Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg manifesto’ was a call for communication across the technological divide. Now she’s thinking in dog.

For some especially literary people, a word can open a world. Twenty years ago for UC Santa Cruz professor Donna Haraway that word was “cyborg.” Hired as the first professor of feminist theory in Reagan’s America, Haraway wrote an antic, ingenious little essay. Retraining the nightmare creation of Cold War science and post-apocalyptic fiction for a different task, “Manifesto for Cyborgs” revised the rules of human-machine interaction. The machine was in us, not outside.

Now, she says, the dog is in us. And she wants a walk.

Cayenne Pepper, Haraway’s 4-year-old Australian shepherd, has just leaped into Haraway’s lap, her quick pink tongue glistening with an inscrutable doggie demand. Haraway reads it instantly as a leap of faith across the supposedly neat dog-human divide. “It’s kind of a scary thing for a dog to do what she just did,” she says, laughing. “Cayenne doesn’t readily do that. But she’s come to like it.”

Haraway, who turns 60 this year, has also come to like leaping. “The Companion Species Manifesto” (Prickly Paradigm Press), a collection of “shaggy dog stories” about the ongoing canine-human co-conspiracy, revisits the work that made her famous -- or as famous as you get if your audience is students, performance artists, feminist scholars and assorted cybercultural dreamers and cranks. “Like the cyborg manifesto, which was an argument about worlds contained within details, anything that’s important enough to take seriously leads you to the whole world,” she says in an interview in her small Santa Cruz home.

Raised as a “good Catholic girl” in a Denver suburb in the 1950s, Donna Jeanne Haraway once planned a different future. “I could have been a Catholic mother of about six children and a right-to-life activist, had life been just a little different,” she reflects. “I could have been a nun, really.” Beneath the hard look and the easy laugh, above the fleece top of the California academic, you can just make out the High Plains girl who once worked at the horse track as an “usherette” in an Indian dress, earning a union wage and doling out smiles to Texas gamblers.

Science offered another path, but after a zoology degree that led her to a joint PhD in biology, philosophy and the history of science, Haraway turned away from the laboratory too.

“At the end of the day I was always much more fascinated by the way science is a cultural practice,” she says. “I’m way too literary in my pleasures. I love words, I love multiple meanings of words, I love metaphor, both verbal and physical metaphor. I really wasn’t willing to discipline the meanings strongly enough to get good answers to experiments.”

Haraway says her love of language was shaped by her father, a longtime sportswriter who loved the “game story.” In her own way, she set out to write the game stories of her former profession. “The Companion Species Manifesto” also tells, in part, how Haraway fell in love with the dog sport of agility.

Seven years ago, Haraway and her partner of nearly 30 years, software engineer and freelance public-radio producer Rusten Hogness, inherited Roland, a recalcitrant 2-year-old Aussie mix. In part to learn to live with Roland, Haraway started going to obedience classes, and a trainer suggested she try agility, a growing sport that teams dog and person in a high-speed obstacle-course run.

Like Haraway, agility is a relatively new arrival in amateur dog land. The sport, inspired in part by horse-jumping and working-dog contests, first appeared at a 1978 London dog show. Played mainly by working-class men, agility migrated to the United States in the 1980s, where it became a sport dominated by middle-class, middle-age women. (“It’s an astonishingly white sport,” Haraway says.)

For Haraway, agility was another word that opened worlds. Interviewing canine health activists, she walked into a web of relationships among veterinarians, drug companies, breeders and ordinary dog owners who want to improve dog and human lives. “These prove to be really interesting people,” she adds.

“She’s translating us to her colleagues,” says C.A. Sharp, a former Australian shepherd breeder from Fresno and one of Haraway’s key sources. “I do the opposite thing. I’m trying to translate the science into dog-speak.” (Sharp now works as a “genetic counselor,” helping breeders combat inherited canine illnesses.)

You need a taste for agility to follow the leaps and bounds of Haraway’s mind. “She reminds me of Vicki Hearne,” says Catherine de la Cruz, a longtime advocate for Great Pyrenees, the massive white “livestock guardian dogs” that have made a surprising comeback in the American sheep and cattle industry. “She wrote from the heart, but academically, and that’s what Donna does.”

It’s a good comparison. Hearne, the Connecticut trainer and self-proclaimed “animal poet” who died in 2001, wrote tightly wound screeds that interweaved training techniques, Wittgenstein’s linguistic theories and Jeffersonian discourse on rights. “When you chewed it up and spit it out, you realized there was a lot of meat in that sentence,” remembers De la Cruz.

Haraway also writes with aphoristic urgency, not quite the cryptic clamor of much academic prose, but not quite common speech either. She prefers dense neologisms such as “natureculture” to available categories. She writes of “tropes,” of “ontologies,” of “humanist technophiliac narcissism” (that’s bad) and “co-constitutive companion species” (that’s good).

“Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter here,” she proclaims in the “Companion Species Manifesto.” “Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote.”

She means: Dogs and people evolved together, and that ancient bond defines both species. “The companion species isn’t that animal, or that machine, or whatever,” she says. “It is the relationship.”

