Manifestly Haraway by Donna J. Haraway | Goodreads

Manifestly Haraway by Donna J. Haraway | Goodreads




Want to Read

Editorial Reviews

Review





"These are crucial manifestos that changed the discourse and clarified our situation in the postmodern in stunning and beautiful ways. That we are animal and machine and human and full of potential is Donna Haraway’s enduring and inspirational message."—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Aurora and the Mars trilogy

"Here Donna Haraway’s manifestos are marvelously composted in the rich humus of reflection, erudition, and reasons for laughter that makes thinking with other people so generative. The brilliance that sparks between Cary Wolfe and Haraway illuminates everything that is between, around, underneath, and beside two most profound moments in critical thought."—Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

"Donna Haraway’s essays are invitations to scientists, artists, and everyone-who-must-improvise for respectful play with chimeras, hybrids, cyborgs, GMOs, holobionts, mosaics, allies, and fusions. They are invitations to generate new creative relationships for flourishing during and after the Anthropocene. As always, when presented with essays by Haraway, accept the invitation at the risk of becoming a different person."—Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College




"The social relations of science was a whole movement in the 1930s...It did not survive the cold war purges of intellectual life. Science studies has reinvented many of its themes and in many ways improved upon them. Yet perhaps, as Haraway once noted in passing, the “liberal mystification that all started with Thomas Kuhn…” has erased a little too much of its radical past. We are very fortunate that Donna Haraway and her kith reinvented it."—Public Seminar

"Unusual and exciting. Every word adds a new detail, facet, nuance, reflection, to an infinitely detailed, faceted, nuanced reality."—London Review of Books

"Manifestly Haraway is a timely and necessary publication in response to our own political moment if we are to link up with past failures, and explore new affinities for the future."—Arcadia

"Widely influential."—Science Fiction Studies

"Important, feminist, bio-political work."—Annals of Science

"Manifestly Haraway is illuminating and engaging. Donna Haraway contextualizes the manifestos and considers how some of these early ideas are developing alongside fresh concepts and influences." —Sociology


Read less
About the Author





Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated with the departments of anthropology, feminist studies, environmental studies, and film and digital media. She is an active participant in UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is also founding director of 3CT (Center for Critical and Cultural Theory). His books Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, The Other Emerson (with Branka Arsic), and What Is Posthumanism? are published by Minnesota.








Rate this book
1 of 5 stars2 of 5 stars3 of 5 stars4 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
Preview

Manifestly Haraway

by
Donna J. Haraway,
Cary Wolfe (Contributor)
4.22 · Rating details · 120 ratings · 18 reviews
Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent “Companion Species Manifesto,” which further questions the human–nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.

Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway’s thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human–nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway’s “Chthulucene Manifesto,” in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.


(less)

GET A COPY
Kobo
Online Stores ▾
Book Links ▾

Paperback, 336 pages
Published April 1st 2016 by University Of Minnesota Press
Original Title
Manifestly Haraway
ISBN
0816650489 (ISBN13: 9780816650484)
Edition Language
English


COMMUNITY REVIEWS
Showing 1-30
4.22 ·
Rating details
· 120 ratings · 18 reviews


|
Sort order

May 21, 2016John rated it it was amazing
Yeah five stars. Haraway, I'm convinced, will be remembered as the key thinker of our time. This new book (2016) from Minnesota collects her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Companion Species Manifesto (2002), and an extensive interview with Minnesota's "Posthumanities" series editor Cary Wolfe, that is really a tour de force.

I read the Cyborg Manifesto in the mid 1990s, and was properly impressed with it at the time; her argument for our essential tangledness and call for taking responsibility for all that we are seemed so right to me back then. I re-read it several times in grad school, & mined it for its many bon mots and nuggets of critical insight. But re-reading it last week, I was shocked how fresh it still seems. Haraway wrote the thing before anyone really knew what the Internet was, let alone how much of our lives, society, and economy would be dominated by it. But it's still spot on, maybe even more so. A friend called it "shockingly prescient."

