Step 2: Nonhuman Worlds (Entering Posthumanism)

Deconditioning animality is critical for refreshing our collective understanding of nonhuman animals, yet the process risks sliding back into humanist gear when the inevitable moment of reconditioning retains human capacities as hierarchical measurement—be it cognition, sociability, language, or other qualia. While now ethologically democratized beyond the anthroproprietary (in the sense that other creatures are understood to hold an evolutionary share, like phonologocentric parrots), this moment of reconditioning often safeguards the human animal as epitome. Peter Godfrey-Smith makes this point in his etho-philosophical study of cephalopods: “When we imagine the lives and experiences of other animals, we often wind up visualizing scaled-down versions of ourselves.”1 Many valuable ethological studies that successfully argue for a democratization of existential capacities hold this assumption, which tends to have a twofold effect: (1) nonhuman capacities that do not coincide with human capacities are elided, missed, or deemed intractable and (2) the circularity of this method, which entails humans imposing their own capacities as the measure for the living, is left uninspected. For this reason, even ethologists attuned to the newfound complexity of animal life can remain anthropocentric. The very concept of complexity itself is assumed to be a fixed law of nature, rather than an operative concept relative to human abilities and limits—yes, humans are complex creatures, but only by decree arising from their own self-measured understanding of said complexity. Even Heidegger, who was no stranger to confronting the abyss of circularity, falls prey to its logic when claiming only human Dasein sees the clearing of the “as such,” all without making note of the fact that it is a human who asserts this ability to generalize the paragon of world making (should “as such” even be anthroproprietary). Is this not ontology as self-fulfilling prophecy?

The pitfall here is no longer anthropomorphism pure and simple, which falsely presumes a discrete humanity ready-made for projecting onto animality. From an ethologically posthumanist standpoint, with a clear-eyed nontranscendental point of departure concerning the immanence of life on earth, this purity of human separation from animality is illusory. Instead, when a human capacity is projected onto nonhuman life, it is based on a difference from within animality itself. Arguably, this projection is always a nonpure difference of degree and not of kind. But even if we come to find (or rather factishistically produce) a human quality that is ours and ours alone, nothing authenticates this quality as our secure extraction point from the creaturely field, barring some divine decree. The human quality being projected from within animality will likely be deemed more sophisticated, either in its relation to other animals or as a discrete nonrelation within the creaturely field (again, should such a quality exist). For even if recent studies show that grief, jealousy, empathy, and so many other affective states are shared by numerous nonhuman animals, these are often assumed to be impoverished compared to their human versions.

There are circumstances where it might be wise to retain humanist circularity when not simply in the service of holding indiscriminate power over nonhuman animals. This is especially true in light of urgent political struggles—the fight against neocolonial aggression, gender discrimination, rampant misogyny and racism—where a strategic essentialization of humanity might be necessary for the full recognition of certain humans. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, however, it is fruitful to suspend this circular ontology that relentlessly finds (or does not find) “scaled-down” versions of humans in nonhumans. This will facilitate a posthumanist democratization of life where the affective modes of the living are no longer considered vertically but as a constellation. It would no longer be assumed that other animals inevitably hold a feeble share of what humans possess most fully. It would champion neurodiversity in its different ecological contexts, tenors, and flavors.2 Above all, it would open avenues for getting a glimpse into nonhuman worlds without disturbing the waters too much with our all-consuming presence. Freed from ourselves, we are freer to speculate on others.

Entering these speculative waters demands the sort of restricted sophistry for which I advocate in the introductory chapter. We need compelling narratives grounded in biological observation and methods that push toward forms of deduction exceeding the disciplinary comforts of a science like ethology—yet not going so far that the method falls into unconditional sophistry, which would only serve to mystify and fetishize other minds. It is instructive to begin with an example that seems to do both: Vilém Flusser’s and Louis Bec’s joint venture Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (1987). This speculative text ruminates on the vampire squid, which until very recently had never been seen alive in its environment. Flusser begins with known biological facts—taxonomy, anatomy, and so on—but gradually, the reader notes a shift into more speculative statements. On the whole, Flusser moves from tractable scientific observation to restricted sophistry to ultimately wild figurative uses of the vampire squid. Bec’s drawings accompanying the text are in a classifying genre of taxonomy laying bare an organism’s inner workings, which is peculiar in contrast to Flusser’s philosophical flights of fancy yet also brings a certain aura of scientific respectability and objectivity to the project.

