Coarticulation: Mutual Transformation in Human and Nonhuman Relations

Representation” and “articulation” are important terms in discussions of multispecies relations. The term “representation” has garnered much critique across a range of disciplines, including political theory, philosophy, legal studies, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, art history, and literature. In the representation framework, reality is split into two camps, the representer and the represented: the world and words; mute matter and speaking humans; subject and object. The link between the two is constantly in question. Indeed, representation itself is in a state of perpetual difficulty as there are always questions of who is represented, how they are represented, and to what extent the represented can challenge the representer’s account. In recent political ecology and multispecies philosophy, the pitfalls of representation have become even more apparent. How do you represent a nonhuman that can neither speak nor oppose in the traditional sense? Responses to this challenge have been diverse. For example, one strand of thought posits that human representation of nonhumans is the only means of human interaction with nonhumans. From this perspective, scientists function as the “spokespersons” for nonhumans in what is often referred to as “the parliament of things” (Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). This approach to representation [End Page 38] often entails the protection of ecosystems from destruction, such as in cases in which rivers, forests, and mountains are legally represented by humans in courts. 1 Whatever their precise make-up, such arguments essentially rest upon one basic tenet: we cannot do without representation, even with all its insufficiencies and unilaterality. On the other hand, there are attempts to move beyond the framework of representation entirely, with the proposition of other ways of conceptualizing our relationships to nonhumans, aimed at conceiving new, more relevant political practices. One such alternative is the concept of articulation.

Articulation is a term that can be encountered in a wide variety of contexts: linguistics, rhetoric, music, architecture, anatomy, dentistry. Etymologically, it is rich, replete with multiple resonances. The word refers variously to the act of fitting together, to the limbs of a body (arm, shoulder, joint), to commodities (a piece of material thing, property), to phonetics, speech and expression, to manner, mode, skill, craft, weapon, military and legal regulations, even to religious beliefs (“Articulation,” Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales; Online Etymology Dictionary; Oxford English Dictionary). Donna Haraway was the first to use the term in the specific context of multispecies relations. In that instance, Haraway uses “articulation” to identify the specific connections that we form with nonhumans. A more extensive discussion of articulation can be found in Bruno Latour’s work, particularly in his Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012/2013). The concept becomes the “ontological foundation” of Latour’s major project, as he sets out to capture the different ways in which beings become intelligible and the ways in which the human and nonhuman can collaborate. Haraway’s and Latour’s elaborations on articulation are undoubtedly crucial, and productively progress our thinking on the topic at hand. Neither offers a sufficient account of the reciprocity of the processes of articulation, however. There is a unilateral direction inherent to articulation: one thing articulates another. Even though this procedure is more open and dynamic than representation, it still does not consider adequately the mutuality of the process: a reciprocal transformation of the entities involved.

In this article, then, I propose a new term in order to emphasize the reciprocal character of the human-nonhuman interaction: “coarticulation.” I consider and leverage, in particular, the work of the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret, which offers sustained engagement with specific nonhumans—animals and the dead—to trace, ultimately, how both humans and nonhumans are radically transformed by engaging with each other. The key thesis of this article is that in order to articulate, we need to coarticulate. In order to be able to engage productively with an entity that is radically different from us and to account for it, we need to transform [End Page 39] not only the nonhuman, by creating an apparatus through which they become intelligible, but also ourselves in the interaction. Ultimately, coarticulation provides an alternative way to think about politics with nonhumans. Instead of the parliamentary model offered by a politics of representation, we begin to glimpse a decisively mutualistic politics of cohabitation of an anarchist kind.

From representation to articulation: How beings become intelligible
In political ecology, the term “articulation” emerges as a direct critique of the framework of representation, an alternative proposal for a conceptualization of the human-nonhuman relations. In his early work, Bruno Latour extends the notion of representation from humans to nonhumans. Notably in Science in Action (1987) and We Have Never Been Modern (1991/1993), he coins the phrase “the parliament of things” to refer to the conceptual space in which scientists act as representatives of various nonhumans and speak in their name. So doing, Latour renders nonhumans into active participants in knowledge production (actants). In scientific procedures, nonhumans can show resistance (“recalcitrance”) to scientific hypotheses, making the representation of nonhumans uniquely reliable in this framework. 2 Scientific representation of nonhumans is, thus, a way to give voice to those who do not speak. Importantly, by formulating “the parliament of things,” Latour opens up logos to nonhumans. Such inclusion of the typically excluded other(s) into a political process is a democratic gesture par excellence. 3 The operative political model here is parliamentary politics, in which rights are extended to nonhumans. For Latour, the sciences serve as the paradigmatic example of how political representation should work, with scientists situated as the best spokespersons of the otherwise voiceless. Representation implies a relation of equivalence, like a chain of references, rather than a relation of transformation. Politics in this mode means “speaking for” rather than “transforming with.” As we will see, this is a very different proposition than the integrally reciprocal dynamics of articulation and coarticulation.

