Octopus Reading Against Our Human(ist) Selves
Katharina Luther
“What strikes me as odd is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there.”
PAUL AUSTER, In the Country of Last Things (2005/1987: 28)
“The octopus is not Ishmael from Moby-Dick, who escaped alone to tell the tale, but a distant relative who came down another line, and who has, consequently, a different tale to tell.”
PETER GODFREY-SMITH, Other Minds (2016: 13)
“Who are we to say the Octopodes//did anything worse? They're an ink species. They overwrote us. They dissembled//our guns by dissolving our systems in the middle of our own shoot-out. What we//thought was gun smoke was ink cloud. The writing was never on the wall, it was in//the water. Our names, like Keats's, writ there.”
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY, The Octopus Museum (2019: 50) Consider that octopuses are not just an “ink species” that may overwrite us. Consider that in evolutionary terms, the octopuses' minds have evolved so remotely from ours', yet are so advanced, that meeting an octopus trans-lates into meeting an intelligent alien; an organism which is seemingly fall-ing away from us (see Godfrey-Smith 2016: 9). Consider what we could learn from them. Consider this random, evolutionary chance. Consider that the English word chance is derived from the Latin cadere (fall, befall). Con-sider that the etymology of cadere suggests a relation to the idea of declen-sion, which connotes a learning, or falling away (see OED online). Con-sider what we could learn if we were to look at us from where we are not.
These, arguably rather unorthodox, epistemological considerations for Karin Amos' Festschrift are not at all random, but continue many conversa-tions surrounding quesconversa-tions of anthropocentrism and speciesism, the liv-ing/organic and mechanical/technical we have had in the Scientization work group and at the conference Transcending Humanity? Transhumanism, Algorithms & Scientization as Phenomena of Late Modernity (2017) here in Tü-bingen1. The octopus seems to present itself as an excellent companion in this pedagogical quest because, in evolutionary terms, it is so removed from us, yet cognitively highly developed with a capacity for mimicry, deception, and problem solving (think about the YouTube videos of octopuses open-ing jars!2).
Brenda Shaughnessy The Octopus Museum (2019) uses this evolutionary chance the octopus offers and speculates that octopodes, indeed, “over-wrote us” (50). Shaughnessy's long poem is situated in a post-apocalyptic world in which cephalopods have taken over after years of racism, sexism, and environmental destruction by the Anthropos, the special ape, aka. us.
Shaughnessy's post-apocalyptic world positions one foot firmly in our 2020's contemporary present, in which we ignore climate change and I might “Tell myself the weather // ruined my plans, though it's me ruined the weather's” (2019: 9); or, in which racial injustice intersects with gun violence and we are “quite literally gunning for our own extinction” and throw “children in prison, we let them be sold” (2019: 50). The Octopus Museum's other foot is positioned in an apocalyptic future, in an area for-merly known as the United States, structured through numbered saliniza-tion pods, such as “Salinizasaliniza-tion Pod #11298 (formerly of New Hamp-shire)” (Shaughnessy 2019: 51) and places in crisis where “You never find
1 For more information on the interdisciplinary project The Scientization of the World, visit
https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/fakultaeten/wirtschafts-und-sozialwissenschaftliche- fakultaet/faecher/fachbereich-sozialwissenschaften/erziehungswissenschaft/abteilungen/allge-meine-paedagogik/forschung/die-verwissenschaftlichung-der-welt/
2 While the following videos raise questions on animal welfare and trigger discourses on research ethics, these videos also show how highly intelligent octopuses are. In this CBS youtube video, the octopus opens a jar to get its dinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kuAiuXezIU.
