Transcript: DONNA HARAWAY on Staying with the Trouble /131
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Ayana Young Welcome to For the Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana young. I want to share a little note before we begin this extremely fascinating interview with Donna Haraway. Donna and I were blessed enough to both be receiving an incredible late spring downfall in the Redwoods during this interview, so you will be welcomed with sounds of showers on my little metal roof at Cougar Mountain during this conversation. And that's what I love about doing this podcast deep in the woods is that the sounds of the rain or of the birds come through sometimes. So I hope you enjoy the little sounds of Cougar Mountain coming through in this episode.
Donna Haraway To do this kind of work over time, this kind of work and play with each other, really means you show up. You show up at the demonstration. You show up at the meeting. You show up at the journal collective. You show up in the writing venture. You read each other's stuff. You read the pamphlets. You help write the propaganda. You become informed about struggles that are not necessarily your own but which you're in alliance with even sometimes from a great distance.
Ayana Young Donna Haraway is a distinguished Professor Emeritus in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. She earned her PhD in Biology at Yale in 1972 and writes and teaches in science and technology studies, feminist theory, and multi-species studies. At UCSC, she is an active participant in the Science and Justice Research Center and Center for Creative ecologies and has served as a thesis advisor for over 60 doctoral students. Attending to the intersection of biology, culture, and politics. Haraway’s most recent works include Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), a feature-length film by Fabrizio Terranova, titled Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival (2016) and Making Kin Not Population (2018), a publication co-edited with Adele Clark that addresses questions of human numbers, feminist, anti-racist reproductive and environmental justice, and multi-species flourishing.
Oh my goodness, Donna, thank you so much for being with us on the show. And like I was telling you earlier, the whole cast of characters at For the Wild Podcast are just in awe that we get to interview you. So we are so honored, all of us here.
Donna Haraway Well, thanks for inviting me. It's really my honor and a pleasure to be part of your gang for the time.
Ayana Young Thank you. So I guess it feels fitting to begin today by grounding our conversation in what you called ‘situated knowledges.’ And much of your extensive body of work is anchored in the commitment to disrupt the objectivity essentialism and neutrality assumed in Western tradition, and so-called science and dominant culture. In contrast, your theory of situated knowledges revolves around a conscious acknowledgment that the production of knowledge, the institution of science, the academic canon, this so-called truth, and even this conversation always exist in relation to power structures and our unique embodied experience of the world. And in this time of so much widespread misinformation and gross misrepresentations of truth, why perhaps now more than ever do we need situated knowledges
Donna Haraway There are a lot of ways to begin to think about the need for situated knowledges. My own writing and thinking and acting within that framework were in very strong, complex, long-term alliances with Sandra Harding and others who are developing Feminist Standpoint theory (Sandra in particular), an approach to what she called ‘strong objectivity’ as opposed to the usual ‘weak objectivity’, which separated off the practices of scientific knowing from their historical moment, from historical conjuncture, and separated out the knowing practices from the complex historical embeddedness of the things known and the knowers. So with Sandra Harding with Karen Barad, with Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock, and others I work through, I worked out a notion of situated knowledges to affirm strong truths, not weak truths. Truths that you would live and die for. Truths that are about who lives and who dies, and whether the planet will flourish or not. Whether Earthlings will land on Earth… that kind of thing. Situated knowledges are about a profound relationality and historical conjuncture but not about relativism. It's relationality, not relativism, not epistemological relativism so that strong truths are made, but not made up.
So the organism or the cell or climate change, or coral reef hollow biome biology, those things are made in historical conjunctures that Karen Barad theorized as a kind of working through a genteel realism, working through a kind of ‘intra-activity’ of all of the players to make the world ‘this way’ rather than ‘some other’. These are strong truth claims. And surely now when a kind of twisting of the work that I and others were doing in feminist science studies but also more broadly, on what I'll call the ‘left’ (although the left is a strange term, let me just use it as a collecting box for now - a large box that has many holes in it), the work that we were doing was in a very strongly and unfortunately very effectively turned against us as nothing but social construction, as relativism, as opening up the possibility of alternative realities, as opening up the kinds of Trumpian epistemological cynicism. And I think people like myself who have been in this struggle (well in my case) for more than 40 years have learned I think a lot about being much more careful of our idioms, of our alliances, of our insistence is on claims, on the kind of the situating from where and to whom we are acting so as to foreclose a kind of cynical relativism, which is everywhere these days and which disables, for example, the struggle for reproductive justice, among other things by making outrageous racist, and misogynist claims about the nature of human pregnancy and human caring for the next generation. Outrageous kinds of misstatements of medicine, of science, in the area of reproductive justice - certainly in the domain of climate justice.