Flusser’s speculations can be separated into two groups: conjectures based in evolutionary homology and metaphoric leaps based in speculative analogy. They are almost always porous, as conjectural homologies provide launching pads for speculative analogies. In her essay on Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis, Melody Jue provides a thoughtful reading attentive to both. She interprets Flusser’s fable as offering a set of figurative associations between squid and photography. Jue also posits that the ephemeral arts and politics of the vampire squid—movements and impressions that dissipate quickly in their watery media—presage our information economy: “society becomes vampyroteuthic as human-made media move into an aquatic paradigm of informatic ‘flow’ programmed to influence human behavior.”3 This sea creature, which, Flusser posits, can manipulate fleeting jets of ink and light up the abyss with its chromatophores (often with the intent of dissimulating or lying), metamorphizes the more dystopian aspects of our media regimes that dictate intersubjective flows of information verging on propaganda and manipulation. The vampire squid thus doubles as spectacle, which today analogizes quite nicely with the more nightmarish corners of cyberspace that have proven to be a far more tentacular pseudo-presence than Flusser or even Guy Debord could have imagined.

Jue spends the bulk of her time on these speculative analogies in Flusser’s text, yet she also points to some conjectural homologies. Flusser’s great contribution to ethological art is his method of paranatural etho-phenomenology, which Jue describes as imagining “the vampire squid’s phenomenological world from the complexity of its particularly evolved body, proprioceptive orientations, and the benthic conditions of its aquatic milieu (pressure, temperature, buoyancy).” Even in the ocean abyss, homologies between human and nonhuman exist (body, eyes, skin, neuronal functions, and so forth) from which compelling conjectures can be grounded. For Jue, this offers a “milieu-specific philosophy,” one that critiques the “terrestrial bias of philosophy and critical theory.”4 As she points out, we know far more today about this elusive cephalopod than we did at the time of Flusser’s writing. It is therefore not surprising that Flusser got some things wrong. For example, the vampire squid is only one foot long, not twenty meters. Nonetheless, Flusser’s work opens the door for more conjectural forms of ethology, which might be too adventurous for the methodological constraints of ethology proper, but not for aesthetic disciplines that admit more daring explorations of other minds—like poetry and visual practices. Conjectural homologies can supply the basis and morph into speculative analogies, giving us our best shot of approaching intractable phenomena in the world that would otherwise remain out of reach of the positivistic sciences. As Stacy Alaimo puts in in her essay on the speculative “unmooring” of terrestrial humanist knowledge, when making statements about deep blue animal alterities, “metonyms traverse trans-corporeal networks, while metaphors demand some kind of imaginative leap.”5

Inside this constellation of creaturely life, not all transcorporeal relations are as distant as human and cephalopod. Flusser was fascinated by the para-evolutionary separation between vampire squid and us, which makes sense in light of his hierarchical understanding of objectivity that the “further removed a phenomenon is from its describer, the more objectifiable it is.”6 For Flusser, the more proximate a creature is to our own human creatureliness, the harder it is to be objective about it. This is because we cannot step out of our animality—especially our mammality, and most especially our primatehood.7 This would mean that, for us, anthropoids are among the most obscure creatures on the planet. In this regard, perhaps the most celebrated contemporary visual work involving a primate is Pierre Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask) (2014).8 The nineteen-minute film features Fukuchan, a long-tailed macaque dressed in a young girl’s clothing, with a long black wig and a white mask covering her face. Huyghe first saw her in a viral YouTube video.9 In this clip, Fukuchan appears in a restaurant near Tokyo interacting with customers, handing them hot towels and beverages. Alongside another macaque, Yat-Chen, she is the property of the restaurant owner, who began using her for customer service, no doubt as a novel attraction. While the humans clearly enjoy themselves, the monkey’s experience of the situation is less than evident. For his turn, Huyghe arranged to film Fukuchan after hours in the same restaurant devoid of any human presence, aside from the film crew, which remains unseen (in this way, retaining Western scientific paradigms of observer/observed). He also replaced her mask with one of his own making based on the visual tradition of Noh theater—a graceful white mask in resin.

