New Normatives?

One of the normative moments in Donna Haraway's When Species Meet pertains to the encounter between organisms, humans and baboons for example, or humans and dogs (We could add between dogs and baboons as well, that just isn't the kind of question humans tend to cogitate on). She recognizes, and advocates recognizing, cross species transactionalism. The Other (dog, baboon, etc) hails us; we can either respond--and perhaps succeed, perhaps fail, but at least gain recognition as something to which one signifies--or be outside the world of communication. We wouldn't just be poor in world (as we might be if we did a very bad job responding to the Other, and they were as egocentric as we) but we would be without world, as stone.

Haraway's ethics of the encounter seems to me to be something like a Levinasian/Derridean ethics of the singularity of the Other, except mutated by an intractable case of immanence or "concrescence," Haraway's preferred word (intended with full Whiteheadian connotation). With that infection comes a body of knowledges as well, what I lump together under the heading comparative ethology and what others might distill into anthropology, sociology, biologies of all kinds. Haraway's big improvement is to reattach those physical knowledges to the abstraction of deconstructive ethics. No small feat, and one she accomplishes with panache.

Now the question that keeps bugging me is how we can extend the encounter beyond the macrosystems called organisms. Baboons and dogs, after all, are pretty gigantic clusters of physical processes. They are a lot more like us than the vast majority of matter or even the vast majority of life. Their social codes aren't quite intuitive but they are not outside of the structural ken of the megaorganism called humanity. However, the speculative realists have made "massively unavoidable" the issue of all that other stuff that is not improbably similar to us (Derrida uses "massively unavoidable" to describe the animal question in Specters of Marx and it has a ring to it that I like).

The process of hailing and having face is not impossible to hook up with nonhuman animals (For more on this head over to The Inhumanities for a discussion of Matthew Calarco's Zoographies). I sign on with that a priori; I've had dogs all my life and they're not hard to understand. But what about beyond the "higher species," beyond mammals, vertebrates, animalia? I probably wouldn't be raising this as a mere theoretical contention if it weren't for the dismal state of the environment. Philosophy, we are reminded, is a language and a techne, and it addresses the problems of its time. For better or worse we are all going to have to answer to the environmental question.

So how does the ethics of the encounter stack up? How does it encounter, how does it respond to the stuff that lacks a socius? Now that the humanist prejudices have started to fall, liberating animals (at least a bunch of them) to ethics, all the other criteria or lines to be drawn seem artificial and insubstantial. I imagine we could--some have--redraw the borders of who/what is in and who/what is out, but that doesn't seem to hold water (Think of all the lifeforms that water is holding!). So, while we can draw on well developed naturalcultural eth(n)ologies to approach certain types of organisms making powerful claims on our philosophical moment, I do not see any established knowledge experience to guide us elsewhere.

We do, of course, have plenty of scientific knowledge on trees, rocks, fire, cotton (maybe not Harry Potter; that one might have to wait a minute). But none, or little, of this knowledge elucidates these objects in the mode of hailing us or of an encounter with recognizable normative dimensions. As I see it--and I may be wrong, feel free to correct me--the claims that trees put on us are pretty mild. Trees don't want to be cut down, but if so they would prefer to have a space in which their seedlings can propagate. Speculatively I'd guess they prefer to have a genetic pool which would make their species more capable of weathering the kinds of plagues that befall tree populations. Cotton I would consider similarly in its life as a plant. But fire? Or rocks? Once things are inanimate the encounter ethos (or any of its predecessors) falls on hard or at least very uncertain times. How do these things hail us? I can't tell.

Drawing on Derrida, I see temporality as a partial key to this riddle. Doing the right thing is conditioned by doing something at the right (delayed but right on time) moment. Say "what's up" too soon or too late and it's worse than staying quiet. The general time frame of right action in human interaction lines up pretty well with other macroorganisms. But with trees, or fire, or--wait for it--Harry Potter, maybe the temporality is just way outside what we are used to and what we are comfortable with. For trees I think we need to think in at least fifty year moments; for certain biochemical processes constituting other organismic scales, longer than that. (Remember how carbon-14 dating works? Among so many other concerns). For something like Harry Potter this may extend to infinity; hence the insurmountable oddity that thinking HP as equally an object presents to many modes of thinking. Maybe temporality is only some part of a greater criterion that would have greater extensibility to inanimate beings. Maybe the final hurdle is a secular sub specie aeternatis. This is the kind of thing Derrideans would pronounce undecidable and which Haraway would point out we are deciding all the time. It seems to me that we still need a better conceptual apparatus for making these tentative decisions.