eJournals Colloquia Germanica 52/3-4

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2021
523-4

Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You: An Animal Act by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec

31
2021
Thomas O. Beebee
This article explicates Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec’s thought experiment Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Para-naturaliste (1987) in the context of zoosemiotics, ethology, and Flusser’s broader philosophical inquiries into culture, nature, and art. Flusser chooses to mind-read and ventriloquize the vampire squid, a cephalopod who inhabits an aphotic world of complete darkness and isolation from humans. Flusser makes the squid an actant in his complex fable that plays against an environmental literature that attributes emotions and consciousness to animals, but only rarely to invertebrates who disgust humans due to their distance in evolutionary branching. Why, Flusser asks implicitly, do we exclude from such theory-of-mind considerations those aspects of human consciousness responsible for amoral, ahuman phenomena such as Auschwitz and nuclear weaponry? What corresponding phenomena for these can we posit in the animal mind? The result is a reconsideration of the function of art, culture, and communication.
cg523-40377
Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You: An Animal Act by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec3 7 7 Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You: An Animal Act by Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec Thomas O� Beebee Pennsylvania State University and Sichuan University Abstract: This article explicates Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec’s thought experiment-Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique de Recherche Para-naturaliste-(1987) in the context of zoosemiotics, ethology, and Flusser’s broader philosophical inquiries into culture, nature, and art�-Flusser chooses to mind-read and ventriloquize the vampire squid, a cephalopod who inhabits an aphotic world of complete darkness and isolation from humans� Flusser makes the squid an actant in his complex fable that plays against an environmental literature that attributes emotions and consciousness to animals, but only rarely to invertebrates who disgust humans due to their distance in evolutionary branching� Why, Flusser asks implicitly, do we exclude from such theory-of-mind considerations those aspects of human consciousness responsible for amoral, ahuman phenomena such as Auschwitz and nuclear weaponry? What corresponding phenomena for these can we posit in the animal mind? The result is a reconsideration of the function of art, culture, and communication� Keywords: art, zoosemiotics, ahumanism, fable The exchange had to do with four key elements: a sardine can, its placement in nearby water (more generally in a spatiotemporal physical locality), a flicker of sunlight reflecting off its metallic surface, and a comment uttered by the (should we say valiant) representative of the working class: ‘You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you! ’ (Lacan 95) The lesson of this anecdote, for Guatam Thakur and Jonathan Dickstein in their book on Lacan - who gladly accepted the label “ahuman” for his brand of psychoanalysis - and the nonhuman, is that “much like the sardine can, 378 Thomas O� Beebee the nonhuman (e�g�, ecology, things, animals) proves to exist in a problematic nonrelation with the witness - the so-called human” (Thakur and Dickstein 5)� This essay explores an “animal act” by the Austrian philosopher and media theorist Vilém Flusser (in words) and the paraphysical researcher Louis Bec (in sketches)� Flusser and Bec perform this problematic non-relationship using the most unseen of animal species, the Vampire Squid, and related imaginary species� Flusser will label his and Bec’s performance in their 1987 Vampyroteuthis infernalis: Eine Abhandlung samt Befund des Institut Scientifique De Recherche Paranaturaliste a “fable,” but several of its features cause it to contradict or exceed that genre� The “Ab-” should be removed from the text’s subtitle to reveal it as Handlung that conforms perfectly to the genre of zooësis, which Una Chaudhuri has defined as “the discourse of species in art, media, and culture” (Chaudhuri, Stage Lives 5)� The emphasis is on action, on “the ways the animal is put into discourse” (ibid�)� Animal acts are never just about the animals, but also about those humans who get them to perform, emphasizing “the coupling of the human to some other order of being” (Clarke 3)� Of course, environmentalism can and does proceed from other foundational beliefs not based on the direct relationality of human to nonhuman� One example would be the cybernetic approach to environment alluded to above: human abuses of the natural world create imbalances that result in positive feedback (e�g�, global warming) that put humans in peril� Self-interest alone should prompt humans to be wary of the consequences of their interventions in the natural world� As Heather Sullivan writes, human agency in the Anthropocene is taking on newly paradoxical aspects: on the one hand, the human species has achieved the scaled-up status of a geological force […]; on the other, our individual choices for change diminish down proportionately in contrast to the vastness of our species-wide planetary impact� This development radically shifts the meaning of human activity in terms of individual subjectivity and agency and the relationship to the non-human� (Sullivan 27) This “scaled-up status” would be another way that the ahuman reveals itself� Yet, a