Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

ISBN-13: 9780822352723

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publication Date: 07-10-2012

Pages: 312

Product Dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

Series: Perverse Modernities

Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read an Excerpt

Animacies

Duke University Press

Chapter One

This chapter aims to recover the alchemical magic of language, whether benevolent or vicious, by demonstrating explicit ways that it animates humans, animals, and things in between. I suggest that this can be done in collusion with existing registers of citizenship, race, sex, ability, and sexuality, depending on the recurrent materializations of iterative power; and it might possibly be done without abandoning the nonhuman animal to the realm of the nonlinguistic (as dominant hierarchies foretell). Language's fundamental means, I suggest, is something called animacy, a concept most deeply explored in cognitive linguistics.

In what follows, I sketch a brief history of the study of animacy within linguistics, as I range beyond the borders of that discipline to think through how de-animation (by way of objectification) also proceeds through and within speech. I go directly to linguistics and ask after its own devices, beginning with the moment in anthropological linguistics where animacy hierarchies first appeared. Then I provisionally deploy a specific framework from the subfield of cognitive linguistics, insisting on the generally untold stories of conceptual mattering and materiality that lie there. I then turn to questions of objectification that have long circulated in critical race, feminist, and disability theory; for while, as I will demonstrate, objectification is a preeminent kind of mattering, its linguistic instance is far from a self-evident process. I pay special attention to how the "animal" is re lentlessly recruited as the presumed field of rejection of and for the "human."

Introducing Animacy

For linguists, animacy is the quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences. Bernard Comrie calls animacy an "extralinguistic conceptual property" that manifests in "a range of formally quite different ways ... in the structure of different languages." Despite animacy's apparently extralinguistic character, however, it pushes forward again and again: Comrie explains that "the reason why animacy is of linguistic relevance is because essentially the same kinds of conceptual distinction are found to be of structural relevance across a wide range of languages."

Mutsumi Yamamoto notes that, by necessity, no treatment of animacy can be limited to the linguistic, for animacy lies within and without. While animacy does not behave in a regular fashion in relation to language structures, it retains a consistent cross-linguistic significance that no other concept seems to address: "the same kind of conceptual distinction seems to be working as a dominant force in various different structural and pragmatic factors across a wide variety of languages in the world." Furthermore, Comrie notes that even if animacy is not apparently structurally encoded in a language, it can influence the direction of language change, as in the case of Slavonic languages. Even if language is in some sense tuned to animacy, animacy is clearly not obligated to it. Does animacy slip out of language's bounds, or does language slip out of animacy's bounds? In this book, the slippage of animacy in relation to its successive co-conspirators will be a repeating, and in my view most productive, refrain.

Many scholars credit animacy's first serious appearance in linguistics to Michael Silverstein's idea of an "animacy hierarchy," which appears in a comparative study of indigenous North American Chinookan, Australian Dyirbal, and other indigenous Australian languages published in 1976. While most understandings of animacy today depart from Silverstein's binary-features account and his focus on finding an explanation for ergative languages, largely in first, second, and third personhood, his initial insights and formulations maintain relevance today in their close pairing of extralinguistic factors with linguistic structure.

Ergative languages (such as Basque) are distinguished from accusative languages (such as Japanese and English) by how their behavior is mapped in relation to transitive verbs (verbs that have a subject and direct object) and intransitive verbs (verbs with only one argument, a subject). How the subjects or objects of these two types of verbs receive "case marking," that is, a grammatical indicator of their semantic role in relation to the action of the verb, determines the overall language classification. In accusative systems, the object of a transitive verb (the lion ate me) can receive distinct marking, whereas the subject of a transitive verb (I ate the lion) and the subject of an intransitive verb (I panicked) are the same. In ergative systems, the subject of a transitive verb receives ergative case marking, unlike the object of the transitive verb or the subject of an intransitive verb. Such behavior, however, is not entirely fixed. Many ergative languages exhibit "split" behavior in which both ergative and accusative case markings are possible for certain subject or object arguments; that is, certain expressions can be rendered either way.

Silverstein explained this split by proposing a hierarchy of animacy. He claimed that many similar Australian languages appeared to show "splits of ergativity patterned with respect to a lexical hierarchy," locating the determining line of distinction between ergative and accusative markings in the characteristic semantics of nouns:

In this paper, I want to bring out the fact that "split" of case-marking is not random. At its most dramatic, it defines a hierarchy of what might be called "inherent lexical content" of noun phrases, first and second person as well as third person. This hierarchy expresses the semantic naturalness for a lexically-specified noun phrase to function as agent of a true transitive verb, and inversely the naturalness of functioning as patient of such. The noun phrases at the top of the hierarchy manifest nominative-accusative case-marking, while those at the bottom manifest ergative-absolutive case marking. Sometimes there is a middle ground which is a three-way system of O-A-S case markings. We can define the hierarchy independent of the facts of split ergativity by our usual notions of surface-category markedness.

