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Speculum of the Other Cene

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10418385-4383037

1938-8020

Joseph Albernaz,

Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

In September 2017 the Oakland gallery Pro Arts featured Past Presence, a joint exhibition of separately produced but thematically linked works by the artists Indira Allegra and Christopher R. Martin. What tied the two artists' concerns together was precisely the question of the tie itself: the weave, the fold, the thread, and the tangle. As the description of the exhibition read, Past Presence was a "response to the politicized trauma in Black contemporary life through the medium of weaving," whether in Allegra's "digital weaving" of audio and images of black families grieving for victims of police violence, or in Martin's large black-and-white cotton-based tapestries depicting symbols of trauma and resistance. Particularly striking were three of Martin's side-by-side tapestries that each depicted the knot of a noose, all tilted at an italicized angle so as to look like the Satanic number 666—evoking the long tradition of African American theology (both Christian and Islamic) associating white supremacy with the devil. At the heart of Martin's work seemed to be a material reflection on the violence of the tie, each knot of the noose haunted by its homophone not: the word of negation, exclusion, and violence. Allegra and Martin's remarkably powerful exhibition dealing with weaving, tying, and violence thus made its viewers reflect on their own various modalities of implication in structures of violence and exclusion—from the most abstract systematic sense of being implicated in something, to the most material and literal, where implicate comes from the Latin verb plicare, meaning "to weave" or "to fold."1 This was on my mind as I read Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, which is similarly obsessed with the ties that bind and blind. As one of the book's many refrains declares, "It matters what knots knot knots. . . . [It matters] what ties tie ties" (sw, 12).A leitmotif throughout Haraway's coruscating, baffling, invigorating, and frustrating book is the multivalent abbreviation SF, which stands for, among other things, "science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far" (sw, 2). The most important of these is "string figures," which incorporates the many metaphoric uses of string words as figures for relationality—weaves, folds, ties, knots, threads, and so on—as well as literal uses of strings, as in the Navajo weaving practices of na'atl'o' that interest Haraway, or the Crochet Coral Reef collaborative art project she lovingly details. SF, we read, "is a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark . . . the cultivating of multispecies justice. . . . SF is practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure for ongoingness in the Chthulucene" (sw, 3). I will return to the rebarbative "Chthulucene"—boldly thrown in the title—and the language of the book in general, but this quote introduces us to the rhythm of Haraway's thought and her main concern here, which is the main concern of all of her work: existence as an infinite—though always partially intelligible—welter of relationality. Indeed, she refreshingly refuses to shy from the ontological import of her claims: "Variously and dangerously configured relationality is just what is" (sw, 175n). Haraway has been one of our most important thinkers of relation, connection, and community for more than thirty years—and one of our most subtle and underrated metaphysicians, though she would probably disavow such a label—especially for reminding us that relation goes beyond humans, involving all beings of all kinds. The enemies in this book are less the usual suspects of principalities, powers, and rulers like capitalism and imperialism (though they are present) than the cynical attitude of "bitter defeatism" and the framework of "bounded individualism," both avatars of spiritual wickedness in low places (sw, 3, 5). The friends, of all species, are too numerous to name, but Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, Marilyn Strathern, several science fiction writers (especially Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin), and Haraway's dog Cayenne are among the key dialogue companions in this generously cited book, whose endnotes amount to over one-third of the text.Crucially, Haraway's attentiveness to and insistence on relationality is also paired with a vigilant refusal of the "god tricks" or traps that would calcify and control any configuration of relations: traps of wholeness, essence, ground, transcendence, teleology, unity, innocence, identity, and so on. Instead, this relational, ecological existence we are all tangled up in is groundless, nonguaranteed, "ongoing," "dangerously configured," "noninnnocent"—we are all implicated, though in different ways, and some more than others (sw, 13). Most of the contents of Staying with the Trouble are variously successful and insightful attempts to do just that: to stay with and in the trouble, to pay attention to the different ways relations happen, and don't, and why (I suspect "staying with the trouble" may secretly be a variation on Hegel's "tarrying with the negative").2 The chapters are a series of (perhaps too many) case studies, plus one multigenerational creative fabulation, of what transpires in the material folds of ecological entanglement—what Deleuze called "the pleats of matter" in his own reflection on the ontology of the fold (The Fold [Le pli]). These alternately hopeful and bleak case studies and the theorizing they propel are appropriately calibrated for the times of catastrophe that are no longer coming but are now inarguably, urgently, here. The conviction behind it all—one that I think is ultimately necessary, productive, and correct—is that relationality, while unavoidable and groundless, is not purely random and hermetically singular. Rather, relationality is situated, an important word for Haraway dating back at least to her influential 1988 essay "Situated Knowledges." The "relentless relational historical contingency" that Haraway invokes has shapes and ongoing stories, "abundant histories of conquest, resistance, recuperation, and resurgence" (sw, 15). The task is to pay attention to these reticulate shapes and patterns, using whatever we can from them. To stay with the trouble of relationality is to put up with those who keep forming us (Alice Notley), and whose form keeps us.The first chapter contains some of the book's most intriguing case studies, which all involve interactions of pigeons with humans and the environment. Haraway begins with the imperial and colonial history of these ambiguous avian creatures (critters is her preferred term throughout the book, as in When Species Meet [2007]), introduced to the Americas by Europeans in 1606, and then explores some of the many recent "threads tied by and with these birds" (sw, 16). After dwelling on pigeon racing and attempted collaborations with pigeons for Coast Guard rescue missions, she turns to the environmental justice initiative PigeonBlog in Southern California. PigeonBlog is a combination of science, sport, and art that deploys pigeons equipped with scientific instruments to measure urban air quality, gathering and streaming data in real time; pigeon flight patterns are able to gather data that the "official instruments" can't measure (sw, 21). Since those at risk of health problems from air pollution are disproportionately low-income, immigrants, and people of color, this is just one example of how nonhuman beings are tied up with contingent human histories of economic domination, colonization, urbanization, racialization, and more. Haraway's point is that any hope for resistance, for new coalitions and communities—her incessantly repeated word is recuperation—must deal with the political ecologies of these "differently situated" entanglements: "Pigeons fly us not into collaborations in general, but into specific crossings from familiar worlds into uncomfortable and unfamiliar ones to weave something that might come unraveled, but might also nurture living and dying" (sw, 16).People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) attempted to shut down PigeonBlog on grounds of animal abuse, largely because the initiative was not scientific enough, having no clearly defined research goal. Haraway critiques PETA's abstract Kantian formalist ethics, which are able to imagine only a "teleological, functional" encounter between humans and animals, rather than the blurry, situated happenings "in the realm of play, outside the dictates of teleology, settled categories" that actually characterized the project (sw, 21). This is not to say that serious ethical questions are not raised by this use of animals but that questions have to be asked from inside "the common fray," not from abstract universal principles or a transcendental perspective (sw, 40).3 Haraway is quite open that PigeonBlog, like anything else, is "noninnocent"; there are troubling elements across the spectrum, from the concrete questions of animal ethics, to US military inquiries about using similar technologies, to the long-term historical fact that pigeons are "creatures of empire," and usually annoying birds at that (sw, 15). But while these violent imperial histories—the "terrible histories" and the frayed threads of their continual present effects (cf. again Past Presence)—are inextricable from human-pigeon relations, these relations are not reducible to this history and determined in advance (sw, 29); new possibilities for community can emerge, and they emerge precisely in the space that beings and collectives create by surprising us, by exceeding their grounds, histories, and fixed identities. Of course, this common, multispecies space is never simply given as such: it must be struggled for each time in the daily, mundane work of ecological politics. In this way Haraway's thought provides not an alternative but a supplement to the elegant, Gnostic misery of so much