It is one thing to show that Haraway is or is not in agreement with other contemporary thinkers, but something completely different to show persuasively that the thought to be found there is truly a thinking of the animal, a vision of multispecies collectivity that actually succeeds in leaving behind the sphere of the human. Much of Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites, for example, is devoted to critiques of philosophies of difference (Levinas and Lyotard) and philosophies of animal subjectivity (Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Stanley Cavell, among others), showing that they all unwittingly remain rooted in humanism, which “bars the animal from th[ese] otherwise potentially welcoming theorization[s]” (Wolfe 2003:58). Wolfe takes up not only overt treatments of the animal in recent Francophone philosophy but also reads poststructuralism through animal studies so as to unpack the human/animal divide in terms of the relationships between language and ethics. It is here, Wolfe contends, that attempts to theorize the challenge that the animal poses to the notion of the subject most often fall back into humanist formulations of what counts as language, meaning, utterance, agency, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and so on.
Haraway has certainly been traversing these waters in her later work on semiosis, contact, and response. Is there an ethics in this work? And, if so, does it truly accommodate the animal? How are the discourses of “animal ethics” and “multispecies polis” related? Where are they in cooperation and in conflict? These are among the questions motivating this chapter. Rather than locating “an ethics” in Haraway, we here attempt to trace the ways this work dislocates not just traditional ethical categories like rights and justice but also those at work in feminist and even some posthuman approaches.
Care, Eating, Love, and Killing
In their anthology, The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007), editors Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams argue that Haraway’s important contributions are precisely not in the area of ethics. They are especially critical of Haraway’s endorsement of meat eating in the Companion Species Manifesto, indicating that it is here that she departs from the discourse of care. “Although feminist postmodernism, like care theory, rejects the Enlightenment-based rights theory, generally speaking the postmodernist exigency to deconstruct coherent political assertion leaves it a problematic approach to animal ethics.” They argue that Haraway’s most important contributions have been the “identification of racist and sexist narratives in primate studies” and “invaluable insight into the social construction of primatology,” but not in the area of the “personal interspecies relationships” she appears to prioritize (Donovan and Adams 2007:12).
From Haraway’s perspective, however, it is animality itself which deconstructs political coherence, stability, and positioning, uprooting the political from its roots in Enlightenment humanism. In the moment of the encounter, in which all of the structures of cultural-semiotic intelligibility have fallen away, all one has to work with is empathetic, responsible listening and witnessing. Incoherence and ethics go hand in hand here and there is clearly something like “care” in these commitments. But this is not the empathy of the feminist care tradition, which draws a clear trajectory from care to coherent political positioning. On the contrary, it is an endless reactivation of the question and so what are we to become?—a “we” that never ceases becoming and thus a fundamental uprooting of the value of coherence and a rescripting of the political as a space of incoherence, indeterminacy, and vulnerability.
Like Butler, Haraway is rooted in the Levinasian commitment to the idea that the heterogeneity of the other keeps all positionings subject to revision. In contrast to “rights” positions, which depend on a logic of interspecies sameness, Haraway insists that our relationship to animals is all the more an ethical one because they are radically other to us. Thus, and importantly, from the recognition of alterity it does not follow that we have no access to animal minds. The trick is to realize that this access is always imperfect and highly mediated, and this fact requires “making it possible for something unexpected to happen.”
This is not to say that one’s cat may suddenly grow wings and fly or that laboratory rats may suddenly begin doing calculus (although, as Hume teaches us, even these are not logical impossibilities). In the tradition of Levinas, Haraway rejects a humanism grounded in sameness and begins from the assumption that the Other is pure unpredictability. For Levinas, from this unpredictability arises the metacommand “do not kill me,” which means that the greatest wrong, murder, is never merely the act of ending a being’s life. Its wrongness inheres in the logic of having made the being killable in the first place, having reduced its unpredictability and having failed to hear its originary demand, “do not kill me” (see Levinas 1992 [1969]:194–201). Likewise, Haraway (alongside other feminist thinkers) explores the possibility of killing responsibly. She writes that the most important commandment should be “thou shalt not make killable,” rather than “thou shalt not kill” (Haraway 2008:80). The ethical problem is not necessarily the killing of animals per se, but the anthropological logic that unilaterally justifies the killing of anyone who at the time does not fit in the category of the unkillable. At stake here is not extending the category to include more and more beings, or to prohibit the killing or killability of a class of beings, but to undo the anthropo-logic of killability itself, to expose and take to task its speciesism, which forecloses the possibility of any real animal ethics.
