The puny mahout, let him pull chains On the pillar like legs and lean his sharp goad.
None of these the great tusker considered in the Dark recess of his crazed, loony, majestic brain.
This adventurer is travelling in his imagination Waving the great ears of speckled deed of freedom
In the playgrounds of his youth, in the valleys Of Sahya ranges, made dense by springtime.
- from ‘Son of the Sahyadri’ by Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon
Introduction: Why Animals are ‘good to think’
Vyloppilli Sreedhara Menon a Malayalam poet from the middle of the 20th century wrote in a style that is perhaps best described as hyper-realistic. The details in his poems are very fine-grained. Many of his poems paint vivid pictures of village life through the two world wars, in Kerala, India. In the Malayalam poem quoted above, Sahyaente Makan, (Son of the Sahyadris) Menon tells the story of an elephant having a violent fit (literally going wild or ‘mast’ as the Hindi term has it) and eventually being shot by a soldier. Animals in various forms of myth-creation have a special place; they indicate precisely where the human seems to separate itself from nature. I make the broader case in this essay that points of overlap between human and non-human semiotic systems produce a kind of interstitial world of signs that are neither entirely human nor non-human. Consciousness I argue is not limited by the extent of human symbolic systems but spread into non-human systems as well.
The assumed centrality of human perception is sometimes dislodged at certain points in interactions with the environment. Here I point to such encounters with the non-human as being ‘signs’ that human consciousness is not a system defined a priori but is rather an improvisational system, or an open system. I suggest further that mythology and literature, ‘stories’ describe animals as important points of encounter that provide an archive precisely of this function of human consciousness as being a linguistic process that straddles both human and non-human actors.
Menon’s poem details a panoply of images in the immediate experience of the elephant like: ‘Wild bananas in bloom shed rubies, Mountain breeze comes to caress the cranium’. In it layered are two forms of ‘wildness’, the first pertaining to the elephant’s actual maternal abode, the cloud-wispy, green Sahyadri hills that separate the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and the second describing the strange madness that possesses the elephant, that can only be defined from the perspective of the human; its violence is ‘wild’ relative to the human.
These two experiential perspectives: the human seeing the animal from a human lens and the human ‘seeing’ the animal from an animal lens are given free play in this poem. In it one gets the sense of a ‘tragedy’, an anthropomorphic trope, as being written even into nature, a theme characteristic to German romantic philosophy through the 19th century, and one I shall return to. Menon’s detailed, condensed vision can be read as an experimental interpretation of a classical dilemma in Cognitive Science; the poem may as well be titled ‘What is it like to be a ‘wild’ elephant?’, slightly changing the title to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay.
The human-animal interface has for seemingly inexplicable reasons always been the subject of human mythos. Claude Levi-Strauss, a great global intellectual figure from around the same period as Menon, and the theoretical zenith of the deeply influential Structuralist movement, points to this quite subtly in his book Totemism:
‘We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" [bonnes à manger] but because they are "good to think" [bonnes à penser]’.
Totemism refers to a globally recorded, ancient to medieval system of categorization where the differences between human groups, particularly clans are described mythologically and ritually in terms of the differences between animal species. Levi-Strauss in his book and in the words quoted above contradicts previous explanations of totemism and argues that the reason that animals are chosen as figures of ritualistic formulae is not because they are ‘good to eat’ (a thesis suggested by previous functionalistic approaches) but because (using a strange turn of phrase) they are ‘good to think’. Here Levi-Strass is playing around with the word think, implying that thinking is less a kind of idle reflection and more a kind of activity like eating.
Levi-Strauss’ fieldwork took place in large part in Amazonian Brazil but later with the maturation of his work, particularly through the development of his four volume Mythologiques project he approaches a comparative mythology of both American continents. The people whose myths he draws on are practitioners who are in close contact with nature, often hunters, and in many ways what Claude Levi-Strauss’ work depicts most vividly is an account of the sur-reality of the human-animal interface. Animals are good to think with because they are close to us, but also in typically Structuralist vein they also draw us outside of what it is to be human, and in allowing us to reflect, recreating the terms that we use to define the word ‘human’.
The Structuralist project was an intellectual movement inspired by the work of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who described language as a self-organizing system, based on various basic functions. Later structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss draw on Saussure’s theory of semiotics and apply the same principles to human mythology. On the whole, the movement through its Anthropological variation showed almost definitively that human mythology is a form of language that has a special place in the perceptual construction of the world for the human. Our perceptions are constructed by the structure of our mythologies. And mythologies themselves in all of Levi-Strauss’s work show how specific cultures perceive space based on an organization of space in a myth, that structures the landscapes of their immediate world.
Menon’s poetry and the myths Levi-Strauss describes are linked in their hyper-reality; they are vivid descriptions of interactions typical to peoples in close contact with nature, people whose techniques reflect a detailed interaction with nature. They both operate on a complex metaphorical system, that uses a series of highly intricate oppositions to deal with dichotomies or problems characteristic of humanity. For Levi-Strauss mythology was the way the human stated the most deep rooted of problematics that pointed in a very deep way to the incompleteness, or inherently contradictory nature of nature.
What this amounts to is that while within cognitive and neuro-sciences consciousness is often caught in an argumentative dilemma between being material and irreducibly subjective, the entire edifice of animalistic mythology as described by the Structuralist movement points to it being irreducible to an ‘experience’.
This idea that there is some hidden inner world of experience that underlies symbolic representation is one that has been subjected to much scrutiny within the ancient and
medieval western philosophical canon but is paid scant reference in modern cognitive science. In fact, in many ways what structuralism would seem to point to are forms of embodied cognition expressed and materialized by forms of semiosis, and mythology as a lasting artifact, an archive of bio-semiotic systems: semiotic systems at the interface of the human and its environment. As best exemplified in Levi-Strauss’ paradigm changing book ‘Of Wild Thought’ or more literally ‘the wild pansies of thought’, that is, in French- Le Pensee Savage1, the human mind is primarily a semiotic system, perpetually ensconced in a larger, environmental semiotic web.
The book ‘Of Wild Thought’ produces a philosophy of mythology. One of the central ideas Levi-Strauss draws out in this book is that of the bricoleur or craftsman who he compares against the engineer. The engineer works with selected materials that are pre-assigned while the bricoleur uses the materials that appear to them, they improvise. Bricolage, the craft of the bricoleur, is according to Levi-Strauss also relevant in the crafting of past events into foundational narratives and myths. Science on the other hand produces events and is oriented towards the future and causing change. The word structure itself is of Latin root meaning ‘to build’. However, the building at hand with the bricoleur is improvisational.
Already as far as the materiality of myth in ‘Of Wild Thought’ Levi-Strauss argues that myth is ‘somehwere between a percept and a concept’. The myth is an arranged series of images or signs, Levi-Strauss argues that they produce an inventory of spatial coordinates, even types of causality and things that are sayable and doable within a cultural context.
1 Initially and archaically translated as ‘The Savage Mind’, although here the title clearly playfully refers to the pansy flower which was at the time a metonym for thought in French culture.
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The Language of Bees
One of the persistent criticisms of Claude Levi-Strauss is that he has a penchant in his work for archaism and over-systematization. Susan Sontag in an essay on Levi-Strauss called ‘The anthropologist as hero’, describes how the structuralist is ‘lamenting among the shadows struggling to distinguish the archaic from the pseudo-archaic’. After the critiques from social philosophers like Foucault, Edward Said, and Lila Abu-Lugodh about the role the west has played in constructing a discourse of civilization as opposed to the barbarianism of the so called ‘primitive’ or the ‘savage’, a Social Science practice that seems to exoticize native ritual at the cost of universal modernity. However, it would be stretching it to say that Levi-Strauss thought there were absolute, metaphysical differences between cultures. Instead in his Mythologiques project he is constantly pointing to the human-animal interface, as porous. As Sontag points out, Levi-Strauss’ insistence is that preservation of various systems intertwined between humanity and nature, and the slowing down of industrial progress could be of great value to the human being. Precisely because of this emphasis Levi-Strauss ends up in a preservationist position which in retrospect remains poignant even today particularly from the point of view of the drastic change in the nature of human experience with the accelerating climate crises.
In this essay, I am trying to describe how structuralism gives us an outline of the human mind as being related to multiple systems outside it and being itself an open system that cannot be categorically pre-defined.
In the southern state of Kerala in India (where I was born), elephants have for many centuries had a sacred and quasi-ritualistic place. They are associated with temple festivals and were often attached to families associated with the ritualistic order. In many ways, even today elephants are a symbol of culture in Kerala. A couple of years back, two delegates from the species turned thieves. They were marked with pseudonyms for their particular appetites. One ‘Arikomaban’ (The rice tusker) would raid government ration depots situated in the quasi-forested regions of hilly districts in the state, and the other ‘Chakkakomban’ (The jackfruit tusker) would raid gardens full of the redolent jackfruit plant. A couple of years passed with attempts to relocate these animals, but their own respective vices drew them back to humanity. Articles in newspapers at moments of such departure would describe the relief but also some of the melancholy that would overtake residents at these moments of scheduled departure. These brigands captured the imagination of the local press for quite some time and local social media pieces would be rife with videos of one of the Kombans (tuskers) pillaging his favorite haunts.
Inter-species interactions of this sort have also grown familiar in the discipline of Social Anthropology in India. Exquisite ethnographic accounts such as Radhika Govindrajan’s ‘Animal Intimacies’ and Nayanika Mathur’s ‘Crooked Cats’ describe how human-animal interactions affect daily human life.
Mathur begins as an anthropologist working on bureaucratic processes involved with a national employment guarantee act. Through the course of this fieldwork in the Garhwal Himalayas hills of Uttarakhand, India, in the town of Gopeshwar, in the district of Chamoli. For a period of her field study. Fairly deep into winter a leopard (bagh) began to circumambulate the town and killing people. The town went into a kind of lockdown. As she describes it:
‘Gopeshwar, never the liveliest of places, became a veritable ghost town over the two and a half months that the bagh haunted it’.
The state government and district administration, however, are unable to gain the required documentation to hunt the leopard. The state thus gets the name ‘Kagazi Bagh’ or ‘Paper Tiger’ (Bagh being also a general Hindi word for big cats) the title of Mathur’s book. She describes how once the everyday is ‘possessed’ by the threat of the leopard’s presence he ‘was not just feared but also anthropomorphized- to the point that he became a co-resident…’. Mathur has gone on from her initial involvement in the anthropology of bureaucracy to an additional dedication to tracing the stories of animal encounters with humans. She describes in her book, ‘Crooked Cats: Beastly encounters in the Anthropocene’, animal tales as ways to ‘illuminate the Anthropocene’ and ‘reframe human, non-human relations on the planet’.
What I find fascinating is that many of these accounts describe how humans tell stories about such encounters with animals. It is almost as if animals have a pre-given, quasi-ritualistic status that grants them unqualified access to the annals of human storytelling. I found this strange pre-disposition of animals being ‘good to think’ in my own doctoral fieldwork, which was situated in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, in the wake of the 2013 flash floods that devastated the state. Although my work did not specifically touch the place of animals in great detail, I found in daily conversation that animals were regularly used to qualify types of personality traits. Conversations would be peppered with naturalistic metaphors. I remember a vivid description from one conversation: ‘The langur [leaf monkey] is even more effective and strong than the monkey leaping from trees. Its courage is obvious and plain for all to see. But even the brave langur when confronted with the roar of a leopard will fall silently to the ground.’ The metaphor is simple but effective. On other occasions animals would be described through their associations in Hindu mythology, and the qualities that they bestow on humans. Hanuman, the monkey god would be associated with great devotion. My suggestion is that while we ordinarily denigrate anthropomorphism, our animal metaphors in the most basic way demonstrate precisely what Levi-Strauss was getting at, or at least one half of this.
