Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Reflection on "symbolification"

This concept of “symbolification” is very interesting to me. When the animal turns into a literary symbol, it becomes ‘of text’ rather than ‘of the world’. Symbolifaction not only “reduces an otherwise multifaceted ‘subject’ into an ‘object’” but limits it to signify but one of its characteristics. I imagine this would change how one views the symbolic animal in the real world, to keep with the example of the dove, when viewing the dove in the real world, the viewer is likely to think of it as a sign of peace rather than coming to their own personal understanding of the dove. In other words, symbolifiction seems to prescribe a certain meaning to animals, limiting their nuanced existence to a definable, single meaning. “Symbolifying” the animal assumes that as humans we know the animal completely, internally the dove may feel the very opposite of peaceful, but we cannot know that. Symbolification is an anthropocentric practice, the symbolified animal does not get to just exist for itself but instead becomes a tool of human literary representation. Defining an animal as a symbol of something restricts it, not so much in a physical sense but in how they are perceived. For example, calling a person a ‘pig’ is a traditionally negative descriptor, this negative connotation is likely to affect the public perception of the pig, and possibly even its treatment by humans. It is difficult for the “symbolifed” animal to change the way it is perceived since animals do not speak (or at least not in a way to be understood by humans), in this way animals are at the mercy of our “symbolifications” of them. Following the suggestions written by the concept-creators, I agree that we should look past these reductive definitions when perceiving animals in the real world, I believe we should put focus on our “symbolified” associations of these animals to consider how these have been shaped and aim to flesh out these reductive interpretations to create nuanced, subjective perception of these animals.

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