Snake(s)kin: The Intertwining Mêtis and Mythopoetics of Serpentine Rhetoric

Abstract

Snakes suffer from a bad reputation, and few human allies stand to prevent their extirpation. Yet more rhetorically powerful than any ethical injunction halting human violence upon nature, a sensuous moment of intertwining with the serpent can enact onto-epistemological shifts and dispositional transformations. Through a serpentine mêtis and mythopoetics of cunning wisdom and knowledge production, we can imaginatively, transversally, re-member the feeling of raising serpentine energy along the spine, sloughing off old skin, and slithering down among the roots and rhizomes into the depths of uncertainty. Opening up a space for the otherwise, responding to the hum of rhetorical energy coursing through our more-than-human relations, we may still live to tell new stories with the snakes and the rest of our strange kin.

Keywords:

• becoming-animal
• cunning
• entanglement
• narrative identity
• posthumanism

Acknowledgments

I thank Lisa Sideris for organizing the Wonder and the Natural World conference from which this Rhetorical Bestiary entry emerged and Katherine Lind who both extended the invitation to contribute and made numerous careful readings of earlier drafts along with her co-editors Jeremy Gordon and Saul Kutnicki. Each member of the bestiary team offered generous and productive feedback throughout the process. Thanks to the wonderful Christine Skolnik and Joanna Steinhardt who provided insights on earlier iterations of this serpentine exploration. Special thanks to Debra Hawhee for her pointed comments, and finally, I express my heartfelt gratitude to reviewer John Mucklebauer for guiding me back into negotiations of tangled complexity.

Notes

¹ In learning to open not only my eyes and ears but other senses and perceptive faculties, especially imagination, to serpentine and other other-than-human rhetoric, the emphasis of my thinking is more on the relational than the essential and more on the process of becoming than on being, or on nominalized beings. In mêtis I have found a cunning, embodied mode of knowledge production suited to such transductive and metamorphic zones. I have settled on mythopoetics as a fitting form of expression for the performance of mêtis. As much as snakes may share our need for maintenance of boundaries in self-preservation, this conversation in critical animal studies entails a creative, constructive desire otherwise displayed in the kinship bonds of serpentine intertwining.

² The world’s largest rattlesnake roundup takes place annually in Sweetwater, Texas with an average of 5,000 snakes killed each roundup. Ted Levin describes some of what’s on offer within the coliseum: “There are … entire snakes—freeze-dried coiled (and still threatening somehow) or inlaid in clear plastic toilet seats, which pretty much sums up their perceived ranking in the animal kingdom. Volunteers from the Children’s Christian Ministry paint kids’ faces, and at a military recruiting booth, soldiers wear … T-shirts that read ‘U.S. Marines strike if provoked’” (286).

³ Influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, David Abram’s iteration of “ecophenomenology” in Becoming Animal sometimes crosses Deleuze’s line of flight although his approach is “far too taken with lived experience—with the felt encounter between our sensate body and the animate earth”—for Deleuze’s abstract conceptualizations (10).

⁴ See the formative work in this field by Donna J. Haraway and S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich.

⁵ See the work of Stephanie Kaza and Priscilla Stuckey for similar accounts of encounters with trees.

⁶ In the recent epic fantasy comics series Monstress, addressing racism and feminism in a matriarchal alternate Asia riven by war, the monster within is a poluplokos being (Liu).

⁷ Bringing together such scholars as Latour, Stengers, Povinelli, and Viveiros de Castro, along with Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak who encouraged me to speak openly about messages from the trees.

⁸ Haraway relies on science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of narrative, in which we need medicine bundles more than pointy sticks for carrying our stories. Furthermore, “With a shell and a nut, becoming human, becoming humus, becoming terran, has another shape—i.e., the side-winding snaky shape of becoming with” (“Sowing Worlds” 139).

⁹ Like the offspring produced by the crossbreeding of the snaky, tentacled, Medusa-like Oankali aliens with the surviving humans in Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood series.