But there's also one more point I want to make before I let you ask another question, and that has to do with the way that situated knowledges insist on opening up and building complex contact zones with other ways of knowing the world, not so as to produce a kind of relativism, you know, to each her own little private culture, or to eat your own little part of the world. It's not to eat your own diorama but rather to open up contact zones for other ways of knowing, most certainly including Indigenous ways of knowing, that put into interrelationship - intra-relationality in the Karen Barad sense, all of the ways of coming into materialist connection with the world so that everybody in the contact zone is transformed by the engagement. So that one knowledge system does not dominate another and turn it into mere tradition, or invading scientific knowledge, or, or, all of the different ways of turning situated ways of knowing the world into oppositional categories. Seems to me our job, if I can have this big box called ‘we’, is to build contact zones of complex entanglement where all of us are transformed by the engagement, and in which scientific knowers do not presume in advance that they have the capital T Truth, even while holding on to our very strong truth claims. So it's a risk-taking historical engagement with each other that I think that we must have in these times of tremendous urgency.
Ayana Young Wow, Donna, there's so much there in your response that I already cannot wait to listen back to sit with all that you are bringing into your response with that. So thank you so much. I'm my head spinning but I also have so many other things that I want to get into. So maybe I'll pause on my response to that question and come back to it when I have a little more time to think on it.
I really also want to return to your essay, A Cyborg Manifesto, which was first published in 1985, and in this piece, you inhabit the figure of the cyborg extending beyond its original use in the 1960s, space race, and Cold War imperialism, and as you explain in the text that we are all, and always have been, cyborgs: complex fusions and unruly assemblages of animal, machine, and human. And since its publishing, the idea has so radically transformed how folks are thinking about human machine and human animal relationships across academic disciplines. So I wonder if you could expand on this idea and connect the dots for our listeners. How are you using cyborg imagery as a tool for destabilizing the boundaries we construct between ‘the self’ and ‘the Other’, nature and culture, mind and body, animal and human? And why are these troubling dualisms so important to disrupt?
Donna Haraway First, let me go back to a tiny little word in your question, which is “always been cyborgs”. I don't think I ever said that. And in fact, ‘we’, that is to say, those people born into a world in which systems sciences, digital apparatuses, digital coding, the war, the electronic battlefield, the Bell Telephone System, and other communications apparatuses, the biomedical transformation of the organism into not just a system of production and reproduction which it was, and heat production, which it was in the 19th century. But an information system which it became through knowledge practices, in a very materialist form, from the mid 20th century on that we have become cyborgs in a particular historical conjuncture, and it's nonoptional.
And knowing something’s origins, I can talk to you about the ways that certain kinds of capitalist development, certain kinds of Cold War conflict, practices in the communication sciences and economics… I can talk to you at length and in detail about where the cyborg came from, not just as a figure, but as an actual thing (a thing of course in the entertainment industry), but I mean a more complex embedded materialist being in the world: not just a figure, never merely a metaphor. For me, figures and materialist fleshly things are very, in a sense, imploded. They are profoundly entangled with each other. The figure or the representation is not separated from the thing itself rather the cyborg as I propose is more an implosion of the figures and of the things in the world.
So cyborgs come into the world in particular historical conjunction, injunctions, and they make us who we are but not evenly, not everywhere, perhaps not everybody. Though I think at this point of the more than seven and a half billion people on this planet, no one is untouched by cyborgs and their offspring in the ways worlding is made to work, including the extractions, the exterminations, the migrations, the medicines, the systems of governance, systems of communication. I think truly no one on earth, no human being, and I would really argue, no organism, no living being on this earth is untouched by what emerged from the mid 20th century and beyond, that I call a kind of cyborg worlding. So it's ongoing but doesn't remain the same. It's dynamic, it’s protean, it’s contestable. Knowing something's origins does not determine what happens next.
