Certitude dismisses the fractal structure of the world, paves it over, turns meadow into concrete slab and then ignores the grasses struggling up through the cracks…At times I imagine a world laden with a trillion untold tales, entombed in silence.  All those who once remembered them are long gone.  They are a blanket on the earth.  They push their way through the sodden ground in spring.  - Chris Clarke, Walking With Zeke

In the summer of 2009 I held in my arms a thirteen-year-old Cocker Spaniel, Samantha, afflicted with a malignant tumor the size of a football on her right underbelly, as the veterinarian injected a high dose of pentobarbital into her front right paw.  It seemed that before the shot was complete, Samantha indolently ambled across that indistinct border between life and death and the death of this dog, this dog I barely knew, crippled me in mourning – a mess of tears, wailing, and snot.

There are certain strains of Heideggerean thought that would suggest that only I, as human Dasein with a relation to finitude as such, could relate (or, better, respond) to the death of this dog.  This is, however, a problematic proposition – if not logically, at least experientially.  A few months prior, in a bout of unusually intense depression, I lied on the couch in my partner’s living room staring at the stucco of the ceiling searching for consolation in at least one absurd figure in its relief.  Samantha, who until that moment had seemed indifferent to me, not by choice (at least I hope not) but because she was deaf and nearly blind, walked across the living room, that tumor as oppressive as ever, and nudged my shoulder.  I tried to ignore her.  She barked.  I turned and she licked my face and lied with me until my spirits returned and we both resumed our daily routines of eating, sleeping, and playful mischief.

The purpose of this anecdote is to raise questions about response, affect, and relationality in inter- or trans-species relations.  I avoid the term “inter-subjective” because, as Jacques Derrida has noted (1991), it has almost always functioned as a variant of “inter-human.”  I argue that by thinking through the categories of “friendship” and “mourning” in a non-anthropocentric analysis (that is, in contradistinction to the traditional “friendship among men”), we are able to develop a richer context from which to think about such ontological structures and themes as co-relationality, co-affectivity, and co-responsivity; of a coeval constitution of subjects through an Other that is not only human, but a whole series of indeterminate beings.

Prior to Species: Messy Relations and Indeterminate Calls

In her book, Bodies That Matter (1993), Judith Butler argues that one of the constitutive moments of heterosexual subjectivity is the preclusion of homosexual desire and connection.  In this sense, heterosexual subjectivity is founded in the impossibility of possibly experiencing non-heterosexual desire and relation.  Taking Freud’s formulation of melancholia (1917) as an object of love that is lost and withdrawn from consciousness, Butler argues that heterosexual subjectivity is itself grounded in melancholia.  She writes, “What drag exposes [is that the] ‘normal’ constitution of gender presentation in which the gender is performed is in many ways constituted by a set of disavowed attachments or identifications that constitute a different domain of the ‘unperformable’” (Butler 1993: 235-6).

This is an interesting framework from which to think about the constitution of gendered and sexualized subjectivity and, I would suggest, we might experiment with its applicability in relation to other modes of subject formation.  If the critical target for Butler is the hetero-normative matrix which governs and maintains all gendered and sexualized relations, then the target of a non-anthropocentric analysis might be that matrix which governs and maintains human subjectivity in general, a sort of “species-normative” matrix, that precludes connections and relations to the nonhuman through a series of acts that define “man” over and against his nonhuman others – which, historically, has not only been nonhuman animals but other human animals as well.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes, “Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity…The history of man calling himself man is the articulation of all these limits among themselves” (Derrida 1997: 244-5).  The point that Derrida makes so well is that the constitution of a “normative” or “ideal” subject-type – the carnophallogocentric subject in Derrida (1991), the hetero-normative matrix in Butler (1990), the White Male City Dweller in Gilles Deleuze (1987) – is constituted through the identification and exclusion of its Others.  For this reason, however, an ideal subject-type is not, in itself, a stable formulation but the site of continual articulations and negotiations.  The task of deconstruction, I think it can effectively be argued, is to elaborate upon and undo these articulations so as to liberate their excluded others as well as the forms of subjectivities these articulations attempt to subject to constancy and permanency.  In this sense, the formation of ideal subject-types captures nothing and everything and charges us with the task of producing more affirmative and multiplicitous ontologies and epistemologies of life.  I would like to turn now to two such deconstructive interventions in Derrida’s essays “The Politics of Friendship” (1988) and “Hospitality” (2000).

In “The Politics of Friendship,” Derrida circumvents the traditional discourse on friendship that attempts to determine precisely who stands as the figure of the friend and what exactly the limits of friendship are.  As he writes, “before knowing what friendship is and what we mean to say here and now with this word, we should first deal with a certain use of the word ‘friendship’” (Derrida 1988: 634).  This proves to be, at least in the historical and anthropological sense, a difficult task as the tradition and concept of “friendship” are anything but homogenous.  Instead, Derrida looks to meditate on the conditions of friendship by turning to Montaigne’s citation of Aristotle, a citation that is in fact found nowhere in the texts of Aristotle, “O my friends, there is no friend.”

As Derrida notes, the declarative fact of the statement (“there is no friend”) seems to contradict and render impossible the apostrophic address “O my friends.”  Rather than abandon the declarative as simply “the playful exercise of a paradox” (Derrida 1988: 635), however, Derrida instead marks how it functions to enact friendship: “There are no friends, that we know,” he writes, “but I beg you, make it so that there will be friends from now on.  What is more, how could I be your friend, and declare my friendship for you…if friendship did not remain something yet to happen, to be desired, to be promised?” (Derrida 1988: 635).  From this, we can make sense of the performative dimension of the opening of the essay – an essay that was presented to an audience at the APA symposium of Law and Society in 1988 – in which after already having said so much about our apostrophic address, Derrida claims to have said nothing “in his own name”: it is an address without any determinate addresser.  Who, after all, is speaking? Derrida? Montaigne? An imaginary Aristotle?

What Derrida plays with in the ambiguities of these questions is, as he calls it, “the question of response” (Derrida 1988: 638): he writes, “before even having taken responsibility for any given affirmation, we are already caught up in a kind of assymetrical and heteronomical curvature of the social space, more precisely, in the relation to the Other prior to any organized socius, to any determined ‘government,’ to any ‘law’” (Derrida 1988: 633-4).  The question therefore shifts from the traditional formulations “what is friendship?” or “who is a friend?” to the “anterior affirmation of being-together in the allocution” (Derrida 1988: 637); an attentiveness to a call or address from an indeterminate Other – indeterminate because we do not yet know who is addressing us – in our co-habitation, our being-with one another.

Fairly early into the “Hospitality” essay, in an intervention with the concept of “hospitality” in Kant, who suggests that hospitality arises from the laws of reason and “not from the ‘love of man as a sentimental motive’” (Derrida 2000: 4), Derrida asks: “what can be said of, indeed can one speak of, hospitality toward the non-human, the divine, for example, or the animal or vegetable; does one owe hospitality, and is that the right word when it is a question of welcoming – or being welcomed by – the other or the stranger as god, animal or plant, to use those conventional categories?” (Derrida 2000: 4).  Derrida asks this question only to place the question of hospitality at the very limits of knowledge when he writes, “We do not know what hospitality is…but will we ever know?” (Derrida 2000: 6).  With this question, Derrida means to invoke or tease out three ambiguous implications on the non-knowledge of hospitality, the problems one inherits in receiving this concept and, as that which is received, he calls them acceptations.

The first acceptation stresses the word “know” in “we do not know what hospitality is” and focuses, not on the deficiency of knowledge (as though one could simply acquire more definitions and, therefore, more knowledge about what hospitality is), “but rather to indicate or recall only that hospitality is not a concept which lends itself to objective knowledge” (Derrida 2000: 7).  That is, if hospitality is owed to and the right of “the stranger,” then the concept itself is on the side of an indeterminate being who, by its definition as stranger, cannot be reduced or comprehended within those familiar forms of nation, family, state, citizen, etc.

This leads to the second acceptation: “If we do not know what hospitality is, it is because it is not, it is not a present being” (Derrida 2000: 8).  This is to say that the intentional act of hospitality, of welcoming, is directed toward, and in anticipation of, that being whose time of arrival (if such a phrase is adequate) is not determined by the one who welcomes, i.e. the host.  It is in this sense that Derrida writes, “the master of this house, the master in his own home, the host, can only accomplish his task as host, that is, hospitality, in becoming invited by the other into his home, in being welcomed by him whom he welcomes, in receiving the hospitality he gives” (Derrida 2000: 9).  The host’s home, and also his subjective constitution as host, is at the service of, disrupted, and constituted by l’arrivant, the one who arrives, who may be a man, a woman, a feral cat, and even a plague.