The importance of this early attempt to unmute nonhumans and integrate them into political community must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, there are multiple problems with representation in this context. Donna Haraway offers a salient critique of Latour’s foundational work on representation, proposing instead “articulation” as a more appropriate term to account for human-nonhuman relations. In “Promises of Monsters” (1992), she asserts that the question, “Who speaks for a nonhuman?” is problematic, because representation only ever authorizes the ventriloquist. This holds no matter the specific nature of the nonhuman to be represented, whether a “jaguar” or a “fetus.” In modern scientific [End Page 40] practice, scientists and experts are considered to be the solely legitimate ventriloquists. They are the most reliable because they are the most disinterested (that is, “objective”). Whatever sustains the represented object and cares for it—local people for the forest, pregnant women for the fetus—is considered irrelevant, or problematic due to its affective and literal proximity to the object. What gets lost in the representation framework, according to Haraway, is that the world evinces an integral messiness, and humans demonstrate a wealth of affective attachments to nonhumans. The represented object is conceived of as a recipient of action, a “stripped actant,” rather than a co-creator (Haraway Reader 89). Even though it can resist, it cannot generate new relations. What is more, Haraway criticizes Latour for drawing “a suspicious line” around what counts as a legitimate practice, and for failing to consider how practices of structural inequality have been an integral part of knowledge production. As she rightly points out, much of the relevant work on power structures has been undertaken by feminist scholars that do not feature in Latour’s work (Haraway Reader 116n14). In her view, Latour, at this point in his work, proposes a conceptualization of the “collective” that is too narrow, including only scientists and machines, and pays little attention to other nonhumans, such as animals (Haraway Reader 115n14).

Haraway proposes the term “articulation” in order to emphasize the collective character of actants: actants as a group of entities rather than individuals. She speaks of actants as “articulated collectives” for which nobody has the prerogative to speak (Haraway Reader 90). Articulation can be defined as the ability to create connections between heterogenous elements in a way that produces meaning:

Articulation is not a simple matter. Language is the effect of articulation, and so are bodies. […] The articulata are cobbled together. It is the condition of being articulate. […] Nature may be speechless, without language, in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate. Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connections can be made.

(Haraway Reader 105–106)
Instead of opening logos to nonhumans by allowing nonhumans to speak through their human representatives, Haraway transforms logos into a semiotics of articulation. In a nutshell: “To articulate is to signify” (Haraway Reader 106). Articulation is a practice that is contestable, non-innocent, and affective, involving various forms of engagement, commitment, and caring. The literal meaning of articulation—as a specific link, a specified joint or joining—is key here. 4 As Haraway asserts: “The point is not new representations, but new practices, other forms of life rejoining humans and non-humans” (Haraway Reader 141, my emphasis). What counts as [End Page 41] a legitimate practice is much broader than scientific practice alone and includes various forms of making connections with nonhumans. It does not involve paternalistic forms of relations (speaking for those who cannot speak) but rather emphasizes being a partial and engaged participant in the process of producing meaning. Through articulations, beings come to exist and can be actively cooperated with. Put otherwise, “We articulate; therefore, we are” (Haraway Reader 106). In her later work, Haraway turns to Isabelle Stengers’ term “cosmopolitics” to describe such singular forms of the creation of new human-nonhuman collectives. 5

