Posthuman Folklore

Tok Thompson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496825100
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythologie

Can a monkey own a selfie? Can a chimp use habeas corpus to sue for freedom? Can androids be citizens? Increasingly, such difficult questions have moved from the realm of science fiction into the realm of everyday life, and scholars and laypeople alike are struggling to find ways to grasp new notions of personhood. Posthuman Folklore is the first work of its kind: both an overview of posthumanism as it applies to folklore studies and an investigation of "vernacular posthumanisms"—the ways in which people are increasingly performing the posthuman. Posthumanism calls for a close investigation of what is meant by the term "human" and a rethinking of this, our most basic ontological category. What, exactly, is human? What, exactly, am I? There are two main threads of posthumanism: the first dealing with the increasingly slippery slope between "human" and "animal, " and the second dealing with artificial intelligences and the growing cyborg quality of human culture. This work deals with both these threads, seeking to understand the cultural roles of this shifting notion of "human" by centering its investigation into the performances of everyday life.From funerals for AIBOs, to furries, to ghost stories told by Alexa, people are increasingly engaging with the posthuman in myriad everyday practices, setting the stage for a wholesale rethinking of our humanity. In Posthuman Folklore, author Tok Thompson traces both the philosophies behind these shifts, and the ways in which people increasingly are enacting such ideas to better understand the posthuman experience of contemporary life.

PART 1

THE CONSCIOUS PLANET

Part one takes as its starting point the remarkable recent developments in ethology, which increasingly confirm our close ontological links with other life forms on Earth. The first chapter sets out the implications for such developments for our understanding of culture, communication, and consciousness, with a particular focus on the role of aesthetics as a possible touchstone. It makes the case, following developments in ethology, that folklore (and, indeed, culture in general) can no longer be considered the sole domain of Homo sapiens, but rather must be viewed as shared inheritances with much of life on Earth.

The second chapter, The Ape that Captured Time, focuses on what may be a significant disjuncture between the folklore of human and nonhuman animals, that being the story. The story is perhaps the single most significant factor of what it is to be human, and the story’s strong relationship with folklore studies reveals this ongoing significance. Tracing the story of the story back in time may therefore tell us a good deal about human evolution, showing both what we have in common with other animals, and what we may claim as unique to our own species. The story is a fundamental part of nearly all aspects of being human, from the stories of nations, creation, fiction, to our own autobiographies, our very sense of self.

The following two chapters investigate some of the implications of posthumanism in how cultures envision their relations to animals. If animals are much like people, should they be considered persons? “Somewhat” persons? To approach vernacular attitudes of “animal personhood,” I investigate the idea of souls: which cultures believe that animals have souls, and which do not? What are the foundations, and implications, of such beliefs?

The last chapter looks at vernacular ways of considering relationships, particularly the notion of sexuality. Sexuality proclaims, disclaims, and establishes relations. Sexuality is also highly culturally encoded, and in the case of Western cultures, integrated with the notion of souls, personhood, and culture. Why is it that animals have come to represent our “wild” instincts? Such thoughts tell us a great deal more about our own cultural views than they do of the wild itself, and, as such, provide resources for understanding vernacular thoughts of ontology.

Part one of this book sets the stage for thinking about our ontology, particularly in terms of a biological ontology: what is it to be an animal, and why are we so often uncomfortable with that label? Our kinship to our carbon-based kin is fraught with cultural signification. Looking at cultures comparatively can give some glimpses as to the contours of this signification.

Such investigations emerge from the “shadow side” of the other main strand of posthumanism, investigated in parts two and three, the increasingly cyborg quality of human life. If we wish to know what it is to be a cyborg, then we must become well aware of what it is not to be one: that is to say, to understand our virtual lives and thoughts, we are led back to examining our biological lives and thoughts, and, to do so, led back to examining our animality, and our kinship with life on Earth.

