Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde

12. Crittercam: Compounding Eyes in NatureCultures

175 12 Crittercam: Compounding Eyes in NatureCultures Donna J. Haraway “[I]t is in the interactions, in the mutual questioning and interacting of the world and ourselves, in the changing patterns of the lifeworld that things become clear…In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.” —Don Ihde (BT 86–87) “I am concerned with how aquatic imaging and hydro-optics cause optics and haptics to slide into each other…Fingery eyes literally plunge the viewer into materialized perceptions.” —Eva Shawn Hayward “Anything can happen when an animal is your cameraman.” —Crittercam advertisement Infoldings and Judge’s Chambers Don Ihde and I share a basic commitment: as Ihde puts it, “Insofar as I use or employ a technology, I am used by and employed by that technology as well . . . We are bodies in technologies.” Therefore, technologies are not mediations —that is, something in between us and another bit of the world— rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.” I like the word “infolding” better than “interface” to suggest the dance of world-making encounters. What happens in the folds is what is important. Infoldings of the flesh are worldly embodiment. The 176 Donna J. Haraway word makes me see the highly magnified surfaces of cells shown by scanning electron microscopes. In those pictures, we see the high mountains and valleys , entwined organelles and visiting bacteria, and multiform interdigitations of surfaces we can never again imagine as smooth interfaces. Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices. Further, syntactically and materially, worldly embodiment is always a verb, or at least a gerund. Always in formation, embodiment is ongoing, dynamic, situated, and historical. No matter what the chemical score for the dance—carbon, silicon, or something else—the partners in infoldings of the flesh are heterogeneous. That is, the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things. Things are material, specific, non-self-identical, and semiotically active . In the realm of the living, critter is another name for thing. Critters are what this essay is about. Never purely themselves, things are compound; they are made up of combinations of other things coordinated to magnify power, to make something happen, to engage the world, to risk fleshly acts of interpretation. Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings , other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces. Remember also one of the meanings of compound is an enclosure, within which there is a residence or a factory—or, perhaps, a prison or temple. Finally, a compound animal in zoological terminology refers to a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one. Connected by cittercam’s stolon—that is, the circulatory apparatus of its compounded visualizing practices—zoons are technologies, and technologies are zoons. So, a compound is both a composite and an enclosure. In this chapter I am interested in querying both these aspects of the early twenty-first-century composition made up of marine nonhuman animals, human marine scientists, a series of cameras, a motley of associated equipment, the National Geographic Society, a popular television nature show, its associated Web site, and sober publications in ocean science journals. At first glance, strapped to the body of critters like green turtles in Shark Bay in Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera—the technological eye—seems to be both the central object of philosophical pretension and self-certainty, on the one hand, and of cultural Crittercam 177 skepticism and the authenticity-destroying powers of the artificial, on the other hand. The camera—that vault or arched chamber, that judge’s chamber —only moved from elite Latin to the vulgar, democratic idiom in the nineteenth century as a consequence of a new technology called photography. A camera became a black...