On the one hand we measure humans often in this form of ‘animal like’-ness. This however raises the obvious questions about the hierarchies we create to locate animals as being close or distant from ‘human-like’-ness. An Indian Supreme Court directive in August 2025 ordered that all stray dogs in the Indian national capital of Delhi were to be relocated to shelters caused a social media eruption. Maneka Gandhi, a politician and prominent animal rights activist argued that the order was produced out of anger over the many vicious attacks made by stray dogs on citizens. The issue became a point of political disagreement across the country. It is perhaps curious to think why humans as a species extend such affection and asylum only to certain species. A Supreme court order, for example, to control the population of rats in a city is unlikely to have such widespread implications. Rats we assume are both literally and legally ‘vermin’. What is it about dogs that distinguish them? While the actual substance of this kinship might be ineffable, we might say that we ascribe to dogs a degree of consciousness, by which we inevitably mean humanoid qualities. While the definition of the word ‘consciousness’ has grown increasingly vague with expanding fields of study, its political implications have often been significant and at times dire. Human history has consistently drawn a line, sometimes within the species itself, across which it refuses to acknowledge a sense of ‘I-ness’ and this line has always had serious consequences for life and the planet.
This as I was alluding to a paragraph ago is one side to the Levi-Straussian riddle of animals being ‘good to think’. The other side was exemplified richly by a compatriot of Levi-Strauss, the eclectic and visionary linguist Emile Benveniste. Benveniste, along with Roman Jakobson and Levi-Strauss were the three founding figures of modern structuralism. Influenced greatly by the insights on Structural Linguistics by Saussure, Jakobson, Benveniste and Levi-Strauss went on to found a deeply rigorous way of applying his conclusions to wider fields of study. Benveniste was perhaps the most experimental of the three thinkers, often focusing on the poetics and stylistics of language and remaining on the fringe of the dialectics and slightly rigid means employed by other structuralist thinkers.
In an experimental article entitled ‘On animal communication and human language’ Benveniste deep dives into the world of the figure of eight dances employed by bees to communicate found sources of food. He writes:
‘The bee performs two different dances, according to the kind of information it intends to convey. In the one dance it traces horizontal circles from right to left, then from left to right, in succession (round dance). In the other dance (wagging-dance) it wags its abdomen continually and cuts what appears to be a figure of eight in the following manner: it flies straight, then makes a full left turn, flies straight again, and begins a full turn to the right, etc. After the dances, one or several bees leave the hive and go straight to the supply spot visited by the first bee.’
He notes as he describes this dance in further detail that while human language is borne through sound ‘the bees message consists entirely in the physical motion of the sound’. He concludes on an insightful note suggesting that substance of the distinction between human and bee language lies in the fact that while the bees are able to immediately convey the message indicating a source of food with great complexity, what they lack, comparative to human language is the capacity for the bees that has received this information to convey it to other bees. What the bee seemingly lacks is reported speech, or to simplify it to the utmost ‘the story’.
I must hurry here to make the crucial counterpoint. As has been suggested voluminously in anthropological accounts of human-natural interfaces and encounters and in linguistic accounts about the human is that human language alienates the human from itself. Human language imposes an alienation from nature upon the human, a separation from nature. It is precisely this that makes human-animal encounters such a rich archive of alternate forms of semiosis. As has been endlessly demonstrated in Social Anthropology the encounter with nature produces variation in human language, a change of syntax and semantic content and an opening out of human consciousness to alternate modes of existence. What makes Benveniste’s article shine is not just its conclusion but the variegated and almost Proustian description of the semiotics of the bee’s everyday life. This is the other side of the human-natural encounter, not the humanization of the animal, but the animalization of the human. In my view, it is precisely this latter side that makes animals ‘good to think’.
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Philosophical Animals and Unspeakable Experience
La Rochefoucauld, the 17th century French aristocrat and aphorist noted famously that ‘There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard that there was such a thing’. The statement is incisive. Human codes of romance are not a purely ‘natural’ phenomenon, they are learnt, cultural and deeply linguistic. The statement opens up in its declaration the possibility of imagining love without statements about and language concerning the acts of love. This alternate hypothesis of an absence of a linguistic-cultural edifice that schematizes the gestures of courtly love is however a deeply tempting one. It points to the fact that at least in inter-cultural and certainly also in inter-species relations there are aspects of experience that remain unsaid, or more precisely do not enter into the language of a particular speaker. A large part of our non-human linguistic experiences seem to occupy such a place, enunciated by codes and yet unavailable to the human filter. As we walk through a forest we experience change from walking through a city, a series of signs confront us, but remain, as we walk, in a kind of background, but they add up to the feeling say of a ‘forest bath’.
The Czech-German author Franz Kafka populated his writings with a very strange bestiary of philosophical animals and most of these stories seem to point to this aspect of a certain blankness or liminality in the interface between the human and the animal. One is possessed with the sense in reading these stories that these are not anthropomorphic renderings of animals in human terms, but rather a strange interstitial dimension where the two meet. His animal worlds are also populated by a series of quips and jokes. In ‘The investigations of a dog’ for example, he describes the world of a philosophical dog investigating questions about the nature of reality and the substance of ‘dogness’. In this world humans do not exist. And for this reason the protagonist dog of the story on occasion witnesses what Kafka describes as ‘lufthund’, or ‘flying dogs’, which are actually being carried in the purses of old women, a kind of fashion even at that time. This strange separation of sensorial dimensions between dogs and humans is telling, it is as if the two live in separate but overlapping worlds.
The Philosopher Jacques Derrida similarly describes the animal human encounter as the meeting of two separated worlds. This separation becomes apparent to us only at certain times. In his book, “The animal that I am’ he describes repeatedly through the book an encounter with his cat, who sees him naked while going into the bath. Derrida becomes conscious of the fact that his cat is looking at him, he feels indifference to his nakedness in his cat’s gaze. He argues through the book that human knowledge typically only considers its own gaze as it surveys nature but is rarely conscious of nature returning this gaze.
