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Abstract
Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and understanding. This profusion of new evidence and edifying approaches demands that we rethink our ideas both of animality and of the nature and origins of culture.
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Notes
This work was supported by two grants from the Australian Academy of the Humanities: International Collaborative Workshop funding in the International Science Linkages – Humanities and Creative Arts Programme, and an Ernst Keller European Travelling Fellowship.
1 Other sources that frequent his writings include Tim Ingold's relational anthropology, Mary Midgley's combative moral philosophy, Raymond Ruyer's bacterial monism, and the phenomenological biology of a number of other thinkers. His contemporary colleagues and collaborators include Vinciane Despret, Chris Herzfeld and Thierry Bardini, and his teachers the artist Louis Bec and the enigmatic philosopher Jin Oshige.
2 The bilingual journal Social Science Information, with which he has had a close relationship as author, special issue editor and book reviews editor, has until now been the sole venue to translate a number of Lestel's essays.
3 Much of his early, often collaborative work was situated at the intersection of the anthropology of the laboratory and cognitive anthropology, performing an ethnography and field epistemology of cognition that situated complex practices and emergent processes, such as distributed systems of reasoning, within their multi-layered contexts (from forest to laboratory) and took in both human and animal cognitive subjects as well as disturbing machines. On artificial intelligence and artificial life, see “L'Anthropologie des laboratoires”; “Metaphors of Complexity”; Lestel, Bec, and Le Moigne. On the ethnography of experimental ant ethology, see “Fourmis cybernétiques et robots-insectes”; “Pensée-fourmi, raison pratique et cognition distribuée.” On cognitive anthropology and the ethnography of cognition, see Grison and Lestel; Despringre and Lestel. On the application of distributed artificial intelligence theory to evolutionary biology, see Lestel, Grison, and Drogoul.
4 I use the term “ethology” very broadly to refer to a set of scientific discourses and practices interested in questions of animal behaviour, cognition and expression – as Lestel defines it at one point, “the science of the behaviours of living beings” (Les Origines 20). But as will quickly become clear, ethology (and its concepts, “behaviour” foremost among them) is here very much a field in question, and Lestel's goal is precisely to transform the very nature and practice of ethology.
5 All translations are mine, other than those taken, with thanks, from chapters translated in this volume, or from Jeffrey Bussolini's translation of Les Amis de mes amis forthcoming as The Friends of My Friends from Columbia University Press. Occasionally, quotations from Lestel's essays already published in translation have been modified for expression.
6 Significant parallels appear between Lestel's work and Derrida's attention to the question of the animal in later texts. Yet while Lestel has recently drawn profitably from Derrida (“The Infinite Debt”), their approaches differ in a number of ways. Lestel enters deeply into the empirical domain of animal science to which Derrida only gestures from within the disciplinary remit of philosophy and literature. Moreover, Lestel seeks not only to deconstruct Cartesianism and human exceptionalism but also offers positive alternatives in an etho-ethnology and a philosophical anthropology thought and lived within animality. See Bessis 32; Balibar and Hoquet 815–17; Chrulew, “Animal Outside the Text.”
7 A critique of transhumanism runs throughout Lestel's work; for an amusing and playful example, see Bardini and Lestel.
8 See L'Animalité 27–37; Les Origines 22–27; Les Amis 11–35; L'Animal est l'avenir 23–36; “What Capabilities”; “Des animaux-machines”; “La Haine de l'animal.”
9 For an extensively researched history of the classical ethology of Lorenz and Tinbergen, see Burkhardt's magnum opus Patterns of Behavior.
10 Lestel's account of mediations of action has significant implications for the thinking of technicity, prostheticity and hominization triangulated between André Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. As Lestel puts it in Les Origines, “Exteriorization does not begin with stone tools, and prostheticity is not the consequence of the liberation of the hand” (302). For Lestel's reading of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, see “Neutraliser le mythe de Prométhée.”
11 The significance of animal culture and the importance of infant learning and apprenticeship in certain species is perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in attempts to rehabilitate traumatized and “acultured” captive primates by teaching them the skills and knowledge needed for forest survival (Grundmann et al.).
12 For example, the multiplicity and complexity of birdsong raises numerous questions about animal aesthetics. Assessments of animal artistic capacities can be “premature and flimsy” owing to the lack of empirical evidence (“Non-Human Artistic Practices” 506), but advances in biomusicology enable qualitative interpretations to be bolstered by the comparison of songs using objective musical notations, demonstrating learning over generations and across territories, responses to season and context, and unpredictable sequences, composition and improvisation (Taylor and Lestel). Many performances are demonstrably not only functional (that is, utilized towards territorial or sexual ends) but their own reward – birds sing for pleasure and produce an aesthetic feeling in themselves and others, not least ourselves. Numerous other aesthetic phenomena exhibit species and individual preferences for forms of symmetry, repetition and consistency, and sometimes display significant concentration and sense of achievement, from emotionally affecting whalesong to primate painting, thus undermining the human monopoly on art.
13 While suspicious of exaggerated claims to human uniqueness, and open to routinely denied animal abilities, this empiricism also means that Lestel does not romantically overestimate the latter, attending rather to the specific demonstrations and performances in evidence, whether it comes to apes' use of language as a tool (“How Chimpanzees Have Domesticated Humans” 14) or the limits of our knowledge of animals' relation to death (Les Amis 186–91).
