Outline of Donna Haraways The Companion Species Manifesto

The Projects Context and Goals

Emergent Naturecultures (1-5)
[Haraways love for her dog Cayenne is] 1>an historical aberration & 2> a naturecultural legacy The Companion Species Manifesto (CSM) addresses 2 questions following from this aberration and legacy: 1> How might an ethics & politics committed to the ourishing of signicant otherness be learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously; 2> How might stories about dog-human worlds convince historically challenged Americans and others that history matters in naturecultures?

Prehensions1 (6-10)
[Haraway lays out some of her philosophical investments & ethical goals.]

Process Philosophies Instead of False Determinisms2

Reality is an active verb through their reaching into each other, though their prehensions or graspings, beings constitute each other and themselves. Beings do not preexist their relatings. The world is a knot in motion. Biological and cultural determinism are both instances of misplaced concretenessi.e. the mistake of : rst, taking provisional and local category abstractions like nature and culture for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations.

Signicant Otherness as Respectful, Workable Ways of Relating

On-the-ground work that cobbles together ways of living that are accountable both to disparate inherited histories and their absolutely necessary joint futures.

What is a Companion & What is a Species?

Companions (11-14)
[Literally, a companion is who you break bread with, a mess mate.]

Dogs Are Not About Oneself

Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationshipsco-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating

Species (15-25)
[Haraway is interested in companion species as a concept that encompasses not only pets, but things as diverse] as rice, bees, and intestinal ora.

4 Resonances of Species
1> History of evolutionary biology 2> Species as generic: as kind and category 3> Catholic doctrine of the real presence, the corporeal join of the material & semiotic [here Haraway is opposing what she sees as an insufciently material notion of semiotics] 4> Species as Money (specie), Species (like dogs) as Commodities In sum, companion species is about a four-part composition, in which co-constitution, nitude, impurity, historicity, and complexity are what is.

1 Pre-hen-sion. 1. zoology & psychology: the action of grasping or seizing. 2. philosophy: the interaction of a subject with an event or entity that involves perception but not necessarily cognition. 2 De-ter-min-ism. Doctrine that events, including human actions, are determined by causes external to human will.

Outline of Donna Haraways The Companion Species Manifesto

Relentlessly Specic Naturecultures

The CSM is about the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historical specic, joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in signicant otherness.

Trope: Factual Stories are Still Stories

All stories trafc in tropes, i.e., gures of speech necessary to say anything at all. Trope (Greek: trops) means swerving or tripping. All language swerves and trips; there is never direct meaning

Metaplasm: Remodeling & Remolding

Metaplasm means a change in a word, for example by adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters, syllables, or sounds. I use metaplasm to mean the remodeling of dog and human esh, remolding the codes of life, in the history of companion-species relating.

Example of a Naturecultures Story: Andrew Goldsworthys Arch

[artist Andy Goldsworthy did a non-permanent piece tracing drovers sheep route from Scottish pastures to English market towns: culture, nature, & companion species all mixed together and effecting the local cultures & landscapes].

Factual Stories of Companion Species & Their Naturecultures

Evolution Stories (26-32) [scale: evolutionary time] 2 Problems with Most Origin Stories
1> relation between what counts as nature and as culture 2> correlated issue of who and what counts as an actor

Against Hegel in the Kennel (Human as Master & Dog as Slave)

[Instead of man the tool maker domesticating wolves and shaping them into an instrument of his will, Haraway stresses dogs role (or more accurately, wolf wannabe dogs) in making the initial moves in domestication.]

Other Examples of Co-Constitutive Relationships in Evolution

[Here Haraway is endorsing specic positions in debates about evolution (especially novelty, how new species emerge)] Co-constitutive companion species and co-evolution are the rule, not the exception.

Love Stories (33-39) [scale: face-to-face time] Against the Notion of Dogs Unconditional Love
Receiving unconditional love from another is a rarely excusable neurotic fantasy; striving to fulll the messy conditions of being in love is quite another matter.

Against the Notion of Dogs as Children

To regard a dog as a furry child, even metaphorically, demeans dogs and children, and sets up children to be bitten and dogs to be killed.

Training Stories (40-58) [scale: face-to-face time] Positive Bondage (Ruff Love) (43-47)
[Haraway discusses behaviorist training methods, especially their effectiveness and how well they align with progressive notions of education. She also discusses her uneasy awareness of the historical context from which the methods and their goals of total control are derived].

Outline of Donna Haraways The Companion Species Manifesto

Harsh Beauty (Vicki Hearne) (48-54)

[Haraway discusses trainer and (Wittgenstein-inspired) philosopher Vicki Hearnes account of training as a language-game played between animal and trainer. Though Hearne despised behaviorist positive-reinforcement training, she and behaviorists are united in the detailed attention they pay to animal others.]

Apprenticed to Agility (55-57) & The Game Story (58-62) [scale: face-to-face time] Breed Stories (63-88) [scale: historical time]
[These are examples of the kind of detailed historical specicity and attention to complexity that Haraway believes is necessary to understand naturecultures]

Great Pyrenees (66-80)

The introduction, from blasted peasant-shepherd economies, of Basque Pyrenean mountain dogs, who were nurtured in the purebred dog fancy, onto the ranches of the US west to protect Anglo ranchers xenobiological cattle and sheep on the grasslands habitat (where few native grasses survive) of buffalo once hunted by Plains Indians riding Spanish horsesalong with the study of contemporary reservation Navajo sheep-herding cultures deriving from Spanish conquest and missionizationought to offer enough historical irony for any companion species manifesto. [the reintroduction of endangered wolves adds even further complexity & irony]

Australian Shepherds (81-87)

[Besides discussing Aussies own complex history and part in the post Civil War ranching economy of the West, Haraway examines the tensions between Aussie breeders who wanted American Kennel Club (AKC) recognition, and those who strongly feel that this will value appearance over health and functionality.]

Conclusion: Inhabiting Complex & Difcult Histories

A Category of Ones Own (Satos) (88-100)
[Haraway owns up to conicted feelings about programs to export Puerto Rican street dogs (Satos) to the U.S. On the one hand, she cares for the dogs. On the other, she see how the stories that frame the endeavor are part of colonial and patronizing heritage. This leads her to a major point about her kind of research and responsibility:] Again and again in my manifesto, I and my people need to learn to inhabit histories, not disown them, least of all through the cheap tricks of puritanical critique. [In other words, rather than seeing herself as magically outside of the complex and not-always-pretty legacies she is analyzing, Haraway tries to see herself as an actor within them, attempting to create the ways of getting on she discussed earlier. This is a refreshing position within academia, where so often professors try to position themselves as above the fray, somehow uncompromised by social structures they wish to critique.] Along with the whole dog, we need the whole legacy, which is, after all, what makes the whole companion species possible. Inhabiting that legacy without the pose of innocence, we might hope for the creative grace of play.