Introduction

This book focuses on a singular problem: What is an animal phenomenology? What is it to be an animal, not as observed from an objective perspective of natural history, but from the fur of the beasts themselves? This does not mean asking what it is like to run like a cheetah. The concern in this problem is not likeness. It is not an issue of similarity; rather, what is running for the cheetah? What is swimming for the seal and slithering for the anaconda and bedding down for the cat—to name but a few animals that appear in this book. Traditionally, phenomenology is interested in how humans are embedded in their world—a world of material things, cultural meanings, and physiological engagement. As such, phenomenology is decidedly anthropocentric; it is interested in how we humans move in the world as we perceive it. There are good reasons for such bias. After all, the human world is what we know best, and inquiry into the animal world proves rather tricky.

Some readers will recognize in this problem of animal phenomenology an echo of Thomas Nagel’s essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” There is an extended discussion of Nagel later in this book, but for now, let me simply say that the problem of embodying another perspective haunts philosophy and art. How is one to get outside of one’s world to think and to feel from another point of view? This is a particular challenge when thinking may not involve rational cognition, and when feeling is done through sense organs differently attuned than our own.1 What does it mean to think with a different body and different mind in a differently constituted world? In these questions of the animals’ worlds, we are confronted with how to understand others’ perspectives without reducing them to our own and without throwing out parts of these others’ worlds that we cannot understand. When these others are not human, their radical disjunction from anything we understand as our world creates grave problems. In its foreignness, the animal other becomes radically Other.

Traditionally, animals have been viewed as having limited faculties. Their poverty of faculties is supposedly evident in their “lesser” ability to reason, in their language, and in their use of tools. Their skills are lessened by measuring them against every standard in which we consider ourselves superior, and by this superiority, we differentiate ourselves from them. In each case, the animals are measured by our yardstick and come out wanting. I characterize the supposed inferiority of their abilities by a shorthand called “living on the surface.” According to a long cultural and philosophical tradition, animals do not engage in the self-reflexive thought that provides humans with individual and cultural depth of being; instead, animals are said to live on the surface of things.2 Surfaces are seen as fleeting appearances, mere shadows lacking the substantiality found in the “depth” of human interiority. Animals supposedly do not have the depth of memory and the ability to process events and memories as humans do; instead, their lives are a series of instances, one after the other as fleeting events in time, rather than a thoughtful narrative. Their lack of critical reflection reveals their lives to be “like water in water,” as Georges Bataille says, meaning that the animals do not differentiate among themselves, their actions, and their environment: “There was no landscape in a world where the eyes that opened did not apprehend what they looked at, where indeed, in our terms the eyes did not see.”3 They do not think in the abstract about the things around them, and so do not see objects as objects.

So it is that we have cornered the animals by limiting their sense of depth. We have corralled them under the concept animal. What depth they do have is dismissed as lesser than that of humans, or so foreign as to be untranslatable and not worth pursuing in our human endeavors. This flattening of animals’ worlds into a thin layer of animal world as a life on the surface of things has legitimated any number of cruel acts against animals.4 What I would like to pursue here is how the notion of “animal surface” can be turned against its negative uses. The surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals.

Contemporary art has a particular investment with surfaces that is useful in unhinging philosophical concepts and moving them in new directions. Artists are keenly aware of the optical and physical surfaces that function as the material for making art. The surfaces presented in the world are doubled by surfaces created by the artists, be they on paper, canvas, photographic paper, film screen, surfaces of installation objects, or body surfaces of performance art. Artists negotiate the optical and material surfaces presented to them in the world and the surfaces of their materials of expression. The allusive and illusive surfaces form a language—both material and cultural—for artistic expression. It is not a formal language and syntax but a comportment and way of proceeding. This expressive language formed from the double fold of these surfaces creates conditions for thinking the problem of contact between the “surface” animal world and our own. Working between these surfaces, folded within them, artists create works that prompt thought in new directions.

While art functions within the cultural world, the very human world, much of the art under discussion in this book comes to terms with nonhuman realms. The works point outside of culture to alien spaces. I am interested in how art calls to us to consider and negotiate the space of this animal other. The artists and their works do not present a unified mode of proceeding but rather heterogeneous approaches and attitudes for understanding the nonhuman.

