To trouble democracy is to trouble the human. The democratic model is grounded in humanism and thus excludes the animal, however “animal” is imagined and defined, in a more fundamental way than it excludes other “others.” Nonhuman animals do not simply broaden the spectrum of possible others, defined in negative relation to the straight, white male legal norm which democracy serves most efficiently, but they threaten legal norms in a more fundamental way. We propose to read Haraway’s turn to the animal as an engagement with political ontology and with the many voices and positions constituting that conversation over the past few decades: feminism, autonomism, radical democracy, and other attempts to imagine collectivity in new and more just ways. This involves tracing what we take to be Haraway’s concerns and illuminating her original contributions. More than that, however, we are interested in presenting her texts as an occasion for working through specific problems of political philosophy, namely the relationship between ethics and politics (how is it disrupted by the presence of the animal?) and what is meant by pluralism and dissensus in democracy (and do they take on different shapes and meanings in multispecies contexts)?
On one hand, this is an attempt to work out what might be called Haraway’s politics, a politics “proper” to her position. On the other hand, and simultaneously, we challenge the ways in which scholarly commentary invests in “the proper” by performing a polyvocal, pluralistic, dissensual negotiation of multispecies sociality, which includes political philosophers besides Haraway. The latter seems necessary in response to Evan Selinger’s criticism of Haraway on the grounds that she is “able to evoke the problem of politics without ever substantially engaging classical or contemporary political philosophers” (Ihde and Selinger 2003:164). However correct this may be on one level of reading, this formulation unwittingly participates in a politics of its own. It begins from an assumption about who should quote whom, and it is clear that feminists (whom Selinger distinguishes from political philosophers) fall prey to irresponsible work if in fact they do not engage the philosophers. The direction of citation is signaled by a one-way arrow, with feminists bound to cite philosophers but not the other way around.
As one anonymous reviewer of this book points out, this response does not get Haraway off the hook. But it does demonstrate that the question is there a politics in Haraway? cannot simply be answered with a no on the grounds that she does not overtly participate in what is immediately recognizable as political philosophy and that the factors which would go into figuring out the answer are from the start organized by logics of what counts as politics and who counts as a political thinker. Despite her place on the sidelines of certain discussions, Haraway has been concerned with the connection between animality and politics, newly fashionable among philosophers today, for almost three decades. As this chapter shows, the engagement is more substantial than the occasional references to the cyborg have allowed for.
Cyborg Politics
Of the projects in political philosophy that do readily pick up the cyborg figure, few manage to exploit its transformative potential. For instance, the following quotation could, at first glance, easily come from Haraway. “Conventional norms of corporeal and sexual relations between and within genders are increasingly open to challenge and transformation.... The first condition of this corporeal transformation is the recognition that human nature is in no way separate from nature as a whole, that there are no fixed and necessary boundaries between the human and the animal, the human and the machine, the male and the female, and so forth; it is the recognition that nature itself is an artificial terrain open to ever new mutations, mixtures, and hybridizations” (Hardt and Negri 2000:215). Interestingly, the text in which it appears is not even an identifiably feminist text. The concerns that recently would have marked a text indelibly as “feminism,” “postmodernism,” or “science studies” now appear throughout contemporary political theory. Crises of nature, the fluidity of gender, the significance of embodiment, the erosion of the human—these are the motifs appearing across philosophers’ attempts to describe the epistemological and cultural paradigm shifts that directly bear upon the political.
