What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
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WHAT WOULD ANIMALS SAY IF WE ASKED THE RIGHT QUESTIONS? Cary Wolfe, Series Editor 38 WHAT WOULD ANIMALS SAY IF WE ASKED THE RIGHT QUESTIONS? Vinciane Despret 37 MANIFESTLY HARAWAY Donna J. Haraway 36 nEofinALISM Raymond Ruyer 35 INANIMATION: THEORIES OF INORGANIC LIFE David Wills 34 ALL THOUGHTS ARE EQUAL: LARUELLE AND NONHUMAN PHILOSOPHY John Ó Maoilearca 33 nECROMEDIA Marcel O’Gorman 32 THE INTELLECTIVE SPACE: THINKING BEYOND COGNITION Laurent Dubreuil 31 LARUELLE: AGAINST THE DIGITAL Alexander R. Galloway 30 THE UNIVERSE OF THINGS: ON SPECULATIVE REALISM Steven Shaviro 29 NEOCYBERNETICS AND NARRATIVE Bruce Clarke (continued on page 251) What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Vinciane Despret Translated by Brett Buchanan Foreword by Bruno Latour Posthumanities 38 {~?~IM: insert logo.tiff here.} University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London posthumanities 38 Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut Français. This work received support from the Institut Français through its publication program. Originally published in French as Que diraient les animaux, si . on leur posait les bonnes questions? by Vinciane Despret. Copyright Éditions La Découverte, 2012. Portions of “B for Beasts” were published in Vinciane Despret, “Il faudrait revoir la copie: L’imitation chez l’animal,” in Mimesis, ed. Thierry Lenain and Danielle Loriès, 243– 61 (Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 2007). Translation copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Despret, Vinciane, author. What would animals say if we asked the right questions? / Vinciane Despret ; translated by Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2016] | Series: Posthumanities ; 38 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015036886| ISBN 978-0-8166-9237-8 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9239-2 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Animal behavior—Miscellanea. Classification: LCC QL751 .D44613 2016 | DDC 591.5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036886 CONTENTS Foreword: The Scientific Fables of an Empirical La Fontaine Bruno Latour ............................................... vii Acknowledgments ............................................xv How to Use This Book ...................................... xvii Translator’s Note ............................................ xix A for Artists: Stupid like a painter? ...............................1 B for Beasts: Do apes really ape? .................................7 C for Corporeal: Is it all right to urinate in front of animals? ........15 D for Delinquents: Can animals revolt? ..........................21 E for Exhibitionists: Do animals see themselves as we see them? ....29 F for Fabricating Science: Do animals have a sense of prestige? ......37 G for Genius: With whom would extraterrestrials want to negotiate? .................................................47 H for Hierarchies: Might the dominance of males be a myth? .......53 I for Impaired: Are animals reliable models of morality? ............61 J for Justice: Can animals compromise? ..........................71 K for Killable: Are any species killable? ...........................81 L for Laboratory: What are rats interested in during experiments? ...............................................89 M for Magpies: How can we interest elephants in mirrors? .........97 N for Necessity: Can one lead a rat to infanticide? ................105 O for Oeuvres: Do birds make art? .............................117 P for Pretenders: Can deception be proof of good manners? .......123 Q for Queer: Are penguins coming out of the closet? .............131 R for Reaction: Do goats agree with statistics? ...................139 S for Separations: Can animals be broken down? .................145 T for Tying Knots: Who invented language and mathematics? .....153 U for Umwelt: Do beasts know ways of being in the world? ........161 V for Versions: Do chimpanzees die like we do? ..................169 W for Work: Why do we say that cows don’t do anything? ........177 X for Xenografts: Can one live with the heart of a pig? ............185 Y for YouTube: Are animals the new celebrities? .................195 Z for Zoophilia: Can horses consent? ...........................203 Notes ......................................................213 Index .......................................................243 FOREWORD The Scientific Fables of an Empirical La Fontaine Bruno Latour Be prepared to read stories of “The Pig Who Tried to Lie,” “The Much Too Clever Magpie,” “The Elephant and the Mirror,” “The Parrot Who Refuses to Parrot,” “The Cow Who Wishes to Meditate,” and “The Goats Who Cannot Be Counted,” of “The Tick Who Believes She Is Charles Sanders Peirce” or of “The Penguin Who Has Read Too Many Queer Stories,” and don’t skip the one on “The Lemur and Its Ethologist Tried for Infanticide” and many, many others. Be prepared to read a lot of sci- ence but also to learn about the many ways to do good, bad, or terrible science. You are about to enter a new genre, that of scientific fables, by which I don’t mean science fiction or false stories about science but, on the contrary, true ways of understanding how difficult it is to figure out what animals are up to. This is one of the precious books that pertain to the new rising domain of scientific humanities, meaning that to understand what animals have to say, all the resources of science and of the humani- ties have to be put to work. The problem with animals is that everyone has some experience with them and tons of ideas on how they resemble humans, or not. So if you begin to offer disciplined accounts about their mores, you immediately run up against a stream of “but my cat does this,” “I have seen on YouTube a lion doing that,” “scientists have shown that dolphins can do this,” “on my grandfather’s farm pigs used to be able to do that,” and so on and so forth. The good side of this is that whenever you mention animals, everybody is interested in what you have to say; the bad side is that your account will be drowned in alternative versions derived from totally different preoc- cupations and experiences of dealing with animals. Most scientists, when faced with such a din of alternative accounts, vii viii FOREWORD will try to distance themselves from all of them, to start from scratch, and to mimic, as exactly as possible, what their fellow scientists in neigh- boring fields have done with physical objects and chemical reactions. Whatever ordinary people, pet owners, stockbreeders, conservationists, and TV documentarists have said will be pushed aside as so many mere “anecdotes.” And the same will be done with what scientists from earlier centuries, or one’s colleagues with a different training, claim to have noticed in some unusual circumstances, for instance, in their many field observations. “Enough anecdotes; let’s start with real data in a controlled setting, the laboratory, to study the behavior of animals in as objective, disinterested, and distant a light as possible.” If the amateurs should be kicked out, those scientists claim, it is because they tell stories from which you will never know, when hearing them, if they speak of their emotions, attitudes, and mores or those of the animals themselves. Only the strictly controlled conditions of the laboratory will protect knowledge production from the pitfall of “anthropomorphism.” Such a reaction produces an interesting paradox: only by creating the highly artificial conditions of laboratory experimentation will you be able to detect what animals are really up to when freed from any artificial imposition of human values and beliefs onto them. From then on, only one set of disciplined accounts of what animals do in those settings will count as real science. All other accounts will be qualified as “stories,” and the storytellers will be dismissed as mere amateurs. For the last twenty years, Vinciane Despret, trained in experimental and clinical psychology as well as in philosophy, has never stopped inquir- ing into this strange paradox: why is it that scientific knowledge about animals should be created under such artificial conditions to get rid of all the equally artificial situations in which humans encounter animals? Is the fight against anthropomorphism so important that it should give way to what she calls a generalized “academocentrism”? By this she means that only a tiny register of attitudes are imposed not only on animals but also on those reading scientific accounts. Is it not a little bizarre that natural- istic descriptions are supposed to be obtained by artifices, whereas the naturally occurring situations are considered a source of artificial fictions? Because knowledge, after all, is always produced for artificial reasons and in artificial settings, why not use the thousands of instances in which FOREWORD ix humans interact “naturally” with animals—including the daily