While Untitled (Human Mask) is by and large set in this empty restaurant, the film begins outdoors. With the slow, steady movement of a drone camera, we first travel along an urban landscape with nary a sign of life. This opening sequence is brief but gives the impression that the subsequent scenes in the restaurant are located somewhere among these desolate streets. This is not the case. The drone footage is from Fukushima post-2011 nuclear meltdown (this is never made clear to the viewer; the work has neither spoken nor written narration). This false spatial continuity finds an echo in the work’s temporal dimensions once the viewer finds Fukuchan sitting “alone” in the restaurant. If Untitled (Human Mask) seems to unfold in real time, its temporality is actually highly disjunctive. Huyghe filmed Fukuchan over the course of a couple days, seamlessly editing the results. Viewers are immersed in a collaged temporality, even if our experience of it cannot pick up on its alinear vectors. We have been worked over by the cinematic apparatus, which in this case might productively reveal that real time is only human existential time and not time-in-the-real. If this different temporality is not existential human time, then neither is it some purported nontime of animality (think of Bataille’s eternally present conception of the animal as water-in-water). To envision creaturely life as either temporal/human or atemporal/nonhuman is clearly an impoverished binary. That said, entering another creature’s sense of time and space is daunting. Cinematic time like Huyghe’s might offer some oblique possibilities. For instance, episodic time. Or superimposed times. Or recursive time, which humans might share despite our forward-marching clocks. Or, considering that some animals see with more plentiful eyes than binocular vision, perhaps there are collaged modes of time. Or experiences of time that are unimaginable for us, which would mean that nonhuman times, like nonhuman languages, may be idiomatically untranslatable into human time—and, furthermore, that a universal creaturely time bank necessary for such translations does not exist. This is not to say that Fukuchan experiences space and time in these ways. As a fellow primate, she likely experiences her world in ways similar to us. I am only pointing to the inherent possibilities of speculating on nonhuman worlds through nonhuman aesthetic media—like drones, cameras, and microphones—which might disturb our all-consuming presence and human capacities all too often assumed to be paragons of the real.

From the start, then, Untitled (Human Mask) plunges the viewer into various zones of indeterminacy. First is ocular indeterminacy, since the drone and cameras used in the work are nonhuman vantage points that supplement human vision—so seamlessly, in fact, that they are barely noticed. Second is ecological indeterminacy, which puts into speculative play the radioactive thresholds of life and death in a disaster area like Fukushima. Third, and most central to the work, is the indeterminacy between human viewer and Fukuchan herself, whereby transspecies confusion blends identification and counter-identification. This zone of indeterminacy is a concrete example of difference from within animality itself, where humans are always both divergent and homologous with respect to disparate nonhuman animals. This is even reflected in our taxonomic practices—in this specific case, primate/primate (sameness) but also human/monkey (difference). This seems to trouble our law of noncontradiction, as well as human narcissism, though the contradiction evaporates with the realization that human differences are immanent to animality. Whatever the case may be, when we are confronted with this zone of indeterminacy between human and nonhuman, a few things tend to happen. Sometimes this indeterminacy is tacitly disavowed through ideologically loaded inferences and projections—be they innocence, wildness, pure instinct, or simple blankness. In other words, it will be tamed in overdeterminate difference. Sometimes the opposite happens, and this indeterminacy will be deemed to be more indeterminate than necessary. The nonhuman animal is then often understood to be abyssal, which usually leads to overreaching skepticism or overly cautious theoretical armature. Sometimes both take place at once, in which case, nonhuman creatures will be interpreted as both abyssal unknowns and securely knowable (usually pejoratively) entities, depending on the need, convenience, or habit.10

I borrow “zone of indeterminacy” from Deleuze, who himself did not seem to realize that the recognition of said indeterminacy depends on a secure point of differential determinacy to make any such determination. This oscillation between indeterminacy and determinacy, which can itself be indeterminate, might be somewhat understandable when it comes to creatures mysterious to us, such as cephalopods. What is strange in this instance, contrary to Flusser’s assertion about objectivity, is that we know quite a lot about macaques. Representing a long history of human interaction, they are one of the most studied animals on the planet. Macaques have been received variously as pests, tourist attractions, performers, deities, companion species, and experimental subjects.11 Their ground-up spinal cords were central to the story of the creation of the polio vaccine, beginning with their importation from India to the Puerto Rican islet of Cayo Santiago in 1939 (in yet another connection with the Caribbean archipelago).12 Returning once more to John C. Lilly, before he turned his attention to bottle-nosed dolphins as his favorite experimental subjects in tanks, we find him electrically stimulating live macaque brains to induce a cortical mapping of behavior—notably feelings of fear or pleasure.13 Less macabre, macaques have played a foundational role in ethology—specifically, Japanese primatology, which Donna Haraway argues marks the origin of postwar primatology. Anticipating Untitled (Human Mask) from the late 1980s, Haraway makes an analogy with Japanese theater traditions: “Japanese monkeys might be viewed as actors in a Kabuki drama or Noh performance.”14 What she means by this is that, in contrast to Western scientific practices hoping to pry open and fully reveal natural and primitive nature, Japanese primatologists understood their subjects as practitioners of sociocultural dissimulation: “their stylized social gestures and intricate rule-ordered lives are like dramatic masks that necessarily both conceal and reveal complex cultural meanings about what it means to be simultaneously social, indigenous, and individual for Japanese observers.”15 Though Haraway dislikes the term, this acknowledgment of primatehood gets to the core of a posthumanist ethology.

