[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.]