Report to the Academy

Last night I went to a talk by John Berger & others on ‘The look exchanged: The Human and the Non-human’.

I have little to report, to be honest. Berger thinks that years ago, at the beginning, it was not that we humans lived in a world with animals, rather we lived in the animal world – we were the minority and tried to understand and orientate ourselves through these creatures to which the world then seemed to belong.

And, says JB, If you burrow deep enough into language you find very often animal metaphors, analogies. In a sense, primitive Man finds itself in animals. This parallelism exists, vestigially, in the tradition of animal parables – Aesop > Robert Henryson. Today it is only perhaps children who find themselves in animals, before they are educated out of it. Beyond childhood, there is only sentimentality or indifference

But even until fairly recently, up to urbanisation, contact with animals was always there on a daily basis. When people were looking at animals (‘the look exchanged’) they saw in the animal something that had to do with their own relation to the world – the same puzzlement or whatever, so there was a kind of reciprocity between man and animal. (They perhaps shared a sommon task of survival/ endurance). When that ‘exchange of looks’ is taken away, Berger speculates, man feels increasingly lonely; 'and man, when he is lonely, actually becomes increasingly violent'.

I found all this rather, well, questionable, for reasons I can’t be bothered going into. ‘The look exchanged’ for example – isn’t this just what’s uncertain, isn’t it perhaps barter rather than exchange? Anyway, let me instead make a rather daft anecdotal observation. When Berger entered the room, he stood and looked round for a moment before spotting someone he knew. It struck me immediately, observing his idiosyncratically ‘lost’ expression, that he has the look of a dog or some other animal – wounded, disappointed by the human world, perplexed by its cruelties. Bear with me, and bear in mind that one of Berger’s books is indeed narrated from the point of view of a dog. In another essay, he tries to see the people at a zoo through the eyes of an ape. Perhaps in a few of Berger’s texts there is this moment of ‘regression into the animal soul.’ At such points he is like Kafka’s ape before the academy, pleading before the human community.

I think this holds the key to Berger’s preoccupation with animals: like Kafka, but also of course in a completely different way, the ‘animal’ is a point from which ‘the human community’ can be seen, by way of contrast. To posit and look at ‘the human’ can be done only from a position of minimal difference and distance. And this distance can be attained by retracting into the lost animal body. What Kafka’s little parable of the Ape before the Academy seems to suggest is that none of us are fully human, none of us are fully inducted into the human community, we are all, as it were, apes before the academy. Moreover, our ‘humanity’ is dependent in some way on this animal legacy/ residue.

A common defining fact about animals is that they do not have language. Thus, for humans, they seem to epitomise the mute suffering body, that basic corporeal fact that knows no translation into speech, which can never quite be ‘reported to the academy’. Humans thus typically see animals as beings who lack language, as the bearers of this lack. The pathos of the animal, the pity automatically extended to them – is it not a response to this perceived 'deprivation'? And in this perception, which is presumably an anthropocentric one, the human sees its own non-linguistic element. To have ‘humanity’ is frequently identified with this awareness of the mute suffering body, a body we see embodied most obviously in animals. And perhaps this is why for Berger the preservation of the link, the ‘exchange’ between humans and animals is key.