The Limits of Planet earth: Octopus Kinship on a Terra-Aquatic Planet

Abstract

ABSTRACT Within Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene exists a ‘rich terran muddle’, an increasing earthliness that replaces Earth, and ignores ocean. In this environmental epoch partial to notions of Earth entirely focused on terrestriality, the octopus prompts a new awareness of the planet, where terracentric philosophies accommodate oceanic perspectives. This terra-aquatic reframing of Earth’s rhetorical topographies manifests the octopus as an archetype of the dichotomy of strangeness and familiarity in the emergence of human/non-human entanglements. Identifying the processes by which humans have alien-ated the octopus aids in the acknowledgement, and acceptance, of networks of symbiotic relationships on a shared planet. Contemporary displays of intimacy with the tentacular other in Brenda Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum (2019), Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus (2015) and the Netflix film My Octopus Teacher (2020) join in a cephalopodic union to guide meditations of what it means to inhabit planet Earth.