And people like myself tried to open the box to drive in wedges, to increase the degrees of freedom, not in some kind of blissed-out techno bunny/technophiliac nonsense, but in an engagement in these worldings, including in play, including opening up the capacities for pleasure, and bonding, and making kin in new and wonderful ways with both humans and nonhumans including technologies as well as critters. That kind of opening up of possibilities, not out of some ridiculous fantasy of infinite possibility, but rather more in the spirit of the Marxist critical theorists who said the established order is not necessary. It is possible and indeed necessary to open up the imagination and to open up the practices for a world which can yet be but is not yet. And that's a collective task that can't be done just in the effect of work, and critique, and condemnation. That has to be done so as to give each other heart for a world which can still be even in the grip of the kinds of extreme urgency that I think all of us are feeling very deeply.
Ayana Young Yeah, absolutely, Donna. I feel like I have been working with the urgency so much to not be driven by the urgency, but to also not look away from the urgency or the anxiety that it produces, but not live from that place. And it's a challenge every day with what we're going through.
Donna Haraway Well, live also from that place. It seems to me that the psychoanalytic doctrines of mourning, as opposed to melancholia, are very helpful here. That in mourning, a subject is able to face loss, and understand that loss is real, and not reversible, and is not the whole story. That that loss can be incorporated into a subject that then becomes other than it was but is in a vital way, not by forgetting, but by remembering vitally so as to make something vital with each other still possible. But without forgetting our mortality, that mourning this owns the fantasy of transcendence, or infinity, or deathlessness. But it also disowns melancholia, and despair, and cynicism. And mourning recognizes real loss, my brother really died. We really have lost an extraordinary number of other living species and will lose more, then it is not reversible. Peoples really have lost their land and their livelihoods, and our enforced homelessness across the earth, these things are real. And so it's not about not living within that, it's about refusing melancholia and insisting on mourning with others, so as to find those ways of living well as Earthlings in a thick present. But without the fantasy that denies wounding, that denies death and denies our own complicity in it.
So without denial, to live with heart, to live with a sense of opening to each other (human and nonhuman), that's what I think that the psychoanalytic approach to melancholia can teach us now. Because people… I mean, there was a woman here cleaning my house yesterday. She's an immigrant. She's from El Salvador. She is a citizen, which is grounds for incredible celebration, has put together a business, is raising children - intense accomplishments. Very proud of this, a skilled and hard worker, really an astonishing human being. And she and I were admitting to each other from our different situatedness in class, and ethnic, and national worldings that came together in this business transaction of housecleaning. She and I were talking to each other about having woken up yesterday, each of us separately and for reasons we were having a hard time putting our finger on, with a kind of profound sadness. And we decided that what we were feeling was a kind of world sadness, that in each of our cases, our own personal lives are going quite well. That we have… I have friends, I have work, I have recognition, I have other animals. She has, what I just described, a business she's proud of, children who are flourishing, a husband who is really putting his weight behind what they're doing together. On the personal level, this is not about sadness, but we were feeling a kind of worldly sadness, and that required some kind of response. But the response can't be cynicism. We have to find the ways to, as Anna Tsing puts it, healing on a damaged planet. But the kind of partial healing that produces real vitality, and flourishing otherwise, including ways that nobody ever imagined but turned out to be quite amazing. We have to remember the sky has not yet fallen, the kind of Chicken Little moves, “the sky is falling! The sky is falling!” All true, but it's not down yet.
Ayana Young I liked what you said as well that we can believe all these truths. We don't have to be in denial but it's not the whole story. Yes, we are losing 200 species plus a day. Yes, there are insane atrocities happening all over the world. All that is true and it's not the full story. We don't know what the full story is. But we also know that we are losing, and how to stay with the trouble, how to stay with the truth of the matter but also being able to find that vitality in the truth, and not finding vitality and false solutions, not finding vitality in being sold some type of fantasy that isn't real, but really being able to find the vitality while holding the immensity of what's happening. I know for me it’s a daily practice. And so everything that you just said, I felt so… I'm over here kind of “rah rah” like completely feeling resonant with how you're understanding the weight of the world. Because something that I can't stand is being sold fantasies, whether it's an environmental justice fantasy or something like that. I'm so tired of being sold and patronized and yeah, just sold this type of ecological fantasy that we are not in. But how to not be cynical within that is really a challenge. So I really appreciate your viewpoint.
Now, I want to go back to the Cyborg Manifesto for a minute. And I'd really like to turn to your critiques of the, let's see, the Marxist, Western-centric, white feminism that are outlined in your Cyborg Manifesto, and really woven, it seems like, throughout your work. And these feminist points of view, as you say, are rooted in problematic definitions of what it means to be a woman, a gender essentialism that further etches harmful dualisms into our cultural psyche, and really erases people of color as well as our trans, gender nonconforming and Two-Spirit allies. So if you could speak a bit more about this idea of cyborg feminism, and how we might build strong intersectional movements and inclusive coalitions based on affinity and political kinship rather than just identity.
Donna Haraway Right, first of all, I think I work by addition and not subtraction. So, I am positioned as white through perfectly describable historical and personal processes. I am a Marxist feminist - I have worked out of that heritage with others. I have inherited a great deal from what got named ‘radical feminism’ or ‘cultural feminism’ or ‘lesbian feminism’ or ‘feminism feminism’, etc, etc, etc. All these various names, which are often turned into insults in political practice so as to name one's better position vis à vis someone else's less good position. I have been undone and redone by women of color feminisms. I have been undone and redone by Indigenous people struggles, which sometimes carefully use the term feminism but more often are going to use other idioms for talking about the care of each other, the making of kin, the care of the earth, including the practices of women, and Two-Spirit people, and generations are going to use the word feminism if at all, with great care, but with whom alliances can be very deep and very profound. And various speakers will, depending on their strategic location in a struggle, adopt and foreground different idioms - not in bad faith, but because of the complexity of these multi-sided struggles.
So, the cyborg I think does not subtract and throw away identity feminisms of various kinds, nor does it ever claim that Marxist feminism worked with the same kind of essentialism that I think certain kinds of radical feminists were accused of doing, in which I often think they did not do. I think the word essentialist is often used as an insult as opposed to a description, and it misdescribes what people might have meant by a kind of essential identity or the importance of being a woman… a woman born, for example, and Adrienne Rich, would be a fool to say that was some kind of reductive essentialism. So I tried really hard not to work by subtraction but to work by addition, which is an intersectionality particularly as it was taught through the struggle of legal and other practices by U.S. women of color feminists, and then expanded and was translated and recomposed in lots of ways by various figures around the world, both of color and not… Anyway, intersectionality certainly was one of the ways in which one is decomposed and recomposed.
But I was I was throwing out a notion of cyborg feminism as a kind of a interrogative, using the networking and potentialities for alliances and entanglement, as a “are ‘we’ are ‘we’?”, what kind of ‘we’ can be built that also includes these systems apparatuses, these digital apparatuses, the cyborg and the cyborg worldings, what kinds of entanglements already exist and can be made stronger, and which need to be made weaker. So I don't disavow my Marxist feminism or a bunch of other things. Rather, they get recomposed as other kinds of attachment sites get built in the working. So I think a corollary of what I'm saying is that to do this kind of work over time, this kind of work and play with each other, really means you show up. You show up at the demonstration. You show up at the meeting. You show up at the journal collective. You show up in the writing venture. You read each other's stuff. You read the pamphlets. You help write the propaganda. You become informed about struggles that are not necessarily your own but which you're in alliance with even sometimes from a great distance.
That showing up in practice, which takes time - actually showing up - is kind of the sine qua non of staying with the trouble.
Ayana Young Yeah, I really like this thought process of adding and not subtracting. And I think it's also a really wonderful way to not be so divisive, especially in movement spaces. So instead of throwing somebody theory in their face, or saying it's not good enough, but rather taking bits and pieces from them all. And I love how you're saying being done and undone, or over and over again, I love that - being able to be so open to these different ways of knowing and belonging and understanding. And instead of throwing it out, like throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak when we get mad at one group or another, but instead really understand what are the pieces that we need to be holding, and be adding to our own understanding of these very complex situations. So I really love that.
Donna Haraway Yeah, we can hold on to anger without turning someone into the enemy. I'm not saying never be angry, or never realize others are angry at you. Hold that - don't walk away from it too fast. But it isn't the same thing as being each other's enemy.