The cyborg makes appearances throughout Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a behemoth of a work of political philosophy from which the quote we have deployed in the last paragraph comes. The fusion of human and machine, they write, is “a fundamental episode at the center” of the formation of the new social body (405). The new nature of productive labor is “immaterial,” but “somatic” (27–29), and it is this “soma” (body) which manifests the power relations emerging in empire and which any new materialism must mobilize.1 However, they continue, “hybridity itself is an empty gesture.” The hybrid body “must also be able to create a new life,” “the infinite paths of the barbarians must form a new mode of life” (216). This is a move we encounter throughout Empire—the charge that postmodern forms of resistance break down boundaries and create hybridities, but fall short of what must be accomplished politically because they fail to effect a new form of life. Postmodern projects remain alienated from praxis and from “the common productive experience” of the new social body (217). Hardt and Negri refer to Haraway’s contribution, but with repeated gestures to what they consider its limitations, as in the following passage: “Once we recognize our posthuman bodies and minds, once we see ourselves for the simians and cyborgs we are, we then need to expose the vis viva, the creative powers that animate us as they do all of nature and actualize our potentialities. This is humanism after the death of man: what Foucault calls ‘le travail de soi sur soi,’the continuous constituent project to create and recreate ourselves and our world” (92). But Haraway’s contribution has never been merely descriptive. For her, as Goodeve observes, “theory and practice are one unit intertwined like a DNA strand” (Haraway and Goodeve 2000:59). Part of her commitment to “process philosophies” (Schneider 2005:139) entails being “required to make moral and political judgments, ones that really matter. To actually make claims on the world and on each other” (141). In other words, “being worldly.” Despite Hardt and Negri’s skepticism, the project to recreate ourselves and our world both in theory and materially—from cultural production down to the bone—has consistently fueled Haraway’s work and does so more and more overtly and explicitly today.
Although questions of gender are in fact explored very little in large-scale political theories like Empire, a quick scan of the history of teratology shows an ongoing and complex relationship between monstrosity and woman, specifically in the history of discourses around procreation.2 In Haraway the relationship between women and the monstrous is refigured so that monstrosity is something for feminism to embrace. The Manifesto relies on such a revaluation: the cyborg is not a goddess and its origins are not innocent. It is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins” (Haraway 1991c:151). The cyborg instantiates a break from the horizons of nature and man, thus offering a figure for feminism which once and for all severs the bond with a female embodiment figured as “given, organic, necessary” (Haraway 1991c:180). The essence of woman, Haraway writes, “breaks up at the same moment that the networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. ‘Advanced capitalism’ is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the ‘Western’ sense, the end of man is at stake” (Haraway 1991c:160). She describes the liberatory character of monsters in the following passage:
Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded the discourses on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases—all crucial to establishing modern identity. The evolutionary and behavioral sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.
(180)
For Hardt and Negri, it is the incursion of technologies into natural, animate life that reveal life to be irreducibly “artificial,” making possible a new notion of the body (Hardt and Negri 2000:216).3
In feminist literature, however, though monsters may have been embraced in various forms, the liberatory status of technology remains contested.4 Contemporaneous with the publication of the Cyborg Manifesto, Gena Corea, along with other feminist critics of emerging reproductive technologies, argued that technoscience facilitates a seamless continuation of patriarchal control over women’s bodies, resulting in a social order in which biological mothers are replaced with “mother machines” (Corea 1985). Writing a decade later, Braidotti echoed this position and offered a different vision of monstrosity: “The test-tube babies of today mark the long-term triumph of the alchemists’ dream of dominating nature through their self-inseminating, masturbatory practices. What is happening with the new reproductive technologies today is the final chapter in a long history of fantasy of self-generation by and for the men themselves—men of science, but men of the male kind, capable of producing new monsters and fascinated by their power” (Braidotti 1994:79).5 In these accounts, which have been criticized for being too binaristic and teleological,6 technology is domination, not because there is anything inherently patriarchal about technology itself, but because its meaning is determined entirely, exhaustively, by its function in patriarchal social organization. For Haraway, in contrast, technology offers the possibility of unstable meanings. The technological world is one in which nature is irrecuperable and meaning cannot anchor itself. It remains under constant threat of slippage and contamination. Thus we can never guarantee that a technology will be either oppressive or liberatory—these values remain always contestable. Different technologies have different political belongings and the same technologies can have different political belongings at different times. In other words, pace Hardt and Negri and any reading that reifies the cyborg, the focus shifts to the active processes of vigilance, judgment, and relation.
