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As I have just suggested, Kohn’s rhetoric displays all the features of systemic closure as defined in Luhmann’s system theory: drawing a border, observing that border, and filtering information from outside the border so as to maintain internal coherence. But the system and its closure is not merely synchronic in character.

Thus several contexts can be identified as providing the genealogy for this circular structure.

The first context that can be made out is an Enlightenment context. The hegemonic existence of the circular structure of the closed system in the present is the result of a diachronic moment of caesura, at which, in Luhmannian terms, a distinction between man and nature was drawn that founded its own subsequent assertions of reality (see on this topic Jahraus 2004: 169-72). For Latour (2006), this is the decisive distinction between us moderns and those who preceded us, the so-called pre-moderns, between those who believed in the separation of man and nature and those who believed in sprits, magic, and a world of animism. Around 1700, so to speak, we left nature behind. The temporal tips over into the spatial once again when we journey beyond the realm of European Enlightenment into the Global South, where the putative pre-modern persists: here the border is between us and them, civilized and non-civilized, Europeans and savages. This border consigns so-called ‘Naturvölker’ (primitive, literally ‘nature’ peoples) to the other side of the civilizational line of demarcation, to the realm of nature, in an act of relegation to the non-human or to ‘bare life’ that can also be executed within Europe. Thus the border between humanity and non-humanity is thoroughly entrenched, infiltrating and contaminating even the most determined attempts to extirpate it. Part of this persistence is simply the result of weight of tradition imposed by the founding act of a self-constituting European ‘declaration of independence’ between 1650 and 1800. Three centuries of reiterated speech-acts are hard to dislodge, especially when they underpin and maintain the deepest strata of continental self-identification.

It has taken many decades to even begin to dismantle this border with regard to the human-animal divide: the evidence for linguistic, cognitive and social complexity among animals has been accumulating gradually since the work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, Gerand Baerends, and more recently Frans de Waal (2016). Much of this erodes the last rampart of human exceptionalism erected by Kohn at the very moment of declaring that ‘forests think’, the symbolic dimension of language. If dolphins, for instance, have ‘signature whistles’ that appear to resemble personal names (Kriesell et al. 2014), then it becomes difficult to maintain the notion of an exclusive ownership of symbolic language by humans alone. Forests, it would appear, use language in ways whose functions exceed that of mere ‘signalling’ (Wohlleben 2015). Language, in particular in its symbolic function, is shared across the spectrum of communicative beings. It is instructive, at this juncture, to note that Peirce (1931-58, II: 228), to whom we will return shortly in greater detail, offers a classic definition of the sign that is remarkably inclusive. Peirce’s definition makes ‘addressivity’ the criteria of signification, and derives ‘personhood’ from a primarily relational signifying activity: a sign ‘is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity […] [i]t addresses somebody.’ Who signifies for or to whom is an entirely open question.

In the face of the frequently reiterated caveat that such claims for language-use among nonhumans are anthropomorphizations, it would seem, oddly enough, quite appropriate to agree. The more we delve into the non-human world and discover complex mechanisms that can be equated with that of human thinking and behaviour, including language, the more these characteristics appear strange and inhuman. The discovery of complexity does not reveal that, after all, animals and trees are much more like us than we realized. On the contrary, it reveals that they are much more complex, and in the strangest of ways, effectively disallowing the anthropomorphic narcissism that accompanies much eco-activism (Nealon 2016).

As Gooding (2017) notes,

the kind of consciousness Wohlleben proposes is so different from ours as to be utterly alien: it is a diffuse, blind intelligence located in the sensitive, questing filaments of thousands of root-tips, or a networked language of chemical messages, fanning out through the forest floor via a “wood wide web” of symbiotic fungal mycelium. It is a sensory alertness present in every leaf.

It would appear that in fact, the life-strategies of non-human beings such as octopuses resist, by virtue of their complexity, any easy assignment to any one side of the nature/culture border, blurring it beyond any categorizing utility whatsoever (Godfrey-Smith 2017; Montgomery 2016). It is precisely the slow progress made in dismantling this border that suggests, in inverse proportion to what has been achieved hitherto, that much more in the way of symbolic and cognitive complexity is yet to be discovered. It will be so complex, however, as to render the current binary utterly senseless, and even revise the underpinning notions of the human and its opposites. What we are finding on the other side of the border does not merely mirror ourselves in an inversion of the non-human that negatively confirms our humanity; rather, it is a complexity which refuses to give us either a negative or a positive mirror image of ourselves at all. (The same thing is happening, for that matter, on the human side of the border, with the gradual discovery of the complexity of human cognition; this is a complexity within which has an equally ‘post-humanizing’ effect.).