If Huyghe’s Noh mask hides something, then what it conceals is not some innocent state of nature, some impassable abyss, and certainly not a creature without any face at all, as reactionary humanists might have it. Instead, the resin mask hides a flesh-and-blood mask that also divulges and conceals certain things about itself. In an odd twist, Huyghe’s uncanny mask is actually revealing. Without it, worn tropes of an innocent, impassably abyssal, or faceless animality might continue to be projected unchecked, even with a macaque staring right back at the human viewer. In negative revelation, the humanoid mask disturbs dogmatic assumptions about the animal on the other side by its obdurate deflection while providing a blank screen for the simultaneous thwarting and revealing of human projections that obscure creaturely life. Were Fukuchan to be unmasked, her interiority would not be fully revealed, any more than human faces reveal their depths, even when supplemented with symbolic languages. Instead, the mask underscores something fundamental about what is likely a panoply of multispecies, intersubjective, and interpersonal possibilities on this planet: the oscillation between knowability and unknowability. As Haraway puts it, “masks cannot be stripped away to reveal the truth; rather the mask is a figure of the two-sidedness of the structure of life, person, and society.”16 Without this socionatural play between knowability and unknowability, of masks going all the way down, revealing and concealing along the way, we would be faced with either full intersubjective presence (which would only collapse into a singularity that undoes any and all relations) or pure unrecognizability (in which case, other life-forms would be purely alien—and, consequentially, completely unseen or missed). This is why indeterminacy needs determinacy. Face-to-face encounters are predicated simultaneously on meanings that get through and those that never can—both bridges and abysses—and this does not even mention all the ways in which intersubjective relations happen beyond the face. What is more, this dynamic is likely baked into the evolutionary real, which would mean there is nothing to reveal when what is sought after is, in fact, not hidden but untouchable in itself: when the full truth and nothing but the truth is its intractability and no amount of opening or imaging can get to it—say, consciousness, both human and nonhuman. This is no longer skepticism pure and simple, since not having full access to other minds becomes a positive knowledge about the real and the teeming creatures that walk, crawl, fly, swim, and lurk inside it. There is nothing to sneak up on; we are there already.

If, as the implied irony of Huyghe’s title suggests, the mask stands in for the ostensible obfuscation of anthropomorphism, the lesson of Japanese primatology is that the human face and its affects should be the point of departure for the animal sciences. Haraway examines the different possibilities that arise from this, beginning with Kinji Imanishi’s groundbreaking work. Encouraging his fellow primatologists to enter into multispecies identification with Japanese macaques, he employed what can be described as an ethnographic approach to nonhuman communities by setting up provisions for his subjects and stressing collective and long-term study. The primatologist Kawai Masao even coined the term kyokan, a sympathetic method that translates to “feel-one,” which encompasses “the particular method and attitude resulting from feelings of mutual relations, personal attachment, and shared life.”17 In other words, Japanese primatology works from the premise that intersubjectivity is, in fact, an objective feature of the world, which flies in the face of Western scientific paradigms maintaining subject–object separation.18 In this way, Japanese primatology was posthumanist from the start. No wonder it was the first to observe and confirm nonhuman culture—that is, the shared knowledge of how to wash sweet potatoes. As Haraway would put it, the world is filled with naturecultures—neither primitivist innocence nor impassable abysses but variegated levels of kin.

Returning to Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask), Fukuchan should now seem far less alien. We can speculate about her existence through sound homologies that provide the basis for compelling analogies. To do so, we have to think more like a Japanese primatologist: a mammal and primate (we human viewers) is watching a fellow mammal and primate (Fukuchan), a sameness that often gets erased by the simultaneously real differences from within these categories, namely, a Homo sapiens watching a macaque. This encounter is like a corporeal Venn diagram forming the basis for posthumanist modes of viewership:19 identifying with nonhuman life from which we share a foundation, and refusing the illusory sovereign position that disavows sameness by myopically focusing on purportedly transcendental differences. Oddly enough, from within this field of creaturely immanence, we have always been as much nonhuman as human. Many of our affective inferences with members of our own species are based in animality, and the nonhuman in us has always been available for deducing judicious meanings in other species. This includes the ability to make logical deductions, as well as inferring feelings and moods, which Western ethology continues to deem intractably off-limits.

