fungiert im Kontext der Pflanzen-Zeit denn auch als Akteurin, deren Fähigkeit zur Bewegung in der Form ihres Wachstums unbestritten ist. Eine zweite Umgestaltung der Erzählordnung baut auf jenem Moment der Bewegung trotz Ortsgebundenheit und einer Relativität der Zeiterfahrung auf: Die Eiche legt dar, dass sie es ist, die sich auf ihr entgegenkommende Menschen, Tiere und Maschinen zu- und wieder wegbewegt und damit eine Erfahrung von Annäherung und Entfernung im Raum herstellt. Anhand der verschiedenen Entwicklungen, die sie im Laufe ihrer 132 Lebensjahre überblickt, vermag es die Eiche, diverse Momente dieser Hin- und Wegbewegung zu kontrastieren: Die erstbeschriebene Bewegung, bei der die Erzählung einsetzt, ist einem Fußgänger 14 Ibid., 270. 15 Ibid., 268. 16 Stobbe, „Plant Studies“, 102.

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zugewandt und entspricht einem „jigjog foot-pace“.17 Die gemächliche Annäherung ist mit „style“ zu vollziehen: „I’d approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly.“18 Eine zweite, etwas zügigere Bewegung vollzieht die Eiche zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt, wenn sie sich auf Pferde und Reiter_innen zuzubewegen hat, wobei der Kanter ein noch vergnügliches „swaying and swooping“ der Bewegung, der Galopp hingegen ein weniger angenehmes Tempo verlangt, das einem Schleudern gleichkommt („cloppety-cloppety-cloppety!“).19 Die Begegnung mit dem ersten Automobil ist für die Eiche schließlich einschlägig, weil sie dem „wretched little monster“ zuckend und holpernd in einem ihr bis anhin unbekannten Tempo der Vergrößerungs- und Verkleinerungsbewegung entgegenkommen muss.20 Die dargelegte Bewegung der Eiche entspricht folglich nicht dem Wachstum, das die Relativität der Pflanzen-Zeit begründet, sondern dient dazu, die Funktionsweise von Bewegung im Raum zu sondieren.21 Indem die Eiche explizit auf ihre Bewegungsmuster hinweist, werden historische Analysen von Bewegungsvorgängen aufgerufen, die gerade die Naturwissenschaft maßgeblich geprägt haben. So konnte Eadweard Muybridge im Jahr 1878 anhand der Chronofotografie die Bewegungsabläufe eines galoppierenden Pferdes nachweisen und die Serienfotografie dahingehend nutzen, jene Prozesse über eine Reanimierung der Aufnahmen zu dehnen oder zu straffen – „Zeit wurde dadurch zu einem veränderbaren Parameter“.22 Insbesondere ließen sich mithilfe der „Zeitverkleinerung“ respektive „Zeitvergrößerung“ um die Jahrhundertwende Erkenntnisse in Botanik und Pflanzenphysiologie herleiten,23 die Charles Darwin im Kontext des Heliotropismus von Pflanzen bereits antizipiert hatte, jedoch nicht nachweisen konnte.24 Gerade die Möglichkeiten der Chronofotografie und des frühen Films vermochten es daher, „verschiedene Wahrnehmungsmaßstäbe miteinander [zu] vergleichen und in Beziehung setzen zu 17 Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 267. 18 Ibid. Die Aussage der Eiche entspricht hierbei einer Ironisierung des Bonmots „Le style est l’homme même“ aus der Antrittsvorlesung Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffons vor der Académie française im Jahr 1753. 19 Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 268. 20 Ibid., 269. 21 Der historische Referenzraum der Erzählung würde es anbieten, die Pflanzen-Zeit an den Forschungsschwerpunkt und die theoretische Konzeption des DFG-Programms „Ästhetische Eigenzeiten. Zeit und Darstellung in der polychronen Moderne“ anzubinden. Da die Zeit nur als ein Teilaspekt der Relationalität im Text angeführt wird, scheint mir die Pflanzen-Zeit jedoch die angemessenere Begrifflichkeit zu sein. 22 Andreas Becker, Perspektiven einer anderen Natur. Geschichte und Theorie der filmischen Zeitraffung und Zeitdehnung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2004), 15. 23 Ludwig Mach, „Ueber das Princip der Zeitverku¨ rzung in der Serienphotographie“, Photographische Rundschau 4 (1893): 121–22. 24 Vgl. Becker, Perspektiven, 14.

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können“.25 So notierte Karl Ernst von Baer in seiner Rede Die Abhängigkeit unseres Weltbilds von der Länge unseres Moments von 1860: „Ein Verharren besteht in der Natur gar nicht, wenigstens in den lebenden Körpern sicherlich nicht. Es liegt nur in dem zu kleinlichen Maaßstabe, den wir anlegen, wenn wir in der lebenden Natur ein Verharren wahrzunehmen glauben.“26 Verweist die Eiche in Direction of the Road auf die von ihr vollzogene Vergrößerung und Verkleinerung – mitunter im Galopp – verkehrt sie folglich nicht nur die Position von Statik und Dynamik, Beobachterin und Beobachtetem, sondern auch die Funktionslogik einer naturgeschichtlichen Forschungspraxis: Die Dehnung und Raffung der Eiche im Raum wird zum konstitutiven Moment für die Erfahrung der Bewegung von Mensch, Pferd und Automobil. Die Eiche produziert damit eine alternative Perspektivik, die gerade nicht zeigt, „wie fremd die gewöhnliche Natur im zeitgerafften und gedehnten Film erscheint“.27 Vielmehr wird die ‚gewöhnliche‘ Wahrnehmung der Bewegung zur Eiche hin und von ihr weg als bloße Illusion aufgelöst, die sie als agierende Instanz aufrechterhält. Etabliert wird damit ein vegetabiles Wahrnehmungssystem, das aus pflanzlicher Perspektive einen Konstruktivismus geltend macht. Wissensgeschichtlich wird simultan der epistemische Umbruch von der Naturgeschichte zu den Naturwissenschaften, d. h. ein „Wechsel von einer statischen, ahistorischen historia naturalis zu einer dynamischen Geschichte der Natur“28 angedeutet.29 Im Verlauf der Erzählung werden die Automobile Teil einer neuartigen Ordnung der Dinge, die sich auf die erzählerische Ordnung auswirkt: Der Verkehr nimmt zu, die Straße wird ausgebaut, die Lebensräume von Ameisen, Mäusen und Füchsen werden eingeschränkt. Die immer größere Anzahl an Automobilen verlangt auch von der Eiche eine Anpassungsleistung: Um die Illusion der Annäherung und Entfernung für die auf sie zukommenden und von ihr wegfahrenden Automobile aufrecht zu erhalten, muss sie sich in mehrere Richtungen gleichzeitig bewegen („two directions at once“30). Die von ihr erwartete Leistung kommentiert die Eiche ausführlich:

25 Ibid., 33. 26 Karl Ernst von Baer, Reden gehalten in wissenschaftlichen Versammlungen und kleinere Aufsätze vermischten Inhalts (St. Petersburg: Verlag der kaiserlichen Hofbuchhandlung, 1864), 252. 27 Becker, Perspektiven, 16. 28 Tanja Van Hoorn, Naturgeschichte in der ästhetischen Moderne (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 7. 29 Vgl. Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1976), 45: „Die Naturgeschichte verfügt über keinen temporalisierten Begriff der Entwicklung.“ 30 Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 271.

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But have you ever considered the feat accomplished, the skill involved, when a tree enlarges, simultaneously yet at slightly different rates and in slightly different manners, for each one of forty motorcar drivers facing two opposite directions, while at the same time diminishing for forty more who have got their backs to it, meanwhile remembering to loom over each single one at the right moment: and to do this minute after minute, hour after hour, from daybreak till nightfall or long after?31

Die Eiche vollzieht ihre Hin- und Wegbewegung folglich simultan und individuell für die bis zu vierzig Autos auf der Straße, wobei ihr Geschick gerade darin liegt, den Autofahrer_innen glaubhaft zu machen, dass sie sich in verschiedene Richtungen bewegen würden („that they were „going somewhere““32). Damit betont die Eiche ihre Handlungsmacht, nämlich die Fähigkeit, trotz Ortsgebundenheit Bewegung und damit eine Annäherung und Entfernung im Raum herzustellen. Tätigt die Eiche ihre Hin- und Wegbewegung zu den einzelnen Automobilen simultan in zwei Richtungen und individuell für jedes Automobil, wird der Raum der Eiche nicht zur Repräsentation eines synchronen historischen Moments stilisiert, sondern bleibt multiplen konstitutiven Relationen verpflichtet.33 Der Text zeigt demnach auf, dass eine pflanzliche Poetik nicht nur vegetabile Heterotemporalitäten, sondern auch topologische Multiplizitäten produziert. Nicht nur die Zeit, sondern auch der skizzierte (Bewegungs-)Raum folgt so einer spezifischen pflanzlichen Logik. Zweitens wird auf die Prämisse der Relativitätstheorie aufmerksam gemacht, die das Verhalten von Raum und Zeit erst aus dem Bezug von sich relativ zueinander bewegenden Parteien erörtern kann. Indem nun die Eiche die Relativität der Perspektive herstellt, wird nicht nur ihre agentielle Beteiligung, sondern ihre Lebendigkeit betont; der Fakt, dass sie als Körper in Bewegung zu verstehen ist. Diese Bewegung macht sie sowohl durch ihr Wachstum in der Zeit als auch durch ihre Hin- und Wegbewegung im Raum explizit. Gleichzeitig hat die Eiche aber eine gewisse Simulation aufrechtzuerhalten: „I would think seriously of escaping my obligation to the general Order of Things: of failing to move.“34 Die Ordnung der Dinge, an der sich die 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 272. 33 Repräsentationen, so notiert Doreen Massey, würden fälschlicherweise oftmals als Bändigung des Raums in Text respektive Konzept verstanden: „over and over we tame the spatial into the textual and the conceptual; into representation“, Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 20. Die Geografin plädiert deshalb für ein Raumverständnis, das Raum als Produkt von Wechselbeziehungen erfasst, die immer erst im Entstehen sind. So löst sie in For Space zwei Argumentationslinien auf; erstens, dass die Repräsentation zwingend fixierend wirken, d. h. eine Lebendigkeit beeinträchtigen oder gar abtöten muss; und zweitens, dass der Raum erst das Produkt dieser Beeinträchtigung darstellt (vgl. ibid., 26). Folglich kann sich Raum auch über zeitgleiche Pluralitäten definieren, und damit über Multiplizitäten: Raum, Relation, Identität – Massey notiert, sie seien alle gleichermaßen ko-konstitutiv (vgl. ibid., 10). 34 Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 272.

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Eiche zu orientieren hat, baut folglich auf der Relativität von Zeit und Raum und der daraus resultierenden Relationalität des Pflanze-Mensch-Verhältnisses auf, sodass die Eiche sich geradezu unaufhörlich zu bewegen hat. Um die Ordnung der Dinge aufrechtzuerhalten, muss die Eiche ihre Vergrößerungs- und Verkleinerungsbewegung („enlarge, loom-over, and diminish“35) nach der Etablierung des Automobils denn auch zwingend beschleunigen. Damit erfolgt insofern eine radikale Verkehrung der These von Jacobs und Kranz, als die Eiche aus dem Hintergrund in den Vordergrund der Dynamik und Bewegungslogik der Erzählung rückt. Eben jenes Moment wird zum kritischen Umschlagpunkt der Eichen-Erzählung; denn bei einem Überholmanöver weicht eines der Autos auf die andere Straßenseite aus („the side which normally runs the other direction“36). Weil das Auto gegen die Richtung der Straße verstößt – d. h. die physikalischen Voraussetzungen, welche die Eiche mitunter mitproduziert, verletzt –, kollidiert die Eiche in ihrer Vergrößerungsbewegung mit knapp 140 km/h mit dem Auto. Der augenblickliche Tod des Autofahrers kümmert die Erzählinstanz wenig („I had to kill him. I had no choice, and therefore have no regret“37), jedoch wehrt sich die Eiche vehement dagegen, dass der sterbende Mensch im Moment seines Todes zu ihr aufblickt und sie als ewig, als unsterblich erfasst. „I do object, passionately, to being made eternal“,38 konstatiert sie und betont, dass sie für die Aufrechterhaltung der Ordnung der Dinge zwar zur Mörderin werde, nicht aber für den Tod an sich für verantwortlich gehalten werden wolle: „For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal.“39 Indem die Eiche ihre Beteiligung am Unfalltod des Autofahrers einräumt, bekräftigt sie einerseits erneut ihre Handlungsfähigkeit, andererseits beanstandet sie, dass die Relation der Bewegung im Raum zwischen miteinander in Bezug stehenden Akteur_innen zu denken ist. Ihr Protest richtet sich damit gegen eine Ewigmachung ihrer selbst in den Augen jener Menschen, welche die Eiche nicht als agierende Instanz im Kontext von Energie, Masse und Lichtgeschwindigkeit verstehen. Nicht nur wird der Eiche dadurch die Leistung aberkannt, die beiden Richtungen der Straße für alle Autofahrer_innen aufrecht zu erhalten, ebenfalls wird ihr verwehrt, Teil der physikalischen Ordnung der Dinge zu sein, die das Verhältnis der Raum-Zeit-Veränderung erst mitproduziert. Aber es ist letztlich nicht nur die Negation der Relativität, welche die Eiche erzürnt, sondern eine ihr abgesprochene Bezogenheit, wenn nicht Verwandtschaft, die ihr durch die Rolle des Todes abhanden kommt: „If the human creatures will not understand Re-

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 269. Ibid., 273. Ibid. Ibid., 272. Ibid., 274.

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lativity, very well; but they must understand Relatedness.“40 Hierdurch wird ersichtlich, dass die Bewegung der Eiche in Zeit und Raum, wie auch die Relativität ihrer Form in Dehnung und Raffung in erster Linie auf ihre Lebendigkeit hinweisen, die unter den von ihr selbstgewählten Parametern der Betrachtung eindeutig ist und mitunter die herrschende Ordnung der Dinge aufrechterhält. Vom sterbenden Menschen wird diese Lebendigkeit allerdings negiert. Die Lebendigkeit der Eiche schlägt sich so in der Raumzeit der Narration, der Positionierung der Erzählinstanz, der Fokalisierung und der Sprachlichkeit von Direction of the Road nieder, sodass von einer Poetik ausgegangen werden muss, die sich an der spezifischen Lebensform der Eiche orientiert. Demgemäß wird ersichtlich, dass die Ordnung der Dinge – the Order of Things – nicht nur den Gegenstand der Erzählung betrifft, sondern die Regel- und Formhaftigkeit der Narration an sich touchiert. So zeigt die Eiche eindrücklich auf, wie eine Zeit und ein Raum der Pflanze als auch eine ihr eigene Bewegung poetisch wiedergegeben werden können: Der Text nimmt eine vegetabile Form an, die Relativität wie auch Verwandtschaftlichkeit auf sprachlicher Ebene herstellt und dabei die Grenzen der Vorstellbarkeit austestet. Es gilt, wie Solvejg Nitzke formuliert hat, „produktiv am Baum zu scheitern“.41 Wenn auf die Sprachfähigkeit wie auch das psychische Innenleben der Eiche eingegangen wird, ist denn auch keine anthropomorphe Logik angezeigt, selbst wenn eine Ähnlichkeit der Eiche zu „menschenähnlich Handelnde[n]“ evoziert wird.42 Vielmehr löst die Erzählung jegliche anthropozentrische Betrachtungsweisen auf, indem sich die Eiche einerseits einer traditionellen Schuldnerinnenrolle verweigert und andererseits Lebendigkeit und Verwandtschaft – „relativity“ und „relatedness“43 – von Beginn an als nicht speziesistisch ausgewiesen werden: Mensch, Tier und Maschine sind gleichermaßen Teil der quantenphysikalischen Ausgangs- und Problemstellung der Erzählung. Im Text wird so anhand der vegetabilen Form eine Umwertung der Beziehungsform von Mensch und Pflanze vollzogen, die im Kontext des Ecocriticism an Relevanz gewonnen hat: Pflanzen werden vermehrt als „acting partners“, bzw. „agentic and active participants in socioecological systems“ erachtet.44 Damit geht die Auffassung einher, dass Pflanzen auf andere Lebewesen einwirken können, dass sie Akteur_innen in Systemen sind, die von Menschen wie Tieren, Flora wie Fauna in derselben Weise bespielt werden. Gerade hierfür 40 Ibid. 41 Solvejg Nitzke, „Arboreale Poetik, oder: Mit Bäumen erzählen“, in Baum und Text. Neue Perspektiven auf verzweigte Beziehungen, hg. v. Stephanie Heimgartner, Solvejg Nitzke und Simone Sauer-Kretschmer (Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 2020), 190. 42 Stobbe, „Plant Studies“, 101. 43 Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 274. 44 John C. Ryan, „Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies“, Societies 2, Nr. 3 (2012): 105; 110.

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ist die Prämisse der Sterblichkeit von Pflanzen, wie sie die Eiche verteidigt, essenziell; denn sie bildet die Voraussetzung dafür, dass Handlungsmacht, Körperlichkeit und Bewusstsein von Pflanzen – anhand des Kriteriums der Lebendigkeit – erst argumentativ als aktive Fähigkeiten angeführt werden können. Der Protest der Eiche wendet sich in diesem Sinn letztlich auch gegen einen Diskurs der Natur und eine Theorie der Naturgeschichte, die nicht mit einer Philosophie des Lebens in Zusammenhang zu bringen war – „der Einschnitt zwischen Lebendigem oder Nicht-Lebendigem ist nie ein entscheidendes Problem“, notiert etwa Michel Foucault.45 Ebenso wurde Wissen über die Natur von einem spezifischen Zeitbegriff vorstrukturiert; „denn die Zeit wird nie als Entwicklungsprinzip für die Lebewesen in ihrer inneren Organisation begriffen, sie wird nur unter dem Gesichtspunkt der möglichen Umwälzung im äußeren Raum, in dem wir leben, wahrgenommen“.46 Die Naturgeschichte, so führt Foucault aus, umfasse deshalb „eine Folge komplexer Operationen, die in eine Gesamtheit von Repräsentationen die Möglichkeit einer konstanten Ordnung einbringen.47 Sie konstituiert ein ganzes Gebiet der Empirizität gleichzeitig als beschreibbar und als in Ordnung versetzbar“.48 Damit sind mehrere Aspekte der Erzählung von Le Guin aufgerufen, welche die Eiche konstitutiv unterläuft: Erstens die Relevanz einer experientiellen Zeitlichkeit, die Wachstum, Erfahrungswelt wie auch die Bewegung der Eiche im Raum zu strukturieren vermag; zweitens die Produktion von Wissen über Pflanze-Mensch-Verhältnisse, die sich nicht an statischen und zeitlosen Vorstellungen der klassischen Naturgeschichte orientiert, sondern auf einem solipsistisch-vegetabilen Wahrnehmungssystems beruht und drittens die Beschreibbarkeit der Umstände in Sprache und Repräsentationen, die im Rahmen der Kurzgeschichte eine poetische Eigenlogik entwickelt und so schließlich eine alternative Ordnung der Dinge durch die Erzählung der Eiche erst erschließen lassen.

Vegetabile Theorie Damit stößt die Eiche in Direction of the Road auch ein Nachdenken über die Bäume in Philosophie und Theorie an; denn ausgehend von der Lektüre Le Guins lässt sich die Metaphorizität jener Theorie-Bäume neu bedenken, die von einer Nicht-Lebendigkeit, d. h. einer Unbeweglichkeit in Zeit und Raum gezeichnet sind. Bäume des Wissens wie die arbor porphyriana oder die arbor scientiae 45 Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 208. 46 Ibid., 195. 47 Ein ordo naturalis verweist im biblischen Kontext des ordo creationis immer auch auf die Vorgängigkeit der Pflanze (in Bezug auf den Menschen). 48 Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge, 204.

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ebenso wie die Bäume bei Chomsky oder Deleuze und Guattari dienen als Denkbilder für hierarchische, nicht-veränderbare und singuläre Ordnungen.49 Jene Bäume sind dabei immer schon ‚ausgewachsen‘ und fungieren als Metaphern für Klassifikationen und Ordnungssysteme selbst, die lineare Entwicklungen, hierarchische Strukturen und separierte Ordnungsebenen repräsentieren. Der Baum dient in Philosophie- und Theoriegeschichte folglich explizit der Klassifizierung und damit der Fixierung und Stabilisierung von Wissen. Von der Lebendigkeit der Bäume, d. h. deren Beweglichkeit in Raum und Zeit, muss für die Funktionalität der Klassifizierung deshalb abgesehen werden, weil die Theorie-Bäume sich nicht unkontrolliert fort- oder weiterentwickeln sollen. Gleichzeitig evozieren sie aber eine gewisse Urwüchsigkeit, Natürlichkeit und Vitalität ihrer Systematik. Um funktionsfähig zu sein, wiederholen die Bäume der Theorie demnach einerseits eine für die Naturgeschichte der Pflanzen signifikante Ausstreichung des Lebens- und Bewegungsbegriffs, andererseits stützen sie auf eine scheinbare Lebendigkeit ab. Die Bäume der Theorie reproduzieren so eine statisch klassifizierende Praxis der Naturgeschichte,50 die eine Objekthaftigkeit und Passivität der Pflanze geltend macht, um wiederum Ordnungen und Klassifikationen erst generieren zu können. Protestiert die Eiche bei Le Guin gegen eine Verewigung ihrer selbst, die ihre Lebendigkeit und Bewegungsleistung in Raum und Zeit verkennt, dann hat dieser Protest sich folglich auch gegen jene Metaphern-Bäume zu wenden, die eine taxonomische Tradition der Naturgeschichte duplizieren, um Taxonomien, d. h. Ordnungssysteme des Wissens, überhaupt repräsentieren zu können. Dass die Ausstreichung der Lebendigkeit die Zeichenproduktion generell betrifft, lässt sich exemplarisch an Ferdinand de Saussures Zeichen-Baum herleiten; denn der Baum dient in den Grundfragen der Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft als Zeichen für die Zeichen – als Repräsentation aller Zeichen und deren Funktionsweise.51 Weil der Zeichen-Baum nicht nur Vorstellung und Lautbild des Baums zu repräsentieren hat, sondern alle Zeichen, d. h. mitunter die Logik der Zeichentheorie, muss der Baum bei de Saussure erst recht jeglichen Lebens- und Bewegungsbegriff negieren. Dass de Saussure sich für ein ‚lebendiges‘ Zeichenbeispiel entschieden hat (neben dem Baum auch für das Pferd), hat 49 Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie (Berlin: Merve, 1992), 29. Die Eiche Le Guins konterkariert zudem eine phänomenologische Betrachtungsweise der Natur und von Bäumen im Spezifischen, indem sie den Husserl’schen Apfelbaum als zahmes, gentechnisch adaptiertes Herdentier beschreibt: „The apple trees in the orchard at the foot of the hill did not seem to mind; but then, apples are tame. Their genes have been tampered with for centuries. Besides, they are herd creatures; no orchard tree can really form an opinion of its own.“ Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 269. 50 Vgl. Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte, 47. 51 Vgl. Ferdinand de Saussure, Grundfragen der Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), 76.

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jedoch durchaus System: Das Zeichen der Zeichen fußt auf einer prekären Logik des Lebendigen, die den Baum immer wieder aufs Neue entzeitlichen und enträumlichen muss, um die semiotische Theorie auszulegen und gleichzeitig von der Lebendigkeit der Bäume – einer sich ständig erneuernden Verräumlichung und Verzeitlichung – insofern profitiert, als der Beispielreferent sich konstant selbst aktualisiert. Als Beispielzeichen funktioniert der Baum folglich deshalb, weil er einerseits zeit- und raumlos ist, andererseits hat gerade die Lebendigkeit der Bäume eine Aktualisierung des Beispielbaums über das vergangene Jahrhundert gelingen lassen – der Zeichen-Baum verfügt so tatsächlich über eine Form der Zeichen-Vitalität, währenddessen sich die Zeichentheorie gewissermaßen ‚urwüchsig‘ geben kann. De Saussure stützt sich für die Funktionsweise des Beispielbaums der Zeichentheorie so auf der Lebendigkeit des Baums ab, die im Baum seiner Theorie allerdings nie ersichtlich wird – dieser ist passiver Repräsentant der semiotischen Theorie. Im entgegengesetzten Sinne verhält sich die Eiche bei Le Guin: Nicht nur ist sie fähig, auf sich verändernde Ordnungen (von der Fußgängerin zur Reiterin zur Autofahrerin) zu reagieren, vielmehr hält sie durch ihre Anpassungsleistung jene Ordnung der Dinge aufrecht, auf der die Verewigung von Pflanzen und Bäumen erst aufzubauen hat. Damit lässt die Eiche die Bäume der Theorie bei de Saussure, Chomsky oder Deleuze und Guattari überhaupt funktionieren und legt gleichzeitig offen, wie die Bäume der Theorie für die Erstellung von Klassifikationen zuallererst die Logik einer naturgeschichtlichen statischen Klassifizierung bedienen müssen, die Bäumen weder Lebendigkeit noch Beweglichkeit zuerkennt.

Das multiple Wissen der Eiche Abschließend lässt sich festhalten, dass der Protest der Eiche gegen eine spezifische Ordnung der Dinge in Direction of the Road – die Regel, sich bewegen zu müssen – zum Zeitpunkt einer sich stetig vergrößernden Mobilität der Menschheit erfolgt. Der Einschnitt, den die Eiche beschreibt, ereignet sich historisch zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, gleichzeitig ist die Ordnung, gegen die in der Erzählung protestiert wird, als das Resultat einer sich über die zwei vorherigen Jahrhunderte hinstreckenden wissenschaftlichen Beschäftigung mit Pflanzen, Tieren und Mikroorganismen zu situieren, die sich keiner relativen oder relationalen Ordnung in Zeit und Raum gewidmet hat. Indem die Eiche die sie dominierende Ordnung erzählend unterläuft, greift sie wie ausgeführt wurde in eine Tradition der Epistemologie ein, die Pflanzen klassifiziert, Taxonomien erstellt und dadurch die Herstellung von Wissen über Lebewesen intern vorstrukturiert. Gleichzeitig wird dieses Wissen jedoch als ein nicht nur naturgeschichtliches, sondern als gleichsam ‚repräsentationales‘ kontextualisiert, das

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Ordnungen des Pflanzen-Wissens auch in Philosophie, Theorie und Literatur situierbar macht. Die Anerkennung der Relativität von Mensch, Tier und Pflanze, wie sie die Eiche in Direction of the Road verlangt, hat sich deshalb mit synchronen als auch diachronen Entwicklungen zu befassen. Hierdurch lässt sich das epistemische Potenzial des Texts in multiplen sich gegeneinander und miteinander fortschreibenden Ordnungssystemen festmachen, die eine bestehende Ordnung der Dinge nicht als explizit naturgeschichtliche verstanden wissen wollen, sondern als eine mitunter jegliche Repräsentationen von Pflanzlichkeit betreffende Auslegeordnung in Naturwissenschaft, Kulturtheorie oder Literatur. Ersichtlich wird so, dass der Protest der Eiche gegen die Ordnung der Dinge am ehesten in der Form der Erzählung stattfinden kann; denn die Erzählung vermag es, die konstitutiven Parameter eines historischen Umschlagpunkts einerseits und die Spezifika einer Geschichte der Naturerfassung andererseits zu erörtern. Gleichzeitig ist der Protest der Eiche auch als Protest gegen eine Erzählordnung aufzufassen, die Alternativen von Erzählzeit, Erzählraum, Fokalisierung und sequenzieller Struktur erst hervorbringen muss. Die in der Erzählung entworfene Poetik des Pflanzlichen dient folglich dazu, Wissen über Pflanzen und Pflanze-Mensch-Verhältnisse zu entwickeln und Ordnungen und Traditionen des pflanzlichen Wissens in Naturwissenschaft, Repräsentation und Literatur zu versetzen. Wissen über Pflanzen respektive die epistemische Eigendynamik wird im Text denn auch nur aus einer vegetabilen Perspektive zugänglich, die nicht nur über einen weitaus größeren Erfahrungszeitraum verfügen kann als ein menschlicher Zeithorizont es könnte, sondern immer auch die Frage mittragen muss, wie Wissen über Pflanzen und die Natur im Allgemeinen von historischen und bestehenden Ordnungen in Raum und Zeit geprägt sind.52 Das Wissen der Eiche in Direction of the Road, die sich einer herrschenden Ordnung fügt, bzw. eine Bewegung vollzieht, welche diese Ordnung zwingend versetzen muss, birgt deshalb ein Risikomoment, das der Autounfall im Text in gewisser Weise antizipieren lässt. Gleichzeitig vermag es die Erzählung, neue Formen des Pflanzen-Denkens durchzuspielen, die von der Lebendigkeit und der Relativität von Beobachter_innen in Raum und Zeit auszugehen haben. Damit wird auch die Rolle der Bäume in der Philosophie- und Theoriegeschichte als Repräsentanten von Ordnungssystemen und Hierarchien relativiert: Der Baum bei Le Guin kann, genauso wie das ihm bei Deleuze und Guattari entgegengestellte Rhizom, nicht-lineare chronologische und topologische Multiplizitäten wiedergeben und repräsentieren. Passt die Eiche ihre Bewegung im Raum an Fußgänger_innen, Reiter_innen und Autofahrer_innen konsequent an, aner52 Joela Jacobs spricht in Anlehnung an den Begriff der Zoopoetik von Phytopoetik, vgl. Joela Jacobs, „Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism“, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, Nr. 2 (2019): 1.

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kennt sie nicht nur die sich verändernden Ordnungen der Dinge; durch ihre Aufrechterhaltung der „obligation to the general Order of Things“,53 nämlich ihrer Bewegungsleistung, lässt sie auch die Bäume der Theorie bei de Saussure, Chomsky oder Deleuze und Guattari eigentlich erst funktionieren. So kann die Eiche simultan eine Ordnung der Dinge dekonstituieren und reformulieren; die Herstellung von Wissen an und mit Pflanzen – d. h. eine gewisse Repräsentation von Pflanzlichkeit an sich – als Teil einer Ordnung offen- und erzählend neu auslegen. Das Multitasking der Eiche – die zwei Richtungen der Straße – sind so durchaus als Bewegungen der Erzählung selbst zu verstehen. Eine Ewigmachung von Bäumen, sei es in Repräsentationen der Theorie, der Literatur oder der Naturwissenschaft, müsste sich deshalb zwingend zu rechtfertigen wissen.

Bibliografie Baer, Karl Ernst von. Reden gehalten in wissenschaftlichen Versammlungen und kleinere Aufsätze vermischten Inhalts. St. Petersburg: Verlag der kaiserlichen Hofbuchhandlung, 1864. Becker, Andreas. Perspektiven einer anderen Natur. Geschichte und Theorie der filmischen Zeitraffung und Zeitdehnung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles und Felix Guattari. Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Berlin: Merve, 1992. Foucault, Michel. Die Ordnung der Dinge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Jacobs, Joela. „Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism“. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, Nr. 2 (2019): 1–18. Jacobs, Joela und Isabel Kranz. „Einleitung“. In Das literarische Leben der Pflanzen. Poetiken des Botanischen. Literatur für Leser 2017/2, herausgegeben von Joela Jacobs und Isabel Kranz, 85–89. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019. Le Guin, Ursula K. „Direction of the Road“. In Ursula K. Le Guin. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. Stories, 267–274. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Lepenies, Wolf. Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1976. Mach, Ludwig. „Ueber das Princip der Zeitverku¨ rzung in der Serienphotographie“. Photographische Rundschau 4 (1893): 121–28. Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005. Nitzke, Solvejg. „Arboreale Poetik, oder: Mit Bäumen erzählen“. In Baum und Text. Neue Perspektiven auf verzweigte Beziehungen, herausgegeben von Stephanie Heimgartner, Solvejg Nitzke und Simone Sauer-Kretschmer, 165–196. Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag, 2020.

53 Le Guin, „Direction of the Road“, 272.

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Ryan, John C. „Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through Human-Plant Studies“. Societies 2, Nr. 3 (2012): 101–21. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Grundfragen der Allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967. Stobbe, Urte. „Plant Studies: Pflanzen kulturwissenschaftlich erforschen – Grundlagen, Tendenzen, Perspektiven“. Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 4 (2019): 91–106. Van Hoorn, Tanja. Naturgeschichte in der ästhetischen Moderne. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016. Vieira, Patrícia, Monica Gagliano und John C. Ryan, Hg. The Language of Plants. Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

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Ines Gries (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)

Tanzende Pflanzen. Eine posthumanistische Perspektive auf Goethes Kunstnatur

Abstract Dancing Plants. A Posthumanist Perspective on Goethe’s Nature of Art Goethe’s late work confronts us with the terminological problem of form. Besides phenomena concerned with both absolute and dissolved form, his late work presents another appearance of form: a form constituted by the withdrawal of form. The following text is the experimental attempt to exhaust this said contradictio in adiecto. The underlying assumption is that the terminological resistance of this third form entails an unuttered demand for transcending this particular concept of form. To settle this hypothetical demand, the following text does not focus on questions of form, but on questions of movement. Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants builds the theoretical foundation for carrying out this intent. In the following text, the metamorphosis is understood as a theory of kinetics and as a poetical negotiation of a botanical principle of accident. It thereby challenges id-entity as the focal point of aesthetic form- and force from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Keywords: Goethe, form, spiral tendency (Spiraltendenz), Im Vorübergehn, ΤΥΧΗ, Das Zufällige

Von einem Entzug der Form in der Form1 schreibt Eva Geulen in einem gleich lautenden Aufsatz zu Goethes fragmentarischem Festspiel Pandora und bezieht sich damit ergänzend auf ein von Georg Simmel identifiziertes Formproblem in Goethes Spätwerk. In diesem zeige sich ein neues geistiges Entwicklungsstadium, das als Durchbrechung und Überwindung des Formprinzips zu bezeichnen sei.2 Während Simmel diesen Formverlust als lebensphilosophische Lösung fruchtbar macht, schlägt Geulen vor, den „Entzug der Form in der Form“3 genauer zu bezeichnen, „um dort einen Formbegriff auszumachen, bei dem die Dynamik der Zeit in den vormals eidetischen Begriff gleichsam eingewandert ist“.4 Geulen holt 1 Eva Geulen, „Entzug der Form in der Form“, in Epiphanie der Form. Goethes „Pandora“ im Licht seiner Form- und Kulturkonzepte, hg. v. Sabine Schneider und Juliane Vogel, 17–35. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018. 2 Vgl. ibid., 18. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 19.

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sich dazu die Figuren Pro- und Epimetheus aus Goethes Pandora zu Hilfe (zum einen als Auflösung und zum anderen als Verabsolutierung der Form), die sie einer dritten Form, nämlich der verzeitlichten, flüssigen, formentzogenen Pandorengabe, gegenüberstellt: In der Pandora hat nicht die Dauer im Wechsel das letzte Wort, nicht das feste Gesetz von Typus und Metamorphose. Die Grundform des Stückes ist die fließende, flüssige Form, die Form noch nicht oder nicht mehr ist. Die Urform dieser neuen Form jenseits von Auflösung der schönen Form einerseits und Reduktion der Form auf Werkzeug und Waffen andererseits sind die „Schwebenden“ aus Pandoras Gefäß. Was diese Bilder im Einzelnen bedeuten, sei dahingestellt, entscheidend ist ihr Aggregatzustand der nicht-festen, sondern beweglichen Form, der ihr Entzug wesentlich ist.5

Nicht als Alternative, sondern als Erweiterung dieser Auseinandersetzung mit Goethes morphologischem Formbegriff ist der folgende Vorschlag gedacht. In Anerkennung dieses ungreifbaren, weil schwankenden6 oder flüssig-sich-entziehenden, Formbegriffs soll ein Perspektivwechsel weg vom Formbegriff (dessen Vokabular zur Beschreibung der Phänomene möglicherweise so unbefriedigend, weil unzureichend ist) hin zu einer nicht-essenziellen, also weder Stoff noch Form betreffenden, Kategorie ventiliert werden: der Bewegung. Wie sich zeigt, ist ein solcher Perspektivwechsel nicht nur zur Beschreibung derartiger „formentzogener“ Phänomene hilfreich, sondern beteiligt sich gleichzeitig an der Diskussion jener kulturellen Leitdifferenz zwischen Kunst und Natur, die Büchners Lenz nicht auf dem Kopf gehen lässt,7 und die eine diffizile Beziehung von Kunstund Naturformen beschreibt. Als eine dieser formentzogenen Altersformen muss auch das 1827 im zweiten Gedichtband der Ausgabe letzter Hand veröffentlichte Gedicht Im Vorübergehn 5 Ibid., 29: Um Figuren des Festen und Flüssigen und deren Grundlage zur Formulierung eines ästhetischen Formbegriffs geht es (auch) in dem im gleichen Band erschienenen Beitrag von Cornelia Zumbusch, „Fest und Flüssig. Goethes „Pandora“ als Schauspiel der symbolischen Form“, in Epiphanie der Form. Goethes „Pandora“ im Licht seiner Form- und Kulturkonzepte, hg. v. Sabine Schneider und Juliane Vogel, 36–58. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018. Zumbusch erarbeitet verschiedene Stürze ins Wasser in Goethes Werk und identifiziert dieses „Wasserstürze“ als symbolische Emergenz des Lebendigen (vgl. ibid., 58). 6 Vgl. Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager, 25–26. Berlin und Köln: August Verlag, 2016: „Typus, Metamorphose und der Etat der Natur bilden vielmehr ein schwankendes Ensemble. […] Auch in der Pandora ist Schwanken ein Wort für ungewisses Erscheinen, das sich noch nicht oder nicht mehr zu einer Gestalt entschieden hat“. 7 Georg Büchner, „Lenz“, in Georg Büchner, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente in zwei Bänden, hg. v. Henri Poschmann, 225–50; 225. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006: „Müdigkeit spürte er [Lenz – I. G.] keine, nur war es ihm manchmal unangenehm, daß er nicht auf dem Kopf gehen konnte. […] Es war ihm alles so klein, so nahe, so naß, er hätte die Erde hinter den Ofen setzen mögen […].“ Vgl. dazu z. B. Martina Kitzbichler, Aufbegehren der Natur: das Schicksal der vergesellschafteten Seele in Georg Bu¨chners Werk (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993).

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gelten. Dieses in der Forschung quasi unbesprochene Gedicht ist bestenfalls durch seine Verwandtschaft mit dem zwölf Jahre zuvor entstandenen Gefunden bekannt, welches Goethe anlässlich der Silberhochzeit mit Christiane Vulpius ersinnt und 1815 im ersten Gedichtband derselben Ausgabe publiziert. Im Vorübergehn zeichnet sich durch einen vergleichbaren Entzug der Form aus, wie ihn Geulen anhand der Pandora erarbeitet. Mithilfe vier analysierter Phänomene wird deutlich, dass der konstatierte Formentzug als eine dem Text eigene Verhaltensweise, als Bewegung, beobachtet werden kann. Die exemplarischen Phänomene werden im Rahmen einer auf Bewegung fokussierten Textanalyse beschrieben, bevor Bewegung als erkenntnistheoretische Kategorie eingeführt wird, die die Dichotomie Kultur–Natur versuchsweise überbrückt und so eine posthumanistische Lesart Goethes ermöglicht.

Textanalyse Im Vorübergehn (1827)8

Gefunden (1815)9

Ich ging im Felde So für mich hin, Und nichts zu suchen, Das war mein Sinn.

Ich ging im Walde So für mich hin, Und nichts zu suchen Das war mein Sinn.

Ich wollt’ es brechen, Da sagt’ es schleunig: Ich habe Wurzeln, Die sind gar heimlich.

Ich wollt’ es brechen; Da sagt’ es fein: Soll ich zum Welken Gebrochen sein?

Heidenröslein (1789)10

Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden, War so jung und morgenschön, Lief er schnell es nah zu sehn, Sah’s mit vielen Freuden, Da stand ein Blümchen Im Schatten sah’ ich Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Sogleich so nah, Ein Blümchen stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden. Daß ich im Leben Wie Sterne leuchtend, Nichts lieber sah. Wie Äuglein schön. Knabe sprach: ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden! Röslein sprach: ich steche dich, Daß du ewig denkst an mich, Und ich will’s nicht leiden. Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden.

8 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, „Im Vorübergehn“, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Abteilung 1, Bd. 1: Gedichte 1756–1799, hg. v. Karl Eibl, 475–76. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. Im Folgenden wird auf die hier ausgewiesene Gesamtwerkausgabe unter Angabe der Abteilung und des Bandes als „FA“ verwiesen. 9 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, „Gefunden“, in ibid. (FA 1,1), 20. 10 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, „Heidenröslein“, in ibid. (FA 1,1), 278.

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(Fortsetzung) Und der wilde Knabe brach ’s Röslein auf der Heiden; Röslein wehrte sich und stach, Half ihr doch kein Weh und Ach, Mußt es eben leiden. Ich kann nicht liebeln, Und pflanzt es wieder Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Ich kann nicht schranzen; Am stillen Ort; Röslein auf der Heiden. Mußt mich nicht brechen, Nun zweigt es immer Mußt mich verpflanzen. Und blüht so fort. Im tiefen Boden Bin ich gegründet; Drum sind die Blüten So schön geründet.

Ich grub’s mit allen Den Würzlein aus, Zum Garten trug ich’s Am hübschen Haus.

– Ich ging im Walde So vor mich hin; Ich war so heiter, Wollt’ immer weiter – Das war mein Sinn.

a)

Fugung

Im direkten Vergleich mutet Im Vorübergehn bis zum zweiten Vers der dritten Strophe zunächst wie eine leicht veränderte Version von Gefunden an. Der Wald wird zum Feld und die attributive Beschreibung des Blümchens („Wie Sterne leuchtend, / Wie Äuglein schön“) wird zur affektiven Selbstbeobachtung des sprechenden Ich („Daß ich im Leben / Nichts lieber sah“), jedoch mit dem gleichen Ergebnis: „Ich wollt’ es brechen / Da sagt’ es […]“. Der nun folgende kleine Unterschied zwischen „fein“ und „schleunig“ öffnet seine hermeneutische Tiefe erst mit Blick auf die folgenden sich durch die Silbenzahl eben dieser Worte ändernden, nun nicht mehr alternierenden, sondern gleichbleibend asynaphischen Versübergänge. Was diese in den folgenden Strophen drei, vier und fünf regelmäßig-unregelmäßige Fugung hervorbringt, ist eine Beschleunigung („schleunig“) wie Fragmentierung (ungefugter Versübergang). Das im Vergleich zu den Strophen drei, vier und fünf in Gefunden beschleunigte Tempo und der zu Versbeginn wie Versende immer wieder abrupte Richtungswechsel bilden die aus Goethes Morphologie bekannte Bewegung des Schwankens par excellence ab.11 11 Dem Schwanken widmet Eva Geulen ein eigenes Kapitel in ihrer „Nagermonografie“ Aus dem Leben der Form. Sie identifiziert Goethes „Lavieren und Schwanken“ in Streit- und Glaubensfragen der frühen Biologie als exzentrisch wissenschaftshistorische Stellung zwischen Cuvier und Darwin (vgl. Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 41) und die Morphologie selbst als „schwankende“ Disziplin zwischen Anatomie und Physiognomik (vgl. ibid., 51), das „Schwanken“ als die Unbestimmbarkeit einer Form als Form (vgl. ibid., 66), und in Kombination mit dem Schaukeln wird „[d]as unstete Schwanken […] mit dem Schaukelsystem zu einem gegenstandsunabhängigen Verfahren geadelt […]“, vgl. ibid., 78.

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Auf den perlenkettenartigen Verlauf der ersten beiden Strophen (der analog zu Gefunden seinen Weg nimmt) folgt also ein Bewegungswechsel hin zum Schwanken, der erst mit dem zweiten Vers der zusätzlichen sechsten Strophe eine weitere Transformation erlebt („So vor mich hin“). Ein Schwanken kann durch eine kurvenförmige Bewegung ausgedrückt werden, die einen festen Ankerpunkt sowie einen ersten Start und Wendepunkt hat. Je nach Gewicht oder Antrieb des „Schwankenden“ verändern sich Start- und Wendepunkt mit jedem Richtungswechsel, d. h. in unserem Fall beginnt es nach jedem Richtungswechsel eine Zeile tiefer, bevor sich das Schwanken ausgependelt hat und sich die Bewegung in Folge der nächsten Beobachtung verändert.

b)

Leerstelle

Das aus sechs Strophen bestehende liedhafte Gedicht weist zwischen vorletzter und letzter Strophe eine prominente Leerstelle auf. Dass Strophe fünf explizit auf den Stoff des zwölf Jahre zuvor entstandenen Gefunden verweist,12 ist zunächst weniger überraschend, mutet das Gedicht doch aufgrund der nahezu identischen ersten Strophe als zweite Version des älteren Widmungsgedichtes an. Umso auffälliger ist die folgende Leerstelle, die das erfolgreiche Verpflanzen13 aus Gefunden als nachhaltige Lösung für die Verbindung von Ich und Blümchen in Frage stellt. Die Leerstelle verweist daher kaum nur auf das (scheinbar) redundant gewordene frühere Gedicht, sondern fordert eine dritte Variable zur Lösung der Gleichung hinzu, nämlich das noch deutlich früher entstandene und 1789 erstmals offiziell veröffentlichte Heidenröslein. Dafür, dem offensichtlich verwandten Gedichtpaar Gefunden und Im Vorübergehn das Heidenröslein anzuschließen, spricht nicht nur das dort ebenfalls motivisch verhandelte Brechen eines floralen Diminutivs, sondern auch die formal-orthografische Ähnlichkeit des stacheligen Gedankenstrichs und des stechenden, heißt dornenbesetzten, Rösleins.14 Erst unter Berücksichtigung des Heidenröslein wird der, angesichts der in Gefunden so harmonisch-nachhaltig verlaufenden Beziehung zwischen „Ich“ und „Blümchen“ unerwartete, erotische Entzug des Blümchens in Strophe fünf („Ich kann nicht liebeln, / Ich kann nicht schranzen“) überhaupt erst 12 Siehe Strophe fünf Im Vorübergehn: „Mußt mich nicht brechen, / Mußt mich verpflanzen“. 13 Siehe Strophen vier und fünf Gefunden: „Ich grub’s mit allen / Den Würzlein aus, / […] / Und pflanzt es wieder / Am stillen Ort“. 14 Als möglicherweise Richtung Bildgedicht zeigende Eigenschaft ist das im Kontext mit Jan Wagners Gedicht nach dornröschen offensichtlich umgesetzt; die mehrfach verwendeten Gedankenstriche scheinen ein orthografisches Bild der inhaltlich verhandelten Rosendornen im Gedicht zu sein: Jan Wagner, „nach dornröschen“, in Jan Wagner, Die Live Butterfly Show. Gedichte (Berlin: Hanser Verlag, 2018), 64–65.

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sinnhaltig. Das Verspaar mit dem doppelten „Mußt“ („Mußt mich nicht brechen, / Mußt mich verpflanzen“) weist damit aus dem eigenen Text heraus auf das zugehörige dritte aus dem Heidenröslein („Mußt’ es eben leiden“).

c)

Sein

„Ich ging […] / So für mich hin“ heißt es in Gefunden sowie in der ersten Strophe von Im Vorübergehn, bevor es in der letzten Strophe des Letzteren in „Ich ging […] / So vor mich hin“ umgewandelt wird. Der erste Fall besteht aus einer Melange der Idiome „vor sich hin“ und „für sich sein“. Hier steht noch bis zum Beginn des späten Gedichts das bewegende bzw. das bewegte („hin“) Individuum („für mich“) im Vordergrund, das auf die persönliche Entwicklung, den eigenen Bildungsweg, bedacht ist. Abgelöst wird es erst in der letzten Strophe von Im Vorübergehn durch die bekannte Phrase „vor sich hin“. Dass diese Änderung weder eine unbedeutende Kleinigkeit noch ein dichterisches Versehen Goethes ist, wird mit der Konsequenz dieser Formulierung für die letzten Verse des Gedichts deutlich. Denn auf „So vor mich hin“ folgt nicht, wie in den vorigen Strophen, „Und nichts zu suchen“, sondern „Ich war so heiter, / Wollt’ immer weiter –“. „So vor mich hin“ ändert die zuvor enklavistisch auf das Individuum gerichtete Perspektive („für mich hin“) von außen nach innen, zu einer von innen nach außen, in der das zeitlich und räumlich Bewegte („vor mich hin“) im Vordergrund steht. „So vor mich hin“ ändert auch den Kontext des zufälligen Findens („Und nichts zu suchen“) in einen Kontext der aktiven Auseinandersetzung mit der Umgebung („Wollt’ immer weiter –“). Das sprechende Ich ist an dieser Stelle bewegt durch ein doppeltes Umfeld und will „heiter“ und „immer weiter“ wandern in Wald und Feld, aber auch, mit Blick auf die im zweiten Gedankenstrich erneut zu füllende Leerstelle, volkstümlichen Fabelliedchen wie dem Heidenröslein begegnen, wie zwischen Strophe fünf und sechs. Die zweifache Leerstelle ist dadurch mit einer doppelten Bedeutung belegt: der Begegnung mit Natur (die in Wald oder Feld zu findende rosa caninae) und der Begegnung mit Kultur (der Ballade Heidenröslein).

d)

Zeit

Die drei Gedichte sind in jeweils großen Zeitabständen zueinander erschienen und decken von 1789 bis 1827 einen großen Zeitraum des goetheschen Schaffens ab. Interessant ist dabei auch die Genese des Heidenröslein, dessen Motivge-

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schichte bis 1602 zurückreicht.15 Dieses paratextuell generierte historische Bewusstsein wiederholt sich auf chronologischer Ebene der Publikationsordnung, denn aufgrund eines manifestierten Rückblicks in der letzten Strophe von Im Vorübergehn geraten die drei Texte in eine Zeitschleife. „Und nichts zu suchen / Das war mein Sinn“ erfahren wir als die ursprüngliche in der Retrospektive festgehaltene Motivation in Gefunden, die den Texten zugrunde liegt, und sich offen als ein in der Zukunft liegendes Urteil über das bereits Vergangene zu erkennen gibt. Diese in der Vergangenheit liegende Motivation wird in der letzten Strophe von Gefunden durch den Gegenwartsmarker „Nun“ ergänzt („Nun zweigt es immer“) und mit einem unmittelbar darauffolgenden Verweis auf die Zukunft vervollständigt („Und blüht so fort“). Nun kann das Blümchen aber nicht ewig blühen und das wird spätestens zwölf Jahre später mit Erscheinen von Im Vorübergehn deutlich, denn das vom Walde zum Haus mit Garten geführte sprechende Ich findet sich nun im Felde wieder.16 Am Ende seines Lebens bleibt Goethe nur noch der Blick zurück, weshalb die Zeitschleife eben da den Anfang nimmt, wo es heißt: „Wollt’ immer weiter – / Das war mein Sinn“. Die zweite Zäsur des Gedichts wiederholt den Verweis auf das Heidenröslein in der vorletzten Strophe noch einmal und legt den in die Vergangenheit gerichteten Fokus damit zunächst auf das nachhaltig verpflanzte Blümchen aus Gefunden und dessen vermeintlich ewiges Blühen („Ich ging im Walde“), um dann auf das noch weiter zurück liegende Heidenröslein und dessen alte Motivgeschichte zu verweisen, von wo die Zeitreise wieder von vorne beginnt und über die Gegenwart und Zukunft in Gefunden erneut über Im Vorübergehn eine Schleife in die Vergangenheit dreht.

