Interview with Daisy Hildyard
“A human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin.”1
Daisy Hildyard in conversation with Katharina Weinstock
I was surprised to find a copy of The Second Body between the stacks of books and papers on my desk. The first point of contact between Daisy Hildyard—the book’s author—and me was established by a stranded physical object. The artist Lore D Selys had left it behind in my home. Sometimes objects travel in human company—sometimes, it seems, objects and people travel at different paces.
Not every book extends an invitation to its reader. This one did. It was small and dainty, easy to hold open in just one hand, and the voice of its narrator felt intimate. Meanwhile, the endeavor claimed by the book’s title seemed big, almost impossible. This “second body,” the narrator explains,
is not a concept, it is your own body. The language we have at the moment is weak: we might speak vaguely of global connections; of the emission and circulation of gases; of impacts. And yet, at some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another.2
In December 2020, James Langdon and I invited Daisy for a panel discussion. James was teaching a seminar titled “Rare Bird Economics,” which centered around the migratory white-throated needletail, the fastest flying bird in the world in level flight. His seminar resulted in a book, which was printed in New Zealand and transported by air to Europe—corresponding and coinciding, as James explained, with the bird’s annual migration route. The project thereby stressed the invisible side of production, the interdependencies and distributive processes that are implicated in every object we buy. My own seminar, “Hyperobjects,” took Timothy Morton’s book of the same name as a point of departure, asking how artistic practices in the past hundred years have been destabilizing our preconceptions of objecthood. Morton writes with a sense of urgency. The climate catastrophe, he says, is so vast and time-stretched that it is impossible to hold in mind. So maybe, if the mind fails, we have to use our bodies?
KATHARINA WEINSTOCK: Bodies: we can all relate to them, because we all have one. And this is how bodies make empathy possible—something that the Anthropocene’s endless maps and graphs fail to evoke. Is your book about empathy?
DAISY HILDYARD: I like the simplicity of that—the idea that we might relate across very different forms of experience, because of the body part. As a writer, though, I feel that I’m on shaky ground if I lean too heavily on empathy as a means or an end for my own work. Instinctively, I’m not sure it’s possible to extend into the experiences of other beings. I think that there can be an assumption and even an enforcement of privilege in that. And it doesn’t bother me to lose the possibility of empathizing in its fullest sense . . . I like living with the belief that others, even the people who are closest to me, are partly unknown. The second body is an idea of mystery as well as of connection.
KW: The idea of having a second, global body poses a challenge to the human imagination. Yet somehow your book finds ways to make this “second body’ felt. Can you explain (maybe also for those, who haven’t read the book) how you’re leading your reader toward that extended sense of self?
DH: I was feeling it out for myself, and I needed to try different approaches—researching in the library, talking to people who have some privileged insight into ecological awareness (butchers, scientists)—and paying attention in my daily life to the way people talk and act in relation to these extended selves in books, in the media, or in the pub. I wanted to make sense of globalized, interconnected, or unbounded existence not through a particular strand of enquiry but in a cross-hatched way, holding big concepts and data up inside intimate or personal experiences.
KW: “One of the challenges of the Anthropocene is finding representations that matter”—anthropologist Anna Tsing said this in her “Anthropocene Lecture” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2018. Her famous book The Mushroom at the End of the World follows matsutake mushrooms and the people who forage for them in the forests of Oregon, Yunnan, Lapland, and Japan. Matsutake are said to be the most valuable mushrooms on earth. Just by zooming in on this particular, somewhat peculiar object, her book unfolds a spellbinding story of post-industrial survival and environmental renewal. You are a storyteller, too—although you initially earned a PhD in the history of science. Science usually operates in a different rhetoric, far away from your book’s intimacy of a first-person narrator. Is there a power in tales, parables, hero’s journeys that our culture needs to recover, in order to change the ways in which we relate to the world?
