Conversations with Other-than-Human Creatures: Unpacking the Ambiguity of “with” for Multispecies Rhetorics

ABSTRACT

Multispecies rhetoric functions as an umbrella for diverse approaches to more-than-human communications that invoke distinct varieties of relations among human and other creatures. Amid that diversity, rhetorical engagements in which all creatures “speak” with others in mutual, iterative exchange can become lost. My argument is, first, that this particular variety of multispecies conversation is rare in discussions of multispecies rhetoric because rhetorical engagement “with” other creatures is often underspecified, and because it is incompatible with Aristotelian foundations that still often underpin rhetorical inquiry; and second, that it should be cultivated so that humans can invite other creatures to be more interesting than the anthropoexceptionalist lens may suggest, such that we can accomplish more together. A multispecies rhetoric wherein humans speak with other creatures, not only speaking for, about, or around them, requires drawing a distinction between capacities to affect/be affected and assumptions about any creature’s internal state of mind.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal rhetorics
• anthropocentrism
• material rhetorics
• microbial
• more-than-human

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Josh Evans, who was instrumental in prompting my thinking on this theme, and the students in my spring 2020 and spring 2022 seminars on posthuman reading and writing practices, who furthered it.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This statement is an observation that pertains to the contemporary Western context in which the vast majority of rhetoricians conduct their work and does not necessarily pertain elsewhere. For example, as Giraldo Herrera details in Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings, shamans in South America practice forms of storytelling with other creatures in which all (human and other) participants’ roles are specified and often explicit.

² Muckelbauer resists this framework in rejecting the assumption that response and reaction are distinct. However, he makes an additional distinction, between meaningful communication and “communication as something other than primarily the communication of a meaning,” as might occur among viruses who “‘communicate’ quite well without any need of symbolic exchange” (99). This implication that only humans or a human-like subset of other (animal, one imagines) creatures make meaning sits at odds with his otherwise open-minded argument and seems to indicate just how sticky is the residue of anthropoexceptionalist rhetoric.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. [678757] awarded to Miguel García-Sancho for the project TRANSGENE: Medical translation in the history of modern genomics, by start-up funds from Colorado State University, by NSF grant [#1935361], “Life with an RNA Genome” and by NSF grant [#204275], “CAREER: Investigating How Discourse Tools Conceptualize Rules of Microbial Life” [#2042475].