In Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (U Chicago Press, 2024), music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves.
Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.
Gavin Steingo is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is also affiliated with the programs in Media and Modernity, African Studies, and Jazz Studies. Steingo’s research examines sound and music as fundamental features in the construction of global modernity, with research specializations in African music, sound studies, acoustic ecology, and music and philosophy. Methodologically, his work is united by a mode of inquiry where theory, history, and ethnography form part of a shared constellation.
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Let's run there at to Brooks running dot com to learn more My dad works in B2B marketing He came by my school for career day and said he was a big row as man Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend my friends still laughing me to this day Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results terms and conditions apply linkedin the place to be to be Welcome to the new books network Hello everyone welcome to a new episode of the new books network podcast. My name is Katija Manta and I'll be your host for the day Today, we are going to talk about humans animals and aliens. Yes, you heard me right I'm here to interview professor Gavin Steingo about his 2024 monographs in this species communication sound and music beyond humanity The book examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human Dramatically challenged from singing wheels to Sandra to searching for alien life Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about and indeed to reach beings that are very unlike ourselves Without further delete, let me welcome professor Gavin Steingo on board. Thank you Gavin for joining me today and Congratulations on the new monograph. I really enjoyed reading about animals aliens and of course humans How would you like to introduce in the species communication to our listeners and how difficult was it to navigate the worlds of human and non-human communication? Thank you for the for the general question together get the ball rolling Kadija So yeah, I would say most simply most basically Really what I wanted to do was put the question of interspecies communication on the table In a succinct and also rigorous fashion So I had found that in a way a lot of people are thinking about interspecies communication But also no one was really putting a fine point to that people were talking about In different ways a rock circling around the question as it were but I was not aware of any very direct engagement with this question So if nothing else what I wanted the book to do was really play this this topic on the table Very squarely very directly and see what came out So as readers will see when they when they look at the book one of the things I think readers will notice is that it really does move the book moves in different directions historical geographic. They're really cool and otherwise So it's not approaching the book from one dogmatic position But really trying to think through the question of what would it mean to even have communication with other species? and At the heart of this book is a little is a tension Which is which I would articulate as follows on the one hand We know that we communicate with non-humans all the time We know that we have relations interactions with domestic animals Livestock, etc. We we this is something that's obvious to all people, but we also There's also a tendency to go beyond what we know and to constantly come up with speculations with Theories with and so there's all of these other things beyond the everyday the pragmatic interactions we have with non-humans And those things that is actually in a way the focus of the book or what I call the excesses excesses or supplements That you merge from our attempts to communicate with non-humans And I focus on those some of them end up being quite metaphysical some of them end up being quite mysterious or elliptical And so I look at the way that historically attempts to communicate with non-humans have resulted in Everything from the humorous to the bizarre to the poignant. So, okay, hopefully that's okay to To begin the conversation. Thank you. Thank you for that excellent response Before we go deeper into non-human communication I would like to revisit a key point from your co-edited project Re-mapping sound studies the project emphasizes the significance of listening to overcome the biases of sound studies Especially when studying spaces in the global south in this monograph you explore the life worlds of non-humans through music and sounds Whether they are animals or extraterrestrial objects. What are the ways of listening you have employed in this project? Is this listening process capable of addressing the anthropomorphism inherent in such projects? This was a great question which forced me to think about several of the projects I've done together on which Yeah, so I appreciated the question a lot before anything else. I would emphasize that Although listening is a central concern in all my research. I am very much against anything that looks like a kind of naive nativism there is a There is a kind of sphere or the main of intellectual inquiry that thinks about questions of the environment, ecology, Anthropocene, which I find problematic in its naive nativist commitments This can be anything from Thoreauian Adventures to even some