Deadly Barks: Acousmaticity and Post-Animality in Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga

Abstract

Acousmatic sound is often defined as a sound whose source is unseen, that is, in terms of a separation between the senses of hearing and seeing. Discussions about the acousmatic have generally focused on the ontological relation between the sonic effect and the visually unavailable source that produces it. This article examines the function of acousmatic sound in Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001), arguing that the film's distinctive employment of acousmatic sound and acousmatic listening constitutes a strategy of disruption, challenging the traditional concept of the "animal" – an ideological and oppressive notion produced by dominant Western philosophical discourse. My reading gives close attention to what seems to be the barking of an unseen dog and its effects on human listeners, contending that, as the semiotic stability of the figure of the dog gradually erodes within Martel's cinematic territory, listening to the canine voice becomes an unsettling sensory-cognitive experience; the sound of the barks presents an irresolvable epistemic problem. I draw on Jacques Derrida's late writings on nonhuman animals, borrowing the term animot, to argue that Martel's film brings into audibility an animality irreducible plural: an alterity exceeding logocentric economies of knowledge. The film's experimental aesthetics and construction of narrative, I suggest, are concerned with perceiving and making perception itself perceptible, while exposing the limits of human perception – impassable limits marked by an animality which gradually withstands conceptual domestication. Through its use of acousmatic listening, La ciénaga expands our perception of ecological ontology.

In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), Derrida launches a critique of humanist discourses on the human/animal division, whereby what is termed the Animal in general is opposed to the Human as a singular and homogeneous category, bereft of world, logos and reason. The traditional concept of the "animal", Derrida argues, does not signify a biological reality but is an ideological notion or "metaphysical datum" (p. 40) in which a flattened, undifferentiated mass of animality is theorised and simply marked as contrary to humanity. This gesture is constitutive of philosophy; it is "the philosopheme itself" (p. 41) that allows the human to be endowed with a special metaphysical value within nature, through the attribution of Spirit, self-consciousness and language. Derrida attempts to rewrite and rethink a kind of animality different than the one authorised by dominant Western philosophical discourse: an animality whose absence of word is no longer thought of as a lack, and whose plurality is no longer violently reduced to a single category. In order to do this, Derrida excises the word "animal" along with all its metaphysical trappings.

By instead coining the idiomatic term animot, Derrida (2008) aims "to have the plural animals heard in the singular" (p. 47). Animot is a verbal assemblage of heterogeneous elements, namely, the plural noun animaux (animals) and the singular noun mot (word). The neologism is phonetically plural, since its pronunciation in French is indistinguishable from the sound of the plural "animaux", and yet its suffix, or verbal tail, "mot", singularises the term. In this sense, animot tricks the human ear and eye and subverts the relation between sound and meaning; it brings into audibility a multiplicity indicated by a singularised verbal body. The word animot demands of the human ear a certain attunement and sensitivity to animal pluralities and differences. Derrida (2008) writes,

Taking into consideration the disruptive ability of the animot, namely its capacity for disrupting the seamless integration of signifier and signified, what are the possible consequences of its arrival on and for the flow of the film form? How can the plurality of the animot come into being in and through the cinematic territory?

Luchi is introduced in the film as a shadow. His silent, dark silhouette is distorted by a diamond-patterned French door that separates his home's interior from a small courtyard. His older brother unlocks the door and Luchi walks into the frame from the courtyard. The camera then cuts to a close-up shot of the little boy blowing air into a dead hare's inoperative nose. Lying next to the sink on the kitchen countertop, the long-eared, lifeless mammal does not respond to Luchi's efforts. A few seconds later, the barking of a dog is heard off-screen for the very first time. The boy and his older sister Agustina (Noelia Bravo Herrera) look in the direction of the patio, reacting to the animal commotion. Agustina responds to the barks by screaming "¡Basta! ¡basta!" ("Stop that! Stop that!"). The camera frames the modest outdoor area: the source of the barks is out of sight, seeming to be located somewhere behind the walls that enclose the courtyard. As Sarah O’Brien (2017) notes, right from the beginning of the film, Luchi is "regularly associated with animals", consistently demonstrating "a tentative curiosity about them" (p. 470).

While the animal vocalisation attracts the boy's attention, at this point there is no evidence suggesting that the child experiences the vocal emission as affectively overwhelming. Moreover, Agustina's perfunctory response suggests a familiarity with the sound. The barks seem to form part of the habitual ecology of sounds enveloping and penetrating the domestic space of their home. At this stage, the sound of the barks is apparently heard by the siblings as the vocalisation of an unseen dog. Although the (presumably) canine body is veiled by walls, human listeners seem to recognise the identity of the barking source as known and knowable. No mystery or disturbance is associated with and heard in the animal commotion.

Nevertheless, the canine identity is later gradually corrupted by the unsettling entrance of two dog-like non-dogs into the film's diegetic space. A deceiving nonhuman creature arrives to the film's diegetic universe by way of what Gérard Genette (1980) identified as "narrative metalepsis", i.e. "introducing into one situation, by means of discourse, the knowledge of another situation" (p. 234). Metalepsis can take many forms within a work of fiction, but it always involves a disturbing effect as it incorporates elements belonging to a narrative world into a different narrative level. One instance of metalepsis occurs with the intrusion of a troubling extra-diegetic element into the film's diegesis through the oral narration of a folktale recited by Luchi's cousin, Vero (Leonora Balcarce). Couched by a fetid pool in his cousins’ dilapidated country estate, Luchi and his siblings and cousins listen to a tale about an anonymous woman who finds a "small" dog "with little body hair" in the street. According to the tale, the woman decides to rescue the apparently harmless animal. Back home, she takes the canine mammal to her patio with all her cats. The next morning, she discovers the dog completely bloodstained. All the cats are gone. The woman takes the dog, washes it and dries it off, and takes it to the nearest vet. Flummoxed, she explains to the vet that her perrito seems to have eaten her feline pets. The vet chops the dog in two with the help of an axe. After locating two rows of teeth inside the animal's oral cavity, the vet tells the woman, "That is not a dog, Señora. It's an African rat".

Interfering with the distinction of dog from non-dog, the African rat may be seen as a destabilising signal whose effects disrupt the logic of identity. Because of its disconcerting likeness to something that it is not, the African rat presents its own difference as nearly imperceptible; the animal phantom tricks the human eye at the same time it interrupts the function of identity. The African rat's difference, veiled by sameness, renders the dog's ontological status as ambiguous. Performing the power of the animot, the African rat alters canine isness, thus upsetting stabilised forms of perceiving and relating to canine animals.

The language and effects of semblance are privileged in multiple, simultaneous ways in the scene. First, in the content of the story itself: the tale about the African rat is a narrative about trickiness and undecidability. The African rat's (in)visibility decimates the guarantee about "the reality of being" and "the status of truth as presence" usually offered by sight (Cavarero, 2005, p. 36). The unsettling African rat problematises the visual identification of dogs as distinct from non-dogs and attacks the sphere of human vision as constitutive of disambiguated knowledge. Second, the formulation of the tale grants a privilege to the verb parecer (to seem) through its repetitive use. The narration begins by stating that "it seems that a woman finds a dog", continues to explain that "it seems to her that the dog was abandoned", and ends by noting that "it seems to the lady that the dog had eaten all her cats". Nothing "is" but "seems to be" in the narrative world presented by the folktale. Third, the cinematic language employed in the scene fractures the synchronous relation between sound and image. As a voice begins to tell the story, the camera frames Vero in a medium close-up. Small facial gestures suggest that she is the narrator of the story. Vocal characteristics indicate that the voice emerges from a woman, at least when listened to through the "culturally gendered binary of the larynx" (Pettman, 2017, p. 38). Yet her mouth is completely covered by an inflatable pool toy. The camera cuts to multiple close-up shots of fragmented canine bodies in close physical proximity to human ones. Paws and tails touch unclothed human torsos. A small, hairless dog rests on the chest of Luchi's oldest cousin. The voice continues to narrate the tale off-screen while the camera shows the diegetic subjects listening to the story. The scene ends without having revealed Vero's mouth actually narrating the tale. These three elements of (non-)semblance overlap as the scene develops. Martel echoes the content of the tale through the cinematic language composing the sequence, thus placing the listener-viewer in a position of uncertainty in regard to what seems to be and what actually is.

Writing on the uneasiness provoked by the representation of voices whose sources are not concurrently represented, Mary Ann Doane (1980) explains that narrative film exploits such "marginal anxiety" (p. 41) by incorporating the disturbing effects of what she calls the "voice-off" within the dramatic framework. According to Doane (1980, p. 40), the efficacy of the voice-off is determined by the knowledge that the unknown speaker can be made visible at any time, that is, that the voice's enigmatic source can, and most likely will, be revealed. Yet Martel ends the scene without revealing the moving lips that would fully confirm the specific identity of the narrator. The listener-viewer may hypothesise that Vero is the narrator, but this proposed explanation cannot be fully assured. In this sense, both narrative modes, i.e. fable and scene, function in like manner: they both tell stories in which the act of seeing loses its capacity for fully determining identities and sources. In other words, this is a scene in which a diegetic character seems to be telling a story about a woman who seems to rescue an animal who seems to be a dog but is not. The two narrative worlds – "the world in which one tells" and "the world of which one tells" (Genette, 1980, p. 236) – put on display the limits of seeing for identifying particular identities and origins.

