When Species Meet (review)

Meet a true alpha bitch and her human and nonhuman companions. Messmates at table and partners in play, they run fast along the high-speed train of biotechnological evolution, they bite hard at rampant global capitalism, and they risk alien encounters likely to cause pain and indigestion when face to face with incommensurable differences and asymmetrical power. The complexities and contradictions of living and dying in the age of technoscience are not easy to stomach, but that is no excuse for not chewing at them as responsively, politely, and gracefully as possible. Call it a commitment to queer cosmopolitics, an ethics of cross-species flourishing, or sf (science fiction) other-worlding in order to nourish a viable future for animals and human critters alike.

In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway shares various ways of doings so, lessons she learned herself about eight years ago, when her hand shook the paw of Cayenne, an individual of the Australian Shepherd breed. The insights and Web sites; the informative, evocative and provocative, personal-political, sad, and humorous stories; and the variety of species herded into the covers of this book are the consequences of that touch. Through touching, living creatures inherit each other’s histories in the flesh and in logic. True to her heritage as the daughter of a sportswriter, Haraway writes about the game of co-constitutive entanglement across machinic, animal, and human species. When species meet, they do not come together as fixed units. Rather, all participants are becoming with each other in “a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters” (4).

Part 1 (making up half of the book), “We Have Never Been Human,” contains a strong antidose against “human expectionalism,” the virus that severs the ties between humankind and all other kinds on the basis of some features unique to the former. Instead, Haraway invites us to see the human as just another knot in the worldwide web of interspecies dependencies, as always already in-formed by organic and technological nonhumans. The term she proposes for all these old, new, and yet-to-(be) come “mixed breeds” is “companion species,” offered as an alternative category also to the cyborg and other figures currently subsumed under the label “posthuman” or, rather, as a new point of orientation from which to look at (and look back at—respectere, “to hold in regard”) animals and as a different way of theorizing relationality and co-presence with significant others of all types in twentieth-century naturecultures.

Foregrounding processes of optic-haptic relating and adding “encounter value” to the Marxian values of use and exchange in relations of labor and capital, a companion-species approach starts from the premise that “all mortal beings…live in and through the use of one another’s bodies” (79) and are hence reciprocally means and ends to each other. In other words, instrumentality should be thought outside the dualistic taxonomies of master/slave, powerful/powerless, free/unfree, active/passive—even though it cannot be denied that pain and suffering is distributed extremely unevenly between human and nonhuman animals. Living within the same instrumental economy, Haraway continues, in her carefully written chapter on experimental lab practices, human beings should learn how to share that suffering in nonmimetic ways, namely, not by taking the place of the animal victim but by understanding what the animal is going through in order to get this unequal relationship and power structure right—emotionally, intellectually, ethically, and operationally.

Part 2, “Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter,” tells the most intimate and touching accounts in the book of what can happen in specific contact zones where different species share the same working conditions. The love letters and e-mails assembled here speak of the love and friendship between a father and a daughter and between a woman and a dog beyond the framework of the Oedipal family romance, anthropocentrism, or anthropomorphism. They speak of the love of team sports (baseball, agility) whereby the partners transform themselves as they are engaged in it...