of the more sophisticated post-cagian attempts So about why this what I mean is people walking around listening to nature quote-unquote and thinking that by opening their gears or by listening in a more attentive fashion that humans have the capacity in that way to simply share the radical other to share the animal or The alien or whatever it is And I think that one of the things this book does which could be disappointing to some readers is that it's very much against this idea That if we just listen harder or better or if we just listen more than something else We are put into direct relationality or direct association with non-humans I do not believe this to be the case at all, and there's a kind of stubborn stubbornness in the book against those kinds of celebrations So that so then that raises the question. So where is this leave listening? Well, I think what the book ultimately argued for is a listening that is anything but naive Listening that fully takes it to consideration. It's historicity It's mediation. We're gonna talk about mediation later I know but it's various layers of mediation technological environments on otherwise. So listening can only ever be having mediated heavily saturated by history by by the violences of history And how subjectivity sort of comes to be constituted through that so I am indeed Committed to thinking about listening and to listening as a pedagogical social and political practice But I do want to distance myself very carefully from any of the various Contemporary and historical authors for we were wondering around the lake or some, you know, big colleague environment and just listening for whom that would be a terrain of intellectual inquiry or Philosophical and political practice I think that that's not at all what's at stake for me and rather it's paying close attention to the entanglements layers of mediation, etc Thank you for bringing the intricacies of the listening process involved and moving to our next question Instead of debating whether humans should speak with non-humans You discuss a symptomatic communication process founded on humanity in this process There is a balance between the semantic and the scientific the ethical and the political and even something like love To what extent is it possible to implement such a symptomatic communication process in your world full of contradictions and distinctions? So I see there's the threads are I'm starting to really emerge because this is in a way similar to my response to squish or two are in that Contradictions and distinctions are not things that can be overcome they're not obstacles that one can Simpillate or transcend but rather I think that the Challenge is to as Barna Haraway would say stay with the trouble, right? Would be to live in the conjunction and to work Work with it and in it and instead of trying to overcome it and so he is indeed There is something like a balance. I actually I don't know what the right finger would be I don't think it's necessarily dialectical. I don't think it's necessarily dialogic I don't know if it's balanced But there is a way that I try in this book very very much to juggle to use some another kind of term To to to to work with the various Pereveters and various registers of interspecies communication togethers the semantic and the scientific Ethical and the political as you put it and I found that Within the so-called broader parent intellectual paradigm that you in which we live on the one hand You have the more social science oriented and humanistically oriented people such as Donna Haraway John Darren Peters or through ethical responsibility and care and Reciprocity or the way that they think about human's relation to the non-human and on the other hand You have the narrow scientific approach, which is focused squarely on communicative processes and what I try to do in this book is to look at the relationship between the two and And it's not simply that both of these things exist, but that they had Hor usual even relationship with each other And that's what I had mentioned in relation to your first-person Khadija that in attendance to Communicate with animals by which I mean simply have some sort of conveyance of meaning Multiple excesses kind of spill out of that or emerge out of that so things like responsibility care Love etc. And music too is by the way I should say and this is how I came to the project in a way is I kept on seeing that People would talk about animal communication, but whenever they failed to articulate what that meant music would emerge as this sort of magical Magical mechanism that sort of helped them and get People at least this is what a people thought it was doing for them. It's actually it's sort of dipped into suture Some of the broken or problematic aspects of communication So I think I'm rambling a little here So I'm gonna stop that I would I do want to just emphasize the way that I try to interrelate the scientific and There's some band tech the ethical the political and try to articulate exact relations through which these Concepts and domains are associated and connected with each other. Thank you for that excellent response Also, I really enjoyed the discussions on the philosophical traditions regarding non-humans starting from Immanuel Kant So the philosophical views from the 18th century also created an ocular centric world and established sensory hierarchies How do you look at the ears that listen to non-human sounds within such a philosophical backdrop? Thank you So share again my answer may not be exactly