Donna Haraway: "From Cyborgs to Companion Species"

It's a great pleasure to be here and it's a a wonderful group of folks in an Exquisite room it must be said uh although it is a little monospecific um although only on the most initial sort of appearance since every one of us is a Conger of many species running into the Millions of entities uh which are indeed conditions of our very being so the mono specificity is one of the many Illusions And wounds to our narcissism about which I will have a great deal to say in the course of this lecture uh partly having

been instructed by those among you who have gone first where no man dare go uh into the uh sewers of psychoanalysis from which I have dredged a little bit of Scat uh for certain sections of my lecture because of the really remarkable ecosystems that scat uh is are Uh um the problem of grammar has been indeed a motor for my work uh for a long time now the title of this lecture dog uh from cyborgs to companion species advertised in that really wonderful little uh pamphlet dogs and people in technoculture has mutated to dogs people

and acquiring genomes in nature culture because I'm in I'm inspired both by the current exhibit at the Berkeley art museum University Art Museum on Genesis but also more generally um by the Multiple ambivalences and ambiguities of acquiring genomes um and I would like to think that the particular take on alternatives to posthumanism that I'll be giving in the course of tonight's lecture might be um informed by Lyn margalus and Dorian Sean uh approach to acquiring genomes in their recent book by that name now I begin with the dog of perfect proportions the Vitruvian dog um

as all of you are clearly aware by the Incidents of laughter in the room the man of perfect prop proportions the bet truvian man Leonardo da Vinci's uh uh humanistic version of the Fibonacci series the um embodiment of Genius art science and money uh in what we are pleased to call early modern Europe um or the Renaissance or that moment of the birth of modern humanism uh in a form which has been fully appropriated in techn humanism uh you can't attend a conference still or read an important Publication uh in contemporary genomics or proteomics without

seeing a small and potent set of artists which include Michelangelo Leonardo and velus and maybe Picasso um by courtesy uh the um repetitive touches of the cinee chapel uh the proportionality of the vetruvian man the denuded body of the muscled um velus anatomical figure uh is of course the figure of humanism appropriated for techn humanism it is The sign of that great join which has been enter prised up in Marilyn Stern's terms in contemporary techno humanism of art science genius and money uh which is not a bad short definition of what passes as modernity now

I of course have gone utterly to the dogs and proposed to you a kind of Canaan ISM the dog of perfect proportions um and to do this properly I'm going to have to go to the next slide it works okay now this is a Cartoon that uh has a convention the American Association of lap dogs and it says ladies and gentlemen behold the enemy good now we have here of course among other things a pun between lap dogs uh and laptops and as Shakespeare taught us these particular kinds of puns that interrogate kin and kind

are are at the root of some of our most important anxieties and some of our most important Important kinships what constitutes kind what constitutes kin in what sense is the cyborgian other at war with the animal Le and in at what sense do they both threaten the human Center this is a joke on the impossibility of humanism and contemporary worlds it's a joke on posthumanism it is ladies and gentlemen behold the enemy it is of course also my uh particular passionate position of having abandoned my initial dopel ganger uh the Cy And embraced the dog

uh but having discovered that indeed both are kin and kind and members of a larger category called companion species that both the Cyborg and animals uh many sorts of animals and dogs in particular uh and many sorts of machines and cybernetic machines in particular are companion species in a way that I would like to tell you something about a quick trip to a dictionary will give us uh the range of meaning that I would like you to hold On to for the duration of this lecture let's begin with the word species from the Latin uh

spere uh kind of to regard to respect to look um to see to speculate to uh take in in a kind of visual manner but we know um at least four major tones of the word species which are going to matter to my affirmation that cyborgs and uh that both machinic and organic animalian entities are um co-inhabitants with us that we are kin and kind together in That kind of punning um punning cohabitation uh that tells us a great deal about our situation we know that the word species has perhaps um a primary meaning in

an interrogation into the goodness of kind the goodness of genre um the uh location in logical category that is a a term from logic that is that it is an inqu into the nature of categories and kinds species has uh irreducibly that sense of an of an inquiry into kind it also of course Has for us and for the last 150 going on um longer than that a uh irreducible tone of a darwinian species of the um populating of the Earth with its multiple species and their relationship to each other the question of the shape

of the lineage networks are they treat esplanades ryom fungal webs branching patterns what is the nature of relationality among the natural kinds of the Earth the darwinian species meaning uh is for us inescapable and necessary Now I am of course not so much a lapsed uh logician or a practicing darwinian uh as also a lapsed Catholic For Whom the notion of species is about the real presence under both species Bread and Wine that indeed inoculated me very early to the predominant doctrines of semiotics that my colleagues in the history of Consciousness unsuccessfully attempted to teach

me um when they tried to persuade me that the sign is simply has an arbitrary relation to the signifi And neither has the slightest relationship uh to the world that we inhabit uh and that best we just give it up and study language and cognitive Sciences uh I was never persuaded uh by this notion of the world because I grew up knowing full well uh that the uh the both that the real presence under both species is the nature of the game uh and that living out that conundrum was the kind of semiotics that I

wished to inhabit so I suggest to you that you'd Best become laps Catholics for the duration of the lecture you will find a dir in your understanding now it was Marx and Freud and Norman o' Brown uh who taught me about specii and the join of and goal and wealth um and that spe species species is inevitably about biting down on the coin to see if the kind holds up um and that that is of course all about the excremental nature of the world out of which goodness comes so that speci uh is a necessary

tone uh In my sper my regard respect um my visual culture which has suddenly had a number of other orifices besides the ocular now the word companion is equally Rich from for my purposes um and I discovered not so long ago by that Excursion of scholarship known as looking up the word in the dictionary that my friend Katie King assured me actually does count a scholarship when I had a moment of insecurity kumis with bread uh messmates Those who break break bread together our companions that's probably the the first and fundamental meaning of the word

