“I speak, therefore I am”: Repositioning Nonhuman Intelligence, Language, and Cognition within Assemblages in “The Great Silence” by Ted Chiang.

Abstract

Cognition has become one of the central analytical categories in the current debate of posthuman and animal studies, which has been proliferating in the last decade. N. Katherine Hayles (2017) proposes a reconsideration of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and cognition from the perspective of a new paradigm, the ‘cognitive nonconscious’, in which she claims that not only humans, but other nonhumans like animals, plants, technological systems or material forces have agency and a cognitive capability of their own. In this re-understanding of cognition as an extended capacity beyond the human, she affirms the existence of a system of non-hierarchical relations in which information circulates and influences all the parts equally. In literary studies, the nonhuman, and more relevant for this paper the nonhuman animal, is surfacing in contemporary creative works in what Kate Marshall has called “Novels by Aliens”, or narrations from viewpoints of conscious nonhumans that experience feelings and emotions and that act as cognitive agents. Ted Chiang adapts this idea in “The Great Silence” (2019), narrated by an almost extinct parrot that lives in the Río Abajo Forest in Puerto Rico. As a first-person narrator, the parrot reflects about the humans’ insatiable desire to contact with extra-terrestrial intelligent life through the Arecibo telescope at the expense of destroying the narrator’s natural habitat and while obviating, or negating, the narrator’s cognitive capacities. The text, analysed using the potentials of the cognitive nonconscious and assemblage, serves as an example of how posthuman fiction and theory are following the same trajectory to dismantle human exceptionalism.