Donna Haraway AAR Audio
by Adam Robbert
I’ve uploaded Donna Haraway’s talk she gave at the AAR yesterday, its not one to miss. I’ve also attached the notes I was able to jot down below (though given the pace of an average Haraway lecture, they are mostly sentence fragments!)
- Haraway Response.
- Ongoing allied oppositions
- Dying, finitude, relationality
- Eruptive conglobulation
- The extraordinary ongoing eruptiveness of words
- Acts of idolatry
- The negative way of naming what is ongoing
- The diversified war terrain
- The care of individuals and not just kinds
- Where to draw the line of use of each others bodies
- Recuperating well enough
- Losing the certainty of villainy
- Building the articulations that might
- Language is a physical force
- Going to fast to the notion of “post”; how to inherit as one of the most urgent ecological tasks
- What’s a good enough individual?
- The infinite parsing of what’s going to count as a unit
- “Everybody is everybody else’s extended phenotype”
- Eco-Evo-Devo synthesis; various temporalities that can become selectable; “genes themselves are always already a crowd”
- “At every layer of the onion we have a Whiteheadian concrescence”
- Inhabiting intimately, publicly
- Multiple species assemblages
- Biodiversity; chronodiversity
- The tangled scales of embodied times
- Enfolded, gapped layers
- What was not yet in time, flesh, and space
- Volcanic rocks and mortal hearts
- Knotted together in the ontological cats cradle of ordinary becoming with
- Microbiome; we’ve had ecology since 1866; symbiogenesis since 1927
- Microbiodiversity; the kinds of diversity produced in times
- Microselective apparatuses; what is the scale?
- “it matters what concept you use to think other concepts with”; the infection of knowing(s)
Listening to this, Haraway says (at 22:37): “…individuality is about selectable patterns of variation the kinds of various temporalities of various patterns that become selectable act-uponable so that their…[sic] its not just that genes act within environments which include the organism but genes themselves are already a crowd. The starting point is a relationality of vulnerable pattern stability/instability at every layer of the onion, what one has got is what? A kind of Whiteheadian concrescence. There are stabilisations for sure but what there are not, are units separated from other units that then have to be got together again by some
fancy philosophical move.”
Is this against the basic foundations of OOO or am I missing something?
This a great question and the one I happened to be focused on the most vis-a-vis objects and ecology right now. I think, on the one hand, OOO fits Haraway’s account of the gene-organism-environment relationship in that, ultimately, organisms are irreducible to both their genetics (undermining) and their environments (overmining). On the other hand, the levels of complexity Haraway notes may lead to the generation of far too many “objects” (i.e. crowds of genes interacting with crowds of organisms and environments) to no longer be useful. In this case the process metaphor may seem the more pragmatic approach. I’m working out the details of what this might mean for both process philosophy and object-oriented ontology. Its a great, unresolved question as far as I am concerned.
Thank you for sharing this. I never know what to do with Haraway these days. I am sure I will end up writing something about this.