perceived empathy or human-animal “theory of mind” remains a strong subset of human self-contemplation, as expressed in the title of Pascal Eitler’s “Weil sie fühlen, was wir fühlen,” where the “sie” refers to animals� The book’s subtitle is Menschen, Tiere und die Genealogie der Emotionen im 19. Jahrhundert� The book reveals a gradual increase in the attribution of emotions and feelings to an ever-greater range of nonhuman animals over the course of that century� Recent books such as Baboon Metaphysics go even further, into the realm of protorationality (cf� Cheney and Seyfarth)� Why, Flusser and Bec’s zooësis asks implicitly, do we exclude from such theory-of-mind considerations those Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 379 aspects of human consciousness responsible for amoral, ahuman phenomena such as Auschwitz and nuclear weaponry? What corresponding phenomena for these can we posit in the animal mind? Flusser chooses to ventriloquize a creature whom we cannot see and who cannot see us, who inhabits an aphotic world of complete darkness and isolation from humans 600 to 1,000 meters deep in the ocean� We don’t see it, and it doesn’t see us - except in Flusser and Bec’s animal act, as we shall discover� Only in 2002, long after the publication of Flusser’s writing, was Bruce Robison able to provide moving images of the creature through deployment of an advanced photographic apparatus and computer animation� 1 What he and other scientists have found out about this football-size creature differs substantially from the image that Flusser gives� Either deliberately or through confusion with other species, Flusser depicts the squid as a carnivore and cannibal� In fact, Vampyroteuthis infernalis (hereinafter VI) is the only known detritivore squid, who does not actively seek out prey but floats and absorbs nutrients as these flow into its arms and beak� Flusser makes much of the semiotics of inking and photophorescence as protowriting, but VI does not ink, and its photophorescent skin cells are poorly developed� Unlike other squid, VI is able to essentially turn itself inside out, covering itself with its dark inner layer that camouflages it in the eternal night of the ocean depths� The fanciful “vampire” designation comes from the capelike appearance of its arms and from its eyes that are proportionally larger than any others in the animal kingdom� 2 Flusser deliberately chose an animal far apart from humans on the evolutionary tree in order to up the ante of his performance� Flusser’s intent, according to Cristina Trivellin, is to “proporre un’antropologia non antropocentrata, uno studio attento sull’ esser-ci umano assai meno esposto al rischio di contaminazione da parte della nostra stessa cultura” / “propose a non-anthropocentric anthropology, a study that is attentive to human Dasein as little exposed as possible to contamination from our own culture” (7; emphasis in the original)� The lack of actual interspecies semiosis is countered by the seemingly endless philosophical speculation enabled by our lack of scientific knowledge and shared experience� Zoosemiotics serves as an umbrella concept for eco-art, posthumanism, and scientific parody� The confounding of genres and intermedial presentation - Bec’s contributions are drawings of imagined Octopoda with descriptions in an invented language combining French, Greek, and neologistic sememes - grounds the reversal of perspective, inasmuch as Flusser ventriloquizes the vampire squid so that it contemplates humans� Under the squid’s withering gaze, fragile human cultural memory pales before the robustness of molluscan genetic memory, while both become mere footnotes in the larger theme of 380 Thomas O� Beebee anti-entropic ecoinformatics� Before reviewing the details of this contribution, let us set the background for zoosemiotics� In an article whose main purpose is a reading of Goethe’s poem “Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” Kate Rigby has provided a sketch of “Biosemiotics in Brief” that moves backwards from Thomas Sebeok to Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), for whom the inheritance of German Romantic/ Idealist philosophy was a bulwark against the relentlessly utilitarian and mechanistic Darwinist currents of the time (Rigby 26)� Biosemiotics proceeds from the basic conviction that biological processes are semiotic processes, with the eventual discovery of DNA coding as its trump card� Uexküll is credited with giving the German word “Umwelt” its modern meaning of environment, as in the title of one of his bestknown works, Streifzüge durch die Umwelt von Tieren und Menschen (1934)� The book contains numerous illustrations to visualize the difference between Umwelt and Umgebung� For example, a bee’s Umgebung may consist of flowers of various sizes and colors� Its Umwelt, on the other hand consists of geometric shapes such as stars, circles, and Xs, which are the signs that bees use in order to decide where the best pollen is (Uexküll 59)� The idea of Umwelt was taken up by but also questioned by philosophical anthropologists such as Helmuth Plessner, who sought to map the overall structure of consciousness, a Lebensplan that would unify and give purpose to the various stimulus-response mechanisms of higher organisms� One can hear echoes of Uexküll, for example, in Flusser’s description of the squid’s apprehension of its world through touch rather than sight, a decentralized and at the same time sexualized mode of cognition� One can hear echoes of Plessner, on the other hand, in the discussion of the squid’s “philosophy,” discussed below� In addition, one hears echoes of Fichtean Idealism and Heideggerian phenomenology in the following quote from the Vampyroteuthis infernalis that discusses precisely the situation of organisms within their Umwelt: Konkret ist weder der Organismus noch die Umwelt, weder Subjekt noch Objekt, weder Ich noch Nicht-Ich, sondern das Zusammentreffen beider� Es ist absurd, sich ein objektloses Subjekt oder ein subjektloses Objekt vorstellen zu wollen, eine Welt ohne mich und mich ohne Welt� “Da-sein” heißt in der Welt sein� Wenn es also Veränderungen gibt, dann nicht, weil ich mich verändere oder weil die Welt sich verändert, sondern im Gegenteil: weil sich die konkrete Beziehung “Ich-Welt” verändert, und das zeigt sich phänomenal in Veränderungen meiner selbst und der Welt dort draußen� Das muss man im Auge behalten, will man sich dem vampyroteuthischen Dasein nähern� (Flusser and Bec 34) 3 Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 381 The section continues (34-35) with a discussion of Martin Heidegger’s differentiation between “vorhanden sein” and “zuhanden sein,” followed by brief discussions of seeing by Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty� “Zoosemiotics,” as the term implies, marks out a subfield that concerns animal communication� As Thomas Sebeok explains, “this word has been coined to emphasize the necessary dependency of this emerging field on a science which involves, broadly, the coding of information in cybernetic control processes and the consequences that are imposed by this categorization where living animals function as input/ output linking devices in a biological version of the traditional information-theory circuit” (200)� The information-theory vocabulary here can be considered a translation of Flusser’s sublation of the supposedly distinct subject and object into a “Zusammentreffen” or circuit� As an “input/ output linking device,” an animal is both subject and object, part of a circuit that can also be called the “Ich-Welt-Beziehung�” A clear example of the linking device using birds comes from Flusser’s treatise Natural: Mind� Birds have evolved not in and of themselves, but for humans “[f]rom being the link between animal and angel [ ] have become objects for the study of group behavior� [ ] [S]uch a modification of our attitude in relation to birds and to flight (provoked by aviation and astronautics) has a significant effect on our view of the world� We have lost one of the dimensions of the traditional ideal of ‘freedom,’ and we have lost the concrete aspect of the traditional vision of the ‘sublime’” (21)� In Chaudhuri’s terms, the rules and norms of zooësis for birds have changed� The “Ich-Welt-Beziehung” can also be seen in the Abhandlung’s epigraph: “nihil humani mihi alienum puto” / “Nothing human is foreign to me�” The quote comes originally from a comedy by the Roman playwright Terentius, but it may be more familiar to modern readers through Fyodor Dostoevsky’s citation of it in Crime and Punishment� It is, in any case, a rather provocative, and certainly highly ambiguous and contradictory opening to a text which, by its title, may be supposed to concern itself with an animal� Looking back on this utterance from the (literal) depths of Flusser’s exploration, we are not sure whether a human is the subject of the enunciation, or a squid - thus making the utterance a perfect example of the subject-object circuit discussed above� In either case, however, the epigraph directly contradicts the purport of the performance, which is to use alienation effects to render humans barely recognizable� Yet at the same time, the subsequent performance also follows a straightforward reading of the epigraph, as Flusser predicts human evolution into “hive mind” mentality as the Information Age progresses� Knowledge of the world today is through media, meaning that communication is a web of circulated, mediated discourse and images, a constative statement amply illustrated by the experience most of us 382 Thomas O� Beebee have had of crowds of people standing or sitting at close quarters and ignoring each other as they stare at their cell phones� The epigraph follows a declaration of the disruptive purpose of the text, a kind of manifesto that precedes the title page and has not found its way into the English translation: “Die Kulturkritik hat von der darwinistischen Revolution so gut wie keine Kenntnis genommen� Deshalb ist sie unehrlich geworden: Sie betrachtet den Menschen und seine Kultur außerhalb des Kontexts der biologischen Entwicklung� Vilém Flusser und Louis Bec versuchen, diesen Zustand zu beenden” (Flusser and Bec n� pag�)� Notice that the first word here is “Kulturkritik,” which is criticized in the terms that have since become familiar in posthumanist and Anthropocene criticism: the problem with Kulturkritik is that the culture worthy of being critiqued is always human culture, precisely because “Culture is the injection of ‘values’ into a set of elements that is exempt of values called ‘nature�’ Things are natural (the technocrats say) when they cannot be judged ‘bad’ or ‘good’ (Natural: Mind 31)� This divide in values leads to the purpose of critique becoming the amelioration of human suffering so that humanity can maintain its position at the center of the planet� A “more honest” approach, with plenty of adherents among environmentalists, would decenter humans rather than preserve their position as the only creatures capable of culture� We will see shortly how Flusser hypothesizes a squid culture laden with countervalues� This “Unehrlichkeit” is unmasked at various points in the text, perhaps most strikingly when Flusser states that “[Die] Absicht [des Textes] ist […] die Tendenz des Lebens zur Sozialisation aus