14 For Lestel, while von Uexküll importantly places the question of meaning at the heart of the living, his animal worlds are too rigid, monadic, biological and ahistorical, and not open enough to interpenetration and change (Les Origines 324; “What Capabilities” 100).
15 This recuperation of phenomenological approaches to animals is indispensable. However, a danger lies in opposing machines to subjects and thus cleaving too closely to a repressive hypothesis of power. If animal sciences are social sciences, then they also need to be critiqued as such. For a discussion of the “ethopolitical” subjectification of animals, see Chrulew, “Preventing and Giving Death at the Zoo.”
16 On anthropomorphism, see also Paroles 165–67; L'Animal est l'avenir 87–91; “Non-Human Artistic Practices”; “Could Beethoven Have Been a Bird”; “Portrait de l'animal comme sujet” 161.
17 The spectres of social Darwinism and sociobiology might give rise to concerns about biologism, but Lestel points out that the renewal of ethology, the emergence of the cognitive sciences (which both enable and buffer the interface of biology and behaviour) and the growth of interest in human/animal relationships have all contributed to ameliorating such fears. The problem lies in applying purely naturalistic logic to animal societies and supposing animals to be reducible to their biology in the first place. Lestel conceives animality non-reductively as a mediated domain of action, freedom, excess and overflow. His radical continuism works not towards the swallowing up of the social sciences by biology predicted by E.O. Wilson but, conversely, towards the opening up of the social sciences to their legitimate domains within the animal world. See further Les Origines; Giribone and Lambert 125. On the question of human ethology, see “Les Enjeux de l’éthologie”; Heurgon et al.
18 Thus, ethology must equally be seen as a cognitive science of situated embodied rationality (“Ethology as a Social Science”), at the same time as it feeds into a cosmopolitical pluralism of intelligences, rationalities, cultures and subjectivities. Lestel also suggests that an etho-ethnological approach will be useful in the case of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (“Ethology, Ethnology, and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence”).
19 For Lestel, animals in human community, who are already (weak autonomous) subjects, can become individuals and even persons (L'Animal singulier; cf. “Éprouver la personne comme personnage”). In Lestel's narrativist (rather than substantialist) notion of personhood, these strong, heteronomous subjects emerge as the weft within the meshwork of interspecies community, through their particular and personal relationships, through processes of storytelling, interpretation and interaction. On the revelation of the intelligence, individuality and interiority of animal subjects through the cultural experience of the face (visage), see “Visages animaux.”
20 Lestel argues that animal biography emerged as a genre with new ways of describing and narrating the lives of both research subjects and companion animals, or more so the combination of the two. It recognizes that animals can have not only a phylogenetic (or species) history and a cultural (group) history but also their own coherent individual history, that familiarity allows one to describe meaningfully (L'Animal singulier 69–74ff.; cf. “Biosemiotics and Phylogenesis of Culture” 50).
21 On singular animals, see L'Animal singulier; Les Origines 151–52, 387–95; “L'Innovation cognitive”; Lestel and Grundmann 390–1; “L'Histoire des animaux singuliers”; “What Capabilities” 92–94.
22 Lestel's “maximalist” reading of the Turing Test plays an important part in his understanding of what it is to interpret others – whether people, animals or machines – as being intelligent or indeed alive. See “Metaphors of Complexity”; Lestel, Bec, and Le Moigne; “Human/Animal Communications” 206; Paroles 170–72.
23 On the ape language experiments, see Paroles; L'Animalité 56–61; Les Origines 395–98; L'Animal singulier 47–58; “Symbols of Discord”; “Les Singes parlent-ils vraiment?”; “How Chimpanzees Have Domesticated Humans”; “Sommes-nous assez intelligents”; “Human/Animal Communications.”
24 Lestel points out that amid unprecedented biological, cognitive and genetic technological developments leading to the artefactualization of animality, we are also witnessing the intriguing anthropological phenomenon of the animalization of artefacts: the development within cybernetics and robotics of adaptive, autonomous machines that can be taken for living beings and with whom we can develop affective relationships and dependencies. They bring with them new risks, such as the preference for artefacts over animals themselves, at the same time as the possibility for new relations and ways of living with technologies that might produce new conditions for the flourishing of animal and human life (“Des animaux-machines”; L'Animal singulier 97–111; Les Amis 192–218; “Emerging Hybrids”; “Data”; “Post-humain et perte de biodiversité”). This animalization of artefacts occurs alongside significant developments in art practice, including transgenic and bio-art that for Lestel, far from upsetting natural boundaries, continue the manipulation of the living that is intrinsic to life itself (“Artistic Manipulation of the Living”; “Liberating Life from Itself”; “Why Are We so Fond of Monsters?”).
25 This philosophy of the production of the real traces a heritage through Xenophon, Vico, William James, Jean Piaget, Ernest von Förster, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Jean-Louis Le Moigne and Ernst von Glaserfeld.
26 For Lestel's reflections on Paul Shepard, see Les Amis 118–26; Lestel and Taylor 184; “Like the Fingers”; “Infinite Debt.”
27 For Lestel's philosophical anthropology, see in particular L'Animalité 98–100; “L'Intelligence à crédit”; Les Origines 323; L'Animal singulier 113–34; Les Amis 42–44; Bessis 32–33; Balibar and Hoquet; Giribone and Lambert 125–26; “Language and the Constitution of Human Societies”; “Creativity within Animal Societies”; “Like the Fingers.”