Investigations into our biological ontology are also important in understanding our current situation and potential futures: as we enter the Anthropocene, where life on Earth itself is being radically transformed (and attenuated) by humankind, such philosophical inquiries carry profound pragmatic consequences. Our biology dictates a need for our kin: without the rest of life, we will surely perish, not only as a culture but as a species. Philosophical investigations into our posthuman ontology are therefore no longer a luxury. Increasingly, such investigations are a necessity, in order to be able to provide for a future for our descendants.

To begin the inquiry, let us turn to how we came to be: an origin story, to be sure, but, like all good origin stories, one with radical implications on how to live our lives.

1

FOLKLORE BEYOND THE HUMAN

Toward a Trans-Special Understanding of Culture, Communication, and Aesthetics

The scientific study of animal behavior (ethology) is increasingly employing the concept of culture to explain nonhuman animal behaviors and, largely stemming from this, the category of nonhuman culture is increasingly influencing the work of many scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well. This remarkable line of inquiry across diverse fields and disciplines has opened up new questions and avenues for research, in what many have called the “animal turn” in general philosophical discourse.¹

My question in this chapter is how humanities scholars and social scientists, and particularly folklorists, may now approach the study of nonhuman culture, and what may be some of the theoretical implications of such approaches. Since folklore is a discipline focusing on the very topic of collectively shaped, traditional, expressive culture, it would seem to be in an ideal position to take the lead in this newly emerging realm of the study of culture beyond the human.² That nonhuman animals have folklore has already been proposed in folklore studies by Jay Mechling, in his work “‘Banana Cannon’ and Other Folk Traditions Between Human and Nonhuman Animals” (1989), which I reified in 2010 as the “banana canon”—the general recognition that nonhumans have folklore (see chapter 2). Somewhat contemporaneously, animal studies have increasingly documented behavior among nonhumans that may be interpreted productively as cultural, traditional performances. How, then, may folklorists use these revelations in ongoing studies of nonhuman culture, increasingly noted and studied by biologists, and subsume them into the discipline? How can we bring the “animal turn” to folkloristics?

One of the necessary steps in such an approach is to try to destabilize the false human-animal binary (humans are animals)—and with that, the false binary between “social sciences and humanities” that study humans and “physical and biological sciences” that study (mostly) nonhumans—and to try to open up ways that scholarship can engage with animal thoughts without focusing on what people think of animals. There are difficulties, of course; folklorists are not accustomed to nonhuman informants and are not used to examining nonhuman cultural expressions. Our very vocabulary tends toward the anthropocentric (we often work in “humanities” departments, or perhaps “anthropology”). This chapter attempts to lay some groundwork in the other direction, in allowing folklore studies to productively study nonhuman cultures—analogous, perhaps, to how psychology has moved successfully toward allowing “animal psychology” as a valid subfield, which aids in the study of the evolution of psychological abilities and processes.

Perhaps the largest advantage in avoiding entrenched anthropocentrism is that this allows us to view cultural expressions in their evolutionary and biological framework.³ Unless we believe that artistic and aesthetic impulses were gifted to humans in a transcendent moment, we must acknowledge that they have emerged firmly embedded in the development of life on Earth, displaying our close kinship with the rest of Earth-based life. Such a move attempts to shift from an anthropocentric view of consciousness and culture (with analogues to creationist Abrahamic mythology) toward one that is more in harmony with current scientific discourses of the evolution of life.⁴

In this chapter, I focus on the notion of aesthetics as a touchstone. I attempt to show how an evolutionary look at aesthetics not only helps cross the human-animal divide, but also how it can help bridge the entrenched notion of a mind-body split, by examining the evolution of consciousness as well. This chapter attempts to ground my calls for the study of nonhuman expressive culture in a philosophical framework.

EXTRA-SPECIAL AESTHETICS

To begin, what do I mean when I say that animals have a sense of aesthetics? Let me offer some examples of recent scientific discoveries.

