Donna Harraway went on to explain that this is actually a talk about biology, but that we need all these cognitive apparatuses to think biology with: tactual and sensual ways of thinking. She then referred to Ursula le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest – which seems to be like Avatar (invasion of a peaceful planet of indigenous-like people), but it isn’t. There is no after the extractions, no successful rebellion, no expulsion, no going back to status quo: “There is no use pretending now, that we do not know how to kill one another.” How do we think irreversible transformation?
Usrsula le Guin taught Donna the ‘carrier bag theory’ of fiction or being Earthbound (cf. Latour’s Gifford Lectures), or rather in Harraway’s words: terran. A leaf, a gourd, a shell, a list of things that carry; ordinary things for ordinary life; a holder; a recipient. So much of earth history is told in the fantasy of the first beautiful words as weapons; tool, weapon, word; the word made flesh by the Sky God, the one real world-maker. This is the man-making tale of the hunter out to kill and bring back the terrible bounty.
The Anthropocene is another story of man the hunter; an epoch – it’s a good idea – but comes from a particular story. “Not so fast with the anthropocene!” A story that Ursula has laboured: all the world has laboured to give birth to its destroyer; the burning comes: this is the story of the Anthropocene.
A slight curve of the shell – to hold just a little water; seeds, to give reciprocal things; mortal companion species. This is not to end the story, not to be the end-times of the earth, but maybe to have a chance of going on in the face of irreversible loss. It calls for the resistance of ‘becoming with’; not ‘lines of flight’.
Via Specilative Realism Aggregator