anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulucene: staying with the trouble - donna haraway

7/25/2019 Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble - Donna Haraway

1/15

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying withthe Trouble

Its an honor to be here, in so many ways, and I want to begin under the title of this talk

with three sto

ries that are too big but also not big enough. The Anthropocene, the

Capitalocene, and my favorite, the Cthulucene. The Cthonic ones, the not yet fin

ished,ongo

ing, abyssal, and dread

ful ones that are gen

er

a

tive and destruc

tive, and make Gaia

look like a junior kinder

garten daugh

ter.

Im going to pro

pose to us in the course of the next twenty-five min

utes that the

Cthulucene might be a way to col

lect up the ques

tions for nam

ing the epoch, for nam

ing

what is hap

pen

ing in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, and oceans, and atmos

-

pheres. Perhaps need

ing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but per

haps offer

-

ing some

thing else, some

thing just maybe more liv

able. Im struck by the fact that two

kinds of insights seem to have over

taken the intel

lec

tual schol

arly world, inter

na

tion

ally

really, and across the divi

sions of the dis

ci

plines. Simultaneously I pro

pose that it has

become literallyunthinkable to do good work in any interesting field with the premises of

indi

vid

u

al

ism, method

olog

i

cally indi

vid

u

al

ism, and human excep

tion

al

ism. None of the

most gen

er

a

tive and cre

ative intel

lec

tual work being done today any longer spends much

time (except as a kind of foot

note) talk

ing, doing cre

ative work with the premises of indi

-

vid

u

al

ism and method

olog

i

cal indi

vid

u

al

ism, and Ill try to illus

trate that a bit, pri

mar

ily

from some of the nat

ural sci

ences.

Simultaneously, there has been an explo

sion within the biolo

gies of mul

ti

species

becoming-with, of an under

stand

ing that to be a one at all, you must be a many and its not

a metaphor. That its about the tis

sues of being any

thing at all. And that those who are

have been in rela

tion

al

ity all the way down. There is no place that the lay

ers of the onion

come to rest on some kind of foun

da

tion.

How is it, if these are truly the intel

lec

tual rev

o

lu

tions and I believe cul

tural rev

o

lu

tions

that are infus

ing this planet at this time, how is it that the name of our epoch that is seri

-

ouslypro

posed and being stud

ied in the inter

na

tional geo

phys

i

cal union and else

where,

with a report to be issued in 2016, that the name proposed for our epoch is the

Anthropocene, with the fig

ure of the Anthropos? What an extra

or

di

nary kind of con

tra

dic

-

tion is implied in nam

ing th epoch that way. But it of course is named that waybecause of

the cor

rect under

stand

ing that peo

ple, for

get the Anthropos, peo

ple have been doing on

this planet has in fact changed the planet for

ever, and for every

one. Anthropogenic


2/15


3/15

Im giv

ing this talk under a par

tic

u

lar gor

geous image of Octopus cyanea, or the day octo

-

pus, who you can see in the cur

rent Tentacles exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As

I have been for a long time, Ive been trying to stay with the trouble under the sign of sci-

ence of SF, of string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative

fem

i

nism, so far. The sky has not fallen, not yet. And I have been inspired by the think

ingof Marilyn Strathernand oth

ers, who tell me that it mat

ters what sto

ries tell sto

ries, it mat

-

ters what thoughts think thoughts, it mat

ters what worlds world worlds. That we need to

take seri

ously the acqui

si

tion of that kind of skill, emo

tional, intel

lec

tual, mate

r

ial skill, to

desta

bi

lize our own sto

ries, to retell them with other sto

ries, and vice versa. A kind of seri

-

ous denor

mal

iza

tion of that which is nor

mally held still, in order to do that which one

thinks one is doing. It mat

ters to desta

bi

lize worlds of think

ing with other worlds of think

-

ing. It mat

ters to be less parochial. If ever there was a time, it is surely now, and I think allof us lack many of the skills.

As you know, Ursula Le Guin is my prin

ci

pal inspi

ra

tion for a great deal, not least her way

of approaching questions of narration, evolution, writing, The Carrier Bag Theory of

Fiction. That rather than a heroic story told yet one more time with the first beautiful

words and weapons, or words asweapons and weapons aswords, instead rethink the

ques

tions of evo

lu

tion in a much smaller vein, with the tiny, hollowed-out neg

a

tive spaces,

the shell which can hold some water that can be shared, the net bag that can carry food

back to the camp, that can carry the baby. The kind of social

ity that comes from com

mu

ni

-
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_05_23-2015-06-15-23h36m02s837.pnghttps://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/leguin/carrier-bag.htmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Strathernhttp://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals-and-experiences/exhibits/tentacles


4/15

ties mak

ing their lives together. Not any kind of Utopia, cer

tainly not absent con

flict, but it

is not the heroic story of the priv

i

leged sig

ni

fier mov

ing across matrix space to bring back

the prize at the end and die.

Always Coming Homeis a story that acti

vates that par

tic

u

lar the

ory of being, the

ory of

evo

lu

tion, really. The Anthropocene is that name that was pro

posed in about 2000. The

word was invented, actually, by a man who is a great lover and studier of diatoms in the

Great Lakes of North America. Its impor

tant to remem

ber that Eugene Stoermeris

a fresh

wa

ter biol

o

gist and a lover of the diatoms. His term the Anthropocene was in fact

invented in order to sig

nal the Anthropogenic processes that are acid

i

fy

ing the waters and

chang

ing the nature of life on Earth. But it was picked up and pop

u

lar

ized by Paul Crutzen,

an atmos

pheric chemist who won a Nobel Prize. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer joined

together to pop

u

lar

ize the name Anthropocene specif

i

cally in rela

tion

ship to those sorts of

processes ema

nat

ing par

tic

u

larly from the mid-18thcen

tury and the steam engine and the

extra

or

di

nar

ily expand

ing use of fos

sil fuels that acid

ify the oceans, bleach the corals (They

were par

tic

u

larly wor

ried about avib

rioinfec

tion in coral reefs thats respon

si

ble for

bleach

ing Well be hear

ing more about vib

rio bac

te

ria both from me and from Margaret

[McFall-Ngai]in a few min

utes. Vibrio is respon

si

ble for cholera, another vari

ant of it.

Vibrios are geniuses at com

mu

ni

ca

tion. They are sig

nallers, queuers par excel

lence. Thoseare guys who really get into the world and change it. In the case of the Hawaiian bobtail

squid, we can cheer for them. In the case of the bleached coral and cholera in Haiti, I think
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_07_46-2015-06-15-23h43m35s304.pnghttps://vimeo.com/97461507https://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Vibrio_shiloihttp://www.mpic.de/index.php?id=31&type=0https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_F._Stoermer


5/15

we have quite another atti

tude toward the encour

age

ment of vib

rio on this planet.

I think the proper icon for the Anthropocene, I think of that human being that is signalled

by the Anthropocene, this Anthropos, the one who looks up, is Fossil-Making Man, burn

-

ing fos

sils as fast as pos

si

ble. And what else would sig

nal this man but the Burning Man

fes

ti

val in the deserts of Nevada?

This is of course the burn

ing effigy at one of the Burning Man fes

ti

vals. They started on the

beach, Baker Beach in San Francisco in a much smaller way. Rather small wooden effigies

of a man (and a dog, I might point out) that were burned as part of the celebration of the

sum

mer sol

stice, and they grew in the way of Fossil-Making Mans atti

tudes toward things,

from a rather mod

est effigy to a 104 foot-tall burn

ing thing in the desert, such that every

-

body who takes a snap

shot of burn

ing man has to sign a con

tract that thecopy

right is

ownedby the Burning Man orga

ni

za

tion.

The Anthropocene is also tightly tied to a god

dess fig

ure, Gaia, the fig

ure of the Earth who

is Gaia partly because Gaia was invokedby James Lovelockto sig

nal what a liv

ing planet

looks like from space. Very much part of the NASA project, the Apollo mis

sions, the search

for life on Mars. Gaia is a fig

ure who emerges into the con

scious

ness of the Anthropos

from space. She is an earthly fig

ure, not a female fig

ure but an it, one who fig

ures themetab

o

lism of a planet, that a planet is a whole, autopoi

etic sys

tem.
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_10_15-2015-06-16-03h35m23s733.pnghttp://www.jameslovelock.org/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesishttp://burningman.org/network/about-us/press-media/press-rights-responsibilities/#PhotoVideoRandR


6/15

[This photo] is from one of the Apollo mis

sions, the pho

to

graph of the Earth ris

ing from

the Moon. That is the per

spec

tive from which Gaia is the fig

ure of the Anthropocene.