It is here, at this point and in the third acceptation that the “Hospitality” and “The Politics of Friendship” essays can be brought into relation.  Derrida notes the paradoxical temporality inherent to “we do not know what hospitality is” that implies “‘we do not yet know what hospitality is,’ in a sense of ‘not yet’ which remains to be thought” (Derrida 2000: 10. My emphasis.).  This is to say that the structure of the “not yet” points to an unknowable horizon in which we do not yet know what or whom will call on us for hospitality.  As the address without the addresser in “The Politics of Friendship” enacts the community of those who are being-with one another, l’arrivant, the one who arrives, maintains the porosity of that community, of subjects, and of knowledge.

The importance of thinking through these questions of friendship and hospitality with Derrida, I would suggest, is that we are given the tools to think about response, affect, and relationality that come prior to and exceed our traditional conceptual stockpiles — be they species, gender, sexuality, etc.  Prior to the ideal subject-types that order and govern our relationships politically, socially, etc., we are brought to think about and to be attentive to the myriad of networks, continua, forces and relations we inhabit.  We begin from an ontological grounding of messy relations and indeterminate calls and we begin to think and live from the position that all beings have magnitudes of exposure in which they are open to the affects and effects of an inconclusive series of other beings.  It is with this grounding that we can begin to think about “friendship” and “mourning” beyond the so-called limits of man.

Living With Dogs: Haraway and Clarke on Trans-species Transfections

For the purposes of this paper, I find it productive to turn from the strictly theoretical openings provided by Derrida to the practical import of these questions.  As such, I would like to turn now to Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and Chris Clarke’s Walking With Zeke (2008) to explore human-dog relations beyond the mundane proprietary forms most of us are used to.  Navigating through these texts together, however, is a difficult task.  It is not only their respective forms – Haraway’s text is a theoretical exploration of human-dog relations while Clarke’s text was originally a series of blog posts[1] during the last five years of his dog Zeke’s life – but also the radical convergences and divergences of their respective thoughts on human-dog relations that makes a comparative analysis quite difficult.

Both Haraway and Clarke were originally trained in the biological sciences with a seeming emphasis on ecology.  As such, the notion of messy relations and indeterminate calls is less a question than a starting point.  Clarke writes, “When we think about relationships among organisms at all, which is seldom enough, our thoughts tend toward the dyadic…This pairing of animals two by two serves the analytic mind well in its simplicity, but there are some interactions that defy such reduction” (Clarke 2008: 28).  This particular image of thought, the reduction of complex organismic relations into binary formulations of sexual difference, predator-prey relations, etc., is precisely what Haraway’s concept of companion species is meant to subvert.  Arguing that beings do not preexist their “relatings,” and that both cultural and biological determinism make the mistake of local abstractions like “nature” and “culture,” Haraway writes, “There are no pre-constituted subjects and objects, and no single sources, unitary actors, or final ends…A bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of time that trump the imaginings of even the most baroque cosmologists” (Haraway 2003: 6).  Beginning from this ontological grounding, both Haraway and Clarke affirm the complexity of inter- and intra-species relations that span the entirety of the micro- and macro- continua.   Such an approach “contributes a rich array of approaches to emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity, co-habitation, co-constitution, and contingency” (Haraway 2003: 7).

There is a particularly powerful scene in Clarke’s text in which, while on a hike with Zeke and his brother Craig near the Sindicich Lagoons, Clarke’s pack comes upon two coyotes watching over a herd of black-tailed deer.  He writes, “I bring a raft of expectations with me to this hilltop meeting.  I have read the literature, heard the myths, watched the cartoons.  In a dozen previous meetings Coyote seemed a willful actor in the encounter, judging my intent and character.  Now I feel nothing of the kind.  These are just animals.  The coyotes’ attention is riveted on Zeke, as Zeke’s is on them” (Clarke 2008: 34).  The scent of domesticity on Zeke and the “wild” on the coyotes crosses a number of territorial, biological, and historical thresholds to produce a moment in which “kinship and unfamiliarity [are] intertwined” (Clarke 2008: 35).  “[Zeke has] never seen anything like this before.  The line between dog and not-dog has blurred.  He is confused, excited, alert to this newly permeable boundary” (Clarke 2008: 39).

Haraway and Clarke are nearly identical on this point.  The obvious affect, response and relation between dog and coyote, the inter-species attentiveness to one another, demonstrates well Haraway’s concept of significant otherness.  When she asks how it is possible that seemingly disparate beings can “get on together,” she writes, “Answers to these questions can only be put together in emergent practices; i.e., in vulnerable, on-the-ground work that cobbles together non-harmonious agencies and ways of living that are accountable both to their disparate inherited histories and to their barely possible but absolutely necessary joint futures” (Haraway 2003: 7).  While both coyote and dog have speciated according to the specificity of their biological development, they are not for this reason separated by an historical and genetic abyss but, at least in some instances, make contact and engage in transfection, the exchange of foreign viral or genetic material.

Coyote and dog are, of course, not the only actors in this speciation as human populations had a significant impact on their divergence.  However, as Clarke notes, “Our own divergence from our origins under the influence of dogs is less obvious, but every bit as profound.  People and dogs have gone through fifteen thousand years of sharing food, of mutual scolding, of training each other…of shared triumphs and disasters.  Fifteen thousand years of fine-tuning this symbiosis.  We have evolved together.  Neither species would be what is were it not for the other” (Clarke 2008: viii-ix).  A similar point is made powerfully by Haraway when she argues that co-evolution must be defined in broader terms than the visible morphological transformations in species.  Moreover, to describe adaptive transformations in dog species as a biological response to human communities and transformations in human species as a cultural or purely inter-human development is a mistake.  “At the least,” she writes, “I suspect that human genomes contain a considerable molecular record of the pathogens of their companion species, including dogs.  Immune systems are not a minor part of naturecultures; they determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom” (Haraway 2003: 31).

On this level, the human-nonhuman distinction ceases to function with any amount of cogency.  We miss out on a large portion of the story of “human subjectivity” if we view its development as the historical acquisition of certain human attributes (i.e. language, reason, spirit, etc.) that are metaphysically determined to cut off the human from the nonhuman once and for all and not as an evolving assemblage of affects and relations populated by dogs, geographies, economies, pathogens and the like.  This is not to say that all beings relate in the same way or share identical magnitudes of exposure; on the contrary, differences abound as the singularity of each being in an emergent network, its powers and affects, requires the utmost attention.  Just as Derrida points to the enactment of friendship, a relation to the Other prior to any given conceptual framework, “fleeting encounters” (Clarke 2008: 35) between and within species require negotiations from those players involved.  Furthermore, transfection provides an added depth to Derrida’s concept of “hospitality” when the host, as a vulnerable and porous organism, is taken as the “hostage of the other” (Derrida 2000: 9) if only in the sense that the host does not completely control, but is besieged by, the exchange of foreign viral and genetic material.

It is not surprising, then, that the forms of human-dog relations in both Haraway and Clarke take on radically divergent contours.  One of the chief characteristics of an ontological grounding of messy relations and indeterminate calls is that radically singular networks emerge according to the specificity of those beings involved – idiosyncrasy is the name of the game.  However, this does not lead us into the cliché and only seemingly radical relativism that often characterizes the “postmodern”; as though any human-dog relation, even an abusive one, is permitted.  Instead, as I stated, deconstruction charges us, admittedly without an appeal to a final “rational” argument, with the task of thinking and living more affirmative and multiplicitous ontologies and epistemologies of life.  It is on this basis that we can think through human-dog relations in Clarke and Haraway.

In a chapter titled “Positive Bondage,” Haraway praises the publication of Susan Garret’s text Ruff Love, a book focused on dog agility training,[2] a sport in which Haraway herself competes.  According to Haraway, the purpose of Garret’s text is to cultivate a closer and more responsive training relationship between handler and dog.  Even the most previously lax and distracted canine will be transformed into an enthusiastic, responsive, and obedient dog through this program of positive, post-“discipline and punish” training.  Positive, Haraway argues, does not imply passive: “Indeed, I have never read a dog-training manual more committed to near total control in the interests of fulfilling human intentions, in this case, peak performance in a demanding, dual species, competitive sport” (Haraway 2003: 44).

The training relationship, at least according to Haraway, is not an exercise in uni-directional attention and response.  The handler, too, has to pay excruciatingly close attention to those activities and rewards that the dog finds most pleasurable and fulfilling: “Garrett directs the human to make careful lists of what the dog actually likes; and she instructs people how to play with their companions in a way the dogs enjoy, instead of shutting dogs down by mechanical human ball tosses or intimidating over-exuberance” (Haraway 2003: 45).  The projected end of this activity is a bit unsettling, however: “The human partner must set things up so that the dog sees the clumsy biped as the source of all good things” (Haraway 2003: 44).  Thus, while Haraway certainly emphasizes the necessity of cross-species attentiveness in training, the entire activity revolves the fulfillment of human intentions and “the cross-species achievement made possible by the hierarchical discipline of companion animal training” (Haraway 2003: 51).

Haraway’s argument against those she pejoratively labels “romantic pet owners,” who might “quail in the face of requirements to keep one’s dog in a crate or tied to oneself by a loose leash” (Haraway 2003: 44), is unsatisfying even to those who do not balk at a minimal amount of obedience training.  Appealing to Vicki Hearne’s notion of “animal happiness,”[3] Haraway suggests that “animal happiness” is “the capacity for satisfaction that comes from striving, from work, from fulfillment of possibility.  That sort of happiness comes from bringing out what is within; i.e. from what Hearne says animal trainers call ‘talent.’  Much companion animal talent can only come to fruition in the relational work of training” (Haraway 2003: 52).  Thus, not only do human intentions stand at the center, or at least above, the human-dog relation, but the human handler is the site of production for representations of what is “within” – the desires, talents, and capacities of the dog.

Despite her efforts to maintain the opening between human and dog affect and responsivity, as well as the singularity of each companion species in training relations, it nonetheless remains a tenuous opening.  Significant otherness, in this context, seems to be compromised by the centrality of the human handler.  Furthermore, this training model pays little heed to those companion species, i.e. certain breeds of dogs or other animals, as well as humans that are not susceptible to the sort of rigorous regime Haraway advocates for.  In fact, it seems that a vast array of inter-species companionships – companionships that do not depend on labor and the cultivation of talent, but on, say, co-habitation, touch, etc. – are precluded or, at best, given scant attention.

Clarke’s relationship to Zeke, on the other hand, stands in stark contrast to the human-dog training relations in Haraway.  Whereas in the agility dog training of Garrett, “Forbidden to the pooch are the pleasures of romping at will with other dogs, rushing after a teasing squirrel, or clambering onto the couch […] unless and until such pleasures are granted for exhibiting self-control and responsiveness to the human’s commands at a near 100% frequency” (Haraway 2003: 44), Zeke’s failing health and the culmination of arthritis in his hips leads Clarke to the point of self-sacrifice: “I would trade my sight to clear his eyes, my legs to make his whole.  I would trade thirty years of my life for one more painless year for him, one more chance to run along a trail eyes shining” (Clarke 2008: 135).  Innumerable passages populate the text, in which Clarke expresses his gratitude when Zeke is able to pursue a squirrel, romp around with other dogs in the neighborhood, and practice predator-prey chase games with Clarke’s rabbit Thistle.

Rather than viewing Clarke as the “romantic” type of dog person, it is perhaps better to view him as a different opening to human-dog relations.  Rather than a relationship between human and dog that is predicated on the hierarchical training model of agility training, Clarke and Zeke are caught up in a horizontal companionship that is extremely physical and geographical.  Clarke writes of an evening spent with Zeke in Red Rock Canyon, one of their many outings in the American Southwest deserts, “He leans into me companionably, still watching the cliffs.  It is a thigmotropic partnership, this pairing of dog and human: we crave touch” (Clarke 2008: 158).  Luce Irigaray has written beautifully on the role of touch, more specifically the caress, as an important moment in the awakening of subjects.  I quote at length:

The caress is an awakening to you, to me, to us.

The caress is a reawakening to the life of my body: to its skin, senses, muscles, nerves, and organs, most of the time inhibited, subjugated, dormant or enslaved to everyday activity, to the universe of needs, to the world of labor, to the imperatives or restrictions necessary for communal living.

The caress is an awakening to intersubjectivity, to a touching between us which is neither passive nor active; it is an awakening of gestures, of perceptions which are at the same time acts, intentions, emotions.  This does not mean that they are ambiguous, but rather, that they are attentive to the person who touches and the one who is touched, to the two subjects who touch each other (Irigaray 2001: 25).

It is unclear from Irigaray’s text whether she is speaking of purely inter-human contact, though I suspect she is as she belongs to a long tradition that has questioned whether “the nonhuman” can grasp, let alone caress.[4]  However, as the relationship between Clarke and Zeke demonstrates, the materiality of bodies, their vulnerability as well as potentialities, cross species lines and play a constitutive role in both “subjectivities.”

The physicality of their relationship is continued to the very end of Zeke’s life.  When Zeke becomes considerably immobile, Clarke and his wife Becky decide that it’s time to call the in-home service that will do for Zeke what my vet did for Samantha.  As the pentobarbital is injected into his Zeke’s bloodstream, Chris writes, “The last thing he saw: my face close up.  The last thing he smelled: my neck.  The last thing he felt: my forehead against his, Becky stroking his flank.  His face next to mine, my eyes closed as I lay next to him, I paid mind to his breathing.  A deep breath, a shallower one, one shallower still, and then no more” (Clarke 2008: 191).  What Haraway misses in her analysis, Clarke makes profoundly clear: the sacrificial structure inherent to inter- and intra- species relations, the aporia of sacrificing one’s love for a companion out of love.  This sacrificial structure does not emerge only at the moment of a death, but accompanies the attentive negotiation between and among species; a displacement of one’s self in responding and relating (whether in friendship, mourning, or some other mode of comportment yet to be thought).

Concluding Remarks

The purpose of this paper was to think through the categories of “friendship” and “mourning” in a non-anthropocentric analysis in order to develop a richer context from which to think about such ontological structures and themes as relation, affect, and response.  Through Derrida, Haraway and Clarke we have seen how these structures do not strictly belong to the realm of human specificity but, instead, emerge in and constitute relations of all kinds, across all registers.  Yet, a few more words would help to think about the nature of these structures.  Leaving the West, if only for a moment, would benefit us here.

In his essay “The Motif of Recognition in Early China,” Eric Henry elaborates upon the term chih (知) used in an anecdote by Kuan Chung when he states: “Those who bore me were my mother and father, but the one who knew (知) me was Pao Shu-ya.” Often translated as “to know,” Henry adds etymological depth to chih (知) and translates it as “‘to perceive, to recognize, to appreciate, to grasp, to pierce through disguises’” (Henry 1987: 8).  The relationship between Po Ya, the skillful zitherist, and Chung Tzu-Ch’i, the skillful listener, gives us the Chinese expression chih-yin 知音 or “the one who knows the sound” (Henry 1987: 9).  I would suggest, or perhaps ask, whether or not we may use this story to add further depth to the etymology of chih (知), hinting towards something like a mutual “attunement” between beings.

In doing so, we intensify the metonymic chain whereby the translation of chih (知) to the English verb “to know” is further destabilized from the traditional, Western epistemological structure that requires the knowing human subject.  “Among all these objects of chih,” Henry writes, “the word jen 人, ‘person, humanity,’ is conspicuously missing” (Henry 1987: 14).  In both Haraway and Clarke, despite their difference in dog-human relations, we certainly see the affects, responses, and relations between humans and dogs as an attunement; as we have seen Clarke argue, it is an attunement that is fifteen thousand years in the making (Clarke 2008: ix).  Even more intriguing, however, is that in the course of this paper we have seen both Haraway and Clarke give attention to affects, relatings, and responses that occur when a human subject is not even site.

In her book The Mysterious Lands (1989), naturalist and author Anne Zwinger beautifully writes,

Yucca moths fertilize all yuccas, including Joshua trees. A female gathers and packs pollen into a ball under her head. At the next flower she inserts her ovipositor into the flower’s ovary and lays her eggs, then continues to the top of the pistil and brushes the stigma with her head, thereby transferring some of the pollen she carries.  The larvae develop in the seed pod and eat part of the seeds.  Then they bore through the pod and drop to the ground, where they form a cocoon, to emerge the following year. The female moth receives no benefit from this procedure because she feeds neither on nectar nor pollen; she does assure however, by her action, food for the larvae. The relationship between moth and yucca has evolved over time to such a nicety that each species of yucca has its own species of moth (Zwinger 1989: 182).

In thinking about “friendship” and “mourning” from the position of messy relations and indeterminate calls, as a chih (知) between species, we are lead to attend to the singularity of relations as such across an entire ontological spectrum and, in so doing, are lead to radical questions about a new ‘politics of friendship.’

REFERENCES

Butler, J. 1999 [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:    Routledge.

———– 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.

Clarke, C. 2008. Walking With Zeke: a Familiar Story. Creek Running North Publishing.

Deleuze, G. Felix Guatarri. 1987 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. 1988. “The Politics of Friendship” in The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 85, No. 11,   pp. 632-644.

———– 1991. “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes After the Subject? (eds. Eduardo Vadava, et al.).  New York: Routledge.

———– 1997  [1967]. Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

———– 2000. “Hospitality” in Angelaki Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 3-18.

Freud, S. 1914. “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XIV (trans. and ed. James Strachey). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis.

Haraway, D. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Henry, E. 1987. “The Motif of Recognition in Early China” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 5-30.

Irigaray, L. 2001 [1997]. To Be Two (trans. Luce Irigaray). New York: Routledge.

Zwinger, A. 1989. The Mysterious Lands: a Naturalist Explores the Four Great Deserts of the Southwest. New York: Truman Library Books.

