Inhabiting the Chthulucene: Forging Tentacular Intimacies at the End of the World1

Abstract

The task is to make kin in lines of inventive communication as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. –Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) All successful life is Adaptable, Opportunistic, Tenacious, Interconnected, and Fecund. Understand this. Use it. Shape God. –Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993) You fear the chassis that was struck by lightning can't be wholly crushed. You should. Fear the radios left in scrap yards—still brimming with circuit and hum … –Jamaal May, “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” (2014) A version of “blasted” (or degraded) landscape, the detritus that stands in for the fallen factory in Jamaal May’s poem “Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines” is the product of Detroit’s failed automobile industry (Tsing). The poem, however, is not a conventional portrait of apocalypse—neither techno-dystopian nightmare; nor a satirical critique of the “end of capital,” such as we might glimpse in popular films like Snowpiercer (2013). In fact, May’s imagined landscape figures a productive departure from any typical dystopian scenario. So too, from a similarly teleological worldview: the “end of nature” narrative, which is generally framed by the imperialist impulses of a narrowly providential landscape ethic. A conventional lament, this narrative foregrounds the twilight of a distinctly American Arcadia now crumbling as the final patch of fecund land falls to industry. Such visions of imminent collapse, unlike the more fruitful examinations of the present that we find in works like May’s, or in earlier articulations of a Black Anthropocene like those of Octavia Butler, are necessarily teleological in nature—aligned with, among other things, expansionist or broadly developmentalist interests; and each evinces an anthropocentric worldview that forecloses the possibility of other ways of being in the world.