The Companion Species Manifesto, which was positioned as the follow-up, was new to me. Here, Haraway turns away from her critique of technoscience and talks about dogs instead, but making many of the same moves... our intertwined histories, our mythologies of purity, our interdependence. I found the second manifesto more challenging -- she's much more of a dog person than I am. The synthesis really comes in the third chapter, which is Cary Wolfe's interrogation of Haraway in 2014, thinking through the themes of both essays in light of everything that's come since. Her brilliance here is even more impressive, as she turns phrases and mines our collective mythological inheritance (especially her Catholicism) with truly breathtaking intensity. This book made the hair stand up on the back of my neck in several places.

Best news: the very end of this book prefigures her forthcoming (fall 2016) Staying With Trouble, in which she apparently move beyond the so-called "Anthropocene" to propose a more ominous, yet (true to Haraway) still hopeful "Chthulucene" era -- there's posthumanism for you. Can't wait for that. (less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review



Feb 22, 2018Ainhoa Rodriguez rated it it was amazing
Donna Haraway portraits the world throught cyborgs, elements of the world that picture transgression and breaking all the stablished boundaries, but, ironically, postulating a myth based on sci-fi, Haraway describes the past and the present of our society purely. This book is, without doubt, a magnificent mirror in which we should be able to see our reflection. It is, also, a must-read for all those who may be interested in Feminism, Philosophy of Science or Metaphysics!
flag1 like · Like · comment · see review



Sep 06, 2019Niall rated it it was amazing
Shelves: biosemiotics, theory, queer-theory
Came for The Companion Species, stayed for the Companions in Conversation. Both wonderful.
flag1 like · Like · comment · see review



Jan 09, 2018Zach rated it it was amazing
The real deal. This retrospective work (plus a recent conversation) only confirms that Haraway is one of the best thinkers of our muddy time. Challenging reading in the best possible way, with a flourish of style that only she can pull off. These shimmering sentences contain multitudes, stocked with vitalizing language that registers in modes from playful curiosity to dead-seriousness. Above all else, Haraway reminds us that “knowing” is fundamentally networked, linked across time and place (and species!) by different types of nodes and connections. I don’t pretend to understand everything here, but her dogged commitment to citing the network of people she thinks-with through these things provides ample opportunity to dig into other theories.

I’ve sort of been reading backwards in Haraway’s oeuvre, starting last year with the top-notch “Staying with the Trouble.” The “tentacular” (to use a Haraway-word) connections between so much of her earlier work and the landscape that she’s thinking in now are fascinating to trace. In particular, it was fruitful reading to see the how the figure of the “cyborg” was following by the “companion species” and then would come to be followed by the figures of the “Chthulucene.”

The pathbreaking “Cyborg Manifesto” feels both of its time (early 1980s) and eerily prescient, still. It made for some generally discomfiting reading — particularly as I read through it on Christmas Eve, “Silent Night” vs. the unapologetically loud cyborg — but Haraway reveals later in the book during the conversation section that the manifesto was meant to be felt in this unsettling way. No surprise, then, when she says: “The Companion Species manifesto grows out of an act of love, and the Cyborg Manifesto grows more out of an act of rage.”

The "Companion Species Manifesto” certainly gestures towards love, of a practiced type. Whereas I could not figure out how one could love or live-with the cyborg, really, I could easily find a place to think through loving companion species. Everyone who lives with dogs, in whatever capacity, has their opinions on the relationship; reading Haraway here was like listening to the most thoughtful “dog person” you could imagine. There are endless theories about “human’s relationship with dogs,” but Haraway doesn’t dwell in this grandstanding, finding that "Stories are much bigger than ideologies. In that is our hope.” We dwell in particularities and in universals here; the specific is what is always at stake in the bigger project of getting on well with each other in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene. Living with dogs, and taking their entangled lives seriously, is not just some pet niche for dog-lovers to think though — it’s one of many portals into learning to live multispecies lives.