Example 1: Songbirds Change their Styles

Songbirds change their songs over time, and females tend to be more interested in the latest trends and styles (Williams et al. 2013). Such journals as Animal Behaviour are now filled with references to nonhuman “culture,” “tradition,” and “innovation.” How can ethnomusicologists help examine such trends? What can ethnomusicology contribute to animal studies noticing such phenomena? Why do birds change their tunes; are their tunes getting better and better? More or less diverse? Is there a weight of tradition, or is it more of a faddish, pop star of the moment sort of thing? What is the role of singing, and listening to songs, in the wider realm of avian culture? There are indications that birds, like people, change their repertoires in part depending on where they live: in the cities, the songs tend to be louder and faster—for both (see e.g., Slabbekoorn and den Boer-Visser 2006; Brumm 2006; Briefer et al. 2010; Nemeth and Brumm 2009).

Example 2: Nonhumans, Languages, and Dialects

Demonstrations of nonhuman languages (defined here as socially learned symbolic communications) have been steadily increasing in the scientific literature.⁵ Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of this is the existence of dialectical, as well as linguistic, differences. Examples include the sperm whale, the highly intelligent leviathans of the deep, who travel across the world’s oceans in closely bonded, interrelated social groups. They communicate with each other at great lengths, displaying not only individual identity in their communications, but also displaying regional varieties of varying degrees (Antunes et al. 2011). We know next to nothing of what they are saying, yet it seems to be important to them. As highly intelligent and highly social mammals, they are also nomadic, which intensifies the importance of their social relations. What is sperm whale linguistic culture like? How many languages and dialects are there? What are the “verbal arts of performance” (see Bauman 1975, 1977) of sperm whales?⁶ Note that sperm whales are not alone in displaying dialectical differences in their languages—far from it; other documented examples include orcas (Dayton 1990), the small furry hyrax (Kershenbaum et al. 2012), chimpanzees (Crockford et al. 2004), prairie dogs (Slobodchikoff and Coast 1980), and even goats (Briefer and McElligott 2012). Orcas have been observed learning new dialects (Deecke, Ford, and Spong 2000), and even learning to speak “dolphin” in captivity (Musser et al. 2014). The interesting interplay of dialects and social identity in aesthetic performances captures the complexity and beauty of communication. The discipline of folklore has long been involved with understanding the plurality of cultural expressions, in their variegated degrees of relatedness (and often in direct contrast to nationalist ideologies or the ideals of a standard national language).⁷ What, then, could folklorists say about various dialectical differences in nonhuman cultures?

Example 3: “Madam, I’m Adam”: Dolphins Give Themselves Names

Dolphins have personal names (King and Janik 2013). Not only do dolphins give each other, and go by, personal names, but they also seem to remember names of individuals for decades between reunions (Bruck 2013). Absent writing technologies, names are, of course, folklore. Are the dolphin’s names nicknames, referring to some attribute of the individual? Or, if not, purely arbitrary? Family names? Is there a naming ceremony? If not, how are names arrived at socially; or, if there is, what is a dolphin naming ceremony? The questions far outweigh the answers.

These above examples reveal that aesthetic behavior, and, yes, artistic communication in small groups (as per Ben-Amos’s famous 1971 definition of “folklore”) have been increasingly documented in the animal studies literature. The pertinent questions then become: Why do organisms engage in aesthetic behaviors and reactions, and how did this evolve? How might different types of life have developed this differently?

Folklore performances are all deeply involved with aesthetics: what motivates a singer to sing a song (and an audience to listen), if not aesthetics? Does it matter whether the singer is human? Although there is no lack of work on aesthetics from all sorts of angles, there is precious little that looks at the aesthetics of nonhumans. Folklorists would seem to have much to offer in this regard: frameworks, perspectives, theories, concepts, and notions of “prior art” that could help elucidate performance and aesthetic behavior among nonhuman as well as human animals.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST THEORY? SOCIOBIOLOGY AND FREUD

An approach from the discipline of folklore would likely be somewhat different than the ones offered by sociobiology, which is the only field up until now to hypothesize on the development of human aesthetics. Sociobiology has contributed several major works on the topic, but, as with all sociobiological arguments, causation is notoriously difficult to prove, troubled by the teleology implicit in such arguments; we are such-and-such way because of such-and-such thing in the distant past, which can never be revisited. Proposed correlations abound, enabling various hypotheses to be proposed as to why, sociobiologically speaking, we are who we are.