Ayana Young Mm hmm. I really feel, that I really feel that. You had mentioned at the beginning of the conversation about, I think reproductive rights, and I know I have been thinking so much about the politics of reproduction in the body, particularly in the past few weeks, as states across the country are passing some of the most restrictive abortion legislation in decades. Just earlier this month, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a Fetal Heartbeat Bill HB 481, and that effectively outlaws abortion after six weeks, subjecting people who seek illegal abortions or terminate their own pregnancies to life imprisonment and the death penalty. I mean, I have chills just thinking about that. And these horrifying bills are but one piece of this country's long history and honestly ongoing legacy of asserting domination and control over people's bodies, particularly those already marginalized. So in light of these complex and, of course, very sensitive issues, how are you thinking about the politics of reproduction, particularly as it relates to our environmental crisis? And I guess another part of that is, how does your invocation “make kin not babies” relate to a reproductive justice framework, which includes both the right to parent, to raise children in a safe, healthy environment, as well as the right to not parent access to safe abortions, etc.
Donna Haraway So much in that question, first, a couple of really critical affirmations. The only person who could possibly make a decision about the intimacy of pregnancy and the outcome of carrying a new life is the woman in whose body it is happening. She is the only imaginable person who could possibly be entrusted with that decision. I may not agree with her decision, I may have a lot of things to say about it, but it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, the only person who could possibly be entrusted with that crucial decision is the pregnant woman herself: not ‘pregnant person’ in the abstract, the actually existing pregnant woman. And anyone who gets in the way of that trust, that responsibility - notice, I am avoiding the word ‘right’. It's not that I don't think it's a right in the context of our legal system, it's that I think the more profound issue is that there is nobody else in the intimacy of the situation who could possibly make the decision.
So I think that's a reproductive trust position more than a reproductive rights position. It's crucial to reproductive justice, but it's radically insufficient. A reproductive justice position is about the capacity to bring future generations into the world, in health and safety and joy and flourishing, and all that that takes in immigration policy, in housing, in agriculture, in medicine, in contraceptive technology, that actually existing people actually want to use as opposed to long-acting imposable that have a quite different political register to them. The ongoing investment in new kinds of contraceptive technologies that are really what people want, a kind of comprehensive politics, practice, science, alliance building, for making generations, which I would be in a shorthand call a pro-child world, but a non-natalist world. It is not anti-natalist. It doesn't say that anyone who gets pregnant and has a baby is somehow doing a terrible thing - I don't think that for a minute, and I think people are situated quite differently. But I think human babies smell almost as good as puppies.
In other words, I think what I'm saying is, I think I understand a little bit of the incredible sensuality of bringing a baby into present, including the anger and the horror and the depression, and you know, all of the affects that are involved in that, bringing a new person into the world, all of it. I think that every born one requires all of our support. And human persons, namely, women who are bringing these beings into the world simply must be trusted, whether I think it's a good idea or not. They simply must be trusted. And the whole apparatus of making kin with much less natalism and much more making kin non-natally is in my view urgent. I think that we now are about 7.6 billion human beings alive on the planet today, the rich fractions of that population are using up the resources of this planet at an extraordinarily rapid rate with extreme injustice to the more marginalized members of this population, who may be having babies at a higher rate. But frankly, poor people are not having babies at a much higher rate than rich people oftentimes actually a lower rate. Those populations still having babies at a fairly high rate are the most marginalized, the most subject of permanent war and extraction and exterminationism, that the great majority of groupings of people on this planet are having babies at a quite low rate.
But the already existing young women who’ve not yet had even a single baby guarantee that the population will continue to grow through the end of the current century to about 11.2 billion people. It's almost impossible not to happen. And it will only be that small if reproductive rates continue to fall. If they remain stable or grow, that 11.2 billion is radically too small a number. So I think it's really really really really important for people who think of themselves as part of reproductive justice work, part of progressive work broadly, part of creative ecologies, to really think about human numbers and our impacts, and the differentiated quality of those impacts questions of justice and capitalism and distribution, but not to talk about human numbering feels to me a kind of denialism.
Ayana Young Now you also talk about this briefly in your film, Storytelling for Earthly Survival, a collaboration with Fabrizio Terranova, but I think there's so much to be said for investing in nonheteronormative joy and belonging. And I really love your idea of creating rituals that celebrate making family beyond the imperative of biological reproduction. But rather than always treating this as a tragedy or a loss, and in many ways a substitute, or kind of even failed femininity or motherhood, this nuclear family in particular, it's such a dominant framework in the American mythic imagination. So I'm wondering how can we recover a sense of wholeness of deep relationality and belonging with our non-natal or non-genealogical kin?
Donna Haraway Well, two ways. One is in the mode of historical memory and critique, which is really getting it, that the white hetero normative nuclear family is a historical invention, it's fairly recent. Its post World War II instantiation was absolutely part of the spread of US imperialism, and its models, including its population control models, that the white hetero normative nuclear family is an instrument and not human nature. A kind of constant redefining of that critique, I think, is important. And then the other is recognizing how much non-natalist kin we already are engaged in. By the way, I'm not for a minute not talking about loving my brothers and, you know, I'm not talking about disowning in some sense one's natal family, or the bringing a baby into the world with another person who's also a parent isn't part of that. But these are foreground, background, and addition operations, not substitute. I actually think a fairly small number of women really, really seriously want, or need, to have a baby. And most of us neither want to nor need to, in circumstances in which living with generations living with the old and the young and with each other, affirming the financial wherewithal to do that, affirming adoption, affirming making financial arrangements to take care of friends, not just in the heteronormative gay marriage model, which I agree is a civil right, but I also think was in many ways a profound loss in our thinking about sexual liberation. The kind of: what do we need in architecture? What do we need in legal instruments? What do we need in law? What do we need in mortgage financial instruments? What do we need in celebrations, national festivals for adoption (including adults adopting other adults)? What would it actually take to have a national festival or local festivals where communities that are in place adopt in all seriousness and for a period of at least two generations, an immigrant, family or group? What would it take actually to create the conditions that don't just depend on individual goodwill? Where people can actually rely on each other for affective help, for material help, for celebrating each other's kin? What would it take to match, say, immigrant families with resident families over two generations to promise that to each other? And what kinds of tax structures would make that possible so it doesn't depend on goodwill and philanthropy?
If we really thought about what it would take to make kin in the mode of addition non-natalistly (which is an ugly word): making kin that gives genealogical continuity because I think, you know Marshall Sahlins and others who theorized kinship, David Schneider, others, Marilyn Strathern… if you have a cousin, a cousin has you. If you have a dog, a dog has you. If you have a kin, a kin has you. If you have a relative, a relative has you. Kinship is reciprocal and it's not optional. And it goes on into the future: it reaches into the past, it reaches into the future. It's generational. Kinship has to loop through time. So what kind of kinship invention, as well as inheritance, are we talking about. And many groupings of people on this planet, Kim Tallbear writes about it eloquently when she talks about beyond settler sexualities, and talks about some of the inherited practices of kin making and generational care that she both experienced and proposes to strengthen the Lakota families that she grew up with. There's plenty on the earth already that offers teachings in actual practice, as well as in our own lives. Many of us have lived in communes, my first husband was gay, and I was part of a nonheteronormative gay world. In a way that was really kind of an amazing time of my life. There are children that I inherited from those groupings that are my lifetime kin. I'm the godmother to a boy who was adopted from Guatemala by a close colleague and friend - all the complexities of international adoption are surely built into that. We inherit the complexities, all of them, including the histories of U.S. imperialism. These are not innocent acts. But they make kin emphasizing that making kin does not require making babies and that we need many fewer babies who are much better taken care of.
Ayana Young I absolutely agree with you. When we were researching for this episode, I came across this term ‘forced life’ coined by Eric Stanley in an interview with you and Sarah Franklin in 2017. And there's a quote that I’d like to read, “forced life is not the organization of the forces of life and death for flourishing, but rather for extractive profit. It's about ecological obliteration through turning all of the earth into nothing but a resource for keeping human beings alive and growing.” And I think this is such an important point, and to just circle around the larger questions of life and death and disposability in these critical times. And that we really must consider not only who is made to die under systems of oppression, but also who is forced to live in cruel, exploitative, and unethical ways.