From the cyborg figure onward this is the political force of Haraway’s work. It is what keeps her question who will “we” be when species meet? always necessarily in the future tense. At stake is the “we” that is yet to come, a gesture that echoes Derrida in spite of itself. We name this condition the animal political, animal understood in Haraway’s broad, “littermate” sense of co-constitutive companion species and inappropriate/d others and political as a contested site of continuous reinterrogation and dissent in contrast to the notion of empathy at work in much feminist writing. The etymological connection between polis and polite, on which Haraway insists, indicates her investment in the productive power of dissensus. After all, it is precisely when we are not necessarily in agreement that “to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem” become pressing (Haraway 2008:19).
The Animal Political
Latour orients his book The Politics of Nature around the same stakes. He expresses concern that the formation of a posthuman collective will demand that we engage in metaphysics, to “define a metaphysics common to humans and nonhumans” (2004:60). However, he writes, this is precisely the sort of conversation we cannot have in advance of forming the collective itself, because in a true democracy all members of the new collective would be able to participate in the formulation of such a new metaphysics. Thus the metaphysics cannot be the ground for the formation of the political body, and we face the dilemma Latour calls a matter of bootstrapping: how to call the collective to “order” and to work without imposing a new metaphysics with which to justify its makeup? It is with this in mind that we pose Haraway’s pressing question as one without the possibility of a stable answer: “who ‘we’ will become when species meet?” (Haraway 2008:5). What kind of democratic theory emerges in the world that companion animals, fetuses, cyborgs, human and nonhuman primates, and genetically engineered laboratory animals have “in common,” in which they seek more just ways of “being with”? What kind of politics-with-the-other does “worldliness” call for?
Aristotle’s famous dictum, that man is the political animal, appears here as spectacularly outdated: humans are animals, but their political nature is what separates them from the other animals. Humans are human insofar as they are political; the political becomes what the human animal does and the others do not. What Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine,” the creating of human life by means of its radical separation from animal life, gets reproduced not only in the canonical philosophies but also in classic social ecology. From Murray Bookchin to most ecofeminisms, as they produce strong critiques of the logics of domination and separation in which exploitation of nature and of disenfranchised social groups is justified, we encounter an assumption that politics belongs to the sphere of the human (Bookchin 1999). The feminist care tradition also fails to trouble the question of politics with animals, reducing the being-with to emotional relations like care and love, both of which Haraway rejects because they fail to articulate the complexity of the relation with animals, which she describes as “multiform, at stake, unfinished, consequential” (Haraway 2003:30). Bookchin himself describes politics, or what he has termed “second nature,” as a product of natural selection, but something with which humans in particular are endowed. In other words, just as giraffes grew long necks, humans grew politics (225–39). Latour’s recent work on political ecology begins with a general critique of this, what he calls the “two house” politics, which posits a radical separation between politics and nature and places humans in the political house. The new collective must learn to do without the concept of nature and produce a concept of the political that will destroy the separation between the human and nonhuman orders.
Accordingly, in Haraway’s work, rather than being what separates human from nonhuman animals, the political itself becomes the site where this separation is robustly problematized. This is precisely what makes this thinking difficult to identify as political, philosophical, disciplined, positioned. The “human” figure at the heart of philosophy was secured by omission and repression of “the animal,” and it is this human figure that forecloses and delimits what counts as philosophical inquiry and “discipline” in the first place. The omission of “the animal” has never been merely a question of theme, but is at the heart of an original, founding gesture of foreclosure. The new philosophies of the animal (Derrida, Agamben, Haraway et al.) begin from this original omission, making them initially difficult to categorize as ethics or politics—precisely because this paradigm shift invites us to reconfigure the meaning of those very terms.
Following Heidegger and Agamben, Haraway uses the technical term the open, the space in which “becoming with” is possible, “the space of what is not yet and may or may not ever be,” “a making available of events,” encounters between beings which have the purpose of “making it possible for something unexpected to happen” (Haraway 2008:34). This is analogous to Lyotard’s tennis match example in his description of what he calls a differend: “Let’s accept now that you are beginning to play with the tennis balls in someone’s company. You are surprised to observe that this other person does not seem to be playing tennis with these balls, as you thought, but is treating them more like chess pieces. One or the other of you complains that ‘that’s not how you play the game.’ There is a differend” (Lyotard 1997:143). What do we do now? Lyotard’s notion of “paralogy” describes the situation on the metalevel: given that the nature of the conflict explodes the rules of the game, we are now in a situation in which there is no one set of rules in which to describe and settle the conflict. Like the tennis match in which my opponent begins to play chess with the balls, the open is a being-with in which the rules of the withness are never available prior to the encounter. Haraway offers a narrative example of this from her own experience of training her dog, Cayenne Pepper, in the sport of agility:
The courses are designed by human beings; people fill out the entry forms and enter classes. The human decides for the dog what the acceptable criteria of performance will be. But there is a hitch: the human must respond to the authority of the dog’s actual performance. The dog has already responded to the human’s incoherence. The real dog—not the fantasy projection of self—is mundanely present; the invitation to response has been tendered. Fixed by the specter of yellow paint, the human must finally learn to ask a fundamental ontological question, one that puts human and dog together in what philosophers in the Heideggerian tradition call “the open”: who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?
(Haraway 2008:221)
In The Open Giorgio Agamben writes that the anthropological machine that makes the creating of the human (or anthropogenesis) possible is able to function only by means of creating an absolute difference, an empty space “between” the animal and the human. “Man exists historically only in this tension; he can be human only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animal which supports him” (Agamben 2004:12). Derrida’s formulation is slightly different: the human exists under the gaze of the animal other: “the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the border-crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself” (Derrida 2008:12).
Agamben invites us to think “in” this open space, in order to overcome anthropogenesis. Derrida states that all of philosophy is based on a forgetting of this space, a willful erasure of the fundamental fact that the animal can see (me). For Haraway, concrete, embodied, responsible encounters with animal others, of which her favorite example is the training relationship, create precisely such a space. Completely aside from whether or not practices like pet keeping or training should continue, Haraway focuses on the concrete situation of the training relation, insisting that this space transforms what is possible, thinkable, in our formulations of democracy. In this sense, she is close to Lyotard’s formulation of the differend as the pragmatic minimum for politics. Streching the challenge of alterity even further than Lyotard, Haraway gives a scenario in which my partner in the game is the ultimate other: a nonhuman. Like Agamben, Haraway reads the open as a space where the actual human is “bare,” stripped of her humanity. Unlike Agamben, however, she reads it as the space in which the actual animal has been stripped of its (anthropogenic) animality, as well. The open is not a “return” to our animal “natures,” but a projection into an animality we have not yet begun to think, nonanthropogenic and irreducibly plural animalities, ways of being (which for Haraway is always being-with) that resist the anthropological machine.
Most animal rights positions participate in the logic of the anthropological machine, basing their demand for recognition of animal suffering and couching justice in the language of rights on anthropomorphic projections of how closely related human and nonhuman animal experiences are. Structurally speaking, however, it cannot simply be enough to extend the boundaries of the system to include other animal species. As Sara Ahmed writes, any attempt at inclusion or extension necessarily performs a critique of the system itself, showing the system to have been exclusive in the first place: “If the concept of rights has to be extended, then its status as universal and self-evident is called into question. Rather than being intrinsic, they become at once historically produced and defined along exclusive and partial criteria (in this case the criteria as shown to be gendered). Rather than the subject being unified and transhistorical, it becomes at once divisive or differential and historically embedded” (Ahmed 1996:74).
