ABSTRACT
What can we learn from Crab, a recalcitrant dog who refuses assimilation to the “gentleman-like” in Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona? The play opens the possibility, I argue, to view Launce, Crab’s human companion, as having chosen the wrong battle. Instead of trying to force Crab to conform to elite expectations, he might instead have allied with Crab in the latter’s struggle against elites. The intimation of such a cross-species alliance, I suggest, points to the problematic past and present implication of dogs in the enforcement of private property relations, both in the period of “Primitive Accumulation” of capitalism, when Shakespeare was writing, and today, as border patrols deploy dogs as agents of exclusion. Only by viewing cross-species alliances in the totality of their workings and effects can we properly assess them, and act politically in ways that can overcome systemic relations of inequality and injustice. Hence, Donna Haraway’s “face to face ethics” is only one moment of “dialectic,” not an alternative to it, as she argues. Under global capitalist conditions, to fail to situate a localizing ethics in global totality serves to assist in the perpetuation of exploitation and oppression, however immediately positively efficacious the local gestures may be, since they can—indeed, likely do—still have pernicious effects generally. “Species Being” is the name Marx gives to a liberatory cross-species alliance of humans with nonhumans that mutually affirms both instead of subordinating the many (human and nonhuman) to the benefit of a relatively few; it requires the total transformation of capitalist property relations into relations that do not prescribe inequality, exclusion, and mastery irreducibly. Such total transformation is the only way to truly undermine the separation of “nature” and “society” that new materialists claim as their goal.
