13300 words
17/07/23 22:20 [ROT]
When I look back along myself, I find undocumented commitments a prior me made that I am proud to have stuck to and allowed to change me. Looking back, I'm pleased to discover a blend of theory and praxis where the ideas I encounter and find to be beautiful or drastic and important have slowly turned into actions that guide my body, my work, my routines, toward new directions. I’m pleased because I think it’s what we should expect of philosophers- that they mean what they say and let their doing follow from what they believe. The chapter title, ‘Re-orientations,’ is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s book “Queer Phenomenology,” where being “oriented” means to face a direction or object which is familiar or normative. Becoming ‘re-orientated’ involves a queer-ing, or a disruption to the normative, which results in un-usual objects, desires and directions providing the familiarity we need to feel we are facing the right way. I want this chapter to document these re-orientations; the ‘ways in which..’ I used to orient myself have been replaced by other ‘ways’ of approaching some aspects of the world. I’ll try to auto-ethnographically explain how the shifts in orientation came about by reconstituting myself at various moments. As I go along I will do my best to position what I'm saying amongst other authors with related ideas. Many of the reflections keep spilling out and became hard to bring into the confines of this thesis, I hope they will find a home elsewhere.
Grant me one last meander.
Contents
<aside> 🌒 Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
</aside>
26/06/23 [TOR]
My supervisor reminds me that I can do even more to trace the theoretical interactions that have left deep unwavering impressions on me. I thank him for handing me back to myself and reminding me that I started in places that I ought to return and give thanks to.
My relationship with one philosopher has nourished my work immensely, but a strong association forces me to answer for the problems that their work faces. I open my PDF of “Companion Species Manifesto” by Donna Haraway and find a document with occasional highlights from the top to its bottom. I can’t remember being here but clearly I have. The concepts and words that Haraway piles into unique configurations is often mysterious at first sight, but rich enough that the bits that do sink in will make a difference. Looking back over this text it seems like all I’ve done is let her convictions be carried by me, and after having my own experiences, reconstituted how Haraway might explain them, but in my own way. In particular, I’ve been inspired by her methods for writing and her ontology for life. I’ll describe how I have Haraway’s ontology has grown in my work, and then try to respond to criticisms on their ethical stance by replying from my (our) perspective.
Before that I’ll compare/contrast my concepts to other people’s work and from their frictions I’ll lay out pertinent contemporary questions that I’ll try to reply to. Regarding ontology, witnessing Haraway refer to humans as “humus” or “composters” in Staying with the Trouble put me onto thinking about mixtures and smudging boundaries across many scales. Her deployment of the ‘holobiont’ concept, which instructed me in the development of thread ontology, encapsulates her vision for natureculture- a merging of the reality of life and the practice of biology with a social constructivist attitude towards any epistemological framework:
Subjects, objects, kinds, races, species, genres, and genders are the products of their relating.. The world is a knot in motion.. There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends.. In Judith Butler's terms, there are only "contingent foundations;" bodies that matter are the result… Alfred North Whitehead described "the concrete" as "a concrescence of prehensions." For him, "the concrete" meant an "actual occasion”.. Through their reaching into each other, through their "prehensions" or graspings, beings constitute each other and themselves.[^companion]
In this passage, there are several large, disparate realms of thought and reality considered in equitable terms. Race, objects, the world, motion, bodies, beings, matter all have lines drawn between them to make them look similar for the apparently obvious reason that they all make each other be. Haraway is reading and finding, in anything -everything else. On certain levels of existence, the idea that things become through processes of free mixture is proven. On the cellular and bacterial level, the process of ‘symbiogenesis’ which Lynn Margulis is famous for teaching is a very raw form of making-with, where new cells and kinds of bacterial bodies are made by one bacteria eating another.[^margulis] On the level of text, Haraway takes distant disciplines, biology and anthropology, and threads them through each other. The biology of symbiogenesis is associated with philosopher Whitehead’s take on concrescence (definition: to coalesce, condense, solidify, harden), which is then threaded through Marilyn Strathern’s anthropological observations of social and natural worlds producing each other due to their inescapable relatedness. Many texts were related and bound together in Haraway’s concept of becoming-with which is the genetic inheritance from which my understanding of the body was instructed and formed. And it is at this level of the body that Haraway’s incessant urge to mix and twist and render differences as insignificant where problems lie.