In her book The Vanishing Hectare Katherine Verdery argues, “Property, being a relation among persons with respect to values, is a critical component of how persons are defined” (Verdery 2003: 172).  Taking her ethnographic subject, the people of postsocialist Aurel Vlaicu in Transylvania, Verdery notes the constitutive effect property has in person-forming so that “recovering land [in the wake of postsocialist decollectivization] meant reasserting those ways of being-in-the-world for Vlaiceni” and “recovering it enabled them to be somebody again” (Verdery 2003: 173).  While not her central concern, Verdery hints towards an interesting dynamic between property and subjectivity: if property, as C.M. Hann argues (1998), should direct our attention to complex networks of cultural and social relations in which material objects are recognized and personal as well as collective identities are made (Hann 1998: 5), then the question stands as to what forms of subjectivity enter into and exist within these complex networks?

One of the intentions of this paper is to demonstrate the difficulty inherent in this question.  Neither property nor subjectivity, I will argue, function as an originary actor that would allow us the sort of inference, “given x type of subject, we would find y type of property” or vice versa. Instead, both property and subjectivity are produced, not in a dyadic relation, but within a vast field of actors such as objects, myths, political institutions, social revolts, human and animal populations, machines, diseases, etc.  This manifold of relations makes any attempt to parcel out and compartmentalize each actor and their affects on one another most daunting.

Yet, at the very inception of formal anthropology and sociology we find in the writings of Henry Sumner Maine and Lewis Henry Morgan evidence of just such an attempt.  In their respective analyses in Ancient Law and Ancient Society, the concept of property plays an essential analytic role in their determinations of both ancient and modern forms of subjectivity.  The purpose of this paper is to elaborate upon these determinations in Morgan and their relations to specific forms of property. I argue that in Morgan’s Ancient Society, a considerable ambiguity arises as to the status of objects owned and the status of persons owning.  As a colleague once asked, “is it the person or the object that is barbaric?”[1] 

Producing the Barbarian: Agamben and the Anthropological Machine

Before I begin working through the work of Morgan and Maine, however, it would be helpful to briefly introduce a concept that will help make sense of such repeated figures as the savage, the barbarian, the ancient, the primitive, and the modern.  In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben introduces the anthropological machine, a theoretical apparatus that helps to illustrate how the human-animal distinction has functioned within dominant scientific and philosophical discourses of the West.  Though Agamben notes two historical variants of the machine, the modern and the premodern, it is sufficient for our purposes to focus on the former.

The modern anthropological machine functions in a post-Darwinian milieu, animalizing certain modes of human life in order to isolate and exclude that which is animal from that which is properly human.  As Agamben notes, this prompted the nineteenth-century fascination with identifying the “missing link,” that transitionary creature between “speechless ape” and “articulate man” (Agamben 2004: 34-35).  Agamben is quick to note that this production, the animalization of human life, obtains nothing of ‘animality’ or ‘humanity’ proper, but is “only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesura [between human and animal] and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew” (Agamben 2004: 38). While the determinations of both human and animal life are perfectly empty and ironic, they are not for that reason innocuous musings of a philosophical or scientific curiosity. In fact, Agamben goes so far as to claim that the functioning of the anthropological machine, its articulation of the human-animal distinction, is “the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict” in the West (Agamben 2004: 80).

Given their contemporaneity with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it is difficult to asses whether or not Maine’s Ancient Law (1861) or Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) were significantly inflected by what Freud called Darwin’s “biological blow to human narcissism” (Freud 1955: 241).  Furthermore, the provocation of these texts is explained less by a concern with the historical acquisition of speech, though it certainly stands at the periphery and in the thinkers who followed,[2] than by a response to the nineteenth-century colonial rebellions that began with the 1853 mutiny of the Bengal army against its British commanders.  As Karuna Mantena notes, “the rebellion was a rude awakening and a deeply disillusioning affair, shaking the growing self-confidence in [Britain’s] imperial mission” (Mantena 2010: 1) which “led to a fundamental rethinking of the nature and purpose of imperial rule” (Mantena 2010: 2).

Still, the anthropological machine helps us to understand an essential logic in the works of both Maine and Morgan: the production of ancient society.  One of Maine’s most significant contributions to imperial research and the question of land tenure was the conjunction of both Roman jurisprudence and the village-communities of India.  Maine writes, “As societies do not advance concurrently, but at different rates of progress, there have been epochs at which men trained to habits of methodological observation have really been in a position to watch and describe the infancy of mankind” (Maine 1954: 71).  Whereas Mantena describes a shift in imperial ideology after the colonial rebellions, a shift from the liberal “civilizing mission” to “a new emphasis on deep-seated ‘cultural’ differences between peoples” (Mantena 2010: 2), we do not find in Maine an elaboration upon a kind of difference that escapes the logic of identity. Instead, difference arises through a temporal disjunction in which a general “mankind” occupies the same time-scale only at different developmental moments.  The “essential nature” of Indian society therefore functions as a conceptual means by which to understand the history and development of European and Anglo-Saxon institutions. That is to say that cultural differences exist for Maine but only insofar as they occupy the same inevitable movement toward Western forms of social, political, and economic organization.  Mantena makes a similar point:

The institutions of Rome and India could be brought into such an epistemological relation because of a prior ontological fact, namely the unity of the Aryan family of nations, discovered and substantiated in terms of an Indo-European linguistic family…the history of language filiation was given an institutional cast (Mantena 2010: 132).

Primitive or ancient society is therefore constructed in contradistinction to the modern and civilized social, political, and economic institutional forms of the imperial powers.

It is on this basis that the category “modern” receives its sense and normative legitimacy — a most potent point in Morgan’s tracing of development from Savagery to Barbarism and, finally, to Civilization proper.  In that “forever memorable” and “most brilliant and remarkable…experience of mankind” (Morgan 1877: I.1) it was the last great period of barbarism in which the Aryan family, representing “the central stream of human progress” (Morgan 1877: I.10), “produced the highest type of mankind” proving “its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming control of the earth” (Morgan 1877: I.10).

While it may be difficult to locate precisely where in the texts Maine and Morgan explicitly animalize their ‘primitive’ Others,[3] there can be no doubt that the “civilizing mission” of liberal imperial ideology has, in their work, not been fully removed — only displaced.  Instead, as Mantena notes, post-rebellion imperial research and practice functioned indirectly, deferring authority to native agencies for the sustainment and reproduction of their cultural practices.  Far from the humanitarian project of preserving ancient or primitive societies for their own sake, however, the project of indirect rule sought to reduce the traumatic impact of colonial contact on the basis that, left to their own devices (though, of course, always with the charitable push of the West), these societies would continue along the inevitable time-scale of progress and join the ranks of the European and Anglo-Saxon models of achievement — in other words, they would become more human.

Peopled Objects or Objected Peoples?

We have seen, if only briefly, how so-called “modern” society gains its sense and legitimacy by posing itself in contradistinction to the “ancient” and “primitive,” simultaneously placing itself at the pinnacle of human development.  What remains to be seen is the way in which the ancient and primitive are understood on their own terms. On this point Maine and Morgan both diverge and converge with one another in their method of analysis.  As Mantena suggests, most, if not all, imperial research operated by constructing a “generic model of native society, newly defined as traditional society in opposition to modern society, that stressed the primacy of the ‘social’ in understanding and explaining the nature of native society” (Mantena 2010: 3).  The same can be said of Morgan as well with his focus on the institutions of inheritance, and the traditional and familial forms of social organization that dictated the rules of these institutions, throughout the developmental stages of “mankind.”  Where Morgan’s work becomes particularly interesting, however, is the way in which these stages are characterized by varying levels of human cognition that correspond to the acquisition of new technologies and objects of property.  For the purposes of this paper, to understand the dynamic between property and subjectivity, turning to Morgan’s Ancient Society will be most helpful.

Morgan begins “Part IV: Growth of the Idea of Property” with the following argument: the earliest ideas of property depended on the procurement of subsistence and roperty would increase as human societies developed new means of procuring that subsistence. The growth of property would, therefore, directly correspond to progress in inventions and discoveries, which would, in turn, be regulated according to the condition and progress of social organization.  “The growth of property,” Maine writes, “is thus closely connected with the increase of inventions and discoveries, and with the improvement of social institutions which mark the several ethnical periods of human progress” (Morgan 1877: I.1).

From this general principle, Morgan suggests “Mankind may be traced by a chain of necessary inferences back to a time when, ignorant of fire, without articulate language, and without artificial weapons, they depended, like wild animals, upon the spontaneous fruits of the earth” (Morgan 1877: I.1).  This is, for Morgan, the properly pre-historical dawn of man and marks a decisive divergence from the theoretical method of Maine: whereas Morgan comes close to the abstract postulation of a pre-social man akin to the state of nature in Natural Law theory, Maine derided such attempts as an “expression to our own ignorance” (Maine 1954: 45).  This should mark Morgan’s analysis as a speculative rather than empirical account of human development and for this reason bring our attention to the ethnographic moment in which Morgan is writing — a task I have attempted in the first half of this paper but which bears repeating as we continue.