Here, the octopus opens a closed jar from the inside:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2kFAjE_gyw. On a similar note, Netflix recently added the documentary “My Octopus Teacher” (2020) on what can only be described as a loving friend-ship between the South African film maker Craig Foster and his octopus companion.
food, bottled water, working flashlights, live batteries, shortwave radios”
(Shaughnessy 2019: 51). While post-apocalyptic story telling generally evolves around the human in crisis, The Octopus Museum employs the idea of fleeting moments between the pre- and post-apocalyptic times exten-sively throughout 68 pages of poetry to capture the shift between the dis-integration of a human-centered world as we know it and the impossibility of foreseeing a post-apocalyptic future beyond our own human demarca-tion lines. Manifesting, what Walter Benjamin calls, the “‘cultural anxiety that we may have reached . . . the end of our species’” (Benjamin quoted in Bouson 2011: 10), The Octopus Museum cephalopods exhibit the remnants of an Anthropocene epoch in five exhibition spaces: (i) the “Gallery of a Dreaming Species,” (ii) a “Special Collection: ‘As They Were,’” (iii) “‘To Serve Man’: Rituals of the Late Anthropocene Colony,” (iv) “Found Ob-jects/Lost Subjects: A Retrospective,” and (v) “Permanent Collection: Ar-chive of Pre-existing Conditions.” The museum serves as a literary device to visit what is left of a human civilization in ruins through artefacts such as letters, but also through lyric stories. The long form of The Octopus Mu-seum, divided through its five exhibition spaces, allows for diverse human voices to enter and exist and to tell stories about human civilization without giving in to narrative or prose. In Shaughnessy's long poem, the octopus is hence not the focal point, but rather an oscillation frame which allows us to negotiate what it means to be human under and after postmodern con-ditions such as globalization, climate change, and the technosciences.
Now, the question of what a seeing as an octopus (vs. what do octopuses do?) onto the remnants of the Anthropocene may reveal only emerges if we take the chance and learn to read against “the [human] grain,” as if we were not human, or at least conceptually from an evolutionary removed position (see Herbrechter and Callus 2008: 95). This reading against us may emerge through the poems' oscillation frame of the octopus as a species, which is so alien to us, to potentially arrive at a place which may inform what it actually means to be human. This “human” I am talking about here as a research desideratum, though, troubles a humanist comprehension of the human as the primary unit of reference when it comes to rational, con-scious, intentional, and responsive beings. Instead, I would like to propose
what Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (2008) call “a posthuman way […]
to read against one's self, against one's own deep-seated self-understanding as a member or representative of a certain ‘species’” (Herbrechter and Cal-lus: 95, see Braidotti 2018). Decentering the human as the primary unit of reference for others, such as the octopus, projects “an otherness to the human, to sympathise and empathise with a position that troubles and un-does identity while struggling to reassert what is familiar and defining”
(Herbrechter and Callus 2008: 95). So, in this posthuman fashion, I would like to explore what the chance to read against our human(ist) selves can do by speculatively looking at us from where we are not with Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum.
Visiting “Other Minds”
As noted in the Acknowledgments, Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum is influenced by Peter Godfrey-Smith's remarkable Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2016), which I will use as a secondary source on the octopus in support of my analysis here. In Other Minds, God-frey-Smith outlines that the next common ancestor that connects us hu-mans to an octopus is a “flattened worm-like creature” that lived “about 600 million years before the present” (8). This little, blind worm, our shared human-octopus ancestor, “lived at a time when no organisms had made it onto land and the largest animals around it might have been sponges and jellyfish” (Godfrey-Smith 2016: 8). In terms of evolution, cephalopods are fundamentally odd: they are “a subgroup within the mollusks, so they are related to clams and snails, but they evolved large nervous systems, and the ability to behave in ways very different from other invertebrates. They did this on an entirely evolutionary path from us” (Godfrey-Smith 2016: 9). It is this evolutionary gap between us and octopuses and their very own pe-culiar evolutionary path which floods octopuses into an independent expe-riential realm when looking at the evolution of intelligent life and complex behavior. In the words of Godfrey-Smith, “[i]f we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not
because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien” (2016: 9).
Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum allows us to meet these intelligent aliens on the page. And at the same time, the long poem destabilizes alienness at its core. In Phenomenology of the Alien (2011), Bernhard Waldenfels describes the alien as “the inaccessibility of a particular region of experience and sense” (Waldenfels 2011: 74 qtd. in Bogost: Kindle Locations 769–773).
Waldenfels' alienness is not necessarily based on the representative logic of another species, race, or creature, but rather on the access to another ex-perience and mode of existence. While an evolutionary thought on origin may suggest a developmental distance between humans and the octopus, psychologically, there are phenomenological similarities between us hu-mans and them, the octopuses. Godfrey-Smith writes on these conver-gences and diverconver-gences:
“[o]ctopuses, like us, seem to have a distinction between short-term and long-term memory. They engage in play with novel objects that aren't food and have no apparent use. They seem to have something like sleep. Cuttlefish appear to have a form of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, like the sleep in which we dream. (It's still unclear whether there's REM-like sleep in octopuses.)
