Ethologies of Education

One: Situatedness

In Situated Knowledges, Donna Haraway (1991) asks, “How should one be positioned in order to see in this situation of tensions, resonances, transformations, resistances, and complicities?” (p. 195). “This situation” is both universal—one is always in one—and radically particular (the indexical “this”). One is always positioned, one is always being positioned, or becoming positioned, even as one is always being moved and transported by the situation and its “tensions, resonances, transformations, resistances, and complicities.” Against what she calls the “god trick” of pretending that one can see from outside of a problem—from everywhere/nowhere—Haraway argues that “the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision . . . the alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, crucial knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (p. 191).

The task set before me by the editors of this issue is to think with and through Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? and the only place to begin, then, is from here. What I will come to offer is less a “review” of Despret’s book than what she calls a “version” of it: an account of its concepts, and commitments, and anecdotes that doesn’t pretend to come from everywhere/nowhere, but that foregrounds my particular situation. For the present purposes, I read this book as someone trained and situated in the humanities and educational philosophy, and with an attentiveness to the question of what Despret’s propositions for ethology might offer by way of a (re)imagining of how we perceive and attune to what happens in educational encounters. My standpoint is also informed by my investments in the discourses that have come to be called Animal Studies, discourses that have led me to the axiom that the human is an animal, a claim that has, so far, barely disrupted framings of cultural production and educational practice within the humanities. This is, for me, both an ontological and a political axiom (I will later argue that from where I’m standing, I can’t discern the difference between these). At stake, then, is a question of how research on education matters, how it interests those of us who are entangled with it, and how it orients us toward each other and the multiplicity of futures that saturate the present without being “actual.”

Two: Frisktion

Before I get to Despret, I want to back up to the questions I’ve been asking for a while because Isabelle Stengers (one of Despret’s collaborators) has taught me to ask them. The question could be asked: What makes a science a “science”? Stengers underscores how science is like good fiction: a risky, speculative affair. Stengers’s (1997) most sustained account of science as the work of “risky fiction” (p. 147) comes in the essay “A Thousand and One Sexes.” Schematically, all scientific knowledge begins as fiction: It consists of “an innovative individual proposition” (p. 136). This fiction comes out of a particular risk taken with respect to a researcher’s situatedness in the world, which is to say in a field of possibilities: “A fiction, even if it is the product of an individual, always expresses what a history enables this individual to think, the risks that he is capable of taking” (p. 137). In this sense, science is neither entirely separable from other practices of knowledge creation—including artistic ones—nor can it be conceptualized except through attention to wider fields of agencies, materialities, and forces that swirl around and give rise to “individuals.” Sciences are particular—in their matterings—but not radically distinct from other modes of thinking-knowing-feeling.

The risk Stengers affirms—which is something that exceeds individual intention or control because it adheres in the situation—is precisely the attempt (which may fail!) to reconfigure what is perceived as world. If the commonsense distinction between fiction and truth adheres in some set of beliefs about what “reality” is (i.e., ontological postulates), then science can be defined as a particular kind of fiction generation that has as its potential outcome a reconfiguration of the real such that it loses its status is “just” fiction. Science, when it is risky, puts the real into play, and, precisely because it mobilizes the force of fiction, it can sometimes become nonfiction because of this force. Science then names that special kind of fiction that anticipates its own status as nonfiction in a future anterior.

This is not just a question of knowledge (whatever is?) but a question of politics, or, perhaps more accurately, of the political. Stengers writes,

A fiction that has the ambition of “being part of” science is therefore not just one fiction among others. It would not be enough to say that it has the vocation of being accepted by the collective; it would be better to say that its vocation is to transform the collective, and even, more accurately, to create a new collective, which is to say, also and indissociably, a new type of history. (p. 139)

Science, as fiction, generates collectivities. It is political fabulation emerging from a particular kind of risk; risk that comes from the way a particular standpoint (the researcher(s)) actualizes the potential in a situation for the emergence of new collectivities.

My neologism “frisktion” is meant to signal this irreducible entanglement of fiction and risk, but it also lets sound a third term, one that lets me push a bit on this rhetoric of the “new”: friction. I’m thinking here of Anna Tsing’s (2005) book with that word as its title, where she writes, “Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. Friction is not just about slowing things down. Friction is required to keep global power in motion” (p. 6). Friction is a way of naming contact and collision. It signals the ways that entities (many of them, to anticipate, won’t be human) move around and into each other. This collision often does slow things down or lead to damage, but it is also condition of possibility for collectivities to emerge. In other words, I want to re-cast the “risk” adhering in science as a kind of attention to or perception of the ways that collectivities are already frictional in the present. In this sense, collectivities are not really “new” although our awareness of them may well be. This awareness is political, precisely in the sense signaled by Sara Ahmed (2008) when she refers to a “politics of attention,” or what Brian Massumi would call a politics of perception (2015). Science is then a kind of fiction making that emerges from perceiving a frictional situation such that attention to what constitutes the collective work of worlding shifts.

Three: Why Ask if You Can’t Listen?

What Would Animals Say if We Asked the Right Questions? (2016) is Despret’s first single-authored book to be translated into English. It takes the form of an abecedaire, organized around 26 questions that human scientists have put to nonhuman animals within a cluster of disciplines that could be grouped under the broader heading of the “animal sciences.” The chapter titles—“A for Artists: Stupid Like a Painter?” “B for Beasts: Do Apes Really Ape?” “C for Corporeal: Is It All Right to Urinate in Front of Animals?” and so on—signal the wide range of concerns about human behavior that guide research in animal sciences. Running through the book, as through the research Despret critically engages, is a strange set of conflicting, seldom clearly articulated beliefs that govern most humanist thought about nonhuman animals. On one hand, nonhuman animals (of various species) are understood to be alike enough to human animals to justify studying them to understand some aspect of human physiology, psychology, evolution, or behavior. On the other hand, nonhuman animals are dissimilar enough that scientists can do things—ranging from merely disruptive to patently, horrifically cruel—to nonhuman animals as part of the research dispositif. That is, while the generalizability of the results presumes likeness or continuity between human and nonhuman animals, the research protocols tend to be constructed based on an absolute ethical rupture that authorizes scientists to interfere in the environments or even corporeality of the nonhuman animals being studied.

This intervention or interference is one of the main objects of critique in Despret’s book, for it turns out that when re-read through her practice of “philosophical ethology” (more on that in a moment), many experiments turn out to create the conditions for the “findings” that the scientists expect, thus giving much “animal science” a tautological form. In “N for Necessity: Can One Lead a Rat to Infanticide?” she examines research, beginning in the 1970s, that explored new findings that occasionally some adult animals will kill their young. Evolutionary biologists, of course, wanted to frame this as a question of the dissemination of genes, but because of the general methodological bias against “anecdote” as a mode of knowledge (more on that too in just a moment), scientists immediately began to concoct experiments with rats to discern the precise conditions which would lead to infanticide. Detailing a series of dispositifs that researchers contrived, Despret writes, “one realizes that the conditions that are said to be able to ‘reveal’ infanticide appear as, above all, conditions that are actively created by researchers” (p. 107). Put somewhat more succinctly, “Rightly or wrongly—they were not asked for their opinion—rats would become infanticidal” (p. 106). These experiments—like most of the work in animal sciences that Despret engages in the book—ask questions in such a way that the material conditions of asking make the answers a foregone conclusion. ¹ I’ll come back to how this is a problem of methodologies of reduction and removal, but for the moment the point I want to make is that the researchers aren’t open to listening to answers. Despret’s book puts pressure on this, wondering why we would bother asking questions—especially when those questions require significant violence committed on real animal lives—if we aren’t open to the risk of listening to answers.

Four: Evidence and Anecdote

“F for Fabricating Science” turns to the work of Konrad Lorenz, and “the moment when ethology was constituted as an autonomous scientific discipline” (p. 39). At issue is the way that “natural history” following Darwin came to be seen as too driven by anecdotal observation. Despret writes,

The majority of texts by naturalists of this era abound with stories that credit animals with feelings, intentions, wills, desires, and cognitive competences. In the twentieth century, these stories are found confined to the writings and accounts of nonscientists: “amateurs,” naturalists, caregivers, trainers, breeders, hunters. Amongst scientists, the discourse will be marked primarily by the rejection of anecdotes and the exclusion of any form of anthropomorphism. (p. 39)

Despret works through this methodological angst driven by philosophical presupposition—inseparable from the creation and maintenance of disciplinary borders—by looking to a disagreement among two ethologists about babblers: Amotz Zahavi (an Israeli ethologist, some of whose work was done accompanied by Despret) and Jonathan Wright (an Oxford-educated zoologist who practices sociobiology). Zahavi’s work is “based on reasoning by analogy: ‘And if I were the babbler, what would I do? What would make me act in such a way?’” (p. 43). For Wright,

Zahavi’s interpretive method clearly belongs to an anthropomorphic and anecdotal practice—where it is understood that an anecdote is generally defined, in this area, as an uncontrolled observation; that is to say, it is not accompanies by the “right” interpretive key. (p. 43)

In other words, “One cannot claim anything if there aren’t any experiments, for this is the requirement of a truly objective science” (p. 43). Objectivity here is defined as experimental manipulation in a controlled environment. Even when this doesn’t turn on the dispositifs made possible in laboratories, there has to be “control.” Despret’s patient engagement with the work of both scientists enables us to see that science, in this mode, is inseparable from a kind of politics. Knowledge and control—we might follow Julietta Singh (2017) in calling this “mastery”—are inseparable.

Foucaultians will be rather bored by this assertion that power and knowledge are indissociably linked, but many of them, despite the questions about humanism that Foucault himself asked in The Order of Things, are content with seeing “power-knowledge” as a given in human worlds. Seeing this same relation at work in the animal sciences, even if one recognizes that the human researchers are in a radically asymmetrical relation with the nonhuman “objects,” opens onto having to reckon with animals as included within political relations. That is, one could propose that the types of “control” over nonhuman animal life that make science “objective” within certain disciplinary frames are ipso facto assemblages for marking the policing the borders of “the political.”

This border, however blurry it can be in the mesh of interactions among beings and entities, is drawn around “the human” (Snaza, 2013, 2014); this is why the problem of anthropomorphism looms so large in the animal sciences: this term captures, more than any other, the complex border work that is inseparable from disciplinary knowledge production and from a much more diffuse humanist campaign the (de)limit politics to the human. The charge of anthropomorphism relies on two linked presumptions. First, that there exist a set of competences or attributes which are properly “human” and lacking in all nonhuman animals and entities. Second, these attributes can be known and enumerated such that scientists can discern “improper” attribution of human qualities to nonhumans. This is political in the sense that these properly human attributes—language, intentional consciousness, culture, familial attachment, the ability to work, and so on—roughly delimit the sphere over which “politics” has purchase. That is, these constitute the matters of the polis which must be collectively negotiated. Despret writes,

the accusation of anthropomorphism . . . is a political accusation, a “politics of science” [politique scientifique] that aims above all to disqualify a mode of thinking from which scientific practice has tried to free itself, namely, that of the amateur. (p. 40)

In other words, the disciplinary rigors of animal science only take shape and make sense against a backdrop of humanist politics.

One can, Despret subtly suggests, reverse the terms of the accusation of anthropomorphism, however. If one calls into question the attribution of a whole host of things to humans and humans alone, then it becomes far more difficult for the border policing to work. Let’s take language, as it may have the most illustrious history as the sine qua non of human exceptionalism. Given recent work in ethology and anthropology that draws on linguistics (Grosz, 2011; Haraway, 2007; Kohn, 2013; Massumi, 2014), it is only dogmatic humanism that allows researchers to insist on a rigid line between human language and animal communication. What this means is that human language is being re-cast not as “language as such” but as one version of a wider field of communicative practices called “language.” In the wake of this work, I’m tempted to say—and I think Despret would agree with me here—that the real anthropomorphism is the insistence that “language” is uniquely human as it overcodes the entire field of “language” with an arbitrary—and politically motivated—version of it. This is synecdochic logic, substituting part for whole.

Despret takes up this “narrow conception of language” (p. 94) in “L for Laboratory.” She asks, “What could be more anthropomorphic than an apparatus that requires an animal to deny his own habits to privilege those that the researchers think humans themselves do in the experience of learning?” (p. 94). Here again, we see how laboratory science is about the construction of apparatuses that build humanist answers into the methods of asking questions such that no risk is taken. This leads to a fairly helpful way to understand what Despret does as a thinker. Brett Buchanan (2015), introducing the special issue of Angelaki on Despret which includes the first English translations of excerpts from a handful of her books, writes that

she’s more an “ethologist of ethologists,” studying the behaviors and practices of the ethologists as much as the birds that they themselves are observing. This ability to look at particular situations in new and inventive ways, from multiple perspectives, defines Despret’s work over the ensuing decades. (p. 18)

What Would Animals Say . . .? then could be called an ethology of ethology, a book that tries to understand the behavior of scientists as they try to understand nonhuman animals. And as a continuation of a long history of feminist science studies, the refrain of the book is that scientists like control, like restriction, like violence, like borders. And they like these so much that they shield their work from any risks which might lead to uncertainty, blurriness, and porosity.

Five: Ethology

“Ethos,” from Greek, means the habitual character of a group. From this word is derived “ethics,” which is the field of philosophy trying to understand what kinds of behaviors are just or “right.” This brief etymological reminder is needed to understand why, despite the narrowness of ethology as an academic discipline founded by Lorenz, the term still matters to Despret, and to a wider network of contemporary thinkers (a network in which I would include myself). Let me back up to Despret’s account of Lorenz’s founding of the field:

To legitimize the area of knowledge that he is attempting to constitute, Lorenz will “scientize” the knowledge of animals. Ethology becomes a “biology” of behavior, hence the importance of instincts, invariant determinisms, and innate physiological mechanisms that are explicable in terms of causes. This differentiation proves to be all the more imperative because the proximity with its rival is strong and experienced as especially more dangerous insofar as a good part of its scientific knowledge is fed primarily by the knowledge of amateurs. In short, it was a matter of removing the animal from common knowledge. (p. 40)

This ethology begins with a set of unquestionable givens about what constitutes animal life and indeed “nature” more broadly. As Despret’s rhetoric makes clear, these seemingly ontological postulates are actually the result of a political will to render a disciplinary field and to authorize the kinds of knowledge that would “scientize” that field. It is not much of a stretch here to say that ethology in this sense isn’t really even about nonhuman animals. It is a modality of intrahuman politics that takes “animal behavior” as its alibi. ²

If traditional ethology works through reduction—to instinct, to determinisms, to the innate and unchanging—then Despret’s ethology is nearly the opposite. Despret likes anecdotes, partly because in refusing the refusal to grant nonhumans capacities humans like to reserve for themselves they can unsettle. But it is an interesting unsettling that returns us to “common knowledge” (although not to “common sense”!). Despret likes to “provoke . . . discomfort” (p. 172), and this leads her to the interpretive practice of cultivating versions through translation. She writes,

Translating, according to the mode of versions, thus leads to a multiplication of definitions and what is possible, to make experiences visible, to cultivate equivocations, in short, to proliferate narratives that constitute us as beings who are sentient, connected with others, and affected. To translate is not to interpret, it is to experiment with equivocations. (p. 175)

I want to draw forth two lessons from this brief statement on translation as the practice of cultivating versions, but first I want to sketch the context in which this statement appears. The question she’s asking, for her book Thinking Like a Rat, is “do rats mourn?” Rejecting the question of whether what rats do is “really mourning” (partly because that participates in the anthropomorphism that synecdochically takes human mourning for the whole of mourning), Despret turns toward “what does this mourning ask of us?” This, she tells us, requires “connecting together relations of differences” (p. 171). ³ Turning to chimpanzee mourning, Despret notes that

If we want to therefore take seriously the question “what is asked of us to say that chimpanzees experience a version of mourning” we must, so as not to exclude chimpanzees from the start, put our own concepts to the test of versions. (p. 173)

That is, engaging with other versions of mourning—rat, chimpanzee—requires risk: We have to put our own sense of mourning into question rather than assuming that our own “commonsense” idea of mourning is the true standard against which to measure other creatures and find them wanting.

This way of thinking has, for me, two main benefits. First, against the parsimony of much of the work authorized under the heading of “science,” this kind of ethology is committed to complexity, difference, multiplication of meanings, and relations. Writing about Despret’s work with Zahavi, Donna Haraway (2015) writes, “In short, this science worked by addition, not subtraction. Worlds enlarged; the babblers and the scientists—Despret included—inhabited a world of propositions not available before” (p. 6). This interpretive benefit opens onto the second benefit, which is more explicitly political: addition rather than subtraction is about worlding. Although traditional ethology hardens lines between human and nonhuman animals and excludes nonhuman animals from “politics” precisely through political violence masquerading as “objective” science, Despret’s ethology of ethology invites in, opens up, burbles forth.

I think, then, that Despret radically reconnects the “ethos” nominally studied by ethology (i.e., behavior) to ethics. Hers is an ethology that is driven by studying the sometimes horrifically unethical behaviors scientists practice in their pursuit of (narrow, low risk) truths and by cultivating forms of studying together with other creatures, human and nonhuman, where worlding happens.

Six: Animality

Against a (long) tradition that would see humans and animals as different types of entity, Despret’s work—like a growing body of work associated with Animal Studies, posthumanism, and the nonhuman turn—sees the human as an animal. Although this in no way requires us to flatten the distinction between human animals and any other animals (Wolfe, 2009), it does allow us to begin thinking about nonhuman animals from a position of entanglement, proximity, and even, as Indigenous scholars have long argued, of kinship. Asserting the animality of the human, or the continuity of humans and other animals, is an axiom that disrupts the anthropocentric restriction of the political to humanity and any disciplinary procedures for knowledge production predicated on human exceptionalism (such as that between anthropology and ethology, taken up below; Nelson, 2017).