At stake is the ability to think about the Other, those agents and beings radically different from ourselves. How are we to understand that which differs from our capacity to comprehend? The conjecture of this book is that such thinking is possible within particular parameters. Foremost, it is a thinking that arises from the event, action, and encounters with the animal others. This is a corporeal thinking that risks itself, mind and body, in the acts of encounters that differ with each animal. (The event is not simply singular but a swarm or pack that multiplies with each engagement.) Additionally, thinking the Other in this case is possible only if we consider thinking as an activity in the wake of philosophy as a series of experiments and paths toward producing tentative, sometimes fragile, and hybrid meaning. In particular, and as I’ll take up in later chapters, pidgin language—as a makeshift and cobbled-together language of words and gestures between two different groups—has been particularly helpful for me as a figure for thinking alongside animals.

To engage the animal other certainly constitutes a question of ethics—or as I note in chapters 1 and 2, a question of violence and consumption of another and its world. How can we meet the other on terms other than our own without co-opting this other for our own ends? I have tried to establish a figural language for talking about and actually engaging with animals. I am interested not simply in if it is possible to meet the Other but how—by what methods this encounter in the no-man’s-land between humans and animals could take place. Certainly this would be no totalizing understanding but rather an understanding that always has its potential for collapse before it.

As may be evident throughout the book but most particularly in its closing chapters on Becoming, engagement with animals is not only a question of ethics but also of ontology. Primarily, I am interested in questions of ontology—our being and comportment in our world and on this earth. Realizing and taking seriously that there are other beings with other worlds and ways of being on this earth means reassessing humanism and what it means to be human. Early on I establish the figure of hybridity—what it means to be both human and animal. Hybridity haunts the chapters that follow by serving as a fundamental operator in our engagement with nonhumans.

If what is at stake is how we think about (and alongside) the Other, hybridity and becoming put up other stakes: rethinking humanims. As most deep approaches to animals studies claim, by measuring ourselves in relation to the nonhuman, humanism deconstructs by way of its necessary supplement, the animal. Indeed, the animal that therefore I am and inaccessible animality (of humans and nonhumans) fashion the human. The outside—surfaces not “within” the “depths” of human interiority—opens up humanism causing inflections in its boundaries. Some of these inflections and risks in restructuring (non)human community are outlined in this book. A more developed look at this restructuring, indeed an animal revolution in the constitution of community, would be another work, one yet to come.

While humans and animals live on the same earth, they occupy different worlds. If we cannot access what it is to live from the standpoint of the beast, then our understanding of the animals and their worlds comes from contact with the surfaces of such worlds—the sites where the human and animal worlds bump against each other, jarring and jamming our anticipated cultural codes for animals and offering us something different. This book seeks to take the negative claim of animals living on the surface without cultural or individual depth of being and turn the premise into a positive set of possibilities for human–animal engagement. I am not claiming that animals live only on the surface; indeed, biologists and ethicists continue to find a depth of thinking in the lives of animals. What will become evident in the middle chapters of this book is that such depth, if radically other than our own, remains necessarily closed off to us and that the surface of interaction between humans and animals becomes a zone for thinking such inaccessible locales that may prove to be but other surfaces yet unexposed.

The supposed poverty of the (animal) surface provides an opportunity for thinking differently. If philosophy is to think the unthought of thought, it will be at such limits, horizons, and surfaces where we meet the Other. The concept of the surface has a long-standing affiliation with illusions, appearances, and art.5 Jean Baudrillard’s association of surfaces with simulacra turns this “bad copy” of the real into a hyperreal.6 In his version of reading surfaces, the real as a model and standard is abandoned altogether. Without any model from which to judge the truth of appearances, every surface sets its own standards. The result is a proliferation or heterogeneity of truth-claims with no singular ground by which to make a judgment.7 The world is a series of appearances flashing before us in an ongoing becoming; yet in order to capture this becoming, we give it a sense of being. Nevertheless, the being of that which appears to be is itself mere appearance and illusion. The true is no longer what is, but rather unfettered becoming. Twentieth-century theorists have turned the value and valences of surfaces into a strength rather than weakness. They see in the surface the flash of becoming hidden by our attempt to solidify appearances into being and depth of meaning. If, as has been the supposition of Western thought, animals live on the “mere” surface of things, then they have something to tell us about the world of becoming. Staying on the surface with animals affords us an invaluable modality for thought, and for pursuing the unthought of thought.

