Emily Eliza Scott Feeling in the Dark

Ecology at the Edges of History

What if it takes sensing the abyss, the edges of the limits of “ inclusion” and “exclusion”
before the binary of inside/outside, inclusion/exclusion, mattering/not-mattering can be seri-
ously troubled? . . . What if it is only in the encounter with the inhuman, in its liveliness
. . . that we can truly confront “our” inhumanity, that is, “our” actions lacking compassion?
Perhaps it takes facing the inhuman within “us” before compassion—suffering together
with, participating with, feeling with, being moved by—can be lived. How would we feel
if it is by way of the inhuman that we come to feel, to care, to respond?
—Karen Barad1

We start at the base of a wing, the camera scrolling slowly upward across tawny feath-
ers, layered one upon another, shimmering faintly. They appear close enough for us to
observe their exquisite structural logic: protein filaments locked together to form sheets
stronger than hoof or horn. This outermost layer of the bird—an evolutionary novelty
in its complexity—not only supports flight but also serves as the interface between
animal and world: shielding its deep anatomy, regulating temperature between inside
and outside, marking the organism’s porous edges. Until this point, we might assume
this specimen to be the prized curiosity on a Wunderkammer display shelf. Only gradu-
ally do we sense the subtle quiver of its body and then the flash of an eyelid. A frontal
view, at last, reveals the statuesque scale of this live Old World griffon vulture (Gyps
fulvus), its hooked beak and talons bearing clear affinity to those of other birds of prey.
The camera then shifts to a pair of human hands nearby, carefully inspecting a delicate
and yellowed bone—a thin tube, roughly the length of a human forearm, with five
small holes chiseled at even intervals along its span. This artifact, at once mineral and
archaeological, is among the oldest known musical instruments in the world, having
been carved by Homo sapiens from the wing bone of a griffon vulture some thirty-five
thousand years ago.2 The musician, a specialist in prehistoric woodwinds, explores
the rare object from end to end, the keratin of her fingernails, the rough skin of her
cuticles, her creased knuckles—the materiality of her body—providing our introduc-
tion to her being.
This triad—bird, flute, and human—forms the basis and arc for Raptor’s Rapture
(fig. 1), an approximately twenty-four-minute video by the Puerto Rico–based artists
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. The scene is one of extreme reduction, or
distillation, as if these might be the last three figures on earth. In a blackened space
with highly focused pools of light, it is also one of decontextualization: bird out of
wild, bone out of animal, artifact out of ground, human sounds out of time. What we
witness, from the flautist’s initial, tentative tappings to the whir of her breath pressed
through the instrument’s apertures, is a strain for meaning across species and across
deep time. An encounter but not quite an exchange, this performance stages the
side-by-sideness of never fully alignable or mutually comprehensible entities. As such,
it is an apt allegory for our own, present moment. Today, to approach the subject of
ecology, which concerns the interactions among life forms within the context of their
oikos, or earthly habitat, is to approach something simultaneously urgent and largely
opaque.3 We are faced, for instance, with the specter of anthropogenic climate change,
already unfolding in myriad locations and forms—from the acidification of oceans and
thawing of permafrost to the quickening extinction of flora and fauna—phenomena

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1 Allora & Calzadilla, Raptor’s
Rapture, 2012. Digital frame
from 23-minute-30-second HD
video with sound. Image and
permission courtesy the artists
© Allora & Calzadilla

not entirely within our grasp, and that moreover represent unprecedented brinks
within human-natural history.
A handful of artists are creating works that move beyond the purely human-focused to
engage what we might call the worldly. More precisely, these artworks illuminate entangle-
ments between the human and the nonhuman as they unfold in time, signaling a dual
rethinking of humans as natural—one among other species and surroundings—and nature
as historical. In some cases, archaeological or geological time scales are invoked to this
end; in others, it is a turn to matter or the nonhuman animal. (In Raptor’s Rapture, all of
the above come into play.) At potential risk in this upscaling or transference of registers,
perhaps, is the elision of crucial questions about various inequalities among humans.
Rather than addressing ecological or political ecological issues per se, however, the work
I wish to discuss trades a topical approach for one that operates in the realm of affect, or
even the existential, suggesting that—in light of our immersion in an environmental crisis
too big to apprehend—it is through probing the (indistinct) edges where human and non-
human meet, that we might begin to feel our way.
Commissioned for dOCUMENTA (13), Raptor’s Rapture was originally installed as
a single-projection video within the subterranean recesses of the Weinberg Bunker in
Kassel, Germany. A labyrinth of underground tunnels first blasted into a rocky hillside
as wine and beer cellars in the nineteenth century, this cavernous space was enlarged
toward the end of World War II to house civilians during air raids. (We can picture
body after body filing into the massive earthen shelter to seek protection within its
cool limestone chambers, the rapid suc­ces­sion of explosions overhead transmuted by
bedrock into muffled vibrations.) While the human-made hollow at Weinberg today
marks a traumatic chapter in recent recorded history, another cave, Hohle Fels, in the
Swabian Alps of southern Germany, opens onto spans of evolutionary time. It was
here, in 2008, that the original of the flute featured in Raptor’s Rapture was discovered
along with a number of other key artifacts from the Upper Paleo­lithic period, includ-
ing the earliest undisputed example of figurative art, an effigy known as the Venus of
Hohle Fels. These objects remind us that the material traces of history are preserved
within the earth’s sediments and/or the peculiar microclimates of its sunless cavi-
ties. Hohle Fels, in particular, connotes the birth of culture—often taken to be the
basis for a presumed distinction between humanity and its animal other. In bringing

