Step 1: Deconditioning Animality (Still Humanist in Certain Regards)

In 1950, the surrealist poet Jacques Prévert and Ylla, then a celebrated animal photographer, published Des bêtes . . . , a photobook collecting the photographer’s black-and-white images of companion species, farmed animals, and zoo animals.1 The images are accompanied by an extended free verse poem by Prévert, which begins with a conscious stripping away of all fabular connotations that risk clinging to the animals pictured. Instead, Prévert emphasizes that “these animals,” unlike those in fables, actually exist. They live, die, feel joy and sadness, and much else. As such, Des bêtes . . . is an ethological photo-poetics that begins to decondition traditional zoo-tropes. The book is an act of epoché or a suspension of prejudices concerning certain species to begin seeing animals in-themselves. Vinciane Despret has aptly described this procedure as encountering “animals as if they were strangers, so as to unlearn all of the idiotic assumptions that have been made about them.”2 Ylla’s photographs lend themselves to this deconditioning of animality by undomesticating their subjects, however modestly, in their focalizations that strip away signs of zoological confinement and display (aside from the occasionally unavoidable cage bars). Her portraits reveal animals at idiosyncratic moments pointing to an array of inner states: a forlorn orangutan pressing mouth and cheeks through cage bars, two chimpanzees with arms affectionately wrapped around each other’s shoulders, a bored lion mid-yawn, aimless penguins, elephants splashing in a pool, and sundry other animals, nearly all close up and nearly all directly addressing the camera. This stylistic lack of context suits Prévert’s opening poetic gesture of defamiliarization. True, Ylla’s portraits are, at times, problematically humanizing, but they are also often evocative of the expressiveness of other minds. As a result, the viewing reader has to make some ethological decisions with all these empathic encounters of flesh and blood—what is coming from me, and what is coming from them?

The 1960s and 1970s were an especially rich moment for zoos influencing artists: the painter Gilles Aillaud, who, unlike Ylla, nearly always contextualized zoological architecture and design in his paintings, ironized the wild painterly animalier genre; an early unrealized screenplay by Marcel Broodthaers is set in the Antwerp Zoo, which eventually led to his employment of a living camel from said zoo in his Un jardin d’hiver installation in 1974; Francis Bacon’s zoomorphic paintings of dark bestial smears in confinement and anguish (which begin in the 1950s) were based on photographs from zoos, as well as on Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion (1899), itself featuring animals from the Philadelphia Zoo; Garry Winograd’s The Animals, a series of black-and-white photographs from his visits to the Central Park Zoo in New York City, was published in 1969; around the same time, Simone Forti’s dance practice was influenced by the nonhuman gestures at the Rome zoo, as was Arte Povera artist Pino Pascali’s work;3 the films of Chris Marker—himself directly influenced by ethology, having translated one of Lorenz’s popular ethology books into French—represent a long-running preoccupation with animality, from the extended scene of animal taxidermy in La jetée (1962) to all the zoo animals in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966/1974) to his Bestiaire videos (1985–90), which include the melancholic Zoo Piece. Examples of artistic engagements with zoological institutions abound.

Outside art proper, the 1970s saw John Berger publish several essays on the zoo that were consolidated in his celebrated “Why Look at Animals?”4 One of Berger’s central claims is that zoological displays always disappoint. The animals are neither vital nor visible enough for public expectations. In 1972, the systems anthropologist Gregory Bateson—who we will see undertook ethological study of cephalopods and cetaceans—published Steps to an Ecology of Mind. This compilation includes a well-known essay on his theory of animal play in which he recounts a visit to the San Francisco Fleischhacker Zoo, evincing a rather different experience from Berger’s.5 Confronted with two monkeys tussling in their enclosure, it became clear to Bateson that their gestures were not truly combative but in fact ludic. They were play fighting. This may seem prosaic, yet as Brian Massumi elaborates in his political theory of animality, which takes Bateson’s observations of creaturely play as its point of departure, it should never be underestimated.6 The ludic register turns out to be foundational for the affective paths that animal life takes on this planet, human and nonhuman, running along sympathy, intuition, and desire, all the way to creativity, language, and politics. As Bateson readily admits during his zoo visit, this primate combativeness holds denotive and even metaphorical meanings. When wolf cubs engage in play fighting, they enter a mutual field of gestures that necessitate decoding, wherein bites hold polyvalent meanings beyond clear-cut aggression. As Massumi argues, animal play reflects a mode of corporeal signification and transindividual meta-communication that model human language, which has simply taken the metaphoric resonance of corporeal play to “a higher power.”7

