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

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The term sympoiesis is a way to get a handle on the complex relations that produce life. Haraway develops these ideas by discussing developmental biologist Scott Gilbert’s work. He talks about the importance of seven ‘model systems’ in developmental biology:

If Humans live in History and the Earthbound take up their task within the Anthropocene, too many Posthumans (and posthumanists, another gathering altogether) seem to have emigrated to the Anthropocene for my taste. Perhaps my human and nonhuman people are the dreadful Chthonic ones who snake within the tissues of Terrapolis. Donna Haraway, radical thinker of A Cyborg Manifesto fame 3, envisions the Anthropocene — along with its aptly named partners the Capitalocene 4 and the Plantationocene 5 — as a (brief) geologic boundary event, and encourages us to think of a bigger name encompassing all “the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake”. 6 She terms this era the Chthulucene. Having nothing to do with Lovecraft’s “misogynist racial, nightmare monster” Chtulu, this Chthulucene (note spelling) is an era of multi-species worlding and “sym-poietic” thinking and making together. Anthropologist, multispecies feminist theorist, environmentalist, and distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Haraway proffers the action of reaching out and “making kin” as a way to establish new lines of “response-ability” between living beings. She draws actively on new thinking in the sciences and arts to present possible methodologies for inhabiting our world at present.

My discussion of the parasitoid wasp and the raising of Darwin’s spectre is not an attempt to retrospectively restore his faith. I described his theological concern with the wasp as quaint. That was a little unfair. Perhaps it is better to ask why Darwin’s concern persists in various ways. This might involve considering how the negation of belief — if it is secular at all — is only barely secular, operating as it does within a Christian frame of thought. In Darwin’s case his limited knowledge of parasitoid ecology and his Christian morality leads him toward the conclusion that a Christian God is unlikely to exist. 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: 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

Language, says Donna Haraway, can provide a route away from environmental catastrophe. That might sound implausible, but for this philosopher, ‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas.’ And language is the way we express these ideas and flow them into public consciousness. One key linguistic expression she thinks we should reconsider, Haraway explains in this book (which knits together various recent essays), is the increasingly popular terming of our current geological epoch: the ‘Anthropocene’. 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. We can extend this idea by considering how a narrow positivist rationalism might wield the same powers of eradication and epistemicide that Christianity has in its various collaborations with colonial power. Haraway and Stengers do so here: “Truth, illusion and eradication”Sawyer Seminar: The Challenge of AnimismDonna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers 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 HarawayDeveloping this sense of what is urgent and important now is one of the forces that moves through Haraway’s words in Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene — the subtitle of Haraway’s book — reinforces this point. It is tentacular webs of troubling relations that matter now and not the genealogies of an individual’s thought. Haraway most certainly isn’t one of those academics busily citing themselves in an attempt to generate more impact for their own research. She is, rather, concerned with articulating the dynamics of her thinking in a web of contemporary relations. A tardigrade can withstand up to five years dehydrated making it one of the most resilient critters presently known. A term for the “devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.” Scott Gilbert, https://studylib.net/doc/13485101/anthropocene–capitalocene–plantationocene–chthulucene-… ↩ While I share Haraway’s concern with the phrase ‘thou shalt not regress’ her determination to figure out what Stengers might mean by the phrase has helped me see the important work that this imperative is doing in Stengers’ argument. By staying with what she finds most troubling in Stengers’ thought Haraway articulates a number of important ideas about belief and truth before moving to the importance of ‘experimental practices where consequences are at stake’. For both Haraway and Stengers this could equally be experimental scientific practices or the experimental practices of art and animism. What matters here is not just the worlds produced by scientific inquiry but also the other worlds produced by experimental practices of all kinds in which the problem — the risk, the danger, the mess — of an engagement with forces we don’t fully comprehend, of our experiments not turning out as we might want, hope or imagine, is fundamental to the practice. This has nothing to do with the lazy relativism of ‘post-truth’ but it is concerned with contingent truth produced by risky, experimental practices. These practices might involve gene editing, video games or sentient mountains, each in different experimental configurations, each with its own risks and each with an ethical commitment to avoiding pronouncements on what is really real. 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. Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the Earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens — the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species,Modern Man — was a chief product of these knowledge practices. 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!