[This] dia

gram is one that James Lovelock used in one of his lec

tures on Gaia that gives us

a sense of what an autopoi

etic sys

tem looks like. Its a sys

tems the

ory. It def

i

nitely has to

do with com

plex sys

tem processes. It is not a the

ory of addi

tive change but of sys

tem
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_11_54-2015-06-16-03h46m40s814.png


7/15

change. It is about self-making and lay

ers of self-making. Its about order out of dis

or

der.

Its about home

o

sta

tic mech

a

nisms in autopoi

etic sys

tems. The lim

its of home

o

sta

tic

mech

a

nisms. The moments of flip from accom

mo

da

tion, accom

mo

da

tion, accom

mo

da

-

tion, whoops, col

lapse. accom

mo

da

tion, Accommodation, accom

mo

da

tion, whoops, col

-

lapse. Autopoietic the

o

ries accom

mo

date col

lapse as they accom

mo

date adjust

ment in

their sys

temic ways of think

ing. These are the fun

da

men

tal kinds of log

i

cal appa

ra

tuses

that have been used in sci

en

tiz

ing the Anthropocene in its major research orga

ni

za

tions

and pol

icy bod

ies, most cer

tainly includ

ing the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change. IPCC has been issu

ing its reports now for a num

ber of years. It uses the

photographs, the snapshots from the cellphone, of the planet Earth, and it engages that

kind of sys

tem think

ing that pro

duces a very par

tic

u

lar kind of scale called global.

InAnna TsingsFrictionshe does a very interesting ethnographic study of what produces

the scale called global, and how the mod

els work, how the insti

tu

tions work, how it is that

some

thing as big as some

thing called global emerges as a work object. Anna is not

a trasher, Anna is not the sort of thing that says, Oops, gotcha. Done with that. but

rather, Oh, thats how it works. How can this both work and notwork for any

thing that

needs to be done on this Earth? So I am not argu

ing that we dont need the kinds of oper

-

a

tions that go on under the sign of the Anthropocene, Gaia, autopoi

etic think

ing, and

global scale, but I amsig

nalling their very his

tor

i

cal and mate

r

ial speci

ficity, and their lim

-

i

ta

tions both mytho

log

i

cal and oth

er

wise.

I would also argue (and this is much more ten

u

ous) that the Anthropocene main bio

log

i

cal

sci

ences are those of the so-called mod

ern syn

the

sisthat was put together crudely from the

30s to the 50s, and then again from the 50s to the 70s, and at some very deep sense these

sciences are grosslyinadequate to the kind of thinking required for our urgent times. They

are pow

er

ful. Im not talk

ing about trash

ing them. Again Im talk

ing about under

stand

ing

what they did, can do, cant do, and what they stopped. So that the sci

ences of the mod

ern

syn

the

sis work with genes, cells, organ

isms, pop

u

la

tions, species, put them into rela

tion

-

ships with each other that were well-described by the math

e

mat

ics of com

pe

ti

tion, the

com

pe

ti

tion equa

tions derived ulti

mately from the ther

mo

dy

nam

ics of Gibbs, and that the

world is pro

foundly math

e

ma

tized in terms of those sorts of units that can suc

cess

fully

leave copies of each other in com

pe

ti

tion with other copy

ing units. Powerful appa

ra

tus for

under

stand

ing the biolo

gies.

