Composite Lives: Making-With Our Multispecies Kin (Imagine!)

Abstract

Inspired by the companionist, compostist philosophies of Donna Haraway, this article imagines a sympoietic life narrative that traverses life and lives (individual, social, biological, special, molecular, atomic), demanding we engage in an emergent autobiomediated collaboration with other human, nonhuman, and nonanimal lives—making-with our multispecies kin. Imagine!

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 González, “Envisioning Cyborg Bodies,” 267.

2 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149.

3 Critiquing contemporary speculative research practices, media theorist Jussi Parikka argues that “the imaginary functions as a sort of a reality-producing device that is irreducible to psychological or sociological methods of explanation,” “often designed to be out of place,” “designed to shift the space of the possible,” “incorporating practices that shift the coordinates of what is possible.” This explains why the figure of the cyborg is so crucial, and why companions, critters, and lichen take on such a significant role in the (re)imagination of life narratives: they each attempt to shift the space of the possible. Parikka, “The Lab Imaginary,” 79.

4 Derrida, Dissemination, 355.

5 Derrida, Geneses, 19.

6 Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer,” 843.

7 Haraway feels uncomfortable with the label “posthumanism,” instead preferring “companion species,” citing the rationale that posthumanism threatens simply to replicate humanism’s errors: “I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences. Fundamentally, however, it is the patterns of relationality and, in Karen Barad’s terms, intra-actions at many scales of space–time that need rethinking, not getting beyond one troubled category for a worse one even more likely to go postal. The partners do not precede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with: those are the mantras of companion species.” Haraway, When Species Meet, 17. In this article, I deliberately avoid the term “posthumanism” wherever possible in favor of a less anthropocentric, more multispecies “companionism.”

8 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies; Chen, Animacies; Braidotti, The Posthuman.

9 Smith, “Reading the Posthuman Backward,” 138–139.

10 Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene.”

11 Frost, Biocultural Creatures, 17.

12 Guthman and Mansfield, “Implications,” 497.

13 Braidotti, “Four Theses,” 21.

14 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 815.

15 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 46.

16 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 13.

17 Smith, “Narrating Lives,” 570.

18 Hengel, “Zoegraphy,” 8.

19 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 279.

20 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12.

21 See Dünne and Moser, “Allgemeine Einleitung”; Gernalzick, “Lives and Deaths”; Huff, “After Auto, after Bio”; and Smith and Watson, “Virtually Me.”

22 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 279.

23 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 149.

24 Mitchell, Me++.

25 Mitchell, Me++, 62.

26 Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto,” 3.

27 Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto,” 2–3.

28 Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto,” 20.

29 Haraway, “The Companion Species Manifesto,” 25.

30 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 10.

31 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 16.

32 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33.

33 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58.

34 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33.

35 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 65.

36 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 97.

37 Debaise, Nature as Event.

38 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 97.

39 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 55.

40 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 56.

41 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12.