TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Appropriating its title from a work of medical anthropology (Stevenson 2013), this paper extends the image as a method of knowing—one based on sensory symbolism and representation, as an important consideration of the nonhuman. Through reconfiguring the construction of the nonhuman image (or Non-image), it suggests a speculative means for the expression of complex nonhuman frameworks of information. This is extrapolated from the futurist discourse of contextual-mapping from Magda and John McHale’s proposal for the Conceptual Revolution, first developed in 1971. Within these parameters, this paper triangulates a theoretical groundwork for inter-species ‘communication,’ based on this representational framework for conceptual understanding. This is presented and informed by certain key principles of biosemiotics, as written about by David Dusenbery (1992), Terrence Deacon (1997), Jakob von Ueküll (2015), among others. As counterpart to its scientific precis, this work is then buttressed by a range of philosophical perspectives on meaning-making. These include the philosophies of Bergson (1998), Deleuze (2003), and Grosz (2008), among others, all in support of the McHale’s idea that information is, at a baseline, spatial and biological. As I argue in this paper, this idea of the Non-Image, once founded, can then be expanded to better develop an ethological understanding of interspecies meaning.