The prevailing moods in Untitled (Human Mask) are contemplative, bored, restless, and anxious. Fukuchan first appears seated in the hazy stillness of the empty restaurant. She quietly inspects her wig, caressing its strands with fingers. She plays with her fingernails. She swings her leg back and forth from off her perch. This hair playing, nail inspecting, and leg swinging might attest to the simple pleasures of movement, but they are more likely symptomatic of an absentminded existential register—either habitual ticks out of malaise or side manners that often supplement contemplation (as Heidegger realized, the dividing line between contemplation and boredom is a thin one). Fukuchan will also suddenly get up and run through the restaurant, opening and closing the refrigerator, for instance, or install herself at the longer wooden table used by dining customers. Again, these movements might be read as the simple pleasures of movement within the possibilities and limitations of her space, or they could be the release of nervous or weary energy. Toward the end of the film, Fukuchan appears more visibly upset. She impetuously overturns a bottle on the table and runs into what appears to be a storage room, where she stares intently at the ceiling. During this scene, Huyghe interposes closeup shots of writhing maggots underneath clear plastic food wrappings and a cockroach scurrying across the floor, adding to the effect of postapocalyptic abandon. It is never clear what disturbs Fukuchan overhead. Since the final shots of Untitled (Human Mask) find a rainstorm opening up over the restaurant, maybe it is the change in weather that elicits anxiety (and since the rain comes some moments after her seemingly alarmed state, it is as if she feels the rain coming before the viewer, though this could be chalked up to chronological editing of nonchronological events). Either way, Fukuchan’s mask is visibly wet during the very final scene, where the viewer finally gains a modicum of access to her face: behind the open eye slits of the mask, Huyghe’s closeup shot reveals quick, darting, and searching eyes looking directly at the camera.

Much could be made about the way I have just described Fukuchan. Handedness, captivation, boredom, anxiety—this is all well-trodden territory for a Heideggerian reading of the animal and its recent cogent critiques.20 At minimum, these modalities point to a lived importance. After all, handling things with your fingers, reflecting, being bored or anxious, all of these make no sense outside some sort of self-awareness or, why not, personhood. This is the case even in the most modest evolutionary explanations that find these feelings to have had adaptive benefits. When speaking to Fukuchan’s self-awareness in her essay on Untitled (Human Mask), Jennifer Higgie makes a seemingly uncomplicated statement, which turns out to be quite complicated indeed. After affirming (wrongly) that humans are the only animals that habitually practice deceit, and that we are the only ones who can deceive ourselves (how would this claim even be verifiable in nonhumans?), Higgie proffers the nonhuman as living in direct self-simplicity: “It knows it’s a monkey.”21 This is a striking claim. It would mean not only that Fukuchan has a sense of self and an understanding of her own kin but, additionally, that she holds the classifying concept of “monkey” as such. The first two parts of this claim are almost certainly true—the second almost certainly not.

As far as we know, macaques do not make taxonomic differentiations as we have seen fit in our history of natural sciences—that this is a “macaque,” a type of “monkey,” that we are “humans,” a type of “primate,” or that this is a “conifer,” a type of “tree,” and so on. This does not mean that they do not communicate in their own embedded semanticisms, which may very well include signifying types.22 And certainly this does not amount to saying macaques do not hold concepts or perform differentiations at all. They must—otherwise concepts and differentiations would only come into existence ex nihilo with the advent of their human classifying signs, a far-fetched conjecture that puts the semiotic cart before the minded horse. Having no need for “monkey” or “concept,” a being like Fukuchan nonetheless lives as the substrate for these signs, living and breathing, recognizing her kin, performing logical leaps of differentiation and imagination, and making and communicating the meaning of her world through a mind-body attuned to the objects and bodies around her. This entity with limbs and a brain largely homologous to ours found herself embedded with a film crew in a restaurant and likely made the following conceptual differentiations: like me these moving presences make sounds, have eyes and limbs, and seem to recognize me and my ability to perform certain feats—while other entities in the world, like these green foliaged structures outside the window I’d like to climb on, or these writhing maggots, or this glass object I just pulled from the fridge, do not have these abilities in relation to my own and do not recognize me. These are words used in a judicious though highly paradoxical attempt to access thinking without words. As humans, we may be able to perform a similar asymbolic epoché on ourselves to attune to the unworded thoughts and affects that course through us all the time, which then get mediated in speech or immediately dissolved into living-dead script (which explains the italicization of my worded attempt earlier to channel macaque thinking). In this way, it is not that we cannot understand the nonhuman. Instead, reiterating Laurent Dubreuil’s suggestive diagnosis, it is that we are hypnotized by our own words that mystify ourselves-outside-our-words: “we say more than we think; we think more than we say.”23 Dubreuil’s rich opening theoretical two-step from his The Intellective Space suggests that our languages exceed our ability to fully account for their shared symbolic powers, while not losing sight of the ways in which we inhabit a semantic field beyond the symbolic. Recognizing this expanded field of semanticism may allow us to access, however obliquely, nonhuman semantic fields. Dubreuil’s opening lines also make room for a wonderful turning of the tables: instead of deeming asymbolic forms of life as deficient, is it not instead our symbols, however powerful and useful for us, that have proven to be inadequate for the job of fully encompassing the real, especially nonhuman experiences of it?

Some fascinating insights arise from all this, perhaps the most fascinating being the utter decentering of the concept of human, which may not be so anthroproprietary after all. In their compelling set of interviews coupling primatology and philosophy, Dubreuil and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh debate this possibility, prying open a considerable distance between the lived experience of being human and the word human. After Sue Savage-Rumbaugh mulls over the question whether chimpanzees and bonobos make us–them distinctions, Dubreuil suggests that there “is no reason to consider that discourse would be the only basis for producing the difference between us and non-us.” This means that adiscursive nonhumans might also hold performative group conceptions demarcating their own lived importance in the world differentially from others.24 Furthermore, this might mean that our marking-off term human, which has been culturally and historically variable, is a symbolic placeholder for a more general group feeling of lived importance. In this way, if nonhuman groups could speak our symbolic language, maybe they would nominate themselves as the real “humans” and not, in fact, as “animals.” Savage-Rumbaugh’s wonderful observation about bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha is telling in this regard: “By the time Kanzi and Panbanisha were grown, I couldn’t possibly accept the definition that they were animals, and I couldn’t stand it when people called them ‘animals’ in their presence. They couldn’t stand it either.”25 It may then be that the human–animal divide is operative outside our species and that human is a shifter pointing to a sense of lived importance shared by at least some nonhuman animals, without having any need for the symbol “human” itself. In other words, if human and, indeed, person are signs pointing to a sense of differential existence in the world, then the possibility always exists that this modality, beyond or underneath these symbols, is felt, shared, and lived by any number of nonhumans in similar though likely variegated ways.

The result is that the human is not first and foremost a taxonomic category but a general mood of self-lived importance, most likely grounded in group dynamics of mutual identification, an existential mood of demarcation in the world, shared horizontally within animality. This aligns with non-Western etho-epistemologies, like the Amerindian “perspectival” and “multinatural” traditions that inform Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in his Cannibal Metaphysics. There de Castro describes the “perspectival inversions” that run through the natural world, notably in the creaturely realm:

Why is it that animals see themselves as humans? Precisely because we humans see them as animals, while seeing ourselves as humans. Peccaries cannot see themselves as peccaries (or, who knows, speculate on the fact that humans and other beings are peccaries underneath the garb specific to them) because this is the way they are viewed by humans. If humans regard themselves as humans and are seen as nonhumans, as animals or spirits, by nonhumans, then animals should necessarily see themselves as humans.26

Some of Huyghe’s installations, like his contribution to Documenta 13 (2012) and his 2014 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, included an Ibizan hound named “Human” who was free to roam the grounds or gallery with a right front leg painted a striking shade of pink. Although this nomination might be read as facile irony or even a debasing gesture, from the preceding analysis, it might actually have a constructive, denotative quality of this dog’s lived importance in relation to the interesting others around her, whom she might interpret as variably friendly nonhumans. She represents a deregulation of the anthropropriety notion of the human as a broader sense of lived importance of which the code word human has so long dissimulated. It should be stressed, however, that smooth spaces exist between established species barriers. It is likely that companion species understand themselves to be embedded as variant “humans” among their human kin—perhaps dogs like Human interpret their largely hairless creaturely companions as differently abled humans. But we can go further, since in some ways, this posthumanist conception of the human as rhizomatically active in the other minds populating our planet retains a liberal and neuro-normative conception of lived importance. It is possible, though certainly even more speculative and difficult to verify, that nonhumans whose cognitive structures are quite different from ours—usually deemed less complex, with fewer neuronal connections—also have a sense of lived importance to which we have far less access, since it is so unlike the “human” placeholder of lived importance we share within our primatocentric and mammaliocentric positions within the evolutionary real.

With the help of Fukuchan, I have brushed up against the limits of human symbolic language and the evolutionary real from which human minds have immanently symbolized concepts over and above a phenomenological existence we share with many other nonhuman animals. I have posited that many animals hold concepts in unworded (or differently worded) neurocorporeal ways. These may nonetheless be communicated via nonhuman semanticism—gestures, calls, looks, or smells. It is also possible that some of these meanings are only known solipsistically without any way of externalizing or translating them (which, again, is likely the case for much of human intersubjectivity). It may equally be possible that their understandableness can only be known from within a nonhuman group or swarm and therefore completely barred from tractable human observation and study. Speaking in speculative realist terms, all this would mean that we are not the sole correlators on this planet. The general stance of Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism, which is variably shared by other recent forms of Continental realisms, such as Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, is to critique the Kantian transcendental human subject who is said only to have access to the world through human mindedness and categories. This is the lot of “correlationism,” where we are forever barred from the absolute—or, using another of Meillassoux’s terms, the “great outdoors”—since our mindedness always gets in our own way. Despite its impressive speculative gymnastics, what is interesting here is that speculative realism and all other philosophical endeavors to exit the correlationist circle so as to arrive at the real in-itself remain within a modernist paradigm of objectivity and autonomy: the desire for total access to the absolute in philosophical panoptic sovereignty.

