Davies, G.

Loftus, A.

English

UCL Discovery

other-than-humans, but teaches us a more basic lesson about the ‘politics ofconviviality’ (Hinchliffe & Whatmore, 2006).For Haraway response-ability is being curious, is engaging. It is learning and un-learning, exposing oneself and admitting failure. And this she enacts through lettingus take part in her very own practice with dogs, in making us familiar with the itchesand twists of agility training. She takes the risk to not just write about, but to show usone way of practising responsibility in a more-than-human world. To creativelyrework her proposition for other encounters will be the task of mosquito and bugpeople for the years to come.ReferencesCarson R, 1962 Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, Boston)Derrida J, 2002, “The animal that therefore I am (more to follow)” Critical Inquiry 28(2) 369-418Hinchliffe S, Whatmore S, 2006, “Living Cities: Towards a Politics of Conviviality”Science as Culture, 15 (2) 123–138PMI, 2007, FY08 Ghana Malaria Operational Plan President's Malaria Initiative,http://www.fightingmalaria.gov/countries/mops/index.htmlService M W, Townson H, 2002, “The Anopheles vector”, in Essential MalariologyEds Warrell D A, Gilles H M (Arnold, London) pp 59-84WHO, 2008, World Malaria Report 2008 World Health Organisation,http://www.who.int/malaria/wmr2008/On the politics of lapdogs, Jim's dog, and crittercamsGail Davies Department of Geography, University College London and Alex Loftus,Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of LondonWhen Species Meet is a deeply political book. It is also a book consisting of lengthydiscussions about dog-agility training. These two claims will not sit comfortably withsome. So, in this review, we reflect explicitly on the demonstration of politicsemerging through the book, above all in Donna Haraway’s approach to researching,writing and engaging with the world. From the first page, Haraway makes the scopeand location of her political project clear. She is concerned with “nurturing a morejust and peaceful other-globalization” that begins from “grappling with, rather thangeneralizing from, the ordinary” (p.3). Both a critique of the existing world and asense of the political possibilities emerging from “becoming with as a process ofbecoming worldly” are implied in her approach. In subsequent experiments withways of connecting the two, the book both illustrates a situated, feminist form ofinquiry and is a radical transformation of a philosophy of praxis. We suggest thebook can productively be understood as a methodological demonstration, addressingquestions of where we look, what we look at and the kinds of perspectives we adoptin both our research and our hopes for a better world. Throughout, Haraway’sresponses to these questions are lively and evocative. We also acknowledge they are,at times, frustrating. What, for example, are we meant to do with a 20-page collage ofe-mails in Chapter 7? Quite how do these intimate encounters between dogs relate tothe practices of doing politics? But, perhaps this is Haraway’s point: these serve asinvitations to think about why we engage in this way. As we conclude, wonderingwhy one would dismiss these forms of relating can be a political provocation in itself.In moving towards this point, we borrow a trope from Haraway herself: the potentialof thinking with narrative figures. The central figure in this book is the dog ascompanion species. Yet it appears here in forms more varied than in the CompanionSpecies Manifesto. We pick up encounters with lap dogs, Jim’s dog and crittercamsbefore returning to review the political task Haraway seeks alongside her morefamiliar companions. We suggest these figures illustrate how to move argumentsabout dogs into other forms of relating. This was a central challenge in theCompanion Species Manifesto. Heidi Nast, in her review, both quotes and questionsHaraway on the wider implications of remaking subjectivities through dog agilitytraining: “both dog and handler have to be able to take the initiative and to respondobediently to the other. The task, is to become coherent enough in an incoherentworld to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh,in the run, on the course. And then to remember how to live like that at every scale,with all the partners” (in Nast, 2005, p. 120, original emphasis). While appreciatingthe encounter, Nast holds back on the recuperative politics of companion species,especially given the way pets are enmeshed in post-industrial commodity circuits.The range of figures animating When Species Meet offers some response to Nast’squestioning, through their multiplicity, mobility and sometimes their indeterminacy.These less literally doggy figures provide more diverse ways of tracing how other-globalisations might be possible through this joint dance of being.First, we consider Haraway’s lapdog/laptop analogy. It is a simple point, and likemany of her analogies it is deliberately folksy, but it also marks the beginnings of aconversation between the fleshy being of dogs and the cyborg potential of the laptop,between nature and technology. As Haraway suggests, the pun “opens a world ofenquiry” (p.9), embodied in the interactive and networked qualities of the book.There are opportunities to drill down through the narratives of becoming worldly withdogs, following links to theoretical arguments and communities of scholars in thefootnotes. We are invited into breeding chat rooms, and get to eavesdrop on e-mailconversations between trainers. The codifications and exclusions through which allknowledge production proceeds are traceable in the book, both in reflections on thephysical process of compiling a text and through the complex activities involved inweaving together a more worldly achievement, like responsibly maintaining a dogbreed. It is a book which is generous to its sources, whilst also reflexive about itsown potential use as source for all manner of knowledge practices – whetheracademic writing, or dog training. This attention to the connective, as opposed to thefixed, spaces of knowledge production means the book can be considered an additionto a small, but vital body of work on knowledge cultures which are virtual, social andmaterial (See also Hine, 2006).These connective spaces are also a crucial source of Haraway’s optimism. Throughworking with a vast and differentiated community of others, one gains a clearer senseof the political possibilities of working together. In a different political moment,Marx writes enthusiastically of the formation of new political associations in Paris ofthe 1840s. Formed to achieve a political end, these created a sense