cleanliness. The same word tells of the same struggle; in French, it has the same origin and the same meaning. Property is marked, just as the footstep leaves its imprint.’21
But this is not the reason for my severity towards him – quite the contrary in fact. That Serres should want to make us aware of, and outraged by, all the various market-driven operations of expropriation and appropriation is not the issue here, and I very much share his opinion on that subject. However, the fact that, for him, garbage and marks, as soiling gestures, are of animal origin seems to me all the more seriously problematic in that the gesture of appropriation is, in his view, synonymous with that of disappropriation and exclusion.22 The equation is too hasty. For this connection can be made only at the cost of a double simplification, a double negligence. Firstly, because it means forgetting that, for a tiger, a dog or a nightingale, territory does not equate to this or, indeed, to any one ‘single’ thing which could claim to unify a certain combination of types of behaviour. And, secondly, because this definition of ownership as a process of monopolizing and taking over seems to me to define living in a territory in too facile and simplistic a manner. By advocating a form of naturality in terms of territorial behaviour as an argument to denounce the right assumed by some people to pollute the air, the acoustic environment, shared things and space, Serres, without pause for question, associates the territorial behaviour of animals with a regime of possession and ownership and, as a result, assimilates it to a form of natural rights. In short, he attributes a modern and unchallenged conception of ownership to animals, turning the latter into petty little bourgeois property owners preoccupied with claiming exclusive ownership.
For me, it is not about wanting to defend the violated dignity of these animals caught up in a project which sets out to defend a damaged earth or polluted existences. But if we are indeed to reflect on the reappropriation of the earth, I believe that it is important to pay attention to the different ways of inhabiting it and to those who inhabit it alongside us. With this oversimplified ethology we are off to a very bad start.
It should be pointed out first of all that it is highly questionable to associate animal markings with dirtiness and to regard the latter as somehow the opposite of cleanliness. It is us, or most of us, who see excrement as dirty, but for many animals things are much more complicated. Anyone who has watched their dog wallowing enthusiastically in a decaying carcase or rolling in animal droppings will immediately understand that, as far as smells are concerned, we inhabit completely different universes. Secondly, putting mammals and birds in the same category is not really a good idea. True, marking and singing appear to share a common function in that both are done in order to signal presence. But mammals and birds have very different problems to resolve when it comes to announcing their presence and any similarities should be approached with considerable caution. It makes little sense to refer simply to ‘animals’. If certain birds – though this is more unusual – can indeed mark their presence by their droppings, they generally tend to favour the use of song and of what might be called intense demonstrations of their physical presence. Mammals, for the most part, have opted simply to suggest their presence. For most birds, territory is a site for display and spectacle. It is the place which enables the bird to be both seen and heard. Indeed, it would be perfectly reasonable to wonder if in certain cases (in the case of leks, or mating grounds, this is indisputably how things stand) it is not so much in order to defend their territory that birds sing and perform their various displays as that the territory provides them with a stage for those songs and displays. Some ornithologists have indeed suggested this to be the case.
Clearly many mammals have a very different ambition and therefore correspond closely to Jean-Christophe Bailly’s proposed definition of territory as a place where it is possible to hide, or, more precisely, a place where animals know where to hide.23 Songs and tracks or traces therefore already have only superficial similarities. It could be said that mammals are experts in the use of the metaphor in absentia – the tracks and traces suggest presence so that animals make their presence felt in their absence. For birds, on the other hand, having chosen the more literal choice of ‘Here I am’, everything is pretext for being seen and heard. One writer uses the term ‘broadcasting’ in reference to this process, a term which suggests dissemination, and this is clearly the case here, but one which also refers to advertising or promotion via the media (radio or television).24 If the term ‘broadcasting’ can be applied to both birds and mammals, it would nevertheless be used somewhat differently in each case. In the case of birds, the focus would be very much on the notion of ‘promotion’, of advertising, whereas for mammals who mark their territory, it would refer to the fact that not only are the transmitter and the message in different locations, but that the transmitter is able to leave multiple indications of presence by making sure every trace or mark left behind continues to broadcast its presence. The deferred power of ubiquity through messages.
Mammals need to resolve a problem which is much less difficult for birds, notably that of being present everywhere. Birds have the advantage of a much greater mobility and are capable of flying over their territory rapidly from one point to another, which is not the case for mammals, particularly since the latter seek to remain hidden. The problem of movement in space – the ability, or inability, to be everywhere at once – and that of needing to be seen or to remain hidden have been resolved in each case through a different relationship between presence and time. Birds, with their songs and displays, are in a regime of physical presence, whereas mammals, with their marking activities, have adopted a regime of historical presence. The tracks left behind by a mammal continue to be effective over a relatively long time (in relation to its actual presence at the site), with the animal seemingly present everywhere at the same time even though in fact any actual presence occurred some while previously. Droppings might in this context be seen as a kind of decoy, in that they create the effect of a presence in absence. But it is a decoy that fails to deceive anybody (though that does not affect its efficacy), since each message conveys an element of ‘watch out!’, or ‘be careful!’ And the message finds its mark. The traces or tracks left by the animal are therefore part of this process referred to as ‘stigmergy’, or ‘non-local rules of interaction’ through which the behaviour of certain animals can – whether in space or in time – affect the behaviours of others at a distance – just as ants leave behind them the pheromones which will alter the route of those following on behind. It is a form of presence which creates certain modes of attention. Moreover, it is rather sad that Serres, who so appositely succeeded in using the argument of writing in its broadest sense to portray the traces and tracks left by animals as the astonishingly sophisticated mechanisms of writing, capable of conveying a wide range of qualities and messages, should fail to consider, or rather deliberately choose to forget, that the hunter is not the only one to read tracks, that animals do so constantly and undoubtedly read them much more often and more accurately than humans. Equally sad that he should also have reduced them to a single function: that of dirtying something in order to appropriate it.
There remains one further matter, to which I shall be returning later (since singing could be interpreted in a similar way): if the act of marking does indeed create the effects of presence in absentia, certain writers have suggested, notably with reference to the mountain goat or to certain animals in captivity, that marking also represents an extension of the animal’s body in space.25 In this context, the term ‘appropriation’ takes on another meaning, since here it is a matter of transforming the chosen space not so much into something the animal ‘owns’, something which belongs to it, as into the animal ‘itself’. The distinction between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ is even less clearly defined, in that many mammals not only mark locations and objects, but they also mark their own bodies with their own secretions, transferring these onto different parts of the body. More astonishing still, many of them also steep themselves in the smell of objects found within the area of the territory – soil, grass, rotting carcasses, tree bark. The animal then becomes appropriated both by and into the space which it appropriates as its own by marking it, thus creating a physical bond with that place which renders the ‘self’ and the ‘non-self’ indistinguishable.
It is clear that what we are looking at here is something much more complicated than the simple regime
