Interspecies Ethics: Becoming With and Leaving Be

The notions of Becoming With (Donna Haraway) and Leaving Be (Patricia MacCormack) represent two ways of imagining interspecies interaction. In her chapter “Posthuman Ethics” Patricia MacCormack argues, after Spinoza, that “The gift of liberty is allowing the power of the other to expand toward unknown futures” (2). In our everyday dealings with non-human creatures, it is therefore essential that we preserve a space for the free and unhampered unfolding of life, in all its myriad forms. MacCormack’s philosophy is also inspired by Deleuze and Guattari in its emphasis on the body, and in its hostility towards any kind of humanist structuring and theorizing – which merely aims to regiment, and categorize unruly bodies. Her preference is instead for attention to be paid to affect, and how it infuses the relationships between humans and non-humans.

In the section Unspoken Friendships MacCormack draws on the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot’s for an interpretation of ethics as a way of “seeking to resist that [regimenting, categorizing] compulsion towards the other” (5). She writes “Ethics is the madness of the doing/not doing, of passivity of a certain kind as activism, silence as allowing the other to be heard” (5). But what is this ‘passivity of a certain kind,’ this Leaving Be, and how does it hold up when non-human creatures reach out to us, reaching out their hands, claws or paws, to engage us, soliciting a response? 

This is what happened in 2001 in Nootka Sound when a baby Orca called Luna was separated from its mother and its pod. Social isolation drove the orca to seek out interaction with the people in the bay, endangering itself and others. Scientist quickly demanded for a kind of tough love to be practiced, for fear of domesticating the animal, while they worked on a plan to reunite the orca and its pod.  However, locals and especially the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nations people questioned the practice. They saw the orca as a reincarnation of their late chief, and considered the practice a cruel one. Rumours about Luna also drew journalists and tourists to the area compounding the danger inherent in whale/human interactions. This made the prescribed passivity more and more problematic. Plans to save Luna came too late and in 2006 he was killed in a tugboat accident.  

The situation is emblematic of what Donna Haraway would call a multispecies string figure, tying multiple perspectives together in one complicated knot: the scientists preaching tough love, the locals who enjoyed Luna’s company; the journalists hoping for a good story; the tourists who flocked to the bay for pictures; the Mowachaht/Muchalaht  for whom Luna carried spiritual importance. But where was Luna’s perspective in all this?

Unfortunately, unravelling the knot – as far as that’s even possible – wont give us an answer. Rather, the knot, the various ways in which people and non-humans come together mutually determines their being, which Haraway would call their becoming, and becoming  is always a Becoming-With. “Becoming-With, not becoming, is the name of the game […] Ontologically heterogenous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not pre-exist their intertwined worldings” (13).  

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

MacCormack, Patricia. "Posthuman Ethics." Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory. Ashgate, 2012. pp. 1-17.

Haraway, Donna. "Playing String Figures with Companion Species." Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. pp.9-29.