Derrida was one of the most virulent and noteworthy critiques of the Structuralist movement. In 1966 at a symposium attended by a large gathering of French structural and post-structural thinkers he presented his paper ‘Structure Sign and Play’. The paper was presented at a time when the Structuralist enterprise was still dominant and, in many ways, critiques the over-systematization of structural thought. However, a fundamental aspect of Derrida’s form of thought has remained structuralist. For Derrida as for the vast multitude of French and German thinkers who enjoyed a kind of pinnacle of philosophical thought at the time, the mind/consciousness was explicable only through the modicum of language. However, language and its structure were not a closed system that could be defined absolutely. Language in fact is always, to most of these thinkers, open to and interconnected with the worlds around it.
Our encounters with animals, as Derrida effectively describes in his cat vignette, leave us deeply aware of inherent contradictions of an anthropocentric perspective, of defining sentience, the mind and consciousness from a human centric perspective. Our encounters with animals show us that our own language, our representational systems, are fundamentally incomplete.
To my mind, among contemporary and popular artists no one has exemplified this incompleteness more directly than Werner Herzog. Herzog’s films point repeatedly to the absurdity and indifference of nature, to the fact that there is some dimension in human-animal interactions that produces a modulation of human language. This was rendered almost unbearably visible in his 2005 documentary ‘Grizzly Man’. The movie describes the life and death of the Grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was a naturalist who lived for many seasons ensconced among wild bears at the Katmai National Park in Alaska. He learned to understand the gestural systems of bears and was able to predict and deflect possible violence from them. He often visited the park with his partner Amie Huegenard. The film is based largely on Treadwell’s footage of his time amongst Grizzly bears. In 2003 Treadwell and his partner stayed into early October at the park a time when the bears are particularly vicious because they are accumulating resources for hibernation. He and his partner were about to start filming on a cliff and had not pulled the lens cap off the camera, when one particular bear that Treadwell had noted before as not being entirely comfortable with his encroachment into bear territory attacked him and Amie. The sounds of the attack were recorded by the camera. Herzog at around the halfway point of the film goes to meet Jewel Palovak, friend and business associate of Timothy who had possession of the camera and at whose acceptance Herzog is permitted to listen to the tape of this final encounter. Herzog listens to the recorded speech in front of Jewel with the camera recording and the scene is played out in the movie. After a few anguished seconds of Herzog listening and Jewel watching him listen, he asks her to ‘Turn it off’. In a brief conversation after they agree to never listen to the tape again. Palovak concludes by a saying, ‘I know Werner, I’m never going to’. Herzog then goes on to discourse on a theme scattered across many movies what he himself describes as ‘the indifference of nature’. The movie Grizzly Man clearly highlights two worlds, the world of human meaning and signs and a parallel world to it, the world of animal semiosis, the overlap between them is a kind of world of difference, a kind of a intermixed lifeworld. Language in that sense is the skin that simultaneously unites and separates body and world.
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Consciousness as a Category problem
The term ‘consciousness’ as designated under various studies conducted in neurology and cognitive science, is also liable to be involved in a series of category errors. At times it is defined as first person experience, at other times as reflexivity, and still at other times as awareness or even wakefulness. With a series of papers such as ‘Consciousness and its place in nature’ (2003) and ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’ (1995) David Chalmers has established at least the grounds of what is usually being talked about when we describe the word consciousness: ‘first person experience’. However, this already assumes that this pure experience eludes cultural codes. This also closes possibilities of variation and mutability in cognitive processes. When we assume experience is first person, we immediately generalize a typically human way of looking at experience. But this generalization itself is a reduction or stratification of the possibilities of what the word ‘experience’ can encapsulate.
The problem of the relation between language, thought and reason has a long genealogy in what has been described as the linguistic turn within analytical philosophy. From Quine and Popper to Wittgenstein and J.L Austin the idea of the perceptive world being refracted in a variety of ways became a part of a generally accepted thesis within philosophical discourse. Access to a commonly objective world, such strands argued, was a form of perspective itself, a language game itself. The line of thought in this regard stretching to J.L Austin also had great influence, particularly through Social Philosophy. John Searle, a major figure in the cognitive sciences began his trajectory within the J.L Austin based language-as-action framework (described under the general rubric of performative speech acts) that structure our reality. A kind of combination of language and an action-oriented perception framework is described in Searle’s work as being crucial in constructing the action physical world we see before us as a species. Over time however Searle moves from a more Austinian approach to a clearly more Phenomenological perspective in describing what he begins to call ‘Consciousness’. In Searle’s work consciousness is defined as a combination of wakeful awareness and intentionality directed at various goals and actions. However, the shift in Searle’s orientation from consciousness as being imbricated in questions of language to it being a more immediate perceptual awareness itself spells one of the most fascinating points of bifurcation in the entire cognitive science tradition: the distinction between consciousness as possibly prelinguistic versus it being the product of linguistically determined processes. While the general emphasis within the whole Phenomenological tradition capped by the fine-grained philosophy of perception of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was with what has since been generally termed as embodied cognition: the imbrication of body and world and the self as a process located on the border between the two. This is the broad tradition that Searle eventually participates in with increasing bias over the period of his professional career.
Many of the presuppositions of this embodied cognition approach however are part of the fabric of the cognitive sciences which are charged with the knowledge of the term ‘Consciousness’. Even Chalmer’s suggestion of an irreducible and qualitative first person perspective that itself cannot be experienced by another. This too has its basis in an idea of a form of perceptual awareness that precedes language.
