Juniper Tremper
Scientific Writing 105-19
Geneseo, NY
~180 words
Efforts to Make Amends Are No Substitute for the Original
Juniper Tremper
Donna Haraway would not appreciate the tree stumps outside the townhouses. Her paper describes the complexity of a world that does not struggle with the boundaries created by humans and refers to the labels we designate for genders, but the tree stumps are their own imposed boundaries. Like the distinction between genders, the tree stumps only exist because we put them there, and they serve no practical purpose. The argument Haraway writes about applies to the conceptual construction of something (gender boundaries), but even her points about the inability to return to a unity as perfect as the original can be applied directly to the physical construction of the trees in the townhouse dirt plots. As she would have noticed, the development of the paved strip between the buildings created a boundary between nature and ourselves, and our attempt to reintroduce nature in the form of a selective planting of trees has ultimately made no improvement, because “no construction is whole” and while the boundary exists between us and the beauty of nature, there’s no way to just overlook our distance apart.
Hi Juniper, This is an intriguing post and it makes me think about Haraway’s ideas. In many ways I wonder if she might take a different perspective from the one you describe here. If she’s pointing out that we’re all cyborgs–mixes of nature and culture, or human and machine–and that we don’t really have an original “unity” we came from or could return to, would she mourn the cutting down of these trees (an act that requires both humans and machines in a cyborg assemblage) or the imagined unity of their original wholeness? I am not certain that she would. However, given that her interest is in recognizing that we’re cyborgs and that as cyborg (say human-and-chainsaw) we may damage our world (look at the passages about this possibility–the people she’s arguing against that see human-machine mixes as leading to a disaster, which is really relevant to your object), it seems important to think about her point that our cyborg identities could also offer an alternative to such damage, and I wonder what that might look like in the case of these trees.