Donna Haraway: "From Cyborgs to Companion Species"

it's a great pleasure to be here and it's a wonderful group of folks in an exquisite room it must be said although it is a little mono specific although only on the most initial sort of appearance since every one of us is a Congaree of many species running into the millions of entities which are indeed conditions of our very being so the mono specificity is one of the many illusions and wounds to our narcissism about which I will have a great deal to say in the course of this lecture partly having been instructed by those among you who have gone first where no man dare go into the sewers of psychoanalysis from which I have dredged a little bit of scat for certain sections of my lecture because of the really remarkable ecosystems that scat is far the problem of grammar has been indeed a motor for my work for a long time now the title of this lecture from cyborgs to companion species advertised in that really wonderful little pamphlet dogs and people in techno culture has mutated to dogs people and acquiring genomes in nature culture because I'm an spine inspired both by the current exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum University Art Museum on Genesis but also more generally by the multiple ambivalences and ambiguities of acquiring genomes and I would like to think that the particular take on alternatives to post humanism that I'll be giving in the course of tonight's lecture might be informed by Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan's approach to acquiring genomes in their recent book by that name now I begin with a dog of perfect proportions the Vitruvian dog as all of you are clearly aware by the incidence of laughter in the room the man of perfect perfor proportions the Vitruvian Man Leonardo she's the humanistic version of the Fibonacci series the embodiment of genius art science and money in what we are pleased to call early modern Europe or the Renaissance or that moment of the birth of modern humanism in a form which has been fully appropriated in techno humanism you can't attend a conference still or read an important publication in contemporary genomics or proteomics without seeing a small and potent set of artists which include Michelangelo Leonardo and Vesalius and maybe Picasso by courtesy the repetitive touches of the Sistine Chapel the proportionality of the Vitruvian Man the denuded body of the muscled Vesalius anatomical figure is of course the figure of humanism appropriated for techno humanism it is the sign of that great join which has been Enterprise DUP in Maryland straithan's terms in contemporary techno humanism of art science genius and money which is not a bad short definition of what passes as modernity now I of course have gone utterly to the dogs and proposed to you a kind of cainan ISM the dog of perfect proportions and to do this properly I'm going to have to go to the next slide it works okay now this is a cartoon that has a convention for the American Association of lap dogs and it says ladies and gentlemen behold the enemy good now we have here of course among other things upon between lapdogs and laptops and as Shakespeare taught us these particular kinds of puns that interrogate can and kind are at the root of some of our most important anxieties and some of our most important kinships what constitutes kind what constitutes kin in what sense is the cyborg II and other at war with the animal other and in what sense do they both threaten the human center this is a joke on the impossibility of humanism in contemporary worlds it's a joke on post humanism it is ladies and gentlemen behold the enemy it is of course also my particular passionate position of having abandoned my initial doppelganger the cyborg and embraced the dog but having discovered that indeed both our kin and kind and members of a larger category called companion species that both the cyborgs and animals many sorts of animals and dogs in particular and many sorts of machines and cybernetic machines in particular our companion species in a way that I would like to tell you something about a quick trip to a dictionary will give us the range of meanings that I would like you to hold on to for the duration of this lecture let's begin with the word species from the Latin spacer a kind of to regard to respect to look to see to speculate to take in in a kind of visual manner but we know at least four major tones of the word species which are going to matter to my affirmation that cyborgs and that both machine ik and organic an Emilien entities are co-inhabitants with us that we are kin and kind together in that kind of punning punning cohabitation that tells us a great deal about our situation we know that the word species has perhaps a primary meaning in an interrogator into the goodness of kind the goodness of genre the location and logical category that is a lot of term from logic that is that it is an inquiry into the nature of categories and kinds species has irreducibly that sense of an of an inquiry and kind it also of course has for us and for the last hundred and fifty going on longer than that a irreducible tone of a Darwinian species of the populating of the earth with its multiple species and their relationship to each other the question of the shape of the lineage networks are they trees Esplanade x' rhizomes fungal webs branching patterns what is the nature of relationality among the natural kinds of the earth the Darwinian species meaning is for us inescapable and necessary now I am of course not so much a last logician or a practicing Darwinian as also a lapsed Catholic for whom the notion of species is about the real presence under both species bread and wine that indeed inoculated me very early to the predominant doctrines of semiotics that my colleagues in the history of consciousness unsuccessfully attempted to teach me when they tried to persuade me that the sign is simply has an arbitrary relation to the signified and neither has the slightest relationship to the world is that we inhabit and at best we just give it up and study language and cognitive sciences I was never persuaded by this notion of the world because I grew up knowing full well that the both that the real presence under both species is the nature of the game and that living out that conundrum was the kind of semiotics that I wished to inhabit so I suggest to you that you'd best become laughs Catholics for the duration of the lecturer you will find a dearth in your understanding now it was Marx and Freud and Norman L brown who taught me about species and the join of and goal and wealth and that species species is inevitably about biting down on the coin to see if the kind holds up and that that is of course all about the excrements all nature of the world out of which goodness comes so that species is a necessary tone in my specific my regard respect my visual culture which has suddenly had a number of other orifices besides the ocular now the word companion is equally rich for my purposes and I discovered not so long ago by that excursion of scholarship known as looking up the word in the dictionary that my friend Katie King assured me actually does count a scholarship when I had a moment of insecurity called upon us with bread messmates those who break break bread together our companions that's probably the first and fundamental meaning of the word companion of messmates also of course the word companion is the lowest order in a company of knights it is a buddy it is a it is closely related to the word company which has in its meaning both the House of Commerce the military unit and the body of guests the company with whom one is Co present the notion of gifting and presence is implied in the notion of companion those with whom one breaks bread in that again the tone that can't dissociate the commerce