humanities critique. This kind of critique often only wants to tell part of the story—the violent history part—and in doing so it forecloses the communal possibilities residing in the ways that the violence that constructs the world can never fully determine, ground, or capture the moving truth of social life, which is to say ecological life.4These cracks in the facade that we know as the world are what call for inhabiting and expanding; they limn the trouble worth staying with. But as always, Haraway gets to the general only from the muddle and middle of the particular. She is at her best in the first chapter dwelling with PigeonBlog and other similar pigeon-related ventures, narrating surprising, messy real-world entanglements and drawing incisive conceptual conclusions, making a virtue of messiness in both the form and content of her work—the kind of thing she has been doing essentially since her first book, the 1976 Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (I would call her work anthropological, but that would give too much pride of place to the Anthropos). The particular example she chooses here emphatically does not mean that we should have a PigeonBlog everywhere—it wouldn't work everywhere. Rather, PigeonBlog and the other case studies model a "pattern" of coexistence or kin making, a pattern whose situated material shape will take different forms, with different rhythms, at different places, but will retain the lived fact of unavoidable, groundless relationality: "String figures . . . propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on this wounded and vulnerable earth. . . . This account is a story, an invitation as much as an accomplishment" (sw, 10, 25; my emphasis). Haraway's paradigmatic thought of patterns—which she invokes in tow with the thread and weaving metaphors that ubiquitously pepper the book—resembles Giorgio Agamben's concept of "form-of-life," though welcomely a less humanist version. Agamben's form-of-life names a way of seeing singular life and law as coinciding, so that every life can be seen under the aspect of the collective potentiality it radiates, or proposes; everyday acts and gestures of (co)existence disclose themselves not just as facts but as possibilities.5 Patterns or string figures, like form-of-life, thus promise the "ontologically inventive" possibility of superseding the figures and force of law itself, orienting existence toward the play that immanently exceeds any rules, laws, or grounds (sw, 98).Some of the other case studies, however—the ant-acacia one in chapter 6, for example—fall flat. Despite its urgency, erudition, and exuberance, the book in general also has a tendency to feel thin, marred at times by Haraway's breathlessly rapid pace and general distractedness, which jars as often as it illuminates unforeseen connections. It is true that the formal messiness of the book makes sense insofar as it recapitulates its theme and content of staying with the trouble, but the omnivorous hunger for multiplicity threatens to undermine the thick situatedness she is so insistent on. Haraway also tries to cover every possible base in some of these case studies, assuring her readers at every step that she is aware of the traps and problematic terrain she wanders through; this is appreciated, yet it also can frustrate by deferring claims in favor of constant qualification, to the point where constant qualification becomes the main claim itself. Two other problems with the book, both of them covered at length in Alyssa Battistoni's extensive and brilliant though not entirely fair review in N + 1,6 are its general avoidance of direct confrontation with global capitalism, and the cross-generational, population-control science fiction fable that makes up the last chapter ("The Camille Stories: Children of Compost").Broaching the issue of capitalism briefly, I would say that Haraway's wariness of universalism in favor of local situatedness makes her avoid analyzing in any serious way the near-universal menacing grasp of capital, out of a seeming fear of reproducing the bad universalism of capital itself. This is the case even as she repeatedly, approvingly cites Jason Moore and Andreas Malm's assertion that we drop the Anthropocene name in favor of the "Capitalocene," as capitalism is alleged to be the real culprit for worldwide ecological crisis (more on the "-cene" naming question in a moment).7 Similarly, her idiom's positive inflection of "cobbling together" and "getting on" is a little too close for comfort to the neoliberal ethic of contingent labor. This, though, is true of any discourse that wants to think the ontology of contingency—existence as ontologically groundless, "without guarantees" (sw, 98)—while actively resisting the ways in which Uberized contemporary capitalism imposes an atomizing condition of "flexibility" and vulnerability on a contingent labor force that must cobble together a living, always distributing this vulnerability unequally along race, gender, and other lines.8The book's language also gets in the way, tending toward a combination