Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway

Introduction

• ‘Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. They also demonstrate and perform consequences. Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are who are. No wonder the world’s great monotheisms in both religious and secular guises have tried again and again to exterminate the chthonic ones. The scandals of times called the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene are the latest and most dangerous of these exterminating forces. Living-with and dying-with each other potently in the Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital.’ (2)
• ‘Third, string figuring is passing on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them. sf is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene’ (3) – could be related to a process-led artwork – Laura Hopes’ breakwater piece?**
• ‘There is a fine line between acknowledging the extent and seriousness of the troubles and succumbing to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference.’ (4)
• ‘This book argues and tries to perform that, eschewing futurism, staying with the trouble is both more serious and more lively. Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly. Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence. Neither hope nor despair knows how to teach us to “play string figures with companion species,” the title of the first chapter of this book.’ (4) – getting away from the panicked tones of the Anthropocene and staying with the now
• Chapter 2 seems relevant – introducing Chthulucene, as well as there being mentions of art/science activisms in chapter 3
• (end of chapter 6: ‘the prose of acacia seeds and the lyrics of lichens give way to the mute poetics of rocks in the final passages’)

Chapter 2

• ‘What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? […] Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!’ (30-31)
• ‘The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to astralize them and set up chief Singletons and their tame committees of multiples or subgods, the One and the Many.’ (31)
• ‘Making a small change in the biologist’s taxonomic spelling, from cthulhu to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be: the Chthulucene.’ (31) – essentially the name for the Chthulucene comes from the name of a spider
• Lots of talk of tangling on page 31 – links well to Jane Bennet and potentially to a tangly artwork/analogy of water?? Particularly seaweed flowing through water?
• Jellyfish
• ‘The Chthulucene does not close in on itself; it does not round off; its contact zones are ubiquitous and continuously spin out loopy tendrils.’ – analogous to water in its unbounded-ness – it flows through all states and all bodies – emphasise this throughout
• “It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas.” Marilyn Strathern (34) – use to unpick the fact that I’m not problematising the acknowledgement of an Anthropocene in terms of that we are undeniably damaging the planet, more the ideas on which we’re building this idea of an Anthropocene – could we remodel it somehow
• ‘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 notone-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.’ (36)
• ^^the lack of being in the here-and-now – stone we can walk over, carefully craft and manage – in water we become immersed, helplessly splashing and thrashing, thoughts only on the next breath and the all-body sensation
• The labelling of the Anthropocene seems scientific and controlled, measured and defined – geologising (in the cold, ‘matter’-based way of a billion black anthropocenes or none) what we should feel as an overwhelming, uncontrollable panic
• Need to allow some give and take – the idea of thinking of the bigger picture, moving away from an often-dominant individualism, is definitely a positive of the Anthropocene. It’s just a case of how we define the bigger picture, what narratives are brought to the fore
• ‘. I name these things urgencies rather than emergencies because the latter word connotes something approaching apocalypse and its mythologies. Urgencies have other temporalities, and these times are ours. These are the times we must think; these are the times of urgencies that need stories.’ (37)
• ‘How did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get in the story? How do such lowly things keep the story going? Or maybe even worse for the hero, how do those concave, hollowed-out things, those holes in Being, from the get-go generate richer, quirkier, fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories, stories with room for the hunter but which weren’t and aren’t about him, the self-making human, the human-making machine of history?’ (40)
• ‘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’ Ursula Le Guin (40) – what I’m trying to do, to get to the untold story because the one we’ve been telling ourselves thus far clearly isn’t working
• ‘Searching for compositionist practices capable of building effective new collectives, Latour argues that we must learn to tell “Gaïa stories.” If that word is too hard, then we can call our narrations “geostories,” in which “all the former props and passive agents have become active without, for that, being part of a giant plot written by some overseeing entity.” (40-41)
• ‘Latour argues that we face a stark divide: “Some are readying themselves to live as Earthbound in the Anthropocene; others decided to remain as Humans in the Holocene.”’ (41) but I’m almost arguing that we are choosing to remain as Humans even, or even because of our significance in, the Anthropocene
• (Pitt Rivers shrunken heads as an example – we need to label our wrongdoings and power (in acknowledging the geological era of our causing) while righting our wrongs, starting a new era in doing so)
• ** do a close analysis of Tania Kovats’ Gaia piece – a noteable lack of water from the final product?? Process led. The water is now in the air around us, moving through our bodies. What made this art now makes us.**
• **tangly artworks to talk about Chthulucene?**
• ‘Gaia does not and could not care about human or other biological beings’ intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures.’ (44) – need to consider whether to include this idea of Gaia – need a thorough understanding of it if so
• Careful to say that water is unchanged as it obviously isn’t – use it more as a metaphor for the fact that water will outlast us, will erode the rocks we’re embedded in – the rising waters are rushing to meet us
• ‘7 In what he calls the Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas, hydro-fracking is the tip of the (melting) iceberg. Melting of the polar seas, terrible for polar bears and for coastal peoples, is very good for big competitive military, exploration, drilling, and tanker shipping across the northern passages. Who needs an icebreaker when you can count on melting ice?’ (46)
• ‘I am aligned with feminist environmentalist Eileen Crist when she writes against the managerial, technocratic, market-and-profit besotted, modernizing, and human-exceptionalist business-as-usual commitments of so much Anthropocene discourse. This discourse is not simply wrongheaded and wrong-hearted in itself; it also saps our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now (including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts, presents, and futures.’ (49-50)
• Could use link of Tania Kovat’s Gaia piece to link to Chthulucene text as gaia features prominently in the explanation of Chthulucene
• ‘Recall that the Greek chthonios means “of, in, or under the earth and the seas”—a rich terran muddle for sf, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and speculative fabulation. The chthonic ones are precisely not sky gods, not a foundation for the Olympiad, not friends to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, and definitely not finished. The Earthbound can take heart—as well as action.’ (53)
• ‘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.’ (54)
• If I wanted to prospose a -cene I would need to pick problems with the pre-existing ones, including the Chthulucene??
• ‘Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of 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. We are at stake to each other. Unlike the dominant dramas of Anthropocene and Capitalocene discourse, human beings are not the only important actors in the Chthulucene, with all other beings able simply to react. The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story.’ (55) – good definition of Chthulucene/outline of why it’s needed
• ‘Diverse human and nonhuman players are necessary in every fiber of the tissues of the urgently needed Chthulucene story. The chief actors are not restricted to the too-big players in the too-big stories of Capitalism and the Anthropos, both of which invite odd apocalyptic panics and even odder disengaged denunciations rather than attentive practices of thought, love, rage, and care.’ (55-56) – maybe room for some criticism here?? It seems to want to shift the focus onto the individual rather than the collective which, while is in some ways very much needed, in many other aspects it is larger corporations etc which are not collectively pulling their weight. As Bennet suggests that we may need some anthropomorphism to encourage a valuing on the nonhuman, so too could we suggest that in finding some kind of exceptionalism (a planetary one), this may be a more sustainable way of re-modelling our worldview? It is easier to shift an exceptionalism than to banish it, at least to start with (and we need to start).
• ‘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.’ (56)
• ‘We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks’ (56)

Chapter 3

• ‘Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with.”’ (58)
• ‘Another word for these sympoietic entities is holobionts, or, etymologically, “entire beings” or “safe and sound beings’ … ‘I propose holoents as a general term to replace “units” or “beings.”’ (60)