Contemporary artists have particular sets of tools that are not available to philosophy. While philosophy delimits itself through language and reason (including the limits of reason), artists can create striking nonlinguistic and asignifying works. They can appeal to a tradition of such works in modern art, while extending the site of such works to engage with the world of animals. The artists considered in this book are not concerned with mimesis or representing animals according to a natural history tradition or a kitsch assimilation of animals into our world as tamed or cute or defeated; rather, these artists have unmoored themselves, even ever so slightly, from the cultural grounding of meaning and the solidification of being over becoming. They have become unmoored in order to take seriously the world of the animal on its own terms. In other words, these artists take seriously the problem of an animal phenomenology.

To ask what is an animal phenomenology is to engage in an unanswerable question. Lest readers become disheartened at the outset, it is worth noting that the very impossibility of understanding the animal as Other serves as the productive friction by which authentically new thinking and art are produced. The problem itself becomes a means of creating outside of what is acceptably known and intelligible. Unlike conventional engagement with animals, the problem of ascertaining an animal phenomenology inscribes within itself and announces in advance its own impossibility; that is to say, it recognizes that the rules, grounds, and engagements that such a problem creates are always shaky and tentative rather than authoritarian demands that assimilate the animal, and in doing so annihilate its difference or unintelligibility. The interrogative prolongs thought and forestalls an answer that would too neatly close our relationship to the opacity of the animal Other. Stephen Laycock describes the dynamic of an open question and positions it against our common mode of question and answer:

But answers that obdurate their questions without remainder comprise no more than “information.” Such “digital” [on/off, yes/no, 1/0] questions are minimal openings, like the negative internal space of a puzzle piece that awaits a specific extroverted form, or like a specifically designed lock that can offer itself only to a key of particular specifications, thus “giving only dead and circular replies to a dead and circular interrogation.”8

In the question that suspends and defers clear answers, we learn the intrigue of thought. We learn to comport ourselves in a way that, rather than imposing on the Other, is able to question the foundations of what it means to be human.

Perhaps, as David Clark has proposed, the very question “What is an animal phenomenology?” serves as its own answer. The event structure of the question, its open-ended act, occasions an interrogation without an expectation of return. The role of the question is to open inquiry into other modes of thought, to an animality and the multitude of animals and their ways of being.9 The invitation extended to the reader is to take up this question, to ask it in the company of the artists and philosophers and animals under discussion here. There is a certain absurdity to asking this question. It is an absurdity addressed in the closing chapters of this book. Engaging in the event that is this question itself is an invitation to a becoming, to a crossing over that restructures what it means to think and what it means to be human, in particular to be human alongside other animals.

By recognizing the impossibility of knowing from the fur of the Other, animal phenomenology asks us to think of our own fragility. The problem announces in advance that our worldview has limits that prevent our pursuits (and our claims arising from them) from being all-encompassing. Instead, in what could be a profound ecological gesture, this question that inscribes within itself its own failure or impossibility allows us to think of human fragility. As Cary Wolfe and Cora Diamond note, fragility and exposure are modes of relating to animals.10 As Michel Serres explains, it is a fragility we share with the earth itself.11 While much of the history of philosophy has been about mastery of thought over and against the stuff of the world, fragility allows us to think otherwise, to think differently. It is such difference that plays out over the course of this book.

While the question of an animal phenomenology challenges humanism and its scaffolding of mastery, the question itself, if pressed, fragments. There is no single animal phenomenology. Indeed, each sort of animal carries itself differently on earth and fashions a different sort of world. For example, Donna Haraway and Tom Tyler have actively pursued an understanding of the dog’s life. Such a life fragments further upon consideration of different breeds and different individual animals. To ask what is an animal phenomenology is a question that serves as a lure. It draws us into an endless progression of other questions about specific animals and their lives. Indeed, throughout this book, readers will note how artists have taken into account the various worlds and worlding of specific animals—Wilson/Snæbjörnsdóttir’s polar bear habitats, Olly and Suzi’s tentative coyote, Coate’s amphibious seal, to name a few examples.