Bewegung als erkenntnistheoretische Kategorie Der zweifache Gedankenstrich des späten Gedichts repräsentiert das Schwanken und Schleifendrehen einer Form, die Kunst und Natur gleichermaßen und gleichzeitig zugehörig ist: dem Heidenröslein und der rosa caninae. Diese Zuschreibung ist doppelt erklärungsbedürftig, denn mit dem Schwanken und Schleifendrehen dieser sessilen Kunst-Natur-Form ist nicht nur eine Bewegung 15 Paul von der Aelst, Blumm und Außbund Allerhandt Außerlesener Weltlicher, Züchtiger Lieder und Rheymen …, hg. v. Ernst Schulte-Strathaus (München: Hyperion-Verlag, 1912), 179–81: „Sie gleicht wol einem Rosenstock, / drumb geliebt sie mir im hertzen; / sie tregt auch einen rohten Rock, / kan züchtig, freundlich schertzen. […] / Der die rößlein wirt brechen ab, / Rößlein auff der heyden, / daß wirt wol thun ein junger knab, / züchtig, fein bescheiden.“ 16 Der zwischen den Gedichten stattfindende Raumwechsel von ‚purer‘ Natur (Wald) in ein ‚natur-künstliches‘ Umfeld des Gartens, und anschließend bestelltes/bewirtschaftetes Feld ist einer eigenen Untersuchung mit Sicherheit wert.

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im Sinne einer wachstums- oder altersbedingten17 Formveränderung gemeint. Die Form des doppelt markierten Heidenrösleins erscheint in dem Gedicht nicht eigentlich selbst, sondern auf sie wird von der Leerstelle aus verwiesen. Dieser Verweis, repräsentiert durch das Schwanken und Schleifendrehen, führt aus dem Gedicht Im Vorübergehn heraus, zwingt die Rezeption dazu, sich aus dem eigentlichen Text hinauszubewegen, die gegebene Form temporär zu verlassen. Bewegung ist eine interdisziplinäre Kategorie, die die räumliche Veränderung einer Form18 mit der Zeit meint. Innerhalb dieser Kategorie sind Ortswechsel, Wachstumsbewegungen oder Transformationen gleichermaßen beschreibbar. Immer wenn eine Form wandert, sich verändert oder auflöst, werden Begrifflichkeiten der Bewegung daher zum legitimen Deskriptionsvokabular. Was sich in Im Vorübergehn und seiner Verweisbewegung Richtung Heidenröslein phänomenologisch als poetisches Verfahren andeutet, greift Goethe in seinen letzten Jahren 1831/1832 im naturwissenschaftlichen Zusammenhang erneut auf. Zwei Aufsätze zur Spiral- und Vertikaltendenz entstehen, die als theoretische Erweiterung seiner Metamorphosenlehre gedacht sind: [H]at man den Begriff der Metamorphose vollkommen gefaßt so achtet man ferner um die Ausbildung der Pflanze näher zu erkennen zuerst auf die vertikale Tendenz. Diese ist anzusehen wie ein geistiger Stab, welcher das Dasein begründet und solches auf lange Zeit zu erhalten fähig ist. […] Das Spiralsystem ist das Fortbildende, Vermehrende, als solches Vorübergehende sich von jenem gleichsam isolierend. Im Übermaß fortwirkend ist es sehr bald hinfällig,

17 Amanda Goldstein interpretiert Goethes Morphologische Schriften als Theorie des Alterns, nicht des (vitalistischen) Wachstums: „Morphology manages to represent life as a condition rather than a power, to turn from self-sufficient integrity toward a proto-ecological notion of contingency and interrelation, and to experiment in theorizing and writing ‚life‘ from the perspective of senescent extravagance rather than self-production and procreation“. Amanda Goldstein, Sweet Science. Romantic Materialism and the logic of life (Chicago und London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 74. 18 Vgl. David E. Wellbery, „Form und Idee. Skizze eines Begriffsfeldes um 1800“, in Morphologie und Moderne. Goethes anschauliches Denken in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften seit 1800, hg. v. Jonas Maatsch, 17–42; 19. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Wellbery beschreibt Goethes Formkonzept als „Endogenes Formkonzept“ und unterscheidet es damit von dem „Eidetischen Formkonzept“ Platons oder dem „Konstruktivistische[n] Formkonzept“ Saussures. Während Platons und Saussures Konzepte auf Objektidentität bzw. Grenzziehung und den Differenzcharakter einer Form ausgerichtet sind, ist Goethes Formkonzept prozessual bestimmt. Das, was ich unter Bewegung ( je)der Form verstehe, ist womöglich dem am nächsten, was Ernst Cassirer unter dem Begriff „symbolische Form“ verhandelt, nämlich (symbolische) Form als Medium „der erkennenden Tätigkeit des Geistes“ (vgl. Klaus Städtke, „Form,“ in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, hg. v. Karlheinz Barck, Bd 2, 489–90. Stuttgart und Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001. „Unter einer symbolischen Form soll jede Energie des Geistes verstanden werden, durch welche ein geistiger Bedeutungsgehalt an ein konkretes sinnliches Zeichen geknüpft und diesem Zeichen innerlich zugeeignet wird“ (Ernst Cassirer, Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften, zitiert nach ibid.).

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dem Verderben ausgesetzt, an jenes angeschlossen verwachsen beide zu einer dauernden Einheit, das Holz oder sonstiges Solide.19

Die Idee zur Spiraltendenz erhält Goethe vom „Ritter Martius“20 sowie dem „vortrefflichen Dutrochet“21, der 1824 „nervimotorische Vorgänge“22 in Pflanzen und eine daraus resultierende „Lokomobilität“23 derselben entdeckt. Was in pantheistisch motivierten Rezeptionen dieser pflanzlichen Nervenzellen24 19 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, „Zur Spiraltendenz der Vegetation“, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Abteilung 1, Bd. 24: Schriften zur Morphologie, hg. v. Dorothea Kuhn, 786–87. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987. 20 Vgl. ibid., 785. 21 Ibid., 799 und vgl. ibid., 793. 22 Henri Dutrochet, Physiologische Untersuchungen über die Beweglichkeit der Pflanzen und der Tiere (1824), übers. v. Alexander Nathansohn (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1906), 4–5: „Diesen Bewegungsvorgang, der in den Sinnesorganen unter dem Einfluß äußerer Faktoren erzeugt wird und sich in den Nerven fortpflanzt, nenne ich ‚Nervimotion‘ und die Fähigkeit, mittles deren sie statthat, ‚Nervimotilität‘. […] Das Leben, als physikalische Erscheinung betrachtet, ist nichts anderes als Bewegung; der Tod ist deren Ende. Die lebendigen Wesen lassen uns mehrfache Art dieses Bewegungsvermögens erkennen: voran die ‚Nervimotilität‘, die Fähigkeit, unter dem Einflusse äußerer Ursachen der ‚nervimotorischen Kräfte‘ bestimmte Änderungen ihres Wesens zu erfahren. Diese erste, unsichtbar bleibende Bewegung ist die Quelle der sichtbaren Bewegung, die lebende Organe ausführen. Die Fähigkeit, diese Bewegungen auszuführen, kann man ‚Lokomobilität‘ nennen: sie weist zwei entgegengesetzte Bewegungsformen auf: die Kontraktion und Schwellung. Alle diese verschiedenen Arten des Bewegungsvermögens knüpfen sich an eine allgemeine Fähigkeit, die ich mit dem Worte ‚vitale Motilität‘ bezeichne. Sie ist nichts anderes als das Leben selbst.“ 23 Ibid. 24 Gustav Theodor Fechner, Nanna oder Über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (Hamburg und Leipzig: Voß, 1903), 36: „Die Spiralfasern, Spiralgefäße, der Pflanzen bilden sich gleich den Nervenfasern aus einer Verschmelzung aneinander gereihter Zellen und stellen, wie diese, eigentlich feine Röhrchen dar, nur daß sie im ausgebildeten Zustande bloß Luft führen, während die Nervenfasern oder Nervenröhrchen ein flüssiges Wesen zu enthalten scheinen. Die Spiralfasern erstrecken sich in einem kontinuierlichen Zusammenhange durch die Pflanze, verzweigen sich nie, sondern die größern Bündel geben bloß kleinere Bündel durch Abbeugen der Fasern von sich ab. Ihre Stellung ist zentral gegen die andern Arten Fasern und Zellen der Pflanze, indem jedes Spiralfaserbündel von solchen umschlossen wird, und zwar vorzugsweise von langgestreckten Zellen (Fasern), wie im Tiere es vorzugsweise Gefäße sind, die in der Nachbarschaft der Nerven laufen. Die Zahl und Anordnung der Spiralgefäßbündel ist charakteristisch und bedeutungsvoll für jede Pflanze, indem der Bau des Ganzen damit im Zusammenhange steht; sie treten im Ganzen um so mächtiger auf und schließen sich um so mehr zusammen, je höher die Stufe ist, auf der die Pflanze steht, während man in den niedersten Pflanzen nichts davon hat entdecken können. Eine wichtige Funktion muß ihnen nach ihrem eigentümlichen Bau und ihrer Stellung in der Pflanze wohl beigelegt werden; aber wie bei den Nerven der Tiere spricht sich diese in keiner materiellen Leistung unmittelbar deutlich aus. Die Pflanzenphysiologen von Fach sind höchst verschiedener Meinung darüber, und die Besonnensten geben zu, daß wir nichts darüber wissen. […] Auch wir finden uns diesen Geheimnissen näher zu treten hier weiter nicht aufgefordert. Man sieht jedenfalls, daß das hier vorliegende Naturgeheimnis, wie alle Naturgeheimnisse, auch der wunderlichen Auslegungen nicht ermangelt.“

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schnell esoterisch anmutet, ist im Grunde die rein phänomenologisch wie experimentell begründete Beobachtung, dass sich Pflanzen – analog zu Tieren – bewegen; auch sessiles Leben inerte organische Bewegungen ausführt, und zwar vornehmlich solche der Schwellung und Kontraktion.25 Für Goethe wird das, was er in Anlehnung an Dutrochet „Spiralgefäße“ nennt und mit dem antiken Konzept der Homoiomerien26 gleichsetzt, zum Bildspender für die grundsätzliche Verhaltensweise einer Pflanze, nämlich sich in gleichermaßen spiraler wie vertikaler Tendenz zu bewegen.27 Dabei liegt sein Fokus aus nachvollziehbaren methodischen Gründen vor allem auf der Bewegung im Sinne eines Wachstumsverhaltens, d. h. derjenigen Bewegung, die sich durch Veränderung der Form manifestiert. Das führt dazu, dass sich das spiraltendenzielle Bewegungsverhalten in Goethes Betrachtungen bei einigen Pflanzen erst retrospektiv ab einem gewissen Alter der Pflanze zeigt.28 Mit Dutrochet aber wird klar, dass die Pflanze ebenso reversible organische Bewegungen in Abwechslung von Kontraktion und Schwellung ausführt, die sich formal nicht manifestieren. Die Beweglichkeit von Pflanzen, die in Goethes Alterswerk unter dem Begriff der Spiraltendenz zum Bedeutungsschlüssel der Metamorphose wird, bezieht sich daher nicht – so wie Goethes Metamorphose (der Pflanzen) bisher rezipiert wurde – auf die Formveränderung,29 sondern die Formveränderung. Schon die 25 Siehe Zitat in Fußnote 20. 26 Doxografisches Konzept nach Anaxagoras: „Ursprünglich waren diese vermischt, durch eine Rotationsbewegung schieden sich aus den verschiedenen Materiezuständen kalt, feucht, schwer etc. die konkreten Stoffe wie Luft, Wasser, Erde; die jeweils vorherrschende Samenqualität bestimmt die Qualität des entstehenden Stoffes“. Kai Brodersen und Bernhard Zimmermann, „Anaxagoras“, in Kai Brodersen und Bernhard Zimmermann, Metzler Lexikon Antike (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2006), 33. 27 Goethe, „Zur Spiraltendenz der Vegetation“, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,24), 799: „Die Spiralgefäße betrachten wir als die kleinsten Teile, welche dem Ganzen, dem sie angehören, vollkommen gleich sind, und, als Homoiomerien angesehen, ihm ihre Eigenheiten mitteilen und von demselben wieder Eigenschaft und Bestimmung erhalten. Es wird ihnen ein Selbstleben zugeschrieben, die Kraft sich an und für sich einzeln zu bewegen und eine gewisse Richtung anzunehmen. Der vortreffliche Dutrochet nenne sie eine vitale Inkurvation.“ 28 Ibid., 800: „Die in ihrer völligen Freiheit herunterhängenden frischen Fadenzweige des Lycium europaeum zeigen nur einen geraden fadenartigen Wuchs. Wird die Pflanze älter, trockner, so bemerkt man deutlich, daß sie sich von Knoten zu Knoten zu einer Windung hinneigt.“ 29 Mihaela Zaharia, „Metamorphose“, in Goethe Handbuch. Supplemente, Bd. 2: Naturwissenschaften, hg. v. Gabriele Busch-Salmen et. al., 542. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2012: „Mit den Begriffen von Typus und Metamorphose suchte G. die Grundgesetze seiner morphologischen Vorstellungen zu umschreiben. Dabei fasste er die nahezu unendliche Formenvielfalt in der Natur mit seiner Anschauung der Metamorphose, dem ständigen Gestalten und Umgestalten, Bilden und Umbilden, während die ordnende Gesetzmäßigkeiten, die dem Wirken der Metamorphose schließlich eine Grenze ziehen in seinem Typus-Konzept zum Ausdruck kamen“; doch schon Boisserée vermerkt nach einem Gespräch mit Goethe in seinem Tagebuch: „Alles ist Metamorphose im Leben – bei den Pflanzen und bei den Tieren bis zum Menschen und bei

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zweite Stanze seiner Urworte. Orphisch30 gibt 1817 dazu den entscheidenden Hinweis: ΤΥΧΗ, Das Zufällige (1820) Die strenge Grenze doch umgeht gefällig Ein Wandelndes, das mit und um uns wandelt; Nicht einsam bleibst du, bildest dich gesellig Und handelst wohl so, wie ein andrer handelt: Im Leben ist’s bald hin-, bald widerfällig, Es ist ein Tand und wird so durchgetandelt. Schon hat sich still der Jahre Kreis geründet, Die Lampe harrt der Flamme, die entzündet.

„Ein Wandelndes, das mit und um uns wandelt“ ist dasjenige welche, das sich selbst und sein Umfeld bewegt; das als Form in Erscheinung tritt, aber in Bewegung lebt.31 Das Zufällige stellt den eben gemachten Unterschied zwischen Formveränderung und Formveränderung anschaulich dar und ist deshalb besonders aufschlussreich, wenn es um Bewegung geht, weil Goethe die Metamorphose in regelmäßig, unregelmäßig und zufällig sortiert. Denn das, was Goethe an dem Metamorphosegedanken so fasziniert, sind die Übergänge selbst und das dabei Ununterscheidbare.32 Die regelmäßig verlaufende Metamorphose ist im Vergleich zur von Goethe aus methodischen Gründen vernachlässigten33 zufällig verlaufenden Metamorphose deshalb so detailliert ausgeführt, weil dieser Prozess eben aufgrund seiner Regelmäßigkeit kalkulierbar und damit anschaulich wird. Die regelmäßig bewegte Form lässt zu jedem Zeitpunkt eine Annahme über die bevorstehende Bewegung zu. Anders verhält es sich mit der unregelmäßig und zufällig verlau-

30

31 32 33

diesem auch. Je vollkommener je weniger Fähigkeit aus einer Form in die andere überzugehen“ (zitiert nach ibid.). Goethe: „Urworte. Orphisch“, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,2), 501–502. und vgl. Anmerkungen derselben Ausgabe 1095 dazu: Während Knebels „Urworte“ die vier Grundmächte Dämon, Glück, Liebe und Not berücksichtigt, orientiert sich Goethes Version über Macrobius an ägyptischem Vorbild und berücksichtigt: Dämon, Tyche (das Zufällige), Eros, Ananke (Nötigung) und Elpis (Hoffnung). Siehe dazu Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form: was Geulen in ihrer Monografie anbietet (und worauf ich mich beziehe, wenn ich schreibe die Form „lebt“ in Bewegung), ist eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Leben der Form, d. h. nicht der Form des Lebens. Goethe, „Nacharbeiten zur Metamorphose“, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,24), 712. Goethe, „Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanze zu erklären“, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,24), 109–151, 111: „§. 8. Dagegen werden wir von der dritten Metamorphose welche zufällig, von außen, besonders durch Insekten gewirkt wird, unsere Aufmerksamkeit wegwenden, weil sie uns von dem einfachen Wege, welchem wir zu folgen haben, ableiten und unsern Zweck verrücken könnte. Vielleicht findet sich an einem andern Orte Gelegenheit von diesen monströsen, und doch in gewisse Grenzen eingeschränkten Auswüchsen zu sprechen“.

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fenden Metamorphose. In diesen Fällen nämlich lässt die Form keinen eindeutigen Rückschluss auf den nächsten Schritt zu; mehr noch wird die Form, weil sie den erwarteten Ansprüchen nicht entspricht, monströs. Monstrositäten sind Erscheinungsformen der Metamorphose, die trotz ihrer Abweichung vom Regelmäßigen ihre Daseinsberechtigung haben: „Die Natur“, schreibt Goethe in seinen Nacharbeiten zur Metamorphose, überschreitet die Grenze die sie sich selbst gesetzt hat, aber sie erreicht dadurch eine andere Vollkommenheit, deswegen wir wohltun uns hier so spät als möglich negativer Ausdrücke zu bedienen. Die Alten sagten […] monstrum, ein Wunderzeichen, bedeutungsvoll, aller Aufmerksamkeit wert.34

Und doch krankt jeder ästhetische Gegenstand an einer monströsen Form, die zufällig entstanden ist: „Die gute ‚Lila‘, aus den allerzufälligsten Elementen, durch Neigung, Geist und Leidenschaften, für ein Liebhaber-Theater nothgedrungen zusammen gereiht, konnte niemals eine große bedeutende Darstellung begründen.“35 Wenn sich Goethes Alterswerk der Beschreibung durch ein formales Vokabular entzieht, dann deshalb, weil es (wie alles andere) nicht nur als Form existiert, sondern auch als Bewegung. Form aber wäre nicht wirkend denkbar, zeigte keine relationale Interaktion mit ihrer Umwelt, wenn Bewegung kein wenigstens sekundärer Bestandteil ihrer Existenz wäre. Eine Analogie zwischen natürlichem wie künstlichem Stoff und natürlicher wie künstlicher Form ist vielfach als problematisch markiert36 und zeigt sich auch für Goethe selbst ambivalent und in der Differenz unüberbrückbar.37 Liegt die Lösung zu diesem bisher als Formproblem untersuchten Paradigma tatsächlich in Goethes Metamorphose, wie vielfach angenommen,38 dann nicht, weil die Metamorphose einen natürlichen Formenwandel einem künstlichen gleichsetzt, sondern weil

34 Goethe: „Nacharbeiten zur Metamorphose“, in Goethe: Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,24), 462. 35 Goethe in einem Brief an Grafen von Brühl in Reaktion auf die nur einmal wiederholte Aufführung 1818. Zitiert nach: Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Hg., Goethe-Handbuch. Supplemente, Bd. 1, Musik und Tanz in den Bühnenwerken (Stuttgart und Weimar: J. B. Metzler 2008), 206. 36 Vgl. z. B. Ernst Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde. Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler 1991. 37 In Rechtfertigung seiner „Elegie“, schreibt Goethe im Aufsatz „Zur Metamorphose der Pflanzen“, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,24), 407–425: „Man vergaß daß Wissenschaft sich aus Poesie entwickelt habe, man bedachte nicht daß, nach einem Umschwung von Zeiten, beide sich wieder freundliche, zu beiderseitigem Vorteil, auf höherer Stelle, dar wohl wieder begegnen könnten.“ Doch in den Propyläen schreibt er: „Die Natur ist von der Kunst durch eine ungeheure Kluft getrennt, welche das Genie selbst, ohne äußere Hülfsmittel, zu überschreiten nicht vermag“. Goethe, „Morphologie als Wissenschaft“, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (FA 1,24), 370–373. 38 Vgl. z. B. Johannes Grave, Der „ideale Kunstkörper“. Johann Wolfgang Goethe als Sammler von Druckgraphiken und Zeichnungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).

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äußere wie innere Bewegungen gleichermaßen an Formen der Natur wie Kunst zu beobachten sind. Unter Berücksichtigung der skizzierten Beobachtungen darf Goethes Metamorphose der Pflanzen als Bewegungslehre verstanden werden. Der Perspektivwechsel von Form auf Bewegung, gerade in Anwendung auf ein werkhaftes Œuvre wie das von Goethe, zieht eine weitreichende Implikation nach sich. Wenn nun keine der essenziellen Kategorien – Stoff und Form –, sondern eine identitätsunabhängige Phänomenologie der Bewegung zur Beschreibung von Texten39 Anwendung findet, werden Texte, die sich historisch als besonders stoffund/oder formenstark (man könnte sagen identitär, weil nach essenziellen Maßstäben der Differenz bewertet) ausgezeichnet haben, u. U. weniger aussagekräftig sind, wenn es um Bewegung geht. Gleichzeitig werden Texte, die sich unter dem Blickwinkel essenzieller Kategorien bisher als minderwertig zeigten, u. U. besonders aussagekräftige Beobachtungen ermöglichen, wenn es um Bewegung geht. Diese carte blanche ästhetischer Wertigkeit öffnet in diesem Fall Wege und Türen zur Reflexion eines posthumanistischen Kulturbegriffs, der – wie vorhergehend skizziert – nicht von einem Denken in definitiven Formen, sondern von einem Denken in (interrelationalen) Bewegungen ausgeht. Anlass zu einer solchen Denkbewegung geben Kulturartefakte, die sich durch Offenheit und Verweisfähigkeit auszeichnen (d. h. tendenziell aus sich heraus und um sich herumführen, statt in sich hinein).

Goethe posthumanistisch lesen Emanuele Coccias Pflanzenphilosophie The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture40 von 2018 ist sein Versuch, eine vom sessilen Leben ausgehende Universaltheorie zu formulieren: [A]nthropology has much more to learn from the structure of a flower than from linguistic self-awareness of human subjects if it is to understand the nature of what is called rationality. This is because every truth is connected to every other truth, in the same way in which every thing is connected to every other thing.41

39 Texte, weil sie die rezeptionsbedingt temporalste Kunstform sind (im Gegensatz zur sonst in diesem Kontext untersuchten bildenden Kunst); gerade Form und Morphologie wurden primär als ‚Bild‘ untersucht: vgl. z. B. Michael Bies: Im Grunde ein Bild. Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe und Humboldt (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012); oder auch Osterkamp, Im Buchstabenbilde, Fußnote 85. 40 Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. 41 Ibid., 117.

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Dieses Vorhaben ergibt sich zwangsläufig aus seinem Anspruch, die Welt als etwas gänzlich Atmosphärisches zu beschreiben: „Everything is a repetition, intensification, and variation of what takes place in breath.“42 Und weiter: [A]tmosphere is fundamentally an ontological fact that concerns the status and mode of being of things, and not the manner in which they are perceived. If every act of knowledge is, by itself, a fact of atmosphere because it is an act of mixing between subject and object, the extension of the atmosphere’s domain goes well beyond any act of knowledge.43

Erkenntnis und Wissen, dem Atmosphärischen zugeordnet, verändern durch diese Perspektive ihre Beziehung zu Hylemorphismus und Vitalismus. Während das Leben selbst, angelehnt an Aristoteles De anima, ins Zentrum der Anschauung rückt, werden Stoff und Form ihres essenziellen Status enthoben und zu funktionalen Komponenten reduziert. „Matter“, schreibt Coccia, is not what separates and distinguishes things, but rather what makes possible their encounter and mixture. It is not simply reducible to the space of a form’s inherence in the world. It is rather the case that, through it, everything is in everything, nothing can separate itself from the fate of the rest, and everything lets itself be traversed by the world and therefore can traverse it.44

Daraus ergibt sich für Coccia die Möglichkeit, ausgehend von hylemorphistischen Manifestationen der Pflanze, nämlich Blatt, Wurzel und Blüte, die vitalistische Dimension derselben in den Blick zu nehmen. Das Blatt wird in diesem Zusammenhang eine „paradigmatic form of openness: life capable of being traversed by the world without being destroyed by it“.45 Im Fokus steht hier nicht die Form an sich, sondern ihre Funktion im Austauschprozess zwischen Pflanze und Welt. Auch die Wurzeln erhalten ihren Wert nicht aufgrund ihrer abgrenzenden (unterirdischen) Eigenschaften, sondern ihrer Beziehung zum Anderen: „The advantages they [the roots – I. G.] bring are those of networking, and not those of isolation or distinction.“46 Ebenso die Blüte, deren stoffliche und formale Eigenschaften der Gewährleistung nach außen gerichteter metabolischer Prozesse dienen: „This is what happens in fertilization: the majority of hermaphroditic flowers develop a system of self-immunization to avoid self-fertilization, a defense against themselves that allows them to open up to the world more.“47

42 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 27–28. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 103.

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Coccias atmosphärische Pflanze begründet seine Philosophie, nicht diejenige der Pflanzen, sondern des Erkenntnisgewinns. Von der Pflanze und ihrem Bezug zur Welt ausgehend, proklamiert er einen philosophischen Methodenwechsel weg vom Wissen durch Lehre, hin zum Wissen durch einen Stoffwechsel, der dem schlichten In-der-Welt-Sein Erkenntnis entzieht.48 Die begriffliche Beziehung von Leben und Erkenntnis sprengt spätestens hier ihren metaphorischen Rahmen, wenn die mit anorganischen Stoffen kreatürlich wirkende, Leben schaffende Pflanze, zum Analogon des Erkenntnis schaffenden Homo sapiens wird. Das Leben der Pflanze (im doppelten Sinne als selbst lebendige und zugleich anderes Leben ermöglichende Entität) ist nicht nur eine bildsprachliche Interpretation von Erkenntnis, sondern ein naturwissenschaftliches Faktum, ein empirisch Gegebenes, das deshalb zur symbolischen Form wird, weil die Wahrheit dieser Gegebenheit von der Transformation desselben in menschliche Erkenntnis abhängt: „all symbolic form is ipso facto philosophical, and none has the right to claim any higher capacity for achieving truth; no one style of writing is more appropriate to philosophy than another.“49 Die symbolische Form vom Leben der Pflanze wirft in diesem Kontext nicht die Frage nach ihrer Form auf, sondern, weil sie ipso facto philosophisch ist, Fragen nach ihrer Relation und Modalität.50 Philosophie als Liebe zur Weisheit ernennt Erkenntnis per definitionem zum Ziel; Philosophie als Liebe zur Weisheit ist aber nicht selbst Erkenntnis, sondern ist eine Verhältnisbestimmung, die Erkenntnis ermöglicht. Möglich ist, ebenso wie notwendig, eine epistemologische Erweiterung des Dualismus zwischen wahr und falsch, der schon für Nietzsche seine Sinnfälligkeit eingebüßt hat: Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen, kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen, die, poetisch und rhetorisch gesteigert, übertragen, geschmückt wurden und die nach langem Gebrauch einem Volke fest, kanonisch und verbindlich dünken: die Wahrheiten sind Illusionen, 48 Vgl. ibid., 118: „All things considered, true knowledge of the world can only be a form of speculative autotrophy: instead of always living exclusively on ideas and truths already sanctioned by this or that discipline in its history (and this includes philosophy), instead of aiming to build itself out of cognitive elements already structured, ordered, and dressed up, it would have to transform any subject, object, or event into an idea, just as plants are capable of transforming any scrap of earth, air, and light into life.“ 49 Ibid., 121. 50 Zur Relation als Erkenntnisgrundsatz siehe Peirce: „Die Begriffe Relationalität („relationship“) und Vermittlung („mediation“) rücken deshalb zunehmend in den Mittelpunkt seines Interesses, weil er alle Phänomene über die Beziehungsgeflechte aufklären will, in denen sie für uns objektiv werden. Den Relationsgedanken versteht Peirce dabei nicht so, daß die jeweiligen Phänomene als vorgegebene Größen nachträglich in eine bestimmte Beziehung zueinander gebracht werden, sondern so, daß sie erst in ihren jeweiligen Relationsbezügen als konkrete Größen hervortreten, weil er den Relationen fundamentale Objektivierungsfunktionen zuschreibt“, Bernd Lutz, „Peirce, Charles Sanders“, in Bernd Lutz, Metzler Philosophen Lexikon, 543–46; 543. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2015.

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von denen man vergessen hat, daß sie welche sind, Metaphern, die abgenutzt und sinnlich kraftlos geworden sind, Münzen, die ihr Bild verloren haben und nun als Metall, nicht mehr als Münzen, in Betracht kommen.51

Die Frage, die sich – ausgehend von Coccia – bei der Analogie von Pflanze und Mensch, Leben und Erkenntnis stellt, ist nicht diejenige von wahr oder falsch, sondern es handelt sich bei ihr um die im Rahmen des Modalen zu befragende Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit (die als ihr Gegenteil auch das Zufällige involviert).52 Das heißt, was das Leben der Pflanze erkenntnistheoretisch enthält, ist nicht die Antwort auf wahr oder falsch, sondern auf möglich und notwendig. Diese sich vom Formalen unterscheidende modale Perspektive ist schließlich das, was sich in der Übertragung des eben Dargestellten auf den Kosmos des Ästhetischen als Novität zeigt. Wenn die Pflanze, mit ihrer Form der Offenheit, ihrer nach dem Anderen gerichteten Kommunikation und ihren external-metabolischen Prozessen, als Paradigma des Lebens gilt, und zwar dezidiert nichtanthropozentrisch, dann bildet das die Grundlage für nicht nur formal-ästhetisches, sondern vor allem modal-ästhetisches Wissen. Im Vorübergehn demonstriert diese Phänomenologie, indem das Gedicht aus sich hinaus und zurück in sich hineinführt und Leerstellen nicht in sich selbst zu füllen verlangt, sondern auf etwas zeigen lässt, das außerhalb seiner selbst liegt, nämlich das doppelt bedeutungsträchtige Heidenröslein: die botanischen Gattung und die volkstümlichen Ballade. Wenn geisteswissenschaftliche Disziplinen, und literaturwissenschaftliche im Besonderen, gestalterischen Anteil an Fragen nicht-anthropozentrischer kultureller Subjektivität nehmen wollen, müssen Umwelt und Subjekt interrelational gedacht werden. Mit dem hier skizzierten Ansatz verweist die relationale Untersuchung von Kunst und Natur über formale Korrelationen hinweg auf ein inhärent natürliches Verhalten kultureller Artefakte: Bewegung ist das, was Kunst lebendig macht. Spezifischer: Bewegung ist, was uns ermöglicht, Kunst als etwas Lebendiges wahrzunehmen. Diese Perspektive ist in letzter Instanz eine höchst (kultur-)politische, die die hier angestellten literaturwissenschaftlich motivierten Überlegungen an posthumanistische Theoriegebäude anschließbar macht. Rosi Braidotti schreibt in ihrer Monografie Posthuman Knowledge: The point of a posthuman position is that it envisages the subject as transversal, transindividual, trans-species, trans-sexes. In short, it is a subject in movement. This 51 Friedrich Nietzsche, „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft,“ in Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, hg. v. Giorgio Colli, Bd. 3, 311. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1980. 52 Vgl. Herbert Hörz, Zufall. Eine philosophische Untersuchung (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980), 10.

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kind of subjectivity obviously includes non-human others, of both the organic and the technological kind.53

Eine derartige sich ständig in Bewegung befindliche Subjektivität legt schließlich den Grundstein für einen Demokratiebegriff, für den die Bewegung und die dadurch ermöglichte inter- wie extrasubjektive Relationalität konstitutiv sind: Let us defend democracy as the critical edge of a heterogeneous, differential and yet connected citizenry, as a ‚missing people‘ that is internally differentiated, but works together.54 […] ‚We‘ can only intervene in this as transversal ensembles, acting collectively: ‚We‘-whoare-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-convergence-together.55

Diese zufällige Teilmenge des Notwendigen (die ökozentrisch in Bewegung vor sich hin gehende Subjektivität) ist in Goethes Konzept bewegter Form (die schon lange nicht mehr klassizistisch ist) mitgedacht. Nur so gelingt die Auflösung des posthumanistischen Paradoxons, die Welt als Mensch nicht menschlich wahrzunehmen. Goethes formentzogene Altersform erhält damit eine überraschend politische Dimension. Seine tanzenden Pflanzen lehren das Wissen der Beweglichkeit der Welt. Wer hätte gedacht, dass ausgerechnet Goethes Texte auf die radikaldemokratische Frage56 nach der qualitativen Beschaffenheit demokratischer Formen antworten: Nicht die Form an sich ist demokratisch, sondern ihre Bewegung.

Bibliografie Aelst, Paul von der. Blumm und Außbund Allerhandt Außerlesener Weltlicher, Züchtiger Lieder und Rheymen … Herausgegeben von Ernst Schulte-Strathaus. München: Hyperion-Verlag, 1912. Bies, Michael. Im Grunde ein Bild. Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe und Humboldt. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012. 53 54 55 56

Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 56. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 132. Siehe dazu verschiedene Positionen in Dagmar Comtesse et al. Hg., Radikale Demokratietheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015): Radikale Demokratietheorie basiert auf Kontingenzannahme, d. h. soziales, ökonomisches, kulturelles Handeln wird als Ergebnis politischen Handelns verstanden. Kennzeichen einer solchen Demokratie ist, „daß [sie] die Grundlagen aller Gewißheit auflöst“; dass Volk also kein fester Bezugspunkt ist und Demokratie damit kein Fundament hat, sondern sich selbst immer wieder hervorbringen muss. Darin liegt das emanzipatorische Versprechen der Demokratie. Vgl. Dagmar Comtesse et al., „Einleitung“, in Comtesse et al., Radikale Demokratietheorie, 11–15.

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Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Brodersen, Kai und Bernhard Zimmermann. „Anaxagoras“. In Kai Brodersen und Bernhard Zimmermann. Metzler Lexikon Antike, 33. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2006. Büchner, Georg. „Lenz“. In Georg Büchner. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente in zwei Bänden, herausgegeben von Henri Poschmann, 225–250. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2006. Busch-Salmen, Gabriele, Hg. Goethe-Handbuch. Supplemente, Bd. 1: Musik und Tanz in den Bühnenwerken. Stuttgart und Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2008. Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Comtesse, Dagmar, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Franziska Martinsen und Martin Nonhoff. „Einleitung“. In Dagmar Comtesse, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Franziska Martinsen und Martin Nonhoff Hg., Radikale Demokratietheorie, 10–21. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015. Comtesse, Dagmar, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Franziska Martinsen und Martin Nonhoff, Hg. Radikale Demokratietheorie. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015. Dutrochet, Henri. Physiologische Untersuchungen über die Beweglichkeit der Pflanzen und der Tiere (1824), übersetzt von Alexander Nathansohn. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1906. Fechner, Gustav Theodor. Nanna oder Über das Seelenleben der Pflanzen. Hamburg und Leipzig: Voß, 1903. Geulen, Eva. Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager. Berlin und Köln: August Verlag, 2016. –. „Entzug der Form in der Form“. In Epiphanie der Form. „Goethes Pandora“ im Licht seiner Form- und Kulturkonzepte, herausgegeben von Sabine Schneider und Juliane Vogel, 17–35. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Abteilung 1, Bd. 1: Gedichte 1756–1799. Herausgegeben von Karl Eibl. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987. –. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, Abteilung 1, Bd. 24: Schriften zur Morphologie. Herausgegeben von Dorothea Kuhn. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987. Goldstein, Amanda. Sweet Science. Romantic Materialism and the logic of life. Chicago und London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Grave, Johannes. Der „ideale Kunstkörper“. Johann Wolfgang Goethe als Sammler von Druckgraphiken und Zeichnungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Hörz, Herbert. Zufall. Eine philosophische Untersuchung. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980. Kitzbichler, Martina. Aufbegehren der Natur: das Schicksal der vergesellschafteten Seele in Georg Bu¨chners Werk. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993. Lutz, Bernd. „Peirce, Charles Sanders“. In Bernd Lutz. Metzler Philosophen Lexikon, 543– 546. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2015. Nietzsche, Friedrich. „Die fröhliche Wissenschaft“. In Friedrich Nietzsche. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli, Bd. 3, 311. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1980. Osterkamp, Ernst. Im Buchstabenbilde. Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1991.

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Städtke, Klaus. „Form“. In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, herausgegeben von Karlheinz Barck, Bd. 2, 462–494. Stuttgart und Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001. Wagner, Jan. „nach dornröschen“. In Jan Wagner. Die Live Butterfly Show. Gedichte, 64–65. Berlin: Hanser Verlag, 2018. Wellbery, David E. „Form und Idee. Skizze eines Begriffsfeldes um 1800“. In Morphologie und Moderne. Goethes anschauliches Denken in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften seit 1800, herausgegeben von Jonas Maatsch, 17–42. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Zaharia, Mihaela. „Metamorphose“. In Goethe Handbuch. Supplemente, Bd. 2: Naturwissenschaften, herausgegeben von Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Manfred Wenzel, Andreas Beyer, Ernst Osterkamp, 542. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2012. Zumbusch, Cornelia. „Fest und Flüssig. Goethes „Pandora“ als Schauspiel der symbolischen Form“. In Epiphanie der Form. Goethes „Pandora“ im Licht seiner Form- und Kulturkonzepte, herausgegeben von Sabine Schneider und Juliane Vogel, 36–58. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018.

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Mary Trachsel (University of Iowa)

What is it Like to be a ‘Batty Telepathic Woman’? Considering Animal Communication in the Anthropocene

Abstract The ecological, existential and ethical crisis of the Anthropocene reveals the shortcomings of scientism and rationalism as exclusive means of understanding what is real. Telepathic communication with animals, widely dismissed as “irrational” by academic authorities, represents an epistemological approach to more-than-human life that is arguably consistent with post-human efforts to escape the dogma of human exceptionalism at the heart of the Anthropocene crisis. Eco-philosopher Timothy Morton’s formulation of ecognosis as “weird embodiment” provides theoretical grounds for considering the possible reality of animal communication. Keywords: Animal Communicators, Anthropocene, Anthropocentrism, Ecognosis, HumanAnimal Communication

Animal Communication is Weird Anthropologist Don Kulick’s review of research on human-animal communication surveys the history and current state of knowledge about intentional communication between humans and other animals.1 According to Kulick, “academically reputable” western scholarship in this field rises from the ashes of ape-language research (ALR), a laboratory discipline that flourished briefly in the second half of the twentieth century. Led by psychologists, linguists, and behavioral scientists who found the availability of chimpanzee research subjects an unexpected byproduct of NASA’s early experiments with “manned” space travel, ALR began in the US as the project of teaching human language to chimpanzees, using various media and pedagogical approaches. ALR soon expanded to include subjects from other ape species as well as dolphins and parrots. In time, the field’s interest in cognition led to studies of these and other nonhuman animals’ possession of nonlinguistic abilities such as episodic memory, 1 Don Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (2017): 357–78.

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short-term and long-term memory, strategic problem-solving, tool-use, toolmaking, self-recognition, theory of mind, and social bonding. Like language use, these cognitive abilities were keyed to those of humans. As Kulick notes, the ALR origin of human-animal communication studies was anthropocentric at its core because it measured behaviors of nonhuman animals by human standards. In the renaissance of human-animal communication studies after ALR, Kulick traces a shift in focus from cognition to ethics – a shift he attributes to growing academic recognition of nonhuman animals as intentional agents, or, as they are elsewhere labeled, “actants in social life.”2 In large part, Kulick credits this shift to the insistence of anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists that social context is part and parcel of communicative acts, including those that involve nonhuman communicators. Opening social life to nonhuman subjects in this way, Kulick reports, has introduced the ethical challenge of “engaging respectfully with nonhuman others,” along with a cognitive challenge he describes in the words of philosopher Kari Weil as accepting the reality of “experiences that seem impervious to our understanding.”3 Kulick hopes that in time human-animal communication studies’ openness to the perceptions and experiences of nonhuman others will prompt similar openness to human otherness in academe. In closing, he imagines this openness may lead to deeper acceptance and integration of nontraditional academic worldviews, like those of feminism, postcolonialism, and disability studies.4 In the spirit of open-minded respect for difference, Kulick’s survey includes “rustic authorities”5 – non-academic sources of practical knowledge about human-animal communication. He sorts these sources into three broad categories: 1) “equestrian and canine trainers,” including those who study and practice animal-assisted therapies; 2) neuro-atypical people “who say they understand animals because they think like animals”; and 3) “a ragbag of sundry New Age women who claim to be able to converse with animals through telepathy.”6 While crediting the first two groups with real contributions to an understanding of human-animal communication, Kulick categorically dismisses “pet psychics” or “animal communicators” as “batty telepathic women.”7

2 Liedeke Plate, “New Materialisms,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. John Farrow et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 3 Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press), 7, quoted in Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” 371. 4 Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” 372. 5 Timothy J. Brown, “Deconstructing the Dialectical Tensions in The Horse Whisperer: How Myths Represent Competing Cultural Values,” Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 2 (2005): 83– 97. 6 Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” 372. 7 Ibid., 358.

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Science historian and founder of the Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer, concurs with Kulick’s assessment of telepathy, describing it as one of the “weird things” that people “believe” to be real.8 In Shermer’s rationalist-objectivist worldview, telepathy is weird because it lacks empirical evidence and defies logical explanation, but it nevertheless attracts the interest of “people on the fringes of academia.”9 Though he acknowledges that scientific observation and reason, like all epistemologies, reflect the values and beliefs of the culture that produced them, Shermer defends the superiority of science and logic over other culturally produced ways of knowing on the grounds that objectivity, in its appeal to universal reason and empirical proof, overrides “personal insights that elude external validation.” Subjective knowledge, Shermer explains, is not real knowledge at all, and belief systems built upon such claims occupy a counteracademic terrain best described as mysticism or magic.10 A more contemporary academic take on weirdness comes from the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, for whom Shermer’s scientism is “a toxic form of metaphysics.”11 In its stead, Morton proposes “weird embodiment” as a mode of “ecological awareness”.12 For Morton, science and magic co-operate in a weird, quantum universe where matter is energy, objects are subjects, and presence coexists with absence. This is a universe populated by “hyper-objects” – vast concepts such as humanity and global warming that are real and discernible but not comprehendible to human understanding because they are only partially present to any of us at any given moment. This is a universe that pulses with intertwining subjectivity and objectivity; it “shimmers” and “flickers” and “ripples.”13 In such a place, telepathic communication between humans and other animals is a possible though incomprehensible reality. In this essay, I examine claims of and about human-animal communicators in light of this changing concept of “weirdness,” situating such claims in a broader academic context than appears in Kulick’s review. While Kulick explicitly limits his survey to studies of “how humans communicate with animals using language or some other medium,”14 I include ethological and sociobiological studies of animal communication that developed side by side with the anthropocentric ALR tradition and its anthropologically inflected aftermath. Focused on social in8 9 10 11

Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). Ibid., 15. Ibid., 20. Timothy Morton, “Weird Embodiment,” in Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human, ed. Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer and Peter Lichtenfels (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 23. 12 Ibid., 19. 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” 358.

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teractions among nonhuman individuals in free or captive environments, ethology and sociobiology emerge from zoology rather than anthropology, and from the field instead of the laboratory. This ancestral line recognizes evolutionarily organized social agency that is only partially available to human understanding, thereby freeing “culture” and “society” from humanity’s monopolistic hold. Ultimately, this biology-based recognition of nonhuman subjects leads to the same ethical concerns Kulick extracts from his survey of humananimal communication studies after ALR but frames them as ecological, or “internatural” relationships within a web of human and nonhuman interactivity. In this bio-centric moral framework, tolerance and respect for the “weirdness” of nonhuman subjectivity supports an ethic of interspecies coexistence in the rapidly changing natural environment of the Anthropocene.15 In re-examining Kulick’s dismissal of animal communicators, my purpose is not to defend them as unquestionable sources of knowledge, but to explore the limits of academic skepticism as an ethical foundation for human relationality in what eco-philosophy calls the more-than-human world. In this respect, I continue a line of inquiry established in Emily Plec’s edited collection, Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication, which recognizes nonhuman subjectivity in the more-than-human world and questions academic reliance on the ethical constraints of human-centered reason and the objectifying gaze of science. Finally, I examine the skeptical dismissal of nonacademic ways of knowing, such as interspecies telepathy, in the context of current developments in eco-philosophy as we begin to comprehend the global effects of human activity as an urgent call for changed relationships between human and nonhuman life.

Weirdness in Academe: Methodologies and Objects of Study Simultaneously with the rise of ALR in laboratory science, longitudinal field studies of nonhuman apes were conducted by a trio sometimes known as “Leakey’s ladies.” Selected by the archaeologist Lewis Leakey, who believed women’s innate relational capacities made them better field primatologists than men, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey began to observe chimpanzees and gorillas, respectively, in sub-Saharan Africa, while Birute Galdikas launched her study of orangutans in Southeast Asia. To the academic community, their research was in some ways as “weird,” in Shermer’s conventional sense of the word, as the ALR project of soliciting communication in human language from nonhuman sub15 Emily Plec, “Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: An Introduction,” in Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, ed. Emily Plec (London: Routledge, 2013), 4.

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jects. While this proposed object of ALR studies was widely regarded as “weird” because it threatened the species boundary that protects human exceptionalism, its assessment methods were scientifically familiar and approved. Employing double-blind trials, video-recorded data, replicable experiments, and statistical analysis of results, ALR tried to formally adhere to scientific norms and was soundly criticized when it fell short. Primatological field studies, by contrast, focused on familiar objects of zoological study – nonhuman animals – but “weirdly” employed methods that violated scientific objectivity. Goodall, for instance, famously insisted on personalizing her observational accounts, naming her chimpanzee subjects and reporting their behaviors anecdotally as the intentional acts of nonhuman characters whose lives she cared about. These practices, adopted by all three of Leakey’s ladies, met with charges of anthropomorphism and an overall lack of objectivity, as they weirdly applied anthropological methods, designed for studying human others, to the zoological study of nonhuman animals.16 This cross-over approach, importing anthropological methods to the study of nonhuman subjects, was not original to western primatology. In the early twentieth century, Japanese zoologist Kinji Imanishi, through his studies of insects, horses, and monkeys, introduced interpersonal and longitudinal fieldobservation methods that “silently invaded” western zoology and eventually even infiltrated the laboratories of ALR scientists.17 Laboratory primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa describes the three pillars of Imanishi’s research style as recognition of unique individual subjects, habituation of subjects through provisioning, and life-long observation in the context of human-animal relationships.18 Ethologist Frans de Waal speculates that traditional belief in interspecies transmigration of souls inclined Japanese scientists to a biocentric worldview in which humans are continuous with the rest of nature, thus producing Imanishi’s interpersonal approach to observing other animals. In Europe, Karl von Frisch, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz reproduced some of Imanishi’s observational methods in studying the social behaviors of insects, birds, and mammals, founding the academic discipline of ethology in the west. Meanwhile in the U.S., entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson was also merging the study of human and nonhuman animal behavior in the synthetic discipline of sociobiology, seeking to uncover the biological origins of animals’ social behaviors, including those of human animals. Reversing the 16 Jane Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). 17 Frans De Waal, “‘Silent Invasion’: Imanishi’s Primatology and Cultural Bias in Science,” Animal Cognition 6 (2002): 293–99. 18 Tetsuro Matsuzawa, “Kinji Imanishi and 60 Years of Japanese Primatology,” Current Biology 18, no. 4 (2017): R578–90.

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methodological “weirdness” of ethology, sociobiology violates the anthropocentric assumption that sapient culture uniquely separates humans from the rest of nature. Assuming the Darwinian tenet of continuity between human and nonhuman life, sociobiology trains the scientific gaze of biology on human social behaviors and socio-cultural formations. Wilson’s textbook, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,19 though it devotes only the last of its twenty-seven chapters to human sociobiology, the transgressive biocentric premise of this single chapter stirred public and academic outrage that continues today. Describing humans as “biological creatures in a biological world,”20 Wilson has been labeled by scholars across the sciences and humanities as an apologist for sexist, racist, and xenophobic human behaviors, like rape, slavery, and genocide. To acknowledge such behaviors as falling within the “natural” range of human activity is to question human exceptionalism, triggering what Melanie Challenger calls “our instinctive aversion” to seeing our human selves as animals.21 Even in academic circles, then, violating the separation of humans and nonhuman animals into categories of culture and nature, subject and object, person and non-person qualifies as a “weird” intellectual move in the conventional sense of the term. In the academic world the “weirdness” of nonhuman ALR subjects who purportedly use human language for intentional communication came sharply into focus when three bonobo research subjects were named as coauthors of a peer-reviewed article on the welfare of captive apes.22 Referring to her co-authors as “languaged apes” and “bonobo people,” lead-author Sue SavageRumbaugh describes an enculturation research program of human and nonhuman “shared lives”23 and maintains that including her research subjects as coauthors “is not a literary technique but a recognition of their direct verbal input to the article.”24 She goes on to summarize conversations with Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota Wamba that resulted in a list of “items the bonobos agreed were important for their welfare”25 and concludes with a plea for the transformation of human-nonhuman ape relations. Humans like Savage-Rumbaugh who purport to understand and translate nonhuman animals’ intentions into human language are considered in academic circles to be just as weird as nonhuman animals who talk. G. A. Bradshaw explains 19 Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 20 Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Norton, 2012), 287. 21 Melanie Challenger, How to Be Animal (New York: Random House, 2021), 44. 22 Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et al., “Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 7– 19. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid., 18.

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that Savage-Rumbaugh’s work “brought the academic community to an uncomfortable edge,”26 while Denyse O’Leary suggests that her “claim of bonobos’ human-like cognition is likely a work of the human imagination,” revealing little more than “what some humans need to believe.”27 To be sure, in Kulick’s home discipline of anthropology, people who profess to communicate with animals may be accorded some degree of acceptance and even respect when they represent animist and shamanic traditions of indigenous societies. Samantha Hurn notes that ritualized hunting practices and shamanic communication with animal spirits are culturally legitimate when they occur in places and communities that align with anthropology’s historic focus on exotic cultures. Why then, she wonders, are academics reluctant to “recognize these phenomena or grant them any credence in so-called developed contexts”?28 In particular, she observes that the “scepticism, even disdain”29 with which Western science tends to regard psychic communication with other animals is grounded in a persistent but misplaced fear of anthropomorphism distorting objective (i. e. real) reality that prevails in the developed world. In place of their widespread fear of “unscientific methodologies,” Hurn encourages Western academics to open their minds to learning about and engaging in communication with non-human beings in a variety of weirdly unconventional modes, including “dreams, visions, trances, hallucinations or even just close, intersubjective encounters.”30 Her hope is that serious academic inquiry into trans-species psychic communication will lead cognitive ethology, research in animal behavior, and anthropological studies of sensory perception to discover “rational explanations for seemingly paranormal behaviors”31 such as telepathic interspecies communication. Even more importantly, she hopes that this line of research will open academic conversations about the natural environment to nonhuman voices that may “unsettle the dominant discourses and exploitative practices of the Anthropocene.”32

26 Gay A. Bradshaw, “An Ape Among Many: Animal Co-Authorship and Trans-species Epistemic Authority,” Configurations 18, no. 1–2 (2010): 27. 27 Denyse O’Leary, “But in the End, Did the Chimpanzee Really Talk?” Mind Matters News, July 25, 2020, https://wwwmindmatters.ai/2020/07/but-in-the-end-did-the-chimpanzee-reall y-talk. 28 Samantha Hurn, “From the Horse’s Mouth: Hearing Nonhuman Voices in the Anthropocene,” in More-than-Human. AURA Working Papers, vol. 3: A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change, ed. Nils Bubandt (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2018), 85. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 87. 31 Ibid., 88. 32 Ibid., 89–90.

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“Batty Telepathic Women” and Other Animal Communicators In 1975, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pondered the inaccessibility of nonhuman subjective experience in an essay titled “What is it Like to be a Bat?”33 Engaging in behaviors such as flying, hanging upside down to sleep, and navigating with echolocation, bats differ radically from humans, physically and sensorially. Their phenomenological being therefore remains “impervious to human understanding,”34 no matter how sophisticated technologically enhanced observation of bats may become. Although Nagel predicts that science and technology will in time advance our understanding of bats,35 he concedes that our best means of apprehending bat subjectivity – what it is like to be a bat – comes through the quintessentially unscientific channels of human empathy and imagination.36 To these alternative epistemological pathways, animal communicators such as those disparaged by Kulick would add human powers of telepathic communication, which they typically break into subcategories of “intuitive” communication: clairvoyance (visual), clairaudience (audial), clairsentience (emotional), clairgustance (taste), clairalience (olfactory), and claircognizance (extrasensory). Individual communicators may claim particularly acute perception through one or more of these channels, or they may report that the animals they encounter prefer communication in a particular telepathic bandwidth. Animal communicators invariably reject the notion that their abilities are anything special, claiming that communication with nonhuman animals and other lifeforms is “universal,”37 and an “ancient, innate characteristic of all life”38 that evolved in humans when our pre-civilized ancestors lived in a state of deep connection with the rest of the natural world. The narrative behind this explanation is a version of the Edenic fall, a story of connections lost but capable of being restored through “relearning” ways of knowing that humans have forgotten or have allowed to atrophy. The North American metaphysical author Ted 33 Thomas Nagel, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 8, no. 4 (1975): 435–50. 34 Weil, Thinking Animals, 7. 35 An interesting follow-up to Nagel’s prediction comes from Yosef Prat, Mor Taub and Yossi Yovel (2016) of Tel Aviv University who used a machine-learning algorithm to “translate” the vocalizations of Egyptian fruit bats. They report that utterances generally classified crudely as “aggressive” contain information about the individual emitters, addressees and social contexts in which the vocalization occurs. (“Everyday Bat Vocalizations Contain Information about Emitter, Addressee, Context and Behavior,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 1–10, https://doi.o rg/10.1038/srep39419). 36 Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” 449. 37 Akshaya V. Kawle, Animal Communication: A Guide to Two-way Telepathic Communication with Animals (Chennai, Tamil Nadu: Notion Press, 2021), 21. 38 Marta Williams, Beyond Words: Talking with Animals and Nature (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2005), 3.

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Andrews’ Animal-Speak, for instance, begins with the assertion, “There was a time when humanity recognized itself as part of nature, and nature as part of itself.”39 Andrews goes on to assert that in this early time, humans and other animals communicated freely in one another’s languages. Beyond identifying their intuitive powers as common to an ancient stage of human evolution, animal communicators also tend to describe interspecies communication as “integral” to indigenous cultures today though suppressed by the anthropocentric norms of western colonization.40 Lisa Larson, for instance, credits her development of intuitive communication skills to the study of Huna, an ancient shamanistic philosophy from Hawaii.41 Marta Williams cites Native American authorities on “silent communication with other life forms,” quoting the assertion of Tatanga Mani of Western Canada’s Stoney Nation that trees talk to one another and to people but “white people don’t listen.”42 Ted Andrews and Steven Farmer43 likewise identify with Native American traditions that recognize “power animals” as natural guides to human behavior. Often, communicators blame formal education and other institutions for suppressing intuitive awareness of nonhuman subjectivity all around us. They typically target science, logic, language, and literacy for causing humans to forget or deny their native abilities to communicate with the rest of the natural world. Marta Williams, for example, explains that intuitive knowledge of animal communication is “the antithesis of logic,”44 and to access it “you have to partition off your rational mind.”45 This, she notes, is difficult because “suppression of intuition has become a habit of our modern culture,”46 and these deeply embedded habits of the civilized mind cause people to deny their own powers: “When you stray into something weird like animal communication, your cerebral cortex may panic and try to push you back into the world of logic and order.”47 Williams encourages would-be animal communicators to “bypass your logical mind, your academic training and your conditioned thinking,”48 even though “people are

39 Ted Andrews, Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1993), 1. 40 Williams, Beyond Words, 13. 41 Lisa Larson, Pawstalking: A Course on Communicating with Animals ([s.l.]: Self-published, 2019). 42 Marta Williams, Learning Their Language: Intuitive Communication with Animals and Nature (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), xx. 43 Steven D. Farmer, Power Animals: How to Connect with Your Animal Spirit Guide (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2004). 44 Williams, Learning Their Language, 11. 45 Ibid., xxii. 46 Ibid., 10. 47 Ibid., 56. 48 Ibid., 92.

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going to think you are weird.”49 Debbie McGillivray agrees that although telepathy is an innate human power, it is often hidden because “as we are socialized, we become dependent on verbal communication.”50 Kawle similarly asserts that although telepathic communication is “our natural language, our mother tongue, taught and gifted to us by Mother Nature,”51 it is a language that humans have “lost touch with over time”52 and must “relearn” in order to “reconnect” with nature.53 For Kawle, relearning and reconnecting is an essentially spiritual practice that she describes as “soul-to-soul” communication, and she advises her readers to “tune in to the frequency of the soul”54 beyond the material world. Many animal communicators similarly refer to their practice in spiritual terms. The South African communicator, Anna Breytenbach, describes her ability to communicate with wild and captive animals as an “ancient” skill that taps an original “harmony” with nature. Noting that our belief systems shape our perceptions and prompt us to edit out discomfiting perceptions, she claims her success in communicating telepathically demonstrates that it is possible to “reconnect our souls with the rest of the planet.”55 As Kulick notes, this spiritual framing of their practice leads some animal communicators to claim the ability to contact animals who have “gone spirit.”56 Larson, for instance, defines telepathic communication with animals as “direct transfer of information between souls” that are unbounded by physical reality57 and adds that nonhuman animals are “exceptional communicators from the beyond.”58 Often the spiritual framework reflects the communicator’s own cultural background. Kawle in India, for instance, maintains that all living creatures are immortal souls that reincarnate or choose to exist as “formless energy” after death.59 Because telepathic communication occurs as energy exchange between souls instead of bodies, she explains, “there is no difference between talking to an animal alive or the one who has passed away.”60 In the United States, Anderson

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., 105. Debbie McGilivray, Animal Communication Boot Camp ([s.l.]: Self-published: 2015), 9. Kawle, Animal Communication, 35. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 23. Swati Thiyagarajan and Craig Foster, dirs., The Animal Communicator. With Anna Breytenbach (NHU Africa: Foster Brothers Film Production, 2012). Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” 358. Larson, Pawstalking, 35. Ibid., 43. Kawle, Animal Communication, 67. Ibid.

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identifies animals as “intelligent, spiritual beings”61 who “transition” in death from physical to spiritual form on a “journey to the Light,”62, sometimes in the company of “Angels.”63 Anderson’s autobiography includes a chapter on “Animals in the Afterlife,” in which she tells several stories of departed pets for whom she has mediated words of comfort to grieving human partners left behind. In this autobiographical account of her work with animal telepathy, Anderson typifies animal communicators as they are depicted in Kulick’s review. Her autobiography reports that animal communication was a calling that began with a blessing from a dove named Noah and led her to transmit departed animals’ wisdom to humans in a discourse that Kulick likens to Hallmark cards and fortune cookies combined.64 A count of animal communicators telling their stories and advertising their professional services on-line and in books like Anderson’s tells Kulick that “batty” animal communicators are “almost invariably white, middle-class women.”65 While Kulick emphasizes the female identity of the group with three separate references to their sex, his classification overlooks middle-class white men like Andrews and Farmer, who identify as shamans and profess to commune with the spirits of wild animals. Nor does he mention the eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen, who opens A Language Older than Words with an account of his negotiations with a coyote, followed by a rumination that links Jensen’s own learned suppression of this sort of intuitive knowledge to the dismissal of women’s perceptions and the silencing of their voices: How did I later come to deny my experience in favor of what I had been taught? How and why does this happen to each of us as we grow up? […] How and why do we numb ourselves to our own experiences? How and why do we deafen ourselves to the voices of others? Who benefits? Who suffers? Is there a connection between the silencing of women, to use one example, and the silencing of the natural world?66

As an eco-philosopher, Jensen situates human-animal communication within the interactional ethics of the Anthropocene, amid mounting empirical evidence of humans’ dysfunctional and unsustainable relationships with the rest of life on earth. Like ethology and sociobiology, eco-philosophy acknowledges social continuity between human and nonhuman life forms and in doing so admits the weird possibility of intentional interspecies communication. 61 Karen Anderson, Hear All Creatures! The Journey of an Animal Communicator (Woonsocket, RI: New River Press, 2008), 28. 62 Ibid., 89. 63 Ibid., 90. 64 Kulick, “Human-Animal Communication,” 365. 65 Ibid., 362. 66 Derrick Jensen, A Language Older than Words (Wind River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2000), vii.

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Interspecies Communication in Weird Ecological Times The eco-philosopher Timothy Morton describes ecological awareness (ecognosis) as a relational, intersubjective worldview that generates a co-existential ethic. Turning moral attention from the freedoms and responsibilities of individual human selves to those of environmentally embedded, ecologically interconnected, interspecies pluralities, Morton’s brand of co-existentialism introduces modes of perception and ways of thinking that he calls “strange,” “darkuncanny” and “weird” because they blend human and more-than-human sensoria of self and other.67 For Morton and others, ecognosis is an embodied, biocentric, relational mode of perception – a mode of experience that rejects human exceptionalism and, like Wilson, sees humanity as a biological species entangled with others in a biological world. This alternative to anthropocentric cognition, according to Morton, is ontologically interactive: “like knowing, but more like letting be known.”68 It is a weirdly plural consciousness composed of self and other, doer and observer, subject and object. It has “a magical, flickering aspect”69 and consists of constant active-passive, subject-object “loops” of appearance and withdrawal within a throbbing web of interconnected life. Even as he derives the ontological pattern of loops from science, Morton invokes mysticism and magic to conjure the “weird weirdness” of ecologically extended human consciousness. To Morton’s ecognisicenti, the world assumes “a ‘supernatural’ illusion-like magical appearance,” an unfamiliar “‘unearthly’ realm.”70 Elsewhere in his explication, Morton calls ecological awareness “spectral,”71 likens it to insanity72 and drug-altered states of consciousness,73 and distils it to “spiritual” understanding and “care” for the more-than-human world.74 In advancing this vision, Morton, like animal communicators who see their intuitive ways of knowing obscured by civilization, maintains that nonrational ecognosis is available to human consciousness but has been “blocked and suppressed” by “dominant Western philosophy”75 because it opens onto “the animistic world within the concept of the web of fate itself.”76

67 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5. 68 Ibid., 5. 69 Ibid., 85. 70 Ibid., 6. 71 Ibid., 126. 72 Ibid., 87. 73 Ibid., 158. 74 Ibid., 161. 75 Ibid., 5. 76 Ibid., 6.

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Thus described, Morton’s worldview seems more at home in science fiction and folklore than in science and philosophy. But Morton is not alone in his academic attraction to non-rational truth. A common move in eco-critical thought is to question the adequacy of objective knowledge while tapping a knowledge base of physical and natural sciences. This simultaneous acceptance and rejection of science and reason is a hallmark of post-human philosophy, which struggles to overcome anthropocentric limitations of human understanding, even as it acknowledges the impossibility of self-transcendence. Recognition of this conundrum arises from scientific reports of deadly bio-spheric consequences of unchecked human appetite. Ironically, the science and technology enabling this Anthropocene awareness are the same forces that intensify human consumption and waste production beyond global limits. In seeking this awareness, post-human theory recognizes human beings as, at once, both a globally destructive force and a hapless victim of our own sapience. It calls for radical changes in human behavior to avert the tragic progression of human business as usual. For Morton, the core of humanity’s evolutionary success and prospective failure is “agrilogistics,” premised on human ownership as the essence of the “nature-agriculture split,” that conceptually separates humans from the rest of life on Earth. Deconstructing this divide is the motive force of post-humanist philosophy that invites non-rationality into disciplines all across the academy. In psychology, for instance, Veronique Servais defends anthropomorphism as “the situated direct perception of animal minds (or other human properties) in the behavior or bodily expression of animals by someone who is engaged in a specific process of activity” (original emphasis).77 Instead of dismissing idiosyncratic, personal dimensions of perception because they interfere with objective truth, Servais endorses the “relational epistemology” of animist cultures and questions the Western academic interpretation of animism as belief instead of knowledge. In human geography, Mabel Denzin Gergan challenges her discipline’s secular dismissal of “engagement with sacred, sentient, and spiritual acts and experiences,” insisting that “the human subject is just another actor in a dense relational network with other animate and inanimate actors.”78 Gergan wants to integrate religious and spiritual beliefs with academic knowledge as a way of healing the pervasive “disenchantment caused by the rupture between culture and nature in Western science.”79

77 Veronique Servais, “Anthropomorphism in Human-Animal Interactions: A Pragmatic View,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02590. 78 Mabel Denzin Gergan, “Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Spiritual in Post-Humanist and Materialist Geographies,” Geography Compass 9, no. 5 (2015): 262. 79 Gergan, “Animating the Sacred,” 267.

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Kulick has observed that animal communicators often support their re-enchantment efforts by citing scholars on the fringes of academe. These quasischolars are, for him, epitomized by Rupert Sheldrake, who studied dogs’ “intuitive” perception of their owners’ approach. In recognizing some humans as “owners” of some dogs, Sheldrake, it might be argued, studied human-animal communication within the agrilogistic paradigm. In an effort to escape a similarly anthropocentric worldview, post-human scholars like Servais and Gergan and Morton appeal to theoretical physics, which unabashedly asserts the quantum weirdness of its empirical subject. Theoretical physicist Xie Chen, for instance, describes “fractons” as “the weirdest phase of matter”80 and fellow physicist Nathan Seiberg reports that the uncanny nature of these “partial particles” overturns scientific belief about how systems behave, prompting his personal realization about his own advanced scientific understanding: “I had been living in denial.”81 Eco-philosophy characterizes the paradigm shift of the Anthropocene as the decentering of human perspective in the face of an unfolding environmental emergency. In the words of Joanna Zylinska (2018), such decentering calls for “a different conceptualization of subjectivity,”82 ushering in a fundamentally “relational” subject who “acknowledges the prior existence of relations between clusters of matter and energy that temporarily stabilize for us humans – on a molecular, cellular, and social level” (original emphasis).83 Proposing the goal of “collaborative survival” in precarious times, Zylinska posits an Anthropocene morality of “cross-species coexistence as an ethical way of being in the world.”84 For her, this relational way of being human is antithetical to the white, Christian, male subject who seeks separation from and dominion over the natural world. While the alternative route I have traced to the ethical questions Kulick finds in human-animal communication studies today offers no final endorsement of animal communicators’ claims, it calls into question their out-of-hand dismissal by academic authorities and demands an examination of the mythologies behind such rejection. Kulick’s identification of animal communicators as female is a case in point. Western identification of women with Nature produces the fabled concept of “women’s intuition” as a way of knowing that is separate from and inferior to reason, and suspicion of supernatural relationships between women 80 Thomas Lewton, “The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description,” Quanta Magazine, July 26, 2021, https://www.quantamagazine.org/fractons-the-weirdest-ma tter-could-yield-quantum-clues-20210726/#. 81 Lewton, “The ‘Weirdest’ Matter.” 82 Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis, MI: Minnesota University Press, 2018), 49. 83 Ibid., 53. 84 Ibid., 58.

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and nonhuman nature is long recorded in the unhappy history of witches and their familiars. In denouncing telepathic communication as “weird” and its practitioners as “batty,” rational empiricists like Shermer and Kulick defend an academic status quo that is ill-equipped to confront the existential, epistemic and ethical questions of the present moment. A woman who earns Kulick’s respect, though she “communicates” with elephants as minded creatures, is Gay A. Bradshaw, founder of trans-species psychology. Her discovery of post-traumatic stress in free-ranging African elephants directs academic attention to the inner lives of nonhuman animals, posing an Anthropocene version of Nagel’s question: What is it like to be an elephant in Africa today? Bradshaw claims that interspecies comparability – the essential logic of anthropomorphism – levels the “epistemic playing field,” reminding us humans that though we overlap with other sensibilities, we can never fully comprehend them or know the world (including ourselves) as they perceive it. Such a realization, she asserts, must compel us to seek ways of coexisting with nonhuman nature “that will not perpetuate the social and ecological holocausts destroying the planet today.”85 The existential challenges of the Anthropocene – hyper-objects such as global warming and ecological decay – require us to be human differently. They require us to collectively devise an evolutionary strategy that does not simply follow the trajectory of Progress that human desire and reason have plotted thus far. They require us to surrender the dogma of human exceptionalism and find new ways to experience and develop human commonality and coevolution with other forms of life. Such a departure from human business as usual demands radical shifts of human attention and effort. In place of humanist practices of cultivating and celebrating ways of being and knowing that distinguish us from other life forms – language, science, technology –, ecological awareness compels us to celebrate commonality and cultivate unaccustomed ways of coexisting with nonhuman life. As Morton asserts, our awareness of the ecological systems in which we are embedded is inevitably partial and distorted by the limitations of human perception, and as Nagel concludes from exploring what it is like to be a bat, reason and objectivity provide very little access to the radically different modes of subjectivity with which we share a world-making project. In the both/and logic of quantum coherence, both rational and non-rational ways of knowing are summoned to the development of ecological awareness. Nagel looks to empathy and imagination, even as he hopes that science and technology will further advance our understanding of what it is like to be something other than human. Morton similarly asserts that ecological awareness

85 Bradshaw, “An Ape Among Many,” 28.

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is more than cognition – it is congruent with “weird embodiment,”86 an animate blend of multiple modes of perception at individual, ever-changing nodes within a multidimensional planetary nervous system. Ecological awareness, according to Morton, produces an attitude of care for more-than-human world through the combined channels of feeling, recognizing, knowing, sensing, experiencing, imagining, empathizing, and other academically unexplored and unexploited ways of understanding the world we are a part of. Animal communicators exemplify one such effort to extend the boundaries of human understanding and bring human selves into closer connection with nonhuman ways of knowing and being. Dismissing these attempts out-of-hand, on the basis of antiquated measures of “weirdness” closes off potentially fruitful possibilities of human becoming.

Bibliography Anderson, Karen. Hear All Creatures! The Journey of an Animal Communicator. Woonsocket, RI: New River Press, 2008. Andrews, Ted. Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1993. Bradshaw, Gay A. “An Ape Among Many: Animal Co-Authorship and Trans-species Epistemic Authority.” Configurations 18, no. 1–2 (2010): 15–30. Brown, Timothy J. “Deconstructing the Dialectical Tensions in The Horse Whisperer: How Myths Represent Competing Cultural Values.” Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 2 (2005): 83–97. Bubandt, Nils, ed. A More-than-Human. AURA Working Papers, vol. 3: A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2018. Challenger, Melanie. How to Be Animal. New York: Random House, 2021. De Waal, Frans. “‘Silent Invasion’: Imanishi’s Primatology and Cultural Bias in Science.” Animal Cognition 6 (2002): 293–99. Farmer, Steven D. Power Animals: How to Connect with Your Animal Spirit Guide. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2004. Gergan, Mabel Denzin. “Animating the Sacred, Sentient and Spiritual in Post-Humanist and Materialist Geographies.” Geography Compass 9, no. 5 (2015): 262–75. Goodall, Jane. Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Hafen, Susan. “Listening with the Third Eye: A Phenomenological Ethnography of Animal Communicators.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec, 185–206. London: Routledge, 2013.

86 Morton, Dark Ecology, 19.

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Hurn, Samantha. “From the Horse’s Mouth: Hearing Nonhuman Voices in the Anthropocene.” In More-than-Human. AURA Working Papers, vol. 3: A Non-secular Anthropocene: Spirits, Specters and Other Nonhumans in a Time of Environmental Change, edited by Nils Bubandt, 76–96. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2018. Jensen, Derrick. A Language Older than Words. Wind River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2000. Kawle, Akshaya V. Animal Communication: A Guide to Two-way Telepathic Communication with Animals. Chennai, Tamil Nadu: Notion Press, 2021. Kulick, Don. 2017. “Human-Animal Communication.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (2017): 357–78. Kwok, Sinead. “The Human-Animal Divide in Communication: Anthropocentric, Posthuman, and Integrationist Answers.” Language and Communication 74 (2020): 61–73. Larson, Lisa. Pawstalking: A Course in Communicating with Animals. [s.l.]: Self-published, 2019. Lewton, Thomas. “The ‘Weirdest’ Matter, Made of Partial Particles, Defies Description.” Quanta Magazine, July 26, 2021. https://www.quantamagazine.org/fractons-the-weirde st-matter-could-yield-quantum-clues-20210726/#. Matsuzawa, Tetsuro. “Kinji Imanishi and 60 Years of Japanese Primatology.” Current Biology 18, no. 4 (2017): R587–90. McGillivray, Debbie. Animal Communication Boot Camp. [s.l.]: Self-published, 2015. Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. –. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2013. –. “Weird Embodiment.” In Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human, edited by Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer and Peter Lichtenfels, 19–33. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Nagel, Thomas. “What is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 8, no. 4 (1974): 435– 50. O’Leary, Denyse. “But in the End, Did the Chimpanzee Really Talk?” Mind Matters News, July 25, 2020. https://wwwmindmatters.ai/2020/07/but-in-the-end-did-the-chimpanzee -really-talk. Plate, Liedeke. “New Materialisms.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by John Farrow, Mark Byron, Pelagia Goulimari, Sean Pryor and Julie Rak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Plec, Emily. “Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: An Introduction.” In Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, edited by Emily Plec, 1–16. London: Routledge, 2013. Prat, Yosef, Mor Taub and Yossi Yovel. “Everyday Bat Vocalizations Contain Information about Emitter, Addressee, Context and Behavior.” Scientific Reports 6 (2016): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39419. Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue, and Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba, Nyota Wamba. “Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 10, no. 1 (2007): 7–19. Servais, Veronique. “Anthropomorphism in Human-Animal Interactions: A Pragmatic View.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02590.

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Shermer, Michael. Why People Believe Weird Things. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. Thiyagarajan, Swati, and Craig Foster, dir. The Animal Communicator. With Anna Breytenbach. NHU Africa: Foster Brothers Film Production, 2012. Weil, Kari. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Williams, Marta. Beyond Words: Talking with Animals and Nature. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2005. –. Learning their Language: Intuitive Communication with Animals and Nature. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003. Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. –. The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: Norton, 2012. Zylinska, Joanna. The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2018.

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Davina Höll* / Leonie Bossert (University of Tübingen)

“What Would a Microbe Say?”: Paving the Way to Multispecies Communication**

Abstract Microbiome research has shown that microbes sustain and significantly affect human and non-human existence. However, an antagonistic view of microbes still prevails, even on a linguistic level. In this paper, we use the approach of ecolinguistics to critique the term ‘invasion,’ which is frequently applied to describe microbe-human entanglements. Taking the example of Sonja Bäumel and Helen Blackwell’s BioArt project What Would a Microbe Say?, we demonstrate how even progressive non-anthropocentric perspectives of humanmicrobe interactions struggle with long-established language patterns. Yet, only respectfully conceived multispecies relationships allow for engaging in multispecies communication, which, in turn, makes it possible to perceive multispecies knowledge production. We argue that sensitivity to language is essential in order to reshape the perception of human-microbe relationships. Combining perspectives from medical and environmental humanities, we conclude our paper with a call for a microbial ethics that might allow for visions of how to live together with microbes in a respectful way. Keywords: Microbiome, Multispecies Communication, BioArt, Cohabitation, Microbial Ethics

Introduction: The Microbiome and Multispecies Knowledge Production Humans share their bodies with about 40–100 trillion microorganisms. A great variety of bacteria, fungi and archaea as well as viruses exist on and in our bodies and constitute the human microbiome. In recent years, international research on the microbiome has grown rapidly and is continually revealing the manifold intricacies of human-microbe relationships. Beyond research on the human microbiome, it has been shown that microbes sustain almost all life forms on * Davina Höll’s research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany′s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2124 – 390838134. ** We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and our colleague Simon Meisch for their constructive and encouraging comments.

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earth as well as the planet’s ecosystems. It can be argued that microbiome research decidedly questions concepts of the human self, its autonomy and supposed supremacy over other life forms.1 Consequently, the microbiome is attracting more and more attention also in the humanities, in disciplines such as philosophy, applied ethics, literary studies, cultural studies and the arts.2 Inspiring theories and visions of multispecies futures attempt to account for the deep entanglements of all living beings (including microbes) and recognize that microbes ultimately turn humans into multispecies beings.3 Border-crossing and category-breaking thinkers like Donna Haraway, who states that “approaches tuned to ‘multi-species becoming with’ better sustain us in staying with the trouble on terra,”4 or posthumanist thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti, who calls for a post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities, are already developing intriguing theories and concepts highlighting the intricacies of humans and other life forms and distinctly questioning anthropocentrism.5 These decidedly non-anthropocentric conceptions of existence indicate extraordinary opportunities for specific multispecies communication and knowledge production.6 As Ursula K. Heise summarizes: “the future study of cultures will need to be multiscalar, […] from the microscopic to the geological […], [a]nd it will need to re-envision the human in a context of multispecies networks that take culture beyond the human.”7 The ever-flourishing posthuman, non1 Tobias Rees, Thomas Bosch, and Angela E. Douglas, “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self,” PLOS Biology 16, no. 2 (February 2018): 1–7; Nicolae Morar and Brendan J. M. Bohannan, “The Conceptual Ecology of the Human Microbiome,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 94, no. 2 (June 2019): 149–75. 2 Beth Greenhough et al., “Setting the Agenda for Social Science Research on the Human Microbiome,” Palgrave Communications 6, no. 1 (Dec. 2020): 18. 3 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden: Polity Press, 2013); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Ursula K. Heise, “Multispecies Futures and Study of Culture,” in Futures of the Study of Culture, eds. Doris Bachmann-Medick, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), 274–287; Myea J. Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Eben Kirksey, The Multispecies Salon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” The American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (December 2014): 1587–1607. 4 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 63. 5 Braidotti, The Posthuman, 60. 6 Jens Hauser, “Rehabilitating Bacteria: An Epistemological Art/Science Interface,” in Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Empathy, and Agency in 21st-Century Media Arts, ed. Hava Aldouby, 193–211. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020; Fermín C. Fulda, “Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3, no. 1 (2017): 69–90; Ewelina Twardoch-Ras´, “Non-human Actors in Their ‘Strongly Possible Worlds.’ Constructions of Alternative Universes in Bio Art Projects,” Przegla˛d Kulturoznawczy 40, no. 2 (2019): 151–80. 7 Heise, “Multispecies Futures,” 280.

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human or more-than-human conceptualizations of becoming and being together have a great impact especially in a certain scientific community. However, in other academic disciplines, such as the life sciences, the popular media and in public debates, an antagonistic view of microbes still prevails. We argue that the still dominant perception of microbes as uncanny bearers of disease and death prevents an actual readiness to communicate with them, get to know them and therefore find ways to learn with and from them. Thus, the aim of our paper is threefold. Firstly, we show how the rather contemptuous attitude towards microbial lives in, on, and around us is reflected even on a linguistic level. To do so, we use the approach of ecolinguistics which deals with how the way of speaking about non-human entities influences attitudes and actions towards them and vice versa.8 In this framework, we critique the topical term of ‘invasion,’ which dates back to the early days of microbiology and is frequently used until today in describing microbe-human entanglements. Based on the criticism of the term ‘invasion’ we, secondly, use the collaborative work of BioArt What Would a Microbe Say? by Sonja Bäumel and Helen Blackwell to demonstrate how even progressive, decidedly more-than-human perspectives of human-microbe interactions struggle with long-established language patterns. As a result, we, thirdly, offer normative recommendations for speaking about microbes. We conclude that sensitive language is a prerequisite for shaping the perception of human-microbe relationships in a more respectful manner. To this end, we propose a new understanding of the concept of cohabitation, enabling a more appreciative way of speaking about microbe-human entanglements. We recognize that only respectfully conceived multispecies relationships allow for engaging in multispecies communication, which, in turn, makes it possible to perceive and appreciate multispecies knowledge production in the first place.

8 Sune Steffensen and Alwin Fill, “Ecolinguistics. The State of the Art and Future Horizons,” Language Sciences 41, no. A (2014): 6–25; Alwin Fill and Hermine Penz, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics (New York: Routledge 2018); Alwin Fill, “Ökolinguistik,” in Natur, Umwelt, Nachhaltigkeit. Perspektiven auf Sprache, Diskurse und Kultur, Anna Mattfeldt, Carolin Schwegler, and Berbeli Wanning eds., 307–323. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021.

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‘Language, Mind, Reality’: Prerequisites for New Forms of Multispecies Communication According to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as Sapir-WhorfHypothesis, language influences human thought and creates realities.9 In the context of human-non-human entanglements, especially the approach of ecolinguistics deals with the practical consequences of the way we speak about the non-human. Ecolinguistics investigates how our way of speaking is shaped in relation to nature and other living beings and how this shapes human-nature or human-animal relationships in particular societies. With this, ecolinguistics aims at establishing a way of speaking which does not reproduce human-nature or human-animal dualisms, as is currently the case when, e. g., humans are associated with culture, while all other living beings are assigned to nature. Therefore, enabling multispecies forms of communication calls foremost for a changed perspective on other living beings, i. e., a perspective that acknowledges them for what they are, not for how they benefit or threaten humans.10 Such a change of perspective in turn requires a new way of speaking. Therefore, we focus on our way of speaking about microbes by discussing the often-employed term ‘invasion,’ since it is a long handed-down topos in speaking about microbes, which underlines a distinct antagonistic conception of human-microbe relationships. For a very long time in history as well as just recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, bacteria and viruses have been framed as some kind of invaders of the human (or animal) body which need to be combated. Marianne Hänseler, Philipp Sarasin and Silvia Berger were able to show that ways of speaking about microbes utilized imagery of war and invasion already in the nineteenth century.11 Priscilla Wald impressively narrates how the story of “Germ Warfare” and “Viral Invaders” was employed in speaking about infectious diseases. Such usage links the politics of anti-microbial warfare to macrobial politics of war.12 Brigitte Nerlich 9 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, eds. John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson, and Penny Lee, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012). 10 The urgency of such a changed perspective on animals has been highlighted in Animal Ethics and Human-Animal Studies for many years. Cf. for many Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11 Marianne Hänseler, Metaphern unter dem Mikroskop: die epistemische Rolle von Metaphorik in den Wissenschaften und in Robert Kochs Bakteriologie, Legierungen 6 (Zürich: Chronos, 2009); Philipp Sarasin, “Die Visualisierung des Feindes. Über metaphorische Technologien der frühen Bakteriologie,” in Bakteriologie und Moderne. Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren 1870–1920, eds. Philipp Sarasin, Silvia Berger, Marianne Hänseler, and Myriam Spörri, 427–61. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. 12 Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 175–212; Heather Paxson, “Interlude: Microbiopolitics,” in The Multispecies Salon, ed. Eben Kirksey, 115–21. Duke University Press, 2014.

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and Iina Hellsten showed that despite an increasingly integrative metaphoric way of speaking about microbes, especially in the context of microorganisms considered pathogenic, the use of martial language continues to be dominant.13 This fact is also confirmed by the recently published study by Alice Beck, who critically examines the “good/bad microbe binary.”14 The COVID-19 crisis has given the war metaphor a new relevance, in some cases with far-reaching political and practical implications.15 A central term of the war imagery is the term ‘invasion.’ In the frame of the semantic field of invasion, microbes are imagined as invisible enemies that transgress the borders of the human bodies to bring disease and death. This concept of invading foes implies that humans have to defend themselves by means of protection from and eradication of the supposed enemy. Such rhetoric of fighting off the invisible enemy hinders the attempt to establish forms of serious communication with microbial beings and in turn the attempt to learn from and with them. A striking example of the consequences of a certain use of words from the world of macrobes is the concept of invasive species. The usage of war metaphors is widespread also for so-called invasive species within conservation biology, conservation practices and in media reports of ‘alien’ species settling in an ecosystem. Often, both popular and scientific discourse lacks reflection on the appropriateness of such language. The term ‘invasion’ distinctly hinders neutral discussion of a topic. It has negative connotations and is associated with suppression and death.16 With regard to socalled invasive species, animal ethicists have shown that the term invasive species is mostly used when the ‘alien’ species cause damage, which is often evaluated in economic terms.17 Consequently, the term is (often unconsciously) used to bring the interests of certain stakeholders to the fore. Speaking of ‘invasion’ in relation to microbes illustrates people’s fears of disease and death triggered by the col13 Brigitte Nerlich and Iina Hellsten, “Beyond the Human Genome: Microbes, Metaphors and What It Means to Be Human in an Interconnected Post-Genomic World,” New Genetics and Society 28, no. 1 (March 2009): 19–36. Allison L. Rowland, Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood. New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 43. 14 Alice Beck, “Microbiomes as Companion Species: An Exploration of Dis- and Re-Entanglements with the Microbial Self,” Social & Cultural Geography 22, no. 3 (March 2021): 357–75. 15 Carmen McLeod, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, and Brigitte Nerlich, “Fearful Intimacies: COVID19 and the Reshaping of Human–Microbial Relations,” Anthropology in Action 27, no. 2 (June 2020): 33–39; Davina Höll, “Zu einer Ethik der Ästhetik in Pandemischen Zeiten,” Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 8, no. 1 (August 2021): 194–196. 16 Leonie Bossert, “Von Hirschkühen, ‘Milchkühen’ und Waschbären: Begründung Unterschiedlicher Hilfspflichten und ihrer Anwendung auf ‘Invasive’ Arten,” TIERethik, no. 2 (2018): 74. 17 Klaus-Peter Rippe, “Zum Umgang mit tierischen Einwanderern. Ethik, Tiertötung und die Bekämpfung invasiver Arten,” TIERethik, no. 2 (2015): 49.

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lective memory of the epidemic and pandemic crises of humankind. The negative connotation of the term ‘invasion’ is an obstacle to engaging in a non-anthropocentric way with the particularities and characteristics of other life forms and their close interconnectedness with other living beings. However, research that reveals humans’ deep dependency on the human microbiome makes it very clear that microbes turn humans into multispecies beings the moment humans are born. We thus advocate for reflecting on and modifying – or rethinking altogether – our use of language in relation to microbes with regards to using negatively connoted or otherwise questionable terms. Following the assumptions of Benjamin Lee Whorf ’s hypothesis, which states that changed language leads to changed perception, we argue that it also can contribute to enabling new forms of communication with the corresponding living beings, which in turn, might be the starting point for knowledge production with microbial life.18 Art is repeatedly attributed a certain innovative character and is considered a genuine form of knowledge production that allows for venturing into unknown terrain. In the following analysis we use an example from the young field of BioArt to show the possibilities and obstacles of engaging in new forms of communication with microbes.

Microbial BioArt and the (Im)Possibilities of Multispecies Communication As Jan Jagodzinski has recently reaffirmed, “[o]ne of the most distinguishing features of contemporary art has been the overcoming of the separation of art and science.”19 He states that “Bioartists have become the new symptomologists of the age […]” who “introduce us to new affective and perceptive states that had never before been experienced.”20 Within BioArt, artists and scientists work together using biotechnological techniques and tools on living material to create art that lives, relies on existing life forms, or becomes a new life form itself. Thus, BioArt produces novel knowledge that fruitfully feeds back into scientific dis-

18 Highlighting the importance of microbes for knowledge production is also done in the philosophical work of Nicole Karafyllis, as in a current project she wants to demonstrate that microbes are a genuine part of cultural heritage and in the processes of producing knowledge about it. What is valued as cultural heritage for humans is a habitat for microbes at the same time, allowing to gain important knowledge when trying to ‘listen’ to the information the microbes reveal: University of Braunschweig, “Microbib,” accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.tu-braunschweig.de/philosophie/mikrobib. 19 Jan Jagodzinski, “Practical Aesthetics. The Case of BioArt,” in Practical Aesthetics, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, 63–72. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 20 Ibid., 66.

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course. Microbes are a strong symbol for the entanglements of terrestrial and – as assumed by some scholars – even extra-terrestrial living beings.21 Therefore, it may come as no surprise that microbes have been an object of art and epistemology from very early on.22 In the last decades, the intricacies of microbes, humans, and their shared environments have become a major theme of BioArt: “Bacteria are getting big […] in the contemporary field of hands-on biomedia art practices, bacteria as the oldest, smallest, structurally simplest but ubiquitous organisms vital for all other life forms are being rediscovered and given a crucial role […].”23 Diverse encounters of microbes, art, and science, demonstrate that the minute organisms are as scientifically, philosophically, and aesthetically fascinating as they are challenging. They function “as agents, material medium, motives, metaphors, and models of knowledge production,”24 advancing into new epistemological territory and thus help to pave the way for truly multispecies knowledge production. In the following section we show how these diverse forms of multispecies knowledge production can be investigated through works of BioArt.

Sonja Bäumel and Helen Blackwell What Would a Microbe Say? (2017–2020) Sonja Bäumel is a protagonist of contemporary microbial BioArt. The Austrian BioArtist works at the intersection of fashion, art, and microbiology. A central interest of her long-standing endeavour of exploring the entanglements of human and the microbial life forms is the skin microbiome. For her, it serves as an “in between layer [that is] full of life”. For that reason, she has repeatedly worked with her own skin microbiome as reflected in a variety of projects. With her work, she wants to make people aware of the porosity of humankind’s bodily borders and the beauty that lies within this awareness. Her collaborative artistic research project What Would a Microbe Say?, which she conducted with American chemist Helen Blackwell, seeks – nomen est omen – “to address human

21 Charles S. Cockell, “Microbial Rights?,” EMBO Reports 12, no. 3 (March 2011): 181. 22 Davina Höll, “Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature,” in Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, ed. Sladja Blazan, 21–42. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 23 Hauser, “Rehabilitating Bacteria,” 193. 24 Ibid.

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exceptionalism and to expand the current knowledge about microbial communication.”25 Between 2017 and 2020, Bäumel and Blackwell focused on “non-linguistic microbial communication”26 in order to investigate the possibilities of expanding “our sensual, haptic, physical, visual and imaginary language”27 in order “to provide a radically new view of biological rules, hierarchies, dimensions, and standards.”28 For this purpose, Bäumel and Blackwell employed and artistically explored the concept of quorum sensing. Quorum sensing is the chemical language of microbes, “a process of cell-to-cell communication that bacteria use to orchestrate collective behaviors in response to changes in cell population density and species composition”29 and allows for “intraspecies, intragenera, and interspecies cell–cell communication.”30 The project’s outcome was a virtual exhibition that includes images, texts and references to the project’s performance and other works of art authored by Bäumel. For the analysis, we take this artistic hybrid as an extraordinary form of life writing, following the intriguing argument of Mita Banerjee and Alfred Hornung who state: “life writing research starts out from a highly open and extensive form of textuality”31 such as “print media, performance, film and video, radio and tapes, or the Internet”32 as well as the combination of “different media for intermedial effects […] [which ultimately] […] dissolve the boundaries between genres and technologies of signification.”33 In this understanding even (non-)human bodies and materials that enter into a permanent exchange with different art forms can become a readable narrative, a textual testimony of the intricacies of life, which challenges language itself in extraordinary ways. In doing so, hybrid artworks, such as Bäumel and Blackwell’s project, ultimately also give the concept of life writing itself an extraordinary spin since they do not

25 Sonja Bäumel and Helen Blackwell, “What Would a Microbe say?,” accessed November 19, 2021, https://cdmc.wisc.edu/2020/07/01/what-would-a-microbe-say/. 26 Sonja Bäumel, “What Would a Microbe Say?,” accessed November 19, 2021, https://www. sonjabaeumel.at/work/what+would+a+microbe+say/. 27 Ibid. 28 Bäumel and Blackwell, “What Would a Microbe say?” 29 Olivia P. Duddy and Bonnie L. Bassler, “Quorum Sensing across Bacterial and Viral Domains,” PLOS Pathogens 17, no. 1 (January 2021): 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppa t.1009074. 30 Ibid. 31 Mita Banerjee, Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography, American Studies 292 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018), 2. 32 Alfred Hornung, “Auto/Biography and Mediation: Introduction,” in Auto/Biography and Mediation, ed. Alfred Hornung, xi. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012 (E-book). 33 Hornung, “Auto/Biography and Mediation: Introduction,” xi.

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only write about but with living beings, impressively engaging in multispecies art and knowledge production.34 The project’s final exhibition was originally planned to be on view from April to June 2020 in the Ruth Davis Design Gallery, located in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020 prevented the exhibition from taking place and forced a change of plan. Key pieces of the planned exhibition were selected and included in an online version, which was launched in the summer of 2020. A book based on the cooperation is in development. The result, for the time being, is a virtual exhibition-image-text-performance-hybrid that spans widely in terms of space and time, media, and theory. Having been developed over several years, in interdisciplinary as well as international contexts and resulting in live performances, exhibition material, images, and theoretical reflections, the What Would a Microbe Say? project is a striking example of BioArt as living art that must adapt to life and – metaphorically and literally – takes on a life of its own. The text passages narrate the evolution of the project and reference important theoretical, artistic and conceptual influences such as the American pioneering biologist and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, the metahumanist Jaime del Val, the Austrian artist, curator and art theoretician Peter Weibel or the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel.35 The descriptive passages are accompanied by a selection of images that often directly refer to the thoughts and ideas expressed. Furthermore, Bäumel and Blackwell directly referenced and hyperlinked Bäumel’s earlier transdisciplinary project Fifty Percent Human that ran from 2015 until 2016 and resulted in an interactive exhibition and a scientific paper.36 As early as then, Bäumel’s interest revolved around the questions “how to approach the microbial body, the microbial interplay between humans and other living species?”37 and “how can we get in touch with our co-habitants?”38 Especially the latter is an important question for thinking in a more-than-human way and already points towards the core interest of the later project. The images that frame the text passages of What Would a Microbe Say? online exhibition mostly show the artworks that have been developed during the project 34 However, this needs to be ethically evaluated, as e. g., BioArtist Anna Dumitriu and colleague Nicola Fawcett, M. D., call for: Fawcett, Nicola J, and Anna Dumitriu, “Bacteria on Display – Can We, and Should We? Artistically Exploring the Ethics of Public Engagement with Science in Microbiology,” FEMS Microbiology Letters 365, no. 11 (June 2018): 1–5, https://doi.org /10.1093/femsle/fny101. 35 Jaime Del Val, “Metabody,” accessed September 7, 2021, https://metabody.eu/jaime-del-val/. 36 Sonja Bäumel et al., “Fifty Percent Human – How Art Brings Us in Touch with Our Microbial Cohabitants,” Microbial Biotechnology 11, no. 4 (July 2018): 571–74. 37 Ibid. 38 Bäumel, “What Would a Microbe Say?”

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period. The intriguing and challenging mixture of text, image, references, and hyperlinks that this online version of the planned exhibition is manufactured of is also reflected in its digital realization. Created with the Microsoft tool Sway, it features a specific dynamic fluidity and hybridity that seems to mimic its thematic content, i. e., a permanent invitation to communicate, to get hold of the communicating elements and make sense of them across the borders of space and time, media, and language and, ultimately, species themselves. However, the project also reveals the predicament of its highly ambitious aim “to learn microbial languages and their collective behaviours […] to start talking to them and to envision further forms of interaction.”39 This becomes most tangible in the way of speaking about the human-non-human entanglement itself. In the text passages of the online exhibition as well as the hyperlinked texts, there is a great number of terms pointing distinctly towards a unifying, even egalitarian concept of living with microbes. Signal words like “multi-beings”, “symbiosis”, “coevolution”, “community” or “microbial heritage” paint a picture of peaceful and beneficial, even familial togetherness. However, there also is a – maybe unintended – sub-text that reveals the ghostly traces of the dark imaginaries of microbial life forms and their impact on the human, which seems to be repeatedly reactivated, especially in the context of infectious diseases.40 Thus, e. g., the installation which was part of the project features an artificial human body floating in agar-like fluid in a transparent casket that strongly resembles Snow White’s glass coffin and gives the impression of being hermetically sealed. The installation, which is composed of the glass coffin-like object containing the form of a human body, appears to be strangely not entangled with its surrounding environment. In fact, it can be perceived as a sterilized “nomad or island” that the project wants the audience to question. In the performance called Microbial Entanglements – In Vitro Breakout that was given in 2019 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany, Bäumel, together with choreographer and performance artist Doris Uhlich and performance artist and dancer Andrius Mulokas, lay undressed in an oversized manufactured petri-dish before getting in motion to “break out of this and move freely in the exhibition space furnished with materials such as kinetic sand and methyl cellulose, which ‘contaminate’ the performers’ bodies”41 as the paratext informs the (virtual) audience and refers to the language of antagonism through pathogenization. Although the single quotation marks do indicate a certain hesitation in using the term, they also show the lack of an alternative. When finally, the SARS-COV-2

39 Ibid. 40 Höll, “Microgothic”, 21–42; Höll, “Zu einer Ethik,” 181–208. 41 Bäumel and Blackwell, “What Would a Microbe Say?”

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virus is mentioned in the text, it is referred to as a “radical virus”42 that “mercilessly makes us realize our fragility.”43 Through anthropomorphization and demonization, the undoubtedly good intentions of the project are again uncannily undermined. It is in these parts of the project that the struggle to overcome the traditional antagonistic concept of human-microbe interactions becomes most tangible. In an act of autopoiesis, the anthropocentric and antagonistic thinking invades the progressive ambition of Bäumel and Blackwell of seriously asking ‘what would a microbe say?’. This – however, involuntary – relapse demonstrates that especially in times of pandemic crises that is decidedly marked by precarious encounters of humans and microbes, the imagery of microbes as invisible invaders with its primarily anthropocentric concern for human well-being alone is permanently reactivated. This shows that a wideranging rethinking of microbe-human relationships and of the way of speaking about them is urgently needed to overcome antagonistic and anthropocentric conceptions of being together with non-human (microbial) life forms. Instead of an autopoetic reimagination of long standing topoi in need to be overcome, in this paper, we argue with Donna Haraway for a “Sympoesis […] a worlding with, in company”44 that is demanded by “the arts for living on a damaged planet demand.”45

Speak War No More! Towards a Language of Cohabitation A non-anthropocentric thinking and acting helps to engage in the exploration of multispecies communication and opens up opportunities for a deeper understanding of multispecies knowledge production. In this paper, we claim that anthropocentric presuppositions and their reflection in language still stand in the way of multispecies knowledge production and of acknowledging other species’ forms of communication for their own sake instead of trying to adapt them to forms of communication that are familiar to humans. As the example of Bäumel and Blackwell’s work has shown, even BioArt projects with a clear nonanthropocentric perspective in some aspects still remain within the humancentred paradigm. There is still a long way to go to change this paradigm. We take language as one example of how anthropocentric biases are demonstrated and argue, through a critical reading of the term ‘invasion,’ for a modification of the terms we use when speaking about microbes. Already in 42 43 44 45

Ibid. Ibid. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58. Ibid., 67.

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2000 molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg (1925–2008) demanded “Teach war no more” when commenting on microbes.46 Similarly, we also urge: “Speak war no more!” Allison Rowland has recently shown that “even in moments of paradigm shift, the war metaphor still forecloses other possibilities for making sense of microbes” and that until today “we have few conceptual resources available to apprehend our mutualistic or commensal microbial others.”47 To this end, we propose the concept of cohabitation and its semantic field as a possible alternative. Biomedical microbiome research strongly points towards the need of seeing microbes as valuable and fundamentally important beings and refers to the all-connectedness of human and non-human entities through the exchange process of their microbiomes. Cohabitation of the human body by microbes, e. g., makes many bodily functions possible in the first place and is a perfect example of multispecies dependencies. One should understand the human (and animal as well as plant) togetherness with microbes as some kind of cohabitation, since we are sharing many habitats with them.48 The most intimate sharing is based on the fact that our body functions as a habitat for them and, that due to their omnipresence, we also share all other habitats – understood as the places we live in – with microbes. However, we do not only want to describe the intricacies of living-together and sharing habitats with microbes. We want to go beyond description by approaching the concept of cohabitation also from a normative perspective. We want to argue that we should respectfully share the common habitat. This follows from the perspective that it is a shared habitat and – in a non-anthropocentric perspective – humans are not per se more entitled to it than other living beings. In order to respectfully share a habitat with someone, it is required to adapt our way of thinking and, accordingly, our language in a respectful way as well. Therefore, instead of speaking of microbes as invaders, we should seek a creative, more microbe-sensitive way of speaking that mirrors their status as cohabitants. Language that is respectful of microbes will also no longer reproduce dualisms related to representation and will overcome the assertions that some living beings need to be represented by others (“representations” – “entities to be represented”), that some belong to culture while others to nature or that some microbes are ‘good’ while others are ‘bad’.49

46 Joshua Lederberg, “Infectious History,” Science 288, no. 5464 (April 2000): 287–93. 47 Rowland, Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood, 50. 48 For this purpose, an analysis regarding the applicability to microbes of Judith Butler’s “Ethics of Cohabitation” might be fruitful: Judith Butler, “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 134–151. 49 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 804.

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Concluding Remarks and Outlook The concept of cohabitation urgently needs further research in relation to microbes, especially in order to investigate how such cohabitation should be constituted to be ethically sound and what normative consequences need to be drawn to make this happen. We are convinced that the concept of cohabitation can be a good starting point for exploring communication between living beings. The concept of cohabitation as we understand it strongly emphasizes the necessity to investigate the possibilities and opportunities of multispecies communication in a way which values and tries to understand other species’ form of communication. Furthermore, and going beyond microbes, it has the potential to improve conservation efforts and planetary health due to the recognition of spaces as habitats of other living beings.50 We argue that thus challenging anthropocentrism is necessary for really becoming able to ‘listen’ to other living beings such as microbes, and for taking multispecies knowledge production seriously in the first place, however difficult that endeavour may be. Ground-breaking work is already being carried out through the development of important posthumanist theories and concepts regarding human entanglements with other – even the smallest – living beings, however changes in the overall societal perspective still lag behind. To address this, we need a modified, new way of thinking and speaking not only in discourses of the life sciences and in the humanities, but also in popular media and in our daily lives. Changing the way we speak and think about microbial life could lay the ground for a more respectful treatment of our invisible co-habitants that also needs to be informed by a – yet to be specified – microbial ethics. We are convinced that the development of a microbial ethics as an interface of Medical and Environmental Humanities can offer humans normative guidance concerning the challenging question of how to act ethically in regard to microbes. The development of this field of applied ethics is one more research gap, which needs to be filled in. Research based on such goals may help in striving for a better future of togetherness as well as for learning how to communicate with and learn from other species.