The pre-historic moment is followed closely, according to Morgan, by the age of savagery in which humans began to organize themselves into small tribes with villages and developed rudimentary forms of language and technology including the flint-knife, pottery, the fire drill, moccasins and the snowshoe.  Morgan invokes a mythos of scarcity in order to suggest that property among the “savages” was inconsiderable as a “passion for its possession had scarcely been formed in their minds because the thing itself scarcely existed” (Morgan 1877: I.2-3).  While the institutions of property, as well as the rudimentary developments in language, government, family, etc., were at this historical moment incomplete and fragmentary, they were nonetheless “immense potentially” and provided the groundwork on which the period of barbarism could build and “their civilized descendants are still perfecting” (Morgan 1877: I.2).

Morgan begins his explication of the lower status of barbarism by arguing that its duration must have been shorter than and problematically distinguished from the status of savagery.  Furthermore, this period was not marked by any great invention or discovery but by its progress in the development of institutions, particularly the institution of property (Morgan 1877: I.3).  According to Morgan, the proliferation of agricultural practice and the cultivation of maize and plants gave rise to cultivated lands or gardens. He writes, “Although lands were owned in common by the tribe, a posssessory right to cultivated land was now recognized in the individual, or in the group, which became a subject of inheritance” (Morgan 1877: I.4).  The cultivation of land, therefore, contributed greatly to the solidification of the family unit, however far their boundaries extended, and “In each case the property remained in the gens” (Morgan 1877: I.5).

Moreover, “While in the Lower Status, the higher attributes of man began to manifest themselves. Personal dignity, eloquence in speech, religious sensibility, rectitude, manliness and courage were now common traits of character; but cruelty, treachery and fanaticism were equally common” (Morgan 1877: I.6).  The important point to note is that, for Morgan, the development of sedentary forms of existence and practice directly corresponded to the emergence of those “properly human” characteristics, though the escape from more animalistic or nonhuman qualities, like cannibalism, “that brutalizing scourge of savagery” (Morgan 1877: I.5), remained incomplete.

The middle status of barbarism, according to Morgan, opened in the Eastern Hemisphere with the domestication of animals.  This period was characterized by the rapid growth of personal property and a definite shift in the people’s relation to land.  “The territorial domain,” he writes, “still belonged to the tribe in common; but a portion was now set apart for the support of the government, another for religious uses, and another, more important portion, that from which the people derived their subsistence, was divided among the several gentes, or communities of persons who resided in the same pueblo” (Morgan 1877: I.8).  While the growth of personal property did not translate into the production of alienable land, its impact on the family unit was significant.  Not only was the inheritable property between mother and father strictly limited, but rules of inheritance greatly favored agnatic kin in the distribution of property.

To conclude this brief outline of Morgan’s theory of the stages of human development, we come to “The last great period of barbarism…[which commenced] with the production and use of iron” (Morgan 1877: II. 1).  Morgan describes the smelting of iron as the catalyst for the most accelerated progress of human intelligence, allowing for developments in the art of way, city planning and building to protect provincial populations from invaders, and, perhaps most importantly, the “intensified struggle for the possession of the most desirable territories” (Morgan 1877: II. 1).  As the old forms of social organization were displaced by population growth and the advancements in technology, land was allotted to individuals revealing to the human mind, along with the possession of domestic animals, “its first conception of wealth” (Morgan 1877: II. 3) and private property in which “the whole surface of the earth could be made the subject of property owned by individuals” (Morgan 1877: II. 4).

The purpose of recalling the different developmental stages in Morgan is to mark, if only vaguely, the various forms of human subjectivity that emerge at each stage: we see, rather clearly, a teleological process whereby the figure of the man of civilization emerges intact with those higher human attributes including dignity, imagination and, most importantly, the distancing of himself from those animal or inhuman qualities of his recent past.  In line with enlightenment thought, this includes the slow dissolution of those traditional ties to collective and familial modes of existence.

What we might find most fascinating about Morgan’s account, however, is the emergent complexity of the forms of subjectivity he details.  While he attempts to maintain that human progress is intimately linked to the objects man has created for the procurement of his subsistence, thereby creating a zone of indistinction between man’s nature and man’s objects, we nonetheless witness a myriad of other actors: domestic animals, city walls, roving invaders, kinship structures, etc., all play a significant role even in Morgan’s speculative ethnography.

Concluding Remarks

The scope of this current inquiry is profoundly limited particularly in its textual focus.  Furthermore, as I attempted to focus on the dynamic production of property and subjectivity, the analysis only unraveled into further dynamics: the relation between the human and nonhuman, colonial rebellions and productions of native society, and the developmental stages of humanity.  Despite its circuitous journey, however, my hopes are that I have at least raised some interesting questions about the complex relationships that force themselves on one who attempts to think about theories of property.

REFERENCES

Agamben, G. 2004 [2002]. The Open: Man and Animal (trans. Kevin Attell). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Darwin, C. 1909 [1859]. On the Origin of Species. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company.

Engels, F. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (trans. Evelyn Reed). New York: Pathfinder Press, Inc.

Freud, S. 1955. “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. and ed. James Strachery). London: Hogarth Press.

Hann, C.M. 1998. “Introduction: the Embeddedness of Property,” in Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition (ed. C.M. Hann). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Maine, H. 1954 [1861]. Ancient Law. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.

Mantena, K. 2010. Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Morgan, L. 1877. Ancient Society. Accessed 28 October 2011 at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/morgan-lewis/ancient-society/

Verdery, K. 2003. The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania. New York: Cornell University Press.

To begin, I’d like to bring attention to Derrida’s citation of Montaigne’s citation of Aristotle, “O my friends, there is no friend,” and reflect on the differences present in this saying, especially in the plural address “friends” and the singular general category “friend.”

In conjunction, we could read the following passage:

“…I still do not know if what exists between us is philia or homonomia, nor how one should distinguish here among us, among each one of us, who together would compose this as yet quite indeterminate ‘us’” (“The Politics of Friendship”, 633, my emphasis)

In reading this passage in conjunction with the first we should mark Derrida’s hesitance, a hesitance demonstrated throughout his works, to attempt to capture heterogeneous series (in this case the audience) under a general singular, i.e. “us,” “the friend,” etc.

Now, what are the implications of this hesitance when approaching the concepts “friend” and “friendship”? Well, from looking at the etymology of “friend” last week we saw, and I will only speak of the Greek philia due to familiarity, various idealizations of what a friend is. That is, these were analytic determinations of what constitutes a friend (ex.: “she has always been there for me, so she is a friend” and “he stole from me, therefore he must not be my friend” etc.). What these ideals of friendship attempt to do is capture or freeze an entire spectrum of possible relationships in advance, that is, to give a set of criteria which you then impose on the other person in order to determine whether he/she/it is your friend or not.

Already we have seen the problems that arise with this way of thinking about friendship, i.e. that friendship can only occur between men but also consider the implications for racial, national, class, species (etc.) exclusions in these ‘systems of friendship’.

So if Derrida has taken from himself the tool of analytic determination, how does he expect to think friendship?

Let’s look at his rhetoric: there is consistent use of words meant to designate a sort of coming before-ness, i.e. “before even haven taken responsibility” (633), “in relation to the Other prior to any organized socius” (644), “a sort of originary sociality is a law” (634), “The very possibility of the question, in the form of ‘what is…?’, seems always to have supposed this friendship prior to friendships, this anterior affirmation of being-together” (637), etc.

It seems then that Derrida is pushing us back before our commonsense and formal understandings of friendship (which he calls “that strange violence that has since forever insinuated itself into the origin of the most innocent experiences of friend or justice”) to force us to think of the conditions of possibility for friendship to ever occur in the first place. He writes, “Behind the logical game of contradiction or paradox [isn’t this a nice characterization of analytic determinations?], perhaps ‘O my friends, there is no friend’ signifies first and last this surpassing of the present [both temporal and “present” in the sense of “presence” as being before me] by the undeniable future anterior which would be the very movement and time of friendship” (637).

It is important to note, then, that Derrida views analytic determinations of friendship as too late to the scene and, in fact, as an erasure or covering over of an originary relation.

For discussion (with the assumption that we are on board with Derrida to this point):

1. Stated explicitly on page 638, Derrida narrows in on what he calls “the question of the response” and “answering”: “what does it mean to respond or to answer and to whom or to what are we responding to?” are Derrida’s questions. We should discuss the dimensions of his meditations on responding and answering, i.e. to answer for, to answer to, and to answer before, and why he argues that “to answer before” appears “more original, more fundamental, and hence unconditional” (638).

