Editors Note: This text is a record of an informal conversation between Timothy Furstnau (TF) and Imani Jacqueline Brown (IJB) in Fall 2020. It has been lightly edited and updated with links and footnotes.

TF: So I wanted to write something looking into the ways tool use is ‘used’ to distinguish humans from other animals. Then you mentioned wanting to write about something similar—along the lines of animals or other beings being used as tools. But instead of writing about those things separately, we decided to have a conservation about it. So…can you say more about what you were thinking about, or what it was about what I’d said that you picked up on?

IJB: Very cool. I love these types of collaborations. I did something similar a couple years ago with Kenneth Pietrobono, my collaborator in Occupy Museums. So, to be clear, you’re thinking about combating the myth that humans are animals who use tools by pointing to tool use by animals—crows with sticks, dolphins with language, bonobos with marshmallow roasting, etc., correct?

What I’m interested in is how (some?) humans have a history/tendency of using/seeing other humans, other existents—life—as a tool to further their own existence. Life as a means to an end.

We use animals as tools to meet needs that are not immediate needs but rather secondary needs—needs that may not really be needs but rather wants (or delusions), e.g. the use of monkeys to test cosmetics, the use of minks for coats (I saw a woman in a mink in Deptford yesterday—there goes the neighborhood!), etc. And then we also use animals to test out life-saving medicine, like the COVID vaccine made from horseshoe crab blood, which is designed to cure a virus that emerged because of the way that humans used other animals as traditional medicine. So maybe there is some form of abstraction at work here?

Is reciprocity a technology or a mode of relation that prevents us from turning lifeforms into tools?

While I don’t want to make some categorical statement like “humans are animals who use other animals as tools,” I do wonder whether there is a distinction between the symbiotic relations between animals and the way that humans use animals (and other human-animals) as tools. For example, when lions eat zebras, are they using them as a tool to meet their need for sustenance? Can we still consider this mode of relation a form of tool use if we also consider that zebras use lions for culling the herd, keeping population numbers sustainable?

Is reciprocity a technology or a mode of relation that prevents us from turning lifeforms into tools? We can stretch our minds to think about inter-species reciprocity, but is it possible to have a reciprocal relationship with inert matter? With objects of our own fabrication? The Māori people, who pushed the New Zealand government to grant personhood to a mountain—Mount Taranaki—can help us to sense the violence of the explosives that detonate a mountain face. And I wonder how we should relate to the stones split from the mountain’s face to construct our shelter. Should we think of those stones—and that shelter—as kin?

TF: Yes, there is definitely some abstraction in the gathering of so many disparate phenomena into the “tool use” category, but also abstraction in the ways that human tool-use in particular gets defined—as something that inherently involves a kind of “abstraction.” (You hear this in the way human cognition is sometimes singled out as “abstract thought.”) One way I’ve seen this done is with the notion of “second-order instrumentality,” or the ability to invest in the production of an object that only has utility as part of, or for the making of, other objects. (Machines and other complex objects with interacting parts, as opposed to simple technological objects whose function is closely related to their form.)

So, I’m interested in this and other kinds of fine distinctions, less to “combat the myth” of humans as tool-users—a myth I feel like falls over with the slightest nudge—and more to pick apart the justifications for it, which might help explain how the myth itself is used as a tool.

One standard counter-argument to the myth is to cite other animals using tools—a genre of science journalism I totally love and will click on every time, don’t get me wrong!—but which somehow plays into the more deep-seated myth of tool use in itself. I’m interested in the ways that humans-as-tool-users apologists respond to such animal studies with more and more specific or elaborate ways of claiming human tool use as exceptional. It starts to become more about what a tool is than what a human is. And that’s where I think something like your framing of the lion-zebra dynamic gets really interesting. Abstraction, yes, and…what role does intention play? Or awareness—implied by intention but not exactly the same?

That’s another way the question of life or lives as a tool comes in. It’s like the concept of a tool shares edges with all these other fuzzy concepts, so that when you push on it, you push on intention, awareness, and eventually on life itself.

