The motto “Make kin, not babies!” featured in the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene [1] by the zoologist and philosopher Donna Haraway is not so much a plea against childbirth in difficult times as it is a call to establish new, intimate relationships with everything around us. These kinships would not be constrained by genealogical or species boundaries, and would become all the more compelling for their unexpectedness, strangeness, and wonder.
Haraway has never been fond of the term Anthropocene to describe the era we inhabit. She prefers the term Chthulucene, which she constructs from the concept of tentacular thinking—entangled “in a multitude of temporalities and spatialities and a legion of entities in intra-active assemblages, including more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.” It is compost-ism instead of post-humanism, humus instead of human, humusities in place of humanities, sympoiesis instead of autopoiesis. Haraway’s language—what she dubs “promiscuous linguistic habits”—operates like sparks from a weld: dazzling and blinding us, preventing us from seeing anything else. But once they cool, we become aware of the solidity of the connection.
Tentacularity, she tells us, is the attitude one must cultivate in order to inhabit what Anna Tsing [2] has called the ruins of capitalism: a trail of precariousness and multispecies exterminations resulting from the failure of the deceitful promises of Modern Progress. Survival amid disturbance and pollution is only possible collaboratively, through “eruptions of unexpected vitality and embodied, contaminated, non-deterministic practices” that contest human exceptionalism and generate new relations with the diverse others with whom we share the multispecies entanglement.
Haraway achieved acclaim in 1984 with her seminal A Cyborg Manifesto, a brief feminist text that transcended feminism by subsuming the problem of gender within a broader project aimed at dissolving many other dualisms and essentialisms. The result, she argued, would be an ontologically more nebulous and richer world, in which, drawing on the scientific concept of the cyborg, dominant binaries—man–woman, human–machine, human–animal, subject–object, nature–culture—could gradually fade. What was particularly compelling in that vision was the absence of both threat and triumphalism. Haraway has consistently avoided both salvationist and apocalyptic logics. On the contrary, she has urged us to embrace, with a realistic energy, the strange, hybrid, dense, and problematic worlds we inhabit and to work toward forming new relationships within them, “romping in the multi-gender, multi-species and multi-machine compost we dwell in.”
Since the fifteenth century, Western architecture has been one of the armed branches of anthropocentrism and its creed, humanism. With few exceptions, it has shown no interest in anything beyond human needs or glory. It has always seemed more comfortable with the ethical lukewarmness of grand systematizing visions and detached reflection, rather than the intimate proximities of making-with-another.
Haraway’s intellectual activism—incandescent, vitalist, non-binary, indeterminate—is premised on inhabiting as a practice among individuals who look at each other, touch each other, and get smeared together. It is thus unsurprising that her thought has been embraced by new generations of architects who, rather than impregnating the world with objects and memorials, aim to make it more habitable for all, human and non-human alike. But how? Where does that multi-species compost take place? What do its spaces look like? How do they shape the relations that unfold within them? To whom do they belong? What does it mean to be present, to pay attention, in such spaces? What sorts of encounters do they incite?
“In an inventory one does not write ‘etcetera.’” [3]
At the beginning of Chapter XXX of Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec describes a small scene in a bathroom in which a black cat witnesses its owners’ sexual intertwining:
“A bathroom. The floor and walls are covered with small ochre-yellow tiles. A man and a woman, both about thirty years old, are kneeling in the half-filled bathtub. The man, his hands on the woman’s waist, is licking her left breast, while she, slightly arched, holds her partner’s penis in her right hand as she caresses herself with the other. A third character is present: a young black cat with golden reflections and a white patch below its throat, sitting on the rim of the tub. Its greenish-yellow gaze seems to express a prodigious astonishment.” [4]
Twenty-three years later, in 1997, in one of the Cerisy colloquia, Jacques Derrida began his famous conference on animals by recounting the profound effect exerted upon him, while he was in the bathroom, by the gaze of his cat:
“I often wonder, to see, who I am; and who I am at the moment when, surprised naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal—for example, the eyes of a cat—I have difficulty, yes, difficulty in overcoming an embarrassment. Why this difficulty?” [5]
Before publishing Life: A User’s Manual, Perec had already sketched his monumental novel in the work that lent the title to this article, Species of Spaces, a remarkable piece on the scales of dwelling and, as is often the case with Perec, on attention as an ethical requisite of the gaze—on the importance of taking into consideration everything that surrounds us and that we normally overlook; on seeing and diligently recording what we consider trivial, what habit or ennui prevents us from noticing.
“Nothing draws our attention. We do not know how to see. We must go more slowly, almost clumsily. Force ourselves to write about what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, the most faded. (…) Force oneself to see with greater simplicity.” [6]
Derrida’s epiphany does not truly occur because his cat looks at him, but because, in looking at him, he looked at his cat. He did not see “the animal,” that anthropocentric Cartesian abstraction that he found so objectionable—one that lumps together all animal species and opposes them as a bloc “to man.” Rather, he saw his cat, that cat and no other—a real, subjective individual, a concrete other with whom an empathetic encounter can occur, even as one acknowledges the impossibility of truly knowing what is occurring in its mind [7]. What does the cat see? What is it like to be a cat? Or better still, what is it like to be that cat?
