Evidence is building of a need for a theory of “difference”
whose geometries, paradigms and logics break out of binaries . . . and nature/culture modes of any kind.
(Haraway, 1991: 129)
Bringing ideas of difference in relation, both in the discursive and in the corporeal sense, to bear on the question of political community has been most extensively explored in the work of Haraway and Latour in their elaboration of concepts of hybridity.
Haraway’s argument is that we “cannot not want”
something called humanity because nobody is self-made, least of all humans (1992a: 64). But in order to recuperate a progressive commitment to humanity as a moral community the dualisms associated with humanism have to be jettisoned. This requires a hybrid concept of community which disrupts the purification of culture and nature into distinct ontological zones, onto which the binary of “human”–”nonhuman” is then mapped. Haraway’s cyborg metaphor articulates a political vision which appreciates the instability of boundaries between human, animal, and machine and their discursive and technological malleability, parti-cularly in the hands of corporate science (1985).
Political agency and community emerge from this vision through “webs of connection” between situated and partial knowing selves fashioned through “shared
conversations,” and what she calls “semiotic-material technologies” which link meanings and bodies (Haraway, 1991: 192). Ethical agency and community likewise emerge as the performance of multiple lived worlds, weaving threads of meaning and matter through and between these “webs of connection.”
As with so many of Haraway’s provocative ideas, what she means by semiotic-material technologies is hard to fix. Her favorite examples are prosthetics, genetics, and organ transplants in which particular codified knowledges become stabilized as tech-nological artifacts which, in turn, are grafted into and mobilized by living beings. These examples tend to site the dilemmas of hybrid subjectivity, and the cyborg figure used to signify them, within an individuated being—”a hybrid creature composed of organism and machine” (Haraway, 1991: 1). There is a tension, then, in Haraway’s account of the status and configuration of her hybrid subject the cyborg. It is not clear whether, as Kruks asks, these hybrid subjects stitch their own parts together, in which case they become more cohesive than Haraway wants to admit, or whether this “stitching together” is better understood as an operation taking place from without (Haraway, 1985:
9). If the first, then Haraway’s hybrid subject falls back on an account of political and ethical agency which privileges cognitive and discursive faculties in the constitution of “knowing selves” (however partial or unfinished the project of self-fabrication). If the second, then it is not clear from Haraway’s account just what it is that connects diverse knowing selves together other than the capacity for linguistic communication evoked in her notion of “shared conversations.” In short, although Haraway’s account of hybridity successfully disrupts the purification of nature and society and the relegation of “nonhumans” to a world of objects, it is less helpful in trying to “flesh out” the “material”
dimensions of the practices and technologies of con-nectivity that make the communicability of experience across difference, and hence the constitution of ethical community, possible. These dimensions require a closer scrutiny of overlapping life-practices and cor-poreal processes, for example those mediated by food, energy, disease, birth, and death, than Haraway has so far admitted.
In this context, I find Latour’s account of hybridity, through the metaphor of the “hybrid network,” more suggestive for elaborating a relational understanding of ethical agency and community. The network metaphor places greater emphasis on the multiple
agency of hybridity—the mobilization of animate, mechanical, and discursive modalities of being within and between differently configured actants. Such networks not only connect pregiven individual entities but shape the possibilities for individuality. Moreover, Latour is explicit about the implications of this interpretation of hybridity for the reordering of ethical community. Hybrid networks, he argues, force us to
take into account the objects that are no more the arbitrary stakes of [human] desire alone than they are the simple receptacle of our mental categories.
(Latour, 1993: 117) The intersubjective understanding of hybridity articulated in the metaphor of networks disrupts the opposition between objects and subjects prescribed by an ethics centered on instrumental reason and its encoding in the purified domains of “Nature” and
“Society.” Instead, a multitude of mediators, what Latour calls “nature–culture collectives,” are exposed, built with raw materials made out of “poor humans and humble nonhumans” (1993: 115). It is these collectives which constitute the topography of political and ethical community, communities which are ever lengthening as larger and larger numbers of nonhumans are enlisted by the technologies of science, governance, and market into networks that are increasingly global in reach.
