Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene is a call to action and a handbook of survival in many ways, it is a book that tells us how we can navigate the unprecedented precarity of the planet. The book was written in the year 2016 and it tells stories of building relationships and connections to survive climate change and the large-scale impending ecological devastation. The Introduction and the first few chapters of the book lay down a theoretical foundation and help the reader get acquainted with the concepts of sympoiesis, tentacular thinking, string figures and the idea of the chthulucene, which borrow from physics, biology, ecology and philosophy. She refers to several scholars and their writing, but Isabelle Stengers’ Cosmopolitics, Marylin Stathern’s work on thinking practices in Kinship, Law and the Unexpected, and Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of Gaia Stories are a few that are referenced throughout the book. I also look at Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern in relation to Haraway’s book, to understand the nature-culture relationship in greater detail. In Haraway’s scientific multi-species worlding imagination, we live in an n-dimensional place known as the Terrapolis and we are all critters - citizens that belong to the same plane. On the Terrapolis, the only way forward is if we all make a commitment to “live and die with each other”. However, it must be noted that this commitment does come with a few caveats and varying degrees of responsibility, according to her. She draws from radical biology schools of thought and the book is full of examples of different species and the relationships that they share with each other. Extending this metaphor rooted in the biological sciences to the current state of affairs, Donna prescribes “making kin” as the solution to the devastation we are facing today.
Her examples take us through pigeons and their historical relationships with human communities in racing, delivering messages, military navigation, in being food for working-class families, and in urban landscapes where they have been deemed the “rats of the sky”. She speaks of the connections between bacteria and the archaea and their symbiogenetic nature, drawing on the groundbreaking work of Lynn Margulis and her evolutionary theory of “the intimacy of strangers”, which has stirred quite the controversy in biology circles. Margulis posits that new cells, tissues, organs, and species only evolve through interaction with one another - and this interaction is inter-species and inter-critter. In all our years of Earth History, this intimacy between different critters, termed Holobionts has been the driving force of evolution.
Haraway uses the example of her aging dog, who is prescribed DES (Diethylstilbestrol) in order to control her irregular urinary cycles. DES is an estrogen hormone and drug that is no longer allowed for human consumption which is compared to Premarin, another hormone that is extracted from pregnant mares, and prescribed to menopausal women, her included. She speaks of the DES anxiety she faced after she started feeding her dog DES because she remembered the time in which DES was prescribed to pregnant women, and the generation of “DES daughters” born to them. DES was known to have carcinogenic and dangerous side effects on women’s health which is why it was removed from production in all pharmaceutical companies. She draws a parallel to Premarin, a drug that is drawn from the urine of pregnant mares which she was taking during her menopause. This connection is solidified in the materiality of “urine” and the responsibilities that we think we owe to our pets, to human beings and towards further fueling the animal industrial complex, because of the ill-treatment of horses in premarin factories. These links are created to allow the reader to think about the idea of sympoiesis and string figures - a literal thread weaving together these multiple narratives.
String figures are a recurring theme throughout the book, and Haraway uses the analogy of SF - which is a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and of course, string figures (Haraway 10) to tell her “geostories”. Using String figures as her material foundation, she writes of the traditions of the Navajo and Black Mesa weavers and of the Crochet Coral Reef Project and its relationship to the vulnerability of the Great Barrier Reef. She tells stories of the Inupiat peoples and their folklore being incorporated into Never Alone, the video game. Never Alone is one of the few video games that is produced by indigenous peoples, and was made as part of a collaboration between the Cook Inlet Tribal Council in Alaska and E-Line media. The video game follows the story of a young girl, Nuna and her fox companion and their journeys through different adventures and challenges. There are several instances where Nuna must enlist the help of other species like whales and moose in order to save their family and village. This kind of world-building has been a part of indigenous philosophies for centuries and this multispecies imagination of the future is central to Haraway’s construction of the Chthulucene.
The last chapter of the book, takes us through Haraway’s fascinating scientific fiction, and her visualization of the future, through the lens of five children, one generation after the other along with their “Companion Species”.
What emerges as a dominant thread that ties all these stories together is the notion of entanglement. In the Chapter titled Sympoiesis, Haraway introduces the concept of Sympoiesis, a relatively new term in Biology as opposed to Autopoiesis. She claims that all Earthlings are sympoietic creatures, and Autopoiesis is a far and distant myth. She defines Sympoiesis as “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries”. Information and control are distributed among components.” By contrast, autopoietic systems are “self-producing” autonomous units “with self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable”. (Haraway 33)
Autopoiesis and its existence is a myth propounded by neoliberalism and the rise of hyper-individualism. In the future she envisages, all critters - human and non-human are indebted to each other, are responsible for each other, and are “at stake” to each other, ideas that are so far removed from what neoliberalism dictates and promotes. These complex webs of entanglement and relationships are compared to the webs of a spider, specifically the Pimoa Cthulhu, an arachnid species who lends its name to the titular Chthulucene, not to be confused with the monster written about in H.P Lovecraft’s The Call of the Cthulu. The Chthulucene is the time-space dimension that characterizes critter relationships and their commitment to each other, and towards staying with the “trouble” according to Haraway, it is used to refer to the temporalities of the past, the present, and the future. A central tenet of the Chthulucene is interdependence and a commitment to survival together, recuperation, and rebuilding to emerge as a natural by-product of this practice.
