The Philosophical Ethology of Vinciane Despret

Brett Buchanan, Matthew Chrulew, Jeffrey Bussolini, Brett Buchanan, Matthew Chrulew, Jeffrey Bussolini

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138067462
• eBook ISBN: 9781351657129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human-animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and allow them to be interesting. With genuine curiosity, Despret looks at how humans and animals transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through an engagement with the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

brett buchanan

THE METAMORPHOSES
OF VINCIANE DESPRET

The best drama is written by animals, I think, and I think that it was a good choice for ethology to choose stories, not only because it’s pedagogical but because it always obliges and requests from us to remember that we are dealing with a living being, a subject with their own experience.

Vinciane Despret¹

I hope to feel differently. To have new percepts […] To change.

Vinciane Despret²

For over twenty years Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret has been carving a unique path in the study of human knowledge about animals: its forms, history, limits, questions, future. And though it has led her to be a leading figure in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, her writings are still relatively unknown to English audiences. Equally at home in philosophical discussions on Leibniz or Deleuze, ethological observations of birds or orangutans, and historical or current practices of scientific investigations and methodologies, Despret has approached the lives of animals with a refreshing and open-minded curiosity. Rather than starting out from a prescribed theoretical position and methodological base, Despret waits, like the ethologists she works with and studies, for animals to show their ways to her. She takes her lead from animals, and those who work with them: she thinks with, from, and like them, follows them, observes and learns from them, and in the process she continuously becomes transformed by them. What do they have to say? How do they behave? What questions do they ask? How are their behaviours affected by the presence of observers? Why have humans approached the study of animals in the ways they have? The result is a rich and diverse body of writings, with over eight books and eighty articles and counting, full of stories that demonstrate just how much more surprising, inventive, and intelligent animals are than we credit.

A veritable bestiary of animals and interesting stories are found throughout Despret’s writings, and her sources are as varied as the animals themselves: she draws from field research (Arabian babblers, sheep, wolves), YouTube videos (cats, crows, lions), scientific laboratories (capuchins, rats), zoos (orangutans, baboons), rescue centres (elephants, chimpanzees), farms (pigs, goats, cows), film (parrots), literature (horses, tigers), philosophy and history (octopuses, ticks, jackdaws), and more. Despite the slightly classificatory feel to this list, none of these stories are just about one species either. Every story is multispecied. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that one of her latest books is an abecedary; from A to Z, from artist to zoophilia, from ants to zebras, animals utterly permeate our languages, our thoughts and behaviours, our accounts of ourselves, our everyday lives. But Despret does not generalize or universalize. There’s no attempt at systematicity or completeness. Like Isabelle Stengers (one of Despret’s mentors), she actively resists an all-purpose explanation or theory (Que diraient; Stengers, Cosmopolitics I). And like Jacques Derrida, Despret claims that not a single animal can speak for its species, just as no species is representative of animals as such (Quand le loup 28; Buchanan, Chrulew, and Bussolini; Derrida). There is no as such. No two stories are alike, then, in the same way that no animal is just like another. Instead, one discovers a plurality of singular animals and meanings that reawaken our understandings of animal lives.

Despret’s methodological approach is similarly idiosyncratic, always changing, and resists easy explanation. Like a curious investigative reporter, she has a knack for discovering, analysing, and articulating good stories. Early in her career, Despret’s work established her as both a philosopher and ethologist, albeit with a twist: as a philosopher, she’s out “in the field,” creating concepts with birds just as much as with ideas, and as an ethologist, she’s more an “ethologist of ethologists,” studying the behaviours and practices of the ethologists as much as the birds that they themselves are observing. This ability to look at particular situations in new and inventive ways, from multiple perspectives, defines Despret’s work over the ensuing decades. In one project she’ll wear the hat of a literary detective and lawyer, poring back over the infamous case of Clever Hans to unravel the testimonies of the expert witnesses (Hans); in another she’ll enter the world of rat experimentations to cast a light on the questions being asked of the rats, and the rats’ responses to this misplaced attention (Penser); in yet another she’ll work with filmmakers, installation artists, and curators to create a large exhibition in Paris on the extraordinariness of animal lives (Bêtes et hommes).

Finally, it’s not just the animals that teach and inform Despret’s thoughts, even if she herself would be the first to claim that she’s learned the most from the animals themselves. Her human sources are just as wide-ranging. These include writings from the history of Western philosophy (from the Ancient Greeks to Gilles Deleuze), the practices and philosophies of contemporary science studies and animal studies (Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Stengers), the science of ethologists and primatologists (Amotz Zahavi, Shirley Strum, Barbara Smuts, Marc Bekoff), historical biologists (Edward Thompson, Charles Darwin, Jakob von Uexküll), and political theorists (Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin) as well as the oral reports and anecdotes of farmers, conservationists, caretakers, trainers, and breeders. The point is not to supply an exhaustive list of all of Despret’s influences but rather to exhibit their great diversity.