from them from the materiality the multiple joinings of these words get my attention now within that framework I have the tools to propose to you an alternative to the various versions of post humanism in that shared project that I think many of us have in this room to somehow come to terms with the multiple descent rings the multiple wounds to narcissism that the ontological human has had to suffer that Freud was one of the great theorists of and Lacan was one of the great commentators on the fundamental wound to the narcissism of the humanists somehow the center of the universe is first the Copernican wound the decentering of the Earth from the center of the Kazakh from the center of the universe then that there whinnying wound the decentering of humanity from the central of all organic life the freudian wounded centering of consciousness from all that is interesting about modes of being active agencies active beings in the world and then finally I suggest a fourth wound which I will call the synthetic the decentering of the natural in general from the artificial so that the liveliness of entities that we call technological has had to be accommodated in ways that neither Freud nor Lacan had the opportunity to theorize or Lacan had the opportunity but didn't take it a number of other opportunities he missed not one of my favorite philosophers now I suggest to you that I no more ever wanted to be a post humanist that I wanted to be a post feminist even as I did not want to affirm the ontological certainty of the human and the feminine I certainly didn't want the post even if it was turned into postal and made into a message I didn't see any particular reason to have a postal system we had a perfectly good alternative and I suggest to you companion speciesism as the alternative these kinds of mess mates in very messy multiple historically situated relationality to each other that accommodates in the same kin kind inquiry the Machine ik and the organic and the humanik we may as well do parallelism the that we are permanently in emergent nature cultures and we are permanently in a set in a Congaree of associations that are mis named family community state civic society so on and so forth or rather those names are locally useful but the kind of misogynists unions that constitute the possibility of being on this planet are perhaps properly named companion species companions speciesism that accommodates these four wounds to the narcissism of ontological human okay with that I suggest you that I have I'm going to spend most of the rest of the lecture actually talking about dogs and animals having assured you that cyborgs are still in the kennel with their mess mates and that I have nonetheless moved from the slogan cyborgs for earthly survival to the better slogans for the era of secondary Bush's filling up all of the life spaces of the earth run fast bite hard and shut up and train which are the two slogans that I offer to you from my dog world that seemed to me just a little more to the point then cyborgs for earthly survival are at this exact moment now with that in mind I'm going to show you something about my methodologies in the next two slides first of all I sight I love citation practices in academia I cite a Seba guide a ciba-geigy ad for its dewormer for that which makes the intestines expel that which shouldn't be there the fluke aside and the verm aside that should be given to the sheep to get rid of their intestinal parasites now what we have here is a reversal it's a joke commercial biotech ads frequently were work by punting and reversal joking it's the sort of low level of consciousness that you would expect of scientists and commercial people of which I am one the doors of humanists are regularly boring the doors of people over in the biology departments are regularly extremely interesting and well worth visiting because they aren't embarrassed they aren't to embarrass to put up bad jokes this is a wonderful bad joke the man here who is letting this UPenn his very talented Border Collies who are the UK national sheepdog champions Thomas Longtin is the current UK national sheepdog sheep trial champion those are his very talented Border Collies being penned by this upstart you and one of the wonderful reversals of the Earth's in Justices where the herbivores get to pin the carnivores in domestic life now from the get-go this ad was inside techno culture in a range of ways that make the reality effect of reality particularly prominent a couple of those young Border Collies in the back are actually tied by leashes that you can't see because they aren't good at their stand stage yet this U is air is melded is one of the early visual graphics programs that was used to make this ad this U is brought in from another photograph all together and brought into the picture the sheep grazing there in your upper left hand field are also brought in from still a third photograph thomas lankton had an in-law who was trying to make a living as an ad designer for the company which is the reason he stood for this ad this is an ad that emphasizes the particular kinds of loaded reversals which I regard as a proper method to academic analysis and also the very interesting point that reversals never work reversals never work never finally copy the supposed original into a proper reversal and this second ad actually makes that particularly clear this ad is sir is obviously a reversal of the previous set of reversals we still have the upending the border collie but left and light left and right are reversed here the quality this ad also says something about its mode of distribution it comes off the off the internet unattributed it is lost its intellectual property status and therefore I think I don't have to pay a fee for using this one but I do have to pay a fee for using that one this one I believe has gone into the Commons so to speak but something has happened to the English countryside which is to say now has a Dutch windmill airbrushed in in the way that our reality suddenly take on certain kinds of fantastic dimensions that change one's notions of landscape that I think as as close as I can come to a theory however I do have a methodology which is built into this particular slide which was given to me by a Ginsberg that many of you know as a talented world-class anthropologist who grew up with her father's wolves in the Jackson in the Jackson Memorial laboratories in Bar Harbor Maine that is the young Fagin's bird with one of her father's wolves that he is studying at the jackson memorial labs the labs that gave us the standard laboratory mouse and a wonderful book Karen Rader recently published it gets all sorts of wonderful things including some of the best to date behavioral genetic research on dogs of which more later but there's the young Faye with her father's wolves and here is the cartoon that face and me this is me with it with the sort of pack the scientific technical pack the recording apparatus the telemetric relay the broadcast apparatus trying to join a pack of canids in this case a bunch of wolves and my introducing partner my sort of big sister bringing me into the pack said we found her wandering at the end edge of the forest she was raised by scientists which is how I have always felt in the history of consciousness where I take my subject formation to have been that of an organism I take having been formed as a subject in the in the location of an organism very seriously I take my having been raised as a biologist exceedingly seriously both in the sense of having been installed in the world as an organism and getting it that biology is a discourse and not the body itself so that Foucault was a wonderful haunting companion species figure in my coming to terms with having been raised by scientists so that I take very seriously this location in both of many biology's