Yet the border persists, and its dogged reassertion continues to impute an absence of symbolic language on the other side of its self-generated demarcations; it does not accurately describe a genuinely existing difference. But that persistent border-drawing is under threat as more and more scientific knowledge about the strangeness of the world around us accumulates. The frontier’s synthetic work includes simultaneous self-maintenance and censorship of what lies beyond its heavily-mined death-strip. As the frontier gradually fades, however, it is to be expected that more and more symbolic work of language —in all its mysterious internal complexity—and as a consequence, the symbolic work of translation, will be discovered in the wider world beyond the human enclave. The role of the symbolic as the guarantor of human exceptionalism will be increasingly lost. And with that, we will approach the end of the Enlightenment era—an end already contained in the notion of the Anthropocene, which implies in its naming of the human transformation of our planet the imminent demise of that transformative agency.

A second context must be borne in mind. This is a colonial context that appears to lead—however controversial and tendentious such claims may be (Fischer and Čupić 2015; Zimmerer, ed 2011)—to the Holocaust. Excavating that colonial context involves a conceptual detour via the long moment of European state imperialism in the non-European world. It is hardly coincidental that linguistic statements such as that one quoted above from Kohn resemble the ‘speech acts’ by which sovereign states call themselves into being. Carl Schmitt defined sovereignty not as something that was grounded, for instance in the will of the people or in some other externally legitimizing instance, but as the capacity of the state to abolish its own constitutive rules (the rule of law) in an act of autarky that reposes upon an equally autonomous and autocratic self-establishment. Nothing grounds a state’s existence except its own calling itself into being, and thus a state can equally easily suspend its own rules, as in a state of emergency. There, the state (usually but not always temporarily) suspends the constitution that it has itself established. Because a state asked no one to legitimize its own self-foundation, there is no necessity for it to ask anyone to legitimize or permits its own self-abolition—it is that self-abolition in the ‘state of emergency’ that proves its sovereign status (Agamben 1998: 28). It is not by chance that Schmitt sees the prototype of state sovereignty in the ‘lines in the sand’ drawn by colonizing powers when they marked out the division between civilized colonizers and barbaric natives. Such lines were founding distinctions that allowed the colonies to emerge as a state of lawlessness, on in which, from the outset, the law is suspended—especially as a protection of rights for those who by definition have no rights—because it is now operating outside the civilized world of the metropolis (Schmitt 1950: 67). The colony is the site where the normative force of the law works to suspend the law with regard to the natives, thus allowing the colonizers, in the words of Ugandan poet Okaka Opio Dokotum (in Benge and Bangirana, eds, 2000: 114), to ‘do the awful lawful’.

It is in the colonies, then, the model of an absolutely sovereign self-abolishing rule-of-law was established. It was then subsequently re-imported to Europe, where the Holocaust saw the ultimate implementation of the absolute ‘state of emergency’—manifest most blatantly in the concentration camps embodying ‘the principle according to which “everything is possible”’ (Agamben 1998: 170). As Césaire (1973: 12-13) and Fanon (1971: 72-3) both wrote in 1952, the Holocaust was the manifestation of the re-emergence of ‘European colonialism brought home to Europe by a country that had been deprived of its overseas empire after World War I’ (Young 1990: 8). It is no coincidence that the inauguration of Nationalist Socialist rule in 1933 was followed almost immediately by the declaration of a permanent state of emergency (Agamben 2005). Nor is it coincidental that the beginning of hostilities in 1939, with the invasion of Poland, went hand in hand with the inauguration of a ‘colonial’ project on the same territory (Mazower 2008; Wasser 1993; Werber 2008).

The Holocaust shifted the border between the human and the in- and nonhuman, and between life and non-life, in ways that recall the drawing of ‘race’-based lines of demarcation in the colony. The Holocaust, with its manifold shifting boundaries (colonies and European continental centre, human vs. nonhuman, human vs. inhuman, life vs. nonlife) embodied the revelation of the sovereign power that shows its power via its capacity to shift the boundaries underpinning the polity. That which is outside the rule of law, and outside the territory of the ‘Geltungsbereich’ [‘domain of validity’] of the Constitution, becomes imported into its very centre, in Agamben’s famous definition of ‘the camp’: it is the contemporary manifestation of the basic principle of sovereignty, that reposes upon ‘an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life’; ‘When our age tried to grant the unlocalizable a permanent and visible location, the result was the concentration camp. The camp—and not the prison—is the space that corresponds to the originary structure of the nomos’ (Agamben 1998: 7, 20). Such inner-European manifestations of sovereignty as the capacity to abolish the self-constituting rule of law thus resonate with their colonial predecessors in ways that have profound implications, retrospectively, for anthropology.