But what the sci

ences of the mod

ern syn

the

sis could not do and did not do was have any

grip on micro

bi

ol

ogy, partly because micro

bi

ol

ogy works in sucha weird way. The lit

tle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesishttp://press.princeton.edu/titles/7885.htmlhttp://anthro.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=atsinghttp://www.ipcc.ch/


8/15

crit

ters just do things we would not per

mit in the aver

age mid

dle school. They could not

and did not deal with sym

bio

sis. The many bio

log

i

cal process that have come to be shown

as gen

eral to life on Earth were ungras

pable within the sci

ences of the mod

ern syn

the

sis,

basi

cally. They were really minor

ity sci

ences. Everything to do with lichens and coral reefs

that became so excit

ing in the late 19thcen

tury in some sig

nif

i

cant way dis

ap

peared from

the lead

ing sci

ences until very recently. And they could not and did not deal with devel

op

-men

tal phe

nom

ena. They could not deal with change through time in any very seri

ous way.

I would like to pro

pose for per

fectly obvi

ous rea

sons that for all of the fail

ings of the

Anthropos and the Anthropocene, and all of the strengths of both, the Anthropos did not

do this thing that threat

ens mass extinc

tion, and that if we were to use only one word for

the processes that were talk

ing about, it should be the Capitalocene.

Furthermore, those processes that are sig

nalled by the extra

or

di

nary prim

i

tive accu

mu

la

-

tions and extrac

tions of orga

ni

za

tions of labor and pro

duc

tions of tech

nolo

gies of very par

-

tic

u

lar kinds for the extrac

tion and mald

is

tri

b

u

tion of profit, so on and so forth, did not

start in the mid-18thcentury, nor do we need to go back to deep time and the end of the

last Ice Age and play the notion that human ver

sus nature is as old as our species itself.

Stark non

sense. But we do need to go deeper in time than the mid-18th

cen

tury, and I usethis slide simply to signal the formations of markets and accumulations of wealth in the

great trade routes, many of which fig

ured China as a major player, and the Indian Ocean as
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_16_36-2015-06-16-04h08m30s108.pnghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time


9/15

a major player. I do this sim

ply to sig

nal that those metab

o

lisms of the oikos and [ikos?], of

econ

omy and ecol

ogy, and of world

ing, and of trad

ing and mak

ing, need to be fig

ured

olderthan the mid-18thcentury, and that does not mean going back to some kind of deep

ecology.

Clearly, the melt

ing of the ice around the Arctic is very impor

tant to the Capitalocene, in

no small part because some

thing like 30% of the nat

ural gas reserves are in the Arctic seas

under the ice, or the no-longer ice. I give you here an old ship that didnt quite make it, and

a new ship which is quite capa

ble, thank you.
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_18_04-2015-06-16-04h16m23s461.png


10/15

And then I give you the third age of car

bon, which I believe we are liv

ing in. Im indebted

to Michael Klarefor this. That is to say that even though sus

tain

able tech

nolo

gies of all

kinds are getting vast investments, waymore money is going into sucking the last calorie

of fossil fuel out of the tissues of the Earth and the melting of the ice in the Northwest

Passage. The melt

ing of ice in the Hudson Bay is a big part of this.

What we have here is Greenpeace going against a Russian oil rig in the Russian areas of the

Arctic. The inter

na

tional com

pe

ti

tion in the Northern seas is aston

ish

ing. The mil

i

tary

com

pe

ti

tion, the cor

po

rate com

pe

ti

tion. The suck

ing of the last calo

rie of car

bon out of this

planet is a big deal.
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_18_34-2015-06-16-04h18m48s742.pnghttp://michaelklare.com/


11/15

So we get to the Cthulucene. My fig

ure [on the left] is Potnia Theron, or Medusa. Medusa

is the Greek ver

sion of this snake-haired cthonic entity who is Potnia Theron, Potnia

Melissa the goddess of the bees, who is a very old and cthonic figure who is in no ones

pocket. A figure of creation and destruction, an entity of extraordinary powers, and I would

sug

gest to you that those who think the cthonic ones are old, tra

di

tional, done, been there,sup

planted by civ

i

liza

tion, are sim

ply wrong. I fig

ure that for this pur

pose with the Ood

out ofDoctor Whosci

ence fic

tion film TV series that I bet every

body in the room has at

least seen some of. And I remind you that the ten

tac

u

lar ones, whose faces are ten

ta

cles

and not eyes, whose face are feel

ers, that the Ood had their hind

brain out

side their body

and that the bad enslavers came and cut their hind

brain, which was the part of them that

tied them to each other and to the pos

si

bil

ity of what they call a hive-mind but lets just call

it com

mu

nity or think

ing with each other, and replaced it with a lit

tle glow

ing globe thatcould be controlled by the slavemakers. So I think of the Ood as a perfectly appropriate