In the broadest sense, what artists visiting zoos understand implicitly, which Bateson and Massumi understand explicitly, is that animality is always in a state of supernormality. Play is a lived pleasure, but it is also a prosocial mode of learning and practice. As such, play complicates any notion of purely instinctual life (as Tinbergen was taught by those kittiwakes and herring gulls). The importance of supernormality cannot be overstated in its defamiliarization of animality, both in premodern folk beliefs and in modern ethology: in direct contrast to the long-held views that nonhuman animals are mere brutes ruled by fixed instincts, to be a creature is to have the lived proclivity for judicious responsiveness and variation. Again, this is for a simple and profound reason: “if the instinctive act were as it is reputed to be—a stereotyped sequence of premodeled actions executed by reflex in the manner of automatism—then instinct would be incapable of responding to chance changes in the environment.”8 Nonhuman existential plasticity unfolds in negotiation with the immunological spaces of the living, from nests to hives, dens, houses, packs, families, kin, and friends. This is one reason why zoos are so evocative of supernormal states: they are sedentary immunological (arguably autoimmunological) confines that are often ill suited to the living desires of their denizens, from which affective states ensue that exceed conventions and tropes—be it entering into profound boredom and malaise, as in Berger’s observations and Marker’s Zoo Piece, or into play and variation, as in Bateson’s and Massumi’s accounts, or ending in outright revolt or escape.9

Contemporary artists have only begun to crack the surface of the deconditioning possibilities of supernormality. Existential plasticity complicates the reduction of the animal to mere medium or installation object and raises the seriousness of nonhuman performance. There are, however, some artists who offer creative forms of deconditioning animality by way of such ethologically inflected practice. The late Martin Roth’s work, which incorporated animal and plant life in considered ways, is a great example. An early piece saw him raise a brood of ducklings in his studio, the duration of which ended when the birds were old enough to be released into the wild. A video shows the artist feeding the ducklings and facilitating a group swim in the tub and the birds playing on a floor strewn with brown leaves.10 Admittedly, this early work does not move beyond a Lorenzian form of rearing and imprinting and is largely an aestheticizing exercise in modern ethology. Roth’s In october 2014 i rescued laboratory mice so they could play swan lake, 2014, however, goes further. The installation featured two mice who had been bred in a lab and used in biomedical research. The artist rescued his subjects by convincing an anonymous researcher to hand them over rather than “destroying” them, as required by law.11 Roth placed the mice in a specially made glass terrarium filled with grasses, pebbles, and dirt, along with a metal wheel connected to a music box mechanism. When the mice played with the wheel, Tchaikovsky’s well-known melody from the ballet lending the installation its name sounded throughout the gallery.12 It became clear to Roth early on that the mice did not come readymade with mousehood.13 Since they were bred in sanitary laboratory conditions, deprived of the immunological benefits of the great outdoors, a pedagogic collaboration ensued between artist and mice so that the latter could learn to live with novel earthly elements.14 They had to be taught how to eat pellets and seeds, dig in dirt, and cope with sunlight. This means that the mice were not necessarily fully encoded to be mice, nor can they be considered to be purely conditioned laboratory subjects. Instead, they expressed variable lived proclivities that unfolded in both sterile laboratory conditions and in the nurturing habilitation of Roth’s terrarium and its microecology.

The past ten years of research on rodents reveals that they are anything but unsophisticated creatures who simply follow their baser instincts. In altruistic fashion, mice will liberate fellow mice from confinement in clear tubes when they can, while rats will readily help conspecifics in danger of drowning, even if presented with chocolate as an alternative.15 These findings are suggestive of flexible prosocial and empathic forms of community making, which refute conceptions of animality that are reducible to behavioral automation or all-encompassing instinctual drive for pleasure and preservation. These experiments, which sometimes involve elaborately designed contraptions of varying degrees of induced duress, can be thought of as participatory art installations thematizing conviviality in miniature. Be it in the laboratory, the wild, or an art installation, mice evince supernormal behaviors within environmental and genetic limits that exist across all forms of animal life. It had long been dogma that only domesticated and confined mice use wheels and that this propensity is symptomatic of a pathological condition. We know today, however, that even mice in the wild willingly run inside wheels.16 Rather than mindless behaviorism or a pathological result of confinement, running the wheel is, quite simply, a source of nonessential enjoyment. Play and sociability; pure joy and empathy—these purportedly humble rodents go a long way in deconditioning animality.

If mice can be taught to be mice, then their existence is, in part, a form of acculturation. Supernormality always presupposes a capacity to learn. Perhaps the most sought after propensity for nonhuman acculturation is that of entering the symbolic worlds of human meaning—especially speech. This fascination is evident in art installations that hope to inculcate speech in birds, notably those species of parrots and corvids who demonstrate the cognitive and physiological capacity to emit phonetic signs. Think of Hans Haacke’s Norbert: “All System’s Go” (1970–71), Rose Finn-Kelcey’s One for Sorrow, Two for Joy (1976), or, more recently, Agnieszka Kurant’s Ready Unmade (2008).17 Kurant taught three macaw parrots to bark by isolating them with recordings of dogs, which they could only do imperfectly. The delicious irony here is of an animal with the capacity to enunciate human speech being unable to fully replicate the sounds coming from another animal who cannot (though canines do have the capacity for a one-way understanding of certain human sound signs). It was only when the installation—a large metal cage with tree branches and plants—was made public that the macaw parrots were immersed in human sounds, which they had an easier time enunciating, and which we know today they have a modicum of self-reflexive understanding in using. A nonhuman animal speaking—and not simply “parroting”—challenges Western histories of animality grounded in the Aristotelean lineage of man as the only rational animal. In truth, this challenge had already begun in the Enlightenment, when the origins of language became a central concern.18 Even before its verification, John Locke was convinced by the vocal rationality of a singular parrot.19

One of the most compelling works exploring avian communication is Allora and Calzadilla’s The Great Silence (2016). The three-channel video installation is a collaboration between the artists and the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, whose short story lends the work its name and provides its narrative. The story is an extended rumination on an analogical disconnect between the Fermi paradox and nonhuman animal intelligence, specifically that of parrots. The Fermi paradox states that the universe is so vastly old that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times—and yet, no signs of such life exist. That this would be the case is perplexing, if not truly paradoxical. Chiang’s story proposes, however, that signs of nonhuman intelligent life have been here all along: clever nonhuman creatures, like parrots, can be rediscovered as intraterrestrial aliens (in itself, this is a wonderful deconditioning of animality). Chiang’s analogy is visually reinforced by Allora and Calzadilla’s juxtaposition of shots from two locations in Puerto Rico: the Rio Abajo State Forest and the nearby (now defunct) Arecibo Observatory. The first is home to the Luquillo Aviary of critically endangered Puerto Rican parrots; the second is a massive radio telescope built in the early 1960s dedicated to finding signs of extraterrestrial life. The fact that Arecibo is ensconced in a landscape only a short distance from the Rio Abajo Forest, which was once home to an abundance of wild Puerto Rican parrots, reinforces the disconnect between the technodesires of alien communication and the invisibility of intelligent nonhumans and their ecosystems. Like Thales falling into a hole when fixating up at the sky, the desire to commune with the stars blinds one to already-existing communicative potential on earth.

The Great Silence’s imagery comprises slow panning shots of the massive observatory dish and its surroundings, real-time graphic readouts of cosmic electromagnetic waves, the Rio Abajo Forest, and Puerto Rican parrots whose deep emerald green plumage, blue-tipped wings, and splash of red just above white beaks provide striking color. The textures of the film are as much sonic as visual. There is the rich diegetic sound of the Arecibo humming a continuous and deep sonorous white noise that cuts away to the ambient forest ecology of trees and birds. Noticeably absent, however, are any spoken words. Instead, Chiang’s short story appears at the bottom of the screen as subtitles. Since the narrator is a parrot, technically speaking, the story is written in first-nonhuman-person—and throughout the film, this avian narrator makes a compelling case for reconsidering her kind as an ethological counterhistory: “Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.”20 In speaking of their likely extinction, the narrator attests that this would mean not simply the loss of a group of birds but “also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions.”21 Clearly this parrot is making some cutting-edge ethological claims.

By giving the parrot narrative duties, Chiang is indulging in hyperbole. As far as we know, the complexity of the implied speech in the written text exceeds the cognitive capacity of any parrot to enunciate. Yet this is not anthropomorphism pure and simple. This artistic license is one of degree and not of kind, for parrots can speak and do understand what they are saying, if not at this level of linguistic sophistication.22 That we know this is thanks largely to one of the most famous parrots who ever lived: Alex, Irene Pepperberg’s celebrated grey parrot subject of some thirty years. If there was ever an animal who deconditioned myths about his kind, it was Alex.23 In making her ethological counterhistory, the narrator in The Great Silence nominates Alex as ambassador and proof of nonhuman communicative potential. In fact, the final lines of the film recall one of the last phrases spoken by Alex the evening before his passing: “You be good. I love you.”24 Alex would say this to Pepperberg nearly every evening, so it was likely not a premonition (as the film seems to imply). This does demonstrate, however, an instance of nonhuman speech attesting to affection—if not “love,” should that word even be precisely determinable by the humans who use it, then at least a feeling of bonding, care, or appreciation. With Alex as representative of parrot intelligence and emotion, the sounds in the Rio Abajo Forest and the Luquillo Aviary no longer read as aleatory sounds of nonmeaning, like wind or water. Now the nonhuman voices are imbued with rich intention (if inaccessible for human listeners). The narrator references ethological research reporting that parrots have a unique self-identifying “contact call,” which is repeated by fellow parrots in what can be described as acts of individuation, naming, and mutual recognition.25 So it is not just Alex who can use vocal sounds to indicate things in the world; the calls in the forest indicate a soundscape allusive of nonhuman community.

With its emphasis on speech, The Great Silence holds a central irony that is also its flaw, albeit a highly constructive flaw. The film proffers parrot intelligence by focusing on the ability for vocal learning. The narrator affirms that, unlike dogs, who understand commands but can only bark in return, humans and parrots “share a special relationship with sound. We don’t simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.”26 The irony here is twofold. At no point in the film are any words spoken—neither by parrot nor human. The much deeper irony, however, is the fact that this narrative parrot falls back on the very self-definition humanism has taken for itself, banking on the notion of the speaking-thus-rational animal: “The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force. I speak therefore I am.”27 By invoking Descartes’s cogito, the parrot betrays a nonhuman form of phonologocentrism, that is, the far-reaching dogmatic assumption Derrida began excavating in the 1960s, which assumes that reason and consciousness are reducible to phonetic signs or to speech-as-logos. This phonologocentrism is reinforced by some of the final passages of the film, where the parrot ponders the ways in which the word-concept “aspiration,” which can mean both “breathing” and “hope,” has informed world religions—from Pythagorean mysticism to Christian Pentecostalism to Brahmin Hinduism. Religiosity is anthropologically predicated on vocal learning and the dogma of the larynx as offering access to the divine, an idea that mirrors humanist metaphysics, which assumes word-logos and mind to be tautological. In this instance, ironically, a parrot really is only parroting humans.