and by courtesy the meaning humanities and social sciences and arts that have allowed me to have a green card for yay these many years having been properly introduced now the particular kind of location that this gives me makes me want to complete this introductory section by telling you something about my ideal research project because since I happen to be actually interested in dogs and not just interested in the way his dogs might figure this or that or the representation of dogs and paintings X Y & Z or the evocation of a dog and a poem or in your wolf's flush or what-have-you since I am actually interested in honest-to-god dogs the you know dogs it strikes me that we need a methodology a particular interdisciplinarity that is not yet extent and in our emergent nature cultures I would like to help along a possible but not yet existing mode of inquiry which has to do with actually putting together the really savvy cultural anthropologists the really savvy art historians the folks who knows something about semiotics and psychoanalysis the people who really get it about the complex issues around deferral and unavailability and the problems of ontology and ethics there are the folks who who really know something about the matters that somehow they might actually be able to form a coherent research project with people who actually know something about behavioral ecology and genetics and physiology and evolutionary theory and and the questions of community structure in Ecology's and so on and so forth and that one might actually be able to ask what is the the historicity the social bio social history of human dog relationality that does not refuse a history to either partner and i mean history in the serious sense I mean both partners are social subjects with real social histories but not the same kind that they are heterogeneous in relentless ways just as humans are heterogeneous to each other which my first group of folks knows how to say okay and but that I really would like to know something about the historicity of particular situated dog human relation a leti and I think to do that to do that seriously takes a kind of practice of translation that is that does not yet exist in the research methodologies among us even though there is an explosion of publishing on animality why if Lacan Andheri done having us and all the rest of them are writing about animality the rest of us can't be far behind there is an extraordinary explosion of interest in questions of animality across the horizon whether it's in cognitive sciences in neurobiology or ecology or whether it's in human rights their animal rights discourse rights discourse if ik discourse law you name it there is and there you know proof to this is that major publishing houses are staking capital in a book series at a time when other kinds of book series are no longer being brought out the ones that deal with questions of the animal are indeed being brought out by the Johns Hopkins University University of Chicago you name it it's an area of exploding interest in publication and many other domains of cultural action but I believe that the method of asking the question about relationality has not yet been taken seriously and that has to do in part with the structure of our institutions and even more so with the structure of our minds because we have sort of historically induce mode of brain damage whereby people who understand the limitations of humanism nonetheless continue to operate out of panics theorize well by Freud as he took on those four kinds of three kinds of wounds now for the panics that lead people to be terrified of either biological determinism whatever that is or technological determinism whatever that is or tend to be horribly worried about whether animals have real language or not or whether this or that corn ah'd these kinds of panics that pervade this course here I think only be understood in terms of the wounding issues and are perfectly bad guides to the knowledge projects that we need now that said let me read you a tiny little section from my recent recent book the companion species manifesto which gives you some of the tone of what I'm trying to do miss cayenne pepper continues to colonize all my cells a shure case of what the biologist lynn margulis calls sim biogenesis even though we share a placement in the phylum of vertebrates we inhabit not just different general and divergent families but altogether different orders yet I bet if you checked our DNA you'd find some potent transfection x' between us her saliva must have the nucleoid or viral vectors surely her darter tongue kisses have been irresistible how would we sort things out canid hominid pet professor woman animal human athlete handler one of us has a microchip injected under her neck skin for identification the other has a photo ID California driver's license one of us has a written record of her ancestors for twenty generations missing only approximately a million possible ancestors we all we all have gaps one of us does not know her great-grandparents names one of us product of a vast genetic mixture is called purebred one of us equally product of a vast mixture is called white each of these names designates a racial discourse and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh one of us is at the cusp of flaming youthful physical achievement the other is lefty but over the hill and we play a team sport called agility on the same expropriated native land where chi Ann's ancestors herded merino sheep these sheep were imported from the already colonial pastoral economy of Australia to feed the California Gold Rush 49ers in layers of history layers of biology layers of nature cultures one word complexity is the name of our game we are both freedom hungry offspring of conquest products of white settler colonies leaping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels on the playing field I'm sure our genomes are more alike than they should be there must be some molecular record of our touch and the codes of living that would leave traces in the world no matter that we reach reproductively silenced females inside the exigent discourses of biopower each and the way proper to her species class nation and time one by age and choice one by surgery and contract between breeder and buyer her red merle Australian Shepherds quick and live tongue has swab the tissues of my tonsils with all their eager immune system receptors I've warned her when she does this to babies that they don't have good bite inhibition those of you who have dogs know something about this problem who knows where my chemical receptors carry her messages or what she took from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside who knows how we companions and messmates acquired each other's genomes we have had forbidden conversation we have had oral intercourse we are bound and telling story upon story with nothing but the facts we are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand we are constitutive ly companion species we make each other up in the flesh significantly other to each other in a specific difference we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love this love is an historical aberration and a natural cultural legacy this lecture is an effort to sort out two things that flow from this aberration and this legacy one how might an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant other nests be learned from taking taking dog-human relationship chips seriously and to how my stories about dog human worlds finally convinced brain-damaged us Americans and maybe even less historically challenged people that history matters in nature cultures I offer dog eating props and half-trained arguments to reshape some stories I care about a great deal as a scholar and a person in my time and place the story is mainly about dogs