A few weeks ago I went to hear Donna Haraway speak about the yet-unpublished Companion Species Manifesto at Lancaster. Here’s a video clip (not from that lecture) where she talks about the way we as humans construct ourselves in relation to, and along with, non-humans. In her words, “The kind of sociality that joins humans and machines is a sociality that constitutes both (…) Who humans are ontologically is constituted out of that relationality. (…) There is not some pre-existing anthropomorphic point of view from which vision proceeds to the world (…) Interactions between humans and machines have produced both. It is not humans that produce machines in some unilateral way. The arrow does not move one way, even in the areas of direct human invention.”

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