Book Review
When species meet
Donna J Haraway
ISBN: 978-0-8166504-6-0 2007 360 pages University of Minnesota Press
Ian Coldwell
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Charles Sturt University, NSW
When Species Meet, a sequel to The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), is the latest installment in Donna Haraway's examination of humans and dogs as companion species in relations of significant otherness. Inviting us to think about ways to nurture more just and peaceful models of world building for ourselves, the land and significant other species, this book has much to interest readers of Rural Society. For in rural Australia, as in America, 'the knots of technocultural, reinvented pastoral-tourist economies and ecologies' (p.40) tie together the landscape.
Two questions - Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dogs? How is 'becoming with' a practice of becoming worldly? - guide the book's acknowledgement of the 'lively knottings that tie together the world' (p.vii). These questions are then tied together through the concept autre-mondialisation (alter-globalisation). Originating with Beatriz Preciado, a Spanish lover of French bulldogs and teacher of technologies of gender, queer theory, prosthetic technologies and gender, this concept has enabled European activists to argue that their responses to 'militarised neoliberal models of world building are not about antiglobalisation but about nurturing a more just and peaceful other globalisation' (p.3). Haraway sees a promising autre-mondialisation that we might learn in retying some of the knots of ordinary multispecies living on earth. First, we must untie some of the old knots that tie us to beliefs and practices that are not necessarily in our long term best interests, and we must raise 'the most basic questions of who belongs where and what flourishing means for whom' (p.41).
With respect to Freud's view that the fantasy of human exceptionalism is the Western psyche's antidote to anxiety and panic, Derrida, with his commitment to tracking down 'the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order, of the law over the living' (p.11), is Haraway's guide. She identifies three great historical wounds inflicted by science upon the primary narcissism of the self-centred human subject: the Copernican wound revealed Earth as only one of many planets in the cosmos; the Darwinian wound placed Homo sapiens in a world of companion species; the Freudian wound showed that the unconscious could undo the primacy of conscious processes, including the rationality that led Man toward his conviction of 'unique excellence' (p.12). Haraway adds a fourth: the informatic or cyborgian wound 'infolds organic and technological flesh' and so 'melds the great divide' (p.12) of human/nature - like right now as I tap away at my laptop in order to meet the deadline for this review, and keep track of constant email and forum posts from my students.
Haraway relates how Derrida understood that animals look back at human beings but was unable as he stood naked before his cat to look back and be curious about what his cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking or even making available as it looked back at him. Through lack of curiosity and an inability to respond to the cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species, thus leaving a hole in the human/nature divide and in the literature that Haraway sets out to fill. We might see if we care to look, that the gap that Derrida left is actually teeming with life even beyond the grave. Haraway begins to show us, taking us on a journey of discovery she shares the Australian Shepherd dogs of her heart, Roland and Miss Cayenne Pepper and their antics at agility trials. She bravely shares her own deep grief following the loss of her sports writer father Frank Haraway. For a moment we are present at his death. In learning to write about it, Haraway teaches us how to resurrect the dead, our own beloved, away from the essentialism and impossibility of the rotting corpse in the grave to where the body becomes a material-semiotic reality, a (re)membered being. That knotted thing we call the body is undone, the knots are untied so that we inherit in the flesh from those with whom we live and have lived and those we were/are entangled with. The body is always in the making, always constituted in relating. It is how we relate that matters.
We are encouraged to consider ethical questions that arise in the implosion of culture and nature through technology. How are we to account for the militant weaponry of pesticides we hail into our cultural identities that have imploded in the lives of those not yet born, who since have died or are dying? What of cloning in the spaces between diversity and standardization? We are alerted to the deformities and health problems that standardization, through line breeding and inbreeding, can inflict upon the lives of dogs and other companion species. We are challenged to think about disabled bodies and wheelchairs as cyborg companions. There are many more examples raised in this further exploration of the idea of companion species who meet and break bread together.
When Species Meet shows us that we can learn to be worldly by 'grappling with, rather than generalising from, the ordinary' (p.3). Haraway has made a career of making the ordinary seem spectacular, shining a light of critique on all manner of relations between humans and 'other' things. Through her methods of figuration, witnessing and story telling, she can lead us to the mirror, to look at ourselves and them, and see we and they as not separate and separated as we think, and as the view from above might have us believe, but as knotted, embodied and interdependent entities: companion species. 'Companion is from the Latin cum panis 'with bread' (p.17) and those who learn to eat well as messmates at table will flourish. But who decides 'which companion species will, and should, live and die and how?' (p.18). In Haraway's view we need to be curious - even though curiosity may have killed the cat - respectful, to engage in 'looking back', responding to significant others, wondering what we might learn from them and with them as significant others. In moving away from the narcissism of human exceptionalism and individuation, we might take collective responsibility for emerging naturecultures capable of sustaining them and us. Herein lies our flourishing. Die-hard objectivists may hate this book even though they and we should read it if only to consider other possibilities.
The book is well set out, with table of contents, well-organised tripartite chapters, a publication history of those pieces of work previously published and an index. Although a comprehensive list of notes to chapters en lieu of a reference list may not suit all readers, I think they enhance the book.
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