The brand of holist ecological philosophy that emphasizes that ‘everything is connected to everything’ will not help us here. Rather, everything is connected to something, which is connected to something else. While we may all ultimately be connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matters — who we are bound up with and in what ways. Life and Death happen inside these relationships. And so, we need to understand how particular human communities, as well as those of other living beings, are entangled, and how these entanglements are implicated in the production of both extinctions and their accompanying patterns of amplified death. Staying with the Trouble is a worryingly pleasant read. . . . The merit of the book is therefore, oddly, that it does not succeed in fully taking away desperation and fatalism, and that it does not shy away from combining debatable traditions. In this way, it allows for multiple feminist interventions at the limits of Western science and philosophy. And it may be through affirming such philosophical ‘systems failure’ that the ‘anthropos’ may finally be dethroned."

Or to put it slightly differently, how do we rethink a present that doesn’t have at its centre that man — the Anthropos, Homo sapiens, the special ape — separate and apart from the rest of the animals, the product of political economy, Western philosophy and Christian theology? Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian individualism — preexisting units in competition relations that take up all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide). If Humans live in History and the Earthbound take up their task within the Anthropocene, too many Posthumans (and posthumanists, another gathering altogether) seem to have emigrated to the Anthropocene for my taste. Perhaps my human and nonhuman people are the dreadful Chthonic ones who snake within the tissues of Terrapolis.

Anthropocene

As always [Haraway's] work is capacious, sharp, inventive, and informed." — Kyla Tompkins, American Quarterly Sympoiesis is a simple word: it means ‘making with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoetic or self-organizing… Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems… Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. The book consists of an introduction, eight chapters, a bibliography and an index. Most chapters have been previously published between 2012 and 2015 and this may disappoint the reader who expected a completely new, coherent whole. Only the last chapter contains previously unpublished material. The chapters constitute loosely related stories, in which similar themes are developed each time from a slightly different perspective. These stories center on the problem of subjectivity; overcoming traditional categorizations and divisions (using such concepts as compost, humus, and symbionts); problems with the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Chthulucene, and the dynamics of biological research. Inevitably, parts of the book are written for different purposes and are of different length and structure: in some the author focuses more on conceptual matters, whereas others are case studies. As someone who has spent many years thinking about how we could live on Mars, I can assure you that there is no planet B. Adjusting ourselves and our society to the planet we actually live on will require us to create and enact a new structure of feeling. The feminist theorist Donna Haraway urges us to take care of our animal cousins in her provocative study Staying With the Trouble. We must establish enduring relationships between generations and species, she argues, and recognise that an improved political economy is both necessary and possible." Haraway’s emphasis on the power of storytelling and the need to radically alter the kinds of stories we tell should be required reading for all academics, artists, and activists committed to finding more ethical ways to live and die well. . . . Haraway’s multiple SF figurations and her clarion call for response-ability are timely, necessary, and contagious forms of thinking, acting, living, and surviving." — David R. Anderson, Feminist Formations

The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness. Used throughout the book, via Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret ( Women Who Make a Fuss), via Virginia Woolf ( Three Guineas) and through Maria Puig de la Bellasca, ( “Politiques féministes et construction des savories) ↩A term for the “devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.” Scott Gilbert, https://studylib.net/doc/13485101/anthropocene–capitalocene–plantationocene–chthulucene-… ↩ The etymology of her term stems from the Pimoa cthulhu, a species of spider (common to the stumps of redwoods in the writer’s native California and typical of the personal references that populate Haraway’s arguments); she uses the spider’s web as a metaphor for a vision of the world in which there is no hierarchy between humans and nonhuman animals, where instead all lives are interwoven. ‘Weaving… performs and manifests the meaningful lived connection for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational action – for hózhó – for human and nonhumans’ ( hózhó being a word from the Navajo language variously translated as peace, balance or harmony; again a defining aspect of Haraway’s writing is its mixing of terms from a variety of cultures and mythologies). Hammering home the point, Haraway compares the symbiotic relations between nonhuman animals with the way humans have organised themselves in the industrial, urban and agricultural systems built under capitalism. ‘Critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each another [sic], get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another.’ What humans have built, however, is a political and economic structure that is ‘ecosystem-destroying, human and animal labor-transforming, multispecies soul-mutilating, epidemic-friendly, corn-monocrop-promoting, cross-species heartbreaking’. The politics of what becomes a model system is an important part of Haraway’s discussion. Models are never neutral. They each suggest their own webs of inquiry, their own ways of deciding what is complex-enough and simple-enough. All model systems gesture in different ways to what lies beyond them in terms of complexity that we are unable to grasp. Haraway identifies some of the problems with the seven model systems that Scott Gilbert lists: Staying with the Trouble is broken into eight chapters, the majority of which are revisions of previous work dating from as early as 2012. Haraway delights in language, bumping colloquialisms against high theory, breeding slang with scientific taxonomy — part of the pleasure of reading this text is her “bumptious” linguistic methodology: experimental, creative, rich, chewy and rhythmically vital — thinking new worlds demands thinking new language.