Other similarities are more abstract, such as an involvement with individuals, including the ability to recognize particular humans. … There's a lesson here about the ways smart animals handle the stuff of the world. They carve it up into objects that can be re-identified despite ongoing changes in how these objects present themselves.
…
Some features show a mixture of similarity and difference, conver-gence and diverconver-gence. We have hearts, and so do octopuses. But, an octopus has three hearts, not one. Their hearts pump blood that is blue-green, using copper as the oxygen-carrying molecule instead of the iron which makes our blood red. Then, of course, there is the nervous system––large like ours, but built on a different design,
with a different set of relationships between body and brain.”
(Godfrey-Smith 2016: 73–74)
By bringing Waldenfels' phenomenological notion of alienness in conver-sation with Godfrey-Smith's findings on octopuses and their convergences and divergences with us, the very notion of the so-called other, the alien, the strange crumbles by deconstructing itself. At this point, reading against the human(ist) grain may lead us to a hunch that the alien is not necessarily another species or another thing, but potentially everything and anything, including us.
This crumbling hunch is also shared by “Identity and Community (There Is No ‘I’ in ‘Sea’),” in Shaughnessy's The Octopus Museum. The exhi-bition starts with, a presumably human poetic voice saying “I don't want to be surrounded by people. Or even one person. But I don't want to //
always be alone” (Shaughnessy 2019: 3). The poem reveals a human longing for belonging to a human collective, which may create one's sense of self in the face of interacting with others. This interaction, in turn, may inter-sect with a longing for solitude, time to be with oneself as an individual.
Yet, the anxiety that seems to drive both human yearnings is an unease, or a coming to grips, with the isolating emotion of loneliness – the very lack of intimacy or belonging. The poem goes on in suggesting, “The answer is to become my own pet, hungry for plenty in a plentiful place. // There is no true solitude, only only” (Shaughnessy 2019: 3). Becoming “my own pet” implies transforming the liberal human Western subject form an “ex-clusionary site” (see Grusin 2015, xviii) into a nonhuman context of the animal. The word choice of “pet” is interesting here. The semantic field of
“pet” unbolts connotations of home, ownership, the domestic sphere, a power and reigning over, as well as a disciplining into a certain relationship between pet and human owner. A pet is an animal that is owned as well as fed by a human. If I was “to become my own pet,” I would deflate the hierarchical speciesism at work in the Western notion of human and pet as well as in the biological development of the homo sapiens, and break open my own anthropocentric privilege to include an alien mode of experience, namely that of an animal pet. The poem uses the idea of the alien to erode
our species perceptions and turns these perceptions onto ourselves. We may become part of an “other”, a pet, but, as the poem concludes: “There is no true solitude, only, only.” In a world full of ontological nonhuman relationalities, there is “no true solitude” since we are always already spe-cifically connected with other organic or inorganic phenomena as connoted by “only, only.” With this poetic twist, Shaughnessy's poetic lines teach us that if we do not deconstruct our cultural anxiety around loneliness through seeing us as part of a larger nonhuman environment and ecology already, loneliness will do us.
Becoming pet – becoming alien, becoming sea, becoming octopus, be-coming woman etc. – includes the experiences of the so-called other inside ourselves. Hence, it is part of a specific inter-subjectivity that erodes hier-archies along species discourses and our own material embodiment by not subjugating groups, but by putting us in relation to them in semantic, but also material terms. Such an inter- and intrasubjectivity does not only shake up hierarchies between species, but also within our own human embodiment.
Since the Early Modern period, the human body has been realigned as a mere mechanical shell, an abject to the human mind and ratio, which makes up the true essence of any human being (see Descartes 1684; 1641). Turned on our human selves, the octopus is a good companion to rethink the re-lationship between our own human body, the environment, and our mind with. Rethinking these relationships can tweak the ways we culturally con-struct the human as a closed off being, who reasons, feels, and acts etc.
