Encounters with companion species: Entangling dogs, baboons, philosophers, and biologists

Configurations

Volumn 14, Issue 1-2, 2006, Pages 97-114

  Haraway, Donna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 47949130331     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0002     Document Type: Review

References (57)

1. This passage is taken from Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), pp. 1-3.
2. I adapt the term "becoming with" from Vinciane Despret, "The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis," Body and Society 10:2 (2004): 111-134.
3. Foundational theorists of intersectionality have been U.S. feminists of color, including Kimberle Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," in Feminist Legal Theory: Foundations, ed. D. Kelly Weisberg (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 383-398;
4. Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981);
5. Chéla Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
6. Gloria Anzaldùa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); and many others.
7. For a primer, see Anonymous, ́Intersectionality: A Tool for Gender and Economic Justice," Women's Rights and Economic Change 9 (August 2004); www.awid.org/publications/primers/intersectionality_en.pdf (accessed November 4, 2007).
8. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007);
9. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
10. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The "posthumanities," however, seems to me a useful notion for tracking scholarly conversations.
11. On "conversation" (versus "debate") as political practice, see Katie King, Theory in Its Feminist Travels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
12. King's new book, Flexible Knowledges (in preparation), is an indispensable guide to trans-knowledge makings and reenactments of many kinds, in and out of the contemporary university. King's notion of " pastpresents" is particularly useful for thinking about how to inherit histories.
13. "Intersectionality" (above, n. 3). Carol Adams, Neither Beast nor Man: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1995), pp. 71-84, argues persuasively for an intersectional and not analogical approach to the needed allied oppositions to the deadly oppressions and exploitations of animals and of categories of human beings who cannot fully count as "man." Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed (above, n. 3) developed a robust theory of oppositional and differential consciousness that should forever prevent hierarchicalized analogical moves in which oppressions are both equated and ranked, rather than made to animate another kind of entanglement of becoming with each other that is attentive to the asymmetries of power.
14. See also Octavia Butler, Fledgling (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005);
15. Alice Walker, "Am I Blue?" in Living by the Word (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1987), pp. 3-8;
16. Angela Davis, "Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist," in Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 172-201;
17. Marcie Griffith, Jennifer Wolch, and Unna Lassiter, "Animal Practices and the Racialization of Filipinas in Los Angeles," Society and Animals 10:3 (2002): 222-248;
18. Eduardo Mendieta, "Philosophical Beasts: Midgley, Derrida, Agamben, Haraway," submitted to Continental Philosophy Review, and "The Imperial Bestiary of the U.S.: Alien, Enemy Combatant, Terrorist," in Radical Philosophy Today IV, ed. Harry van der Linden and Tony Smith (Charlottesville, Va.: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2006), pp. 155-179.
19. In his search for another logic of metamorphosis, Achille Mbembe, in On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), tracks the brutalization, bestialization, and colonization of African subjects in philosophy and history. The readiness with which taking animals seriously is heard to be an animalization of people of color is a shocking reminder, if one is needed, of how potent colonial (and humanist) tools of analogy remain, including in discourses intended to be liberatory. Rights discourse struggles with this legacy. My hope for companion species is that we might struggle with different demons than those produced by analogy and hierarchy that link all of fictional man's others.
20. Anna Tsing, "Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species," in Thinking with Donna Haraway, ed. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi (MIT Press, forthcoming);
21. see also Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 5, "A History of Weediness."
22. Jacques Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369-418.
23. This essay is the first part of a ten-hour address Derrida gave at the third Cerisy-la-Salle conference in 1997. See Jacques Derrida, L'Animal autobiographique, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999).
24. Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am," p. 374.
25. Ibid., pp. 378-379.
26. Ibid., p. 416.
27. "Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in the general singular . . . are all the living beings that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers. . . . Animals are my concern. . . . I will venture to say that never, on the part of any great philosopher from Plato to Heidegger, or anyone at all who takes on, as a philosophical question in and of itself, the question called that of the animal . . . have I noticed a protestation of principle . . . against the general singular that is the animal. . . . The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within this general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking . . . but a crime of the first order against the animals, against animals" (ibid., pp. 402, 403, 408, 416).
28. Ibid., pp. 382-383.
29. Ibid., p. 396.
30. I highlight "once its protocol is established" to differentiate the kind of question that needs to be asked from the practice of assessing nonhuman animals in relation to human ones by checking the presence or absence of a potentially infinite list of capacities, a process that Derrida so rightly rejected. What is at stake in establishing a different protocol is the never denotatively knowable - for human or nonhuman animals - relation of response. Derrida thought that Bentham's question avoided the dilemma by pointing not to positive capabilities assessed against each other, but to "the non-power at the heart of power" that we share with the other animals in our suffering, vulnerability, and mortality. I am not satisfied by that solution; it is only part of the needed reformulation. There is an unnamable "being/becoming with" of co-presence that Smuts calls something we taste rather than something we know, which is about suffering and expressive, relational vitality, in all the vulnerable mortality of both. I am (inadequately) calling that expressive, mortal, world-making vitality "play" or "work," not to designate a fixable capability in relation to which beings can be ranked, but to affirm another kind of "non-power at the heart of power" than suffering. Maybe a usable word for this is "joy." "Mortality . . . as the most radical means of thinking the finitude we share with animals" does not reside only in suffering, in my view. (Both quotations come from ibid., p. 396.) Capability (play), as well as incapability (suffering), are both all about mortality and finitude. Thinking otherwise comes from the ongoing oddities of dominant Western philosophical conversations, including those Derrida knew best and undid so well most of the time. I want a different protocol for asking about a lot more than suffering, which at least in U.S. idioms will regularly end in the self-fulfilling search for rights and their denial through abuse. I am more worried than Derrida seems to be here about the way animals become discursive victims and little else when the protocols are not properly established for the question, "Can animals suffer?" Thanks to Cary Wolfe for making me think more about this unsolved problem.
