The relationship with other living and non-living beings, present or extinct, is one of the themes to which our culture is most dedicated in recent years, dissecting aspects, finding paths, indicating solutions in every human and non-human discipline. Like any self-respecting anticipatory literature, science fiction has already explored these territories more than forty years ago. In 1974 Ursula Le Guinn’s story was published The Author of the Acacia Seed (and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistic) in which the term Therolinguistics appears for the first time. Forty-seven years later, in 2021, Vinciane Despret publishes Autobiographie d’un poulpe et autres récits d’anticipationwhere he develops the seed launched half a century earlier by Le Guin in a book in balance between science and invention published in 2022 in Italy by Contrasto with the title Autobiography of an Octopus and Other Animal Stories, because it is precisely animals, or rather, living beings that we are talking about. The root thér in ancient Greek it indicates the wild animal, Therolinguistics then “designates the branch of linguistics that is dedicated to the study and translation of the productions written by animals (and later by plants), in the literary forms of the novel, poetry, ‘epic, pamphlet, or archive.’ This is what we read in the text by Despret, who is a philosopher of science and teaches at the Universities of Liège and Brussels. From Therolinguistics to Theroarchitecture, the architecture of the wild, the step is short: Theroarchitecture “refers not only to the study of habitats, but also to that of the different infrastructures created by animals (roads, tunnels, signs, monuments, migratory corridors, etc.) and is particularly interested in the artistic, symbolic and expressive dimensions of these artefacts.” The idea of a Theroarchitecture is fruitful and opens up unexplored or almost unexplored universes, because there are notable studies on animal constructions such as those by James Gould and Carol Grant Gould, The architecture of animalsreleased by Raffaello Cortina in 2008, but it is the perspective and above all the naming of a possible new discipline that changes things.
I stumbled upon Theroarchitecture towards the end of a crackling and varied reading that hadn’t happened to me in a long time, perhaps because the author, Gianfranco Marrone, belongs to that category of intellectuals born from semiotics, a discipline prevalent in the seventies and beyond, who, dealing with signs and languages, ends up dealing with a bit of everything and in the most refined minds allows brilliant disquisitions worthy of Pindar that bounce from pop to erudite in the space of the same line of text. The book is called In the semiocene, was released in 2024 by Luiss University Press and is one of those texts similar to precious treasure chests containing seeds which, when they arrive in ready soil, begin to germinate, creating new paths for thought and action. At the beginning of the first chapter we find an idea that runs throughout the book, that of multinaturalism, introduced by a tasty and brilliant summary: “the idea of nature is seventeenth century, that of culture is nineteenth century, so that the great partage between the two was able to develop almost spontaneously – and naively – within the twentieth century paradigm of the human and social sciences . The idea that on one side, that of culture, there are humans and their forms of aggregation, while on the other, that of nature, there are non-humans governed by everlasting laws in time and space, is typical of our naturalistic West; in many other cultures it is not given: humans and non-humans live within the same society. Regulated by laws that are both anthropological and biological. It follows that, just as there are many different cultures, similarly there are many natures: a senseless, if not blasphemous, idea for some, yet very reasonable for many others. Viveiros, in this regard, has found real forms of in some Amazonian ethnic groups multinaturalisma term that has recently begun to be taken very seriously.”
Viveiros de Castro, Ingold, Descola, Latour are the refined and selected traveling companions who often accompany us during the journey of the text, which made me think of a journey in which we cross different territories and stop, get off, walk, talk to people and set off again with the desire to stay a little longer but already with our eyes on the next destination, while we listen to the opinions of the group of companions among whom the author acts as a mediator, giving the floor to one and to the other, many animals appear but above all many points of view that crumble our little Western certainties. At a certain point in the journey, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, one of our most talkative companions, quoting the History of the Indias, written in 1526 by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, tells us how “The Spaniards, intrigued by the inhabitants of those places, established commissions of inquiry to decide whether the Indians had a soul or not, and whether they could be considered people in all respects human. Like us. The Indians, for their part, immersed the white prisoners under water, to carefully examine the physical transformations of their corpses, in order to understand whether those bodies were putrefying or not; and whether, for this reason, they could be considered human beings in all respects. Like them.”
Marrone continues: “nature does not exist, culture does not exist, just as, more than anything, there is no univocal way to separate these two areas. For us Westerners, nature is one and only one, physical and biological basis from which the various cultures are constituted as so many ways to detach themselves from it. For many other ethnic groups, however, things are not like this. For them, what is unique is culture, while natures are multiple.” Speaking of perspectivism, a key concept in Viveiros de Castro’s thought, the idea emerges that “we are all either prey or predators (eaten objects or eating subjects, as translated by the great French mathematician René Thom). Hence the multiplicity and constant variation of points of view, which in turn depend on the position and role of bodies in given circumstances.”
After the appearance of René Thom who brings with him the theory of catastrophes, only the other great Frenchman, Edgar Morin with his complexity, would be missing to make the group one of the most fruitful for the development of thought in the coming years, given that each of them adds a step towards abandoning the reference models that have accompanied us in recent centuries. Among the things we are certainly abandoning is the anthropocentric idea of the world of which we are discovering all the most hidden nuances and in this abandonment (even God is now a nostalgia) it is as if we were seeking consolation in the new family to which we discover we belong , that of all living things and in particular that of our closest neighbors, the mammals. It is with a kind of relief that we see them more and more similar to us, even in the passions triggered by jealousy, one of the feelings that we believed to be exclusive to man. Marrone takes inspiration from a crime of passion that occurred between orangutans in July 2014 in the jungle of Indonesian Borneo, to analyze how this event was reported by both the scientific community and the press. Kondor, a fifteen-year-old female, attacked and killed thirty-five-year-old mature Sony, because Ekko, the male with whom she was having a relationship, approached her and smelled in the wrong places. Marrone’s analysis takes various and unexpected turns, from the active role of the two females in defiance of all the theories on alpha males to the contrast between journalistic and scientific texts. Another primate, the one from Kafka’s story “An Academic Relationship”, is the protagonist of one of the chapters of the book, where a monkey actually makes fun of the men who taught her to speak and behave like them. Beyond Marrone’s detailed and tasty considerations, I find significant the preponderant presence of the discussion on animals that pervades the entire text.
But among all the seeds that Marrone sowed liberally, the one that immediately began to germinate in me was certainly that of Theroarchitecture. The architecture of the wild has given a name to a series of insights that I have been developing for some time and which involve many of the traveling companions who accompanied us in Marrone’s text together with others. But that’s another story.