Also, the flipside of granting personhood to a mountain is of course revoking personhood, or conferring animality to a person. David Livingstone Smith, who wrote Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others in 2012, has a new book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, intended for a more general audience at a time when the phenomenon seems to be on the rise. One of his points is that although dehumanization exploits some deep-seated psychological instincts, it is not in that sense “natural,” but rather created by authorities who play on those instincts for their own benefit. In classifying others as subhuman—the better to use them as tools— it is the dehumanizers who have become tools.

IJB: Yes, I think the key question here is: what can ethically become a tool?

As we’ve discussed before, Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism includes a chapter called “Not with the Master’s Tools, Not with Tools at All,” riffing off of Audre Lorde’s canonical speech, “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” (I’ve referenced this speech in a previous text.) Azoulay’s fundamental concern seems to be the instrumentalization and institutionalization of violence to achieve imperial ends, but also (and therefore) the instrumentalization and institutionalization of certain aspects of existence— history,^1[1] politics,^2[2] and possibilities ^3[3]—to carve out a path to a predetermined future. This predetermined future is, she suggests, itself a form of violence inasmuch as it constrains the unfolding of the world and the fractal branching of its relationships.

Of course, the design and use of tools, as you’ve indicated, Tim, are necessary and natural, if not neutral, modes of engagement with the world. And tools can be liberatory. Liberatory tools “make repressed potentialities present again.” ^4[4] For Azoulay, tools become problematic specifically when they are wielded against the realm of human affairs to craft “a gigantic taxonomic system in which people [are] allocated places, roles, and fates.” ⁵

And this is just where things get really interesting. Where, I wonder, does the realm of human affairs begin, and where does it end? If we take ecological being, ecological existence—Kinship—seriously, we know that there is no boundary between human affairs and everything else. I’m sure Azoulay would agree that the instrumentalization and institutionalization of other-than-human beings is an imperial project…but this is just where the nuances around use/need (and perhaps scale) come into play.

I am imagining a Black woman who is enslaved on a sugarcane plantation. She is holding a simple hoe. Such a hoe may have been used by this woman to till the plantation fields she was bound to; perhaps she would have used a similar hoe, perhaps even the same hoe, to till the garden plot she and her kin were allotted to grow their own food. And perhaps, as the first skirmishes of the Civil War erupted and shredded the imperial order of the plantation, she may have used this same hoe to till this same land, which she claimed for herself and refused to vacate. In each instance, the woman, the hoe, and (largely) the land remain the same, yet the relations between them shift.

The hoe that cultivates the plantation is a violent, imperial tool, not simply because its manufacturers and suppliers and purchasers intend it to be wielded to the point of death-by-exhaustion by its enslaved human users, but also because it facilitates the death-by-exhaustion of the land it is wielded against, as well as the wider ecology of which the land is a part.

So what of the relationship between the woman, the hoe, and garden plot? We can imagine that the hoe and the plot have a much healthier relationship and that the enslaved woman treats the plot with great care. It is, after all, one of her few resources; it is critically limited, and if the soil is depleted, it may not be so easily replaced. She likely cultivates not only edible plants—Food—but also beneficial herbs for medicine and “weeds” that she knows will encourage some insect garden-dwelling insects and discourage others.

But the relations between the woman, the hoe and the garden plot experience a radical shift from one day (prior to the War) to the next (during the War). Does the hoe become a liberatory tool the moment the plantation’s enslaved community realizes that the imperial order(s)—the imperial tools—have been shredded through with musket fire? Does the hoe transform as if by Magic as the woman who holds it realizes that she now grasps this tool freely, and that this tool will enable her to cultivate her own way in the world?

Perhaps this speculation is overly romantic. (Perhaps she cultivated her own garden plot on her hands and knees, with a spade of her own.) And why should we imagine the character of the hoe to be bound up in the geopolitical affairs of warmongering white men at all? What if its identity is instead shaped by the woman—her relationship with the land or simply her will and whim? Land becomes a liberatory geography when it is treated with loving care. Does the hoe transform into a liberatory tool when it enters a loving relationship between land and woman? Or perhaps the hoe and land are liberated together in the geography of her mind as she chooses how to organize her garden rows or loses track of time and place and even her enslavement, as she squats with her hands in the soil, the hoe resting by her side, her eyes pouring over the sky in search of a hawk whose cry synchronized with her singing.