what people would anticipate, but I think it's with the question helps me to To express a slightly heterodox position on the matter because indeed so much of Enlightenment rationality is steeped in the form of ocular centrism. I Think this is absolutely true, but only up until the point I think what one sees in the long jury the long history of attempts at communication with non-humans whether this is animals or extraterrestrials is a kind of Strategic deployment of the figure of listening. So what do I mean by that? Well, what you have for one thing is the Technologizing of of the ear. So we have all of these projects setty. This is search for extraterrestrial intelligence These projects are always talking about listening. They always say they're listening for messages from alien They're listening to to to the beyond to the cosmos. There's a famous setty project called project big ear Now this is not called project big eye and they're not saying we're looking into the cosmos They're invoking the notion of listening. This is of course course not listening as a auditory sensory Modality because one cannot listen to radio waves. They these are not things that can be heard by the human ear and they can be transduced and mediated to the ear just as easily to the eye I mean you should take a radio wave and you should make it visible or you to make audible or tactile whatever you are there's there's nothing auditory at all about radio waves or about any of the activity that happens outside of a medium such as air or water however cosmologists and entrepreneurs whether you're talking about a long mask or any of these figures or you're talking about You know a more serious astronomers they've constantly invoked the notion of listening listening to the cosmos And I think that goes also for Being in contact with animals There's a deployment of the particular kind of ear again. This is not the human ear This is not the ear that the takes vibrations. This is the ear in a sort of metaphysical way In when people again like I was talking earlier and I'm trying not to mention specific names because it really is a paradigm And I don't pick on individuals if there's a whole cottage industry of books out there Sort of suggesting that to understand the non-human world or to understand ecology and environment We just have to listen better. So listening has become Raised to have a very high value as be placed on listening I don't think we can call is an ocular centric Paradigm I think we can call this a paradigm in which listening is globalized in very strategic ways Again, what is the relationship between that thing that people are calling listening and something like? human listening It's a very loose connection But also I don't think we can say it's not listening because listening has always been about more than the just the mechanism of the human Year drug so I think that this the all I'd like to sort of do to conclude in my answer to this question is to say It's not the case that we have a whole lot of philosophy that Business people and astronomers and everyone saying oh, we need to look we need to look and their response should be we need to listen actually a lot of the most cynical and most problematic thinkers of our time and Going back it also at least to the 19th century if not before Have spoken incessantly about listening and how we have to listen listen listen so I think in a way what that possibly shows is that everything is co-optable, um, you know, there's nothing that's Sacred to put a better world. There's nothing that cannot be co-opted by The most more rose forms of Western Russian Personality the most problematic forms of capitalist exploitation Listening is not an antidote to that but can be very easily and I think I'm fortunate like it's it's unfortunate how easily something like listening can be in the put in the service of Something to be problematic and even violent. It's that time of the year your vacation is coming up You can already hear the beach waves feel the warm breeze Relax and think about Work you really really wanted all to work out while you're away Monday.com gives you and the team that piece of mind when all work is on one platform and everyone's in sync Things just flow wherever you are tap the banner to go to Monday.com Now going to the media question of the project you introduce three types of media in the monograph They are the technological media communication media and an environmental media Instead of speaking about these media objects you discuss the mediation process They facilitate regarding human and non-human entanglements. Can you elaborate on the mediation process involved? Yeah, thank you So I mean, I think mediation and it has already come up in the sense that I insist that listening is always mediated We cannot aim for an unmediated listening. There's no such thing. So instead what we really have to do is sort of recognize the layers of mediation and and what they are but I'm gonna take a little bit of an oblique answer to your question because this gives me the opportunity to talk about something that I haven't I think spoken about as much as I would like to in as much as I should today, which is To say the importance of effective or an imagined form of imediatedness so what one sees in the literature often is that There's an appeal to a form of connection without mediation and this happens a lot when people often are frustrated with their failed attempts to What what people often call in the historical effort to break through the human non-human barrier