Staying with the Trouble - Donna Haraway [chapter two part-digest]

 The Chthulucene. A cene of Haraway’s own invention, tying together lines between a tiny spider Pimoa chthulhu, living in redwood forest in California, to Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, to octopuses, and bleached coral reefs. The term Anthropocene was coined in regard to man’s impact on coral reefs, as they “helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthropocene in the first place.” (Haraway 2016 pp.56) and “recall that the Greek chthonios means “of, in, or under the earth and seas” – a rich terran muddle for SF” (Haraway 2016 pp.53) Moreover, “mobile, many-armed predators, pulsating through and over the coral reefs, octopuses are called spiders of the sea. And so Pimoa chthulhu and Octopus cyanea meet in the webbed tales of the Chthulucene.” (Haraway 2016 pp.55)

To fully understand this Chthulucene, we must first remember that Haraway is advocating for a thinking with methodology, altogether in the muddled mud of humus being, she steers away from the term ‘autopoietic’ –

“self-producing autonomous units with self-defined special or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic and predictable” (Haraway 2016 pp.33)

– and prefers the term “Sympoietic”. This term originated with M. Beth Dempster’s 1998 Masters of Environmental Studies Thesis, meaning “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed along components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.” (Haraway 2016 pp.33)

We can understand why Haraway, as from all we have seen so far, would prefer to use a word which does not indicate the reproducing of something from oneself, but rather the making of things within a system of various actors and actants. And this is precisely what the Chthulucene is - “ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished, and the sky has not fallen – yet.” (Haraway 2016 pp.55)

The Chthulucene goes past “both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene (as they) 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.” (Haraway 2016 pp.56) In the Chthulucene, “human beings are not the only important actors (…), with all other beings able to simply react” (Haraway 2016 pp.55)

Furthermore, we have the introduction of Gaia, here described by Isabelle Stengers in her book In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (2015);

What I am naming Gaia was in effect baptized thus by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis at the start of the 1970s. They drew their lessons from research that contributed to bringing to light the dense set of relations that scientific disciplines were in the habit of dealing with separately – living things, oceans, the atmosphere, climate, more or less fertile soils. To give a name – Gaia – to this assemblage of relations was to insist on two con- sequences of what could be learned from this new perspective. That on which we depend, and which has so often been defined as the “given,” the globally stable context of our histories and our calculations, is the product of a history of co-evolution, the first artisans and real, continuing authors of which were the innumerable populations of microorganisms. And Gaia, the “living planet” has to be recognized as a “being,” and not assimilated into a sum of processes, in the same sense that we recognize that a 45 rat, for example, is a being: it is not just endowed with a history but with its own regime of activity and sensitivity, resulting from the manner in which the processes that constitute it are coupled with one another in multiple and entangled manners, the variation of one having multiple repercussions that affect the others. To question Gaia then is to question something that holds together in its own particular manner, and the questions that are addressed to any of its constituent processes can bring into play a sometimes unexpected response involving them all.

Haraway’s use of Gaia is a flirtation compared to Stengers, whilst saying “an unfurling Gaia is better situated in the Chthulucene, an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names.” (Haraway 2016 pp.51), “we need another figure, a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the Anthropocene into another, big-enough story.” (Haraway 2016 pp.52)

Therefore it is here, in the place of Gaia that Medusa explodes from the depths, as “the Gorgons erupt more than they emerge; they are intrusive in a sense akin to what Stengers understood by Gaia.” (Haraway 2016 pp.54)

But they go further than that -

“The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not Anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman. As a suffix, the word kainos ‘-cene’ signals new, recently made, fresh epochs of the thick present. To renew the biodiverse powers of terra is the Sympoietic work and play of the Chthulucene.” (Haraway 2016 pp.55)

“The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents and futures.” (Haraway 2016 pp.57)