passionately engaged in these accounts I hope to bring my readers into the kennel for life but I hope also that even the dog phobic or just those with their minds on higher things will find here arguments and stories that matter to the worlds we might yet live in the practices and actors and dog world's human human alike ought to be central concerns of techno science studies even closer to my heart I want my my hearers to know why I consider dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory or really the other way around that's that feminism has been very good on the problem of the general specific which Tom found out lack of manners earlier in the day now I turn from this introductory material to the section of lecture of a lecture that I call from the animal animal machine to the animal turn and I take my first text from a Jaffa da da in an English translation of lectures that he gave in 1997 in a conference held in his honor in France a commentary series of eight hours of commentary on the animal that he gave over a whole series of important critics of the ontological errors of the centering of the human as some kind of ontological certainty his commentary on Levinas not calm and a number of other thinkers are in that eight hours and Kerry Wolfe recently published an English translation the first time any of this has appeared in print in English or French that is titled and say the animal responded what if the animal responded is definitely does title in this commentary in the way that only he can do commentary on Lacan first of all the tiny little dependent clause which gave him some minor hope that the con was actually going to take animals seriously in his claims to be doing so and then discovered that immediately he was let down as the con ascribed to animals the capacity to make traces but not erase traces therefore setting up a de Rhydian commentary for whom making and erasing traces is his bread and butter a kind of mess mate with the question of the indistinguishability than undecidability between the making and erasing of traces and indeed the question of the power to make an erasing that make and erase traces is one of his major passionate concerns so that daily dot points out that particularly from a cycle on analytic viewpoint the asked the with holding or ascribing to capacities various capacities to animals you that they do where they don't have language either they do where they can't mourn either they do where they don't have ritually that they do where they don't do symbolic communication either they do where they don't that there is a truly infinite in principle list of can or can't that is involved in this panicked reaction of the question of relationality in companion species worlds Derrida is absolutely on the side of the angels and getting this dead right but there is one tiny little problem and he has entire discussion he doesn't actually say anything about any really existing animal except possibly humans and even that is perhaps only by courtesy um he says a great deal about other writers and I do believe in his heart of hearts he's actually interested in animals and perhaps in other places I haven't yet read he discusses a stickleback fish or a herring gull or a you know a damselfly or I don't know a particular intestinal bacterium or maybe the the Vibrio squids a concern the waters of Hawaii that produces these marvelous light organs maybe he actually takes it on outside of my view but I haven't found in doing it so some of you who read these matters with a better heart might show me the passages nonetheless I think he did as crucial work and I want him on my research team or an equivalent to Derrida equivalent on my research team so moving from the the correct critique of the problem of the animal machine which Andheri does opinion finally rests on the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic that's the one he's really after in this little piece the the bankruptcy of the firm distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic is his true target I turn now to the animal turn which I think actually has its most important it's kind of birth moment in a series of publications out of social geography interestingly enough a book called animal geographies in 1995 Marxist social geographers actually did something completely unexpected which is take animals seriously in their relation allottee in urban context and others and did some amazing social geography work in a book called animal geographies subsequently but really at the same time it sort of grew up independently in a number of places a group of cultural anthropologists led by Molly Mullins and Sarah Franklin staged some wonderful sessions at the American Anthropological Association that took up animal human relationships in a serious ethnographic way began to ask questions differently from the way they had been asked before I think that the animal turn as Sarah Franklin and Molly Mullins called it informed in fact by the very by the philosophical resources of Derrida and Foucault and others is doing some very important work along the lines of the kind of work cyborg anthropology is doing Mike Fischer Paul Ravenel many others that I will lump under cyborg anthropology irrespective of the fact they wouldn't particularly like the label well I want to turn instead to a bio anthropologist Barbara Smuts who I first knew as a young postdoc study in baboons in East Africa in the 1970s and I've subsequently remit as a person designing research projects around dog human relationships in US cities these days and studying with all of the mature apparatus that she has as a socio biologically trained behavioral ecologist behavioral by just now smudge says look folks this is a an article that she calls encounters with animal minds published last year in the Journal of consciousness studies certainly a suspect name but we'll let that go vol.8 I missed the first seventh you know miss a lot Barbara Smuts did something really crucial that I think depended on her knowing really actually existing baboons socially historically situated in a time and place that redid her ability to produce knowledge as a scientist in a particular historical moment that is to say she noticed when the baboons that she was following around assiduously 8 to 10 hours a day stopped treating her as a dangerous Rock and started treating her as just maybe a good enough baboon social subject to warrant training up to see if she could grow up and learn proper manners to cohabit the space with baboons so that she noticed the moment that they began treating her as a social subject who could just maybe learn so that she would respond properly to their particular conventions and manners they she would acquire good enough manners to deal with social space in a way that the baboons would recognize as appropriate adult behavior so that she talks about the moment where the baboons started expecting her to respond to yawns - stairs to threat gestures - affiliative gestures where the baboons started expecting her to be a proper social subject and she went on from there that's to talk about the issue of co-presence that kind of recognition seems to cross many sorts of species boundaries baboon human being a pretty easy one since we're both higher primates so-called higher but these these sorts of capacities actually seem to link us to organisms across a great range of taxonomic categories perhaps surprising perhaps not as much as interested in the the process of the recognition of co-presence and she talks about it in terms of metaphors of taste rather than in metaphors of vision or knowledge so that she says the recognition of Ko presence is a bit like tasting each other and then from that can possibly emerge with work on both sides social historical conventions for dealing with each other's across the communicative