Donna Haraway (1991) long ago articulated the necessity of situated knowledges by reminding her human readers that we have “bodies endowed with primate colour and stereoscopic vision” (p. 191), even though we augment our capacities with all sorts of technopolitical prostheses. Thus, the kind of feminist and anti-imperialist science that Haraway imagines (I will come back to the politics of knowledge) hinges on replacing a single difference—human/animal—with a whole network of differences among creatures. What Haraway calls “situated knowledges” are practices of translation of the unfurling of versions. She calls for “a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (pp. 191-192). I’m drawn to Haraway here both because I read this long before I encountered Despret and it undoubtedly shapes the sense I make of Despret’s work, and also because Haraway signals here that objectivity is itself open to reconstitution and change. The point of “objective” vision—from our highly situated standpoints—is transformation in “ways of seeing”! That is, knowledge production has to be committed not just to the accumulation of knowledge (as if knowledge can be “property”), but also to mutations in what counts as knowing, in ways of knowing. Knowledge doesn’t just pile up, it grows, spreads, changes form, disperses. And given how knowledges sustain us, this means that mutations in knowing cannot be separated from mutations in being (Haraway would, rightly, instead say “becoming”). The hope of knowing is that someday we will come to know differently and to be otherwise than we are.

If we return to the idea of the animal that seems to lurk in Lorenz, it is not difficult to understand why it wouldn’t make sense to posit the human as an animal. If the animal is all about instincts and determinist natural laws, then animality exists at a remove from change, history, and becoming. An overwhelming amount of thought within the humanities and social sciences shared something like Lorenz’s view for much of the recent past, ⁴ but for the last couple of decades, an alternative has been steadily growing louder. To give a sense of this alternative, Elizabeth Grosz writes, in The Nick of Time, of “language, the economy, law, justice, and so on” that

these are not the emergence of “higher” qualities but the elaboration and expansion of certain animal impulses. And just as the human is an elaboration, a becoming-other of animal impulses to social and moral behavior, so too the human is in the process of becoming other-than-human, of overcoming itself. (Grosz, 2004, pp. 62-63)

Zeroing in more specifically on “instinct,” Brian Massumi (2014) has argued, drawing on Henri Bergson’s (1911/1998) Creative Evolution and that way he recodes intelligence and instinct as mutually constitutive tendencies, that instinct is the source of creativity, spontaneity, and play: “every instinctive act, no matter how stereotyped it normally seems to be, carries a margin of maneuver. Every instinct carries within itself a power of variation, to some degree or other” (p. 13). Because he re-reads instinct as not “determined” or rigid, Massumi can go so far as to argue that “animal politics has no fear of instinct” (p. 54).

Once one recodes the human as a kind of animal, and animality is transvaluated to be understood as part of animate nature that is not rigidly deterministic, but instead fundamentally creative, then it becomes possible to see human “science” as also an elaboration of animal capacities and impulses. In this precise way, I want to propose that the “Animals” in the title of Despret’s book are not just the rats, birds, and primates about whom she shares anecdotes, but they are also the animal scientists. Re-reading their research, she wonders what they, as human animals, might say if they asked riskier questions, or questions that opened onto the real risk of listening to other animals. This is also why it makes sense to see Despret as engaged in the “ethology of ethology,” for ethology is, in the first instance, something that some (human) animals do: ethology is animal behavior.

Haraway (1989), in Primate Visions, writes that “the point of my argument is rather that the natural sciences, like human sciences, are inextricably within the processes that give them birth. And so, like the human sciences, the natural sciences are culturally and historically specific, modified, involved” (p. 12). This has become one of the guiding insights of the fields of science studies and feminist science studies in particular. This insight allows for an enormous amount of complexity in accounting for how sciences are practiced, and how they are shaped by all sorts of political, cultural, and economic systems within which they operate. And yet as I read Despret (and Haraway, and Grosz, and and and), I can’t help but feel that we need still more complexity: we also need to suggest that all of those “cultural” and “historical” forces are also operative far beyond human groups. Put differently, we have to remember that the entirety of humanity is also “inextricably within the processes that give [it] birth.” This is where Despret’s work touches so much recent posthumanism and feminist new materialism: the human, for her, names a specific animal that is emergent within networks of relation that include a dazzling array of nonhuman animacies and agencies. ⁵ The human is not the source of knowledge, scientific or not, for the simple reason that the human as an effect of other systems and agencies. ⁶ Put in terms of an Indigenous politics of land, “we are as much a part of the land as any other element” (Coulthard, 2014, p. 61).