50 Stanislav Roudavski, “Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design,” Conference Paper, accesed October 29, 2021, https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1 233&context=drs-conference-papers.

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Bibliography Banerjee, Mita. Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography. American Studies 292. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018. Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801– 31. Bäumel, Sonja. “Fifty Percent Human.” Archive Sonja Bauemel. Accessed October 29, 2021. https://archive.sonjabaeumel.at/works/bacteria/fifty-percent-human/sample-page/. –. “What Would a Microbe Say?” Accessed November 19, 2021. https://www.sonjabae umel.at/work/what+would+a+microbe+say/. Bäumel, Sonja, and Helen Blackwell. “What Would a Microbe Say?” Accessed October 29, 2021. https://cdmc.wisc.edu/2020/07/01/what-would-a-microbe-say/. Bäumel, Sonja, Hanne L.P. Tytgat, Birgit Nemec, Ruth Schmidt, Loo Wee Chia, and Hauke Smidt. “Fifty Percent Human – How Art Brings Us in Touch with Our Microbial Cohabitants.” Microbial Biotechnology 11, no. 4 (July 2018): 571–74. Beck, Alice. “Microbiomes as Companion Species: An Exploration of Dis- and Re-Entanglements with the Microbial Self.” Social & Cultural Geography 22, no. 3 (March 24, 2021): 357–75. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Bossert, Leonie. “Von Hirschkühen, ‘Milchkühen’ und Waschbären: Begründung unterschiedlicher Hilfspflichten und ihrer Anwendung auf ‘Invasive’ Arten.” TIERethik, no. 2 (2018): 58–84. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Malden: Polity Press, 2013. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2012): 134–151. Cockell, Charles S. “Microbial Rights?” EMBO Reports 12, no. 3 (March 2011): 181. Del Val, Jaime. “Metabody.” Accessed September 7, 2021. https://metabody.eu/jaime-del -val/. Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka, eds. Zoopolis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dornenfeld, Katharina. “Sprachexperimente mit Nichtmenschlichen Tieren als Ausdruck von und Herausforderung für Problematische Konzeptionen Tierlicher Agency.” In Das Handeln der Tiere, edited by Sven Wirth, Anett Laue, Markus Kurth, Katharina Dornenzweig, Leonie Bossert, ans Karsten Balgar, 151–182. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016. Duddy, Olivia P., and Bonnie L. Bassler. “Quorum Sensing Across Bacterial and Viral Domains.” PLOS Pathogens 17, no. 1 (January 2021): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1371/jo urnal.ppat.1009074. Fawcett, Nicola J, and Anna Dumitriu. “Bacteria on Display – Can We, and Should We? Artistically Exploring the Ethics of Public Engagement with Science in Microbiology.” FEMS Microbiology Letters 365, no. 11 (June 2018): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1093/femsle /fny101.

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Fill, Alwin. “Ökolinguistik.” In Natur, Umwelt, Nachhaltigkeit. Perspektiven auf Sprache, Diskurse und Kultur, edited by Anna Mattfeldt, Carolin Schwegler, and Berbeli Wanning, 307–323. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. Fill, Alwin, and Hermine Penz. The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. New York: Routledge, 2018. Finlay, B. Brett, Katherine R. Amato, Meghan Azad, Martin J. Blaser, Thomas C. G. Bosch, Hiutung Chu, Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, Stanislav Dusko Ehrlich, Eran Elinav, Naama Geva-Zatorsky, Philippe Gros, Karen Guillemin, Frédéric Keck, Tal Korem, Margaret J. McFall-Ngai, Melissa K. Melby, Mark Nichter, Sven Pettersson, Hendrik Poinar, Tobias Rees, Carolina Tropini, Liping Zhao, and Tamara Giles-Vernick. “The Hygiene Hypothesis, the COVID Pandemic, and Consequences for the Human Microbiome.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 6 (February 2021): e2010217118. Fulda, Fermín C. “Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3, no. 1 (2017): 69–90. Greenhough, Beth, Cressida Jervis Read, Jamie Lorimer, Javier Lezaun, Carmen McLeod, Amber Benezra, Sally Bloomfield, Tim Brown, Megan Clinch, Fulvio D’Acquisto, Anna Dumitriu, Joshua Evans, Nicola Fawcett, Nicolas Fortané, Lindsay J. Hall, César E. Giraldo Herrera, Timothy Hodgetts, Katerina Vicky-Ann Johnson, Claas Kirchhelle, Anna Krzywoszynska, Helen Lambert, Tanya Monaghan, Alex Nading, Brigitte Nerlich, Andrew C. Singer, Erika Szymanski, and Jane Wills. “Setting the Agenda for Social Science Research on the Human Microbiome.” Palgrave Communications 6, no. 1 (Dec. 2020): 18. Hänseler, Marianne. Metaphern unter dem Mikroskop: die Epistemische Rolle von Metaphorik in den Wissenschaften und in Robert Kochs Bakteriologie. Legierungen 6. Zürich: Chronos, 2009. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hauser, Jens. “Rehabilitating Bacteria: An Epistemological Art/Science Interface.” In Shifting Interfaces: An Anthology of Presence, Empathy, and Agency in 21st-Century Media Arts, edited by Hava Aldouby, 193–211. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020. Heise, Ursula K. “Multispecies Futures and Study of Culture.” In Futures of the Study of Culture, edited by Doris Bachmann-Medick, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning, 274– 287. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. Heuberger, Reinhard. “Anthropocentrism in Monolingual English Dictionaries. An Ecolinguistic Approach to the Lexicographic Treatment of Faunal Terminology.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 28, no. 1 (2003): 93–105. Hird, Myea J. The Origins of Sociable Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Höll, Davina. “Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature.” In Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, edited by Sladja Blazan, 21–42. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. –. “Zu einer Ethik der Ästhetik in Pandemischen Zeiten.” Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 8, no. 1 (August 2021): 181–208. Hornung, Alfred. “Auto/Biography and Mediation: Introduction.” In Auto/Biography and Mediation, edited by Alfred Hornung, xi–xviii. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012 (E-book).

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Jagodzinski, Jan. “Practical Aesthetics. The Case of BioArt.” In Practical Aesthetics, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 63–72. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Kirksey, Eben. The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Kurth, Markus. “Von mächtigen Repräsentationen und ungehörten Artikulationen. Die Sprache der Mensch-Tier-Verhältnisse.” In Human-Animal Studies, edited by Chimaira Arbeitskreis für Human-Animal Studies, 85–119. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Lederberg, Joshua. “Infectious History.” Science 288, no. 5464 (April 2000): 287–93. McLeod, Carmen, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, and Brigitte Nerlich. “Fearful Intimacies: COVID-19 and the Reshaping of Human–Microbial Relations.” Anthropology in Action 27, no. 2 (June 2020): 33–39. Morar, Nicolae, and Brendan J. M. Bohannan. “The Conceptual Ecology of the Human Microbiome.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 94, no. 2 (June 2019): 149–75. Nerlich, Brigitte, and Iina Hellsten. “Beyond the Human Genome: Microbes, Metaphors and What It Means to Be Human in an Interconnected Post-Genomic World.” New Genetics and Society 28, no. 1 (March 2009): 19–36. Paxson, Heather. “Interlude: Microbiopolitics.” In The Multispecies Salon, edited by Eben Kirksey, 115–21. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Rees, Tobias, Thomas Bosch, and Angela E. Douglas. “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self.” PLOS Biology 16, no. 2 (February 2018): 1–7. Rippe, Klaus. “Zum Umgang mit Tierischen Einwanderern. Ethik, Tiertötung und die Bekämpfung Invasiver Arten.” TIERethik, no. 2 (2015): 46–64. Roudavski, Stanislav. “Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design.” Conference Paper. Accesed October 29, 2021. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art icle=1233&context=drs-conference-papers. Rowland, Allison L., Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood. New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020, 43. Sarasin, Philipp. “Die Visualisierung des Feindes. Über Metaphorische Technologien der Frühen Bakteriologie.” In Bakteriologie und Moderne. Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren 1870–1920, edited by Philipp Sarasin, Silvia Berger, Marianne Hänseler, and Myriam Spörri, 427–61. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007. Steffensen, Sune, and Alwin Fill. “Ecolinguistics. The State of the Art and Future Horizons.” Language Sciences 41, (2014): 6–25. Thomas, Julia Adeney. “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value.” The American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (December 2014): 1587– 1607. Twardoch-Ras´, Ewelina. “Non-Human Actors in Their ‘Strongly Possible Worlds.’ Constructions of Alternative Universes in Bio Art Projects.” Przegla˛d Kulturoznawczy 40, no. 2 (2019): 151–180. University of Braunschweig, “Microbib.” Accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.tu-bra unschweig.de/philosophie/mikrobib. Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson, and Penny Lee. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.

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Anna Pomyalova (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Radio Mycelium (2018) – eine Jam Session mit Pilzen?

Abstract Radio Mycelium – a Jam Session with Fungi? This article addresses the issue of “interspecies communication” through the subject of Radio Mycelium – a sound performance by Martin Howse and the Mycelium Network Society presented at the Taipei Biennial 2018. On the opening night seventeen local sound artists formed an inter-specific human-mycelium radio network. The article questions how Radio Mycelium is an aesthetic collaboration between humans and fungi. This view is about a new understanding of matter and how to deal with it. How can the matter be explored through interaction with it? How can a performance reveal hidden non-human subjectivities? Can we speak of a jam session here, and what contribution does such a form of performative artistic practice make to cross-species communication? The article follows the path of this communicative approach from cultivating the mycelium and a preparatory DIY biohacking workshop to the sound performance and participatory experience of symbiosis. Keywords: interspecies communication, material as co-actor in artistic practice, living systems art, posthumanistic artistic strategies, DIY biohacking

I.

Allgemeiner Einstieg in die Kontextfelder

Vor dem Hintergrund der Frage Material als Ko-Akteur soll im Folgenden auf relevante theoretische Konzeptionen von Bio Art, wie Vitalistischer Materialismus / material agency eingegangen werden, um die Emanzipation des Materials zum Akteur zu skizzieren. Aus der materialistischen Denkweise der Diskurse werden anschließend Konsequenzen für entsprechende künstlerische Strategien wie schöpferischer Umgang mit dem Material und Überschreitung der Grenzen zwischen Spezies abgeleitet und ins Visier der Werkanalyse genommen. Die Fallbetrachtung soll offenlegen, wie Pilze in performativen künstlerischen Praktiken das Verständnis einer dynamischen, sich hervorbringenden, interagierenden Materie manifestieren; und wie sie im ästhetischen Prozess Mitautorschaft tragen.

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Bio Art Bio Art ist eine Kunstpraxis innerhalb der Science Art, in der Künstler mit lebendem Gewebe, Organismen und Lebensprozessen bei der Erschaffung ihrer Werke operieren.1 Heutzutage ist Bio Art ein heterogenes Feld mit zahlreichen Definitionen. Man unterscheidet nach Capucci und Gessert solche Bereiche wie Transgenic Art, Genetic Art, aber auch Bio Art im weiten Sinne, sodass ihre Definition auch Werke der Land Art und Eco Art miteinschließt.2 Das Instrumentarium der Bio Art hat sich jedoch in den letzten zehn Jahren stark erweitert und daher eine Fokusverschiebung bewirkt. Es sind zunehmend neue technologische Erweiterungen und Schaltstellen zu beobachten, die mit dem Bestreben einhergehen, Beziehungen zu anderen Umweltakteuren, Interaktion mit ihnen oder gar kreative Kollaboration zu visualisieren. Das Besondere an Bio Art ist, dass Medium und Konzept zusammenfallen. Solche Werke verweisen nicht auf etwas, sondern zeigen das Leben an sich, sind also per se antirepräsentalistisch. Werke der Bio Art referieren nicht, sondern manifestieren die Materie, die ihrerseits in sich gespeicherte Energien und Prozesse trägt.3 Folglich wird die physikalische Basis, wie z. B. die Reaktionsfähigkeit ihrer Akteure kommuniziert. Künstlerisches Medium wird auf diese Weise zur greifbaren Form der Materie. Linda Weintraub erwähnt neben Lebewesen auch Lebensprozesse als Werkmedium. Hinsichtlich der Tatsache, dass der vorliegende Beitrag auf aktive, sich ereignende Seinsweisen der Materie fokussiert ist, erscheint diese Bemerkung besonders wichtig. Arte Povera und Land Art – zwei große Kunstbewegungen der Zweiten Avantgarde der 1960er-Jahre – korrelierten in ihren Programmen mit der gesellschaftlichen Neuorientierung durch eine neue Sicht auf die Materie. Sie werden daher als kunsthistorische Vorgänger der Bio Art angesehen. Es handelt sich schließlich um künstlerische Zusammenarbeit mit Energien der Natur, um Sichtbarmachung und Inszenierung der unsichtbaren Prozesse und Kräfte wie Schwerkraft, Magnetismus, Wachstum, Elektrizität, um laut Germano Celant „[…] ein neues Verhältnis zu den Dingen der Welt“4 herzustellen. In der aktuellen Bio Art wird ebenfalls versucht, die Verhältnisse zwischen Natur und Kunst, Technik und Natur, Menschlichem und Nichtmenschlichem neu zu denken und 1 Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco art in pursuit of a sustainable planet (Berkeley, Los Angeles und London: University of California Press, 2012), XXI. 2 Pier Luigi Capucci, „Declinations of the living: toward the third life“, in Evolution haute couture: art and science in the post-biological age, Tl. 2: Theory, hg. v. Dmitry Bulatov (Kaliningrad: NCCA, 2009), 53. 3 Weintraub, To Life!, 43. 4 Vgl. Germano Celant, Ars Povera (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1969), 225.

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den Athropozäntrismus aufzuheben, allerdings mit erweiterten Werkzeugen und Technologien. Die Kunsthistorikerin und Autorin der ersten deutschsprachigen Monografie zu Bio Art, Ingeborg Reichle, reflektiert, 16 Jahre nach Kunst aus dem Labor,5 über das Interesse der Künstler an Biotechnologien. Während es damals um Manipulation des genetischen Codes in einer „künstlerisch motivierten – zweckfreien Anwendung“ ging, richtet sich aktuell das Interesse mehr auf die Grenzen und Rahmenbedingungen des existierenden Lebens im Zeitalter einer ökologischen Bedrohung und des Artensterbens.6 Von der Transformation des Lebens an sich verschiebt sich das künstlerische Interesse mehr in Richtung des Relationalen, mit Augenmerk auf komplexe Beziehungen zwischen den Agenten der Umwelt. Es handelt sich um eine künstlerische Praxis, die die Umwelt genau beobachtet und sich direkt mit den ihr innewohnenden ökologischen Strukturen auseinandersetzt. Durch ein ganzes Set an künstlerischen Strategien verändern die Künstler unsere Wahrnehmung der Umwelt und die Beziehung zu ihr.7 Eine Radikalisierung der Definition von Bio Art wird vom Kurator und Medienforscher Jens Hauser vorgenommen: „Bio Art gibt es nicht – oder es gibt nur „Bio Art““.8 Hauser begründet diese Position mit dem Phänomen der sog. CoCorporalität, womit gemeint ist, dass ein lebendiges System mit einem anderen lebendigen System interagiert. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Beobachtung zweiter Ordnung. Wenn nämlich ein Lebender Leben betrachtet, findet eine Interaktion zwischen zwei lebendigen Systemen statt, eine besondere Spannung, die einer Performance ähnelt und bei einem passiven ästhetischen Objekt nicht gegeben ist. Das Faszinierende an solcher Kunst ist für Hauser die Direktheit der Erfahrung.9 Die Idee der Begegnung von Menschlichem und Nichtmenschlichem verschiebt die traditionelle Vorstellung einer hierarchischen Relation von Objekt und Subjekt, passivem Werk und aktivem Betrachter. Die Direktheit der Erfahrung in der konstruierten Situation der Begegnung ist nicht mehr hierarchisch. Daran erkennt man die allgemeine Bestrebung der Bio Art dialogisch zu sein. Die künstlerische Praxis der Bio Art schöpft ihre diskursiven Grundlagen aus dem Neuen Materialismus und Posthumanismus. Mit dem Werk Radio Myce5 Ingeborg Reichle, Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience (Wien: Springer, 2005). 6 Ingeborg, Reichle, „Bio-Art – die Kunst für das 21. Jahrhundert“, Kunstforum International 258 (2019): 87. 7 Heather Barnett et al., „Introduction“, in The Art of Science. Artists and artworks inspired by science, hg. v. Heather Barnett et al. (London: Welbeck, 2021), 7. 8 Vgl. Magdalena Sick-Leitner, „Es gibt keine Bio Art“, Interview mit Jens Hauser, Ars Electronica Blog, 2. Juni 2015, https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/de/2015/06/02/es-gibt-keine-bio-art/. 9 Ibid.

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lium befinde ich mich inmitten der Debatten um die Wirkungsmacht der Materie, den Nonhuman Turn und den Postanthropozäntrismus.

Vitalistischer Materialismus und Agency In Vibrant matter schildert Jane Bennett die Idee von thing power, die im „vitalistischen Materialismus“ mündet.10 Orientiert an Spinozas Konzept von conatives bodies als antriebhaften, strebenden Körpern konstatiert sie einen aktiven und dynamischen Impuls in der Materie, ob menschlich oder nichtmenschlich. So heißt es bei Bennett: „Even a falling stone, writes Spinoza, „is endeavoring, as far as in it lies, to continue in its motion““.11 Demzufolge sind alle materiellen Entitäten weder stabil noch fest, sondern relational und ständig fluktuierend.12 Es bietet sich deshalb an, weder von Objekt noch von Subjekt zu sprechen, sondern stattdessen für jede „menschliche oder nicht-menschliche Bezugsquelle einer Aktion“13 den Begriff Aktant14 zu verwenden. Die Konzentration auf Materialien, statt – wie üblich – auf Objekte, markiert einen „Übergang von einer Philosophie des Seins zu einer Philosophie des Werdens“.15 Aus der Perspektive Donna Haraways werden Aktanten als „materiell-semiotische Knotenpunkte“ betrachtet, woraus neben der erwähnten Entprivilegierung des Subjekts eine Kritik der binären Oppositionen Natur/Kultur, bzw. Natur/Technik hervorgeht. Diese teilt Haraway mit der Physiker_in Karen Barad. Barads Erklärung für die aktive und agierende Materie speist sich aus dem quantenphysikalischen Verständnis von Niels Bohr: Statt der Teilung in aktiven formenden Geist und formbare passive Materie wird Materie als „geronnenes Tätigsein“16 begriffen. Das verlagert den Schwerpunkt auf die prozessuale Intraaktivität der Materie.

10 Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter. A political ecology of things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2010), 1–19. 11 Vgl. ibid., 2. 12 Nick J. Fox und Pam Alldred, Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action (Los Angeles: Sage, 2017), 4. 13 Vgl. Susanne Witzgall, „Neue Materialist_innen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst“, in Die Macht des Materials – Politik Der Materialität, hg. v. Susanne Witzgall und Kersin Stakemeier (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014), 140. 14 Ähnliche Auffassungen vom Begriff „Aktant“ sind bei anderen Posthumanist_innen und Donna Haraway zu treffen. 15 Vgl. Tim Ingold, „Eine Ökologie der Materialien“, in Macht des Materials / Politik der Materialität, hg. v. Susanne Witzgall und Kerstin Stakemeier (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014), 73. 16 Vgl. Siegfried Köhler, Hania Siebenpfeiffer und Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, „Einleitung“, in Materie. Grundlagentexte zur Theoriegeschichte, hg. v. Siegfried Köhler, Hania Siebenpfeiffer und Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 17.

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Auch Rosi Braidotti, eine weitere feministische Denkerin des posthumanistischen Materialismus, stützt ihre Überlegungen auf eine Philosophie, „die selbstorganisierende Kraft lebendiger Materie betont“.17 Auf das aristotelische Argument, handlungsfähig sei nur derjenige, der Willen hat, antwortet sie mit einer Neukonzeption der Subjektivität, die sie als nomadisch auffasst.18 Aus dem Konzept der Handlungsmacht der Materie resultiert außerdem eine weitere wichtige Komponente – vitale Dynamik der Materie oder ihre Performativität.

Performativität und Material als Akteur und Ko-Autor Materialien sind das, was sie tun.19 Tim Ingold

Tim Ingold legt in seinem Ansatz zur Ökologie der Materialien nahe: „Materialien sind Wesenheiten, die im Werden begriffen werden.“20 Wenn man also ein Material begrifflich erfassen möchte, müsste man demnach hinterfragen, wie es sich in einer Interaktion ereignet. Die Erforschung der Materie wäre mittels einer intensiven Beobachtung und einer Interaktion mit ihr möglich, u. a. in der Produktion, also im künstlerischen Prozess. Ingold beschreibt nämlich den Schöpfungsprozess als Korrespondenz zwischen den beiden Aktanten: Künstler und Material. Diesen Prozess des Dem-Material-Folgens begreift Ingold als „eine Korrespondenz zwischen den Strömen des Materials sowie dem Bewegen und den Strömen des Bewusstseins des Machers“.21 Dabei wären Ströme Wellenlinien des Materials und des menschlichen Bewusstseins, welche im AufeinanderAntworten allmählich synchronisiert werden. Um das Machen zu verstehen, solle man diesen Linien, also den Bewegungen, Kräften und Gesten des Materials folgen und sich in sie einfühlen: „Ein Ding berühren oder beobachten heißt daher, die Bewegungen unseres eigenen Seins (oder vielmals Werdens) in Übereinstimmung mit den Bewegungen der Materialien zu bringen.“22 Damit ist der Macher eine Person, die von der „Intuition in Aktion“23 geleitet dem Material folgt. 17 Vgl. Friedrich Weltzien, „‚Material Agency‘ und die Lebendigkeit der Dinge,“ in Die Sprachen des Materials: Narrative-Theorien-Strategien, hg. v. Friedrich Weltzien und Martin Scholz (Berlin: Reimer, 2016), 234. 18 Weltzien, „‚Material Agency‘“, 234. 19 Vgl. Ingold, „Eine Ökologie der Materialien“, 70. 20 Vgl. ibid., 73. 21 Vgl. ibid., 71. 22 Vgl. ibid., 73. 23 Vgl. ibid., 69.

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Ko-Autorschaft des Materials Das Gestaltungspotenzial des Materials liegt dabei im Material selbst, deshalb agieren Materialien im Rahmen ihrer molekularen Struktur. Das Material setzt also dem kreativen Handeln Grenzen, erzeugt selbst seine eigenen Narrative mit Konsequenzen für das kreative Handeln und schränkt damit die entwerfende Arbeit ein. Bei der ständigen Interaktion mit anderen Netzen, Strukturen, Agenten, menschlichen und nicht menschlichen Akteuren – alles Cyborgs im Sinne von Haraway – vollzieht sich im Werden der Entwurfsprozess. Somit emanzipiert sich das Material vom Mittel zu einem Ko-Autor, es wird „zu einer aktiven Kraft im Entwurfsprozess“.24 Eine solche Disposition erfordert einen schöpferischen Umgang mit dem Material. In Sprachen des Materials spricht Friedrich Weltzien davon, dass Materialsensibilität über geistige oder rationale Prozesse nicht vollständig begriffen werden kann.25 Posthumanistische künstlerische Strategien der Bio Art zielen auf eine Sensibilisierung für diese Phänomene. Sie kommunizieren nämlich eine neue Konzeption dynamischer, sich in der Zeit ereignender Materie. Welche Konsequenzen für künstlerische Prozesse und ästhetische Strategien bringt die Handlungsfähigkeit der Materie mit sich? Das Anliegen des kreativen Schaffens, das im Sinne des vitalistischen Materialismus agiert, bestehe nach Friedrich Weltzien darin, Narrative des Materials aufzugreifen, „seine Stimme wahrnehmbar [zu] machen“.26 Es wird somit zu einer künstlerischen Strategie, die Selbstorganisation der Materie, ihre schöpferischen Kräfte und ihre Widerständigkeit für die Interpretierenden erlebbar zu machen. Daher folgt eine Verlagerung des Schwerpunktes auf die prozessuale Auseinandersetzung, den Dialog und die „dauerhaft[e] Erzeugung von Sinn, als Bedeutungsgenerator.“27 Die andere Seite, die den Inhalt der Narrative des Materials ausmacht, wäre die Interaktion zwischen menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Akteuren. Die Vermittlung von nichtmenschlicher Handlungsfähigkeit (nonhuman agency) erfolgt außerdem in der Offenlegung der kollektiven Produktionsweise, wie etwa im DIY Hacking, die als Dekonstruktion im kognitiven und semantischen Sinne gelesen werden kann. Sie ist dabei eine wichtige Form der Erforschung der Performativität der Materie, denn die Prozesse der Demontage und Montage offenbaren sich als das zuvor thematisierte Dem-Material-Folgen. Eine Partizi-

24 25 26 27

Vgl. Weltzien, „‚Material Agency‘“, 230. Ibid., 229–230. Vgl. ibid., 238. Vgl. ibid., 239.

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pation am Werk durch Teilnahme an einer DIY Hacking Aktion bedeutet ein unmittelbares Material-Erleben und ein Lernen des Materials. Künstler_innen, die mit ökologischen Ästhetiken arbeiten und den Dynamismus der Materie in ihren Werken artikulieren, verlängern ihr künstlerisches Engagement weit über die reine Werkrepräsentation hinaus. Dies geschieht durch die Einbeziehung aktueller Veränderungsprozesse in ihre Kunstwerke. Solche Veränderungen sind nach Weintraub bereits in der Natur des Mediums enthalten oder sie sind ein Ergebnis von Umwelteinflüssen. Sie können aber auch durch Maschinen in den Gang gesetzt werden. Als die letzte Option nennt Linda Weintraub die Anregung durch die Intervention des Publikums.28

Hybridität: Körper in Allianzen, geteilte Handlung, Porösität der Materie Der Fachausdruck Hybridität leitet sich ursprünglich aus dem biologischen Begriff Hybridisierung (Kreuzung) ab.29 In der Soziologie und postkolonialen Studien verselbständigte sich Hybridität als eine allgemeine Bezeichnung einer Mischform von ursprünglich zwei getrennten Systemen.30 Jedes Ding, so Bennett, besitze (Handlungs-)macht, weil jedes materielle Objekt zu einer dichten Verwobenheit gehört, welche alle lebendigen und nicht lebendigen Komponenten der Umwelt verbindet.31 Ein Aktant agiere demnach immer zusammen mit anderen Aktanten, befinde sich also in einer „interaktiven Interferenz vieler Körper und Kräfte.“32 Aus dieser Handlungsmacht und Reaktionsfähigkeit der Materie heraus sind Körper eingebettet in Allianzen oder Assemblagen wie man es bei Deleuze und Guattari33, Latour34, Haraway35 und bei De Landa36 beobachten kann. Bei Latour denke man an Assemblagen, wenn z. B. wissenschaftliche Fakten im Labor konstruiert werden. In der kulturwissenschaftlichen Heuristik der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (ANT) avanciert die Erkenntnis also zu einem kol28 Weintraub, To Life!, 7. 29 In der Molekularbiologie: ein Molekulargenetischer Vorgang der Anlagerung eines DNAStranges an einen ihm komplementären DNA-Strang. 30 Natalya Lusty, Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 77. 31 Weintraub, To Life!, 45. 32 Vgl. Witzgall, „Neue Materialist_innen“, 140. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Günther Rösch, Gabriele Ricke und Ronald Voullié, Tausend Plateaus (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1992). 34 Bruno Latour, Die Hoffnung der Pandora: Untersuchungen zur Wirklichkeit der Wissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002). 35 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 36 Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London und New York: Continuum, 2006).

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lektiven Werk, basierend auf der Vorstellung einer unter Aktanten geteilten Handlung. In Die Geschichtlichkeit der Dinge. Wo waren Mikroben vor Pasteur? prägte Latour die Vorstellung, dass bei der Entdeckung des Milchsäureferments Mikroben sich mit dem Wissenschaftler Pasteur zusammen entdeckt haben.37 Untersuchungsobjekte selbst als Aktanten der Wissensproduktion nehmen also, zusammen mit Gerätschaften des Labors und den Wissenschaftler_innen, an der Konfiguration vom Wissen teil. Im Prozess der Selbstorganisation verschwinden Hierarchien und Grenzen zwischen Lebendigem und Nichtlebendigem, Natur und Technik, Mensch und Nichtmensch zugunsten ihrer Netzwerke. Posthumanistisch gesehen sind kreative Prozesse Vorgänge geteilter Handlung, die von Cyborgs vollbracht werden. Erkenntnisse und Schöpfungen in den kreativen Prozessen, ähnlich wie bei wissenschaftlichen, werden nicht von Individuen vollzogen, sondern „[…] aus Assoziationen zwischen Menschen und nicht-menschlichen Wesen […].“38 Die Kreativität erwächst demzufolge primär aus den autopoietischen Potenzialen der Materie selbst und nicht aus der Genialität des genuin menschlichen Künstlers. Porosität oder Durchlässigkeit der fluktuierenden Materie ermöglicht zum einen eine Interaktion mit anderen Materialien (u. a. im Sinne von metabolischen Prozessen als Austausch von Stoffen), zum anderen, als eine Konsequenz daraus, eine speziesübergreifende Kommunikation, welche auf einer Interaktion zwischen Elementen unterschiedlicher Systeme basiert. Fluktuierende Übergangsprozesse in der porösen Materie manifestieren die Hybridisierung der organischen und nichtorganischen Bereiche.

Überschreitung der Grenzen zwischen den Arten In der künstlerischen Praxis konkretisiert sich das oben Genannte nicht in einer Gegenüberstellung von Mensch und Nichtmensch, sondern in ihrer Hybridisierung, also durch Bildung eines Kontinuums zwischen verschiedenen Arten. Dies kann in der Bio Art durch mediale Verschaltung erfolgen: biotechnologische (in der Transgenetic Art) sowie körpertechnische Verschaltung (mittels DIY Bio Hacking). Mediale Verschaltung dient insofern zur Grenzüberschreitung zwischen den Arten, als dass sie wie ein Interface funktioniert, um eine nichtsprachliche Kommunikation zu führen. In diesem Fall wird auch die Technik nicht als den Anthropozentrismus verstärkend gedeutet, da sie selbst als Ge-

37 Latour, Die Hoffnung der Pandora, 175–76. 38 Vgl. Weltzien, „‚Material Agency‘“, 236.

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rätschaft zu einem Mitakteur des künstlerischen Prozesses avanciert.39 Dies greift ein Zitat von Richard Grusin treffend auf: „Technical mediation itself needs to be understood as a nonhuman process within which or through which humans and nonhuman relate.“40

II.

Radio Mycelium

Abb. 1. Martin Howse und Mycelium Network Society (Franz Xaver + Taro + Shu Lea Cheng + global network nodes), Radio Mycelium, mixed media, Installation: 1000×800×360 cm, seit 2018, 11. Taipei Biennale 2018: Post Nature – A Museum as an Ecosystem, vom 17. November 2018 bis zum 10. März 2019, Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), Taiwan, Setting während der Performance am 16. November 2018. © TFAM, Martin Howse and MNS, 2018, http://www.1010.co.uk/org/ra diomycelium.html, abgerufen am 01. 09. 2021

39 Naomi Gramlich, „Nonhuman Agents in Art, Culture and Theory, Art Laboratory Berlin, Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin, 24.–26. 11. 2017“, Tagungsbericht, ArtHist.net, 23. Januar 2018, https://arthist.net/reviews/17193. 40 Vgl. ibid.

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Abb. 2. Martin Howse und Mycelium Network Society, Radio Mycelium, mixed media: Ligh Zhi Pilze, maßgeschneiderte Elektronik (Trasistoren, Antennen), Installation: 1000×800×360 cm, seit 2018, 11. Taipei Biennale 2018: Post Nature – A Museum as an Ecosystem, vom 17. November 2018 bis zum 10. März 2019, TFAM, Taiwan, Installationsansicht (Fragment). © TFAM, Martin Howse und MNS, 2018, http://www.1010.co.uk/org/radiomycelium.html, abgerufen am 01. 09. 2021

Das erste Foto (Abb. 1) ist eine Momentaufnahme aus Radio Mycelium von Martin Howse und der Mycelium Network Society (MNS)41 in der Eröffnungsnacht der 11. Taipei Biennale Post-Nature – a Museum as an Ecosystem im Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan und zeigt das Setting während der Performance. Die Präsentation wurde zuvor durch einen Workshop über Kommunikation mit Pilzen in der Stadtwerkstatt (STWST48x4) in Linz vorbereitet und mit einer Soundperformance in Taiwan eröffnet. Auf den ersten Blick weiß man nicht so recht, wo man ist: auf einer Konzertbühne, auf einer Hacking-Aktion oder mittendrin in einer Performance. Auf dem Boden liegen Kabel, Laptops, blinkende Apparaturen und Radiorekorder. Unter einer unter der Decke schwebenden Installation, die sich über den Raum in Form eines gigantischen Molekülmodells erstreckt, treten in einer abwechselnden Dramaturgie Künstler_innen auf. Die Installation besteht aus 17 transparenten Hohlkugeln aus Acrylglas in drei unterschiedlichen Größen, die bis zu einem Meter im Durchmesser erreichen. Sie 41 MNS ist eine Initiative von Stadtwerkstatt (Linz, Österreich) und cycleX (Andes, NY), die weltweite rhizomische Myzel-Netzwerkknoten verbindet. Homepage der MNS: http://mns.s twst.at/.

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sind durch Rohre miteinander verbunden und repräsentieren in ihrer Konstellation das exakt aus 17 Atomen bestehende Strukturmodell des Pilzgiftes Patulin C7H6O4. Gleichzeitig dienen sie als Gefäße, in denen Pilzmyzelien kultiviert sowie maßgeschneiderte Elektronik, Leiterplatten mit FM-Radio montiert werden (Abb. 2), damit unterschiedliche physikalische das Pilzwachstum betreffende Parameter, wie Feuchtigkeit und Temperatur elektronisch erfasst werden können. Die Gefäße sind mit Substrat für das optimale Wachstum des Pilzmyzels gefüllt und beherbergen Pilze in unterschiedlichen Wachstumsstadien. Die ausgewachsenen länglichen Fruchtkörper des regionalen asiatischen Ling Zhi Pilzes erinnern in ihrer Form selbst ein wenig an Antennen und werden skulptural nachgeahmt, um die Technik darin zu verdecken. Eine Videoaufnahme der Performance42 zeigt, wie unter den 17 Patulin-Atomen sich ebenfalls 17 Soundkünstler_innen bewegen. Auf der Suche nach Signalen richten sie ihre Radioantennen auf wiederum antennenartige Ling Zhi Pilzfruchtkörper, die daraufhin plötzlich anfangen zu knistern. In nächster Sekunde reagieren die Soundartist_innen auf die Klänge, das Knistern wird mal lauter, mal unterbrochen und durch andere empfangene Radiowellen überlagert.

Dekonstruieren, um zu verstehen oder Materialhandeln durch das Material-Erleben Electricity as a fire, a light (luminous), a soul, a living fluid coursing through veins, roots and matter, uniting man with animals, plants and all things.43 Martin Howse

Der Produktionsprozess besteht aus dem Kultivieren des Myzels44 und seiner technologischen Realisierung – dem Bau einer elektronischen Verschaltung mit Sensoren und FM Empfängern im eintägigen MNS Workshop for Mycelial Radio Activation in der Stadtwerkstatt STWST48x4 in österreichischem Linz (Abb. 3). Einige Wochen zuvor annoncierte die Stadtwerkstatt den Workshop folgendermaßen: Im Rahmen dieses offenen Workshops werden wir DIY-Radioempfänger und skulpturale Antennen bauen, den Empfang von Signalen testen und zum Beispiel mit Lingzhi-Pilzen koppeln. Die Teilnehmer lernen die Kommunikation zwischen Mensch und Myzel kennen – durch Klang, Radiowellen, Berührung, Geruch und Aufnahme. Die 42 Soundwatch Studio, „Mycelium Network Society at Taipei Biennial 2018. Mycelial Radio Activation – Opening night performance. Part 1_2018“, gefilmt am 16. November 2018, Taipei, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA6tDmvxBLY. 43 Vgl. Martin Howse und Nick Gaffney. „The Approaching the Inexplicable“, letzte Änderung am 14. November 2019, https://libarynth.org/parn/approaching_the_inexplicable. 44 Zwei Monate vor der Präsentation wurden zunächst Ling Zhi-Pilze kultiviert.

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Teilnehmer arbeiten mit wachsenden Lingzhi-Pilzen und lokalen/radio-fähigen Sensoren für verschiedene physikalische Eigenschaften wie Feuchtigkeit und Temperatur. Pilze werden auch verkostet (im Tee) und erhitzt (zur Rauchfreisetzung) […].45

Abb. 3. MNS Workshop for Mycelial Radio Activation. Martin Howse und Teilnehmer_innen, 8. September 2018, 11.00–17.00. © STWST48X4 Stadtwerkstatt Linz, Österreich, 8. September 2018, Foto: Felix Vierlinger, https://stwst48x4.stwst.at/radio_mns_workshop, abgerufen am 10. September 2021

Die angeborene Fähigkeit des Pilzmyzels zur Bildung von Netzwerken und Übermittlung von Informationen zwischen den Bäumen übersetzen Martin Howse und die MNS künstlerisch in die Radio-Metapher.46 Dabei entwickeln sie „ein funktionierendes Modell eines Myzelnetzwerks“47 zur Demonstration der Informationsweitergabe. In der Natur benutzen Pflanzen und Pilze eine verschlüsselte Sprache auf der Basis chemischer Moleküle. Neben biochemischen Prozessen nutzen sie in der Kommunikation physikalische Prozesse. Die Rede ist hier von elektromagnetischen Signalen. Die Kommunikation findet aufgrund der Änderung des elektrischen Widerstands in Teilen der Pflanze oder des Pilzes

45 STWST, „MNS Workshop for Mycelial Radio Activation Martin Howse“, durchgeführt am 8. September 2018, 11:00–17:00 bei STWST48x4, Linz, Österreich, abgerufen am 2. November 2021, https://stwst48x4.stwst.at/radio_mns_workshop. 46 Im Sinne des Sender-Empfänger-Modells. 47 Vgl. STWST, „Mycelium Network Society Franz Xaver + Taro + Martin Howse + Shu Lea Cheang + Global Network Nodes“, 158, abgerufen am 2. November 2021. https://mns.stwst.a t/_media/projects/mns-taipei-biennale2018-pdf.pdf.

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statt.48 Der Elektromagnetismus ist also ein Grundlagenprinzip sowohl für Kommunikation innerhalb der Lebensprozesse von Organismen als auch für Radiowellen, die sich am unteren Ende des elektromagnetischen Spektrums befinden. Während des Workshops werden von den Teilnehmer_innen Sensoren sowie 17 direkt in das Pilzmyzel vorinstallierte Übertragungsgeräte (Leiterplatten mit FM Radio) benutzt. Diese Geräte messen die lokale Feuchtigkeit und folgen den Temperatur- und bioelektrischen Signalen innerhalb der wachsenden Pilzkörper und übersenden Informationen über Änderungen lokaler Bedingungen im Myzel49 über Breitbandradiofrequenzen. Die Teilnehmer_innen des Workshops sind gleichzeitig Ko-Produzent_innen von Radio Mycelium, denn sie teilen mit dem Künstler eine und dieselbe Handlung. Dabei geht es um eine hybride Verflechtung von Wissen und Handeln.50 Um die Prinzipien der Materie und ihre Reaktionsfähigkeit zu begreifen und mit ihr zu kollaborieren, wird dekonstruiert, um auf der Spurensuche zu dem materiellen Kern zu gelangen. Eine zentrale Rolle in diesem Prozess spielt die eigene Erfahrung. Laut der Leiterin von dOCUMENTA (13), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, gelte die eigene Erfahrung als die wichtigste Grundlage des Lernens.51 Bio Hacking selbst zu betreiben, heißt zu beobachten und selbst nachzubauen, um dadurch die Relationen zwischen Kräften und Körpern zu begreifen. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei das Nachempfinden des Transformationsweges zwischen Elektrizität, Elektromagnetismus, Radiowellen und Klang. Das Eingreifen in andere Systeme, also der Prozess von DIY Bio Hacking lässt sich im Sinne von Ingold als Korrespondenz mit dem dynamischen Material verstehen. Der Bau der Verschaltung mit dem Myzel ist selbst eine partizipatorische Praxis und damit die erste kommunikative und interspezifische Annährung von Pilzen und Menschen. Das Aktivieren des Myzels bestand jedoch nicht nur im Hacking selbst. Noch vor dem Austausch von Informationen zwischen den beiden Systemen fand wörtlich ein erstes materiell-sinnliches Antasten statt. Durch das achtsame Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken (Pilztee) wurde bereits Empathie mit diesen Orga48 Howse und Gaffney, „The Approaching the Inexplicable“. 49 Sie gelten als Indikatoren für Veränderungen von Standortfaktoren wie Wetter, Klimaentwicklung, Bodenbelastung und sind von großer Relevanz für Geo-, Bio- und Umweltwissenschaftler, Archäologen und bis auf Kriminologen. 50 Open Source Anleitungen von Howse sind frei verfügbar unter: Martin Howse, „Radio Mycelium Workshop Reader“, letzte Änderung am 23. November 2011, https://drive.google.com /file/d/17OIzlNnn8M39NQTfbVH9LpPLEfP68sEs/view. 51 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, „Ich habe kein Konzept“, Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine, 1. Dezember 2011, https://www.hna.de/kultur/documenta/documenta-leiterin-caro lyn-christov-bakargiev-kunsthochschule-ich-habe-kein-konzept-1513454.html.

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nismen entwickelt. All diese Sinne sind außerhalb des Linguistischen angesiedelt und bilden eine Verbindung zur materiellen Umwelt. Der Mensch teilt sie größtenteils mit Nicht-Menschen. Sie sind ein wichtiger Ausgangspunkt für den Austausch von Informationen zwischen den Arten jenseits der Sprache. Gleichzeit handelt es sich um das Verwandeln und Transformieren der Materie. Bevor die verborgene Kraft im Werk zum Vorschein kommt und elektromagnetische Wellen in Klang übersetzt werden, wird recherchiert, erhitzt, angetastet, probiert. Hier lässt sich festhalten, dass die erste interspezifische Begegnung und kommunikative Annäherung bereits während des DIY Bio Hacking Workshops stattfand – einerseits durch die inhaltliche Einführung über die ökologische Rolle der Pilze in Wäldern, die symbiotischen Beziehungen zwischen Pilzen und Bäumen, andererseits geschah das durch die Beobachtung der Physiologie der Pilze und die sinnliche Erfahrung bei der praktischen Arbeit mit dem Myzel bei der Installierung der Übertragungsgeräte.

Performance: Interagieren, Improvisieren, Kollaborieren Im Vorfeld der Performance servierte Martin Howse zunächst den MNSSoundartist_innen auf der Bühne einen Tee aus getrockneten Pilzen. Während im Workshop die erste akustische, elektromagnetische und taktile Aktivierung stattfand, griff die Performance das Erprobte auf, um ein interspezifisches kommunikatives Netzwerk herzustellen. Am Tag der Performance formten 17 Teilnehmer_innen ein interspezifisches Menschen-Myzel-Radio-Netzwerk, indem jeder von ihnen jeweils eins von den siebzehn Glieder des molekularen Patulin-Models aktivierte und alle zusammen einen audio-myzelar vernetzten Stromkreis hervorbrachten. Die Performance verlief in einer bestimmten Dramaturgie mit Akten, die von bestimmten Signalsätzen dominiert waren, welche zuvor im Workshop teilweise erprobt wurden.52 Die siebzehn Soundkünstler_innen bewegten sich innerhalb der Rahmung der Acht-Kanal-Soundsystems, das eine präzise Lokalisierung der Tonsignale ermöglichte. Dabei entstanden mal sehr klare Signale, mal lösten die Pilze Funkstörungen von lokalen Signalen aus. Bei den Soundexperimenten fungieren die Ling Zhi Pilze als Audio- und Vollspektruminstrumente. Die von Antennen der Künstler empfangenden modulierten Schwingungen erscheinen als Grollen, Rauschen und Knistern. In Echtzeit werden sie durch laute Megafone und rhythmische Trommelklänge oder – hingegen – durch sanfte 52 STWST, „Patulin: Biennale Taipei 2018 Mycelium Network Society in Taiwan“, abgerufen am 3. November 2021, https://newcontext.stwst.at/_media/tools/booklet_patulin-1.pdf.

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und tiefe Rohrpfeifenklänge begleitet. Jede Interaktion verläuft anders, sie ist sehr individuell und hängt von dem aktuellen Zustand des Myzels und der Umgebung ab. Nach einigen Minuten vermischen sich die empfangenen Klänge aus der Pilz-Umgebung und dem Raum außerhalb der Installation zu einem vibrierenden Klangkontinuum. Es entsteht eine Improvisation. Das Empfangen der Radiowellen, ihre Transformation in Klänge und die darauffolgende musikalische Antwort finden gleichzeitig statt. Etwas für den Menschen nicht auditiv Wahrnehmbare wahrnehmbar zu machen, korreliert mit der klassischen postmodernen künstlerischen Strategie des Sichtbar-Machens von Nichtsichtbarem. Die Kunsthistorikerin Jessica Ullrich sieht gerade in Performances ein großes Potenzial für die Artikulation nichtmenschlicher Entitäten: „Die Subjekte werden vielmehr erst durch ihre Handlungen hervorgebracht. Deshalb sind Performances tendenziell offener für die Anerkennung der Existenz nichtmenschlicher Subjektivitäten.“53 Die Natur einer Jam Session54 ist durch eine permanente Improvisation geprägt. Das Improvisieren als künstlerische Strategie kann als eine Art des schöpferischen Umgangs mit dem Material aufgefasst werden. Mit Improvisieren wird „der Umgang mit unvorhersehbaren Situationen“55 bezeichnet, in denen Plan und Aufführung einer Handlung zusammenfallen. Diese absichtlich herbeigeführte Situation lässt Zuschauer_innen an dem sich ereignenden Kunstwerk partizipieren.56 Bei Radio Mycelium handelt es sich um eine Improvisation, da Soundkünstler_innen mit einem nichtmenschlichen Aktanten zusammenarbeiten, bzw. auf seine Ausdrucksweise in Echtzeit musikalisch reagieren. In Radio Mycelium wird die Klangproduktion zu einer Kollaboration menschlicher und nichtmenschlicher Agenten, zwischen 17 Künstler_innen, Gerätschaften und einem Pilzmyzel. Die Performance legte die Reaktionsfähigkeit der Pilze offen, deren Agentialität, die sich in der Bildung von Assemblagen offenbart: „The performance is a collaboration between electronic sensibilities and the extra human realms of radio frequency and Lingzhi.“57

53 Vgl. Jessica Ullrich, „Performative Interspezieskunst im 21. Jahrhundert“, in Das Ausgestellte Tier. Lebende und tote Tiere in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, hg. v. Bettina Paust und LauraMareen Jansen (Berlin: Neofelis, 2019), 38. 54 Bei einer Jam Session spielen Musikerinnen verschiedener Bands ohne gemeinsame Noten intuitiv zusammen. Vorab wird ein Rhythmus festgelegt; die Melodie des Stückes ergibt sich aber erst im Prozess durch die gegenseitige Reaktion der Musizierenden aufeinander. 55 Vgl. Alessandro Bertinetto, „Improvisieren“, in Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch, hg. v. Jens Badura, Selma Dubach und Anke Haarmann (Zürich und Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015), 147. 56 Ibid. 57 Vgl. Martin Howse, „Radio Mycelium 2018+“, letzte Änderung am 6. März 2020, http://www. 1010.co.uk/org/radiomycelium.html.

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Immersive Erfahrung der Symbiose und artenübergreifende Kommunikation Ziel ist es, eine Sensibilität zu schaffen, die zu einer veränderten Wahrnehmung führt und somit neue Perspektiven schafft.58 Friedrich Weltzien

Radio Mycelium vermittelt Empathie für nichtmenschliche Lebewesen. Die Performance, also der Akt des Sendens der lebendigen Dynamiken der Pilze über Radiosequenzen und eine live Interaktion in Form von Improvisation wurde selbst zu einem Ritual, mit dem die Biennale eröffnet wurde. Durch seinen partizipatorischen Kern liefert Radio Mycelium viel mehr als nur eine bloße mediale Interpretation von nicht-menschlicher Wahrnehmung, sondern es trägt als interaktive Installationen zur interspezifischen Interaktion bei. Posthumanistische künstlerische Strategien hinter dem Werk kommunizieren Materialität als eine nicht hierarchische Verwobenheit von Aktanten und als Mitakteure von künstlerischen Prozessen. Auf die symbiotische Form der Interaktion bezogen kann man hier wohl von symbiozentrischer Orientierung sprechen. Argumente für menschliche Kollaboration mit Nichtmenschlichem entspringen aus den Eigenschaften und Prinzipien der Materie selbst und sind verankert in materialistischen Diskursen um den vitalistischen Materialismus und Postanthropozäntrismus. Das Konzept einer Übertragung der Myzel-Daten kann als eine Übersetzung im Rahmen einer nonlingualen, speziesübergreifenden Kommunikation betrachtet werden.

Bibliografie Barnett, Heather, Richard J. Bright, Sheena Calvert, Nathan Cohen und Adrian Holme. „Introduction“. In The Art of Science. Artists and artworks inspired by science, herausgegeben von Heather Barnett, Richard J. Bright, Sheena Calvert, Nathan Cohen und Adrian Holme, 6–8. London: Welbeck, 2021. Bertinetto, Alessandro. „Improvisieren“. in Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch, herausgegeben von Jens Badura, Selma Dubach und Anke Haarmann, 147–150, Zürich und Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter. A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Capucci, Pier Luigi. „Declinations of the living: toward the third life“. In Evolution haute couture: art and science in the post-biological age, Tl. 2: Theory, herausgegeben von Dmitry Bulatov, 50–63. Kaliningrad: NCCA, 2009. Celant, Germano. Ars Povera. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1969.

