“This thick and fibrous now”

Thangam Ravindranathan (bio)
Brown University

A review of Haraway, Donna. Manifestly Haraway, U of Minnesota P, 2016 and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke UP, 2016.

Published a few months apart, Manifestly Haraway (April 2016) and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (September 2016) together attest to the unique, undimmed pertinence of Donna Haraway’s thinking to our “strange and uncertain” times (as Barack Obama recently called them). The three-in-one volume Manifestly Haraway carries reprints of the two essential manifestos—The Cyborg Manifesto (originally published in 1985) and The Companion Species Manifesto (2003)—followed by the transcript of a conversation (“Companions in Conversation”) that took place over three days between Haraway and Cary Wolfe at her Santa Cruz home in May 2014. Absorbing if elliptical, the conversation sets itself the task of thinking together meaningfully the two epoch-making manifestos, revisiting the material-historical-political contexts and thought-worlds that shaped their particular objectives and deep continuities. The dialogue closes with Haraway gesturing toward a third manifesto in the offing—a “Chthulucene Manifesto.” This work appeared a year later under the jauntier title Staying with the Trouble, gathering essays written between 2012 and 2015 and broadly concerned with the theme of multispecies survival in the Anthropocene.

Thirty years after its first publication, The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century reads just as powerfully. As the “noninnocent” child of socialist-feminism and the Cold War-era of “command-control-communication-intelligence,” the cyborg famously refused to simply reject science and technology, or to dream of lost wholeness. It saw clearly that erstwhile forms of resistance (premised on identities or totalizing theories) were increasingly obsolete, but also that late capitalism’s military-industrial-technological and information systems had the potential to unravel the dualisms historically structuring the Western self and its practices of domination: self/other, organism/machine, mind/body, culture/nature, human/animal, male/female, reality/appearance, matter/fiction. In these conditions, Haraway memorably argued, the socialist-feminist movement needed to resist the “nothing-but-critique” impulse; rather, it needed to recognize its ironic allies in “transgressed boundaries” and “potent and taboo fusions” across gender, race, class, species, method and matter (52). As the organization of labor, market, gender, time, mobility, knowledge, communication, body, skin, and life changed substantively in the Reagan-Thatcher years, “cyborg writing” needed to be alert to the danger of naturalizing and sentimentalizing what was being lost—often inseparable from forms of oppression—and wake to the possibilities emerging from contradiction, unnaturalness and ambivalence. Without question one of the most influential, lucid, electric, thought-rebooting, anti-depressive texts of the late twentieth century, The Cyborg Manifesto described—in acidic, irrepressible prose—the ironic, even “blasphemous” form that the revolutionary struggle against the Western logos would have to assume in order to survive in the military-industrial-cybernetic age: “Perhaps, ironically,” wrote Haraway, “we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (52).

How not to be Man was also the concern, one could say, of The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, where “dog writing” is argued for as “a branch of feminist theory”—with Haraway adding, ever the iconoclast, “or the other way around” (95). Seeing in twenty-first-century human-canine companionship an instructive guide for “fleshly material-semiotic” co-evolution and survival, she cautions: “Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with” (98). This text, with its greater dose of biography, worldliness, vulnerability, domesticity, sharing, joy, and saliva than The Cyborg Manifesto, (knew that it) risked striking readers of the angry/melancholic twentieth-century anti-bourgeois anti-realist persuasion as less radical. But therein lay precisely the provocation (and dogs’ well-documented talent for warm-and-fuzzily fooling us): man’s best friend is also his most “ecologically opportunistic,” techno-engineered, ironic, protean, ambiguous, co-constitutive, inescapable symbiont—not to say satellite and shadow (my terms). Wolfe does not even need to go into explicit details (or “to the dogs,” as Haraway might put it). As a longtime close reader and companion thinker, his conviction gives Manifestly Haraway its framing hypothesis: however differently they “ramify” (as he likes to repeat), the two manifestos wrestle with very much the same questions. Haraway in turn agrees with his suggestion, when discussing The Companion Species Manifesto, that “the figure of the cyborg was not queer enough for the work [she] wanted to do then” (she adds: “also not intimate enough” (254-255)). To those who might want to ask her “Why did you drop your feminist, antiracist, and socialist critique in the ‘Companion Species Manifesto’?” she answers: “Well, it’s not dropped. It’s at least as acute, but it’s produced very differently. There’s a sense in which the ‘Companion Species Manifesto’ grows more out of an act of love, and the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ grows more out of an act of rage” (219) (my emphasis).