The inscription of the African rat within the cinematic occurs through narrative metalepsis, through the nesting of a narrative within another by and as verbal media. The cinematic image does not visualise the strange extra-diegetic creature, nor does the soundtrack bring into audibility sounds emitted by it. Enveloped in its own invisibility and inaudibility, the African rat is inscribed as an audio-visual absence within the cinematic territory. Yet its invocation of a grammar of semblance and resemblance transgresses and contaminates the film's diegetic world by affecting Luchi's mode of perception. The boy listens to a story about a deceptive creature that is sonically and visually unavailable in his own world. Unable to perceptually capture the particular or actual African rat, that is, to either see or hear the specific individual, Luchi begins to question the ontological status of the canine animals that are confined to the space of the diegesis. The African rat's transgression of the film's world is oblique and mediated, yet substantial: the disturbing dog-like non-dog affects the perceptual and affective relation the boy sustains with canine figures. Not all canine mammals who look like dogs can be perceived as and thought of as actual dogs. Listening to the oral narration of the folktale encourages a doubtful attitude towards the facticity of dogs being dogs.

Back home, the child anxiously inquiries about the material existence of African rats. His voice is heard off-screen asking, "Mom… is it true that African rats exist?" Luchi's mother, Tali (Mercedes Morán), does not react to the question and remains in silence. The sound of the barks is heard for the second time in the film, right at the moment the camera frames the boy's worried face in a close-up shot. The scene allows a sonic juxtaposition between the anxious human voice and the barks. Two ontologically different vocal emissions – human and nonhuman, symbolic and asymbolic – are placed close together in an almost dialogical way. It is as though whatever emits the barks were replying, though without words nor clarifications, to the enquiry about the actual existence of non-dogs which look like dogs, and that, perhaps, sound like dogs too. The camera then frames Luchi's bedroom. Luchi's father wraps up the child in blankets and turns the bedside lamp off. Mumbling, the child utters in complete darkness, "Leave it on, daddy… There is a huge rat". The scene discloses the ways in which the tale about the African rat plays in Luchi's mind, while prefiguring the increasingly disturbing character of the nonhuman sound in the boy's ears.

Later, a second dog-like non-dog enters the diegetic world of the film. Luchi is heard counting numbers, "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco". He is playing hide-and-seek with his sister Marianita (Maria Micol Ellero), and his sister's friend Verito. The boy walks into the courtyard, where his mother Tali is gardening. The barks are heard one more time. Anxiously, Luchi tells his mom, "It seems to me that the dog next door is really big and may break the wall". The boy looks up, as though he wanted to stretch out his vision and get a glimpse of the source of the barks at the other side of the courtyard. Suddenly, the girls enter the cinematic frame and scream "¡Muerto! ¡Muerto!" ("You're dead! Drop dead!"). Luchi plays dead and drops to the floor. As the camera frames his face in a medium close-up shot, the barks are heard in synchronicity with his image once more. Back from his performed death, Luchi helps Tali with gardening tasks. Marianita and Verito walk up a ladder leaning against one of the walls in the courtyard. They scream, off-screen, "¡Es un perro-rata! ¡Es un perro-rata!" ("It is a dog-rat! Dog-rat!"), while the camera continues to frame Luchi's face. The girls claim to have seen the unseen source of the barks: it is not a dog, it is a dog-rat, a crossbreed that constitutes another attack to the self-sameness of canine identity. Perro-rata: not just a dog, nor just a rat, this animal montage is both and neither. Rather than implying a change from one identity to another identity, or the synthesis of two identities, the perro-rata further divides the canine figure. For Derrida (2008), the hybrid is always an animot: "Chimaera was, as we know, the proper name of a flame-spitting monster. Its monstrousness derived precisely from the multiplicity of animals, of the animot in it" (p. 41). The hybrid invokes a multiplicity in a singular, disparate body that disturbs self-contained identities; the hybrid ineludibly adulterates and contaminates: it is the making impure and becoming impure.

Inscribed within the diegesis as a visual absence, as an empty frame whose veiled image is said to be present at the other side of the wall, the girls claim that the perro-rata does have an audibility within the diegesis: a voice that mimics the cry of an actual dog. Given this new language of sonic simulation, is it possible to determine if the barks heard in the past were coming from a canine larynx? From an impure hybrid throat? If the African rat decimates the powers of seeing for guaranteeing epistemic certainty, the perro-rata sets the powers of listening against helplessness, for the hybrid tricks the ear with its sonic mimicry. Both aural and visual perception of the canine encounter a limit: what one sees or hears cannot be said to be what it was thought to be. Familiarised significations are displaced by further and further semblances that prevent ever finding a stable identity.

