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Donna Haraway: “From Cyborgs to Companion Species”
Donna Haraway presented her lecture as the 2003-2004 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Haraway is a prominent theorist of the relationships between people and machines, and her work has incited debate in fields as varied as primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology. Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, first published in 1985, is now taught in undergraduate classes at countless universities and has been reprinted or translated in numerous anthologies in North America, Japan, and Europe.
via YouTube https://youtu.be/Q9gis7-Jads

I liked this YouTube clip because I enjoyed Donna Haraway’s amazingly eloquent, witty and erudite exploration of the relationship between people, machines and animals. She describes “us” (specifically herself and her audience, and more generally, humans) as

congeries of mini species running into the millions of entities which indeed are the very conditions of our being

This complex interrelation of our broken-down biological selves and what or whoever we come into emergence with she goes on to describe, quoting Margulis and Sagan, as a process of “the co-opting of strangers, the involvement and infolding of others”. This biological perspective vividly illuminates a way we might think of our technological adoption and adaption, of humans as being describable only in relation to what they are doing with what or whom where and when 🙂

Companion Species are assemblages of living and non living ‘species’, as well as human and non-human organisms

(Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (2002). Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origin Of Species. Perseus Books, New York.)