How to Change your Mind: Moving into Ecosystem Thinking
Using Key Concepts from Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
I have to admit. Some books really have the power to put words in what you just thought of in your head. This is the value of academia and the people we pay to muse and think. This essay is partly a book review that selectively highlights concepts from the mind of Haraway and the cohort of thinkers from the “Anthropocene” studies group at Arnhem University. My goal is to draw from Haraway’s ideas and recast my own network thinking which I have applied almost exclusively to people relations to a wider ecosystem approach. I use the ecosystem here as a shorthand to refer to the interconnected relationships of living and non-living things symbiotically dependent on each other to exist and thrive. Since we have been reading various iterations of human-animal and science technology studies done by ethnographers and more experimental anthropologists, I hoped to slowly incorporate and integrate my own knowledge and implement it in user research practice.
Shoot the Messenger First. Okay, this is my first time with this author. She will enrage you, frustrate you, confuse you, and you will pull your hair as you read this work. This is what audience frustration looks like. Juniors are warned against this but senior tenured full professors wallow in this style. They can get away with it and still be published. (It could be about cats and still, land a book contract!) If you are lucky, you can be cited all over by people from different disciplines. Scholars like this can get away with inventing words and terms and people will still be clapping. This is their power. And influence.
In Haraway’s case, she is short of genius. (As influential as Strathern is in my thought but in a more accessible format - (less academic-lese). Her obscurity lies in the way she writes. Unlike the academic-lese language, she combines different creative writing styles - she calls them speculative fiction, science fiction, speculative feminisms, but I urge you to keep reading and you will find some gems in there. Native English speakers will understand this and sit with it. Harrowing for basic English speakers and thinkers.
Thinking about Climate Change (and other Big Issues). Yawn. Boring. Yeah, I don’t want to hear more about it. This book was not marketed as such but speaks about how to think about such an abstract and divisive topic without the preaching or the baggage that involves it. She deconstructs it. Haraway uses creative writing and speculative fiction(s) to speak about how we can think and be in an era of climate change and chaos. It starts with one’s personal mindset.
I raise climate change as a jump-off point to the wider anthropological project of studying the “Anthropocene.” That is, how to tackle a larger than life, planetary-scale, and speed of chaos and change encompassing people, animal species, capital, and the environment. This is not simply a post-colonial project but a soupy amalgamation of complexities involving past, present, and future grounded today.
A big project that requires an imagination like Haraway to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and proposing a new framework for practitioners.
Reading the Chapters
I will be discussing the book chronologically in a series of essays and presenting how I understood and reflect on Haraway’s key thesis across different chapters and build from her arguments. Overall, the book is a collection of essays containing primordial concepts and ideas that are supported by secondary case studies or speculative fictions as evidence. Or a mix of both. The difference can be difficult to discern and that is her point. You need both for anything to work in the Haraway ‘Chthulucene’ world.
Introductory chapter
The introductory chapter lays out her main themes which will be explained in detail in other chapters. When you first read it, nothing makes sense and it will require you to return to this chapter as you go along the book. Make sure to bookmark and annotate any questions. She returns to these concepts over and over again and in doing so, you will slowly understand her point after several readings.
What is her main thesis?
The first significant point that Haraway raises is the proposition that death and life (and any dual permutations) are both a given in the study of the anthropocene phenomenon. She calls this as…
Staying with the Trouble - a malleable phrase that refers to one’s state of being and thinking in the present. This present self-awareness of the researcher understands and accepts that death, destruction but also resurgence, and life are occurring simultaneously. The term means sitting with chaos, incompleteness, the unfinished unfolding of events, contexts, and situations. And that is okay, a given, a starting point.
This of course is nothing new as Strathern (1988) has established this point in her analysis of relations and gender. This traffic between dualities has also been apparent in Latour’s (2005) network anthropology with people, knowledge, and other species crossing over across different nodes. As I have learned belatedly in my career, the endpoint of analysis is not that we are relationally connected but how ( ). Staying with the trouble is a prompt to cue the observer of his/her/their state and not just the observed phenomenon or group. What is different in Haraway’s proposition is that she is primarily speaking about changing your mind, the researcher’s persona as a way to shift your perspective on the subject of research.
How does one begin to contemplate studying planetary-scale problems?
Haraway precludes that all researchers are inherently practical activists. She does not advocate the detached and distanced researcher to the subject. Indeed, in her formulation, the researcher/author is deliberately and intimately connected with the subject at hand. It is in this deep, intimate, and personal involvement of the writer that the phenomenon can clearly come to light.
She calls this practical activism as the human characteristic of…
Response-Able / Response - Ability - Given the discomfort and dis-ease of ‘staying with the trouble,' she advocates for ‘capability’ a ‘response.’ Every person has the capability and ability to respond, acknowledging failures, pain, death but also the possibilities of resurgence.
“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
The call for response-ability is inherent in the researcher and not just a framework applied to the subject of investigation. Death and life should not only be present in analysis but as part and parcel of any activism. While ‘staying with the trouble,’ is a reminder to the researcher that any study during this era requires considering the damage, loss, and defeat in history, environmental pollution, species extinction, population deaths, ‘response-ability’ counters the cynicism and defeatist approach to big issue analysis but to find and include pockets of resistance, resilience, and hope. Hence, Haraway distinguished her position from traditional anthropological approaches to network thinking because her vision of the network extends to the knowledge producer himself/herself/themselves.