of hyperproliferative neologisms and deeply repetitive sloganeering. This recurring mix sometimes becomes cringeworthy even for those who are great admirers of Haraway and those with a generally high tolerance for jargony wordplay, both camps in which I include myself. I appreciate Haraway's blithe disregard for the typical affective posture of humanities writing, but in this book she can be, as we now say, a little extra. The slogans—endemic to the manifesto genre at which Haraway otherwise excels—come hard and fast without stopping, and without being very interesting: "Think we must!," "Make kin not babies!," "Stay with the trouble," "It matters what X Xs X," and so on. And as mentioned, Haraway's writing sometimes lunges into self-parody, for example: "Terrans do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures, they do not do History" (sw, 49); or "Speaking resurgence to despair, the Chthulucene is the timespace of the symchthonic ones, the symbiogenetic and sympoietic earthly ones" (sw, 71).Overall, one just has to decide not to get too caught up in the tics, which, in the context of the general wealth of the book and Haraway's thought, isn't that hard. This last quote bears tarrying with, though, as it brings us to the most questionable and conceptually consequential neologism: the titular Chthulucene. The Chthulucene is Haraway's contribution to the recent menagerie of "-cene" proposals jostling for recognition to replace Anthropocene, the latter being the new geological epoch named for human beings' cumulative effects on the climate and earth system (following the Holocene). These other "-cenes"—some of which Haraway discusses in the book—include the Capitalocene, the Plantionocene, the Petrolocene, the Coloniocene, and many more; all understandably find the homogeneous false universalism of Anthropos wanting and promise to name the age better by finding the true origins of the crisis. In Haraway's book, as outlined particularly in chapter 2, the Chthulucene is one of the three "timescapes"—Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene—and represents the hopeful messy embrace of ecological relationality. The Chthulucene is thus an "ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names" and that undoes the "too-big stories of Capitalism and the Anthropos" (sw, 51, 55).Haraway's cogent critique of the Anthropos is just one of many places in the book that exemplify the extraordinary idiosyncratic feminist approach that she continues to develop and productively to place at the heart of her thought. Yet the choice of the term Chthulucene is dubious—Haraway derives it from the Greek word for earth (kthôn) and from the Pimoa cthulhu spider that lives in northern California forests near Haraway; if you're wondering about H. P. Lovecraft's colossal primordial God-monster Cthulhu, the obvious resonance for almost everyone else, Haraway shrugs off this darker genealogy with a bizarre nonchalance (Lovecraft's virulent racism is notorious), noting the slight difference in spelling. Chapter 2, the most direct discussion of the "-cene" question, is the most theoretical and abstract of the book, taking up several prominent thinkers in the environmental humanities like Strathern, Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Thom van Dooren. This makes the chapter rich and helpful in many ways but also largely detached from the lively case studies that make other parts of the book so compelling. The closest this chapter comes to those studies is a brief discussion of the aforementioned Pimoa cthulhu spider, its eight legs linked to octopuses in an uncertain invocation of "tentacularity."To be sure, Haraway keenly understands the urgency and challenges of this qualitatively new epoch we are in and that we have unwittingly made (but "who, we?," as Jacques Derrida would have us ask). Her paradigm of thinking the situatedness of groundless relationality is basically the right one. Yet what is gained from the addition of the Chthulucene, or from the proliferation of other "-cene" proposals? In our uncanny temporal disjunction of stalled, zombie neoliberalism and too-soon, too-late ecological crisis, what "-cene" is this after all, this -cene which is not one?9 Can we retain the critiques of "Man" and fold them into the Anthropos and Anthropocene itself? Perhaps rather than reifying an exclusionary particular image of Man, the Anthropocene simply can name this crisis, constantly undermining itself, resisting reification and figuration, and staying with the trouble, with the continuing, colliding, and situated struggles for many modes of justice. Thought this way, the Anthropocene catachrestically indexes a collective demand to unmake and remake the image of the human, freed from the constitutive exclusions and violence encoded in the false universal of Man, an exigency that the work of Sylvia Wynter points us toward. In other words, let's keep Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene but just call it the Anthropocene. Haraway even approaches this possibility at one point: "We will