so there's all these attempts to break through to animals to Truly share it or to truly get the animal to share there or to truly share if there are messages coming from outer space from civilizations we don't know about and What one sees quite frequently is a frustration And so people keep on ratcheting up the layers of mediation. They use more and more technologies For example, but then there's sometimes a crisis in which people reach for a form of pure unmediated connection and The figure that typically emergence out of that it emerges out of that is music. So music becomes this Thing that helps us connect in an unmediated way arm the music theorist Falkle calls this guns un mitu bara completely Immediate it or just immediate and I base this on the historian or music theory Roger Grant is written beautifully about us so music is one of the figures that sort of tries to short cuts mediation, so again if you have these various times of mediation that you mentioned psychological communication environmental music people call upon or summon music as a way to try to short circuit those all the mediation and another figure that sometimes does that same work is water People imagine water to be this kind of immersive environment in which Mediation is not needed. So again, this is the very sort of basic axiom of media media theory. Nothing is unmediated communication is stricter sense of always mediated But they're one of the things that media is the hidden media history has shown is how How often people turn to figures that? I imagined to create I didn't you know no mediation so I mean you have for example the ontology of presence that Jock Derrida famously talked about that the voice gives you a kind of Unmediated to presence and the whole of deconstruction is trying to show that you know There's no such thing that the voice is always already mediated and so one of the things my book does is shows many historical cases where people have Tried to short circuit mediation and I've tried to get to this unmediated Formal relation with the non-human world and I think that as a kind of anyone working with media history with media theory that is a very important place to look Because it's one thing to say that everything's mediated. We know that but it's another thing to look at cases in which people are trying to clear opposite and you can really learn a lot about intellectual history from looking at those examples so Yeah, the book takes those moments very seriously. This is such a thought-provoking response I'm fascinated by the biosemiotic theoretical frameworks you have incorporated What was your experience diving into the world of biosemiotics? Also, dear listeners do know that there's also a detailed appendix on this topic in the book Thank you So this was a tough decision to make but I wanted to get technical and talk about some of the sort of more technical aspects of communication theory in particular biosemiotic theory and I'll wait back and forth a long time and I mean You know when one writes a book You never know if you did they're made the right decision But I decided instead of but used to actually be in the introduction as part of the introduction But I thought I was too much heavy lifting so I shifted this Technical note to an appendix at the end of the book for those who wish to delve into such things Because because while I think some readers may be interested others may not so as I said I'm in the beginning of this interview and as I say the very beginning of the book human non-human communication operates at multiple levels The main level the book deals with is this level of excess of Suckerman charity of all the things that fall out of communication like when it fails So I show for example that in attempts to communicate with parrots People end up falling in love with the parrots often with with wet with whales and dolphins We we we say well, we don't know if they're communicating, but whales sing they have music so most of the book deals with these sort of extravagant examples or supplement of supplementarity where something far more than communication kind of emerges from the attempt at communication, but I also insist that there is actual very simple preglided communication with non-humans and we do know about this and Biasing some semiotics is that the Raunch of thought that I think helps us to understand this the best Okay, so I take a very specific Understanding with biosemiotics because I should mention that there are biosemioticians you do things that I don't agree with for example extending And the notion of semiosis or even language to trees and bacteria. I don't think trees have Meaning I don't think trees do communicate. That's a thing as bacteria communicate But I don't think they do so in any meaningful semiotic way and I also insist that humans are the only Creatures on earth with language proper with what we call language so I actually do think that it's important to separate out different semiotic processes and Again, most of the book is not dealing with this kind of technical boundary Mainment it's actually dealing with all of ways that those boundaries are scrambled and messed up and brought constant and trespassed but I Did find some of this work useful and so and I think and I think that more work can be done in this in this regard especially Taking into account My work, which is about the way that these bargains are always being trespassed. So Let me just sorry, let me reflect on your questions specifically as you ask a theory What was your experience in diving into this world? Well, it was a great experience and I There are a few authors who really inspired me at World O'Con's book How far think is a really important book that melts together the William evolution and personal semiotics So that was really profound for me Also some of the work of Gary Trenwinsen and like in the William years of music. So I did indeed delve into this Work and I have an appendix, but I should also say that moving forward I'm going to be working a lot more in this area and trying to And doing a little bit more kind of if not scientific in more focused work on some of the semiotic mechanisms that might be available to humans and One humans. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on biosemiotics moving ahead the first section of the monograph which focuses on animals involves significant discussions on John C. Lilly and American physician and neuroscientists whose studies on whales and dolphins later influenced activity-building activism and even the problematic mystification of marine animals How was your experience engaging with Lilly's scientific and personal archives? How would you compare Lilly's encounters with dolphins and whales to that of recent Saint Lucas and us spiritual encounters? Yeah, thanks. So, yeah, there's a lot to tell on Lilly He's become I mean, he was a big feather in the 70s. Uh, he out of fell out of favor Partly because it was it came to light just how much cruelty he had inflicted upon with the dolphins that he had in captivity But he's become he sort of re-emerged as a major figure in the last few years. I'm far to say why Part of it is the resurgence of or the the acceleration of research into marine mammals Part of it is some of his more miss mystical and psychedelic aspects have come back into favor There's more there's a kind of second wave of research on LSD and hallucinogens So there was a mass a major Lilly conference at Cornell a couple years ago There's a new documentary being made on him. No, he's coming back into favor And so I was lucky that I had a lot to draw upon I was not the first personal binding means to work on Lilly but I did go to the archives in Stanford and I discovered some amazing documents that haven't Peter it's about before Including a sort of journal that he wrote where he talks about music in a way that he has he doesn't in a lot of his published works So, you know, Lilly is this strange figure that I just you know I thought it would be a good way to speak in the book by drawing people in because he and you can tell the whole story of the western Contemporary conceptualization of marine mammals through the this wine person because he not only because he was central to it but because he Yes, he was an important figure but also he just knew so many people and he worked with so many people that I don't know I thought it was a good way to to tell that story. So in Lilly And I do come back to him It's subsequent chapters as well because he was also connected with a bunch of people in the city projects like Frank Drake and Lilly himself speculated a lot about extra on extraterrestrials so Lilly is a figure that I spent possibly too much time on and I wanted to I did feel the need to work on him But I also it's important to me that this book is not just a history of western science book I also look at many other parts of the world and at the sections of non-human animals. So thank you for mentioning was in Sela Kuzana who's agnosa Man who lives in the in the in close to Cape Town in South Africa And I did some work with him and I'm not gonna go so into detail about that story because it's a bit convoluted And that chapter two is where I talk about Sela Kuzama and she's the way people talk about she's calling whales by blowing this horn that she uses and some of them rosa cosmologies and processes such as Utwaza, which is the practice of becoming a diviner by going under a river So there's all of this other stuff going on But what I also found is that in a way He wasn't that different to Lilly and this was maybe more the more surprising thing I had sort of assumed that he would offer some You know, college some other side of the coin some different way of thinking about whales and marine mammals But actually what I found is that Whether one is looking at Lenny or Irene Pepperburg the famous Parrot science bird scientists or on autologists. I mean if you work with the parrot And then Alex for many years or whether one looks at social scientists like on a hair away or where the one goes to the Cape and works with these with folks there There's some things that just keep on re-emerging and one of those things is music and another is love and What I found speaking to Wilson is that it was very hard to pin him down on exactly what was happening when he was blowing This phone and these whales were coming but one thing he readily admitted to is that he loves these whales And he said that repeatedly to me. She loves them. He loves them. He loves them with his father on his heart and this to me really struck something in within me because No matter what I was reading social science philosophy Science, you know hard silence or hanging out in the Cape with these so-called whale callers whale cries actually that's a whole other story which you read about in my book for those listeners, but so often love emerged out of these encounters, so Wilson, San Lequizano was not able to articulate exactly Whether she was communicating with these whales if he was a lot there was a lot You didn't know that he was