Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Warming and Acidification of the Oceans from Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” in Donna J

We are all lichens. – Scott Gilbert, “We Are All Lichens Now”1 Think we must. We must think. – Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make 01/17 a Fuss2 What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences Donna Haraway have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the Earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Tentacular Homo sapiens – the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species,Modern Man – Thinking: was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What happens when the best biologies Anthropocene, of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus Capitalocene, whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if Chthulucene they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in e n human-only histories? Surely such a e c transformative time on Earth must not be named u l u the Anthropocene! h y t a h ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWith all the unfaithful offspring of the sky C w , a r e gods, with my littermates who find a rich wallow a n e H c in multispecies muddles, I want to make a a o n l a n critical and joyful fuss about these matters. I t o i D p Ê want to stay with the trouble, and the only way I a C 6 , 1 know to do that is in generative joy, terror, and e 0 n 2 e r collective thinking. c e o b ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊMy first demon familiar in this task will be a p m o r e t spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in h t p e n the redwood forests of Sonoma and Mendocino s A : g — Counties, near where I live in North Central n i 5 3 k 7 California. Nobody lives everywhere; everybody n # i l h lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to a T n r r a everything; everything is connected to u l o u j 4 c something. This spider is in place, has a place, x a t u l n f and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. e - e T This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes.5 The eight-legged tentacular arachnid that I appeal to gets her generic name from the language of the Goshute people of Utah and her specific name from denizens of the depths, from the abyssal and elemental entities, called chthonic.6 The chthonic powers of Terra infuse its tissues everywhere, despite the civilizing efforts of the agents of sky gods to 09.18.16 / 17:33:21 EDT astralize them and set up chief Singletons and ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAll the tentacular stringy ones have made their tame committees of multiples or subgods, me unhappy with posthumanism, even as I am the One and the Many. Making a small change in nourished by much generative work done under the biologist’s taxonomic spelling, from cthulhu that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested to chthulu, with renamed Pimoa chthulu I compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as propose a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped that was, still is,and might yet be: the into that wormy pile.9 Human as humus has Chthulucene. I remember that tentacle comes 02/17 potential, if we could chop and shred human as from the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler,” and Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making tentare, meaning “to feel” and “to try”; and I and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a know that my leggy spider has many-armed conference not on the Future of the Humanities allies. Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but story of the Chthulucene.7 instead on the Power of the Humusities for a ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe tentacular are not disembodied figures; Habitable Multispecies Muddle! Ecosexual they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle made a humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural bumper sticker for me, for us, for SF: extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated “Composting is so hot!” beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊShaping her thinking about the times called microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, Anthropocene and “multi-faced Gaa” (Stengers’s swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled term) in companionable friction with Latour, ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, Isabelle Stengers does not ask that we it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is recompose ourselves to become able, perhaps, about life lived along lines – and such a wealth to “face Gaa.” But like Latour and even more like of lines – not at points, not in spheres. “The Le Guin, one of her most generative SF writers, inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, Stengers is adamant about changing the story. human and non-human, are wayfarers”; Focusing on intrusion rather than composition, generations are like “a series of interlaced Stengers calls Gaia a fearful and devastating trails.”8 power that intrudes on our categories of thought, A pro-composting bumper sticker designed by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens with Kern Toy Design. 09.18.16 / 17:33:21 EDT 03/17 Humans are the entitled minority in the face of the sixth great extinction. Copyright: Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, University of Oregon 09.18.16 / 17:33:21 EDT that intrudes on thinking itself.10 Earth/Gaia is as well as an agent of double death, the killing of maker and destroyer, not resource to be ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire in our exploited or ward to be protected or nursing times are at stake. mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThus it is past time to turn directly to the person but complex systemic phenomena that time-space-global thing called Anthropocene.15 compose a living planet. Gaia’s intrusion into our The term seems to have been coined in the early affairs is a radically materialist event that 1980s by University of Michigan ecologist Eugene collects up multitudes. This intrusion threatens 04/17 Stoermer (d. 2012), an expert in freshwater not life on Earth itself – microbes will adapt, diatoms. He introduced the term to refer to to put it mildly – but threatens the livability of growing evidence for the transformative effects Earth for vast kinds, species, assemblages, and of human activities on the Earth. The name individuals in an “event” already under way Anthropocene made a dramatic star appearance called the Sixth Great Extinction.11 in globalizing discourses in 2000 when the Dutch ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊStengers, like Bruno Latour, evokes the Nobel Prize – winning atmospheric chemist name of Gaia in the way James Lovelock and Paul Crutzen joined Stoermer to propose that Lynn Margulis did, to name complex nonlinear human activities had been of such a kind and couplings between processes that compose and magnitude as to merit the use of a new sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as geological term for a new epoch, superseding the a partially cohering systemic whole.12 In this Holocene, which dated from the end of the last hypothesis, Gaia is autopoietic – self-forming, ice age, or the end of the Pleistocene, about boundary maintaining, contingent, dynamic, and twelve thousand years ago. Anthropogenic stable under some conditions but not others. changes signaled by the mid-eighteenth-century Gaia is not reducible to the sum of its parts, but steam engine and the planet-changing exploding achieves finite systemic coherence in the face of use of coal were evident in the airs, waters, and perturbations within parameters that are rocks.16 Evidence was mounting that the themselves responsive to dynamic systemic acidification and warming of the oceans are processes. Gaia does not and could not care rapidly decomposing coral reef ecosystems, about human or other biological beings’ resulting in huge ghostly white skeletons of intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into bleached and dead or dying coral. That a question our very existence, we who have symbiotic system – coral, with its watery provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both world-making associations of cnidarians and human and nonhuman livable presents and zooanthellae with many other critters too – e futures. Gaia is not about a list of questions n indicated such a global transformation will e waiting for rational policies;13 Gaia is an intrusive c come back into our story. u l event that undoes thinking as usual. “She is u ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊBut for now, notice that the Anthropocene h y t a what specifically questions the tales and refrains h obtained purchase in popular and scientific C w , a r of modern history. There is only one real mystery e discourse in the context of ubiquitous urgent a n e H at stake, here: it is the answer we, meaning c efforts to find ways of talking about, theorizing, a o n l a those who belong to this history, may be able to n modeling, and managing a Big Thing called t o i D p create as we face the consequences of what we Ê Globalization. Climate-change modeling is a a C 6 14 , have provoked.” 1 powerful positive feedback loop provoking e 0 n 2 e r change-of-state in systems of political and c e o 17 Anthropocene b ecological discourses.

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