companion messmates um also of course the word companion is the lowest order in a company of knights uh it is a buddy um it is a um it is closely related to the word company which has in its meaning both the house of Commerce the military unit and the body of guests the company with Whom one is co-present the notion of gifting and presence is implied in the notion of companion uh those with whom one breaks bread uh in that uh again tone that can't dissociate the Commerce from the from the materiality um the uh

multiple joinings of these words get my attention now within that framework I have the tools to propose to you an alternative to the various versions of posthumanism in that shared project that I think many of us have in this room uh to somehow come to terms with the multiple decentering um the multiple wounds to narcissism that the ontological human has had to suffer that Freud was one of the great theorists of and that Lan was one of the great commentators on the fundamental wound to the narcissism of the human as somehow the center of the

universe is first the capern wound the decentering of the Earth from the center Of the COS from the center of the universe then the darwinian wound the decentering of of humanity uh from the central of all organic life the Freudian wound the centering of Consciousness from uh all that is interesting about modes of being uh active agencies active beings in the world and then finally I suggest a fourth wound which I will call the synthetic uh the decentering of the natural in general uh from the artificial so that the liveliness of Entities that we uh

call technological um has had to be accommodated in ways that neither Freud nor Lan had the opportunity to theorize or Lan had the opportunity take it uh number of other opportunities he missed um not one of my favorite philosophers now I suggest to you that I no more ever wanted to be a post-humanist than I wanted to be a post feminist uh even as I did not want to affirm the ontological certainty of the Human and The Feminine uh I certainly didn't want the post even if it was turned into postal and made into a

message I didn't see any particular reason to have a postal system we a perfectly good alternative and I suggest to you companion speciesism uh as the alternative uh these kinds of U messmates in very messy multiple historically situated relationality to each other that accommodates in the same kin kind Inquiry the machinic and the organic and the humanic we may as well do parallelism uh the that we uh are permanently in emergent nature cultures and we are permanently in a set in a Hungary of associations that are misnamed family community State Civic Society so on and

so forth or rather those names are locally useful but the kind of um um misogynous unions that um constitute the possibility of being on this planet are perhaps properly named Companion spe companion speciesism that accommodates these four wounds uh to the narcissism of the ontological human okay with that I suggest to you that I have I'm going to spend most of the rest of the lecture actually talking about dogs and animals having assured you that cyborgs are still in the kennel with their messmates uh and that I have nonetheless moved from the slogan cyborgs for

Earthly survival to the Better slogans for the era of secondary bushes filling up all of the life spaces of the earth run fast bite hard and shut up and train uh which are the two slogans that I offer to you from my dog world that seem to me just a little more to the point than cyborgs for Earthly survival are at this exact moment now with that in mind I'm going to show you something about my methodologies in the next two slides uh First of all I site uh I love citation practices in Academia I

cite a cagide uh cagi ad for it um dewormer for that which makes the intestines expel that which shouldn't be there the fluca side and the vermicide um that should be given to the Sheep uh to get rid of their intestinal parasites now what we have here is a reversal uh it's a joke uh commercial biotech ads frequently work work by punning and reversal joking uh it's the sort of low level of Consciousness that you would expect of scientists and Commercial people uh of which I am one uh the the doors of humanists are regularly

boring the doors of people over in the biology Department are regularly extremely interesting and well worth visiting because they aren't embarrassed they aren't too embarrassed to put up bad jokes this is a wonderful bad joke uh the man here who is letting this youu Pen his very talented border colleagues who are the UK National sheep dog Champions uh Thomas lton is the current UK National sheep dog sheep trial Champion those are his very talented border colle being penned by this upstart you in one of the wonderful reversals of the Earth's injustices where the a bores

get to pan the carnivores uh in domestic life now from the get-go this ad was uh inside technoculture in a range of ways that Make the reality effect of reality particularly prominent a couple of those young Border Collies in the back are actually Tied by leashes that you can't see because they aren't good at their stand stays yet this U is air is uh build is one of the early uh visual Graphics programs that was used to make this ad this U is brought in from another photograph altogether and brought into the picture uh the

Sheep grazing there in your upper leftand Field are also brought in from still a third photograph Thomas lankton had an in-law who was trying to make a living as an ad designer for the company which is the reason he stood for this ad uh this is an ad that emphasizes the particular kinds of loaded reversals which I regard as a proper meth to academic analysis and also the very interesting point that reversals never work reversals never work uh never finally copy um the supposed original Into a proper reversal and this second ad actually makes that

particularly clear this ad is C is obviously a reversal of the previous set of reversals we still have the U Penning the Border Collie but left and light left and right are reversed here the quality this ad also says something about its mode of distribution it comes off the off the internet unattributed it has lost its intellectual property status um and therefore I think I don't Have to pay a fee for using this one but I do have to pay a fee for using that one this one I believe has gone into the common so

to speak but something has happened to the English Countryside uh which is to say it now has a Dutch windmill airbrushed in in the way that our reties suddenly take on certain kinds of fantastic Dimensions that change one's Notions of landscape uh that I think is as close as I can Come to a theory um however I do have uh a methodology which is built into this particular slide which was given to me by feag Ginsburg that many of you know as a a talented uh world class Anthropologist who grew up with her father's wolves

um in the Jackson in uh the Jackson Memorial Laboratories in Bar Harbor Maine that is the young Fay Ginsburg with one of her father's wolves uh that is studying at the Jackson Memorial Labs the labs that gave us the standard laboratory mouse in a wonderful book Karen Raider recently published it gave us all sorts of wonderful things uh including some of the best to date uh behavioral genetic research on dogs of which more later but there's the young Fay with her father's wolves um and here is the cartoon that Fay sent me this is me

with the with the um sort of pack the scientific technical pack the recording apparatus the Telemetric relay the broadcast apparatus trying to join uh a pack of canids in this case a bunch of wolves and my my introducing partner my uh sort of big sister bringing me into the pack says we found her wandering at the end edge of the forest she was raised by scientists um which is how I have always felt in the history of Consciousness where I take my subject formation to have been that of an Organism I take having been formed