certain of how much he loved these other ones And you see that also in a lot of even the kind of hard sciences. So one of the things I did in the book was okay I read the scientific monographs and papers of these scientists, but also a lot of scientists write memoirs so if you read the memoirs you see that alongside this very dry scientific work They talk about how they love the animals that they work with and they had these deep feelings of affection and intimacy and a crime in the animal diets etc etc So I was always interested in this emotional Cathesis that people have with non-human animals. That's often running alongside Their attempt to communicate with animals and so in that sense Your question says how would you compare their leads encounters with dolphins and whales to those of Wilson's have a bizarre Spiritual characters and one of the surprising things I found is that they weren't always so different as I had anticipated and This invocation of love was something that I saw across the board And so I take the love seriously Not again to say oh, we should all love nature or something Silly like that, but I take love very seriously as a theoretical concept and I did my homework there, too I read everything from Bell Hooks to NATO and I try to understand you know, well, not only understand love, but also find the best theories on love and I think that the best theories I found were Bell Hooks was really useful Black feminist thought was super helpful in thinking about love as an action as a verb That was very important for me 10 Chang the science fiction author I found really helpful to thinking through the question of love Alexis Paulin comes as well So yeah, so love just for those listeners out there who share me talking about love and think that I'm so I'm hopeless romantic If anything I wish I was more I'm so cynical that I can't even think of love in any kind of romantic way it becomes The radical concept that I had to read everything about So yeah, so Lily Wilson these different approaches. They can verge in surprising ways and I will stop it Thank you for that wonderful response You highlight instances of human and non-human communication saturated with racism and colonialism With the discussing whale songs the city project or an elephant brought from colonial salon to perform in the 19th century Parisian opera Sometimes these animals and extraterrestrials are afforded more dignity than humans living in settler colonial spaces How would you address these inherent racial and colonial biases in human and non-human communication? Okay, so to answer the Question you pose at the very end there. How would you address these inherent racial colonial biases? I will say very simply that There is no thought of the human or the non-human without those racial and colonial biases like it doesn't exist And this is what I meant earlier when I said You know, I'm not interested in like listening in some pure way. I'm interested in recognizing and grappling with these layers of historical violence So very simply I address those those racial and colonial biases by confronting them at every turn and by never letting People speak about you know never Letting a tale about the human or the animal go by without showing the way that it's being conditioned by these racial and colonial logic So really need to take one example. I mean let go back to Lily But sure why not John Lily? I mean, he was a white male American scientist. I talked about his project in the Caribbean He used a huge amount of black labor Never-wise mentions these people had anything ever wrote and I had read all his books all his articles and a lot in his archive You don't share about the metal, but if you see photos you see all these black men in the back So, I mean you're of course and I mean he was getting funded by NASA. He was getting funded by the US military He worked directly with the with the US Navy So I mean you can't then read what he says about a dolphin and not I understand the huge amount of Imperialist apparatus behind what he's doing not to mention the suffering not only of the dolphins that he killed a lot of but all these black laborers who are literally Completely unnamed that I recognize anyway, so I just to John to the question quite simply I've always tried to uncover those hidden aspects of any Into species attempt specifically the scientific ones that do Tried really hard to hide cover over and hide those And I also I do I have time to say something else. I don't know how much time we it's okay So I would I would also like to just mention something else because your question the other part of the question that you asked Gives me an opportunity to talk about a quirky part of the book that comes right at the end that people may not make it to you So I'll just mention it quickly, so you say Khadija, and this was very astute Sometimes these animals and extraterrestrials are afforded more dignity than humans living in settler colonial spaces So this raises this question of value of whose life matters as it were And in the epilogue of my book I talk about these new Misanthropic movements that are emerging around the world some of which are tied to forms of eco-fascism and By this I mean that It's not uncommon to hear the sentiments to the effect of Humans have messed everything up. We should really We should just let the animals take over. Okay, now this is usually said by white settler colonial figures who are thinking of the human as their own self-deprecating version of who they are but that's the idea of whose