Silverstein observed that less animate subjects were more likely to receive special ergative marking, in a kind of communicative reassurance that such types of subjects could indeed possess the agentive or controlling capacities required to do the action provided by the verb. More animate subjects did not need this marking and could receive regular nominative (unmarked) case. His observations resulted in a suggested "hierarchy of animacy" from inanimate to third, second, and first personhood: "So the case-marking system here seems to express a notion of the "naturalness" or unmarked character of the various noun phrases in different adjunct functions, particularly the transitive ones. It is most 'natural' in transitive constructions for first or second person to act on third, least 'natural' for third to act on first or second. Decomposed into constituent hierarchies, it is natural for third person to function as patient (O) and for first and second persons to function as agent (A), but not vice-versa. The marked cases, ergative and accusative, formally express the violations of these principles."

First- and second-person animacies, all else being equal, tend to value higher in animacy than third-person ones. Later studies found that another major parameter of animacy is the individuation scale. More easily individuated entities than those that are massified or "instances of a type" receive more animacy. Furthermore, Silverstein noted that the hierarchy was implicational: if a borderline entity behaved in a certain way, then those entities below its animacy level could not behave syntactically as if they were more animate. We can begin to see here how racism, stereotyping, and a lack of empathy can coconspire to construct deflated animacies for some humans (and, arguably, some nonhuman animals) in spite of biological equivalences.

Perhaps the broadest cross-linguistic study of animacy hierarchies was done by John Cherry. Cherry's study, representing several language families and including Swahili, English, Navajo, Shona, Chinook, Algonquian, Hopi, Russian, Polish, and Breton, yielded a summary that roughly characterizes each station (with its own hierarchical orders) in an animacy hierarchy, and offered perhaps the most detailed summary of its kind:

Humans:

adult > nonadult; male/Masc gender > female/fEM gender; free > enslaved; able-bodied > disabled; linguistically intact > prelinguistic/ linguistically impaired; familiar (kin/named) > unfamiliar (nonkin/unnamed); proximate (1p & 2p pronouns) > remote (3p pronouns).

Animals:

higher/larger animals > lower/smaller animals > insects; whole animal > body part;

Inanimates:

motile/active > nonmotile/nonactive; natural > manmade; count > mass;

Incorporeals:

abstract concepts, natural forces, states of affairs, states of being, emotions, qualities, activities, events, time periods, institutions, regions, diverse intellectual objects.

This schema asserts that an adult male who is "free" (as opposed to enslaved), able-bodied, and with intact linguistic capacities, one who is also familiar, individual, and positioned nearby, stands at the top of the hierarchy as the most "animate" or active agent within grammars of ordering. Lower down, and hence less agentive, would be, for example, a large, distant population of females. Lower still would be nonhuman animals (ranked by size). Near the bottom would be something like "sadness." Obviously, this conceptual ordering has profound ramifications for questions of gender and sexuality, species difference, disability, and race (though race as such is not broached on Cherry's list); the hierarchalizations written into these questions are explored in the following chapters. Cherry deems these hierarchalizations socially significant cognitive categories, but not others. To that extent, his work does not begin to contend with the social, political, and often colonial contexts that subtend these very categories. The merit of Cherry's work is that, for him, "animism" is a generalized perspective rather than a belief system proper only to "primitive societies." And he further cautions against taking the list as rigid.

Yet in a subtler vein, Cherry does seem to align "adult" taxonomies (in contrast with underdeveloped "child" taxonomies, which are considered rife with errors, full of anthropomorphizing slippages between animal, inanimate matter, and human) with more hierarchalized relations between elements, in the form of popular biological understandings that encode more expected horizontal and vertical relations among humans, nonhuman animals, and plants. Taking animacy variabilities seriously, and not just as a matter of child development, has consequences for possible resistance to what Cherry calls "adult" taxonomies. It further demonstrates the likelihood that language users will draw differing lines between what is "socially constructed" and what is "biological." The cross-linguistic consistencies among the data do not vitiate this possibility of variation, even if they might press us to contend with the notion that something widespread (even universal, that is to say, prevalent as a norm) about preferred manners of distinguishing things just might be going on. Why, after all, are person distinctions so common?