The proximity of the perro-rata is radically different than that of the African rat. The African rat belongs to a different narrative world, namely, to the world of the folktale. Its effects within the narrative form of the film are indirect: the diegetic dogs seen by Luchi may be dogs or may be non-dogs. Contrarily, the perro-rata is said to live next door, within the fabric of the diegesis. Wandering right at the margins of the domestic and the interior, the perro-rata threatens the private geography of the house.

Never an identity in themselves, the African rat and the perro-rata insert a language of simulation, duplication and semblance that displaces the origins of canine identity. The effect provoked by the introduction of the dog-like non-dogs within the diegesis can be articulated in terms of Derridean espacement or spacing, i.e. the movement marking "the impossibility for an identity to be closed in itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself" (Derrida, 1981, p. 106). Put differently, spacing indicates the operation by which a certain otherness divides identity. This alterity is not simply "the other that it is not" (Glendinning, 2011, p. 151) but an otherness that is internal to identity itself. The African rat, which looks like a dog, and the perro-rata, which sounds like a dog, cannot simply be understood as a difference exterior to the dog – that is, as a self-contained otherness that can be made relative and opposed to the self-contained identity of the dog. Instead, they space canine identity: every dog is perceived as containing non-dog(s); every dog constitutes a (non-)canine multiplicity.

How does this spacing of the canine identity affect the ways in which the bark is listened to by Luchi? In the following section, I will examine theories of acousmatic listening and acousmatic sound, arguing that Luchi's acousmatic mode of listening to the barks enables him to hear the nonhuman voice as a non-linguistic animot or as a bark-animot: the animal sound refers back to an ambiguous source that defers becoming fully knowable for the listener.

The word "acousmatic" is predominantly used to define a sound whose source is visually unavailable. The term was brought to light in the 1950s by composer Pierre Schaeffer, the founder of musique concrète, i.e. music that utilises natural sounds recorded on tape as raw material. One of Schaeffer's main interests consisted in controlling and suspending the tendencies whereby sound is distorted by vision and by cultural meaning, so that the "objectivity" of sound itself could emerge. Inspired by Pythagoras's pedagogical practice, in which his disciples listened to the master's lessons from behind a curtain without seeing him and observing the strictest silence, Schaeffer (2017, p. 64) theorises l'acousmatique or the acousmatic reduction. As Pooja Ragan (2019, p. 133) notes, Schaeffer believed that the distortion of hearing by vision could be counteracted by another act of veiling, that is, hiding the sources causing the sounds. Schaeffer (2017) writes, "the dissociation of sight and hearing encourages another way of listening: listening to sound forms, without any other aim than to hear them better" (p. 66).

Now, while Schaeffer thought that the acousmatic reduction – dissociating sight and hearing – was advantageous for encouraging a redirection of listening, the separation of the sensorium was not enough for allowing the "sound object" to appear. Following Husserlian phenomenology, Schaeffer (2017) then theorises "an even more rigorous reduction than the acousmatic reduction" (p. 211): the appearance of the sound object in reduced listening. The sound object must be understood as an object in the phenomenological sense, that is to say, an object which is constituted by the intentional acts of the subject. David Carr (1987, p. 159) explains that in Husserl's view, it is consciousness that constitutes its objects, in that it confers meaning on them. Thus, an object, in this sense, must be understood as correlative to the subject: consciousness produces a meaningful unity constituting a cognised, ideal object. According to this phenomenological approach offered by Schaeffer, the sound object is no longer related to its sound source or material body from which the sound emerges in any way, precisely because the constitutive intention of the listener perceives an autonomous sound object in itself, i.e. an ideal objectivity that comes into being through the listener's intentional acts.