life values whose life is valued and whether it's a life of an animal or a European or a Slave because of course slavery and colonial transatlantic slavery and colonialism would the two sort of main historical conditions for the emergence of emergence of enlightenment reason and the notion of the human as a kind of free agent But yeah, I do take this idea very directly at the end about how especially European rationality Has taken a cynical view to the value of human life and again This is a very specific notion of human is and what's human life is it or what value is? So I'm not trying to generalize that but I do look at these new emerging movements that say the shoe the human and again, this is a very snare of this finish of the human but they say this human should no longer devalued and instead we should we should Start to value non-humans higher than humans because humans have closed so much destruction. So this notion of Value evaluating how Precious or how worthy various beings are to exist is also fundamental to any notion of attempted communication because there's always a kind of value judgment placed on On different different lives and this goes of course also for communication, right? If an animal communicates, it may be it has it should have more reason to live Or if an animal has music that was the whole argument with anti-warly that whales could sing therefore They deserve to not be killed So there's all of these different ways of creating ethics and politics out of notions of intelligence of language of music, etc And so the book does deal a lot with those kind of expressions as well. There's definitely a key important discussion put forward by the project Moving on in chapter four you discuss the creative potentials of Afrofuturism as illustrated by the works of artists like Sandra and Capone Kewanga Can you speak about Afrofuturism in light of in this species communication? Yeah, so this actually also dovetails nicely with the last Question because again, what I see these artists doing particularly Capone Kewanga and Sanra is They are not so interested in breaking through the human animal communication barrier as John Lilly said, but rather interrogating the very notion of the human So if in if the human is the of course, there's many definitions, but some of the ones that we've inherited from European enlightenment are the human as having free will as Of course freedom and liberty liberty certain notions of intelligence and those definitions and those ways of Characterizing humanity emerged once again at the high point of slavery and colonialism at which Europeans were claiming that you know after it comes did not have freedom and therefore we're not human in in this particular way, so Afrofuturists I mean what they often known for is The sort of claim that black people are aliens That's kind of the claim that a lot of people know Afrofuturism for that black people There's there's there's sort of sort of alliance or resonance Between blackness and alienness or alienation if I want to put it that way And you know son Roy would say things explicitly like that like he you know, he's not from this planet He's from another planet. He you know, the black man and is not part of this this world. Oh, you know those kinds of statements very Extremely controversial, you know, political and of course he was also trying to Raise consciousness by making these outlandish claims. So this chapter The focus of it after having investigated a lot of ways that people have attempted to first communicate with animals And then communicate with extraterrestrials Is to say well, this kid this can really only this conversation can only be meaningful if we really interrogate what we mean by the human in the first place and I found These Afrofuturists artists as well as Miss Carter we use constellation of black critical thinkers To be the most sort of potent way of getting at this question I Don't think that Afrofuturists have somehow got us out of the issue You know Taken us beyond the human and there's ideal with the critiques of Afrofuturism as well So this is not a un thoughtful and critical celebration of Afrofuturism, which you do find a lot I mean, there's a lot of people that written about Afrofuturism. So In such a celebratory way to say, you know, like this this work, you know It's taken us just out of the realm of the human and into this, you know, this other celebratory post human realm and you cannot think the post human from anywhere other than the position that we're in So again, it's not a matter of going beyond the human or ravishing the human and starting from some other subject position that cannot exist but rather kind of imminent critique critiquing the this figure of the human from within and Thinking with sonrock of whiny qwanga and writers like Frank Wilson Sexton Simone White I do a Ronald Judy. I work with a lot of the different writers and artists together I tried to piece together some sort of videotape How do I say this if the way that certain Afrofuturists musicians and artists radically challenge the notion of the human but without suggesting some pathway to It meant a bit immense a pastry utopia in world where humans only exist or something like that So it's a it's a it's a it's a it's maybe the most they're really to hear each other of the book But I think that I think that in a way it It well what someone said you read the book is that the first two chapters are well The first chapter is a little bit more historical. The second chapter is in this love direction