AFTER WORDS:

When I, an artist, tumbled down the rabbithole (or better yet a mole tunnel, following Hermione Spriggs) of multispecies ethnography over a decade ago, anthropology as a discipline was new to me. A burgeoning enthusiasm to include interdisciplinary perspectives made it possible for me to connect my artwork’s core questions and desires with ideas and research across an emerging field. Yet a big conundrum remained; it bothered me profoundly that in most academic fields, the Book (or the Paper) stands as the ultimate end and mark of achievement. Because, frankly, I have never been satisfied that written publications on their own can be adequate as the primary product of encounters with more-than-humans worlds. The prospect of limiting reflections to standardised forms of expository prose to trace the joys and vicissitudes of making worlds with others (for whom language is not primary) has always seemed to me at best an absurdity and, at worst, something more treacherous. 

With this in mind, I was both relieved and apprehensive to read this collection and its ambitions to integrate ethnographic research with artistic methods and media. Relieved: because the aims of the project foregrounded the limitations of traditional academic disciplines and outputs to respect the autonomy and agency of those who inhabit their worlds in other ways. But, as an artist, I was a little worried, too. Often the experience of artists engaged in academic-scientific realms involves compromising core principles and practices in uncomfortable ways. Such discomforts arise in what Andrew Yang calls the ‘drunken conversation between two cultures’, art and science (Yang, 2015). Sometimes in academic venues, this exchange can tend to feel, well, a bit uneven.

When Science sidles up to Art at the university bar, it’s usually the one buying the drinks and determining the parameters of what gets talked about. Looming and leaning, and however fast and loose it plays, the Discipline decides what will be taken seriously or dismissed as silly, insensible, irrelevant, or passe. In such situations, art is allowed to speak its own language so long as it respects the terms and conditions of its admission to the conversation. It must be responsible to the common goals of rational, progressive knowledge-making discourse, even if it doesn’t exactly share them … even if its aims are otherwise, impossible to articulate by means of expository prose and (politics of) citation. Even if it believes, alongside Hugo Ball, that its own goals as art are to ‘speak a secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox’ (Ball, 1974). Art might feel especially inclined to believe this when it proposes to speak with (if not for) other beings whose languages it must fail to fully grasp. 

This failure to grasp the fullness of more-than-human worlds is in fact at the heart of the MEAM project’s success. Rather than asserting authority through deployment of traditional disciplinary forms, the projects assembled here embrace a more experimental ethos in the making of hybrid forms for sharing their research. Of course, the creation of unrecognisable forms carries inherent risks of misapprehension. But a great success of this collection is that it is willing to take such risks, with an eye to the possible rewards that might be found on the other side. 

One consistent way this project reaps the benefits of such risks is through its embrace of poetics through and across the different projects. Poetics serve many different roles across the chapters, but first and foremost is the overt recognition, as Merlijn Huntjens, Nina Willems and Leonie Cornips have it, that: ‘… there are subtleties in this communication that need a different type of language than the academic language’ (this volume). It is worth noting how this might be particularly salient for academics, because there is real danger in the threat that one’s thesis might not come across clearly. As linguistic communication, poetry grapples with and revels in this risk – and collects its rewards – in ways that traditional forms of expository prose do not.

The precarities I evoke here are generally integral to artistic practices, to poetic and nonlinguistic, visual, forms of communication. The artist usually holds that the danger of venturing into uncertainty is worth the novel encounters it leads to. While such wanderings afield may lead to dead ends at times, they are also a means to forge new crossings to uncharted, undisciplined spaces where we can meet others on more open grounds. For instance, Andrea Pettit describes how wrangling with the lyric traditions of cowboy poetry is not so much about the production of poems as it is a means to deepen her ethnographic practice, encouraging different rhythms and unexpected insights to emerge within her thinking on the range, moving between the differential force fields of cows, horses and the unruly sounds and meanings of words (Pettit, this volume). Bartram+Deigaard make the value of creative risk-taking explicit in documents of their artistic practices, which open and frame radical spaces of agency for dogs, horses, and others they invite into their investigations: ‘We embrace classical views of failure as successful outcomes through our commitment to reciprocal and non-hierarchical values’ (Bartam+Deigaard, this volume).

Yes, there is always a danger that when I make an unexplained intuitive leap from one thing to another, you the reader will not make that leap with me, and whatever meaning we might have exchanged flutters down into the abyss between us. But when you do leap with me, here we are: suddenly together in new territory, full of unforeseen possibilities.

When faced with the prospect of a book that proposes to probe multispecies encounters, it always comes back to the question of whether and how words – whether poem or prose, written, spoken or sung – can speak to or for others belonging to worlds where human languages do not hold sway. Angela Bartram wryly reflects this ongoing conundrum in the images that document the performance, ‘Reading Theory to Animals – Horse’. The horses are politely attentive and apparently interested in the artist’s presence, but it’s hard to say to what extent they are edified by the nuances of argument in the text she presents to them. Ironies aside, we must believe to some degree that our communicative labours in whatever media can change things in some ways for the better. If not on our words, what other forms can we rely on to navigate and affect lives we want to better understand and honour? This is a question that any quest to respectfully inhabit more-than-human worlds must live with.  

The outstanding value of this project is not only in what it presents in the way of images, or texts, or discursive interventions. Rather its most vital gift is the encouragement of experimental ways of approaching more-than-human worlds, which invites researchers to depart from standardised modes of authority and move more softly, with humility, into gentler modes of listening and gathering. Most radically, these hybrid modes of attunement demonstrate that research does not have to be extractive or even productive of particular forms of output in ways that tend to dominate and prescribe what can be sensed and shared. Research’s traces might be otherwise: continuous, radical acts of respect for what flows through, and just beyond, our efforts to represent meetings with each and every other, who is not circumscribed by any form of knowledge and so ‘remains mysterious’ (Dorn, this volume). Or as Merlijn Huntjens, Nina Willems and Leonie Cornips (this volume) offer via pictures, prose and fragments of poetic observation, such differently sensitised research modes might work more like gestures that both give and take in unexpected ways – new kinds of exchanges across the charged and porous edges of fields and bodies where tongues and skins, whiskers and welts might ‘touch lightly in passing’