ABSTRACT
“A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and The Companion Species Manifesto open wide discussions about identity, relationship, and what Donna Haraway calls the material-semiotic knot. Haraway’s deconstruction of the semiotic-material binary implicates, this essay argues, a whole suite of binaries: content-form, representation-the represented, animal-plant, active-passive, teaching-learning, writing-reading, inside-outside. This essay and the classroom it is about show how the studying of these texts and themes can involve a practice of material-semiotic knottedness, in turn putting pressure on the implicated binaries. Following Haraway’s lead, this essay and the classroom it is about explore how personal lived material experience is already knotted with how we read and make theory. They find their way to the mimosa, a plant and a figure (in Haraway’s sense) that helps with thinking through Haraway’s radical ontology.