der optimistischen Perspektive des Fortschrittsdenkens in die etwas ernüchternde Perspektive der Nach- Auschwitz-Zeit und der thermonuklearen Ära zu heben” (Flusser and Bec 47)� Nothing human should seem foreign to us; progress and genocide are equally valid outcomes of socialization� These events of mass death cause Flusser to argue, against the more widespread view that the grouping of organisms into collective societies enables a more complex and adequate response to environment than can be achieved by individuals, that socialization is a form of the death-drive� The individual cell or organism surrenders its individuality to the “Überorganismus,” for example to the beehive or termite swarm� Superorganisms are biologically rather than politically organized� Similarly, VI are born out of clusters of eggs, and their social organization - such as it is - is based on the distinction sibling/ not-sibling: “Er ist biologisch bedingt, den Bruder in seiner hierarchischen Stellung anzuerkennen, und er wird frei, wenn er sich dieses Anerkennenmüssens entledigt hat� Freiheit ist für ihn Kannibalismus: den Bruder auffressen können” (Flusser and Bec 51)� Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 383 In Section III, “Die Welt des Vampyroteuthis,” Flusser uses Wilhelm Reich’s idea of repression as the creation of “Panzer” or armor as a way of discussing what memory looks like for animals� Flusser does not cite titles (as is typical for him), but the Reich book Charakteranalyse (1933; Character Analysis) contains several of the ideas that Flusser extends to mollusks� Whereas Freud had concentrated on the unconscious or “Es” as a repository of repressed narratives and symbols, Reich thought of it on a much more physiological plane, as a collection of instincts, most of which are repressed most of the time: The character armor is formed as a chronic result of the clash between instinctual demands and an outer world which frustrates those demands� Its strength and continued raison d’etre are derived from the current conflicts between instinct and outer world� The expression and sum total of those impingements of the outer world on instinctual life, through accumulation and qualitative homogeneity, constitute a historical whole� […] It is around the ego that this armoring is formed, around precisely that part of the personality which lies at the boundary between biophysiological instinctive life and the outer world� (Reich 156)� Flusser takes Reichian physiology several steps further� In Reich, character armor is a stiffening of the body, a holding of the head backwards, away from the groin, in a kind of S shape� For Flusser, an organism is a stratified memory constructed of superimposed repressions, the layers of memory forming its character armor� Here the idea of ecoinformatics becomes prominent, as information reaching back millions of years in the evolution of the species is stored in the skeleton and posture, and then read out again as “personality”: “Der Organismus wird dann als phänotypische Manifestation dieser genotypischen Verdrängung angesehen, d� h� als eine von latenter Energie geladene Bombe, in welcher die Summe der im Laufe des Lebens und der gesamten Lebensentwicklung erlittenen Pressionen aufgehoben wurde” (Flusser and Bec 27-28)� Moving the mouth backwards, away from the anus, creates aggressive personalities, most relevant here being the insects; when mouth and anus remain close to each other, as in the mollusks, the personality is generally soft and pliable� VI is an exception, a death machine that “makes love in order to make war” (28; English in original)� This includes aggression towards his own species, towards his “brothers�” But this phenomenon as well can be explained as the return of the repressed� As mentioned above, Flusser makes much of the fact that squid lay eggs in clumps, guaranteeing that there will be twins, triplets, and so forth, who then will face life together� According to Flusser, a kind of genetic memory is active that constantly reminds VI of its relative evolutionary closeness to ants, termites, bees, and other creatures in which the family, determined genetically by descent from a single female, has robbed all individuals of their freedom in 384 Thomas O� Beebee favor of the totalizing collective� VI struggles for freedom by cannibalizing as much of his family as possible� The reference to Auschwitz has a personal dimension for Flusser, and so at this point it is worth giving a bit of background on the author� Many readers will be familiar with Flusser as a philosopher of media� His theory of photography, Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (1983), is perhaps his best-known work, followed by his phenomenological essays collected in Gesten (1991)� But his writing in four languages is diverse, and includes his own family history� Flusser was born into a Jewish intellectual family in Prague in 1920� The Anschluss of 1939 caused him and his wife to emigrate to London, and eventually to Brazil� His entire family perished in the concentration camps� When the military dictatorship of Brazil dismissed all philosophy professors from university teaching in 1970, he returned to Europe, first to North Italy, and then to southern France, where he became a close friend of the co-author, Louis Bec� 4 The text of Vampyroteuthis infernalis consists of five chapters, followed by an appendix of Louis Bec’s drawings� The chapters are: Octopoda; Genealogy; The Vampyroteuthic World; Vampyroteuthic Culture; and Its Emergence [Sein Auftauchen]� The first chapter places Homo sapiens and Vampyroteuthis infernalis in their respective orders� They are both bilateral and