Latour responds admirably productively to this critique. In his later work, he radically shifts focus from representation to articulation and makes the latter term foundational to his grand philosophical project that culminates with The Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME). 6 In fact, Latour characterizes AIME as “philosophy à la Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway” (Latour and Davis 51). In Pandora’s Hope (1999), he comments on his earlier work on Louis Pasteur, who famously proved that lactic acid fermentation (e.g., souring of milk) is caused by micro-organisms including yeasts, and claims that “the lactic acid ferment becomes articulable” (143, my emphasis), it becomes “more articulate” (144), rather than merely represented by Pasteur as its spokesperson. In this way, Latour reformulates his unilateral, clean model of representation in favor of a much messier, semiotically richer, and more complex framework of articulation. For Latour, as for Haraway, articulation is a collective endeavor between humans and nonhumans. To the question “Who speaks?” Latour now responds: “neither nature nor humans, but well-articulated actors, associations of humans and nonhumans, well-formed propositions” (Politics of Nature 86). In place of human beings operating within a mute world as ventriloquists for nonhuman beings, we find well-articulated settings that allow for all to participate in the processes of articulation. In this sense, as Latour claims: “Articulation is not a property of human language but an ontological property of the universe” (“Articulation”). Beings articulate themselves. The question is how we can access and interpret this articulation and “speak truthfully” about nonhuman beings engaged in articulation, that is, to account for the nonhuman in the mode of existence that a particular being operates within (whether religious, scientific, fictional, or juridical, among many others). Articulation in Latour not only involves language but also other means: “gestures, papers, settings, instruments, sites, trials” that are specific to a mode of existence (Pandora’s Hope 142). In order to exist, a being has to “pass by way of others” (Inquiry 145–46). In the processes of articulation—by expressing differences in contact with other beings—entities become intelligible. That means that it is impossible for any being to exist autonomously, without attachment to other beings. [End Page 42]

Latour’s shift of focus, from representation to articulation, is arguably owed to a variety of factors. The latter term opens up a significantly richer lexical and conceptual field to account for the range of nonhuman beings with which we interact (viruses, gods, fictional characters, technological devices, and so on), interactions about which Latour develops an ever-keener interest as the trajectory of his work progresses. In addition, Latour’s change of tack is a response to the necessary formulation of a new question, one to which the concept of articulation implicitly responds. The question is no longer how to grant rights to nonhumans—this would be a question of representation, founded upon the assumption that the representers are stronger than the represented, legitimizing the representers’ role of speaking for the represented. In its place, a different question has emerged, one raised by the circumstances in which we now find ourselves: how to integrate our complete dependence on nonhumans into our modern worldview and into our practices? From our early position of strength as representers and of supremacy over the represented nonhumans, we now find ourselves in a position of fragility, of interdependence with nonhumans. As Latour himself admits, neither Rousseau’s social contract extended to nature nor Michel Serres’ notion of the natural contract are appropriate frameworks to allow us to make sense of our human-nonhuman interrelations (“How to understand”). By contrast, articulation is a powerful tool to make those beings intelligible that would normally not be considered fit for scientific inquiry but that still exist in our world and matter to us. 7 Articulation captures their existence and allows for the description of their specific modes of operation. It is a way to enrich our understanding of the world and to make our attachment to it that much stronger. In this way, articulation becomes the act of creatively processing an encounter with difference, with the alien world that each nonhuman represents. Instead of choosing the path of radical alterity—that is, of treating nonhumans as fundamentally different, incommensurable, and forever inaccessible to us—with articulation we can connect to nonhumans the best we can, in incomplete and partial ways. 8 Articulation works with small differences that make a difference. It builds connections that integrate our fundamental interdependency with nonhumans into our interaction with them, putting our absolute certainties at risk.

Coarticulation: Rendering each other capable
Although articulation is a highly productive term for thinking about human-nonhuman relations in their ontological richness, the concept can be developed further to account in even finer detail for the dynamics at play. Here, I propose the term “coarticulation” to emphasize the reciprocity [End Page 43] of the processes of articulation between humans and nonhumans. Processes of articulation often cut both ways—they impact both humans and nonhumans—and “coarticulation” serves to underscore this mutual transformation. This process of reciprocal and joint individuation between human and nonhuman has been extensively studied by the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret. 9 While Haraway’s and Latour’s articulation focuses on transformations of nonhumans, Despret is interested in human-nonhuman constellations and their mutual molding. 10 Even though Despret does not use the term “coarticulation” herself—following Haraway and Latour, she refers to “articulation”—the term, and the concept, captures well the dynamics that Despret interrogates throughout her work. Indeed, I argue that Despret’s usage of the term articulation pushes the concept far beyond its characterization in Latour’s and Haraway’s work. Despret’s articulation demonstrates not only how various nonhumans—specifically animals and the dead—become intelligible to humans, and how we can “speak truthfully” about them (Latour) but also, and more importantly, what humans become capable of owing to our interactions with specific nonhumans, and vice versa. Otherwise put, Despret may use the same term as Latour and Haraway, but it does not mean exactly the same thing in her work. Coarticulation presumes mutual transformation, reciprocal and unavoidable imprinting between two beings from incommensurable worlds (human-nonhuman), in that they become what they are owing to each other. Because this process is creative—it transforms the participants into something they could not have otherwise become—we can speak here of mutual engenderment or co-emergence. A close reading of Despret’s work makes it crystal clear: the only way to articulate is, in fact, to coarticulate.