Through my interests in Critical Animal and Environmental Studies there inevitably emerges questions about the tactics and strategies of animal and environmental liberation. Often these tactics involve, not only the rescuing of animals used for experimentation and consumption, but the destruction of laboratories, meat and fur farms, logging factories, equipment, etc. These tactics have been labeled as violent in political, legal, and vernacular discourses, often invoking a connection between the property destroyed and persons — even if the term ‘persons’ is only meant to designate a nebulous network of corporate entities. However, as the current literature in the anthropology of property demonstrates, this is anything but a necessary and self-sufficient connection. Furthermore, the appropriation of animal bodies and entire ecological networks as property is itself a practice worth questioning — all the more so given our current ecological crises and their effects on nearly every domain of political and social life.

My purpose in taking this course is to ground my academic, as well political, interests in the anthropological literature on property; my intended goal being to take from these resources a more concrete and material understanding of the social and political usages of property.

I have always found it difficult to speak about, and even more so for, someone. It has always been, for me, a question of doing justice; a task, that as I speak before the ashes of my father, is made all the more difficult: he had always been, to my mind, both supremely righteous and supremely flawed.

I then consider it a matter of luck that just months before his death I had had a crisis in my academic life, questioning the power and strength of philosophy in general, and philosophers in particular, to provide us with novel reflections and insights into the so-called “big questions.” I had come to suspect that philosophy was simply the sophisticated articulation of what, at least some of us, experienced in our daily lives. To test this suspicion, I had intended to ask a series of staple philosophical questions of my father to which he would respond either in writing or in conversation. Due to his deteriorating health and to the reason we are here today, his death, he was only able to respond, in writing, to one question: “Who or what am I?” Absolving me of the task to speak about or for my father, this is what he wrote:

I am my mother. For better or worse, I am also my father and the three stepfathers who followed him. I am the three years I toured in Vietnam, the friends I’ve made in my 59 years, and every dog I have loved and has loved me.

As a hobby, I have always been a miner and so I suppose I am earth, I am quartz and, in more ways that one, I am fool’s gold.

I am my sister, though I’m sure she’d hate to hear that, my three sons, my two beautiful girls, and my wife, Vicky, who I could never begin to compensate for her love – and yes, I am even my first wife.

I am every job I’ve held, every boss I’ve had, every co-worker and customer I have cooked for. I am Barstow. I am the desert. I am the Santa Fe railroad and swimming down the Mojave Narrows collecting soda bottles for pennies.

I am unbelievably lucky.

I find it absolutely remarkable that my father understood that when we ask the question “Who am I?” we cannot answer without being spoken through: we are, as it were, only “I’s” insofar as we are composites of our life experiences, the others we come into contact with and who constitute us (whether that be persons, dogs, or deserts). My initial hesitance to speak about or for my father, your father, your husband, your friend, your brother, your tío, your abuelo, was perhaps too hasty: Carl Edward Goebel III already speaks through all of us, this is why we are here, why we mourn, and why we love.

Since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, nine utility-scale solar developments have been fast-tracked for approval in regions of the Mojave Desert, exposing over 50,000 acres of public lands to intensive development.[1]  While the arguments that have supported these massive investments of public resources have not been homogenous, they have nonetheless orbited within a certain constellation of thinking about the desert as such.  In October of 2010, at the groundbreaking of Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stated, “Some people look out into the desert and see miles and miles of emptiness […] I see miles and miles of gold mine.”[2]  However, the two positions – the desert as emptiness and the desert as gold mine – are two sides of the same ecological nihilism, effacing the infinite complexities of desert ecologies: desert tortoise populations, 500 to 800 year old Mojave yucca groupings, and the myriad of other organisms that inhabit these lands are reduced to a narrative of human use-value in general, and profit in particular; therefore, continuing a tradition of westward expansion at least as old as the 19^th century in which the American deserts were viewed as the “Creator’s dumping place”[3] and “an unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless.”[4]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rich account of those minor literatures, including the emergence of a blogging culture by so-called “desert rats,” that contest these empty and destructive desert ontologies.  Pejoratively labeled NIMBYs[5] by proponents of Big Solar in order to brand them as “small-minded” and selfish, caring more about local aesthetics than an imagined “global good,” we argue that these literatures take place, not simply on aesthetic grounds (though this is a justifiably strong influence), but also with deep scientific, political, and ontological commitments; with a fidelity to deserts as complex, diverse, and necessary ecosystems; and within a more robust, extra-human notion of what it means to inhabit desert worlds.

Passages:

p. 16:

I turn back to rendezvous with Susan and stop dead in my tracks. All the sandy channels look alike, and for the life of me I can’t tell which one that disappears around which hillock is the one that will deliver me back to our meeting place. Not for the first time the implications of being alone in the desert and the potentials for disaster strike me: stumbling onto a rattlesnake, spraining an ankle, confronting an irritable peccary, or getting embarrassingly lost.

And my next thought is, Good. Good. The desert grants me expanded time, time to perceive, to enjoy, to ask questions, to learn. I may get to be here for a while by default, the sensible, responsible housewife freed into a maze of dry channels that feed only into each other. As Ed Abbey says, “the desert, any desert, suggests always the promise of something unforeseeable, unknown but desirable, waiting around the next turn in the canyon wall, over the next ridge or mesa, somewhere within the wrinkled hills.”

p. 34, a companion traveling with Zwinger finds a pipistrelle (a type of bat) with a broken wing bone. The bat is barely breathing, lying comatose:

As I hold this exquisite creature, I grieve at the accident that brought it to this pass at the same time feeling selfishly grateful to have this chance to examine it close up. It beggars my imagination to understand how something so small can be so complex. I think of all the things it can do that I cannot, of what I know that it does not, and of what we share, a common chromosome perhaps, or a retinal cell. Because it cannot fly I know that it will not, cannot, live, that the wing cannot be splinted and healed. Such a small miscalculation to be so fatal.

On this fresh sunshiny morning a chill draft unfurls from the river, reminding me of my own mortality.

p. 58, while standing on the crest of a barchan dune, Zwinger notes the seething surface of the dune; the activity of stilt bugs and wolf spiders:

So much life goes on here, hidden from the world above. I no longer think of sand dunes as empty, barren mounds of dry sand, but as honeycombed with life, burrowed and tunneled and excavated, drilled and dug and tamped, full of scratchers and hoppers and tickly walkers.

p. 61:

San Marcial was one of the last places to get water for humans and stock before facing the Jornada [del Muerto]. Partway down the slope to the river that so ill-treated it, San Marcial is a place of leavings with no one there to whom to say good-bye. Anyone traveling the Jornada dreaded it, its reputation built from truth and rumor, fact and fiction, each worse than the other. The loss of life and property and stock to marauding Indians, plus tempers quickened by apprehension, all intensified the horrors of the journey. Today no amount of sunshine can stanch a foreboding that even I, here in this desert over a century later, feel as I take into account the isolation, when letter deliveries were measured in months, when major events weren’t called up on the evening news, when small mishaps could be fatal, when you couldn’t get in touch with anyone on the instant, when there was plenty of time for rumor and hearsay. I have to think what it was like not to know, and even today this desert teaches you that.

p. 62, citing a letter from Colonel Philip Kearny to his wife, relating his three-day travel of the Jornada:

It surprised me to see so much land that can never be of any use to man or beast. We traveled many days without seeing a spear of grass, and no vegetation excepting a species of the Fremontia [creosote bush], and the mesquite tree, something like our thorn, and which our mules eat, thorn and branches to keep them alive.

p. 78:

When abundant annual plants are available in the desert, most ant groups eat seeds. When only a few annuals are present, they shift to being omnivores. Harvester ants take different seeds as various kinds come in and out of season, and the amount they consume is considerable. Despite their small size, ants by their sheer numbers strongly impact the ecosystem. They effectively compete with and influence seed-eating rodents (who may themselves carry off 75 percent of seed production), as well as limit plant populations by leaving so few seeds to germinate. Some plants, like a species of datura, get around this by producing seeds that attract ants by providing tiny carrying handles, but prevent the ants from utilizing them by arming the seeds with a thick coat that they cannot penetrate. The datura takes advantage of the harvester ants’ predilection for seed carrying to get its seeds scattered far away from the parent plant before rodents have a chance to remove and cache them.

p. 81:

Striding toward the center of the playa is great walking – no cacti to run into, no vines to trip over, no rattlesnakes to watch out for. I leave the pools and puddles behind, cross through the rimming saltbushes, and stride out onto its hard-packed surface. Even though there may be a couple of feet difference between the edges and the middle, the slope is generally about 1 percent, so gradual it wouldn’t roll a marble, kept level by periodic flooding. In two hundred yards I stand, like the pivot point of a compass, in the center of the universe – a place to dance, to hoot and holler, to rearrange mountains, to count the rollicking stars at night. To redesign the world.

