“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?