February 9, 2015 - 08:52
I. coursekeeping
Nkechi: naming?
We'll spend next week w/ Donna Haraway, who has a Ph.D. in biology--
picked her because trained as a scientist, and this course is trying to cross the 2-culture divid.
Haraway is a prominent scholar in science and technology studies,
infamous for "The Cyborg Manifesto," which celebrated the
breakdown of boundaries between human and animal, human and machine;
the latter got the most attention: her claim that 20th Century machines have blurred
the lines between the natural and artificial (our bodies--@ least old bodies like mine--
have hearing aids, pacemakers, plastic knee replacements...),
but the essay was also important in its call for more fluid definitions of identity,
not based on essential characteristics (say: a vagina), but on affinity
(= Monday's announcement of changed admissions policies here!).
Haraway wrote another important book called Situated Knowledges:
The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,
that developed the importance, for science, of recognizing the
locatedness of researchers, their personal investments, partial perspectives.
Haraway's important--and she's also a challenge to read.
We'll study the first and eighth chapters of her latest book, When Species Meet,
(each about 40-pp. long); you can access the text on-line from the libraries.
I expect you'll find it very skittery to begin--on re-reading this week,
I didn't settle into it until Barbara Smuts showed up on p. 23. You'll
also find it very VERY full of academic references--though loose and associative,
it is very reference-heavy. I'll explain some of those, if we need them; mostly you won't.
Just read for what you can get, and then post about what you'd like us to focus on.
By Friday @ midnight your next report on your site-sit is due;
I haven't forgotten Tosin's suggestion that we engage in some sort of geo-caching,
but I don't think we're quite ready for that yet! (anyone with ideas about how
to do this should post them..) However, by Monday @ midnight,
I'd like you to do another post that is a kind of geo-caching:
describing your intial reactions to Haraway's texts
(and to your classmates' reactions to her)--in the form of a "webby post."
All your postings, so far, have been "stand alone"--you just go to Serendip when it suits--
maybe you read others' posts, maybe not--and then you say what you have to say.
The "webby post" works a little differently: the first person to put up a post makes it "webby,"
and everyone after that needs to respond to it, or to another one that responded to it,
and to tag its relationship: are you "clarifying, supporting, complexifying, weaving,
or challenging" what your classmates have said?
This is a (somewhat clunky!) attempt to make the on-line work more like in-class work, more interconnected (ecological?)
and also--relatedly and maybe more importantly--more meta-cognitive: asking you to think about--and practice--
learning as a process of social participation, rather than just individual knowledge acquisition--or display.
The focus is on learning as a continuously renewed set of relationships, on learning to talk w/ one another as
a key to participation in knowledge-making. And on thinking about what you are doing: not just posting, but
watching yourself post, thinking about what sort of thing you are making, what sort of conversation you are shaping.
There's another social dimension to this (Nkechi can testify that this happened in our 360 last semester):
it may increase your awareness of not being responded to--a sense that you are not being attended to,
that no one is listening. But you should be aware that you are being read--everyone will need to read what others have written,
in order to place themselves in the conversation....there will be lots of "sustained silent reading" going on, even if your words aren't
directly picked up and commented on.
Also don't forget to get going on The Hungry Tide...
II. Okay! back to The Lives of Animals!
when we left off, Marjorie Garber (aka Tosin/Teresa/Rosa) had said,
"In these two elegant lectures we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals...
but all along he was really asking, "What is the value of literature?"
Peter Singer (aka Maddie, Abby, Amala) had replied, "but I prefer to keep truth and fiction clearly separate"
(though then, confusingly, he wrote a fiction...or maybe a memoir?--you might explain your choice of genre here!),
while Barbara Smuts (aka Ariel, Marian, Caleb) had argued (and this basically stopped the conversation!) that
what was important here was not "the poetic imagination," but rather "real-life encounters with other animals."
It's not how we shape language--as Marjorie claims--which matters,
but "opening our hearts to befriend nonhuman persons."
Smuts' key point is that "in a story that is, ostensibly,
about our relations with members of other species,
none of the characters even mentions a personal encounter with an animal.
She focuses not on the text @ all, but on what it leaves out.
In other words, each of the speakers had a dramatically different view,
both of what this book is doing and how it is doing it.
And Wendy Doniger (aka Joni & Liz) didn't get a word in edgewise. What would she say here?
What does she add to the conversation? What's her angle, her p.o.v?
Her response to what the others said?
You had talked, when we were drawing up our rules of engagement,
about not wanting to have small groups that just reported out what they said to each other,
but rather wanting to build on what was said there to go somewhere further. So the question here
is not so much what Wendy already said about the history of religious beliefs about compassion towards animals,
but how she would respond to Marge's focus on metaficton, Peter's on truth, Smuts on real-life relations with animals..
(Christine, Nkechi--where do you want to enter here?)
Does this collection of stories and reflections lead you to believe that vegetarians and meat-eaters
(or anyone w/ decidedly opposed views, or different training-- literary critics, philosophers, religious scholars,
primatologists) actually have dialogue? Or are there divisions so deep, that common academic training,
common culture, even--or especially?-- familial ties can not bridge the gap?
III. Let's try this out, with a barometer (who can explain this form?)
"we thought John Coetzee was talking about animals...
all along he was really asking, 'What is the value of literature?'" (Marjorie Garber)
"different capacities are relevant to the wrongness of killing" (Peter Singer)
"one can feel empathetically for animals--and kill and eat them" (Wendy Doniger)
"real life encounters with animals are more important than developing the poetic imagination" (Barbara Smuts)
IV. Sit down and write up your own "truth" statement,
based on reading and interpreting this book
(or: a truth statement--or provocation--from the book...)
Let's play again...