V. From Over the Horizon: Animal Alterity and Liminal Intimacy beyond the Anthropomorphic Embrace

Intimacy and Distance 

In his influential essay Why Look at Animals?, first published in 1980, John Berger argues that, prior to what he calls ‘the rupture’ of modernity and industrialization, animals ‘were with man at the centre of this world’ (2009, 12), before articulating a striking narrative of the gradual disappearance and marginalisation of animals from human life, by which he means their ontological and existential disappearance. In outlining the multiple dimensions and technologies of this disappearance, Berger argues not just that animals have been made culturally and physically distant, or that they have been removed from our lives, in the way that Keith Thomas (1983) for example argues that animals were progressively removed from view in everyday life by the processes of urbanisation. On the contrary, for Berger animals are more centrally in view than ever before. In zoos, aquariums, safari parks and animal documentaries, for example, we often have a less obstructed view of animals than would be conceivable without the assemblage of numerous technologies, and yet the animal itself is irremediably out of focus; indeed the clearer our view of the animal the more invisible it becomes. The key to this paradox, for Berger, is that the existential significance of the animal has been almost entirely negated, because what he calls ‘the look of the animal’, meaning our relational awareness of the animal’s unique phenomenological and experiential world, comparable to our own yet different in ways that can never be entirely known, has been dissipated along with a sense of the animal’s autonomy and agency. The significance of the animal’s gaze has been marginalised in proportion to the extent that animals have become always the observed rather than the observers: 

In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever- extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are (Berger 2009, 27) 

If any development might appear to contradict this thesis then the obvious candidate would be the proliferation of domestic companion animals; how can animals be said to have ‘disappeared’, when increasing numbers of people live together more closely in non-instrumental relations with animals than ever before? But Berger dismisses pets as ‘creatures of their owner’s way of life’, which cannot offer the ‘parallelism of their separate lives’ that was central to the existential relationship with animals prior to ‘the rupture’. This is because ‘in this relationship the autonomy of both parties has been lost’ (2009, 25); the owner has become psychologically dependent upon the animal for certain aspects of his or her self-identity, Berger suggests, while the animal has become almost entirely physically dependent upon the owner. 

There are many aspects of Berger’s argument that are problematic. His sweeping view of human relations with companion animals, for example, is difficult to sustain in light of numerous studies grounded in ethnographic research which have suggested that ‘pet-keeping’ encompasses diverse forms of human-animal relations, by no means all of which resemble Berger’s model (Fox 2006; Charles and Davies 2008; Podberscek, Paul and Serpell 2000). It also implies too sharp a conceptual distinction between the wild and the domesticated in a way that ultimately rests upon a humanist conception of human beings as separate from nature. I do not want to endorse or defend these aspects of Berger’s essay, nor many of its historical and empirical claims. But underlying his account there is nevertheless a nuanced sense of how proximity may paradoxically abolish a kind of intimacy that is predicated upon distance and alterity, which I think is worth retaining. It is valuable because in making the case for distance, difference, and what Berger calls ‘the parallelism of separate lives’ (2009, 15, 25) it pulls against the tendency to rather uncritically equate anthropomorphism with human-animal intimacy, and anthropocentrism, conversely, with distance. Indeed, it would be unsurprising according to this latter way of thinking if Berger were to disdain anthropomorphism as a consequence of his dismissive attitude toward pet- keeping relations, but this is not his position; on the contrary, Berger regards anthropomorphism as a residue of a relationship between humanity and animals that has been lost: 

Until the nineteenth century, anthropomorphism was integral to the relation between man and animal and was [...] the residue of the continuous use of animal metaphor. In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy (2009, 21). 

So the familiar conceptual schema is not operating here; rather than physical and social proximity and the sharing of time, space, and lived activity being equated with intimacy, the closeness which these factors would seem to facilitate is negated by the wider asymmetrical relationship in which the human being effectively controls the animal’s conditions of existence. This control, and the erasure of the animal’s autonomy and agency it involves, is held to destroy the possibility of an authentic encounter with animal alterity as such, and thus to hollow out the intimacy that might otherwise accompany the proximity of shared lives. 

In its apparent reliance upon some underpinning notion of animal ‘freedom’ as absence of human control, this might be read as a romantic critique of animal domestication, and again perhaps as broadly consistent with some variants of a liberationist approach to human-animal relations, wherein ‘the wild’ becomes translated into ‘the free’. But Berger is quite clear that the ‘rupture’ he refers to, and which initiated the epochal marginalisation and disappearance of animals, took place in the modern era – he refers in particular to the transformations of the nineteenth century – and not with the Neolithic revolution or the historic domestication of animals (2009, 21-23). Indeed, if there is a hero at all in Berger’s narrative, it is not the hunter-gatherer of human past or present, who eschews the domination and control of animals through domestication, but the peasant, who lives closely with domesticated animals. For Berger the relationships between peasants and their animals combine proximity and distance, or presence and absence, in a way that is very difficult for the modern urban sensibility to comprehend, because we have come to utterly counterpose these concepts and to separate out the ways of seeing they are bound up with; thus: 

Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. [...] This – maybe the first existential dualism – was reflected in the treatment of animals. They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed. Today the vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and so difficult for a stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and, and not by a but (2009, 15). 

Many contemporary students of animal ethics would have no compunction in calling this an unsustainable contradiction. It may well be, but interestingly Berger sees this contradiction as a kind of ‘wisdom’, the basis of which he believes ‘is an acceptance of the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal’ (2009, 36). A note of caution here, since ‘dualism’ has during the last quarter of a century become almost wholly negative in its connotations, as one theoretical paradigm after another has sought to overcome this or that dualism. As Berger uses it here, however, it does not signify the unwarranted separation into two discrete domains of something that should properly be grasped more holistically or monistically, but rather the holding together of two logically contradictory ways of thinking about something, rooted in an intuitive recognition that the complexity and multiplicity of the thing exceeds linear logical reasoning. Rather than a failure of critical thinking then, dualism as used here – and a better term perhaps would be liminality – denotes a certain kind of subtle sensibility which, rather than faithfully following through the logic of either one or the other side of the duality, thereby negating the other, is instead content to live with their co-existence in dynamic tension. Thus, animals are both like and unlike, present yet always partially absent, familiar yet unknowable, near to us yet far away; this duality is intrinsic to the sensibility of being-with-otherness that I call liminal intimacy. 

 

Autonomy and Alterity 

Although Berger focuses on peasants as ‘the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom which accompanies that familiarity’ (2009, 36), his argument is haunted by hunter- gatherers, and has some interesting parallels in Tim Ingold’s (1994) ‘indigenous’ account of the shift in human-animal relations bound up with the transition from nomadic hunter-gather subsistence to settled pastoralism, which he posits as fundamentally a shift from relations of trust to relations of domination. At the heart of this is the question of animal autonomy or agency, or more accurately, the human perception of the animal’s power or lack thereof to make a difference to them in ways that matter. According to Ingold many hunter-gatherer cosmologies involve a belief that an animal is not simply discovered by the hunter during a hunt but chooses to present itself to him as part of an ongoing reciprocal relationship between that species and the hunter (9-10, 14-15). If the animal is treated disrespectfully, subjected to cruelty or avoidable pain, or if its meat is either wasted or not shared equitably among the community, then the animal has the power to withhold itself from the hunter in future, so that he may go hungry. Hence despite a successful hunt culminating in the killing of an animal, when understood in terms of the hunters’ own cosmology this is not a relationship of domination, but one of trust, since the animal retains agency in the relationship: 

The hunter hopes that by being good to animals, they in turn will be good to him. But by the same token, the animals have the power to withhold if any attempt is made to coerce what they are not, of their own volition, prepared to provide. For coercion, the attempt to extract by force, represents a betrayal of the trust that underwrites the willingness to give. Animals thus maltreated will desert the hunter, or even cause him ill fortune. This is the reason why [...] the encounter between hunter and prey is conceived as basically non-violent. It is also the reason why hunters aim to take only what is revealed to them and do not press for more (Ingold 1994, 14-15). 

For farmers, in contrast, however affectionately the animals may be treated and cared for, they are essentially subject to the farmer’s control. There is no belief that the animal has the power to withhold what the farmer requires of them, hence there is no reciprocity in the relationship, rendering trust redundant (16-17). 

It should hardly need to be said that we do not have to endorse the specific characterisations of hunter-gatherers, farmers, peasants or pet-keepers posited by either Berger or Ingold, in order to recognise that at the heart of these accounts is a perceptive argument about the pivotal importance of conceptions of animal autonomy in human-animal relations. For Ingold the erasure of animal agency involved in domestication constitutes the negation of trust and the imposition of domination, as reciprocity is replaced by dependence and control (1994, 16). While for Berger the progressive marginalisation of animals which occurs through industrialisation and the proliferation of the Cartesian machine-view of animals destroys the notion of animals as autonomous beings with parallel lives that enabled animals to offer a unique ‘companionship to the loneliness of man as a species’ (2009, 15). 