as a subject in the in the location of an organism very seriously uh I take my having been raised as a biologist exceedingly seriously both in the sense of having been uh installed in the world as an organism and getting it that biology is a discourse and not the body itself so that Fuko was a wonderful haunting companion species figure in my coming to terms with having been raised by scientists so that I take very Seriously this location in both the manyi biologies and by courtesy the location in the manyi humanities and social sciences and

arts that have allowed me to have a green card for yay these many years um having been properly introduced now um the particular kind of of location that this gives me makes me want to complete this introductory section by telling you something about my ideal research project because since I have Happen to be actually interested in dogs and not just interested in the ways dogs might figure this or that or the representation of dogs and paintings X Y and Z or the EV evocation of a dog in a poem or in Virginia Wolf's flush or

what have you since I am actually interested in honest God dogs um the you know dogs um it strikes me that we need a u methodology a particular interdisciplinarity that is not yet extent and in our emergent nature Cultures I would like to help along uh a possible but not yet existing mode of inquiry which has to do with actually putting together the really Savvy cultural anthropologists the really Savvy art historians the folks who know something about semiotics and psychoanalysis the people who really get it about the complex issues um around deferral and unavailability and

the problems of ology and ethics that you know the folks who who really know Something about these matters that somehow they might actually be able to form a coherent research project with people who actually know something about behavioral ecology and genetics and Physiology and evolutionary theory and and the uh questions of Comm of community structure and ecologies and so on and so forth and that one might actually be able to ask what is the the historicity the social biosocial history of human dog Relationality uh that does not refuse a history to either partner and I

mean history in the serious sense I mean that both partners are social subjects with real social histories but not the same kind that they are heterogeneous in Relentless ways just as humans are heterogeneous to each other which my first group of folks knows how to say okay um and that but that I really would like to know something about the historicity of particular situated dog Human relationality and I think to do that to do that seriously takes a kind of practice of translation that is that does not yet exist in the research methodologies among us

even though there is an explosion of publishing on animality why if Lan and der da and linas and all the rest of them are writing about animality the the rest of us can't be far behind um there is a an extraordinary explosion of interest uh In questions of animality across the Horizon whether it's in cognitive sciences and neurobiology or uh ecology or whether it's in um human rights or animal rights discourse rights discourse Civic discourse law you name it uh there is and there you know proof to this is that major publishing houses are staking

capital in a book series at a time when other kinds of book series are no longer being brought out the ones that deal with questions of the animal are indeed Being brought out by the Johns Hopkins University University of Chicago you name it uh it's an area of exploding interest in publication and in many other domains of cultural action but I believe that the method of asking the question about relationality has not yet been taken seriously uh and that has to do in part with the structure of our institutions and even more so with the

structure of our minds uh because we have sort of um historically induced Mode of brain damage uh whereby people who uh understand the limitations of humanism nonetheless continue to operate out of panics theorized well by Freud as he took on those four kinds of three kinds of wounds now four the panics that lead people to be terrified of either biological determinism whatever that is or technological determinism whatever that is or uh tend to be horribly worried about whether animals have real language or not or whether this or that Cognitive property is unique to us or

not these kinds of panics uh that pervade discourse here I think can only be understood in terms of the wounding issues and our perfectly bad guides to the knowledge projects that we need now that said let me read you a tiny little section from my recent recent book The Companion species Manifesto which gives you some of the tone of what I'm trying to do Miz cayenne pepper continues to Colonize all my cells a short case of what the biologist Lynn margalus calls Sim biogenesis even though we share placement in the filum of vertebrates we inhabit

not just different Genera and Divergent families but altogether different orders yet I bet if you checked our DNA you'd find some potent transections between us her saliva must have the nucleoid or viral vectors surely her Darter tongue kisses have been Irresistible how would we sort things out canid hominid pet Professor woman Animal Human athlete Handler one of us has a microchip injected under her neck for identification the other has a photo ID California driver's license one of us has a written record of our ancestors for 20 Generations missing only approximately a million uh possible ancestors

we all we all have gaps one of us does not know her great grandparents names one of us product of a vast Genetic mixture is called pure bread one of us equally product of a vast mixture is called White each of these names designates a racial disc course and we both inherit their consequences in our flesh one of us is at the cusp of flaming youthful physical achievement the other is Lusty but over the hill and we play a team sport called agility on the same expropriated native land where cen's ancestors hered Marino sheep these

sheep were imported from the Already Colonial pastal economy of Australia to feed the California Gold Rush 49ers in layers of History layers of biology layers of nature cultures one word complexity is the name of our game we are both the freedom hungry offspring of Conquest products of white settler colonies leaping over hurdles and crawling through tunnels on the playing field I'm sure our genomes are more alike than they should be there must be Some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living that will leave traces in the world no matter that we are

each reproductively silenced females inside the exigent discourses of biopower each in the way proper to her species class nation and time one by age and Choice One by surgery and contract between breeder and berer her red Merl Australian Shepherd's quick and live tongue has swabbed the tissues of my tonsils with all their eager immune System receptors I've warned her when she does this to babies that they don't have good bite inhibition um those of you who have dogs know something about this problem who knows where my chemical receptors carried her messages or what she took

from my cellular system for distinguishing self from other and binding outside to inside who knows how we Companions and messmates acquired each other's Genomes we have had forbidden conversation we have had oral intercourse we are bound and telling Story upon story with nothing but the facts we are training each other in Acts of communication we barely understand we are constitutively companion species we make each other up in the flesh significantly other to each other in the specific difference we signify In the Flesh a nasty developmental infection called love this love is an historical Aberration and

a natural cultural Legacy this lecture is an effort to sort out two things that flow from this aberration and this Legacy one how might in ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking taking dog human relationships seriously and two how might stories about dog human worlds finally convinced brain damaged us Americans and maybe even less historically challenged people that History matters in nature cultures I offer dog eaten props and half-trained arguments to reshape some stories I care about a great deal as a scholar and a person in my time

and place the story is mainly about dogs passionately engaged in these accounts I hope to bring my readers into the kennel for life but I hope also that even the dog phobic or just those with their minds on things we'll find here arguments and stories that matter to the worlds we might yet Live in the practices and actors and dog worlds human and nonhuman alike ought to be Central concerns of technoscience studies even closer to my heart I want my my hearers to know why I consider dog writing to be a branch of feminist Theory

