The Animal Responds: A Posthumanist Analysis of Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC)

Abstract

This thesis presents a posthumanist analysis of Augmentative Interspecies Communication (AIC) through a multispecies autoethnography of using button communication with my dog, Boribon, in our day-to-day life. The study relies on methodological tools of storytelling from an autoethnographic journal, critical reflexivity with an anti-anthropocentric stance, and entangled empathy, the ability to assess emotional states and lived experiences through an intimate familiarity with another creature that arises from our shared history together. I offer this study as a transdisciplinary contribution to Gender Studies and Critical Animal Studies, to supplement existing research on AIC. In the analysis, I focus on three key concepts of posthumanist feminism: (1) companion species, (2) the cyborg, and (3) intra-action. These concepts help me challenge anthropocentric binaries of human/nonhuman, nature/culture, subject/object. First, I situate AIC in a broader context of dog-human companionship, which co-constitutively determines both dog and human. Through an example of expressing emotions, I argue that companionship is a space where relational knowledge emerges, where neither teacher nor learner can precede the other as companions co-create shared meaning. Second, I explore buttons as a technology of communication ingrained in our flesh and mind, making us cyborg companions. I bring an example of multiple meaning emerging for the same button concept to show how cyborgs enact multiplicity in a resistance to anthropocentric intelligibility. Finally, I examine the material-discursive performances in AIC as a posthuman phenomenon. Here, I apply the concept of intra-action on an example of unexpected meaning-making in button communication, to show the ongoing co-constitutive processes of human/nonhuman, subject/object, nature/culture. I conclude that AIC, as a practice, as a phenomenon inherently challenges anthropocentric dichotomies, in its co-constitutive human-animal-technology intra-actions.