Despret focuses on two distinct types of entities throughout her work: animals and the dead. At first glance, these beings may seem to have little, if anything, in common. However, they share a crucial common feature: the strong emotional pull they exert on humans. Both animals and the dead deeply affect, animate, and transform humans. These are beings that make us do things: they respond to our action (or inaction), and this response is in turn integrated into our practices. 11 Consequently, Despret grapples throughout her work with the nature of “good science”. How do researchers pose good questions? How do they make the research environment richer, and research objects themselves more interesting, without reducing them to established patterns and familiar routines? In particular, Despret focuses on how we become attuned to nonhuman worlds that exhibit radical differences compared to our own semiotic and behavioral patterns. For Despret, the only way to live up to this challenge is with another being. We can become responsive to nonhumans only with [End Page 44] active participation from their side, in a process of transformation which works in both directions: it impacts both the human and the nonhuman alike. This is what she calls “becoming intelligent together” (“une intelligence à deux” [Hans 131]). The phrase is essentially synonymous with the term “coarticulation,” the process of becoming articulate together.

One question arguably animates Despret’s philosophy, a common thread that can be traced across her collective works: How do we become worthy of the nonhumans we study? Similarly, coarticulation is conceptually motivated by one issue above all: How do humans and nonhumans render each other capable? In something of a domino effect, this raises further questions with regard to specific constellations: What do humans and nonhumans bring out in each other in the specific articulation—the joint, the connection—that they are creating together? In what mode of existence does this coarticulation happen—science, religion, law, fiction, politics, morality—and what types of attention does a mode require of us in order to account for a being properly? What do these coarticulations make us do? Coarticulation presumes a form of plasticity of humans and nonhumans in their relationship with each other. 12 Hence, it demands an ethics. It calls forth an “ontological responsibility” in the sense that each living being is an inextricable condition of the existence of another living being that is, in turn, an inextricable condition of its own existence (Despret, Autobiographie d’un poulpe 49). This tangled interdependence, and the co-emergence of the involved parties, lies at the heart of coarticulation.

Coarticulation with animals
Despret concentrates on the work of specific ethologists who study animals with the aim of determining what is important to their nonhuman research subjects. She tells compelling stories of, for instance, Oskar Pfungst and the horse Clever Hans, Irene Pepperberg and the parrot Alex, Thelma Rowell’s sheep, Amotz Zahavi’s Arabian babblers, Shirley Strum’s baboons, and Robert Rosenthal’s rats. By turning to such stories, Despret attempts to resist thinking in terms of a fundamental gap dividing humans from animals. Instead, she exclusively considers human-nonhuman collectives: scientists and their animals are situated as a mutually enabling team. Despret works with a Deleuzian understanding of ethology as a practical study of modes of existence, of what animals and humans can do rather than what they are (their essence) (cf. Au bonheur des morts 20n15). Ethology is a way to account for various forms of being in the world (cf. Habiter en oiseau 15), and is thus analogical to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s definition of anthropology as a study of the variations of importance. The driving force for ethology is the description of the modes of existence proper to an animal, as each animal has its own way of knowing the [End Page 45] world. Unlike Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic approach, which focuses on “thinking like” an animal, Despret is interested in “thinking with” an animal (Penser comme un rat 36–37).

In Despret’s reading, our tacit assumptions about animals are fundamentally problematic, erroneous even from our very first principles. We assume that cultures develop, while nature remains the same. The ability to change is hardwired into humans, while animals only change through our representations of them. Humans have dynamic history, while animals experience only steady evolution. We have culture and its different transformations, while animals have only invariants and the stability of instinct (cf. Quand le loup 10–11). Despret tries to counter this narrative. In her various works, she shows how animals emerge in our histories always accompanied by at least one human being, who brought about, imposed, or witnessed their transformation (cf. Quand le loup 17). She is interested in the creative and cooperative aspects of ethology, in which a scientist and an animal become different from what they were together, becoming with each other more than they were previously, through their mutual interaction.