differences of evolutionary history I find Smuts as a way of thinking extremely provocative in my companions speciesism that I am proposing to you tonight still for a while okay from from the animal turn I can't see anymore is the problem of presbyopia and cataracts and Jack not to mention lighting we need bright lights once we get old but that said we move ahead because we're all pros here okay we move now to the third part of the shaggy-dog story having done the animal machine to the animal turn and this is the section on acquiring genomes I would like to discuss dog human relation a leti within the rubric of they acquired us and we acquired them and so what okay what would it mean to think dog human relation a leti historically evolutionarily social historically biocultural in F natural culturally under the sign of acquiring genomes with all of the multiple meanings of the word acquiring new you a kind of a hostile takeover what mode of acquiring the company of the genome is this that the genome is a mode capital is not news to anybody in this room but it is much more than that the genome is one of those wonderful polyvalent really existing entities patently produced in front of our very eyes that has reality effects that we have barely come to terms with so it's within that framework that I proposed the term acquiring genomes but I am in fact plagiarizing it from Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan there Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis his son together so we have the Stars and the intestinal flora Lynn Margulis did the intestinal flora and car say Carl Sagan did the stars and they had a boy child who co-authored with his mother this wonderful book acquiring genomes now Lynn Margulis is of the persuasion that anything interesting that's happened on the earth the bacteria did it first first important thing you need to know about her as a writer as a theorist as a biologist that there's truly nothing that has been done on the earth that the bacteria didn't do first and an awful lot has been forgotten that other organisms don't do that bacteria still do or were used to do and that in their book the origins plural of species which is really about the problem of the generation of serious organizational novelty in evolutionary history a problem that has never gone away cumulative mutation doesn't do the trick punctuated equilibrium is it kind of a multi polysyllabic cover-up for the inadequacy of cumulative mutation the problem of the generation of organizational novelty in the world emergence in short is far from solved it remains one of the most interesting biological problems as one of the most interesting historical and philosophical problems the emergence is a polysyllabic word which also covers the the fact that we don't have a really good clue to this fundamental matter now lynn margulis actually does have a pretty good clue to some aspects of emergence she she and her colleagues as I think persuasively demonstrated with really existing data the emergence of the nucleated cell the modern cell the equivalent of man those who have a proper center cells with nuclei you know the humanists of the biological world the emergence of eukaryotic eukaryote isset II I don't know eukaryotic cells out of basically bacteria gobbling each other up but failing to digest each other completely questions of eating each other and indigestion so that a H B but B refuses to turn into proper component parts for A's purposes and a hijacks what's left of B for some of its purposes well B carries on inside B various levels of integration for B's own purposes and they both continue to copy well enough and indeed might have quite an interesting narrative history of further organizational arrangements but basically we got a story of predator-prey and bad digestion as the fundamental motor of complexity in the living world now I think that goes a long way for my theory of companion speciesism where we are after all talking about messmates and oral intercourse I have by the way had people asked me if I mean it literally about cayenne and me having had oral intercourse I believe a question such as that does not deserve an answer in the way of most literal questions both and neither nor figured out now however so no Margolis and and her contraire in kids have this theory about the origin of biological complexity from various kinds of her word misogynist fusing misogynist couplings the infolding of strangers that's her term the infolding of strangers is a great biological concept the infolding of strangers and the ongoing history subsequent to the infolding now she means it on the whole in terms of what goes on at the level of the those boundaries between the prokaryotes and eukaryotes those with and without good nuclei as well as the really exploding field of ecological developmental biology for example the growing body of fascinating data that shows such things as this amazing light organ in the squid that inhabits some of the oprah upper ocean layers such that it at night they're glowing bellies look like the star that they're the light coming out of their bellies which comes from the symbian bacteria has the same kind of angle and property of moonlight and Starlight so that potential predators that think of them as the sky and not as a meal it's absolutely wonderful now this this obligatory symbiosis and the light organ itself the anatomical light organ which is uniquely the squids except that it's also the habitat for the obligate symbionts of the bacteria actually not quite oddly obligate they can be killed in the lab for example by heat and antibiotics which is one of the way of studying this stuff you know kill this look at that sort of tried-and-true biological methods ablation experiments of various sorts none less well forgive them their method sadism is not limited to biologists dissection of sentences is just as bad so nonetheless there's this fabulous starlight coming out of the bellies of squid and the organ of the squid won't develop unless they are infected at a particular moment in their developmental history by a particular variety of bacteria and happening those waters and indeed they have this fabulous sorting method to get just the right bacteria and to stimulate population of just that bacterium in there in there going to be light organs where the light organs don't be absolutely have these these fabulous ecological developmental histories which are turning out to be more the rule than the exception as the methods of molecular genetics and molecular biology more broadly get turned into tools for getting at the Congaree of associations that everybody is so the gene for this that and the other thing is a really a kind of a bad seriously bad reductionism in terms of what's really coming out of this kind of research these days a hold on emergence that's really wonderful now I use the marvelous work as trope certainly but I'm also interested in it as actual method as actual process in the world and I'm interested in dealing with what and it's sing taught me to do which is making scale going from going from scale to scale to scale the scale of temporality spaciality materiality the very little to the very big and the medium-sized I'm interested in the way acquiring genomes these the message Enosh fusions operate at many scales to produce various kinds of complexity okay so I use that to go to the third part of my lecture which I lost anyway R which is a particular way of talking about the history of dog human relationships at three scales one the molecular and the evolutionary which is of course both big and little but the molecular evolutionary and species cohabitation history of these beings as as symbionts species cohabiting species to the scale that is normally meant by history you know nation building labor processes immigration state