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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
-
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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 -
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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 -
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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 -
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[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 -
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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/ -
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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 -
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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 -
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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/ -
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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 -
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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 -
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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/ -
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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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