continue to need the term Anthropocene. . . . What and whom the Anthropocene collects in its refurbished netbag might prove potent for living in the ruins and even for modest terran recuperation" (sw, 47).For it is doubtful that the Chthulucene—or many of the other names that Haraway's energetic appellative impulse generates here10—will catch on or be useful for many people beyond Haraway herself. This makes the coinage an indulgence, though one we should probably allow this most generous of thinkers. The good thing about the neologisms, concepts, or case studies that fall flat is that each one is an "invitation" and a "proposed pattern." This means that if it doesn't resonate for us, we can decline the particular invitation or reject the proposal; we can drop it and still keep going on with the "ongoing trouble" alongside Haraway (sw, 16), still struggling in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call "the general antagonism," which is just the world—or rather, "another world in the world."11 Haraway doesn't expect or want accord, symmetry, or full coherence, as evinced by her constant recourse to the adjective partial, especially with the key term recuperation. The phrase partial recuperation occurs regularly, as does partial healing and partial resurgence, alongside a complex of "re-" words: recuperation, resurgence, reconjugate, revolution, recursive, and so forth. Recuperation is always partial because there was no whole to heal or return to in the first place; thus partial recuperation for Haraway is recuperation tout court—it is acceding to the partiality, the incompletion, that is the truth of every existence. This point has been central to her thought since the justly famous and still bracing "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), where cyborgs are "wary of holism, but needy for connection" and have "permanently partial identities."12This brings us to another key component of the book, the final chapter, which contains a concrete if speculative (or science-fictional) exploration of what ecologically benign "partial identities" might be: "The Camille Stories," a strange, bold experiment that Haraway first compos(t)ed at the Cerisy writing workshop "Narration Spéculative." As already noted, "The Camille Stories" are problematic in several respects, but I will leave it to readers to make what they will of these speculative futures and mostly refrain from criticism, since Haraway herself is upfront about the ugly histories of eugenics and population control that haunt her narrative. This narrative imagines new interactions, crossings, and configurations of humans, animals, and plants to reduce the planet to a population of 3 billion by 2435 (over five generations, five Camilles). Haraway acknowledges "failed models of population control" and maintains that "kin making and rebalancing human numbers had to happen in risky embodied connections . . . not in the abstract" (sw, 138). Yet however radical and open and imaginative this Malthusian fable is, perhaps more radical and interesting would be an openness to utterly new configurations of social being that don't necessitate population control.Haraway's insistence on the partiality of recuperation, on doing with less, doing with loss, and acknowledging the inescapability of violence is evident even in the inconclusive conclusion of her utopian parable "The Camille Stories," with which the book itself closes. At the end of the five generations that Haraway narrates, each generation bringing about a more ecologically robust (and less populous) world, the fifth Camille becomes a "Speaker for the Dead," communing with the "lost lifeways" that have departed from the earth and letting no one forget "the murders of human and nonhuman beings in the Great Catastrophes named the Plantionocene, Anthropocene, Capitalocene" (sw, 166). As a Speaker for the Dead, Camille 5 sings a song that Haraway takes from the contemporary "neopagan witch" Starhawk. "Starhawk's Song" is an injunction not to let go of history's violence: Feel the painwhere it lives deep in usfor we live, still. . . . . . . . . . . . .Raise your voice.Cry out. Scream. Wail.(166)The scream is the irreducible, unforgettable remnant. Starhawk's scream, like that of Aunt Hester, is a material marker of the ineradicable trace of violence that, because never fully past, stains every present and future, blocking the gate to paradise. Recall here the title of the art exhibition by Allegra and Martin with which I opened this review essay: Past Presence.And yet. What does this foreclose? I ask some questions not knowing at all myself. But it seems that a thinking of resurrection might have been an interesting alternative path to take. The word resurrection is absent from the book, though her characterization of Starhawk's song as "represencing" comes close (sw, 166); still, resurrection haunts the other "re-" words, not least because of the pronounced Catholic inflection of Haraway's conceptual idiom, as well as her emphasis on the importance of the dead: for the relational movement of