Deeply influenced by Stengers’ philosophy, Despret maintains that animals always respond to the questions that have been posed to them: “It is our questions that animals answer, it is our interpretations that give meaning to their answers and it is our curiosity that mobilises them” (Quand le loup 22, my translation). 13 This is what Stengers calls “invention” in science: “the beings that science brings into existence are ‘invented,’ in the sense that all their attributes are relative to our histories” (Stengers, The Invention 99, qtd. in Despret, Quand le loup 22). 14 Even though these animals are created through our stories, it does not mean that they are any less real, however. Their existence as scientific objects is produced through the close cooperation between scientists and animals and, importantly, their production is an achievement (réussite): “This is the singularity of our scientific practices: the animals that [the scientific practices] ‘invent’ exist in and through these stories with a density, a singular reality, because scientists have passionately sought how to make history with them” (Quand le loup 22, my translation). 15 Such a “quest for pertinence,” as Stengers puts it, is how one produces good science in ethology. Despret summarizes this approach as “the politeness of ‘getting to know each other’” (“la politesse du ‘faire connaissance’” [Quand le loup 126]). This means focusing on what interests animals, rather than imposing human problems and concerns on them. In scientific practice, this is equivalent to posing questions to animals that would intrigue and engage them. One becomes worthy of the animal one studies by observing how an animal responds to a question, how it is transformed by a question posed to it by, and through, a [End Page 46] scientific apparatus, and how, in turn, the animal’s response changes the scientist and their scientific practice. This form of mutual interest and, more importantly, trust is what Despret investigates throughout her work.

Among the many examples of coarticulation that Despret analyzes, Konrad Lorenz and his goose Martina offers perhaps the most salient case for our present purposes. In her compelling article “The Body We Care For” (2004), Despret calls a strong human-nonhuman relationship “anthropo-zoo-genetic practice,” that is “a practice that constructs animal and human” (“The Body” 122). An animal and a human propose to each other “a new manner of becoming together, which provides new identities” (“The Body” 122). Despret reinterprets in pragmatic terms, à la William James, the process of imprinting that happened between Lorenz and his goose. When Martina hatches, Lorenz initially takes care of her before passing her on to another goose as a surrogate parent. However, Martina refuses to be abandoned by her first caretaker, and adopts Lorenz as her mother. In a process of mutual domestication, Martina and Lorenz develop new ways of being with each other and bring into existence new possibilities. Lorenz has to learn what it means to be a good goose-mother to Martina: how to take care of her, how to behave like her, how to read her emotional states (notably, fear). And Martina the goose becomes more human by her exposure to Lorenz. In this way, Lorenz the goose-parent constructs with his goose-child “an ethos of domestication” (“The Body” 129) in which mutual “attunement,” a conjunct transformation, takes place. Crucially, the goose has an active role in creating this relationship. As Despret convincingly shows, by involving himself and his body in this process of domestication, Lorenz’s scientific practice changes accordingly, and for the better: new questions about attachment and imprinting emerge, different ways of gathering data are developed, new skills and forms of scientific practice are created (cf. “The Body” 130). As the Belgian philosopher observes:

Lorenz gave his birds the opportunity to behave like humans, as much as his birds gave him the opportunity to behave like a bird. They both created new articulations, which authorized them to talk (or to make the other talk) differently.

(“The Body” 130)
Evidently, Lorenz’s transformed, and transformative, approach to science did not include a disinterested subject, but rather an engaged and involved co-creator of an experimental practice. In this case:

The experimenter, far from keeping himself in the background, involves himself: he involves his body, he involves his knowledge, his responsibility and his future. The practice of knowing has become a practice of caring. And because he cares for his young goose, he learns what, in a world inhabited by humans and geese, may produce relations.

(“The Body” 130) [End Page 47]
This process changes both Lorenz the scientist and Martina the goose, making each capable of things of which they would not have been capable on their own. This relationship adds “new definitions to what it is to be a human being” and allows for richer interpretations of what it means to be a goose (“The Body” 130). It is apparent that the way in which an animal’s talents and habits articulate themselves in relation to a specific human being and the way in which a human being, in turn, co-creates these talents are a key concern for the philosopher (Hans 51). Indeed, for Despret, Lorenz and Martina’s case emblematizes good scientific practice: more possibilities and more worlds are opened up by bringing together heterogenous actants.

Despret gives many other examples of such coarticulations—such “anthropo-zoo-genetic practices,” in her own terminology— in ethology, defining them in the mode of William James’ pragmatist philosophy. How can we know whether our research questions are interesting to animals?

These propositions can be evaluated as interesting according to their capacity to transform us: “What is the value of a truth that does not make us act, believe or think, in short, a truth that is not interesting?” What is a truth worth that does not make the world more interesting and those who learn about it more interested? What good is a proposition that is not fruitful?