It is for all of these reasons, and more, that her writings will be of interest to those working in animal studies, science studies, contemporary philosophy, cultural anthropology, social geography, political theory, religious studies, and artistic practices. Her training and experience have drawn from the academic disciplines of psychology and philosophy, and ethological fieldwork in parks, farms, laboratories, and cities throughout Europe. Throughout it all, Despret seeks something relatively simple. Simple to say, but far more difficult to achieve. She seeks transformations and metamorphoses: to transform and be transformed, to change ideas, behaviours, and habits, both her own and those of others. To view the world differently – and to take joy in its plurality – will be the sign of such an achievement. She wants, in short, no more than to let animals be interesting, and no less than to change the world, and this begins with “learning to transform our habits” and acquiring “new ways of living together” (Quand le loup 255).

origins

Despret admits that it is somewhat of a cliché for an author to appeal to an “origins” story for how she or he came to have an appreciation or love for animals. Perhaps it was a family companion animal while one was young, perhaps a discovery of one’s own eating habits, or perhaps a black bear encountered along a forest trail. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in these stories, and this is no less the case with Despret herself. She has her own versions of an origins story, but there are a few caveats: on the one hand, there isn’t a single “origin” to Despret’s passion for animals, but rather many continuously unfolding origins, and on the other, these stories are not so much about her own self-awakening (as such stories tend to emphasize), but rather they are just as much about the animals themselves. In one of her most autobiographical works, Despret explains that it

is a matter of performing through narration the pressing obligation that is now mine: to always attempt, by all means possible, not only not to erase the presence of the animal, but above all to avoid relegating the animal to the status of a passive object. This is a moral, political, and epistemological obligation. (“Why ‘I Had Not’” 98)

This story could therefore begin with an account of Despret listening to a blackbird early one spring morning in her Liège backyard garden. Overtaken by the experience of the blackbird’s song, Despret has said that the bird sang as if the importance of the world was in its song, that this blackbird knew what importance meant, and that it was teaching Despret something about importance.³ Like many of her colleagues in ethology, she dismisses any suggestion that a sentiment such as this bears a negative mark of anthropomorphism. Human attributes are not being attributed to animals, as it may in fact be just as much a case of theriomorphism, with humans adopting the capacities and influences of the animals.⁴ In the present scenario, the blackbird taught Despret about the notion of importance, of being open and available to the world around her, of hearing the song, and of becoming transformed through an event as seemingly simple and routine as this.

This story, however, could just as easily begin when Despret showed up on the doorstep of the Israeli ornithologist Amotz Zahavi, eager to observe Arabian babblers with him in the Negev desert. Through this process she discovers that Zahavi is just as interesting as the birds themselves, so much so that her project takes off in a different direction. One of these insights is that no one is “neutral” in the study of others: neither the scientists nor the animals. Each contributes to the production of existence that brings them together, and each constructs the stories that are told (Naissance 14–22; Stengers, Invention 146). Then again, this story may begin when she first met Isabelle Stengers, and discovered that her theoretical approach to the sciences was exactly what she herself was intuitively thinking about, but had not yet been able to formulate with respect to her work with animals. Or it may start with her work with the dance choreographer Luc Petton (whose images appear in this issue), with whom she re-imagines the notion of choreography and collaborative work as they place in motion a dance involving humans and Manchurian cranes or humans with swans.

In every case, Despret transforms her thinking and actions through all of her engagements. By her own admission, she gets bored by the status quo, by the same overarching generalizations, by the erasure of individual idiosyncrasies, anecdotes, and knowledges (Buchanan, Chrulew, and Bussolini). There isn’t a single “origin,” then, but multiple origins that arise as a result of the “agencement” of various agencies coming together (Despret, “From Secret Agents” 38); each origin isn’t self-produced, as though autonomously willed by Despret alone. Instead, each origin is both the commencement and consequence of a new entanglement of which she forms a part, as she becomes together with her interlocutors, both human and non-human. She listens to animals, and her writings are responses in kind. More on this below.

That there isn’t just one story to be told here is likely clear, but there is one particular fable that runs its course throughout her writings. Beginning with her doctoral thesis on emotions (Our Emotional Makeup) and continuing through to her most recent writings (Les Faiseuses; “Why ‘I Had Not’”), Despret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• General Introduction: Philosophical Ethology
• Introduction: Vinciane Despret
• Preface: A Curious Practice
• 1. The Metamorphoses of Vinciane Despret
• 2. Models and Methods: Sketch of a Field Study
• 3. The Enigma of the Raven
• 4. Who Made Clever Hans Stupid?
• 5. The Pragmatics of Expertise
• 6. Beasts and Humans
• 7. The Otter and the Fish Farmer
• 8. Thinking Like a Rat
• 9. Animal Abecedary: “O for Œuvres” and “Q for Queer”
• 10. We Are Not So Stupid … Animals Neither
• 11. On Asking the Right Questions: An Interview with Vinciane Despret
• Index