What thinking that human as an animal thus allows is a refusal of the border that has tended to be structurally built-into animal sciences. Indeed, it allows for us to offer another “version” of animal sciences as the sciences practiced by animals, among other animals. This is, of course, a question of disciplinary practice and politics, but it immediately opens to the whole range of behaviors which are generally included within “ethics” or politics. To unfurl this, the best example might be Despret’s work with the sociologist Jacelyne Porcher. Porcher asks, quite simply, “do animals work?” (Despret, 2016, p. 177). For most researchers, and farmers actually engaged with animals in the work of agriculture, “the same response pours out: no, it is only people who work, not beasts” (p. 177). Drawing on Haraway’s (2007) writings on human–animal relations in laboratory work, Despret and Porcher propose that “farmers and cows share the conditions of work”; “This obliges us to think of beasts and people as connected together in the experiment they are in the process of living and through which they together constitute their identities” (p. 182). This is different version of work, one that connects humans and other animals without flattening differences between them, and which opens onto an entirely different kind of knowledge about both agriculture in particular and “work” in general, but also onto a significantly expanded proposition for political action. If humans and animals work together, then it becomes possible to see all these animals as subject to the expropriating mechanism of capitalism and (ongoing, sometimes settler) coloniality. ⁷ This means, of course, that it becomes possible to imagine forms of specific, material, situated political engagement that would link human and nonhuman actors in the struggle to dismantle capitalism and decolonize the planet.

Seven: Anthropology and Ethology

Anthropology has produced, as its “object,” Anthropos. ⁸ This means that it has built into its methods and processes a default, habitual commitment to seeing “Man” everywhere, both in terms of its “object” (human societies and cultures) and in terms of its subject (the human researcher). Anthropology, then, is the practice of Man coming to know other humans or in relation to “Man.” The discipline’s history is difficult to disconnect from the politics of European imperialism, to say the very least, and this holds even after the so-called “interpretive turn” associated with researchers like Clifford Geertz and James Clifford (Ismail, 2005). This is so largely because of the disciplinary structure of its knowledge production: “anthropology is about us producing knowledge of them” (Ismail, 2005, p. 10). This is already cause for concern, even though the field is undergoing a radical, and to some extend unpredictable, mutation right now that pushes anthropology “beyond the human.” Scholars like Stefan Helmreich (2009), Eben Kirksey (2014), Eduardo Kohn (2013), Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean (2017), and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) are doing anthropology in a way that would seem to move away from producing knowledge about Anthropos, begging the question of what makes anthropology “anthropology” at all.

This blurriness—which exerts a magnetic affective pull on some of our attentions—poses, for me, the question of the difference between “ethnography” which is the dominant methodology in the field and “ethology.” “Ethnos,” also from Greek, denotes a nation or group. That is, it seemingly gets more specific than “ethos” by limiting the reach of those included, which is partly how the us/them dichotomy Ismail worries about gets built into the field. More crucially, the difference between the two methodologies is precisely the question of human exceptionalism. Both refer to practices of observing behavior and interpreting those behaviors in systematic ways such that the results can be considered “scientific.” Putting Anthropos into play, though, renders ethology ethnography and turns a so-called natural science into a “human science.”

If traditional ethology (à la Lorenz) a priori reduces the animal to unchanging and determined instinct, traditional ethnography a priori interprets every behavior of the animals it studies as “human” (carrying with that presumption a whole metaphysics and politics). Despret’s ethology is not only nontraditional, but it would also seem to call into question the very distinction between ethology and ethnography. In her discussion of working with Zahavi and the babblers, she writes, of Zahavi, “In observing him [here is her ethology of ethology!], I could not help but associate his methods with those of anthropologists” (Despret, 2016, p. 42). That is, when one brackets human exceptionalism and presumes that the human (including the researcher) is an animal, the distinction between ethology and ethnography loses purchase.

Within the broad field(s) of educational research, the overwhelming majority of what is called “qualitative research” is work involving methods developed by either sociology or anthropology. As St. Pierre (2016) has noted, graduate training in education often involves a great deal of study of these “qualitative” methods, usually presented as a set of already determined, given methods that can be selected and applied to educational phenomena. Doctoral students are seldom given much training in philosophy (of science) or more than a smattering of Theory, and so one sees a lot of “add ontology and stir” dissertations (p. 2) that refer to philosophical ideas that radically call into questions the epistemologies and methodologies that are practiced by the researcher. This insistence on using predetermined methods which supposedly provide for “validity”—especially when the object studied or the theoretical apparatus would disrupt those methods—is what John Weaver and I (Weaver & Snaza, 2017) have elsewhere called “methodocentrism.”

