Prior to this course I had had no exposure to the Environmental Humanities whatsoever. I assumed it was field of scholars doing nature writing, reading Annie Dillard, or, I suppose, contemplating the hermeneutics of foliage. Therefore, I thought, it has no relevance to my research. I am delighted, if not really surprised to find I was quite wrong. Every text in this course has opened a new perspective for me, as I learned that the Environmental Humanities is not only legitimate but actually useful to me. More than any other text, though, I keep coming back to Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. To explain why Haraway has resonated with me, let me first, as briefly as possible, touch on my aims and methods as a scholar of literature.

I research the material cultural history of literature and practices of reading and writing. My methodology tends to draw on Book History, Media Studies, and Textual Studies. Texts are always encountered as material objects. I like to think about texts therefore with an eye toward production and use. Textual production and use are always deeply interrelated. I mean a variety of things by this, but to avoid writing my dissertation in a blog post, allow me to home in on a single instance: one use for a text is the production of a new text. This is as much true when Seth Grahame-Smith added his own words to Jane Austen’s to produce Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as when a young Emily Dickinson read poetry by the Brontës. Moreover, if we consider production beyond mere composition, it becomes clear that many more hands were involved in making the thing we read than just the author’s. What I’m getting at here, is that my broader interest is a decentering of the author, not à la Barthes as a rhetorical or logical position intended to open up interpretive possibilities, but as a way of reading intertextually and revealing the labor hidden or elided by an “author-”centered approach. This is, make no mistake, a political project. I am resisting a neo-liberal discourse of individualism.

I was elated, then, to discover, amidst Haraway’s admittedly fruity prose, concepts that seemed to line up strikingly with my own work. Take sympoiesis, which Haraway learned from Katie King, who in turn learned it from M. Beth Dempster. Sympoiesis, Haraway explains (by quoting Dempster), describes “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change” (33). What have I been moving toward if not a sympoietic model of literary production? Haraway seems to call to me to push what I’ve been thinking about even further. Her literary form enacts what it describes. She embeds herself in tentacular networks of ideas and writers. Haraway’s SF [string figures, “speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, soin de ficelle” (31)] is both a way of thinking the world and telling the world. “SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come” (31). Haraway marries cultural criticism and cultural production; that is to say, she positions interpretation in a reflexive relationship with what is normally thought of as creation [a problematic term in Haraway’s cosmology and indeed in my own model of shared labor]. Moreover, her model of sympoiesis emphasizes distributive authorship and distributive responsibility. Her form both interrogates and postulates (and then she closes with fiction!). She makes different syntactic, semantic, and aesthetic choices than I certainly ever will but this way of thinking and doing scholarship (or theory or philosophy) seems more alive than almost anything I’ve encountered.

At heart, what I find so compelling (or maybe just validating) about Haraway is that it makes me feel like my work could be connected to something more significant than the academy. In the last few years academia has come to feel like a particular pair of panels from K.C. Green’s Gunshow that are quite popular online:

Only it’s worse than that, because some of us have decided this is not fine and we seem helpless to communicate the urgency of that fact with anyone but ourselves. It is helpful to be reminded that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” (34), that our work does not need to carry the weight of the world, that we can become together, and move toward a way of working, writing, and doing that has stakes for confronting issues like nuclear power/proliferation and climate change. Not only does Haraway expand my conception of what scholarship can accomplish but my conception of how we might perform and undertake scholarship altogether.

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Top: “Spawn of the Stars” by Sofyan Syarief: Deviantart – Artstation – Behance – Instagram [CC BY-SA 3.0] Please note that Haraway’s “ChthuIucene” has nothing whatsoever to do with Cthulhu, and you are silly for assuming it might. However, I, for one, am looking forward to abandoning both the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene for the coming Cthulhucene, when the blessed cradle of madness can at last rock humanity to its longed-for slumber. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn