Irony and Play in Nonhumans

I have the great fortune of sharing a living space with a very playful dog named Fulmine. He is small and quite possibly the fastest dog in the world, hence his name, which translates as ‘Lightning’ in Italian.

He likes to play a game with a crushed yellow plastic bottle, the classic one where I throw it and he goes to get it. More often though, the game involves him grabbing the bottle in his mouth, and then getting my attention by jumping up on the backs of my legs. When I turn around to grab the bottle so that I can throw it, he quickly turns and takes a step or two away so that it is out of my reach. As I said, he is extremely fast, both in reflexes and on foot, and there is no chance that I can ever get anywhere close to grabbing the bottle. In fact, my efforts are so pathetic as to be comical, I am sure.

So here’s the question: Why does he offer me the bottle only to snatch it away? He must be aware of the irony in the gesture, hence its capacity to constitute a game. He is only pretending to give me a bottle, and he knows he is pretending because it is more fun that way. If he were an earnest human toddler, or a little puppy, I imagine (he’s about two), he might trot up with the bottle and gently lay it at my feet, which would be adorable, but not ironic, and not playful, at least not in this teasing sense.

There are times when he wants to be vigorously petted, and I am good at that, but I am afraid that he is getting bored with me as a sporting challenger. He even slows his reaction so that the game becomes more of an even match, but even then I disappoint him.

It is easy to read dogs. (Sorry, all of you behaviorialists who say we make too much of canine personalities, you are just dead wrong on this). It must be much harder to read unicellular organisms. Perhaps their ontologies are just too far out of reach for us. But I am convinced that the trajectory of animal studies is putting us on a path that will lead us to greater understanding of nonhuman personalities and personhoods. I have never seen a news item in which it is announced, for example, that, ‘you know what, folks, parrots aren’t as bright as we thought they were’. No, it is always in the other direction, towards greater recognition of the sophistication of nonhuman sensibilities.

Agency, Consciousness and Irony

A new study indicates that ova exert influence over sperm selection; that is, to some extent, an ovum can choose which sperm fertilizes it. This is a clear example of agency, but does it indicate that the ovum is conscious?

The answer depends, in part, of course on how you define consciousness. The psi group considers everything to be conscious: when a photon hits a carbon molecule and the molecule reacts, that is a sign of consciousness, and I think it is a valid argument. Social scientists are more likely to look beyond agency to something like perception or self-awareness to identify the presence of consciousness in an entity or being, but again, it depends on how you define, and empirically investigate, these terms and characteristics.

Again, I like the psi understanding of consciousness, with mere agency being sufficient to determine its presence, but maybe the social scientists, and natural science behaviorialists, would find this proposal intriguing: if it could be demonstrated that an ovum selected a sperm ironically, would it not indicate the presence of consciousness rather than mere agency? For example, if the ovum secreted a fluid that inhibited sperm A but assisted sperm B, even though sperm B would lead to the development of an entity with greater evolutionary fitness, would that not provide evidence for consciousness?

I suppose it would depend on whether the action was considered an error or dysfunction, and in this case a statistical study would be helpful. Evolutionary biology does not explain all, or even most, behavior. Understanding the role of irony in behavior would be helpful. How one would conduct a study to examine this is a puzzle. Perhaps a greater ecological study of ova that routinely choose the evolutionarily disadvantaging spermatozoa would shed light on the issue.

Garden

The ultimate plant fiction, that points toward beauty (see how the themes come together?), is the garden. Like a novel, for example, it is made of characters, put in place by an author, who then begin to exert their own agency, in a time register that is all their own, a remarkably nonhuman slowness.

And their rootedness marks them as particularly integrated placemakers, radically (if you will excuse the pun) different from anything known to animal ontology. A nearby fir tree, the tallest in Europe if I remember correctly, recently fell over, maybe as the result of a storm. The same day I read about its demise, I happened to read a quote from Saint Francis of Assisi, in which he warns against counting on trees for assistance because they, like all temporal beings, will die; only divine help is eternally dependable. I read the quote in Italian, and I cannot find (instantly) an English version at my fingertips, but the word in Italian, that indicates the tree’s death, is ‘seccare’, to dry out. It is a word that evokes a remarkable insight into the relation between plants and water: plants don’t die in the way that animals do - they dry out. I suppose some plants, including trees, rot in the way an animal’s body would (forgive the image), but it seems that plants, being both simpler in composition and closer to water in relation, in comarsion with animals, exhibit less transformation, and less trauma, in death. And while I suppose animals also eventually dry out, returning to dust seems to be easier for plants.

So this fictional garden, authored by a human being, offers a comfortable transition between humans and the globe they inhabit. I would think a poet would not like gardens for this reason - they interfere with the relation between writer and world. I suppose, however, that the garden itself is a kind of poem, or short story, or novel - do gardens have genres? - should the author choose to look at it that way. And why not, words are overrated. Whitman might have composed his work with real leaves of grass, rather than metaphorical ones.