The octopus troubles these human(ist) boundaries between body and mind not just in function, but also in form:
“[w]hen advocates of embodied cognition such as Chiel and Beer give examples of how bodies provide resources for intelligent ac-tion, they mention the distance between parts of a body (which aid perception) and the locations and angles of joints. The octopus body has none of those things––no fixed distances between parts, no joints, no natural angles. Further, the relevant contrast in the octopus case is not ‘body rather than brain’––the contrast usually emphasized in discussions of embodied cognition. In an octopus,
the nervous system as a whole is a more relevant object than the brain: it's not clear where the brain itself begins and ends, and the nervous system runs all through the body. The octopus is suffused with nervousness; the body is not a separate thing that is controlled by the brain or the nervous system.“ (Godfrey-Smith 2016: 75) Because the octopus is all body, all mind, all nervous system at the same time, it lives outside of our Cartesian body/mind split, and thus defies any notion of separateness between outside/inside, human/nonhuman, mate-rial/immaterial etc. The octopus' body “itself is protean, all possibility; it has none of the costs and gains of a constraining and action-guiding body”
(Godfrey-Smith 2016: 76). Hence, while the octopus is in itself a material and situated organic being, it is always becoming with (the other, the envi-ronment, us etc.).
It is through this octopus being that is “all possibility” (all chance!) that the idea of a purity as well as closed-offness between us vs. them liquefies.
And with the octopus as an oscillation frame, “Identity and Community (There Is No ‘I’ in ‘Sea’)” continues to deconstruct our human(ist) readings by complicating our notion of purity and contamination. And so we read,
“Watching three mom-like women try to go in, I'm green––I want to join them.//But they are not my women. I join them, apologiz-ing.//They splash away from me––they're their pod. People are al-ien.//I'm an unknown story, erasing myself with seawater.//There goes my honey and fog, my shoulders and legs.”(Shaughnessy 2019:
3)
Experiencing another inside oneself can be reached by encountering a group of “three mom-like women” which fail to read one's own woman-hood and thus mark the poetic voice saying “I” as not-woman,
not-in-“their pod.” Or, by going for a dip into “the inhuman surface the sea has”
(Shaughnessy 2019: 3), where the materiality of water molecules flush into our human bodies and out again, “erasing myself with seawater. // There goes my honey and fog. My shoulders and legs” (Shaughnessy 2019: 3).
It is not for nothing that Shaughnessy's first poem in The Octopus Museum is called “Identity and Community (There Is No ‘I’ in ‘Sea’).” The threat of impurity of one's pod or one's body haunts this poem, which ends with
“I was a woman alone in the sea // Don't tell anybody, I tell myself. … //
Remember: write down to not-document it” (Shaughnessy 2019: 3). In Al-ien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (2004), Neil Badmington writes that “humanisms faith in identity” may be destabilized by the very dynamic it creates, namely that of self and other (129). The concept of a human
“Identity & Community” is based on singling out a human individual, a person, which may become part of a community of people. Yet, as the
“mom-like women” who “splash away from me ––they're their pod” show, humans diverge and are at odds within their own human group and com-munity. With “Identity & Community (There Is No ‘I’ in ‘Sea’),” The Octopus Museum's first exhibited poem does nothing less than, what Badmington refers to as, deconstructing the human; a process, in which “the human is never quite at home with itself, and never without the alien” (Badmington 2004: 134; Herbrechter and Callus 2008). Or, as Shaughnessy's poem would say, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Sea’.”
The Museum Poem:
Or, to Look at Us from Where We Are Not
Conceptually, The Octopus Museum directs our receptions to institutionalized places that are always already designed for looking at us from where we are not, namely museums. Hence, museums have a built-in inter-subjectivity, which converts these places into a suitable literary device for using the oc-topus as an oscillation frame that determines what remnants of humanity we can see, while allowing for human voices to emerge through letters, poems, and studies as exhibition pieces.
With the industrial revolution in Western Europe and North America, the ontological foundation of museums historically has been to preserve and safeguard material (artistic) artefacts of another civilization/epoch etc.
With the industrial revolution in Western Europe and North America, the ontological foundation of museums historically has been to preserve and safeguard material (artistic) artefacts of another civilization/epoch etc.