Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene
Bibliography
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham: Duke University Press.
Notes
I intended to write a review. But what review could top the one by the Great Old One, Cthulhu himself, over at Savage Minds. Also, I believe this book is not to be reviewed, but to be read. Itâs every trans- and multispecies personâs wet dream come true. So here are some of my thoughts.
There is one aspect to the book, not outspoken, very inherent. Donna Haraway doesnât like transhuman and anthropocene concepts and I understand that very well. Anthropocene, post- and transhuman stories are still very much focused on human ontologies and etymologies. Even OOO with itâs deanthropocentric intention, still philosophes in regard to what can be described via human concepts. If we ask ourself how it is to be a thing, then being and thing are still uttermost human.
That is ok. Weâre human and we wont be able to not be human until we are. And this is the place were Staying with the Trouble gives me more then letâs say, Harmanâs Circus Philosophicus, itself a great and wonderful book. Haraway doesnât concentrate on being human to much. She instead tries to convey the infinite complexity of being, especially in relation to the living persons we share our spacetime with. She shows, what it is to be human in relation to other species.
On of the most important word plays and mantras that Haraway uses throughout the book is: âIt matters what stories we tell stories with.â Through a magnificient array of examples she lines up what this could look like in relation to being and species. Being of and with the world, not just in it, and sympoiesis are strong themes that tell another such story.
âHost-symbiontâ seems an odd locution for what is happening; at whatever size, all the partners making up holobionts are symbionts to each other.
What to do with this book? Itâs not a practical guide to be applied onto future living. Itâs also not a theoretical book, in my opinion, that lies foundations for whatever. I believe, the strength of this book and the way Donna Haraway wrote it, is in reimagining what already is and to do so together with the reader and to do so with all the other beings that we populate this planet with.
Welcome to the world of multispecies being. Letâs stay here for a moment, ok?
Annotations
Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle!
LOCATION: 860
Arendt witnessed in Eichmann not an incomprehensible monster, but something much more terrifyingâshe saw commonplace thoughtlessness. That is, here was a human being unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not-one-selfness is and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself. Here was someone who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability, could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in consequences or with consequence, could not compost.
LOCATION: 926
Function mattered, duty mattered, but the world did not matter for Eichmann. The world does not matter in ordinary thoughtlessness.
LOCATION: 930
Mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed, and how we must ourselves change and renew our relationships if we are to move forward from here. In this context, genuine mourning should open us into an awareness of our dependence on and relationships with those countless others being driven over the edge of extinction ⊠The reality, however, is that there is no avoiding the necessity of the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning. This work is not opposed to practical action, rather it is the foundation of any sustainable and informed response.
LOCATION: 978
Latour argues that we must learn to tell âGaĂŻa stories.â If that word is too hard, then we can call our narrations âgeostories,â in which âall the former props and passive agents have become active without, for that, being part of a giant plot written by some overseeing entity.â
LOCATION: 1021
His Earthbound will have to trek into the Chthulucene to entangle with the ongoing, snaky, unheroic, tentacular, dreadful ones, the ones which/who craft material-semiotic netbags of little use in trials of strength but of great use in bringing home and sharing the means of living and dying well, perhaps even the means of ecological recuperation for human and more-than-human critters alike.
LOCATION: 1072
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.
LOCATION: 1189
The Gorgons turned men who looked into their living, venomous, snake-encrusted faces into stone. I wonder what might have happened if those men had known how to politely greet the dreadful chthonic ones. I wonder if such manners can still be learned, if there is time to learn now, or if the stratigraphy of the rocks will only register the ends and end of a stony Anthropos.
LOCATION: 1263
Both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene lend themselves too readily to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the âgame over, too lateâ 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.
LOCATION: 1301
ââDo you realize,â the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, âthat [once upon a time] they couldnât even read Eggplant?â And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pikeâs Peak.ââ
LOCATION: 1319
To be animal is to become-with bacteria (and, no doubt, viruses and many other sorts of critters; a basic aspect of sympoiesis is its expandable set of players).
LOCATION: 1469
âHost-symbiontâ seems an odd locution for what is happening; at whatever size, all the partners making up holobionts are symbionts to each other.
LOCATION: 1495
Hustak and Myers argue that a zero-sum game based on competing methodological individualists is a caricature of the sensuous, juicy, chemical, biological, material-semiotic, and science-making world.
LOCATION: 1518
intimacies and subtle propositions. What is at stake in this involutionary approach is a theory of ecological relationality that takes seriously organismsâ practices, their inventions, and experiments crafting interspecies lives and worlds. This is an ecology inspired by a feminist ethic of âresponse-abilityâ ⊠in which questions of species difference are always conjugated with attentions to affect, entanglement, and rupture; an affective ecology in which creativity and curiosity characterize the experimental forms of life of all kinds of practitioners, not only the humans.
LOCATION: 1524
Rather, the crafters stitch âintimacy without proximity,â a presence without disturbing the critters that animate the project, but with the potential for being part of work and play for confronting the exterminationist, trashy, greedy practices of global industrial economies and cultures.53 Intimacy without proximity is not âvirtualâ presence; it is ârealâ presence, but in loopy materialities. The abstractions of the mathematics of crocheting are a kind of lure to an affective cognitive ecology stitched in fiber arts. The crochet reef is a practice of caring without the neediness of touching by camera or hand in yet another voyage of discovery.
LOCATION: 1722
Working with Brazilian Amerindian hunters, with whom he learned to theorize the radical conceptual realignment he called multinaturalism and perspectivism, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wrote, âAnimism is the only sensible version of materialism.â
LOCATION: 1862
I am talking about material semiotics, about practices of worlding, about sympoiesis that is not only symbiogenetic, but is always a sensible materialism. The sensible materialisms of involutionary momentum are much more innovative than secular modernisms will allow. Stories for living in the Chthulucene demand a certain suspension of ontologies and epistemologies, holding them lightly, in favor of more venturesome, experimental natural histories.
LOCATION: 1867
symanimagenic sensible materialism,
LOCATION: 1870
HĂłzhĂł is a central concept in Navajo cosmology and daily practice. Usual translations into English are âbeauty,â âharmony,â and âorderâ; but I think a better translation would emphasize right relations of the world, including human and nonhuman beings, who are of the world as its storied and dynamic substance, not in the world as a container.
LOCATION: 1902
Weaving is neither secular nor religious; it is sensible. It performs and manifests the meaningful lived connections for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational actionâfor hĂłzhĂłâfor humans and nonhumans. Situated worlding is ongoing, neither traditional nor modern.
LOCATION: 1916
We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings. So do all the other critters of Terra, in all our bumptious diversity and category-breaking speciations and knottings. Other words for this might be materialism, evolution, ecology, sympoiesis, history, situated knowledges, cosmological performance, science art worldings, or animism, complete with all the contaminations and infections conjured by each of these terms. Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Crittersâhuman and notâbecome-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.
LOCATION: 2039
I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.
LOCATION: 2089
All the thousand names are too big and too small; all the stories are too big and too small. As Jim Clifford taught me, we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.
LOCATION: 2106
I propose âMake Kin Not Babies!â Makingâand recognizingâkin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent part.12 Feminists of our time have been leaders in unraveling the supposed natural necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation, class and race, gender and morphology, sex and reproduction, and reproduction and composing persons (our debts here are due especially to Melanesians, in alliance with Marilyn Strathern and her ethnographer kin).13 If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species.
LOCATION: 2120
It matters how kin generate kin.
LOCATION: 2150
Shame is a prod to lifelong rethinking and recrafting oneâs accountabilities!
LOCATION: 2301
but the details matter. The details link actual beings to actual response-abilities. Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise.
LOCATION: 2394
Giving my dog DES makes me accountable to histories and ongoing possibilities differently than if we never shaped kinships with the attachment sites of this molecule. Perhaps reading this chapter has consequences for response-ability too. We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, but not in the same ways. The differences matterâin ecologies, economies, species, lives.
LOCATION: 2400
âDo you realize,â the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, âthat they couldnât even read Eggplant?â And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pikeâs Peak. âUrsula K. Le Guin, âThe Author of the Acacia Seedsâ
LOCATION: 2406
âA leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.â
LOCATION: 2426
Pseudomyrmex ants.
LOCATION: 2547
Vinciane Despret
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Her kind of thinking enlarges, even invents, the competencies of all the players, including herself, such that the domain of ways of being and knowing dilates, expands, adds both ontological and epistemological possibilities, proposes and enacts what was not there before.
LOCATION: 2593
âa particular epistemological position to which I am committed, one that I call a virtue: the virtue of politeness.â
LOCATION: 2598
Visiting is a subject- and object-making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster.
LOCATION: 2608
Good questions come only to a polite inquirer, especially a polite inquirer provoked by a singing blackbird.
LOCATION: 2610
Birds and scientists were in dynamic, moving relations of attunement.
LOCATION: 2626
Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf both understood the high stakes of training the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met.
LOCATION: 2671
Anna Tsing urges us to cobble together the âarts of living on a damaged planetâ; and among those arts are cultivating the capacity to reimagine wealth, learn practical healing rather than wholeness, and stitch together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds.
LOCATION: 2762
Compostists eagerly found out everything they could about experimental, intentional, utopian, dystopian, and revolutionary communities and movements across times and places. One of their great disappointments in these accounts was that so many started from the premises of starting over and beginning anew, instead of learning to inherit without denial and stay with the trouble of damaged worlds.
LOCATION: 3032
Camille 2 had to learn to let go of colonialist notions of religion and secularism to begin to appreciate the sheer semiotic materiality of those who came before. Until sympoiesis with the dead could be acknowledged, sympoiesis with the living was radically incomplete.
LOCATION: 3157