Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)

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The etymology of her term stems from the Pimoa cthulhu, a species of spider (common to the stumps of redwoods in the writer’s native California and typical of the personal references that populate Haraway’s arguments); she uses the spider’s web as a metaphor for a vision of the world in which there is no hierarchy between humans and nonhuman animals, where instead all lives are interwoven. ‘Weaving… performs and manifests the meaningful lived connection for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational action – for hózhó – for human and nonhumans’ ( hózhó being a word from the Navajo language variously translated as peace, balance or harmony; again a defining aspect of Haraway’s writing is its mixing of terms from a variety of cultures and mythologies). Hammering home the point, Haraway compares the symbiotic relations between nonhuman animals with the way humans have organised themselves in the industrial, urban and agricultural systems built under capitalism. ‘Critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each another [sic], get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another.’ What humans have built, however, is a political and economic structure that is ‘ecosystem-destroying, human and animal labor-transforming, multispecies soul-mutilating, epidemic-friendly, corn-monocrop-promoting, cross-species heartbreaking’. Those who celebrated the emancipatory power of social media in the wake of the Arab Spring are now finding fake news in their feed. In place of emancipation social media is producing a kind of illiterate writing that at worst involves the invention of fact; writing that produces the distracting noise of our rush to offer half-formed opinions on current events, opinions that cannot wait for the event to pass, that cannot pause to reflect, opinions that we must consume with the event. Social media in this mode places a premium on opinion over the gathering of stories, over thinking with and telling those stories, over developing those stories through many different kinds of work. This is partly why the most pressing question for readers of Staying with the Trouble and listeners to Haraway’s recent talks is not, how does this relate to the cyborgs? (although cyborgs do get a passing mention), but rather, how do we make sense of all the critters that Haraway is thinking with now? Haraway discusses art, science and politics in a theoretical register for most of Staying with the Trouble but she also develops her own speculative imaginings of these subjects in the final chapter of the book. The way that Haraway thinks critically and creatively with art, science and politics is also an invitation for us to delve deeper — to follow some of the threads and find new string figures in the materials that she is thinking with. Haraway is fond of reminding us of Virginia Woolf’s phrase: ‘think we must’. This injunction urges us to keep going, to delve deeper into the mud, to really engage with the difficulty of thinking with and beyond the materials that she offers us.

Taking Staying with the Trouble on its own terms involves doing a bit of that Chthulonic delving into the art and science that Haraway is thinking with. One of the questions here is how these materials help Haraway to articulate an ethics of ‘ living and dying together on a damaged earth’. A useful place to start this delving is in the third chapter of the book, ‘Sympoiesis: Symbiogensis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble’ . It begins with a definition: Here we can return to Nicole King’s work with her favorite choanoflagellate, S. rosetta. King and her collaborators have now found a suite of molecules that contribute to multicellular rosette formation and discovered that these molecules can come from many different bacteria. There are many consituative relatings that trigger the thinking in S. Rosetta that produces multicellular forms. Ceaselessly and creatively questioning the kinds of stories that we tell about the relations of science to society and nature (and their endlessly complex and partial interrelations), this volume troubles relations of all kinds." — Luis Campos, Quarterly Review of Biology I am not speaking metaphorically here. As Donna Haraway teaches us, ‘a model is not the same kind of thing as a metaphor or analogy’. While there are undoubtedly many who will want to hold on to thinking as an exclusively human activity, the thinking with that Haraway does, and models, goes beyond such conceptions. We don’t just think with S. rosetta in a metaphorical sense or as a kind of abstracted diagram but rather thinking with S. rosetta means attempting to get inside its thinking process, it means testing our capacity for empathetic projection, making a genuine attempt to think the thoughts of a choanoflagellate, not because we must get it right, but because we know that interesting work, and working out, happens in the messiness and mistakes of thinking with and between. In Staying with the Trouble, we find real SF: science fiction, science fact, science fantasy, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far. So many ways to look at the world and ourselves, so many complicated ideas on how we critters will survive and thrive and die in the disturbing Chthulucene. Haraway is difficult to read. But the effort required is worth it."

Table of Contents

All of the symbiont children developed both visible traits and subtle sensory similarities to their animal partners in early childhood. Yes we are all stardust but such observations are pretty useless at this point. Instead, as is the case with Haraway’s Chthulucene, we need to consider ‘who we are bound up with and in what ways’. We need to make new knots in those webs, new ways to be bound into relationships that matter. This is where art plays a role. It is one of the means that we have for making significant bonds between ourselves and the prospects of other critters, it is — in the forms that Haraway describes — a mode of response-able thinking and acting. One of the things that the art of the Chthulucene responds to is knowledge from the biological and earth sciences. In this mode art is a means to delve deeper into the specific modes of relation that science describes and studies.

Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, is very much about the way we think and the things we think with in the urgent time named the Anthropocene, Capitolocene, and Chthulucene. As she asks in the epigraph above, how must we think differently about the current planetary crisis (ecologically, politically, geologically, ethically) so that we do not fulfill an apocalypse we project ourselves? How can we both recognize our complicity in damaging and violent practices while also working to change them? Another way to approach the thinking that Haraway does in Staying with the Trouble, and in the spoken form, is to consider how she takes seriously the task of doing work with and through the relationships that shape her as a thinking subject among other thinking subjects. This involves showing how her thinking develops, rather than erasing the process that produces particular ideas. The biological systems that Haraway discusses can be thought of as modelling aspects of these constituative relatings among thinking subjects.The myth system associated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story, but not the whole story. I’d like to be able to better empathise with Darwin’s great crisis of faith, and the role that the parasitoid wasp played in it, but in the more secular world of twenty-first century biology it seems rather quaint. Aphids, like so many insects, are the victims of Darwin’s monsters. However, the evolutionary pressures created by parasitoid wasp predation are responsible for creating some unlikely entanglements and alliances that put into relief the wrinkle created by Darwin’s worries. Ayana and Donna’s fascinating conversation this week winds through topics like the reclamation of truth and “situated knowledge,” the importance of mourning with others, the etymology of “Anthropocene,” the place of forgiveness in movement building, and the urgency of making non-natal kin. Donna invites us to wander in the colorful worlds of science fiction, play with story, and dig through the compost pile, offering up powerful tools and practices needed for humans and nonhumans alike to “live and die well together” on Earth. With spirit and bold defiance, Donna leaves us with a resounding message: Show up and stay with the trouble! I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars … Haraway models like few others deep intellectual generosity and curiosity. Staying with the Troublecites students, thinks with community activists and artists, and writes alongside scientists and fiction writers. Haraway does not want you to read her; she wants you to read with her. She also insists on conversations with all kinds of storytellers: academics or not, humans or not, environmental humanities scholars or not."

What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene! Haraway has successfully made the debate around the Anthropocene more complex by bringing in alternative paths. The book has – through SF practices – contributed to building a habitable earth in times of sustained trouble." — Julian R. A. Swinkels, Social & Cultural GeographyA tardigrade can withstand up to five years dehydrated making it one of the most resilient critters presently known. It falls to us now to go on thinking… Think we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking — what is this “civilization” in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us…? A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (Haraway, 1985) Among the terms that Haraway offers us for rethinking the present are the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene: “The Capitalocene and Plantationocene”2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway Haraway delights in language, bumping colloquialisms against high theory, breeding slang with scientific taxonomy — part of the pleasure of reading this text is her “bumptious” linguistic methodology: experimental, creative, rich, chewy and rhythmically vital — thinking new worlds demands thinking new language.

Staying with the Trouble is Haraway at her most accessible. Readers familiar with her work with recognize her characteristic style and language, polysemous metaphors co-mingle with evocative refrains, deep etymological readings, and even the occasional sentence with internal rhyme schemes. . . . This is a work to provoke and inspire. It is a call to arms (or pseudopods as the case may be)!" Staying with the Trouble offers a glimpse of the newer paths [Haraway] is travelling with her formidable analytic and imaginative skills." — Catriona Sandilands, Annals of Science

Anthropocene

The implication here is that the particular antibiotics used selectively killed certain bacteria while leaving relatively unharmed the one that causes the development of multicellularity. This is one of a number of stories that Haraway uses to illustrate the biology of sympoiesis, in this case the choanoflagellate becoming with the bacteria that induces multicellularity, a story that is big-enough to tell us something about the processes that make us what we are. Excellent for studying how parts (genes, cells, tissues, etc.) of well-defined entities fit together into cooperating and/or competing units, all seven of these individuated systems fail the researcher studying webbed inter- and intra-actions of symbiosis and sympoiesis, in heterogeneous temporalities and spatialities. Holobionts require models tuned to an expandable number of quasi-collective /quasi-individual partners in constitutive relatings; these relationalities are the objects of study. Staying with the Trouble is a worryingly pleasant read. . . . The merit of the book is therefore, oddly, that it does not succeed in fully taking away desperation and fatalism, and that it does not shy away from combining debatable traditions. In this way, it allows for multiple feminist interventions at the limits of Western science and philosophy. And it may be through affirming such philosophical ‘systems failure’ that the ‘anthropos’ may finally be dethroned." The terra-cotta figure of Potnia Theron, the Mistress of the Animals, depicts a winged goddess wearing a split skirt and touching a bird with each hand. 35 She is a vivid reminder of the breadth, width, and temporal reach into pasts and futures of chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond. 36 Potnia Theron is rooted in Minoan and then Mycenean cultures and infuses Greek stories of the Gorgons (especially the only mortal Gorgon, Medusa) and of Artemis. A kind of far-traveling Ur-Medusa, the Lady of the Beasts is a potent link between Crete and India. The winged figure is also called Potnia Melissa, Mistress of the Bees, draped with all their buzzing-stinging-honeyed gifts. Note the acoustic, tactile, and gustatory senses elicited by the Mistress and her sympoietic, more-than-human flesh. The snakes and bees are more like stinging tentacular feelers than like binocular eyes, although these critters see too, in compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics.