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

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To put it slightly differently, to be an artist in this mode is to make strategic decisions about media in relation to the imperatives of thought. Haraway is as finely attuned to these kinds of decisions as any artist who works in this way. This is partly what I’m getting at when I talk about the differences in Haraway’s thinking through writing and speech and this is one of the reasons why I find her discussion of art so compelling. Art is never a rarefied object of formal analysis in Haraway’s work. It is always situated in relation to other forms of knowledge and, crucially, its ideas and processes — the thinking it does and that we do with it — have the potential to disrupt other ways of knowing and create new ways of doing politics. Haraway’s discussion of Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef project helps to illustrate this point: “Crochet Coral Reef”2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway The Föhr Reef, part of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project. Exhibited in Tübingen, Germany April-September 2013. Photo: NearEMPTiness You can see Haraway grappling with one such troubling notion in a seminar called ‘The Challenge of Animism’ that we’ve already heard excerpts from here. Part of Haraway’s response to Isabelle Stengers involves trying to work out what Stengers might mean when she uses the phrase ‘thou shalt not regress’ in relation to animism. “Thou shalt not regress”Sawyer Seminar: The Challenge of AnimismDonna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers move away from the dictionary and theories founded on the categories of the individual and on the idea of rivalry. She calls for new ways of thinking, but her aim is not just another theoretical appeal and an attempt to build an original system of concepts, rather it is about collective action for revolutionary change in the current situation. In this clip I find another affinity between my way of working and Donna Haraway’s. I am wide but not deep and my only claim to expertise is in the visual arts — and even within that field I have no great depth of knowledge in any one area. The kind of practice that I’m schooled in, and which I engage with in my studio, does not occupy any of the old divisions in visual arts activity (painting, sculpture, ceramics etc.) but rather is a practice in which particular media are chosen based on their suitability to the task of thinking through particular ideas. Ben Denham, Evolution and ecology: spiral set no. 3, 2016, 70x100cm, 445nm laser on paper.

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? How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned?” –Donna Haraway 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.Anthropocene is a term most easily meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among indigenous peoples. 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 book is a pleasure to read because of the playful complexity she is famous for. While her affection for science-fiction tropes is evident across her oeuvre, Staying with the Trouble is the closest she has ever come to a sci-fi genre piece. As a totality of examples from the reparative arts of The Crochet Coral Reef project, to her dog Cayenne’s fraught medical imbrication with Big Pharma via the horses that are factory farmed for the high-oestrogen urine they produce—both of which could be found just as easily in the feminist futurism of Margaret Atwood—Haraway’s book is best navigated with an openness to the speculative quality of her writing and its reimagining of the world." — Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Cultural Studies Review The good news is that many of the biases of twentieth-century biology are shifting. The new model systems of twenty-first century biology are capable of studying something of the incredible complexity of relations through which organisms and ecosystems come into being. In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway talks about a number of these systems including Nicole King’s study of choanoflagellates, aquatic filter-feeders that can live as both single cells and in multicellular forms. “Nicole King and the origin of animal multicellularity”2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway With all the unfaithful offspring of the sky gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow in multispecies muddles, I want to make a critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and collective thinking.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 going to trace the lines in Haraway’s thinking that led to Staying with the Trouble. I haven’t read enough of her work to draw those lines. Instead my motivation to write this essay comes out of two broad affinities that I have with Haraway’s current thinking: a recognition of the importance of new knowledge from the biological sciences — knowledge that we might call the ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ — and an engagement with art that takes seriously the kind of thinking that it does. These two points come together in what I think is a third affinity: the idea that thinking with art and science can help us to articulate an ethics of ‘ living and dying together on a damaged earth’. Haraway sums up these affinities in this clip: “The alliances of art biology and politics”2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway A tardigrade can withstand up to five years dehydrated making it one of the most resilient critters presently known. In the last fifty years traditional evolutionary trees based on the morphology of physical characteristics have been replaced by phylogenetic trees that take genetic markers as the basis for determining relatedness between species. While this shift revealed that the majority of life’s diversity is microbial, as well as helping to do away with old kingdom-based classifications by introducing the three domain model of taxonomy that is now widely accepted — bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes — it did not get us away from what microbiologist Elio Schaechter describes as the tyranny of phylogeny. “The tyranny of philogeny”TWiM 34: Doing the DISCO with EmilianiaElio Schaechter

