Network Nature by Coyne Richard

Author:Coyne, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350029514
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Talking with animals

In Chapter 3, the Book on Nature, I outlined the insight of Peirce and others that all of nature is involved in communication through signs. I need hardly reiterate that animals communicate within and outside their own species boundaries, and we communicate with animals. Watching pet owners coach their pets to deploy human speech provides a cute diversion on YouTube. You can train a dog to say ‘hello’ as a vocalized yawn, or to growl out something like ‘sausages’. Animals (non-human) respond to what we say some of the time, but do not talk back in the same way, that is, using our language. A dog cannot tell its owner in words why it wants to be let out to the backyard and what it enjoys most about rolling about in the grass.

In this context, I am drawn to Derrida’s essay, ‘The animal that therefore I am’.43 Building on Saussure’s theories of signs, Jacques Derrida wrote about speech, talking, writing, meaning and language. He identified animals and their attributes throughout his writings: ants, silkworms, asses, animal sacrifice, suffering, shame, nakedness, etc. In this context, I think of Derrida as Peirce on speed, ludic, subversive and tricky. Derrida joins the chorus of scholars such as Donna Haraway who seek to unsettle categorical certainties, and thereby bring about social and political change.44 For example, Haraway asserts the cyborg ‘as our ontology’, a prototypic human–machine hybrid, a monster, a marginal entity that functions as a surrogate for minorities, the oppressed, women, and those without a key stake in the power structures. Derrida’s tactic in his essay ‘The animal that therefore I am’ is a bit different, and puts language at the centre of the critical discourse. According to my reading of Derrida, it is not just that we say animals cannot speak, but it is the way we speak about animals that is open to question and ready for renewal. At least Derrida helps explain our fascination with animals that talk, and machines that do something similar.45

I have attempted to show in this chapter how animals feature in cognition, the definition of difference, categorization, metaphor, power relations, aesthetic categories and language. We need only recall via Shepherd how the presence of domesticated animals permeates and defines the domestic sphere. So, our attitude to non-human animals implicates the idea of home, hearth and architecture in general. Our cognitive coupling with animals can be explained in terms of the human’s co-evolution with other creatures, our love of competition and the hunt, the animal’s availability for semiotic bricolage,46 the trickster archetype, monstrosity, the role of metaphor, human contest and issues around signs and language. Such accounts already presume our separateness from animals, but they serve to introduce the problematic of the animal and the human. Experiments with robotic pets, and the way we anthropomorphize animals, computers, engineering constructions and buildings also reflect our dealing with the animal in human nature. In this chapter I tried to reinforce the proposition that natural environments are complicit

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