animal affiinities
At the beginning of chapter two of The Savage Mind (entitled "the Logic of Totemism"), Lévi-Strauss discusses the "primitive identification" we feel with animals as the prime example of the kind of concrete knowledge out of which culture builds structured sets of terms. After quoting a native informant describing how links between his people and the animals stretch back into deep time ("our ancestors married the animals, learned all their ways, and passed the knowledge from one generation to another," 37), Lévi-Strauss goes on to assert that this sense of idenification with animals is universal, and may even be found among zoologists whose expertise otherwise consists in reducing animals to ecological niches and adaptive vectors. He relates the testimony of a zoo director whose close encounter with a dolphin was an experience of uncanny interpersonal exchange:
Flippy was no fish, and when he looked at you with twinkling eyes from a distance of less than two feet, you had to stifle the question as to whether it was in fact an animal. So new, strange, and extremely weird was this creature that one was tempted to consider it some kind of bewitched being.
(The zoo director's witness is so charming and familiar that it's almost possible to forget how the experience he's describing is essentially the opposite of the "native" testimony—which asserts that animals are family, cousins several times removed. The zoologist's experience of identification by contrast is one of radical unfamiliarity—it's fey, bewitching, almost supernatural. Something intervenes between these two—an alienation has taken place. But ouroboros-like, the phenomenon comes full circle. What began as a set of relations that produces magic ends as a kind of magical capable of making relationships. In short, there's a history of consciousness implied here, which CLS seems content to elide. But I digress.)
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
In Rilke's poem, too, the debris of archaic affinities makes its impact felt.
I was motivated to string these thoughts together after viewing a video slide show narrated by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicken, who relates his experience swimming with a leopard seal off Antarctica. The leopard seal is an apex predator in those waters—an efficient killer pursuing prey of all kinds, from tiny krill to emperor penguins and even other seals. It's a formidable presence in formidably alien waters, and Nicken's encounter with a hunting female is harrowing at first. But the seal seems to attempt to forge a relationship with Nicken, and even to feed him, during a series of dives over several days. Nicken concludes: "to have this top predator in Antarctica take care of me and nurture me and even feed me for four days straight was the most incredible experience." (Thanks for the link goes to Robin Sloan.)
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari charge Structuralism with erasing the numinous, charged quality of "becomings-animal"—those moments which are common to myth and the signal ingredient in shamanistic practice. In the structuralist view, they argue, "a man can never say, 'I am a bull, a wolf...' But he can say: 'I am to a woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep.'" There is a logic revealed and made accessible in these encounters—but Lévi-Strauss risks domesticating or neutering those irreducible experiences of animal-becoming to which not only the "savage mind" but all of us are susceptible. Is the encounter magical, uniquely intimate, or matter-of-fact? And if such an experience has a particular quality, does that mark it off as, savage, anti-scientific, or decadent? I want to think there's room for animal-becoming; for empirical, observable structure; for the scientist's disruptive spirit possession; and for the shard-gathering of a broken-hearted postmodern. These things interpenetrate one another; within each what matters is perhaps not structure but texture.