For 360 degrees I mark not a tree, not a shrub over three feet high, not a glint of water, only a light-absorbing heat-inhaling landscape that translates heat into wavering light and light into shimmering heat so that one inhales, smells, touches only heat, listens only to heat drying skin and cracking silt. No wonder Bartlett questioned why the United States wanted this country anyway:

As we toiled across these sterile plains, where no tree offered its friendly shade, the sun glowing fiercely, and the wind hot from the parched earth, cracking the lips and burning the eyes, the thought would keep suggesting itself, Is this the land which we have purchased, and are to survey and keep at such a cost? As far as the eye can reach stretches one unbroken waste, barren, wild, and worthless.

p. 85:

One December morning, botanist Karen Reichhardt and I explore the interfingering of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts in the southeastern corner of Arizona. She is a delightfully companion and, because she lives in Arizona, a very knowledgeable one. For both of us crossing a transition area between two deserts is slow going – there is so much to see: what was, what is becoming, what is, and what yet may be. We keep to the east bank of the San Pedro River, traversing the alternate uphill and down-dale crests and gullies that drain to the river, looking for the signal sign of the Sonoran Desert, a saguaro cactus.

p. 121:

Three concerns haunted me before I came on this bighorn sheep count: that I would be uneasy alone, that time would hang heavy, that I could not endure the heat. Instead I have felt at home, there have not been enough hours in the day, and the heat has become a bearable if not always welcome companion. The words of Joseph Wood Krutch, also writing about the Sonoran Desert, come to mind: “Not to have known – as most men have not – either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one’s self. Not to have known one’s self is to have known no one.”

p. 125:

The day dims and I stretch out to count the stars framed in a triangle of mesquite branches. Content, I realize I have reached, as Sigurd Olsen wrote, “the point where days are governed by daylight and dark, rather than by schedules, where one eats if hungry and sleeps when tired, and becomes completely immersed in the ancient rhythms, then one begins to live.”

Yes.

p. 149:

My cultural beliefs that fires are one of the evils of nature has required some massive rethinking on my part to discard, in order to accept that fire has always been a natural part of certain of the North American biomes, even a necessary part. The burning of the prairies fertilized and kept the tall grasses vigorous. The Indians who lived near the palm oases – and each oasis had its own group – often fired them to promote new growth. Plant and animal populations are adjusted to fire. Man is not, and has contrived to remove fire as much as possible from the ecosystem, frequently to its detriment.

But before there were careless campers there were, and still are, careless storms with careless lightning. Nature has its own cadence, in which there is little tolerance for houses built in floodplains or flammable chaparral, little consideration for cities built on fault zones, or irrigation works that turn the desert green. Nature acts without calling in a consultant or submitting an environmental impact statement.

p. 182:

Yucca moths fertilize all yuccas, including Joshua trees. A female gathers and packs pollen into a ball under her head. At the next flower she inserts her ovipositor into the flower’s ovary and lays her eggs, then continues to the top of the pistil and brushes the stigma with her head, thereby transferring some of the pollen she carries.  The larvae develop in the seed pod and eat part of the seeds.  Then they bore through the pod and drop to the ground, where they form a cocoon, to emerge the following year. The female moth receives no benefit from this procedure because she feeds neither on nectar nor pollen; she does assure however, by her action, food for the larvae. The relationship between moth and yucca has evolved over time to such a nicety that each species of yucca has its own species of moth.

p. 196:

We camp halfway up the canyon. I position my sleeping bag in order to have an unparalleled vista in the morning. I awake before the sun is over the horizon and face a voluptuous view of the Panamint Mountains, sleeping lavender on the horizon, fronted by a high ridge line of smoke mauve just now taking shape on its surface. Colors shift as I watch, contours form, dissolve, re-form as the light plays on them. I would stop the light metamorphosis, play it back, watch the day emerge again from its chrysalis of dawn. I would stop time to gather up this desert morning, fold it neatly, slip it in my pocket, and carry it away with me. (I did, in words.)

p. 218, remarking the on the Devil’s Hole pupfish and why they are of such an interest to researchers (of course, because of their benefit to human welfare):

What makes the Devil’s Hole pupfish of such interest to researchers is their relatively fast adaptation from cool freshwater fish to fish that can survive in water whose salinity may be up to six times that of sea water, an amazingly rapid evolution that has implications for all living creatures. Because they live in such calcium-laden waters, researchers are looking for the physiological shields they must have to protect their renal system; an overload of calcium salts is one of the main causes of kidney stones and kidney failure in humans.

p. 222, citing a document from Manly (no first name given, maybe mentioned earlier in the text, but I can’t find it) in which, crossing the Mojave desert in 1849, quoted a Kansas “Jayhawker” disenchanted with the area:

[…] this was the Creator’s dumping place, where he had left the worthless dregs after making a world, and the devil has scraped these together a little. Another said this must be the very place where Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and the pillar had been broken up and spread around the country. He said if a man were to die he would never decay on account of the salt.

p. 225:

A ten-foot-wide rill with a hearty flow braids through the dry ground, the water deep amber. Near the bank, webbing binds an inch-wide spider-hole opening. Salt deposits fringe the edge of the water where the ground is marshmallow soft, so consistently saline is the soil. Small mounds of sand heap around every saltbush, but not one single creosote bush is to be seen. The only green sprigs belong to inkweed and salt grass. The wind worries the grass and waters my eyes and hassles the universe, mischievous, annoying, petulant. A restless time of year, full of questions, among them why anyone would want to convert this beautiful, empty salty desert into anything other than what it is.

p. 230, remarking on the intermediate position between the creosote bush of the Mojave and the big sagebrush of the Great Basin:

Boundaries like this one fascinate me. These visual boundaries augur the invisible ones: where stands the last creosote bush and where grows the first sagebrush? Where does the last saguaro become a mere armless post in the ground and finally give up its footing? Where does the kangaroo rat pause, one well-adapted desert foot poised in the air, nose twitching toward a wetter, lusher existence, and not cross over? Where is the line beyond which the desert cockroach does not tunnel? Where is the barrier that keeps the sidewinder and the fringe-toed lizard at home on hot sands? Where does the desert tortoise blink its slow eyes and turn back to the only home it knows? In trying to define where a desert is not, one learns where it is.

p. 244, remarking on two horned larks:

Two swoop with short wingbeats, white bellies sparkling, one right on the tail of the other. The subspecies of Great Basin horned larks are paler and smaller than populations to the east. The most omnipresent Great Basin birds, they are widespread across the West. Like the Chihuahuan Desert, the Great Basin has no endemic birds; rather it supports an assemblage of birds filtered in from outside its borders in a unique combination.

p. 245, remarking on an encounter with a rattlesnake:

Seeing the rattlesnake becomes an obsession, for where it is sets the limits of my movement. I can easily make a wide circle around. But I have a deeper curiosity than that. We have become connected by chance and need to play out our roles.

After an infinity of intense peering I finally separate out a patch of pattern marking the back of a western rattlesnake, coiled in a depression beneath a very small saltbush. From the curvature I estimate a coil perhaps eight inches across, and a body an inch and a quarter in diameter, a snake perhaps two feet or so long. I cannot see the rattle but the whirring is almost constant, fading and intensifying, in an oddly peaceful way. I feel warned. I do not feel threatened. Although I cannot see it, I know, having just seen one of its ilk out on a road, that its forked tongue darts out of its mouth straight up, then bends down, quivering, before being pulled in again, a motion that I find almost hypnotically fascinating to watch.

I am tempted to go closer, believing that it is so entangled in the bush that it cannot strike. It is not good sense that holds me back but good manners: I am disturbing it enough simply by my presence. My guess is that it was coiled there in the meager shade of the saltbush during the day and was just awakening to think about hunting when it was rudely disturbed by the vibrations of an arrogant and heavy-booted trespasser.

p. 247:

Herman lowers the flaps over Winnemucca and the aeronautical sectional chart on my lap comes to life. The color and the shadings of map and terrain match. As on the chart, there is no bright green on the ground, only a subtle series of tans and burnt siennas. The resemblance between the two – man’s map and nature’s map – is uncanny.

But the map records no harvester-ant mounds, no doughnuts of bare soil. Yet hundreds stud the ground below. I feel a quick tinge of superiority: I know something the map doesn’t know. Nor does the map acknowledge the scorched and blackened patches of hillsides and fields from last week’s lightning fires.

p. 250, cited here because of my interests at the time in biogeography:

Cheatgrass turned up in the American West around 1900 when it was introduced from Eurasia. When native grasses cannot withstand grazing, or where they are burned out, cheatgrass elbows in aggressively. As a winter annual, it sprouts in the fall and sets seed early, drying into a fire hazard by mid-June, a vicious circle since it thrives after a fire to the detriment of other plants, outcompeting them for water. In the last decade it has spread drastically, now covering half a million acres south and west of Winnemucca.

p. 267-68, citing a passage from the journeys of Bennett Clark across the Great Basin:

Taking the general aspect of this desert into view, and the fact that there is an absence of everything desirable and an abundance of everything pernicious here couple with what we saw, we cannot conceive a hill more full of horrors. It realises all that such a mind as Dante’s could imagine.

p. 280-81:

A rock wren chirrups an intermittent commentary. A friendly wind skips by and twines through the rocks. Some of the rock is abrasive, dolomitic, with sharp edges, eaten with circles and dots and disks and shallow solution holes, beset by juniper roots. There are little shallow caves all along, and in them there is often scat, but not a sign of what I expected, a wood rat’s nest. I’ve stowed manuscript in my day pack to work on as I sit in this beneficent solitude, but I am quite content not to do anything except look and be cooled by the wind, dissolved by the rain, and grown over by a juniper of infinite character and wisdom. A jumping spider comes up my sleeve, catapults into my backpack. I don’t have to be anywhere until dark. Not since childhood have I felt a day so unstructured, so unprescribed, and when my conscience stops nagging me to go to work, I give my mind permission to go play, and contemplate it contemplating what mischief it might get into – use clouds as stepping-stones? Play tiddlywinks with the flat shadows?

