On the Animal Trail. Baptiste Morizot
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while it exists in prodigious forms on Earth, among us, before our very eyes, but discreet in its muteness.’4 We send probes and even messages to the four corners of the universe, and we walk through the forest as noisy as a troop of baboons on the razzle, which can only confirm our strange conviction that we are alone in this world. It’s time to come back down to earth.5
That’s where this investigation comes in. As a geopolitical inquiry, it attempts to find answers to the question of how to live together with non-human beings, no longer as a rather abstract dream of returning to nature, but concretely and practically. Of course – and Morizot does not forget this – tracking reconnects us with the oldest practices of hunters. Nor does he neglect the ethology which is itself inspired by those practices, an ethology which he can now draw on for his project. These practices are arts of attention. However, unlike tracking, they do not involve knowing as a prelude to appropriating; and unlike ethology, they do not involve knowing for the sake of knowing, but ‘knowing in order to live together in shared territories’. By tracking, we attempt to rekindle the possibility of forging social relationships with non-human beings.
‘We can change metaphysics only by changing practices’
Tracking, therefore, is an art of seeing the invisible so as to frame an authentic geopolitics. As we have mentioned, there is nothing supernatural in these invisible things even if each discovery involves a certain magic, that of tracking ‘which flushes signs’. There is nothing natural about them, either: there can be no serious geopolitics based on Nature. For the term ‘Nature’, even when used in such trivial circumstances as those which make us say ‘we’re going out for a walk to get a bit of nature’, isn’t innocent. As Morizot writes, with reference to Philippe Descola, this term is ‘the marker of a civilization’ (not a very likeable one, he adds) ‘devoted to exploiting territories on a massive scale as if they were just inert matter.’ And even if we decided to move away from this ‘heritage’ dimension and asserted our desire to protect nature, for example, we would not escape the tacit implications of this term – that there is, in front of us or around us, a passive nature, in short, an object of action – or, even worse, a leisure spot or place for spiritual renewal.
So Morizot’s project asks us to dispense with a metaphysics that has caused definite and palpable damage and that we cannot hope to patch up with a few good intentions. The first thing that needs to be revised is the old idea that we humans are the only political animals. (Indeed, we should be concerned about the fact that when we declare ourselves to be animals, this is often a way of laying claim to a quality that simply confirms our exceptionalism.) But wolves are political animals too: they know all about rules, the boundaries of territories, ways of organizing themselves in space, codes of conduct and precedence. And the same applies to many social animals. Morizot takes up, and extends to other living beings – for example, to the worms in the worm composter, whose habits are similar to our own – the idea that what we need to relearn are truly social relationships with them. Tracking, as a geopolitical practice, then becomes the art of asking everyday questions. The answers to those questions will form habits, prepare alliances or anticipate possible conflicts, in an attempt to find a more civilized, more diplomatic solution: ‘Who inhabits this place? And how do they live? How do they establish their territory in this world? At what points does their action impact on my life, and vice versa? What are our points of friction, our possible alliances and the rules of cohabitation to be invented in order to live in harmony?’
‘A possible detour to get us back home’
I have just referred, as does Morizot, to the worm composter and its worms as a site for social exchange. A site that also requires a detailed knowledge of habits, attention, alliances and compromises. This example is important because it tells us that becoming a ‘tracker’, ‘becoming a diplomat’ with animals, actually involves a transformation in ways of thinking, of reading signs and of attuning (recognizing and creating harmony between) habits and intentions. Tracking may involve travelling great distances or through forests, but it doesn’t always require it.
After all, as Morizot says, tracking is above all ‘an art of finding our way back home’. Or rather, he implies, it is an art of finding ourselves at home: but this ‘at home’ is not the same as before, just as the ‘self’ which finally finds itself at home has itself become different.
Tracking means learning to rediscover a habitable and more hospitable world where feeling ‘at home’ no longer makes us stingy and jealous little proprietors (the ‘masters and possessors of nature’, as seemed so obvious to Descartes), but cohabitants marvelling at the quality of life in the presence of other beings.
Tracking means enriching our habits. It is a form of becoming, of self-metamorphosis: ‘activating in oneself the powers of a different body’, as the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes. It means finding in ourselves the crow’s leaping curiosity, the worm’s way of being alive – perhaps even, like the worm, feeling ourselves breathing through our skins – the bear’s desiring patience, or the panther’s replete patience, or the very different patience of the wolf parents of a turbulent pup. It means gaining access, as Morizot says, ‘to the prompts specific to another body’.
But ‘all this,’ he adds, ‘is very difficult to formulate, we have to circle round it.’
In the wonderful book in which he recounts his long friendship with a bitch called Mélodie, the Japanese writer Akira Mizubayashi discusses the difficulties that his adopted language imposes on his way of describing the relationship between him and his animal companion. He writes:
The French language, which I have embraced and made my own over a long apprenticeship, stems from the age of Descartes. It carries with it, in one sense, the trace of this fundamental break that means it becomes possible to classify non-human living beings as machines to be exploited. It is sad to note that the language of the time since Descartes somewhat obscures my sight when I contemplate the animal world, so abundant, so generous, so benevolent, described by Montaigne.6
We inherit, then, a language which in certain respects accentuates the tendency to de-animate the world around us – as evidenced by the simple fact (to take just one example as highlighted by Bruno Latour) that we only have at our disposal the grammatical categories of passivity and activity.
To narrate the activity of tracking, as Morizot does, to narrate the effects of this ‘finding our way back home’, involved learning to get rid of certain words, playing tricks with syntax so as to account for presences or, more precisely, effects of presence, so as to evoke affects that flood through the body (joy, desire, surprise, uncertainty, patience, fear sometimes), to use the writing of the investigation in order to touch on what goes beyond this writing, as Morizot himself was touched while writing. He had to twist the language of philosophy, to defamiliarize himself from it, to poetically force the grammar, sometimes forge terms or divert their meaning (what he has elsewhere called a semantic wilding),7 because none of the terms we have inherited could express the event of the encounter or the grace of awaiting it. To create, in other words, a poetics of inhabiting, an experimental poetics, out in the open air, with plural bodies.
Beyond all that this book teaches us about what animals can do, as well as the humans who go out to encounter them, beyond the concrete and highly innovative political proposals for another way of inhabiting the earth with others, Morizot invites us to explore not only the close confines of our world, but the very limits of our language. To express the event of life.
Where are you going tomorrow? Actually, from the very first words, you will already be on your way.
Vinciane Despret
Notes
1 1. Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le Parti pris des animaux (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2013).
2 2. The idea of thinking about the relationships with living things