Haraway and away... -- Emily Martinez
Sometimes I wish I could articulate the imagination event/flood of simultaneously morphing-compressing-expanding-retracting-unfolding- erecting-dissolving-dissapearing-interfering-noisecancelling-branching- fractaling-atomizing-imploding-birthing-rebirthing-multiplying-instant ((big bang)(genesis style)) creation of the concepts/meanings/symbols/ words/sounds/images that arise from the electrical signal processing that happens in my head all the time, especially when I read things like, “‘ontological choreographies.’ The scripting of the dance of being is more than a metaphor; bodies, human and non-human, are taken apart and put together in a process that makes self certainty and either humanist or organicist ideology bad guides to ethics and politics, much less to personal experience” (8)
Writing/reflecting on this alone reenforces several things:
1. Relating back to Grosz, the virtual/real, plane of immanence + plane of intensity, and the impossibility of realizing the infinite nature of possibility that arises in that virtual space. If only I could express the multiplicity/mess I described above in one instance that can be received and communicated to you/anyone in one instance. But our brains, and our language/communication system of translating intention to thought to word to speech will never come close to providing the bandwidth and speed necessary to allow for that, among other (telepathic) limitations. The only thing I can do is take those million-billion simultaneous universes, and utter something reductive and completely insufficient for transmitting their infinite possibilities (like this sentence).
2. The paradoxical enabling/limiting power of our linguistic structures and the linearity of language to shape our perceptions, our logic, and by extension, our consensus “realities” that activate possibility/impossiblity with/in certain systems (in this case, a lexicon strongly anchored in hierarchical and binary relationships), while simultaneously failing to communicate so much of the ambiguous, irreconcilable characteristics/qualities/experiences of life so awkwardly articulated when constrained to system/s, insufficient for communicating this complexity. And that’s not to say language is useless, on the contrary, it’s amazing(!) — it is the birthing place of the virtual/real — for real! However what this does stress (at least for me), is the importance of combining and exploring every means we have for communicating and understanding our world — through words, visuals, sound, affect, fantasy/dreams, information systems, intuition, and even all the weirdo far out irrational notions of what could exist, if only… It’s one of the luxuries of being an artist (vs a philosopher, or a scientist, or anyone bound to the ideologies or empirical forces that dominate certain fields). Personal aside: The empiricist / skeptic in me keeps me honest and unattached to even my strongest convictions/intuitions, however it does not impede me from exploring the most fantastical and “irrational” of possibilities — it’s just one end of the string I attach to the stake in the ground that keeps me from floating off into oblivion/insanity/belief — always keeping it real.
3. So after all of that exposition/expansion, returning to Haraway, four lines down from the quote I first cited, and reading this: “conceiving of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as either polar opposites or universal categories is foolish” (8), followed by an entire essay advocating for the useful and necessary inclusion of “partial connections” / Haraway’s “relations of significant otherness”(8), other topologies, and word/concepts, like “natureculture”, I am again, left thinking/sighing about/re-reenforcing my above contemplations, convictions, and run-on sentences (sorry - again, this language/ temporality problem).
4. On the subtle/drastic differences between thinking in terms of: nature and culture VS culture and nature VS culture or nature VS nature or culture VS nature and/or culture VS natureculture VS culturenature VS a concept/word that doesn’t even exist because we have been building upon this perceptual difference for so long that it has been inconceivable so far that such a thing exists, and should be named, thus invoking into existence a reality/world born of the very name, the word itself.
(I will now restrain myself from going into examples from religious texts OR what Elizabeth Grosz infers when writing about the “floor being an excess of horonzontality”, giving rise to things like dance and athletics OR what William Burrough’s meant by “language is a virus”).
Sorry, so late. :/ Crazy week…
Emily
Random collection of thoughts about Emergent NatureCulture - Heather Logas
My apologies for this being late.
I struggled with the term “natureculture”. Its weird because when she says”technoculture” I feel like I completely get what she means, but”natureculture” throws my brain for a loop. On page 8 she talks about howMarilyn Strathern says that “nature” and “culture” should not be thought ofas polar opposites: “Finally, Marilyn Strathern…taught us why conceivingof “nature” and “culture” as either polar opposites or universal categoriesis foolish.” So maybe Harroway is using natureculture to talk about howhumans are not separate from nature, as is sometimes conceived? And ourconnectedness with nature has something to do with our relationship withcompanion animals? I’d like to get more clarity on this.