of a new need, theneed for society. What appeared to be simply a means of achieving an end(associating) becomes an end in itself. This also happens when species meet and it iscrucial to the emergent politics within the book and the tensions that began thereview. Marx’s Parisian socialist community is no longer one of predominantly maleartisans: it is a rich entanglement of humans and non-humans, all becoming with oneanother. Haraway makes this move clear in the second chapter, reflecting on hercomplicated debt to Marx. For her, he “understood relational sensuousness, and hethought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the worldenacted in living labour” (p. 46). Still, he never managed to escape a humanexceptionalism. His philosophy of praxis, rooted in the practical resolution ofphilosophical conundrums through everyday interactions is present throughout WhenSpecies Meet. Here, it is transformed through a wider sense of who or what isinvolved in these interactions. The tentative beginnings to Haraway’s Biocapital:Volume One are both tantalising and provocative.Potential participants in these interactions can be traced further in the figure of Jim’sdog. This dog, whose shape is formed from the logs, mosses and ferns of the canyonsof Santa Cruz, is the only colour illustration in the book, a vivid and living example ofthe contact zones between many species, digital technologies and friendship. Jim’sdog works as the canine equivalent of Darwin’s tangled bank, as an updated, situatedand embodied metaphor of the lively entangled and personal networks ofcontemporary biology. Its relation to arguments about how units are defined inbiology – whether individuals, communities or assemblages – resonates with Hird’sreview. Here, we add, it is a reminder of the potential for conversations withbiological research practices, which are earthy, enquiring but also critical. AsHaraway writes ‘Jim’s dog is a provocation to curiosity’ (p.7). The transformation ofresearch practices flowing from this are most clearly articulated in the footnotes.Haraway notes the development of her relationships with scientists to those ofmutually generous suspicion: ‘one of the most important epistemological virtues ofcompanion species’ (p. 213). In this figure, we find a invitation to engage withbiology, in ways which are not reductive, historic and dependent on the closednarratives of science, but hopeful, engaged and forward looking, even if, in seekingsuch entanglements in practice “requires responses one cannot know in advance”(p.313).A third, and not entirely unproblematic figure, is that of the Crittercam (chapter 9).Again, acknowledging in an inspiring and humble way the rich debt to her graduatestudents, Haraway reflects on the forms of situated knowledges possible through thisview from below. Although bound up in the filmic magic of romanticising nature,Haraway links the spectacularisation of wildlife to the radical political potentialwithin situated knowledges. Here, as in other works, Haraway demonstrates howsituated knowledges are more than recognitions of positionality or calls to or from theoppressed: they are a political tool for more adequate knowledge, rooted in themessiness of the everyday. Perhaps this politics is clearest in her admiration for thework of dog-breeder CA Sharp. As a producer of more adequate knowledge ofepilepsy in dogs, Sharp confronts the prejudices of both a scientific community,protecting its claims to knowledge production, and a hierarchically organisedbreeding community, who feel threatened by revelations of a genetic link to epilepsyin their own dogs. Sharp learns through doing and produces new knowledges formaking a more just world in which different species might flourish. Theseknowledges, in turn, are changed through the act of achieving this. Sharp embodies aradical and world-changing philosophy of praxis, based on these complexly situatedknowledges.So, we return to the central figure of the dog as companion species. This remains agrounding truth within the book as sensuous interacting bodies come to define newtruths. Haraway is, of course, not the only scholar to use domestic animals in thesearch for new ethical or political realities. Derrida confronts his cat, Levinasencounters the dog, but these are philosophical exploration of otherness, which sayless about the difficult everyday messiness of accommodating difference. Julie AnnSmith (2003) writes memorably of the day-to-day experience of living with houserabbits, as a demonstration of post-human ethics. However, without the saintlypatience of Smith or the abstractions of philosophical discourse, such as those aroundrights, these practices may struggle to travel, relegated to personal domesticexperiments. These questions remain in When Species Meet, yet they are questionedand refigured here as well. Figures like the lapdog, critter cam and Jim’s dog, hint atthe potential for spiralling entanglements of emancipatory politics. The book takesbodily ground ‘truths’ out of domestic contexts, into other spaces, into the laboratory,on the internet, into the texts of academic writing. Here they may be received withsome discomfort or embarrassment. Such reactions remind us that boundariesbetween private and public spaces are actively negotiated and often gendered; that thepolitics of research is about not only where we look and what we look at, but also inhow we write in the world. Thus, whilst this book may not have all the answers, itposes important political questions, moving companion species into considerations ofphilosophies of praxis and feminist methodologies. Derrida, despite standing nakedin front of his cat, never took such a political risk.ReferencesHine, C. (2006) New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science, Idea Group Inc. 286.Nast, H. (2005) Book Review: The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, andsignificant otherness Cultural Geographies 12: 118-120Smith J.A. (2003) Beyond Dominance and Affection: Living with Rabbits in Post-Humanist Households Society and Animals, Volume 11, Number 2, 2003: 181-197When Species Meet: Staying with the TroubleDonna Haraway, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa CruzIt is a privilege—not to mention a joy—to receive reviews with such generous criticalreadings both to what I do and to what I failed to do or do badly in When SpeciesMeet. These reviews are models of the “corporeal generosity” (Rosylyn Diprose) and“making available” (Vincanne Despret) to each other that Isabel Stengers’s sort ofcosmopolitics is about. Skirting the sucking quicksands of both humanism and

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