In fact the whole question of whether there is a pre-cognitive, perceptual world that interacts through a minute temporal delay with an organizational or at least a kind of compositional cognitive capacity (the broad outline of Ned Block’s hypothesis) can be further investigated using instances where experiences exist, at least for a period of time outside human language, precisely like Kafka’s flying dogs, or Derrida’s cat’s gaze, or the silence provoked by the recording of the killing of Timothy Treadwell. That is, experiences that have not fully entered human language.
We find a similar conundrum with descriptions of naturalistic subsistence activities, like agriculture, hunting and fishing, the engagement with nature at the level of technique allows an absorption of human semiotic systems into larger bio-semiotic systems. Anthropological investigations into such interfaces have increasingly shown that human language itself has certain dimensions that are not purely symbolic, that are given to the rules of signification designated by Saussure, but also that human language itself is constantly in interaction with bio-semiotic features, emphasized within the discipline of Social Anthropology by practitioners like Jospeh S. Alter. Alter currently studies the relation between embodied cognition and bio-semiosis particularly in relation to a wide variety of human and human/non-human practices. But he started out by studying the relation between the body and language early on in his career by studying a sport: wrestling.
Alter began his career studying the sport of Indian Wrestling (Kushti) in Gymnasiums (Akharas) across in large parts of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Alter studies in his classic ethnographic monograph ‘The Wrestler’s Body’ the interaction between codes of conduct imposed by religion and caste, through mythologies relating to Hindu gods (since the Akharas he primarily studied were Hindu) and to practices drawn from these mythologies, dealing with yoga, and various practices of mediation for example. What Alter’s research demonstrates fundamentally is that technical codes (in this case of the practice of wrestling) are ensconced in cultural-linguistic codes.
It is the same with ‘sport’ like hunting and fishing, the technical codes of the man-nature interface are constantly in interaction with human cultural-linguistic codes with the feedback between the two systems being bi-directional. These more ‘thing’-like technical codes are particularly emphasized deeply in Eduardo Kohn’s highly influential ethnographic monograph ‘How forests think: towards an ethnography beyond the human’, on the subsistence practices and associated mythos of the Kichwa speaking Runa people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. He describes how the Runa world is immersed in a ‘greater than human semiotic web’. This describes any system whether living or non-living that the person interacts with. Kohn for example shows how human linguistic systems have intrinsic parts that take care of how we interact with spaces around us. For example, our sense of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are tied deeply to learning these categories through language. The part of language that deals with bodily orientation is described as the indexical mode of language. This is a term he borrows from the linguist Charles Sanders Pierce. This is one form of what Kohn describes as Bio-Semiosis that he takes to be the interpellation of the human and non-human in certain kinds of sign systems.
Early on during his fieldwork among the Runa in the foothill’s village of Avilla, Kohn is travelling northwards to the hilly towns on the way to a major district centre. He is passing through a number of hilly, cloud forest regions when landslides start along the road. The stones hurling from the slope barely miss the bus he is seated in. He is completely alarmed by the event but those around him, including the tourists on the bus, were not. He describes distrusting his own bodily intuitions as ‘radically alienating’. This bodily grounding Kohn goes on to describe as a form of indexicality, a kind of linguistic/experiential mode that Kohn relies on greatly during the course of his recounting life amongst the Runa. Here what Kohn is demonstrating is that even our bodily reactions, such as being frightened of something, are culturally and thus linguistically grounded. This at least is what Kohn means by bio-semiosis: a linguistic process that constructs the orientations and affordances of the body.
Human communication following the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s central observation, is seen to be based on the arbitrariness of the relation between the sign that represents (signifier) and the mental imagery it is representing (signified). There is no inherent reason why words are related to certain objects. This arbitrariness means that human semiosis is alienated from the immediacy and sheer materiality of language and the world around.
The other mode of bio-semiosis that Kohn describes is borrowing again from Pierce is the iconic. The iconic as Kohn explains, describes the fact that imagistic communication of signs exists amongst animals and between plants and animals as well, as with cases of mimicry in nature. He gives the example of a stick insect found in the Ecuadorian Amazon, that imitates its immediate environment so perfectly it looks like a stick. Orchid dupe wasps for example form Australia are confused by the Cryptostylis Orchid whose flower looks incredibly like the female from the wasp species.
The indexical and the iconic, as I have already described are alternate modes of linguistic formulation that are described in the work of linguist C.S Peirce who Kohn borrows from heavily to describe his work, and to describe the semiotic capacities of nature. While the structuralists, at least overtly, were concerned only with human language, Peirce’s work opens structuralism onto the surrounding world. Where for the structuralist the sign is an object that has a value based on social convention, Peirce describes this only as one mode of linguistic formulation: the symbolic. The indexical deals with signs that have a direct relation to the body being described and the iconic are signs that resemble their objects. Kohn also gives examples of the iconic in onomatopoeic words like ‘tsupu’: the sound of something landing in water, an onomatopoeic word, or ‘that’, the sound of an animal’s head being attacked by a puma. The language of the Runa has a highly emphasized portion of it that concerns the fact that everything around, plants and animals and rocks all have souls and the language of the Runa emphasizes this animation through the use of iconic and indexical modes of language. That is the technical codes of the Runa, relating to their hunting and agricultural activities, thus interacted with the broader cultural-linguistic codes of the Runa.
Language in this way through mythology can structure the literal lifeworld of the human species. There is seemingly no way theoretically to undercut this linguistic lifeworld to get to some kind of ‘pure experience’. Curiously the philosophical movement C.S Peirce was associated with- American Pragmatism, brought to the fore this notion of ‘pure experience’ but Peirce in his work avoids a reference to a kind of pure unmediated experience, describing the same only through the world of signs. Our experiences, Peirce argues, are not limited to just the symbolic register of language, they pass through indexical and imagistic or iconic registers as well.
Consciousness as the linguistic construction of ‘the human’
The term Consciousness is also at the forefront of technologies that are now looking to channel and harness thoughts and neural functioning. Thus, it is no longer a question of defining consciousness but seeing what we are constructing and calling consciousness. The ideas of ‘singularity’ and ‘transcendence’ that govern fields like AI limit the construction of consciousness to a merely human form and limits the sheer width of how the mind has been described for millenia in philosophy. Neuroscience and cognitive science are not describing or defining the mind, they are constructing it through a series of definitions and counter-definitions.
