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Vital Powers: Cultivating a Critter Community

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Vital Powers: Cultivating a Critter Community Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 12 (2018), No. 2, pp. 15-27. Vital Powers: Cultivating a Critter Community Dr. Stephen J. Smith, Professor, Faculty of Education, Associate Dean, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University Email: [email protected] Abstract This paper is based on the eco-pedagogical aspiration to live with domesticated animals in accordance with Alphonso Lingis's Community of those who have nothing in common. I draw upon this remarkable text as well as Lingis's animal writings in describing moments and movements of pathic community. Such a community in affective affiliation with one another, where symbiotic relations are possible and bodily kinships are exercised, exemplifies what is possible in more rational human communities where domesticating impulses seek to harness the vital powers of co- constitutive life. Of telling significance are predatory threats, the manner in which they appear, and the protectionist responses they occasion. By recasting these threats and responses in terms of motional affordances, it may well be possible to move with non-human creatures, both literally and figuratively, beyond the anthropocentric confines of domestication. Animals with whom we appear to have nothing specifically, or in species terms, in common can show us how to cultivate more pathic communities of our own kind. Introduction Alphonso Lingis's animal writings inspire an ecological imagination of how we as a human species of metamorphic proportions have taken on the multiplicity of the flock, the school, the herd, and the pack. Our communal lives may at times appear of a mob mentality bound by animal drives, however there is contagious enthusiasm generated in particular group affiliations, feelings of solidarity that come with compelling community engagements, and a sense of belonging engendered when working alongside others for a common cause. These communal sensibilities have not necessarily left the flock, the school, the herd and the pack behind (cf. Welten, 2016, p. 132). Lingis (2007) reminds us that “[a]nimals come in packs, herds, and flocks, and induce multiplicity in the movements of the human animal who enters into symbioses with them” (p. 117). In a paper titled “Ecological consciousness: Reflections on hominids and other thinking animals,” Lingis (2001) wrote of the packs of wild dogs and prides of lions that prey upon the fleet-footed migratory herds of Africa. He cited anthropological evidence for understanding the evolution of human speech as that which distinguishes hominids from other animal species. Yet human speech remains linked to the “predator consciousness” of the hunting band (p. 294). The swimming, slinking, slithering, creeping, crawling, ponderous as well as light, fleet-footed, Phenomenology & Practice 16 flapping, soaring movements of the multiplicity of predator and prey species may well have given definition to the water and land in, through, on, under, over, and around which these creatures move, however it is the human being with the definitional capacity of speech who has come to name and rule the land, oceans, and skies. Still, “predator consciousness” is not all we retain in affinity with other animals. There are also the cooperative and communicational manners resonating in human speech that pick up the “murmur of the world” (Lingis, 1994, pp. 69-105). We communicate amongst ourselves and potentially with other creatures in this coalescing, co- constitutive, confabulating “noise of life” (p. 92). The quail and the albatross, the crows and the hummingbirds, the coyotes and the seals, the schooling fish and the great whales, the crocodiles infrasonically and the praying mantises ultrasonically continue and reverberate the creaking of the branches, the fluttering of the leaves, the bubbling of the creeks, the hissing of the marsh grasses, the whirring of the winds, the shifting of the rocks, the grinding of the earth’s plates. (pp. 96, 97) Conversation, dialogue, and the most deeply felt registers of communication amongst ourselves and with others still carry “the humming, buzzing, murmuring, crackling, and roaring of the world” (p. 84). Lingis (2001) also points beyond this evolutionary, biospherical inheritance to suggest “that the human species is rapidly evolving into a species that lives entirely in an environment of its own making” (p. 298). In doing so, he poses the question of the connection between “this new ecological consciousness and the one that evolved in the savannah of East Africa four million years ago” (p. 299). Some indications of that connection are found in a later piece addressing the face of nature in the formative work of Emmanuel Levinas. Here Lingis (2010) draws attention to the moving, perceiving