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2 Allora & Calzadilla, Raptor’s
Rapture, 2012. Digital frame
from 23-minute-30-second HD
video with sound. Image and
permission courtesy the artists
© Allora & Calzadilla
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
together multiple, overlapping temporalities, Raptor’s Rapture highlights points where
the human and nonhuman intersect. The slowness of the film’s pace, which portrays
not so much action as focused attention, furthermore unsettles our sense of time
as usual.
The philosopher Michel Serres asserts that we have “lost the world” through our
rampant objectification of nature, and likewise our increasing isolation from its time
and weather, or temps.4 Whereas peasants and sailors once worked out in the world,
in direct response to seasons, storm fronts, the biological clocks of plants and animals,
and the rhythm of night and day, most of us now live inside walls of our own making,
inhabiting a strange, hermetic kind of time—one that is perpetually short-term and
obsolescent, that folds in on itself, sealing us from and blinding us to everything
outside of it. The art historian Jonathan Crary speaks similarly to the “generalized con-
dition of worldlessness” stemming from our distinctly contemporary and profoundly
alienating “24/7” temporality: “a time without time, a time extracted from any mate-
rial or identifiable demarcations, a time without sequence or recurrence.”5 For both
thinkers, our disorientation from time itself and the concomitant relegation of the
world to the shadows inhibit our ability to experience the present, remember the past,
and envision the future. Seeing our way out of an ensuing global emergency, one of
our own making, demands a renewed attunement not only to long-term perspectives
but also to those beyond the human.
In Raptor’s Rapture, the flute serves as a hinge between contemporary and past,
between human and animal, between the live bird and its ancestors (not to mention its
interior anatomy). It is, moreover, animated, possessing agency to connect times and
beings. Of course, this particular tool was designed by its makers precisely for com-
munication, to facilitate exchanges
and thereby solidify bonds
between people. Increasingly,
anthropologists believe that music,
as a precursor to language, was
central to the social develop-
ment, territorial expansion, and
evolutionary survival of humans.
Others have conversely stressed the
primary role of matter in driving
evolution’s course. Citing the
philosopher Manuel De Landa’s
ideas about the mineralization by
which soft tissues became bones,
thereby radically expanding the
potentials for animal motion, the
political ecologist Jane Bennett
writes, “In the long and slow time
of evolution . . . mineral material appears as the mover and shaker, the active power,
and the human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action, appear
as its product.”6
At the same time that the flute, traditionally taken to be a mute relic, performs,
the musician—as she attempts to elicit sounds from it—becomes animal. She spits,
sweat forms on her brow. Her throaty exhalations seem not of “our” world (fig. 2). The
protagonists in Allora & Calzadilla’s film exist as both object and subject, or, in each
case, any easy distinction between the two is murky. Allora elaborates upon the artists’
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3 Panel of the first “Chinese
horse” (detail), Lascaux Cave,
Dordogne, France. 15,000 BCE.
© N. Aujoulat-Centre National
de la Préhistoire/MCC (France)
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
long-standing fascination with the body as a physical medium through which external
surroundings are translated into impressions:
Sound literally touches. The vibrations produced by sound move tiny bones inside our
ears. This stimulation is registered first as an intensity (affect) to which the body responds
with feelings, emotion, and cognition. . . . How our senses, our emotions, our beliefs, and
our judgments are mediated through affects and resonances constitutes a very rich line of
inquiry within the larger terrain of the bio-politics of embodiment, especially since it fore-
grounds the body as the material site from which people are connected to each other and to
the world at large.7
The artists recount an instant during the flautist Bernadette Käfer’s performance
when this tactile facet of cognition becomes visible: “as . . . she gets closer to produc-
ing the tone, her pupils begin to dilate as her eyes jump back and forth, up and down
searching for this sound,” revealing “the
other/animal/non-conscious workings
of her body in relation to her conscious
efforts to make this sound.”8 Among
the sequences that Käfer demonstrates
are those based loosely on the calls of
animals, from apes to birds. Birdsong,
in particular, has been linked to the
origins of language, with several recent
studies corroborating Charles Darwin’s
hypothesis that early human music
involved its imitation.9
For most of human time, notes the
art critic and historian John Berger,
“animals constituted the first circle
of what surrounded man. . . . They
were with man at the centre of his
world.” Referencing prehistoric cave
paintings (fig. 3), he points out that
animals were the original symbols depicted at the dawn of representation, appear-
ing “as messengers and promises” as well as signs “for charting the experience of the
world.”10 Only with the rise of the Industrial Age and eclipse of an agrarian one, he
argues, were animals pushed to the margins of human consciousness as commodities
and/or spectacles. In Raptor’s Rapture, human and animal are summoned again into
proximity, where we (and they) can contemplate their likenesses and unlikenesses.
By way of its camerawork, the film underscores a chasm of unknowability between
the two, who occupy the same space but are never simultaneously in focus. Close-up
views skip from one figure to the next during some intervals; at others, we see bird
or musician in sharp detail while the second is blurred, apparition-like. The artists
attest to the challenge of avoiding the “false impression of some kind of unity” or
of “anthropomorphizing the animal [by giving] it human attributes.” At times, we
sense what might be recognition, captivation, or agitation on the part of the griffon
vulture, although ultimately, its responses to Käfer’s improvisation remain undecipher-
able. A parallel impenetrability surrounds the distant ancestors conjured by the flute,
which, as the artists remind us, “did not come with a manual or an accompanying
songbook.”11
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4 Photograph from Joseph Beuys,
I Like America and America Likes
Me, 1974. René Block Gallery,