31. Ibid., pp. 379, 380, and 383. Emmanuel Lévinas, "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights," in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 151-153. Lévinas movingly tells the story of the stray dog called Bobby, who greeted the Jewish prisoners of war as they returned from work each day in a German forced-labor camp, restoring to them knowledge of their humanity: "For him, there was no doubt that we were men. . . . This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives" (p. 153). Thus was Bobby left on the other side of a Great Divide, even by a man as sensitive as Lévinas was of the service rendered by this dog's look.
32. My favorite essay in animal studies and philosophy on the question of Bobby and whether an animal has "face" in Lévinas's sense is by H. Peter Steeves, "Lost Dog," in Figuring the Animal: Essays in Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, eds. Catherine Rainwater and Mary Pollack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 21-35.
33. On Derrida and others in the Continental philosophical canon on animals, see Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
34. Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (above, n. 7), p. 397.
35. The book based on that and subsequent research is Barbara Smuts, Sex and Friendship in Baboons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
36. I wrote about Smuts in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 168-169, 176-179, 371-376. When I wrote Primate Visions, I failed the obligation of curiosity in much the same way I suggest Derrida did. I was so intent on the consequences of the Western philosophical, literary, and political heritage for writing about animals - especially other primates in the so-called Third World in a period of rapid decolonization and gender rearrangements - that I all but missed the radical practice of many of the biologists and anthropologists, women and men both, who helped me with the book; namely, their relentless curiosity about the animals, and their tying themselves into knots to find ways to engage with these diverse animals as a rigorous scientific practice and not a romantic fantasy. I also often mistook the conventional idioms of the philosophy and history of science that most of "my" scientists spoke for a description of what they did. They tended to mistake my grasp of how narrative practice works in science, how fact and fiction co-shape each other, to be a reduction of their hard-won science to subjective storytelling. I think we needed each other, but had little idea of how to respond. Had I known in 1980 how to cultivate the curiosity I want from Derrida, I would have spent much more time at risk at field sites with the scientists and the monkeys and apes, not in the facile illusion that such ethnographic fieldwork would give the truth about people or animals where interviews and documentary analysis mislead, but as a subject-forming entanglement that requires response one cannot know in advance. I knew I also cared about the actual animals then, but I neither knew how to look back nor that I lacked the habit.
37. Barbara Smuts, "Encounters with Animal Minds," Journal of Consciousness Studies 8:5-7 (2001): 293-309, quote on 295.
38. Ibid., p. 295.
39. Ibid., p. 297.
40. Ibid., p. 295.
41. I did not write "smallest possible units of analysis," because the word "unit" misleads us into thinking that there is an ultimate atom made up of internal differential relatings, which is a premise of autopoiesis and other theories of organic form. I see only prehensile turtles all the way up and down.
42. On the creative force of the prosaic, the propinquity of things in many registers, the concatenation of specific empirical circumstances, the mis-recognition of experience by holding to an idea of the experience before having had it, and on how different orders of things hold together co-evally, see Gillian Goslinga, "The Ethnography of a South Indian God: Virgin Birth, Spirit Possession, and the Prose of the Modern World" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006).
43. Barbara Smuts, "Embodied Communication in Nonhuman Animals," in Human Development in the 21st Century: Visionary Policy Ideas from Systems Scientists, eds. Alan Fogel, Barbara King, and Stuart Shanker (publication of the Council on Human Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
44. When a run goes awry in agility, I hear my fellow dog-sport people say of the canine and human persons, "They look like they have never met; she should introduce herself to her dog." A good run can be thought of as a sustained greeting ritual.
45. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 367-370.
46. Ibid., p. 6.
47. Ibid., p. 7.
48. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
49. Ibid., pp. 55-56.
50. Ibid., p. 205.
51. To track both the positivists' and the interpretivists' approaches to this narrative about nonteleological infinite regress - the world rests on an elephant resting on a turtle resting on turtles all the way down - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_ the_way_down (accessed November 4, 2007).
52. Isabelle Stengers tells a "turtles all the way down" story involving William James, Copernicus, and a savvy old lady, in Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 61-62.
53. For his critique of autopoiesis, see Scott F. Gilbert, "The Genome in Its Ecological Context: Philosophical Perspectives on Interspecies Epigenesis," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 981 (2002): 202-218;
54. see also Scott Gilbert, John Opitz, and Rudolf Raff, "Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology," Developmental Biology 173 (1996): 357-372, quote on 368.
55. Scott Gilbert, e-mail to author, August 23, 2006.
56. Ibid.
57. Drawing from second-generation cybernetic thinkers like Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Cary Wolfe reworks autopoiesis so that it cannot mean "self-organizing systems," which is the chief complaint I and Gilbert have. Nothing "self-organizes." Wolfe's development of nonrepresentationalist communication is close to what I mean by companion species engaged in turtling all the way down. The word autopoiesis is not the main problem, although I prefer to let it go because I do not think its meanings can be bent enough. What Wolfe and I both insist upon is finding an idiom for the paradoxical and indispensable linkages of openness and closure, called by Wolfe "openness from closure" repeated recursively. See Cary Wolfe, "In the Shadow of Wittgenstein's Lion," in Zoontologies, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), esp. pp. 34-48. Thanks for Wolfe's e-mail on September 12, 2006, for pushing this question. In Meeting the Universe Halfway (above, n. 4), Barad's agential realism, phenomena, and intra-action provide another vital theoretical idiom for this conversation.