Attributes of Animalist Thinking

Graham Pechey, “Intercultural, Intercreatural: Bakhtin and the Uniqueness of ‘Literary Seeing’,” in Bakhtin & His Intellectual Ambience, Edited by Bogusław Żyłko (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańkiego, 2002), p. 278. On related topics see Graham Pechey, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).

Pechey, “Intercultural, Intercreatural….,” p. 283.

Pechey, “Intercultural, Intercreatural….,” p. 283.

“Fresh views of structure”: physicist David Bohm; “Creativity as a language”: eco-artist Olafur Eliasson; both cited in chapter “Perception, Cognition, Writing”.

Whitehead may offer a reason for treating creativity not as a separate sustained topic, but many times as a recurring (but essentially non-developing) theme: “It is that ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality. It cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–1928, Corrected Edition, Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 31. As note to a note, for the sake of completeness: later recourse to OED online shows subsequent editions of the OED rather poorly define “creativity” as “the faculty of being creative,” but now give example-usages from 1659, 1875, and two from Whitehead himself from his earlier book, Religion in the Making (1926).

Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead, Translated by Michael Chase, With a Foreword by Bruno Latour (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011); Nicholas Gaskill and A. J. Nocek, The Lure of Whitehead (Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2014).

“The Problem of the Text,” Speech Genres, 118–120. Russian phrases from the same passage come from Mikhail Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The Aesthetics of Verbal Creation] (Moscow: Iskusstva, 1979), pp. 298–299.

The Savage Mind, quoted by John Berger in “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 2. What kind of knowledge was taken on by the human husband in Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife?

The term “cognitive mapping” is Fredric Jameson’s where the meaning takes us to historical and class placement of the speaking subject; here, without losing those perspectives, I would add to those what Berger adds, “texts from nature” and from animal inside (which is what Berger means by “predecessors since the Stone Age”).

However, this book and Varela’s other writings led social scientist Niklas Luhmann to theorize social systems in a new way. See Luhmann in Social Systems (1984; English translation 1995), and extensive commentary on this very topic in Luhmann by Cary Wolfe in Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the ‘Outside’ (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Is this also true for nonhuman animals? Do they find language indispensable for reflection as well? For them, we call language “communication,” in order to keep to ourselves the idea of language. Phrasing things as they do here, Maturana and Varela cannot encounter this range of questions.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2nd edition, 1984). See, on Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body as a principle of resistance to digital culture, Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez, “Dialogical Thinking in the Digital Era: Paradoxes of Cyberculture,” Dialogism: An International Journal of Bakhtin Studies 3 (1999), pp. 104–131 (Sheffield Academic Press).

Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (Paris: Lagrasse, Verdier, 1982). Tadeusz Sławek and I have described Henry Meschonnic in a different context: Literary Voice: The Calling of Jonah (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995). In that book, Tadeusz Sławek wrote the section on Meschonnic. There are pages on Meschonnic and rhythm in my book, Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry (Bucknell University Press, 1995).

Henri Meschonnic, Les états de la poétique (Paris: PUF, 1985), p. 276; my translation. Other works by Meschonnic to be quoted here in my translation are: La rime et la vie (Paris: Verdier, 1989); Politique du rythme, politique du sujet (Paris: Verdier, 1995); Poétique du traduire (Paris: Verdier), and a book written with Gérard Dessons, Traité du rythme: Des vers et des proses (Paris: Dunod, 1998).

Russians who have well theorized the term, inner speech, are: Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (1934; English translation, 1986); Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984); A. N. Sokolov, Inner Speech and Thought, Translated by George T. Onischenko (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1972).

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” see pp. 311, 362.

“Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” pp. 96–97.

Stefania Sini, “Intonation, Tone, and Accent in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Thought,” in Bakhtin and the Future of Signs, an issue of Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry, 18, No. 1–2 (Montreal, 1998), p. 55.

Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vol. I: The Positive Affects (1962, Reprinted 1992); Vol. II, The Negative Affects (1963, Reprinted 1992), Vol. III: The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear (1991); Vol. IV: Cognition and Information Processing (1992) (New York: Springer, 1992). Silvan S. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, With a Biographical Sketch by Irving E. Alexander (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).

For non-technical presentation of topics, I rely on the interviews in Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2015. For detailed exploration of these and related topics, see these books by Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); What Animals Teach Us About Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

In Shame and Its Sisters, Edited by Sedgwick and Frank (pp. 10–11) consider the concept “density of neural firing” reductive: they think Tomkins “persists in treating the brain as a homogeneous mass.” (11) But if the neurology is, for them, crude, the affect-side “is qualitatively highly differentiated.” They find exactly the right clarification from Tomkins himself, when he says: “The general advantage of affective arousal to such a broad spectrum of levels and changes of levels of neural firing is to make the individual care about quite different states of affairs in quite different ways.” [Tomkins’s italics, quoted on p. 10.] The editors add that the quite different states of affairs are never to be considered as purely external—never a “direct translation of some external event” like a loud sound (10–11). The stimulus, they affirm, “already itself reflects the complex interleaving of endogamous and exogenous, perceptual, proprioceptive, and interpretive—causes, effects, feedbacks, motives, long-term states such as moods and theories, along with distinct transitory physical or verbal effects.” (11)

The American Psychological Association circulated an inverted tree-diagram with 135 emotion-names at the bottom, moving up trunks and branches to seven at the top; Silvan Tomkins works with his chosen seven emotion-names and the names of their diametrical opposites, so all the pages in his four massive volumes are devoted to explorations of fourteen affects—divided into those that are positive, those that are negative.

Annie Dillard, “The Weasel,” in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, Foreword by Geoff Dyer (New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2016), pp. 33–38.