However, with the bizarreness of the kinds of ‘singularity’ described in the annals of cognitive philosophy that takes consciousness to be a kind of purely human-to-human endeavor that is heading in the direction of technological synthesis of machine and mind, a new technological direction humanity has taken, now has ironically, actually produced the possibility of ‘pure experience’. Much like nuclear physics, before we have a clear and defined sense of materiality, we have devised technologies that severely injure the fabric of materiality. Similarly in the sphere of the mind, we are starting to construct technology to regulate it before we are able to describe its structure. We just have to turn to the modern prophet of social materialism Elon Musk to ask why.
By around 2016 Musk with a group of scientists had formed the company called 'Neuralink'. Studies indicate that the technology which aims to produce active brain-computer interfaces ostensibly to produce neural solutions to a series of biological ailments. In every way Neuralink fulfils a kind of science-fiction lover’s dream. It comes close to creating what has often been called by futurists such as Ray Kurtzweil, the ‘Singularity’, the apparent possible merging of human and machine intelligence. The neuralink technology promises to allow humans from across the globe to share their experiences as they happen without any actual physical transfer of information. It aims at creating what many Social Scientists and Scientists today would describe as a total materialization of the human. Here is Musk himself describing the prophetic powers of such technology:
'There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is – your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person … If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. You wouldn’t need to verbalize unless you want to add a little flair to the conversation or something (laughs), but the conversation would be conceptual interaction on a level that’s difficult to conceive of right now … That’s the thing – it’s difficult to really understand what it would be like to think with someone. We’ve never been able to try. We communicate with ourselves through thought and with everyone else through symbolic representations of thought, and that’s all we can imagine.'
Here the ‘symbolic representations’ being imagined are merely categories of perception limited to what we call the ‘normal human’. There are also a number of ethical questions about access to people’s minds produce. Further, the natural questions that arise here, are if we are to give way to this complete definition of consciousness what happens to subjectivity itself. In every sense this technology seems full fill the prognostications of singularity that seem, particularly today, to entice the intellect. One could imagine being carried away into a kind of universal dream, experiencing only our collective archetypes, connected forever to a second brain that can not only read but ‘improve’ our thoughts. In that sense it seems clear that the category of human 'experience' could change drastically.
It becomes crucial with such a drastic almost evolutionary change being pressed on us in a sharply small period, to the consider the limits of what we call consciousness. Thus, to examine consciousness as a linguistic process that straddles several semiotic systems, including human and non-human sign systems, it might be useful to examine a theory that deals with consciousness as a process that is carried out within the limits of the human mind, to examine clearly what it is about human language creates a difference. Here I want to show that often philosophies of ‘oneness’ of a kind of cosmic unified perception ignore the fact that to be totally psychically exposed, as with the promise of neuralink, might be a deeply alienating rather than a liberating process. Here the problem with even our highly limited definitions of consciousness as human, is that we imagine consciousness to be a process without a Subject arbitrating the process of cognition. Much of cognitive science while highlighting the structure of experience has nothing to say about how a subject is structured. Here again the formulation of Jacques Lacan, Freudian Psychoanalyst and Structural Linguist, that the human subject is ‘split’ from the external world by language becomes invaluable to parse out.
Jack Black, associate professor of culture media and sport at Sheffield Hallam University, recently published a paper entitled ‘Can AI lie? Chatbot technologies, the subject and the importance of lying’ where he describes how AI chatbots remain unreceptive to social cues that we follow unconsciously which are all predicated on the human capacity to lie. Black relies on French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s linguistic method of outlining the self and consciousness. Lacan himself an enthusiast of structural linguistics, reformulated the basic structure of Saussure’s system of the linguistic sign. Lacan in his work in describing the structure of consciousness of a single subject, describes how the position of the speaking subject itself is split. For example, as Jack Black describes in his exposition of AI Chatbots, the human in using the phrase ‘I am lying’ is able to speak simultaneously from one subject position where he is simply affirming the negative in the statement ‘I am lying’ or is in fact telling a deeper truth about his own subject position in his world, ‘Everything I am saying is a lie’. Black points further to two positions through which a lie can be told: ‘lying with truth’ or ‘telling the truth by the means of the lie’. The first involves generalizing on the basis of scant information to assert a dubious statement. For example, one might say of a sports team ‘They’ve won every one of their home games’ and the team in question may have played only one home game. This would be an example of the first kind of lying which the AI chatbot is capable of. But the second capacity ‘telling the truth by means of a lie’ might be embodied frequently in statements of love or affection. ‘I love you to the moon and back’ is a statement that through a lie tells the truth of the extent of affection.
What these examples point to is that the formation of the human subject, of consciousness in an individual, is rarely if ever a question of ‘pure perception’. Even deep emotional realities need linguistic signs to construct them. Without language, experiences remain in a kind of shadow realm, where still certain basic rules of language, described by the structuralists as substitution (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy), still apply. Substitution and displacement simply mark a dual function that Sigmund Freud discovers in dreams, how individual frames in the dream are being organized both horizontally and vertically on a table, that reveal a deeper inner structure of the dream.
Lacan’s work is a particularly fruitful case of a convergence between Saussurean linguistic theory and a later structural theorist that attempts to generalize this theory to a theory of subjectivity, consciousness and behaviour. Lacan had a number of major thinkers attend his annual seminars which have all been published now and are the subject of considerable academic speculation and discussion. Claude Levi-Strauss himself attended a few of Lacan’s early seminars and the lines of continuity between Levi-Strauss and Lacan is apparent in their reliance on Structural Linguistics. Lacan intervenes to make the primacy of language over any kind of ‘immediate experience’ preceding language clear. This is of course inscribed in Saussure’s path breaking formulation, of what I have already described as ‘the arbitrariness of the sign’. That is the sign as the relation between signifier (Sr- word) and signified (Sd- meaning). That is the representation Sr/Sd already assumes that the bar (/) creates a break between the signifier and signified. When we use the word 'Tree' there is no necessary connection between the word and its meaning (although this is broken in by other kinds of sign systems, such as in onomatopoeia).
It is through a relation: Sr1-> Sr2-> Sr-3... that language constructs itself. That is for Lacan the signified is completely barred, it is a formal sense 'real' or 'noumenal'. This is epitomized in his concise formulation in his third annual seminar with the concept of a quilting point, that is language works retroactively, we construct 'meaning' backwards in time while language itself moves forwards through time.
So, with the sentence 'Upon the porch he set his...'
Since the sentence is incomplete it shows that it requires an additional signifier to 'quilt' or stipulate its 'meaning'. So, Lacan's modification is to argue that the a-temporal dimension of structure, the value of any given signifier taken as being oppositionaly related to other signifiers, does not exist in a kind of quasi-metaphysical dimension above speech, but is actualized in speech itself. We make sense of language as it emerges.
Figure 1: Lacan’s elementary ‘graph of desire’ from his foundational essay ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’: The figure demonstrates how language moves from one Signifier S to another S’ but is cut across by the subject (consciousness) which moves backwards or retroactively to make sense of the articulation
Here we demonstrate that the structure of the subject is split by the fact of language itself. Language splits the subject from itself. ‘I’ according to Lacan am the delay between what is said and my own understanding I myself am saying, as I say it. It is because the subject is split and it lacks that it is also open to the possibility of other forms of lack, at times in nature itself. The crack in the self retrospectively shows us that nature itself is not naturally given but is also made.
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Non-human semiotics in human language
The structure of the subject that Lacan designates as being foundational of human subjectivity as such, has been described as a historical formation by Anthropological and Philosophical writers alike. In a now canonical article, the French Anthropologist Marcel Mauss describes this split structure of subjectivity as being a product of a Christianization of the world and an interpretation of Christianity by Roman property law. The article entirely ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of the person, the notion of the self’ describes the self or person prior to Christian civilization as being archetypal, for example in the system of passing on first names of famous ancestors common to many civilizations. The concept of an interiority in Mauss’s description begins with Christian Civilization and Roman property law.
Much of Anthropology is testament to the fact that amongst the first non-human entities to gain the status of ‘person’ were totemic animals, or animals representative of one’s clan and sacred to one’s clan. Meyer Fortes, who worked amongst the Tallensi people, from Ghana showed how the peoples maintained certain animals as their ancestors. In the case of one clan, it was the crocodile that was ancestor to the clan and thus the crocodile could not be eaten and was given a burial after its death. The place of the animal in such ritual but also in mythology is very significant, the answer as I have pointed out to Lev-Strauss’s point about animals being ‘good to think’.
In his theory of Totemism Claude Levi-Strauss rejects the Durkheimian suggestion that Totemism is just a means of social organization, arguing instead that totemism is a way for humans to pose their most basic existential dilemmas in the form of quasi-mathematical problems. These problems for Levi-Strauss emerge at the borders between humans and the environment. Thus, for Levi-Strauss from the very beginning nature and human sign systems are combined on the same plane rather than being causally linked on two separate planes.
Anthropology is replete with instances of the human and animal sharing the same plane of semiosis. Radhika Govindrajan’s ethnographic classic ‘Animal Intimacies’ from 2018 describes the relations between humans and animals in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in the eastern part of the state known as Kumaon. One of the central concepts she draws from the field is that of ‘bandhan’ (a Hindi term literally meaning knots) that her interlocutors used to describe their relations to the animals around them both domestic and wild. Bandhan can be thought in a broader sense as a concept within the broad limits of cognitive science, as relationality, as the extent to which relatedness of various semiotic systems, constructs resonances between these various systems, allows one to structure the other.
While here Govindrajan perfectly employs the structuralist conceptual apparatus showing starkly the human self in relation to its animal counterpart in some cultural-linguistic system, other structural approaches have looked to isolate the human in relation to abstractness as a principle: the human measured against the limits of its own ability to deal with higher levels of abstract thought. While to a great extent Noam Chomsky has been renowned for his conception of a Universal Grammar that is common to all natural languages and also for the notion of generative grammar the idea that humans have a particular propensity for language. A fact that Lacan also marks as a singular and distinguishing point that separates humans from other animal species, many of which have their offspring oriented and walking within minutes of birth. It is worth noting here that Chomsky was taught, amongst others, by Roman Jakobson who also edited a cultural journal ‘le homme’ with Claude Levi-Strauss and was one of the founders of modern structural linguistics.
Human upbringing on the other hand occurs through stages of the rapid development of our faculties. For Chomsky, surface level variation within language is infinite but deep structural variation is nearly impossible. Humans have within themselves certain limits of intelligibility. In many ways by intelligibility Chomsky simply means the ability to produce a certain degree of abstraction. What Chomsky eventually argues for thus is a picture of the mind as organized and structured by certain linguistic procedure, a notion that bears close resemblance to the Levi-Straussian and Lacanian pictures of how reality is formed for a subject.
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Consciousness as Yearning in Nature Itself
Naveeda Khan in her rich and conceptually detailed account of life among inhabitants of Charuas or Chaur Lands (sandbars), (in the deltas of the Jamuna River in Bangladesh) which are small island filled delta landscapes, that shifted and had increasingly done so with climate change. Naveeda Khan in her work traces how land ownership, kinship, linguistic and mythological systems are affected by the constant movement of nature. Above all she is trying to show the role nature has in producing patterns of culture. In an interview regarding her book, she takes a classically structural approach to question of evolution: ‘For instance’, she says in an interview ‘evolutionary biologists have speculated that culture emerged out of the human need to survive in particular physical locations. Given my interest in the ideational side of nature, I was more interested to explore how myths, or culture more generally, helps us to work through intellectual puzzles that are in nature.’ Khan through her ethnography shares and cross-cultivates her findings in relation to the Nature-Philosophie of the 19th Century German romantic philosopher F.W. Schelling.