58 Vgl. Weltzien, „‚Material Agency‘“, 238.

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Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. „Ich habe kein Konzept“. Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine, 1. Dezember 2011. https://www.hna.de/kultur/documenta/documenta-leiterin -carolyn-christov-bakargiev-kunsthochschule-ich-habe-kein-konzept-1513454.html. De Landa, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London und New York: Continuum, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, Günther Rösch, Gabriele Ricke und Ronald Voullié. Tausend Plateaus. Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1992. Fox, Nick J. und Pam Alldred. Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action. Los Angeles: Sage, 2017. Gramlich, Naomi. „Nonhuman Agents in Art, Culture and Theory, Art Laboratory Berlin, Prinzenallee 34, 13359 Berlin, 24.–26. 11. 2017“. Tagungsbericht. ArtHist.net, 23. Januar 2018. https://arthist.net/reviews/17193. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Howse, Martin. „Radio Mycelium 2018+“. Letzte Änderung am 6. März 2020. http://www. 1010.co.uk/org/radiomycelium.html. Howse, Martin. „Radio Mycelium Workshop Reader“. Letzte Änderung am 23. November 2011. https://drive.google.com/file/d/17OIzlNnn8M39NQTfbVH9LpPLEfP68sEs/view. Howse, Martin und Nick Gaffney. „The Approaching the Inexplicable“. Letzte Änderung am 14. November 2019. https://libarynth.org/parn/approaching_the_inexplicable. Howse, Martin und Verena Kuni. „Martin Howse: Inter-Species Communication Plattform“. Abgerufen am 1. Dezember 2021. https://www.uni-weimar.de/kunst-und-gestal tung/wiki/images/Martin-howse.pdf. Ingold, Tim. „Eine Ökologie der Materialien“. In: Macht des Materials / Politik der Materialität, herausgegeben von Susanne Witzgall und Kerstin Stakemeier, 65–74. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014. Köhler, Siegfried, Hania Siebenpfeiffer und Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf. „Einleitung“. In Materie. Grundlagentexte zur Theoriegeschichte, herausgegeben von Siegfried Köhler, Hania Siebenpfeiffer und Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, 11–24, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Die Hoffnung der Pandora: Untersuchungen zur Wirklichkeit der Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Reichle, Ingeborg. Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Tecnoscience. Wien: Springer, 2005. –. „Bio-Art – die Kunst für das 21. Jahrhundert“. Kunstforum International 258 (2019): 86– 95. Sick-Leitner, Magdalena. „Es gibt keine Bio Art“. Interview mit Jens Hauser. Ars Electronica Blog, 2. Juni 2015. https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/de/2015/06/02/es-gibt-keine -bio-art/. Soundwatch Studio. „Mycelium Network Society at Taipei Biennial 2018. Mycelial Radio Activation – Opening night performance. Part 1_2018“. Gefilmt am 16. November 2018, Taipei. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA6tDmvxBLY. STWST. „MNS Workshop for Mycelial Radio Activation Martin Howse“. Durchgeführt am 8. September 2018, 11:00–17:00 bei STWST48x4, Linz, Österreich. Abgerufen am 2. November 2021. https://stwst48x4.stwst.at/radio_mns_workshop. STWST. „Patulin: Biennale Taipei 2018 Mycelium Network Society in Taiwan“. Abgerufen am 3. November 2021. https://newcontext.stwst.at/_media/tools/booklet_patulin-1.pdf.

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STWST. „Mycelium Network Society Franz Xaver + Taro + Martin Howse + Shu Lea Cheang + Global Network Nodes“. Abgerufen am 2. November 2021. https://mns.stwst.a t/_media/projects/mns-taipei-biennale2018-pdf.pdf. Ullrich, Jessica. „Performative Interspezieskunst Im 21. Jahrhundert“. In Das Ausgestellte Tier. Lebende und tote Tiere in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, herausgegeben von Bettina Paust und Laura-Mareen Jansen, 37–56. Berlin: Neofelis, 2019. Weintraub, Linda. To Life! Eco art in pursuit of a sustainable planet. Berkeley, Los Angeles und London: University of California Press, 2012. Weltzien, Friedrich. „‚Material Agency‘ und die Lebendigkeit der Dinge“. In Die Sprachen des Materials. Narrative–Theorien–Strategien, herausgegeben von Friedrich Weltzien und Martin Scholz, 229–243. Berlin: Reimer, 2016. Witzgall, Susanne. „Neue Materialist_innen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst“. In Die Macht des Materials – Politik Der Materialität, herausgegeben von Susanne Witzgall und Kerstin Stakemeier, 137–151. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2014.

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Keitaro Morita (Rikkyo University, Tokyo)

An Anti-/Anthropomorphic Approach to Plants?: A Reading of Works by Japanese Female Writers Yoshimoto Banana and Ito Hiromi*

Abstract This paper ecocritically analyzes works by Yoshimoto Banana and Ito Hiromi, two contemporary Japanese female writers. Both authors describe the correspondence between humans and plants, but do so using contrasting perspectives. In particular, the author compares Yoshimoto’s short story “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers] and Ito’s book, Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb]. Already in the titles of both works one can identify references to the gift of growing plants, but the two writers outline human-plant correspondence quite differently, with Yoshimoto taking an anti-anthropomorphic approach and Ito taking a more anthropomorphic one, though both works simultaneously indicate the turn (that is, the opposing approach), with some anthropomorphic elements in Yoshimoto’s story and anti-anthropomorphic ones in Ito’s book. The writers’ works give us an opportunity to reconsider our anti-/anthropomorphic approach to plants. Keywords: anti-/anthropomorphism, critical plant theories, Yoshimoto Banana, Ito Hiromi, ecocriticism of Japanese literature

* This paper is based on my Japanese presentation “From to : Reading Ito Hiromi’s Mrs. Green Thumb and Yoshimoto Banana’s ‘Green Fingers’” on July 11, 2021 at the 16th annual conference of the Japan Society of Social Design Studies. The names of Japanese writers and scholars in this paper follow the Japanese convention, in which the last names precede the first names, except for direct quotes. Please note that all the citations are translated from the original Japanese by the author and that in the case of Japanese books and papers, their English titles are shown in square brackets. The author is grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers and the editors of this issue, Professor Emeritus Kitayama Seiichi of Rikkyo University, Associate Professor Yamamoto Yohei of Meiji University, and Dr. Gerald Lombardi, as well as Mr. William Paul Baptist for providing incisive and thoughtful comments and suggestions.

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Prelude: From Multispecies Studies to Animal Studies to Plant Studies Academic discussion has been ongoing for some time in relation to the dichotomy between humans and nonhumans, and how the line between the two can be blurred. Ursula K. Heise, for example, proposes to deconstruct this dichotomy under the rubric of multispecies studies (or, more specifically, multispecies ethnography), which she defines as “reconstructing the understanding of ‘human’ communities as in reality conglomerates of human and nonhuman species that shape each other.”1 Along similar lines, the binary between humans and animals has been questioned, reconsidered, and deconstructed in animal studies by Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal,2 Donna J. Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness3 and When Species Meet,4 and Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am,5 to name a few books. What appears to be underrepresented in such discussions so far is the perspective of plants. There do exist some exceptions, that is, books on critical plant studies. These include Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life6 and Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola’s Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence.7 Nealon looks to Michel Foucault, Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, among others, in his attempt to deconstruct the human/animal/plant divide. Meanwhile, Mancuso and Viola shake up the fixed boundaries between humans/animals/plants based on the fact that humans cannot live without plants and that plants and animals can communicate with each other. Other books from the field of plant studies include Matthew Hall’s Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany8 and Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with 1 Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 195. 2 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 3 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003). 4 Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 5 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 6 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 7 Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2015). 8 Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).

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Plants.9 The author of this article has ecocritically examined how the border between the organic (human/animal/plant entities) and inorganic (the convenience store as a setting) is blurred in the novel Convenience Store Woman by Japanese female writer Murata Sayaka.10 To contribute to the further development of critical plant and human-plant studies, this paper will ecocritically analyze works by Yoshimoto Banana11 and Ito Hiromi,12 contemporary Japanese female writers whose works describe the cor-

9 Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018). 10 Keitaro Morita, “Kuturû-shinsei no Kuia-na Saibôgu?: Murata Sayaka no Konbini-ningen wo Yomu” [A Queer Cyborg in the Chthulucene?: A Reading of Convenience Store Woman by Murata Sayaka], Literature and Environment 24 (2021): 60–68. 11 Yoshimoto Banana was born in 1964 to Yoshimoto Takaaki, one of the most prominent philosophers in Japan’s post-war period. She made a sensational debut with her bestselling work Kicchin [Kitchen; 1988], which originally came out in a journal in 1987 and won the 6th Kaien Newcomers’ Literary Prize. The piece has been translated into many languages, adapted for film, and is widely read worldwide even today. Most of Yoshimoto’s major works, especially her earlier ones, have been translated into English, including Kicchin [Kitchen], “Mûnraito-shadô” [Moonlight Shadow; 1986; later recognized and awarded the 16th Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature in 1988], which is included in most editions of Kitchen, TUGUMI [Goodbye Tsugumi; 1989; winner of the 2nd Yamamoto Shugoro Prize and adapted for film], Amurita [Amrita; 1994; winner of the Murasaki-shikibu Prize], Karada wa Zenbu Shitteiru [The Body Knows Everything; 2002; a collection of novellas, including “Midori no Yubi” (Green Fingers), the focus of this paper], and Mizuumi [The Lake; 2005]. Yoshimoto has been well received outside Japan too and has won several literary prizes in Italy. 12 Ito Hiromi, one of the most widely recognized contemporary female poets in Japan, was born in 1955 in Tokyo and made her writing debut in 1978. After living for some years in Kumamoto, Japan, and divorcing twice, Ito moved to California in 1997. She lived there with her British husband and children and returned to Japan after his death. Ito has been a trailblazer among women poets since the 1980s, through her explicit and sometimes disturbing portrayals of femaleness and sexuality. At the same time, she is open about her fondness for plants and has depicted them in her poems since early in her career. Ito, a prolific and successful writer of poems, novels, and essays, has produced several “green” publications overflowing with passages and images of both outer nature (the natural environment, animals, plants) and inner nature (body, gender, sexuality): Kusaki no Uta [Songs of Plant and Sky; 1978; her first published poetry book], Aoume [Green Plums; 1982], Ranînya [La Niña; 1999; winner of the 21st Noma Literature Award], Kawara-arekusa [Wild Grass Upon a Riverbank; 2005; winner of the Takami Jun Award; available in English], Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb; 2005; the focus of this paper], Koyôte-songu [Coyote Song; 2007], Inu-gokoro [The Heart of a Dog; 2013], and Kodama-kusadama [Tree Spirit, Grass Spirit; 2014]. The biographical sketch here is based on two of my previous papers: Keitaro Morita, “Queer Ecopoet?: An Analysis of ‘Chitô [Tito]’ by Japanese Poet Hiromi Ito,” The Paulinian Compass 1, no. 4 (2010): 101–20; Keitaro Morita, “A Queer Ecofeminist Reading of ‘Matsuri [Festival]’ by Hiromi Ito,” in East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader, ed. Simon C. Estok and WonChung Kim (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 57–71. Indeed, some of Yoshimoto’s and Ito’s other works have been translated into non-Japanese languages, including English (Yoshimoto and Ito), Italian (Yoshimoto), and German (Ito).

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respondence between humans and plants, but do so using different approaches.13 Specifically, the author will compare Yoshimoto’s short story “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers],14 which has been included in several high school textbooks of the Japanese language in Japan, and Ito’s book, Midori no Obasan [Mrs. GreenThumb].15 The titles of both works refer to the gift of growing plants, but the two writers sketch the human-plant correspondence quite differently, with Yoshimoto taking an anti-anthropomorphic approach and Ito taking an anthropomorphic one.

Yoshimoto’s Anti-anthropomorphic Approach to Plants in Her “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers] Yoshimoto’s short story “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers] is included in her anthology of short stories Karada wa Zenbu Shitteiru [The Body Knows Everything]. One feature of the fictional work is that it is narrated in the first person. The protagonist of the story lives with her parents and sister. One day, the protagonist’s sister buys an aloe plant and places it by their front door, where it grows so big that it overhangs the road in front of their house. Meanwhile, the protagonist’s grandmother is hospitalized with end-stage uterine cancer. While the protagonist “I”16 visits her in the hospital regularly, she also goes to Grandmother’s house every day to water her beloved potted plants. Grandmother says to the protagonist, “You understand plants very well.”17 In the spring, when Grandmother appears to lose consciousness, she suddenly speaks up when “I” visits her, asking the protagonist not to cut away any of the aloe leaves. When “I” returns home, she replants the aloe plant. During the first winter after Grandmother’s death, alone in the mountains, the protagonist senses something. She thought it was Grandmother but it was, in fact, an aloe plant, growing like a jungle in the garden of a small house. The protagonist keeps climbing up the mountain path, feeling connected with aloe plants and with her grandmother. 13 The author has analyzed some of Ito’s works from an ecocritical and (queer) ecofeminist perspective in the past. See Morita, “Queer Ecopoet?”; Morita, “A Queer Ecofeminist Reading”; Keitaro Morita, “Chô-shintaisei de Yomitoku Ito Hiromi no Kawara-arekusa: Futatsu no Shizen wo Koete” [Reading Ito Hiromi’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank with Regard to Transcorporeality: Beyond the Two Natures], in Kankyô-jinbungaku [The Environmental Humanities], vol. 1, ed. Ken’ichi Noda, Yohei Yamamoto, and Keitaro Morita (Tokyo: Benseisha Publishing, 2017), 271–89. 14 Banana Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers], in Karada wa Zenbu Shitteiru [The Body Knows Everything] (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 2002), 9–23. 15 Hiromi Ito, Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb] (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 2005). 16 The protagonist’s name is not revealed in the story. 17 Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi,” 16.

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One ecocritical element of note in the piece is correspondence. According to ecocritic Noda Ken’ichi, correspondence is “a sense or thought that finds some correlation between humans and nature. […] at the root of it is a cosmology that finds continuity and relationship between humans and nature.”18 With Yoshimoto’s story in mind, the author would modify this definition of correspondence to emphasize the ideal of a flat and equitable correlation/continuity/relationship between humans and nonhumans. Indeed, such correspondence between humans and plants is observed in the story when Grandmother almost loses consciousness in the spring. She suddenly speaks to the visiting protagonist, asking her not to prune the aloe leaves: “The aloe says, ‘don’t prune me’”, “The aloe says, ‘Got hit by a car in the shadow in the parking lot and it hurts’”, and “It’ll treat acne and scars and bloom, so please don’t prune it.”19 Here, Grandmother shows an especially flat and equitable correlation/continuity/relationship with the aloe plant, not forcing a hierarchical relationship with it but rather, (almost) becoming the aloe plant herself, hence achieving correspondence. Indeed, the correspondence of the flat and equitable relationship is enabled by Yoshimoto’s (or the narrator’s) anti-anthropomorphic approach to plants. Anthropomorphism has been criticized pungently in ecocriticism in that it projects human feelings onto nonhumans, and thereby constitutes an arbitrary interpretation of or a kind of violence against them, by depicting them as beings speaking a language or having human feelings.20 Remarkably, the story resists such temptations, a rare occurrence in this type of literature. Instead, Yoshimoto aims for explicit anti-anthropomorphism. For example, the protagonist looks at the replanted aloe plant and says, “The aloe that was replanted and hence covered with mud was exuding life force. I was tempted to anthropomorphize it and say that it was saying, ‘thank you,’ but it wasn’t like that, it was just living, spreading its roots and leaves everywhere.”21 Here, she is successful in seeing the aloe plant as it is, without anthropomorphizing it, displaying a flat and equitable relationship with the plant. In fact, the story not only illustrates the notion of human-plant correspondence but also depicts plant-to-plant communication. According to plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso and scientific journalist Alessandra Viola, 18 Noda, Ken’ichi, Shizen wo Kanjiru Kokoro – Neichâ-raitingu-nyûmon [The Heart That Feels Nature: An Introduction to Nature Writing] (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 2007), 152. 19 Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi,” 18. 20 Yusuke Yamada, “Ningen-chûshin-shugi/Shinjin-dôkei(dôsei)-ron” [Anthropocentrism/Anthropomorphism], in Bungaku kara Kankyô wo Kangaeru: Ekokuritishizumu-gaidobukku [Thinking about the Environment through Literature: An Ecocriticism Guidebook], ed. Kazuaki Odani, Gakuto Hayama, Masami Yuki, Mayumi Toyosato, and Ikue Kina (Tokyo: Benseisha Publishing, 2014), 306. 21 Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi,” 20.

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plants do communicate with their fellow plants through their roots, as animals do with plants.22 Whether or not Yoshimoto is versed in the scientific details of this phenomenon, she inserts the theme of plant-to-plant communication into the story: After asking the protagonist not to cut away the aloe, Grandmother narrates, “So, you know, I as Granma think you can understand that kind of sensitivity. That’s the way plants are. If you save one aloe, from now on, every aloe you see everywhere will come to love you. Plants are connected to each other.”23 The Grandmother’s remark can be linked to the closing scene of the story. The protagonist is alone in the mountains, during the first winter after Grandmother’s death. She senses something and hopes it means that she will see a ghost of Grandmother but instead, it is an aloe plant growing like a jungle in the garden of a small house. Looking at the aloe plant basking in the sun, the protagonist “felt warmed in the sunshine in the bosom of the aloe,”24 the scene of which, according to Japanese literature scholar Sasaki Yoshito, describes that “there is no wall between the ‘human’ and the ‘plant.’ This represents a world where all are interlinked.”25 Then she climbs up the mountain path, feeling connections with aloe plants and also with Grandmother. The protagonist expresses her mental landscape: No matter where, every time I see an aloe plant, I feel the warmth and tenderness of it. Any aloe is equally a friend of the aloe I replanted that night. I’m connected with aloe plants in the same way as with humans, this is how various plants and I face each other, that’s what I thought. What I inherited from Grandmother was the power of the socalled green fingers, which is certainly useful, even if it is a kind of superstition with no basis in fact.26

Feminist essayist and poet Morisaki Kazue interprets this mental landscape as Grandmother’s love melting the categories that classify and divide creatures (humans) and plants.27 In this “world of vegetal life” or “cosmic world of correspondence by the distinct species of plants and humans,”28 the protagonist and aloe plants are connected; their borderlines have melted into each other. This 22 23 24 25

Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green. Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi,” 19; emphasis added. Ibid., 22. Yoshito Sasaki, “Yoshimoto Banana ‘Midori no Yubi’ wo Yomu: Yusaburareru ” [The Contextual Reading of Narration in Banana Yoshimoto’s “Midori-noyubi”], Nihon Bungaku [Japanese Literature] 60, no. 8 (2011): 20. 26 Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi,” 22–23. 27 Kazue Morisaki, “Inochi wo Tsugu” [Inheriting the Life], Kôkô-kokugo-kyôiku [High School National Language Education] Summer 2003 (May 30, 2003): 11. 28 Masanori Yasuda, “Midori no Yubi no Yubisasu Hôkô: Yoshimoto Banana no Shôsetsu wo Yomu” [The Direction That the Green Fingers Point at: Reading Yoshimoto Banana’s Novel], Kôkô-kokugo-kyôiku [High School National Language Education] Summer 2003 (May 30, 2003): 16.

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melting resembles the framework proposed by Jeffrey T. Nealon29 and Mancuso and Viola30 to deconstruct the human/plant divide. This sort of anti-anthropomorphic approach that does not objectify plants but rather enables the correspondence of human-plant equitable relationships contrasts with Ito Hiromi’s anthropomorphic approach to plants, which will be examined in the next section.

Ito’s Anthropomorphic Approach to Plants in Her Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb] Ito’s Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb], a collection of prose pieces, which some may call autobiographical essays,31 is about the author’s relationships with various kinds of plants that she takes care of at home. The collection’s inherent anthropomorphism can be opposed to the anti-anthropomorphism observed in Yoshimoto’s short story. In the Afterword, Ito confesses: I’ve been living in California already for ten years now. The climate here is mild, warm, not hot, not cold, perfect for gardening, so I bought one pot after another, and without knowing I was totally hooked and couldn’t get out of it, thinking it’s just like the addiction I used to have (which is exactly what it is), now I’m taking care of about 200 pots of plants. What is different from the addiction is that I am now able to look at things from the perspective of plants, and hence to spend my life in a very affluent and happy way.32

The ability to look at things from the perspective of plants can be a way of circumventing anthropomorphism; however, this does not happen here. On the contrary, Ito seems unable to escape from her anthropomorphism, which the following passage represents well: When it comes to cyclamen (primrose family), if you don’t water them enough, they wilt exaggeratedly, and if you water them too much, they just die limp (not coming back to life), they’re just those of many words, or very expressive, there are times when I think they should just shut up.33

Ito clearly projects her feelings and hence a note of anthropomorphism onto the plant, referring to cyclamen as a being that expresses itself eloquently, and at times too verbosely from her perspective. Here, if we look back at Yoshimoto’s 29 Nealon, Plant Theory. 30 Mancuso and Viola, Brilliant Green. 31 The author had the opportunity to discuss this point directly with the poet, Hiromi Ito. She says that at the time of writing, she thought she was creating essays but now in retrospect, she considers them as prose pieces. Hiromi Ito, E-mail message to author, October 24, 2021. 32 Ito, Midori no Obasan, 190; emphasis added. 33 Ibid., 13.

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short story again, we notice that it is quite successful in not anthropomorphizing the aloe plants, but not completely so, as in the very last scene the protagonist touches the aloe at the small house down the mountain path and indeed anthropomorphizes it: “I was invigorated [by the aloe plant] as if shaking hands with humans.”34 Of interest is that Ito is so aware of her anthropomorphism. The following discourse exemplifies it: In my opinion, taking care of plants is a substitute for love for humans, and even a desire for “power.” In other words, I have the inexplicable desire in me to fixate on, possess, and control the object. On top of that, I’m a perfectionist, so I have had a hard time raising my children and doing love relationships. Up until now, I’ve managed to keep that in check. […] However, when dealing with plants, the power that I had been holding back just comes out in full force […] It is possible to have the power without reservation and the authority to take control of life and death, and even to hold on to it and not let go.35

In this passage, Ito brutally objectifies plants, and thereby reveals herself as still being in the trap of anthropomorphism, which creates an inequitable relationship with plants. Objectification in this context is similar to alienation in the Marxist sense. Sociologist Maki Yusuke maintains that when you are alienated to an object, you are privileged to rule that object.36 Here, it can be said that Ito is alienated to plants by being fixated on them, thereby ruling them. Indeed, Haraway says, “We must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation, and nostalgia. No longer able to sustain the fictions of being either subjects or objects, all the partners in the potent conversations that constitute nature must find a new ground for making meanings together.”37 When objectification is equivalent to reification, then, Ito’s anthropomorphic approach to nature may be something to be abandoned and not sustained. Yet, she does achieve some correspondence with a plant – sansevieria in this case – while being conscious of her own anthropomorphism. The following discourse indicates sensual correspondence between Ito and the plant: sansevieria is an ideal indoor plant, and indeed I have a secret pleasure with it. When its sword-shaped leaves get old, the whole leaves start to rot. Then, you pull them off at 34 Yoshimoto, “Midori no Yubi,” 23. 35 Ito, Midori no Obasan, 62; emphasis added. 36 Yusuke Maki, “Gendai-shakai no Sonritsu-kôzo: Busshôka, Busshinka, Jiko-sogai” [The Existential Structure of Contemporary Society: Objectification, Reification, Self-alienation], Shisô [Thoughts], no. 587 (1973). 37 Donna J. Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 158.

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once, the roots come apart and fall out. Oh, good. That’s good. It’s so refreshing. It feels good. This sensual pleasure is directly related to the physiological pleasure that I can never experience by removing dead leaves from other plants. […] That’s how I get to know. That there is “the time” in life.38

In such sensual yet hierarchical, anthropomorphic relationship or “skinship”39 with plants, they acquire subjectivity, in a similar vein as proposed by Gagliano40 and Hall.41 Ito considers them as persons and even sees them as having the ability to (sexually) violate her: “[Being surrounded by multitudes of plants in Kumamoto] I might have been [sexually] violated by crawling vines, stems, and leaves without knowing. I thought I was a human being, but it might be possible the blood of plants has entered me somewhere.”42 Is anthropomorphism something to be always abandoned? Against the conventional ecocritical interpretation of anthropomorphism, ecocritics Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann categorically argue that “anthropomorphizing representations can reveal similarities and symmetries between the human and the nonhuman.”43 Ito’s conscious and self-reflexive anthropomorphizing approach to plants can paradoxically embody correspondence, a sensual one in this case, with plants in the similarities and symmetries they share with the writer. Even though Ito’s text is largely anthropomorphic, it does contain some antianthropomorphic elements. These can be discerned in the citation above, specifically in its emphasis on the notions of “rot” and “‘the time’ in life.” These phrases bring to mind (multispecies) compostism, a concept proposed by Haraway.44 Building on this concept, Azuma Chigaya proposes that “the concept of com-post involves humans living now into the composting, which should usually be considered postmortem. In other words, the concept confronts us humans with the reality that we have no choice but to live with other species.”45 Intriguingly, Yasuda Masanori claims that toward the end of Yoshimoto’s short story, “the smell of flesh [that exists in the beginning of the story] is washed

38 39 40 41 42 43

Ito, Midori no Obasan, 102; emphasis added. Ibid., 127. Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant. Hall, Plants as Persons. Ito, Midori no Obasan, 80–81. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity,” ECOZON@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3, no. 1 (2012): 82. 44 Donna J. Haraway, “Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 45 Azuma Chigaya, Jinrui-taihika-keikaku [The Humankind Composting Plan] (Osaka, Japan: Sogensha, 2020), 59.

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away” in “the world of vegetal life”46 by the protagonist, which contrasts with Ito’s vivid illustration of sansevieria rotting, as if emitting the smell of decay. Following Azuma’s line of reasoning, in composting, humans and plants stand on an equal footing as species that die and rot. In ancient times, according to philosopher Ito Susumu, “Japanese are presumed to comprehend and compare human life and death to the plant’s process from development to withering.”47 That two items are comparable, however, does not imply that those in comparison are completely concordant. Indeed, Ito does acknowledge that plants have their own “law of plants” and “their ‘die,’ ‘be born,’ ‘live,’ and ‘propagate’ are fundamentally different from those we know.”48 Here, while Ito cannot escape anthropomorphism entirely by applying human concepts such as “die” and “live,” she, at the same time, is successful to a certain extent in achieving antianthropomorphism by portraying plants as beings that die and rot in the same fashion as human beings while separately having their own “law of plants.”

Coda: Reconsidering Our Anti-/Anthropomorphic Approach to Plants This paper has looked at Yoshimoto’s short story “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers] and Ito Hiromi’s book Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb] and presented their contrasting approaches to plants. More specifically, the former shows an anti-anthropomorphic approach to plants, while the latter enacts an anthropomorphic approach, though as in my analysis, both works simultaneously indicate the turn (that is, the opposing approach), with some anthropomorphic elements in Yoshimoto’s piece and anti-anthropomorphic ones in Ito’s writing. This turn is also observed in recent discussion around anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism has been criticized in ecocriticism for the reason that it projects human feelings onto nonhumans, and thereby constitutes an arbitrary interpretation of or a kind of violence against them; however, some ecocritics have of late begun to look at both pros and cons of the notion and contend that anthropomorphism can function to uncover similarities and symmetries between humans and nonhumans. Such a turn, or paradoxes and contradictions in other words, is something that always makes us think further. Yoshimoto’s and

46 Yasuda, “Yubisasu Hôkô,” 16. 47 Ito Susumu, Nihonjin no Shi: Nihonteki-shiseikan eno Shikaku [The Death of Japanese: An Angle to the Japanese View of Life and Death] (Tokyo: Hokujushuppan, 1999), 45. 48 Ito, Midori no Obasan, 182.

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Ito’s works give us a clue and opportunity for us to reconsider our anti-/anthropomorphic approach to plants.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Chigaya, Azuma. Jinrui-taihika-keikaku [The Humankind Composting Plan]. Osaka: Sogensha, 2020. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Gagliano, Monica. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna. “Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene.” In Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 99– 103. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. –. “Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 157–87. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. –. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. 2nd ed. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003. –. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” ECOZON@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3, no. 1 (2012): 75–91. Ito, Hiromi. Midori no Obasan [Mrs. Green-Thumb]. Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 2005. Ito, Susumu. Nihonjin no Shi: Nihonteki-shiseikan eno Shikaku [The Death of Japanese: An Angle to the Japanese View of Life and Death]. Tokyo: Hokujushuppan, 1999. Maki, Yusuke. “Gendai-shakai no Sonritsu-kôzo: Busshôka, Busshinka, Jiko-sogai” [The Existential Structure of Contemporary Society: Objectification, Reification, Self-alienation]. Shisô [Thoughts], no. 587 (1973): 592–620. Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Translated by Joan Benham. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2015. Morisaki, Kazue. “Inochi wo Tsugu” [Inheriting the Life]. Kôkô-kokugo-kyôiku [High School National Language Education] Summer 2003 (May 30, 2003): 6–12. https://tb.san seido-publ.co.jp/wp-sanseido/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/kokokokugo_2003.pdf.

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Morita, Keitaro. “A Queer Ecofeminist Reading of ‘Matsuri [Festival]’ by Hiromi Ito.” In East Asian Ecocriticisms: A Critical Reader, edited by Simon C. Estok and Won-Chung Kim, 57–71. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. –. “Chô-shintaisei de Yomitoku Ito Hiromi no Kawara-arekusa: Futatsu no Shizen wo Koete” [Reading Ito Hiromi’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank with Regard to Transcorporeality: Beyond the Two Natures]. In Kankyô-jinbungaku [The Environmental Humanities], vol. 1, edited by Ken’ichi Noda, Yohei Yamamoto, and Keitaro Morita, 271–89. Tokyo: Benseisha Publishing, 2017. –. “Kuturû-shinsei no Kuia-na Saibôgu?: Murata Sayaka no Konbini-ningen wo Yomu” [A Queer Cyborg in the Chthulucene?: A Reading of Convenience Store Woman by Murata Sayaka]. Literature and Environment 24 (2021): 60–68. –. “Queer Ecopoet?: An Analysis of ‘Chitô [Tito]’ by Japanese Poet Hiromi Ito.” The Paulinian Compass 1, no. 4 (2010): 101–20. Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Noda, Ken’ichi. Shizen wo Kanjiru Kokoro – Neichâ-raitingu-nyûmon [The Heart That Feels Nature: An Introduction to Nature Writing]. Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 2007. Sasaki, Yoshito. “Yoshimoto Banana ‘Midori no Yubi’ wo Yomu: Yusaburareru ” [The Contextual Reading of Narration in Banana Yoshimoto’s “Midori-no-yubi”]. Nihon Bungaku [Japanese Literature] 60, no. 8 (2011): 13–23. Yamada, Yusuke. “Ningen-chûshin-shugi/Shinjin-dôkei(dôsei)-ron” [Anthropocentrism/ Anthropomorphism]. In Bungaku kara Kankyô wo Kangaeru: Ekokuritishizumu-gaidobukku [Thinking about the Environment through Literature: An Ecocriticism Guidebook], edited by Kazuaki Odani, Gakuto Hayama, Masami Yuki, Mayumi Toyosato, and Ikue Kina, 305–6. Tokyo: Benseisha Publishing, 2014. Yasuda, Masanori. “Midori no Yubi no Yubisasu Hôkô: Yoshimoto Banana no Shôsetsu wo Yomu” [The Direction That the Green Fingers Point at: Reading Yoshimoto Banana’s Novel]. Kôkô-kokugo-kyôiku [High School National Language Education] Summer 2003 (May 30, 2003): 13–17. https://tb.sanseido-publ.co.jp/wp-sanseido/wp-content/upload s/2019/08/kokokokugo_2003.pdf. Yoshimoto, Banana. “Midori no Yubi” [Green Fingers]. In Karada wa Zenbu Shitteiru [The Body Knows Everything], 9–23. Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 2002.

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Cosima Bruno (SOAS University of London)

Animal Talk. The Sentient and the Sensible in Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Abstract Through analogical association and differentiation, the practice of the human-nonhuman animal correlative in poetry can shed light on the relationship between the physical environment and figurative language. Can the animal in poetry take the mediating role of weaving the human into nature, or does it remind us that humans are “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2003) and forever set apart from nonhuman animals? This essay explores a number of contemporary Chinese poems’ engagement with nonhuman animals to better understand how figurative thinking links the sentient to the sensible, even when it points to an epistemological gap between human and nonhuman animals. Recuperating the Chinese contemporary debate around the slogan “poetry puts body into words” 诗言体 (Yu 2001), my principal aim is to explore the intersectional space between the concepts of ‘body’ and ‘knowledge,’ answering the questions: What is knowable? How does the body know? How does poetry know? Keywords: animal, epistemology, Chinese language, sensuous poetics, body and language

The Chinese Character and Nature One principal aim of this paper is to explore the intersectional space between the concepts of ‘body’ and ‘knowledge’. The major questions orienting me in this study on the relationship between the sentient and sensible in contemporary Chinese poetry are: what is knowable? How does the body know? How does poetry know? Is it through practice, perception, language? These questions have been the focus of attention of philosophers and poets for centuries, often intersecting with theories on the Chinese language, which branch out in two main diverging directions. The Chinese writing system, unlike the writing systems of alphabetical languages, has attracted much interest but also misunderstanding as a sort of universal language that can restore the lost connection between word and world. Conversely, there has also been an argument

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(e. g. Hegel,1 Ong,2 Yu), according to which the graphic nature of the Chinese character further separates language from orality, thus increasing its distance from the world.3 What I need to highlight here is a notion of the Chinese character that intersected with European philosophical traditions for which language was fundamentally detached from “objective reality”, and the “ideograph” could offer the perfect (or worst) link to eliminate such distance. The underlying assumption in such a prolonged debate is that reality and nature (including animals but excluding humans) is on the other side of language. For many a European thinker of the seventeenth century, China was “a land without a notion of artifice.”4 As a matter of fact, China was rather involved in a concept of wen (letters) that distinguishes yet does not separate humans and their language from the rest of nature. In fact, as eloquently explained by Zhang Longxi, writing and literature are not “a human invention to imitate nature, but are part of nature, of the natural cosmos itself”.5 The poet “creates” the aesthetic pattern of wen not through mimesis but by revealing those patterns that have always been present in nature. Human-made literature, culture, or civilization 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004). 2 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982). 3 Because of space restrictions, I will not overview these two arguments here. I only refer to useful literature on the subject. The historical trajectory of the European “hallucination” of the Chinese characters is efficiently summed up in Edward McDonald, “’Humanistic Spirit or Scientism?’: Conflicting Ideologies in Chinese Language Reform,” Historie, Epistémologie, Langage 24, no. 2 (2002): 51–74. McDonald includes Francis Bacon’s (1605), Champollion (1822), Ezra Pound, via Fenellosa, (1919), Creel (1936), and Derrida, via Gernet (1967). To this list we can add Leibniz, John Wilkins, Borges, Lakoff and Foucault. See also Han-Liang Chang, Hallucinating the Other: Derridean Fantasies of Chinese Script. Working Paper 4 (Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1988). 4 For Leibniz – a great admirer of the pictorial nature of the characters – the Chinese script “speaks to the eyes.” He proposed to compile an illustrated universal dictionary which would include words to be accompanied by pictures: A little picture of an ibex would be more readily understood than a long description of the animal. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understandings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 253–54. Another example is provided by a 1687 manuscript entitled Digressio de Sinarum Literis [sic!], which explained the Chinese characters in naturalistic terms, using symbols portraying birds and fish. Knud Lundbaek, The Tradition of the Chinese Script (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1988). It is also worth mentioning that, at the end of the 19th century, in contraposition with the fetish for the Chinese characters, there was a sustained effort from Chinese modern intellectuals, including renowned figures such as Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879–1942), Lu Xun 鲁 迅 (1881–1936), Qian Xuantong 钱玄同 (1887–1939), and Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899–1935), to get rid of the Chinese characters, as these were held responsible for the hindered modernization of China, under what Mullaney defines the “alphabet imperialism.” Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2018). 5 Longxi Zhang, “What is Wen and Why is It Made so Terribly Strange?,” College Literature 23, no. 1 (1996): 24.

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remain grounded in nature. According to such postulates, Chinese writing does not simply represent the natural but first and foremost the factuality of wen actually overcomes the distinction between nature and culture.6 This is confirmed by the Chinese myth of Cang Jie 仓颉, chronicler at the court of the legendary Huang Di 黄帝, or Yellow Emperor, who, sometime between 2697 and 2597 BC, after having studied the celestial bodies, their formations, nature, and in particular the traces of birds’ and animals’ footprints, embarked in the invention of the Chinese characters. These views however mostly pertained to an understanding of wen in primitive Chinese society, which had the privilege of a “marvelous original contact and communication with the animal and plant worlds,” whereas “language as we now use it, poetical or otherwise, often belies these magical conceptions”.7 In Daoist philosophy, in fact, humans can grasp the totality of things only by “deverbalizing”, wu yan 无言 the world.8 This is why much of Daoist literature aims at showing the relativity of perspectives, often inverting the role between the sentient human and the sensed animal.

Yu Jian and the Idea that ‘Poetry Puts Body into Words’ Fast forwarding several centuries, we find that the issues and notions are still under discussion in the contemporary artistic and literary spheres. By manipulating the famous classical lyricism phrase shi yan zhi 诗言志 (poetry puts mind into words), the poet, essayist, photographer, film director, editor, and academic Yu Jian 于坚 (b. 1954) forged the phrase shi yan ti 诗言体 (poetry puts body into words)9 to convey his vision of a kind of poetry writing that is of the body, sensuous, situated, evolving directly from the world:

6 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, “Genes, Memes, and the Chinese Concept of Wen: toward a nature/ culture model of Genetics,” Philosophy East & West 60, no. 2 (April 2010): 167–86. 7 Wai-lim Yip 叶维廉. “Wuyan duhua: Daojia meixue lunyao” 无言独化： 道家美学论要 [Deverbalize and Self-transform] (1979), in Wai-lim Yip, Cong Xianxiang dao biaoxian 从现象到表现, 203–27. Taibei: Dongda guoshu gongsi, 1994. Translated into English as “Language and the Real-Life Worlds”, in Wai-lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances. Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics, 64. Berkeley, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. 8 Ibid., 66. 9 In Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language, Scott Knickerbocker defines a “sensuous poetics” as “the process of rematerializing language specifically as a response to nonhuman nature.” Like Yu Jian’s poetic project, Knickerbocker talks about environmental poetry that attempts to return to the world, and the world to language. Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 2.

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In the beginning things were named orally. […] the first man who saw the sea sighed: see!10 […] A sound indicated a tree. That sound simply was that tree. Tree! What that sound said was: there is this tree. It didn’t say imposing, magnificent, grown up, luxuriant, straight… or other metaphors of the kind. In our time, it has become difficult for a poet to say tree, which is already a metaphorical screen. If one says big tree, the first recipient understands it as the male reproductive organ. The second thinks the speaker is suggesting shelter, the third thinks he means a place to perch […] the n-recipient, according to the degree of industrialization of the time, takes tree as the symbol for nature […] the signifier and the signified have become separated.11

As we can evince from this excerpt, for Yu, years, if not centuries, of expressing individuality and focusing on the mind made poetry “a bodiless language play.”12 He sees such a trend as a direct outcome of the transition from oral to literate cultures, which dulled human sensory perception and severed the connection between humans and the living world. World and word are thus conceived in dichotomy, as the original and its (bad) translation.13 Yu’s argument is in dialogue with many ecocritical poets around the world who purport that writing and even language, being anthropocentric manifestations, are in opposition to the nonhuman world, and therefore should be treated with suspicion. Physical reality, they say, should instead be favoured, as it should a language that gives access to it, without dominating and destroying it with abstraction.14 And yet, Charles Bernstein, for example, states: “Sounds is language’s flesh […] In sounding language we ground ourselves as sentient, material beings, obtruding into the world with the same obdurate thingness as rocks or soil or flesh.”15 Such a poetics of presence and immediacy indicates 10 The original pun has ha˘i 海 (sea) and ha¯i 嗨 (an exclamation similar to oh!). 11 Jian Yu, 于坚. Zongpi shouji 棕皮手记 [Brown Cover Journal] (Guangzhou: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 1997), 239; 241. 12 Jian Yu, 于坚, Yu Jian ji 于坚集 [Yu Jian: Works] (Kunming: Yunnan renmin, 2004), 84. 13 Simon Patton states that for Yu Jian “translation inevitably dismembers poetry, the body or ‘bearing’ of a text being virtually impossible to replicate in another language.” Simon Patton, “Yu Jian,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Chinese Poets Since 1949, vol. 387, eds. Christopher Lupke and Thomas E. Moran, 284. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2020. 14 Philosophically, however, Yu’s rejection of metaphor could point to two different directions. As the locus of a meaning breakdown, metaphor for Yu thwarts understanding, and further separates language from reality, or humans from their environment. But if we consider tradition and language as a process, metaphor might as well be seen as a way of preserving freedom of meaning, and supporting relativity of point of view, against autocratic, or idealistic, attitudes toward language. For a fascinating novel on the conundrum of the metaphor, see Li Hongwei 李宏伟, Guowang yu shuqingshi 国王与抒情诗 [The King and Lyric Poetry] (Beijing: Zhongxin chubanshe, 2017). A thoughtful discussion of this novel is found in Joanna Krenz, “Living an Emperor’s Life, Dying a Nobel Death. Li Hongwei’s Novel The King and Lyric Poetry as a Journey through the History of Chinese Poetry,” Litteraria Copernicana 2, no. 38 (2021): 57–82. 15 Charles Bernstein, ed., Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21.

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a tension between the conceptual and the perceptual, symbolism and imagism. It leans towards those theories of poetry of “pure experience,” through orality and sound. The point that I am trying to make by using Charles Bernstein, a L=A=N= G=U=A=G=E poet, as example, is that for Bernstein the voice is able to extend poetry beyond the written or alphabetical signifier. Such a move may be seen as contesting and resolving the presumed inimical relationship between the critical inquiry of ecopoetry and the experimental practices of “language” poetry.16 It might be that for some Language poets language is part of nature or nature is partially constituted through language (as purported by Scigaj and Knickerbocker). Either way, Bernstein’s ‘sounding word’ does share the ecopoetic vision of the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception.17 Conceptually, however, the poetic project that puts sound at its centre is not so far away from those theories of visual poetry, as advocated through the debate of “thinking in characters.”18 Although both advocates for the orality or visuality of language recognise that a deep human engagement with the world has been severed, they both argue that perception is the link that connects us to the world.19 Thus the visual and the oral aesthetics of the Chinese characters as a poetic means 16 This same argument is in my view explicitly made through the ethical engagement of language poets such as Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, among others, and their elaboration of the notion of the “expanded field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” 17 See Charles Bernstein, ed., Pitch of Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), part 1. Incidentally, Bernstein also participated in the influential journal Ecopoetics (2004–2005). In all fairness, two contrasting arguments – one in support and one against Bernstein’s participation in ecopoetics – must be recognized. For an example of supporters, see Timothy Morton, “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Oxford Literary Review. 1, no. 32 (2010): 1–17. For an example of refuters, see John Shoptaw, “Why Ecopoetics?,” Poetry, (January 2016), https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70299/why-ecopoetry. 18 Under the name of “thinking in characters,” I refer to a prolonged theoretical re-examination of the poetics of the Chinese character that was carried out since the early 1990s by artists and poets. The focus of the “thinking in characters” debate was the association of the Chinese character with an aesthetics of perception, or “pure experience” in the Chan Buddhist poetic tradition, or in the Fenellosa-Pound elaboration. Some of the main features of such an aesthetics included breaking down linearity, omission of conjunctions and other coherence markers, and creation of psychological (rather than semantic) connections, through montage techniques. In the eyes of the “thinking in characters” artists and poets, the Chinese characters almost constitute an ideal world language that can achieve a deeper integration with the external object. Cf. several articles published in the poetry journal Shitan suo 诗探索 [Poetry Exploration] 2 (1996): 8–25; 3 (1996): 37–56; 4 (1996): 72–86; 1 (1997): 46–66; 2 (1997): 37–67; 3 (1997): 45–56; 4 (1997): 86–103; 2 (1998): 83–94; 4 (1998): 52–55; 1 (1999): 129–33; 2–4 (2000): 81–88; 2–3 (2002): 44–88; 1 (2003): 47–63; 1 (2004): 66–70. Cf. also Wai-lim Yip, “Wuyan duhua,” 203–27, and Cosima Bruno, “Words by the Look: Issues in Translating Chinese Visual Poetry,” in China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer and Representations of China and the West, ed. James St. Andre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 245–76. 19 It is worth reminding that conventional ecopoetics displays a dominance of imagistic and perceptual techniques.

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are united by the perceptual, the body. Whereas the senses of individuals in oral communities ceaselessly converge in their synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, humans, and landscape, the sensory experience of individuals in literate societies allows them to participate in an exclusively human discourse, since humans’ movement from oral to written communication has altered not only communication styles, but also the very modes of perception (Abram, Clark).20

Animal Talk In light of the theoretical propositions sketched above, I would like to examine now some of the textual strategies emerging from contemporary Chinese poets’ musing on animals, both to investigate at a practical level the outlined arguments and to explore how poetry can encourage reconnection and engagement with the living world beside humans. I have selected poems featuring animals by Yu Jian, Zang Di 臧棣 (b. 1964), Mu Cao 墓草 (b. 1974), and Hsia Yü 夏宇 (b. 1956), with the purpose of studying the ways figurative thinking links the sentient to the sensible, even when it points to an epistemological gap between human and nonhuman animals.21 Yu Jian’s poem “Goldfish” 金鱼 reiterates his views on metaphor and its alleged distancing from the living world: A goldfish can be described in terms of other objects capable of motion because motion and motion are similar […] But these motions are all dry a goldfish might die in such a narrative […] So the narrative goldfish might have no relation with the goldfish itself you may set out from this word and reach destinations in which in real life it would die […] 20 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House. 1996); Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborg: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). This brings to mind the (unresolved) dispute between i colori (the colours) and la parola scritta (the written word) as narrated by Italo Calvino in a short dialogue in which the voice is asked to sound them both. Italo Calvino, “La parola scritta, i colori e la voce”, in Italo Calvino, Romanzi e racconti, vol. 3, 416–17. Milano: Mondadori, 1994. 21 For John Berger figurative language originates from humans’ relationship with animals, a chiastic relationship of simultaneous difference and inseparability. Not only did “language itself [begin] with metaphor,” as Berger states paraphrasing Rousseau, but also the “first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that […] the first metaphor was animal.” John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin, 2009), 261.

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And it can still have more descriptions that is why when we see this little body we must call it goldfish then, just like a goldfish, it will manifest itself as an image in an aquarium filled with clean tank-water […] I can also assume that this sound is effective goldfish It is just another living animal sharing the drawing room with me22

Observing the accumulation of metaphorical associations, Yu Jian’s poems present a clear statement of a poetics that returns to naming, orally. In the line “I can also assume that this sound is effective goldfish”, italics aim at conveying an original that is given in pinyin transliteration, rather than in characters, so as to highlight the sound of the word over the visual character. The aurality of the word for goldfish seems to finally confirm its existence as any other living being on earth, at the same level as a human being. Thus poetry’s renaming is able to minimize metaphorical language and to re-connect things to words, world to language. As he further elaborates in an interview: […] I’d like to talk about the elephant in relation to reality. […] There is a street in Kunming called Xiang Yan Street, literally meaning “Elephant Eye Street,” this is because traveling merchants from Burma and Laos used to ride elephants to Kunming and fasten the elephants on that street. […] My home is close to the zoo, where I can see elephants. The elephant is a very important animal in my life, not just an idea. […] When I traveled along Mekong River, I saw a lot of them, too.23 […] On the oracle bones, the inscription of the word [xiang] means infinity, so enormous that it has no ends. Though this concept of infinity is an abstract one, in Chinese it has to be embodied in something concrete, in this case, the animal elephant. […] So far I have written eleven poems on elephants. […] It is like the story of blind men touching the elephant, getting a little part every time, but it is all these little parts that lead to something huge behind.24

Yu claims his shi yan ti poetics allows him to explore the animal, bit by bit, poem by poem, like tiny pieces of a huge puzzle, which might never be completed, but that nonetheless produces knowledge. For him, first comes his sensuous experience, and then the idea. Standing at the opposite side of Yu Jian’s poetic project is Zang Di’s strategy of exploring reality, language and poetry metaphysically. Throughout the poems of his “Book Series,” Zang deals with the animal and the biological world in general from the perspective of language and communication, continuously providing 22 Jian Yu, Yu Jian de shi 于坚的诗 [Poems by Yu Jian] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000), 142. 23 See how elephants have been the object of attention in the article by Julia Hollingsworth and Zixu Wang, “Millions of People in China Can’t Stop Watching a Pack of Wandering Elephants,” CNN, June 11, 2021, https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/09/china/elephants-china-yu nnan-intl-hnk/index.html. 24 Jian Yu, Marjorie Perloff, and Guilian Hao, “Conversation with Poet Yu Jian,” Waiguo yuwen yanjiu 外国语文研究 [Foreign Language and Literature Research] 24, no. 6 (2018): 23.

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associations from different angles and levels. “Night Bird Series” 夜鸟丛书 can be read as an embodiment of the epistemological gap between humans and animals, and between their languages: I dreamt each time we’re together, three people are there. You said, the other one is a bird. When I call your name, the bird calls as well. When you call my name, he’s still calling. […] The calls imply something, but don’t name names. His calls contain another vaster cry, a kind I thought couldn’t exist outside of human screams.25

The poem reflects on the different mechanisms of communication of humans and animals. But there is some ambiguity in the identification of the subjects here: Is the bird an animal, or is it a facet of human nature. There is some overlap: the bird is referred to as a third person, whom the subject cannot fully understand, but can recognise that he is implying something. He does not name names (as humans do when using language); his call is linguistically competent even though he does not talk. He does not give any rational insight into the conceptual framework of the name, but his cry is a primitive, spontaneous, unreflective, ungrounded form of acting or reacting. And yet it is in this form that the poet finds a link between the bird and the human; it is the cry that resembles the human scream. Thus, nature and culture cannot fully integrate into each other’s order, but they are still linked by some implication or sensation. The bird in the poem is there to sharpen human sensibility toward overlooked and mysterious aspects of being in the world. This is almost an animist poetics that gives the bird a spiritual essence, an aesthetic logic that challenges dichotomies by aesthetically expanding personhood beyond the individual, human, and physical subject, replacing it with a sort of (trans)subject, the more-than-human, more-thanphysical, expansive personhood in lyric poetry. The persona merely observes, whereas the you seems to want to domesticate the bird, by calling it human. The persona, however, uses the qualifier “I thought,” and makes a comparison. Mesmerized, he seems to maintain a difference from (yet also a connection with) the I and the bird. It is perhaps in this distinction where poetry abandons the descriptive mode and creates a dream language or spiritual realm, leaning towards the metaphysical, or transcendental. This makes Zang Di’s personal relationship to the animal or the biological, which he understands as an opportunity to expand knowledge, acknowledge relativity of points of view, and ob25 Di Zang 臧棣, “Ye niao congshu” 夜鸟丛书 [Night-bird Series], trans. Elenore Goldman, Poetry International 2017, https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/28594/auto/0/0/Za ng-Di/NIGHT-BIRD-SERIES/en/nocache.

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serve degrees of closeness between poetry and things. In “So Awesome Series” 就 这么牛丛书 we read: They say poetry is useless, and I don’t refute it. […] Poetry does not exist in useful or useless, The poem is perpendicular to these photos, just like the rain last night Straight into the earth.26

Zang Di’s poems confirm the relativity and multiplicity of knowledge. The photographs have their apparent objectivity; poetry has its own rules, and it can question and perhaps also challenge reality, revealing different aspects that mimesis and objectivity obscure. Thus, poetry enters in contact with other entities. Zang Di’s poems do not use natural things for the purpose of expressing the secrets and habitual images of nature. It does not rely on the similarity of things. In contrast, he relies more on language itself to widen the distance between the body and the linguistic metaphor. As Geng Zhanchun 耿占春 said: “His metaphors often do not overlap words and objects but constitute semantic deviations. It seems that poetry almost exists in this distance between words and objects.”27 In Zang Di’s poem, the bird is not describing an aspect of a physically imagined reality, but rather is a mysterious site of thought. The image of the bird, with its language, creates an intangible realm of the linguistically unfamiliar, more than external reality, something that does not resolve. In Mu Cao’s poem “A Masturbating Monkey” 手淫猴子,28 animal resemblance to the human is employed ironically: In a zoo […] A young monkey Is masturbating like human’s “shooting at the plane” At the moment of orgasm No one knows Its sexual dream – Does an amorous and beautiful female monkey

26 Di Zang, “Jiu zheme niu congshu” 就这么牛丛书 [So Awesome Series]. In Di Zang, Huigen congshu 慧根丛书 [The roots of wisdom series] (Chongqing: Chongqing daxue chubanshe, 2011), 91. 27 Zhanchun Geng 耿占春, Shiqu xiangzheng de shijie 失去象征的世界 [The World without Symbols] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2008), 241. 28 Mu Cao 墓草, “Shouyin de houzi” 手淫猴子 (A masturbating monkey), trans. Yang Zongze, in Mu Cao, Mu Cao shixuan 幕草诗选 (Selected poems by Mu Cao), 98–99. Chongqing: Huanqiu wenhua chubanshe, 2009.