While my mind is off playing on the wind, I operate in total lethargy, somewhere half past peace and a third beyond lazy. My biggest task is to watch the cloud shadows define the ridges. When the sun is full out they’re all the same color, and difficult to differentiate. Now a cloud shadow falls on one, then another, separating them in depth, showing off the contours.

Here on this ridge Tule Valley stretches in full view, north to south. The valley sags like a hammock, brownish-green, streaked and marbled with chalky patches, with the broad white streak of a salt flat down the middle. Mountains bound the whole east side, one after the other. The mountains have so much sky above them that they are not barricades but adornments: they exist only to create valleys.

p. 288:

Sitting quietly in the darkness, waiting for an owl rejoinder that never comes, I perceive a tiny glow. In the dark I work my way toward it and find a pinkish glowworm, cashew nut-shaped, clustered with three other insects. In the dim light, I cannot tell if they are winged male glowworms mating with her (the female glowworm mates while in the larval stage) or predators feeding upon her – luminescence is not used to attract the opposite sex, and may provide protection against predators. Another glowworm gleams faintly, twenty feet farther up the canyon, a comma of light.

The female never goes through metamorphosis to set out on six spindly beetle legs, never feels the pull of wing on thorax, never hunts her meal under a desert moon, never senses the world through probing antennae. She just remains a pudgy pink glowworm, a cold, curled-up light in a deep desert canyon, eternally luminescent and eternally adolescent.

p. 291, remarking on the Great Basin Spadefoot Toad who burrows under the desert floor, often for nine to ten months:

I walk the edge of the steaming pond, imagining them enduring this crystalline winter. Burrowing enables them to endure a season of both cold and desiccation safely underground. While hibernating, they can store almost a third of their body weight as diluted urine to forestall water loss through their skin to the surrounding soil as the soil dries. Some species may even form impervious cocoons of mud around themselves to reduce desiccation. For nine to ten months they survive without any food, locked away in a Stygian subterranean darkness, metabolic activities reduced to a barely detectable level, mere nuggets of life.

A heavy rain with air temperatures above 52 degrees F. stimulates the magic of the toads’ rapid emergence, a breaking through into fresh air, even though they may continue to return to a damp burrow during the day. The incessant calling of a group of male spadefoots attains an amazing volume of sound that buckles up the night air. Male calling attracts the females – males hold onto the slippery skinned females by their embossed front fingers – and there is an orgy of mating the likes of which hasn’t been seen since ancient Rome.

p. 297:

If there were but one memory I could take away with me – I squint against the sky, thinking, knowing I don’t really have to think because it was the answer that instigated the question – it is the talisman I shall have always: an afternoon with a small black-tailed gnatcatcher who so trusted this outlandish earthbound creature that we napped on a torrid desert afternoon, within a wing’s reach of each other’s dreams.

To the west a single thin cloud poises over the evening mountains, a molten spear illuminated from beneath, a Vasa Murrhina cloud. The only cloud, alone in the sky, it incandesces as I watch, the curve of a bow arcing between two distant points. Then it fades. The ends still glow while the middle darkens to match the mountains beneath. The relationship shifts: the cloud, like a spear thrown from an atlatl, flies to the next mass of mountain, burying its head in the mountain flank.

The sky behind the mountains segues to a pale steely blue, without warmth, bending upward to dusk. Where the sun has departed, the sky bleaches. Dust spirits sleep. The wind abides. Silence streams from the mountains. Black feathers of darkness drift downward.

The desert comes alive.

Bibliographic Resources

Abbey, Edward. Beyond the Wall. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984.

– Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Random House, Inc. 1968.

Bartlett, John Russell. Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1856.  Bartlett traveled the southwestern deserts while surveying the boundary between Mexico and the United States in 1852-53; his intelligent firsthand narrative encompasses a lot of country, much of which is just the same as when he first saw it.

Frémont, John Charles. Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842, and to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44. Washington: Gales & Seaton, Printers, 1845. Although the report is concerned with his whole exploration of the West, Frémont’s view of the Great Basin is a fascinating firsthand account of discovery and the rigors of desert travel.

Goetzsmann, William H. Exploration and Empire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. A superb book in which are some insights on the role North American deserts have played in the westward movement and how they have affected history.

Hornaday, William T. Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914. An entertaining, macho, historic view of the Pinacate region of the Sonoran Desert, on the border between Arizona and Mexico; included here because it gives an insight into how deserts were view seventy years ago.

Madsen, David, and O’Connell James F., eds. Man and Environment in the Great Basin. Washington D.C.: Society for American Archaeology, Papers No. 2, 1982. How ancient man and deserts interrelated provides some provocative thought for present-day man.

Twain, Mark. Roughing It. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1891.

Footnote Resources (most of which are unclear due to citation)

John T. Hughes, Doniphan’s Expedition; Containing an Account of the Conquest of New Mexico; General Kearney’s Overland Expedition to California; Doniphan’s Campaign Against the Navajos; His General Price at Santa Fé (Cincinnati: U.P. James, 1847): 61, gives a sad account of the loss of men and stock at Valverde while waiting to embark on the Jornada [del Muerto], as do Kearny’s soldiers.

Dwight L. Clarke, ed., Stephen Watt Kearny

Manly, Death Valley in ’49.

Sigurd Olsen, Reflections from the North Country (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).

Bennett Clark, “Diary of a Journey from Missouri to California in 1849,” ed. Ralph P. Beiber,  Missouri Historical Review 23(1928).

W.J. Ghent, The Road to Oregon. A chronicle of the Great Emigant Trail (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1929).

Speaking of the Wave Manual project, we have nine more days before donations can no longer be accepted. Steven Rodriguez is already in Mexico and I will join him in August ONLY if we are fully-funded. So please, donate whatever you can – any amount will help.

Also, I came across this poem from Ruth Nolan with video from over 40 photographers in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s beautiful!

Thanks to Cary at Racing the Horizons for sharing this link with me. It comes out June 22nd, hopefully somewhere near me, so check it out if you have a chance. Looks truly amazing.

Shaun over at Mojave Desert Blog and I were having a discussion in which I asked him where he sees, or would like to see, the future of desert activism headed. He said he had to think about the question and asked me where I would like to see it headed. Now, I’m quite green on the topic, which is why I like to ask people like Shaun and Chris Clarke these kinds of questions since they have such a wealth of knowledge about the desert. But I do have four preliminary thoughts:

First, I think it is essential for environmental activists concerned about recent developments in the Mojave and elsewhere (see here, here, here and here for examples) to articulate their solidarities with other social and political struggles, ecological and otherwise. This means putting ourselves in conversation with feminist, labor, indigenous, minority, student, animal rights, and (other) environmental rights groups. This is only to name a few as the struggle to halt industrial development in the desert can be articulated in multiple directions. One recent example is the Chevron and Solar Millennium LLC development of roads on Native American Sacred sites where giant geoglyphs depicting Indigenous deities are located (see video above). This does not mean reducing these struggles to each other but articulating the history and specificity of each in order to find the ways in which they can, and do, inform one another.

Second, and following the first point, it is important for desert activists to understand what they can learn from the practices and forms of resistance of these groups as well as the sort of challenges (legal, social or otherwise) they face. We can learn a great deal from Indigenous groups about the occupation of territories to halt development, like what is currently taking place in Glen Cove, developing democratic and non-hierarchical forms of community participation from feminist and minority groups, and the values as well as risks of industrial sabotage from animal and environmental liberation groups like the ALF and ELF. It is also important for desert activists to be cognizant of what they might teach to other activist groups.

The third point takes into account the social, political, and legal dangers involved in even engaging in dialogue with the tactics of groups like the ALF and the ELF. To me, this is an essential role for those academics and journalists interested in and working with environmental activism: we must be vocal and engage critically and rigorously with the social and legal constrictions that act to suppress dissidence while simultaneously developing alternative narratives, ontologies, and epistemologies for understanding these actions in contradistinction to the current ‘Green Scare.’ Our silence is our acquiescence.

Finally, at some point we simply have to stop writing, stop debating, and stop discussing and decide to put ourselves between a Deere Brush Hog and a 500 year old Yucca.