Fiction

The word ‘fiction’ comes from the Latin ‘fingere’ which means ‘to form’ or ‘to contrive’. So when Jorge Luis Borges entitled his collection ‘Ficciones’ I am thinking that his intention was not so much to indicate that the stories were untrue, but that they were formed, without making any comment, necessarily, about their veracity, which really is not relevant or important. As Michel Serres notes, ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek for ‘creation’, without any connotations of untruthfulness. Similarly, I do not think that anyone considers fictional literature to be in any way fake. The academic discourse on cultural production seems to be aimed at making the point that things considered natural are really culturally produced and therefore, viewed in the most antagonistic sense, fake or false. There are more nuanced threads in the discussion that focus on determining the history and origins of culturally produced phenomena, but too often the message is that because a certain feature of a society is culturally produced it must be in some sense invalid; but of course, anything considered valid was also culturally produced. There is no escaping it.

My aim in this post is to focus on the use of fictions, of creating fictions, as a way of managing dissonant scales. In this sense, any human relationship, for example, is a fiction. A family is a fiction, that is rendered to make the world livable, for it is very hard to live as a resident on earth without having some kind of mediating scale, or a set of mediating scales, between a person and the world. Ask any poet.

Plants must serve this purpose. I was watching a documentary on beauty yesterday in which several anthropologists made the point that certain features of the natural landscape are considered beautiful because they provided evolutionary assistance: running water, green plants, and other similarly life-assisting things. There is also the discourse on symmetry of features, waist to hip to shoulder ratio, and other body parameters, that relate to fertility.

Fair, enough, as far as it goes, but there were some dissenters. They dissented not so much by saying that this evolutionary understanding of beauty is wrong, but that it is insufficient, that it does not account for less instrumental postures and engagements of the human mind. I wonder, therefore, if it might be possible to tease out the various reasons why humans find plants to be beautiful. I will have to think a bit more on this and write about it in the next post.

Beauty

Beauty is the ultimate motive for everything.

I developed this phrase, in a fevered pre-sleep, while meditating on the meaning of another phrase, this one already well known, ‘beauty will save the world’.

The second phrase comes from a character in a novel, The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The character, who suffers from epilepsy, reasons that with deep concentration, he can develop a perspective on his disease that renders it beautiful, because how could a truth that is accurately understood, be anything other than beautiful, since it is as much a part of creation as one that is more commonly and conventionally appreciated.

So my phrase, ‘beauty is the ultimate motive for everything’, tries to fill in the contours of Dostoevsky’s claim by playing on the double meanings of two words that it contains: ‘ultimate’ and ‘motive’. The first, ‘ultimate’, denotes for me ‘last’ as well as ‘best’; while ‘motive’ denotes both ‘reason’ as well as ‘design’, as in the word ‘motif’.

I got there with the help of another Dostoevsky quote, this time from the novel Demons.

‘Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty, he can no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here’.

In the midst of this meditation, whIch extended throughout the night and into the morning, as well as into the days following, I happened to see a story on a population that lived by scavenging in an enormous garbage dump that was kilometers long. In fact, an entire village has emerged around this dump as people found enough to use, eat and sell from their scavenging alone, to create an economy.

What use would beauty be to these people, I asked myself, to put Dostoevsky’s idiot’s claim, and the other quote, to the test, and what would it look like, what form would it take? These people certainly live without the benefit of science, at least as it is understood in contemporary terms, and as far as bread is concerned, if the term is construed to mean a regular and wholesome food supply, then it is their sad fate to demonstrate that this is also possible.

But what beauty could there possibly be in such a life, and how would it serve as the the ultimate motive, to use my phrase, to keep on living? Before I answer this question, I want to take a brief detour to the theme of reason, as a kind of anti-beauty. Now, reason, and logic, can certainly be beautiful, but they are not sufficient to serve as the ultimate motive, here with a stress on the ‘mot’ of motive, as found in the words emotion, in the spiritual register, and ‘motion’ in the physical one. What might be the reason for getting up each morning with the expectation or hope (and here’s a clue), of finding something to eat, or use, or sell in order to live another day?

No, reason or logic are not sufficient, but beauty is. Only beauty, in the form of imagination, of a better tomorrow and a better life, serves as a sufficient motive. Reason and logic could lead equally to conclusions that life will get better or worse, but probably the latter. Only beauty, and the need for beauty, and the strategies for fulfilling that need, provide a motive, because it fosters that most irrational and illogical of emotions - hope.

So, as always, at some point, I have to ask what any of this has to do with plants. Answering this question never causes any anxiety, because anything and everything has to do with plants. Simply put, plants provide beauty in abundance and without asking for anything in return. They cling tenaciously to rocks in any wind, push themselves up through cracks in sidewalks and asphalted roads, assaulted by traffic and exhaust, producing their leaves and flowers, extending their roots, in search of light, water and nutrition, to continue the existence of their kind into the future. What could be more inspiring, what could be more analogous and concordant, to a group of people who live with similar grit, determination and ingenuity?