The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness

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The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness Donna Haraway PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS CHICAGO 1 Emergent Naturecultures From "Notes of a Sports Writer's Daughter": M, Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells-a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margnlis call'symbiogenesis. I bet ifyou checked our DNA, you'd find some potent transfections between us. Her saliva must have the viral Vel-tors. Surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. Even though We share place­ ment in the phylum of vertebrates, we inhabit not jzm different genera and divergent families, but altogether different orders. How would tve sort thing.r out? Canid, hominid; pet, professor; bitch, woman,. animal, human; athlete, handler. One of us has a microchip injected nnder her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID 2 3 California driver:r license. One afus has a written , other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of Us in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty does not know her great grandparents' names. One of developmental infation called love. This love is an us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called ''pure­ historical aberration and a naturalcultnrallegacy'" bred." One afus, equal~y product of a vast mixture, is called "white. " Each of these names designates a racial This manifesto explores two questions flowing discourse, and we both inherit their consequences in OUr flesh. from this aberration and legacy: 1) how might an One ofus is at the cusp off/aminp;, youthful, phys­ ethics and politics committed to the tlourishing of ical achievement; the other if lusty but over the hill. significant otherness he learned from taking dog­ And We playa team sport called ap;ility on the same human relationships seriously; and 2) how might expropriated Native land where Cayenne sancestors stories about dog-human worlds finally convince herded merino sheep. These sheep were imported from brain-damaged US Americans, and maybe other less the already colonial pastoral economy ofAustrali~ to historically challenged people, that history matters in feed the California Gold Rm-h 49m. In layers of naturecultures? history, layers of biology, layers ofrtflturecultures, The Companion Species Manife;to is a personal complexity is the name of our game. We are both the freedom-hungry offspring of conquest, products of white document, a scholarly foray into too many half known, settler colonies, leaping over hurdles and crawling territories, a political act of hope in a world on the throu~-h tunnels on the playinp; field. edge of global war, and a work perm~nently in I'm sure our genomes are more alike than they progress, in principle, I offer dog-eaten props and should be. There must be some molecular record of our half-trained arguments to reshape some stories I care touch in the codes of living that will leave traces in the about a great deal, as a scholar and as a person in my world, no mDtler that we are each reproductively time and place. The story here is mainly about dogs, silenced females, one by age, one hy surgery. Her red Passionately engaged in these accounts, I hope to merle Austrfllian Shepherd's quick and lithe tonp;ue has swabbed the tissues of my ton.riir, with all their eflger bring my readers into the kennel for life. But I hope immune .system receptors. Who knows where my chem­ also that even the dog phobic--Dr just those with their ical receptors carried her mesrages, or 7vhat she took minds on higher things-will find arguments and from my cellular system for distinguishing selffrom stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in. othe,~_ and binding outside to inside? The practices and actors in dog worlds, human and ',We have had forbidden conversation; we have had non-human alike, ought to be central concerns of oral intercourse; we are hound in telling .st:ory upon technoscience studies, Even closer to my heart, I want story with nothing hut the facts. We are training each my readers to know why I consider dog writing to be a other in acts of communication we bare{y understand. branch of feminist theory, or the other way around. ~ are, constitutively, companion species. We make each 4 5 This is not my first manifesto; in 1985, I the dogs to explore the birth of the kennel to help published "The Cyborg Manifesto" to try to make craft tools for science smdies and feminist theory in feminist sense of the implosions of contemporary life the present time, when secondary Bushes threaten to in technoscience. Cyborgs arc "cybernetic organisms," replace the old growth of more livable natureculmres named in 1960 in the context of the space race, the in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on cold war, and imperialist fantasies of tcchnohumanism earth. Having worn the scarlet letters, "Cyborgs for built into policy and research projects. I tried to earthly survival!" long enough, I now brand myself inhabit cyborgs critically; i.e., neither in celebration with a slogan only Schutzhund women from dog nor condemnation, but in a spirit of ironic appropria­ sports could have come up with, when even a first nip tion for ends never envisioned by the space warriors. can result in a death sentence: "Run fast; bite hard!" Telling a story of co-habitation, co-evolution, and This is a story of biopower and biosociality, as embodied cross-species sociality, the present manifesto well as of technoscience. Like any good Darwinian, I asks which of two cobbled together figures-cyborgs tell a story of evolution. In the mode of (nucleic) and companion species-might more fruitfully inform acidic millelmialism, I tell a tale of molecular differ­ livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds. ences, but one less rooted in Mitochondrial Eve in a These figures are hardly polar opposites. Cyborgs and neocolonial Out ofAfriCll and more rooted in those companion species each bring together the human and first mitochondrial canine bitches who got in the way non-human, the organic and technologiGll, carbon of man making himself yet again in the Greatest Story and silicon, freedom and strucmre, history and myth, Ever Told. Instead, those bitches insisted on the the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diver­ history of companion species, a very mundane and sity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and ongoing sort of talc, one full of misunderstandings, namre and culmre in unexpected ways. Besides, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes. Mine is a neither a cyborg nor a companion animal pleases the story told by a student of the sciences and a feminist pure of heart who long for better protected species of a certain generation who has gone to the dogs, boundaries and sterilization of category deviants. literally. Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter Nonetheless, the differences between even the most here. Dogs are not an alibi tor other themes; dogs are politically correct cyborg and an ordinary dog matter. fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of I appropriated cyborgs to do feminist work in technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; Reagan's Star W.~rs times of the mid-1980s. By the they are not here just to think with. They are here to end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do live with. Partners in tbe crime of human evolution, the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as threads needed for critical inquiry. So I go happily to Coyote., 6 7 Prehensions contributes a rich array of approaches to emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity, co-habita­ Many versions of process philosophies help tion, co-constimtion, and contingency. Dozens of me walk with my dogs in this manifesto. For feminist writers have refused both relativism and example, Alfred North 'Vhitehead described "the universalism. Subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, concrete" as "a concrescence of prehensions." For genres, and genders are the products of their relating. him, "the concrete" meant an "actual occasion." None of this work is about finding sweet and nice­ Reality is an active verb, and the nouns all seem to be "feminine"-worlds and knowledges free of the gerunds with more appendages than an octopus. ravages and productivities of power. Rather, feminist Through their reaching into each other, through inquiry is about understanding how things work, who their "prehensions" or graspings, beings constimte is in the action, what might he possible, and how each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and their relatings. "Prehensions" have consequences. love each other less violently. The world is a knot in motion. Biological and For example, smdying Yoruba- and English­ cuI mral determinism are hoth instances of misplaced speaking mathematics elementary school classrooms in concreteness-i.e., the mistake of, first, taking provi­ post-independence Nigeria and participating in sional and local category abstractions like "namre" Australian Aboriginal projects in math teaching and and "culmre" for the world and, second, mistaking environmental policy, IIelen Verran identifies "emer­ potent consequences to be preexisting foundations. gent ontologies." Verran asks "simple" questions: How There are no pre-constimted subjects and objects, can people rooted in di fferent knowledge practices and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends. In "get on together," especially when an all-too-easy Judith Butler's terms, there are only "contingent culmral relativism is not an option, either politically, foundations;" bodies that matter are the result.
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