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Accepted Paper:
‘Noch Nicht’ OR ‘Doch Nicht'?: A Hopeful Discourse on Semiotic Spaces
Alex Oehler
(University of Regina)
This paper explores somatic spaces through the use of materials as communicative devices. What is the potential of reaching beyond one’s own perceptive world? Invoking Laruelle’s non-philosophy, I ask: How can shared environments provide more-than-human material thinking spaces?
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Soiot herder-hunters of southern Siberia, this paper highlights ways in which aspects of our environment have the potential to become non-verbal communicative devices. Drawing on an affordance perspective, I look at how human and other species identify available materials in different ways, resulting in multi-layered somatic spaces. These layers of species-specific meaning beg us to explore the extent to which diverse natures are capable of reading each other’s signs in the landscape. But going beyond acts of non-verbal inter-species communication, I am interested in exploring landscapes and their material potentialities as more-than-human thinking spaces. I invoke Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy to see how useful this approach might be for anthropologists studying animal-human relations in shared spaces. To what extent can humans and other animals engage in joint acts of material thinking?