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Appear in a cage Or in the mountain forest29

The comparison precisely foregrounds the epistemological gap between the human and the nonhuman, while also providing a critique of anthropocentric tendencies that apply the human point of view to animals. Nevertheless, the use of anthropomorphic language grants the monkey subjectivity and thereby enables a change of perspectives and perhaps even observation of the “animal mind.” Mu Cao’s poem concerns itself with the body, literally. It does not undermine the realism of language, and accepts what can be observed, even when recognising the possibility of another order of reality. Mu thus conveys specificity to the animal and to the human: by investing passion and moral feeling, the poet however admits the diversity of the animal and its language to the human body. The trope of the monkey becomes one of doubleness, oscillating and substituting between animal and human. Hsia Yü’s 夏宇 piece “His Works and Him” 牠和牠的作品 was first shown at the Taipei Contemporary Art Museum in 2008, as part of the exhibition titled Cross It Out, Cross It Out, Cross It Out, which included poems by her fellow poets Ling Yü, Hong Hong, and Yung Man-Han. The visual poem was then collected in issue nine of the journal Xianzai shi 现在诗 (Poetry Now) 2012. Hsia’s poem uses a Chinese translation of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am as its interface: Derrida’s text is crossed out and photographed in combination with images of a dog in the process of chewing up an armchair. Thus, Hsia crossed out Derrida’s text, while the dog – as the mythological Celestial Hound who devours heaven and earth – crossed out Hsia’s armchair (fig. 1). In the excerpt shown here, we read the translation into Chinese of the following passage from Derrida: I must once more return to the malaise of this scene. I ask for your forbearance. I will do all I can to prevent its being presented as a primal scene: this deranged theatrics of the wholly other that they call animal, for example, a cat, when it looks at me naked, at the instant when I introduce myself, present myself to it-or, earlier, at that strange moment when, before the event, before even wanting it or knowing it myself.30

In an interview published in Asymptote, Hsia comments: “my watching over him (without intervening) was completely indulgent, even loving.” The poet then explains: “Because this person herself had mistakenly thought that, in this world where mankind is the lone sentient being, animals have no words to explain

29 Ibid. 30 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I am,” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002), 380.

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Fig. 1. Hsia Yü’s Dog. © Hsia Yü

themselves, I respected the speechlessness of animals and, consequently, I remained speechless.”31 Hsia Yü takes up Derrida’s project by giving it a visual extension. This extension does not subtract Derrida’s text from its propositions: by remediating it, “His Work and Him” simply endows it with a new functionality, one that the photographization of the text allows it to display. By showing the disruptive and creative energy that comes from the animal, this poem shows that the unconscious language of the dog is at the opposite of writing and writing’s constraints of rationality. Thus, while Yu Jian advocates “poetry puts the body into words,” Hsia’s project concentrates on the very physicality of language. Taking words from existent texts, and mixing media, she presents her readers with a physical refraction of reality. In fact, Hsia Yü talks of experiencing a feeling of “wordincarnation.” She described the words, language and verses as “physical,” “close to a skin sensation,” such as itching, sticky, pain, etc., as if she could actually feel

31 Yü Hsia et al., “Cross It Out, Cross it Out, Cross it Out. Erasurist Poetry from Taiwan’s Poetry Now,” interview by Dylan Suher and Rachel Hui-Yu Tang, Asymptote, April 2012. https:// www.asymptotejournal.com/visual/hsia-yu-et-al-cross-it-out-cross-it-out-cross-it-outerasu rist-poetry-from-taiwans-poetry-now/.

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the texture of the word.32 In its static visual quality, the poem nevertheless transmits energy. It communicates by expressive, though not just linguistic, means. It conveys a mode of experience to which human language is normally closed.

Conclusion Writing this paper from a context in which a pandemic has considerably severed physical human interaction while exponentially increasing the use of technologies, the poetics of presence and of the body discussed by these poets has acquired a whole new significance. I have mentioned two diverging ways in which the Chinese language has been understood through centuries and how these have resonated in a number of poetic projects that put perception at their centre. What does the animal represent in such poetics? How is it portrayed and how can poetry allow us (if at all) to engage with entities that do not speak our language? While there is an unbridgeable gap (or deep chasm) separating humans from the minds of animals, there is also a form of communication that we share with animal creatures, namely expressive communication which is apt to present a “synchronic middle ground” poised between two poles. It is a common practice, for example, to attribute to animals sensations and feelings (hunger, thirst, fatigue, agitation, pain, and pleasure). As indicated by Merleau-Ponty, humans are in constant dialogue with the natural world, forever affecting and being affected by it and all of the entities within it. This reciprocal relationship is based on the sensuous world, which perceives and initiates communication, just as humans do. These poems seem to affirm that there is a plurality of non-scientific and scientific forms of knowing and/or understanding. Being in language allows the poet to observe and think with emotional engagement, provoking unforeseen insights. Of course, reading and writing are not the same as feeling sensations on the body, like the sun or the rain on the skin. If I describe my encounter with an elephant in the jungle, the reader will know a part of the reality expressed in my description, even though she would have never seen an elephant. This knowledge may not be the same as actually seeing the elephant, because the knowledge of the body contains too detailed information – temperature, a certain chromatic scale, the foliage around, smell, sounds, etc. All poetry can do is provide a special 32 Hsia Yü 夏宇 and Wan Xuting 万胥亭, “Bi tan” 笔谈 [Talking of Writing], in Hsia Yü, Fuyushu 腹语术 [Ventriloquy], 4th ed. (Taipei: Hsia Yü chuban, 2010), 105.

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avenue to human imagination, symbolic expressions, and connection with the world. The boundaries between the human and nonhuman animals have often been porous in Chinese poetry. What these texts express and preserve is not merely a point of view or a particular truth. It is a way of knowing, a certain disposition or way of being in the world. It is an openness to certain kinds of experience and to certain dimensions of reality. These poems attempt to embody the incommunicable experience, a way of inhabiting the world, with at its centre the experiential quality of a sensible body. Thus, this paper proposes to work towards a common definition of the knowing body across philosophy and poetry, beyond the outdated binary of visuality/orality-literacy, and the suspicion bestowed on language, writing and reading outlined in the beginning of this paper. In its place, following the postcritical account of literature suggested by scholars such as Rita Felski33 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,34 we can recognise the significance of the ways of seeing and knowing the world allowed by the poetic text.

Bibliography Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Random House. 1996. Berger, John. Why look at Animals? London: Penguin. 2009. Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. –, ed. Pitch of Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. “Genes, Memes, and the Chinese Concept of Wen: toward a nature/culture model of Genetics.” Philosophy East & West 60, no. 2 (April 2010): 167– 86. Bruno, Cosima. “Words by the Look. Issues in Translating Chinese Visual Poetry.” In China and Its Others: Knowledge Transfer and Representations of China and the West, edited by James St. Andre, 245–276. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2012. Calvino, Italo. “La parola scritta, i colori e la voce.” In Italo Calvino. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 3, 416–17. Milano: Mondadori, 1994. Cao, Mu 墓草. “Shouyin de houzi.” 手淫猴子 (A masturbating monkey). Translated by Yang Zongze. In Mu Cao. Mu Cao shixuan 幕草诗选 (Selected poems by Mu Cao), 98– 99. Chongqing: Huanqiu wenhua chubanshe, 2009. Chang, Han-Liang. Hallucinating the Other: Derridean Fantasies of Chinese Script. Working Paper 4. Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1988.

33 Rita Felski, “Context Stinks,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 573–91. 34 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Perfomativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

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Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborg: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I am.” Translated by David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369–418. Felski, Rita. “Context Stinks.” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 573–91. Geng, Zhanchun 耿占春. Shiqu xiangzheng de shijie 失去象征的世界 [The World without Symbols]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2008. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. Translated by John Sibree. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004. Hollingsworth, Julia, and Zixu Wang. “Millions of People in China Can’t Stop Watching a Pack of Wandering Elephants.” CNN, June 11, 2021. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/0 6/09/china/elephants-china-yunnan-intl-hnk/index.html. Hsia, Yü 夏宇 and Wan Xuting 万胥亭. “Bi tan” 笔谈 [Talking of Writing]. In Hsia Yü. Fuyushu 腹语术 [Ventriloquy], 4th ed., 105–21. Taipei: Hsia Yü chuban, 2010. Hsia, Yü et al. “Cross It Out, Cross it Out, Cross it Out. Erasurist Poetry from Taiwan’s Poetry Now.” Interview by Dylan Suher and Rachel Hui-Yu Tang. Asymptote, April 2012. https://www.asymptotejournal.com/visual/hsia-yu-et-al-cross-it-out-cross-it-out-cros s-it-outerasurist-poetry-from-taiwans-poetry-now/. Knickerbocker, Scott. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Perfomativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Krenz, Joanna. “Living an Emperor’s Life, Dying a Nobel Death. Li Hongwei’s Novel The King and Lyric Poetry as a Journey through the History of Chinese Poetry.” Litteraria Copernicana 2, no. 38 (2021): 57–82. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. New Essays on Human Understandings. Translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Li, Hongwei 李宏伟. Guowang yu shuqingshi 国王与抒情诗 [The King and Lyric Poetry]. Beijing: Zhongxin chubanshe, 2017. Lundbaek, Knud. The Tradition of the Chinese Script. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1988. McDonald, Edward. “‘Humanistic Spirit or Scientism?’: Conflicting Ideologies in Chinese Language Reform.” Historie, Epistémologie, Langage 24, no. 2 (2002): 51–74. Morton, Timothy. “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology.” Oxford Literary Review 1, no. 32 (2010): 1–17. Mullaney, Thomas S. The Chinese Typewriter: A History. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2018. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982. Patton, Simon. “Yu Jian.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography. Chinese Poets Since 1949, vol. 387, edited by Christopher Lupke and Thomas E. Moran, 277–285. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2020. Shitan suo 诗探索 [Poetry Exploration] 2 (1996): 8–25; 3 (1996): 37–56; 4 (1996): 72–86; 1 (1997): 46–66; 2 (1997): 37–67; 3 (1997): 45–56; 4 (1997): 86–103; 2 (1998): 83–94; 4 (1998): 52–55; 1 (1999): 129–33; 2–4 (2000): 81–88; 2–3 (2002): 44–88; 1 (2003): 47–63; 1 (2004): 66–70.

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Shoptaw, John. “Why Ecopoetics?”. Poetry (January 2016). https://www.poetryfoundatio n.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70299/why-ecopoetry. Yip, Wai-lim 叶维廉. “Wuyan duhua: Daojia meixue lunyao” 无言独化：道家美学论要 [Deverbalize and Self-transform] (1979). In Wai-lim Yip. Cong Xianxiang dao biaoxian 从现象到表现, 203–27. Taibei: Dongda guoshu gongsi, 1994. Translated into English as “Language and the Real-Life Worlds”. In Wai-lim Yip. Diffusion of Distances. Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics, 63–99. Berkeley, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. Yu, Jian 于坚. Zongpi shouji 棕皮手记 [Brown Cover Journal]. Guangzhou: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 1997. –. Yu Jian de shi 于坚的诗 [Poems by Yu Jian]. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000. –. “Dui yi zhi wuya de mingming” 对一只乌鸦的命名 [The Naming of a Crow]. In Jian Yu. Yu Jian de shi 于坚的诗 [poems by Yu Jian], 88–91. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2000. –. “Shi yan ti” 诗言体 [Poetry Puts Body into Words]. Furong 芙蓉 3 (2001): 69–75. –. Yu Jian ji 于坚集 [Yu Jian: Works]. Kunming: Yunnan renmin, 2004. –. “Di huo” 地火 [Underground Fire] (2018). Translated by Simon Patton and Helen Chow. Chinaman Creek, January 29, 2018. https://simonatchinamancreek.wordpress.c om/2018/01/29/underground-fire-by-yu-jian/. Yu, Jian, Marjorie Perloff, and Hao Guilian. “Conversation with Poet Yu Jian.” Waiguo yuwen yanjiu 外国语文研究 [Foreign Language and Literature Research] 24, no. 6 (2018): 15–25. Zang, Di 臧棣. “Ye niao congshu” 夜鸟丛书 [Night-bird Series]. Translated by Elenore Goldman. Poetry International 2017. https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/28 594/auto/0/0/Zang-Di/NIGHT-BIRD-SERIES/en/nocache. –. “Jiu zheme niu congshu” 就这么牛丛书 [So Awesome Series]. In Huigen congshu 慧根 丛书 [The roots of wisdom series], 91. Chongqing: Chongqing daxue chubanshe, 2011. Zhang, Longxi. “What is Wen and Why is It Made so Terribly Strange?” College Literature 23, no. 1 (1996): 15–35.

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Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Julia Stetter (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Neumaterialistische Perspektiven auf eine Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen in der Literatur exemplifiziert anhand Stifters Hochwald und Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn

Abstract New Materialist Perspectives on Heterogenization of Nature Knowledge in Literature with a Brief Consideration of Stifter’s High Forest and Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn New materialist approaches with their alternative conceptions of knowledge certainly have the potential to challenge traditional views of human subjectivity. Against the backdrop of the current crisis of the human-nature relationship, this paper analyzes aspects of literary representations of nature knowledge. Particularly, it is concerned with how new materialist perspectives can serve as a central reference point for reading literary texts in less anthropocentric and dualistic ways and instead follow the counter-discursive and imaginative forces of literature. By looking at key ideas of Jane Bennett and Karen Barad, the article argues that a new materialist reading of literature can offer alternative insights into the particular characteristics of literary knowledge production, which is finally illustrated with passages from Stifter and Sebald. Keywords: New Materialism, Literature and Knowledge, Human-Nature Relationship, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad

Der anthropogene Klimawandel mit durch ihn verursachten Wetterextremen, schmelzenden Polkappen und Gletschern, der Bedrohung durch Hochwasser, Wirbelstürme, Dürren und Waldbrände, der fehlenden Gerechtigkeit zwischen dem globalen Norden und dem globalem Süden sowie das weltweite Aussterben von immer mehr Tier- und Pflanzenarten führen deutlich vor Augen, dass wir uns in einer ökologischen Krise befinden, in der das Mensch-Natur-Verhältnis aus dem Gleichgewicht geraten ist. Die nur schleichende Umsetzung von Umweltkonzepten, die unzureichende Reduzierung des CO2-Ausstoßes und der fahrlässige Umgang mit natürlichen Ressourcen lassen daran zweifeln, dass wissenschaftliche Forschungsergebnisse zur Erderwärmung tatsächlich ernst genommen und in ihrer Tragweite erfasst werden. Erforderlich scheint insofern ein grundsätzliches Umdenken, das offene wie latente anthropozentrische Vorstellungen hinterfragt, den Status des Menschen und sein Verhältnis zur Umwelt

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überdenkt und nach neuen Modellierungen der Beziehung zwischen Menschen, Natur und Wissen sucht. Aktuelle Forschungsansätze, namentlich die Environmental Humanities gehen davon aus, dass die derzeitigen Umweltprobleme nicht nur eine biologische und geologische, sondern auch eine soziale und kulturelle Dimension aufweisen und daher mehr als nur naturwissenschaftliche Reaktionen erfordern, sondern z. B. auch die Schaffung anderer Vorstellungen von Umwelt und die Gestaltung neuer diskursiver Praktiken.1 Problematisch seien insbesondere Epistemologien, die eine ontologische Dissoziation zwischen Menschlichem und Nichtmenschlichem behaupten, wobei in diesem Zusammenhang auch weitere strikte Dualismen wie etwa der Natur-Kultur-Dualismus kritisiert werden.2 Kultiviert werden solle vielmehr ein Bewusstsein für die Verbindung des Menschen zur materiellen Welt,3 was sich gegen den Materie-Geist-Dualismus richtet. Neumaterialistische Ansätze als Unterbereich der Environmental Humanities nehmen dazu verstärkt die materielle Umwelt und den Ablauf zwischen Beziehungen von Energien, Stoffen und Lebewesen in den Blick.4 Der Aufmerksamkeit für das Materielle liegt die Annahme zugrunde, dass Menschen nicht von der sonstigen Welt getrennt sind und dass mit dem „Ineinander-Gewebe (entanglement) des Materiellen Formen des Kommunizierens und Interpretierens“ verbunden sind.5 Angenommen wird, dass es Verflechtungen körperlicher und diskursiver Beziehungen sind, die sowohl das biologische als auch das soziale Leben konstituieren.6 Vor dem Hintergrund derartiger und verwandter neumaterialistischer Annahmen stellt sich die Frage, inwiefern Praktiken von Wissensgenerierung sich verändern, wenn anthropozentrische Epistemologien ihre Tragweite verloren haben. Im Folgenden sollen zunächst Theorien von Jane Bennett und Karen Barad untersucht werden, um sie hinsichtlich ihrer Implikationen für Praktiken von Wissensgenerierung zu prüfen. Ein Schwerpunkt soll überdies darauf gelegt werden, inwiefern gerade Literatur ein Wissen über die Natur in multipler und mehr als menschlicher Form evozieren kann. Als eine Form der Kunst könnte Literatur potenziell dazu bei1 Serpil Oppermann und Serenella Iovino, „The Environmental Humanities and the Challenges of the Anthropocene“, in Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, hg. v. Serpil Oppermann und Serenella Iovino (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 3. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 16. 4 Heather I. Sullivan, „New Materialism“, in Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, hg. v. Gabriele Dürbeck und Urte Stobbe (Köln: Böhlau, 2015), 58. 5 Ibid., 59. 6 Serenella Iovino, „(Material) Ecocriticism“, in Posthuman Glossary, hg. v. Rosi Braidotti und Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 113.

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tragen, nicht anthropozentrische epistemische Erfahrungen zu generieren, indem ihr andere Möglichkeiten als den wissenschaftlichen, politischen oder wirtschaftlichen Diskursen zur Verfügung stehen. Im Anschluss an Hubert Zapf kann davon ausgegangen werden, dass Kunst und Literatur nicht nur als Illustrationen von bestehendem Wissen dienen, sondern eigene Erkundungen unternehmen, wobei auf facettenreiche, selbstreflexive und transformierende Darstellungsformen innerhalb von Literatur sowie semantische Offenheit und ästhetische Komplexität zu verweisen ist.7 Aufbauend auf eine Diskussion um die neumaterialistischen Theorien von Bennett und Barad lässt sich genauer fragen, welche literarischen Strategien es gibt, um die Dezentralisierung des Menschen in der Welt ästhetisch darzustellen bzw. den Menschen als Teil des materiellen Werdens literarisch erfassbar zu machen. Neben allgemeinen Überlegungen soll anhand von konkreten Textstellen aus Adalbert Stifters Der Hochwald und W. G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn betrachtet werden, wie die dargestellte Einbettung des Menschen in die Natur ein Wissen über seine Zugehörigkeit in materielldiskursive Gefüge vermittelt und zu einer Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen beitragen kann. Die Wahl gerade dieser Autoren erfolgte hier nach Gesichtspunkten der Repräsentation für zwei verschiedene Arten der literarischen Auseinandersetzung mit Naturwissen, d. h. einer wirklichkeitspräfigurierenden und einer gegendiskursiven, wie nachstehend noch erläutert wird. Die verschiedenen literaturgeschichtlichen Entstehungszeiträume werden dagegen im Folgenden nicht weiter berücksichtigt, was aber im Rahmen vertiefender Analysen ebenfalls lohnend wäre.

Materialität und Praktiken von Wissensgenerierung bei Jane Bennett und Karen Barad Praktiken von Wissensgenerierung und Annahmen über den Status von Wissen in der Welt verändern sich, wenn man mit Jane Bennett und Karen Barad zu einer Rekonzeptualisierung von Materie übergeht. Bennett und Barad teilen, dass sie tradierte Vorstellungen der Trennung von passiver Materie und aktiven Menschen ablehnen und stattdessen eine neue Aufmerksamkeit für die Beziehungen zwischen menschlichen und nichtmenschlichen Wesen und Dingen entwickeln. In ihrer Studie Vibrant Matter beschreibt Bennett, „wie die Welt aus verschiedenen ‚Agencies‘ besteht“, wodurch eine „traditionell[e] Subjekt-Objekt-Dichotomie unterminiert“ wird, sodass Agency „als gemeinsame Tätigkeit“ ge-

7 Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 4; 12.

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dacht werden kann.8 Wesentlich für Bennett ist es, dass ein Mensch, wenn er handelt, es nie alleine tut, sondern immer im Verbund mit anderen Akteuren, wie etwa mit Mikroorganismen, Gegenständen, Geräuschen, Technologien oder der von ihm verzehrten Nahrung.9 Weitere Beispiele für nichtmenschliche Akteure sind Wetterereignisse, Chemikalien, Arzneimittel und Omega-3-Fettsäuren, die mit ihrem Einfluss auf das menschliche Gehirn nicht zuletzt die Stimmung verändern.10 Die derartige Herausstellung einer Vitalität der Materie beruht bei Bennett auf einem ökologischen Engagement. Würde man – wie in der westlichen Geistesgeschichte üblich – von einer Passivität der Materie ausgehen, fördere dies ein destruktives Konsumverhalten. Gerade die Vorstellung einer beherrschbaren Materie verhindere die Entwicklung von nachhaltigeren Formen der Produktion und des Verbrauchs.11 Zwischen traditionellen Umweltschützern und Umweltengagement im Sinne Bennetts bestehe ein Unterschied, insofern es traditionellen Umweltschützern darum gehe, das sie umgebende Ökosystem zu bewahren und es umsichtig zu behandeln. Demgegenüber liegt der Fokus bei Bennett darauf, strategischer mit einer Materialität umzugehen, an der man selbst Teil habe: „If environmentalists are selves who live on earth, vital materialists are selves who live as earth, who are more alert to the capacities and limitations […] of the various materials that they are.“12 Ausgangspunkt von Bennetts hier zugrunde liegender Vorstellung einer verteilten Handlungsmacht in Form von Assemblagen ist ihre Beobachtung von Ding-Macht. Damit ist eine grundsätzliche Wirksamkeit von Dingen gemeint bzw. „an efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve“.13 Der Begriff erinnere außerdem an kindliche Fantasien, in denen Objekte aller Art belebt sein können.14 Letztlich entwickelt Bennett jedoch ihr Konzept der DingMacht zu dem der „distributive agency“ weiter, da ihr Ding-Macht-Ansatz Agency zu stark individualistisch modelliere, was dem gemeinschaftlichen Moment von Agency nicht gerecht werde.15 Um eine Illustration für den Begriff der Ding-Macht zu geben, greift Bennett auf einen Eindruck zurück, den sie einmal an einem Juni-Morgen in Baltimore gewonnen hat. Vor einem Bagel-Shop sah sie Folgendes liegen: einen großen 8 Sullivan, „New Materialism“, 61. 9 Jane Bennett, „Vibrant Matter“, in Posthuman Glossary, hg. v. Rosi Braidotti und Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 448. 10 Ibid., 447–48. 11 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), ix. 12 Ibid., 111. 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 20–21.

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schwarzen Männerplastikhandschuh, ein dichtes Geflecht von Eichenpollen, eine makellose tote Ratte, einen weißen Plastikflaschenverschluss und einen geschmeidigen Holzstock.16 Einerseits habe es sich um zu ignorierende Dinge gehandelt, die höchstens noch auf menschliche Aktivitäten wie die Anstrengung des Arbeiters mit dem Handschuh oder den Erfolg des Vergifters der Ratte verwiesen hätten. Andererseits hätten die Gegenstände aber eine eigene DingMacht ausgeübt, insofern sie Aufmerksamkeit in eigener Sache gefordert und zu einer Irritation Bennetts geführt hätten. Ausgehend von einem Müllhaufen, der aber nicht mehr ausnahmslos als solcher gesehen wird, stellt Bennett eine Widerständigkeit von Dingen fest, die sich ihr gemäß nicht mehr vollständig menschlichen Bedeutungen, Gewohnheiten oder Zielen haben unterordnen lassen.17 Sie folgert: „In my encounter with the gutter on Cold Spring Lane, I glimpsed a culture of things irreducible to the culture of objects.“18 Weiterhin ergänzt sie, dass ungebremster Konsum insofern antimaterialistisch sei, als dass er das Entsorgen sehr vieler Dinge als Müll verlange, obwohl eine vitale Materialität sich eigentlich niemals wirklich entsorgen lasse, da ihr Akteurstatus weiter fortbestehe.19 In ihrem Bestreben die Vitalität der Materie jenseits menschlicher Zwecke zu denken, greift Bennett unter anderem auf Adornos Konzept der Nichtidentität zurück. Impliziert wird damit bei Adorno, dass Dinge nicht gänzlich in ihren Begriffen aufgehen. Bennett leitet daraus ab, dass das Leben unser Wissen und unsere Kontrolle überschreitet und kontrastiert einen Willen zur Beherrschung mit einem Respekt für die Nichtidentität der Dinge.20 Hinsichtlich der Darstellungsformen ist sie für Anthropomorphismen offen, da diese für strukturelle Parallelen sensibilisieren können und sich gegen eine strikt in Subjekte und Objekte getrennte Welt richten.21 „Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing.“22 Die Praktik des Anthropomorphisierens erweist sich gemäß Bennett als wertvoll, weil sie ein nichtanthropozentrisches Verhältnis zu nichtmenschlichen Wesen und Dingen voraussetzt und fördert. Kritisiert wurde an Bennetts theoretischem Ausgangspunkt der Ding-Macht, dass das Konzept tendenziell vitale Materie „als Fundament“ setze, wodurch Handlungsmacht nicht wie eigentlich intendiert „in Beziehungen“ entstehe, 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 14–15. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 120.

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sondern in Anlehnung an vitalistische Theorien als „grundlegende Kraft“ vorausgesetzt werde.23 Eine Alternative bietet die ebenfalls interdisziplinär rezipierte Theorie Karen Barads, die hinsichtlich ihrer neumaterialistischen Prämissen eine Verwandtschaft zu Bennetts Ausführungen aufweist, zusätzlich zu geisteswissenschaftlichen aber auch physikphilosophische Überlegungen einbindet. Ihr gelinge es, dass sie „oszilliert […] zwischen der theoretischen Fokussierung auf Offenheit und Relationalität auf der einen und der Affirmation einer immer schon gegebenen Dynamik und Macht der Materie auf der anderen Seite“.24 Dazu passt, dass Barad in einer ihrer Grundannahmen Materie als performativ hervorgebracht auffasst, womit sie sich an Judith Butlers These eines performativ hervorgebrachten Geschlechts anlehnt. Indem Barad eine Parallele zwischen „gendering“ und „mattering“ ziehe, könne sie den aktiven Status von Materie herausstellen, wobei Materie eine Rolle in Materialisierungsprozessen etwa von Geschlecht oder anderen Identitäten einnehme.25 Dabei werde Butlers Ansatz derart erweitert, dass sich der Begriff der Materialisierungsprozesse auch auf nichtmenschliche Körper und Praktiken beziehe.26 Zentral ist in diesem Zusammenhang auch Barads These, dass Beziehungen nicht von ihren Relata abhängen, sondern umgekehrt: „Relations do not follow relata, but the other way around. Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things.“27 Häufig wird mit Barads Namen überdies der von ihr geschaffene Neologismus der Intra-Aktion verbunden. Im Vergleich zu Bennett kann Barad mit Hilfe ihres Intra-Aktions-Begriffs noch stärker den relationalen Charakter wie auch die Prozessdimension von materiellen Gefügen erfassen. Im Gegensatz zur gewöhnlichen Interaktion, die davon ausgeht, dass es individuelle und voneinander getrennte Kräfte gebe, die der Interaktion vorausgingen, soll mit dem Begriff der Intra-Aktion herausgestellt werden, dass unabhängige Kräfte überhaupt erst im Rahmen von Intra-Aktionen entstünden.28 Angeregt worden sei Barad diesbezüglich von Niels Bohr, insofern auf subatomarer Ebene der Akt des Beobachtens 23 Katharina Hoppe, „Eine neue Ontologie des Materiellen? Probleme und Perspektiven neomaterialistischer Feminismen“, in Material turn: Feministische Perspektiven auf Materialität und Materialismus, hg. v. Christine Löw, Katharina Volk, Imke Leicht und Nadja Meisterhans (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2017), 44–45. 24 Katharina Hoppe und Thomas Lemke, „Die Macht der Materie: Grundlagen und Grenzen des agentiellen Realismus von Karen Barad“, Soziale Welt 66, Nr. 3 (2015), 272. 25 Brandon Jones, „Mattering“, in Posthuman Glossary, hg. v. Rosi Braidotti und Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 245–46. 26 Ibid., 246. 27 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 136–37. 28 Ibid., 33.

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das Ergebnis der subatomaren Interaktionen beeinflusse. Es sei daher unmöglich den Beobachtungsprozess vom beobachteten Objekt zu trennen oder ein vorausgehendes Objekt zu bestimmen, weshalb Bohr stattdessen von Phänomenen spreche.29 Zurückgewiesen wird bei Barad entsprechend auch Demokrits Atommodell und dessen Vorstellung, dass alle Stoffe aus kleinsten unteilbaren Teilchen bestünden. An der entgegengesetzten Bohrschen Theorie hebt Barad positiv hervor, dass Dinge darin keine ontologischen Grundeinheiten mit festen inhärenten Grenzen und Eigenschaften seien.30 Weiter führt sie aus: „Bohr also calls into question the related Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object, and knower and known.“31 Abgelehnt werden bei ihr folglich solche Perspektiven auf Wissensgenerierung, die Wissen losgelöst vom Kontext bzw. ohne Berücksichtigung von intraagierenden Komponenten gewinnen wollen oder die eine Verbindung zwischen Beobachtendem und Beobachtetem innerhalb der Phänomene ignorieren. Ähnlich wie Bennett in ihrem vitalen Materialismus betont ferner Barad in ihrem agentiellen Realismus die Zugehörigkeit des Menschen zur Welt: „we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand“.32 Daraus ergibt sich bei Barad eine Untrennbarkeit von Sein und Wissen: „Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated.“33 Insofern Menschen immer Teil der Welt sind, die sie erforschen, erfolge Wissensgenerierung nicht unabhängig von Gefügen, an denen sowohl der Mensch als auch andere Dinge Teil haben. Gleichzeitig verändern Praktiken von Wissensgenerierung laut Barad auch die Welt, indem sie Einfluss auf ihr weiteres Werden nehmen: „the point is not merely that knowledge practices have material consequences but that practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world. Which practices we enact matter – in both senses of the word.“34 Will man mit Barad Praktiken der Wissensgenerierung untersuchen, ergibt sich daher nicht nur die Frage, welches Wissen entsteht oder in welcher Weise dieses Wissen erzeugt wird, sondern auch, wie die jeweiligen Praktiken der Wissensgenerierung auf die Welt zurückwirken. Dementsprechend ist Wissensgenerierung potenziell politisch relevant, insofern sie Anlass für Kritik bieten kann, sodass z. B. anthropozentrische Muster mit Barads Überlegungen hinterfragbar werden.

29 Nick J. Fox und Pam Alldred, Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action (London: Sage, 2017), 19. 30 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 137–38. 31 Ibid., 138. 32 Ibid., 26. 33 Ibid., 185. 34 Ibid., 91.

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Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen in der Literatur Ähnlich wie für Bennett und Barad, die materielle Eingebundenheit des Menschen betonen, gilt auch für Literatur, dass sie sich nicht jenseits von materielldiskursiven Intra-Aktionen bewegt. Tatsächlich entstehen aus neumaterialistischer Sicht bzw. aus der Perspektive des material ecocriticism literarische Geschichten aus der Intra-Aktion zwischen menschlicher Kreativität und der Handlungsmacht der Materie; auch nichtmenschliche Akteure sind dabei an der Schaffung neuer Erzählungen und Diskurse beteiligt.35 Ein Ausgangspunkt der aktuellen Erforschung des Verhältnisses zwischen literarischen Texten und ökologischen Konzepten kann in der Einführung des Begriffs Ecocriticism in einem Aufsatz aus dem Jahr 1978 gesehen werden.36 Speziell für die Frage nach Naturwissen in der Literatur sind überdies Ansätze relevant, die sich generell mit dem Verhältnis von Literatur und Wissen beschäftigen. Es lassen sich drei Varianten37 unterscheiden: 1) Wissen in der Literatur (Hier geht es unter anderem darum, inwiefern Wissen aus anderen Quellen in die Literatur aufgenommen und darin ggf. verändert wurde.), 2) Wissenschaft als Literatur (Untersucht werden literarische Darstellungsweisen in wissenschaftlichen Texten.), 3) Wissen der Literatur (Gefragt wird, ob Literatur eine eigene Art von Wissen zukommt.). Der dritte Ansatz eines eigenen Wissens der Literatur wird zuweilen im Sinne eines „Verdoppelungs- oder Trivialitätseinwand[s]“ kritisiert: Das, was Literatur an Erkenntnis biete, sei ungenau oder trivial im Vergleich zu wissenschaftlichem Wissen.38 Entgegenzuhalten ist jedoch, dass es mehr als nur „Aussagenwahrheit[en]“ gibt und dass Literatur eine

35 Serenella Iovino und Serpil Oppermann, „Introduction: Stories Come to Matter“, in Material ecocriticism, hg. v. Serenella Ioviono und Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 8. 36 Siehe: William Rueckert, „Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism“, in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, hg. v. Cheryll Glotfelty und Harold Fromm (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996), 105–23. Für die erste deutschsprachige Einführung zum Ecocriticism siehe: Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe, Hg., Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung (Köln: Böhlau, 2015). Zu ökologischem Wissen in verschiedenen Genres siehe: Evi Zemanek, Hg., Ökologische Genres: Naturästhetik – Umweltethik – Wissenspoetik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). Zum ökologischen Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts siehe: Gabriele Dürbeck, Christine Kanz and Ralf Zschachlitz, Hg., Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts: Neue Ansätze und Perspektiven (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018). 37 Yvonne Wübben, „Forschungsskizze: Literatur und Wissen nach 1945“, in Literatur und Wissen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, hg. v. Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes und Yvonne Wübben (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), 5. 38 Gottfried Gabriel, „Fiktion, Wahrheit und Erkenntnis in der Literatur“, in Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, hg. v. Christoph Demmerling und Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 167.

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„Vergegenwärtigungsleistung“ erbringen kann.39 Neben der Vermittlung eines „Wissens, wie es wäre“ bzw. eines Vertrautmachens mit Situationen40 kann Literatur z. B. auch „die situationsbezogene Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit von Personen […] trainieren“.41 Wenn im Folgenden nach einer literarischen Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen gefragt wird, wird entsprechend angenommen, dass literarischen Texten und ihrer Gestaltung durchaus ein Erkenntniswert zukommen kann, wenngleich dieser von wissenschaftlichem Wissen verschieden ist. Um Zusammenhänge zwischen Literatur und einer Thematisierung des Mensch-Natur-Verhältnisses zu klassifizieren, hat Urte Stobbe in Anlehnung an Hubert Zapf vier Dimensionen42 benannt: 1) Literatur als Speicher historischer Umweltnutzung und -wahrnehmung, 2) Literatur als Reflexionsmedium von Natur- und Technikkatastrophen, 3) Literatur als Archiv gegendiskursiven Wissens, 4) eine wirklichkeitspräfigurierende Funktion von Literatur. In weiteren Erörterungen werden vor allem die dritte und vierte Dimension betrachtet, da es darum geht zu untersuchen, inwiefern neumaterialistische Perspektiven mit Besonderheiten literarischer Wissensproduktion in einen Dialog gebracht werden können. Hierzu bietet es sich an sowohl das gegendiskursive Potenzial von Literatur als auch ausgewählte literarische Beschreibungs- und Darstellungsformen daraufhin zu prüfen, in welchem Maße sie zu einer Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen beitragen können. Mit der „wirklichkeitspräfigurierenden Funktion“ ist bei Stobbe gemeint, dass literarische Texte „Bilder einer angenommenen Realität entwerfen“ und damit „mittelfristig den Umgang des Menschen mit der nicht-menschlichen Umwelt verändern“.43 Ähnlich dazu verweist Zapf darauf, dass Literatur innerhalb einer Kultur als ökologische Kraft wirken könne, indem sie als kreative Erneuerungsquelle von Sprache, Wahrnehmung, Vorstellungsvermögen und Kommunikation wirke.44 Welche konkreten Strategien aber sind es, die gerade im Anschluss an neumaterialistische Theorien zur wirklichkeitspräfigurierenden Funktion von Literatur beitragen? Sowohl mit Blick auf Bennetts Konzept der Ding-Macht als auch hinsichtlich Barads Annahmen über das Wirken der Materie innerhalb von Intra-Aktionen ist nach solchen Darstellungsweisen zu suchen, die im Rahmen von Literatur zu einer Aktivierung der Materie führen bzw. 39 Ibid., 168. 40 Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, „Das Wissen der Literatur und die epistemische Kraft der Imagination“, in Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, hg. v. Christoph Demmerling und Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 121. 41 Tilmann Köppe, Literatur und Erkenntnis: Studien zur kognitiven Signifikanz fiktionaler literarischer Werke (Paderborn: mentis, 2008), 186. 42 Urte Stobbe, „Literatur und Umweltgeschichte/Environmental Studies“, in Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, hg. v. Gabriele Dürbeck und Urte Stobbe (Köln: Böhlau, 2015), 150. 43 Ibid., 154. 44 Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology, 28.

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die der üblicherweise als passiv dargestellten Materie ihren aktiven Status zurückgeben. In Stifters Hochwald etwa finden sich Anthropomorphismen, die den Wald und dessen Komponenten als belebt und handelnd vorführen. Diese gilt es zu untersuchen, um zu ermitteln, inwiefern sie zu einer Heterogenisierung des Naturverständnisses beitragen können. Hinsichtlich Barads an Bohr angelehnter Kritik an der Trennung zwischen Subjekt und Objekt sowie zwischen Wissenden und Wissen ist überdies danach zu fragen, inwiefern Literatur auf eine Dekonstruktion derartiger Dualismen hinwirkt. Wenn in Stifters Hochwald bestimmte Komponenten des Waldes anthropomorphisiert werden, ist es dann auch so, dass sich das Verhältnis zwischen dem Wald und den Menschen verändert? Kann Literatur unsere binäre Vorstellung von einer einerseits gegebenen Umgebung und andererseits darin befindlichen Umgebenden verändern? Schließlich ist in Anlehnung an Bennetts Verweis auf die Gefahren von Anthropomorphismen zu analysieren, ob es literarische Strategien gibt, die metareflexiv die eigenen anthropomorphisierenden Darstellungsweisen ausstellen. Zu achten ist folglich auf eine mögliche Erzeugung einer heterogenisierenden Ambivalenz, die die Naturbilder polyperspektivisch erfahrbar werden lässt. Neben der wirklichkeitspräfigurierenden Funktion der Literatur kann ihr gegendiskursives Potenzial laut Zapf darin bestehen, auf versteckte Konflikte, Widersprüche und pathogene Strukturen aufmerksam zu machen sowie vorherrschende Entwicklungen, Annahmen und Lebensmodelle kritisch zu reflektieren.45 Exemplarisch werden diesbezüglich literarische Gegendiskurse zu historischen Praktiken von Wissensgenerierung in Sebalds Ringen des Saturn betrachtet. Überdies können Eindrücke des Verfalls bei Sebald im Sinne von Bennetts Reflexionen über Müll veranschaulichen, wie sich älter gewordene Gegenstände menschlichen Zuschreibungen entziehen und eigene und von Menschen nicht intendierte Narrative über Natur und Naturgeschichte hervorbringen.

Wirklichkeitspräfigurierende Naturdarstellungen in Stifters Hochwald Stifters Erzählung Der Hochwald handelt von zwei Schwestern Clarissa und Johanna, die während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges von ihrem Vater, dem Freiherrn von Wittinghausen, zu ihrem Schutz in einem Versteck im Wald an einem Ort zwischen Österreich, Bayern und Böhmen untergebracht werden. Letztlich führen jedoch eine Liebesbeziehung Clarissas und eine Verwechslung dazu, dass in

45 Ibid., 27–28.

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den Kriegswirren die väterliche Burg zerstört wird und der Vater sowie Clarissas Liebhaber sterben. Erzeugt wird in der Erzählung eine „räumliche Opposition zwischen dem Hochwald und dem umgebenden großen Raum des Krieges“, wobei der Wald als „Refugium außerhalb der Zivilisation“ dargestellt wird, der „in die Nähe romantischer Naturdarstellungen“ rückt.46 Im 2. Kapitel mit dem Titel Waldwanderung begeben sich Clarissa und Johanna von dem väterlichen Versteck in den Wald, um von da an in einem Waldhaus zu leben. Unterwegs zu ihrer neuen Bleibe sammeln sie erste Eindrücke vom Wald und lernen dessen Schönheit kennen. Der Wald seinerseits reagiert auf die Ankunft der Mädchen: Die Waldblumen horchten empor, das Eichhörnchen hielt auf seinem Buchenast inne, die Tagfalter schwebten seitwärts, als sie vordrangen, und die Zweiggewölbe warfen blitzende grüne Karfunkel und fliegende Schatten auf die weißen Gewänder, wie sie vorüberkamen; der Specht schoß in die Zweige, Stamm an Stamm trat rückwärts, bis nach und nach nur mehr weiße Stückchen zwischen dem grünen Gitter wankten.47

Ersichtlich wird, wie hier der Wald als aus verschiedenen Individuen bestehend dargestellt wird, denen zum Teil menschliche Handlungskompetenzen zugeschrieben werden. Auch Pflanzen haben in der zitierten Textstelle die Fähigkeit zu hören oder sich intentional zu bewegen, sodass eine Stimmung der Willkommenskultur des Waldes durch seine Tiere und Pflanzen vermittelt wird. Der Wald erhält dadurch einen aktiven Status bzw. wird in handelnder Intra-Aktion mit den Mädchen gezeigt, wodurch er Einfluss auf deren Stimmung gewinnt: Zuvor war es so, „daß sie sich noch kürzlich so sehr vor diesen Wäldern fürchteten“, doch nun sind ihre Gesichter „blühend und vergnügt“.48 Auffällig ist auch, wie sich bei dieser ersten Begegnung zwischen Mädchen und Wald die Sphären der Natur und Kultur aneinander annähern, da in den „blühend[en]“ Gesichtern der Mädchen und den „Zweiggewölbe[n]“ und „Karfunkel[n]“ des Waldes Natur und Kultur ebenso wie Menschliches und Nichtmenschliches ineinander übergehen. Heterogenisiert und präfiguriert wird Naturwissen damit hier insofern, als dass die Natur so dargestellt wird, als würde sie aus freundlich agierenden Wesen bestehen. Auch deutet sich hier bereits an, dass im weiteren Verlauf der Erzählung immer wieder Subjekt-Objekt-Dichotomien subvertiert werden. Wenn nur noch „weiße Stückchen“ von den Mädchen im „grünen Gitter“ des Waldes zu sehen sind, dann hat der Mensch hier keine übergeordnete Subjektrolle mehr, sondern 46 Brahim Moussa, Heterotopien im poetischen Realismus: Andere Räume, Andere Texte (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2012), 71; 73. 47 Adalbert Stifter, „Der Hochwald“, in Adalbert Stifter. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, hg. v. Alfred Doppler und Wolfgang Frühwald (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1980), Bd. 1.4, 235. 48 Ibid., 236.

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ist dem Wald vielmehr gleichgeordnet und geht in ihm auf. Gezeigt wird ein sehender und hörender Wald, der sich die Mädchen zum Beobachtungsobjekt macht, sodass in einer Umkehrung der üblichen Rollen die Natur den Menschen und nicht mehr ausschließlich der Mensch die Natur anschaut. Auch trifft dies z. B. auf eine Stelle aus dem 3. Kapitel zu, in der Johanna sich unerwarteterweise von einem Hirsch angesehen fühlt, als sie an ihrem ersten Morgen im Waldhaus früh nach draußen tritt. Zur Begegnung Johannas mit dem Hirsch heißt es: Verwundert, betroffen und wohlgefällig sah sie auf das edle Thier, das seinerseits auch mit den unbeweglichen neugierigen Augen herüberglotzte auf das neue Wunderwerk der Wildniß, auf die weiße in der Morgenluft schwebende Gestalt und ihre bannenden Augen […]. – Mehrere Augenblicke dauerte die Scene, bis Johanna sich regte, worauf er den Kopf leicht erschrocken zurückwarf, sich langsam wendete, und zurück in die Gebüsche schritt.49

Indem hier zeitweise die Perspektive des Hirsches übernommen wird, der sich über Johanna wundert – er sieht in ihr ein „Wunderwerk“, sie selbst wiederum ist „[v]erwundert“ – werden Gefühlswelten von Mensch und Tier parallelisiert. Nicht nur Tiere, auch Menschen sind Teil von Natur und Umgebung, die von anderen Lebewesen bewohnt wird. So ergibt es sich auch, dass Johanna und Clarissa „ein Märchen für die ringsum staunende Wildniß“ werden und nicht nur das Leben im Wald für sie ein Leben „wie inmitten eines Märchens“ ist.50 Derartige Verfremdungen tradierter Beschreibungsmuster evozieren bei Stifter eine Öffnung, die alternative und weniger anthropozentrische Modellierungen des Mensch-Natur-Verhältnisses möglich erscheinen lassen. Dass der Wald auf die Mädchen wie ein Märchen wirkt, ist überdies unter anderem auf Gregor zurückzuführen, dem ihnen von ihrem Vater zugewiesenen Beschützer. Gregor ist laut Forschungsliteratur ein „durch die Aufklärung hindurchgegangene[r] Romantiker“, weil er einerseits Sagen mit Elementen einer magischen Natur verwirft, andererseits aber an der Vorstellung einer sprechenden Natur festhält.51 Zweifel an romantischen Naturbildern werden ebenfalls durch den Erzähler geäußert: es liegt ein Anstand, ich möchte sagen ein Ausdruck von Tugend in dem von Menschenhänden noch nicht berührten Antlitze der Natur, dem sich die Seele beugen muß, als etwas Keuschem und Göttlichem, – – und doch ist es zuletzt wieder die Seele allein, die all ihre innere Größe hinaus in das Gleichniß der Natur legt.52

49 Ibid., 254. 50 Ibid., 259. 51 Christian Begemann, „Metaphysik und Empirie: Konkurrierende Naturkonzepte im Werk Adalbert Stifters“, in Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, hg. v. Lutz Danneberg und Friedrich Vollhardt (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 107. 52 Stifter, „Der Hochwald“, 241.

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Stellen wie diese demonstrieren, dass es letztlich falsch wäre, generell „von Stifters Anschluß an die romantische Tradition“ zu sprechen.53 Vielmehr ist Stifters Text oftmals durch ein „Nebeneinander […] von Illusionsbildung und -zerstörung, von Anthropomophisierung und Autonomisierung der Natur“54 geprägt. Gerade diese Ambivalenz aber ist es, die einerseits Möglichkeiten zur Überwindung anthropozentrischer Vorstellungen andeutet und andererseits epistemologische Grenzen und das Nichtidentische im Sinne von Bennetts Diskussion von Adorno mit reflektiert.

Gegendiskursive Naturdarstellungen in Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn Während in Stifters Hochwald eine Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen eher implizit über die Entwicklung alternativer Naturdarstellungen erfolgt, wird bei Sebald explizit auf historische Praktiken der Generierung von Naturwissen Bezug genommen. Sebalds Buch, das eigentlich eine Wanderung des Erzählers durch Ostengland im Jahr 1992 zum Thema hat, schweift immer wieder ab, um auf historische Begebenheiten, Biografien oder Fotos zu sprechen zu kommen. Eine dieser Digressionen beschäftigt sich mit der Heringsfischerei, wobei unter anderem historische Forschungen zu Heringen referiert werden. Beispielsweise habe man sich mit der Frage beschäftigt, ob Heringe außerhalb des Wassers unmittelbar stürben, was dazu geführt haben soll daß ein Herr Neucrantz in Stralsund mit großer Genauigkeit die letzten Zuckungen eines vor einer Stunde und sieben Minuten (zum Zeitpunkt des Todes) aus dem Wasser geholten Herings registrierte. Auch ein gewisser Noel de Marinière, Inspektor des Fischmarkts von Rouen, hat eines Tages staunend wahrgenommen, wie ein paar Heringe, die schon zwei bis drei Stunden auf dem Trockenen lagen, sich rührten und fühlte sich dadurch veranlaßt, die Überlebensfähigkeit dieser Fische genauer zu erkunden, indem er ihnen die Flossen abschnitt und sie auf andere Weise verstümmelte.55

Zum Abschneiden verschiedener Körperteile der Fische wurde in der Sekundärliteratur von van Hoorn angemerkt, dass „aus heutiger Sicht“ diese „wis-

53 Christian Begemann, Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), 173. 54 Hee-Ju Kim, „Natur als Seelengleichnis: Zur Dekonstruktion des Natur-Kultur-Dualismus in Adalbert Stifters Hochwald“, in Ordnung – Raum – Ritual: Adalbert Stifters artifizieller Realismus, hg. v. Sabina Becker und Katharina Grätz (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), 72. 55 Winfried Georg Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2018), 74.

