When Species Meet (Posthumanities) by Donna J. Haraway

Author:Donna J. Haraway [Haraway, Donna J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816650453
Amazon: 0816650462
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: 2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

in the right spot, and had all my parts technically correct;

Cayenne turned well and correctly too. Then, we just lost

each other. Period. It was not a “technical” mistake for either

of us, I swear. Rob saw nothing wrong and did not know

what happened. I swear Cayenne and I both heard the

Velcro ripping when our cross-species conjoined mind–body,

which we are when we run well, came apart. I’ve experienced

losing her mentally before, of course, as she has me. Almost

always, the actual literal error of a course—usually a tiny but

fatal glitch in timing—is a symptom of such a loss of each

other. But this was different—much more intense—maybe

because we were both tired and we had been unconsciously

but strongly linked all night. She looked abandoned, and I

felt abandoned. I experienced the confused look we gave each

TRAINING IN THE CONTACT ZONE

d 231

other to be full of loss and yearning, and I truly think that

was what her expressive canine being was screaming too. I

think the communication between us was as unambiguous as

a play bow would be in its context. Just as a play bow binds

responding partners to take the risk of playing, somehow we

unbound each other from the game. Something severed us.

All of this happened in much less than a second.

Have you read the Philip Pullman series, Golden

Compass, Subtle Knife, and Amber Spyglass, in which a

human–daemon link is a main part of the fictional world?

The daemon is an animal familiar essential to the human,

and vice versa, and the link is so strong and necessary to

being whole that its deliberate severing is the violent crime

driving the plot. At one point, the narrator says, “Will, too,

felt the pain where his daemon had been, a scalded place of

acute tenderness that each breath tore at with cold hooks”

( Amber Spyglass, ). Earlier, the narrator described the

crime of severing daemon and human: “While there is a

connection, of course, the link remains. Then the blade is

brought down between them, severing the link at once. They

are then separate entities” ( Golden Compass, ). 38

Surely, I am dramatizing the rip between Cayenne and

me over a little agility discrimination—tire or jump?—late

on a rainy Wednesday night in March in a central California

horse arena. Yet, this tiny tear in the fabric of being told me

something precious about the weave of the whole-selves

commitment that can bind companion species in a game of

conjoined living, in which each is more than one but less

than two. We trained hard—for years, actually—to develop

this kind of link; but both its coming into being and its

coming apart are only made possible by that discipline, not

made by it.

Does all that make any sense?

Coming apart in Sonoma County,

Donna

232

d TRAINING IN THE CONTACT ZONE

PLAYING WITH STRANGERS

Agility is a sport and a kind of game that is built on the tie of cross-

species work and play. I have said a lot about work so far but too little

about play. It is rare to meet a puppy who does not know how to play;

such a youngster would be seriously disturbed. Most, but not all, adult

dogs know very well how to play

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