Donna Jeanne Haraway

Donna J. Haraway refigures our current epoch, moving away from the Anthropocene toward the Chthulucene: an epoch in which we stay with the trouble of living and dying on a damaged earth while living with and understanding the nonhuman in complex ways conducive to building more livable futures.

Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Staying with the Trouble

Bryan Alexander

What an unusual, delightful, frustrating, rewarding book.

Staying with the Trouble is a collection of Donna Haraway's recent writing. It includes essays, mostly, of various sorts and on various topics, along with some fiction and art. They all swirl around ideas of creating a different, better world in the wake of climate change. As well as other horrible things. Haraway pushes to get past patriarchy, colonialism, racism, human centrism, and more.

The book openly resists synthesis and linearity, opting instead for multidirectional arguments and a lot of playfulness. In that spirit, let me pull forth the ideas and themes that most struck me. They do overlap:

Make kin, not babies: this is Haraway's call for us to make close links with other people and other critters. She'd like us to produce far fewer children, and is keen to explore interspecies contacts in many ways. Haraway thinks through these connections politically, seeking impacts of oppression and liberation across domains from war to health care. 

Producing fewer children: this isn't something easy for the author, as we can see in a three page footnote (!) (208 n 18) which struggles to encourage women to have fewer babies while at the same time maintaining a feminist politics.

Connections: Staying with the Trouble is all about linking disparate things. Artwork, animals, philosophers, genres all get played with and knitted together. (Knitting, or string, is a persistent theme) For example, at one point Haraway neatly recommends we cease thinking of autopoiesis and instead consider sympoiesis (33, 61). The book also energetically references Haraway's influences and collaborators, creating a lively cast of artistic/scholarly/activist characters.

Period play: Haraway is not happy with the recently popular term Anthropocene to describe our emergent era, and that is interesting. She objects that the name calls up a bad story, one that's too human-centric and too beholden to humanity's worst traits (49). Instead she coins the term Cthulhucene, which suggests Lovecraft but the author refuses this, claiming that her neologism decenters humanity and emphasizes ancient, deep, nonhuman powers.

Science fiction: Staying with the Trouble draws on some sf texts (Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card (surprisingly)) and also on sf as a way of thinking. There is a future science fiction story about successive generations building new human-animal, human-insect relations, which is part of a broader worldbuilding project.

Many of the sections are written in a dense, imaginative, playful style that will challenge some readers. You have to be ready for a steady stream of word games, allusions, puns, and neologisms, while also being able to switch across domains as diverse as horticulture, postcolonial theory, pets, science fiction, and material culture, often within the same sentence. This style can build up to immense, daunting paragraphs... but it's worth it.

I hesitate to point out flaws or weaknesses in such an ambitious, rich, and often fun book. Because it's a collection including prepublished worth, there is some repetition and also unevenness. Personally, my skepticism about much of science studies gave me pause at many points. 

Yet as a futurist I appreciate the bracing and creative effort to imagine new futures.

One final note: I read Staying with the Trouble while steeped in a lot of reading about climate change and technology, while also living through 2020's double whammy of election and pandemic, not to mention America's sudden antiracist mobilization. It seems to me that we're in a political ferment, with many ideas being taken up by people for the first time, and building up new shapes in their intersections and applications. Think of queer studies and activism, antiracism, the trans movement, a resurgence in anticapitalism, feminisms, post-9-11 anti-Islamophobic politics, posthumanism, the anti Silicon Valley techlash, climate change, reproductive rights, various biopolitics, opposition to settler colonialism all rolled up together. What does this lead to? "Social justice" may be a placeholder term, one that falls short of the sheer size and complexity of these ideas. Who is synthesizing them most effectively?

Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chthulucene

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