Whereas the Schaefferian sound object received much criticism (e.g., Chion, 2019, p. 31), the definition of acousmatic sound as a sound one listens to without seeing what causes it remains widely accepted. Yet, Martel's composition of the acousmatic in La ciénaga exceeds this definition. The problem posited by the film comprises not merely the visual unavailability of the source but also the non-coincidence between seeing and knowing, as non-dogs resemble ordinary dogs. Severely restricting the efficiency of seeing for identifying, discerning and defining canine isness, Martel poses a problem for what Eugenie Brinkema (2014) calls the "oldest metaphysical binary in the West" (p. 21), that is, the strict oppositional logic of either true or false. In La ciénaga, the visual perception of canines encounters a limit: "false" appearance cannot be visually distinguished from "true" identity or essence. Significantly, this problematisation of the visual sphere is not simply a complication at the level of the sensorial, but at the level of knowledge itself. As Adriana Cavarero (2005) notes, in Western epistemological economies, the "order of the signified appertains to the realm of the eye", for "what we call ‘signified’, is in fact, for metaphysics, an object of thought that is characterised by visibility and clarity" (p. 35). The grammar of mimicry founded by the extra-diegetic non-dogs affects both the sensory and the cognitive, both sense and sense-making.

Furthermore, the traditional definition of acousmatic sound cannot account for a crucial phenomenon: Luchi experiences the animal vocalisation as affectively overwhelming in a gradual manner. The child listens to the barks four times throughout the film. In the beginning, the boy seems to listen to the barks without feeling anxiety; the nonhuman vocalisation seems to form part of a familiar ecology of sounds surrounding the domestic space of the house. Towards the end of the film, however, Luchi's worried concern with the origins of the barks takes him to his own death. How might one account for these affective changes provoked by the animal vocalisation when the conditions in which the sound of the barks is listened to remain identical at all times?

In Martel's perceptual world, the acousmatic is not reducible to just a simple sensorial separation. Rather, acousmaticity, as expounded by Kane (2014), perhaps better describes this mode of listening's epistemological dimensions. Developing a theory of acousmatic sound and acousmatic listening different than the one offered by Schaeffer, Kane reconsiders the acousmatic situation from a different perspective, one that emphasises the ways in which the mind apprehends the world as modulated by the ear. Through his reading of Franz Kafka's short story "The Burrow" (Der Bau), in which the protagonist suddenly hears an unidentifiable, non-localisable sound whose sonic source is nowhere to be found and yet cannot not be anxiously looked for and theorised by the burrower, Kane argues that acousmatic sound must necessarily be considered in terms of, and determined by, the phenomenon of acousmaticity.

Following Derrida's spacing, Kane (2014, p. 148) defines acousmaticity as the degree of spacing between the three essential parts of a sound: sonic source, cause and effect. Conceptualised this way, acousmaticity has important theoretical consequences. Acousmaticity stresses the ontological inseparability of three aspects: the sonic source or material body from which a sound is emitted, the action causing the source to produce a sound, and the sonic effect, i.e. the sound heard by the listener. Under this view, the "being" of a sound is comprised of these three parts.

According to Kane, in the case of acousmatic sound, the relation between sonic source, cause, and effect is characterised by an unsettling non-self-sameness or spacing which prevents the listener from fully determining the sound's material origin or causal action. As explained earlier, Derridean spacing refers to the interruption of "every punctual assemblage of the self, every self-homogeneity, self-interiority" (Derrida, 1981, p. 107). Spacing marks a self-difference within identity. In Kane's model, a sound heard in full acousmaticity inaugurates a crisis of signification, for the listener cannot determine the source of the sound heard. The phenomenon of acousmaticity, in other words, upsets the relation of self-sameness between the three constitutive parts of a sound, thus forming a problem at the level of knowledge: listeners cannot fully make sense of what their ear receives, for they cannot ascertain what produces the sound.

Unlike non-acousmatic sound, in which the relation between sonic source, cause and effect is one of self-sameness, acousmatic sound is marked by an aporetic relation between sameness and otherness in which the sonic effect refers and defers toward a "demarcated but underdetermined source and/or cause" (Kane, 2014, p. 260). Following this line of thinking, then, if a sound's source, cause and effect cannot easily be put into a consistent relationship, a listener will experience a sound as acousmatic, that is to say, a listener will judge the sound as having a high and disturbing degree of acousmaticity. For Kane (2014), the experience of acousmatic sound "is not fundamentally about seeing and hearing" but must be "articulated in terms of knowledge, certainty, and uncertainty" (p. 224).

Whereas Kane (2014) theorises acousmaticity as the spacing between the three sonic parts, in particular, as the "underdetermination of the source by the sonic effect" (p. 149), Martel models a change of acousmaticity that is initiated by the spacing of the source with itself. As Kane (2014) notes, in Kafka's tale the protagonist "discovers an unidentifiable high-pitched sound, ‘an almost inaudible whistling noise’" (p. 139). Unable to determine what produces the sound, Kafka's main character begins to hypothesise the undetermined source. Unlike Kafka's non-signifying sound, Martel's nonhuman sound is highly recognisable: the barking of a dog is identifiable as such, even if the body producing it is out of sight. While the concealment of the sonic source voicing the barks may cast some doubt about particular or specific aspects of such a source, listeners are able to ascertain the "nature" of the source, i.e. a dog. The barks, in other words, do not underdetermine the source itself, unlike the "whistling [Zischen]" or "piping [Pfeifen]" in Kafka's tale (Kane, 2014, p. 139).

