I attended the plenary speech at The Nonhuman Turn
Conference given by Brian Massumi entitled “Animality and Abstraction.” In his speech, Massumi addressed issues
of consciousness and instinctual reactions in the way animals interact with
their given environment. Massumi
described instinct as determined at the moment of sexual selection and that
their was evidence of inherent mechanisms of recognition in animals. He spoke of an experiment done with
Herring Gulls that was designed to judge the bird’s response to different
visual representations of decoy gulls.
The experiment found that the Gulls responded more naturally and
favorably to the decoys that were less than perfect representations of their
own kind. This indicated what he
called “a natural disrespect for good from.” This also shows that certain instinctual triggers are not
bound to any reliable schema.
Massumi
said that “environment provides selective restraint” which forces a selective
pressure on an animal and improvise in their given environmental habitat. Animals react to the different and
various sensations provided by the world they occupy. Some species cooperate in functional relationships that are
instinctively beneficial to one another.
Species vary, and adapt differently to different environments in terms
of how they create a spatial domain and function inside that space, playing a
part in the larger ecosystem.
Animal instinct was likened to jazz in the ways that it plays on the
environment and creates an “induced improvisation” that allows a being to
freely and creatively control its own personal space.