eucoelomatic, i�e�, they have a body cavity with organs separate from the endoderm� On the other hand, humans belong to a branch that refined the endoderm, VI to a branch that evolved the ectoderm� At this point Flusser plunges into a discussion of vampryoteuthic Dasein� While doing so, he provides clues for the reader about how to interpret his text: In dieser Grundstruktur nämlich werden einige Züge des menschlichen Daseins ersichtlich� Andere wieder erscheinen darin völlig verwandelt� Somit kann ein Spiel mit verzerrenden Spiegeln aufgebaut werden, dank dem wir die Grundstruktur unseres eigenen Daseins aus weiter Entfernung und verzerrt wiedererkennen können� Ein derart “reflektierendes” Spiel soll erlauben, eine zwar sehr distanzierte, aber nicht “transzendente” Sicht auf uns selbst zu gewinnen� Die Sicht ist nicht transzendent, weil sie nicht, wie etwa die wissenschaftliche, von einem über der Welt schwebenden Standpunkt aus, zum Beispiel vom “objektiven”, auf den Menschen hinunterschaut� […] Der Mensch in seinem Wirbeltierdasein soll vom Standpunkt eines Weichtieres kritisiert werden� Wie die meisten Fabeln handelt auch diese scheinbar von Tieren� De te fabula narratur� (Flusser and Bec 12-13) The story is being told of you, says the Latin, reminding us of the text’s epigraph� “Fabula” in Latin means simply “story,” but its German (and English) derivatives have come to be restricted to a certain kind of allegorical story, in which animals are the characters that serve as vehicles for discussing human virtues and vices� Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 385 The dictum tells us that the traditional rule of the fable genre has the animal characters representing character types or behaviors and attitudes of people� Hence, the genre already fulfills aspects of the game of mirrors that Flusser intends: animals have human emotions and values, but are also unlike them enough that they can serve as a vehicle of analogy� Flusser instead introduces extensive details about this squid and about mollusks in general “because [the squid] is, in the end, nothing but our other as other” (Finger et al� 124)� Flusser later (Flusser and Bec 36) differentiates fable both from theory and from real life� The latter lacks any form of reflexivity, while the reflexivity of the former takes us outside of life altogether� In an interview, Flusser pointed to this motivation for his text as well: “Wie kann ich die gegenwärtige Kultursituation kritisieren, ohne in einen transzendenten theoretischen Raum auszuweichen� Und so habe ich mir vorgestellt: Was, wenn ich mir einen Gegenmenschen vorstelle? Was, wenn ich mir das Gegenteil vom Menschen vorstelle? ” (Zwiegespräche 91)� The images from Bec remind readers of emblemata, images with accompanying short texts, many of which could be called “flash fables�” But we recognize immediately aspects of this text that distance it from the fable genre� Most prominently, Flusser’s section provides details on the animal that are meant to be factual, adding an expository dimension not present in fables� Bec’s drawings belong unambiguously to another genre altogether: the bestiary, which is free to range between actually existing and imaginary creatures so long as they are described in detail, and which shares with the fable a moralizing tendency� “Vorstellen” in the quote above means “to imagine,” but also “to perform�” Taken together, the two parts of VI perform a set of mollusks� The VI may thus best be described as an “animal act,” in the recuperative sense given the term by Una Chaudhuri� One sure way of determining that a piece belongs to the category we are defining here - interspecies performance, the new kind of “animal act” - is that, whatever else animals may come to mean in the piece (and they will undoubtedly mean many things), we will be reminded - or we will want to remind ourselves - of their real existence, their actual being as members of a biological species with a specific morphology, geography, and history� And this will be so, I want to assert paradoxically, even when the animal being discussed belongs to an imaginary species� (“Animal Acts” 5) In an email to Rainer Guldin later published in Flusser Studies (“Vampyroteuthis infernalis� Postscriptum”), Flusser’s co-author, Louis Bec continued with the story of publication: one day, Flusser gave him the French text of Vampyroteuthis infernalis, as a kind of private textual discussion between the two� When Andreas Müller-Pohle then expressed interest in publishing the text, Flusser insisted that it belonged to Bec� Eventually, it was worked out that the text 386 Thomas O� Beebee would be co-authored between the two, with Bec using Flusser’s language as inspiration for his “artistic research” into future and possible molluscan lifeforms� Bec concludes his Postscript by reproducing a number of the drawings� Unlike in the published text, he provides a caption for each one, meant to demonstrate the role that Flusser’s language played in the production of Bec’s art� The first example explicitly mentions zoosemiotics: “Planche 1: le discours fascinatoire de Vilém (profondeur, bioluminescence, attributs morphologiques et zoosémiotiques)” / “Plate 1: Vilém’s fascinating language (depth, bioluminescence, morphological and zoosemiotic characteristics)�” But zoosemiosis in its various subcategories and media is present in all the images, for example: “Planche 9: Une vivacité épistémologique et sémaphorique des connaissances” / “Plate 9: an epistemological and semaphoric liveliness of knowledge�” The plate depicts a creature whose name is “Lalokame Semaphoroïde�” End effect: zoosemiotics on steroids� 5 Fiction writers have long turned