Cross-Species Intelligence

‘New materialisms’ have produced new epistemologies by theorising ‘scapes’ that direct ontologically flat mobilities through flows of energy-matter. Acknowledging that matter is not inert but vibrant (Bennett 2010), this branch of posthumanist philosophy has demonstrated the necessity of thinking in terms of intra-action to understand that entities materialise from relations (Barad 2013), and that environments are always co-composed by humans and non-humans (Braidotti 2019).

Materialist theories of ‘alien’ intelligence (Weizenbaum 1976) have, since then, been applied to other species, too. Here, intelligence is seen neither as an innate, species-specific ability, nor as a programmed function, but rather as a method and process that constantly modulates its own operational coherence (Malabou 2019). Although other-than-human intelligence is not ‘global’ in the way that human intelligence is (which can replay to consciousness various thinking processes and produce a synthesis), it is recursive. In computing, the recursive function is the function that calls itself. In ‘bacterial intelligence’, bacteria ‘synthesise’ the information obtained from previous intra-actions in the form of embodied, spatially distributed knowledge.

Focusing on the work of Kuai Shen and Maja Smrekar, with ant, machinic, and canine agents, this paper analyses their respective intra-actions and evolutions in time and intensity. It argues for an ontologically unstable notion of cross-species intelligence based on emergence through a close reading of three phenomena: a) liminality – seen as a process of transitioning across boundaries; b) memory – seen a set of dispositions or ‘codings’ for reactivation; and c) distributed agency – the capacity to act inter-dependently with other actants, factors and networks.