or really the other way around it's the feminism has been very good on the problem of the general specific um which Tom found out by my lack of manners earlier in the day now I turned from this introductory material To the section of lecture of the lecture that I call from the animal animal machine to the animal turn and I take my first text from Jac DEA in an English translation of lectures that he gave in 1997 in a Conference held in his honor in France uh a commentary uh series of eight hours of commentary

on the animal that he gave uh over a a whole series of important uh critics of the ontological errors of the centering of the human as some kind of ontological certainty uh His commentary on lvas Lon um and a number of other thinkers are in that eight hours and uh Carrie wolf recently published an English translation the first time any of this has appeared in print uh in English or French that is titled and say the animal responded what if the animal responded is dea's title in this commentary in the way that only he can

do commentary on L first of all he shows the tiny little dependent clause which gave him some Minor hope that Lan was actually going to take animals seriously in his claims to be doing so and then discovered that immediately he was let down as thean ascribed to animals the capacity to make traces but not erase traces therefore setting up a derian commentary for whom making and erasing traces is his bread and butter a kind of messmate uh with the question of the indistinguishability the undecidability between the making and erasing of traces and indeed the Question

of the power to make and erasing make and erase traces um is one of his major um passionate concerns so that Del points out that particularly from a psycho analytic Viewpoint the as the withholding or ascribing to Capac ities uh various capacities to animals either they do where they don't have language either they do where they can't mourn either they do where they don't have ritual either they do where they don't uh do symbolic communication Either they do or they don't that there is a a truly infinite in principle list of of can or can't

uh that is involved in this panicked reaction of the question of relationality in companion species worlds Del do is absolutely on the side of the angels and getting this dead right but there is one tiny little problem in his entire discussion he doesn't actually say anything about any really existing animal uh except possibly Humans and even that is perhaps only by courtesy um he says a great deal about other writers and I do believe in his heart of hearts he's actually interested in animals uh and perhaps in other places I haven't yet read uh he

discusses a stickleback fish or a Herring Gull or a you know a damsel fly or I don't know a particular intestinal bacterium or maybe the the vibrio uh squid uh uh consociation off the Waters of Hawaii that produces these Marvelous Light organs maybe he actually takes it on uh outside of my view but I haven't found him doing it um so some of you who read these matters um with a better heart might show me the passages nonetheless I think he does crucial work and I want him on my research team or an equivalent a

dairy D equivalent on my research team so moving from the CR the correct critique of the problem of the animal machine which in Dar D's Opinion finally rests on the distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic that's the one he's really after uh in this little piece the the bankruptcy of the uh firm distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic is is his true Target I turn uh now to the animal turn which I think actually has its uh most important it's kind of birth moment in a series of Publications out of social geography interestingly

enough a a book called animal geographies in 1995 um Marxist social geographers actually did something completely unexpected which is take animals seriously in their relationality in urban context and others and did some amazing social geography work uh in in a book um called animal geographies subsequently but really at the same time it sort of grew up independently and in a number of places a group of cultural anthropologists uh led by Molly Mullins and Sarah Franklin staged some uh Wonderful sessions at the American anthropological Association um that took up Animal Human Relationships in a in a

serious ethnographic way began to ask questions differently from the way they had been asked before um I think that the animal turn as Sarah Franklin and Molly Mullins called it um informed in fact by the very by the uh philosophical resources of Dar Don Fuko and others is doing some very important work along the lines of The of the kind of work cyborg anthropology is doing uh Mike Fischer Paul Rabino many others that I will lump under cyborg anthropology respective of the fact they wouldn't particularly like the label but I want to turn instead to

a good uh a bio Anthropologist Barbara smutz uh who I first knew as a young postdoc study in baboons in East Africa in the 1970s and have subsequently remat as a person designing research projects uh around dog human relationships in US Cities these days and studying with all of the mature apparatus that she has as a sociobiological trained behavioral ecologist behavioral biologist now smut says look folks this is a Jour an article that she uh calls encounters with animal Minds published last year in the Journal of Consciousness studies certainly a suspect name but we'll let

that go volume eight I missed the first seven um you know Miss a lot uh Barbara smutz uh did something uh really crucial That I think depended on her knowing really actually existing baboons socially historically situated in a time and place that redid her ability to produce knowledge uh as a scientist in a particular historical moment that is to say she noticed when the baboons that she was following around assiduously 8 to 10 hours a day stopped treating her as a dangerous Rock and started treating her as just maybe a good enough baboon social subject

to Warren training up to See if she could grow up and learn proper manners uh to cohabit the space with baboons so that she noticed the moment that they began treating her as a social subject who could just maybe learn uh so that she would respond properly to their particular conventions and manners they that she would acquire good enough manners to deal with social space in a way that the baboons would recognize as appropriate adult Behavior so that she talks about the moment where The baboon started expecting her to respond to yawns to uh stares

to threat gestures to affiliative gestures where the baboon started expecting her to be a proper social subject uh and she went on from there that's uh to talk about the issue of co-presence that kind of recognition which seems to cross many sorts of species boundaries baboon and human being a pretty easy one since we're both higher primates so-called higher um but these these sorts of Capacities actually uh seem to link us to organisms across a great range of taxonomic categories um perhaps surprising perhaps not uh and smut is interested in the uh the process of

the recognition of co-presence and she talks about it in terms of metaphors of taste rather than in metaphors of vision or knowledge so that she says the recognition of co-presence is a bit like tasting each other uh and then from that can possibly Emerge with work on both sides uh uh social historical conventions for dealing with each others across the communicative differences of evolutionary history I find smuts's um way of thinking extremely provocative in my uh companion speciesism that I am proposing to you tonight still for a while okay from uh from the animal I

