Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
51 pages • 1-hour read
Donna HarawayStaying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
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The Evolution of Nature in a Collective System
Haraway’s central biological and philosophical claim is that no being on earth comes into existence by itself. The bounded individual of Western science and political economy, the autopoietic self-making unit, has become, as she puts it, “unthinkable: not available to think with” (30). This plays on her broader assertion that one’s ability to think with and about others—other people and other species—is the basis of much of the world’s current crises. In its place, she develops sympoiesis, or “making-with,” a word she borrows from M. Beth Dempster to describe collectively producing systems whose boundaries are porous and whose components shape one another into being. The opening sentences of Chapter 3 state the position plainly: “Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing” (58). “Critters,” in Haraway’s vocabulary, are inherently related, not units that subsequently choose to relate to each other. The major goal is making people think on this relationship and move forward accordingly.
The exemplar “holobiont” (a symbiotic assemblage understood as a single entity) that anchors the argument is Mixotricha paradoxa. Under low magnification, it looks like one singular cell; under the electron microscope, it resolves into “five distinct kinds of creatures” (61), and it lives in the gut of an Australian termite, which itself depends on cultivated fungi. What looks like one critter is a tangle of many, and the tangle has no edge that can be cleanly drawn. Lynn Margulis’s symbiogenesis (the theory that new kinds of cells and organisms evolve through the long-lasting fusion with other organisms) provides the biological scaffolding for this theory. Haraway extends it to a specific, ancient orchid and the extinct bee that once pollinated it, whose lives were “mutually constituted through a reciprocal capture from which neither plant nor insect can be disentangled” (68). Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’s “involutionary momentum” names the inward-folding pull by which partners shape each other’s evolution.
The sympoietic claim then crosses scales into ethics and politics. Haraway writes, “We are humus, not Homo [sapien], not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman” (55). This slogan rests on the biology developed in Chapter 3: A human is a holobiont, swaddled and infiltrated by bacteria and archaea from before birth, developed in a collective system alongside all things. The essays of Chapter 5 show the same point in the negative register, where one woman’s estrogen, one dog’s urinary leakage, and pregnant mares in Manitoba turn out to share a single fluid economy. By Chapter 8, the Camille stories make symbiogenesis a deliberate practice: Human babies are born “as symbionts with critters of actively threatened species” (139), with butterfly antennae growing from a 15-year-old’s chin. The biology and the speculative fiction make the same argument in different registers. Becoming-with is not a metaphor for connection; it describes the system that creates all living things. Without each other, singular organisms could not exist.
The Importance of Seeing Living Things as Kin
The book posits that if no being makes itself or evolves alone, then kinship between people cannot be reserved for those in their own family or a pre-defined community. Haraway opens the book by redefining the term: “Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible” (2). Oddkin, here, is an enlargement of kin to include these broader connections. Kin, in this expanded sense, names lateral relations across species and across historical positions, formed by deliberate alliances and by the recognition that “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense” (103). The conclusion of seeing all things, including other species, as kin appears in Chapter 4: “Make Kin Not Babies!” (102), printed in bold and stuck on bumpers by eco-sexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle.
The slogan has two halves—to make kin and to not make babies—and Haraway acknowledges that both are difficult. The kin-making half asks readers to expand obligation beyond the household; the not-babies half asks them to face the demographic reality that human numbers, projected toward 11 billion by 2100, cannot be addressed by blaming capital alone in her opinion. Haraway is careful to refuse coercive methods of reducing the birth rate and to note that population-control policies have a long misogynist and racist history. Her position is that feminists who have “been leaders in unraveling the supposed natural necessity of ties between sex and gender, race and sex, race and nation” are now needed to unravel the tie between kin-making and biogenetic reproduction (102). From her perspective, intentional actions to create interspecies communities that engage with the earth and its needs will naturally reduce the social impetus to have children. Making kin creates fulfilling, complex relationships, demonstrating that many of the dynamics and connections that people seek already exist and must only be sought out.
Chapter 8’s Communities of Compost demonstrate, through science fiction, how this process may work and its benefits. In the Camille world, “every new child must have at least three parents, who may or may not practice new or old genders” (138), and “the decision to bring a new human infant into being is strongly structured to be a collective one for the emerging communities” (139). The community doesn’t force a potential parent one way or the other; rather, the mutual understanding of their kin’s broader needs helps guide the decision. The pregnant parent’s reproductive freedom is exercised by choosing an animal symbiont for the child, binding five generations of humans to five generations of monarch butterflies. The population of the earth declines from 10 billion to 3 billion across 400 years and learns to live more harmoniously with its surroundings. When the monarch species Camille is bonded to dies, they respond by speaking for the dead, embracing not only interspecies alliances but also relationships between dead and living things. Making kin incorporates Haraway’s broader points of acknowledging the interconnected dynamics of all organisms’ existence on earth. By seeing living things as kin, people become capable of fundamentally different, flourishing, and fulfilling relationships.
Storytelling as a Tool for Living on a Damaged Planet
The third theme names the practice that makes the first two livable. For Haraway, “thinking” as a complex, intentional act is inseparable from the stories one tells, and the choice of story determines which futures become imaginable. The methodological theory, lifted from Marilyn Strathern and elaborated across Chapter 2, is an acknowledgement of the interconnected, cyclical nature of narratives: “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories” (35). The acronym SF (science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far) that Haraway uses to collectively describe her method of research, genre of writing, and metaphor through which to interpret her theories names a single practice that crosses what is usually kept separate. A string figure passed between hands and a peer-reviewed paper on choanoflagellates are, on Haraway’s account, the same kind of work, each telling related stories.
Storytelling matters because the dominant narrative form of Western modernity, what Haraway calls the “prick tale” of the hunter and his weapon, cannot tell the story that the present requires. Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier-bag theory, she argues for narratives shaped like a sling or a gourd, which collect other experiences rather than wield a singular one. “If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell contaminated diversity, then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices” (37), Anna Tsing wrote, and Haraway takes the line as a directive. The Chapter 6 essay on acacia seeds, the Chapter 7 reading of Vinciane Despret’s Arabian babbler scientists, and the Chapter 8 fabulation all proceed by weave together partial connections rather than by driving a single argument to its conclusion. Thom van Dooren’s claim that “mourning is about dwelling with a loss and so coming to appreciate what it means, how the world has changed” sets up a thread that the book completes only when Camille 5 becomes a Speaker for the Dead (38), charged with keeping the memory of extinct critters present so that those still living can incorporate the knowledge that these stories offer into current actions and beliefs.
The Camille stories themselves are the book’s most sustained demonstration of what stories do. Haraway calls them “invitations to participate in a kind of genre fiction committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real news” (136). The stories are not predictions; they are what she calls “sym fiction,” a form that readers are explicitly asked to extend, revise, and contradict. Chapter 2 ties this concept to sympoiesis directly: “There is only the relentlessly contingent SF worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoiesis, and so, just possibly, of multispecies flourishing on earth” (40). The three themes converge here. Sympoiesis is the inherent structure of life on earth, kin-making is the proactive work that structure demands, and storytelling is the medium through which sympoietic kin become recognizable to one another. Without the stories, singular practices like science or politics have no way to take process and respond to the needs of a damaged world.
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