Beware ye “dog phobic[s]” and “those with their minds on higher things” (95)! What may appear, in the move from cyborg to dog and rage to love, to be a mellowing (as we too often—pessimistically? ageistically?—tend to call the evolution of things over time) is more likely the opposite. As the conversation proceeds, it becomes clear that Wolfe has been thinking hard about this and is guiding them both towards a very precise set of articulations. For him, the radical politics and irony of The Cyborg Manifesto are “sustained” in The Companion Species Manifesto, but, he ventures, “they’re retooled within a context that I would call more thoroughgoingly biopolitical,” and “that’s a very different context from command-control-communication-intelligence and the military industrial complex” (even if they may overlap) (219). Haraway responds tentatively to this reading at first (“I hope that’s true”); what is at least as true is that—even while her post-Cyborg writings devised (as Wolfe notes) an ever-richer figural and syntactic vocabulary for talking about earthly survival and bodily cohabitation (think of natureculture, becoming-with, response-ability, ongoingness, the Chthulucene, compost communities etc.)—the presence of the biopolitical as explicit frame or word has been noticeably scarce. There are interesting reasons for this (as I see it). For one, to be committed to the biopolitical as lexicon and paradigm is to follow a Foucauldian and/or Agambenian line of analysis that Haraway’s practice of resolutely eclectic, feminist (“My sisters rock!” 283), cross-disciplinary, “kitchen-sink” scholarship and “excessive citation” has always exuberantly overshot (292). For another, her authentic interest in “[h]ow to truly love our age, and also how to somehow live and die well here, with each other” (207)—a stance of “joy” in which she is closest to Isabelle Stengers—has arguably stood her at affective and rhetorical odds with the themes and verdicts of biopolitical thought, at least in its negative dimension (which, until recently, remember, was its main dimension). And then there is the fact that a note to The Cyborg Manifesto dares to declare the biopolitical age (of “medicalization and normalization”) over (“It is time to write The Death of the Clinic“), succeeded by an age of advanced multinational capitalism, networking, automation—calling precisely for cyborg politics (69). Finally, there is something of a genre gap, if one considers the rule first evoked in The Companion Species Manifesto and observed even more seriously in the works that followed: “no deviation from the animal stories themselves. Lessons have to be inextricably part of the story” (109). The resolute preference for love/joy/rage over critique, for stories over theories, for messy multiplicities over neatness is in turn of a piece with an overall poetic and ethical sensibility that runs deep. Haraway has always written against “hygienic distance” (108; “because love is always inappropriate, never proper, never clean,” 275), and to that extent against both biopolitical regimes (that identify, regulate, extract, monocultivate, optimize) and a dominant strand of biopolitical thought (which, in critiquing biopower, inevitably lends it unbearable dominance). Her unembarrassed calls to “forbidden love,” ironic alliances, “oral intercourse” with dogs (yes, literally), infections and miscegenations, “worldings,” “compost” and “humus“ (over “posthuman,” most recently) have made Haraway to much critical theory what a radical toxic-yard co-op permaculturalist is to certified organic farming. Make kin not babies! would become the credo of Staying with the Trouble. Immune systems, beyond their biopolitical operativities, are for Haraway live ecological archives—blueprints for past and future communities: “they determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom” (122).

Wolfe, undaunted, keeps bringing the biopolitical back in—taking his cue perhaps from the tireless retriever for which he can safely bet Haraway would have infinite patience (which brings us to the burning and unaddressed question at the heart of this conversation: does Wolfe have a dog? Or, to put it in Haraway speak, does a dog have Wolfe?). The bee in his bonnet is the fact that the human/dog relation, increasingly regulated and medicalized, “is in fact part of a much larger biopolitical fabric” (245), an instance of life subject to strategic, routinized power, and, as such, for analysis, a problem. Besides, shouldn’t we heed the differences between “pets” (henceforth known as companion species), “pests,” factory farm animals, zoo animals, wildlife, etc., not to say, as Wolfe has recently suggested, between bio and zoë, as this distinction divides different animals? True, in Staying with the Trouble Haraway moves from pigeons to dogs to ants as if this difference does not matter fundamentally. But on the other hand, a chapter in that book titled “Awash in Urine” (whose first version was published in 2012) is surely as dirty an engagement with the biopolitical as they come, retracing the ironic story of the synthetic hormonal drug DES (diethylstilbesterol) harvested from pregnant mare urine and prescribed to Haraway’s dog (Cayenne) for incontinence just as it had been prescribed for years to menopaused (“estrogen deficient”) women—until shown to be linked to increased incidence of breast cancer and heart disease (a cause taken up by women’s movements) and discontinued for human use. In that most personal chapter of the book, Haraway addresses both the multibillion-dollar pet pharmacare industry and the gendered cross-species predicaments produced by a “still-expanding conglobulation of interlinked research, marketing, medical and veterinary, activist, agricultural, and scholarly body-and subject-making apparatuses” (115). She even throws in the words “biopolitical” and “biocapital,” yet no diagnostician’s gloom weighs her down. Rather, she draws from this story yoking her aging self to her aging dog an upbeat lesson in “viral response-ability,” which she defines as

carrying meanings and materials across kinds in order to infect processes and practices that might yet ignite epidemics of multispecies recuperation and maybe even flourishing on terra in ordinary times and places. Call that utopia; call that inhabiting the despised places; call that touch; call that the rapidly mutating virus of hope, or the less rapidly changing commitment to staying with the trouble. (114)

She goes on to write in her signature brachylogical prose:

It is no longer news that corporations, farms, clinics, labs, homes, sciences, technologies, and multispecies lives are entangled in multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial worlding; but the details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities. Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise. (Staying 115)

“Caring about flourishing” appears here as the delightful, provocative other to the “biopolitical”; certainly “to flourish” is a verb conspicuously absent from the biopolitical theory “canon.” But Wolfe is keen—and has come prepared—to reclaim this decisive duality within biopolitical thought. His last book, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2013) had focused precisely on such a fundamental ambivalence within Foucault’s thinking (his “debt to Nietzsche”) and what contemporary biopolitical analyses were doing with it. As noted by commentators such as Jeff Nealon and Maurizio Lazzarato (on whose readings Wolfe relied critically), biopower in Foucault worked on bodies “not always already abjected,” (as they are in Agamben) but”enfolded via biopower in struggle and resistance” (Wolfe 32). Its power necessarily originated in something other than itself; before biopower could affect concrete objects/subjects, it had to be a relation between virtual forces, implying their virtual “freedom.” Thus the potential for something as “creative” and “aleatory” as life “to burst through” biopower’s systematic and thanatological arrangements was already inscribed within biopolitical thought—and not only as an impasse, as Roberto Esposito saw it—but “in ways more and more difficult to anticipate” (Wolfe 32-3). Wolfe’s conclusions in that book—notably his conviction that biopolitical thought has arrived at a “specific juncture” (Manifestly 253)—drive his engagement here with Haraway. For one, he is interested in thinking an “affirmative biopolitics” that would both correct the “almost hysterical condemnation and disavowal of [pre-political] embodied life” in a certain lineage of thinkers—Arendt, Agamben, Rancière, Badiou, Zizek—and avoid the pitfall of simply celebrating positive, undifferentiated life (think deep ecology of the 1970s, or Esposito today) (Wolfe 30, 59). Second, given his own longtime investments and following Nicole Shukin’s sharp analyses in Animal Capital (published in his own Minnesota UP “Posthumanities” series), he is committed to the idea that the analysis of biopower—known to operate ultimately at the level of flesh (rather than person, in which Wolfe agrees with Esposito)—logically and powerfully demands that attention be paid to animal life, yet has tended to ignore it (as its “internal limit,” to quote Shukin). For Wolfe, then, a movement against factory farming “has the potential to actually radicalize biopolitical thought beyond its usual parameters” by drawing attention to the fate of sentient, embodied life (Wolfe 51).