body that, since Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s foundational phenomenological analyses, has been understood as contiguous with its situatedness in the world and, conversely, where the world is understood as the coefficient of corporeality. Incarnated subjectivity is “where we find ourselves within the sensuous medium, immersed in it” (p. 67). We sense that nature is essentially about movement. We see the plays of light, hear the vibrations of sound, taste and smell the flows of water and air, touch the oscillations of pressure and release. There are kinetic, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and affective registers to the movements we perceive. Human sensibility carries the over-riding impression that “[n]ature is movement”(p. 79; also Lingis, 2011a, p. 40). There is nothing necessarily new in this impression. What is noteworthy is the realization of the need for a “new ecological consciousness” that breaks with the evolutionary legacy of predator- prey dynamics yet finds itself still enthused by the energies of the pack, the herd, the swarm, the flock, and the school and by contact with the fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals whose motions we can see and feel reflected in our own movement repertoires. Lingis (2010) wrote: To go to nature is to is leave sedentary and stabilized existence and enter into movement: moving with the falling leaves in the autumn winds in the mountains under the drifting or gathering clouds; moving through the savannah and the forest with the winds, ascending the mountains with the mists, drifting down the rivers; moving with the herds of wildebeests, zebras, and impalas in the Serengeti; soaring on a paraglider in the thermals with the vultures; or, not swimming, only steering with one's fins in the ocean surge with the coral fish. (p. 80) Smith 17 Going to nature means becoming animated by the movements of other creatures who compel us to not only recall from whence we came but also to remember how it is that we may stay affiliated with these creatures, symbiotically, and through the motional affordances of bodily kinship. Going to nature in this manner is not a movement backward in any kind of nostalgic feeling for what we domesticated human beings may have lost of our animal sensibilities, but a movement forward in eco-pedagogical appreciation of what our affective and motile relations with other creatures can teach us about how to live more vibrantly with one another. I take up Lingis’s animal sensibility as “an intelligibility that is affective before it is intelligible and vital before it is rational” (Sparrow, 2007, p. 110) and, specifically, as a motile, metamorphic impulse to participate in the community of those who have nothing in common (Lingis, 1994). I want to show that “the community of modern individuals that each one of us is born into—all of this is preempted by our encounter with other bodies, intruder or seducer bodies, and the appeals they make on our own” (Sparrow, 2007, p. 110). We sense these appeals at a primal level, at the level of sensation, through “the multiplicity in us – the human form and the nonhuman, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal and vegetable” (Lingis, 2000, p. 28). We respond in ways that reflect our creaturely composition and thus our capacity to move in diversely animated ways (cf. Serres, 2011, p. 51). In “each life extend[ing] across metamorphoses” (Lingis, 1998, p. 88; also Lingis, 2011b, p. 148), I assert that we can live more sustainably with one another through better appreciating the dynamics of life in a critter community where even those who have limited species characteristics in common can become motilely attuned to one another and, in doing so, create practices of communal living that are good for all. Through my usage of the word ‘critter’ in preference to the more conventional ‘creature’ or ‘animal,’ I follow the lead of Donna Haraway (2003; 2008) in challenging the division between human beings and other animals and suggesting, from the outset, that we are all critters with capacities to move with other creatures in deeply affecting and vitally empowering ways (Smith, 2017). I also have another purpose in mind that has to do with the colloquial sound of this dialectal variant of ‘creature.’ I want suggest that the essential features of a critter community are as much revealed in tone of voice as they are encounters in and of themselves. This suggestion follows from the comment made above, and attributed to Lingis, about the very evolution of human speech. It is, we might say ‘critter-cally,’ the very manner in which creaturely encounters are spoken of and written up that discloses their essential meanings. This, too, is why I have emulated Lingis’s richly evocative, phenomenological descriptions and written this article, in significant part, as a “first- person chronicling”
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