In terms of aesthetics, the explanations in sociobiology are usually derived from Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest, relying on our survival (personal and reproductive) skills of natural selection. Many sociobiologists use a combination of Darwinian evolutionary theory with Freud’s theory of repression and sublimation to explain human aesthetics. Freud’s idea, explored particularly in Civilization and Its Discontents ([1930] 1962), was that humans developed civilization by the repression of incest. That repression of sexuality supposedly helps to form human societies through marriage and alliance groups, and is expressed in various dreams, fantasies, and cultural mythologies.⁸ This move toward “civilization” required the elemental repression of individual desires. This repression of individual desires (sexual but also aggressive) in turn gave rise to the symbolic expression of these individual, tabooed thoughts and feelings in art. For Freud, the energy of “civilized” aesthetics comes about primarily from the repression of sexual urges. However, most sociobiologists focus on aesthetics as deriving not so much from the repression of sexual desires as from the expression of them—an interestingly opposite supposition. This may be the effect of Darwinian ideas in sociobiology, which tend to emphasize the individual choices involved in natural (including sexual) selection, yet the net result still suggests a sudden creationist moment, when aesthetics as an expression of sexuality became aesthetics as repressed sexuality, giving us, once again, an absolute split between Homo and all other life forms.

While Freud’s theory may be attractive, there is of course no way to go back in time to see if this was indeed the case. And even if social repression of individual desires is at the root of aesthetics, what to make of the fact that sexual and/or aggressive desires are also strongly curtailed in many nonhuman cultures? Repression is not confined to Homo sapiens sapiens (see e.g., the classic Chimpanzee Politics [de Waal 1982]). Could this same Freudian principal then be applied to nonhuman cultures? Do their aesthetic activities also derive from social repression (and if so, what to make of the fact that our closest relatives, the bonobos, develop deep social bonds while engaging in a great deal of unrestrained sexual activity)? Further research in actual animal studies may illuminate this question, bringing a sense of testability to the Freudian theory on the evolution of civilization and aesthetics, rather than the common implicit assumption that aesthetics are another marker of “humaniqueness.”

Most sociobiological works implicitly assume that only humans have aesthetics, whatever the evolutionary antecedents might have been. One influential book was even entitled Homo Aestheticus (Dissanayake 1995). Another more recent, and more influential, work is Stephen Davies’s The Artful Species (2012) (the species to which he refers is, of course, humans). Such works underline the position that aesthetics is the realm of the human alone. Such a position is in line with Abrahamic mythological discourses that emphasize the absolute categorical difference between humans and all other forms of life (“God made man in His image”), but it is decidedly out of line with other mythological discourses, and current developments in Western science.⁹

While very often sociobiologists rely on the behavior of our relatives (particularly the close ones) to try to understand the biological roots of human behavior, this has not been well explored in the case of aesthetics. Instead, it is generally assumed that only humans have aesthetics, so there is no point of comparison between a human singer (aesthetically aware) and a nonhuman one (acting out of pure instinct). The relative lack of comparative animal studies of sociobiological theories of aesthetics is odd: most topics covered by sociobiology include a great deal of animal studies, while ideas of Homo aestheticus still seem predominant. Bereft of any useful comparisons from current data, sociobiological explanations of aesthetics are therefore even more hypothetical in nature than many other sociobiological theories. For example, one recent high-profile work, Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Posthumans and Us
• Part 1 The Conscious Planet
• Part 2 Becoming Cyborg
• Part 3 Us and them: Re-Imagining Ontology in the Cyborg Age
• Conclusion: Being after Being Human, a How-To Guide
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author