Beginning with this definition of the feminist critique of human rights, Ahmed then proposes a critique of Lyotard, posing his notion of paralogy and the agonistics of language games against what she calls feminist practice. “The problem with Lyotard’s paralogy is thus the same problem with free market theories. In its very aestheticism and formalism it fails to recognize that local situations or events are overdetermined within broader structures or social relations characterized by systematic inequality, such as is represented by the gender division. It refuses to recognize, and even conceals, that subjects are always already differentiated from each other in terms of power and resources” (85–86). This position echoes Seyla Benhabib’s (1984) characterization of paralogy as a model of society that takes conflict to be a matter of “play.” The same criticism could at least initially be made of Haraway’s own investment in play (between dogs or dogs and people, for instance) as both trope and practice. Benhabib objects to Lyotard’s use of the gaming metaphor and offers what may be described as a reprimand: “there are times when philosophy cannot afford to be a ‘gay science’” (124). In other words, social injustice and political action are too serious and important to be reduced to talk of gaming, playing, the training of companion species, and so on. But she and Ahmed forget two important aspects that fuel both Haraway’s and Lyotard’s insistence on the function of play. First, the charges of aestheticism, formalism, and “gay” play overshadow the fact that for both Lyotard and Haraway gaming is always a matter of justice, precisely because it presents conflict, and conflict invariably demands judgment. Paralogy means not that language games should be left to work out their differences internally and organically, and that whatever results will be just—as in the case of the free market model. On the contrary, Lyotard recognizes that certain (local) discourses (for example, a humanism which takes the human animal’s vantage point as natural and necessary) present themselves as metadiscursive, universal, which is precisely the source of their power (Lyotard 1998). Likewise, it is precisely in the situation of dog training, for instance, that dog vantage points are taken seriously, that they must be taken seriously in order for the training to “work”—and this is no small point for thinkers in the throes of imagining a multispecies collective. As much as Benhabib and Ahmed appear to reject Lyotard’s metaphors of games and polytheism, they forget how freely he reverts to the use of the word terror in the same contexts. Naive humanism is terror because it does not recognize and cannot even “see” paralogy. Paralogy means there is no metadiscursive, universal position from which to adjudicate the differences, which destabilizes androcentric and humancentric power. Thus paralogy is always—necessarily—concerned with differences in terms of power and resources.
Competing Models of Pluralism
When Species Meet (2008) pushes the urgent question of the possibility of a politics in which nonhuman others are actors in some sense, though not in the (often invoked and ridiculed) sense that we give non-human animals human rights like suffrage (see also Latour 2004:60) and freedom of assembly. Our conceptions of what is possible politically must be, will be, are already being transformed by an attitude of wordliness, a new self-awareness that is an awareness of the many relationships of interspecific and mutual co-constitutions that make a collective possible. Haraway presents us with a challenge more radical than any that radical democratic theories have dealt with so far—a poststructuralist politics of alterity that would take seriously the ethical encounter with the nonhuman other. Given their investment in a politics that includes nonhuman participants, both Latour and Haraway must reject a model of the political in which the possibility of consensus is a necessary condition of the political relation. But how could a politics of dissensus be formulated for a common world humans and nonhumans share? It appears simple, at first, to show that consensus is not an option with nonhumans: how could we deliberate with them at all, much less reach consensus? Unfortunately, that knife slices both ways: if we cannot deliberate with nonhumans, in what meaningful sense can we say that the field we inhabit “in common” with them is one of dissensus and contest?