I’ll end with but one of the many exhortations Haraway gives us: “Again and again in my manifesto, I and my people need to learn to inhabit histories, not disown them, least of all through the cheap tricks of puritanical critique.” I think this is a challenging mantle to take on. We live in worlds not created by and for us, but rather shaped by the deeper forces of all that we don’t know and the more proximate ones of our recent ancestors and their multispecies relationships. The temptation to be “puritanically critical” of the past is strong — very strong indeed when you look at the mess they’ve given us. But what would we have done differently? Really, do we think that we would have made less of a mess? Haraway challenges us to “inhabit” rather than “disown” the lumpy legacy we’ve been born into — and her foray into “dogland” shows just how this done: attention to the particulars, care towards those which are not you, a wry orientation towards the past. But you must embed yourself as best you can — no funny games of critical distance here. Tough work to do, but essential too. (less)
flagLike · comment · see review



Oct 08, 2018Kelly rated it it was amazing
I did not get through "The Cyborg Manifesto," but "The Companion Species Manifesto" is amazing. She offers so many ways to think about our intersubjectivity with our companion animals and to situate that relationship in a more moderate space. She argues that humans do not "make" dogs or other domesticated animals, but that we make them and are made by them in relationship.

She does not go all the way in promoting "animal rights" because she focuses on individual animals and individual kinds of animals, all of which have different needs and particular qualifications for happiness. Rather, the dogs she discusses have rights within a certain relationship with their significant human other.

Her focus on working dogs is also really interesting, as the work these breeds have historically done has been largely outsourced to more technologically advanced methods. However, new crises in ecology have made Great Pyrenees relevant again as LGDs because poison is no longer a viable option for controlling livestock predators like coyotes. But even agility training can be fulfilling, she argues, as it gives dogs and humans a shared goal of excellence that they reach only through hard work and a close, trusting relationship.

So while I still believe in animal rights to a certain extent, her argument has made me see that for certain domesticated species, being left alone would be the more abusive option. We must find ways to work together in relationships of mutual respect with our companion species again, and this is the path to actually valuing the lives of the species and individual animals with whom we share our environments. (less)
flagLike · comment · see review



Aug 29, 2019Trenchologist rated it really liked it
I read Cyborg for undergrad work and parts have stuck with me, but as a memory of what it was about vs what it is about. Reading it with so many more years lived, experienced, and changes in the world (including feminism and technology) makes it feel at once optimistic but still vital and relevant.

The expansion of feminism to include WoC and the movement of technology to greater paternalistic spaces alone makes you go o.O with how that is an unresolved, thorny issue but also appreciate its prescience -and- proposals for solutions. Maybe everyone should reread this, right about now.

I cannot get into a full deconstruction. There just aren't enough characters left in this box and also I haven't the time to write a thesis/term paper lol.

Companion Species is different in quality but interesting. It's niche and specific and maybe doesn't seem to relate, but it does. That'd be a good framework for the thesis on this I'm not going to write.

I enjoyed the conversation on the end that adds depth and more contemporary reaction and thoughts from Haraway on her manifestos and perspectives. It's a bit too-too in some ways -- smart people indulging in reference-heavy PoMo smart dialogue -- but worth getting through to illuminate the manifestos in new ways. (less)
flagLike · comment · see review



Apr 13, 2018Laura Peña rated it really liked it
this gets another star for book design. i love that it seems to refer to the tamed for part of little prince bc i was reminded of that during the companion species manifesto. it is so beautiful!! this book was a joy to experience just because i liked how the pages felt and looked!

the last interview is mostly a summary of "staying with the trouble". you could read that instead actually. or maybe it wouldn't make sense if you didn't read this. there was some parts of that interview that was just philosophy name circle jerking and i was bored. the rest that i understood were bc of SWTT.

it was a good idea to put these three together tho. however yea i think they coulda maybe shortened that interview. I'm astonished that she talks like she writes. but i also felt that section helped me understand a bit better what she is getting at in her ideas. (less)
flagLike · comment · see review



May 01, 2018Lance Grabmiller rated it really liked it
Shelves: favorites, 2000-2025, non-fiction, 1976-1999
Contains "The Cyborg Manifesto" and "The Companion Species Manifesto" as well as a conversation between Haraway and Cary Wolfe (the series editor).

