Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures: Technologocal Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices) - Hardcover

Haraway, Donna J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822362147 ISBN 13: 9780822362142

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Staying with the Trouble

Making Kin in the Chthulucene

By Donna J. Haraway

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6214-2

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Playing String Figures with Companion Species, 
2. Tentacular Thinking, 
3. Sympoiesis, 
4. Making Kin, 
5. Awash in Urine, 
6. Sowing Worlds, 
7. A Curious Practice, 
8. The Camille Stories, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Playing String Figures with Companion Species

In honor of G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903–91) and Beatriz da Costa (1974–2012). Hutchinson, my PhD adviser, wrote a biographical memoir called The Kindly Fruits of the Earth, a title that enfolds all the "reliable voyageurs" of this chapter.

Multispecies Storytelling and the Practices of Companions

String figures are like stories; they propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth. My multispecies storytelling is about recuperation in complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings. In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus suffering in companion species knottings, I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble. And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation.

SF is a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures. Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn't there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth. String figures require holding still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship and politics are like that too — passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching.

Racing pigeons in Southern California, along with their diverse people, geographies, other critters, technologies, and knowledges, shape practices of living and dying in rich worldings that I think of as string figure games. This chapter, enabled by diverse actual pigeons and their rich tracings, is the opening pattern of a cluster of knots. The critters of all my stories inhabit an n-dimensional niche space called Terrapolis. My fabulated multiple integral equation for Terrapolis is at once a story, a speculative fabulation, and a string figure for multispecies worlding.

[MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION OMITTED]

x1 = stuff/physis, x2 = capacity, x3 = sociality, x4 = materiality, xn = dimensions-yet-to-come

a (alpha) = Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology's multispecies epigenesis

O (omega) = recuperating terra's pluriverse

t = worlding time, not container time, entangled times of past/present/ yet to come

Terrapolis is a fictional integral equation, a speculative fabulation.

Terrapolis is n-dimensional niche space for multispecies becoming with.

Terrapolis is open, worldly, indeterminate, and polytemporal.

Terrapolis is a chimera of materials, languages, histories.

Terrapolis is for companion species, cum panis, with bread, at table together — not "posthuman" but "com-post."

Terrapolis is in place; Terrapolis makes space for unexpected companions.

Terrapolis is an equation for guman, for humus, for soil, for ongoing risky infection, for epidemics of promising trouble, for permaculture.

Terrapolis is the SF game of response-ability.

Companion species are engaged in the old art of terraforming; they are the players in the SFequation that describes Terrapolis. Finished once and for all with Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics and grumpy human-exceptionalist Heideggerian worlding, Terrapolis is a mongrel word composted with a mycorrhiza of Greek and Latin rootlets and their symbionts. Never poor in world, Terrapolis exists in the SF web of always-too-much connection, where response-ability must be cobbled together, not in the existentialist and bond-less, lonely, Man-making gap theorized by Heidegger and his followers. Terrapolis is rich in world, inoculated against posthumanism but rich in com-post, inoculated against human exceptionalism but rich in humus, ripe for multispecies storytelling. This Terrapolis is not the home world for the human as Homo, that ever parabolic, re- and de-tumescing, phallic self-image of the same; but for the human that is transmogrified in etymological Indo-European sleight of tongue into guman, that worker of and in the soil. My SF critters are beings of the mud more than the sky, but the stars too shine in Terrapolis. In Terrapolis, shed of masculinist universals and their politics of inclusion, guman are full of indeterminate genders and genres, full of kinds-in-the-making, full of significant otherness. My scholar-friends in linguistics and ancient civilizations tell me that this guman is adama/ adam, composted from all available genders and genres and competent to make a home world for staying with the trouble. This Terrapolis has kin-making, string figure, SF relations with Isabelle Stengers's kind of fleshy cosmopolitics and SF writers' practices of worlding.

The British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who wrote The Gender of the Gift based on her ethnographic work in highland Papua New Guinea (Mt. Hagen), taught me that "it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with)." Strathern is an ethnographer of thinking practices. She embodies for me the arts of feminist speculative fabulation in the scholarly mode. It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. Strathern wrote about accepting the risk of relentless contingency; she thinks about anthropology as the knowledge practice that studies relations with relations, that puts relations at risk with other relations, from unexpected other worlds. In 1933, Alfred North Whitehead, the American mathematician and process philosopher who infuses my sense of worlding, wrote The Adventures of Ideas. SF is precisely full of such adventures. Isabelle Stengers, a chemist, scholar of Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, radical thinker about materiality in sciences, and an unruly feminist philosopher, gives me "speculative thinking" in abundance. With Isabelle Stengers we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world. In the spirit of feminist communitarian anarchism and the idiom of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822362147
• ISBN 13: 9780822362142
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland