A couple of lines of inquiry. First, is "listening" at bottom a too comfortable metaphor for conceptualizing how elephants perceive seismic vibrations, how they live with vibration? In any case let's ask ourselves what listening could possibly be. Second, elephants can apparently recognize each others' "voices." (This too, this thing we call "voice," among the metaphorical—even as we learn that voice may be something that develops "in" nature, as if nature had no concourse with imagination.) "I know you." "I recognize your vibration." "I hear your voice." And already I have gone too far. Does an elephant say "I"?
On May 29, 1789, professors of the Conservatoire de Musique gave a concert for a pair of Asian elephants, Hanz and Marguerite. The concert was part of a scientific experiment intended to determine whether music stirred the passions of listeners in a natural state.
The experiment was a success. The swift and direct effect of music upon sensitive listeners uncorrupted by the monarchy was confirmed. A rough correlation between particular types of music and specific response could now be made. Most important, the passionate impact of military music, just as the Greeks had chronicled, now seemed indubitable. The central lesson of the experiment was just what Ginguené had said earlier in the decade: music acts most strongly when listeners respond most naturally. The report offered a lofty conclusion: "Such is the empire of music over all beings endowed with life and with sensitivity, that men may make use of it. . .to civilize themselves and regulate their morals."
(James H. Johsnon, Listening in Paris, p. 131)
Johnson touches on without answering the questions "What is music?" and "What is listening?" The latter question suggests how Johnson would go about answering the former. The question "How is collective experience possible?" also arises from his work. These are all good questions. Johnson's work has forced me to acknowledge my own prejudices regarding music, to realize that my thoughts about music are culturally, historically shaped. My prejudices about music are also personally shaped to such an extent that I notice that nobody really shares exactly my views of what music is or what it means.
I spent some time this morning listening to Dr. Chandrakant Sardeshmukh's cd, Celebration. "Happiness Forever: Raga Hemant" is in 16, so it was good to work out to–I do all my exercizes in reps of 16; 32 of these, 48 of those, 64 of the other, 96, 128, 192....–though perhaps not as good for working out as the Ohio Players. My counting was a bit of a distraction. Is this an unnatural way to listen to "Happiness Forever"? Well, is there a natural way to listen to "Happiness Forever"? It was a live recording but the audience was silent until the very end when they all burst into applause. That was nice, I thought. Would I want to call that unnatural? Dr. Sardeshmukh links to the following video clip on Youtube, make of it what you will:
I'll add a thought. Is it the case that there's one activity called "listening" that people pursue in various ways, with varying intensity, with varying degrees of attentiveness; or is "listening" in fact a label for diverse activities that would be given different names were our common language more precise. If one follows the latter path, what must one say about music? Oh, and since I'm at it, what does the phrase "aesthetic imperialism" suggest to you?
Hoffmeyer again suggests that the unity of the person, the feeling of being a whole person, is illusory (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 86). To put it crudely, Hoffmeyer says this because our brains and our immunological networks, which he regards as being part of a single system and the source of biological personhood, are composed of trillions of cells, each of which may be regarded as an "independent, interpretive entity" (p. 80).
Hoffmeyer, following Frederik Stjernfelt, intends his semiotics to strike a balance between two errors: (1) denying that human signs originated in the natural world and thus denying that anything in nature could resemble human signs, and (2) denying "the uniqueness of human existence, the error inherent in considering all the world as a kind of human being" (p. 78). If we say that the feeling of being a whole person is illusory, are we putting at risk our understanding of the uniqueness of human existence? Is Hoffmeyer's "semiotic freedom" also the freedom to be wrong about who we really are? I'm not sure about this.
"The cell's 'intelligence,'" Hoffmeyer writes, "comes solely from habits formed over the course of its billion-year-long history" (p. 80). Can a non-intelligent entity form habits? Is the faculty of assuefaction, so keenly a characteristic of hominid existence, contingent upon the achievement of a certain level of semiotic freedom? What would that level be? If we follow Hoffmeyer in regarding semiotic freedom as a cosmobiological fact, on what basis do we approach human uniqueness? Ontology?
We might put this question to Paul Bains (The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontology of Relations). He points to Maturana and Varela's idea of linguallaxis (a linguistic trophollaxis) as the form of ontogenic "structural coupling" specific to Homo sapiens (p. 102).
The essential feature to be grasped in Maturana and Varela's approach is that although language requires the neurophysiology of the participants, it is not a neurophysiological phenomenon. Language takes place in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions, not in the bodily materiality of the participants. Maturana emphasizes that physiology (i.e., the internal dynamics of the organism) and behaviour (i.e., interactions with the milieu of other organisms) occupy different phenomenal domains. Nevertheless, the flow of actions will trigger structural changes in the bodyhoods of the participants, and vice versa. In other words, changes in our bodyhoods result in changes in our interactions, and changes in our interactions result in changes in our bodyhoods. Conversations affect bodies, and bodies affect conversations.
Thus Maturana argues that phenomena like language, mind, and ego, and psychic and spiritual phenomena in general, depend on the operation of our bodyhoods but do not take place 'in' them. They are, rather, distinctions that an observer makes of the different networks of conversations–that is, recursive behavioural and physiological couplings in which he or she lives–most importantly, the language networks he or she is born into and has to take place within.