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senschaftliche Praxis […] fragwürdig, ja lächerlich“ erscheint.56 Überdies habe Sebald seine angeblich historischen Quellen zur Heringspassage teilweise verändert oder zusammengebastelt, wobei alte Wissenschaft ironisiert und degradiert werde.57 Die Absurdität der Vorgehensweisen des Herrn Neucrantz und Noel de Marinières aus der Textstelle könnte man ferner mit Adornos und Horkheimers Dialektik der Aufklärung in Verbindung bringen, wobei man die verunglimpfende Darstellungsweise bei Sebald als Gegendiskurs zu aufklärerischen Auffassungen von Wissensgenerierung und Fortschritt interpretieren könnte.58 Vorstellungen einer stetigen Verbesserung menschlichen Lebens über wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis und Naturbeherrschung werden hier mit unprofessionellen Experimenten und der Ignoranz eines möglichen Leidens der Fische konfrontiert. Aus neumaterialistischer Sicht fällt zudem auf, dass Sebalds Erzähler seine Diskurse über Heringe mit seinen Wandereindrücken initiiert. Die von ihm bereiste Region in der Nähe des Seebads Lowestoft, einst bekannt für ihren Heringsfang, ist nun im Niedergang begriffen. Von der Küste aus werde kaum noch etwas gefangen und die dennoch am Strand sitzenden Fischer wirken sonderbar.59 Bedenkt man, dass laut Barad Praktiken der Wissensgenerierung einen Einfluss auf die Welt haben, könnte man hier einen Zusammenhang zwischen den vom Erzähler ironisierten, historischen Heringsforschungen und dem gegenwärtig heruntergekommenen Zustand der Region erkennen. Wären damals andere Praktiken der Wissensgenerierung etabliert worden, die den Fischen einen größeren Respekt entgegengebracht hätten und wäre gleichzeitig nachhaltiger mit den vorhandenen Fischbeständen umgegangen worden, hätte sich die Geschichte von Lowestoft möglicherweise anders entwickelt. Sebalds spezifische Vermischung aus intertextuellen Bezügen, zusammengebastelten Quellen und tatsächlichen Reiseeindrücken sensibilisiert im Sinne Barads für Zusammenhänge zwischen Wissen und Sein bzw. Diskurs und Materie. Beobachtungen von Niedergang und Verfall bleiben in Die Ringe des Saturn nicht auf die Heringsfischerei beschränkt, sondern bilden vielmehr ein „Strukturmuster der Verkettung verschiedener loci“.60 Beispielsweise wird auch das vom Erzähler besichtigte Herrenhaus Somerleyton als im Schwund begriffen 56 Tanja van Hoorn, Naturgeschichte in der ästhetischen Moderne: Max Ernst, Ernst Jünger, Ror Wolf, W. G. Sebald (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 363. 57 Zu Quellen der Heringspassage und deren Veränderung siehe ibid., 344–68. 58 Zum Verhältnis Sebalds zur Kritischen Theorie und zur Dialektik der Aufklärung siehe: Jens Birkmeyer, „Kritische Theorie“, in W. G. Sebald Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, hg. v. Claudia Öhlschläger und Michael Niehaus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017), 245–50. 59 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 67–69. 60 Claudia Öhlschläger, „Die Ringe des Saturn“, in W. G. Sebald Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, hg. v. Claudia Öhlschläger und Michael Niehaus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017), 46.

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gezeigt und damit mit der später erfolgenden Heringspassage verknüpft. Somerleyton als „einer der vielen Adelssitze in England“ soll eigentlich dem zahlenden Publikum „einen Anhauch jener glorreichen Zeiten“ vermitteln, „als Großbritannien noch groß war“.61 Der Erzähler berichtet jedoch: Die Samtvorhänge und die weinroten Lichtblenden sind verschossen, die Polstermöbel durchgesessen, die Stiegenhäuser und Korridore […] vollgestellt mit zwecklosem, aus der Zirkulation geratenem Kram. […] In der Eingangshalle steht ein mehr als drei Meter großer ausgestopfter Eisbär. Wie ein gramgebeugtes Gespenst schaut er aus in seinem gelblichen, von den Motten zerfressenen Fell.62

Indem der Erzähler hier dazu bereit ist, die Dinge in ihrem Verfall wahrzunehmen, kann er ihnen seine Stimme leihen und sie ihre eigene Geschichte erzählen lassen. Diese dekonstruiert die Heroisierungsnarrative britischer Vergangenheit, indem einstmalige Repräsentationsobjekte wie der ausgestopfte Eisbär nun zu Zeugen der Vergänglichkeit werden. Wie Bennett in ihren Reflexionen über Müll und Ding-Macht ausführt, verliert die Materialität nie ihr aktives Potenzial, sodass sie hier in ihrer Widerständigkeit an die Möglichkeit alternativer (Natur-) Geschichtsschreibungen erinnert.

Schlussfolgerungen Neumaterialistische Perspektiven, wie sie sich bei Bennett und Barad finden, bieten wichtige Referenzpunkte, um literarische Texte einer kritischen Relektüre zu unterziehen und sie auf die Generierung von Naturwissen in multipler und mehr als menschlicher Form hin zu prüfen. Theoretisch gestützt durch Rekonzeptualisierungen von Materie, die den aktiven Status des Materiellen sowie die Zugehörigkeit des Menschen zur materiellen Welt hervorheben, können literarische Modellierungen von Natur, Dingen, Tieren und Menschen anders als bisher analysiert werden. Zwar gelten die Darstellungsweisen von Natur und Landschaft innerhalb vieler Epochen und bei kanonischen Autoren oftmals als schon verhältnismäßig gut erforscht. Vor dem Hintergrund neumaterialistischer Theorien ergeben sich jedoch Fragestellungen, die spezifischer gerade auf die jeweilig erzählten Mensch-Umwelt-Verhältnisse abzielen. Interessieren sich demnach tradierte Analyseansätze primär für die Funktionen von Natur in Texten, welche sie z. B. in der Schaffung von Stimmungswerten, in der Selbstthematisierung des empfindsamen Protagonisten oder in der Möglichkeit zur Bewährung des Helden gegenüber Gefahren ermitteln, geht es einem neumate61 Uwe Schütte, W. G. Sebald: Einführung in Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 132. 62 Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn, 48–49.

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rialistischen Blick eher um die Art und Weise der Einbindung der dargestellten Figuren in materiell-diskursive Gefüge. Auch der Subversion von Subjekt-Objekt-Dichotomien und mithin dem Akteurstatus nichtmenschlicher Entitäten innerhalb literarischer Welten kommt verstärkt Aufmerksamkeit zu. Grundannahme dieser alternativen Herangehensweise ist, dass manche literarischen Texte ein spezifisches und nicht anthropozentrisches Wissen generieren, womit sie der Diversität von Wesen und Dingen gerecht werden. Nicht als Suche nach einer bloßen Bestätigungsmöglichkeit für neumaterialistische Thesen, sondern vielmehr als eigenständiges Fortführen und Anknüpfen an diese ließe sich folglich eine neumaterialistisch orientierte Literaturanalyse beschreiben. Zukünftige Aufgaben einer solchen könnten auch in einer stärkeren Berücksichtigung außertextlicher Mensch-Umwelt-Verhältnisse sowie nichtliterarischer zeitgenössischer Diskurse liegen. Während im Rahmen dieses Beitrags bereits exemplarisch anhand von Stifter und Sebald skizziert wurde, inwiefern sich das wirklichkeitspräfigurierende und gegendiskursive Potenzial von Literatur neumaterialistisch aufgreifen lässt, wäre in folgenden Untersuchungen überdies danach zu fragen, wie sich das jeweilig im Text modellierte Verhältnis zwischen Natur und Menschen zum realen Umweltverhältnis der zeitgenössischen Leser dieses Textes verhält. Auf diese Weise könnte eine Lektürepraxis gefördert werden, die es Literatur zutraut, in ästhetischer Weise auf die jeweils historisch gegebene Einbindung des Menschen in materiell-diskursive Verflechtungen zu reagieren und in diesem Zuge zu einer Heterogenisierung von Naturwissen und menschlichen Identitätskonstrukten beizutragen. Verwiesen sei schließlich auf die Vorteile, die eine interdisziplinäre Offenheit für derartige Relektüren bieten kann. Durch einen Austausch etwa mit Ergebnissen der Film- und Medienwissenschaften, der Kunstgeschichte, der Kultur- und Geschichtswissenschaften sowie der Philosophie ließen sich neumaterialistische Literaturanalysen in ein breiteres Spektrum künstlerischer Repräsentationen und außerkünstlerischer Hintergründe einordnen. Nicht zuletzt ließe sich prüfen, inwiefern neumaterialistisch-literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auch für außeruniversitäre Anwendungsbereiche wie Veranstaltungen, Aktionstage und Ausstellungen zu Umweltbildung und Nachhaltigkeit sowie für schulpädagogische Kontexte nutzbar sind.

Bibliografie Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Begemann, Christian. Die Welt der Zeichen: Stifter-Lektüren. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.

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–. „Metaphysik und Empirie: Konkurrierende Naturkonzepte im Werk Adalbert Stifters“. In Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, herausgegeben von Lutz Danneberg und Friedrich Vollhardt, 92–126. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002. Bennett, Jane. „Vibrant Matter“. In Posthuman Glossary, herausgegeben von Rosi Braidotti und Maria Hlavajova, 447–48. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. –. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Birkmeyer, Jens. „Kritische Theorie“. In W. G. Sebald Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, herausgegeben von Claudia Öhlschläger und Michael Niehaus, 245–50. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017. Dürbeck, Gabriele und Urte Stobbe, Hg. Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. Dürbeck, Gabriele, Christine Kanz und Ralf Zschachlitz, Hg. Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts: Neue Ansätze und Perspektiven. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. Fox, Nick J. und Pam Alldred. Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action. London: Sage, 2017. Gabriel, Gottfried. „Fiktion, Wahrheit und Erkenntnis in der Literatur“. In Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, herausgegeben von Christoph Demmerling und Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, 163–80. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Hoorn, Tanja van. Naturgeschichte in der ästhetischen Moderne: Max Ernst, Ernst Jünger, Ror Wolf, W. G. Sebald. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016. Hoppe, Katharina. „Eine neue Ontologie des Materiellen? Probleme und Perspektiven neomaterialistischer Feminismen“. In Material turn: Feministische Perspektiven auf Materialität und Materialismus, herausgegeben von Christine Löw, Katharina Volk, Imke Leicht und Nadja Meisterhans, 35–49. Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2017. Hoppe, Katharina und Thomas Lemke. „Die Macht der Materie: Grundlagen und Grenzen des agentiellen Realismus von Karen Barad“. Soziale Welt 66, Nr. 3 (2015): 261–79. Iovino, Serenella. „(Material) Ecocriticism“. In Posthuman Glossary, herausgegeben von Rosi Braidotti und Maria Hlavajova, 112–15. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Iovino, Serenella und Serpil Oppermann. „Introduction: Stories Come to Matter“. In Material ecocriticism, herausgegeben von Serenella Ioviono und Serpil Oppermann, 1– 17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Jones, Brandon. „Mattering“. In Posthuman Glossary, herausgegeben von Rosi Braidotti und Maria Hlavajova, 244–47. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Kim, Hee-Ju. „Natur als Seelengleichnis: Zur Dekonstruktion des Natur-Kultur-Dualismus in Adalbert Stifters Hochwald“. In Ordnung – Raum – Ritual: Adalbert Stifters artifizieller Realismus, herausgegeben von Sabina Becker und Katharina Grätz, 69–100. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Köppe, Tilmann. Literatur und Erkenntnis: Studien zur kognitiven Signifikanz fiktionaler literarischer Werke. Paderborn: mentis, 2008. Moussa, Brahim. Heterotopien im poetischen Realismus: Andere Räume, Andere Texte. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2012. Öhlschläger, Claudia. „Die Ringe des Saturn“. In W. G. Sebald Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, herausgegeben von Claudia Öhlschläger und Michael Niehaus, 38–47. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017. Oppermann, Serpil und Serenella Iovino. „The Environmental Humanities and the Challenges of the Anthropocene“. In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the An-

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thropocene, herausgegeben von Serpil Oppermann und Serenella Iovino, 1–21. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. Rueckert, William. „Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism“. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, herausgegeben von Cheryll Glotfelty und Harold Fromm, 105–23. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996. Schütte, Uwe. W. G. Sebald: Einführung in Leben und Werk. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. Sebald, Winfried Georg. Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2018. Stifter, Adalbert. „Der Hochwald“. In Adalbert Stifter. Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, herausgegeben von Alfred Doppler und Wolfgang Frühwald, 209– 318. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1980, Bd. 1.4. Stobbe, Urte. „Literatur und Umweltgeschichte/Environmental Studies“. In Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, herausgegeben von Gabriele Dürbeck und Urte Stobbe, 148–159. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. Sullivan, Heather I. „New Materialism“. In Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung, herausgegeben von Gabriele Dürbeck und Urte Stobbe, 57–67. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid. „Das Wissen der Literatur und die epistemische Kraft der Imagination“. In Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, herausgegeben von Christoph Demmerling und Íngrid Vendrell Ferran , 119–40. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Wübben, Yvonne. „Forschungsskizze: Literatur und Wissen nach 1945“. In Literatur und Wissen: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, herausgegeben von Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes und Yvonne Wübben, 5–16. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013. Zapf, Hubert. Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Zemanek, Evi, Hg. Ökologische Genres: Naturästhetik – Umweltethik – Wissenspoetik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018.

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Dan Parker / Kylie Soanes / Stanislav Roudavski* (University of Melbourne)

Interspecies Cultures and Future Design**

Abstract This article introduces the notion of interspecies cultures and highlights its consequences for the ethics and practice of design. This discussion is critical because anthropogenic activities reduce the abundance, richness, and diversity of human and nonhuman cultures. Design that aims to address these issues will depend on interspecies cultures that support the flourishing of all organisms. Combining research in architecture and urban ecology, we focus on the design of urban habitat-structures. Design of such structures presents practical, theoretical, and ethical challenges. In response, we seek to align design to advancing knowledge of nonhuman cultures and more-than-human justice. We present interspecies design as an approach that incorporates human and nonhuman cultural knowledge in the management of future habitats. We ask: what is an ethically justifiable and practically plausible theoretical framework for interspecies design? Our central hypothesis is that the capabilities approach to justice can establish goals and evaluative practices for interspecies design. To test this hypothesis, we refer to an ongoing research project that aims to help the powerful owl (Ninox strenua) thrive in Australian cities. To establish possible goals for future interspecies design, we discuss powerful-owl capabilities in past, present, and possible future situations. We then consider the broader relevance of the capabilities approach by examining human-owl cultures in other settings, globally. Our case-study indicates that: 1) owl capabilities offer a useful baseline for future design; 2) cities diminish many owl capabilities but present opportunities for new cultural expressions; and 3) more ambitious design aspirations can support owl wellbeing in cities. The results demonstrate * Dan Parker conducted the research, developed the argument for the manuscript, reviewed literature, wrote the drafts, and produced visual materials. Kylie Soanes provided ecological guidance and contributed to the development of the manuscript. Stanislav Roudavski conceived and developed the overarching ideas, directed the research, and contributed to all stages of manuscript production. All authors contributed critically to the writing and revision of the manuscript and gave the final approval for publication. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. ** We respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri people who are the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this research took place. The project was supported by research funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170104010, Future Cities Grant (Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute), and William Stone Trust Fund (University of Melbourne). We thank Therésa Jones and Bronwyn Isaac for contributions to this research and their feedback on the drafts of the article.

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the capabilities approach can inform interspecies design processes, establish more equitable design goals, and set clearer criteria for success. These findings have important implications for researchers and built-environment practitioners who share the goal of supporting multispecies cohabitation in cities. Keywords: Animal culture, capabilities approach, environmental ethics, interspecies design, multispecies justice, powerful owl

1.

Introduction

This article considers the notion of interspecies culture and highlights its consequences for the ethics and practice of design. These considerations are particularly important in the context of urban, landscape, and architectural design but are also applicable to other activities that plan for and work to implement better futures. To explore this topic, we investigate how design can respond to advancing knowledge about nonhuman cultures and more-than-human justice. This discussion is critical because anthropogenic activities reduce the abundance, richness, and diversity of all cultures, human and nonhuman.1 Unfortunately, design is responsible for much of this damage. Design that aims to address these issues will depend on interspecies cultures that support the flourishing of all organisms. As a starting point, we present an approach that integrates cultural knowledge of multiple species. Combining research in architecture and urban ecology, we focus on urban habitat-structures.2 This work addresses the urgent need to provide habitat that supports human and nonhuman cohabitation in cities.3 Design of such structures presents practical, theoretical, and ethical challenges. Engaging with these challenges, we ask: what is an ethically justifiable and practically plausible theoretical framework for interspecies design? To address this question, we discuss conceptions of justice that 1 Thibaud Gruber et al., “Cultural Change in Animals: A Flexible Behavioural Adaptation to Human Disturbance,” Palgrave Communications 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–9, https://doi.org/10/ggc vtw. 2 See Stanislav Roudavski, “Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design,” in Proceedings of Design Research Society (DRS) 2020 International Conference: Synergy, ed. Stella Boess, Ming Cheung, and Rebecca Cain (London: Design Research Society, 2020), 731–50, https://doi.org /10/ghj48x. 3 Relevant fields include urban planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and architecture. See Kirsten M. Parris et al., “The Seven Lamps of Planning for Biodiversity in the City,” Cities 83 (2018): 44–53, https://doi.org/10/gfsp47; Georgia E. Garrard et al., “Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design,” Conservation Letters 11, no. 2 (2018): e12411, https://doi.org/10/gf sqmw; Margaret J. Grose, “Gaps and Futures in Working Between Ecology and Design for Constructed Ecologies,” Landscape and Urban Planning 132 (2014): 69–78, https://doi.org/10/f 6qm7s; Alexander Felson, “The Role of Designers in Creating Wildlife Habitat in the Built Environment,” in Designing Wildlife Habitats, ed. John Beardsley, vol. 34 (Washington: Harvard University Press, 2013), 223–24.

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include human and nonhuman beings. We hypothesize that the capabilities approach can establish goals and evaluative practices for interspecies design. To test this hypothesis, we refer to an ongoing research project that aims to help the powerful owl (Ninox strenua) thrive in Australian cities. Using this project as a characteristic example, we discuss past, present, and future communities of humans and owls, highlighting the impact on the wellbeing of individuals and ecosystems. Our analysis contributes to scholarship by reconsidering conservation in response to interspecies knowledge and testing ideas of justice in application to design.

1.1.

Interspecies Cultures

Discourse within environmental humanities provides relevant background to our notion of interspecies cultures. This discourse interrogates relations that involve all life on earth.4 The ‘multispecies turn’ – also known as the ‘nonhuman’, ‘animal’, or ‘more-than-human’ turn – challenges ontological distinctions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and subject and object.5 Discourses of new materialism, posthumanism, actor-network theory, and feminism also discuss the abandonment of such dualisms.6 Significantly, these studies move away from human exceptionalism, recognising the interdependencies and entanglements of human and nonhuman entities. Multispecies studies aspire towards more diverse, rich, and autonomous ways of living

4 Deborah Bird Rose et al., “Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities,” Environmental Humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–5, https://doi.org/10/gg3q6p. 5 Piers Locke, “Multispecies Ethnography,” in The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Hilary Callan (Oxford: Wiley, 2018), 1–3, https://doi.org/10/ghcxtg. This turn engages philosophy, anthropology, geography, art, cultural studies, literary studies, and history, among others. Thom Van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–23, https://doi.org /10/gfsjh4. These fields also include design, planning, and sustainability, Donna Houston et al., “Make Kin, Not Cities! Multispecies Entanglements and ‘Becoming-World’ in Planning Theory,” Planning Theory 17, no. 2 (2018): 190–212, https://doi.org/10/gdkqp6; Christoph Rupprecht et al., “Multispecies Sustainability,” Global Sustainability 3 (2020): e34, https://doi.or g/10/gjsbsb. 6 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81; Diana Coole et al., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Medford: Polity, 2019); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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together.7 In keeping with this objective, we aim to understand the interests and experiences of others, recognising nonhuman knowledge, consciousness, intelligence, creativity, emotions, personality, intentions, and desires.8 Such understandings are useful to conceptualise human responsibilities towards other beings of all kingdoms. Extending this discourse, we begin by outlining the need for human cultures that support the flourishing of other taxa. Following, we introduce how cultures emerge in nonhuman animals and outline the potential to cultivate interspecies cultures. 1.1.1. Human Cultures Without innovative modifications of prevalent human practices, the unfolding environmental crisis is likely to grow catastrophically, provoking unstoppable climate change, global-scale ecosystem collapse, and the destruction of human and nonhuman lives.9 Even where species still survive, their ecological interactions may be effectively extinct.10 The loss of interaction with other lifeforms and associated decline of human ecological knowledge, or the ‘extinction of experience’, will make the reversal of these trends increasingly difficult.11 Resulting ‘shifting baselines’ for conservation can occur as the perceived condition of ecosystems changes over time due to the loss of knowledge about past conditions.12 Consequent injustices arise through human-induced homogenisation of species, languages, and cultural habits.13 Biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are cultural narratives that frame human perceptions of, and en7 Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg, “A Manifesto for Abundant Futures,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 2 (2015): 322–30, https://doi.org/10/gftcks. 8 Danielle Celermajer et al., “Multispecies Justice: Theories, Challenges, and a Research Agenda for Environmental Politics,” Environmental Politics 30, no. 1–2 (2020), 119–140, https://doi.o rg/10/ghd4fd. 9 Valérie P. Masson-Delmotte et al., Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 10 Alfonso Valiente-Banuet et al., “Beyond Species Loss: The Extinction of Ecological Interactions in a Changing World,” Functional Ecology 29, no. 3 (2015): 299–307, https://doi.org /10/f658d7. 11 Masashi Soga and Kevin J. Gaston, “Extinction of Experience: The Loss of Human–Nature Interactions,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14, no. 2 (March 2016): 94–101, https://doi.org/10/f8jd9x. 12 S. K. Papworth et al., “Evidence for Shifting Baseline Syndrome in Conservation,” Conservation Letters 2, no. 2 (2009): 93–100, https://doi.org/10/dp2dcb. 13 Ricardo Rozzi, “Biocultural Ethics: From Biocultural Homogenization Toward Biocultural Conservation,” in Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action, ed. Ricardo Rozzi et al., Ecology and Ethics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 9–32, https://doi.org/10/dz2d.

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gagement with, nonhumans.14 Human worldviews, stories, media, scientific studies, livelihoods, norms, and institutions reflect and influence relations among plants, humans, and other animals.15 Recent scholarship calls for conservation practices to account for human-cultural differences, engage with local communities, and incorporate social narratives on multispecies histories, locality, and Indigenous forms of knowledge.16 These cultural aspects have important implications for species conservation and human-wildlife conflict.17 1.1.2. Nonhuman Cultures Culture is not unique to humans and research on nonhuman cultures is expanding in several fields. Recent reviews of biological literature demonstrate that many nonhuman animals have culture.18 Acknowledgements that culture is not unique to humans have also become more common in the humanities and social sciences.19 Understood as the transmission of socially learned behaviours, cul-

14 Ursula K. Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 15 Brgit H. M. Elands et al., “Biocultural Diversity: A Novel Concept to Assess Human-Nature Interrelations, Nature Conservation and Stewardship in Cities,” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Urban green infrastructure – connecting people and nature for sustainable cities 40 (2019): 29–34, https://doi.org/10/gdb8p4. 16 Tanja M. Straka et al., “Conservation Leadership Must Account for Cultural Differences,” Journal for Nature Conservation 43 (2018): 111–16, https://doi.org/10/gdvg9g; Lucy Taylor et al., “Enablers and Challenges When Engaging Local Communities for Urban Biodiversity Conservation in Australian Cities,” Sustainability Science (2021), https://doi.org/10/gmwp9h; Alex Aisher and Vinita Damodaran, “Introduction: Human-Nature Interactions Through a Multispecies Lens,” Conservation and Society 14, no. 4 (2016): 293–304, https://doi.org/10/gf 5j5h. 17 Carl D. Soulsbury and Piran. C. L. White, “Human-Wildlife Interactions in Urban Areas: A Review of Conflicts, Benefits and Opportunities,” Wildlife Research 42, no. 7 (2016): 541–53, https://doi.org/10/f 75rzg; Justin Schuetz and Alison Johnston, “Characterizing the Cultural Niches of North American Birds,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 22 (2019): 10868–73, https://doi.org/10/gf3x8n. 18 Philippa Brakes et al., “Animal Cultures Matter for Conservation,” Science 363, no. 6431 (2019): 1032–34, https://doi.org/10/ggcvtt; Andrew Whiten, “The Burgeoning Reach of Animal Culture,” Science 372, no. 6537 (2021): eabe6514, https://doi.org/10/gjndw3. 19 For examples in geography, sociology, and post-colonial studies, see: Timothy Hodgetts and Jamie Lorimer, “Methodologies for Animals’ Geographies: Cultures, Communication and Genomics,” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 2 (2015): 285–95, https://doi.org/10/f66r5n; Richie Nimmo, “Animal Cultures, Subjectivity, and Knowledge: Symmetrical Reflections Beyond the Great Divide,” Society & Animals 20, no. 2 (2012): 173–92, https://doi.org/10/f3znmv; Lauren Corman, “He(a)Rd: Animal Cultures and Anti-Colonial Politics,” in Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, ed. Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor (Oxon: Routledge, 2020), 159–80.

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ture is important for wellbeing and survival.20 Cultures influence migration patterns, communication, food selection, foraging strategies, breeding-site choices, courtship and mating, play, habitat use, and risk avoidance.21 Examples of cultural expressions include place-specific dialects of genetically identical birds, socially learned songs of whales, and regional use of tools by chimpanzees.22 Anthropogenic activities can alter or destroy such cultures. For instance, extensive land clearing in Australia led to endangered honeyeaters losing their songs and even adopting the songs of other birds, thereby making the males less attractive to females.23 Novel conservation responses attempt to restore lost cultures, for example through the use of drones to teach ibis cranes their forgotten migratory flightpaths.24 A significant challenge is to preserve existing relationships while also imagining and permitting new cultures that involve human and nonhuman cohabitants. 1.1.3. Development of Shared Cultures We see this situation as an opportunity to cultivate interspecies cultures which curate non-anthropocentric interactions and foster beneficial relationships between humans and nonhumans. This is possible because both human and nonhuman animals continually reconstruct their cultures. Cultures develop across generations, emerging as beliefs, knowledge, skills, traditions, or practices.25 Behavioural plasticity and innovation allow animals to adjust their behaviour to suit local conditions, such as those found in cities. As an example where humans taught birds novel foraging techniques demonstrates, such cul-

20 Philippa Brakes et al., “A Deepening Understanding of Animal Culture Suggests Lessons for Conservation,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 288, no. 1949 (2021): 20202718, https://doi.org/10/gjr2tm; Philippa Brakes, “Sociality and Wild Animal Welfare: Future Directions,” Frontiers in Veterinary Science 6 (2019), https://doi.org/10/ggtk6b. 21 Whiten, “The Burgeoning Reach of Animal Culture.” 22 Lucy M. Aplin, “Culture and Cultural Evolution in Birds: A Review of the Evidence,” Animal Behaviour, no. 47 (2019): 179–87, https://doi.org/10/gfsp4p; Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animals Learn to Be Animals (London: Oneworld Publications, 2020). 23 Ross Crates et al., “Loss of Vocal Culture and Fitness Costs in a Critically Endangered Songbird,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 288, no. 1947 (2021): 20210225, https://doi.org/10/gjg86g. 24 Christian Sperger, Armin Heller, and Bernhard Voelkl, “Flight Strategies of Migrating Northern Bald Ibises – Analysis of GPS Data During Human-Led Migration Flights,” AGIT – Journal für Angewandte Geoinformatik, no. 3 (2017): 62–72, https://doi.org/10/gmwt82. 25 Alex Mesoudi, “Cultural Evolution: A Review of Theory, Findings and Controversies,” Evolutionary Biology 43, no. 4 (2016): 481–97, https://doi.org/10/gfsp3b.

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tures are influenceable and can spread rapidly throughout populations.26 The ability to acquire new cultures presents opportunities, but also carries risks. On one hand, cultural adaptation can help animals to adjust their behaviours in response to changing environments.27 On the other, cultures can prevent the spread of adaptive behaviours or lead to detrimental consequences.28 Individuals can copy behaviours that result in harmful cultures.29 Further, there may be a risk that humans continue to dominate the development of new cultures. In constructing their own niches, humans profoundly alter habitats and therefore cultures, behaviours, populations, wellbeing, and even evolution of species.30 Highly human-altered ecosystems can intensify evolutionary traps, where population declines occur because animals make maladaptive selections of habitats, mates, food, or other resources.31 Human social patterns and culturally informed activities alter evolution in urban environments and require design strategies that can facilitate adaptations to urban habitats instead of attempts to restore historic conditions.32

1.2.

Interspecies Design

1.2.1. Nonhuman Knowledge We argue that designers ought to develop intentional engagements with interspecies cultures.33 Design, as a process that shapes futures and impinges on existing ecosystems, will play an important role in imagining new shared cultures. Interspecies design provides an opportunity for this endeavour. Understood as an approach to the management of future habitats, interspecies design

26 Lucy M. Aplin et al., “Experimentally Induced Innovations Lead to Persistent Culture via Conformity in Wild Birds,” Nature 518, no. 7540 (2015): 538–41, https://doi.org/10/f3pfvt. 27 Brakes et al., “A Deepening Understanding of Animal Culture Suggests Lessons for Conservation.” 28 Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us (New York: Doubleday, 2017). 29 Aplin, “Culture and Cultural Evolution in Birds.” 30 Marina Alberti et al., “The Complexity of Urban Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics,” BioScience 70, no. 9 (2020): 772–93, https://doi.org/10/ghfn3f. 31 Bruce A. Robertson, Jennifer S. Rehage, and Andrew Sih, “Ecological Novelty and the Emergence of Evolutionary Traps,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 28, no. 9 (2013): 552–60, https://doi.org/10/f5b6g7. 32 Simone Des Roches et al., “Socio-Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics in Cities,” Evolutionary Applications 14, no. 1 (2021): 248–67, https://doi.org/10/ghs8tw; L. Ruth Rivkin et al., “A Roadmap for Urban Evolutionary Ecology,” Evolutionary Applications 12, no. 3 (2019): 384– 98, https://doi.org/10/ggbt5j. 33 Roudavski, “Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design.”

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entails a process of deliberate designing for and with more than one species.34 Potential applications of interspecies design range from small objects, products, or graphic visualisations to urban landscapes, systems, or fictional worlds. Our own research focuses on physical structures that support human and nonhuman cohabitation. Examples include small-scale habitat-structures for bees, buildingscale attachments for mosses, tree-scale interventions for vertebrates, and landscape-scale schemes for parklands and ecological infrastructure.35 These projects move away from the prevailing approaches of design for nonhumans which remain anthropocentric and seek to satisfy human criteria for success.36 For instance, contemporary design projects create pavilions that exploit animals for artistic labour and structures that position animals as livestock for human consumption.37 Yet non-anthropocentric forms of design are on the rise.38 Some of these approaches seek to involve nonhumans in design processes without exploitation or forced adjustment to human lifestyles.39 Going further, designers can grant nonhumans goal-setting and decisionmaking powers, and therefore abilities to influence the outcomes of design processes.40 Nonhumans possess knowledge and perspectives that could offer valuable contributions to the design of future environments. Many nonhumans alter their environments through interspecies interactions and cultural ex-

34 Stanislav Roudavski, “Interspecies Design,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, ed. John Parham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 147–62. 35 Roudavski, “Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design.” 36 Stanislav Roudavski, “Notes on More-than-Human Architecture,” in Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design, ed. Gretchen Coombs, Andrew McNamara, and Gavin Sade (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 24–37, https://doi.org/10/czr8. 37 Jennifer R. Wolch and Marcus Owens, “Animals in Contemporary Architecture and Design,” Humanimalia 8, no. 2 (2017): 1–26. 38 Carl DiSalvo and Jonathan Lukens, “Nonanthropocentrism and the Nonhuman in Design: Possibilities for Designing New Forms of Engagement with and through Technology,” in From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, ed. Marcus Foth (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 421–35. 39 Monika Rosin´ska and Agata Szydłowska, “Zoepolis: Non-Anthropocentric Design as an Experiment in Multi-Species Care,” in Who Cares? Proceedings of the 8th Biannual Nordic Design Research Society, ed. Tuuli Mattelmäki et al. (Nordes 2019, Espoo: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, 2019), 1–7; Laura Forlano, “Posthumanism and Design,” She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3, no. 1 (2017): 16–29, https://doi.org/10/gfpf8d; Michelle Westerlaken and Stefano Gualeni, “Becoming with: Towards the Inclusion of Animals as Participants in Design Processes,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction (Milton Keynes: Association for Computing Machinery, 2016), 1–10, https://doi.org/10/f94dsg. 40 Emı¯lija Veselova and а I˙dil Gaziulusoy, “Implications of the Bioinclusive Ethic on Collaborative and Participatory Design,” The Design Journal 22, no. sup1 (2019): 1571–86, https://doi.org/10/f9p9.

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pressions, such as nest building or ecological engineering of dams.41 Even organisms that do not construct their own habitat structures have agency that includes abilities to act, bring about change, and affect others.42 Attempting to incorporate such knowledge presents significant opportunities for future interspecies design that benefits nonhumans. 1.2.2. Ethics and Design Integrating nonhumans into design processes presents unresolved ethical challenges.43 Namely, existing design ethics concentrates on human interests.44 In response, we consider ethical aspects of interspecies cultures and design. Any design undertakings must make ethical judgements on aesthetics, values to prioritise, and trade-offs to make.45 Therefore, designers ought to consider possible consequences of their designs when they attempt to improve existing situations.46 In the context of interspecies design, humans are in an exceedingly powerful position. Research on cultural ecosystem-services remains largely anthropocentric but provides insights into potential challenges. It considers approaches to preservation of cultural values, incorporation of diverse worldviews into decision-making, and integration of multiple disciplines into deliberation processes.47 Responding to these challenges, we ask: what is an ethically justifiable and practically plausible theoretical framework for interspecies design? Our central hypothesis is that theories of justice can provide useful frameworks for designing future environments that support interspecies cultures. Although justice is a disputed term that has many different interpretations, its more-than41 Alexis J. Breen, “Animal Culture Research Should Include Avian Nest Construction,” Biology Letters 17, no. 7 (2021): 20210327, https://doi.org/10/gnmk; Gillian Barker and John OdlingSmee, “Integrating Ecology and Evolution: Niche Construction and Ecological Engineering,” in Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, ed. Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins, and Trevor Pearce (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 187–211. 42 For a range of examples, see Tuomas Räsänen and Taina Syrjämaa, eds., Shared Lives of Humans and Animals: Animal Agency in the Global North (London: Routledge, 2017). 43 Roudavski, “Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design.” 44 Jeffrey K. H. Chan, “Design Ethics: Reflecting on the Ethical Dimensions of Technology, Sustainability, and Responsibility in the Anthropocene,” Design Studies 54 (2018): 184–200, https://doi.org/10/gczncm. 45 Maurice Lagueux, “Ethics versus Aesthetics in Architecture,” The Philosophical Forum 35, no. 2 (2004): 117–33, https://doi.org/10/b9qncw. 46 Tony Fry, “The Voice of Sustainment: Design Ethics as Futuring,” Design Philosophy Papers 2, no. 2 (2004): 145–56, https://doi.org/10/gfsqdh. 47 Rachelle K. Gould, Joshua W. Morse, and Alison B. Adams, “Cultural Ecosystem Services and Decision-Making: How Researchers Describe the Applications of Their Work,” People and Nature 1, no. 4 (2019): 457–75, https://doi.org/10/gk97c7; David Cabana et al., “Evaluating and Communicating Cultural Ecosystem Services,” Ecosystem Services 42 (2020): 101085, https://doi.org/10/ggmn85.

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human conceptualizations offer insights into ways of balancing human, nonhuman animal, and even non-sentient interests.48 Notably, ‘multispecies’ and ‘interspecies’ justice seek to recognise experiences and interests of all living beings and provide a pragmatic frame to consider related ethical issues.49 Similar to multispecies approaches, interspecies justice emphasises the co-presence of many forms of life but puts emphasis on their relationships.50 This focus allows us to consider cultures in living forms, especially in animals.51

2.

Methods

2.1.

Capabilities as Design Criteria

We investigate ideas of justice for interspecies design through the notion of capabilities. The capabilities approach to justice aims to ensure that living beings have fulfilled lives. Its early interpretations supported evaluations of human wellbeing beyond the narrow notion of economic welfare.52 Capabilities referred to the opportunity for a human or a group of humans to achieve what they value.53 48 Colin Hickey and Ingrid Robeyns, “Planetary Justice: What Can We Learn from Ethics and Political Philosophy?,” Earth System Governance, Exploring Planetary Justice 6 (2020): 100045, https://doi.org/10/gjphcb; Frank Biermann and Agni Kalfagianni, “Planetary Justice: A Research Framework,” Earth System Governance 6 (2020): 100049, https://doi.org/10/gkm 3qx. 49 Danielle Celermajer et al., “Justice Through a Multispecies Lens,” Contemporary Political Theory 19 (2020): 475–512, https://doi.org/10/ggvkrv; Celermajer et al., “Multispecies Justice.” Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002). For the discussion of similar issues without the use of the term ‘interspecies’, see Adrian C. Armstrong, Ethics and Justice for the Environment (Milton Park: Routledge, 2013). 50 Klaus Bosselmann, “Ecological Justice and Law,” in Environmental Law for Sustainability: A Reader, ed. Benjamin J. Richardson and Stepan Wood (Oxford: Hart, 2006), 129–63; Klaus Bosselmann, The Principle of Sustainability: Transforming Law and Governance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 51 We acknowledge that biocentric justice is but one of the aspects of ecocentrism, along with such frameworks as geocentric ethics and astroethics. Bosselman understood interspecies justice as a concern for the nonhuman world and defined ecological justice as consisting of three elements: intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, and interspecies justice. We focus on interspecies justice for pragmatic reasons. This allows us to focus on the considerations of cultures that are more readily acceptable in living forms, especially in animals. Broader discussions of universal considerability are important but remain outside of scope for this article. 52 For further background, see Ingrid Robeyns, “Capability Approach,” in Handbook of Economics and Ethics, ed. Jan Peil and Irene van Staveren (Cheltenham: Elgar, 2009), 39–46. 53 Amartya Sen, “Development as Freedom,” in The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on Development and Global Change, ed. J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite, and Nitsan Chorev, 2nd ed. (1999; repr., Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 525–48.

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More recent literature extends the capabilities approach to sentient animals.54 Like humans, nonhuman animals can flourish and their lives can go well or badly.55 When a nonhuman animal cannot exercise a capability, the quality of their life diminishes.56 Extending beyond the utilitarians’ focus on sentient animals’ capacity to feel pleasure and pain, the capabilities approach seeks to account for cognitive and social lives of animals.57 Going beyond the contractarians’ focus on compassion and humanity, this conception of the capabilities approach treats animals as subjects with agency.58 More inclusive understandings of the capabilities approach account for cultural groups and systems such as rivers or forests.59 These approaches argue that harm to sentient or non-sentient organisms may hinder their capabilities for flourishing.60 Case-studies on stormwater systems and urban forests demonstrate the usefulness of the capabilities approach to integrate human and nonhuman stakeholders into design and decision-making.61

54 Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Gail Tulloch, “Animal Ethics: The Capabilities Approach,” Animal Welfare 20 (2011): 3–10. 55 Elizabeth Cripps, “Saving the Polar Bear, Saving the World: Can the Capabilities Approach Do Justice to Humans, Animals and Ecosystems?,” Res Publica 16, no. 1 (2010): 1–22, https://doi.org/10/frj2kb. 56 Katy Fulfer, “The Capabilities Approach to Justice and the Flourishing of Nonsentient Life,” Ethics and the Environment 18, no. 1 (2013): 19–42, https://doi.org/10/gfsp32. 57 Martha Nussbaum, “The Capabilities Approach and Animal Entitlements,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp and Raymond G. Frey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 228–54. 58 Anders Schinkel, “Martha Nussbaum on Animal Rights,” Ethics and the Environment 13, no. 1 (2008): 41–69, https://doi.org/10/fwsp4c. 59 David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 148. 60 We acknowledge the potential limitations and critiques of the capabilities approach, including its possible intersections with anthropomorphism, individualism, universalism, and paternalism. However, the potential benefits to individual organisms and entire ecosystems justify further exploration of the capabilities approach in application to design. For the discussion of these issues, see Fulfer, “The Capabilities Approach to Justice and the Flourishing of Nonsentient Life”; Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, “The Politics of Wonder: The Capabilities Approach in the Context of Mass Extinction,” in The Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach, ed. Enrica Chiappero Martinetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 247–244; Constanze Binder, “Cultural Diversity and the Capability Approach,” in Agency, Freedom and Choice, ed. Constanze Binder, Theory and Decision Library A: Rational Choice in Practical Philosophy and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Springer, 2019), 105–27; Ian Carter, “Is the Capability Approach Paternalist?,” Economics and Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2014): 75–98, https://doi.org/10/gw8x; Cripps, “Saving the Polar Bear, Saving the World.” 61 Anna Heikkinen et al., “Urban Ecosystem Services and Stakeholders: Towards a Sustainable Capability Approach,” in Strongly Sustainable Societies, ed. Karl Johan Bonnedahl and Pasi Heikkurinen (London: Routledge, 2019), 116–33.

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The Powerful Owl as a Case-Study

We test the capabilities approach in the context of an ongoing project that aims to help large owls thrive in or around cities. Our component of the project focuses on the design of habitat-structures for the powerful owl (Ninox strenua), a threatened species in south-eastern Australia.62 We conduct this project in the context of a broad effort by multiple parties to enjoy, study, and support powerful owls.63 This integration into an existing interspecies context makes the case study relevant as an illustration of complex interactions. These interactions include multiple bioregions, owl communities, and human groups including The Powerful Owl Project run by BirdLife Australia, biologists and ecologists specialising in powerful owls, local amateur collectives, urban municipalities, and management organisations. This choice is also relevant as an instance where novel cultural imagination across species will be increasingly necessary. Design and management decisions that include powerful owls are important in response to ongoing habitat loss and degradation. This case-study is also useful because it highlights applications of justice theories to interspecies design that will be relevant in many other situations of environmental degradation and novel ecologies. Australian urbanisation and habitat destruction are illustrative of the global trends. Here, 10% of terrestrial mammals went extinct since the arrival of the Europeans and over 16% of birds are listed as threatened.64 Some 30% of threatened Australian species live in cities.65 The plight of owls who attempt to find ways to live alongside humans is similar to the challenges faced by many other species. To establish possible goals for future interspecies design, we evaluate capabilities in human-dominated areas noting how powerful owls behaved (species

62 For details of our earlier work on habitat-structures for powerful owls, see Stanislav Roudavski and Dan Parker, “Modelling Workflows for More-than-Human Design: Prosthetic Habitats for the Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua),” in Impact – Design with All Senses: Proceedings of the Design Modelling Symposium, Berlin 2019, ed. Gengnagel, Christoph et al. (Cham: Springer, 2020), 554–64, https://doi.org/10/dbkp. 63 Powerful owls are the largest of the Australian nocturnal birds. Endemic to eastern and southeastern Australia, the conservation status of powerful owls is ‘endangered’ in the state of Victoria and ‘vulnerable’ in the states of New South Wales and Queensland. For more information on the powerful owl and the Powerful Owl Project, see BirdLife Australia, “Powerful Owl,” accessed December 3, 2021, https://www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/powerful-o wl. 64 Michelle Ward et al., “A National-Scale Dataset for Threats Impacting Australia’s Imperilled Flora and Fauna,” Ecology and Evolution (2021): 1–13, https://doi.org/10/gq37. 65 Christopher D. Ives et al., “Cities Are Hotspots for Threatened Species: The Importance of Cities for Threatened Species,” Global Ecology and Biogeography 25, no. 1 (2016): 117–26, https://doi.org/10/f 76nk2.

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norms) and fared (wellbeing) before colonisation and urbanisation.66 This helps to provide benchmarks for possible restoration through design.67 We use this approach because the restoration of capabilities may prevent future harm and compensate for past injustices. In four steps, we consider the: 1. Powerful owls in the past: evolved capabilities of owls in pre-colonial Australian contexts (~300 years ago and earlier). We first outline the historical context of human and owl cultures and explain the environments that owls evolved to accept. We then use historical and scientific literature to list 12 capabilities of powerful owls. Instead of relying on predetermined sets, we recognise that different purposes may require different lists of capabilities.68 We organise the list of powerful-owl capabilities into three categories: health, autonomy, and affiliation.69 These categories are sufficiently broad to allow comparisons with capabilities of other stakeholders, such as trees and possums, in future studies. 2. Powerful owls in the present: expression of capabilities by owls in Australian cities. To understand how colonisation and urbanisation restricted or enabled powerful-owl capabilities, we collect examples of owl behaviour from scientific literature, news articles, visual media, anecdotes, firsthand observations, and grey literature. Cross-checking these observations against the list of 12 capabilities (step 1), we identify the extent to which cities restrict or enable owl behaviours.

66 For background on this approach, see Nicolas Delon, “Animal Capabilities and Freedom in the City,” Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 22, no. 1 (2021): 131–53, https://doi.org/10/gmnmnb. 67 We consider this approach to be especially valuable in cities, where attempts to return the environment to previous states are unfeasible due to the expanse of existing infrastructure, extent of degradation, and possible lack of reference points for restoration. Further, aims to restore pristine wilderness (free of human influence) are not necessarily possible or desirable, especially where Indigenous communities held centuries-long land-management practices. 68 For background, Nussbuam’s theory of justice lists ten general capabilities that humans and sentient animals should be entitled to up a minimum threshold: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotion; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment. See Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. 69 We acknowledge that this approach inevitably generalises and ask readers to treat the lists as an illustration rather than an exhaustive list of all possible capabilities. We do not claim that owls could utilize all capabilities or that owl wellbeing cannot improve beyond this state. Also note that our analysis also relies on more recent literature about owl behaviour in areas with less human disturbance because researchers only recently made the first assessments of the distribution, abundance, and conservation status of powerful owls. See Department of Environment and Conservation, “Recovery Plan for the Large Forest Owls: Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua), Sooty Owl (Tyto tenebricosa) and Masked Owl (Tyto novaehollandiae),” Approved NSW Recovery Plan (Sydney: DEC, 2006).

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3. Powerful owls in the future: effects of current and aspirational design and management. To understand how interspecies design could impact the capabilities of powerful owls in cities, we extrapolate the trends established by current design and management actions. We then draw from recent design proposals to put forward possible interspecies approaches that could better support the goal of restoring capabilities. 4. Implications beyond powerful owls. To consider potential applications beyond the case of the powerful owl, we consider capabilities of other owls in other settings. We examine three categories of animals: captive, liminal, and wild.70 Within these categories, we identify four representative human-owl cultures based on a taxonomy of human-animal relations that distinguishes between animals engaged in display and performance as well as meat, pets, experimental subjects, workers, and symbols.71 We conclude with a discussion on the ethical challenges of designing for interspecies cultures and posit directions for further research based on this knowledge.

3.

Results

The Results section presents our findings in four parts using tables and diagrams: 1. Section 3.1. collects an array of powerful-owl capabilities, offering a baseline for future design. 2. Section 3.2. finds that cities diminish many capabilities of powerful owls but present opportunities for new cultural expressions, highlighting the need for design to target multiple aspects of powerful-owl wellbeing. 3. Section 3.3. develops visual mapping which indicates the possibilities for design to help restore powerful-owl capabilities in cities in a way that moves beyond current design and management strategies. 4. Section 3.4. presents the reusability of our approach in other cases, ascertaining the opportunities for context-specific and place-based applications to other taxa and human-owl cultures.

70 For background on these categories, refer to Section 3.4. and see Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 71 Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, 2nd ed. (2012; repr., New York City: Columbia University Press, 2021).

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Powerful Owls in the Past: Cultural Interactions as a Baseline for Design

This section describes past lifestyles and capabilities of powerful owls as a baseline for future design. Archaeological records confirm that human-owl cultures are old. Owls played an important role in the construction of landscapes, contributed to the senses of place and community, and even influenced the making of humanity.72 During the Late Pleistocene, owls increasingly shaped the material, cognitive, and social worlds of their human co-dwellers, prompting owl-directed human behaviours such as visual culture. Ninox owls, including powerful owls and the closely related Tasmanian spotted owl (Ninox novaeseelandiae), likely underwent an ancient radiation in Gondwanaland.73 Powerful owls evolved to thrive in the old-growth forests and woodlands of south-eastern Australia (Fig. 1).74 They coexisted with the Indigenous Australian communities who thought that owls were important.75 Table 1 highlights how these conditions provided habitat and resources which enabled owls’ capabilities. This offers habitat designers a benchmark for design that attempts to support a broad array of cultures and behaviours.76

3.2.

Powerful Owls in the Present: Design for Survival in Novel Ecologies

To identify opportunities for design, this section describes how powerful owls changed their behaviours in cities. Since European colonisation, exploitative land-management caused major ecosystem changes in south-eastern Australia.77 Land-clearing destroyed over 50% of forest and woodland in New South Wales and 65% in Victoria.78 These changes restrict the lives of owls and lead to declines

72 Shumon Hussain, “The Hooting Past. Re-Evaluating the Role of Owls in Shaping HumanPlace Relations Throughout the Pleistocene,” Anthropozoologica 56, no. 3 (2021): 39–56, https://doi.org/10/gkrfkt. 73 Department of Environment and Conservation, “Recovery Plan for the Large Forest Owls.” 74 Peter Jeffrey Higgins, Handbook of Australian, New Zealand & Antarctic Birds (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990). 75 Philip A. Clarke, “Birds as Totemic Beings and Creators in the Lower Murray, South Australia,” Journal of Ethnobiology 36, no. 2 (2016): 277–93, https://doi.org/10/gknqjp. 76 Refer to Supplementary Materials (A) for references and further details in support of Table 1. 77 Recent accounts have underestimated the magnitude of this ecological change, risking ‘shifting baselines’ for conserving owl habitat. See Rohan J. Bilney, “Poor Historical Data Drive Conservation Complacency: The Case of Mammal Decline in South-Eastern Australian Forests,” Austral Ecology 39, no. 8 (2014): 875–86, https://doi.org/10/f6qqnd. 78 Department of Sustainability and Environment, “Action Statement: Powerful Owl,” Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 (East Melbourne: Department of Sustainability and Environment, 1999).

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Fig. 1. Powerful-owl chicks in a hollow of a large-old tree. Photography: Nick Bradsworth

in owl populations.79 Present-day owl populations exist in dramatically modified landscapes and are increasingly common in cities.80 Although researchers once thought that powerful owls are habitat specialists restricted to old-growth forests, powerful owls now inhabit Australia’s densest cities including Sydney and Melbourne.81 This suggests that owls can adapt to, tolerate, or even benefit from human-dominated landscapes (Fig. 2). However, cities present owls with several challenges which threaten their wellbeing and prospects of long-term survival.82 Urbanisation reduces the availability of critical habitat-structures that owls depend on, such as tree cover, structurally complex vegetation, and access to wa-

79 Higgins, Handbook of Australian, New Zealand & Antarctic Birds. 80 Raylene Cooke et al., “Powerful Owls: Possum Assassins Move into Town,” in Urban Raptors: Ecology and Conservation of Birds of Prey in Cities, ed. Clint W. Boal and Cheryl R. Dykstra (Washington: Island Press, 2018), 152–165. 81 Ian McAllan and Dariel Larkins, “Historical Records of the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua in Sydney and Comments on the Species’ Status,” Australian Field Ornithology 22, no. 1 (2016): 29–37; Raylene Cooke, Robert Wallis, and John White, “Use of Vegetative Structure by Powerful Owls in Outer Urban Melbourne, Victoria, Australia-Implications for Management,” Journal of Raptor Research 36, no. 4 (2002): 294–99. 82 Refer to Supplementary Materials (B) for references and further details in support of Table 2.

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Examples Live a normal length life, in good health and free from bodily intrusion or violence, with opportunities to develop a full range of senses.

Rest

Choose favourable roosting sites.

Access perches with good shelter;

Feed

Practice typical hunting and foraging strategies and choose food.

Exhibit rare prey-holding behaviour for food storage or territorial display; maintain a mixed diet.

Access water to drink, clean self, or regulate body temperature.

Bathe and drink in freshwater pools.

Access sources of pleasure, enjoy recreational activities, or have adequate sensory stimulation.

Ferry bark-strips, snatch at foliage, swoop, hang upside-down on branches, and chase animals.

Bathe

Play

199

Make own decisions and have freedom of movement.

Move

Fledge

Disperse

Defend

Perform movements that support prey handling, foraging, and transit.