And so I'm just wondering, where do you see examples or moments of forced life in our society today? For me, I think of so many things, but one of which I think about the biotech industry, and Monsanto, which spends millions of dollars a year trying to sell an empty vision of survival and planetary future that is completely devoid of biodiversity, a kind of forced life that extinguishes the human spirit and violates our sacred connection to the earth. I also think about Monsanto, and interviewing people who have known people who work there, and they actually think that they are supporting life. So again, it's this forced life, this imprisonment, of life itself. So many thoughts around that. But I'd love to open this up to you and hear what you think about it.
Donna Haraway Yeah, well, life is such an abstraction. But people who work at Monsanto, often in good faith, really are promoting systems of raising food that they think of as essential to feeding the numbers of human beings alive on this planet, that I think they really do understand this takes radically simplified ecological systems that displace risks in a way that they think is tolerable. I don't think they're fools. And I don't think they're necessarily - depending on how a congress, how an engagement occurs on an individual level - they're certainly not necessarily enemies. I think the corporate capitalism of Monsanto, I think, is an enemy. But I think we would be in error to dismiss all of the people working for Monsanto as enemies.
But let me go back to Eric Stanley, who's just a wonderful, beautiful human being. He was writing a dissertation with me at the time that he taught me about forced life. Forced death was much on the critical theory agenda at the time and Eric who was profoundly involved in prison politics, in prison abolition, in alternatives to human prison politics, and the forced life of prisoners. There's capital punishment but perhaps much worse, or in any case in relationship with capital punishment, is the forced life of captivity: the forced life of slavery, and the forced life of prisons. Not the same thing, but certain kinds of historical continuities. And always, Eric was part of animal rights activism, radical animal rights activism, legal and less than legal… anyway, people that he was living with were vulnerable to arrest and other kinds of raids and many other kinds of things. Activist radical politics around other living beings animals in captivity in the agribusiness food complex in particular. The research animal issue was Eric thought of as somewhat more complicated, but he was pretty radical on that, too. Eric really taught me that I had to pay attention to forced life in order to kill. So if we think of the many billions of chickens forcibly made to live each year in order to market their flesh for profit, but also in order to produce protein for protein deficient populations, and also in order to produce meat for a growing global middle class (same could be said with pigs and cattle and other “meat animals”, the working meat animals, the agroindustrial meat complex), Eric was the one who forced me to pay attention to the way capitalist forced life worked. And the abstraction life, so that the actual living being ends up having no place. Similarly, was pro-life politics. The actual living pregnant woman, or not yet pregnant woman, the actual woman - or the actual living person - is not present in a notion of pro-life. Life is a radically destructive abstraction. And I think that substituting living being/living person/living plant/living animal every chance we get, and then ask who lives and who dies in these assemblages.
So Anna Tsing and I have been working on a notion of ‘Plantationocene’ in interesting connection with ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ and ‘Chthulucene’ at the time of the earthly ones, namely paying attention to the 500 year history, approximately, of radical ecological simplification, forced labor systems - African slavery is the crucial case that transforms the world - radical ecological simplification, radical forced labor, substitution of the existing living beings in a place with other living beings brought from elsewhere, such that they have no refuge (captives can't run away because they have no kin nearby, that kind of thing). The way the Plantationocene transformed the earth and became the model for capitalism, including to this day, the palm plantations, the monocropping systems, the forced vulnerable migrant labor systems in the Central Valley of California, who drink dirty water even while the plants get all the clean water, the good water is directed toward the agribusiness crops for global marketing. The actual communities legal and illegal living in the silliness and Central Valley are drinking heavily polluted water… If there isn't a more materialist proof of the ongoing nature of the Plantationocene, I don't know what would be.
So I'm not a pro-life activist, anywhere, including in my relationship to other living beings. And I think killing is a complex matter. I do, in fact, buy and eat meat because I feel an obligation that all of the working food and fiber animals in the world not become nothing but museum pieces or heritage animals. But that is very difficult, and I'm not sure that's the right decision. I am compelled by my vegan colleagues to think that's a really iffy decision to make. I'm still making it, still proposing it. Living in the difficulties of complex decisions, but opposing the agroindustrial forced life complex that Eric Stanley was talking about, surely that's easy, or at least easy as a decision, if not always easy to know what to do.