DH: There is a form of power there. In the Anthropocene, there’s an especially interesting and troubling friction—a term that Tsing uses in another context—between the way stories and realities bring one another into being. Human narratives about what humans need to live have created, and are constantly recreating, these planetary conditions (though these stories take part in that ongoing process of creation together with many other forms of being). And then, in turn, these conditions of living on this planet are affecting the nature of the stories that are being written. In the last year or so there’s been a big pulse of fiction which is interested in the climate emergency. But many narratives try to approach and contain it with conventional narrative tools. There are a few authors who—I think—inhabit more reality than others (Tsing comes to mind, as does Svetlana Alexievitch) but my sense is that much storytelling is still trying to catch up with the world I live in, and as a writer that’s exciting. There’s a lot of world for a storyteller now. So I think narrative can have power in that way, but I also think that it’s rarely immediate and not very muscular. I would like to read an ecological thinker considering the latent power of storytelling to bring about planetary change, in comparison with other forms of political agency—activism, legislation, or brutality.
KW: Your book reads like a journal intime—one reason, perhaps, why it sucks us in so easily. It takes us on a journey across disciplines and, in doing so, through different spaces: Offices, laboratories—even a slaughterhouse. And while the narrator talks to butchers and biologists there are wonderful moments where she catches them musing “off script.” For example, when she talks to Nadya, a microbiologist, and notices a print by Miró in her office. Nadya says she saw it once in the Miró Museum in Barcelona and didn’t know at the time why she liked it. It was only later that she noticed how much the black teardrop-shaped object in Miró’s painting resembled a microbe: “A cute little microbe, said Nadya drily. With whiskers.” For me, this is when the distinct worlds, which segregate our modern disciplines come together unexpectedly, serendipitously. What’s your take on interdisciplinarity—and these “off-script” moments you create?
DH: “Off script” is a nice idea. It would be most of life. Isn’t this something you also experience as strange: the way that disciplines are separated from one another, in spite of the fact of their being so flagrantly integrated in the world . . . just as work is from the family, private from public, intellectual from silly? I remember once requesting to study a twentieth-century German novel, together with some twentieth-century English novels, on an English Literature postgraduate degree. The academics responded as though I’d asked to spend a semester on Mars—it was, for various logistical reasons, wildly unfeasible. (In context, I recognize that disciplinarity is a functional distinction and it mostly seems to work for organizing studies.)
Later, when I was working on my PhD on seventeenth-century scientific and philosophical manuscripts, I came up against this real-world integration again and again in the archives—Isaac Newton’s doodles, Robert Hooke’s diary entries about having sex with the maid, John Locke’s notes to self about the spring evening he walked up to the sloping field and saw the first swallow—in the margins of some important mathematical or climatological manuscript. There wasn’t any dissonance, these aspects of living are continuous with one another.
KW: In every human body, human and nonhuman life are entangled. Our gut, which science considers our body’s second brain, is actually a state governed by bacteria. Our mitochondria, Morton says, are symbionts. Since the 1980s Bruno Latour has been promoting an awareness of these fine interconnections between objects and people, animate and inanimate agents. With his Actor Network Theory, he challenged us to think of them as nonhierarchically as equal participants in every little aspect of life. “Political Bodies” is the theme we chose for this first issue of our journal. Which political bodies, in your reading of this theme, need to be given a voice?
DH: This is a good, challenging question. It’s a cliché to say that there’s no equality without equality for all, but the cliché exists in a world which is fundamentally and universally symbiotic and interconnected (for better and worse), which lends new force to the idea. When I think about these global and often intangible interconnections it gives me a headache even trying to make hierarchies of importance or distinctions between whose voice should be heard—if everything is connected, it’s impossible to know the ramifications of allowing anything to be discarded or even demoted. So, in a way, I think all voices should be heard all the time, and also screams, hums, buzzes, reverberations, etc. But I also think: that would not sound good. Where would it end? Standing back, it’s clear to me that some needs are more urgent than others and I would find it ugly to think otherwise. A person in Gaza is more important than a whole colony of ants, even though I might understand in a more granular way that the colony of ants could be an ecosystem keystone, and its eradication could instigate a cascade of calamitous events.
Perhaps it’s a question of privileged voices receding, rather than identifying an alternative set of figures to be prioritized, and then promoting these new bodies along this same axis in which some voices are privileged while others are silenced (or just ignored). There are certain human beings and certain identities whose voices dominate and that’s really obvious to see, so that—those dominant voices receding—could be a place to start. But I don’t have an overview, my insights on this are small and limited.