The development of a new field of study is very often just as much about a creative meaning-generation, obliging us to think in new ways (to evolve one might say), as it is simply or only about the objects of study themselves. A semiotic view of such an evolution of human knowledge would speak of this in terms of sign-objects which, in engendering new interpretants, grow the endless spiral of semiosis (i.e. knowledge) further. (1) Nonetheless, the (sign) objects we choose for thinking with are telling. The direction and terrain of travel, and the sign vehicles chosen, are all clues to what kind of new knowledge we might be looking for. In the case of animal studies, and the questions addressed in this special issue of new formations, these questions seem very often to be about ethics--about our place, and the place of animals, in other words--in a long mutually shaping symbiosis of human and more-than-human relationships. (2) The growing interest in animal life, both without and within us, alongside the growing understanding that all this life is semiotic, might suggest that what we are attempting to think about is life, mind and minding, and thus ethics, from a wider than human perspective. One of the things which this shift of ethical perspective--in relation both to ecological place and to mutual shaping over time--throws into sharp relief, beyond merely human conceptions of utility, is thus the question of how we think about the meaning of 'mind' as that belongs to animals, humans, or even ecological systems more widely. (3) 'Mind', in other words, might be a property of systems (vegetative, animal, human) rather than of individual consciousnesses only. Indeed, the idea that anything like individual consciousness could exist in the absence of an entity's embeddedness in biocybernetic systems (bodies and worlds and, hence, differences and information*) seems extremely unlikely. (5) Human consciousness is like a bright spotlight: dazzlingly focused but narrow. But a care for the animals' part in our own constitution and caring involves not only the recognition of 'care' (as caring, concern, caritas, minding) for animals, but also the recognition of animal care and consciousness as part both of our own, and also of their, strange consciousness. (6) It is also to recognise, perhaps belatedly in regard to anthropocentric accounts of reason and mind, the 'animal part' in our own reasoning. As recent investigations of human consciousness suggest, by far the greater part of human mind and inventiveness is, like animal mind, intuitive and only indirectly available to conscious manipulation. (7) This strangeness of creative reason is what the biologist Francois Jacob, in distinction to day-time logic, called 'night science'. In his autobiography, The Statue Within, Jacob writes: Day science employs reasoning that meshes like gears ... One admires its majestic arrangements as that of a da Vinci painting or a Bach fugue. One walks about it as in a French formal garden ... Night science, on the other hand, wanders blindly. It hesitates, stumbles, falls back, wakes with a start. Doubting everything, it feels its way, questions itself, constantly pulls itself together. It is a sort of workshop of the possible, where are elaborated what will become the building materials of science. Where hypotheses take the forms of vague presentiments, of hazy sensations. Where phenomena are still mere solitary events with no link between them. Where the plans for experiments have barely taken form. Where thought proceeds along sinuous paths, tortuous streets, most often blind alleys. At the mercy of chance, the mind frets in a labyrinth, deluded with messages, in quest of a sign, of a wink, of an unforeseen connection ... What guides the mind, then, is not logic. It is instinct, intuition. (8) Recent developments in animal studies, (9) both scientific and cultural, indicate that we are only at the very beginning of this particular journey. …
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jul 26, 2023
+ 1