I have sketched these Enlightenment and colonial genealogies of linguistic exceptionalism, and the way they reach to the heart of European self-identity, at such length so as to demonstrate the full ramifications of Kohn’s maintenance of a hierarchy that, via his privileging of the symbolic function of language, keep the human in its place of sovereign power. My long analysis of Kohn’s extremely partial ‘provincialization’ of language is embedded in an attempt, in this book, to show how such a ‘provincialization’ might be achieved in a more thorough way. This intention is in turn part of an undertaking that seeks to generalize translation as a creative process well beyond the bounds of human linguistic activity.

This is why I now turn back to translation—which, it transpires, is one of the fundamental jobs of an anthropologist such as Kohn. If the self-grounding nature of the exception, whether juridico-political, or linguistic, strips customary legitimizing narratives of their credibility, liberating both state violence and linguistic power into a domain where no ethical rules obtain, does translation perhaps provide an ethical counterweight to this state of affairs?

Translation lies exactly at the antipodes of this ungrounded sovereign structure, whence its relevance for the anthropological profession. As Derrida (1985) has shown, translation is posited upon its own impossibility. If there were no linguistic difference, translation would not be necessary. But the act of translation can never overcome difference, for if it did, it would banish its own reason for existence and the rationale for its work. The difference that calls forth translation thus persists, even as translation seeks to overcome it, thus making its work of overcoming difference a Sisyphean undertaking, an impossibility that is translation’s own condition of possibility. Here the sovereign structure of the symbolic as that which creates itself as the site of a difference that it must then guard and maintain is turned inside out. That turning-inside-out produces the work of translation as a site of a difference that can never be overcome because it founds the very rationale for translation. This inverted structure is however not strictly speaking an opposition or an antagonism, as both are entangled with each other, especially as most translation as we think of it goes on within the order of the symbolic.

The ungrounded structure sanctioning unbridled political and linguistic violence thus explains the role of the anthropologist as translator. In translating the difference of the native for the metropolitan reader, the anthropologist stands on the border and constantly reinscribes it at the very moment of claiming to traverse it. It is because the native is so fundamentally other that a translator’s expertise is needed to elucidate the opacity of the barbaric native other. The anthropologist’s role is to confirm, via scientific method and translative exposition, the otherness of the native other that the colonizer has already established via violence and expropriation. As ‘participant observer’, the anthropologist constantly enacts a second-order observation of an already-drawn line of demarcation. The anthropologist does not merely take for granted, but re-inscribes, in the anthropological gaze and the anthropological text, the ‘denial of coevalness’ that asserts a fundamental ‘distance between the West and the Rest’ (Fabian 1983: 35)—even when, as in the case of Kohn, she or he claims to be minimizing that distance. The anthropologist is thus a translator who, via her or his sovereign gesture, contravenes the basic conditions of possibility of translation as a constantly paradoxical, self-defeating-but-also-enabling affirmation of difference as possibility. The opposite of the anthropologist-as-translator, and thus the translator faithful to the underlying principles of the profession, is the shaman-as-translator, a figure whom we will encounter in the following chapter.

This longish detour from Kohn via Luhmann, Agamben and Schmitt takes us back to Kohn so as to lay bare the profoundly colonialist and necropolitical implications in the gestures of part-tolerance that we find in this anthropological foray ‘beyond’—but not too far beyond—‘the human’. For all the radicalism of Kohn’s work, it merely operates a marginal shifting of the fundamental distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the civilized and the barbaric, the alive and the non-alive. The internal borders of language (between symbolic language and iconic or indexical language) are rendered porous to some extent so as to allow a limited degree of migration that admits some actants into the realm of speech. But the outer boundaries of language remain fixed: ‘Entities that exhibit self-organization, such as crystals, snowflakes, or whirlpools, are not alive. Nor, despite their name, do they involve a self’ (Kohn 2013: 55). And nor, Kohn implies, do they participate in language. It is almost as if, without at least one immoveable border, Kohn’s notion of language itself would disappear. After all, if everyone could speak, what need would we have for a concept of language?

In place of this defence of language against non-language, I will be positioning, in this book, a plurality of languages whose ultimate expanse covers the entirety of creation. There is, in a sense, no outside to language; only a myriad of internal borders, constantly being translated by a myriad of translation media, some but not all of them linguistic. Here, translation does not straddle a border that it reinscribes in the very act of border-crossing, thus becoming a handmaid of the inside-outside, system-environment hierarchy. Rather, translation links the entities meeting in its mediating action, and in their meeting, brings them anew into being. The translator-as-shaman is someone who takes on this task. It is with this more positive project in mind (although it must wait until the following chapter for a fuller exposition) that I turn to my second objection to Kohn’s work.