I copy and paste the earliest description/motivation for my concept of Love:
11/04/22 [UTR]
I want to develop a notion of Love that is ambiguous in terms of its ‘goodness’. It is a take on love that is not meant to serve as a backbone for an ethics but instead a metaphysics. Tentatively, I summarise ‘love’ as a form of becoming where one thing will literally become like another thing. In aspects of its very disposition, one thing will be exactly like another.
Qualitatively, this process of becoming is one that I have experienced. When in the presence of cows or a cow, my ‘attunement’ as an embodied and present researcher is best characterised as becoming-cow. That is not to say that I became a cow, or that my whole disposition was analogous to a cow’s. What happened is that in some respects, however slight, I met the cows in a state that is exterior to the interiority I or others would attribute to a normal Samar. Note that this notion poses a critical threat to the idea of ‘individuality’ which would require that the organism that is me or a cow are distinct and distinguishable owing to their skin-bound state of embodiment.
Understanding your own body as the product of mixture always makes trouble for who is the you and who is the I. This trouble is something I've brought into the heart of my work by wondering whether it's possible to let others write through me. In “Companion Species Manifesto,” Haraway writes about her relationship with her dog who is named Cayenne Pepper. Haraway writes:
Miss Cayenne Pepper continues to colonise all my cells, a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis. I bet if you checked our DNA you'd find some potent transfections between us.. I'm sure our genomes are more alike than they should be. There must be some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living that will leave traces in the world.. No matter that we are each reproductively silenced females, one by age, one by surgery. We have had forbidden conversations. We have had oral intercourse and are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We make each other up in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love.
This passage is an example of the post-human flavour that Haraway supplies to contemporary theorising of human-animal relations. By treating her pet(?) dog as a “coloniser” of Haraway’s human cells, we are encouraged to consider how human histories and animal histories are reciprocally produced. This is an innovation embraced by the ‘animal turn’ within several disciplines. For example, in her PhD thesis on laboratory mice, Anne van Veen lauds Haraway for giving us another way to de-centre humans when we write animal histories.[^mice] We aren’t simply revisiting human historical events from the perspectives of animals, or writing evolutionary histories which document how human economic or technological decisions have had consequences on the bodies and population sizes of animals. Instead, we come right down to the scale of interpersonal relationships and tell the story of a human-animal relationship with narrative structures that we reserve for humans, like Haraway’s awkwardly intimate ‘love’ story. One question we might return to:
Is it right to apply a narrative structure like a love story to a human-animal relationship? Isn’t this an anthropomorphisation?
Van Veen highlights a different concern; if we are to focus on interpersonal interactions we risk not paying attention to the structures that perpetuate oppression on larger scales. This is a criticism put forward by another research realm, ‘Critical Animal Studies (CAS),’ which suspects that posthumanism hasn’t got a sharp enough critical edge and are irritated at how much agency Haraway affords to animals that are clearly kept in conditions that won’t favour their desires. For example, in “When Species Meet” Haraway refers to lab animals as having “shared conditions of work,” writing:
Human beings are not uniquely obligated to and gifted with the responsibility; animals as workers in labs, animals in all their worlds, are response-able in the same sense as people are; that is, responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects, and objects, come into being… The interesting question, then, becomes, What might a responsible “sharing of suffering” look like in historically situated practices?[^whenspecies]
On the one hand, CAS scholars are pushing for the political and economic systems that cause animal suffering to be shut down. Meanwhile, Haraway can be read as suggesting lab animals share in the responsibility for the ongoingness of their own oppression. A succinct reply from the CAS camp comes from Pederson:[^mice]
Surely most nonhuman animals have never expressed any desire whatsoever to ‘co-emerge’ with the species that, to them, above all means violence, horror, and death? Theorizing boundary-dissolution is relatively unproblematic for those who never need to experience oppression: those to whom life is a constant struggle with suffering imposed by others, are likely to be more keen on protecting their subject boundaries from uninvited intervention.
