For this blackbird, the word ‘importance’ imposed itself above all else. Something mattered, more than anything else, and nothing else mattered except the act of singing. And whatever it was that mattered was invented in a blackbird’s song, suffusing it completely, transporting it, carrying it onwards, to others, to the other blackbird nearby, to my body straining to hear it, to the furthest limits to which its strength could convey it. Perhaps that feeling I had of a total silence, clearly impossible given the urban environment beyond my window, was evidence that this sense of importance had seized me so powerfully that everything outside that song had ceased to exist. The song had brought me silence. The sense of importance had imposed itself on me.
Perhaps also the song affected me so powerfully because I had recently read The Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway.4 In this extremely beautiful book, the philosopher describes the relationship that she has forged with her dog, Cayenne. She explains how this relationship has had a profound effect on the way she relates to other beings, or, more precisely, to ‘relations of significant otherness’, how it has taught her to become more aware of the world around her, more closely attuned to it, more curious, and how she hopes that the experiences she has shared with Cayenne will stimulate an appetite for new forms of commitment with other beings who will one day matter in the same way. What Haraway’s book does, and I was struck by this in the context of my own experience, is to stimulate, encourage and bring into existence, to render attractive, other modes of attention.5 And to focus attention on these forms of attentiveness. It is a matter not of becoming more sensitive (a rather too convenient hotchpotch of a notion which could just as easily lead to allergies) but of learning how to pay attention and becoming capable of doing so. Paying attention here with an added sense of being attuned, of ‘giving your attention’ to other beings and at the same time acknowledging the way other beings are themselves attentive. It is another way of acknowledging importance.
The ethnologist Daniel Fabre would often describe his profession as one which focused attention on whatever prevented people from sleeping. The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro came up with a very similar definition of anthropology, describing it as the study of variations of importance. He writes moreover that, ‘if there is something that de jure belongs to anthropology, it is not the task of explaining the world of the other but that of multiplying our world.’6 I believe that many of the ethologists who observe and study animals, following in the footsteps of the naturalists who preceded them and who took this task so much to heart, invite us to follow a similar path: that of becoming aware of, of multiplying ‘modes of existence’ – in other words, ‘ways of experiencing, of feeling, of making sense, and of granting importance to things’.7 When the ethologist Marc Bekoff says that each animal is a way of knowing the world, he is saying the same thing. Scientists cannot, of course, dispense with explanations altogether, but explaining can take many very diverse forms. It can, for example, be a way of reconfiguring complicated stories as the vagaries of life which stubbornly insists on trying out every possible variation, or it can mean trying to seek answers for puzzling problems, the solutions to which have already been invented by this or that animal, but it can also reflect a determination to find a general all-purpose theory to which everything would conform. Put another way, there are explanations which end up multiplying worlds and celebrating the emergence of an infinite number of modes of existence and others which seek to impose order, bringing them back to a few basic principles.
The blackbird had begun to sing. Something mattered to him, and at that moment nothing else existed except the overriding obligation to allow something to be heard. Was he hailing the end of the winter? Was he singing about the sheer joy of existing, the sense of feeling himself alive once again? Was he offering up praise to the cosmos? Scientists would probably steer clear of such language. But they could nevertheless assert that all the cosmic forces of an emerging spring had converged to provide the blackbird with the preliminary conditions for his metamorphosis.8 For this is indeed a metamorphosis. This blackbird, who had probably lived through a relatively peaceful winter, albeit a challenging one, punctuated from time to time by a few unconvincing moments of indignation towards his fellow creatures, intent on maintaining a low profile and living a quiet life, is now singing his heart out, perched on the highest and most visible spot he could find. And everything that the blackbird had experienced and felt over the last few months, everything which had, until that moment, given meaning to things and to other creatures, now becomes part of a new importance, one which is urgent and insistent and which will totally modify his manner of being. He has become territorial.
Notes
1 1. E. Souriau, Le Sens artistique des animaux. Paris: Hachette, 1965, p. 92.
2 2. Ibid., p. 34.
3 3. Bernard Fort would moreover give the title ‘Exaltation’ to one of his electroacoustic compositions based on the songs of skylarks: Le Miroir des oiseaux (Groupe de Musiques vivantes de Lyon, produced by Chiff-Chaff records).
4 4. D. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
5 5. Baptiste Morizot invites us to take a similar direction with his conception of tracking as an art and a culture of attentiveness which encourages us to re-examine the ways in which we cohabit with other species as well as with humans.
6 6. E. Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014, p. 196.
7 7. D. Debaise, Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 2. The speculative question which runs through his work, ‘how to grant due importance to the multiplicity of ways of being within nature’, is based on the acknowledgement of the ever-present influence of what Whitehead called the ‘bifurcation of nature’, the effects of which are still being felt, notably in the denial of plural forms of existence within nature. The ‘bifurcation of nature’, which determines our modern experience of the world, refers to a way of understanding for which our experience reveals only what is apparent, whereas the elements necessary for the process of discovery and understanding are always hidden and must be found elsewhere. As a result, nature ends up divided into two distinct systems.
8 8. In the work of Louis Bounoure the expression ‘cosmic factors’ recurs repeatedly to indicate, in particular, the lengthening of daylight and the modification in temperatures. L. Bounoure, L’Instinct sexuel: étude de psychologie animale. Paris: PUF, 1956.
1 Territories
Unicum arbustum haud alit
Duos erithacos
(A single tree cannot shelter two robins)
Proverb by Zenodotus of Ephesus
(Greek philosopher, third century BC)
Scientists have found themselves genuinely intrigued by this process of metamorphosis. And not just intrigued, but moved at the same time. How can these birds, some of whom have been observed quietly living together through the winter, flying in unison, seeking food together, sometimes squabbling over apparently trivial matters, somehow, at a given moment, adopt a completely different attitude? From that point on, they isolate themselves from other birds, select a particular place and confine themselves to it, singing ceaselessly from one of their chosen promontories. Seemingly no longer able to tolerate the presence of their fellow creatures, they furiously devote all their energy to a frenzy of threats and attacks if any of these dares to cross a line, invisible to our eyes, but which appears to represent a remarkably well-defined border. The strangeness of their behaviour is astonishing enough, but even more striking is the aggressivity, the utter determination and pugnacity of their reactions towards others and, above all, what will later be referred