(Quand le loup 108, my translation) 16
Despret links coarticulation to the power of transformation: the power to create new habits, competencies and skills that an encounter with difference may generate. From this perspective, the antithesis to coarticulation is an approach to animals that aims to instill submission (“docility”) rather than facilitate co-creation (“availability” to a proposition) (“The Body” 122–124). Despret supports her contention with a particularly illuminating example, Harry Harlow’s controversial experiments on “love” with rhesus monkeys. Infant monkeys were exposed to inanimate wire-and-cloth surrogate mothers or faced prolonged isolation in order to establish their social needs and to study the effects of maternal deprivation. Consequently, and rather unsurprisingly, the experimental setting produced despair: it created disturbed animals that were not able to function in social settings and often died shortly after the completion of the experiment. Harlow’s infant monkeys were neither able to resist nor cocreate a research question, and, as such, his experiments were not only highly unethical but also emblematic of bad science. The research team imposed human problems on animals—how does the mother-child bond impact a child’s cognitive development?—and used monkeys because it would be unethical to carry similar experiments on human subjects. There was no consideration of what “makes sense” for a rhesus monkey and how “an interesting becoming” could be offered to it. For Despret, this [End Page 48] is the diametrical opposite of good science, which equates, ultimately, to creating a common world with an animal (“The Body” 124). Due to our different biosemiotic makeup, this common world could not be the same for a human and for an animal, but ideally it would propose something to both parties to which all could meaningfully relate, however differently. As Despret asserts: “It is first of all a matter of raising more interesting questions that enable more articulated answers, and therefore more articulated identities. It is an epistemological question” (“The Body” 125). By design, Harlow’s rhesus monkeys were neither afforded the chance to teach Harlow and his team of scientists anything, nor granted the capacity, or opportunity, to surprise them.

As the preceding discussion makes apparent, the scientific settings created by scientists, and in which they operate, in fact produce not only the scientist herself, but also her research subjects. 17 Following Stengers, Despret argues that experimental devices are “transformation devices; they can never claim to have revealed what would pre-exist the test of the device” (Hans 121, my translation). 18 As Lorenz and his goose, Martina, were articulated by the setting established for the experiment, so too was Harlow and his rhesus monkeys (cf. “The Body” 131). Despret focuses primarily on collective articulations: goose-with-human, monkey-with-human, parrot-with-human, horse-with-human, Arabian Babbler-with-human. She is fundamentally concerned with the question of what ethologists owe, conceptually, to the animals that they study. 19 Above all, Despret’s work on animals demonstrates how important it is to create connections—articulations—between heterogenous parties that are not paralytic, but rather afford both sides of the exchange dynamism and agency, and thereby create new possibilities (cf. Quand le loup 87; Latour, “A Well-Articulated Primatology”). By definition, ethologists bear witness to such enabling coarticulations.

Coarticulation with the dead
Despret is not only concerned with how we become worthy of the nonhumans we study, but also how to “treat well” the ambiguous and puzzling entities that enter our lives and that matter to us (cf. Despret and Stengers 77). In her two books about the dead, Au bonheur des morts (2015) 20 and Les morts à l’œuvre (2023), Despret explores how people maintain intense, meaningful and positive relationships with the deceased. The dead, ghosts, phantoms, wandering souls, apparitions, specters: these are entities that populate our collective imagination, feature in artworks and sometimes even haunt us ourselves, but whose existence cannot be captured by scientific means. Despret attempts to make space for the dead in our contemporary, Western, secular societies. She follows various [End Page 49] studies, personal stories, and artistic narratives to trace informal ways in which various people maintain, and even develop afresh, relationships to those who have passed on.

Contrary to theories for coping with grief that advise us to detach ourselves from deceased loved ones and move on, Despret demonstrates how people cultivate intense relationships with the dead, a process in which the dead are actively involved (cf. Au bonheur des morts 160). She focuses on the dead because these are entities that cannot exist on their own, without their humans. And humans, in turn, when faced with their dead, are irrevocably transformed by them. Both are always articulated together in specific settings and in specific ways. The dead do not “stand” on their own. We are responsible for their existence. But we also need “cults, suffrages, modes of convocation and, above all, stories and dreams, which are the preferred vehicles at certain times and in certain places. We need to cultivate dispositions, devices, in other words, technical operators of availability” to be able to connect with them (cf. Au bonheur des morts 61, my translation). 21 In brief, we need to create favorable conditions that make us available to certain forms of convocation by the dead (cf. Au bonheur des morts 57). According to Despret, to be committed to nothingness— “to be dead for no one”—is the biggest risk for these fragile beings (cf. Au bonheur des morts 80). To be done with grief and to move on is to decide that our dead no longer play any vital part in our lives. They are left alone, forgotten and, thus, disempowered.

Despret emphasizes that the dead are anything but passive. They incite the living to tell stories about them, in which hesitation with regard to the status of the story (fact or fiction) is constantly maintained. There is no single version of what happens when someone encounters the dead in the form of a ghost, a phantom, or a spirit. The confusion sowed by such encounters—whether they do or do not really take place—is often sustained by the people who experience them. This means, as Despret argues, that the speaker passes along not only the narrative of what happened but also the destabilizing, ambiguous experience of that encounter. By making others feel what it was like, the speaker extends and protects the enigmatic meeting. This short-circuits the traditional disqualifying response of a skeptical listener, the contention that the experience was not real, that it was only an illusion (cf. Au bonheur des morts 190–193). By having such ambiguous stories retold, Despret suggests, the dead insist on their unique existence (Au bonheur des morts 205). They are relayed through those stories, retold again and again, and thereby transform the living as they pass along from one person to another. Such storytelling helps the dead grow and thicken in their existence. They become real, though not in the same way that an electron would become real for a scientist. They exist in their own mode, following their own rules and ways of operation. [End Page 50]

This perhaps begs the question: what is the purpose, the rationale, for keeping our dead alive in such a fashion? For Despret, what is so interesting about the dead is that they make us do things. Paradoxically, even though they are themselves inanimate (literally no longer living), they animate us. They incite, instigate, and recreate the past in the present by making the living not only tell stories about them but also do their bidding, including finishing certain tasks for them (cf. Au bonheur des morts 166). The dead are those that insist and wait for a response from the living (Les morts 13). Despret recounts an amusing vignette in Au bonheur des morts that exemplifies her arguments. On her deathbed, a woman asks a friend to put her son’s letters into her coffin. The woman passes, but the friend, struck by grief, forgets to fulfill her final wish. Shortly after, a postman dies in their hometown. The friend puts the letters into his coffin instead, as she is sure that he will do as excellent a job in the other life as he did in this one (cf. Au bonheur des morts 43). This tale demonstrates the curious logic that underpins the relationship between the dead and those they leave behind, a logic that is at once perfectly reasonable and yet quite baffling. The dead resist deanimation because once they stop moving people—emotionally and physically—they also cease to exist (Au bonheur des morts 208).

By trafficking with ghosts, Despret proposes a very sensitive approach to beings that are banished from our secular societies but who clearly remain part of us: we all have the deceased in our lives, whether grandparents, friends, or colleagues, who still matter to us. We are inhabited by voices from beyond the grave, not only the voices of people we personally knew, but also the voices of dead philosophers, writers, or artists that are made intelligible to us simply by engaging with their work. As Despret fleshes out the curious existence that the dead lead—owing their post-mortem life to the actually living—she demonstrates that some form of mutual transformation, a coarticulation, must take place for a new form of shared existence to emerge.

Despret further argues for an “ecology of feelings” in that we should pass along that which touches us so that others can be touched by it, too (cf. Au bonheur des morts 98): “That which touches us, calls for us” (Au bonheur des morts 98, my translation). 22 Stories of the dead form alliances between people. More than that: they form communities. If these stories are about the dead whom we have in common—a colleague, a neighbor, a friend—then these dead people form a new community among those they have left behind. The living are transformed into new collective subjects, subjects-in-common. We become a community with and owing to our dead, beings that reconnect us in new and multiple ways (cf. Les morts 161).

Despret considers animals and the dead from the same standpoint of coarticulation, but never examines them directly in concert. What, then, [End Page 51] about dead animals? And, indeed, other dead and dying nonhuman beings that similarly bring about new communities? These seem like apposite lines of enquiry in the context of our ecological crisis: human-nonhuman communities created around slaughter animals in the industrial complex, species threatened by extinction, polluted ecosystems that call for us because they touch us. Coarticulation provides the means for humans to respond to such haunting nonhuman calls, through making ourselves available to a new form of joint individuation with our fellow beings. 23 To open ourselves up to becoming new subjects-in-common with nonhumans—rather than human beings representing nature—would mean to embark on a collective multispecies transformation. In this, we would need to become, individually and collectively, cosmopolitical coarticulators —cosmopolitical coarticulation partners—participating in expansive, multispecies dialogue and in intensive engagement with the Other, be that spirits, animal species, or any other beings.