“Some of it frankly is way beyond me,” says Sharp. As Haraway admits near the end of the book, “Perhaps I worry about words too much.”

But Hearne and Haraway, who never met in person, have some important differences in what dog people might call temperament. Hearne, who became an accidental but enthusiastic partisan in the “pit bull wars” of the 1980s, was a contentious character. “If ever there is an alpha bitch in the human world, she was one,” says Haraway admiringly. Haraway herself rarely indulges what Hearne called the “joyous feeling of contempt.”

“I’m sort of overly obedient, as a character formation,” she says. “And I’m way too much a good girl. So I work against that. Learning how to be properly disobedient was a skill I had to pick up.”

Proper disobedience

Haraway brought her brand of proper disobedience to a university department undergoing dramatic change. The History of Consciousness program, which united scholars and students of history, anthropology, feminist theory, literature, science studies, philosophy and other far-flung pursuits, had been founded as a collection of “praxis groups,” or student-run cooperatives, in the 1970s. “There was this tradition of revolution,” says Katie King, a women’s studies professor at the University of Maryland who studied at Santa Cruz. “Every new class killed off the professors and installed themselves as the new authority.”

When Haraway arrived in 1980, the Hiscon program, as it is known, had a new department chair, the medieval historian and literary theorist Hayden White, and faculty had taken some control over hiring and admission decisions. With her intellectual roots in socialist feminism, Haraway liked the cooperative legacy -- “I’m a child of the ‘60s.... I liked it a lot” -- but she also was “very glad that the department I came into had been tamed.” In a department of academic “stars,” including White and former FBI “10 Most Wanted” fugitive Angela Davis, professors refused to “play prima donna,” she says.

UC Santa Cruz is often perceived as the poor relation of the UC family, and especially UC Berkeley. One former Hiscon graduate student, choosing between the two schools, remembers being told by a Berkeley professor to reflect on the inter-campus bus, which ran to Berkeley in the morning and to Santa Cruz at night. Haraway laughs at this story. “That’s not the direction the bus runs, thank you,” she says. “The generative and creative place was actually here.”

In 1984, when Haraway became a full professor, William Gibson’s cyber-punk novel “Neuromancer” swept the major science-fiction awards and “Terminator” made Arnold Schwarzenegger the first cyborg superstar. Haraway’s little essay might have been road kill on the cyber-superhighway, but it helped trigger what one of her colleagues called a “cyberquake.”

That year Haraway joined three Santa Cruz PhD students in what they half-jokingly called a “cyborg roadshow,” traveling to academic conferences. King, a roadshow member, calls it “a pivotal thing for us professionally and intellectually.” As the academically senior member, Haraway got most of the attention, but she shared the spotlight. “Donna is an unusually generous person intellectually,” says King. Haraway puts it this way: “With whose names do you want to be affiliated -- the big boys, or the graduate students with whom you are really working out your ideas? Which networks are real?”

Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, which wasn’t published until the next year, looked back to the Cold War science of her early education, when government-funded cybernetic studies promised a techno-miracle of enhanced humanity and perfect control. (“Cyborg” is short for “cybernetic organism,” a term coined in 1960 by two scientists studying ways to help astronauts survive space flight.) Haraway, who has an academic’s ear for hard irony, saw the techno-miracle as an orgy of violence and death, but also of hope. Against the hunter-killers and fembots stood her “ironic dream of a common language.” The manifesto was a call to communication, not control.

In “The Haraway Reader” (Routledge), a collection of her essays published last year, Haraway jokes that she has written the “same paper twenty times.” She has sought the “common language” in all her books, including a 1997 record of her encounter with a genetically modified mouse, a 1989 study of primatology and a 1975 farewell to developmental biology, “Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields,” reprinted last month by North Atlantic Books. Her new project, like the others, puts science and society into meaningful dialogue. The companion species, like the cyborg, is more than a concept; it’s a goal. “The word companion contains inside itself a complexity that you could spend the rest of your life paying attention to,” she says. “It’s one of those words that all of a sudden pulls worlds together.”

Later, when Haraway and Cayenne go out in the slanted light of off-leash hour at the local park, they play their serious game of companionship. Cayenne sits like a shaggy statue, while Haraway walks away. Between them spreads the deep, silent history of dog-human devotion. The usual loose-limbed dog-park madness prevails, but the two are locked in their quiet conversation. Waiting for the next word, the next leap.

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Pet projects: A few Haraway links

“Manifesto for Cyborgs”: Reprinted dozens of times, the standard version of the 1984 manifesto (from the 1991 compilation “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women”) is available online at www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Companion Species: A webcast lecture Haraway gave last year at UC Berkeley, “From Cyborgs to Companion Species: Dogs, People, and Technoculture,” is at webcast.berkeley.edu/events/details.html?event_id=92

Agility: Clean Run, a monthly magazine devoted to the dog sport, offers an agility glossary and useful links on its website, www.cleanrun.com

Canine health: The Canine Diversity Project at the University of Ottawa has resources on canine genetics: www.canine-genetics.com