Book Review: Donna Haraway,Manifestly Haraway

I have been inspired, invigorated, provoked and irritated by both Donna Haraway’s manifesto pieces, and experienced all this again yet in different ways, as new things presented themselves to me. There is certainly something to be gained from reading them one after the other as presented in Manifestly Haraway. The new material here, particularly the extended conversation with Cary Wolfe that runs to almost a hundred pages, is illuminating and engaging; contextualising the manifestos and considering how some of these early ideas are developing alongside fresh concepts and influences as Haraway reaches towards her new book.

Returning to the Cyborg Manifesto reminded me why Haraway makes me smile; as Wolfe puts it in his introduction, she is ‘winking at the reader here only to do some serious cage rattling in the very next page’ (p. viii). It recalls the theoretical and practical political tensions around difference that were integral to feminisms of the 1980s; and which – despite the comforting blanket of intersectionality – still haunt critical theory and radical politics. Whether or not we are drawn to the trope of the cyborg as a dualist-busting boundary transgressor, Haraway’s contribution to accepting the partiality of feminist understandings and the inevitability of contradiction has had significant influence. This is such that many of us will wonder why heads might have been shaking in the 1980s on reading that ‘Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters’ (p. 15). Some of the insights from 1985 are heard far more insistently now, and the claim that a key ‘difficulty’ to be faced is the ‘inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self’ (p. 23) stands out particularly for me, informing my current projects and those of many others working in multi-species studies. The writing still arrests the reader with its breadth, economy and panache. My colleague and co-adventurer into more-than-human worlds Debra (Debbie) Shaw, says ‘I can still remember where I was, what I was wearing and what the weather was like the first time I read the Cyborg Manifesto.’ For Debbie, cyborg ontology signals all the other entanglements we have yet to address, and is prescient of some of the technophiliac dangers we face. Cyborg irony powerfully undermines ‘taxonomic hierarchies and troubles the distinctions which make “human” an exclusive category’ (Debbie, personal communication). The Companion Species Manifesto attends to this too; yet while Debbie has more reservations here, I probably have fewer.

Reading both together indicates not only shifts in contexts, but in focus and position. For Manifesto 1, the task for feminism and for ‘us all’ is ‘to survive in the diaspora’ (p. 46) in conditions of gendered vulnerability and insecurity (p. 49). The question of making liveable worlds in insecure times also underpins Manifesto 2, yet here the concern is multi-species worlds that are co-evolving and co-habited. There are those who consider this to be a less political piece, less concerned with developing anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminist critique than its predecessor. For my friend Debbie, there is also an exclusivity in the caninophilia, and the development of ‘potential oppositional subjectivities based on very particular histories of species-relating’ (Debbie, personal communication). While I quite see the point, I am drawn to the more distinctly embodied Haraway here. Haraway herself considers that her critiques are quite present in the second manifesto, but are differently expressed because ‘the “Companion Species Manifesto” grows more out of an act of love, and the “Cyborg Manifesto” grows more out of an act of rage’ (p. 219). Despite beginning with a kiss between a woman and her dog, this Manifesto is more strongly biopolitical as it tracks the co-constituent relations between people and dogs in different times, places and contexts. Debbie has cruelly suggested to me that people and potatoes function as well here. Perhaps I just love a dog story.

Whereas Haraway’s target in Cyborg… is the ‘single vision’ of some Marxisms and feminisms, a parallel target in Companion Species… is animal rights. Haraway’s tale is one of co-domestication, co-training and conviviality but there is some rage too; with critique reserved for animal rights discourse while the racial tropes of pure breed dogland are left alone. As a result, the hackles of critical scholarship in animal studies were unsurprisingly raised. Yet by 2008 and the concluding pages of When Species Meet there was a shift, and now Haraway says ‘I’ve changed my politics’ (p. 230). Despite continued advocacy of the importance of ‘working animals’ she has ‘moved on’ since 2003, and the conversation with Wolfe returns a number of times to concerns about ‘the animal holocaust’ and ‘animal genocide’ (industrial animal agriculture and mass species extinctions).

The critique of Haraway from critical animal studies concerned her underestimation of dominatory power despite intersectional nods, and as Manifestly… illustrates, this has been there a while. The chart showing the ‘transitions’ between the organics and informatics of domination in Cyborg…, and talk of a substantial move from the ‘comfortable old hierarchical dominations’ to the ‘scary new networks … the informatics of domination’ (p. 28) still strike me as over-played. I remain unconvinced by her on questions of capitalism. As Haraway and her colleague Anna Tsing have made clear, our current task cannot be to save, renew or restore a world of pristine being that never was. Rather, as Tsing (2015: viii) puts it, it is to reflect on ‘what manages to live despite capitalism’; and how relations are reconstituted and ways of life forged from the entanglements in which people and others (be they fungi, dogs or potatoes) find themselves. Yet I still wondered what (more than Jason Moore’s (2015) excellent contribution) Haraway might have to say about the Capitalocene as an earth-making system, and how it might relate to this problematic but currently powerful conception of the Anthropocene.

At the close of the conversation with Wolfe, Haraway promises us monsters. From the ‘ordinary’ biopolitics of Companion Species… we move into wider kin-making waters and our responsibilities to earthly critters and the systems they make up in the times of the ‘the troubles’ (global warming, population pressure, eco-system collapse). Our era, she says, is characterised by the generative and destructive powers of the earth which may enhance or be enabled to prevent ‘double death’ (see Bird-Rose, 2004, 2011); that is, the annihilation of ‘on-goingness’ (e.g. species extinction) (p. 232). In response we must ally with ‘the generative powers of the Chthulucene, to power resurgence and partial healing in the face of irreversible loss’ (p. 296). For those like me who favour a triptych and find cliff-hangers frustrating, we might ask where the hinted third Manifesto might be – with its slogan ‘Make Kin, Not Babies!’ Haraway’s answer is that this was aspirational at the time of her conversation with Wolfe and to be found in the next book which is entirely a ‘Chthulucene Manifesto’. We may well also hear more about making kin rather than babies. I have Staying with the Trouble on order, and it will be released before this review is published. I expect I will laugh, nod, sigh and probably growl too, but as Manifestly Haraway has reminded me, I will enjoy having my cage rattled once again by Donna Haraway.