What risks negation in the transformations outlined in these accounts is not just agency and autonomy, I want to argue, but also alterity. Ingold’s farmers do not need to trust the animal because by virtue of their domination of the animal they presume knowledge of every relevant facet of the animal’s existence. Similarly, with Berger’s pet-keepers, the owners assume that there is no relevant dimension of the animal’s life and experience that is not transparent to them, rendering the human-pet relationship not a companionship in the existential sense but a relationship of co-dependence. In both cases the erasure of alterity is intricately bound up with the imposition of relations of control, domination or dependency; but I would argue that, rather than merely their corollary, this erasure is an actively constitutive element of these relations. In other words, the negation of otherness is a performative way of seeing which contributes to the enactment of a certain kind of human-animal relationship. Thus, while it may be more or less prevalent in different kinds of structural human-animal relations, the erasure of alterity is potentially present in a range of interspecies relationships and practices. From this point of view, the well-intentioned anthropomorphic impulse to bring animals near risks an unwitting enactment of the modernist tendency to treat the world as ‘raw material for humanization’ (Haraway 1991, 198). 

Liminal intimacy in contrast is predicated upon the maintenance of a tension between knowing and unknowing, familiarity and strangeness, in which intimacy consists in respecting, living with and even cultivating distance and alterity, rather than seeking a closeness that would obliterate these; it implicitly recognises the fragility of authentic encounters with the other, and the colonising tendencies intrinsic to proximate intimacy. An example of this is the practice of indigenous Sámi reindeer pastoralism discussed in Hugo Reinert’s (2014) ethnography in the Norwegian Arctic. Reinert explains that ‘as a result of their mobile and largely free-ranging life, reindeer occupy an ambiguous position [...] appearing neither fully domesticated nor fully wild, the animals slip between descriptive and normative categories’ (2014, 50). While this is perceived by non-herders as a problematic lack of control which leads to the reindeer ‘consuming crops, breaking fences, disturbing livestock, disrupting gardens, invading urban space, colliding with cars or buses, and so on’ (50), for the herders themselves ‘the apparent lack of control also represents more than an absence; it involves active effort and the extension into new conditions of a positive ethical commitment on the part of herders to the reindeer they herd’ (50-51). 

Reinert understands this in terms of the way in which pastoral Sámi animal ethics incorporates ‘situationally specific rules that take into account both the mobile, liminal quality of the animals themselves, and the varying degrees of control humans can (and should) exercise over them’ (51). This in turn is part of ‘a framing overall responsibility, to protect the autonomy and independence of the reindeer; that is, to preserve their ability to exit the coordinates of human control. 

[...] Behavior that damages this ability [...] is understood, to some degree, as a violation of the unspoken pact between humans and reindeer’ (51). One manifestation of this is that herders are reluctant to provide animals with artificial feed, even in very harsh winters and when food is scarce, for fear of making the reindeer too dependent on humans over time and slowly depriving them of their autonomy; this would be ‘a sort of disrespect, or violation, which risked transforming the reindeer into something they were not, jeopardising their integrity and independence’ (52). Reinert grasps this as an ethics of ‘cultivated distance’, which ‘patrolled and delimited the presence and influence of the humans, in deference to the maintenance of a partial entanglement: an entanglement whose partiality, vitally, must be preserved’, and in which ‘distance was managed and cultured, as an element of moral obligation toward certain nonhuman others’ (52). 

A somewhat different articulation of a kind of non-proximate or liminal intimacy is found in Priska Gisler and Mike Michael’s (2011) discussion of the history of the horseshoe crab, or Limulus Polyphemus. With reference to Donna Haraway’s (2003; 2008) concept of ‘companion species’ as a way to think about relational processes of hybrid emergence, or ‘becoming-with’ animals through mutually constitutive ‘intra-actions’ (Barad 2007), Gisler and Michael point out that the iconic companion species in Haraway is canine, and suggest that the horseshoe crab ‘is not, for most people, a good candidate for the status of companion species’ because ‘the seeming distance between human being and horseshoe crab – evolutionary, historical and social – suggests associations that are thin, alien, and highly distanciated, as opposed to the thick, “intimate”, short (though always complex and surprising) associations that characterise the relations between human and dog’ (2011, 131). They therefore argue that the concept of companion species needs some reworking and extension in order to be fully applicable to limulus. 

