Companion species and comrades: a critique of ‘plural relating’ in Donna Haraway's theory manifestos

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Donna Haraway's manifesto writing, focusing on the ethical prescription of how to relate with human and nonhuman others. Haraway prescribes a compass, however broad, about how the human species should connect with nonhumans, foregrounding unexpected kinships, multispecies flourishing, mutuality and the ability to respond to significant others. I call this an ethics of ‘plural relating’, a relating that regards potential partnerships with all existence on earth, irrespectively of their biological and cognitive status, from insects to dogs and bacteria to pigeons. I argue that while useful for opening affective bridges with nonhuman others, plural relating may end up advancing a loose and problematic figure of bonding that mirrors neoliberal ‘fluid’ relationalities. By discussing my own ethnographic research on an ‘invasive species’ and paying attention to the intensity of bonding and the agency of bonding parts, I hold that plural relating runs the danger of obscuring processes of social antagonism and reproducing structures of domination. I argue that the question should not just be how we relate with beneficial or harmful animal others but a more overall one: how do we relate with those others who share the same desire for changing or abolishing repressive institutions in a socio-economic context that favours partial relating? For this end, stronger figures of bonding, such as the comrade, have to be embraced.

KEYWORDS:

• Donna Haraway
• manifestos
• nonhuman others
• kinship
• political bonding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Later in this text I draw on Rossi Braidotti (2017) to describe the usage of the notion of ‘figure’ in posthumanism and beyond.

2 This is done as the above project and critical posthumanism in general purport to speak from the perspective of the intellectual, academic and often political Left.

3 Fredrick Jameson saw the rise of ‘theory’ as a symptom of postmodernism, fragmenting and interdisciplinarising areas of study (1999).

4 As Jameson notes the term ‘French theory’ has been used to apply to the ‘uncategorizable work of people like Michel Foucault’ (1998, 3).

5 Such manifesto book series include the ‘Manifestos for the 21st Century' by Chicago University Press or the ‘Manifesto Series’ by Polity Books.

6 This illustrates the general tendency of the contemporary manifesto to turn from a ‘genre of action’ – in its classic forms – to ‘a genre of reflection’ (Puchner 2002, 453).

7 Haraway proclaims: ‘If not in my own body, surely in those of my friends, I will someday owe to OncoMouse™ or her subsequently designed rodent kin a large debt’ (2008, 76).

8 More information about the status of lagocephalus as invasive species can be found in the following link: https://eosc-portal.eu/pufferfish-invasion-mediterranean-sea-demonstrator

9 In the constant bombardment of images that characterises this condition, the ‘animal other’ plays a prominent role as a loosely constructed affective pole (Marx 2019). This is expressed for instance in the ‘economy of cuteness’, where the charismatic animals – from cats to sloths – are made to capture the users’ attention, so as to share, circulate and participate in maintaining the stream of information (Marx 2019).

10 Even if mutuality could in some degree be shared with a few more proximate animals to humans, like dogs, cats or some mammals, this is not enough to overgeneralize potential partnership with all animals.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Panos Kompatsiaris

Panos Kompatsiaris teaches cultural and media theory at HSE University in Moscow and is a research associate at IULM in Milan. He is the author of The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials (2017) as well as of several articles on art, theory and cultural politics.