staying with the trouble: reflections on donna haraway's 'tentacular thinking: anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulucene'

In the second chapter of Staying with the Trouble, titled Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Donna Haraway employs a circuitous, playful linguistic methodology to offer a reimagined response to the global ecological disaster that is upon us- an alternative response-ability to the current paradigm propagated by dominant narratives of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. This alternative geological epoch- named the Chthulucene- is one that “stays with the trouble”, necessarily so given Haraway’s disillusionment with the simultaneous escapism and defeatism of the two aforementioned positions. In particular, Haraway rejects the Capitalocene’s “comic faith” in autopoietic technofixes to reverse man-made catastrophe, and as for the Anthropocene, its millenarian narrative that lends itself all too readily to the defeatism of the “game over, it’s too late” rhetoric. 

The framework of the Chthulucene necessitates a praxis of engaged “tentacular thinking” as proposed by Haraway. Theoretically guided by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far— this is a praxis that embraces our collective conditional futures and sympoietic making-together to imagine new, holistic possibilities of recuperation. With a literary style that is serpentine, interwoven and rhythmically buoyant, Haraway co-fashions the colloquialisms and slang of ‘low culture’ with the esotericism of high theory. In doing so, she tactically executes a meta usage of the tentacular thinking she advocates as conceptually fundamental to the Chthulucene. 

In an invitation to embrace our connectedness to one another, as well as to nonhuman others, Haraway eschews bounded individualism- the crux of what she rejects about the anthropocentric response. In a repudiation of a posthumanist solution, the paradigm of the Anthropocene, described as “the prick tale of Humans in History”, is seen to instill a hubristic view of history that places humanity at the forefront, “a tragic story with only one real actor” that overlooks the multitudes of other forms of life, the critters, with which we must make kin. What Haraway problematizes about Anthropocentrism at its core concerns the lack of thinking synonymous with its defeatism; she goes on to compare the disavowal of climate urgency to the banality of evil in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes. Alternatively, at the centre of Haraway’s Chthulucene is the act of unprecedented thinking- think we must, we must think; to take the unpredictability of ecological disaster as unknowability itself, or to refuse to know, to cultivate the response-ability, to be present is to be complicit in this disaster. In a way similar to the Anthropocene’s succumbing to defeat, the Capitalocene naively churns out endless technofixes for a crisis engendered by its very necropolitics of slavery, indigenous genocides and forced relocations of life. It is against these paradigmatic notions of “cynicism, defeatism and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions” that Haraway forges her provocative epoch of the Chthulucene- one that embraces the present, life in all its varying complexities, and ultimately stays with the seemingly unending trouble that continues to devastate the very systems that maintain us.