Perhaps to ask what is an animal phenomenology concedes too much to humanism. It grants too much to the argument that there is a divide between humans and all other animals. Yet in making this concession, the question as lure proves useful by drawing us into an abyss where “all other animals” become a wide array of different ways of being. Such a variety—being manifest in so many ways—wears thin the walls of a human/animal divide. Eventually one might ask what are animals’ phenomenologies, and the misnomer of a singular animal phenomenology could be put aside. I have maintained the singular question of an animal phenomenology as an opening gambit in what culture calls “the animal”; it is a play of stakes that eventually open onto more complex questions involving the plurality of animals lurking within the pages of this book.

Animal worlds set a limit to human knowledge and serve as the starting point for contemporary animal artists who slough off social values of humanism in order to produce opaque objects that bear witness to the other side of the animal–human divide. They are not interested in mastery of nature or mastery of expression. Theirs is not an illustrated natural history. My fundamental speculation is that the wonder of such art is found in the play of surfaces; it is here in the contact zones, between the outer edge of a human world and the animal world, where exchanges take place. Art brings something back from this limit and horizon of the unknowable; it bears witness to encounters without falling into a language that assimilates or trivializes the world of the animal. This art instead provides an infectious wonder at the animal world on the other side of human knowing.

It bears emphasizing that animal phenomenology is a lure within this book. Animal phenomenology is an impossible horizon because humans fundamentally return to a human phenomenology, or at least its limits and what can happen to human phenomenology as it bears witness to that which remains closed to us. In this book I do not examine specifics of how animals think and feel. The approaches by neurobiology and animal behavioral science have done much to speculate in these areas. Rather, I am using the limit of knowing as a site of productive inquiry. It is difficult enough to arrive at any certainty about what I think and feel, and it is perhaps impossible to know what another human feels. Extending this problem to animals only rebounds to show the complexity of thinking without foundation of certainty. Without transparency of knowing the Other, I’ve found recourse in discussing the frictions and follies of animal encounters.

In the contact zone between humans and animals, something does take place. This something cannot be translated into human knowing or human relations without loss and distortion of the event. Indeed, the human–animal contact zone becomes a contact without contact, a relation of nonrelation and communication whose language would be under erasure. As will be evident in these chapters, our comportment in the world and our means of communication become stretched, bent, and malleable in the wake of encounter. Artists in this book struggle to bear witness to the presence of the nonhuman—the alien presence among us. In the shadows and in the wake of encountering the animal, how is one to articulate the event? Where is there a language without translation, loss, blindness, or appropriation? Aware of these pitfalls, these artists inscribe within their works a sense of fragility and mutability. My writing about works in the wake of animal encounters creates another encounter and another wake. For me the problem has been to create a way of talking about the art that does not appropriate nor assume too much—or subsume too much. It means doubling the inscribed fragility of “knowing” or knowing when placing the work (and the event) within an economy of discourse and thought.

This book is not about what lies under the fur of the beast as some presence that ever recedes before us. Rather, it is what happens on the surface when we encounter animals as unassailably animals. The event of encounter, the problem of animality, remains the animals “before us,” as Derrida says. They are before us and we come after them, in their wake and in a wake mourning the incommunicability of encountering them. The encounter as event is an untimely now—a “now” outside of human time—a moment that puts aside before (us) and after (them). It is not a question of what animals are up to in their worlds but that they are up to anything at all, and that we in our worlds bump up against them. What happens amid the friction and gliding between human and animal worlding?

Turning from the general approach of this book to its particulars, each chapter introduces and develops a series of concepts for entering the world of animals. In most cases, the concepts are intimately entwined with the work of a particular artist examined in the chapter. The art invokes concepts, and the concepts further our understanding of the art. Through direct and oblique approaches, the art and concepts turn and return to the problem of animal phenomenology—what is “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” of the animal.12 The book has three movements. The first two chapters explore artist approaches to animality, the second two take up the immanence of animal worldings, and the final chapter along with the coda leap the supposed fence of the human–animal divide and explore a Becoming-animal.

