Habiter En Oiseau by Vinciane Despret (review)

Vinciane Despret’s latest book has not yet been translated into English, but it merits in my view an early review. In these days of crisis, when reports state that birds everywhere have become more prevalent, or maybe rather more “audible” through the reduction of traffic and industry [due to quarantine restrictions—ed.], it seems more apt than ever to give them a platform. Habiter en oiseau could be considered in relation to Mundy’s Animal Musicalities that I reviewed earlier [1], but Despret’s book is more like a passionate manifesto. Its title can be translated either as Bird Watching or more literally as Living as a Bird. The combination of both would not be bad, although Despret not literally urges us to live like birds. Instead she wants us to open up to other stories, to diversity, to other perspectives.

Despret in that sense is very clearly part of a group of scientists that urge for the need of new storytelling, such as Donna Haraway, but certainly also Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, with all three of whom Despret regularly collaborates. It should therefore not be surprising that she dedicates her book to them and frequently makes reference to their writing and thinking [2].

Habiter en oiseau is in all respects a very sensitive book. To start with, it is very specifically composed in two so-called accords or agreements that each consist of several chapters and counterpoints. Accord can of course also be interpreted as harmony, and Despret here in particular plays with that notion and that of an overall musical composition. In the first accord it is a blackbird that she hears through her open window that starts everything off. In her journey to understand this blackbird’s singing, Despret takes us through a good century of bird study and especially the notion of territory. It is exactly the unraveling of the notion of territory, or the way it has been and very often still is seen, that is the most important quality of the book. Along the way Despret, in her characteristic style of writing, can be hugely irritated about certain opinions—sometimes a bit unfair in my opinion, as in the case of Michel Serres, where she maybe becomes a bit too overprotective of animals. In the second accord she’s almost ready to ditch Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus because of its relentless criticism of animal lovers. She initially feels that animals are taken hostage in a problem that isn’t theirs by Deleuze and Guattari but, then, thanks to Isabelle Stengers, she perseveres in her rereading and ultimately turns their study of territory into one of her most important sources of inspiration. Especially their notion of territorialization and deterritorialization, “increasing your territory by deterritorialization,” becomes crucial.

Just as in her book What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions (2016), Despret reverses the roles and questions researchers and their techniques more than the birds. Where the research into territory was for a long time viewed from the perspective of aggression and survival in which the “removal” of birds was common practice in order to test hypotheses, Despret poses, in a Karen Barad kind of way, the question of what it is that we decide to make remarkable in what we observe. In her quest to open our imagination to other ways of thinking and breaking with certain routines, it is remarkable that it is mainly female researchers that have discovered that female birds have a lot more to say in the choice of territory than thus far was assumed and that territories turn out to be flexible, not static, with a very specific function of birdsong that for a long time has been overlooked. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari and their argument that “there is a territory when there’s an expressivity of rhythm” [3] as well as Haraway’s notion of the Phonocene as an alternative phrase for the Anthropocene, Despret...