We could even think of the hoe as a dial swinging along the spectrum of resistance.⁶ Or as a collaborator. Enslaved women often cultivated herbs for reproductive health (and justice), including herbs that induce abortion, in their plots. Such plants become tools to liberate her womb from use as an imperial reproductive tool.⁷) As the hoe travels in an arc through the air, does it spin, like a wheel of fortune, around the array of possibilities always already encoded within it? Is its fate—and that of the woman and the land (and the imperium?)—determined mid-air as it descends toward either plot or plantation or even, perhaps, toward the back of the overseer’s head?

TF: I agree the question of ethics is key, and the Azoulay text and the case of the Black woman on the plantation are rich references for getting at that.

It strikes me (the idea, not the hoe—though ideas can be like hoes) that the question we already asked, of intention, unites this problem of the master’s tools with the problem of defining tools in the first place. Does it matter what the master or owner of the hoe intended it to be used for? Or what its inventor intended? For the hoe, as for most of what are usually considered tools—how can we ascertain the collective “intentions” of the countless generations, human or otherwise, that contributed to its invention? (A digging stick, or a shaped rock, from which a hoe is derived, being one of the most commonplace tools in the long archaeological record of hominids.) In the taxonomic distinction between manufactured hoe and found rock or stick, the contributions of all those lost generations are missing.

Or maybe it’s wrong to make that kind of typological connection between hoe and digging stick—something you’d see in the Pitt-Rivers Museum’s famous displays—and remember that both master and slave in this situation are subject to other “intentions” (the profit motive), both of them instrumentalized by the tool of property, of whoever it was that produced and sold them the hoe in the first place? I think the ownership question is crucial, and it is lost in the way Lorde’s quote assumes tools in a slave’s hands as still somehow “belonging” to the master.

Part of me wants to tease apart the implications of Lorde’s metaphor, as others have done, and part of me wants to refrain from this completely, in an attempt to do justice to and honor the context in which she first uttered it. (Lorde was making a point about embracing difference in a feminist culture that sought advancement within white heteropatriarchal academia.) It is an idea that can be “used” in ways that may be contrary to Lorde’s “intentions.”

Your question about the sudden radical shift in relation between woman and hoe reminds me of a quote in Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus that’s always stuck with me. Taylor was interviewing a couple who had been born into slavery but in 1937 were living on an abandoned 28-family plantation in Greene County, Georgia. One of them said: “I remember when the Yankees come through, a whole passel of ‘em hollerin’, and told the Negroes you’re free. But they didn’t get nothin ‘cause we had carried the best horses and mules over to the gully.” Here the plantation’s current occupants offer an implicit critique of the “master’s tools” of laws and policy—as if some words on paper can instantly change conditions on the ground—as well as a critique, through their savvy protection of their own property, of the “once the master’s, always the master’s” idea of inherent tool ownership. The implements of the plantation now belonged to them, and they may have known that many other such emancipated plantations were burned and looted by white mobs.

Which brings me back to the hoe, and right back to where we started. Horses and mules, after all, are animals that are used as tools. They do many things, but one of their main functions on a working farm is to till the ground, as a kind of automated hoe. And like a hoe they can do the same violence to the soil that threatens its long term fertility, water retention capacity, and so on. And they can be owned and instrumentalized by other living beings. But it seems to me the couple making use of a former plantation might greet someone hollering “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” with just as much suspicion as a bunch of Northerners telling them they’re free. With all due respect to Lorde (and much respect is due), in this context it sounds like something a master might claim to slaves instead of handing over the tools—and finding out just what can and can’t be done with them.

IJB: Perhaps this couple you’ve invoked recognized the presence of the master in the spirit of their “savior!” I also wonder about this anti-imperial spirit of the recently-emancipated, which cuts so easily through imperial bullshit. I wonder how long it took us to lose it—how many decades of broken promises of reparations, restricted geographic access, and pressure to culturally assimilate were required to realign, by and large, Black liberatory land-use with imperial land abuse. And, equally, I wonder what conditions enabled this liberatory land-use spirit to survive and thrive and grow into tools with enduring power and relevance, like community land trusts.

Ultimately, however, I think we’ve landed on the realization that the hoe alone won’t repair our relationship to land, to animals, or to each other. But perhaps the more that humans are allowed to relate care for their bit of earth to self-care, the better all of our relationships will be.