How is one to approach animality? Archimedes once said: “Give me a place to stand and with a lever and I shall move the world.” The problem is, where can one stand outside the world by which to lever it? Chapter 1 examines how the art of Damien Hirst finds a lever in the abstract conceptual apparatus that enframe animals under the rubric animal. Through conceptual works, Hirst hoists us up out of the animals’ worlds into a world of ideas where human self-reflexive consciousness finds its purposiveness and its home and, unfortunately, leaves the animals (or their carcasses) behind. In contrast, the second chapter looks at approaching the animal from immanence rather than transcendence: Carolee Schneemann’s Dionysian revelries are paired with Nietzsche’s satyr in order to illustrate the chiaroscuro human–animal nature of what it means to be human.

Choosing immanence as a method of inquiry into animals, the next chapters pursue the issue of engaging animals without the safe distance of enframing or enclosing (and closing off) the animal worlds. Through the work of Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, chapter 3 develops the concept of animal Umwelt, or world. In chapter 4, Olly and Suzi work in the far reaches of the globe where they are out of place, but where the animals they encounter are very much at home. Their work bears witness to the contact zone between animals and humans.

In “Minor Art,” Marcus Coates seeks to collapse the differences between humans and animals to embrace surfaces as becomings. Rather than a friction between worlds delineated in the previous sections, Coates imagines a plane or site in which attributes of the human and nonhuman are exchanged among species, and the solidity of the substantive terms human and animal becomes porous boundaries. The brief coda tests the concepts of the book by using Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, where human and animal encounters lead to metamorphosis.

Given the wide array of contemporary animal artists, my selection of six artists may appear idiosyncratic. I have tried to choose artists whose work corresponds to particular issues in philosophy and is unique it its engagement with animals. Certainly there are many other artists with related conceptual interests; I leave it to other writers to explore the animality within those works. The present study is admittedly limited in scope so as to provide some room for developing ideas in a narrow rather than ranging study of artists. For readers interested in more breadth of art, I recommend Steve Baker’s well-known book, The Postmodern Animal, along with his subsequent essays and his forthcoming work Art before Ethics: Animal Life in Artists’ Hands, and I point readers to the animal-art journal Antennae, edited by Giovanni Aloi. Additionally, the phenomenological approach to animals suggested in Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, edited by Peter Steeves, has informed the philosophical tact of this present work.

I am interested in the way art reveals the world of the animal as a necessary lacuna in human knowledge.13 Art reveals the inability to articulate the world of the animal; art sets a limit, a blindness to our insight, while at the same time providing us with the palpable biotopic zone of interaction where the boundaries of worlds jostle each other.14 By working from the animal to human art, rather than the other way around, the impossibility of an animal phenomenology becomes the productive limit from which artists find inspirational and transformational material for their work.

In these chapters, there is little direct criticism or critique of the artists discussed (with, perhaps, the exception of the chapter on Damien Hirst). Rather, the book diplomatically enlists the artists as allies in thinking animality. The goal is to produce a line of thinking that builds on the labor and construction of these artists. Their engaging cooperation, hospitality, and vulnerability through conversations, correspondences, and studio tours have been an important part of the process of writing this book. I have not tried to find a space where as an objective critic I can stand outside the works of these artist and discuss them. Rather, I am interested in extending the artists’ experimentations into the studio of cultural and philosophical thought. What might be produced not by reflecting back on the artwork but by taking off with the art and making it do work in other realms? Part of enlisting the artists has meant not co-opting their work for philosophy but rather translating and then extending the work beyond the discipline of art into other modes of thinking and expression. This move has been facilitated by the transdisciplinary modes of inquiry the artists themselves have established.

The artists are not philosophers. While working across disciplines, they are critically aware of and a part of the language and traditions of contemporary art and speak to this community. Moving the work to engage specifically with the lure of animal phenomenology reveals not only the potential but also their limits in articulating the event of contact and encounter. I discuss these limits briefly within each chapter. For example, for Schneemann, are animals more than props for human discourse about sexuality and gender? By omitting any interaction with live animals in their work, have Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson put aside the most difficult of questions—the event of encounter itself—and left in its place a series of anthropological investigations of human representations of animals? For Olly and Suzi, is canvas really a contact zone, or are they simply baiting animals to come into contact with the drawings in a naive view of transspecies communication? For Coates, is his becoming-animal simply a sly wink and nod game in which he leverages cultural desires for communication to advance his own artistic ends? And finally, are animals for Barney more than figures for human cultures and psychic states? Such questions should be understood not primarily as criticisms of the art and artists but more fundamentally as a recognition that the question of animal phenomenology provides a foil for unpacking the possibilities and the lacunae within these works.

