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Ingold (2011: 175) focuses on the (for us) curious fact that in some Artic circle societies, animal names are verbs rather than nouns. He gives a plethora of examples: “‘perches in the lower part of spruce trees” tells us something about how the boreal owl lives. The names describes a pattern of activity that may then resolve itself into the form of an owl’ (ibid: 170). This appears to be a part of a broader linguistic phenomenon not uncommon in Circumpolar societies. As Cruikshank (2005: 3-4) notes,

English is a language rich in nouns back lacking verb forms that distinguish animate from inanimate subjects. Both Athapaskan and Tlingit languages have comparatively fewer nouns but are verb rich and hence often define landscape in terms of its actions … Both languages [Tlingit and Southern Tutchone] emphasize activity and motion, making no distinction between animate and inanimate. In Athapaskan languages, you know something is animate if the verb signals that it has the power to act on other things or to move, and actions are often attributed to entities, such as glaciers, that English speakers would define as inanimate.

In order to give English speakers a sense of how these verb-nouns might sound, Ingold uses a substantivizing continuous participle: where English would use the noun ‘owl’, ‘the Koyukon name does not really refer to the owl as an object, but to what we might call the activity of “owling”’ (ibid: 170). The use of the ‘ing’-form conveys the sense of existence as process. It gestures towards the verb as an index of animation, of ‘animacy’. Where there is life, there is a verb. And where there is life, verbs create stories: ‘every bird that flies is like every telling of the story: the character endures in its living enactments as the story endures in its retellings’ (ibid: 171). But Ingold’s use of the simile (‘like’) is ingenuous, because what he in fact means is a performative copula. If the animal’s life is described by a verb, to use that verb is not merely to describe but also to participate in that lively processuality. For the societies that Ingold studies, animals (to take only this example, leaving trees, glaciers, or mountains to one side), described by a verb-name, are stories (ibid: 169, 170, 171).

The conflation of animal, verb, life and story may appear curious, even bizarre, but its true interest lies in the way it transforms narrators as well as narrative, and by extension, narrative language itself. Ingold (ibid: 175) notes that, because the name is coeval with a process which is coeval with life, ‘[t]o speak of an animal among the Koyukon … is to enter into the process of its life.’ Furthermore, narration is also closely connected with interpellation and calling: animals know their names and respond to them (ibid: 173). Language is both processual and infused with addressivity. To describe is to address in a relation of contiguous intimacy. Thus, ‘[i]f humans respond to the calls of animals the same way that animals respond to their vocal invocation by humans, then there can be no absolute difference between animal vocalisation and human name calling’ (ibid: 174). Consequently, the world consists of an interrelated tapestry of human and non-human stories and addressivity (ibid: 173). Not only stories and names are related to each other, the narratives forms and textures in which these stories and names are couched also become an all-pervasive, contaminatory influence. Language in turn becomes caught up in this porous processuality. Ingold (2011: 175) concludes, falling back upon his use of continuous forms, that ‘speaking [the animal’s] name is part of the process whereby language itself is brought to life: the animal can be animaling in a language that is languaging.’ At risk of redundcy, but in order to stress the importance of this idea, Ingold (ibid: 175) details this process: ‘In languaging language—one not semantically locked into a categorical frame but creating itself endlessly in the inventive telling of its speakers—animals do not exist, either as subjects, or objects; rather, they occur.’

Ingold opens up a possibility which allows us not merely to admit animals to the symbolic rather than keeping them imprisoned in the world of iconicity or indexality, but rather, to transform language itself. This happens—or better, is recognized as always already happening—when we become cognisant not only of language’s power to transform the world, but more radically, of its mode of being as a process of transformation in itself.

Language, in the concepts that Ingold relays from Circumpolar societies, thus becomes part of the meshwork of life. It does not display its creativity merely by attaining higher functions that are freed from the constraints of iconicity and indexicality (i.e. locked into systems of concrete referentiality) so as to become autotelic and thus poetic, i.e. creative (in a realm to which only humans can aspire). That vision of language would merely assert its superiority by moving away from things, away from materiality towards ideality (this was why it was so important to stress the materiality of the sign in an early phase of structuralism [Goux 1968], though this rapidly degenerated into a distancing of sign and signifier in poststructuralism, culminating by extension in an enhanced notion of distance from worldly referentiality [During 2012: 74]). Rather, in the Circumpolar concepts of language described by Ingold, we are confroned with a concept of language that entails entanglement (Hodder 2012) and proximity (West-Pavlov 2018a). The verb is a connector: it makes no sense to leave a verb in isolation. The verb does not move in the separated world of the autotelic, autonomous symbolic as Kohn imagines it. The verb is an operator of dynamic enlivenment, which means relational continguity and promiscuity, and thus of productive generativity.