and gets a little more metaphysical the third chapters it kind of insane and deals with notions of I mean It really is a bit crazy and then the fourth chapter like really re-ground everything and it's kind of rigorous So it comes back at the end, but yeah I felt that I had learned so much from People that like kabwani kiwanga artists who I've been working with for the last few years that I Thought it was valuable to spend a long and serious chapter thinking through the work that she's about What's our final question? Human entanglements with non-humans are often viewed ambiguously by the scientific world Have you received any responses from the scientific community regarding in this species communication? How would you respond to the ambiguous stance of the scientific community on humans communicating with non-humans? Yeah, thanks. So, I mean, how did received so many responses in this? I mean the book hasn't been after so long I mean, I didn't do a book book book at Princeton and I mean Princeton There's a lot of sign, you know, it's a very famous institution for pure science So they were some scientists in the audience and they We've very animated and asked great questions and it was really wonderful to to hear So I think the con the potential is there. I'm also working on a collaborative project now with a neuro Auditory neuroscientist at Princeton my colleague professor as a cousin for And we are trying to work with some of these concepts, but in a way that's maybe more legible to scientists. I mean what I What I thought for some time now, although it's very difficult to do is that I don't see you the humanities as functioning as some other of the sciences I mean, I respect the position that the humanities is committed to de-instrumentalizing reason I have a colleague another colleague at the Princeton of our one name. He says that the job of humanists is to not be scientists That is our historical role is to not to be as he puts it to be anything other than a scientist And I respect that position because we live in such a technothritic world in which science is so That analyzed that I do understand we're based coming from at the same time I think that humanists have something to offer the sciences and we live in a technophilic Scientific world, but we also live in the world of growing anti science Sentiment, I mean, especially in the US. There's a whole contingent of mega people who are very Realistic to what scientific authority and so we have anti-vaxxers and all of this kind of stuff so I think that's what I hope that My book, but also my work podcast You know, whatever speaking at conferences or working with my colleague will hopefully to is to partner with science and to Help scientific discourse do a little bit a little less Pongtivistic some of the work on in this In these areas in general in the sort of hard scientific journals. I think it's very uncritical Because it woefully neglects some of these issues and really does kind of repress them I mean, it's it's it's there is in debt or out of science to repress some of the things we talked about today But I think that scientific inquiry will be stronger. It's more convincing if it doesn't do that. So Yeah, the way that I'm trying to do that right now is not simply by publishing more because I just don't think scientists will Necessarily read this work or if they read it, they'll read it not to directly help their work And they may read it or come to my talk But then when they go to their land, they'll probably get what they read, but I'm hoping that collaborations Is a way to do it and maybe also Punishing a little but in some scientific journals. Um, it's not easy because they have their templates and they have their sort of like all disciplines do But I'm still hopeful and I'm gonna continue Continue with that and that's one of the sort of areas that I do want to work with someone like us up is this biosellular edicts Because I think that the work that I've done outside of narrow scientific thinking could be really useful So that's what I'm going to try to do. We'll see what happens but it's part of the larger project of thinking about the role of the humanities in the spirit and the role of music scholarship of As if my other colleagues has anything other but science. What are what is what are these what are these other? Think this is a place to do and I hoping to show that we can we have something powerful to offer I believe that we do There's under you know where the people listed again where the people listen or not. I don't know But this only so much we can do I'm convinced that they need us I mean, it's not just that we need them It's not that science has all the findings and we need to be parasitical I've certainly don't in my life But I really do think that there's just so many I'm critical Intellectual issues when one reads about animal behavior That's they that scientists would be very well-aided by Working with people outside of our You know human or social scientists and I think there's definitely a lot of Scientists who do want to do that. So There's the disciplinary Boundaries, but then there's also the human institutional context and I think that within that we can Do some really good work. Thank you for your time Gavin. I really enjoyed the book and the conversation Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation to Khadija and I appreciate you taking the time to Interviewed me this evening. Thank you. Thank you listeners. I'll be back with the new book soon. Stay tuned "Piano Music" (gentle music)