becoming-with also means "becom[ing]-with the dead and extinct" (sw, 101).13 The concept of resurrection seems itself back from the dead of late, in ecological discourse (re-wilding; de-extinction, i.e., "resurrection biology") and in some recent theorists like François Laruelle and Quentin Meillassoux, as well as a revival of interest in the theory of resurrection associated with the strange intellectual flare that was Russian cosmism. I suspect that Haraway would be deeply suspicious of any thinking of resurrection, as it heralds too full a recuperation; she does explicitly reject "reconciliation" and "restoration" (sw, 10). But does accepting the partiality of recuperation always encode the necessity of negation, of loss, the violence that haunts every tie? Call it the problem of the "re-." Would it be possible to think an immanent relationality—a trouble—that does justice to the exclusionary knots that tie some and not others, or the knots that tie some too tightly (as in Christopher R. Martin's knots in Past Presence), while avoiding a theodicy that says violence must naturally inhere in every relation? That is: a thinking that honors the historical facticity of suffering without reinscribing it into our imaginaries of the new world to come, a theory and practice of community that refuses the sacrificial exclusions constitutive of partiality—especially antiblackness, the "nonrelationality that structures all relationality."14 Perhaps a materialist account of resurrection holds promise in this direction, and despite everything, a kernel of this thought utterly to come will have been found in Haraway's remarkable book.A thought to come, but also an impossible thought, perhaps. The difficulty of undoing the past was broached not only in the Past Presence exhibition but also at the end of David Lynch and Mark Frost's stunning recent revival of their cult TV series Twin Peaks after a twenty-five-year hiatus, in a way that bears a striking resemblance to the shattering scream at the end of Haraway's book—the scream denying full recuperation. In the spirit of Haraway's own exemplary thinking with science fiction, and her invitation for readers to do more of such speculative fabulation, I wish to close by exploring Twin Peaks's own treatment of the final scream. The original plot of the show in 1990 was set in motion by murderous and misogynist violence, with the killing of the young Laura Palmer at the hands of her father, the latter possessed by a demon known as Bob: the very opening of the show, season 1, episode 1, scene 1, is the discovery of Laura's dead body, and everything that happens follows in the wake of her tragic and mysterious death. But finally, in the penultimate episode of the new 2017 season, the hero of the show, Agent Dale Cooper, seemingly travels back in time to undo the murder of Laura, unraveling the thread of her fate; after Cooper's rescue, we see that original 1990 shot of her corpse again, but with the body dissolving into thin air. In the finale, back in what looks to be the present time, Cooper seems to confirm the success of his resurrection or full recuperation of Laura, finding her alive and middle-aged, though with a different name (Carrie Page) and in a different town. Sensing that something is wrong, Cooper takes Laura/Carrie back to her original home in Twin Peaks, Washington. They knock on the door of Laura's old house, but the current resident living there has no recollection of any Palmer family in the past, nor does Laura/Carrie have any memory of anything to do with Twin Peaks or the story of Laura Palmer. Cooper and Laura/Carrie leave the house and walk back to the street, looking dazed, and Cooper speaks his final line of dialogue in the series, a line indicating a temporal disjunction like that of Haraway's discordant "timescapes":15 "What year is this?" Laura/Carrie stares at the house, as a woman's voice—her mother's—cries "Laura!" faintly in the distance. Laurie/Carrie's face lights up in horror as she lets out an abjectly chilling scream. The house goes dark and the screen goes black as the series ends with the scream still echoing.Twin Peaks, via Cooper, attempts a full recuperation—the pun on Cooper's name is almost too neat—but the endeavor is undone by a scream. Laura's scream at the end of the series, exactly like Starhawk's scream at the end of Haraway's book, echoes as a reminder of the impossibility of truly, wholly recuperating and redeeming the suffering of the past. We are folded and woven too deeply into it, and it into us: past presence. Laura Palmer has been recuperated or resurrected—but only partially. The violence that took her life has been erased, yet the scream persists through different times, different dimensions, different worlds. What year is this, what "here" is this, what "-cene" is this, split open by the utter incommensurability of a scream?Special thanks to Brandon Callender, Amanda Jo Goldstein, and Sanders Creasy, conversations with whom helped me formulate some of the ideas herein; thanks as well to Andrew Barbour and the Qui Parle editors.