Since I'm thinking about ecology, philosophy, and multi-species coexistence, it was about time I read "Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene" by Donna Haraway. The book reflects a very wise approach to multi-species coexistence.
I found the overall message a good one -- but weirdly, to digest the overall message all I really needed was the title and the introductory chapter, which unpacks the delicately-constructed title and explains the slogans. Once I read the intro, I had already learnt pretty much everything I was going to get out of this book. The rest is repetition and elaboration of the themes.
Partly this is because the writing style is very unusual, and anyone approaching it should beware that they'll need to be patient with all the wordplay, meta-textuality and constructive ambiguity. The book is philosophy, yes. In some ways it helps to read it as poetry: the lessons you take from it are largely through allusion and metaphor. So you could instead describe it as non-fiction poetry.
I do understand Haraway's meta-textual point, that it matters HOW you think and construct ideas, and this is exactly why she chooses a "tentacular" way of building up the narrative points. There's real value there. For me it's approach contrasts neatly against Bruno Latour's "Down to Earth" which I read recently: Latour tries to construct a simple conceptual framework for ecological thinking, and the book is good, but he doesn't quite manage to convey his ideas clearly or crisply enough (due to the lack of a strict editor, in my opinion). On the contrary, Haraway's writing is very un-simplified, full of poetics, wordplay and repetition, but in part that's the point. The way it's written deliberately embodies the tangled "hot mess of compost" future that she advocates.
Chapter 2 however does contain additional clear detail: it's very clear on why "anthropocene" is a poor choice of term for our current era, and "capitalocene" is better; and then further why that term is wrong too, and the story to be told is "chthulucene".
Chapter 3 introduces some science-art projects, but not really working hard to persuade us that "science art" is of any real benefit for living our lives, beyond asserting that they are tentacular practices. The projects in this chapter feel rather small to me, and it's not clear what I learn from them. I love science art and have witnessed (and done) plenty of it, but I don't see what in particular it has to do with the Chthulucene. --- Almost anything can be described in tentacular form, i.e. weaving multiple distant connections together. The Black Mesa example is the strongest one in the chapter. But still... thus, what?
Some page-wise notes:
p4 Despair [e.g. climate nihilism] caused by the falsehood that "only if things work do they matter". A beautiful point.
p40-41 Intriguing praise & explication of Latour's position on the "earthbound".
p42-43 Criticising Latour's previous stories of strength, struggle and war in ecology. Latour must have read this before writing "Down to Earth"! That's why DtE seems such a pacifist text, and, as I noticed, can't seem to tell us how to resist the violence against us.
p43-44 Discussing Gaia in Latour and in others' works.
p105 nice philosopher's definition of "queer": "Not committed to reproduction of kind" (and also "having bumptious relations with futurities")
p165 The concept of "animism" seems to be thrown around casually here, and without unpacking it. Is it really a good thing to advocate? Animist beliefs could range from a simple appreciation of the tentacular (?!) to a literal spiritual animism as practised in some religions, and surely that's not baggage that Haraway really wants us to pick up?
--- I find out later online that there's a rather post-modern meaning of "animism" popularised in anthropology by Latour. I would have to read even more to be sure what baggage is really hanging on that word. It seems Latourian animism has something to do with rejecting the dualism where only humans can be the cause/instigator while "mere objects" cannot. The "animism" that rejects this dualism fits well with Haraway's multi-species and tentacular position.
In what I've read online, Latour seems to pitch "animism" as a rejection of "modern" dualistic thinking. But I see it differently: it seems to me that perfectly ordinary modern thinking (of the non-spiritual non-Cartesian type exemplified e.g. by many physicists) puts humans on the same level as everything else, with no special causal or "agent" role. To my mind, if "animism" has any meaning it is something that rejects this, it's something that asserts that causal chains can terminate in all kinds of things which we'd then think of as having "agency". In ordinary modern thought, there are no ends to the causal chains: causation circulates endlessly. And ... the latter seems to me more faithful to Haraway-style thinking of Chthulucenic sympoeisis!