Studies of linguistic animacy tend to culminate in the idea that for all of animacy's many component features, their significance is collective: it is their derivation, or the contextual importance of some factors over others, that results in the most likely effector of the possible action denoted by the verb. Comrie tentatively wrote, "A high degree of animacy is necessary for a noun phrase to be interpreted as having a high degree of control or as an experiencer, but is not a sufficient condition."

Yamamoto, the author of the most recent comprehensive study of linguistic animacy, has been even more salubriously tentative, writing that "in addition to the life concept itself, concepts related to the life concept—such as locomotion, sentiency, etc.—can also be incorporated into the cognitive domain of 'animacy.'" That is, lifeliness in itself does not exhaust animacy. Even though animacy seems to be generally scalar, it is not monolithic, since it is sensitive to further distinctions; locomotion might trump sentience in one instance, whereas the relation is reversed in another instance. More importantly, animacy is realized in sometimes radically different ways both within and across languages. Yamamoto shows how many instances controvert what the generalized animacy hierarchy predicts, even when biological theories that contradict this hierarchy stand beside such "knowledge," whether because of early language conflations, fanciful imagination, or a remarkable cosmology. (She shows this even though she offers as examples the rather innocent ones of child language, profound companion animal horizontality, fictional conceit, and language representing decisions made by corporations.) That abstractions tend to be placed at the bottom of animacy hierarchies belies the fact that they are easily gendered or personified; consider the conventionalized gendering in the United States of weather forces such as hurricanes.

Furthermore, animacy variations may be within languages or across them. For instance, within English, some language users may not make any distinctions in animacy with their dogs, while others do; whereas in Manam, an indigenous language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the dual and paucal grammatical forms are used only for humans and a select group of "domesticated dogs, birds (including fowls), and now domesticated goats, horses and other larger animals introduced quite recently into New Guinea," though not necessarily used for the same animals when they are wild.

Given animacy's insistent presence, as well as its variation, it is compelling to consider where and how such hierarchies might be generated. For Cherry, animacy (which he calls animism) is a phenomenologically derived intuitive recognition of like kind on the basis of one's own embodiment, purposiveness, and activity, which is installed early in development: "We are necessarily oriented to other entities in the very terms implicit in our orientation to our own selves. Phenomenologically, the first figure against the background of the world is always oneself." This "like kind" recognition is similar to what Ronald Langacker calls an empathy hierarchy. Yamamoto also attributes animacy's very hierarchical nature to anthropocentric human cognition, but pointedly asks, "why [are] Homo sapiens supposed to be much more 'animate' than, say, amoebae?" Further, she points out that linguists themselves, beholden to human supremacy, have often unthinkingly made the error of substituting "human/nonhuman" distinctions for "animate/inanimate." The degree of anthropocentricity most certainly varies, is arguably more cultural than universal, and helps us to see how certain animate hierarchies or animate variants become privileged in one group or another.

If animacy not only works in different ways for different cultures but indicates different hierarchalizations of matter, then it is critical to distinguish between relatively dominant formulations of animacy hierarchies and relatively subordinated ones, a project that seems all too vital for studies that reify the place in "nature" of non-Western or subordinated cosmologies. (If we were to assume that nonhuman animals themselves had animacy hierarchies as part of their ontology, then we could count nonhuman animacy hierarchies as also subordinated.) There is thus good cause for either serious consideration of subordinated animacy realizations or—as is my project here—mapping the coercivities and leakages of the dominant ones.

The rest of this book focuses on this conceptual hierarchy in the context of the recent United States, while retaining a grasp on the renderings of it presented here. While I consider the animacy hierarchy as linguists do, as a prevalent conceptual structure and ordering that might possibly come out of understandings of lifeliness, sentience, agency, ability, and mobility in a richly textured world, I actively contextualize this hierarchy as a politically dominant one, one potentially affected and shaped by the spread of Christian cosmologies, capitalism, and the colonial orders of things. In this way, I depart from Yamamoto, Cherry, and Comrie, since my understanding of grammar expands beyond linguistic coercion to broader strokes of biopolitical governance.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Animacies by MEL Y. CHEN Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

<

What People are Saying About This

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Animating Animacy 1

Part I Words

1 Language and Mattering Humans 23

2 Queer Animation 57

Part II Animals

3 Queer Animality 89

4 Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation 127

Part III Metals

5 Lead's Racial Matters 159

6 Following Mercurial Affect 189

Afterword: The Spill and the Sea 223

Notes 239

Bibliography 261

Index 283