formations blah blah blah the historical time in short in the normal ways that historians use it and then finally face-to-face time the the scale of the intimate partner the face-to-face partner the the scale of the of the intimate partner okay both its temporality and its speciality these three modes of temporality and spatiality are quite different from each other but I think all three are illuminated by notions of acquiring genomes okay now first let's take the molecular and evolutionary and I'm going to do this so fast it will vanish if you don't listen hard and that is to say that the old story of dogs is the first tool of conquering man who realizes his intention in the flesh of the other and produces the dog is the servant out of the master man is a bad story that it may be true the dogs are among the first domesticated animals though probably pigs have pride of place here but what is certainly not true is the notion that the domestication was the result of human technological intentionality or in spite of the lack of intentionality among those primitive humans it happened anyway and then they put it to use and it was as good as intentionality and in any case the dog ended up serving in them and the man in a master and we have kind of Hegel in the kennel version of domestication that's why deep ecologists love this story because they love to hate it because then dogs are the sign of the the complete you know abandonment of the free and noble wolf that dogs are vermin dogs are from the get-go not but the realization of someone else's intention okay that's the story of domestication as it's usually told well it fails on the grounds of evidence it just isn't true one might make a minor point that almost certainly the early moves in the sagas of domestication were by both both and/or all sets of organisms involved but in this one dogs probably took advantage of wasteful primate habits and the calorie bonanzas that we have left a law left around coextensive with the existence of homo and probably before what we call homo the piles the garbage piles the mittens the leavings that produce calorie bonanzas for others including wolf want to be dogs who undergo a whole series of changes that allow them to reduce reduce flight you know improved marrow tolerance distances to hang out closer to flee less readily to quell the flight fright hormones to cohabit with these dangerous opportunistic social organisms all too much like themselves and that from those early moments of multiple agency and opportunism almost every imaginable kind of relationship has ensued between dogs and humans both beautiful and truly appallingly ugly brutalities and joys that should surprise no one that one can no more talk about the dog than one can talk about the Vow human the situatedness is relentless but not infinite indefinite but not infinite and that's the story of coevolution and domestication now at the level of histories hey I'm still ok at the level of histories I would like to tell you a little bit of a story about Australian Shepherds because I introduced to you Cayenne a few minutes ago I now introduce to you Dogon grit winning high end sheep at the trial in Bakersfield last fall what an Australian Shepherd looks like working there's another Australian Shepherd working cattle these are the first thing that needs to be said about Australian shepherds were working herding dogs is that they have almost nothing to do with Australia except their name except for the fact that they probably picked up the name Australian Shepherd in the context of the massive importation of sheep into California to field feed disappointed miners beginning in approximately 18-49 so that sheep are import are sailed around horn into California they're taken from the nearby white settler colony nearby is relative the nearby white settler colony of Australia merino sheep that had been part of flourishing export trade and sheep the king Spain gave the Sheep to Saxony who imported the colonies and then they get imported to California to feel the gold feed the 49ers the Sheep economy of California introduced by the Spanish as part of the mission ization of the Indians had declined by the middle of the 19th century along with them the Native Americans in question the Sheep economy had collapsed and needed to be reawakened in a way that changed the land of California forever so that the massive importation of these highly destructive herbivores and the taking up of Collies mainly a motley of English colleagues who happen to be around an occasional German collie coming with the Australian called German because they live next door to German settlers in a strip now never mind ok it came on ship and an occasional basket AAG that that might have come over with Bossk actual actually folks hoping to make it rich in the gold mines who hadn't even necessarily been herders in the Basque regions of Spain the Basque who went to Australia actually went in the early 20th century and a sugar cane workers not herders those who came to California came as Gold Rush folks by and large and also came up from the southwest and Mexico for the same purposes and because my by and large they didn't strike it rich they end up dealing with these English colonies called Basque dogs to herd merino sheep to feed Anglo settlers and what began in the gold rush was finished after the Civil War I assure you as the extraordinary consolidation of Ecology's will politely call them the Ecology's of the post Gold Rush and post-civil war West depended on the work of dogs like these okay now I have a dog like that therefore what I have inherited in the flesh part of the conquest part of very historically specific biologies and and various kinds of a logical change I have inherited a kind of accountability for certain sets of sovereignty considerations restoration ecology a reconsideration of the meet industrial complex a reconsideration of the jobs of dogs I have acquired a genome and they have acquired me we have specially we have respect we have a question of accountability in having acquired each other's genome in these very specific nature cultures which have everything to do with messmates with eating together with breaking bread now there are people in breed scenes Australian Shepherds who understand very well the responsibilities that they have inherited in acquiring a genome I've spent a lot of time with some of the folks who are activists in the breed clubs around health and genetic issues and part of the accountability of acquiring genome that I will just reference for you quickly can be shown by a woman named see a sharp film and cinema studies college person's self educated in biology very savvy in pedigree analysis has elaborate databases in Australia how come I have a 20 generation pedigree on my dog is because of CAS databases she knows every australian shepherd who has ever gotten a sick she has poop she does a little kitchen table laptop publishing operation called the double helix network news she counsels breeders she is exceedingly discreet and good on confidentiality she is co-founded with others the Australian Shepherd health and genetics Institute she teaches dog people how to solicit and work with scientists she teaches scientists how to get along with dog people she translates she runs a genome anything she does a genome project having gotten it that when you have a dog a dog has a human and that she has a kind of accountability and responsibility a question of respect in her companion speciesism in her in her companionship her breaking bread and her multilevel species relationship but I'm going to finish my lecture I'm going to finish my lecture with face to face time and I'm going to do that there are a number of ways that I've been thinking about face to face obviously I am alluding to others who have thought about face and encounter