Access adequate structures to land on when leaving nest and gain independence.

Access complex vegetative structure to

Disperse into adequate territories and establish own home-range.

Disperse into areas without clustering; establish home-range in high-quality habitat.

Defend territory from threats.

Protect territory from intruders, including displays or swooping.

Form rewarding relationships with others and have choice of attachment to others.

Socialise

Learn

Develop and express the local dialect and

Develop local knowledge and expertise others.

‘woo-hoo’ call.

Learn hunting strategies from parents and siblings or the routines of prey.

Mate

Find potential mates, court, and mate.

Bleat, duet, preen, gift food, and copulate.

Nest

Access potential nesting sites to incubate eggs and raise young.

Access large tree-hollows.

Table 1. Baseline capabilities of powerful owls. Colours distinguish different capabilities to assist cross-referencing between tables and diagrams

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terways.83 This reduces the opportunities for owls to bathe, fledge, disperse, defend, socialise, learn, mate, and nest (Table 2). The restoration of these capabilities can serve as a target for design which moves beyond the usual goals of supporting bare-minimum biological necessities and towards other factors that are important for wellbeing and survival.

Fig. 2. Powerful owls expressing novel behaviours and inhabiting urban contexts. Top left: tearing a cooler bag. Top right: hanging off shorts (Credit: Choosypix). Right middle: using a birdbath (Credit: Andrew Gregory). Bottom left: nesting in an arboreal termite mound (Credit: Ofer Levy). Bottom right: roosting in an inner-urban/introduced tree (Credit: Lian Hingee)

3.3.

Powerful Owls in the Future: Designing for Flourishing

This section considers whether current and possible future design and management strategies could meet the design targets established above. Most of the current design for owls relates to nesting. Provision of nesting structures is particularly important because the tree hollows suitable for nesting are rare and declining in cities. In one Australian city where powerful owls are present, the number of hollow-bearing trees in urban greenspace is likely to decline by 87% 83 Bronwyn Isaac et al., “Does Urbanization Have the Potential to Create an Ecological Trap for Powerful Owls (Ninox strenua)?,” Biological Conservation 176 (2014): 1–11, https://doi.org /10/f6c3zf.

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Rest

Feed

Bathe

Play

201

Examples Owls are subject to several health risks in cities including car strikes, electrocution, attacks from introduced species, and secondary poisoning. Availability of healthcare in veterinary clinics or sanctuaries does not substantially alter this overarching trend. Limited sites for resting; possible susceptibility to disturbance including, noise, light, and infrastructure.

Use of sub-par roosts that do not allow

Less diversity but greater abundance of prey including possums.

Smaller home-ranges; novel food such as

Less availability of riparian areas for bathing.

Use of human-made bathing spots like bird ponds.

Relatively unchanged opportunities to play, for example by swinging on branches.

Snatching of human-made objects of stimulation, such as clothing, cooler bags, and tea-towels.

roosting sites such as tennis-court fences, powerlines, and cars.

Owls maintain autonomy in cities, but the destruction of habitats has reduced to live good lives by undermining freedoms and restricting options. Move

Fledge

Disperse

Continued freedom of movement but with

understory or tree-lopping practices.

adoption of orphan owls; human aid in

Less availability of suitable areas for

Young owls remain with their parents for longer.

mortality, inbreeding and lower fecundity. Defend

unsuitable habitat to connect to another habitat patch.

Possibly more threats to defend territory from.

Techniques to defend territories from other owls and the mobbing of introduced birds.

wellbeing. Some humans poach owls. Some urban owls habituate to human presence and enter places near humans. Socialise

Fewer opportunities to socialise with populations.

Interaction with humans and possible change in vocalizations between regions.

Learn

Greater need to adapt to cope with new threats.

Development of personality traits that help urban exploitation.

Mate

More human disturbance and fewer

Possible breeding failure and infanticide due to human presence.

Nest

Less opportunity to reproduce because of the shortage and decline of old hollowbearing trees.

Use of novel structures including introduced trees, human-made hollows, or arboreal termite nests.

Table 2. Present-day capabilities of powerful owls. Colours distinguish different capabilities to assist cross-referencing between tables and diagrams

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over 300 years under existing management practices.84 Tree-planting alone is inadequate because it can take several hundred years until tree hollows become large enough for powerful owls.85 In response, most of the current designs for powerful owls propose human-made tree hollows such as nest boxes or similar structures (Fig. 3). While the human-cultural interest in supporting owls is encouraging, there is only one recorded occasion of a powerful owl using a humanmade hollow, and even then, only one chick survived.86 Unsurprisingly, most advice for the management of future environments for owls urges managers not to rely solely on nest boxes. Instead, existing guidelines for planners, architects, and landscape architects focus on regeneration of vegetation, preservation of existing vegetation, and reduction of human impact on owls.87 These mitigation efforts, combined with improvements to human-made hollows, may help to maintain powerful owl populations in the short term while revegetated environments mature. Still, the goal of reconfiguring cities in a way that allows owls to utilise their range of capabilities may necessitate cultural changes that depart from the status quo of urban management (Fig. 4). This diagram shows how design goals could help to support expressions of powerful owl capabilities documented in Tables 1 and 2. The irregular edges of the lines indicate the approximate nature of such predictions. This visual mapping clearly indicates the need and possibility for more ambitious design to support powerful-owl flourishing in response to the destructive human-activities in recent pasts and projected futures of cities.88

84 Under a worst-case scenario, human activities such as clearing land for stock grazing and urban development may completely remove hollow-bearing trees from the urban landscape within 115 years. Even under a best-case scenario, the number of hollow-bearing trees will likely decline. See Darren S. Le Roux et al., “The Future of Large Old Trees in Urban Landscapes,” PLOS ONE 9, no. 6 (2014): e99403, https://doi.org/10/f6dg7p. 85 Philip Gibbons and David B. Lindenmayer, Tree Hollows and Wildlife Conservation in Australia (Collingwood: CSIRO, 2002). 86 Ed McNabb and Jim Greenwood, “A Powerful Owl Disperses into Town and Uses an Artificial Nest-Box,” Australian Field Ornithology 28, no. 2 (2011): 65–75. 87 For example, advice developed by owl-protection groups encourages (1) regeneration of habitat by introducing indigenous trees that will eventually bear hollows along waterways and streets, providing pathways across roads using cables/poles, and planting complex vegetation on both public and private property, (2) preservation of habitat by protecting riparian areas, vegetation patches, and tree corridors, as well as retaining and pruning trees instead of removing, and (3) reduction of vegetation removal or direct harm to owls when constructing buildings (e. g., installing bird-sensitive windows that reduce collisions with glass), constructing tracks and paths, and introducing lighting near core habitat areas. See Robin Buchanan, Helen Wortham, and Powerful Owl Coalition, Protecting Powerful Owls in Urban Areas: Powerful Owls Benefit People (Turramurra: STEP, 2018). 88 Refer to Supplementary Materials (C) for references in support of Figure 4.

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Fig. 3. Human-made hollows for powerful owls. Top left: carved hollow. Top right: carved log. Middle left: nest box. Middle right: repurposed wheelie-bin (Credit: Gio Fitzpatrick). Bottom left: hempcrete hollow. Bottom right: 3D printed wood hollow. Photography by the authors unless stated otherwise

3.4.

Beyond Powerful Owls: Capabilities in Other Taxa

While our case-study focuses on urban-dwelling powerful owls in south-eastern Australia, the capabilities approach has broad relevance to other situations. Table 3 presents these implications with examples of human-owl cultures at different sites and outlines the possible impacts on owl capabilities. Fig. 5 takes the scenarios from Table 3 and illustrates how these human attitudes can affect the likelihood of owls utilising their capabilities. The irregular edges of the circles indicate the approximate nature of such predictions. Awareness of these interspecies relationships can inform the composition of design teams and help to establish more equitable objectives. The form of interspecies design will vary depending on whether the species are captive, liminal, or wild. For instance, owls raised in captivity will have more tolerance towards humans in comparison to those captured in the wild.89 In the case of powerful owls, captive birds may live 89 Aurora Potts, “Captive Enrichment for Owls (Strigiformes),” Journal of Wildlife Rehabilitation 36, no. 2 (2016): 11–29.

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aw ide rr an ge o f ca pa bi lit Owls exer cise

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Possible: Humans develop nesting structures that appeal to owls’ sensory capacities and accommodate a range of owl behaviours Projected: Termite nest formed now degrades

00 0

O w ls

+1

Interspecies design improves

Possible: Humans develop cultures that help to keep mature/decayed trees in the landscape, depart from urban sprawl, and cultivate ecological literacy Projected: Nest box built now breaks

Interspecies cultures develop

habitat-structures Projected: Tree hollows in use now become unusable due to removal or decay

Possible: Humans implement city-wide regeneration strategies, including reinstating lost waterways, converting roads into vegetation corridors, and

Interspecies design produces impact

ies

+30

+1

e x er cise

+3

Future

00

+3

-3

Past

0

-30

b ili a li m it e d r a n g e o f c a p a

0 Years

Present

+/-1000

Rest

Feed

Bathe

Play

Move

Fledge

Disperse

Defend

Socialise

Learn

Mate

Nest

xercise their range of capabilitie s Owls e

-30

tie s

-10

Possible: Human interest in, appreciation of, and knowledge about owls is high; owl tolerance of humans and human-made structures is high Projected: Trees planted now form hollows large enough for the powerful owl, but only 13% of today’s hollow-bearing trees remain

Ow

ls u

s

t ea

er m

it e

ne

st

Melbourne’s human population reaches 1,000,000

Urbanisation depletes habitat

Europeans establish Sydney Cove colony in 1788

Colonisers arrive

O w l s e x p l o it u r b a n a r e a s

Interspecies design supports mutually

e

an tr y

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0

-10

Ow

st b ox

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Fig. 4. Design goals for capabilities. Right half: the impact of past events on powerful-owl capabilities (multi-coloured). Left half: projected situations under current design and management (grey text) and possible impact of design on powerful-owl capabilities in the future (blue). Colours distinguish different capabilities to assist cross-referencing between tables and diagrams. Line thicknesses indicate the likelihood of powerful owls expressing their capabilities, where thick = likely, medium = possible, thin = unlikely

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Examples

Possible Impact on Capabilities

Captive

Entertainment

Companion

attachment to others and freedom of

Patient

Liminal

Wild

Table 3. Human-owl cultures globally and their potential impact on owl capabilities

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Feed

Bathe

Play

Move

Fledge

Disperse

Defend

Socialise

Learn

Mate

Nest

Experiment

Entertainer

Companion

Human-Owl Relationships

Patient

Labour

Urban Visitor

Synanthrope

Mutualist

Omen

Resource

Recluse

Human Thought

Capabilities

Fig. 5. Illustration of the potential impacts of human-owl cultures on owl capabilities based on the examples in Table 3. Colours distinguish different capabilities to assist cross-referencing between tables and diagrams. Circle sizes indicate the likelihood of owls expressing their capabilities, where large = likely, medium = possible, small = unlikely. Rows: representative humanowl relationships. Columns: capabilities of owls

severely restricted lives and develop behaviours that are radically different to those typical in the wild. Wild powerful owls, when hospitalised or in aviaries, are often unsettled, stressed, aggressive towards handlers, and difficult to keep.90 Wild or liminal powerful owls also exhibit considerable behavioural differences in different regions.91 This behavioural plasticity highlights the need for interspecies design that is context-specific and place-based.

90 Fiona Park, “Behavior and Behavioral Problems of Australian Raptors in Captivity,” Seminars in Avian and Exotic Pet Medicine 12, no. 4 (2003): 232–41, https://doi.org/10/bjjhsc. 91 For example, urban owls demonstrate more tolerance of humans than rural conspecifics (refer to Table 2). For evidence of different behaviours across regions of Australia, see Higgins, Handbook of Australian, New Zealand & Antarctic Birds.

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Discussion

4.1.

Case-Study Findings and Limitations: Extending the Capabilities Approach

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The objective of this article is to establish goals and evaluative practices for interspecies design. Our results demonstrate that the capabilities approach can support this objective by proposing and testing future-oriented design possibilities with respect to interspecies cultures. Our case-study focused on owls and points to the need for alternative design approaches that imagine what future interspecies design and culture can entail. These approaches should aim to incorporate more-than-human cultural interactions into design thinking (Section 3.1.), provide targets for design that recognise rich and diverse lives of nonhuman species (Section 3.2.), and encourage more ambitious design aspirations beyond business-as-usual (Section 3.3.). As an initial step towards developing an ethically justifiable and practically plausible theoretical framework for interspecies design, our examples exclude significant aspects that will require further research. In this paragraph, we list some of the limitations of the work presented here and the planned further research. 1. This article generalises capabilities for all powerful owls without detailed considerations of their local cultures or individualities. Future research ought to map and compare the capabilities and interactions of owls within interspecies communities across distinct bioregions and novel ecologies. 2. We focus on the interactions of powerful owls and humans, largely excluding other stakeholders. Future work should include relations with different human groups, from enthusiasts to scientists and park managers; prey such as possums and parrots; cohabitants and competitors such as birds that also use hollows or attack owls because they see them as a threat. Beyond birds, plants, parasitic microorganisms, and other forms of life are also important as members of multispecies communities. Engagement with Indigenous peoples, cultures, and land-management practices can also be informative and is ethically necessary for future design but remained beyond the scope of this article. 3. Very brief engagement with extended timescales is another limitation. More thorough exploration of past and possible circumstances at different timescales, from evolutionary to phenological and circadian, can further inform design decisions. Our approach to deriving and documenting capabilities via tables and diagrams serves as a useful and reusable base to extend these investigations (Section 3.4.). As we discuss below, such investigations reveal conflicts, practical and ethical challenges, and opportunities for design.

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The Ethical Challenges of Interspecies Design: Directions for Future Research

Ethical issues of interspecies design warrant further conceptual and theoretical consideration. Here, we discuss the potential challenges of deciding when and why to intervene in the lives of others, who is entitled to design, what form the design takes, and how design changes nonhuman lives. Why, or under what circumstances, should designers intervene? Should interventions wait until a species is on the brink of extinction or aim to supplement existing populations? One argument is that humans have a responsibility to assist the animals they make dependent or influence through habitat destruction.92 Sceptics will call out the apparent irony of installing human-made habitats in direct response to human-made habitat loss. Do financial provisions via ‘nature offsets’ make habitat-designers complicit in destructive practices like housing developments?93 Most will likely feel ambivalent when creating habitat structures that intend to offset past or future habitat destruction. Yet, there is a need to imagine culturally and ecologically sustainable futures that challenge the dominant, exploitative economic systems.94 Even when designers might prefer systemic political and economic change, immediate interventions such as nest boxes can serve as an achievable measure that may help to avoid the extinction of certain species. However, such actions could result in the emergence of nest-box-loving individuals who might speciate from their natural-hollow conspecifics, with undesirable results. Some will argue that humans should stop interfering with others’ lives, stressing that human-made habitats are band-aid solutions or last-resort measures. This logic has merit but understates the value of human-made habitats including bird houses and bee hotels as culturally significant artefacts that can enhance human knowledge about and emotional connections with other species. Further, arguments which presume the binary separation of humans and nature are problematic. These separations break down under pervasive human impacts in the Anthropocene or when exposed to the non-dualist worldviews and practices of Indigenous societies.95 Cities or other human-altered landscapes provide 92 Clare Palmer, Animal Ethics in Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 93 For further discussion on the ethics of offsets, see Christopher Ives and Sarah Bekessy, “The Ethics of Offsetting Nature,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 13, no. 10 (2015): 568– 73, https://doi.org/10/f 724z3. 94 Tony Fry, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009). 95 Lesley Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-Conceptualising Human-Nature Relations, Routledge Research in the Anthropocene (New York: Routledge, 2016).

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critical habitat for many animals.96 This reality reiterates the need for design that encourages mutually beneficial cultures between human and nonhuman cohabitants in cities. Who is entitled to future design? Visions of more just futures require considerations of practices humans consider unjust, including the sufferers of this injustice and ways to eliminate or remedy harms.97 Contentions occur when simultaneously existing needs are not compatible. Examples include the interests of current and future generations, preferences of individuals and collectives, or misalignments between intrinsic and instrumental values.98 The provision of habitat for target-species presents one such challenge. For example, human support for powerful owls will impact other species such as possums. Some conservationists target charismatic animals, often attempting to help wider ecosystems via ‘umbrella species.’99 Research on speciesism contemplates cultural drivers that underpin human partiality for some species over others.100 In the context of interspecies design, discourse on the ethics of selecting target species is less common but related frameworks do exist.101 This work recommends focusing on species based on the potential conflict with humans, their observability to humans, and what benefits they might create for human societies. We suggest that there are opportunities to consider nonhuman as well as human capabilities when making such decisions. While conflicts between capabilities of different stakeholders will eventuate, participatory deliberation that includes local knowledge can guide negotiation.102 The challenge for designers is to imagine the form and operation of these interspecies collectives.103 Recent

96 Kylie Soanes and Pia Lentini, “When Cities Are the Last Chance for Saving Species,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 17, no. 4 (2019): 225–31, https://doi.org/10/ghdc q7. 97 Biermann and Kalfagianni, “Planetary Justice.” 98 Hickey and Robeyns, “Planetary Justice.” 99 Jamie Lorimer, “Nonhuman Charisma,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911–32, https://doi.org/10/frpzfs. 100 Lucius Caviola, Jim A. C. Everett, and Nadira S. Faber, “The Moral Standing of Animals: Towards a Psychology of Speciesism,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 116, no. 6 (2019): 1011–1029, https://doi.org/10/gdcf5m. 101 Beate Apfelbeck et al., “A Conceptual Framework for Choosing Target Species for WildlifeInclusive Urban Design,” Sustainability 11, no. 24 (2019): 6972, https://doi.org/10/gmkmq9. 102 David Schlosberg, “Justice, Ecological Integrity, and Climate Change,” in Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future, ed. Allen Thompson and Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 165–183. 103 Michelle Westerlaken, “What Is the Opposite of Speciesism? On Relational Care Ethics and Illustrating Multi-Species-Isms,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 41, no. 3/4 (2020): 522–40, https://doi.org/10/gjb52c.

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design theories that attempt to work towards more just futures present opportunities to lead these efforts.104 What interspecies design is and does, including processes of making and propagation, may create unanticipated problems of sustainability. Designed products that serve to accumulate wealth or secure ongoing funding can drive consumerism and waste. Designers rarely take responsibility for the end-lives of what they design or the waste that occurs when new replacement products render existing ones unwanted.105 In the case of powerful owls, this could become an issue if a human-made hollow design becomes popular and leads to bulk-replacing of existing nest boxes with new ones. This links to issues of ideational destruction, whereby designers undermine the value of existing designs to justify their replacement for something better.106 Well-meaning efforts to supply habitat-structures can come with questionable claims of innovation. ‘Powerful owl nest boxes’ are available for purchase online, despite having no recorded success of attracting powerful owls. Such practices can mislead purchasers and lead to widespread installation of habitats that favour already abundant species. These issues highlight the need for critical reflection that considers possible consequences of interspecies design. How humans intervene with the lives of others is a matter of ethical concern. An important interspecies design issue pertains to augmentation and the inducement of physiological changes. Beyond supporting or restoring the critical needs of a species, design can enhance certain habitat functions. Should designers strive to provide maximal comfort, for instance through air-conditioning devices, or aim to mimic the bare-minimum affordances of known habitats which vary widely in structure, quality, and availability? On one hand, humanmade structures can and do enhance the quality of life for some animals. This can lead to physiological changes, for instance, in the clutch sizes of bird eggs in nest boxes compared to those in tree hollows.107 On the other hand, human-made habitats can lead to dependence without guarantees of support. Human-made habitats, such as nest boxes, can create ecological traps that attract habitation but

104 Refer to transition design, critical design, speculative design, more-than-human architecture, and undesign. Gretchen Coombs, Gavin Sade, and Andrew McNamara, eds., Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), https://doi.org/10/gxcq. 105 Cameron Tonkinwise, “‘I Prefer Not to’: Anti-Progressive Designing,” in Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design, ed. Gretchen Coombs, Gavin Sade, and Andrew McNamara (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 74–84. 106 Tonkinwise, “‘I Prefer Not to.’” 107 Anders Møller et al., “Variation in Clutch Size in Relation to Nest Size in Birds,” Ecology and Evolution 4, no. 18 (2014): 3583–95, https://doi.org/10/f25cvr.

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result in lower chances of survival.108 In the design of human habitats, there are many guidelines and regulations that aim to prevent such damages and ensure the health and safety of occupants. Interspecies design would benefit from the establishment of similar regulatory frameworks. Conversely, regulations of human dwelling should demand the provision of habitat for other lifeforms. In either case, it will be important to ensure long-term accountability at temporal scales relevant to all stakeholders beyond typical project durations or human lifespans. Going further, how might owls and other nonhuman stakeholders have a greater say in future decision-making? Knowing worldviews of others, human and nonhuman, is difficult.109 However, nonhuman behaviour can serve as a form of voice.110 For example, owls communicate that they feel threatened by hooting, swooping, or balling up one foot and knocking it on a perch.111 The practice of including nonhumans as participants in decision-making processes is challenging, notably because humans inevitably mediate such voices.112 A further challenge for design will be to learn about nonhuman preferences without being obtrusive, using captive animals for testing, or testing potentially dangerous designs in the field. Here, explorations of future possibilities via the capabilities approach can be especially useful. Where design intervenes should inform decision-making processes. Interspecies design must respect the existing cultures and consider the implications their interventions may have for the local populations. To illustrate, re-introduction of wolves into an area they once inhabited caused the local elk to become more watchful, anxious, and fearful.113 Similarly, as apex predators with multiple potential prey, encouraging powerful owls into cities could profoundly impact other local species. Both humans and owls may also alter their habits. 108 Virginie Demeyrier et al., “Experimental Demonstration of an Ecological Trap for a Wild Bird in a Human-Transformed Environment,” Animal Behaviour 118 (2016): 181–90, https://doi.org/10/f8w4nj; Ákos Klein et al., “Exterior Nest-Boxes May Negatively Affect Barn Owl Tyto alba Survival: An Ecological Trap,” Bird Conservation International 17, no. 3 (2007): 273–81, https://doi.org/10/dg7jfn. 109 Nimmo, “Animal Cultures, Subjectivity, and Knowledge.” 110 Eva Meijer, “Interspecies Democracies,” in Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans: Blurring Boundaries in Human-Animal Relationships, ed. Bernice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz, The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics 23 (Cham: Springer, 2016), 53–72. 111 Ed McNabb, “Observations on the Biology of the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua in Southern Victoria,” Australian Bird Watcher 17, no. 7 (1996): 267–95; Friends of Canadian Corridor, “A Transcript Featuring Powerful Owl Authority Jasmine Zelený,” accessed December 3, 2021, https://www.focc.asn.au/powerful-owl/. 112 Heikkinen et al., “Urban Ecosystem Services and Stakeholders.” 113 Jamie Lorimer, Timothy Hodgetts, and Maan Barua, “Animals’ Atmospheres,” Progress in Human Geography 43, no. 1 (2019): 26–45, https://doi.org/10/gfc94b.

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Some owls will need to learn to live near humans and recognise human-made structures as possible habitats. Some humans will need to learn to tolerate or even appreciate owls and the environments that sustain these large birds. These values may clash with other human desires that include owning large dwellings, driving cars, or holding superstitious beliefs which shun owls. Therefore, future design must present compelling proposals with demonstrable benefits.114 For instance, designers might emphasise the joy one experiences when witnessing an owl, or the ecosystem benefits an owl provides. Future design ought to engage with local communities in attempts to understand multiple worldviews, with awareness that supporting some cultures can and will diminish others.

5.

Conclusions

This article introduces the need to cultivate interspecies cultures in response to human activities that harm nonhuman lifeforms and their communities. We propose that interspecies design can help to tackle this problem. Understood as a process of designing for and with multiple species, our framework for interspecies design incorporates human and nonhuman cultural knowledge. Such knowledge presents novel opportunities for design and fosters beneficial relationships between humans and nonhumans. However, interspecies design also presents ethical challenges. Engaging with these challenges, we investigate morethan-human conceptions of justice through the capabilities approach. Our project tests the capabilities approach in application to an ongoing project that aims to help powerful owls thrive in cities. By comparing past baselines with present-day behaviours, we demonstrate that cities restrict many aspects of owl lives. We also consider how possible human-owl cultures might support or hinder capabilities of urban inhabitants. Our analysis reiterates the significance of human cultures for the wellbeing of nonhuman lives. Significantly, we demonstrate that the capabilities approach can support nonhuman interests within the design process, establish more equitable design goals, and set clearer criteria for design ideas. Such findings have important implications for architects, urban planners, developers, local governments, academics, educators, and conservation organisations who share the goal of supporting multispecies cohabitation in cities.

114 Tonkinwise, “‘I Prefer Not to.’”

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Supplementary Materials A.

Evidence for Table 1: Baseline capabilities of powerful owls

Capabilities Definition Examples Health Live a normal length life, in good health and free from bodily intrusion or violence, with opportunities to develop a full range of senses. Rest Choose favourable roosting sites. Access perches with good shelter (e. g., tree cover/height);115 camouflage and hide.116 Feed Bathe Play

Practice typical hunting and foraging strategies and choose food.

Exhibit rare prey-holding behaviour for food storage or territorial display;117 maintain a mixed diet.118 Access water to drink, clean self, or Bathe and drink in freshwater regulate body temperature. pools.119

Autonomy

Access sources of pleasure, enjoy Ferry bark-strips, snatch at foliage, recreational activities, or have ad- swoop, hang upside-down on equate sensory stimulation. branches, and chase animals.120 Make own decisions and have freedom of movement.

Move

Choose when and where to fly.

Fledge

Access adequate structures to land on when leaving nest and gain independence.

Movements that support prey handling, foraging, and transit.121 Access complex vegetative structure (i. e., shrubs) to land on when learning how to fly.122

115 Raylene, Wallis, and White, “Use of Vegetative Structure by Powerful Owls.” 116 McNabb, “Observations on the Biology of the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua in Southern Victoria.” 117 Chris Pavey, “Evolution of Prey Holding Behaviour and Large Male Body Size in Ninox Owls (Strigidae),” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 95, no. 2 (2008): 284–92, https://doi.org/10/d5gszc. 118 Rohan Bilney, Raylene Cooke, and John White, “Change in the Diet of Sooty Owls (Tyto tenebricosa) Since European Settlement: From Terrestrial to Arboreal Prey and Increased Overlap with Powerful Owls,” Wildlife Research 33, no. 1 (2006): 17–24, https://doi.org/10/fj 45h8. 119 Stacey McLean, “Remote Camera Capture of a Powerful Owl Ninox strenua Bathing and Drinking,” Australian Field Ornithology 35 (2018): 117–18, https://doi.org/10/gmx54x. 120 Matthew Mo and David R. Waterhouse, “Development of Independence in Powerful Owl Ninox strenua Fledglings in Suburban Sydney,” Australian Field Ornithology 32, no. 3 (2015): 143–53. 121 Nicholas Carter et al., “Joining the Dots: How Does an Apex Predator Move Through an Urbanizing Landscape?,” Global Ecology and Conservation 17 (2019): 1–12, https://doi.org /10/gfw2jf. 122 Mo and Waterhouse, “Development of Independence in Powerful Owl Ninox strenua Fledglings in Suburban Sydney.”

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(Continued) Capabilities Definition Disperse Disperse into adequate territories and establish own home-range. Defend Affiliation Socialise Learn Mate Nest

Examples Disperse into areas without clustering;123 establish home-range in high-quality habitat.124 Defend territory from threats. Protect territory from intruders, including humans and conspecifics, via vocal displays or swooping.125 Form rewarding relationships with others and have choice of attachment to others.

Develop and express the local dialect and have connections with conspecifics. Develop local knowledge and expertise based on interactions with conspecifics or others.

Practice different variations of the typical ‘woo-hoo’ call (i. e., deep, soft, excited).126 Learn hunting strategies from parents and siblings127 or the routines of prey.128

Find potential mates, court, and Bleat, duet, preen, gift food, and mate. copulate.129 Access potential nesting sites to in- Access large tree-hollows.130 cubate eggs and raise young.

123 Fiona E. Hogan and Raylene Cooke, “Insights into the Breeding Behaviour and Dispersal of the Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua) through the Collection of Shed Feathers,” Emu 110, no. 2 (2010): 178–84, https://doi.org/10/d2c6rt. 124 Todd Soderquist and Dale Gibbons, “Home-Range of the Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua) in Dry Sclerophyll Forest,” Emu 107, no. 3 (2007): 177–184, https://doi.org/10.1071/MU06055. 125 McNabb, “Observations on the Biology of the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua in Southern Victoria.” 126 Ibid. 127 Mo and Waterhouse, “Development of Independence in Powerful Owl ‘Ninox strenua’ Fledglings in Suburban Sydney.” 128 Matthew Mo et al., “Observations of Hunting Attacks by the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua and an Examination of Search and Attack Techniques,” Australian Zoologist 38, no. 1 (2016): 52–58, https://doi.org/10/ghhz. 129 Bronwyn Isaac, “Owl About Town,” Wildlife Australia 52, no. 1 (2015): 22–25; McNabb, “Observations on the Biology of the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua in Southern Victoria.” 130 Todd Soderquist et al., “Habitat Quality in Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua) Territories in the Box–Ironbark Forest of Victoria, Australia,” in Ecology and Conservation of Owls, ed. Ian Newton et al. (Collingwood: CSIRO, 2002), 91–99.

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Evidence for Table 2: Present-day capabilities of powerful owls

Capabilities Change (from past to present) Possible New Behaviour Health Owls are subject to several health risks in cities including car strikes, electrocution, attacks from introduced species such as cats, dogs, and foxes,131 and secondary poisoning.132 Availability of healthcare in veterinary clinics or sanctuaries does not substantially alter this overarching trend. Rest

Limited sites for resting; possible susceptibility to disturbance including, noise, light, and infrastructure.133

Feed

Less diversity134 but greater abundance of prey including possums.135

Bathe

Less availability of riparian areas for bathing. Relatively unchanged opportunities to play, for example by swinging on branches.

Play

Use of sub-par natural roosts that do not allow effective thermoregulation; human-made roosting sites such as tennis court fences, powerlines, and cars. Smaller home-ranges;136 novel food such as fish,137 koalas,138 and brush turkeys.139 Use of human-made bathing spots like bird ponds.140 Snatching of human-made objects of stimulation, such as clothing,141 cooler bags,142 and tea-towels.143

131 Department of Environment and Conservation, “Recovery Plan for the Large Forest Owls.” 132 Graham Readfearn, “Powerful Owl Deaths Fuel Concerns Mouse Poison Is Spreading Through Food Chain,” The Guardian, June 12, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/envi ronment/2021/jun/12/powerful-owl-deaths-fuel-concerns-mouse-poison-is-spreading-thr ough-food-chain. 133 Nick Bradsworth et al., “Where to Sleep in the City? How Urbanisation Impacts Roosting Habitat Availability for an Apex Predator,” Global Ecology and Conservation 26 (2021): e01494, https://doi.org/10/gh4477. 134 James A. Fitzsimons and A. B. Rose, “Diet of Powerful Owls ‘Ninox Strenua’ in Inner City Melbourne Parks, Victoria,” Australian Field Ornithology 27, no. 2 (2010): 76–80. 135 Cooke et al., “Powerful Owls: Possum Assassins Move into Town.” 136 Nick Bradsworth et al., “Species Distribution Models Derived from Citizen Science Data Predict the Fine Scale Movements of Owls in an Urbanizing Landscape,” Biological Conservation 213, Part A (2017): 27–35, https://doi.org/10/gbxrkb. 137 Matthew Mo, Peter Hayler, and Antonia Hayler, “Fish-Catching by a Juvenile Powerful Owl Ninox Strenua,” Australian Field Ornithology 33 (2016): 112–15, https://doi.org/10/gfspxq. 138 Bob Hambling and Chris Pavey, “Predation on Koalas by Breeding Powerful Owls,” Australian Field Ornithology 25, no. 3 (2008): 140–44. 139 Ann Goth and Mary Maloney, “Powerful Owl Preying on an Australian Brush-Turkey in Sydney,” Australian Field Ornithology 29, no. 2 (2012): 102–4. 140 Andrew Gregory, “Powerful Owl Takes a Bath: See the Video,” Australian Geographic, February 15, 2021, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2021/02/rare-powerful -owl-takes-a-bath-see-the-video/. 141 Refer to the image by Choosypix in the main text of the article, showing an owl swinging of shorts.

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(Continued) Capabilities Change (from past to present) Possible New Behaviour Autonomy Owls maintain autonomy in cities, but the destruction of habitats has reduced opportunities to fully exercise their capabilities. Urbanisation can affect animals’ ability to live good lives by undermining freedoms and restricting options.144 Move Continued freedom of movement Long-distance flight across areas of but with more dangers when flying unsuitable habitat to connect to and less places to fly to. another habitat patch.145 Fledge Disrupted fledging due to the Greater mortality of fledglings; clearance of understory or treeadoption of orphan owls;147 human lopping practices.146 aid in rehabilitating/fostering fledglings.148 Disperse

Defend

Less availability of suitable areas for offspring dispersal in treeless areas;149 risk of increased mortality, inbreeding and lower fecundity.150 Possibly more threats to defend territory from.

Young owls remain with their parents for longer.151 Techniques to defend territories from other owls152 and the mobbing of introduced birds.153

142 Choosypix, “Powerful Owl (Juvenile) Catches and Eats Wattlebird,” Birds in Backyards, March 1, 2015, https://www.birdsinbackyards.net/forum/Powerful-Owl-juvenile-catches-a nd-eats-wattlebird. 143 Choosypix, “Powerful Owl (Juvenile) Catches and Eats Tea-Towel,” Birds in Backyards, January 29, 2015, https://www.birdsinbackyards.net/forum/Powerful-Owl-juvenile-catches -and-eats-tea-towel. 144 Delon, “Animal Capabilities and Freedom in the City.” 145 Carter et al., “Joining the Dots.” 146 Peter Hannam, “Powerful Friends in Low Places Rescue and Release Disoriented Owlet,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 16, 2018, https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conse rvation/powerful-friends-in-low-places-rescue-and-release-disoriented-owlet-20180914-p5 03va.html. 147 Beth Mott, “The Powerful Owl Project: 2020 Season Round Up,” last modified December 2020. https://birdlife.org.au/documents/Powl_December_20.pdf. 148 Ed McNabb, “The Successful Rehabilitation of Two Powerful Owl Fledglings,” Australian Bird Watcher 15, no. 7 (1994): 287–97. 149 Department of Environment and Conservation, “Recovery Plan for the Large Forest Owls.” 150 Hogan and Cooke, “Insights into the Breeding Behaviour and Dispersal of the Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua) through the Collection of Shed Feathers.” 151 Andrew Gregory, “Powerful Owls: The Reason to Protect Remnant Bushland in Our Cities,” Australian Geographic, December 30, 2019, https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topic s/wildlife/2019/12/powerful-owls-the-reason-to-protect-remnant-bushland-in-our-cities/. 152 Matthew Mo, Peter Hayler, and Antonia Hayler, “Male Combat in the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua,” Australian Field Ornithology 32, no. 4 (2015): 190–200. 153 Matthew Mo et al., “Observations of Mobbing and Other Agonistic Responses to the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua,” Australian Zoologist 38, no. 1 (2016): 43–51, https://doi.org /10/gfsp2c.

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(Continued) Capabilities Change (from past to present) Possible New Behaviour Affiliation Increased affiliation with humans in cities may positively or negatively affect owls’ wellbeing. Some humans poach owls.154 Some urban owls habituate to human presence155 and enter places near humans such as zoos.156 Socialise Fewer opportunities to socialise Interaction with humans157 and with conspecifics due to sparse possible change in vocalizations urban populations. between regions.158 Learn Greater need to adapt to cope with Development of personality traits new threats. that help urban exploitation, such as ‘pushy’ juveniles.159 Mate Nest

More human disturbance and fewer opportunities to find mates. Less opportunity to reproduce161 because of the shortage and decline of old hollow-bearing trees.162

Possible breeding failure and infanticide due to human presence.160 Use of novel structures including introduced trees,163 human-made hollows, or arboreal termite nests.164

154 Miki Perkins, “Men Sought After ‘Endangered Powerful Owl’ Shot Dead in State Forest,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 3, 2021, https://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation /men-sought-after-endangered-powerful-owl-shot-dead-in-state-forest-20210401-p57fsw. html. 155 Mo et al., “Observations of Hunting Attacks by the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua and an Examination of Search and Attack Techniques.” 156 Taronga Conservation Society Australia, “Rare Display of Power,” April 8, 2010, https://ta ronga.org.au/news/2018-07-11/rare-display-power. 157 Gregory, “Powerful Owls.” 158 Anna Salleh, “Powerful Owl Chicks Are Poking Their Head Out of the Nest for the First Time – and Scientists Need Your Help to Protect Them Properly,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, August 10, 2021, https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-08-08/powerfulowl-chicks-emerge-from-the-nest/100334196. 159 Mott, “The Powerful Owl Project: 2020 Season Round Up.” 160 Alan Webster et al., “Diet, Roosts and Breeding of Powerful Owls Ninox strenua in a Disturbed, Urban Environment: A Case for Cannibalism? Or a Case of Infanticide?,” Emu 99, no. 1 (1999): 80–83, https://doi.org/10/chg6xn. 161 Isaac, “Owl About Town”; Isaac et al., “Does Urbanization Have the Potential to Create an Ecological Trap for Powerful Owls (Ninox strenua)?” 162 Darren S. Le Roux et al., “Reduced Availability of Habitat Structures in Urban Landscapes: Implications for Policy and Practice,” Landscape and Urban Planning 125 (2014): 57–64, https://doi.org/10/f55h66. 163 Centennial Parklands, “The Parklands’ Powerful Owlet Is Happy and Healthy,” November 29, 2018, https://www.centennialparklands.com.au/stories/2018/the-parklands-powerful-o wlet-is-happy-and-healthy. 164 Roudavski and Parker, “Modelling Workflows for More-than-Human Design.”

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Evidence for Fig. 4: Design goals for capabilities

Timeline Title Past -300 Colonisers arrive years

Europeans establish Sydney Cove colony in 1788.165

-100 Urbanisation depletes habitat years -30 years -

Melbourne’s human population reaches 1,000,000.166 Owls exploit urban areas.167

-10 years -3 years -

Owls try a nest box.168 Owls use a termite nest.169

Projected Future +3 years Interspecies design improves

Termite nest formed now degrades.170

+10 years +30 years

Description

Interspecies cultures develop

Nest box built now breaks.171

Interspecies design produces impact

Tree hollows in use now become unusable due to removal or decay.172

165 By the time that John Gould scientifically described the Powerful Owl in 1838, the European colonisers had explored much of coastal south-eastern Australia. Ian McAllan and Dariel Larkins, “Historical Records of the Powerful Owl Ninox strenua in Sydney and Comments on the Species’ Status.” 166 Melbourne’s human population reached 1,000,000 in 1929 and continues to grow today. Clay Lucas and Craig Butt, “Five Million Melburnians: City’s Population Hits Milestone Tomorrow,” The Age, August 31, 2018, https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/five-milli on-melburnians-city-s-population-hits-milestone-tomorrow-20180830-p500rm.html. 167 Several studies report powerful-owl sightings in urban areas within the past 30 years. See Raylene Cooke, Robert Wallis, and Alan Webster, “Urbanisation and the Ecology of Powerful Owls in Outer Melbourne, Victoria,” in Ecology and Conservation of Owls, ed. Ian Newton (Collingwood, VIC: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, 2002), 100–106. 168 Powerful owls used a nest box 10 years ago. This is the only recorded occasion that powerful owls have nested in a human-made structure. See McNabb and Greenwood, “A Powerful Owl Disperses into Town and Uses an Artificial Nest-Box.” 169 Refer to the image by Ofer Levy (2017) in the main text of the article. 170 Damage to termite nests is common and can limit longevity. Yael D. Lubin, G. Gene Montgomery, and Orrey P. Young, “Food Resources of Anteaters (Edentata: Myrmecophagidae) I. A Year’s Census of Arboreal Nests of Ants and Termites on Barro Colorado Island, Panama Canal Zone,” Biotropica 9, no. 1 (1977): 26–34, https://doi.org/10/cc88s9. 171 Many nest boxes have short lifespans, often breaking or falling within 10 years. See David B. Lindenmayer et al., “Are Nest Boxes a Viable Alternative Source of Cavities for HollowDependent Animals? Long-Term Monitoring of Nest Box Occupancy, Pest Use and Attrition,” Biological Conservation 142, no. 1 (2009): 33–42, https://doi.org/10/fqpr7n. 172 Tree hollows can have a lifespan of 30 years or more, but many do not last that long. See Tomasz Wesołowski, “‘Lifespan’ of Non-Excavated Holes in a Primeval Temperate Forest: A 30 Year Study,” Biological Conservation 153 (2012): 118–26, https://doi.org/10/f38hf 7.

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(Continued) Timeline Title +300 Interspecies design supports years mutually beneficial relationships Possible Future +3 years Interspecies design improves +10 years

Interspecies cultures develop

+30 years

Interspecies design produces impact

Description Trees planted now form hollows large enough for the powerful owl,173 but only 13% of today’s hollow-bearing trees remain.174 Humans develop nesting structures that appeal to owls’ sensory capacities and accommodate a range of owl behaviours.175 Humans develop cultures that help to keep mature/decayed trees in the landscape,176 depart from urban sprawl,177 and cultivate ecological literacy.178 Humans implement city-wide regeneration strategies, including reinstating lost waterways, converting roads into vegetation corridors, and retrofitting buildings with habitat-structures.179

173 Suitable hollows for powerful owls do not develop in trees until they are 150–500 years old. See Cooke et al., “Powerful Owls.” 174 In Canberra, where there are powerful owls nearby, the number of hollow-bearing trees in urban greenspace is likely to decline by 87% over 300 years under existing management practices. Le Roux et al., “The Future of Large Old Trees in Urban Landscapes.” 175 The widespread interest in and experimentation with different human-made hollows suggests improved human-made hollow designs are possible. Refer to Image 3 in the main text of the article. 176 Large-old trees are critical habitat-structures. There is a need and potential for urbandwelling humans to develop ecocentric cultures that enable large-old trees to mature in the landscape. See Stanislav Roudavski and Ashley Davis, “Respect for Old Age and Dignity in Death: The Case of Urban Trees,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand: 37, What If ? What Next? Speculations on History’s Futures, ed. Kate Hislop and Hannah Lewi (Perth: SAHANZ, 2020), 638–352. 177 Proposing design visions can offer useful devices to help imagine alternative future-scenarios that depart from unsustainable, sprawling urban development. Sidh Sintusingha, “Sustainability and Urban Sprawl: Alternative Scenarios for a Bangkok Superblock,” Urban Design International 11, no. 3–4 (2006): 151–72, https://doi.org/10/bnsddh. 178 Pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours are more likely in humans who have greater ecological knowledge and awareness. For example, see S. D. Pitman, C. B. Daniels, and P. C. Sutton, “Characteristics Associated with High and Low Levels of Ecological Literacy in a Western Society,” International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 25, no. 3 (2018): 227–37, https://doi.org/10/gfsp8j. 179 For example, see the urban mapping proposals in Roudavski and Parker, “Modelling Workflows for More-than-Human Design: Prosthetic Habitats for the Powerful Owl (Ninox strenua).”

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(Continued) Timeline Title +300 Interspecies design supports years mutually beneficial relationships

D.

Description Human interest in, appreciation of, and knowledge about owls is high; owl tolerance of humans and human-made structures is high.180

Evidence for Table 3 and Fig. 5: Human-owl cultures globally

Relationship Captive Experiment

Examples Possible Impact on Capabilities Captive refers to animals that live among, depend on, or are confined by humans. Captivity provides some health benefits but risks diminishing owls’ ability to exercise autonomy or maintain affiliation. Humans use owls as medical sub- Laboratory conditions do not jects, for example neuroscientists allow owls to express their capagain insights into human brain bilities but support improvements function by analysing how barn to human health. owls learn.181

Entertainment Humans keep owls for entertainment purposes, such as in zoo displays, acting, or in cafes.

Companion

Humans keep owls as pets for conservation182 or affiliation purposes; digital media183 including popular films184 increases such practices leading to illegal trade and abandonment of pets.

Human aid means owls live longer but suffer confined and heavily managed conditions that diminish their ability to maintain sound mental health, move freely, establish species norms of socialisation, and choose nesting sites/raise young. Enclosures restrict owls’ choice of attachment to others and freedom of movement, affecting their ability to develop local calls or hunting strategies. Poor handling/treatment harm owls’ heath.

180 For discussion of the potential for both solidarity and conflict between humans and owls, see the abstract and forthcoming article of Dan Parker and Stanislav Roudavski, “Abstract of: Toward Interspecies Art: Prosthetic Habitats in Human and Owl Cultures,” Leonardo 54, no. 5 (2021): 575, https://doi.org/10/gqcg. 181 Hans Peeters, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 182 Michael Archer, “Confronting Crises in Conservation: A Talk on the Wild Side,” in A Zoological Revolution: Using Native Fauna to Assist in Its Own Survival, ed. Daniel Lunney and Chris R. Dickman (Mosman: Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, 2002), 12–52. 183 Penthai Penthai, Kimberly Nekaris, and Vincent Nijman, “Digital Media and the ModernDay Pet Trade: A Test of the Harry Potter Effect and the Owl Trade in Thailand,” Endangered Species Research 41 (2020): 7–16, https://doi.org/10/gkq9t9.

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(Continued) Relationship Patient

Examples Possible Impact on Capabilities Humans keep injured or ill owls as Human aid improves owl health but restricts autonomy in the short patients in medical clinics or term. sanctuaries; pre-release conditioning teaches birds how to survive in the wild again (mobility, agility, hunting experience).185 Liminal refers to animals that live in human settlements but do not necessarily affiliate with or depend on humans. Compared to captive owls, liminal birds have greater autonomy and opportunities for affiliation. Humans (falconers) train owls as Enclosures reduce autonomy but hunting partners to acquire food – typical hunting techniques resume a practice existing for several upon release. Owls regain authousands of years.186 tonomy when they choose not to come back or when falconers release them into the wild.

Liminal

Labour

Urban Visitor

Synanthrope

Owls adjust their behaviours to exploit urban environments, for example, by learning to make shelters or nesting sites instead of relying on existing structures.187 Owls range freely, live closely alongside humans, and benefit from human activities such that they can become ‘synanthropes’;188 increased populations lead to humans viewing owls as pests.

Owls encounter urban threats that significantly reduce their opportunity to live full, healthy lives. More frequent encounters create mutually beneficial affiliation between humans, owls, and other animals but with additional risk of conflict.

184 Vincent Nijman and K. Anne-Isola Nekaris, “The Harry Potter Effect: The Rise in Trade of Owls as Pets in Java and Bali, Indonesia,” Global Ecology and Conservation 11 (2017): 84–94, https://doi.org/10/gfspx9. 185 Scott Ford and Kristen Dubé, “Pre-Release Conditioning,” in Medical Management of Wildlife Species, ed. Sonia M. Hernandez et al. (Hoboken: Wiley, 2019), 105–22. 186 Clint W. Boal and Cheryl R. Dykstra, eds., Urban Raptors: Ecology and Conservation of Birds of Prey in Cities (Washington: Island Press, 2018). 187 Jakob C. Mueller et al., “Evolution of Genomic Variation in the Burrowing Owl in Response to Recent Colonization of Urban Areas,” The Royal Society Publishing 285, no. 1878 (2018): 1–9. 188 Amy R. Klegarth, “Synanthropy,” in The International Encyclopedia of Primatology, ed. Agustín Fuentes (Chichester: Wiley, 2017), 1–5.

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(Continued) Relationship Mutualist

Wild Omen

Resource

Recluse

Examples Possible Impact on Capabilities Owls maintain freedom of moveHumans and owls establish mutually beneficial relationships; for ment, choice of food and habitat, example, humans provide nesting and opportunities to reproduce, sites while owls keep rodents away while human health and affiliation with other animals also improves. from crops.189 Wild refers to animals that live apart from humans or have little to do with humans. Owls can express their full range of capabilities in the wild. However, human-cultural behaviours can still affect wild owls. Humans commonly use owls as Omens impact owls differently omens.190 Some humans think that because they range from associaowls are noble, beneficial, wise and tion with good luck and wisdom to benign beings;191 others view owls bad luck, terror, evil, death, and with superstition,192 pessimism,193 sickness.195 or believe that they are ‘diabolical’ and should be killed.194 Humans treat owls as resources, hunting owls for food, making arrows, trading,196 magic medicine, or fun during hunting trips.197 Owls live rurally and separate from humans. Yet, conflicts still emerge for example in the arguments between conservationists and loggers.198 Tourism and education on ecosystem service helps alter negative perceptions.199

Hunting takes away owls’ ability to live an autonomous and fulllength life. Conflict creates challenges but owls still exercise the range of their species-specific behaviours.

189 Kobi Meyrom et al., “Nest-Box Use by the Barn Owl Tyto alba in a Biological Pest Control Program in the Beit She’an Valley, Israel,” Ardea 97, no. 4 (2009): 463–67, https://doi.org /10/ccpkwf. 190 Felice Wyndham and Karen Park, “‘Listen Carefully to the Voices of the Birds’: A Comparative Review of Birds as Signs,” Journal of Ethnobiology 38, no. 4 (2018): 533–49, https://doi.org/10/gfsszp. 191 Heimo Mikkola, “General Public Knowledge of Owls in Finland,” Buteo 11 (2000): 5–18. 192 Heimo Mikkola and Helmo Mikkola, “General Public Owl Knowledge in Malawi,” The Society of Malawi Journal 50, no. 1 (1997): 13–35. 193 Abdel Fattah N Abd Rabou, “On the Owls (Order Strigiformes) Inhabiting the Gaza Strip – Palestine,” JOJ Wildlife & Biodiversity 3, no. 1 (2020): 1–11. 194 Soledad Molares and Yamila Gurovich, “Owls in Urban Narratives: Implications for Conservation and Environmental Education in NW Patagonia (Argentina),” Neotropical Biodiversity 4, no. 1 (2018): 164–72, https://doi.org/10/gjvz73. 195 Peeters, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West. 196 Alejandro Bodrati et al., “The Owls of Paraguay,” in Neotropical Owls: Diversity and Conservation, ed. Paula Enriquez (New York: Springer, 2017), 619–631. 197 Mikkola and Mikkola, “General Public Owl Knowledge in Malawi.” 198 Peeters, Field Guide to Owls of California and the West, 135.

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(Continued) Relationship Human Thought

Examples Owls exist only in human thought, or in representations rather than direct experience including photos, documentaries, films, fairy tales, picture books, songs, commercials, or soft toys.200

Possible Impact on Capabilities Extinction means owls are unable to exercise any capabilities. Detachment and mediated learning contribute to an ‘extinction of experience’ in humans, harming health and affiliation.

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Transpositiones, 1/2022, Jg. 1, ISSN 2749-4128 © 2022 V&R unipress | Brill Deutschland GmbH

Transpositiones (2022), Volume 1, Issue 1, DOI 10.14220/trns.2022.1.issue-1

Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0

Transpositiones, 1/2022, Jg. 1, ISSN 2749-4128 © 2022 V&R unipress | Brill Deutschland GmbH