In his 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? philosopher Thomas Nagel [8] asked whether it would be possible to understand, from the outside, the specificity of each species’ subjectivity—i.e., to feel what it is like to be that subject. Could a human experience precisely what it feels like to be a bat, or a cat? Even without changing species, could sighted or hearing humans experience what it is like to be congenitally blind or deaf humans, or vice versa?
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt for that specific, private phenomenological universe of each subject through which they perceive, act, and relate to their environment and others—i.e., inhabit.
“Each subject weaves relations—like a spider’s threads—upon certain properties of things, interlacing them until configuring a solid web that carries its existence. (…) We are easily carried along by the illusion that the relations that a subject foreign to us maintains with its objects in its environment play out in the same space and time that our relations with things in our human world occupy. This illusion is nurtured by the belief in a single world in which all living beings are packaged.” [9]
In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben highlights that Uexküll’s investigations into the animal environment were contemporaneous with quantum physics and avant-garde artistic movements—and he regards them, alongside these, as part of a vector away from anthropocentric perspective.
“Where classical science saw a single world containing hierarchically ordered living species—from the most elementary forms to higher organisms—Uexküll proposed, instead, an infinite variety of perceptual worlds, all equally perfect and interconnected, like a gigantic musical score, and yet mutually inaccessible and exclusive.” [10]
If the multi-species compost we inhabit is woven from an infinite multiplicity of subjects—each with their Umwelt, perfectly connected yet mutually inaccessible—what then are the possibilities of generating robust kinships? Perhaps the answer lies in Perec’s injunction to “force oneself to see with greater simplicity.” To reject the excuse of complexity, satellites, and data. To be present and attentive at a 1:1 scale, to encounter gaze-to-gaze, and to inventory and care without etcetera.
Although Emmanuel Lévinas was the great philosopher of the ethics of otherness, and devoted much of his work to the revelation that occurs in the face-to-face encounter with the other, Derrida always reproached him for failing to consider that this other might be a non-human animal—failing to think of the non-human as an ethical other. Yet, in assigning to the face of the other an ethical agency that transcends religion, culture, origin, or race, Lévinas illuminated the possibility of extending that list to include the boundary of species and the parameter of sentience—i.e., the capacity to suffer and enjoy.
What would architecture look like that looked gaze-to-gaze, at the eyes of every sentient being?
Epilogue
In the work of architect Andrés Jaque there is much of Haraway’s sexy compost and Perec’s inventories without “etcetera.” His thinking fluidly traverses the different scales and attitudes these two represent, as demonstrated in his outstanding book Mies and the Cat Niebla (2019). Jaque’s cosmopolitics is comprised of “transmedia urbanisms” and domesticities constructed in “the spaces that lie between bodies and their digital profiles,” where doors open to new kinships with “intimate unknowns.” Yet his true richness emerges from attention to small, richly detailed stories. “Detailing is politicizing.”
In the book appear Aurora, Daniel, Candela, Manolo, Carlos, Marina, Nayana, Toñi, Paco, Berta (now Teo), Greg, Donnie, Maja, Corentine, Denish, Frank, Moddy, Mama Gianna, Rael Michael, Gladys, Jorge, John, Onil, Abel, Edith, Gabriela, Pauline, Marian, Harriet, Juan, Vilma, Geoffrey, Rafael, Bruno, Eros, and Joel. And Niebla. Without etcetera.
Niebla was the cat living in the basement of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion—ostensibly to keep it free of mice. Jaque dedicates a chapter in his book to the intervention he developed there in 2013. Although the cat only appears at the end of the narrative, it is not difficult to feel that Jaque intended her to be the protagonist.
I cannot imagine a better way to conclude than with this excerpt from the book:
“Two years ago, the cat Niebla died. Niebla lived almost her entire life in the pavilion basement. (…) Niebla was the most important inhabitant of the basement. The darkness eventually affected her vision: she developed macular atrophy that began as photophobia and ended up preventing her from seeing daylight, giving her that strange gaze by which, over time, she came to be called Niebla. While connoisseurs of Mies are blind to the basement, Niebla was blind to Mies.” [11]
NOTES
[1] Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press
[2] Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
[3] Perec, G. (1984). Penser/Classer. Hachette
[4] Perec, G. (2008) (1978). Life: A User´s Manual. Penguin Random House.
[5] Derrida, J. (2008) (2006). The Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press
[6] Perec, G. (2018) (1974). Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Penguin Classics
[7] Derrida, in his lecture, cites the pre-Cartesian and anti-Cartesian Montaigne—sensitive to animal well-being—from Apology for Raymond Sebond:
“Montaigne mocks ‘human cynicism with regard to beasts,’ the ‘presumption’ and the ‘imagination’ of man when he claims, for example, to know what goes on in the minds of animals. Above all, when he presumes to assign or deny them certain faculties.”
On the question of whether we are equipped to understand animals, the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) by Frans de Waal, published in English by W. W. Norton is recommended.
[8] Nagel, T. (2024) (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Oxford University Press
[9] Uexküll, J. von (2010) (1934). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning. University of Minessota Press
[10] Agamben, G. (2003). The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford University Press
[11] Jaque, A. (2019). Mies y la gata Niebla: Ensayos sobre arquitectura y cosmopolítica. Puente