In retaining this phonologocentric bias, The Great Silence inadvertently points to some central disciplinary complications in ethology. There are at least two ways the discipline retains a similar phonologocentric bias. First (and most obviously), reporting on animal behavior is mediated by words, be they a conference talk or research paper. This means that nonlinguistic affects and forms of communication, which are abundantly shared by human and nonhuman animals, are unavoidably translated into a linguistic register. If ethological discourse presumes itself to be an adequate translation without loss, then the logocentric bias is evident. This is an area where art has a clear advantage over ethology, since artists deliver nonlinguistic affects and forms of communication through aesthetic experiences in ways that are less overpowered by the human linguistic register (that is, until it is written about by a critic or art historian, as in this very book). This is also why more popular ethological writings often take recourse to a certain degree of allusive and literary language (as well as photographs) to convey extralinguistic becomings, though even these will ultimately be overdetermined by the word. Second, and more consequential, is the relationship between scientific tractability and human language. If the verifiability of nonhuman minds runs along the path of speech (or even writing, if understood as purely phonetic)—as with speaking parrots or lexigram savvy bonobos whose symbols are vocalized with the help of a computer—then the assumption is clear: scientists have a more direct access to those types of nonhuman minds that can most easily enter the fold of the human world of symbols. These animals, it is assumed, have the capacity to attest to themselves through the phono-logos in ways other animals cannot. This is why Alex is a fascinating case study but also a limitation: the ethological breakthrough he rightly represents is nonetheless restricted to an (ultimately circular) claim that speaking is, if not in a tautological relationship with mindedness and truth, then the closest or most transparent relationship we have to it.28 What is missed are all the forms of language, communication, affectivity, and modes of becoming or being-with that no words can hope to fully encompass. Scientists may cry unprovable negative ontology here—but perhaps this is the best we can do in trying to access the great outdoors beyond what Bataille, in arguing for the world as deeply formless or informe, disparaged as the academic or mathematical “frock coat” of human reason. His definitional examples, incidentally, included spiders and earthworms.29

It should be clear that these ideas send us down the rabbit hole of language, cognition, and other minds that made Tinbergen balk at the prospect of studying the animal brain. It is much simpler to think that nonhumans cannot mean anything, properly speaking. For my present purposes, I point out the either/or that results from these observations: either speech and its phonetic mediation in writing are reducible to mind-concepts without remainder, and therefore offer the only way mind-concepts can be thought and expressed meaningfully, or, in a ethogrammatological reversal, speech is only one communicative medium for mind-concepts among others, which include gestures, nonphonetic vocalizations, somatic and affective collectives, and perhaps forms of nonhuman communication we have yet to decipher or even witness.30

There is every reason to think the latter is the more compelling starting point for appraising nonhuman alterity. After all, human speech is an evolutionary process only made possible by prelinguistic forms of communication based in affective meanings—recall Bateson’s and Massumi’s forms of play that presume semiosis. Our early hominid kin thought without words, as do all humans at the infant stage, which means concepts and cognition can and are embodied in unspoken ways—or better, spoken in unspoken ways, a paradoxical utterance that tellingly is only paradoxical in words.31 Returning to Laurent Dubreuil’s designation, there is an “intellective space” before, underneath, and all around spoken meanings.32 This intellective space comprises a base “semanticism.” This semanticism is not reducible to speech or even vocalizations. It is more capaciously described as “the proliferating attribute of mobile meanings” between self and environs.33 So, rather than remaining “hypnotized by the power of our words”—saturated in their uncanny ability to code the real, a self-saturation that makes us think human logos amounts to meaning tout court—Dubreuil claims we should understand verbal language as “an extrapolation and a consolidation of semantic aptitudes” shared by many nonhuman animals.34 He offers vervet monkeys as examples—specifically, their aptitude for communication, for making associations, and for organizing the world around them.35

