Thread by @TheLitCritGuy

#TheoryTime?

Let's talk about Donna Haraway's 'Staying with the Trouble,' specifically Chapter Two on the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene and Chthulucene...

Haraway begins with a question - what happens when the 'old saws' of Western philosophy and political economics (namely human exceptionalism and individualism) begin to be unthinkable - not available to think with?

What happens when the best biologies of the modern age 'cannot do their job' with bounded individuals ' no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did?'

In essence, what Haraway is trying to do in this chapter is rethink the Anthropocene away from a anthropocentric point of view.

There are several biological and natural world examples which Haraway draws from (it's part of what makes the methodology of this book so strange) and so she starts the chapter by discussing a spider...

Pino Cthulhu, the spider of North California the 'spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere..' Its connected etymologically to the language of the Goshute people of Utah and to the denizens of the underworld..

Thus, Haraway proposes a connected model of environment - not an Anthropocene but rather a Chthulucene.

Haraway on rethinking post-humanism and the role of the tentacular:

As Haraway puts it, The earth of the ongoing Chthulucene is sympoietic, not autopoietic. - a 'together created' system, not a system of self-making.

As Haraway puts it, in a rather poetic and dramatic style:

This tension between the sympoietic and the autopoietic requires a rethinking of the current moment of 'porous tissues and open edges of damaged but still ongoing living worlds, like the planet earth and its
denizens..'

The bounded individualism which is the normative model of considering subjectivity,combined with autopoiesis is not 'good enough, figurally or scientifically.'

A few pages into the chapter comes a sentence which helped me get a foothold into the work: 'It matters what thoughts think thoughts.'

How do we think of the world and our place in it? How could reframe the story and what new possibilities this might bring to light, especially in the midst of ecological crises.

As Haraway puts it, the Anthropocene is a era of multi-species urgency, of great mass death and extinction, of unprecedented catastrophe and wide-spread 'looking away...'

We must (re)think and so Haraway turns to Arendt's examination of Eichmann - evil through his very thoughtlessness.

"Function mattered, duty mattered, but the world did not matter for Eichmann. The world does not matter in ordinary thoughtlessness."

The problem of thoughtless in the era of the Anthropocene is not just a question of an emotional lack but also a 'deeper surrender to what I would call immateriality, inconsequentiality,...'

Given what Haraway calls the "onrushing urgencies" of these multi-species disasters calls for urgent thoughtfulness - care for the material world at hand to try and uncover 'the arts of living on a damaged planet.'

In the matsutake mushroom and its assemblages of earth, bio-matter, and biology possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance... (I think Haraway's been reading Deleuze and Guattari)

Or, as Haraway puts it a couple of pages later, "Outside the dubious privileges of human exceptionalism, thinking people must learn to grieve-with"

Why? Because in that grief of what has been done and is being done we find a 'path to understanding entangled shared living and dying" - we must grieve with because we are in and of the fabric of the world.

(This reminds me a little of Critchley's point about our "thrown-ness" into the world..)

As Haraway rather beautifully puts it 'without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think...'

If it matters which thoughts think thoughts, then it also matters what stories tell stories. For that, Haraway turns to Ursula K Le Guin as an author who told stories which could change the Anthropocentric story

(Which ties back to Jameson's essay on Le Guin and what he calls 'ontological reduction.')

Quoting Le Guin: “Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”

In theoretical terms, Haraway sees Bruno Latour as working in a similar direction, with his desire to build new collectives in terms of 'geostories.'

Haraway on Latour and his embrace of science, not Science:

That said, Haraway thinks that Latour's reliance on the material-semiotic trope of trials of strength makes the new story rather too difficult to tell and this is all down to Latour's influence from Schmitt and his political theology

Haraway, contrasting Latour with the work of Isabelle Stengers:

So, on top the Anthropocene - a useful term for 'obtained purchase in popular
and scientific discourse' in an age of urgent climate disasters and rapid changes of environment

Haraway on 'fossil-making man:'

Or, as Haraway rather caustically notes, 'who needs an icebreaker when you can count on melting ice.' Climate change is a business opportunity for big competitive military, exploration, drilling, and tanker shipping.

The only scientific thing to do, is revolt! The question is how to do so and so we must think:

Haraway's objections to the term Anthropocene are worth quoting in full:

Or, in other words, this discourse of the Anthropocene is not simply wrongheaded and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds,

As I've been reading I was wondering when we'd get to Haraway would get to Marx and here we are - the Capitalocene was relationally made and must be relationally unmade

It is not enough to denounce the evils of capitalism - if that was all it took , capitalism would have vanished long ago, but as Mark Fisher puts it we have yet to reckon with our insertion into capitalism on the level of our desire.

In Haraway's phrase capitalism works a dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress, preventing us from rethinking ways of being in multi-species harmony.

(I could not love that previous image any more)

I'll stop there for now - it is a strange and weird book (in the best possible way) and a whole lot of fun. Hope you've enjoyed this small section of the whole book!