The practice of pet keeping, for instance, is a site where not just killing, but killability flourishes. While Donovan and Adams turn away from postmodernism because it does not unilaterally condemn meat eating, the authors in their anthology do not unilaterally condemn pet keeping, even though, as Haraway points out, “the status of pet puts a dog at special risk in societies like the one I live in—the risk of abandonment when human affection wanes, when people’s convenience takes precedence, or when the dog fails to deliver on the fantasy of unconditional love” (Haraway 2003:38). The kind of love Haraway promotes, which she calls “theological,” is in fact quite Levinasian: “The recognition that one cannot know the other or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in the relationship, is the key. That is so for all true lovers, of whatever species” (Haraway 2003:50). Both eating and killing are matters of theological love, at the very heart of any ethics of community:
In eating we are most inside the differential relationalities that make us who and what we are and that materialize what we must do if response and regard are to have any meaning personally and politically. There is no way to eat and not to kill, no way to eat and not to become with other mortal beings to whom we are accountable, no way to pretend innocence or transcendence or a final peace. Because eating and killing cannot be hygienically separated does not mean that just any way of eating and killing is fine, merely a matter of taste and culture.… Killing well is an obligation akin to eating well. This applies to a vegan as much as to a human carnivore.
(Haraway 2008:295–96)
This is not an endorsement of meat eating or of killing, obviously. Haraway’s position is that meat eating and veganism can both be lived more or less responsibly, more or less “well.”
Response and Regard
The figure of Levinas appears repeatedly throughout Haraway’s texts, as it does in Derrida and Lyotard, but never simply or as a transparent text. These thinkers draw on him, sometimes critically, sometimes uncritically, adopting his vocabulary, unhinging his assumptions. In a gesture identifiably Levinasian, Derrida’s posthumously published work on animality locates the threat posed to ethics by the animal in the animal’s gaze, the event of the animal looking at me. It is here that the animal’s difference manifests itself. For Derrida, this is irreducibly connected to questions of temporality: from the discourses of evolutionary biology (and not only), we have learned to figure animals in “natural history” terms, with humans appearing invariably “after” the animal, in the sense of succession or inheritance. The animal was what was there before me and is therefore able to look at me. “And from the vantage point of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also—something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting self—it can look at me. It has a point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor” (Derrida 2008:11). Feminist primatology has been politicizing posthuman temporality for decades, as Haraway points out in the very title of “The Past Is the Contested Zone.” Much of the political edge of feminist primatology depends on the idea that “the open future” to which feminist resistance points rests first of all on “a new past” or a critical rewriting of androcentric natural histories (Haraway 1991d [1978]:41). Those of us working in feminist epistemologies will even more immediately hear echoes of the politics of looking, which has historically been at the center of so much feminist theorizing about everything from pornography to scientific methodologies. The feminist question has been, who looks (at whom) and how does this locate (and dis- and re-locate) power? But Derrida’s concern is not power, or at least not immediately. Instead, he invites us to imagine how radically the encounter with the animal other dislocates thinking in general.
At this point a comparison might prove useful. In Barbet Schroeder’s interview cited in the chapter 3, the film shows stills of Koko the gorilla looking at the camera as Schroeder, the director, states, “You’re obviously in front of somebody who understands what you’re saying, what you’re doing.” Contrast this with a scene from a much more recent and widely distributed film, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, a documentary about naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who lived unarmed among wild grizzly bears for thirteen years until he was killed and eaten by one of them. Toward the end of the film we are confronted with Treadwell’s footage of the bear that probably killed him. Herzog’s voice-over accompanies the slow motion footage, which closes in more and more tightly on the bear’s eyes: “And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discovered no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.” In the first case, the gaze of the animal at us is supposed to mean its likeness with humans, its personhood, while, in the second, the animal’s gaze shows its very nonpersonhood and warns of the dangers of anthropomorphism. But, for Derrida, the gaze of the animal is reducible to neither of these things. The animal gazing at me is otherness itself, the endless reminder of the limit of the human. It is “more other than any other” (Derrida 2008:11). Levinas writes that the gaze of the other does not contain meaning—it makes meaning possible. The other’s gaze never “speaks,” but poses the limit to the self that makes subjectivity possible, thus making it possible for things to signify at all (Levinas 1992 [1969]:53–81). The experience of true alterity is not in itself an experience of meaning, but of a sort of ground of meaning. Within this thinking of alterity, Derrida’s relationship to Levinas remains as complex and ambivalent as ever, and he immediately offers something like a critique of Levinas and other philosophers who think and write as if they have never been looked at:
The experience of the seeing animal, of the animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical structure of their discourse. In sum they have denied it as much as misunderstood it.... It is as if the men representing this configuration had seen without being seen, seen the animal without being seen by it, without being seen by it, without being seen as naked by someone who, from deep within a life called animal, and not only by means of the gaze, would have obliged them to recognize, at the moment of address, that this was their affair, their lookout.