Lyotard explains that dissensus may—and indeed must—be understood as something other than merely interlocutory disagreement. The differend, a situation in which the interlocutors are no longer in a relationship of discussion (in which consensus could be reached at least in principle) helps us think through the irreducible differences at work in what Haraway calls other-globalization. The idea of democracy depends on the maintenance of this heterogeneity between the aforementioned partners in the tennis match—a real otherness. But the idea that I could persuade my opponent to play tennis again—and that it is for this reason that we are playing at all—is what reduces the otherness to sameness. Such attempts to reduce the heterogeneity—what he calls litigation, or placing the other in quotation marks while making her the referent of our discussion rather than addressing her—eliminate the other as a possible interlocutor. If we no longer address her, Lyotard asks, “how can we be liberal democrats with such an other?” (1998:146). Thus, in contrast to the idea that democracy depends on the possibility of reaching a consensus—and thus that we must at the very least be able to discuss and deliberate—Lyotard argues that only the differend allows for a true “interlocution,” or, if you prefer, a true encounter with the other in all her alterity. It is the differend, and not the telos of consensus, which is the condition for the possibility of democracy. Lyotard’s critique here takes a negative form. His aim is not to spell out the positive conditions for the possibility of democracy, but to show that the telos of consensus is incommensurable with the commitment to true diversity on the part of those flying the democracy flag.
The differend demands a rigorous listening—not because of some a priori rule which says I must do the other’s bidding, but precisely due to the absence of a priori rules, to the sui generis nature of the encounter. Every differend has never happened before—it is always happening for the first time, and thus requires an openness to every possible way of linking onto the phrases produced. “Phrase” here does not necessarily mean linguistic phrases, but it does mean “utterance” produced by a semiotic agent or whatever is taken to be a semiotic agent by the rules of the language game. In other words, in some contexts a lighting bolt might be a phrase (as when a mystic believes herself to be speaking to God, who then sends down a lightning bolt in response), whereas in others it won’t be (as in a meteorological discourse). Silence is a phrase when someone chooses to withhold or not speak. Thus, for our purposes, everything depends upon showing that nonhumans can be, and are, semiotic agents and maintaining a context in which what they produce counts as utterances in spite of the fact that these utterances will necessarily be, for lack of a better term, different. In other words, this model of democratic being-with requires that we figure the other as capable of meaningful utterances even as we are unable to understand these utterances.
Cary Wolfe’s critique of Lyotard’s notion of the differend centers precisely on the notion of agency and its humanistic entanglements. Because the differend takes place between agents of phrases, it is not the best model for understanding our differences from animals when animals are “mute” as a matter of course, not agentially. The animal’s silence is not a phrase and so not a proper silence, “it is not a withholding, and thus does not express the ethical imperative of dissensus and the differend” (Wolfe 2003:59). Because the animal cannot be said to be the agent of its utterances in the same way as the human, Wolfe argues, this fundamentally undermines the effectiveness of the differend schema for a multispecies theory of justice. Lyotard’s humanist commitments sneak in “in the taken-for-granted muteness of the animal, which, crucially, can never be a withholding” (Wolfe 2003:62). However, apart from what Lyotard may or may not have written about the animal, it is important to examine what role agency could possibly play in a philosophy that begins from the condition of a relation of not-understanding the other. What does it mean to identify a being as a semiotic agent—or not—in conditions of not-understanding?
The recent success of the blockbuster motion picture Avatar (Cameron 2009) illustrates the difficulties of shaping the social imaginary in the direction of semiotic agents we cannot understand. Breaking box office records in the winter of 2009–10, Avatar takes its 3-D-bespectacled audience on breathtaking flights on the backs of dragons through valleys alternating with floating mountains and sparkling waterfalls. The disjunction between the beautiful, animated, wildly natural world, which the protagonist can inhabit only as an avatar, and the “real,” brutal, technological world in which his real but disabled body moves freely, turns the real/virtual dichotomy on its head. The unspoiled natural beauty of the planet Pandora, especially in 3-D, is so seductive that the viewer loses all desire to return to reality. She is also temporarily robbed of her critical faculties by the sheer awesomeness of the adventures. But critique is precisely necessary given how much money and media hype is devoted to this morality play about humans waging war against nature.