But Latour insists that such networks are by no means comprehensive or systematic. They are “connected lines, not surfaces, points of view on networks that are by nature neither local nor global” (Latour, 1993: 120).
Instead, hybrid networks are conceived as occupying narrow lines of force that allow us to pass with continuity from the local to the global, from the human to the nonhuman, through partial and unstable order-ings of numerous practices, instruments, documents, and bodies.
Though by no means unproblematic, Latour’s notion of hybridity as networks of nature–culture collectives seems to me to breach the impasse of individualist ethics at a number of key points. First, it releases “nature” and nonhuman beings from their relegation to the status of objects with no ethical standing in the human pursuit of individual self-interest, without resorting to the extension of this liberal conception of ethical agency to other animals. Second, it substantiates an intersubjective understanding of ethical agency and community by which the corporeal connectivities between differently constituted actants
can be traced in particular material circumstances and specified cases. And finally, it liberates the geographical imaginary of ethical community from the territorialized spaces of the embodied individual, the local neigh-borhood, and the nation-state, to trace the threads of ethical considerability through more dynamic, unstable, and performed spatial orderings of flow, mobility, and synthesis (see Shields, 1992).
I want to illustrate these themes briefly through the example of food, which represents one of the most pervasive corporeal mediators of hybrid communities spanning differently situated people, artifacts, biotic complexes, and practices (Lupton, 1996). As Atkinson has remarked, “Food is a liminal substance . . . bridging . . . nature and culture, the human and the natural, the outside and the inside” (1983: 11). The transformation of human food-production and food-consumption processes has involved the proliferation of hybrids, through the genetic engineering of plants and animals, and the pollution of biotic networks, through the release of synthetic chemical waste and the absorption of hormonal and chemical additives into the bodies and organs of producers and consumers of agrofood goods.
The material and discursive economies of these hybrid networks connect the life-practices of human food-consumers and food-producers with those of other animals, plants, and environments over considerable distances. The ethical connectivities between actants at one location in the network and those at other locations are no less intimate or immediate for the physical distance or lack of proximate knowledge involved. Figure 7.1 traces in a simplified way the corporeal contours of ethical community for one hybrid network constituted through the fluid geographies of milk.
The figure illustrates the transfigurations of milk in animal (including human) bodies, variously inscribed by hormonal, genetic, and chemical treatments, and in biophysical spaces, such as in the form of nitrate runoff into river catchment areas. It highlights the myriad ways in which the connectivities between people, variously situated in the social organization of milk production and consumption, are fashioned in and through animals, habitats, and technologies, whose presence is integral to recognizing ethical community. Such a recognition informs numerous ethical practices, for example those manifested in alternative food networks which enact more equitable relations between producers and consumers, based on the principles of “fair trade” and more sustainable
D I S S E C T I N G T H E A U T O N O M O U S S E L F 117
Figure 7.1 Corporeal geographies. Hybrid networks of embodiment and embeddedness: an agrofood example.
relations with other living constituents of the network through the adoption of “organic” farming methods.
The example raised earlier of BSE represents another such hybrid network, centered this time on a “prion” disease which has passed from sheep to cattle through infected animal feed and from cattle to humans through infected meat products (Lacey, 1994).
The ethical (and political) implications of the BSE epidemic in Britain center precisely on recognizing the material properties of the BSE prion as a mobile constituent of a hybrid collective; an intricate net-work of corporeal relations between humans, animals, and technologies. In both cases, intimate ethical connections between people and places, bodies and meanings, sometimes over considerable distances, make sense only through an acknowledgement of the material properties of nature–culture hybrids such as milk and BSE.
GEOGRAPHICAL DIRECTIONS FOR A