Classify and Control: part two
Welcome to the third article in this series exploring queer ecology and other transformative subjects close to my heart.
My dream is to bring this work to more people and I’m hoping to publish it as a book in 2025. Please share with your friends!
Read more about me here: https://otterlieffe.com/
You can read part one here
Putting classification aside
On reflection, I think sometimes (western, industrial-scientific) classification in itself creates a sense of distance between me and the rest of our world. That distance is an illusion; observers are never neutral. And they are watching us too.
As an ornithology enthusiast since I was very young, I’ve probably experienced this most closely with birds.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with the feathered ones and I immerse myself in their presence whenever I can. I can watch them quietly for hours, whether from the sacred hush of a bird hide, or the sun-dappled floor near my home. At this point, if I know the habitat well, I can probably recognise most birds around me — from a full-throated song, a flash of feathers over water, or just a tiny squeak of a contact call somewhere in the canopy.
And with that familiarity, and all that observation, comes a lot of classifying.
My mind is constantly listing species names, or types of call — Willow warbler, song; Blackbird, ground predator alert; Long-tailed tit, contact call. It’s hard to switch off sometimes. I know my friends with a lot of plant and fungal knowledge have the same ‘problem’ — every plant and fungus they observe comes with a common name or two, a scientific name and a collection of associated information accumulated over a lifetime.
But I think it’s important to be able to disengage that part of ourselves sometimes. What might at first glance seem to be permanent, almost essential, definitions of life are culturally constructed and subject to change. Taxonomic definitions are slippery and constantly being redefined. The concept of what a ‘species’ even is is much more complex and fluid than many of us realise or have been told.
If this all sounds similar to queer analysis of gender, it should.
In a way, we shouldn’t be too surprised that trying to fit something as wondrous as life into tidy boxes involves some simplification, but still we are often closer to our categories, colonial names and cultural baggage than the organisms around us.
That bird in front of me isn’t just ‘Eurasian Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes’, any more than I am just ‘Human, Homo sapiens’. She’s a whole individual with her own life, her own experiences, preferences, memories, and friends. And she’s very likely observing me as well. She didn’t appear just because I noticed her and she didn’t disappear because I got distracted by my thoughts or because she flew out of my view. We are in a relationship.
Sometimes I need to take a deep breath to see beyond the classification. It returns of course, and once in a while it’s even useful, but being able to let all that go, to come back to my senses, to return to my lived reality is a practice.
Even if you’re not a compulsive classifier like me, you might still see ‘pigeon’, ‘sparrow’, ‘oak tree’, ‘dandelion’ before the reality of the organism in front of you. The classification you use might be less from biology studies and more from your own experience of pigeons, sparrows, oak trees, and dandelions, but the result can be the same.
Dreaming the world around us
Neuroscientists call this predictive processing [1]. We use experiences to create templates and refer to those templates to process all the information around us. Instead of tasting this actual piece of apple in my mouth, my brain can save energy by inserting the learned patterns of what an apple usually feels like and tastes like.
It’s a way of simplifying life and in that simplification, there is a great loss. We are effectively dreaming the life around us, predicting based on experiences, rather than engaging with our senses in the moment.
This dreaming can be interrupted. Mindfulness practice has been shown to decrease predictive processing. Being in the here and now allows us to move closer to the world as it truly is and to sense the reality of that delicious piece of fruit. I was thrilled when I learned this: my meditation practice, my political engagement and my love for life, all brought together in the bite of an apple.
So here’s an invitation for us to pause and breathe. To let go of our lists and predictions for a time and enter the present moment. To dive into our senses, without abstractions or shorthands, and to truly observe. What is the smell of this specific lavender? How has that particular dandelion grown through the cracks towards the light and how are they interacting with the other plants nearby? Where is that beetle headed? Maybe you want to follow them for a while and see what they get up to.
As I release names and impositions, I re-inhabit my body. As I come home, I re-enter a world so much richer than all my categories.
References
[1] From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind. Ruben E. Laukkonen and Heleen A. Slagter, 2021
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342100261X#sec0090
Kes Otter Lieffe is a writer, ecologist and community organiser currently based near Berlin. She is the author of four queer speculative fiction novels and several short stories. She also writes non-fiction on class and queer ecology. Kes writes from a working-class, chronically ill, transfeminine perspective.
Learn more about Kes’ work and how to support her writing at https://otterlieffe.com/
https://www.patreon.com/otterlieffe
Special thanks to Athene Knüfer for detailed edits and feedback and to Natalie Kontoulis for proofing.
