The city montage from King Vidor’s 1928 silent film, The Crowd
The montage of the busy city streets, enormous crowds, and speeding trains that is Johnny’s introduction to New York City is frantic and a bit awe-inspiring, especially the great shot that climbs the side of the building where Johnny works. Many of the crowd shots were done with a hidden camera, and in one scene, when a traffic cop seems to tell us to move along, he was actually instructing Vidor and his crew to move.” (source)
But what does anyone get from The Crowd? The comfortable citizen who drove to the theatre in a car of his own and who can sleep at night without worrying about the grocery bill, sees paraded before him on the screen every heartache he and his wife endured during the years of their upward struggle. Out of locked closets come spectres of the past that the screen breathes life into and makes real again. And what do the friends of Johnny Sims get out of it- the young people who constitute the crowd? The only thing that keeps their heads up and eyes front is the thought that some day they will rise above the multitude, as the heroes in motion pictures always do. But this picture has no such inspiration. With extraordinary vigor and conviction it plants the utter futility of endeavoring to battle one’s way to success. It shows that the crowd is too powerful to be combatted, and it breathes hopelessness and despair.” (source)
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
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.
In Reassembling the Social Bruno Latour reevaluates the ambiguous term ‘the social.’ He claims that the dominant trend within sociology has been to conceive of the social as a given totality, “always already there,” which provides a solid base for understanding any other phenomena (p. 5-8). Against this tendency Latour contends that it is the social itself which requires explanation and insists that we must always ask how it is constituted; through which associations, involving what actors (p. 64). Only to the extent that the thinker pays attention to all the agents and relations involved in a given assemblage, he writes, does she have any right to posit a unifying theory of the whole (p. 5).
This is not only Latour’s rule for good science but a political maxim, actually a democratic ethic, which postpones the question of how we shall live together in favor of asking whether all are represented (p. 254, 259-260). It is an attempt to keep open the question “how many are we?” (p. 254, 260) and to resist the idea that the social world is an objective reality with incontestable boundaries – as if the fundamental political question of ‘who counts’ were already and forever resolved (p. 162-164, 260).
His worthy maxim for the social scientist is “‘follow the actors themselves,’… learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands” (p. 12). By carefully considering the “idiosyncratic terms offered by the actors…” (p. 47), Latour argues, we will recapture the sense of the social as a precarious gathering of associations continually in need of reassessment and reconstitution (p. 233-234).