Cthonic One for the Cthulucene.
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_18_53-2015-06-16-04h20m42s313.pnghttp://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Oodhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potnia_Theron


12/15

Shoshanah Dubiner, Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis

But lets move to the biolo

gies and go to Lynn Margulis. This is Endosymbiosis: Homage

to Lynn Margulis, a giant paint

ing of sev

eral feet by sev

eral feet, on the wall between the

bio

log

i

cal sci

ences and the geo

sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where

Lynn pro

posed, and she and her labs showed, that the ori

gin of com

plex cel

lu

lar

ity on this

Earth is an endosymbiotic event. That is, some bacterial sorts of critters ate others and got

indi

ges

tion and stuck around with each other. That the ori

gin of com

plex cel

lu

lar

ity is an

act of indi

ges

tion. This paint

ing is of the crit

ters involved in indi

ges

tion that is per

haps the

worlds first com

plex world

ing, except Lynn would dis

agree with that since she was quite

sure the bac

te

ria were already quite com

plex enough, thank you.
https://www.cns.umass.edu/about/newsletter/october-2012/memorial-painting-in-honor-of-lynn-margulishttp://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_20_17-2015-06-16-04h31m52s055.pnghttp://www.cybermuse.com/blog/2012/2/13/endosymbiosis-homage-to-lynn-margulis.html


13/15


14/15

Art-science activisms inspire me at a level and I refuse to give any of my pre

sen

ta

tions

with

out a kind of potent alliance with those who are work

ing with beauty and fury in their

enlisting the possibility of ongoingness. The first picture that you see up there is from

Margaret and Christine Wertheims Institute for Figuring. The hyperbolic Crochet Coral

Reef, where the prac

tices of womens cro

chet

ing the non-Euclidian fig

ures became veryimpor

tant math

e

mat

i

cal fig

ures. Something like 27 coun

tries and more than 7,000 peo

ple

have been involved in the col

lab

o

ra

tions to make dis

plays of coral reefs from cro

chet

ing.

Theyd enact a sol

i

dar

ity with the reefs through womens fiber arts, envi

ron

men

tal

ism, the

math

e

mat

ics of com

plex non-Euclidian spaces, the inter

na

tional col

lab

o

ra

tions of instal

la

-

tion art. They are an extra

or

di

nar

ily inter

est

ing acti

va

tion. This is the Toxic Reef, made

sig

nif

i

cantly out of dis

carded reel-to-reel tape and other toxic fibers.

The other is a book project put together by a friend of mine who died a cou

ple of months

ago,Alison Jolly, a pri

ma

tol

o

gist who stud

ies lemurs in Madagascar and was deeply

involved in con

ser

va

tion. Alison was hor

ri

fied by the fact that Malagasy chil

dren study

European animals and have no literature or animal fables in the Malagasy language, or

pictures of Malagasy animals, the Madagascar flora and fauna. She and her colleagues have

pro

duced an aston

ish

ing seriesof about ten childrens books that are bilin

gual in Malagasy

and English.Realnat

ural his

tory. These are excit

ingani

mal sto

ries, fab

u

lous ani

mal sto

-

ries, that are an effort to incul

cate in the young a love of place, a love of home.

Cthulucene reworld

ing. Compost not Posthuman. Revolution is but thought car

ried into
http://opentranscripts.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/vlc-00_23_12-2015-06-16-04h49m07s462.pnghttp://www.lemurreserve.org/akoproject2012.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Jollyhttp://crochetcoralreef.org/about/toxic_reef.phphttp://crochetcoralreef.org/index.phphttp://www.theiff.org/


15/15

action, Emma Goldman. The acti

va

tion of the cthonic pow

ers that is within our grasp as

we col

lect up the trash of the Anthropocene and the exter

min

ism of the Capitalocene, to

some

thing that might pos

si

bly have a chance of ongo

ing.

Thank you.

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anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulucene: staying with the trouble - donna haraway

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