Dealing properly with these ideas would require another book altogether, one recognizing the many internal differences of the realist turn in Continental thought. I do, however, want to tentatively introduce the creaturely into this debate. An attentive reader of Meillassoux’s touchstone After Finitude, for example, will note a frequent slippage in the text within the category of earthlings: we find “terrestrial life,” “living creatures,” “human species,” “humanity,” “consciousness,” and “thought,” all of which overlap but are not necessarily reducible to each other.27 Are nonhuman animals correlationists? Quasi- or inferior correlationists? Do they not correlate at all? And does that fact that many nonhumans perform arithmetic trouble Meillassoux’s ultimate claim that humans have access to the absolute through mathematics? The nonhuman creature poses a dizzying array of problems for speculative realism and any flat ontology that whisks away the creaturely to be like any other entity in the real. By virtue of their stubborn parahuman existence, nonhuman animals seem to impose a deconstruction of/in the real of the correlationism–noncorrelationism binary. For are these really the only two options available? Might we not instead understand the world as comprising a multitude of correlationisms? Correlationism in the singular is certainly wrongheaded because of its anthropocentric myopia—and yet, arguing for pure noncorrelationism, should such a thing be possible, risks skipping over a panoply of nonhuman creaturely worldings. For a speculative realist, the problem with the preceding argument is that I have performed a generalized Kantianism of the living, where now even nonhumans correlate with the world.28 I have simply widened the correlationist circle and made it posthumanist (still, I would argue that this is no longer in fact a circle but a constellation of different correlationisms, fragmentary and intersective). This would mean that, like us, nonhuman animals are cut off from the great outdoors, in contrast to Rilke’s poetic notion of animals having full access to the Open. If the poet were alive today, he might say that the kreatur is the original speculative realist in its uncorrelated and unmediated access to the world, an idea that now can only smack of projected, primitivist innocence.

Again, I do not have the space here to entertain the complex issues that arise from taking the creaturely seriously with respect to the multifaceted debates in speculative realism, but there is one final observation that should interest philosophers, ethologists, art historians, and artists alike: let us hypothesize that we humans are only one correlator among many; would this mean that there is one world or many? If the former, then one absolute exists with which we and all other creatures correlate in a unified great outdoors (though this begs the question of who authenticates this One). This would be akin to the universal language of thought discussed in the previous chapter, though now on a more material plane of the real. Consequentially, all experiences on this planet would ultimately be understood as phenomenal idioms that can be translated as particular units of experience of a universal world. While we may correlate with the world differently than other nonhuman animals, human and nonhuman animals nonetheless correlate with the same absolute. If, instead, there are as many worlds as there are types of correlators, then there is no unified great outdoors. In this scenario, every creature is a unique point of worldly overture, which is why Derrida claimed that there is no world, only islands. Here we enter the speculative domain of Jakob von Uexküll’s Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans or, more recently, Cary Wolfe’s theory of worldly islands built on his reading of Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign lectures.29 All experiences on this planet would ultimately be understood as phenomenal idioms that cannot be translated as particular experiences of a universal world; the world is instead made up of only a profusion of different particular worldings. No world, only worlds. I certainly will not settle on one side or the other in what is likely an unsettleable debate, but returning to Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask), let me just say that, like us, Fukuchan is part of the real that moves and correlates from within it. What is the world to her? How does she correlate with it? Taking recourse once more to a posthumanist ethology, she correlates in ways that are likely simultaneously alike and different from us. The answer may be a deconstructive midpoint: there is both a world and many worlds.