Haraway proposes the term, “Chthulucene” to replace the terms “Anthropocene” and “Capitalocene”. Her aversion to these terminologies stems from the fact that she believes we need a more universal term for our situation at hand, one that does not perpetuate more despondency.
“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.” (Haraway 56)
In her most important slogan, “Make kin, not Babies” (Haraway 103), Donna takes an almost anti-natalist stance and preaches that we as Earthlings must make “kin” with each other because we are all entangled within one another, and every critter on this planet share the same flesh. She uses the examples of ants and acacia plants and their contributions to each other’s growth, nutrition and survival to speak of kin-making but the analogy can be applied to any one of the relationships that are written about in her book. The word “Kin”, for Haraway pushes the boundaries of ancestry, genealogy, taxonomy and gender. This is most definitely a callback to her other seminal work, “The Cyborg Manifesto” which also deals greatly with the breakdown of these boundaries and rejects binaries and bio-essentialist arguments. It proposes a model of multispecies feminism where technology erases and makes us rethink the nature-culture binary, and leads us into a new world of extraordinary possibilities . In Haraway’s imagination of the future, we are all cyborgs, and being a cyborg in this changing world requires making kin with each other to survive it.
The connection between Haraway and Latour’s body of work, specifically in We have never been Modern lies in the way they think of the categories, human and non-human. While writing about the history of scientific thought, he pushes for a rethinking of the meaning of these categories. His writing concerns this nature-culture dichotomy, particularly its relationship with modernity. He outlines two processes that are simultaneously at play here - translation which is the formation of hybrids of nature and culture and the networks that are formed as a result of these hybrids, and purification which is the attribution of non-humans to nature, and the human to culture. (Latour 10) According to him, these two processes are simultaneously at play in the modern world, and as the translation process continues, hybrids proliferate and purification becomes harder and harder to come by. In Haraway’s writing too, she explores this idea of the human and non-human relationship and invites the possibility of collapsing the barriers between these boundaries.
Although We have never been Modern does not make an explicit appearance in the book, Haraway refers to Latour’s influential writing on collective narratives to support her argument for the push to tell more stories about multispecies entanglements. Latour writes that we must tell “Gaia Stories”, Gaia being the Greek Goddess of the Earth, to establish this new world order that we wish to see in the future. Haraway claims that these “Gaia or Geo Stories” play a huge role in Terran World Building in the future. She further uses the ethnographer and anthropologist Marylin Stathern’s writings on how one must tell stories. These words appear and re-appear in multiple instances across the book:
“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” (Haraway 12)
She also steers clear of the term “PostHuman” and prefers to call herself “Compost” instead. She believes that we, as critters are constantly performing the functions of composing and decomposing together, living and dying together and of celebrating and grieving together. She claims that the term “post-human” is still very much living in the Anthropocene and does not reflect the new conditions of the Chthulucene.
Her persistence of being “Compost”, continues in her last chapter titled “The Camille Stories: The Children of Compost”, which is a work of speculative fabulation that articulates the hypothetical future of the Terrapolis, following five generations in the future, dealing with the changes in the environment of the Terrapolis, as predicted by Haraway. She has written these Compost Communities to be able to live in the ruins, and respond to the ecosystems around them, rather than making them start from scratch. The activities of these communities drew inspiration from Indigenous communities and their treatment of non-human critters, from practices of anti-colonial, pro-queer, feminist resistance and most of all, these communities are characterised by their sympoietic, response-able, kin making nature (Haraway 138). Having a child becomes a careful intentional community decision, and each child is assigned a symbiont when it is born, this symbiont could be any other Earthling that is classified as vulnerable or endangered. The child in the stories, Camille has found a companion in monarch butterflies, and the next five generations of Camilles would be committed to their growth and survival. Each Camille follows the Earth, or the Terrapolis at different stages, different climates, different ideologies, different politics, and varying population levels. She envisions a sharp increase in population now over the next couple of centuries, followed by a gradual decrease by the 2400s. By 2425, she imagines the human population to be 3 Billion, and millions of companion species relationships being in existence. (Haraway 166)
The veracity or the accuracy of these claims is not up for debate in this situation, is is important to see how Donna uses SF (Science fiction, speculative fabulation and string figures) to create a foundation for her picture of the future, and the Chthulucene. In Haraway’s words, “How to revolt? How to matter and not just want to matter?” (Haraway 64) is really the central idea that this book leaves you with. It tells you that you matter, and so does every other Earthling inhabiting the Terrapolis. Their mattering does not take away from yours.
Works Cited:
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Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
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Latour, Bruno, translated by Catherine Porter. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.