On page 15 I was struck by the quote: “Post-Cyborg, what counts asbiological kind troubles previous categories of organism. The mechanic andthe textual are internal to the organic and vice versa in irreversibleways.” My brain immediately leapt to thinking about virtual creatures —Aibos, Furbies, Tamogatchies, etc. and wondering if they counted as species. From there I started wondering about the proliferation of virtual pets andwhat that proliferation says about the nature of humanity? Do we just havean inexhaustible craving for nurturing? Or love (either to be loved or tolove)? And does this relate back to our real pets too? Why IS IT thathuman beings seek out the company of other animals to the extent that we do,and why are virtual animals adequate surrogates in some instances? What doesthat say about what qualities we are seeking to get from live animals?
The quote that straddles page 16 & 17 seems critical, but I struggled withit. “I want to convince my readers that inhabitants of technoculture becomewho we are in the symbiogenetic tissues of naturecultures, in story and infact.” People steeped in life with technology become that way due to ourdeeply rooted drive for symbiosis, which is part of our integration withnature… This is as far as I could get. I couldn’t completely “unpack” it.
A thread that runs throughout the whole chapter is this theme of acombination of material/semiotic, sign/flesh, story/fact. This seems key tothe idea of naturecultures: “Flesh and Signifier, bodies and words, storiesand worlds: these are joined in naturecultures.” It is resisting myattempts to sort it out however.
Also, I like the word “Metaplasm”. “Metaplasm means a change in a word, forexample by adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters,syllables or sounds.”(Harroway, 20)
Response to Haraway -- Helen Park
[Tried posting this last night, hopefully now this will go through.]
Haraway and process philosophy… In discussing her writingstoday the word ‘concrescence’ came up more than once, and I find thatHaraway’s writing itself - at least the bit that we have been exposed tohere - is often a concrescence of ideas; things that are often conceived ofas separate or even diametrically opposed come together in a symbiosis toform something new. Her term ‘natureculture’ is one example. Often pittedagainst each other, nature and culture now form to create a new and morecomplex understanding of experience in the world. Things that occurnaturally combine with things of human construct. She writes, “I want tolearn how to narrate this co-history and how to inherit the consequences ofco-evolution in natureculture” (12). Like the practices of oral storytellingin ancient cultures, or perhaps something deeply embedded within our DNA,passed on by ancestors now so long gone, how exactly can we learn thisco-history and “inherit the consequences of co-evolution”? Indeed, narrativeand story also play a significant role her treatise, whether it beDarwinian, Marxian, Catholic, Companion, and/or Cyborg, our stories are thesymbols by which our histories and the concrescence of being-togethernesswith all Others crystallize into ideology, myth, natureculture.
She takes the cue from Althusser: “Today, through our ideologically loadednarratives of their lives, animals ‘hail’ us to account for the regimes inwhich they and we must live. We ‘hail’ them into our constructs of natureand culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness,longevity and extinction. We also live with each other in the flesh in waysnot exhausted by our ideologies. Stories are much bigger than ideologies.In that is our hope” (17). We - meaning everything and all living beings,flesh and cyborg - are co-creators, deeply intertwined and embedded withineach other’s narratives, and toward what end? Survival, creation? What do wedo within the occurrence of excess that Grosz wrote about? Where does arthappen in all of this?
“So, in ‘The Companion Species Manifesto,’ I want to tell stories aboutrelating in significant otherness, through which the partners come to be whowe are in flesh and sign” (25). Haraway often alludes to this compellingpair: flesh and sign. The material semiotic being. The concrescence ofsensation and signification into a dynamic process of being. How do weco-create each other in flesh and in sign? What a great question.
This trajectory of thought, the line of flight, certainly intersects nicelywith Grosz’s philosophical terrain. They are jointly supportive in themovement toward reproduction, symbiosis, superabundance that feeds into art,life, and the significant otherness of relation.
[this is a repost as the first send did not appear online. sorry for anyduplicates.]
Response to Haraway -- James Pollack
My first question upon reading Haraway’s article is: Why not cats? Orreally, why not any other “companion species”? Perhaps it’s better touse the term “companion animal,” to ask this question, since given a”companion species” to humans, “one must include such organic beingsas rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora” (15). Leaving open sucha broad range of possibility certainly closes off our ability toreally find out what’s going on in any one particular relationship —this is the quantum problem of measuring devices. For comprehension,it seems that we must affect & therefore limit our subject. Whatthen, constitutes a “companion animal”? “Generally speaking,” writesHaraway, “one does not eat one’s companion animals…” (14). Though shegrants that the boundaries on whether “companion animals” like dogs”were and are vermin,” (14) may be the result of certain socialdeterminants (i.e. respect for dogs in early American Indiancultures), Haraway doesn’t present convincing evidence that her act ofchoosing dogs as the topic of this book is any more meaningful thanany other choice. It’s hard to overlook the economic implications ofwriting about a popular “companion animal,” such as dogs, against aless popular companion animal. Haraway’s interest in “the joint livesof dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness” (16)seems too convenient — there may the the most number of people withcompanion animals that are dogs, but does this aspect of the dog/humanrelationship make these relationships inherently meaningful? I thinkthat the Haraway’s book about our companion-relationship with ricemight produce some interesting results. Or her book about cows, sinceshe’d have to deal with the fact that a large portion of humanitywould rather consider them companion animals than Big Mac components.How much the better that this portion of humanity lies in anon-Western sphere of understanding.