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Shaping her thinking about the times called Anthropocene and “multi-faced Gaïa” (Stengers’s term) in companionable friction with Latour, Isabelle Stengers does not ask that we recompose ourselves to become able, perhaps, to “face Gaïa.” But like Latour and even more like Le Guin, one of her most generative SF writers, Stengers is adamant about changing the story. Focusing on intrusion rather than composition, Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating power that intrudes on our categories of thought, that intrudes on thinking itself. 10 Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet. Gaia’s intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself — microbes will adapt, to put it mildly — but threatens the livability of Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an “event” already under way called the Sixth Great Extinction. 11 Sympoiesis is a simple word: it means ‘making with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoetic or self-organizing… Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems… Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. 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."Note that insofar as the Capitalocene is told in the idiom of fundamentalist Marxism, with all its trappings of Modernity, Progress, and History, that term is subject to the same or fiercer criticisms. The stories of both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene teeter constantly on the brink of becoming much Too Big. Marx did better than that, as did Darwin. We can inherit their bravery and capacity to tell big-enough stories without determinism, teleology, and plan. 28 Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism — preexisting units in competition relations that take up all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide). Already, you’ll see I’ve run through a handful of knotty neologisms; 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. If you’re like me, you’ll want to follow and participate in these new inventions as you enter and occupy this terran text. Using the tools of what she terms “SF” — speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, string figures, so far — Haraway imagines and invents new ways of “living and dying” in our multispecies world. Messy and imperfect, and actively generative, this co-fashioning methodology invites new perspectives on the depths of our connections to each other, our notions of independence, and the inseparable threads we must follow and affirm in perilous times.

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! Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the “game over, too late” discourse I hear all around me these days, in both expert and popular discourses, in which both technotheocratic geoengineering fixes and wallowing in despair seem to coinfect any possible common imagination. Encountering the sheer not-us, more-than-human worlding of the coral reefs, with their requirements for ongoing living and dying of their myriad critters, is also to encounter the knowledge that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing living and dying well. Diverse corals and diverse people and peoples are at stake to and with each other. Flourishing will be cultivated as a multispecies response-ability without the arrogance of the sky gods and their minions, or else biodiverse terra will flip out into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. Used throughout the book, via Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret ( Women Who Make a Fuss), via Virginia Woolf ( Three Guineas) and through Maria Puig de la Bellasca, ( “Politiques féministes et construction des savories) ↩All of this, of course, would come across as passive handwringing if Haraway’s burlesque of language failed to lead anywhere. How do we turn the idea of the Chthulucene – this interwoven, nonhierarchical, symbiotic mode of living across species – into a reality, something we ‘live and die with, not just think and write with’, as she puts it? Haraway provides a few examples of small-scale art-activist-environmentalist projects (for example, an illustrator and an animal behaviourist collaborating on a Malagasy-language children’s book in which a lemur appears as the hero – encouraging a new generation of Madagascan children to look after the primate’s habitat), but none of these are convincing as real solutions to such great problems. This is easily where the book is at its weakest. Where Haraway is far more radical – and off’ers a convincing strategy for harmonising human and nonhuman animal relationships, utilising her newly established vocabulary – is in her call for concerted e’fforts to reduce the world’s human population. Echoing her much-cited 1985 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, Harraway calls for the flattening of any supposed interspecies hierarchy For anthropologists Haraway’s book will read as an invitation to think and write in terms that allow for symbiosis throughout.... Readers may not find clear road maps that guide them to struggle for more just flourishings or to understand the powerful and violent articulations of economies and ecologies in the Capitalocene. But they will perhaps rethink and expand the diverse relationalities that constitute the very preconditions of collective action. This is an invitation both to theorize and to make unexpected collaborations." — Caterina Scaramelli, American Ethnologist Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene is a 2016 book by Donna Haraway, published by Duke University Press. In a thesis statement, Haraway writes: "Staying with the trouble means making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become - with each other or not at all." [1] Both the imagery of the compost pile and the concept of oddkin are repeated motifs throughout the work.