Our opponents in the conflict are the Na’Vi, indigenous inhabitants of Pandora. They commune with the planet/goddess/Mother Nature directly, by fusing the ends of their spinal cords, which extend out from long braids on their heads, to other living beings. They are truly “one with nature.” It is these wondrous creatures that the human (and overtly American) military attempts to destroy to extract the precious metal Unobtanium. The Na’Vi are giants by comparison, easily three times our size. They are beautiful, sleek, strong, wise, and organized into well-functioning communities. The humans are small (human-sized), unattractive (after all, they are not animated), manipulative, deceiving, desperate, armed, and armored with incredibly ugly robotic machines, devoid of regard for nature or a people’s connection to the land. Of course, the Na’Vi, initially propagandistically constructed as the enemy, turn out to be the real people, the ones with whom the viewer identifies and wishes that she, like the protagonist, could stay, rather than having to return to her gray life upon leaving the cinema. No one identifies with or feels for the humans, and it is a relief when they are sent back to their own planet, which they had previously rendered almost uninhabitable by means of similar operations. Good riddance to those idiots.
The story in Avatar belongs to the kind of science fiction that does nothing to challenge existing ideologies or power relations. It is a patriarchal, colonialist fantasy in many ways. But the most pressing concern for our purposes is that the force of the story lies in the fantasy of living in communion, in immediate communication and spiritual fusion with the unitary being that is nature. What does Avatar tell us about how we read the relationship between humans and nature in the early twenty-first century? Nature is so anthropomorphized as to speak in this film. She acts, gives signs, fights back. And the inhabitants are a part of her, a sort of extension. The coming-of-age rituals to which our protagonist is subjected all involve entering into ever deeper levels of communion until he in fact becomes one with the planet’s most feared predator, the giant red dragon Turuk, whom he then rides to victory against the evil humans. If we viewers are not the evil humans, who signify as a throwback to days when we weren’t so enlightened about the integrity of either ecosystems or other cultures, then we are the Na’Vi, or we should at the very least strive to grow into them (and who wouldn’t like to have such a gorgeous, sleek, giant blue body, with its athletic prowess?).
Clearly, this moral stands in stark contrast to the kind of politics that motivates Haraway’s multispecies democracy, in which semiotic agents precisely cannot commune with each other, plug into each other, communicate without mediations of various sorts. It is because there is no unitary, homogeneous field of nature to which we might ever gain immediate access or from which we might grow out as extensions that our relationships in autre-mondalisation are relational in the first place. For both Haraway and Lyotard, this is the starting point of thinking politically: we are in relations of conflict with beings we cannot understand. What now? How does that shape our political model on the metalevel? There is no more concrete and urgent example of this problem than Haraway’s autremondalisation. Her complicated question, “what is the semiotic agency of the animals in the hermeneutic labor of Crittercam?” (Haraway 2008:261; for an overview of Crittercam see previous chapter) must be read in analogy to Latour’s analysis of the formation of the collective, which means it cannot be answered in advance. No general answer to the question is possible because “hermeneutic potency is a relational matter; it’s not about who ‘has’ hermeneutic agency, as if it were a nominal substance instead of a verbal infolding.… The animals, human, and machines are all enmeshed in hermeneutic labor (and play) by the material-semiotic requirements of getting on together in specific lifeworlds” (Haraway 2008: 262–63). Like the differend, every instance of multispecies hermeneutic labor/play has never happened before and thus requires a rewriting of the “rules.” What counts as agency? What counts as an utterance? What are the effects of the meanings produced?—are all questions that cannot be answered in advance of the event. This goes also for the animal’s muteness, which thus cannot ever be “taken-for-granted” or guaranteed to “never be a withholding” (Wolfe 2003:62).