New York © 2014 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Reproduced
from Caroline Tisdall, Joseph
Beuys: Coyote (Schirmer-Mosel,
1980), 129. Photo, Caroline
Tisdall
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
This, of course, is neither the first nor the only artwork that has brought human
and nonhuman animal face to face. Most famously, the German artist Joseph Beuys
shared quarters with a coyote for three days as part of his 1974 “action,” I Like America
and America Likes Me (fig. 4). Without rehearsing the full details of this oft-cited event,
it is worth mentioning that Beuys turned to the coyote primarily for its symbolic value,
and specifically what he interpreted to be its association with indigenous peoples and a
despoiled environment in the United States (the two of which he conflated). “You could
say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can this [whole
American trauma with the Indian, the Red man] be lifted,” he would later state.12
Many contemporary artists distance themselves from the essentialist tenor of Beuys’s
artwork. In contrast, their endeavors look to animals as a way to probe other-than-human
subjectivities, without the aim of assimilation into clear meanings or empirical facts.
Jennifer Monson’s multiyear project, bird brain (2000–2006), for example, investigated
the intricacies of specific animals’ migrations (e.g., gray whales, geese) by way of interac-
tive workshops and “public dance presentations” involving students, biologists, land
managers, and others. Rachel Mayeri has collaborated with primatologists for almost a
decade in conjunction with Primate Cinema, a series of experimental videos exploring the
human-primate continuum.13 Sam Easterson creates installations from the raw footage
of “critter-cams” that he has attached to a wide variety of plants (e.g., tumbleweed) and
animals (e.g., pheasant, scorpion, tortoise, bison). The material produced by these artists
leaves much opaque, with Easterson’s flora- and fauna-driven point-of-view imagery at
times verging on abstraction. As such, it aligns with the counterlinguistic and counter-
representational “turns” being articulated within a field like animal studies, which places
value on nonhuman encounters precisely because they point to “an aporia in our reason
and our knowledge.”14 From such a perspective, representation and reason itself often
alienate us from alternate materialities, temporalities, and ways of knowing and being, both
within and beyond ourselves.
The degree to which humanity has by now reshaped the world in its own image involves
a retreat of discernible reference points. Which is not to say that nature has ever been
stable or ahistorical (quite the contrary). However, the extent and rate of human-induced
environmental change have intensified
dramatically. Take, for instance, Gyps
fulvus, a species that is actively morphing
in response to conditions under rapid
transformation. Europe’s last remaining
populations have been brought back from
the brink of extinction owing to elaborate
reintroduction programs since the 1980s.
In 2011 an “alarming departure” in the
creature’s behavior, from scavenging to
predation, was additionally reported—this
modification was spurred by new poli-
cies that require ranchers to dispose of
carcasses rather than leaving them to rot
in the open.15 There are countless other
examples of animals shifting their mil-
lennia-old home ranges and/or migration
routes in reaction to altered geographies,
weather patterns, and so forth. A study
published last year documented a
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 metamorphosis in the physiology of several North American species’ brains, thought to
reflect the development of sharpened skills for navigating abruptly mutating habitats.16
In these cases, humans are the drivers of adaptation, signaling what we might call a
thoroughly post-natural moment. At minimum, any baseline of “nature” has now been
supplanted by something more hybrid.
The term “Anthropocene” is being adopted by many earth scientists, philosophers,
and others to characterize our present epoch, with humans understood to be a newly
geologic force, possessing the power to alter the history of the planet itself. (According to
the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, this development throws the entire project of history,
rooted in humanism—and to be sure, art history, too—into deep crisis.17) Geologic time
is measured by way of strata, but more specifically by fossils encased within them. Mass
extinction events—in which an overwhelming percentage of global species vanish in a
geologically brief interval, something that has happened only five times before—provide
especially clear markers between periods. The most recent such event entailed the
extinction of dinosaurs, with birds being the only relatives who crossed the cataclysmic
threshold of the Cretaceous to persist to this day; as such, we might indeed think of
them as messengers from a former world. Some biologists warn that we may now be
causing the sixth mass extinction on earth, which moreover poses the possibility of
humanity itself becoming geologic, or rendered into silent sediments.
According to Christian theology, “Rapture” refers to the final ascension of believers
to heaven at the end times or, in Allora & Calzadilla’s secular interpretation, “to those
who . . . remain or are left behind on Earth after another group literally leaves.”18 Like
its etymological sibling, “raptor,” the word “rapture” derives from the Latin rapere,
“to seize or take by force, to carry off,” and can also denote the state or experience
of being swept up in overwhelming emotion. In a world of dizzying acceleration and
subsequent losses of orientation, there is something utterly arresting and (dare I say?)
moving about the staging of a single, yet at once wildly multiple, point of contact.
Two sentient beings: not parallel, but adjacent, coexistent in a moment of intense
presentness. What is called for, on our part, might be named compassion. Or perhaps,
it is something closer to “critical empathy,” a term that arises from trauma studies,
defined by the art historian Jill Bennett as a “conjunction of affect and critical aware-
ness” that constitutes “the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity ( feeling for
another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that
entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.”19
How might practices and studies of art take us not deeper into the human but, rather,
push us to consider the ways that humans and nonhumans are inextricably entangled
with one another, both historically and materially? How might they help shake us from
a state of “worldlessness” to one where we better care for and respond to the ecological?

