Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication

Internatural Communication

Emily Plec

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136182228
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias biológicas
• Categoría: Zoología

Despite its inherent interdisciplinarity, the Communication discipline has remained an almost entirely anthropocentric enterprise. This book represents early and prominent forays into the subject of human-animal communication from a Communication Studies perspective, an effort that brings a discipline too long defined by that fallacy of division, human or nonhuman, into conversation with animal studies, biosemiotics, and environmental communication, as well as other recent intellectual and activist movements for reconceptualizing relationships and interactions in the biosphere. This book is a much-needed point of entry for future scholarship on animal-human communication, as well as the whole range of communication possibilities among the more-than-human world. It offers a groundbreaking transformation of higher education by charting new directions for communication research, policy formation, and personal and professional practices involving animals.

1 Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication

An Introduction

Emily Plec

“Does every intelligent creature have to do things of which we can see the point and show its intelligence in ways we can recognize?”

—Mary Midgley (qtd. in McReynolds 157)

“We stand in community with other animals by virtue of our communication with them.”

—Douglas Anderson (190)

Many students of communication are drawn to the field, as I was, because of its inherent interdisciplinarity and because of its capacity to be inclusive of a wide range of perspectives and understandings of social interaction. Yet the academic discipline of communication has long suffered from a practical anthropocentrism that privileges human interaction and relegates the communication efforts of the more-than-human world to the margins of the discipline.¹ That many animals do indeed communicate—manipulating symbols, gesturing and even demonstrating a sense of self and other, has been argued at length by ethologists, zoologists, veterinarians, anthropologists, psychiatrists and biologists (e.g., Abram; Dawkins; Griffin; Mason; Midgley; Rogers and Kaplan; Sheldrake; Shepard; Zimmer). Gary Snyder puts it succinctly: “The evidence of anthropology is that countless men and women, through history and pre-history, have experienced a deep sense of communion and communication with nature and with specific non-human beings” (13).² As Jean Baudrillard points out, “animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed” (29). Moreover, animals communicate in myriad ways that are, at least for most humans, either poorly understood or entirely unrecognized. Perhaps the gulf between some social and natural sciences and communication studies has contributed to the neglect of animal communication and human-animal communication, the subject of this book.

Our purpose in these chapters is to open up this area of investigation through consideration of a wide range of communication perspectives on human interactions with animals. We wish to do for communication studies what Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert did for geography in their insightful collection Animal Spaces, Beastly Places. More than this, though, we want to aid readers of all backgrounds in rethinking the role of communication in the construction and transformation of human relationships with the more-than-human world. Thus, the anthropocentric impulse holds fast in many of the chapters that follow, not to mention in some of our assumptions and understandings of animal communication. Bound in these pages by human language, that ancient art of rhetoric, we both recognize our limitations and hold them up for scrutiny. For example, some authors use the language of ownership to describe human relationships with companion animals while others make rhetorical choices that seek to challenge our ways of understanding interaction with other animals.³ As Tema Milstein points out, “Struggles over discourse … are a necessary and interrelated part of wider struggles for change,” including changes to human relationships with animals (1052). These chapters are but a starting point for consideration of the ways in which communication theories and methodologies can help us to broaden our critical horizons to include other species and, indeed, other worlds.⁴

Those approaching this volume with a foundation in the humanities and social sciences may recognize this call from the writings of several philosophers who have influenced the field of communication. Charles Saunders Peirce and George Kennedy, whose scholarship has been foundational for the study of rhetoric, offer invitations to consider animal communication. Their contributions are discussed briefly alongside an overview of extradisciplinary scholarship that has also been influential in this area. Among the most notable semioticians to address the topic, for example, is Thomas Sebeok, whose various examinations of sign-based animal communication popularized the study of “zoosemiotics” or “biosemiotics” (Sebeok; Wheeler). Despite the ‘human’ bias in the communication field,⁵ a few scholars have succeeded in publishing articles that explicitly address the subject of nonhuman communication (Barker; Carbaugh; Hawhee; Liska; Neiva and Hickson; Rogers; Rummel). Richard Rogers, in his germinal essay arguing for a materialist, transhuman and dialogic theory of communication, summarizes much of the relevant ecofeminist literature, highlighting the need for “ways of listening to nondominant voices and nonhuman agents and their inclusion in the production of meaning, policy, and material conditions” (268). As David Abram writes,

To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. (Abram 22)

Critical theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari provide substantial insight into the larger question of how animals and humans might communicate with each other, as do several ecofeminist authors (Adams; Gaard; Haraway; Merchant; Warren). Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto characterizes animals as “signifying others” (81); in it, she echoes anthropologist Barbara Noske’s suggestion that we think about (and communicate with) animals as “other worlds” (34). Noske further suggests that ecofeminists, “unlike many other animal advocates … value non-animal nature, animate as well as inanimate” (Noske 173).⁶

For a semiotician such as Charles Saunders Peirce, feelings can “function as signs” (Anderson 86). He argued that animals have an instinct for communication and that the capacity to feel with another is the basis for perception. Clearly, certain animals signify with each other and across species, which Peirce described as “forms of communication … made possible by the shared feelings of difference perceivers” (qtd. in Anderson 87–88). Because of this ability to share feelings with others, Peirce suggests, like Kennedy, that we can “study the semeiotic, or sign-using, habits of all animals.” (Anderson 87).