(Derrida 2008:14)
One must use the word critique with caution, however, since following this quote Derrida confesses that he doesn’t really believe that the philosophers have been completely in denial about the animal gaze “or that it has not in some way been signified, figured, or metonymized, more or less secretly, in the gestures of their discourse” (Derrida 2008:14). It is not a matter of making visible what has been invisible or disappeared throughout the history of philosophy, but of deciphering “the symptom of this disavowal” (Derrida 2008:14). This, for Derrida, is the philosophical question: why has the animal been omitted, what are the symptoms and historical effects of this omission?
But his own formulation repeats the same gesture of omission with which Derrida is concerned. As Haraway notes, though he correctly criticizes the history of thought as representing animals in ways that do not acknowledge the animal gaze, or as mythic or literary figures, Derrida never asks “what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning” (Haraway 2008:20). He fails to consider the testimonies of certain humans who have in fact, risked “an intersecting gaze.” In particular, Haraway wonders about the omission of those like Jane Goodall or Barbara Smuts who “have met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and redone themselves and their sciences” (Haraway 2008:21). In contrast, of course, such workers with animals have been the subject of much of Haraway’s work from Primate Visions (Haraway 1989b) to When Species Meet (Haraway 2008), and these science workers contribute to her epistemological and ontological questions. Like many philosophers for whom such work with animals simply does not matter, Derrida “did not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement … one that risked knowing something more about care and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately” (Haraway 2008:20).
This is precisely what marks the difference between Haraway’s work and other forms of posthumanist discourse. Companion species is a category, or better, a “pointer to an ongoing ‘becoming with’” meant as an alternative to, rather than representative of, posthumanism: “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.… 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” (Haraway 2008:16–17). That is, her concern is not so much with form, as with relation—not the fact of re-creating the human or creating a new posthuman, but rethinking the categories themselves, reimagining ways of being, becoming with, and relating to all our companion species. At the heart of this understanding is Anna Tsing’s observation that “human nature is an interspecies relationship” (cited in Haraway 2008:19).
While contemporary philosophies of the animal explore the ideological and legal production of animality and its role in the production of the human, they do not consider work by people who live in close proximity to animals in an effort to better understand the forms of subjectivity particular to them. And indeed, given the recent formulation of posthumanism by Wolfe, what role should such work, empirical and concrete as it is, play in a posthumanist project that is clearly ontological?
The perspective I try to formulate here … forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens itself, by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of “bringing forth a world”—ways that are, since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself. But it also insists that we attend to the specificity of the human—its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing, and describing—by (paradoxically, for humanism) acknowledging that it is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically “not-human” and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is.
(Wolfe 2010:xxv)
For Wolfe “this prostheticity, this constitutive dependency and finitude, has profound ethical implications for our relations to nonhuman forms of life” (Wolfe 2010:xxvi). But for Haraway, the ethical question comes first or is, at the very least, inextricable from the ontological one. And “the entire sensorium of other living beings” is itself a category that already precludes engagement on the individual, particular level, the kind of engagement that might be necessary for those “autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world’” to reveal themselves.
From this vantage point, the philosophy that declares the animal to be more other than any other is precisely the one most frightened of otherness, most reluctant to think through the specific otherness of animals, rather than the unspecific Other with a capital O. For Haraway, it is precisely posthumanism that has disappeared animals, precisely as it theorizes the animal, and even as Derrida writes against the tradition which has always conceived of the animal as “an immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has the right, the theoretical or philosophical right, to distinguish and mark as opposite, namely, the set of the Animal in general, the Animal spoken of in the general singular” (Derrida 2008:41). If this is correct, then we should challenge the philosophical right to speak of the Other in the singular as well. To challenge both this distinction and the generality, to think animality, including the human animal, in terms of radical heterogeneity could mean differences of degree of difference among its members, rather than one singular category of otherness.
