Chtulucene humusities

The Lang courtyard trees are celebrating, or maybe I'm projecting? Today was the day "Anthropocene Humanities" got its second wind, as we crossed into Donna Haraway territory. Drawing on her partner Rusten Hogness's suggestion, Haraway proposes we replace "posthumanism" with "compost," "human" with "humus," and "humanities" with "humusities."

Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle!

To string together several of Haraway's key terms, we're part of the composting, multispecies worlding, sympoetic ongoingness of life - and had better realize it, since everything is at stake! The grandiose delusions of the Anthropocene arrive just as we should he recognizing how poisonous such delusions of individuality and distance (a de-worlded Anthropos modeled on the "skygods") have been. Better to call it the "Capitalocene," since it's not the species, not "human nature" which caused our problems but a particular constellation of economic and social practices which have undone even our awareness of our relational dependence on the rest of nature.

The Capitalocene was relationally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could be proud of.

But even the Capitolocene risks becoming a disempowering abstraction, so Haraway recommends the tentacular and unpronounceable "Chtulucene" instead, the busy webbing, braiding, symbiotic muddle which is also the "trouble" of her slogan, Staying with the Trouble, what goes on and has gone on for eons in her "ongoingness." Haraway speaks and writes in a language all her own, and we spent some time finding our bearings within it. But we were ready to understand, having read Ursula LeGuin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" on which Haraway relies just last week. But we were ready for ongoingness also because we'd given ourselves to the discourse of the Anthropocene and come out - without hope.

I haven't had a chance to tell you (I was quite sure how to tell it_ that this class, too, wrote a batch of "Anthropocene stories" for me, and they were grim. A few imagined the earth and moon, or Halley's Comet, or even forests as agents, but all the rest were stories of stunned spectatorship: people in the distant or near future - often children - experiencing the end of our human world or its aftermath. 

Especially because we had just shared some of the stories from China I was struck by this disempowerment. The Chinese stories' protagonists often chose self-sacrifice but at least they were acting. But my American students' stories had no place for agency. The damage was done, it was too late. As I read the stories I wanted to put my head on the table and cry. When I discussed it with them, one said "welcome to Gen Z." Another said the ones she worried about were not her generation but kids in the 4th and 5th grade now, who were the most cynical people she had ever met: "they just don't care."

I didn't know what to think, but the thought did come to me that maybe the Anthropocene make isn't a suitable topic for a first year seminar, for students' first experience of college? They weren't wrong to think that they've come late to the game, that earlier generations (including mine) have left them a world in what seems a terminal spiral of loss. But then they didn't need me, or the sources I've given them to read, to tell them this.

What they needed, I thought, was hope - and for that, it turns out that Haraways ideas of "ongoingness" are just the ticket. It relit a fire I thought had been ignited by Julia Adeney Thomas' insistence that most human actions over time did not lead to the Anthropocene

cumulative history necessarily ignores all the things that people did that never contributed to the forcings on the Earth System (Strata and Three Stories, 61) 

but had been extinguished by a careless remark of Amitav Ghosh'

althrough different groups of people have contributed to it in vastly different measure, global warming is ultimately the result of the totality of human actions over time (Great Derangement, 115) 

- a line which jumped out its context to restore the fatal logic of all-overwhelming Anthropos. Fatal and fatalistic - but false. I've been at pains to argue that most human living has been and continues to be mindful of the resources and relationships squandered by the Capitolocene, but I think the point finally stuck today. Thanks, Donna!