In particular, for Gisler and Michael ‘companion species’ implies a kind of active reciprocity which is difficult to identify in the relations between people and horseshoe crabs; instead with limulus there is what they refer to as a ‘more elongated’ and extensively mediated companionship, or ‘a distanciated co- presence’ (2011, 132). Moreover, for Haraway the temporal and affective dimensions of interactions between companion species are marked by ‘surprise’, the unexpected that arises in interaction, rendering it unpredictable and eventful in ways that are both ‘dangerous’ and ‘delightful’; indeed this possibility of ‘surprise’ is a consistent feature of ethnographic accounts of human-canine play, and is often identified as central to what makes such activity meaningful as intersubjective interaction (Shapiro 1990; Sanders 1993; Bekoff and Byers 1998). In human relations with the horseshoe crab however, ‘the intensity, speed, and reciprocity of interaction necessary for such surprise is somewhat less in evidence’ (Gisler and Michael 2011, 133). Gisler and Michael suggest that this therefore requires a modified notion of reciprocity, alongside an attentiveness to a different modality of affectivity, which ‘lies not within the sentimental anthropomorphising of animals but in a deeper understanding of the interactions between human and nonhuman’ (ibid.). They propose that central to this deeper understanding is what one might tentatively call ‘wonder’, encompassing ‘a sense of the sublime, of bemusement, of coincidence, of “ungraspability”, of ambiguity, of irony’ (ibid.). Crucially, in the relations of ‘distanciated co-presence’ or ‘companionship at a distance’ that enframe this sense of ‘wonder’, the irreducible otherness of the nonhuman is not colonised by an intimacy of proximity but maintained, respected, and infused with a sense of awe. 

A final example of human-animal relations that might be thought of as involving a form of liminal intimacy can be found in honeybee apiculture or beekeeping. As I have argued elsewhere (Nimmo 2015, 186-189), though an account of beekeeping as simple animal exploitation is of course possible, it involves glossing over many of the specificities of beekeeping practices and of honeybees as a form of life, for the sake of critical consistency. Examined for their own sake, bees in managed hives do not fit easily into the categories of either ‘wild’ or ‘domesticated’, and there is a long cultural history of representations of beekeeping not as a kind of farming but as a more hybrid and mutual endeavor involving a form of interspecies exchange – or in Haraway’s (1992, 86, 90) terms a ‘conversation’ – that is mediated through the space of the managed beehive. As Claire Preston (2006, 34) points out, bees ‘consent to inhabit artificial hives which have been devised for them, but their relationship to man is better conceived as symbiotic, with each species benefitting from certain behaviours and capabilities of the other’. Though bees have sometimes been understood as a kind of ‘livestock’, as ‘fuzzy herbivores with wings’ (Buchmann & Nabhan 1997), this is belied by a closer look at the beehive itself, which notably is not the equivalent of a factory farm or a fenced-in field, but is better grasped as a human-nonhuman assemblage that mediates a negotiated intra-action between species (Nimmo 2015, 189). 

Notably beekeepers typically describe their activities in terms that are distinct from those of either farmers or pet-keepers, and in which the language of control is characteristically absent. We may be sceptical of this, but if we want to maintain that the inter-corporeal understandings and everyday knowledges of pet-keepers and others who live and work closely with animals should not be dismissed in the name of scepticism, ‘objectivity’ and detachment, then we should surely practice the same forbearance with respect to beekeepers and not be too quick to dismiss their lived ontologies out of hand and to assert a superior understanding on the part of the critical theorist. With this in mind, it is significant that the complexity of honeybee colonies and their highly sensitive interrelationship with the local environment means that there are always more contingencies at work in determining the fate of the colony than the beekeeper could hope to master. Thus beekeepers routinely make exhaustive preparations and take all possible precautions, hoping that this will be enough to see their bees thrive, produce abundant honey, and survive the winter, but there is no guarantee of this; bees cannot be compelled to produce honey, and even the most seasoned beekeepers will have encountered disappointment and failure, sometimes inexplicably (Nimmo 2015, 186-192). Consequently beekeepers tend to be acutely and respectfully aware that in their interactions with bees they are engaging with a dynamic and living alterity that is always partly unknowable. Or as one beekeeper eloquently puts it, ‘the bees know what they are doing: our job is to listen to them’, which means ‘never thinking of them as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly-evolved, wild creatures, with whom we are privileged to work’ (Chandler 2009, 34). 

 

References

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Chandler, Philip. 2009. The Barefoot Beekeeper, www.biobees.com, printed by www.lulu.com. ISBN: 1409271145.

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Originally published in Otherness: Essays and Studies, 5.2, 2016