What Despret’s ethology allows is, I think, a much more interesting approach to educational research, one that wouldn’t be so committed to ethnography even if it continues to involved sustained observation and fieldwork. As Stephanie Springgay (2014) has noted, “Posthumanist research does not need new methods. What it needs are procedures that make felt the unknowability within the unknown” (p. 86). That is, we need interpretive practices that don’t downplay and disavow everything complex by referring observation back to the kinds of findings one knows how to describe as “science.” To get a sense of how disciplined observation can “reduce” a phenomenon by operating in traditional modes, we might look to what Andrew Pickering says about the field Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). In The Mangle of Practice, Pickering (1995) writes that SSK

is grounded in the traditional humanism of sociology as a discipline, inasmuch as it takes the human subject to be the center of the action. Whenever SSK detects a tendency for the action to be located elsewhere—a decentering of the human subject . . . Any trace of nonhuman agency is immediately recuperated by translating it into an account of nonhuman agency that is attributed straight back to human subjects. (p. 25)

We see an enormous amount of this in educational ethnographies. For most ethnographers, what matters is the action of the human subjects—students and teachers, for the most part—and everything else is reduced to background setting. There is scant attention to the agential role of classroom environments—except as conduits for the human interaction that “really” matters—or even the curricular and pedagogical materials. The contributions to Pedagogical Matters (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016) disrupt this tendency, drawing on new materialist theories. These educational researchers examine playground equipment (Knight), metal detectors (Sonu), art installations (Springgay), marginalia (Truman), zombie fiction (Huddleston), a sweater (Robbins), social media materialities (Eaton), and school gardens (Rotas) as directly agential participants in educational encounters. Much of this scholarship enacts precisely what Springgay (2014) proposes: Not new “methods” per se, but different propositions, new ways of seeing, sensing, feeling, and attuning that detect “a fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (Bennett, 2010, p. ix).

Although this expansion in “detection” (to stay with Bennett’s word) matters, I think it is also crucial to risk the axiom that the human is an animal. This means that what matters in educational encounters, even if one restricts (most of) one’s attention to the human(imals) involved, cannot just be what is said, what is rationally and conceptually articulated. Here, I’m inspired by the work of Elizabeth de Freitas and Francesca Ferrara (2016) who study how children’s corporeal movement in duration reveals intuitive sense of mathematical mentation. They write that

It is through the qualitative indivisible movement of thought that the children link up with the virtual multiplicity of duration and the sequence of building. The children’s collective movement of thought attends to a particular rhythm in this case, that being the rhythm of the sequence of odd numbers, which is only one of the diverse potential sequences that might have been actualized in this material encounter. (p. 51)

This is, I think, observation that doesn’t participate in a humanist ethnography that would presuppose it knows what humans think or why they do what they do. It downplays traditional educational “learning outcomes” and standard measures of assessment, and instead de Freitas and Ferrara allow themselves to attune to what happens, much of which would be lost in standard ethnographies of education that transcribe, code, sort, and explain. Although they don’t use this term, I am tempted to see here an enactment of ethological praxis.

Eight: The Risk of Interest

One of the most important challenges that Despret’s work poses to those of us who do “research” is that we have to produce something interesting. I mean this in a double sense. The first might be translated back into what Stengers calls “risk”: the study has to wager something that might expand the field of attention to who worlds and how. That is, research has to be what I earlier called frisktional in that it offers up a speculative account of worlding such that it might transform the sense of reality thus losing its originary fictional status. It can only do this by attuning to the frictional collision of real, concrete situations and practicing what Haraway has long called “response-ability” (Despret, 2016). But second, Despret’s work argues that the studies cannot just be interesting for researchers and the audiences their work solicits once it is written (or presented at conferences). Research must interest all the participants, including, in the studies she works through, the nonhuman animals. The problem with a great deal of laboratory research with rats, she contends, is that “it doesn’t matter how much a rat might be interested in solving a problem posed to it, he must still be able to solve it in the terms that interest the researcher” (p. 93). Earlier in the book, she offers this less as a critique and more as a proposition for doing science: “In place of routine and repetitive protocols, scientists could instead substitute inventive tests through which the animals could show what they are capable of when we take the trouble of giving them propositions that are likely to interest them” (p. 35).