We are aided in doing so by expanding our understanding of communication beyond that very human obsession with the structure and substance of verbal utterances. Animals, including humans, speak not only via vocalization but also in scent, posture, eye gaze, even vibration. John Durham Peters describes communication as “the occasional touch of otherness” (256). For Kennedy, rhetoric is more than discursive; it is a “natural phenomenon: the potential for it exists in all life forms that can give signals, it is practiced in limited forms by nonhuman animals, and it contributed to the evolution of human speech and language from animal communication” (Comparative Study 4). Elsewhere, Kennedy argues that “rhetorical energy is not found only in language. It is present also in physical actions, facial expressions, gestures, and signs generally” (“A Hoot” 3–4).

Admitting that humans are generally inept at employing most systems of animal communication, Kennedy argues that we still “share a ‘deep’ natural rhetoric” with animals (Comparative Study 13). Through observation, we can “learn to understand animal rhetoric and many animals can understand some features of human rhetoric that they share with us, such as gestures or sounds that express anger or friendliness or commands” (Comparative Study 13). Kennedy’s understanding of rhetoric suggests that communication is as much an exchange of energy as it is a matter of symbolic interaction (26). In fact, in his general definition of rhetoric, Kennedy alludes to the importance not only of acknowledging animal communication as rhetorical expression, but of enhancing the human interlocutor’s ability to understand and take action.

Rhetoric, in the most general sense, may thus be identified with the energy inherent in an utterance (or an artistic representation): the mental or emotional energy that impels the speaker to expression, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy received by the recipient who then uses mental energy in decoding and perhaps acting on the message. Rhetorical labor takes place. (Comparative Study 5)

On this last point, Barbara Noske points to several examples of humans who made an effort, who expended the rhetorical energy, to learn the language of their animal interlocutors and to listen to what they were expressing.⁷ From a communication standpoint, such efforts demonstrate awareness of a point Noske makes shortly after addressing the question, “Is Animal Language not Language?”

The basic question should not be whether animals have or have not human-like language. In having to pass our tests as measured by our yardsticks, they will always come out second best, namely, as reduced humans. The real question to be posed is how the animals themselves experience the world and how they organize this experience and communicate about it. (143–144).

Some of Noske’s other arguments about human-animal communication are worth repeating here because, just as the subfield of intercultural communication has learned a great deal from anthropological studies of other humans, students of what I term internatural communication have much to gain from a critical anthropological approach to animal communication. Of particular note are Noske’s observations regarding “feral” children raised by animals:

In becoming one with the animals by virtually crossing the species boundary, these human beings not only have met the Other, they have almost become the Other. And by accepting this strange being in their midst the adoptive animals in their turn meet the Other. Indeed, animal-adopted children exemplify an animal-human relationship more than a human-animal relationship. …

Even though we may not succeed in becoming animal with the animals, we as humans may make the effort of meeting the animals on their own ground instead of expecting them to take steps towards us and making them perform according to our standards. … To do this one must try to empathize with animals, to imagine what it is to be a wolf, a dolphin, a horse or an ape. (167)

She goes on to say, “Good participatory observation is basically an exercise in empathy while at the same time one is aware of the impossibility of total knowledge and total understanding” (169). It is this empathic impulse that drives this collection.⁸

Deleuze and Guattari’s essay “Becoming-Animal,” published in A Thousand Plateaus, provides a way of thinking about communication that, in some ways, echoes Noske’s call for empathy and Kennedy’s definition of rhetoric as essentially “a form of mental and emotional energy” (Comparative Study 3). For Deleuze and Guattari, “becoming-animal” is about movement and proximities. “Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a particular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone because they take on those relations” (122). They offer instructions for grasping this notion of human-animal compossibility, this “shared and indiscernible” proximity “that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between the human and the animal lies” (122).

An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter. Clearly, this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less directly related to the animal in question … (Deleuze and Guattari 123)

Later in the essay, the authors affirm the molecular nature of “becoming-animal”: “Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or forms that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or by habit” (124).

More than mimicry or reflection, though, this ‘becoming’ is a manifestation of corporeal dialogism, an “embodied rhetoricity” and perspective on communication that “forsakes oppositionality in favor of an all-encompassing perspective on the rhetorical act” (McKerrow 319). Emphasizing corporeality, Deleuze and Guattari suggest we must allow ourselves to feel, at a molecular level, the connection to otherness. In the process of becoming-molecular, becoming-animal, we humans might do wel...