can't see anymore it's the problem with presbyopia and cataracts and Ja not to mention lighting we need Bright Lights Once we get old but that said we move ahead because we're all Pros here uh okay we move now to the third part of this Shaggy Dog story having done the animal machine to the animal turn and this is the section on acquiring genomes I would like to discuss dog human relationality within the rubric of they acquired us and we acquired them and so what okay what would it mean to think dog human relationality historically evolutionarily

social historically Biocultural n natural culturally under the sign of acquiring genomes with all of the multiple meanings of the word acquiring you you is it a hosle takeover uh what mode of acquiring the company of the genome is this uh that the genome is a mode of capital is not news to anybody in this room but it's much more than that um The genome is one of those wonderful polyvalent really existing entities patently produced in front of our very eyes um that has reality Effects that we have barely come to terms with with so it's

within that framework that I propose the term acquiring genomes but I'm I am in fact plagiarizing it from Linn margalus and her son Dorian Sean they Carl Sean and Linn margalus is son together so we have the stars and the intestinal Flora Linn margalus did the intestinal flora and car Carl Sean did the stars and they had a boy child who co-authored with his mother this wonderful book acquiring Genomes now Lyn margalus is of the persuasion that anything interesting that's happened on the earth the bacteria did it first it's the first important thing you need

to know about her uh as a writer as a theorist as a biologist that there is truly nothing that has been done on the earth that the bacteria didn't do first and an awful lot has been forgotten um that other organisms don't do that bacteria still do or used to do and that uh in their Book the origins plural of species which is really about the problem of the generation of serious organizational novelty uh in evolutionary history an a problem that has never gone away cumulative mutation doesn't do the trick punctuated equilibrium is a kind

of a mult polyic coverup uh for the inadequacy of cumulative mutation uh the problem of the generation of organizational novelty in the world emergence in short is far from solved it Remains one of the most interesting biological problems as one of the most interesting historical and philosophical problems um the emergence is a polycab word which also covers the the fact that we don't have a really good clue um to this fundamental matter now Lin margus actually does have a pretty good clue to some aspects of emergence uh she she and her colleagues has I think

uh persuasively demonstrated um with really existing data uh the emergence of the Nucleated cell the modern cell the equivalent of man uh those who have a proper Center cells with nuclei you know the of the biological world uh the emergence of eukaryotic eukariotic I don't know eukariotic cells out of um basically bacteria gobbling each other up but failing to digest each other completely uh questions of eating each other and indigestion uh so that a eats B but B refuses to turn into proper component Parts for A's purposes and a hijacks what's left of B for

some of its purposes while B carries on inside B various levels of integration for be's own purposes and they both continue to copy well enough and indeed might have quite an interesting narrative history of further organizational Arrangements uh but basically we got a story of um Predator prey and bad digestion uh as the fundamental motor of complexity in the living world now I Think that goes a long way for my theory of companion speciesism where we are after all talking about mes mates and oral intercourse I have by the way had people ask me if

I mean it literally about cayenne and me having had oral intercourse I believe a question such as that does not deserve an answer uh in the way of most literal questions both and neither nor figured out now however so Lyn margalus and uh and her confra and kids uh have this Theory about the origin of biological complexity from various kinds of her word misen fusings mogeneous couplings the infolding of strangers that's her term the infolding of strangers is a great biological concept uh the infolding of strangers and the ongoing history uh subsequent to the infolding

now she means it on the whole uh in terms of what goes on at the level of the those boundaries between the procaryotes and The ukots those with and without good nuclei as well as the really exploding field of ecological developmental biology for example the growing body of fascinating data that shows such things as this uh amazing light organ in the squid that that inhabit some of the oper upper ocean layers such that um at at night their glowing bellies look like the star that there the light coming out of their bellies which comes from

the symbient Bacteria has the same kind of angle and and property of Moonlight and starlight so that potential Predators think of them as the sky and not as a meal uh absolutely wonderful now this this obligatory symbiosis um and the light organ itself the anatomical light organ which is uniquely the squids except that it's also the habitat for the uh obligate symbient the bacteria actually not quite o obligate they can be killed in the lab For example by heat and and um antibiotics which is one of the way of studying this stuff you know kill

this look at that sort of tried and true biological method I experiments of various sorts um nonetheless we'll forgive them their method sadism is not limited to biologists dissection of sentences is just as bad so nonetheless there's this fabulous Starlight coming out of the bellies of squid and the organ of the Squid won't develop unless they are infected at a particular moment in their developmental history by a particular uh variety of bacteria inhabiting those Waters and indeed they have this fabulous sorting method to get just the right bacteria and to stimulate population of just that

bacterium uh in their uh in their going to be light organs or the light organs don't be uh so we have these these fabulous ecological developmental histories which Are turning out to be more the rule than the acception as the methods of of molecular genetics and molecular biology more broadly get turned into tools for getting at the congery of associations that everybody is so the gene for this that and the other thing is is really a kind of a bad uh a seriously bad reductionism uh in terms of what's really coming out of this kind

of research these days a hold on emergence that's really wonderful now I use the Margalus work as Trope certainly but I'm also interested in it as actual method as actual process in the world and I'm interested in dealing with what anat Singh taught me to do which is making scale going from uh going from scale to scale to scale to scale of temporality spatiality materiality the very little to the very big and the medium ized I'm interested in the the way acquiring genomes these myogenous fusions operate at many scales to produce various kinds Of complexity

okay so I use that to go to the third part of my lecture which I have lost okay there we are um which is um a particular way of talking about the history of dog human relationships at three scales one the molecular and The evolutionary uh which is of course both big and little but the ular evolutionary and um species cohabitation history of these beings as uh as symbiant as species cohabiting species two the scale that is normally meant by history you Know nation building labor processes immigrations State formations blah blah blah the historical time

in short in in the normal ways that historians use it and then finally face Toof Face Time the uh the scale of the intimate partner the face to-face partner uh the the scale of the of the intimate partner okay both its temporality and its spatiality these three modes of temporality and spatiality are quite different from each other but I think all three are Illuminated by Notions of acquiring genomes okay now first let's take the molecular and evolutionary and I'm going to do this so fast it will vanish if you don't listen hard and that is

