Disconcerting Ducks & Dogs

It's March 1, 2006 at 12:10 p.m.

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First sentence of chapter: “Nature is for me, and I venture for many of us who are planetary fetuses gestating in the amniotic effluvia of terminal industrialism and militarism, one of those impossible things characterized during a talk in 1989 in California by Gayatri Spivak as that which we cannot not desire.”

Sydney, age 8, says that the first sentence of Haraway’s chapter entitled, “Otherwordly conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms” (p. 125-150), means: “We are not nature.” Michael, age 50, says that Haraway is ridiculous and exemplifies the hollow conceit of academic writing. Max, age 10.9, finds Haraway exceedingly hilarious to the point where, upon hearing the text read aloud, he would choke on his own spit. The point being that we are not ducks.

Ducks do not discuss effluvia aloud nor do they, as Haraway asserts, “deserve our recognition of their non-human cultures, subjectivities, histories and material lives” (p. 129), which implies that her human friends who insisted that four ducks swimming across a lake were matched in heterosexual pairings while Haraway contended the ducks were “into queer communities” – on their “culturally appropriate therapeutic trip ‘outside civilization’” – were denying the duck foursome something from which the ducks could derive some benefit. Ducks think of the following things, with the asterisks representing what we cannot know:

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Moving along, this chapter is about ownership and control of nature. Haraway seems to contend that nature is god, though not unmistakably. She describes nature as “a commonplace” and “a trope” (p. 127-128). It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere. Humans of course force themselves on it impossibly and do whatever possible to bend the nature of nature to our nature.

Ultimately, Haraway does the same, horrible thing that she protests in her objectification of the dog as demonstrated by the little pin on her poly-fleece blue vest. (See front cover.) Her crime of commandeering the dog-image parallels the issues raised in relation to the ducks, in the sense that Meg Ryan, as seen today on the Oprah show, has commandeered the low-flying birds’ queer lip structure (view image, right).

This chapter is best read through an ironic, satirical lens, wherein the reader is the satirist and the author a victim of chance.

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