Non-human voices and human communication: the raising ventriloquism effect
(2019) IAMCR congress — Location: Madrid (7.July.2019)
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- At a conference in 2016, Peter Jackson, Sea Shepherd’s president, said that we spend millions to go to Mars, but we’re not able to understand non-human voices. Quite surprisingly, vegetal communication and plants as “communicators” represent today a raising theme in the media. From December 2017 to December 2018, we collected more than 15 best-selling books, documentaries, and special issues of popular scientific magazines. This opens a new field in environmental communication practice and research. In this paper, we focus on how non-human vegetal voices are given place and visibility in human communication, in connection with the questioning concerning the rights and place of non-human beings. The notion of “ventriloquism” (Cooren, 2007) can be useful in this case. Environmental communication research has developed knowledge about the relation between non-human voices and human communication. On the one hand, there has been a slow but sure conversion of the vision of nature as “wild” and sublime into a vision in which nature is much more “entangled” with human culture (Williams, 1972). Haraway (1989) proposed a vision of nature close to an eco-centric animist vision. Cantrill and Oravec (1996) focused on the origin of the concept of the “environment”, and Crone (1996), Abram (1997), Davis (1997), Sowards and Stibbe (2001) worked on the place of man in relation to nature. On the other hand, Cox (2007) and Milstein (2007, 2009) proposed a completely different analysis, which is still relevant today, pointing the importance of the reference to the “mega fauna” (emblematic mammals species) in the discourses on nature. They identified also biases, like the “Bambification phenomenon” (Milstein, 2007), which is an angelic conception of wild animals and the attribution of human characteristics to their behaviour. These various researches underline the entanglement and links between nature and culture from the point of view of communication. The works of Latour (2004, 2005) and Descola (2013) are other important contributions on this subjects from other disciplinary points of view, as is the philosophy of antispecism (Singer, 1975). The conceptions of Nature are changing today. Berger (1980) had already pointed out to what extent the media representations of a "vibrant and lively” nature have transformed the animals into objects of observation and spectacle. Cheryl Lousley (2016) extends this comparison, using the term "charismatic life” to translate the evolution towards a permanent emphasis or even a “fetishization” of living beings: nature becomes a "collection of souvenirs" and biodiversity becomes a spectacle. We propose in this paper to analyze in the first part the place of non-human voices communication in environmental communication research. The second part will discuss the basic findings of our content and semio-pragmatic analysis concerning the actual emergency of the theme of vegetal beings as communicating beings in media communication, using the scope of semio-pragmatics. Our semio-pragmatic analysis is applied to our corpus of more than 15 different media contents, including more than 1300 pages and 80 minutes of audiovisuals, including off and on-line media. Finally, the third part develops a discussion on a potential ventriloquist effect (Cooren, 2007).
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Catellani, A., & Céline Pascual Espuny. (2019). Non-human voices and human communication: the raising ventriloquism effect. IAMCR congress, Madrid. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/126765