Becoming More-than-Human: Realizing Earthly Eudaimonia to (E)coflourish through an Entangled Ethos

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Pease see attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the creativity of this manuscript and the interweaving of theories and perspectives for studying animals, ourselves, and communication. It is timely as well with My Octopus Teacher as the example. A creative and interesting essay.

For a research article, however, I encourage the author to remove the personal pronouns and rephrase. Not in the case where they are saying “I augment” or “I argue” but rather in places such as “our deathly planet” (abstract) or “Our planet Earth (line 1 of introduction).  And throughout.

Also, Abram’s “more than humans” is noted, therefore the author can’t term them, Abram already did.

Line 43: define “compassionate conservation” – see Bekoff too. Are you saying it is the same as peaceful coexistence?

Line 68- for gender neutrality, remove first names such as with Freeman. Same with Abram line 117; Endres line 122. Lines 152, 153, 162, 169 etc.

I like the suggest of moving to creative from critical but the way this is written presupposed that critiquing is only as such negative, or judgmental.

Good organization.

I was looking for, in the abstract, intro a statement of what theory was used and what it predicts, how the research was studied – I would argue a discourse analysis rather than a rhetorical analysis based on the introduction and activism inherent in this, and then a statement of who the findings are important to and why. Then, a simple statement of what you found in your analysis.

Lines 143 & 144. Not clear what this means in terms of agency? How if media are presenting representations with hegemonic perspective? “Media, then, composes worlds anew 142 through representations that offer agency to audiences for particular ends.”

Line 145. Certainly, documentaries are made with a point of view, but not all anthropomorphize, or if you have research to support this generalization then please include it.  Some certainly do.

Documentaries are a medium.

Re: section 4.  I believe that discourse analysis would serve this better than rhetorical. 

Really interesting analysis unpacking eudaimonia and Aristotle.

The concepts are complex, and the language for a general reader, but as an academic journal, well defined.

Line 385- “credibility”?

A nice description of the film. Good descriptive analysis.  It seems to me that the anthropocentric gaze could be emphasized more and that perhaps a discussion of how empathy, versus sympathy, is generated for the octopus, we are still using the animal other than human to teach us about us – rather than for purposes of the animal herself. And that this might be the way into generating it – as most humans need to know how they will benefit from caring for others, whether it is just feeling good about themselves or more.

Below are a few references that might help in refining this essay. And it is an essay. I did think there might be research here in terms of looking for themes, perhaps a discourse/textual analysis, that’s not the nature of this piece, written more as an exploration/essay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course. I admire work that pushes the boundaries. However, if the goal of the journal is to present rigorous research, this would not fit that type of issue.

See also:

The Audience in the Wilderness: The Disney Nature Films

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I'll say a few things and I'm putting my name to this in order not to come off as someone who will write strong critical feedback and then hide behind anonymity. I mean to be collaborative and helpful here and appreciate many of the larger hopes that either frame this work or which this work hopes to name and help contribute to as legitimate disciplinary knowledge, so please don't take me for being dismissive and overly cranky, even though I won't deny that in reading it, some parts of me began to feel that way.

Why? Ok, first off I am one of the founders of critical animal studies, where a lot of my work has specifically concerned itself with the theorization of the "human," and with Doug Kellner, my mentor, I also have contributed towards the theorization of what is here called creative/critical cultural and media studies. My book with a fellow Kellner student, Education Out of Bounds: Reimagining Cultural Studies for a Posthuman Age specifically combines a lot of this work and my concept of zoöphilia is directly connected to the love, friendship and co-flourishing between as is identified here "human and more-than-human." Lastly, my work is also decidedly for and within a planetary ecological paradigm and is also directly based in the reality of what it means to learn to be in a time of mass extinction and planetary collapse. Now, I am a transdisciplinary scholar but my academic home is within Education and so some part of me excuses the appearance that despite all these connective interests between us, my work appears completely unengaged. And yet: the editor found me. So right there I am concerned about who else is not engaged and should be. Perhaps issues of animality and ecology are devalued within Communication, but as a former editor myself I published people writing on these issues well over a decade ago. How would the argument change, I wondered, if they had been included in citation. Perhaps not much. But in my case I have strongly argued that the ways in which "human" and "more-than-human" are treated here rhetorically reproduce speciesism and that "human" has to be understood ecologically and axiologically as a moral relationship that includes all parties. So someone who has a speciesist "human" identity can encounter another being that is ideologically conscripted as "more-than-human" and this might be a learning pathway into a transformed understanding of what it means to be human, as well as its alternatives. And perhaps this leads to a new identity language such as "earthling" in which the speciesist baggage of human, etc. is jettisoned altogether. But I have argued that it is worth maintaining the concept of "human" at this time even as we hold open the question. This then bears down on the Anthropocene and how that is defined in the paper's opening as well, which I find both insufficient and wrong. It is not collective human endeavor that is generating planetary catastrophe but rather a hegemonic global system of capitalist and other oppressions that are responsible for that and assigning blame to the billions of dehumanized peoples for their part in this "human action" is double jeopardy of a cruel and inhuman kind. 

I personally did not like My Octopus Teacher in the positive ways you attempt to theorize it but as an award-winning film I think it did have some merits. Those merits, for me, were largely about its performing the ironic and ultimately tragic romance of middle-aged male patriarchy attempting to find escape as a means of restoring the harmony of the narrator subject's psyche (which has come under midlife crisis). His wife and family are abandoned. He doesn't "witness" the death of his friend as much as he actively contributes to it by doubling down on the very nature/culture divide that your essay claims he is overcoming! Many feminist critics of the film immediately noticed this. I don't find hardly any mention of any of it in your account interestingly? Sort of like the narrator I guess all that critique didn't suit your purposes? Certainly, I recognize an essay can't say everything for space reasons and I imagine if this were a book you would have engaged it. But instead you chose to spend a section arguing for the restored relevance of Aristotle's moral conception of the good. I think you did as "good" a job as might be hoped for there, pardon the pun, but again you sort of lost me at hello at that moment. Really, I thought? Aristotle? Granted he had a lot of things to say about rhetoric too but in an age in which white supremacy and racial capitalism, if not settler colonialism, is now named and legitimated as important critiques of academic work (if not popular culture!), I thought this was at best a very conservative move and at worst a tone deaf strategy.

I kept thinking: what if the section were replaced with an exploration of Indigenous or other cultural languages about the octopus. How could that aspiringly decolonial move provide alternative communicative and rhetorical tools and strategies from which to asses the ideology of My Octopus Teacher, as well as the less progressively romantic talk and habits of the brutal carnist macroconsumer culture? Again, no paper has to do everything or can it. But when this sort of strategy is replaced by Aristotle I start thinking to myself "This is some white animal bullshit." So I offer that for you to consider about how it comes across to a friendly, though perhaps not ideal, reader.

Still, the article makes some real contributions. There are plenty of positive citations and you taught me that there is a subfield of critical animal and media studies, which is being brought into dialogue with creative critical cultural studies. I feel like a forgotten son to such work but I'm happy it is striving to exist and will do my best to support it. Hence, I am suggesting that you consider (with the editor) some of these points and favor publication all the same. Good luck and thank you for listening.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf