Staying with the Trouble

Having recently read Donna Haraway’s text, Staying with the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016), I now offer some thoughts in response.

Haraway is best known for her seminal essay, ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’, first published in 1985, in which she explores the idea that humanity has always been constituted as a process of species becoming that is intermingled with social and technological processes that shape and constitute the body, in a way that leaves no principled distinction between proximal and distal prosthesis. Thus, we are already cyborgs, given the sense of science fiction becoming reality that now characterises our technological and mass-cultural situation.

In this, her more recent work, she continues with the notion of humanity’s interdependence and interpenetration with parallel processes of complex ecologies, but the focus has shifted more intently to interspecies interactions and co-dependencies. Her arguments bear the characteristic features of a critical posthumanism in denying any principled basis for anthropocentrism and seeking a positive way forward through possibilities for a decentred ethic of flourishing, ranging over a wide variety of life forms and their ecologies. However, she rejects the label ‘posthumanist’, repeatedly (pp. 11, 32, 50, 55, 97, 101, 134), preferring ‘com-post’(!) Even so, she does not clearly explain her objection and her own view simply seems to emphasise the continuity between diverse material manifestations of life without offering anything categorically distant from, say, Braidotti’s critical posthumanism. It really is the same project of grounding knowledge and ethics after humanism. It is likely that, by ‘posthumanism’, she means what I broadly categorise as ‘transhumanism’, i.e. hyper-humanism holding onto the stance that there is something essential to being human (in some sense) that can and should endure through re-embodiment into other cybernetically, genetically or digitally distinct forms. The best way to keep ‘posthumanism’ as a term of some conceptual utility, I think, is to emphasise the etymology of the term relating to the epoch after Western humanism, allowing it to cover a wide variety of non-nihilistic, anti-humanistic theories, of which Haraway’s ideas are one and ideas of transhumanism are not.

Having defined posthumanism in this way, I think that we can distinguish between posthumanisms of immanence and transcendence, which both locate the grounds of human ethics and knowledge beyond the human, yet respectively within and beyond the network of material processes and structures that might once have been referred to as the natural order. I think the latter has more to be said for it. Haraway’s ideas fall into the former category.

 

On Flourishing and Ongoingness

“This is not a longing for salvation or some other sort of optimistic politics; neither is it a cynical quietism in the face of the depths of the trouble… Such living and dying have the best chance of cultivating conditions for ongoingness.” (pp. 37-38)

“There are no guarantees, no arrow of time, no Law of History or Science or Nature in such struggles. There is only the relentlessly contingent SF worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoiesis, and so, just possibly, of multispecies flourishing on earth.” (p. 40)

“Flourishing will be cultivated in a multispecies response-ability without the arrogance of the sky gods and their minions, or else biodiverse terra will flip out into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult.” (p. 56)

The aim of the game is to offer a vision as minimally normative as possible, so as to be seen to stay allied with the descriptive and explanatory success of scientifically verifiable causal systems, and yet to prioritise one class of outcomes over others in a way that can only be delivered by a normative ordering. Haraway is quick to deny any sense of telos in nature, and yet her vision of flourishing and ongoingness is a substantive privileging of some states of affairs over others. By the tentative and cautionary tone of much of her writing, it is clear that the material worlds about which she writes could tend away from her preferred states of affairs as much as toward them. Why, then, and in what sense, should we regard her vision of flourishing and ongoingness as preferable?

This question highlights the way in which posthumanisms of immanence perpetuate the same normative fallacy as humanists defining humanity’s inherent virtues by declaring some possibilities of the species, homo sapiens, not to be truly human. This privileging of some characteristics of humanity as its essence, and thus conditions of human excellence and flourishing, also had the effect of marginalising great swathes of humankind, particularly in the context of colonisation. Only, now, it is that not all life forms embody life’s fullness: the ones who insulate themselves from kinship with alterity and terminate the ongoingness of otherness; the ones who “insult” and render “slimy” wider ecologies. So, why is this preferential treatment of some alternatives to be preferred? If living and dying are to be embraced as equal moments of becoming, what matters it should all in a species become towards dying at once? And does this not imply a chauvinism of favouring one form of complex carbon molecule arrays over other material manifestations? What is the affirmation of life and sympioesis if not a prejudice against certain “toxic” or “simple” chemical processes that will endure in their ancient wisdom long after all traces of DNA and RNA have degraded?

I do not think that Haraway would attempt to justify the way in which she delineates her circle of compassion on anything but contingent grounds. Instead, she would likely defer to the historical situation and established dispositions of the implied reader to which she addresses her text. Thus, she is alleviated of the burden of brightening the line between the material conditions designated as flourishing and ongoingness, and those designated otherwise. Yet, this does suggest an inconsistency between claims being made in the ethical metalanguage, and the attitudes expressed in first-order language critiquing the arbitrary bright lines drawn in nature by human exceptionalists who privilege humanity, as circumscribed, over the non-human thereby rendered as the subhuman other. Notwithstanding self-reflexive denials, this is a normative critique leveraging off of the arbitrariness of drawing of such lines, calculated to bring those who draw lines that way across into the light by undermining its objectivity as one of two dichotomised alternatives: a simple logical move of disjunction elimination.

This comes out most clearly in her repudiation of posthumanists (as she conceives of them) who are closest to, yet still removed from, her position. The dichotomy forces them, most of all, to move closer through its appeal to a pure rejection of anthropocentrism. Yet, even should a reimagined “posthuman” conception of humanity and its conditions of flourishing be equally arbitrary as that touted by the exclusive humanist, Haraway’s conception of flourishing and ongoingness (being offered as what is at stake if we do not attempt to implement her compostism) is just as arbitrary in its depiction of a target towards which we should be aiming. Why should we not, then, measure flourishing and ongoingness against the metric of a single species, and to hell with all others? The answer might be enlightened self-interest, but that is to argue from anthropocentric premises, and why not? ‘Tis one arbitrary circle or another, and the means and ends are equally uncertain in all directions.**

Of course, as to uncertainties, over a long enough time line, there are few uncertainties. Everything will, eventually, have transformed to the point of permanently ceasing to resemble one’s privileged conception of flourishing and ongoingness – at least according to our best scientific theories of a purely naturalistic time scale. Evolution and entropy will have their way, at least from the perspective of posthumanisms of immanence. How can we not fall to nihilism when our action is guaranteed its futility, if only we dare to stare into the abyss of time?

** Note that this is not an argument that I would put forward other than rhetorically. For what it is worth, I agree with Haraway’s rhetorical strategy. I just think that only a posthumanism of transcendence can resist the same argument, meaning that Haraway’s position fairs no better than those she critiques.

 

On Knowing and Deciding

“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.” (p. 30, repeated p. 57)

“Latour aligns himself with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); he does not believe its assessments and reports; he decides what is strong and trustworthy and what is not. He casts his lot with some worlds and worldings and not others.” (p. 41)

“The decisions and transformations so urgent in our times for learning… how to become less deadly, more response-able… more able to practice the arts of living and dying well in multispecies symbiosis… on a damaged planet, must be made without guarantees or the expectation of harmony with those who are not oneself—and not safely other, either.” (p. 98)

As I said, the aim of the game is to offer a vision as minimally normative as possible. Just as this applies to the normativity of ethics, so must it apply to epistemic normativity. In Haraway’s epistemic metalanguage, concepts become unthinkable, whether or not to accept truth claims is a matter of decision (rather than something objective like rational evaluation), and action must be taken on the basis of hope rather than predictive likelihoods – though hope we must, staying with the trouble. However, though that is what Haraway claims, the approach suggested by her first-order language entails normative commitment to rational standards of argument that hold objectively, apart from anyone’s decision or belief. Haraway draws on the authority of a scientific perspective on the world that has proven remarkably powerful in explaining a broad array of natural phenomena, and yet renders those very capacities problematic as the lens of science is turned back upon itself and upon its agents. Though it seems to afford grounds to evaluate truth claims, it does so by banishing the evaluative from its explanations. Though it seems to discern universal regularities, it can discern nothing in human perceptual systems to explain that capacity, instead finding the explanation for human thought in localised material conditions that undermine its universal reach. So, Haraway’s knowledge claims borrow authority from a naïve (popular) sense of scientific objectivity, but must disavow that source to maintain a consistently materialistic vision.

 

The Vision

“So, make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin.” (p. 103)

The last chapter of the text is most instructive in outlining what it would mean to act on the basis of Haraway’s compostism. It is expressed through a fictional recount concerning five generations of individuals sharing a name, Camille. What is more, each Camille is similarly charged with becoming kin to a particular species other than homo sapiens. The parents of the first Camille decide, for [her], that [she] shall be raised in a parallel process of sympoietic becoming with the monarch butterfly species. Before birth, [she] is genetically engineered with certain traits of the monarch butterfly to enhance this connection. This genetic enhancement progresses further with later generations of Camilles, giving them a distinctively insectoid appearance and further physiological resemblances.

There is much more than this involved in Haraway’s vision, not the least of which is a concerted attempt to reduce the number of human births to renew room for the flourishing of other species that had been placed under pressure by teeming humanity’s drain on resources, pollutions and spatial intrusions. It is enough for my purposes to focus on the detail of genetic alteration.

It is one thing to leverage the virtues of ecological responsibility to promote an extreme posthumanist view in the abstract. It is another to paint a picture of the concrete monstrosity that this view entails, which is precisely how such an insectoid hybrid would seem to many who would be otherwise sympathetic with the purity of Haraway’s vision. Until this point, the claim that Haraway’s concepts of flourishing and ongoingness were objectionably arbitrary might have seemed petty, because who could argue with her ecological conscience? However, the arbitrariness of her vision suddenly takes on a new gravity with the realisation that she is asking us to experiment on our children for the hope – the hope – that it will make some gains towards a “thinkable” future. To many, by this point, Haraway’s argument will have become a reductio against her position, and posthumanisms of immanence generally. For this reason, alone, it has been a worthwhile read.