ABSTRACTRhetoric scholars often turn to the sciences to understand animal rhetorics, but rarely query how scientists themselves listen to nonhuman modes of communication. This essay demonstrates how biologist Katy Payne employs a fully embodied method of listening in order to hear the songs of the humpback whale as well as feel the infrasonic rumbles of African elephants. Payne’s method of inquiry serves as a model for rhetorical listening beyond the human, and anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s theory of an open semiosis is applied to understand Payne’s unique method. Rhetorical listening to the open semiosis offers a form of empiricism in which scientists, led by affect, intuition, and feeling, become more like witnesses than observers.KEYWORDS: Animal rhetoricsKaty Paynenew materialismsrhetorical listeningrhetorics of science AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor for providing insights that transformed the essay from start to finish. This project would not exist without the generosity of Katy Payne and the support of Debra Hawhee. Writing group members Sarah Adams, Curry Kennedy, Ashley Ray, and Michael Young also believed in this draft at its earliest stage. This article further benefitted from the intellectual community in Byron Hawk, Diane Keeling, and Thomas Rickert’s Rhetoric Society of America’s “The Futures of New Materialism” Workshop. Many thanks to Ed Comstock, Linh Dich, Anita Long, and Joe Vuletich who endured my endless frustration with the “meaning of meaning.”Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 To listen to these songs, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM.2 Hereafter, I will use “Payne” to reference Katy Payne and use Roger Payne’s full name to avoid confusion with their shared last name. This intensive interview was deemed Institutional Review Board exempt from Penn State’s Office of Research Protections in 2018. There is no conflict of interest in writing or publishing this work.3 Recently, Gries has introduced a methodology for new materialist rhetoric studies, called new materialist ontobiography (NMO), that “draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment” in situ, or through experiential practice (302). My grounded theory approach works similarly to Gries’s NMO, but rather than focusing on my own experiential encounters, I focus on how scientists like Payne make sense of their sensory encounters with nonhuman rhetoric.4 The songs featured in Science were based on the recordings of Naval engineer Frank Whatlington, who was the first to take the Paynes out in the Atlantic Ocean to hear the songs of the humpback whale. Later, the Paynes would go on to conduct their own recordings of humpback whales off the coast of Hawaii and of right whales off the coast of Patagonia.5 Because of its embodied nature, listening, like seeing, is never neutral, as Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson points out with his notion of “hungry listening.” Listening is a “haptic, proprioceptive encounter with affectively experienced asymmetries of power” filtered through how individuals attend, or not, to race, class, gender, and ability (11). Payne’s positionality as a white, middle-class woman with an Ivy League education certainly afforded her the ability to listen to whale songs for years on end without the need to make those songs mean, to publish about them, and/or profit from them. Yet what sets Payne’s form of listening apart from that of other scientific epistemologies is that she doesn’t seem to listen “hungrily,” or try to make the whale sounds “fit” colonialistic interpretations (Robinson 6).6 In The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics, Parrish explains via Peirce’s “sign properties” how this detached perspective arises: “Firstness is simply a sign’s feeling or one’s sense of a sign. Secondness is the level of physical fact, of a sign’s material reality. Thirdness is the level of general rules that governs firstness and secondness in any given object” (116). To symbolize, then, is to be caught up in thirdness, or to be able to consider how the symbol functions via cultural influence.7 This moment of “regrounding,” of sinking into the open semiosis, of knowing affectively and intuitively beyond the symbol, is not dissimilar from what Rickert has called attunement.8 The field of biosemiotics studies this open sharing of signs between human animals and the natural world, even considering how signals are sent within the human body. Jesper Hoffmeyer works parallel to Kohn when he posits that human animals are able to signify about the natural world because the natural world is itself signifying. “How can signification arise out of something that signifies nothing?” (3), Hoffmeyer asks. Hoffmeyer, too, like Rickert, relies on Uexkhull’s theory of Umwelt to theorize communication and meaning beyond the human. For Hoffmeyer and others in biosemiotics, Umwelt comes to explain how all organisms live first and foremost in their own unique “semiospheres” (vii). Parrish further highlights that zoosemiotics also treats the sign as the basic unit of life (44). Kohn thus aligns with these arguments, but would perhaps avoid the bio- and zoo- distinctions, as, for him, semiosis is an open whole.9 In The Incorporeal, Elizabeth Grosz argues that there is an element of the immaterial in every new materialism. Rhetoric’s study of sensation and affect, as Davis’s “rhetoricity” highlights, provides the ideal lens needed to shed light on where the immaterial is located in new materialisms as well as what role it serves therein.