to say that the old story of dogs as the first tool of conquering man who realizes his intention In the Flesh of the other and produces the dog as the servant out of the master man is a bad story okay uh that it may be true that dogs are among the first domesticated animals though Probably pigs have pride of place here but what is certainly not true is a notion that the domestication was the result of of human technological intentionality or in spite of the lack of intentionality among those primitive humans it happened anyway and

then they put it to use and it was as good as intentionality and in any case the dog ended up servant and the and the man ended up master and then we have kind of Hegel in the kennel uh version of Domestication that's why deep ecologists love this story because they love to hate it because then dogs are the sign of the the complete you know abandonment of the free and Noble wolf uh that dogs are Vermin dogs are are from the get-go not but the realization of someone else's intention okay that's the story of

domestication as it's usually told well fails on the grounds of evidence um uh it just isn't true one might U make a minor Point uh that almost certainly the Early moves in the sagas of domestication uh were by both both Andor all sets of organisms involved but in this one dogs probably took advantage of wasteful primate habits and the calorie bonanzas that we have left along left around coextensive with the existence of homo and probably before what we call homo the the garbage piles the mittens the the leavings that produce calorie bonanzas for others including

wolf wannabe dogs uh who undergo a whole Series of uh of changes that allow them to reduce uh reduce flight you know improve um narrow tolerance distances to hang out closer to flee less readily uh to quell the flight fright uh hormones um to uh cohabit with these dangerous opportunistic social organisms all too much like themselves uh and that from those early moments of multiple agency and opportunism almost every imaginable kind of relationship has ensued between dogs and humans both beautiful and truly Appallingly ugly brutalities and joys um that should surprise no one that one

can no more talk about the dog than one can talk about the human the situatedness is Relentless but not infinite indefinite but not infinite um and that's the story of co-evolution and domestication now at the level of histories hey I'm still okay at the level of History I would like to tell you a little bit of a story about Australian shepherds because I Introduced to you Cayenne a few minutes ago I now introduce to you Doon grit winning high-end sheep at the trial in Bakersfield last fall it's what an Australian Shepherd looks like working uh

there's another Australian Shepherd working cattle these uh the the first thing that needs to be said about Australian shepherds who working hurting dogs is that they have almost nothing to do with Australia except their name except for the fact that they probably Picked up the name Australian Shepherd uh in the context of the massive importation of sheep uh into California to feeli feed disappointed miners uh beginning in approximately 1849 so that sheep are import are are sailed around the horn into California they're taken from the nearby White Colony nearby is relative the nearby White settler

colony of Australia Marino sheep that had been part of a flourishing export trade in sheep they The king Spain gave the Sheep to Saxony who imported it into the colonies and then they get imported to California to fi the gold feed the 49ers the Sheep economy of California introduced by the Spanish as part of the missionization of the Indians had declined by the middle of the 19th century along with uh the Native Americans in question um the Sheep economy had collapsed and needed to be reawakened in a way that changed the land of California forever

um so That the uh massive imputation of these highly destructive herbivores uh and the taking up of Collies mainly a mly of English Collies who happen to be around and occasional uh German colleague coming with the Australian called German because they live next door to German settlers in Australia um never mind came on ship and an occasional Basque dog that uh that might have come Over um with Bosque um actual actually folks hoping to make it rich in the gold mines who hadn't even necessarily been herders in the Bosque regions of Spain the Bosque who

went to Australia actually went in the early 20th century and a sugarcane workers not herders those who came to California came a as Gold Rush Folks by and large and also came up from the south west and Mexico for the same purposes and because my by and large they didn't strike it rich They they end up uh dealing with these English colonies called Bosque dogs uh to herd Marino sheep to feed Anglo settlers and what began in the Gold Rush was finished after the Civil War I assure you as the uh extraordinary uh consolidation of

U ecologies we'll politely call them uh the ecologies of the post Gold Rush and post Civil War West depended on the work of dogs like these okay now I have a dog like that there for what I have inherited In the Flesh part of the conquest part of very historically specific um know biologies and and uh various kinds of uh permanent eological change I have inherited a kind of accountability for certain sets of sovereignty considerations restoration ecology a reconsideration of the meat industrial complex a reconsideration of the jobs of dogs I have acquired a genome

and they have acquired me we have Speer we have respect we have a question of accountability in having acquired Each other's genome in these very specific nature cultures which have everything to do with messmates with eating together with breaking bread now there are people in breed scenes Australian shepherds who understand very well the responsibility that they have inherited in acquiring a genome uh I've uh spent a lot of time with some of the folks who are activists in the breed clubs around health and genetic issues and part of the accountability of Acquiring genome that I

will just reference for you quickly uh can be shown by a woman named CA sharp uh film and Cinema studies college person self-educated in biology uh very Savvy in pedigree analysis has elaborate databases in Australia that's how come I have a 20 generation pedigree on my dog is because of ca's databases uh she knows every Australian sheer who has ever gotten sick uh she has P she does a little kitchen table laptop publishing Operation called the double helix Network news uh she counsels breeders uh she is exceedingly discreet and good on confidentiality she is co-founded

with others the Australian shepher health and genetics Institute she teaches dog people how to solicit and work with Scientists she teaches scientists how to get along with dog people she translates she runs a genome okay she does a Genome Project uh having gotten it that when you have a Dog a dog has a human uh and that she has a kind of accountability and responsibility a question a obligation of respect uh in her companion speciesism in her in her companionship her breaking bread and her multi-level species relationship but I'm going to finish my lecture H