Spoiler alert! Wolfe easily gets Haraway to agree that she is doing a certain kind of “affirmative biopolitics,” enabled precisely by a “root feminist thinking” that has never been afraid to explore “an affirmative sense of mortal connection with other forms of life” (Manifestly 264-265). In a nice twist, she becomes the answer to Wolfe’s question of “what an affirmative biopolitics would look like.” Haraway’s other lineage here is of course ecological politics (from Val Plumwood to Thom Van Dooren)—another vexed part that Wolfe wants to reconnect to the biopolitical whole. At this point, Wolfe’s highly systematic mind (remember how he made deconstruction and systems theory converse like long-lost cousins in What is Posthumanism?) has him reevaluating feminism and ecology as analogous formations—both extraordinary legacies for thinking mortal life affirmatively and across difference, both limited awhile (until they were thankfully queered) by their tetheredness to reproductive discourses, and both badly needed today to extend, radicalize, and indeed realize the vital critical potential of biopolitical thought—which also means to rethink and sustain “life” and “politics” within it.

I put down Manifestly Haraway thinking that these two thinkers flourished in concert, precisely because they stretched and entangled and disentangled the branches, the roots, the skins, the antennae of their thought-worlds furthest. At the same time I wondered whether anything had really been said, whether any “becoming-with” had happened at all. For Haraway, in a sense, the whole palaver around biopolitics stems from an historical “misunderstanding” that develops “in a colonial institutional framework, of getting rid of the enemy and managing the subordinate. Sterilization, exclusion, extermination, transportation, so on and so forth” (248-249). Not that this framing of things was not absolutely strategic; the point is rather that this was never how the world actually worked or would continue to work. The biopolitical frame was “the misunderstanding of historical multispecies life,” an impoverished description that stood at every point to be belied by everyday ordinary associations and infections (248). This is why resistance is about (earthly) storytelling more than (unearthly) critique, and why politics is a power struggle over who gets to tell which stories. Here we also find the reason why Haraway remains a keen student of the biological sciences, where a “tectonic shift” is revealing the ways in which earthly life uncannily resembles its most radical tellings: critters are ecosystems, bounded individualism simply does not occur in nature (nor does “nature”), and cyborg/companion species writing was, quite (im)modestly, only refusing to pretend not to know this.

Because you literally can’t sterilize; the hand-sanitizer thing is a bad joke. The main point is that insofar as biopolitics is concerned, this question of ecosystem assemblages is the name of the game on Earth. Period. There is no other game. There are no individuals plus environments. There are only webbed ecosystems made of variously configured, historically dynamic contact zones. (248-250)

There is a difference at play here between the two thinkers that is not quite (or not only/wholly) the realist/materialist vs. idealist or the negative vs. affirmative divergence that may divide strands of philosophico-political thought. It is something more like the difference between two understandings of writing’s relationship to its matter. Perhaps one could call it, dramatically, old-fashionedly, the difference between the problematic and the poetic mode—where one critiques an assumed-to-be-existing world that one may reasonably fear is (i.e which nothing in principle prevents from being) uninhabitable, while the other describes a world into being, and in doing so dwells (as its very inscription, if you like) vulnerably and until the end in/with/as it. Endnote #5 of The Cyborg Manifesto had called knowingly for “language poets” (69-70), and Staying with the Trouble repeats ethnographer Marilyn Strathern’s lesson: “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” (34). Might there be a case for thinking the stakes of this problem/poem difference as it plays out in critical thinking today, and conditions the potential for our being wholly subjected to biopolitical regimes? Are we not at a juncture where poetry and philosophy can—and must—come together again? Or is it too late to dwell in and with and as the world? Whatever one may think of that question, or of Haraway’s latest recourse to humus and compost as figures for dwelling, there are few thinkers who can say about their thinking what she so exquisitely says to Wolfe: “This is not just the way I work, this is how worlding works” (Manifestly 212).

“Companions in Conversation” touches on a number of other points of interest to readers in contemporary critical theory, biopolitics, the Anthropocene, feminism and ecology. For instance, Haraway offers a more nuanced argument here than in Staying with the Trouble for her unwillingness to use the term “Anthropocene” (preferring instead “Capitalocene” or, better, “Chthulucene,” from the word for earth—and therefore life and potential—no connection to “misogynist” Lovecraft). While in that book she objects to “Anthropocene” essentially on the grounds that the best natural and social sciences (i.e. biology and philosophy) have by now thoroughly debunked bounded, neoliberal individualism—and therefore human exceptionalism—and that there is therefore no sense in reinstating yet another great phallic adventure tale with Man as its tragic hero (31, 47), in talking to Wolfe she points out that the term seems to suggest a “species act,” “an act of human nature,” whereas what is at issue is “a situated complex historical web of actions—and it could be, could have been, otherwise. But people forget that, partly because of the power of the word” (237-238; my emphasis). In this argument, Haraway is in the company of French historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene, who argue methodically against the naturalizing powers of the Anthropocene narrative; not only could things have been otherwise, but at every point of history, there are records of alternative forms of knowledge, practice and community (and more sustainable conceptions of world), which certain namable agencies and interests—imperialist, capitalist, fossil fuel, agro-chemical—knowingly defeated. In another fascinating moment, Haraway expands on her debt to the sacramentalism of Catholic theology, and how it set her up to be suspicious of “the various purifications and sortings of the world”—between word and flesh, world and trope, “semiosis and fleshliness,” “mind/body, animal/human, signifier/signified, nyeh-nyeh/nyeh-nyeh” (268-269). Steepedness in Catholic/Peircian material semiotics is something Haraway significantly shares with her two close “companions in thinking,” Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour—which leads to a joke about a Catholic takeover via Paris, Brussels and Santa Cruz. As one might expect, the conversation is also remarkable—as is Staying with the Trouble—for the tributes Haraway consistently pays to her many teachers, interlocutors, co-travelers: Lynn Margulis, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Anna Tsing, Valerie Hartoum, Vinciane Despret, Vicki Hearne, Strathern, Stengers.

One must be patient with the “Conversation,” and read it for the deep lines of thought it casts out but, given its format, can examine only gesturally. There are so many places where it inevitably advances by way of shorthand allusions (especially when Wolfe is speaking), “say-no-more”-type responses, incomplete sentences or sentences started by one speaker to be completed sympathetically by the other that one sometimes wishes there were footnotes. The stage-direction-like inserts of laughing, and the reference at one point to deep breaths and some well-aged Scotch, are as incongruous as they are cute; at the very least, this is useful stuff for anyone wishing to reenact the conversation as a play. But the final verdict would have to be that this is a real conversation, and a chance to witness some high-caliber symbiogenesis (to use a Haraway word) between two particularly lucid thinkers of our times. And this was before the 2016 election, when everything still seemed possible. Who is to say? Another day (and more aged Scotch) might even have persuaded Haraway to join Wolfe’s movement against factory farming¹, and Wolfe to start writing of flourishing and joy.

Footnotes

1. Readers eager for the conversation to address whether Haraway should have been less hard on Derrida in When Species Meet (whose index had featured wryly, under the entry for “Derrida,” the subheading “curiosity, failure of”) will be left unsatisfied. But the question of Haraway’s strongly stated ambivalence to Derrida is an aspect of a much larger question that, precisely because of its glaring centrality and difficulty, Manifestly Haraway both must and cannot manifestly process: what to do about meat. Haraway’s lament in When Species Meet—that Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I Am had failed in “a simple obligation of companion species” (ultimately to care what his cat was doing or thinking that morning) and thus missed “a possible introduction to other-worlding”— appeared itself to miss the real concern of Derrida’s text which was not the neglected companion cat (the latter a stagey alibi, one could say looking back, for getting to the animal question) but billions of zombie animals reared in factories every year to be killed. Wolfe’s unstated question to Haraway throughout here (which I would not put it past her to answer another day) is thus: What would it mean to practice a companion species “curiosity” not in the home but in the slaughterhouse, where it would stand to disrupt the very world order? (When Species Meet 404; 20)

Works Cited

• Haraway, Donna J. Manifestly Haraway. U of Minnesota P, 2016.
• —. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.
• Obama, Barack. Remarks at the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, 17 Jul. 2018, Johannesburg, South Africa. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/17/629862434/transcript-obamas-speech-at-the-2018-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
• Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. U of Chicago P, 2012.