Chapter 1, “Meat Matters,” examines how human values of depth and interior reflection are used to minimize the animal and its world. Many of Damien Hirst’s best-known works grapple with the seemingly alchemical, violent transformation of life to death and opaque to knowable as animals become meat. To understand the significance of such alchemy, the chapter traces meat as the metaphysical moment when the animal is killed for raw material, and human meaning; nature is laid bare, made lifeless and exposed, in order to be subsumed within cultural intelligibility. At the same time, the notion that nature can be made fully present to us is worth reconsidering: how do the metaphors of nature hiding and nature revealed ground our understanding of animals, and how might we begin to think outside of this predominant approach to nature?

The relationship between meat and knowing can be found in Francis Bacon’s justification for dissection and vivisection. For this seventeenth-century natural scientist, knowledge attained in cutting open animals helps restore humans to an Edenic world. Such empirical and positivist claims about the ability of science to restore human well-being are furthered by G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy. For Hegel, through dialectic tension, the material world is subsumed by consciousness into full knowledge and intelligibility. In his Encyclopedia, eating becomes the transformation of dead matter into life, and intellectual consumption transforms matter into self-presence. These valences of dissection and consumption provide a means of grappling with Hirst’s work. At the same time, as shall be seen throughout this chapter, meat is never simply the animal opened up and made intelligible–consumable; meat has its own frictions that prevent human intellectual and physical consumption of the animal.

The second chapter, “Body of Thought,” responds to the Baconian idea of cutting open and consuming the animal body by using a different model as method: the figure of Dionysus. Carolee Schneemann’s work, and in particular Meat Joy, exemplifies Dionysian art in which the animal cut open becomes the site of a frenzied feast of destruction. The feast doubles the fragmented nature of our human–animal being and comments on the act of artistic creation. Here, consumption becomes a performance of human animality and a plane of immanence by which the human meets the animal, even as the human seeks to consume the animal Other. Friedrich Nietzsche’s satyr as both animal and man grapples with the tensions in this double way of being, which is intimately woven into Nietzsche’s ontology. Artists and scholars working with animals are tasked with recognizing the ground from which they work, be it the intimate animality indicative of the satyr or the distance or obfuscation of one’s animal nature as figured by the shepherd who is always a staff’s distance from the animal flock. To be a bit more forceful in this claim, I have ventured from the ontology implicit in the satyr and the shepherd to the means by which they stage their eating, and I have equated eating, consumption, and incorporation with epistemology. The problem of the satyr is how he incorporates, makes singular and whole, his divided body (corpus). The satyr’s Dionysian feast is a frenzy of destruction that doubles the fragmented nature of his own being; his eating and his epistemological ability to know or make sense of his self and his world remains as fragmented as his human–animal nature. In contrast, Martin Heidegger’s “shepherd of Being” knows and manages his flock, but his eating (what Derrida calls his bien manger) is never explicitly discussed; the shepherd is stuck between his managing and eating, or between manage and manger. We know that the shepherd will take his sheep to the butcher, but how the cutting up and eating (or, epistemologically, how the divisions leading toward knowledge) take place gets averted.

Having established immanence as a mode of inquiry, the next section, which focuses on animal worlds, provides the central conversation about a theory of animal surfaces. Chapter 3 examines how artists Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson work in the margin between the animal and human worlds. They do not provide a perspective from the animal’s point of view, nor one solely from the human’s. In as much as the animal world is unknown to us, it remains as what Rainer Maria Rilke calls a “nowhere.” Yet as explored and recovered in the artists’ works nanoq: flat out and bluesome and (a)fly, their artworks reveal a “nowhere without the no.” We cannot know this “no” through direct investigation and interrogation of the animal or its dwellings; indeed, only by upending the groundedness of home and recalling the stray (animal) in our own dwelling can we obliquely glimpse another’s abode. Rilke claims that “[w]e know what is outside us from the animal’s face alone.” Following Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson as they track the animal world, we can begin to understand an “outside us” that is in our very midst.