Nine: The Politics of Thinking

Feminist, queer, postcolonial, and decolonial science studies scholars have been asking, for a long time, about the politics of scientific research, especially when it participates in the us/them structure that structures the episteme of modern Enlightenment rationality. ⁹ Indeed, this general problematic forms the contact zone from which most of Donna Haraway’s work emerged. In Sciences From Below, Sandra Harding (2008) asks,

What would development for poor peoples in the South and North look like if it were directed by the interests and desires of poor peoples themselves instead of by the economic and political agendas of elites in the North and their allies in the South? (p. 143)

This question, which cuts to the core of the operations of scientific research as one part of the global hegemony of capitalist male supremacy and European (settler) coloniality, signals the irreducibly political (and ethical) quality of all scientific scholarship. Despret’s work allows us to see this as, in part, a question of interest: Whose interests guide what is studied, in what context, by what methods? Who gets to play knowing researcher, and who becomes studied “object”? ¹⁰

This means not just asking hard—risky—questions about who and what participates in research, and trying to be response-able to all of those participants. It also means extending the field of attention beyond what is the ostensible “phenomenon” of research to think about what Sara Ahmed (2006) calls “conditions of arrival.” In her discussion of the experiments with rats that sought to understand the conditions for infanticide, Despret writes,

The scientific literature informs us that this behavior can be exhibited by the mother, an unfamiliar male, or an unfamiliar female—one should probably add to this list of culprits the researcher and laboratory technicians who are in charge of euthanasia when the young rats become too numerous, but this would spoil the publications. (p. 106)

Here, what is excluded from the “study” as irrelevant and nondisciplinary is the violence of the laboratory’s conditions of existence. In the name of “studying” why rats kill other rats, human researchers kill rats without having to attend to this as part of the “phenomenon.” Although the scientists wouldn’t see it this way, Despret thus shows that they participate in the very “problem” they set out to understand.

Even setting aside what happens around the experiment that makes it possible, Despret worries about the politics of research that functions according to reduction and removal. Writing about these same experiments with rats, Despret writes,

One cannot ignore that these are extreme conditions of captivity [which lead rats to infanticide], that is, conditions of experimental captivity manipulated so as to induce stress, hunger, hostility, fear, and so on. In short, these are pathological conditions, carried to the extreme, that clearly have the goal to force the behavior; the researchers will repeat and vary the test until the desired behavior appears. (p. 107)

This is, for Despret, bad science, and it is also bad politics. Scientists who work this way transform conditions of living through reduction to render life pathological.

Taking up the etymology of “ethos” I discussed earlier, Despret writes, of her “new ethological practice,”

Admittedly, I am not using the term in its usual and narrow sense as a “science of animal behavior” but in a way that returns it to its etymology, ethos, and the manners, customs, and habits that tie together beings who share, that is, create together, the same ecological niche. (p. 196)

What emerges from this is what I am calling frisktion, where questions of knowing are inseparable from ethical questions of how to behave as we circulate and collide with others—many of us nonhuman—in particular milieux. Writing of Porcher’s work with the farmers, Despret writes,

If she asks them to think, and she actively asks this of them, it is not to collect information or opinions but to explore propositions with them, to provoke hesitation, to try to experiment, in the most experimental sense of the term: what does this do to think like this? (p. 179)

This is knowledge production not as truthful representation of a world, or positivist objectivity, but as experimental, almost Spinozist, ethics. The question of objective knowledge is not, strictly speaking “is this true?” but “what does this allow us to do?”

This “us” is never a given. I want to end, then, by thinking about how research might have to be thought of as a particular kind of hospitality. Riffing on Derrida’s provocative distinction between the Law of Hospitality without reserve and various laws of hospitality that govern particular sites and situations, Jen Gilbert (2014) writes,

Derrida reminds us that we cannot simply rest with the idea of being welcoming; such an idealization of welcome fails to consider how difficult it can be to encounter what is not yet known or understood. We must, therefore, pour our resources into imagining how we might govern that welcome. In the pedagogical moment when we enact an imperfect welcome, we must also be striving for an unconditional welcome. (p. 85)

This might be just another vocabulary for Despret’s ethology of ethology. As Haraway (2015) puts it, Despret’s

kind of thinking enlarges, even invents, the competencies of all the players, including herself, such that the domains of ways of being and knowing dilates, expands, adds both ontological and epistemological possibilities, proposes and enacts what was not there before. This is her worlding practice. (p. 5)

This is a thinking-with, and one that is never certain, in advance, of how far this “with” extends. That cannot be answered, except through a kind of ethical commitment to this enlarging. There is always more to what happens in the friction of a specific situation, and we need fictions that risk this enlargement. We need a frisktional ethology of our animal practices.