express and understand ourselves as beings in the world, we also express and create our relations with others. As we saw in the first chapter, Heidegger regarded other animals as poor-in-world (chapter 1): as beings without language and consequently without the opportunity to experience the world as such. This results not only in the assumption that non-human animals cannot experience the world as world, it also restricts Mitsein to humans (ibid.). However, like humans, other animals are “thrown into” a world that consists of meaning-giving structures from the moment they are born. These structures are formed by language, and other animals influence them by language, in interaction with others (Iveson 2010, 2012).
Being with others does not only involve being with members of the same species. Humans are already constantly with other animals and vice versa. We share a world with them, and some of us share our lives with them: this is part of what constitutes our sense of world and our perception of ourselves. Relationships and language games will, of course, vary between groups and individuals. Some non-human animals are very similar to humans in the way in which they express and understand the world, whereas others are very different. The examples of Howard and the birds and Hearne and her dogs show how individuals of different species can add new layers of meaning to their repertoires through interaction, and can together create new forms of language and understanding. The form of this language and the manner of creating meaning are not predetermined; they follow from the situated interaction and are shaped by the agency of the various animals involved.
Speaking Bodies
In creating common interspecies language games and common understanding we need to take the different ways in which animals express themselves into account. Hearne uses words, gestures, and body movements to teach Salty to retrieve; Salty runs and moves, and uses gestures, sounds, and eye contact to reply. Howard and the birds communicate with song, human words, gestures, movements, and other expressions. The body also plays a major role in human language games (Wittgenstein 1978), but so-called “body language” is often thought of as a weaker or less precise form of communication. Locating language in the mind refers back to Descartes’s mind-body dualism, and to an idealized view of language. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, the image of language as located in the mind can be challenged in different ways, and various philosophers (Derrida 2008; Heidegger 1927; Wittgenstein 1958, 1978) argued for a more situated idea of language, interconnected with relations and social practices. Wittgenstein (1958) also emphasizes that in language games, gestures, movements, ways of using one’s voice, and other expressions can be as important, or more important, than words.
In the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) we can find some helpful motives for further exploring the embodied aspects of language in an interspecies context. In developing his view of language, Merleau-Ponty focuses strongly on the role of the body, on the basis of which he also sees an ontological connection to other animals. According to Merleau-Ponty (1962), we are not thinking, but speaking subjects. Expression completes thought; speech does not translate thought into words, but rather accomplishes it. A thought is not a representation: speech and thought are interconnected. Thoughts are not internal, and do not exist separately from the words we use and the world in which they are used. Bodies play an important role in language because they form the shape of speech, and thus meaning. Expression brings meaning into existence, and words are so many ways of “singing of the world” (1962, 217). By locating meaning in the words themselves, Merleau-Ponty aims to refute both empiricism—according to which speech is a mechanistic response—and intellectualism (or rationalism) in which words are seen as empty containers for pre-formed thoughts. In contrast to Saussure, who privileged langue
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