The “outside” or animal’s perspective has been strikingly described by the early twentieth-century scientist Jakob von Uexküll, a founding figure in ethnology and biosemiotics. In A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Uexküll moves beyond mechanistic biology to develop a line of inquiry into the animal’s sense of its surroundings—something close to an animal phenomenology. Uexküll presents an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that are as different as the animals themselves. Each animal species holds its own point of view and its own distortions of the actual earth. These perspectives reflect how the body of the animal has evolved over ages to adapt to the earth and to meet the animal’s needs. We are left with the understanding that there is no single unitary world and no unified space or time; instead, time moves differently for each species, and each animal senses and shapes space quite differently. The work of Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson illustrates the heterogeneity of animal worlds put forth by Uexküll.

Because the world of the animal remains foreign to humans (or, as Thomas Nagel says, we will never know “what it is like to be a bat” from the bat’s perspective), we can only know the animal through surfaces. We know it through contact with the surface of the animal and the surface of the animal’s world, or “bubble,” as Uexküll explains. Chapter 4 explores how Olly and Suzi work with the animal surface, its living flesh, as well as the surface of the animal world as it meets our own in contact zones. The work of Olly and Suzi provides a test case for breaching the divide between human worlding and the “poor in world,” or mere surface lives of the animal as explicated by Heidegger. The artists’ paper spreads out as surface between the animal, and the artists create a contact zone at the edge of the human and animal worlds. The paper marks a productive site for pidgin language that counters human interiority as the space for thinking. The pieces of paper circulate in a human–animal economy and bear witness to an animal world. This witnessing is not a knowing and consuming that subsume the animal and its world and subsequently deprive animals of a space outside human understanding. These works leave the mystery of the animal and its world intact while calling attention to its existence.

Following from concepts developed in the middle section of the book (including worlding alongside animals and a pidgin language that emerges from encounters), the final section, which is about Becoming, considers infectious transformation between human and animal states that are activated by an encounter. Chapter 5, “A Minor Art,” considers the work of Marcus Coates as a becoming-animal. When Coates performs his shamanistic rituals as artistic social intervention, when he descends to the “lower world” and squawks with the birds and grunts with the deer, he is enacting a minor art. One of the features of minor art espoused by Deleuze and Guattari is the move from metaphor to metamorphosis (what they will later characterize as “becoming”). The good metaphor and obedient literary image work because of a social agreement based on selection, which signals the proper relationship between vehicle and tenor. The well-regulated metaphor manages elements to be included and those to be discarded in the relationship between vehicle and tenor. Coates’s work botches or misplaces these proper relations, which results in the death of metaphor and the rise of metamorphosis. Sounds and words, gestures and bodies lead us away from established social configurations—away from the metaphors that we have forgotten are metaphors, now inscribed as social truths. We are led instead to meanings and marks of signification whose selection is based on the hybridity of two worlds being negotiated tentatively and temporally; meaning becomes immanent to a particular place and time within a particular set of quasi-social exchanges.

Animals challenge language and representation that too often purport to be disembodied thought. To make thought move and do real work at the horizon of the unthought, representation should create a friction, reciprocity, and exchange between the human symbolic system of representing and the physical world shared with other creatures—the marks and remarks of various Umwelts. To think alongside animals means to distribute the body of thinking, creating a distribution of states or plural centers for valuing, selecting, and marking/making a world. Coates’s masks and dances are not a disguise or mimicry. They are a flattening of human interiority toward a minor aesthetic.

The brief coda or tail on Matthew Barney considers how lifting restraints of language and gesture and ritual set in motion a transformation of human–animal boundaries. This brief examination of his video work Drawing Restraint 9 puts into play and suggestively plays with prior figures and concepts formed throughout the book.

The concepts developed in this book are not intended as an end to the maddening and haunting opacity of the animal world, and indeed, the coda keeps worlding an open-ended event. In the end is our beginning. I hope the concepts and art discussed here bring us to a state of wonder rather than knowing. In moments of wonder come the possibilities of developing problems and questions that allow us to think the outside, the Other, and the animal. In the vertiginous exploration of animal phenomenology, we unmoor ourselves from comfortable, habitual dwelling and set out on a stroll in the worlds of animals and humans.