Read The Cyborg Manifesto many years ago but completely forgot how amazing it is. Seriously 150% required reading. I feel I should reread this every year. The Companion Species Manifesto is good but it's collage-like narrative makes it feel unfinished. I understand the form was purposeful but it doesn't work as well as she'd like it to. This would absolutely be my best book in a decade if it weren't for that waywardness.

Shows how powerful a deep understanding of science (in this case Biology) wedded to postmodern philosophy (and socialist-feminism) can be. Really stunning breadth here and it speaks volumes STILL about our lives and needs (especially in the area of intersectionality). (less)
flagLike · comment · see review



Jun 30, 2018c. rated it really liked it
i read "cyborg manifesto" as part of my thesis research. truly and honestly i understood about 1/4 of the text but it's such a brilliant and thoughtful examination of feminism, post-capitalism, immateriality, and the mechanical being as an ontological analogy for the human that i'll probably return to it at a future date.
flagLike · see review



Feb 15, 2019Iris rated it liked it
Overly-optimistic about people's ability to function under postmodernity, but at the same time is probably the closest thing to good a guide on how to properly go about that assuming you have no other choice there is.
flagLike · comment · see review



Aug 01, 2018Zoe rated it it was amazing
One of the most transformative texts I've read in years. Cannot recommend highly enough
flagLike · comment · see review



Aug 06, 2018Andy rated it liked it
3.5 stars

I think I need to re-read the cyborg manifesto. There's a lot in this book!
flagLike · comment · see review



Oct 15, 2016Ansh rated it really liked it
Covers the two major manifesto from Haraway's career and a retrospective interview on her work. While Cyborg Manifesto still has potent strains of idea, I found Companion Species to be quite problematic in how it dealt with naturecultures and interspecies coevolution without discussing the inherent power dynamics involved in it. Felt that the personal tone of the manifesto sugarcoated some difficult issues, but the interview in the final third of the book is excellent and resolves some issues. Ends with a brief note on the currently-hot chtulhucene and its implications for our present epoch. (less)
flagLike · comment · see review



Apr 14, 2016Akemi rated it it was ok
The Cyborg Manifesto is, of course, still a stunning, revolutionary piece of philosophical work that, in my opinion, succeeds in dismantling both the liberal subject, and analytic objectivity.

However, the Companion Species Manifesto reads far less like a philosophical work, and more a meandering jaunt across dog history and Haraway's own experiences with dogs.

I find it strange that a feminist could be open to the idea of pets. How does owning a pet differ from a man owning a women, teaching her how to act, and then saying, 'but it's a reciprocal relationship, see look, I feed her, she takes care of the kids and we occasionally go for walks'.

Am I missing something, or is this not the very definition of subjugation and paternalism? I know Haraway is intent on saying it isn't; that it's a deep, meaningful kinship, blurring our conceptions of animality and humanity; but replace dog with woman, and owner with man, and it's pretty obvious what kind of a relationship this is. (less)
flagLike · 3 comments · see review



Jan 06, 2017Evan Cvitanovic rated it it was amazing
companion species manifesto is really great ! now I want to read about the geneology of dogs and the different histories and cultures that different dogs retain through their 'pure bred' nature or their 'mutt' the one that is oneself. What if we did a trans-critical analysis of athusser's ideological state apparatus essay through the critical lens of the first dog philosopher 'Spot'. Dogs as subjects for Subjectivation. Dog is my co-pilot. Subject (man) interpellates subject (dog) into a system of relations that reproduces the means of relations that legitimate the owner/pet relationship--sooo similar to the base superstructure if u just extrapolate
it could be a children's book (less)
flagLike · comment · see review