It follows that there must be a way to productively think relation in terms of similarity or continuity, which is not necessarily the same thing as grounding ethics in similarity. This not a simple return to privileging claims about similarities between human and nonhuman minds and grounding ethics in claims of sameness rather than difference. The point is to find some alternatives to this binary in response to comparative work in the sciences that takes nonhuman forms of subjectivity seriously.
It is no longer possible scientifically to compare something like “consciousness” or “language” among human and non-human animals as if there were a singular axis of calibration.… No single axis of difference, and no single postulate of continuity, does justice to the motley of communicating critters, including people and dogs. “Minds” are not all of the human sort, to say the least. Figuring out how to do the needed sorts of experimental work, in which heterogeneous material-semiotic entanglements are the norm, should be great fun and scientifically very creative. That such acute work remains to be done gives a pretty good idea about how abstemious, if not frightened of otherness, researching and philosophizing humans in Western traditions have been.
(Haraway 2008:235–36)
Semiotic Agency
The problematic of semiotic agency is thus at the center of the question of ethics after humanism. But should it remain there? Does the obsessive return to the question of forms of nonhuman semiosis not harbor the same humanist roots as what Wolfe calls the “taken-for-granted muteness of the animal,” stacking the ideological decks against nonhuman forms of life and subjectivity (Wolfe 2003:62)? What kind of ethics is made available to the animal if we continue to prioritize the role of language?
For instance, according to Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, every relationship is governed by what she calls norms of recognition, which means that it is never merely ethical, but in ongoing relation to the social. “The very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our own making. They are social in character” (Butler 2005:21, 25). This shows the “fundamental dependency of the ethical sphere on the social,” Butler writes. Norms of recognition function to “produce and deproduce the notion of the human,” but, following Wolfe, we could point out that this deproduction of the human remains rooted in humanism in spite of itself (Butler 2004:32).
Butler’s own engagement with Levinas limits her to understanding the ethical encounter in terms of address. Responsibility results from my being undone by the other. “I become responsible by virtue of what is done to me,” something not of my own choosing or under my control. “We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human” (Butler 2005:88, 136). But the investment in unknowingness and becoming undone need not commit us to the idea that the other is radically unknowable in fact or even that the ethical risk requires the other’s unknowability. We might come to know things about the other that will, precisely, undo us. Or, at the very least, the very process of coming to know the other might itself be a form of becoming undone in a sense that is ethically significant. From Haraway’s perspective, as we have seen, the intellectual tradition to which both Derrida and Butler belong stands in opposition to an ethics of companionship. From this vantage point, the ancient and theoretically over-saturated question can animals speak? appears as a curious anachronism. It is, deeply, the wrong question. The right question would be something like what diverse kinds of semiosis are at work between species and what is their ethical significance?
Address remains situated in a language of speech, that capacity humanism has carved out as properly human—speech understood as the capacity to dissimulate (or lie), and to name, the world, the word understood as noun (nomen). This is precisely the concept of language that Derrida states a new understanding of animality would force us to leave behind, and it is here that he appears more in line with Haraway’s project. Accordingly, Wolfe writes that it is because deconstruction challenges the very idea of language, understood as a homogeneous field, and specifically of any straightforward notion of semiotic agency, that his work is the most “animal-friendly” of all the Francophone philosophers (see Wolfe 2003:72 and 2010:xxv). Derrida writes, “It would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back to the animals’ but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation” (Derrida 2008:48). From Haraway’s perspective, however, such a thinking is not at all fabulous or chimerical, given scientific discourses that have been dealing with the semiotic agency of animals outside the discourse of “speech” for decades. Latour takes the value of scientific work to lie in precisely this—the capacity to give voice to nonhuman actors and to thus position them actively in politics.
To limit the [political] discussion to humans, their interests, their subjectivities, and their rights, will appear as strange a few years from now as having denied the right to vote of slaves, poor people, or women. To use the notion of discussion while limiting it to humans alone, without noticing that there are millions of subtle mechanisms capable of adding new voices to the chorus, would be to allow prejudice to deprive us of the formidable power of the sciences. Half of public life is found in laboratories; that is where we have to look for it.
(Latour 2004:69)
Given this, we are faced with the task of articulating a different figure for the ethical encounter. Following Mary Pratt and Jim Clifford, Haraway develops “contact zones” as relations between subjects rendered in terms of “co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices” (Pratt cited in Haraway 2008:216). She develops this notion specifically in response to the investment in the dyadic, asymmetrical “address” relationship. Her concrete example in the multispecies context is the sport of agility, in which humans and dogs enter into a training relationship, forming a team that then competes against other teams for time on a course of jumping patterns and other obstacles. Her description makes clear that the human undergoes training and transformation at least as much as the dog does during this process.