Dubreuil is careful to insist that this semanticism is not some universal code: “there is no language of thought (LOT), this fantastic universal ‘mentalese’ that particular idioms would duplicate.”36 He invites us to think more along the lines of a constellation of terrestrial meaning-making entities, which do not necessarily feed from the same semiotic trough. In this way, creaturely meanings or worldings represent idioms of the evolutionary real that can never be transparently known across some purported universal natural language reservoir—much in the way Jacques Derrida assessed literary translation to be necessarily impossible.37 To perfectly translate French into English is to make it into English—and there can be no fixed, transcendental repository of Franco-Anglo tautological signifieds/referents. Similarly, to somehow translate the lived experience of a parrot into the lived experience of a human is to make another human, something equally impossible. In this way, the nonhuman English Alex spoke was, in part, idiomatically untranslatable into human English, which does not mean transspecies communication did not happen. We can often get the gist of a foreign idiom and use it as a tool, however clunkily and imperfectly, as did Alex. Those contact calls in the Rio Abajo Forest from The Great Silence, then, are idiomatic vocalizations of individuation, what we call “name,” and what function as naming for parrots, if not in “name.” Identifying another entity through a meaningful sound or gesture occurs beyond the coded parameters of human communication; we have simply added the extra conceptual step of giving the act a name.

All these observations bear on our many fantastical meeting points with extraterrestrial life. When aliens are presumed to speak in science fiction (usually in English), life and meaning remain phonologocentric and humanist. If, however, aliens communicate with earthlings by means other than speech, they open toward ethogrammatological and posthumanist conceptions of nonhuman life. Although written much earlier than his short story scripting The Great Silence, Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” which was adapted as the film Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016), falls on the ethogrammatological side: the alien visitors, who appear in large glass tanks in hybrid form somewhere between elephant trunks and cephalopods, do not speak but write in a complex visual code via inky fluid.38 These scenes find a wonderful echo in Derrida’s hypothetical cuttlefish, which he sought to hold gently in his hands so that it might expel some ink. This ink, he maintains, would have the power of attesting to cephalopod interiority—it would not necessarily be “the power to say ‘I’ but the ipseity of being able to be or able to do I, even before any autoreferential utterance in a language.”39 In both cases—the theriomorphic aliens in Arrival and Derrida’s cuttlefish—meaning manifests as a trace structure in an expanded ontological field of semanticism. They also both suggest that any conception of alien life beyond animality is something we cannot grasp—for what would communicable alien life be in science fiction films if not in the form of some humanoid or theriomorphic entity? It is as if establishing communication with alien life always presumes, at base, an ethological dimension, which may be telling for the ethogrammatological foundations of meaning and communication itself.

The analogy between alien and nonhuman animal life in The Great Silence and Arrival is not new. As the elemental media theorist John Durham Peters puts it, parrots, along with cetaceans and squid, have always been “preeminent fantasy animals.”40 These fantastical investments have often involved themes of the close encounter variety. Already in the 1950s, John C. Lilly, the flamboyant and controversial cetologist, is perhaps the person most associated with this analogy. His hit 1961 book Man and Dolphin begins with these lines: “within the next decade or two the human species will establish communication with another species: nonhuman, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine; but definitely highly intelligent, perhaps even intellectual.”41 These ideas tap into a speculative captivation for extra and intraterrestrial intelligence during subsequent decades, which conflated large-brained mammals with alien life-forms.42 Lilly even founded a “semisecret” society of SETI researchers with Carl Sagan named the Order of the Dolphins.43 In 1960, he also opened his Communication Research Institute (CRI), situated on the island of Saint Thomas, only a stone’s throw from Puerto Rico—the very same year the Arecibo Observatory was getting off the ground.44