Her practical activism in writing does not suppress the tragic fallouts of events or untoward consequences (or worse, sole reliance on a technofix). A foregone conclusion to human and earth history. Haraway does not support this because she argues that we are missing the resurgence of life amidst destruction. Her twin foundational concepts of ‘staying with the trouble’ and ‘response-ability’ acknowledge the dominant discourse of cynicism of planetary destruction and the demise of all earth species only if it includes the resilience, creativity, and survival-ability of species in the discussion. There is no ‘safe future’ because every action is embedded in complexities with unseen effects (including techno-apocalypses). ‘Staying with the trouble’ and ‘response-ability’ accept both consequences.
How does she operationalise her framework and analysis?
Similar to network anthropology and Stratherian relationality, Haraway’s call to think about the connection or making oddkin follows the development in animal-human species studies and other cross-species bodies of work.
Oddkin / Making Oddkin - The first step to articulate the ecosystem approach is by beginning to consider kinship (not just the ‘genealogical and biogenetic family’) to other forms of life. A way of thinking about being responsible for other beings and things.
Oddkin encompass:
Chthonic beings - The oddkin of beings from the past and present in various forms and permutations. These may look monstrous (‘monsters in the best sense’ (2))- ‘tentacles, feelers digits, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair.’ (2) Invisible beings like microbes, fungi, single-celled organisms, bacteria, and mutations. These beings are in of themselves subject to destruction and control yet they remain living, dying, and changing in response.
However, Haraway not just proposes establishing kinship with unlikely species but also using mixed creative writing frameworks to refresh ways of seeing and doing that may renew practice in anthropology. The standard framework is not enough to describe the phenomenon. Therefore, she expands her tool kit to include creative writing, speculative fiction, and string figures (other mnemonic devices from other cultural resources) to help the researcher visualise how these connections come to shape and what such connections constitute. The visual result is stunning, remarkable, and surprising as described in her other chapters. A different way of seeing and feeling these 3D and 4D connected webs.
Haraway talks about the present orientation required for any researcher to ‘stay with the trouble’ and ‘response-ability.’ How then should we situate the damaged pasts and uncertain futures in big issue phenomena?
Or why Haraway disputes the term ‘Anthropocene to describe her sub-field of study. I deliberately used the dominant discursive term of the anthropocene as a shorthand and there lies the danger and irony of writing about planetary-scale phenomenon. The use of anthropocene defeats her mission of redirecting attention to the inter-species dependence and relations and misplaced attention back to humans yet again.
She cites the arrogance in thinking that man had the singular hand in enacting irreversible changes to the planet. Forgetting that it is our relationship with other species and environment that produce unpredictable and often devastating consequences that we do not foresee. I have started to use the term post-human to describe my way of thinking since 2018 when I started writing about social detachment or the emptiness in-between connection as part of my own thesis on work relations. However, I soon realised that the term is similarly empty of any reference because post-human is what exactly. Animals? Animal-human connection? Thing-human connection (Giaccardi et.al. 2016)? My next choice of term is the ecosystem approach which considerably encompassed living and non-living objects.
Planetary-scale problems clearly reference a specific temporality or sensitivity to time that the ecosystem term suspends in favour of its spatial representation. Thus, the term ‘anthropocene’ is remarkably effective in the popular imagination to situate man’s actions in a very real and critical present-ness. Haraway feels that this is tantamount to another form of arrogance that man’s actions are the sole cause of earth's destruction. Rather, she wants to emphasise that all beings are embroiled in what she instead labels as the timeline of the….
Chthulucene - a reference to a ‘timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’ (2). She found it useful to use this because of the combination of two Greek words khthon and kainos. The latter referring to the full embrace of damaged pasts, broken presents, and uncertain futures all grounded in a cyclical revolution of fresh starts. This is the centrepiece of the movement located in an understanding that the present requires an imagining of a timeline borne of uneven historical cycles always with the possibilities of change by the intermingling of different species in accordance to man’s action or even reaction. Greater than the ‘Anthropocene’ or ‘Capitalocene,’ the Chthulucene is Haraway’s conceptualisation of time-space that encompasses these two and more.
Summary:
I will stop at this point to chew on her big concepts and thinking. Haraway proposes a mindset shift for individuals on how to view one’s inward world and outward relations. The fundamental challenge for every individual is to “stay with the trouble” - we have to accept the imperfect selves, the defeats in implementation, the failures of our project, and the discomfort of our feelings and tragedy. To stay with the trouble is essential to living in the world facing planetary extinction. That said, this is not a defeatist stance, but rather a foundation that prepares an individual to cultivate ‘response-ability’ or to act towards change but cognizant that successes and failures are both acceptable outcomes of any action.
The types of ‘response-ability’ acts she advocates revolve around building ecosystem mindsets or connected viewpoints. One, she advocates for ‘oddkin’ or expanding our relational view beyond people to include other species. Second, ‘oddkin-ning’ does not happen in a static timeline but a specific present that is a result of a cycle of past and future, healing and damage. This is why Haraway disagrees with the use of ‘Anthropocene’ as a reference timeline because of the human-centric view. Oddkin requires a Chthulucene time view that implies movement and change (destruction or redemption) with other species involved.
Reference:
Giaccardi, Elisa, et.al. 2016. Doing Design Research with Non-Humans. DIS 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Fuse. 4 June 2016, Pages 377-387.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. CA: University of California Press.