I'm going to finish my lecture with face Toof face time and I'm going to do that uh there are a number of ways that I've been thinking about face to face Um obviously I am alluding to others who have thought about face uh in encounter but I but this is inflected differently I'm interested in questions of intimacy questions of honesty uh questions of ethical encounter uh and questions of acquiring each other um that might be dealt with that way and to do that I'm going to read for you a little piece assuming I can find

it okay from the companion species Manifesto that I call maros story I acquired a god kid a god Kid acquired a god dog uh one acquires a kid out of the international adoption Market one acquires a dog out of this um one had these the kid and the dog acquired each other um in the way I am about to tell you Marco my godson is cen's God kid she is his god dog we are a fictive kin group in training perhaps our family coat of arms would take its motto from the Berkeley K9 literary politics

and arts magazine that is modeled after the Barb namely the bark whose Mast head reads dog is my co-pilot the title of a book that just came out published by uh the bark which I recommend when Cayenne was 12 weeks old and Marco six years old my husband Rustin and I gave him puppy training lessons for Christmas with cayenne and her crate in the car I would pick Marco up from school on Tuesdays drive to the Burger King for a planet sustaining Health Food dinner of burgers Coke and Fries and then head out to the

Santa Cruz sbca for our lesson the um improving discourses pervade dog land the Santa Cruz sbca is an excellent uh example of the improving discourses in action now like many of her breed Cayenne was a smart and willing youngster a natural to obedience games like many of his generation raised on high-speed special visual special effects and automated Cyborg toys Marco was a bright and motivated trainer a Natural to control games Cayenne learned Q's fast so she quickly popped her bum on the ground in response to a Sit command besides she practiced at home with me

in transed Marco at first treated her like a microchip implanted truck for which he held the remote controls he punched an imaginary button his P his puppy magically fulfilled intentions of his omnipotent remote will God was threatening to become our Co-pilot I an obsessive adult who came of age in the communes of the late 1960s was committed to ideals of inter subjectivity and mutuality in all things certainly including dog and boy training the illusion of mutual attention and communication would be better than nothing but I really wanted more than that besides here I was the

only adult of either species present inter subjectivity does not mean in equality a literally deadly game in dog Land but it does mean paying attention to the conjoined dance of face-to-face significant otherness in addition control freak that I am I got to call the shots at least on Tuesday nights Marco was at the same time taking karate lessons and he was profoundly in love with his karate master this fine man understood the children's love of drama ritual and costume as well as the mental spiritual bodily discipline of his martial art respect was the word and

The act that Marco ecstatically told me about from his lessons he swooned at the chance to collect his small robed self into the prescribed posture and bow formally to his master or partner before performing a form there's the puppy there's the boy okay caling his turbulent first grade self and meeting the eyes of his teacher or his partner in preparation for demanding stylized action thrilled Him hey was I going to let an opportunity like that go unused in my pursuit of companion species flourishing Marco I said Cayenne is not a cyborg truck she is your

partner in a martial art called obedience you are the older partner and the master here you have learned how to perform respect with your body and your eyes your job is to teach the form of tayen until you can find a way to teach her how to collect her Galloping puppy self calmly and to hold Still and look you in the eyes you cannot let her perform the sit command it would not be enough for her to just to sit on Queue and for him to click and treat that would be necessary certainly but the

order was wrong first these two youngsters had to learn to notice each other they had to be in the same game it is my belief that Marco began to emerge as a dog trainer over the next 6 weeks it is also my belief that as he learned to show her the Corporal posture of Cross species respect she and he became significant others to each other 2 years later out of the kitchen window I glimpsed Marco in my backyard doing 12 weave poles with cayenne when nobody else was present The Weave poles two feet apart poles

in a line that the dog weaves in and out of at Speed The Weave poles are one of the most difficult agility objects to teach and to perform I think cayenne and Marco's fast beautiful weave poles were Worthy of his Karate master there they are being messmates and that's Cayenne performing that's Cayenne also at work that's my bad Australian Shepherd Chow cross also at work he the AKC thinks of him as an Australian Shepherd because I did a little fraudulent [Laughter] registering now Marco's story like this lecture is about in Caris Thompson's terms Ontological choreography

which is that vital sort of play that the participants invent out of the histories of body and mind they inherit and that they rework into the fleshly verbs that make them who they are they invented this game this game remodels them metapas is the word acquiring genomes is the name of the game it always comes back to the biological flavor of the important words the word is made flesh in nature Cultures that's the pedagogi thank you [Applause] [Applause] [Music] our improving discourses did not extend to Temperance but that is a really well regard actually there's

a well-regarded training book that's in there too but we've both been working rather hard before you have a chance to uh break bread uh with Donna inform I we'll have a few Questions who would like to could you use the microphone or repeat the questions please uh well I use the microphone the question might use the microphone it's right there so it can actually be passed around come ah good okay then it's then that can be done it's on hello just a rather trivial observation who who oh there you are I lost directionality because of

the microphone just a rather trivial observation in Which uh you might have some comment this is the extraordinary difference across the British Channel between the English who uh have this extraordinary esteem for animals to the extent that they refus to send horses off the France to be slaughtered for consumption tell that to the people whose sheep were slaughtered in the hoof and mouth disease Fiasco French who really regard the English as a Ms about this now one hypothesis I've heard and as a laps Catholic you may have some particular kind is that as slaugh comes

natural to laps anyway Pas taught me that sorry as Protestants the English are always a little uncertain of the relationship to God and therefore this uncertainty spills over so to speak animals around them whereas the French as Catholics are have no anxiety whatsoever about their interaction with God and animals can look after Themselves now I'm just curious on your take onine hysterical laughter well I think it probably is a little bit of a broad brush uh approach I mean I hardly regard the Church of England is particularly Protestant so um maybe the methodists among them

have this particular uh we'll do the theology at well besides the the dogs in Paris or Something else again you know the little pooper scopers that the parisians have surely match anything the British do you speak loudly sure isn't the hear you okay this might be a basic question and if so I apologize but isn't the phenomenon of emergence which we talk talk about within what I would call a broad range of different discourses and contexts and so forth itself I mean in what sense does it make sense to compare the emergence of the Cellular

from the molecular for example to the emergence of the vertebrates from the cellular are these really similar phenomena or is there some well that ends up being a um that ends up interestingly and recently at least a partially empirical question uh are there incidents of um change in fundamental biological organization that work by symbiogenetic processes or not is this uh restricted to are these processes really only Operating at the um levels of um protes and um you know procaryotes and so on are these only working at at rather considerably smaller levels of biological organization or

not and the reason I gave you the squid um bacterial symbiotic uh example is because that sort of uh cohabitation that um is pretty get ends up being then pretty fundamental to the kinds of ecology the kinds of niches that can be occupied by that Association To the capacities um of the organisms really pretty fundamentally affected there in a way that surely would be subject to selection that one could that one could begin to think and perhaps even deal qu to some degree empirically with ecological developmental questions as evolutionary emergent organization questions um you know

these are at the very you know these are emergent research practices but I think that the tools are beginning To be available for asking questions that simply couldn't be asked other than speculatively until now um and but the one begins to be able to do something with things like this hi a little yeah um two questions very brief uh I wonder if you'd comment on the relationship oh I wonder if you'd comment on the relationship between the whole notion of the pure breed and sort of the mongr or the non-pure breed I wonder how that

that fashion accessory Of the New York Elite how that's slightly yeah how that slightly third R quality it's all the talk about breeding uh sort of intersects with the issues about nature culture that you're sort of most interested in and then the second question is um um I'll put my bad cross back on yeah go ahead I I'll actually I'll just leave off never mind well that's that's an important question um Eugenics uh and breeding uh the Improvement of The Germ of uh the Improvement of the of the stock okay and there is absolutely no

question that dogs as other um uh other organisms such as cattle and sheep and and chickens and dun and so forth and so on are subject to eugenic practices and eugenic discourses in a way that has become at the very least a source of anxiety when applied to people though alas atas it wasn't so much a source of anxiety in the recent past um now when of the um several Things I had to let go to an appalling number of prejudices when I actually started hanging out with dog people who do the breeding and talk

the Eugenics discourse because I I had to get it um that the similarities I heard were often misleading and the eugenic discourse in dog land while sometimes like what it is in human land is often doing different work both materially and culturally and that I had better start paying attention to the actual idiom of real life dog People and not assuming I knew in advance what eugenic discourse was doing uh that's a kind of prelim you know obvious lesson but when I started paying serious attention to Great Pyrenees breeders for example uh who were uh

you know perfectly into improving their lines and and breeding back onto uh the you know to somehow get back to the really great dog and so on all the rest of it that they are also doing something um that is that is about Something else uh that they um and furthermore that it is truly not the same thing to do the to do these discourses with cattle and dogs and people that these species differences do matter uh and that's one of the lessons one gets um in refusing anthropomorphism and projection as an adquate way of

dealing with the problem of relationality uh including the problem of power and hierarchy Independence and eating each other uh so um and that said A Contin an extraordinary amount of important symbolic works gets done on the bodies of the animals uh racializing work gender work class work so forth work uh that works through breeding practices that dogs are inserted into biopower through breeding discourses with a vengeance neogenics is only one little piece of that puzzle actually the sterilization discourses interest me even more than the Eugenics discourses and the sterilization discourses hit Both the pure Breads

and the muts in a range of ways and mutum is no exit from The Dilemma uh not only is the well-appointed but the uh the elite fashion accessory in contemporary New York over the pure bread um they are as susceptible to benetiz uh as pure breads okay um one can safely say uh not only that there the international adoption Market in small bodied muts is a fascinating place to look at contradictions and get it That there's no place to head for innocence so that the pipeline from the hard streets of Puerto Rico to the forever

homes of Massachusetts for the uh small-bodied mut of which there is a shortage in the no kill shelters in the um the zones of the of um the forever Homeland uh that have adopted the sterilization practices and therefore no longer have enough desirable muts they also have a rescue Hound program from the American South that has been a Little slow to pick up the sterilization discourse uh so that you know well-endowed hounds still roam the countryside uh and produce dogs for the forever homes of Massachusetts so that literally t th000 Puerto Rican muts have been

adopted into forever homes from the hard streets uh and I've paid some attention to the family discourses and the international adoption practices and the home visits and the contracts you sign and the training discourses you Take on the pedagogies and the it is just wonderful so I assure you exiting purebred Eugenics is not exiting the domains of biopower uh with all of their uh contradictions and complexities one last question right here in front um in both the speech tonight and in the manifesto there's an issue I feel isn't I don't feel is addressed yet and

that's sort of the issue of power I noticed on one hand with all the you know co-evolution and the neutrality a little Too companionate K the language in Marco's story is of obedience and control and so I'm wondering is the p parent power Dynamic a matter of inherent relationship or historical moment or both I think I think that um power relationships pervade every form of messmate relationship uh there is no cohabiting without questions of power however the specificity of power Relationships in dog human relationships are quite different from those say between adult humans and uh

child humans or among adult friends human friends or lovers that the specificities matter both their historical specificities and a few other biological species specificities one of the things that interests me about face-to-face ethical discourse between me and my dogs is that I cannot forget that equality would kill my Dogs um that equality would be about the most irresponsible thing I could do uh that if I a mode of dishonesty that would kill my dogs would be to do a kind of liberal equality discourse with them um so that the martial art of obedience is not

a joke it's about the chances of life and death and contemporary dog human cultures in uh the world in which we live um if my dog bites a kid even a minor bite my dog will get killed the kid might also be hurt I suppose I care Uh that's a bad joke I do care I said that for Wendy's sake actually it was it was one of those you know moments of things slipping out that should never have been said um I don't I think that that one of the forms of honesty that that face-to-face

relationality with dogs forces on me is confrontation with my IDE iCal commitments um to various kinds of democratic uh discourses which isn't the say I'm about to give them up uh Comprehensively or you know toss them into the trash bin but I think uh you can't do dog human relationality without getting it um that this not that you can't base this relationship on equality and furthermore that if you want to do something interesting together um uh the do Vicki Hearn does this particularly well within sort of Jeffersonian discourse um the possibility of of really doing

something beautiful the possibility of of achieving skill uh Rests on a kind of discipline uh that has to do with I have a dog a dog has me they have a right to the consequences of their actions U and that involves uh the discipline of training and training is not a discipline of equality anym in schools for human children or in um the way I work with my dog in agility well thank you very much than