When Species Meet by Donna J. Haraway (2008). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 423 pp. Posthumanities Series, Volume 3, ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-5046-0
Reviewed by Emily Snyder, University of Alberta
Creative Commons Photo by Annie in Beziers
Puffing its feathers and twisting around, it dances on the railing of my high-rise balcony. My cat chats at it and I peer out the window and take a good look. I think hard about what to make of this pigeon and our encounter. To work with ‘the pigeon,’ I turn to Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, and as hoped, her work is invaluable for providing openings for thinking differently about human-animal relationality. Her book gave me some serious indigestion (this unsettling of the human self, no doubt, her goal) and I approach this review with the specificity of my predominantly under-respected, ‘parasitic’ balcony companion in mind. (a)
When Species Meet is an extension of Haraway’s (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto, and it continues to develop her previous work on the entanglement of technology, nature, and culture. Drawing on Bruno Latour, she sets up the problem of the Great Divide of human/animal in Western culture and seeks to subvert human exceptionalism. Her exploration of our co-species existence is guided by two main questions, “(1) Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? and (2) How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?” (p.3). Haraway argues for an epistemological and ontological shift to recognize that non-human animals are agents that can also shape our lives and this co-constitution requires an ethical call for respect and responding “to and for those other primate beings” (p.6). Several reviews have been done on this book (De Boever, 2006; Coldwell, 2008; Ritvo, 2008) and rather than provide a summary (for detailed summaries see Rossini, 2008; Wilson, 2009; Mullin, 2008), I instead focus on two dilemmas – moments of curiosity about pigeons, bred from the openings that the author provides.
Haraway insists that each new context requires examining the cultural and historical specificity of the human and non-human animal encounter. Yet readers should be cautious that some aspects of Haraway’s theoretical approach might also need to be re-examined and further developed when looking at creatures outside of the ‘domestic’ realm (see also De Boever, 2006). While she extends her work to all species, my exploration of the pigeon, and parasitic species more generally (see Serres, 1982), suggests further work needs to be done. An integral part of ‘being with’ is that “meeting the look of the other is a condition of having face oneself” (p.88). While I hesitate to take her ideas too literally, one must ask what the implications are of Haraway’s emphasis on face-to-face encounters. If it is accurate to speculate that we primarily encounter parasitic creatures at a distance (tend to not stop and face the creature, if we see some of them at all), how do we go about ‘becoming with’? This brings me to my second allure.
Is it possible to engage Haraway’s politics of becoming worldly with the parasite through a process of facing the other via their virtualities and representations? Although she begins her book discussing a photograph of a figure of a dog found in the forest (made up of various plants and a redwood stump and needles), these types of encounters seem less theorized than ones with actual creatures. Further, she uses the term ‘material-semiotic’ throughout but does not devote space to explicating this concept. When I come across representations of pigeons, how might these encounters compel me to question the rigid division of human/animal relations as they might with a close encounter with the actual plump being? How do I develop a sense of respect through these types of encounters? If it is through our coming together that we are co-constituted, does it matter what forms this takes? Haraway would answer ‘no’ and would point to an inseparability of the material and immaterial, yet it seems virtualities and representations as a means for becoming worldly need to be further explored. Overall, Haraway’s message that “To be one is always to become with many” (p.4) is powerful and When Species Meet is a provocative resource for instilling curiosity about the meaning and implications of our multi-species co-existence.
(a) I focus on the pigeon as parasite here but certainly an analysis of the pigeon as worker and as racer could be done. Haraway’s work is a much better fit with the latter, thus I explore the friction with the former pervasive conceptualization here.
References
Coldwell, I. (2008). Book Reviews: When Species Meet. Rural Society, 18(2), 142-143.
De Boever, A. (2006). When Species Meet (review). Discourse, 28(2&3), 229-232.
Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Mullin, M. (2008). Book Review. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(7-8), 373-376.
Ritvo, H. (2008). Making Animals Real. Biosocieties, 3(4), 443-446.
Rossini, M. (2008). When Species Meet (review). Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(3&4), 309-311.
Serres, M. (1982). The Parasite. London: The John Hopkins University Press.
Wilson, D. (2009). When species meet. History of the Human Sciences, 22(1), 149-155.
- Anne