but this is infected differently I'm interested in questions of intimacy questions of honesty questions of ethical encounter and questions of acquiring each other that might be dealt with that way and to do that I'm going to read for you a little piece assuming I can find it okay from the companion species manifesto that I call Marcos story I acquired a god kid a god kid acquired a God dog one acquires a kid out of the international adoption market what acquires a dog out of this one had these the kid and the dog acquired each other in the way I am about to tell you mark oh my god son is Kyon's god kid she is his God dog we are a fictive kin group in training perhaps our family coat of arms would take its model from the Berkley canine literary politics and arts magazine that is modeled after the barb namely the bark whose masthead reads dog is my co-pilot the title of a book that just came out published by the bark which I recommend when cayenne was 12 weeks old in mark oh six years old my husband Rustin and I gave him puppy training lessons for Christmas with cayenne and her crate in the car I would pick Marco up from school on Tuesdays drive to the Burger King for a planet sustaining health food dinner of burgers coke and fries and then head out to the Santa Cruz SPCA for our lesson the improving discourses pervade dog land the Santa Cruz SPCA is an excellent example of the improving discourses in action now like many of her breed Cayenne was a smart and willing youngster a natural to obedience games like many of his generation raised on high speed special visual special effects and automated cyborg toys marco was a bright and motivated trainer a natural to control games kyon learned Q's fast so she quickly plopped her bum on the ground in response to a sit command besides she practiced at home with me entranced Marco at first treated her like a microchip implanted truck for which he held the remote controls he punched an imaginary button his pad his puppy magically fulfilled the intentions of his own nipa tenth remote will God was threatening to become our co-pilot I an obsessive adult who came of age in the communes of the late 1960s was committed to ideals of intersubjectivity and mutuality in all things certainly including dog and boy training the illusion of mutual attention and communication would be better than nothing but I really wanted more than that besides here I was the only adult of either species present intersubjectivity does not mean equality a literally deadly game in dog land but it does mean paying attention to the conjoint dance a face to face significant other nuts in addition control freak that I am I got to call the shots at least on Tuesday nights Marco was at the same time taking karate lessons and he was profoundly in love with his karate master this fine man understood the children's love of drama ritual and costume as well as the mental spiritual bodily discipline of his martial art respect was the word and the act that Marco ecstatically told me about from his lessons he swooned at the chance to collect his small robed self into prescribed posture and bow formally to his master or partner before performing a form there's the puppy that was the boy calming is turbulent first grade self and meeting the eyes of his teacher or his partner in preparation for demanding stylized action thrilled him hey was I going to let an opportunity like that go unused in my pursuit of companion species flourishing Marco I said Cayenne is not a cyborg truck she is your partner in a martial art called obedience you are the older partner and the master here you have learned how to perform respect with your body and your eyes your job is to teach the form to Cayenne until you can find a way to teach you how to collect your galloping puppy self calmly and to hold still and look you in the eyes you cannot let her perform the sit command it would not be enough for her to just to sit on cue and for him to click and treat that would be necessary certainly but the order was wrong first these two youngsters had to learn to notice each other they had to be in the same game it is my belief that Marco began to emerge as a dog trainer over the next six weeks it is also my belief that as he learned to show her the corporeal posture of cross-species respect she and he became significant others to each other two years later out of the kitchen window I glimpsed Marco in my backyard doing 12 weave poles with cayenne when nobody else was present the weave poles 2 feet apart pulls in a line that the dog weaves in and out of at speed the weave poles are one of the most difficult agility objects to teach and to perform I think Diane's and Marcos fast beautiful weave poles were worthy of his karate master there they are being messmates and that's Cayenne performing that's Cayenne also at work that's my bad Australian Shepherd Chow Cross also at work he the AKC thinks of him as an Australian Shepherd because I did a little fraudulent registering now Marko's story like this lecture is about in Karis Thompson's terms ontological choreography which is that vital sort of play that the participants invent out of the histories of body and mind they inherit and that they rework into the fleshly verbs that make them who they are they invented this game this game remodels them meta plasm is the word acquiring genomes is the name of the game it always comes back to the biological flavor of the important words the word is made flesh in nature cultures that's the pedagogy thank our improving discourses did not extend the temperance but that is a really well regard actually there's a well-regarded training book that's in there too but we've both been working rather hard before you have a chance to break bread with Donna in formal we'll have a few questions who would like to did you use the microphone or repeat questions please I well I use the microphone the question might use the microphones they're noise so it can actually pass around town not good okay then it's then that can be done just rather trivial observation would be interesting oh there you are I lost directionality because of the microphone just a rather trivial observation this is extraordinary difference across the British channel between the English have this extraordinary steam prapannam to the extent refused to send horses welcome friends to be slaughtered for consumption tell that to the people whose sheep were slaughtered in the hoof-and-mouth disease fiasco one hypothesis like her as a lapsed Catholic you may have some is that yes slaughter comes natural to the Lambs got anyway papayas taught me bad guy sorry as English are always a little uncertain of the relationship to God and therefore this uncertainty spills over those big animals around whereas the French as Catholics are have no anxiety whatsoever about their interaction with God and animals can look after themselves now I'm just curious on your take hysterical laughter oh well I think it probably is a little bit of a broad brush approach I mean I hardly regard the Church of England this particularly Protestant so you know maybe the Methodists among them have this particular well besides the dogs in Paris or something else again you know the little pooper scoopers that the Parisians have surely match anything the British do which we talked talked about within what I will call a broad range of different discourses and context to the emergence of the vertebrates from the celli are these really similar phenomena or is there well that ends up being a that is up interestingly and recently at least a partially empirical question are there incidents of change in fundamental biological organization that work bison biogenetic processes or not is this restricted to are these processes really only operating at the levels of protech peace and I'm you know prokaryotes and so on are