Lilly, with the help of like-minded researchers (including a young Gregory Bateson, who would eventually head the CRI), controversially sought to speak with dolphins as a means of communicative preparation for what he was convinced would be eventual visitations from intelligent space aliens.45 Like Allora and Calzadilla’s The Great Silence, Lilly’s focus on the vocal abilities of dolphins is an instance of phonologocentric prejudice. He assumed that communing with cetaceans (and eventually Martians) would involve human speech, leading Lilly to great lengths in attempting to establish lines of communication with his nonhuman subjects (early investigations in nonhuman primate language learning were similarly phonologocentric, such as Cathy and Keith Hayes’s work with chimpanzees that led to so much controversy and setbacks for primate communication research46). His far-fetched and scientifically dubious experiments involved dropping acid and dosing the animals themselves with LSD to facilitate conversation.47 Lilly also planned on using vocoders to translate dolphin vocalization into human speech. Again, this presumed a clean phonetic translation between dolphin and human language to be possible. This is attested to by a diagram published in 1967 depicting this elaborate contraption: the dolphin sounds would be relayed through a set of microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, and recording devices.48 The crucial links in the vocoder’s chain, however, are the boxes labeled “man-dolphin decoder” and “dolphin-man decoder.” Needless to say, these presume a great deal about the translatability of nonhuman meaning into human speech—and vice versa—and that a universal code of language exists to be transformed and decoded into human speech without loss.

Falling into scientific disrepute after his experiments with synthetic hallucinogens, as well as a notorious episode of human–dolphin eroticism in the tank involving one of his assistants, Margaret Howe,49 Lilly later leaned toward new age spiritualism and made even more dubious claims further exceeding the rigors of science (including the claim that conversing with intelligent cetaceans will lead to a more peaceful postwar world). If I conclude this chapter with Lilly, then, it is not to offer him up as paragon of constructive deconditioning of animality that might push the constraints of science. As an ethological sophist, his example is nonetheless informative, since his pushing of the scientific envelope reveals some of its dogmas. Humanistic, phonologocentric presumption is only one. Another is taking recourse in a self-evident truth about nonhuman animals as conditioned by fabular beliefs that presume inferiority. In their review of Man and Dolphin, the marine biologists William N. and Margaret Tavolga criticized Lilly’s unsound methods and fuzzy use of terminology. In doing so, they make a telling analogy between cetacean and avian mind:

If “one two three” said with very poor intelligibility by a dolphin is indicative of the giant-brained animal’s ability to speak, and therefore to learn language, what is to be said of a parrot’s clear-cut, if bird-brained, “Polly wants a cracker”? Furthermore, if the parrot is then given a cracker, have we established communication with an alien species?50

This passage has it all—alienness; the assumption that speech and language are tautological; and the smug, automatic belief that parrots are “bird-brained.” The latter, as self-evident analogical supplement serving to discount cognitive abilities, has since lost its grounding. From the perspective of a critical ethological aesthetics, however, we can be satisfied neither with killjoy scientism nor with new age sophistry. Perhaps a deconstructive midway point—which would show how the killjoys and the new agers actually need each other in negative supplementation—is a strategic sophistry based in compelling speculation. Despite Lilly’s humanist assumptions about the centrality of speech and vocalization, he does represent a proto-posthumanist position that envisions a Copernican revolution with respect to intelligence. Many of Lilly’s outlandish claims have rightly been discarded, but some of his speculations remain compelling. His idea that dolphins perceive the world through sonar “vision,” which allows them to see through things in ways humans cannot, might be persuasive.51 Picking up on this thread in his The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, which blends media studies with ethological research, Peters attempts to think through what it would be for a creature to experience the world and its others via porous sound waves, “an oxymoron for us, but perhaps mundane for dolphins.”52 Peter’s cetacean phenomenology is just the sort of judicious speculation that is called for and is an exemplary attempt at stepping into nonhuman worlds.