Toward a politics of coarticulation
What sort of politics does coarticulation envision, then? Despret stays away from questions of politics in her work, admitting her difficulty in integrating in her writing anything that could cause friction (cf. Despret, “Why I Had Not Read Derrida”; Despret and Dolphijn 106–8; Buchanan et al.). This is, undoubtedly, a limitation of her philosophy. Nevertheless, Despret’s framework is founded upon the affirmative construction of alternatives. It has a prefigurative power. She unearths and investigates examples of the successful, collective creation of common worlds between radically different beings that are, admittedly, unique but that offer a basic blueprint that can be followed—however unfaithfully and incompletely—by other coarticulation collectives. Despret is a storyteller, and she hones her craft by spinning engaging stories of success, of collective achievement (réussite) between humans and nonhumans in becoming otherwise together. The primary affect in her writing is joy, and the primary impulse in her philosophy is curiosity (cf. Despret and Dolphijn 106). She attempts to construct new worlds with her narratives rather than undo the one we inhabit. With her work, we have definitely moved beyond critique in philosophy. 24 To some extent, Despret writes a series of small utopias, where two heterogenous entities bring out the best in each other, where engaging with difference, however partially and non-innocently, leads to fuller, richer lives.

Like Haraway, Despret is convinced that by creating multiple worlds through storytelling, we can make our own world more habitable. Creating worlds that are more habitable entails looking for ways to honor various modes of inhabiting, alongside identifying how spaces create new ways [End Page 52] of being and new ways of doing (cf. Habiter en oiseau 41). Rather than reducing various nonhuman worlds to fit our own, Despret seeks instead to multiply nonhuman worlds and populate our world with them (Habiter en oiseau 42). Following Latour, she claims that our strong attachments to nonhumans are the condition of our emancipation (Latour, Reassembling the Social). Emancipation here is not understood as modernity’s freedom from something (equivalent to independence and lack of connections) but as a form of engaged and committed connection to the other. In this way, emancipation renders both parties more capable: an increase in potential (puissance) rather than power (pouvoir). The better we are attached, in multiple and diverse ways, the higher chances we have of creating a better common world, a more habitable world. Perhaps this world would not merit the description of “good” in overall, or abstract, terms, as Despret herself concedes, but it would simply be a little better than the current state of things (Despret and Stengers 201).

Coarticulation implies a politic because the manner in which bodies are articulated to each other and with each other is always political (cf. “The Body”). As one being cannot do without another in order to exist (whether human or nonhuman), the only way to articulate is to coarticulate. Despret’s basic philosophical assumption is that there are different ways of being together in the world. She works within a plural ontology, in which various nonhumans “instaure” themselves owing to the humans that respond to them in a particular way, whether they are scientists, artists, writers, priests, lawyers, or engineers. 25 Despret’s approach is fundamentally ecological à la Stengers and Latour because beings—be they ghosts, fictional characters, artworks, animals, humans, technological instruments, microbes, or particles—are engendered by specific environments, their co-actants, available materialities, and requirements of a practice. All existence needs to be brought about jointly, to be coarticulated by heterogenous beings.

Humans are always coarticulated with the beings, objects, techniques, infrastructures, and environments to which we are exposed in a given socio-temporal context. Our coarticulation partners differ not only across space but time. From this perspective, we become different humans from those before us and those that will come after us. The humans that we will become in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 1 million years will not be the humans that we are now. 26 This ethological understanding of beings as those that do (comport themselves) rather than those that are (essences), invites us to focus on the affordances of our current environments and the possibilities they offer in coarticulating better collective futures.

The difference between representation, articulation, and coarticulation broadly correlates to the difference between political models. While [End Page 53] representation functions according to a parliamentary model of “speaking for,” and articulation is about making new connections across difference (a “diplomacy model”), coarticulation relies on a mutual collective transformation. Coarticulation is a means to create modes of cohabitation in the here and now. 27 In terms of existing political practices, coarticulation thus corresponds most closely with contemporary anarchist practice. Anarchism should be understood here in its etymological meaning: as a political model, where there is no single arche (singular principle) to rule all beings and all settings. Instead, it operates according to an ecological model, in which small-scale collectives work according to rules that are elaborated internally, and that are geared towards creating better alternative worlds every single day. Such an anarchist politics of cohabitation is based on a prefiguration in the here and now, where a multiplicity of modes of existence is taken into consideration. 28 The politics of coarticulation coalesce around two key questions: How can we live together even though we are radically different? How can we keep recreating the conditions of cohabitability, working together with beings that operate differently from us? It is for this reason that the political dimension of coarticulation is so potent: it proposes, even insists upon, a politics of habitability—a politics of cohabitability—not only of humans with each other but also of humans with nonhumans in multispecies relations. And, as such, it forces us to fundamentally rethink our basic political vocabulary and remake our political practices for the new ecological age.