Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness Book

With this manifesto, Haraway moves away from the figure of the cyborg (which made her famous) and toward the figure of the companion species--specifically, the dog. She attempts to do much the same thing with dogs that she did with cyborgs, saying:

"Cyborgs and companion species each bring together the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture in unexpected ways" (3).

Unfortunately, Haraway's new manifesto lacks the depth and complexity of her mid-1980s manifesto. Although she claims that the story of the relationship between dogs and humans, companion species, is one "of biopower and biosociality, as well as of technoscience," she does little to illustrate this fact's greater significance for either species.

She does, however, present a valuable counterbalance to common elements among some branches of animal rights and ecocritical movements, including the use of animals as metaphor, the habit of anthropomorphizing animals, and the tendency to assign rights to animals on the same basis that we assign rights to humans. She says, first,

"Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter here. Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with" (5).

In other words, dogs are not mere metaphor; they carry weight and meaning of their own. Regarding the other tendencies, Haraway argues that we must remain "alert to the fact that somebody is at home in the animals [we] work with" (50) but that the way to do this is not through "the kind of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory" (51). Following the ideas of Vicki Hearne, Haraway endorses the idea that "dogs obtain 'rights' in specific humans. In relationship, dogs and humans construct 'rights' in each other, such as the right to demand respect, attention, and response" (53).

In these ways, Haraway's manifesto provides interesting ways of thinking through companion species relationships, but it falls short of the theoretical rigor I had hoped for based on her earlier work.