As Judith Butler writes, “Contestation must be in play in order for politics to become democratic. Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so. It is not a predictable process; it must be undergone” (Butler 2004:39). For those of us who read Haraway as a political thinker of precisely such dissonance, it is important to note that there is more than one possible model of dissensus in radical democratic theory. For example, Chantal Mouffe offers a theory of democracy that centers on dissensus but is quite different than Lyotard’s. Mouffe’s model of democracy as agonism has been appropriated by some feminist thinkers as a model for feminist democracy (see, for example, Shannon Bell’s Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body [1994]). Like Lyotard, Mouffe argues that “far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence” (Mouffe 2000:103). However, in her project, this is a descriptive claim: those who argue for the deliberative model and for the telos of consensus simply miss the truth about the nature of political relations. Lyotard’s position, in contrast, is a normative one. It is always possible in principle to reduce a differend to a litigation, but we must decide not to, in order to remain open to the possibility of democratic engagement. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the feminist democratization movement takes for granted that consensus is the most desirable end. “But it remains to be proved that it is always better to play together,” writes Lyotard, reminding us that no relational model has been decided upon prior to the encounter (Lyotard 1997:144). The democratic process must first be undergone. Lyotard’s formulation of a politics concerned with justice requires that the idea of justice and the idea of the “we” remain interminably contested, that each and every case of judgment be a new interrogation of them. They, too, must remain open-ended, necessarily, and the space of justice must remain indeterminate.
Thus the demand for pluralism must be made with caution and nuance. For Mouffe, total pluralism is objectionable because it gives us no resources with which to distinguish differences that maintain unjust power relations from more benign differences (Mouffe 2000:18–22).7 In other words, if we are after a “democratic politics that aims at challenging a wide range of relations of subordination,” we cannot embrace a “total” pluralism, because the latter does not allow us to challenge certain unjust relations of power (Mouffe 2000:19–20). For Lyotard, however, the problem is not that this model of pluralism fails to challenge injustice in terms of power differences. Mouffe’s assumption that “it is always better to play together” fails to take full account of the irreducible multiplicity (including multiplicity of interests) that is the real. According to Mouffe, total pluralism fails instrumentally: it fails to give us the best tools for criticizing injustice in terms of power. For Lyotard, in contrast, the total pluralism of some feminist epistemologies fails on the level of ontology: it fails to see that the conflicts between interests are in fact irreducible. In other words, according to Mouffe it is not always possible to play together because of “the fact that some existing rights have been constructed on the very exclusion or subordination of others” (Mouffe 2000:20), whereas Lyotard criticizes the tendency to assume from the start that the struggle to advance all interests is the best one possible because it is in fact not possible to play together. What is best always hinges on the question best for whom? Like Haraway, Lyotard begins from the assumption that reality is heterogeneity, and so concludes that politics must be agonistic out of responsibility for and to that reality.
Haraway’s insights into the formation of the collective are also normatively oriented. “The privilege of people accompanying animals depends on getting these asymmetrical relationships right” (Haraway 2008:263). She clearly does not mean coming up with the most correct description of these relationships, but actually living well, relating “rightly.” From the perspective of Haraway’s multispecies collective, the reason that a total pluralism is objectionable is not because it doesn’t describe the truth of relations (though it may in fact not), but that it results in the kind of relativism that precludes responsible positioning. And Haraway’s version of responsibility is intelligible only in conditions of heterogeneity, otherwise it would not be necessary.
Is it by accident that autre-mondalisation, aligned as it is with the paralogical politics of differends, appears in French, answering to a tradition that has taken such care to think l’autre? It is striking that Francophone political philosophy, with its attention to radical alterity, has been so slow to address the animal, lagging decades behind Anglophone thought.8 But it is also striking that the Anglophone thought, even by feminists, concerned with interspecies relations has made so little use of poststructuralism as a metaethical and theoretical resource. Haraway’s work, from the cyborg to multispecies democracy, is the exception, but it is also just the beginning.