Question of Crow-Being with 'Surface Encounters' by Ron Broglio

In his book Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art Ron Broglio (2011) explores the question of animal phenomenology. What it is like to be an animal “from the fur of the beasts themselves.”(Broglio 2011 pp.6) Broglio explains that “phenomenology is interested in how humans are embedded in their world – a world of material things, cultural meanings, and physiological engagement. As such, phenomenology is decidedly anthropogenic; it is interested in how we humans move in the world as we perceive it. (…) The problem of embodying another perspective haunts philosophy and art.” (Broglio 2011 pp.6) In undertaking philosophical thinking about Crow, I am not trying to get inside her mind, as this is impossible. However, in my art, the scope for thinking about Crow’s intentions, habits and rhyme or reason is more open; therefore, in doing so a number of rules have to be adhered to. As Broglio describes, “in these questions of the animals’ worlds, we are confronted with how to understand others’ perspectives without reducing them to our own and throwing out parts of these others’ worlds that we cannot understand.” (Broglio 2011 pp.7) 

Of course, we cannot fully understand their worlds, and this creates a Big Problem for human. How to think of things without things to think with? Humans need a medium for the thinking, we need to describe, denotate, determine our dominion. “In its foreignness, the animal other becomes radically Other.” (Broglio 2011 pp.7) We have always measured animal skills against our own, their languages, tool use, reasoning all pale in comparison against Human, Broglio (2011 pp.7) names the “supposed inferiority of their abilities by a shorthand called “living on the surface.”” He goes on to explain that this ‘surface’ is a lack of depth, that Humans theoretically have in spades. We have set them apart from us, and even when a little depth is glimpsed of an animal, it is dismissed as “untranslatable and not worth pursuing in our human endeavours. This flattening of animals’ worlds into a thin layer of animal world as a life on the surface of things has legitimated any number of cruel acts against animals.” (Broglio 2011 pp.8) Broglio strives to flip this ‘surface living’ on its head and show that it can be a space for fruitful and positive encounters with animals.

Furthermore, the arts and the artist can be beneficial for this surface adjustment, as artists make double the surfaces we depict through reproduction, we also understand the concept and material mode of surface very well as it is a constant tool in our practice. Broglio confesses he is “interested in how art calls us to consider and negotiate the space of this animal other.” And moreover, despite art existing within the cultural and thus human sphere, “The artists and their works do not present a unified mode of proceeding but rather a heterogeneous approaches and attitudes for understanding the nonhuman.” (Broglio 2011 pp.8)