Circuito Ubu - Agosto de 2022

Very difficult to read, however, the philosophy is phenomenal. Haraway turns one's mind into a proverbial pretzel in every paragraph, and regardless of the difficulty, and the need to slog through it, doing so provides a unique reward in knowledge.

In general, posthumanism fascinates me, and Haraway is a large part of this. ( )

In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway asks two questions, “(1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? and (2) How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (pg. 3). She examines the interaction between humans and other species, predominantly focusing on domestic species such as dogs for their historically close relationship to humanity. She works to undo concepts of human exceptionalism, “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies. Thus, to be human is to be on the opposite side of the Great Divide from all the others and so afraid of – and in bloody love with – what goes bump in the night” (pg. 11). Her work intersects not only with posthumanism, but also with discourses of race and gender, especially in the exceptionalism blended with eugenics that is the concept of purebreds.
Haraway writes, “Canis lupis familiaris, indeed; the familiar is always where the uncanny lurks. Further, the uncanny is where value becomes flesh again, in spite of all the dematerializations and objectifications inherent in market valuation” (pg. 45). This examination of the uncanny recalls the concept of the uncanny valley, something not-quite-human, yet almost so. With the manner in which humans, and Haraway in particular, anthropomorphize their dogs, these subjects are both familiar and novel simultaneously the more we think about our interactions with them. Discussing the role of healthcare in “humanizing” animals, Haraway writes, “Dogs in capitalist technoculture have acquired the ‘right to health,’ and the economic (as well as legal) implications are legion” (pg. 49). As consumers in a marketplace increasingly catering to their unique needs, the pet-parent concept so popular in the blogosphere no longer accurately describes the role of animals in the economy. Dogs, especially, are not just subjects/patients, but also commodities in a Marxist system (pg. 52).
Discussing the role of humanity in the world, Haraway suggests “that it is a misstep to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed and those who may not and a misstep to pretend to live outside killing” (pg. 79). While she is not trying to reduce the world to the view of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H., she does encourage empathy in the laboratory setting. After all, “the puppies had to become patients if they were to become technologies and models” (pg. 59). Even this concept of certain animals as having a unique place in society is relatively recent. Haraway writes, “In the United States, dogs became ‘companion animals’ both in contrast and in addition to ‘pets’ and ‘working and sporting dogs’ around the late 1970s in the context of social scientific investigations into the relations of animals such as dogs to human health and well-being” (pg. 134). This idea, however, still privileges humanity.
In one of her strongest conclusions, Haraway writes, “Ways of living and dying matter” (pg. 88). The traditional humans-only method does not do justice to the reality of the world. Like Azetbur, the Klingon Ambassador in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991, dir. Nicholas Meyer) critiqued the United Federation of Planets, an anthropocentric view is “little better than a Homo sapiens only club.” Interestingly, Haraway finds the most prescient comparisons to these cross-species encounters in the realm of science fiction. She concludes, “Animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with. Human and nonhuman animals are companion species, messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (pg. 301). ( )

"I am not a posthumanist; I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind" (19). (she is, rather, "nonhumanist": see 92-93)

"The coming into being of something unexpected, something new and free, something outside the rules of function and calculation, something not ruled by the logic of the reproduction of the same, is what training with each other is about" (223).

Great praise is due Haraway for her use and interchange with so much material lacking in animal theory, namely, current research (not just the usual von Uexküll and Kohler) of biologists, ethologists, and geneticists, and for her close attention to on-the-ground experience. We animal thinkers should be aware that deep nonanthropocentric research and thinking has been going on in communities with whom we virtually never speak or think! Let us have the biologists if they will have us! Also to be praised: her attention to the ordinary, mundane (watchwords for Haraway here) that includes both naturalcultural (Haraway's locution) canine/human ecology and history and, above all, actual animals, who are not ciphers (as is Derrida's cat), but rather actual fellow "critters" (Haraway's word, smartly chosen to avoid "creatures") with desires and needs that can affect the sufficiently attentive, sufficiently open human (here I would have liked to have seen DH work with Acampora's humanimal phenomenology of "bodiment"). The human disaggregates to a certain degree in this relationship that, perhaps, is so active, so transformative, that it should not be called "relationship." I would have liked more Deleuze and Guattari to get a thicker sense of the work this does, since, without their thought, I often felt that Haraway was all too frequently just worrying the same points, or giving me a variant of their thought with a different vocabulary (e.g., "reciprocal induction" (228)). Instead, there's not much D&G in this at all, despite how much their work on mobile molecular assemblages works with Haraway's becoming-with dogs in training: I can't help but feel that DH dismisses D&G as retaliation for their dismissal of housepets and, indeed, their misogynist sneer at old women (I can't help but feel this, but I can't help but recognize the unfairness of my own feeling, especially given the smart notes on 314).

Also, When Species Meet is throughout insufficiently attentive to violence, even when it attends to actual violence (see DH's proposals for animal experimentation, e.g., 75, which move but do not convince me). WSpeciesM is especially inattentive to what Cary Wolfe called "the logic of the pet," by which Haraway's dog Cayenne gets singled out for this mutually transforming care, effected in part through the rewards of liver cookies. Whose liver gets eaten? Who or what is being punished for the knowledge this eaten liver should memorialize?

At the same time, most animal work--Wolfe, the rights and liberation people, (me), and, above all, Derrida--is at heart an animal victimology. Its strength is its seriousness. But there's so much left out when we think only in terms of the murderous reaction that forms l'animot. As DH presents it, Derrida errs by foreclosing the work of ethologists and humanimal mitsein by leaving his cat as a great mystery, virtually a symbol--despite JD's assurances of nonexemplarity--of the nonpower at the heart of power. What would have happened if JD had talked of playing with his cat?

A final, necessary point in this disjointed review: while the abundant biographical material--emails to canine listservs, a memoir of her father's senescent decline--at once displays and enacts the interactive communities of being-as-becoming so key to her arguments, I can't help--for now--feeling that a good 100 pages of the book is filler: this is likely theoretically retrograde of me, and perhaps even anti-feminist (see Jane Tompkins' famous "Me and My Shadow"). ( )

With this book, Haraway confirms her new interest about the interconnectedness between human and other species. Although all the chapters focus on this subject, the book can also be read as a collection of essays, some autobiographic. This is a promising book to add to the rediscover of same topic by several other authors, namely Derrida. What Haraway adds is the technological component and this component opens new possibilities ( )