Ayana Young So you had mentioned the Chthulucene, which you write about in your book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, and you also just mentioned the Capitalocene. And, of course, many of the listeners are really familiar with the Anthropocene and all these all the -cenes, but I would really love for you to unpack these words because you give so much care to terminology and the linguistic origin of the words and their historic and literary context. So yeah, if you could unpack a few of these terms, the Chthulucene particularly, and then just the multiplicity of meanings that they carry, and why they're really important tools.
Donna Haraway So I'm not in favor of just multiplying words for the playful pleasure of it all, though one might take 10 minutes in a day to do that and then stop it. I want words that actually do some work, that helped collect us up in order to live and die better with each other. So Anthropocene, this suffix cene, it means a time; it is a time of a thick present, it is the time of the recent, the time of now. So the the suffix cene doesn't mean a visual scene, it's rather a temporal term. It's about a thickness of now. So the Anthropocene was proposed for the thickness of the now in which human beings become a planetary transformative force of a dominant kind. And I and many others did not like the term because I think it mistakenly ascribed to human beings as a species what I think are the actions, or the systemic actions, of historically located people over about a 500 year period, which might be better named the Capitalocene: the time of the emergence of capitalism. And then as I just described, the Plantationocene, the beginning of all of this really was in the invention of the plantation, and enslaved labor systems and all that followed from that. But all that's well and good both as critique and as making us foreground very important historical processes, foreground what continues and what doesn't, foreground what kinds of actions might be needed to be taken and what is already being done.
But I proposed the Chthulucene, also - not instead of but also - because I wanted to emphasize the time of the earthly ones, the time of the phonic ones, of the tentacular, and muddy and living and dying ones of the earth, a time of Earthlings: not captured in all of these other formations, co-temporary with them, both old and now and yet to come. And that play and that are deeply in play in the world, and not innocent, not necessarily nice, if the notion that the Chthulucene is the time of the happy phonic Earthlings is nonsense. Because the Earth itself, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers in different ways talk about this, the earth itself is in revolt, the earth itself is rising against its destroyers. In his new book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour talks about the geo-social classes of the earth, and the offworld classes of the destroyers. And that those of us who are in end of the earth and are at stake to the forces of destruction must rise up with the earth against the destroyers. It's a very interesting political fiction that he's developing in his little book Down to Earth.
So the Chthulucene developed for me from the word phonic, or the Greek root of the earthly ones, not just necessarily under the earth under the waters, but those of the earth. All of us with each other in these coterminous, in these co-temporalities. That's what I was trying to do. I think I made an oral mistake, a mistake of the ear, by calling it Chthulucene instead of Thanocene, because I haven't yet read Lovecraft. Actually, I confess that I still haven't. But obviously his Cthulhu was in my head because I am a reader of science fiction, of course, it's in the air I breathe. I was unconscious, it was way too late, before I realized that my Chthulucene was going to evoke his Cthulhu wrongly, because his tentacular patriarchal monster of the deep Cthulhu is not related to my Chthulu. So by a pronunciation trick emphasizing the soft phonic, I hope to differentiate it. But it was really a mistake on my part not to call it the Thanocene.
Ayana Young My goodness, Donna, thank you. I already would love to have another conversation with you again because I feel like I'm going to listen to this conversation and I'm going to have so many awakenings and notes. And like you said, holding all the feelings, holding it all, holding the anger, the love, the admiration… being able to really sit with all the feelings and not demonizing one or the other, not making one wrong and one right, getting out of that, what you're saying, colonial Protestant mindset that it has to be either or has to be bad or good. So I have so much to soak in with this conversation. And hopefully we'll meet at some point in person in the Redwoods as we both belong to this forest, this incredible Redwood Wonderland. And yeah, this has just been I have beyond words that I can describe right now.
Donna Haraway Well, thanks for the conversation. It's really a privilege for you to have done this, and a privilege for me that you did this.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana young. The music you heard today was by Jeremy Harris. I'd like to thank our deeply dedicated team, podcast production and editing: Andrew Storrs, writing and lead research: Francesca Glaspell, outreach and research: Hannah Wilton and Aiden McCrae, podcasts music: Carter Lou McElroy, digital community organizing: Aaron Wise, graphic and web design: Erica Ekrem, and Melanie Younger with partnerships in media.