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E-book Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices

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Penilaian

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Within Western institutional thinking, the human is constituted through an abil-ity to speak, defined as the sole creature who holds language and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. Along with language comes the power of naming, of choreographing the semantic categories put in place, continually reproduced and negotiated to make sense of the world. Language is a kind of gathering technology that enables collectivity and continuity between bodies and ideas. It is also a tool of separation and control, which holds a promise of mastery. Language is commonly thought of as that which sets “us” apart from the rest of species, as that which lifts and divides us from an otherwise mute or unintelligible materiality. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conver-sations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities; some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not.And still, we often think of ourselves as the sole creature in this universe capa-ble of actively producing meaning. This is a story of separation through semantics: that we, as humans, are separated from the rest of nature by that crucial dividing line called language that runs between those who speak and those who are spoken of. In this story, Man is master of nature, and nature is consequently reduced to a beautiful “out there,” an exotic other, pacified, and devoid of voice, lacking both political agency and legal rights.However, entering the vast and humming fields of multispecies storytelling comes with a set of urgent problems. Merging linguistics with the more-than-human world opens questions of anthropomorphism (i.e., adorning nonhumans with human faculties of speech) and problems of centering certain kinds of semi-otic faculties on the expense of others. All too often, the human becomes a sort of spokesperson, a well-meaning ventriloquist assuming the right to speak on behalf of the nonhuman other and hereby confirming, rather than challenging, the nor-mative taxonomical hierarchy of Western science. At the same time, as the multispecies philosopher and animal trainer Vicky Hearne reminds us, while the obstacles to transversal conversations between spe-cies are many, our lived, everyday experiences of multispecies cohabitation tell us that in practice, “we” often manage to understand each other. Beyond the bounda-ries of species, of different kinds of bodies, different dialects and their different apparatuses of communication, meaning is reproduced and confirmed within more-than-human encounters. Haraway, Despret, and likeminded thinkers have accounted for a kind of generative, open-ended, and ongoing multispecies mor-phology in which bodies, materials and ontologies are always negotiated, in which the contours of “we” are always morphing and emerging anew through a kind of deep contact founded within play, intercession, digestion. The question remains: how do we narrate and (re)present these encounters in ways that do not negate, annul, or overwrite the distinctive qualities and logics of a nonhuman semiotics?

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

790.2 BEN m

Penerbit

New York : Punctum books., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

325 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781685710231

Klasifikasi

790.2

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

The Performing Arts

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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