Notes
I wish to thank Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla for their generous willingness to be in exchange
during the production of this essay, Rachel Mayeri for opening my eyes to animal studies, and Alan
Braddock, Renée Ater, and Emily D. Shapiro for their keen editorial input along the way.
1 Karen Barad, “Intra-actions,” interview by Adam Kleinman, Mousse, no. 34 (June 2012): 81.
2 Because the flute was damaged during excavation, an exact replica—constructed by the archaeologist
Nicholas J. Conard and colleagues at the University of Tübingen, who also discovered the original—
appears here.
3 The word “ecology” derives from the Greek oikos, which means household, dwelling place, or habitation.
The same prefix, “eco-,” is shared by “ecology” and “economy,” which refer respectively to the “study of”
and “management of” the household.

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 4 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor:
Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995), 29.
5 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 18, 29.
6 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2010), 11.
7 “Interview with Allora & Calzadilla,” in Angela Rosenberg, Allora & Calzadilla: Compass (Berlin:
Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, 2009), n.p.
8 Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, email interview with the author, January 24, 2014.
9 Shigeru Miyagawa, Robert C. Berwick, and Kazuo Okanoya, “The Emergence of Hierarchical Structure
in Human Language,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (February 2013): 1–6.
10 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 1, 2, 6.
11 Allora & Calzadilla, email interview with the author, January 24, 2014.
12 Carin Kuoni, ed., Energy Plan for the Western Man: Writings by and Interviews with the Artist (New York:
Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 141.
13 Monson’s project website: http://www.birdbraindance.org/; and Mayeri’s website: http://rachelmayeri.com/.
14 Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2012), 23–24.
15 Antoni Margalida, David Campión, and José A. Donázar, “Scavenger Turned Predator: European
Vultures’ Altered Behavior,” Nature 480, no. 7378 (December 22, 2011): 457.
16 Carl Zimmer, “As Humans Change Landscape, Brains of Some Animals Change, Too,” New York Times,
August 22, 2013.
17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009):
197–222.
18 Allora & Calzadilla, email interview with the author, January 24, 2014.
19 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2005), 10.

Kinshasha Holman To Reap the Harvest Wonderful

Conwill
On Sustainability at the National Museum of
African American History and Culture

Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to
reap the harvest wonderful.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk1

Throughout America’s history African Americans have helped America live up to its best
ideals. Making the planet better, shaping what museums do—all of that is at the heart of
what we do.
—Lonnie G. Bunch III 2

Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum

of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), sees the value and meaning
of sustainability and the new museum’s design and construction as much more than
achieving the goal of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)

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