The human is responsible for knowing the sequence of obstacles and for figuring out a plan for human and dog to move fast, accurately, and smoothly through the course. The dog takes the jumps and navigates the obstacles, but the human has to be in the right positions at the right time to give good information.... The errors might be bad timing, overhandling, inattention, ambiguous cues, bad positioning, failure to understand how the course looks from the point of view of the dog, or failure to train basics well beforehand.
(209)
She extends this model to Clifford’s description of contact zones across borders and among cultures: “Contact approaches presuppose not socio-cultural wholes subsequently brought into relationship, but rather systems already constituted relationally, entering new relations through historical processes of displacement” (Haraway 2008:217). Clifford’s example is the border town. Haraway’s is the agility training yard, but also labs in which animals are experimental subjects. Contact zones are not innocent, like the developing chick embryo Haraway invokes, cracked open for “young hominids” in school bio labs to marvel at as they explore what is called “development” (Haraway 2008:274). They are difficult places, sites of violence, injustice, and power differentials, and it is precisely for this reason that sociality and responsibility are inextricably linked in them.
Contact Zones in SF
When species have encounters, they never merely meet, but enter contact zones, communicative spaces where species can “entangle each other” (Haraway 2008:215). Again, SF provides a pertinent training to fully inhabit this term: “I learned much of what I know about contact zones from science fiction, in which aliens meet up in bars off-planet and redo one another molecule by molecule” (Haraway 2008:217). SF readers, familiar with a profusion of terrestrial and extraterrestrial species, are more likely to be open to new interspecies encounters: “It would be a mistake to assume much about species in advance of encounter” (Haraway 2008:18). In a 2006 interview, Haraway puts it even more bluntly: “You also can’t think species without being inside science fiction” (Gane and Haraway 2006:140). Indeed, in writing of her dogs and others, it often feels like we are reading an SF alien encounter. Haraway particularly draws on the “sentient critters” and “several curious progeny” of Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1995 [1975]), a text that had already featured in her 1992 “Otherworldly Conversations.”1 First published in the collection Science as Culture, this (relatively) short article brings together her responses to three very different “stories” about nature—a historical study of nineteenth century views on nature, a feminist study of humans and animals, and Mitchison’s Memoirs. Mitchison’s text takes up and complicates the questions Haraway draws from the Robert Young and Barbara Noske books, in particular, Noske’s argument for “connection and conversation” in ethical relating between human and animals.
The short section on Mitchison (which could be well-nigh incomprehensible for those not familiar with the novel) begins with background information on this unusual author. In her sixties when Memoirs was first published in 1962, Mitchison wrote out of a very different political and scientific milieu than most feminist SF writers. As Haraway notes, Mitchison’s birthright was “a grand view of the universe from a rich, imperialist, intellectual culture.”2 The spacewoman of Mitchison’s story, Mary, is a “xenobiologist”—a communications expert whose job it is to commune with extraterrestrial life on her interstellar travels. While supposedly morally limited by the rule of “non-interference,” as Haraway notes, communication is “inherently about desire,” and the novel delights in “erotic fusions [and] odd couplings” (Haraway 2004:145). In short, communication cannot happen without “interference” and communication “even with ourselves, is xenobiology” (Haraway 2004:145). In short, these communicative acts leave neither party unchanged—in coming to know, Mary becomes other: sometimes involuntarily, sometimes by choice. On one mission, she confronts a “radial” species with whom it seems impossible to communicate. Not until Mary almost loses her ability for “logical” binary thought can she see a way to communicate. With phenomenological overtones, this encounter demands a loosening of the “either-or” thought and systems determined by a bilateral organism to a very different way of being—thinking radially: “With some interest I was observing myself at this moment not able to speak. It was impossible to do what one had once thought of as making up one’s mind. It seemed ridiculous, almost wrong, to be faced with a direct positive or negation” (Mitchison 1995 [1975]:30). It is of this breakthrough that Haraway writes: “The subject-making action—and the moral universe—really begins once those bilateral and radial entities establish touch” (Haraway 2004:146).