The acousmatic begins in the film at the moment that the cognitive disturbance caused by the dog-like non-dogs inevitably affects the ways in which the unseen source of the barks is understood and interpreted by the child. In Luchi's ears, what was once a familiar nonhuman sound gradually begins to refer back to an indefinite and indefinable source, not only because the body from which the barks are emitted is out of sight, but because the ontological status of the dog itself can no longer be fully determined. As canine identity becomes contaminated by an indiscernible otherness, the child's aural awareness of the animal vocalisation becomes more and more of a disturbing experience. The sound of the barks presents an epistemic problem: what does it mean to listen to a sound whose habitually recognisable source becomes ambiguous and ultimately indeterminable?

Martel's employment of acousmaticity in the film gains its force as the ontological stability of the dog begins to disintegrate – an occurrence which calls attention to the sonic source emitting the barks. The status of the barking source changes, for what was known and knowable (even when unseen) progressively becomes indefinable (even when seen). This change of status prevents and delays the identification of the barks with a stable source, thus increasing the degree of acousmaticity when listening to the animal vocalisation. The two processes – the corruption of the dog's self-sameness and the variation of acousmaticity perceived in the barks – are necessarily inseparable. Once the diegesis is (potentially) inhabited by non-dogs who look like dogs and by non-dogs who are said to sound like dogs, the source of the bark can no longer be ascertained. How might Luchi listen to the barks? As the vocalisation of a dog? But how can he distinguish dog from non-dog? Both the African rat and the perro-rata have contaminated and displaced the original canine identity, making it impossible to verify the dog's isness. Perhaps, that which barks at the other side of the courtyard is something different altogether: not a dog, not an African rat, not a perro-rata, but some other creature with the capacity for mimicking the (un)familiar canine cry; a quasi-perro-rata, a quasi-dog. How might the child listen to the barks in a world where difference conceals itself as and through likeness?

Significantly, Martel treats listening as kaleidoscopic: different listeners make sense of the world they access through the ear in heterogeneous ways. Luchi seems to be the sole diegetic subject who experiences the barks in full acousmaticity. Every other diegetic subject seems to hear the animal vocalisation as a sound whose source, albeit visually unavailable, can be easily determined and therefore be put into a coherent relation with the nonhuman sound, that is, as a sound without any degree of acousmaticity. These two dissimilar registers of listening to the barks – either as a sound whose source is not only unseen but also unable to be fully determined, or as a vocal emission whose source can be easily ascertained even when is visually inaccessible – coincide in the film. Kane (2014) remarks, "acousmaticity is ultimately a judgement of the listener, not an intrinsic quality of the sound itself. Two listeners may experience different degrees of acousmaticity (or the lack thereof) in the same sound" (p. 225).

Toward the end of the film, the very possibility for differentiating dog from non-dog completely dissolves. On his last visit to his cousins’ estate, Luchi refuses to get out of the car, as the vehicle is surrounded by many dogs. Unsure of the ontological status of the free-ranging canines, the child avoids direct contact with the animals. Luchi's sister Marianita affirms, "It is not a perro-rata, Luchi. We can get out of the car". Even when fully seen, Luchi doubts canine genuineness. Characterised by a difference with itself, canine identity is no longer one but many; it contains that which is not within itself.

The child ends up perceiving the barks as being emitted from a source that is internally divided; the sound of the barks is heard as a disturbed and disturbing signal transmitting the traces of a nonhuman plurality that constitutes an illegible, nebulous sign for the human. Dog-cum-non-dog, the ambiguous source of the barks roams at the very edges of representation: it exists in an unstable ontological in-betweenness and double-ness that thwarts the logic of either/or. Given the spacing of canine identity with itself, the child comes to listen to the vocal emission as emanating from a source that, paradoxically, is always many.

The nonhuman sound becomes an animot: a perturbed sonic sign bearing the marks of an animality that is a multiplicity and an alterity. Garnier (2011) reminds us that an animot "should always be understood as a plural" (p. 35) even when its verbal body is singular. The sound of the barks or bark-animot(s), in all its ordinariness and simplicity, comes to be heard by the child as referring back to a nonhuman plurality withstanding the reduction to a single, knowable identity.