Schelling has many maxims that have become popular ways of thinking now, one of these being that the human is alienated from itself by its own cognition, what Schelling adds to this initial conception is the counter-intuitive point that immersion into the durational and technical aspects of an interaction with nature, through animals or landscapes and so on, doesn’t fill this gap but creates a certain awareness of it. It is precisely this that Khan too is pointing to when describing ‘intellectual puzzles’ as I’ve described earlier Claude Levi-Strauss consistently describes mythology as a system that points to man’s metaphysical system as being fundamentally incomplete and given to paradox and contradiction.
Khan is very evocative of nature’s semiotic powers commenting in detail on Schelling’s work in her book ‘River Life and the Uprising of Nature’. She describes how the experience of nature itself is one of yearning, discussing Schelling’s work ‘Philosophical Investigations into the essence of human freedom’. Yearning in nature itself is a strong theme in much of Schelling’s work. For Schelling the separation, or ‘split’ in the subject produced by human language is in fact internal to what is called ‘nature’ itself. Schelling replaces Cartesian dualism between mind and body for a kind of monism. Nature itself produces the human, for Schelling which can reflect on itself, and nature in this sense can be understood as a kind of larger subject.
When I was doing my doctoral fieldwork in Sociology on the aftermath of the 2013 floods in Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, I was often struck by how much the change in the immediate environment, particularly the depletion and denudation of mountain slopes, and by how difficult it would be for many to fully process despite passing through these regions every day. It wasn’t a question entirely perhaps of fear of an approaching landside and a sorrow over the loss of landscape. My project has looked to describe how one of the major consequences of the floods had been, at least
in the district of Rudraprayag where I was doing my fieldwork, that the number of landslides in the valley had increased exponentially. My work shows how these very processes of nature interrupt and delay bureaucratic surveys that look to produce estimates of land lost, interfering in the very maps that are used to estimate fields before negotiating in relation to them. Nature however asserted itself also in other processes like language, poetry and music. I note in my work how a particular genre of poetic music, known as Khuded Geet, a form of folk-music, associated with songs that are songs of longing or yearning for a family member who has left the village, spread in the wake of the flood. Khuded Geet themselves are based on a Garhwali language term: ‘Khud’ which is the essence of the persona of a person.
For example, when one person is fond of another they may say ‘Teri Khud lag gayi’ (‘Your Khud is now attached to me’).
Khuded Geet inevitably are written in communion with nature and the very sense of longing for another finds expression in relation to nature. The vast distances of the sky separating two crows, or sense of a long empty road, all these form symbols of longing and isolation. At times the features of nature depicted in Khuded Geet are directly birds or animals, a favourite being the Turtle Dove (Ghughuti).
The figure of ‘Ghughuti’ occupies a kind of radically alter place, expressing the limits of human language.
As Levi-Strauss describes it in his lecture at Berkley in September 1984, Mythological stories actualize a variety of possibilities but always leave some possibilities as such, which are then picked up by other groups and clans and actualized in different ways. He says,
‘We observe means for possible choices conceived by mythical imagination to become actualized as social facts. In previous essays dealing with a myth from the Tsimshian of British Colombia, the story of Asdivaal, I try to show that the myth simultaneously resorted to several codes: cosmological, meteorological, topographical, so as to make a homology appear between several natural oppositions: higher sky and chthonian world, upper and lower, mountain and sea, up river and down river, winter and summer and oppositions pertaining to the Sociological or Economic level such as descent and affinity, endogamy and exogamy, plenty and scarcity and so forth.’
Here the mythical imagination describes not just the arrangement of narratives that help to cultivate the self in a variety of ways, but to a set of linguistic co-ordinates that govern the very structure of human perception. The mythology Levi-Strauss describes, contains in its topographical structure, a resemblance to the actual landscape that the Tsimshian people inhabit.
More crucially while human systems have parts that are non-human, for these to even be available to the human, the non-human would have to have semiotic capacities. This is described quite uniquely by Noam Chomsky in his work on the history of his own linguistic oeuvre: ‘Cartesian Linguistics’. Chomsky at one point of the book argues that Descartes and many of his interpreters viewed the non-biological world as totally mechanical. Chomsky argues that this what disputed later by Newton, who Chomsky suggests, was moved by the idea that we do not have a conclusive way of knowing if matter is just mechanical. However, the Cartesian view of human nature, as Chomsky described it, helped considerably with developing his own deep structural linguistics.
Descartes through his meditations, letters and other materials has discussed the issue of the difference between man and animal as being centered on the ability for human speech. Chomsky too argues, quoting Descartes, that at the surface level we display a great degree of linguistic innovation even within basic social situations:
‘It is only our ability to innovate, and to do so in such a way that is appropriate to novel situations and that which yields coherent discourse, that provides crucial evidence, To speak is not to repeat the same words one has heard, but to utter different words in response to those.’ To show that other persons are not automata, one must provide evidence that speech manifests this creative aspect…’
Here, however, I feel we can extend Chomsky’s insights on human creativity in language to argue that the encounter with the animal produces a kind of creativity in our usual way of perceiving the world. The animal or ‘animalesque-ness’, seeing the world through radically altered perspectives, may not be in Chomsky’s sense deep-structural variation, if indeed this is possible at all, but it certainly involves a deep kinship, or bandhan at a linguistic level with nature and the improvisational creativity we apply at this interface.
The encounter with the animal, in the various forms presented here is a source for such variation and alterity, a kind of linguistic fact or event which is recorded in much mythical production. The encounter with the animal describes succinctly how human thought is never merely human, but that it always extends into the environment, like a point of inflection at the borders of the human and the more-than-human.
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