Her proclivity for canines aside, I must say that I agree, in general,with many aspects of Haraway’s approach. I like that she wants totell a story — but if semiotics can be considered the study of thescience of all that can be used to tell a lie, then we must deal withHaraway’s anti-semiotic assertion of an objective truth in the form ofa neo-Catholic instantiation of truth in any sort of doctrine of realpresence. No jesus in my mouth, thanks. While Haraway comes rightout and says that “Species is about the corporeal join of the materialand the semiotic in ways unacceptable to the secular Protestantsensibilities of the American academy and to most versions of thehuman science of semiotics” (15-16), I get the feeling that she doesso to fend off criticisms by these groups, without explaining exactlywhy this “corporeal join” might be unacceptable, not to to mentionwhat such a “corporeal join” even is. I’m hoping this is another oneof those issues that’s worked out in the body of the text — such isthe risk of reading introductions. I think Haraway’s at her best whenshe’s insisting on “cohabiting an active history” (20) — when weattempt to understand ourselves through our companion animals, weadmit that there’s some variable we will never really know (thecompanion animal). This unknowing means that we are never finished —hence, any attempt to understand a whole self will fail. There’s ahole that’s never plugged, many holes, where self-meaning leaks outand into how we treat, think of, interact with, and imagine the mindsof our companions on this planet, and in this universe.
Response to Haraway -- Anonymous
I found Haraway’s formulation of the term “natureculture” anintriguing problem with which to grapple. Though the word itself is abit clunky, Donna Haraway’s reconfiguration of human culture asnatureculture is a deft rhetorical move which redefines “culture” tosubsume the limits of “nature” in the constructed “nature/nurture”binary. This allows her to overturn colonizing, capitalist, andanthropocentric discourses and to discuss human habits in terms ofecologies and relations, webs of interconnectedness between organismsin their environments rather than as fixed systems for or controlledsolely by human interests. There is some difficulty inherent in the formation of the wordexpressing Haraway’s concept. I think that the problem with theverbosity of the term, however, goes beyond the fact that it has twoextra syllables tagged on that make it longer to say. The problemcomes from the meaning associated with those syllable noises. As Isee it, adding “nature” to “culture” in textual visualaurality (ortactility, or howsoever a textual meaning is sensed) as words and notsimply as a melding of concepts does serve in some way to reinforcethe binary, as the compound word still recognizes its constituentparts and puts them in immediate juxtaposition. The compound word iscombined, but not seamless and, in this way, does not feel whollyintegrated as yet. I think it might have been more effective tosimply use the term culture, which has the benefits of being anotoriously flexible term without being a mouthful, though I can seehow Haraway might have avoided a strict redefinition of just the termculture as it could be read as a return to the anthropocentricprinciples from which her discourse attempts to break away.
Response to Haraway -- Natalie McKeever
“”Instead, I am looking for Marilyn Strathern’s ‘partial connections” whichare about the counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translationsnecessary to getting on together, where the god-tricks of self certainty anddeathless communion are not an option.”
“Process and dissolution - and agencies both human and non-human, as well asanimate and inanimate - are his partners and materials, not just histhemes.”
“For example, what kind of temporal scale-making could shape labor systems,investment strategies, and consumption patterns in which the generation timeof information machines became compatible with the generation time ofinformation machines became compatible with the generation times of hum,animal, and plant communities and ecosystems?”
“Living with animals, inhabiting their/our stories, trying to tell the truthabout relationship, co-habiting an active history: that is the work ofcompanion species, for whom ‘the relation’ is the smallest possible unity ofanalysis.”
“Companion species is bigger and more heterogeneous category than companionanimal, and not just because one must include such organic beings as rice,bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what itis - and vice versa.”
The major point from Harroway’s introduction that I latched onto is that thehuman world and the animal/plant/microbacteria worlds are not seperable, andmore importantly that there is no hierarchy of importance. We are asdependent on our companion species as they are on us, humans do not reignsupreme in this world. Relating this to an artmaking practice: If thecreation of art is our way of framing the chaos of our world around us, whydo we not include our companion species as part of our audience? Is it aridiculous or even selfish way of making art to think of it only for humans? This made me think of Laurie Anderson’s recent work, “Music for Dogs” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38g4VzkIf14) in which she composed a scorewith canines as the intended audience. People brought their animals to theSydney Opera house and sat for a concert. The dogs appear to be happy,excited, vocal - obviously they are not thinking of it as art or even music- but the experience of sitting in a concert hall with their owners andhundreds of other dogs has to be interesting for them, and certainly outsideof these dogs everyday experiences. Animals see and hear the worlddifferently then us, but I think it might be interesting to try and figureout what kind of “art” interests other species, expanding the viewership ofour art to all of our coexisting species.
-Natalie
A bit out there, perhaps -- Sudhu Tewari
“I take “interpellation” from the French post structuralist and Marxis philosopher Louis Althusser’s theory for how subjects are constituted from concrete individuals by being “hailed” through ideology into their subject positions in the modern state. Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals “hail” us to account for the regimes in which they and we must live. We “hail” them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction. We also live with each other in the flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies. Stories are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our hope.” (Haraway, 17)
To do biology with any kind of fidelity, the practitioner must tell a story, must get the facts, and must have the heart to stay hungry for the truth and to abandon a favorite story, a favorite fact, shown to be somehow off the mark.” (Haraway, 19)
“Metaplasm is a generic term for almost any kind of alteration in a word, intentional or unintentional. I use metaplasm to mean the remodeling of dog and human flesh, or remolding the codes of life…” “Flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds: these are joined in naturecultures. Metaplasm can signify a mistake, a stumbling, a troping that makes a fleshy difference.” (Haraway, 20)
In these three quotes Haraway seems to be suggesting that the narratives we construct to describe our existence in fact manipulate the reality about which we’re constructing these narratives. So, our narrative attempts to understand and explain reality are actually somewhat responsible for shaping the same reality. I’m taking Haraway’s quotes out of context and pushing them far beyond her intended meaning, but I think this is an interesting idea, as a theory not based on empirical data. Narratives offer a way to understand the world around us, and as we co-create these stories with those around us (hailing) we shape the episteme in which we live. Artists (crafters of fiction) then can serve an important function of re-telling, rebuilding, a story with new realities, possibilities, built into the new narrative. I’ve been immersed in John Cage lately and trying to wrap my head around his influence on the world, specifically on the way in which sound, silence and noise relate in music in the wake of his reconstructions of music and philosophy. Did reality change when these new thoughts came into many people’s brains? If reality is informed, explained, by what we think we know, then each new piece of knowledge skews reality a bit and our narratives have to be adjusted to explain the new reality (unless of course the narrative is the source of the skewing). If so, philosophical thought is capable of changing reality and art can act similarly. Maybe this is what Grosz was getting at…
In a somewhat similar vein of thought (wondering about the point of philosophizing and art’s ability/role in enacting change) I latched on to these passages:
”…cyborgs raise all the questions of histories, politics, and ethics that dogs require… For example, what kind of temporal scale-making could shape labor systems, investment strategies, and consumption patterns in which the generation time of information machines became compatible with the generation times of human, animal, and plant communities and ecosystems? What is the right kind of pooper-scooper for a computer or a personal digital assistant? At the least, we know it is not an electronics dump in Mexico or India, where human scavengers get pad less that nothing for processing the ecologically toxic waste of the well informed.” (Haraway, 21)
“And where is the labor of the hired shepherds and of the food and fiber producing sheep in this story? In how many ways do we inherit in the flesh the turbulent history of modern capitalism? How to live ethically in these mortal, finite flows that are about heterogeneous relationship – and not about “man” – is an implicit question…” (Haraway, 24)
Haraway seems to be adding a layer to her thesis (that no thing can be understood without looking at, and understanding/exploring, its relationships to other things (humans cannot be fully understood without taking into account their relationship to companion species)). In understanding a species through its relationship to a companion species certain courses of action/methods of operating become clearly more “ethical” than others. Is the fine print here that if we really dug in and attempted to understand, understood, the human race, we’d construct a narrative that didn’t include many, or any, of the negativities/detrimental/unethical elements we now find in our world?
Donna Haraway: Companions / Species
Post responses here (about 250 words, not counting quoted texts…but don’t limit yourself strictly…) related to readings from Donna Haraway’s (2008) Companion Species Manifesto. As much as possible, try to make your response useful to others in the seminar, clarifying the point of view from which you read, what you bring to the text as an interpreter, and what you’ve taken from it so far.
To make your post, simply send an email to post.bencarson.companions at “squarespace dot com.” It will appear in this blog within a few minutes, as a post similar to this one. Or write me for an account that would allow you to edit on this site. (It just takes me a second to set it up for you.)