Although Martel's film may be seen as preserving what Georgina Born (2019) refers to as "a certain asymmetry" governing the treatment of the couplet "human subject-nonhuman sound" – an asymmetry whereby the human is seen as "an active figure" doing the perceptual work upon "a kind of object, ground, or context" (p. 190) provided by nonhuman sound –  the film renders the nonhuman as constantly thwarting the logic of human interpretation. At the very end of the narrative, Martel suggests the possibility of the moment of "de-acousmatisation", a process defined by Michel Chion (1999, p. 27) as the identification of the source of an acousmatic sound by visual means. More recently, Kata Gellen (2019) has expanded Chion's de-acousmatisation to the linguistic realm, proposing that "there are other ways to ‘know’ sound, even to reveal and discover sound sources, than to see them with the eyes" namely, "one can name sounds" (p. 116). In the world disclosed by La ciénaga, de-acousmatisation might be considered as a path for recapturing the ambiguous figure of the (non-)dog, or for returning the sign to presence, to use Derrida's parlance. Yet, Martel problematises the possibility of de-acousmatisation.

In the case of de-acousmatisation as a linguistic process, the play with words and naming, specifically the creation of the hybrid name perro-rata, complicates knowing a single, self-contained source voicing the sound. Is the source from which the barks are emitted a regular perro or a perro-rata? How can a listener differentiate and name the source of the sound when discriminating the original perro from the deceitful perro-rata is beyond the bounds of possibility? Martel gives the impression that the moment of de-acousmatisation as the visual identification of the source will be actualised, as Luchi climbs up a ladder in order to catch a glimpse of the source voicing the barks. Yet, the boy slips and falls to his death. The sound of the barks is heard one last time, just as the camera frames the lifeless body of the child. Whatever produced the barks remains unseen. Now, one can hypothesise the process of de-acousmatisation, had Luchi not died. Had the boy discovered a little dog barking at the other side of the walls, the uncertainty in regard to the dog's identity and the nature of the barks would not have dissipated, for, as we know, African rats look exactly like little dogs. Even when seen, the duplicity of the non-dog preserves the acousmatic character of the barks. To be sure, the child might have visualised something entirely different. One just needs to remember Fritz Lang's masterful moments of de-acousmatisation in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1927), in which the listener-viewer discovers that what was thought to be the direct voice of a character was indeed a recording playing over and over again, to hypothesise unpredictable barking sources. But, of course, Luchi's death takes with it the prospect of de-acousmatisation.

In this sense, while Martel does align listening with what Rey Chow (2019) calls the "old-fashioned humanistic values of understanding and interpretation based on subjectivity" (p. 121), I consider La ciénaga as a demonstration of a cinematic practice that attempts to think the animot or the "post-animal", i.e. an animality emancipated from the conceptual and corporeal restrains of metaphysics. The post-animal emerges in the film just as the degree of acousmaticity sensed in the barks increases in the child's ears – the post-animal can only be heard and yet, it cannot be fully known. Animality becomes and stays a blind spot for the human – an opaque sign that remains unreadable and unreachable, thus unsettling the narrative form. As Matthew Senior, David L. Clark and Carla Freccero (2015) suggest, the post-animal highlights that "the human comes after, is derived from, and follows the animal, not only as evolution tells the story, but in non-linear and recursive modes" (p. 8). By refusing to de-acousmatise the bark-animot(s), Martel preserves the force of the post-animal and consequently moves beyond a narrative form in which the human and human knowledge constitute the prime focus of content. Luchi's fatal accident materialises the unreachability of an animality or of a post-animality which remains "uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal, and secret" (Derrida, 2008, p. 12).

In Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013), Adrian Ivakhiv presents an "ecophilosophy of the cinema" (p. 6), i.e. an "ecosystemic" mode of analysis which considers cinema as a form of world-production or, in Heidegger's terms, as a form of poiesis – the bringing-forth of a meaning-laden world. Ivakhiv (2013, p. 7, 8) proposes that cinema's "cosmomorphism" involves the disclosure of a film-world arranged in three dimensions or ecologies: the geomorphic, the anthropomorphic and the biomorphic, or, more broadly, the material, the social and the interperceptual.

Because films present a world of material objects, or, in Ivakhiv's (2013) words, an "objectscape" (p. 9) depicting territory, space, and place, cinema produces a geomorphic dimension – a territoriality presented as a world that is given. Because films disclose a social world, an anthropomorphic dimension in which the category of the human emerges as other than, and distinct from, the nonhuman, cinema models a world of subjects, i.e. agents capable of acting upon, and of modifying, the world as givenness.

