The circular images in the previous post are little reminiscent of the abstract circular glyphs that the aliens use in the 2016 movie Arrival. The aliens are huge and mysterious and shrouded in mist and communicate to the bewildered humans by displaying these circular forms in the air. What’s interesting is that, compared to animal life here on earth, the heptapod’s uncanniness is quite superficial. They’re very conventional, when it comes down to it; they have a language, a sense of ethics, empathy and most importantly a will to communicate with humans.
From the very beginning there is at least the potential for two-way communication offered, and with it the implicit possibility of mutual understanding. We can imagine, somewhere down the line, the heptapods and the humans developing a deeper rapport and succeeding in inter (-galactic)-cultural understanding, learning about each other’s way of life, appropriating new customs and most importantly, ‘speaking’ , in some form, to each other. This speaking would entail responding to one another. In this sense they’re not so alien.
The perspective that I’m taking for this research project, categorizes terrestrial animals as actually alien, because the are so much more distant than the heptapods in Arrival. We assume that animals lack the ability to engage with humans with the same level of sophistication as the aliens. Can we go a speculative step further and interpret this lack of ability more as a primal lack of will?
Here’s a quote from Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. The animal never responds, and it shares this reticence with the reticence of writing.
“According to many philosophers and theoreticians, from Aristotle to Lacan, animals do not respond, and they share that irresponsibility with writing… No matter what question one asks them writings remain silent, keeping a most majestic silence or else always replying in the same terms, which means not replying… it is always as if humans were less interested in emphasising the fact that the animal is deprived of the ability to speak, a zōon alogon, than the fact that it is private and deprives humans of a response.”
And perhaps we’re on the right track in interpreting animals’ reticence as privacy. The idea is certainly one I find attractive and fascinating. The implication in the quotation is that we have always expected a response from animals and have always been let down. Perhaps we feel we deserve a response? Is our sense of cognitive, (and therefore ethical…) superiority then, derived from the sting of rejection; from the fact that we are the species rebuffed by all other species? To compensate for this slight, we assume the fault lies with them.
Animals, even when they are facing us, have their backs turned to us because they are occupied with life-worlds that are more alien than most (but not all…) representations of alien life in sci-fi. Animal reticence comes from a sort of fundamental coolness, from the fact that they really do their own thing, like Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural here…
Seen in this way humanity’s persistent efforts at ‘understanding’ animals, would be something akin to an indiscreet curiosity, an nosiness where persistence becomes incessance — a dynamic that only says something about humans.