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Abstract
“A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and The Companion Species Manifesto open wide discussions about identity, relationship, and what Donna Haraway calls the material-semiotic knot. Haraway’s deconstruction of the semiotic-material binary implicates, this essay argues, a whole suite of binaries: content-form, representation-the represented, animal-plant, active-passive, teaching-learning, writing-reading, inside-outside. This essay and the classroom it is about show how the studying of these texts and themes can involve a practice of material-semiotic knottedness, in turn putting pressure on the implicated binaries. Following Haraway’s lead, this essay and the classroom it is about explore how personal lived material experience is already knotted with how we read and make theory. They find their way to the mimosa, a plant and a figure (in Haraway’s sense) that helps with thinking through Haraway’s radical ontology.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 97–98.
2 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 98.
3 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 65.
4 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 81.
5 Johnson, Generall Historie of Plantes, 1599.
6 See Kelley, Clandestine Marriage.
7 [Darwin], The Botanic Garden, 25.
8 Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant.”
9 Shelley, quoted in Kitani, “Sensibility,” 35.
10 For details of this research, see Braam, “In Touch”; Eisner, “Leaf Folding”; and Fromm and Lautner, “Electrical Signals.”
11 Gagliano et al., “Experience,” 63.
12 Helgason et al., “Ploughing?”
13 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 122.
14 Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees.
15 Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses.
16 Marder, Plant Thinking.
17 Hansen, The Triumph of Seeds.
18 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. vegetable.
19 Haraway, When Species Meet, 206.
20 Pollan, The Botany of Desire, xv.
21 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 6.
22 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 6; When Species Meet, 3.
23 Haraway, When Species Meet, 336n27.
24 Haraway, When Species Meet, 70–71.
25 Levine, Dying to Know.
26 Revelles-Benavente and González Ramos, Teaching Gender, 2.
27 Revelles-Benavente and González Ramos, Teaching Gender, 2.
28 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 19.
29 Butler, Gender Trouble, xviii.
30 Butler, Gender Trouble, xix.
31 Butler, Gender Trouble, xix.
32 Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” 53.
33 Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” 53.
34 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 18.
35 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 20.
36 In her introduction to The Donna Haraway Reader, Haraway describes metaplasm, her “favorite trope these days,” as a “remolding or remodeling” (2). It usually involves the alteration of a word by removal, addition, or transposition of letters.
37 Haraway, When Species Meet, 4.
38 Haraway, When Species Meet, 383n11.
39 Morton, “Ecology as Text,” 3.
40 Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” 53.
41 Lentricchia, “The Last Will,” 31.
42 Lentricchia, “The Last Will,” 31.
43 Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 74.