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Thoreau (2016: 104) claims that ‘particular written languages … are but themselves but dialects and provincial’ in contrast to ‘the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard’. How difficult—but also how crucial—this task of radically rethinking the cosmic hybridity of language and the subsidiary character of human language may be is illustrated by a detailed examination of a recent work of anthropology, Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013). Explicitly seeking to move Anthropology beyond the Human—as Kohn’s book announces in its subtitle—his project includes the task of ‘provincializing language’ as one of its subchapters (ibid: 38-42). Calqued on both Thoreau’s injunction and Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), Kohn announces that ‘we need to “provincialize” language’ (2013: 38). He does this within the context of Amazonian culture in the Napo Province of Ecuador. Seeking to displace the centrality of human language, Kohn (ibid: 8) stresses that

[n]on-human life-forms also represent the world. This more expansive understanding of representation is hard to appreciate because our social theory—whether humanist or posthumanist, structuralist or poststructuralist—conflates representation with language.

Kohn (ibid: 8) explains that ‘signs also exist well beyond the human (a fact that changes how we should think of human semiosis as well). Life is constitutively semiotic. That is, life is, through and through, the product of sign processes.’ All beings are involved in a range of semiotic processes:

In Peirce’s terminology these other modalities (in broad terms) are either ‘iconic’ (involving signs that share likenesses with the things they represent) or ‘indexical’ (involving signs that are in some way affected by or otherwise correlated with those things they represent). In addition to being symbolic creatures we humans share these other semiotic modalities with the rest of nonhuman biological life. (ibid: 9)

All beings, or at least all living beings (this is in itself a significant distinction Kohn makes to which I shall return in a moment) use semiotic forms such as the ‘Iconic’ and the ‘Indexical’. So far, so good.

However, at his point, Kohn does an abrupt about-turn. His subsequent subchapter is entitled ‘The Feeling of Radical Separation’ (ibid: 42-9). Having just evoked an ‘open whole’ (ibid: 27-68) in which all beings are involved in semiotic work, he immediately re-introduces a differentiation between types of semiotic activity. Kohn employs the above-mentioned Peircean triad of icon, index and symbol, which is articulated according to progressive degrees of distance from the visual form of the thing itself: the icon imitates its referent visually; the index is connected to the referent via contiguity, causality or association; and the symbol is connected to its referent entirely arbitrarily by the mere force of convention. Kohn wields this triad of progressive distance between types of sign and referent to re-install a distinction—a distance—that separates the human from the non-human. Kohn explains,

symbols, those kinds of signs that are based on convention (like the English word dog), which are distinctively human representational forms, and whose properties make human language possible, actually emerge from and relate to other modalities of representation. (ibid: 9)

‘Emergence’ here is a multilayered word that needs some unpacking. On the one hand, it refers to the notion of ‘emergence’ used by cybernetics and systems theory to describe the way complexity develops. Kohn (ibid: 54) stresses that ‘[t]he symbolic is a prime example of … an emergent dynamic … in which particular configurations of constraints on possibility result in unprecedented properties at a higher level.’ On the other hand, though, it carries with it a hint of escape or liberation: emergence as increasing complexity parallels emergence from a constraining simplicity. This accounts, Kohn says, ‘for the sense of separation … that the symbolic creates’ (ibid: 54).

He hastens to add that the symbolic, though ‘emergent with respect to other semiotic modalities’, that is, the iconic and the indexical, does not lose its links with the more rudimentary semiotic forms from which it arises; ‘something that is emergent is never cut off from that which it came and within which it is nested because it still depends on their more basic levels for its properties’ (ibid: 54). Emergence in this sense carries a secondary meaning of residual connectivity adhering, however minimally, to the structure left behind. This sense, however, is one that Kohn sees as entirely subsidiary.

Kohn clearly imagines the freedom of the symbolic within (but also from) the iconic and the indexical in ways that are analogous to and inform the freedom of the human within (but from) the natural world. The freedom of the symbolic is directly responsible, Kohn says, ‘for the sense of separation … that the symbolic creates’ (ibid: 54). By contrast, he stresses the relationship of ‘dependency’ that binds the symbolic/human to the iconic-indexical/natural realm, thereby foregrounding the limiting nature of this connection rather the enabling aspect of ‘nesting’. Kohn’s choice of vocabulary patently privileges the sense of escape from irritating constraints that characterizes the humanist narrative of progressive emancipation from the limits of nature. By the same token, his choice of terms marginalizes the enabling synergy and symbiosis with nature that, we now know, humankind can ignore only at its peril.

Zooming out to a larger scale, Kohn suggest that ‘[l]ife … is an emergent threshold’, that ‘[l]iving dynamics are constitutively semiotic’, and that ‘[t]he semiosis of life is iconic and indexical’ (ibid: 54). Life, thus, is part of the lower level of self-organization that emergent complexities such as the symbolic exceed. The threshold appears to be the site where the human moves beyond mere life to a superior level of complexity. This is a remarkable and bizarre notion, given the by now widely-recognized and almost common-sense body of research that sees the entirety of life as a gigantic process of emergent complexity (Capra 1983: Capra and Luisi 2014; Gleick 1988; Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Humanity is part of that complexity, not a superior form of complexity that somehow escapes mere biological complexity. In the later parts of this chapter, where I discuss the work of Viveiros de Castro and Ingold, I will suggest that life is a term without an exterior, and that language is part of the fabric of the emergent complexity of life. These theorists do not draw a frontier between life and complexity, but take life, with its constitutive processes of emergent complexity, as the overarching term.

Language is most definitely not exterior to or above the emergent complexity of the living. In the domain of language, then, the symbolic is coeval with, and both iconically and indexically informed and driven by the emergent complexity of life itself. Translation is one of the expressions of the creative innovation that arises within with fabric of linguistic life as part of that larger domain of life.

By contrast, Kohn entrenches the old hierarchy of human superiority even as he appears to liberalize its ancien régime. Even within the laudable project of ‘provincializing language’ so as to democratize the global society of humans and nonhumans, and deposing language from its hierarchical position as the marker of human supremacy and admitting it as a medium common to all species, Kohn retains a pecking order. He does ‘provinzialize’ language to the extent that he admits that some forms of the non-human world employ some forms of language (namely, the iconic and indexical registers). But in effect, even if he has ceded some territory, making language a province, that province still has a capital city, ‘symbolic language’, which is firmly under the control of humans. In effect, little has changed at the fundamental structural level. Humans continue to use language to set up language as the criteria of humanity as an exclusive category. What becomes particularly visible at this juncture, however, is a circular structure of argumentation that I interrogate below.

Because Kohn claims so persuasively to ‘provinzialize’ language and thus to let ‘forests think’, it is all the more important to scrutinize the recuperative work of hierarchy-building that he carries under the smoke screen of putative inclusiveness. In what follows, I rehearse two principle objections in an attempt to sketch alternative models of translation within the natural world.