Pederson is asking: How can animals have responsibility over the maintenance or modification of a relationship that they never asked to be involved in? The concern about the danger of dissolving the nature/culture or human/animal boundary is acutely personal, they are basically asking: Who are you to speak on behalf of the animals? In what sense do you have their consent to speak on their behalf? These are questions of confidence that I was stuck with when writing chapter 2 (2.3). It’s fun to think about how you make each other through intra-action and co-emergence, but couldn’t that just be an “uninvited intervention”? More questions pop out:
Who are we to speak on behalf of them? Who are you to speak on behalf of them? Who am I to speak on behalf of you?
The critics and Haraway are talking past each other in a sense, since speaking to the scale of the “species,” versus “lab animals” is different. A species of animal can live in many places in many degrees of separation to humans, whereas lab animals are very much intertwined with human bodies or architectures. There are many testimonies from lab workers who describe forming intimate bonds of reciprocal understanding with the confined animals that they work on/with.[^giraud] However, knowing that you know what your pet dog wants is not the same as arguing that lab animals might want the same things humans want. Again with regards to scale- the criticism of Haraway that I have read skips a crucial element of her anthropological praxis, which is that her writing follows from lessons learnt through becoming-with her dogs. Haraway reckons, and writes, that she became mixed up with her dog at a genealogical, physical and spiritual level. She thinks that human lab workers do the same with their human animals. She thinks all of natures bodies work in that way, we are all becoming-with, therefore we are all implicated in the same shit. Again, privilege may have protected her from experiencing how shit things can really be (and her acid-trip, techno-optimistic speculative fiction at the end of “Staying with the Trouble” did strike me as something written by someone that had lived in and around the cradle of Silicon Valley a little too long). The fantasies that may materialise in California wouldn’t have the same chances in other parts of the world. Nonetheless, it is through becoming otherwise at the scale of her own bodily self that Haraway is able to find the vocabulary, and the nerve, to propose new perspectives and commit to a weird ontologies.
Does the scale of the self or the interpersonal provide a solid grounds to evaluate interspecies relations at larger scales?
How do inferences from embodied experience fall short of inferences produced by the scientific method?
There are several big overlaps between the way I've described my fieldwork and produced concepts and the way that Haraway describes human-animal interactions. One of them is in our use of anthropomorphic language. For example, I refer to cows as farmers’ collaborators in chapter 3 (3.2.4). And ‘collaborators’ suggests that there is some sort of collusion, some agreement reached about how to go about working on the land. This is very similar to how Haraway has viewed responsibility. Another overlap is in our ambition for engaging agricultural animals in sympoeisis or ‘making-with’ through non-biological means like the design of machines and materiality. Our conviction that this is possible comes from noticing that there are creative uses of the machines, materials and organisational structures (for example: dissent that leads to adjustments of the rules) by working animals. In 2.4.2 I took some liberties by telling a story from a cow brush as though it had made friends with cows. This is too ambitious because how on earth are we going to make conclusive, scientific observations about relationships between machines and materials and animals? And how can we demonstrate that design processes are in fact iterative?
These are fair criticisms and the crux of my response to them is through reference to the becoming that one has to undergo in order to become a Listener. To tell a speculative (hi)story you have to have been by their side long enough to have followed some of the flows of living and dying that they undergo. To have conviction in an ethics of human-animal relations it has to be your conviction, you have to start with your self, you have to have put yourself in the various configurations of relating to a subject matter and somehow decided which is best for you and others to occupy together. If I wrote a multi-species history of myself, if I wrote a multi-species history of my body's encounters at the dairy farm, then one of the major changes I would be able to document is in the kinds of beings that I'm able or find it necessary to notice and respond to. Typically evolutionary histories in the context of the Anthropocene will document how non-human animal bodies have been shaped by humans and the role of economic and technological changes in this process. Most will miss out on how humans themselves are changed by non-humans. My concerns expanded from the condition that the cows are kept in, to the conditions that the cows produced for me as a researcher. And this is why my approach to ethical questions will be from a different, more granular ontological standpoint, which I share with Haraway.
How do we compare ethical arguments launched from the experience of a self, rather than the pre-existing structures that order the objects that society is formed by?
What follows won’t have a linear structure, it will be a collection of re-orientations expressed in terms of three processes of digestion: encounter, sedimentation and how it surfaces.
[/companion]: Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, p.4
[/margulis]: Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Life and Its Environment on the Early Earth.
31/08/23