When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?

Abstract

This interview reconsiders Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto 21 years after it was first published. It asks what has become of the three boundary breakdowns around which the Manifesto was structured - those between animals and humans, animal-humans (organisms) and machines, and the ‘physical and non-physical’. Against this backdrop, this interview examines the connection between the Cyborg Manifesto and Haraway’s more recent writings on companion species, along with what it means to read or write a ‘manifesto’ today. Recent notions of the ‘posthuman’ are also placed into question.

A Meaningful Method: Research with Adolescent Girls Who Use Crystal Methamphetamine

“…In terms of practice, Kreuger (2007) asserts that an awareness of this is necessary: ''the absence of focus on workers in a field that was trying to focus on youth involvement and agency created an equation for progress in which half was missing'' (p. 58). Similarly, we must remind ourselves that we cannot assume an omniscient role as researchers, as conditions change with each interaction or even throughout a single dialogue (Gane 2006). Instead, perhaps, we can strive to engage with conditions and participants, and cast our gaze not only upon those with whom we interact, but also upon ourselves, and the interaction itself.…”

“…In an interview with Donna Haraway (Gane 2006), we recently read ''We don't need methods so much as practices, and we're already engaged in them'' (p. 155). To us, this felt like a hint of an answer.…”

Making Death Matter : A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory

“…By the end of the millennium, cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical inquiry" (2003,4). She argues that the material coevolution of dogs and humans (e.g., the exchange of organic matter and bacteria) and their long history of companionship testifies to multidirectional gene exchange and interspecies connections but also highlights that "we have never been human" (quoted in Gane 2006). In other words, the massive number of bacteria and fungi in a human body as well as the molecular exchanges between bodies and beyond species boundaries bring up the question of what is human about human beings.…”

Ideology, Hegemony, Discourse: A Critical Review of Theories of Knowledge and Power

“…Her use of an often monstrous trope suggests that a cyborg politics must also engage with that which appears alien and hostile upon first glance; it challenges us to overcome a binary politics of "good versus evil." Related to this is Haraway's notion of the "informatics of domination" (p. 161; also see Gane and Haraway 2006). This is her expression of a rather Foucaultian conception of power, wherein social power is not a top-down flow from elites to masses, or an objective thing, but a property of social relations.…”