Donna J. Haraway

Three short passages from Staying with the Trouble:

I think babies should be rare, nurtured, and precious; and kin should be abundant, unexpected, enduring, and precious.

Good stories reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep the story going for those who come after.

The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.… (more)

Although it took a little getting used to, Haraway’s writing style was easier to read than I expected. This is the first book of hers I’ve tackled and quotations I’d come across in the past were generally oblique, to say the least. I can’t remember how I discovered the existence of ‘Staying with the Trouble’, but am usually up for commentary on the concept of the Anthropocene. Moreover, it has a distinctive cover and I’m not above being swayed by such things. The book is shorter than it looks, as a good 130 pages of the total are notes, bibliography, and index. The remaining 160-odd consist of meandering chapters on ideas of ecological regeneration through co-operative coexistence between people and other living beings. Haraway writes in a lyrical, elliptical style with a conversational tone, playing with words and frequently re-stating phrases. I neither loved nor hated this, so found my interest in the book waxed and waned with the content. The chapters are essentially structured around anecdotes, some of which I found more meaningful than others.

I most enjoyed the longest chapter, ‘Sympoesis’. The titular concept seems vaguely familiar from [b:Austral|33673959|Austral|Paul McAuley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1495059075s/33673959.jpg|54549061], an excellent sci-fi novel, and Haraway goes into sufficient detail that the anecdotes become case studies. They are examples of the tentacular, interconnected approach to ecological understanding and regeneration through solidarity and art that she espouses. I wanted to call this a philosophy, but she deliberately describes it more in terms of practice. If I had to situate it philosophically, though, I’d suggest object-oriented ontology as described by Timothy Morton in [b:The Ecological Thought|7722063|The Ecological Thought|Timothy Morton|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348985833s/7722063.jpg|10474582]. I didn’t find new insight into the Anthropocene as such. I liked Haraway’s comment that, ‘The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge.’ However I was not convinced by her term ‘chthulucene’, which refers both to the Greek name of a spider and to Lovecraft’s cthulu. I believe it is meant to reflect that we’re all part of the same compost heap. (Wasn’t that a line from Fight Club?)

Haraway’s slogan for this era is ‘Make Kin Not Babies’, which I have a certain amount of sympathy for. A couple of my close friends have recently had babies and I like the idea of being their kin. Although I don’t want any children of my own, I’d like to play with and read to the children of my friends. The slogan is also intended to encourage communication and solidarity between groups more generally, beyond nuclear families and narrow interests. I found the string figures concept harder to grasp the usefulness of. Chapter 5 on the unpleasant, often cruel practice of deriving human oestrogen supplements from horse urine was the least satisfactory part of the book for me. Probably because it really was just a personal anecdote and because I thought it was common knowledge. I remember hearing about the practice as a child from an animal rescue charity. Haraway recounts her much more recent discovery of it to highlight how easily information can be overlooked, but doesn’t draw much in the way of lessons from the experience. Her conclusion seems simply to be ‘the world is complicated’, which is true but hardly novel.

On the other hand, I liked the final chapter much more. This consisted of speculative fiction about five generations of people called Camille, all of whom had a symbiotic relationship with monarch butterflies. What a conceptually delightful idea. This fictionalisation also meant that the book concluded on a note of clarity, by depicting Haraway’s vision of a better future. I didn’t find ‘Staying with the Trouble’ revelatory and the length was awkward; it might have been better further compressed or considerably expanded. Nonetheless, there was some vivid and interesting material to be found and Haraway undoubtedly has a distinctive voice.… (more)

"En medio de una devastación ecológica en aumento constante, la teórica feminista multiespecies Donna J. Haraway ofrece nuevas y provocadoras maneras de reconfigurar nuestras relaciones con la tierra y sus habitantes. Evita referirse a nuestra época actual como el Antropoceno: prefiere el concepto de lo que llama el Chthuluceno, ya que describe más y mejor nuestra época como aquella en la que humanos y no humanos se encuentran inextricablemente ligados en prácticas tentaculares...". (Descripción editorial).… (more)