杏吧原创

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The idea of human uniqueness is central to western cultures. But suppose the world doesn鈥檛 revolve round we humans, that we鈥檙e just part of a network of relationships, between鈥� well, almost anything? That鈥檚 the line Donna Haraway has defended for decades. She鈥檚 a postmodern guru, a scientist who broke new ground with a PhD on metaphor and biology, and has written that she would 鈥渞ather be a cyborg than a goddess鈥�. Liz Else wondered why her latest book is centred on something as apparently simple as her relationship with her dog.

Tell us about your dog.

Cayenne Pepper is an Australian shepherd I had from a puppy. We take part in the sport called agility, where we negotiate 20 obstacles and judges evaluate us for speed and accuracy. It is a team sport where we have to learn to move as a single, new entity. To do that with a member of another species is not at all the same thing as doing it with a cheating, language-wielding hominid partner.

What else can you achieve through your relationship with Cayenne?

I鈥檓 interested in taking the ordinary seriously. Here I am, a white, late-middle-aged, middle-class academic having inherited the gender apparatus of white sentimental culture and a history of pet-keeping. I get a puppy, we play a sport together and train each other up over a period of eight years, both as companions and as partners in serious work. This is an extraordinarily ordinary thing 鈥� but what I鈥檓 trying to do in my book, When Species Meet, is to take this encounter, this kind of 鈥渞edoing鈥� of each other, this entanglement of love, work, skill and heritage, seriously. To think as deeply as I鈥檓 capable about my relationship with my Cayenne, with human beings and with other organisms that this encounter brings me into touch with.

Has this changed your thinking about what it means to be human?

The highs Cayenne and I experience come from focused, trained, responsive, conjoined movement at speed. It can be chaos for us both. One night when we had trained really hard, in a nanosecond, we both went a different way. We stopped and looked at each other. I swear I heard a sound like Velcro ripping when our cross-species, conjoined mind-body came apart. I looked at Cayenne and she looked stunned, confused and hurt. It felt like something out of Philip Pullman鈥檚 His Dark Materials [in which every individual is connected to an animal 鈥渄aemon鈥漖 鈥� except that Pullman鈥檚 daemon is more to do with the human soul.

It鈥檚 a deep pleasure being one among many living and dying creatures, and to understand that walking away from human exceptionalism is as much a relief from carrying on a kind of impossible fantasy as it is a burden to take on.

Can you explain what you mean by 鈥渉uman exceptionalism鈥�?

The dominant western philosophical and scientific traditions have emphasised the exceptional nature of human beings. Since the 18th-century Enlightenment, what constitutes the human is its difference from all the 鈥渙thers鈥� 鈥� from gods, demons, creepy-crawlies, blobs, slaves and, above all, animals. The relentless quest for something that creates a gap between what鈥檚 human and what鈥檚 not, that鈥檚 human exceptionalism.

Do we need to move on from this mindset?

What I鈥檓 saying is quite simple, but the consequences aren鈥檛. Instead of thinking about what separates our species from all others, ask how the entities in any encounter make us all the things we are. Ask how they are the products of their relationships. To be a human is always to be in a relationship with a host of others: plants, animals, humans, dead, living, fantasised. To be on Earth is to be in a companion-species relationship in the sense of coming into being with a crowd of others, and in the sense that we shape and reshape each other into what we are.

By companion species I don鈥檛 mean companion animals like pets. The word companion comes from cum panis, to break bread [literally 鈥渨ith bread鈥漖, which seems the right way to describe all those who are at the table together on this Earth.

Why does changing the way we think matter?

It matters very much. We are beginning to understand that the global conversation has got to be more tuned both to history and to the tangled complexities of now. For example, taking my training with Cayenne, a herding dog by heritage, seriously forces me to be aware of many things: the history of local ranching; responsibilities to the food and justice projects connected with ranching these days; issues of ecological restoration that can鈥檛 just be to do with animal-rights approaches to the meat-industrial complex but have to be part of building sustainable agro-pastoralism, which, in turn, includes rare-breed trusts, connections with slaughterhouse reform and so on. In other words, it involves us in politics that must pay attention to genetics, ecology, ranching, internet marketing, who eats what, a whole set of entanglements.

The biggest picture I can paint is that new ways of thinking which involve others and our entanglement with those others will help us understand the challenges of the 21st century better. These include our relationships within this planet鈥檚 ecology (how can we live better without the splits between nature and culture?), with the unfolding virtual and cyborg worlds, with our own diverse inner worlds, and with our own bodies, which are themselves made up of vast numbers of interrelating critters.

What do you say to people who still don鈥檛 get it?

I don鈥檛 think that it鈥檚 possible to be a serious person in the world without a major commitment to curiosity and where it leads, but curiosity is not a nice virtue 鈥� and it certainly never leads to innocence. Those who are unsympathetic to the need to change our thinking should understand that knowledge practice, which is what all researchers and engineers are doing, involves human beings in relationships with machines, organisms and landscapes that can never be innocent. Our work can involve killing or harming animals, changing them by turning them into cyborgs or genetically engineered hybrids and so on, not to mention doing a raft of dubious things to humans, all of which can also damage the researchers doing them. But one thing I think all researchers do understand is that cumulative, secular knowledge is a fragile, precious achievement and must be defended.

鈥淐uriosity is not a nice virtue 鈥� and it never leads to innocence鈥�

Are you involved with defending knowledge?

Living in California, I have to deal with the stupidity of 鈥渋ntelligent design鈥� being used to attack evolutionary textbooks in high schools. I regard these attacks as a major abuse of young people, as serious as other forms of abuse. But you can鈥檛 defend knowledge with some kind of self-satisfied arrogant certainty that you鈥檝e got the truth. I think you defend it without self-certainty, in part by recognising these entanglements I鈥檝e been talking about.

Rationality is a fragile, finite virtue. It鈥檚 something that mortal creatures have constructed and it鈥檚 hard to figure out what it means at any one time. But we have to nurture it, in loving alliance with the other critters of this planet, with species that are our companions in every sense.