the fable on its head, disrupting the allegorical transfer of moral characteristics in favor of a “Spiel” of puzzled mutual observation� Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo have compared Flusser’s text with the 1956 short story “Axolotl” by Julio Cortázar, and with the 1936 novel War of the Newts by the Czech writer Karel Čapek (Finger et al� 127-29)� In the former, a person is obsessed with observing a type of salamander (Ambystoma mexicanum) native to Mexico and known by its Nahuatl name “axolotl�” His obsession reaches the point that, at the end of the story, we see his consciousness being transferred inside the amphibian’s body, who now is obsessed with observing the man who comes to visit him in the aquarium from time to time� Intertextually, the story recalls the metamorphoses of Ovid and the animal writings of Franz Kafka� On the metaliterary level, it is a disruption of the analogic of fabular narrative� Čapek narrates human exploitation of newts as objects of experimentation and also of culinary delectation, despite their high degree of intelligence� The newts take their revenge and eliminate humans, but then destroy themselves in a civil war� The next section of Vampyroteuthis infernalis is devoted to a genealogy of mollusks and cephalopods� Flusser puts forward the idea that human’s relative disgust with other animals results from their genealogical distance and their relative difference from humans� By the same token, however, cephalopods are far more interesting to humans than is the distant universe, due to a subjective overlap in both species’ swimming in the stream of life: Cephalopoda sind interessant, insoweit wir uns in ihnen wiedererkennen, insoweit sie ein Teil jenes Lebensstromes sind, der uns selbst mitreißt� Und die Wissenschaft als Ganzes ist interessant, insoweit sie ein Versuch ist, uns selbst in der Welt zu orien- Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 387 tieren� […] Insofern sie “objektiv” wird, wird sie unmenschlich� Nicht “rein” wird sie, sondern ein Wahnsinn� Die Gegenwart fordert uns heraus, die wissenschaftliche Objektivität zugunsten neuer Forschungsmethoden aufzugeben, ohne dabei notwendigerweise auf die vorher gewonnenen “objektiven” Erkenntnisse verzichten zu müssen� Eine dieser neuen Forschungsmethoden wird von der Phänomenologie vorgeschlagen� Es wird versucht, sie hier anzuwenden� (Flusser and Bec 19) An apology for cephalopods becomes, simultaneously, a cultural critique of science, whose abstract communications and basis in matheses are inhuman and thus alienating� The disgust that humans feel towards animals without skeletons, a result of our distance in the branchings of the evolutionary tree, nevertheless is a form of interest that binds us to them more than to abstract science� A few pages later, the commonality between Octopoda and humans is made even more explicit� Both are capable of Geist, which is simply a particular item among thousands in the agenda of life that has been shaped by contingency: “Der Geist steht im Programm des Lebens, er verdeutlicht sich seit den Protozoa, und zwar in Mensch und Vampyroteuthis auf konvergierende Weise, analogisch� […] Wenn wir also im Vampyroteuthis - in Analogie zu uns selbst - ein geistiges Wesen erkennen, dann anerkennen wir die blinde Sturheit des Würfelspiels ‘Leben�’” (Flusser and Bec 25) The characterization of programming as a roll of the dice may seem paradoxical, but it finds its pedigree in other writing by Flusser� For example, we can connect this passage with the essay “Unser Programm,” which is part of the collection Nachgeschichte that is comprised of chapters that begin with the possessive pronoun “Unser�” After “Unser Programm,” which is the first, we find “Unsere Arbeit,” “Unser Wissen,” “Unser Schrumpfen,” and “Unser Rausch,” among others� Flusser argues that there have been to date only three ways of viewing human existence: teleological, which sees humans as the culmination of evolution; causal, which places them in a sequence of inevitable evolutionary moves; and programmatic, which sees humankind - along with everything else - as products of contingency� This last results from the positing of an infinite universe, in which an infinite number of possibilities can be played out an infinite number of times - an incessantly repeated throwing of the dice� In some of these scenarios, consciousness emerges, while in others, it does not� It would be an interesting game to estimate the number of times the dice have been rolled, from the first coming together of organic material to create a life form, all the way to present-day humans� Flusser instead asks us to consider the music of Mozart not as inevitable, but as the product of a string of contingencies: So wunderbare Werke wie Figaros Hochzeit waren in einem gegebenen Stadium der westlichen Welt unumgänglich, obwohl es absurd wäre, sie in ihrer Anlage, zum 388 Thomas O� Beebee Beispiel in der Musik des Cro-Magnon, zu suchen� Programme sind Spiele, die, wenn genügend lang gespielt, notwendigerweise alle, auch die unwahrscheinlichsten ihrer Kombinationsmöglichkeiten zufällig verwirklichen müssen” (Flusser, “Unser Programm” 24)� The roll of the dice becomes wonderfully transparent through Flusser’s juxtaposition of Cro-Magnon music with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro� Both count as music, both are made by humans, and we assume that European classical music has a long prehistory, rather than being a sudden, recent invention ab ovo� Yet the sequencing of the latter work’s genealogical relation to its distant starting point seems futile, due to the number of rolls of the dice that have occurred� The