From Ethical Principles to Response-Able Practice

Abstract

Chapter 3 of When Species Meet opens with a fictional encounter between a laboratory animal caretaker and the guinea pigs he works with. The laboratory is used to research sleeping sickness in cattle. As part of the experimental process, guinea pigs are shaved and placed in tight little baskets, wire cages filled with biting flies are placed over them, and their skins are painted with poisons to see if these sicken the flies. During a discussion with an observer (a young girl), the animal caretaker puts his arm into the cage. His arm is immediately covered by flies and starts to swell up. The man explains he does this to learn what the guinea pigs are suffering (page 69). For Donna Haraway, this moment captures a very different sense of what is meant by ethical practice, what she terms sharing suffering. Rather than looking towards higher guiding principles and rights to justify the pain and suffering felt by animal subjects during the experimental process, the ethical response she urges is about entangled subjectivities ` opening to shared pain and mortality and learning what that living and thinking teaches'' (page 83). Haraway's move here resonates with other moments where geographers, among others, have produced cartographies for a relational ethics. Firstly, it shifts the focus of ethics away from a singular Cartesian ethical subject, an autonomous individual capable of making rational ethical choices. For Haraway, abstract discussions of ethical principles are limited by working with human or animal individuals, ``the wrong units'' (page 70). In contrast, Haraway's concept of sharing suffering begins not with the expressed wishes of an individual, but with a relationship between the animal caretaker and his guinea pigs which seeks to share suffering. Sharing suffering is a collective not an individual achievement. As Jane Bennett might put it, this is a kind of agency which is ` distributed across multiple, overlapping bodies, disseminated in degreesorather than the capacity of a unitary subject of consciousness'' (2007, page 134). Similarly, the geographer Sarah Whatmore (1997) suggests that any ethical issue cannot be confined to one person, place, or procedure (like an informed consent), but needs to be `situated' in relation to a whole series of locations and agents. But in WSM Haraway also moves beyond a call for a more situated appreciation of ethical decision making. In her chapter on sharing suffering, ethics seems to take on more performative dimensions. The scientist in her opening vignette does not just think about the practices entangling his subjectivity with others, he performs them through sticking his hand in the cage and through the everyday practices of caring for and working with the guinea pigs. Here WSM is perhaps closer to some of the arguments made by nonrepresentational theory and its imperative to be attentive to processes exceeding the moment of (ethical) representation.Within geography, Derek McCormack's (2003) empirical account of a Dance Movement Therapy classoa therapy principled on a relationship between emotion and motionoalso describes a performative ethics. Here, rather than focusing on representing different ethical interests through a procedure (such as the signing of a consent form) ethics is articulated through touch, gesturing hands, and bodily movement. McCormack's account fleshes out what Haraway's ethic of sharing suffering might entail as an Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 43 ^ 45