We would do well at this juncture to recall Simondon’s (1964: 260) dictum, referring to the biological phenomenon of the membrane, to the effect that ‘Le vivant vit à la limite de lui-même, sur sa limite’ [‘The living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit’ (qtd in Deleuze 1990: 103)]. Taking into account that within the worldviews Ingold documents, language is pervaded by life’s own processuality, we could retool Simondon’s dictum to say that ‘Languaging languages at the limit of itself, on its limit’. In contrast to the ‘internal distanciation’ (distanciation interne) that Althusser (1995: 564) imagined as a sort of non-transcendental critical distance within ideology itself, we might want to imagine here a sort of ‘internal proximate productivity’ within the fabric of the material world where the ‘emergent complexity’ of matter happens at the interface between entities. (The doubling of critique and creativity that I rehearse here is a topos to which I will return in chapter 4 below.) To this extent, the verb is the site of the ‘emergent complexity’ that Kohn assigns to the symbolic function of language, but this ‘emergent complexity’ happens within and by virtue of the fabric of being, not by escaping from it. Language would be part of that process, not a detached descriptor or ‘representation’, and it would thus be characterized by its own ‘internal proximate productivity’. In other words, language would be embarked upon an immanent process of translation from the outset.

For Ingold, life is not an attribute, something that might be possessed by an entity, held within its boundaries, or at worst, ‘attributed’ to it in the ‘anthropomorphizing’ projections of primitive peoples and misguidedly romantic eco-philosophers. This would submit life to the economy of ‘inversion’, a ‘logic’ according to which ‘the field of involvement in the world, of a thing or a person, is converted into an interior schema of which its manifest appearance and behaviour are but outward expressions’ (Ingold 2011: 68). ‘Inversion’ is a process by which processes properly situated in the commons are internalized and lodged as goods within the inner space of an entity. The attribute becomes a ‘tribute’, something extracted by force from a subjugated commons and captured in a colonial encampment. If an attribute is something that, etymologically, is ‘allotted’, it is thus contained in the individual’s ‘allottment’: most typically for the Enlightenment individual, his fenced-in private domicile.

By contrast, for Ingold life is all around us, distributed and dispersed. But, precisely because of this ubiquity, it cannot be thought of as an attribute. It must be thought of as a relational process. Life is not something that one has, nor that everyone has, but rather, the processual mode of existing together by which things are. Life, in other words, happens. It happens, in its hypothetically most minimal form when two entities interact. But these entities are themselves constituted of processes, which in turn are constituted of sub-processes, and so on, and these entities are embedded in much larger networks of processual relations, so that the constitutive notion of the boundary or border that defines both attribute and entity must be abandoned. Life has no boundary or outside or opposite (most certainly not that of death). There is no oppositional relationship à la Saussure that defines life. As Ingold (ibid: 4) notes,

It is of the essence of life that it does not begin here or end there, or connect to a point of origin with a final destination, but rather that it keeps on going, finding a way through the myriad of things that form, persist and break up in its currents. Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure.

If there is a difference that is somehow constitutive of life, it is not a static, spatialized one located on its borders, at the sites where life meets the nonliving, or at the moment when life comes to an end. Rather, this constitutive difference is one that is dynamic and generative within itself. This difference is the point of encounter between a given process and other processes that attract, deflect, transform it, thus triggering the next stage of the unending process. The border is between life and life, between its constitutive processes. Simondon again: life lives at is own limits. Each of these borders is a moment of ‘translation’, as one process encounters another and undergoes a transformative metamorphosis.

These notions in turn have implications for agency. Agency is not a property of internalized identity and stability, but is conferred and devolved onto the actants by their inter-actants, or interlocutors, by the connections that take place within the interaction. Rejecting the accusation of anthropomorphism frequently levelled at notions of animism, Ingold suggests that ‘The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not a result of the infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation’ (Ingold 2011: 68). One could make a similar argument for language and for linguistic agency, and especially the creative agency that putatively accompanies the command of the symbolic function of language. The task is not to raise nonhuman entities into the realm of language, but in fact to recognize the already-always location of all beings within a meshwork of creativity, whether linguistic or lively, that is ontologically prior to their differentiation: As Liz Grosz (2011: 19) has suggested, ‘Language is not the uniquely human accomplishment that post-Enlightenment thought has assumed.’ Summarizing the work of Darwin, she notes the prevalence of language as ‘a mode of sexual allure, as a form of enhancement and intensification’ ‘which man shares with many species’ (ibid: 18). It is ‘already a tendency, residing within the voice and other organs capable of resonating sound, to articulate, to express, to vibrate, and thus in some way to affect bodies’ (ibid: 19). To the extent that language is a creative, connective, generative business from the outset, languaging would emerge as a process similarly ontologically prior to the differentiation between iconic, indexical or symbolic uses of language. The creativity of language at its apparently most autonomous would in fact be a creativity of one sector of the world as it unfurls in creative contact with other sectors at one of its extreme outer edges—a linguistic-ontological meshwork of becoming. Language, in this sense, becomes neither a descriptor of inherent agencies, nor an inherent agency in itself, but rather, a site of of shared, participatory, collaborative agencies. Agency is always already devolved and derivative, and linguistic agency remains, even in the symbolic, devolved and derivative. Every language is thus a contact zone. And every entity is a translator, translating itself via its own constitutive difference between what it is and what it may become—in concert with others.