First, some dog agility training:

This one is long but even just a few minutes will do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG6TeAn4N6I&list=FLXtYxn6KLvi7vUCO6kh95Iw&index=2&t=313s

Sweet Ollie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4N7G29GWQI

In this post, I want to share what has been helpful for me in thinking about Donna Haraway’s work. This is, perhaps, elementary but I found so much of my thinking around her work particularly dealing with non-human animals and post-humanism solidified when I watched dog agility competitions online such as the UK’s Cruft’s Dog Show (clips from which are above). Speaking directly to ideas discussed in When Species Meet and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Haraway explores the boundary between human and the non-human animal through an exploration of the ways in which dogs, other critters, and humans have evolved together. Centered on the domestic, her work rallies against human exceptionalism. In The Companion Species Manifesto, she focuses on her own dog, Ms. Cayenne Pepper, and uses dog agility training as an example of two species who are in communication with one another in a way that is not merely an “owner” asking its “pet” to perform tricks. Rather, clearly illustrated in agility training, the dog’s agency is clearly visible—they can choose not to follow a command, to bark and yip, or go off course. It is not an instance of a non-human animal “performing” for their “owner.” There is an entire relationship between handler and dog wherein each creature has agency.

In her latest work from which we read an excerpt, it seems that Haraway is expanding her focus from the domestic and dogs to thinking of ourselves and other critters as a compost—a continual, joyous “becoming with” one another in all our creaturely forms: animal, human, and plant life, micro, and macro. Haraway envisions this compost as a literal, but not pejorative, hot mess wherein “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” She also expresses this idea through the idea of the tentacular wherein “The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres.” And it is an attention to the present—to this hot messy compost—that we must begin wherein we must be “truly present . . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1). Haraway urges readers to be open to “unexpected” collaborations (4). So, back to dog agility training—could we begin to conceptualize of this compost as numerous conscious and unconscious collaborations like the relationship or collaboration of that between dog and human? If we think of the compost of all organisms and beings on earth, then could we situate dogs and humans as one of these collaborations?

Again, that’s probably simple stuff when it comes to Haraway. But I suppose in reading this it wasn’t until I started thinking back to agility competitions that it clicked for me. I am curious as to what implications Haraway’s recent work has for gender?

Yesterday at a seminar at Stanford, Jasbir Puar engaged a set of considerations that I want to think about in light of today’s reading as well as the last few weeks. Keeping in mind that these questions are only a part of what Puar was discussing and brought certain considerations to the forefront for me, they are not the only statements Puar was making in the context of current liberation struggles in Palestine. Puar introduced some of her thinking in her upcoming book, where she engages with Foucault’s biopolitics and Membe’s necropolitics. In the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine Puar sees a specific difference that she terms “the right to main.” Puar positioned Palestine as exemplary of a contemporary control society, where all movement is under surveillance and regulated to the point that in Puar’s words, “there is no plane of redemption or relief, no fantasy that the occupation will change, and no fantasy that if it did lives would change, therefore there is no ‘good life’ to aspire to.” Puar theorizing “maiming” vs killing as an act that produces a discourse of humanitarian benevolence, that helps reify narratives of liberalism surrounding Israel.

I was struck by this condition Puar articulated as a lack of a future “good life” and it invoked for me Ahmed’s thinking around happiness. For Ahmed, future happiness is not a necessary ingredient for revolutionary consciousness. If as Puar says, there is no aspiration to a good life in Palestine, what is striking to me, is that this does not equate to an apathy or lack of revolutionary movement. In Speculate This! speculation is defined as “[…] essentially always about potentiality: a reach toward those futures that are already latent in the present, those possibilities that already exist embedded in the here and now, about human and nonhuman power, which is, in effect, the ability to become different from what is present.” In the context of Palestine, the potentiality of liberation, if we take seriously Puar’s concerns around “no good life,” would fall into the category of affirmative speculation, “embracing uncertainty.” What kinds of temporal concepts are being invoked in Speculate This!? How does this relate to a question Puar’s asked yesterday? “What happens to forms of temporal attachments if they must give up the “fantasy” of temporal futurity (in context of good life)?”