these only working at considerably smaller levels of biological organization or not and the reason I gave you the squid bacterial symbiotic example is because that sort of cohabitation that is pretty ends up being then pretty fundamental to the kinds of ecology the kinds of niches that can be occupied by that association to the capacities of the organisms really pretty fundamentally effective there in a way that surely would be subject to selection that one could a man and perhaps even deal to some degree empirically with ecological developmental questions as evolutionary emergent organization questions you know these are at the very you know these are emergent research practices but I think that the tools are beginning to be available for asking questions that simply couldn't be asked other than speculatively until now and but the one begins to be able to do something with things like this hi a little yeah two questions very brief uh I want to comment on the relationship or when if you'd comment on the relationship between the whole notion of the pure breed and sort of the mongrel is a non pure greed I wonder how that that fashion accessory of the New York elite tell it's like the mutts yeah how that's like a Third Reich quality to all the talk about breeding sort of intersects the issues about nature culture that you're sort of most interested in and then the second question is I'll put my bad cross back on it yes go ahead all that shows no returns never mind with well that's it that's an important question eugenics and breeding the improvement of the germ of the improvement of stock and there is absolutely no question that dogs as other other organisms such as cattle and sheep and and chickens and bunkin so forth and so on are subject to eugenic practices and eugenic discourses in a way that has become at the very least a source of anxiety when applied to people though alas at last it wasn't so much a source of anxiety in the recent past now one of the several things I had to let go to an appalling number of prejudices when I actually started hanging out with dog people who do breeding and talk the eugenics discourse because I had to get it that the similarities I heard were often misleading and that eugenic discourse in dog land while sometimes like what it is inhuman land is often doing different work both materially and culturally and that I'd better start paying attention to the actual idiom of real-life dog people and not assuming I knew in advance what eugenic discourse was doing okay that's a kind of preliminary attention to Great Pyrenees breeders for example who are you know perfectly into improving their lines and and breeding back on to the writ you know to somehow get back to the really great dog and so on all the rest of it that they're also doing something that is that is about something else that they and furthermore that it is truly not the same thing to do the to do these discs or with cattle and dogs and people that the species differences do matter and that's one of the lessons one gets in refusing anthropomorphism and projection as an adequate way of dealing with the problem of relationality including the problem of power and hierarchy independence and eating each other so and that say to continue an extraordinary amount of important symbolic work still gets done on the bodies of the animals racializing work gender work class work so forth work that works through breeding practices the dogs are inserted into bio power through breeding discourses with a vengeance and eugenics is only one little piece of that puzzle actually the sterilization discourse is interesting even more than the eugenics discourses and the sterilization discourse has hit both the purebreds and the mutts in a range of ways and mahtim is no exit from the dilemma not only is the well appointed mutt the the elite fashion accessory in contemporary New York over the purebred they are as susceptible to Bennett ization as purebred ok one can safely say not only that there the international adoption market in small bodied mutts is a fascinating place to look at contradictions and get it that there's no place to head for innocence so that the pipeline from the hard streets of Puerto Rico to the forever homes of Massachusetts for the small bodied mutt for which there is a shortage and the no-kill shelters in the the zones of the the forever homeland that have adopted the sterilization practices and therefore no longer have enough desirable mutts they also have a rescue hound program from the American South that has been a little slow to pick up the sterilization discourse so that you know well in downtown still roam the countryside and produce dogs for the forever homes of Massachusetts so that literally 10,000 were Tareq and mutts have been adopted into forever homes from the hard streets and I've paid some attention to the family discourses in the international adoption practices and the home visits and the contracts you sign and the training discourses you take on the pedagogy zand it is just wonderful so I assure you sitting purebred eugenics is not exiting the domains of bio power with all of their contradictions and complexities right here in front in both the speech tonight and in the manifesto there's an issue IP listen I don't feel its address yet and that's sort of the issue of power I noticed on one hand with all the you know coevolution and the new child a little - companion I know an affiliate in my channel a language and Marcos story is of obedience and control and so I'm wondering is the parrot power dynamic a matter of inherent relationship or historical moment or both I think that power relationships pervade every form of mass maitre d rizal power however the specificity of power relationships and dog human relationships are quite different from those say between adult humans and child humans or among adult friends human friends or lovers that the specificities matter both their historical specificities and a few other biological species specificities one of the things that interests me about face to face ethical discourse between me and my dogs is that I cannot forget that equality would kill my dogs that equality would be about the most irresponsible thing I could do that if I am owed of dishonesty that would kill my dogs would be to do a kind of liberal equality discourse with them so that the martial art of obedience is not a joke it's about the chances of life and death and contemporary dog human cultures in the world in which we live if my dog bites a kid even a minor bite my dog will get killed the kid might also be hurt I suppose I care that's a bad joke I do care I said that for when they sink actually it was one of those you know moments of things slipping out they should never have been said I I think that that one of the forms of honesty that that face-to-face relationality with dogs forces on me is confrontation with my ideological commitments to various kinds of democratic discourses which isn't the same about to give them up comprehensively or you know toss them into the trash bin but I think you can't do dog human relation a leti without getting it that this not that you can't base this relationship on equality and furthermore that if you want to do something interesting together the Vikki Hearn does this particularly well within sort of Jeffersonian discourse the possibility of really doing something beautiful the possibility of achieving skill rests on a kind of discipline that has to do with I have a dog a dog has me they have a right to the consequences of their actions and that involves the discipline of training and training is not a discipline of equality anymore in schools for human children or in the way I work with my dog and agility well thank you very much you

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Published: Tue Oct 25 2011