Other acts of communication with alien others are rendered in sexualized, sensual terms, twice ending in a form of pregnancy. As part of an experiment with self-generating alien tissue to test their potential intelligence, Mary offers to host a graft of the alien. Her body responds as if she were pregnant, and she responds to the graft (which she calls Ariel) in very intimate terms, as “flesh of [her] flesh,” receiving sensual enjoyment from their interactions: “It liked to be as close as possible over the median line reaching now to my mouth and inserting a pseudopodium delicately between my lips and elsewhere” (Mitchison 1995 [1975]:54). Her second alien “pregnancy” is accidentally “activated” by the hermaphrodite Martian, Vly (who later becomes a mother himself), while he is communicating with Mary to revive her after an accident. The pregnancy occurs as a result of the fact that Martians communicate with their “sexual organs” (Mitchison 1995 [1975]:60). Mitchison certainly has lot of fun with this conceit: Mary explains to a shocked and disapproving crew member who has just observed naked Martians “communicating” how equally strange the Martians had perceived humans to be: “They found us terribly shocking at first, you know … the way we covered up what should be uncovered. They couldn’t get used to it. They thought we must have some kind of horrible taboo against communication.… The earlier explorers had their trousers pulled off, and were asked very sympathetically if they weren’t happier that way” (Mitchison 1995 [1975]: 60).
This encounter changes both and produces an “unexpected other” in the form of the “not entirely human” haploid child Viola (Mitchison 1995 [1975]:67). It is to these “unexpected” others, who signal a different order of “subject-making action,” that Haraway refers in closing this section—Viola and Ariel are evidence of “otherworldly conversations” where ethical relating and moral encounters cannot leave subjects, self or others, untouched. They are also unintelligible offspring of a contact zone in which the rules of conduct do not transcend the participants or the event of their meeting. Contact zones render their participants not entirely human, in fact, necessarily not entirely “themselves.”
The Ethics of Companionship
Stories like these raise the question: what counts as ethics? Even the distinction Butler makes between the ethical and the social becomes increasingly unintelligible inside contact zones. They are not exactly different from each other or different levels of the same event. In the contact zone there is no ethical encounter that is somehow social on the metalevel. Instead, because interspecies semiosis requires constant facilitating, it is coextensive with the ongoing negotiation and transformation of norms of recognition. Norms here do not constitute a background, the conditions for the possibility of recognition of the address. They become what all the different moments of address are about, and this is what makes the encounter transformative. It is because, as Haraway notes, throughout the experience of training my dog becomes a stranger over and over again that negotiation is necessary. This is what makes the event ethical. But because the negotiation is of norms of recognition that make us, however briefly, imperfectly, and contextually, not simply strangers but also companions, this is sociality. That is what it means to be constituted relationally: the stranger who is also the companion, an original complexity, which gives a slightly different shape to Butler’s proposal that the ethical does not and in fact cannot in any sense come “before” the social. However, neither can the category “social” ever fully exhaust what is happening here, because the companion remains a stranger. Ethics never merely resolves into sociality but remains actively at work in the ongoing negotiation and invention of the rules mediating communication and conduct.
Perhaps Derrida is much closer to Haraway than either of them would admit, and his work on animality can actually be read as a departure from the Levinasian language of address. This would require a slightly different spin on the claim that the animal is “more other than any other.” The address of the animal coming from a “wholly other origin” would then mean wholly other not with respect to the individual subject, but to the human itself. “More other than any other” could mean that no norms of recognition govern this event, which is not recognizable as address because it is not recognizable at all and thus requires that much more careful mediation and facilitation.
Butler states, “In asking the ethical question ‘How ought I to treat another?’ I am immediately caught up in a realm of social normativity, since the other only appears to me, only functions as an other for me, if there is a frame within which I can see and apprehend the other in her separateness and exteriority” (Butler 2005: 25). But Haraway’s claim that “no single axis of difference, and no single postulate of continuity, does justice to the motley of communicating critters” maintains the instability of any frame including any claim about separateness and exteriority, which also cannot be decided beforehand. Rather than an address which brings with it the logically prior social norms governing its recognizability, in the animal context unrecognizability of address inaugurates the negotiation of norms in which “the human” is precariously situated between its own making and unmaking. When animals meet, sometimes there is difference, but sometimes there is continuity, and we never know in advance which will be the axes and trajectories mediating the relation, organizing the space opened by the intersecting gaze. A Harawayan ethics of companionship, if such a thing may be said to exist, is grounded neither in difference nor in sameness, but in the impossibility of deciding between difference and sameness prior to the event of material, particular contact.