SM5325 Chap.10 Post-trans-humanisms and Companion Species
Post-trans-humanisms and Companion Species
The final section begins
Week 11 opens the course's last section, on gender and posthumanism. Its guiding questions ask how Donna Haraway's companion species challenges the binary between humans, animals and machines, and what a multispecies approach contributes to our understanding of media and nature.
The readings are Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto and Michael Fisch's essay on multispecies science fiction, which reads a novel about uplifted spiders alongside anthropology.
Companion species and naturecultures
Haraway begins with herself and her dog, Cayenne, as partners who have shaped each other, and asks what ethics and politics devoted to letting significant otherness thrive could learn from dogs and people, and how their stories might show that history matters in naturecultures.
Naturecultures is her word for what is usually divided into nature and culture. A companion species is a relation of at least two partners who make each other up in flesh and history, and the category includes rice, bees and gut flora as well as dogs.
Drawing on process philosophy, Haraway argues that beings do not exist before their relating, and she calls the ethical relation between partners who stay different yet matter to each other significant otherness.
From the cyborg to training stories
Haraway's earlier manifesto of 1985 made the cyborg a figure for feminist theory; here she calls the cyborg a junior sibling within the larger family of companion species.
She hears four tones in the word species at once, biological kind, logical category, the joining of sign and flesh, and money, and much of the manifesto is made of training stories. Agility, the sport she practises with Cayenne, becomes a case of two species learning to respond to each other, with a goal she calls disciplined spontaneity.
She rejects the fantasies of dogs as furry children or as sources of unconditional love, because both erase the dog.
Fisch and multispecies science fiction
Fisch reads Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, in which an attempt to uplift monkeys fails and a virus uplifts spiders instead, who build a civilisation of silk and vibration while the last humans drift in an ark ship.
He places science fiction and multispecies anthropology in a shared zone where something passes between them, both working in a condition of post-nature.
His central argument concerns the social contract: where classic theory begins by leaving nature behind, the spiders found a society on interconnection and mercy across species, asking humans to become un-human by giving up the desire for mastery.
How the chapter is built
The chapter follows Haraway's dog stories and Fisch's novel as cases, maps the four tones of species, and turns a pet anecdote into a companion-species argument.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Companion species as a relation of at least two
- 02
Naturecultures
- 03
Significant otherness
- 04
The cyborg as a junior sibling
- 05
Four tones of the word species
- 06
Training, agility and disciplined spontaneity
- 07
Post-nature and multispecies science fiction
- 08
Rethinking the social contract across species
Worked example · free
Read a working animal through companion species
- 3Identify what the tool description assumes about the dog.
- 4Apply co-constitution and significant otherness to the pair.
- 2Rewrite the description in one sentence.
Key terms
- Companion Species
- A relation of at least two partners, human or not, who make each other up through shared history.
- Naturecultures
- Haraway's single word for the inseparable tangle usually divided into nature and culture.
- Significant Otherness
- A relation between partners who remain really different yet matter to each other.
- Cyborg
- A cybernetic organism, which Haraway made a feminist figure in 1985 and now calls a junior sibling of companion species.
- Post-nature
- A condition with no certainty about what nature is, its laws or its limits.
- Zone of Indiscernibility
- A shared area where two things remain distinct but something passes between them.
- Multispecies Ethnography
- Anthropology of how humans are formed alongside animals, plants, fungi and microbes.
Post-trans-humanisms and Companion Species FAQ
What does Haraway mean by companion species?
A relation of at least two partners who make each other up in flesh and history, so that neither exists as it is before the relating. The category is broader than companion animals and includes rice, bees and gut flora. Haraway uses dogs because their long shared history with humans shows co-constitution clearly, and she treats the relation itself as the smallest unit worth analysing.
How is the companion species different from the cyborg?
The cyborg, which Haraway reworked for feminist theory in 1985, was a figure for the fusion of organism and machine in technoscience. In the companion species manifesto she calls the cyborg a junior sibling within a larger family and argues that companion species are now a better guide to living with difference, because they foreground relationships of care, training and history rather than fusion.
Why does a science fiction novel appear in a media and cultural studies course?
Fisch argues that science fiction and multispecies anthropology think through the same problem, the collapse of a clear boundary between nature and culture. The novel he reads imagines a society founded on alliance across species, which lets him question the social contract's assumption that politics begins by leaving nature behind. Fiction here works as a thought experiment rather than a prediction.
Assessment move
Pick one non-human partner in your daily life, an animal, a plant or even a microbe culture like a sourdough starter, and write down what it has changed in you and what you have changed in it. That short account is the kind of entry point the final essay's personal requirement rewards, and it tests whether you have grasped co-constitution.
