snotes

Drs Affrica Taylor, Common Worlds Research Collective

Worlding – making worlds together with our non-human kin

Geos → Inert (e.g. rocks)
Bios → Living (e.g. humans)

Cthulucene
Cthonic → Creatures from the underworld
Cene → Geological era

“The era of earthly and underground forces”

Cthulucene is to displace the anthropocene (era of human)
Not because she rejects scientific proof of world being hurt by man, but because it replaces “the stargazing homo” (conceited man, thinking they own and master nature).
Haraway wanted a more grounded term. → Replacing singular man (anthro) by down-to-earth feminine cthonics.
Learn to live with the world around us, rather than learning how to improve it. No longer separating the bio and the geo. Cohabitation. Connection human being and earth. → denied by human exceptionalism.

[OWN NOTES: not separating bios from geos kinda reminiscent of Animism, e.g. Japanese Shintoism where every inert object is a creature/yokai]

Catherine Yusoff: Anthropocene implies human activities are suddenly articulated as geopower → humans are a geological force → the anthropocene validates our onthologies.
Advise: “Jump into the crack, this is an earth revolution.”

[OWN NOTES: The crack and what lies thereunder being the chthonic/underwordly as meant by Haraway?]

chthonic forces: e.g. geological movements, seismic stuff, the shaping of mountains
Even rock is constantly on the move, so it isn’t like it’s an inert thing.

Affrica Taylor’s own take/narrative on Haraway’s cthulhuscene: Persephone, regenerative goddess of the underworld. She lives underground in the winter but emerges in spring. She has multiple attributes, she has transformative power which always comes from the earth below. Like Persephone we must rise from the ground and be in tune with the earth and the seasons
e.g. the schoolstudents who stand up for climate change, who don’t oppose their view from above like the stargazing homo. “what I stand for is what I stand on,” “there is no planet B” are all very chthonic.
- Identify human greed and hubris that depletes the earth and destablises
- Staying silent is not an option
(both things also done in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring)
We are complicit

Haraway: Don’t heroically save the world though! Don’t be a “good anthro” or the saviour-like “stargazing homo”
Humans are not the only movers and shapers of the earth.

References:
R. Carson’s Silent Spring
D. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the cthulucene
The Persephone Project (2020)
G. Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference
K. Yusoff’s The Anthropocene frack, Profress in Human Geography

….

Plastic is organic and not organic at the same time (it comes from the earth and doesn’t)
Plastic defies our idea of decay, it doesn’t decompose like other things.
The Subject-Object divide is devastating