Yet, in Ivakhiv's (2013) model, the object and subject distinction is not static; rather, the geomorphic or material and the anthropomorphic or social are seen as the two ends of a stretched continuum between which extends "a field of possibilities within which action and reaction, perception and response, take place" (p. 10). It is in the middle ground between the world as a given materiality or objectivity and the world as agency or subjectivity where the process of world-making develops, or, in Ivakhiv's (2013) terms, the biomorphic dimension: "an interperceptive relationality of things, which span a continuum from the barely alive to the recognizably social" (p. 8). The material and the social, then, are dynamically related through an interperceptual register, understood as a world-making capacity "through which a world comes into being for world-bearing beings" (Ivakhiv, 2012, p. 91). Significantly, for Ivakhiv (2013), all things – not only humans – are taken to be lively and worldly; the world-making capacity is intrinsic to all experience (p. 89).

Examining La ciénaga through the child's distinctive register of listening brings into perceptibility modes of experiencing the film that may otherwise remain inaccessible for the listener-viewer. Listening to Luchi's acousmatic listening illuminates the conditions and processes by which the diegetic world becomes a world for the child – a world in which the stable, singular line dividing the human from the nonhuman gradually dissolves, as the nonhuman animal turns into an ambiguous presence. Through Luchi's listening, the film's biomorphic dimension enables the emergence of the animot: an animality signifying a plurality and an alterity that resists and defies logocentric epistemologies. It is through such process of becoming-animot in the child's ears that the figure of the nonhuman animal gains a form of agency in the film, a capacity for action and creativity without mimicking human subjectivity or interiority. Contrarily, the child's acousmatic listening enables the formation of a subjectivity in close relationship to the nonhuman; Luchi's listening to the bark-animot(s) makes possible an interspecies interaction marked by an indeterminacy and ambiguity that expresses the closeness yet separateness of humans and animals. If, as Ivakhiv argues, cinema produces an anthropomorphic dimension that articulates boundary-making and boundary-negotiating between the human and the nonhuman, Martel's employment of acousmatic listening in the film generates a complex movement that both brings the animal and the child in intimate proximity while preserving the layered borders between them.

The film's representation of human-animal relations, however, is not limited to unanimity or uniformity. The diegetic world offers multiple subject positions approaching the animal issue in contradictory manners. By modelling differing modes of listening, Martel arises tensions around the human-animal interrelations. While Luchi's acousmatic listening dynamises the boundary between human/other, non-acousmatic listening preserves a stable order of relations in which the animal is considered fundamentally other to humanity. These different and multiple mediations offered by the film configure a complex view of reality, one that brings into visibility the ways in which reality itself is always "thick with meaning, intention, feeling, desire, expectation, anticipation, and narrative" (Ivakhiv, 2013, p. 280).

Giving close attention to the marginal in the film – the child, the figure of the dog and the barks, and a "secondary" sensorial mode, i.e. listening – constitutes a practice of spectatorship that clears a path for listening to the bark-animot(s), that is, for attending to the canine voice beyond habitual modes of thinking about the animal. In this sense, Luchi's acousmatic listening functions as a conduit enabling the listener-viewer to expand their perception of ecological ontology – to expand our perception of nonhuman or more than just human worlds, with their enigmatic differences and insoluble unreachability. Rather than solely focusing on our own perception of the nonhuman sound, we must listen to Luchi's listening(s) in order to engage in a viewing and listening practice that compels us to rethink the "animality" of the animal, the "humanity" of the human, and the interdependencies between the nonhuman and human worlds. In La ciénaga, the dog is gradually freed from the conceptual leashes of metaphysics, a process that allows the voice of the dog to be heard by human ears in all its alterity – dog as animot, bark as bark-animot.

1. The sound of barking is heard four times throughout the film, always from behind walls. The barks preserve similar sonic qualities, thus, one can hypothesise that the source voicing the sound is the same, i.e. one dog emits the barks. However, writing about sound whose source is unseen presents a difficulty. As Brian Kane notes in Sound Unseen (2014), following P. F. Strawson, "in a purely auditory world one can determine qualitative identity but not numerical identity. Without visual access to the source emitting a sound, one can establish that two sounds sound alike (that they are qualitative identical), but one cannot definitively establish that they are the same numerically distinct individual" (p. 145). Thus, without visual reference to the body emitting the barks, one can never be sure if the barks come from four numerically distinct sources or one numerically identical source. Since we do not have visual access to the sonic source, there is an irresolvable ambiguity surrounding the body (or bodies) producing the barks. For a short discussion on Strawson's writings on the problem of identity in a purely auditory world see Kane's chapter "Kafka and the Ontology of Acousmatic Sound" in Sound Unseen (2014, pp. 145–147).