In his essay on Untitled (Human Mask), Bertrand Dommergue posits that Huyghe’s film offers an end-of-the-world scenario in which humans have become extinct and Fukuchan is the last monkey—perhaps even the last living thing—on earth.30 Dommergue’s essay is framed along traditional lines that presuppose a determinacy between human and animal, something Huyghe’s film does so much to suspend and destabilize. Rather than speculating more deeply on what the world without us would mean for Fukuchan, Dommergue maintains our all-consuming presence in the negative by claiming that Fukuchan is more or less aimless without her humans and unable to return to a natural state of animality (hence also presupposing a determinacy between culture and nature, which Huyghe’s film also does so much to suspend and destabilize). Nonetheless, Dommergue’s thought experiment is fruitful. For one, Fukuchan would represent a form of present-tense ancestrality. Here would be, on-screen, a minded entity in the world posterior to any human mindedness, effectively giving us an impossible glimpse of the world anterior to any human correlation. When Meillassoux describes ancestrality as “any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species—or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth,”31 Fukuchan can stand in for the creaturely slippage after the pure mind-independent (not even) nothing of the absolute real, but before the mind-dependent reality of human emergence and correlation that it is argued masks access to the absolute (even though, of course, Fukuchan is a contemporaneous creature, fully herself, and not stalled on a ladder of life with humans looking down from the top). It should be noted, once more, that Meillassoux’s text presents an instability about mind-dependent reality—at times, it is restricted to the human, while at others, it is attributed more capaciously to the creaturely. The hyphen in Meillassoux’s preceding definition of the ancestral is thus quite loaded.

In fact, there are at least three possible worlds when considering ancestrality: a time before any correlates at all (a precreaturely time), a time of nonhuman correlates but prehuman minds (a creaturely time, though not yet human creaturely time), and a time of human correlates (the present, if not likely the far future). That middle time is speculative ethology’s time. It has to be admitted that we can imagine what the world was like for the dinosaurs whose fossils litter geological strata today far better than precreaturely objects; rocks and plants do not have neurological structures and did not become the birds flying by our windows. Admittedly, the access to dinosaur mind is highly speculative and forever unverifiable—but nonetheless, there is some retroactive theoretical purchase. At the very least, we can say that this triceratops was embodied and had some sort of rapport with the world, even if we cannot know the how of its ancestral life. The same cannot be said about Theia—the ancient planet that collided with Earth, likely forming our moon—nor the elementary particles created much further back at the big bang (barring some divine observer whose faculties of experience would have to be, at bottom, creaturely). Compared to the mental exercise of what it might mean to be an electron, being a bat starts to seem far more bridgeable. Even if we agree with Meillassoux that the human is a distinct creature with mathematical analyses providing access to absolute ancestrality, thus making objective claims about a precreaturely time, it would still behoof a speculative realist to attend to the speculative ethologies that might give us even richer access once creatures arrived on the planetary scene.32

What is further interesting about Dommergue’s thought experiment is that, at its heart, it is a pure impossibility. This is not only in the paradoxical positing of our own extinct viewership. Recalling Jean-Luc Nancy, it would require Fukuchan to be absolutely alone, which is logically impossible: “to be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must be alone being alone—and this of course is contradictory.”33 But more practically, how could a macaque ever verify or know that it is the last living thing on earth? Or, for that matter, how could even the most technologically extended human know this? It is an impossible knowledge. Yet the far more interesting impossibility here is less logical than logistical at the level of ethological care. As Karl Steel has eloquently written about the history of isolation experiments and feral children, “nothing does well on its own.”34 It is catastrophic, as Harry Harlow found out in his needless depravation experiments on macaques. The innovation of Steel’s revisiting these stories, which have fascinated the European imagination for so long, is to underscore the fundamentals of creaturely caring that apply to human and nonhuman, even in multispecies negotiation. Fukuchan starts to look like a feral child in reverse: raised, not in the wild by wolves, but in a restaurant by humans. However different, both scenarios tellingly demand attunement, attention, and care—in other words, meaningful others.

Finally, returning one last time to Dommergue’s text on Untitled (Human Mask), he poses a fascinating question: why does Fukuchan not simply unfetter herself from mask and clothing? He seems disappointed that this does not happen (though it is possible that these moments were edited out, especially the mask, which must have felt new to her). Leaving aside the assumption that she in fact does feel alone (after all, the film crew is there, as is the cat I have not yet mentioned, an interesting other Dommergue seems to miss), this leads to a complex set of questions: Does she feel at home? And if so, where is this feeling localized? Does ideology extend into the nonhuman realm? Has something been beaten into her? Ana Teixeira Pinto makes an important point about this and Fukuchan’s kin that cuts through the speculation in which this chapter has indulged: “Bred in captivity or captured as infants, the monkeys undergo a grueling training process. To strengthen their hind legs they are often hung by the neck with both hands tied up for weeks on end, until they finally acquire a human-like posture, learning to handle props and perform human chores.”35 Here the question of power enters the picture, as does the use of nonhuman supernormality for darker ends. With this, the time of pure speculation is over. We now need the courage to make ethicopolitical claims about creaturely life by building on the ontological domain, without becoming resigned to its enervating and rationalizing temptations of skepticism and aporia—thereby entering the zoopolitical.