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

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Haraway’s kinships offer a brave opening in feminist theory.... Haraway has a long history of making brave moves—and winning feminism over." — Paulla Ebron and Anna Tsing, Feminist Studies What actually protects the aphid isn’t the bacteria but a virus that infects it. It is this virus inside the bacteria that stops the wasp’s eggs from growing in the aphid body. The virus kills some of the Hamiltonella defensa cells that it infects — but without the virus Hamiltonella has nothing to offer the aphid. Aphid, bacteria and virus form this fragile alliance — what Donna Haraway might call complex a ‘natural-cultural’ assemblage — because of the presence of the wasp that threatens to wipe out all three parties. Carl Zimmer sums up this alliance in this excerpt from an interview that he conducted with Nancy Moran: “The aphid, bacteria and virus alliance”‘The Incredible Shrinking Microbe’, Meet The Scientist episode 55Carl Zimmer and Nancy Moran Pea aphids extracting sap from the stem and leaves of garden peas. Photo: Shipher Wu. Aphids provide by Gee-way Lin, National Taiwan University. Lynn Margulis looms large in Donna Haraway’s thinking and rightly so. Margulis was a remarkable scientist and thinker. Her many books — including the classic Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986), written with her son Dorian Sagan — do not receive the attention that is lavished on the books of her contemporary Richard Dawkins. This reflects a number of larger biases in twentieth-century biological and evolutionary sciences; the study of animal evolution over evolution in other domains, the study of the visible over the microbial, the study of competition over cohabitation, the study of vertically transmitted nuclear genes over hologenomic associations, and the gender bias that has privileged the views of men of science over their female colleagues. Even as the technical limitations that have led to some of these biases have been overcome, certain strands in evolutionary thought continue to overlook the importance of something as fundamental as the origins of the eukaryotic cells that make all visible life possible. Here Donna Haraway points to the important contribution that Lynn Margulis made to our understanding of this subject: “Lynn Margulis and the origins of complex cells”2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble is broken into eight chapters, the majority of which are revisions of previous work dating from as early as 2012.

Developing 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. 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. Echoing her much-cited 1985 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, Harraway calls for the flattening of any supposed interspecies hierarchy 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 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.For the sake of brevity I’ll skim over what led Haraway to the following statement in which she articulates how she understands Stengers troubling turn of phrase. “What Isabelle means by thou shalt not regress”Sawyer Seminar: The Challenge of AnimismDonna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers This is the kind of thinking that Haraway models in Staying with the Trouble and in her many YouTube videos, thinking that brings us to a broader point. While social media might be facilitating illiterate writing and thinking the internet also provides a platform for new forms of oral literacy and this is something worth celebrating. On a deep cultural level the production of new literate, oral cultures online is cause for cautious hope. “It matters what thoughts think thoughts”2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series: Donna Haraway

It has never been clearer than now that we must “stay with the trouble” and actively seek possibilities for recuperation even as we are anxiously learning the great depths of the trouble we face. This is a book concerned with exactly that, with teasing out effective methodologies for moving forward in contemporary times through invention, collaboration, exploration, play, and a willingness to take on the risky business of “follow[ing] the threads where they lead.” 2My 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. By emphasizing connectedness, Staying with the Trouble can be thought of as a continuation of major themes from " A Cyborg Manifesto" and The Companion Species Manifesto. Haraway's book can also be thought of as a critique of the Anthropocene as a way of making sense of the present, de-emphasizing human exceptionalism in favor of multispecism. [2] Structure [ edit ] For we are utterly and hopelessly entangled in this story. The first chapter looks at multispecies storytelling through the lens of string figures as metaphor and engaged games of giving and receiving, and at practices of recuperation via the possibilities of making something together (“sympoiesis”). String figures — the games of making patterns with loops of string between players — enact a rich history of storytelling through physical thinking enacted between two people. Haraway recognizes the complexities of this tool and the possibilities of failure — of dropping a thread, of getting caught in a story that doesn’t function — in the “risky comaking” practices of SF. Deeply challenging our ideas of individuality, the Chthulucene demands we engage sympoiesis, making together, rather than autopoiesis, self-making. Throughout the book, she investigates the work of interdisciplinary artists and scientists who are inventing new ways of working together and with other species, and who are developing new sensitivities and means to fostering collective response-ability. 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! 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 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 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. All of which leads us to the Chthulucene of Haraway’s title, which I read as an invocation of alternatives to the monocultural, monotheistic logic of the Plantationocene and the Capitalocene. That is to say that the Chthulucene is — in one of its many extensions — the powerfully specific tentacular webs of relatedness that are crucial to our existence. It is a name for those who are bound to the earth with all of its troubles: critters of all types for whom escape from the trouble is a techno-fantasy and staying with it involves cultivating ethical response-abilities. This trouble is not a vague sense of menace floating above us, it is specific and situated. One of the footnotes in Haraway’s definition of the Chthulucene comes in the form of a quote from Thom van Dooren’s Flight Ways: Life at the Edge of Extinction.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. 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 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’. 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. 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."