These different networks of conversations, in which our bodies are nodes of operational intersection and words are 'nodes in coordinations of actions in languaging,' imply what Maturana calls 'multiplicity of domains of existence.' The 'identity' of a human animal is constituted as it is realized in his or her participation in a particular network of conversations. Thus each human being exists as a configuration of many different temporary 'identities,' which intersect in their realization in his or bodyhood. The notion of multiplicity as used by Deleuze and Guattari is more appropriate than the notion of identity, which suggests a continuity of sameness as a first principle from which deviations and changes have to be accounted for. The concept of identity is developed in a language game. This resonates well with Maturana's multiplicity of domains of existence.
(pp. 111-112)
It is tempting to imagine that the capacity to act as the observer of oneself is connected to a capacity for language. However, an elephant may be capable of self-awareness though it has no place in a network of conversations, unless we are willing to stretch our understanding of language to the point where we need yet another concept to specify human structural couplings.
Perhaps we need something besides the history of positional relations to account for human ontogeny. I would nominate the faculty of assuefaction as a key to human uniqueness, but it appears we may have here two strikes against such a notion: (1) Hoffmeyer wants us to consider cellular life as also being a matter of forming habits, and (2) Bains, following Maturana, would have us recognize two separate domains of action and of the body, leading us to conclude that the process of incorporation cannot be the result of anything like a faculty but instead represents a history of relations.
I've been on a little vacation and haven't been reading much of the philosophy books I've set out to read this spring. I have, though, just reread The Lord of the Rings and thought I'd comment on something that didn't quite make it into Peter Jackson's cinematic adaptation: sympathy for the oliphaunts (or mûmakil) felt by Samwise Gamgee. "And when he learned that at the siege of Gondor there had been a great number of these beasts and they were all destroyed, he thought it a sad loss" (p. 936). Understandably the movie adaptation, even the eleven-hour plus extended edition, had to pare down the book in order to bring it to the screen; however, sympathy for the oliphaunts should have been included in the movie. It should have colored how Jackson portrayed the oliphaunts from beginning to end. It didn't. On the commentary to the extended edition dvd, screenwriter Fran Walsh raises the problem of audience sympathies leaning toward the oliphaunts and going against the Rohirrim, the riders of Rohan. Some more graphic scenes of violence aimed at the oliphaunts were cut from the film for this reason. Jackson offers the opinion that a common sensibility of pity for abused circus elephants explains why audiences react negatively to such scenes of violence. He and the digital effects team made some effort to make the oliphaunts seem less like elephants and more like monsters. That doesn't really solve the problem of audience sympathies–which is in essence the problem of compassion and one of the key themes of The Lord of the Rings. The journey toward compassion, most strongly portrayed through the character of Frodo, suffers in Jackson's adaptation. Jackson's Frodo is initially less aggressive and finally more agresssive and less compassionate that Tolkien's Frodo. Generally, Jackson strays too far from his source material in his portrayal of monsters, relying on graphic horror rather than dread, suspense, or compassion. Tolkien's oliphaunts warrant compassion, even as they are led into battle in the service of evil. They are in many ways not unlike men, who may be misled, yet who may also be redeemed.
Here is a problem that is not unrelated to Henry's phenomenology of the lived body. Derrida notes (in "L'animal que donc je suis") an abyss between the relation to self charateristic of all animals and the I of "I think." As Bains sees it, the concept of ipseity that Derrida deploys here cannot do justice to his insight(The Primacy of Semiosis: An Ontlogy of Relations, pp. 140-141). Instead, Bains argues, what is needed is a concept of cadacualtez, a neologism invented by the school of Argentinian existential neurobiologists. Literally "each-oneness," cadacualtez stands for the fact of being thrown to experience one's own corporeal and historical circumstance instead of another. Interestingly, this concept is meant to apply not just to human existence, but to any lifeform with a nervous system.
What I take from this is an argument against any kind of impersonal philosophizing of experience. When we think, for example, of an elephant's relation to self, it is vital to recognize that the elephant is cadacualtic, that it is not interchangable with other animals or even other elephants. This obviously limits the way we make generalizations about the living world. It also places our empiricism on firmer, if more radical, ground.
Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition (MSR) has long seemed limited to humans and apes. In both phylogeny and human ontogeny, MSR is thought to correlate with higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior. Apart from humans and apes, dolphins and elephants are also known for such capacities. After the recent discovery of MSR in dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), elephants thus were the next logical candidate species. We exposed three Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to a large mirror to investigate their responses. Animals that possess MSR typically progress through four stages of behavior when facing a mirror: (i) social responses, (ii) physical inspection (e.g., looking behind the mirror), (iii) repetitive mirror-testing behavior, and (iv) realization of seeing themselves. Visible marks and invisible sham-marks were applied to the elephants' heads to test whether they would pass the litmus "mark test" for MSR in which an individual spontaneously uses a mirror to touch an otherwise imperceptible mark on its own body. Here, we report a successful MSR elephant study and report striking parallels in the progression of responses to mirrors among apes, dolphins, and elephants. These parallels suggest convergent cognitive evolution most likely related to complex sociality and cooperation.