Staying with the Trouble - Donna Haraway [chapter one digest]

  

“The question of whom to think with is immensely material.” (Haraway 2016 pp.43)

(Here’s looking at you, Haraway.)

 

To begin semester three thinking through the ideas of Donna Haraway is to come up against a shimmering of beautifully tangled, worldly and turbulent ideas. It is due to this that I have been so careful to avoid reading the deeply rich and powerful writing of Haraway throughout semester two, as I was already entrenched in the words and theories of Timothy Morton, Mark Fisher and Eugene Thacker. These ideas were crucially pertinent to my work of course, however there was no mistaking the distinctly baritone sound they produced. Therefore now, as semester three begins, and with no reading lists and writing constraints to adhere to, I can finally turn to Haraway, Bennet, Stengers and others to restore a theoretical balance, reuniting myself with my sisters (kin) in the humanities. 

In Staying with the Trouble Haraway (2016) advocates for making kin; not offspring. She writes of being present, to remain with the trouble at hand, and on the same hand be making string figures: SF – “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.” (Haraway 2016 pp.2) Moreover Haraway discusses the premise of the Chthuluscene as an alternate ‘cene’, separate from the Anthropocene or Capitalocene. This Chthuluscene is a way of staying with the deep tentacular ways of the world. This book is an exciting, easy to read (off the back of Morton that is a sigh of relief) playful, joyful and terrifying immersion into Haraway’s world, wherein Chthulonic critters roam within her “n-dimensional niche space called Terrapolosis” (Haraway 2016 pp.10).

“Terrapolis is an equation for guman, for humus, for soil, for ongoing risky infection, for epidemics of promising trouble, for permaculture.” (Haraway 2016 pp.11)

One of these many critters are pigeons, and they take up the first chapter of the book, a simple and subtle way into understanding the ways in which Haraway suggests playing string figures with companion species. For Haraway, Pigeons are connected to people, place and time, spanning many categories. “Codomesticated” pigeons are “other-than-human critters” who have been “becoming-with people for several thousand years”(Haraway 2016 pp.15). Seen in myriad ways, these companion creatures are subject to and target of a huge range of human interventions, and it is within these connections that Haraway sees recuperation.

“Pigeons fly us not into collaboration in general, but into specific crossings from familiar worlds into uncomfortable and unfamiliar ones to weave something that might come unravelled, but might also nurture living and dying in beauty in the n-dimensional niche of Terrapolis. My hope is that these knots propose promising patterns for multispecies response-ability inside ongoing trouble.” (Haraway 2016 pp.16)