Stephen Muecke

The following piece is a conversation on how the dead, animals, and people animate each other. We interviewed Vinciane Despret in French, via Zoom, on May 2, 2024; Vinciane was in Brussels, Iwona was in Prague, and Stephen was in Sydney. Despret is not only a key figure in ethology and animal studies because of her empirical studies, her work also has strong philosophical implications. We explore how her work is not just contributing to these fields but changing what she calls our “cognitive routines,” which means deploying sensitive practices of defamiliarizing those routines, listening to what those who “cannot speak” have to say, in particular, in this interview, animals and the dead. Going beyond human language, we discover ways of “feeling the world,” or rather the worlds, of particular beings. By turning to “stories of anticipation,” Despret offers an alternative take on the question of species extinction. Vinciane Despret, Iwona Janicka and Stephen Muecke (2025):“Animals Give Us a Body We Didn’t Have. An Interview with Vinciane Despret.” Environmental Humanities 17(3) 705–712. doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11942118.

Australian Native Title law is critiqued in three moves: 1. Analysing the kinds of knowledge used in Australian Native Title law to make cases for Indigenous land tenure; 2. Analysing how a Nyikina elder narrates a legal matter of concern from his point of view; 3. Speculating about how an Indigenous ‘legal’ institution called the bugarrigarra was mobilised to resist extraction colonialism. These are all experimental moves in that they are partially composed around matters of concern, rather than displaying matters of fact. They are experiments that stage a learning process as they describe a number of different events.

In his lucid introduction, Thomas Lamarre, Stengers’s translator, considers this book ‘a summation of Stengers’s work to date’, as she ‘relays’ Whitehead’s thought to grapple with contemporary issues in our ‘times of collapse’. In this she is continuing the work of her longer Thinking with Whitehead that did much to relaunch the somewhat forgotten Whitehead, via Europe and back to readers in the anglosphere. This review article takes Stengers’s cue to test its ideas elsewhere, specifically among the Goolarabooloo people in North-West Australia, fairly recently colonised and resisting the modernisation frontier of which Stengers is very critical. To that end, this article finds field philosophy, as in the environmental humanities, a commensurate approach, as it teases out some Indigenous Australian concepts that ‘make sense in common’ with Stengers’s Whitehead.

1. IntroductionIt is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.1 I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text attempts to translate his sense of belonging to that territory, an attachment he had to struggle to maintain, both in the face of ongoing destructive colonization and also in the face of other Aboriginal territorial claims. These collective attachments are therefore inflected by history—not just settler history, but Indigenous history that has changed in relation to colonization. These changes are wrought through overwhelmingly rapid material changes, shifting institutional alliances, contested concepts, and new practices. This ethnographic history is an attempt to provide an overview of some of these changes in the North-West corner of Australia over the last forty years.

Two impressive essays that explore the energetic cultural presence of gender open Action, our first issue for 2004. In ‘Burst into Action’ Stephen Chan explores how the ‘woman warrior’ in Hong Kong action cinema organises aspects of everyday Hong Kong sensibility in the shifting terrain of the global popular. Then, in ‘Men who Surf’, Clifton Evers takes us to some of the moments when male bodies are formed in relation to the violent beauty of waves and surfing cultures. In both cases, the objects that emerge in these studies—the cinema and the beach—become radically different spaces that take us in unexpected directions. These essays are followed by Isabel McIntosh’s engaging study of cultural sovereignty in the disappearance of the Urewera Mural and Raya Massie’s wild ride with the hypercreature.

This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value.

For how long can history, as it is conceived in ‘the West’, continue to attach itself to an exhausted humanism, where ‘man’ is central and all the natural and inanimate objects surrounding humans are relegated to the function of support act?This essay argues from anthropological theory that there are fundamentally different sorts of relationships that humans can entertain with non-humans, and that these relationships can have a magical force. When a monument is placed at the spot where an explorer first touched the land, does this impart a contiguous magic? On the other hand, where the stuff of history seems animated, and spreading out without clear connection to impart some small part of the aura to a doll representing the historical figure, are we not dealing with a sympathetic, contagious magic? This essay will experiment with these nonrepresentational forms of energy as they are transferred in domains associated with the figure of Lt. James Cook. What, then, is Cook when he is displaced from ‘western’ history and spread around cultures like a virus? How precarious or robust, then, are the historical certainties associated with Cook-monumentalised Kurnell and its place in time as ‘the birthplace of modern Australia’?

In a post-critical environment, literary and cultural analysis can find new directions through engagement with ‘experiment’, ‘multirealism’ and ‘reproduction’ as agents ‘earn participation’ in collectives of humans and non-humans. Collectives of ‘partners’ are necessary collaborators in the reproduction of cultural forms. This vitalist approach carries an experimental method, an expanded ontological field, and a relational subjectivity, which contrasts to the traditional humanities intellectual who aspires to the refinement of judgment.

Indigenous cultures have an immanentist ontological basis, as opposed to the largely Western ontology of transcendence. We explore the implications for this assertion in the different ways that technological artifacts can be seen to articulate with human and non-human bodies in extended ecologies. Our method is one of an Indigenous critique of modernity, which aims iconoclastically to deflate the faith, hope and idealism often invested in technologies. Our (counter) examples emerge from the TV series Bush Mechanics, where practical skills are articulated with blackfella magical powers. These illustrate how bush ecologies are vastly different from suburban car cultures, such that what really matters in people’s coarticulations with machines is now open to philosophical speculation via an Indigenous critique of Western modernity. (Indigenous) powers of immanence can be opposed to (Western) powers of transcendence, we argue, through disclosure of the operations of the ecologies that sustain them.

One of the tasks of the humanities academic—the philosopher, the cultural studies researcher—is to devise informed judgement through the exercise of a complex intelligence. It’s a matter, one might think, of sorting out the truth from bullshit and telling it how it is. If only the world would just stay simple … This directness has some appeal, until you start trying to specify the appropriate criteria, grounding and form for judgement. Disciplines address precisely these issues, and to the extent to which they do so successfully, they specify complex phenomena in particular ways; they authorise certain kinds of enquiry and speech as they productively cultivate their own patch of knowledge. Cultural studies has made interdisciplinarity its business, bewitched and distracted by the complexities of actual existing cultural practices, by spatial and temporal mobility and seepage, by authority and exclusion, ownership, belonging and boundaries.