While trying to consider this example, the extremity of surveillance and lack of autonomy experienced by Gazans, both Dawn and Critical Thought in the Face of Capitalist Hydra I came to mind.  In Dawn, despite the reality of being contained and under constant surveillance, the futurity and hope lay in the possibility of freedom and autonomy that may be possible once back on Earth. In the case of the EZLN, autonomy has looked like a many decade autonomous project where everything from governance, basic daily needs, education, and theorization around gender and futurity, comes from the maintenance of that autonomy. As Ahmed makes clear with her considerations of happiness, it is not possible to read revolutionary potentiality within the context of a future that is perfectly legible to all. Thinking of these in tandem with the conditions of possibility that Puar described in the context of Palestine, motivates me to further interrogate ideas around revolutionary imaginary, autonomy, and how we as a class were and weren’t articulating them around the EZLN text.

1. I’m interested in the idea of Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra as a collective work. While it is clearly a transcription of an event, the act of turning the seminar into a text so that it can be read at a later date is interesting to me. Is collaborative writing/art making/archiving an activist and/or feminist act? I’m reminded of disparate texts such as poet C.D. Wright’s One With Others wherein different voices/texts describe a moment in history and various POVs are included within one work. Likewise, I was also thinking about Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets as her work also includes a collection of voices (and, of course, there are many other texts that embody such collectivities of voices/places/groups). What does it mean to decenter a single author from a text, a manifesto, or an event? What does this communicate about the event’s or text’s politics? It allows for interruption as we see on 109 with the collected voices of non-indigenous women. It also allows for contradiction and complexity to arise. Going back to this section again about the experience of Zapatista women and youths, only pages earlier did a young Zapatista express their pride over not wearing the clothing that the very women would later justify wearing. Perhaps, in this way, a collective text also allows for conversation.
2. This comment is, perhaps, more telling for myself than for anyone else as I struggle with dense theoretical texts but I was pleasantly surprised at the clarity of the EZLN’s work. I’m curious what role accessibility plays in theory and activism? Should it all be “accessible?” What does it mean to be accessible? Rather, what do we (“we” as in creators) prioritize (accessibility, clarity, rhetoric) and how does this relate to a text/piece/event’s goals?
3. I am fascinated with Ana Mendieta’s work and spent a good few hours Thursday night learning more about her art and her life. I didn’t know who she was prior to this class and am both astonished and unsettled by her work and her life (rather, her tragic and mysterious death). The repetition of her body in the siluetas series that traverses a multitude of places and affects show the malleability of a (fragmented? absent? suggested? body that was once there but has vanished?) body that simultaneously allows for regeneration (flowers, a body seeming masked by a tree, etc.) and for violence and disintegration (blood on sand, a flame silhouette). The body vanishes, blends, becomes with, grows, dies, evaporates, and burns, among other acts. Is Mendieta returning to the earth or is she escaping it? Is she grounding herself or evaporating? I’m also fascinated by the possibility for remnants of other unknown bodies in these pieces. I wonder if there is a suggestion of the bodies that have come before and grown into something else: dissolved into smoke, grown into a field, or washed away in the sand? What are the silhouettes that have come before Mendieta’s work and what will come after? What role does temporality play in her work?

A sparse, omniscient voice narrates Octavia Butler’s Dawn yet information is released according to the experience of the protagonist, Lillith. Expository information is released slowly and carefully, wherein the situation regarding Lillith’s captivity and her history further spirals into complexity with each chapter, resulting in an unsettling novel that engages themes of captivity, colonization, consent, human nature, compost and regeneration, hierarchy and domination, and human and more-than-human and other-than-human relations, among other ideas.

Butler resists simplistic dualisms wherein the Oankali are “good” and the human race is “bad.” Butler’s portrayal of humans (essentially, ruining the earth) is seemingly pessimistic, but the Oankali’s relationship with the “rescued” humans is one that resonates with colonialism, internment camps, and slavery. Given Dawn is the first in a series, the book ends with no resolution to any of the challenges or inequalities posed. Thematically, I’m curious what this choice (complication of the dualism between “good” and “bad” beings wherein both species are flawed) conveys. 

I’m also interested in the role of non-human-animals in this novel (as opposed to human-animals and “aliens”) given the use of non-human-animals as a way for Lillith to capture her experience in language. She describes her captors as being like sea creatures yet she also describes herself as being like a captive non-human-animal. I’m wondering where the politics of animal rights resides in this text (if at all). It is also interesting that the ship itself is alive and, seemingly, composting waste and generating new materials. What is the line between human, non-human-animal, and extraterrestrial in Dawn? Apart from Dawn, how would humans regard non-human-animals if non-human-animals could speak or communicate with humans on their own terms? Furthermore, what does Dawn convey about the power of language and translation to unite, manipulate, and/or exclude?