emergence of consciousness is another such event� Analogous are the various contingencies that led to evolutionary branchings that made Homo sapiens seem to have so little to do with VI, despite a common ancestry - and, Flusser argues, a shared propensity for reflective thinking and for art, though these are of wildly different qualities� The recognition of consciousness in animals is a hallmark of deep ecology and of posthumanism; it is worth noting in this context that the octopus is the only invertebrate to be included in the 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in the following formulation: “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness� Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates” (Low et al� n� pag�)� The special plea for Octopoda in the statement, bypassing fish, for example, seems to speak to Flusser’s claim that invertebrates generally evoke disgust in humans, causing us to overlook the possibility of such animals thinking and feeling� Greater context is given by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith in his book Other Minds: Octopuses, the Sea, and the Origins of Consciousness� Like Flusser, Godfrey-Smith spends much time explaining the evolutionary branching that created two different kinds of consciousness� Like Flusser, Godfrey-Smith relates octopodal thinking to its lack of a skeleton, resulting in a distributed brain and embodied consciousness� Like Flusser, Godfrey-Smith speculates intensely on the question of animal communication, be this through tactile or semiotic signaling� And while the latter author does not use the word “culture” to describe the relationship between animals, he does hint at the possibility of a color-based semiotics: The [octopuses] often go through unexplained sequences of colors even when, as far as I can tell, no other octopuses are nearby� Perhaps the camera is their intended audience in these cases� That’s possible� But another possibility is one that takes things more at face value� I think these animals have a sophisticated system designed for Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 389 camouflage and signaling, but one that is connected to the brain in a way that leads of all sorts of strange expressive quirks - to a kind of ongoing chromatic chatter� (Godfrey-Smith 128) What name should we give to these “expressive quirks” in chromatic display, for which we can detect no Zweckmäßigkeit? The octopus producing the colors without a receiver seems to resemble a garret-dwelling poet pouring out the sufferings of his soul into verse� As a scientist, Godfrey-Smith tries not to cross the boundary of what he has actually observed� The above passage is perhaps the most speculative in his book, and he is careful not to anthropomorphize his octopod: is consciousness required for one to have “expressive quirks”? Flusser feels free to hypothesize more deliberate purposes for the complex chromatic and ink displays of his squid� The first and most primary is deception: Die vampyroteuthischen Codes sind von der Art der Spionagecodes: Sie sollen nicht entschlüsselt werden bzw� sie verleiten zu irreführenden Schlüssen� Die Absicht hinter der vampyroteuthischen Kommunikation, hinter seiner Kultur, ist, den anderen in die Irre zu führen, um ihn verschlingen zu können� Es handelt sich um eine Kultur des Trugs, des Als-ob, des Falschen� Man könnte sie auch eine Kultur der Kunst im weitesten Sinn dieses Wortes nennen� (Flusser and Bec 46) The view of art as primarily a form of deception goes all the way back to Gorgias’ “Encomium of Helen,” and emerges repeatedly in Western intellectual history, for example in Augustine, Sir Philip Sydney, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Theodor Adorno� Flusser, however, mentions of these only Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of the world as will and representation (Vorstellung), while using Friedrich Nietzsche’s elaboration of the concept in his actual explanation: “Die vampyroteuthische Kultur ist ein Licht- und Farbenspiel, ist eine Vorstellung, in welcher sich der Wille zur Macht dieses rasenden Raubtiers maskiert” (Flusser and Bec 46)� In a later passage, however, Flusser puts forth a rather different explanation for the “Farbcodes”: art� Bypassing the centuries-long volume of criticism that ascribes an aesthetic function to art, Flusser considers it merely artificial memory, a way that humans have of preserving information by impressing it into material� Animals, on the other hand, have apparently not used this method, and it is completely impossible for deep-sea creatures whose watery environment carries everything away� 6 For them, memory can only be preserved and transmitted intersubjectively, not through materials� Flusser interprets the color displays that puzzle Godfrey-Smith as “schöpferische Tätigkeit�” The octopus has had a thought, learned something new, and is working it out through chro- 390 Thomas O� Beebee matic displays, like an accountant works the beads on an abacus� The next step, however, is the need to transmit this new information, which otherwise would remain with the individual and eventually be lost: Der schöpferische Prozess der vampyroteuthischen Kunst besteht demnach aus zwei Phasen� Erstens, die Datenverarbeitung durch den Künstler selbst: Das bisher Unsägliche und Unerhörte wird artikuliert, und zwar als Ejakulation im Orgasmus� Zweitens, das Verführen des Partners: Ein Kunstgriff bringt den anderen zum Orgasmus, um es ihm zu ermöglichen, das Artikulierte in seinem Gedächtnis zu lagern� Künstlerisches Schaffen ist daher Ausdruck aus sich hinaus und Eindruck auf den anderen� Es ist Vergewaltigung des anderen, um