Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

by Donna J. Haraway

I read this book in conjunction with a review by Ben Denham titled What Matters: Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. Denham is an Australian artist interested in the links between art and neuroscience, so his review of Haraway’s book was through an artist’s lens. He describes art as thinking with things, like space, materials, images, people and “the thoughts of other disciplines,”[1] which aligns nicely with Haraway’s interdisciplinary thinking and her view that all human and non-humans need to find innovative ways to connect. The ways that things connect are very important to my practice. The temporary connections that the pieces in my work make are vital to the interrelated tension of the work and their resistance to being finished.

Haraway rejects the idea of the Anthropocene where the human individual is central and instead offers the Chthulucene as “a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth.”[2]

She has a science-fiction angle that doesn’t particularly gel with me, but there were several ideas in her work that did.

The idea of the “thick present”[3] – expanding our concept of the present to include the past few hundred years and the future five or so generations. I feel like the older we get we are embodiments of the thick present. That is, we are the culmination of our lifetime experiences. My present includes 56 years already. And the things we are doing now are having an impact on generations to come.

The idea of enough – pulling back on our tendencies to universalise because it destroys diversity. This makes me think of agonism theory and the need to listen to diverse and differing voices.

The idea of “tentacular thinking”[4] – likening this to making string figures, temporary string shapes that rely on knots, lines, and hands to create them, making unlikely entanglements, and new knots and threads. I think of this a bit like rhizomatic thinking. There are no dead ends, only more connections that can be made. Knots, tangles and messiness also bring me to agonism. Agonism IS staying in the trouble.

The idea of interdisciplinary thinking -  Denham fanboy’s on Haraway a bit because he likes her ideas about art. “Art is never a rarefied object of formal analysis in Haraway’s work. It is always situated in relation to other forms of knowledge and, crucially, its ideas and processes — the thinking it does and that we do with it — have the potential to disrupt other ways of knowing and create new ways of doing politics.”[5] Interdisciplinary thinking is crucial to art making. For me it’s drawing from agonism and feminism. Denham says “interesting work, and working out, happens in the messiness and mistakes of thinking with and between.”[6]

[1] Ben Denham, “What Matters: Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway,” Review of Staying with the Trouble, by Donna J. Haraway.  https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/staying-with-the-trouble-donna-haraway/, accessed 14/08/2024.

[2] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.

[3] Durham, “What Matters”.

[4] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 31.

[5] Durham, “What Matters”.

[6] Ibid.

Feminist solidarity building as embodied agonism: An ethnographic account of a protest movement

by Sanela Smolovic Jones, Nik Winchester, and Caroline Clarke.

This article brings together Chantal Mouffe’s theories on agonism with Judith Butler’s theories on embodiment as a model for fostering solidarity within the feminist movement. The authors argue that agonistic theory alone is not enough to achieve this as it’s limited to language but when combined with ideas of the body and embodiment solidarity is possible. To demonstrate their theory, they used an example of a women’s protest in Montenegro in 2016. The corrupt government had revoked a law that they had brought in promising lifelong benefits to mothers of three or more children if they would renounce their jobs and pensions, leaving those women who had opted for the benefit with nothing. The protest saw diverse groups of women coming together to fight a common enemy – agonism and embodiment in action.

Agonism helps to reframe the focus on difference rather than unity that has come about through intersectional feminism which considers the many different ways women throughout the world experience discrimination. Rather than allowing the differences to create separate antagonistic groups, agonism uses the differences as a resource or strength to bring these groups together. Embodiment brings disparate groups together physically, proximity opening up opportunities for bonds to be made.

The authors refer to three dimensions coming in to play to constitute solidarity; exposing, citing, and inhabiting. “Exposing means making one's body open to the hardship of others, enabling alliances between unlikely allies to emerge. Second, citing denotes the drawing in of others’ symbolic resources and publicly affirming them. Third, inhabiting involves living through, in embodied and intimate ways, the deprivations of others, which strengthens solidarity and enables alliances to grow and persist.”[1]

There are a few ideas here that translate to my practice. Aligning agonism with feminism for a start. Using agonism as a way to move forward with the divisions in feminism brought about by Third Wave intersectionality. Drawing on embodiment to fill the gaps that language alone can’t fill. My work embodies difference. Bringing disparate pieces together and using vulnerability as a basis for connection. Building structures using elements that are reliant on one another to maintain their integrity and create a collective energy.

[1] S. Smolovic Jones, N Winchester, C Clarke, “Feminist solidarity building as embodied agonism: An ethnographic account of a protest movement,” Gender Work Organization 2021;28:917–934: 918, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12453, accessed 1 October 2024.