Week 2 - literature notes: Donna Haraway

"Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Anthropocene" by Donna Haraway:

Haraway proposes the term “Chthulucene” rather than “Anthropocene” or “Capitalocene”. She suggests the latter terms centre humans as the central focus and ignore the complexity of the situation or presume that the moment in time we live in is a closed event with a finite boundary and timeline. In contrast, Chthulucene implies an ongoing event, while the latter two propose a finite window of time and events.

• Haraway proposes that a core element of the Chthulucene is “tentacular thinking”, tentacle coming from the Lain tentaculum (feeler) and tentare (to feel, to try).

• “Tentacularity is about life lived along lines – and such a wealth of lines – not at points, not in spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of interlaced trails”.”

• “The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas...matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots...[they] are also nets and networks”

Anthropocene also leans towards defeatist rhetoric, and both it and Capitalocene gloss over the nuance in human influence and activity on the planet, the agency of non-human actants in the shaping of the world, and the responsibility industrial human society and Capitalism has in creating the situation we find ourselves in today. Dangerously, Capitalocene suggests a technological solution to the damage industrial society has enacted, and continues to enact, on the world. Haraway is particularly critical of the global response to climate change, including in relation to this issue.

To counter the present Anthropocenic and Capitalocenic events and thinking, a brutal sense of honesty is needed – looking directly at the horrors we’ve enacted on the world and the role we have in this destruction -, and different actions as well as different words must be undertaken.

• As Haraway says, “thinking is important! Thinking is not a process for evaluating information and argument; it is a choice between active caring for a troubled world or active participation in genocide.”

Industrial society has codified Gaia as a character, rather than a force – a maker and destroyer. Gaia, Haraway argues, is not a person, nor “a resource to be exploited, ward to be protected or mother offering nourishment”, but a complex systemic phenomena that “compose a living planet”. In anthropomorphising the natural world, we deify and distance ourselves from it and from the agency we hold in affecting it throughout actions.

• Gaia is autopoietic, self-forming and maintaining, dynamic and stable; “Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts but achieves finite systemic coherence in the face of perturbations within parameters that are themselves responsive to dynamic systemic processes.” It does not care about humans or other biological beings.

• “Gaia’s intrusion into our affairs is a radically materialist event that collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens not life on Earth itself – microbes will adapt... - but threatens the livability of Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and individuals in an “event” already underway called the Sixth Great Extinction

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Without looking for something relating to Haraway's writing, I came across Entangled Others Studio while looking into AI technology. From their website, their artist statement reads:

Entanglement is a complex state one where no single entity can be said to be separate, or somehow unaffected, by any other present entangled, we cannot consider ourselves without others, act without interacting, speak without being heard. It is a multitude of you, and others, equally present and alive, together. The rich substrate of the uncanny, eerie spaces between us and the non-human world cannot remain as an aesthetic space, our world cannot bear this self-imposed distance and denial of our inter-twined state of us and others. Becoming entangled others studio is about moving further into an entanglement with the more-than-human world of us & others. A world where diversity and inter-connectedness are nurtured and engaged.

AquA(l)formings – Interweaving the Subaqueous

2021 sculptural installation, audiovisual experience

Artists: Robertina Šebjanič, Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick

Utilising narrative-poetic reflection and backed by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, AquA(l)formings addresses the opportunity for the empathetic interspecies development of relationships with more-than-human entities. It explores the large-scale changes in the marine environment caused by human presence and tries to imagine how the new conditions (rising sea levels and water temperatures, new chemical composition …) are reflected in its inhabitants. Seas and oceans record such environmental changes in biological or geological time as memories, either within individual organisms or as marked shifts in ecosystem structures. In the theoretical core of the project, the artists lean on Donna Haraway’s writings, more specifically on her latest texts on tentacular thinking (Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, e-flux journal # 75, September 2016). Simply put, tentacular thinking is the ability to perceive the world by touching, feeling and experiencing things. Human could use it to gain new knowledge, understanding and experience of the Other and the unknown. In this respect, the authors approach the solving and analysis of issues from different perspectives in the first research phase of the project, e.g. from the point of view of the idea of an all-encompassing disintegration into the next singularity, where the line between our experiences and the Other will no longer be defined. To facilitate the idea of such and similar ideas based on visions from the perspective of unknown futures, the AquA(I)formings project uses AI technology.