im anderen unsterblich zu werden� (Flusser and Bec 55) In this passage, Flusser brings into conjunction his three ideas of art: as memory, as deception; and as rape� In order to make information collective rather than individual, but lacking the ability to inform materials into repositories for cultural memory, a squid seduces another squid and injects its genetic material in order to be remembered through that creature� This account of squid art is unrepentantly Lamarckian; indeed, even Jean-Baptiste Lamarck did not go so far as to suppose that a single mental state will become part of evolutionary inheritance, but rather only repeated behaviors� The account is, as well, a performative act of pure speculation, of zooëtic imagination� It can neither be proved nor disproved� Traditionally, at the top of the pyramid of productions of Geist as source of willed semiotic complexity has been art, which then joins emotion and consciousness as a litmus test for the difference between human and machine, human and animal� Thomas Sebeok, the next generation after Uexküll, made the question of animal art a key part of his semiotic investigations� Flusser bypasses this line of inquiry, going directly to a Platonic-flavored characterization of Vampyro-art as deception� But there is a second function of art that, in Flusser’s performative imagination, unites squid with human: memory� Not expression, but memory - albeit memory of the unique experience or vision that the artist wishes to express, is the purpose of art, and humans have inscribed such memories in various materials that will ultimately perish, whereas the squid has them written directly into the brains of its “public�” Again, art as intersubjective rather than material, and as a kind of rape: Eine Kunst also, die nicht künstliche Gedächtnisse herstellt (Kunstwerke), sondern die ihre Informationen unmittelbar an die Gehirne der Artgenossen weitergibt, damit sie dort gespeichert werden� […] Es ist Vergewaltigung des anderen, um im anderen unsterblich zu werden: Kunst als Strategie der Vergewaltigung, des Hasses; Kunst als Ahumanism, Art, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, and You 391 Täuschung, als Fiktion, als Lüge; Kunst als trügerischer Schein, also als “Schönheit” - und dies alles in der Stimmung des Orgasmus (Flusser and Bec 63)� But here is where human culture continues to approach that of the vampire squid: having entered the Information Age, most of us no longer manipulate objects, but rather codes, and in which we commit to memory not what we have directly seen, felt, and experienced, but what various media have informed us about� Art becomes ever less material, and hence ever more “liquid,” in digital and other technical forms of copying� For example, digital art - which Flusser predicted but did not experience - allows for the first time texts to consume or reconstitute themselves upon being opened and read� The ephemerality is achieved through the material substrate necessary to programming, but which remains mostly invisible to the viewer or reader� Thus, a performance that began on the ground of zoosemiotics and evolutionary theory, so as supposedly to understand a mysterious sea creature, concludes as a prophecy of the future of art and media� In Does Writing Have a Future? , Flusser posits that the increased availability of writing due to print culture finally pushed pictogram codes out of their central position and into “such corners as museums and the unconscious” (147)� In Flusser’s view, digital codes are now replacing alphabetic codes, human thought is moving from ideological to extracranial, ahuman thinking, though alphabetic writing - including Flusser’s - is putting up resistance� He and Bec redeploy the fable genre to create an intermedial animal act that situates itself on the frontlines of a seismic shift in the semiotics of human culture� Notes 1 See Robison, “The Vampire from the Abyss�” 2 For these and other facts, and an image of the squid, see “Vampire Squid�” 3 It is perhaps worth mentioning the consonance of Flusser’s statement with the organisms-in-environment approach of the American philosopher John Dewey, who argued, for example, that “The idea of environment is a necessity to the idea of organism, and with the conception of environment comes the impossibility of considering psychical life as an individual, isolated thing developing in a vacuum” (56-57)� 4 In a 2007 email to Rainer Guldin, Bec described it as a friendship of 17-18 years� 5 The drawings may be viewed by going to Bec’s online “Postscriptum�” 6 The film Arrival (2016) depicts squid-like aliens who have developed a form of writing using their ink� 392 Thomas O� Beebee Works Cited Bec, Louis� “Vampyroteuthis infernalis� Postscriptum�” Flusser Studies 4 (2007): n� pag� Web� 15 Jan� 2019� Čapek, Karel� War with the Newts� Highland Park, NJ: Catbird P, 1985� Chaudhuri, Una� “Introduction: Animal Acts for Changing Times, 2�0: A Field Guide to Interspecies Performance�” Animal Acts: Performing Species Today� Ed� Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes� Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2014� 1-12� —�The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance� New York: Routledge, 2017� Cheney, Dorothy L�, and Robert M� Seyfarth� Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007� Clark, Bruce� Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems� New York: Fordham UP, 2008� Dewey, John� “The New Psychology�” The Early Works, 1882-1898� Ed� Jo Ann Boydston� Vol� 1� Evanston: Southern Illinois UP, 1967� 48-60� Eitler, Pascal� “Weil sie fühlen, was wir fühlen”. 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