In this clip I find another affinity between my way of working and Donna Haraway’s. I am wide but not deep and my only claim to expertise is in the visual arts — and even within that field I have no great depth of knowledge in any one area. The kind of practice that I’m schooled in, and which I engage with in my studio, does not occupy any of the old divisions in visual arts activity (painting, sculpture, ceramics etc.) but rather is a practice in which particular media are chosen based on their suitability to the task of thinking through particular ideas. Ben Denham, Evolution and ecology: spiral set no. 3, 2016, 70x100cm, 445nm laser on paper. Haraway models like few others deep intellectual generosity and curiosity. Staying with the Troublecites students, thinks with community activists and artists, and writes alongside scientists and fiction writers. Haraway does not want you to read her; she wants you to read with her. She also insists on conversations with all kinds of storytellers: academics or not, humans or not, environmental humanities scholars or not." We need new ideas and new ways of thinking, new kinds of stories to think with , because the old ones are failing us. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 21. ↩ Language, says Donna Haraway, can provide a route away from environmental catastrophe. That might sound implausible, but for this philosopher, ‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas.’ And language is the way we express these ideas and flow them into public consciousness. One key linguistic expression she thinks we should reconsider, Haraway explains in this book (which knits together various recent essays), is the increasingly popular terming of our current geological epoch: the ‘Anthropocene’.

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). Aphids allow us to reconsider what was for Darwin a troubling wrinkle in the competition between species, the life cycle of the parasitoid wasp. These wasps are a diverse bunch, each adapted to parasitising particular insect species. They lay their eggs inside the body of the insect so that their larvae might eat that body from the inside out to become an adult wasp. Darwin was so concerned by this wrinkle that it caused him to question his faith in a creator God. In Staying with the Trouble, we find real SF: science fiction, science fact, science fantasy, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far. So many ways to look at the world and ourselves, so many complicated ideas on how we critters will survive and thrive and die in the disturbing Chthulucene. Haraway is difficult to read. But the effort required is worth it."move away from the dictionary and theories founded on the categories of the individual and on the idea of rivalry. She calls for new ways of thinking, but her aim is not just another theoretical appeal and an attempt to build an original system of concepts, rather it is about collective action for revolutionary change in the current situation.

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. All of this, of course, would come across as passive handwringing if Haraway’s burlesque of language failed to lead anywhere. How do we turn the idea of the Chthulucene – this interwoven, nonhierarchical, symbiotic mode of living across species – into a reality, something we ‘live and die with, not just think and write with’, as she puts it? Haraway provides a few examples of small-scale art-activist-environmentalist projects (for example, an illustrator and an animal behaviourist collaborating on a Malagasy-language children’s book in which a lemur appears as the hero – encouraging a new generation of Madagascan children to look after the primate’s habitat), but none of these are convincing as real solutions to such great problems. This is easily where the book is at its weakest. Where Haraway is far more radical – and off’ers a convincing strategy for harmonising human and nonhuman animal relationships, utilising her newly established vocabulary – is in her call for concerted e’fforts to reduce the world’s human population. Staying with the Trouble is a kind of Whole Earth Catalogue of thought devices for attuning our senses to the damaged ecosystem of the still-blue planet. It makesIt makes inspiring and imaginative use ofscience fiction, art projects, geology, evolutionary theory, developmental biology, science and technology studies, anthropology, environmental activism, philosophy, feminism, horticulture, linguistics, pigeon fancying, and many other ways of thinking and knowing about ourselves, our worlds, and the many imbricate relations through which life on earth comes into being and dies." — Sarah Franklin, American AnthropologistYou can see Haraway grappling with one such troubling notion in a seminar called ‘The Challenge of Animism’ that we’ve already heard excerpts from here. Part of Haraway’s response to Isabelle Stengers involves trying to work out what Stengers might mean when she uses the phrase ‘thou shalt not regress’ in relation to animism. “Thou shalt not regress”Sawyer Seminar: The Challenge of AnimismDonna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars … In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway offers important guidance to us, the storytellers of the Chthulucene (i.e. STS scholars); in our own situated projects, we need to ask what it would take to avoid thinking traps of environmental optimism/pessimism, stay with the trouble and imagine ourselves as participants in collective world-making. While the Anthropocene has been useful for gathering the arts, humanities, and social sciences around environmental questions, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene asks us not only diagnose problems but to embrace our roles as technoscientific fabulists and learn to tell stories that strengthen ecological response-ability in a world characterized by ongoing environmental irresponsibility that is both appallingly murderous and spectacularly profitable."