Communication et animalité : cartographie d'un commerce

This thesis operates mainly on two levels: one is ethnographical, the other is communicationnal. I explore the curious case of North American jungle backyards in which « used-to-be-wild » animals are experiencing « almost-domesticated » existences while their daily lives are merged with that of Homo sapiens. As pets, guinea pigs or postnatural totems, these pioneer organisms not only feed the third most important black market in the world, they also blur our traditional zoological and philosophical apparatus (often driven by dichotomies between nature/culture, human/nonhuman, prey/predator, dominant/dominated, transmitter/receiver). In 2011, I traveled 16 000 miles all around the continent to explore some of these contemporary humanimal modalities. Hence, I examine important transpecific aspects of these modified ecological landscapes, in which known living organisms experience unknown reorganizations of life. In a Simondonian perspective, I reconceptualize animality and communication activities in order to readdress, along with the question of the animal, individuation processes and their inherent indetermination qualities – the kind, yet unseen, that contemporary jungle backyards silently nurture. At a time when animal rights and bioethics are regularly at stake (and indeed a serious preoccupation for societies that strive to leave behind medieval practices, but also attempt to cope with their biotechnological becomings), jungle backyards provide an original ethological dataset based not only on what an animal is or should be, but rather on what real animal existences actually consist of. In that respect, I offer firsthand material that may help to better navigate our common Ark, possibly facing a new environmental flood. Instead of considering animals from a reductive substancialist point of view or from a strict hylemorphic perspective, focusing on matters of form or forms of matter, I concentrate on movements that give form to matter and matter to form. I then suggest that animality, more than a simple collection of mere attributes or even a basic manifestation of an elaborate biochemical complex, constitutes an enmeshment constantly in motion made of transductive relationalities. Here, biomedia are not considered the latest bourgeon of our technological modernity, slowly shifting from inorganic materialities to organic potentialities, but rather an ancient deviation of natural forces (too quickly restricted to domestication). Instead teckné and anima operate jointly and disparately to propel what I call aniculture and which I consider to be not only a part of our anthropogenic processes, but also a mutagenic pool of differentialities from which humanity constantly draws in order to reinvent itself. Then, along with a specific textual mode of organization (as transpecific as its topic), writing is here even envisaged as another possible expression of animality, maybe even a powerful re-intensification. Because our traditional dealings with animals have always been inseparable from our becomings, the (yet untold) ways we are now dealing with some of our ex-predators and preys reveal a great deal about our postnatural futures and that “animal-medium” we all inhabit. In fact, jungle backyards are less denaturalized places than renaturalized spaces in which animals demonstrate not only adaptive responses to selective pressures but initiate creative processes at a number of levels from which fertile lines of thought can eventually stem.

Keyphrases: Simondon, Jungle backyards, Transpecific ethnography, Media ecology, Animality, Information et communication processes, Creative evolution