Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying withthe TroubleIt’s an honor to be here, in so many ways, and I want to begin under the title of this talkwith three sto ries that are too big but also not big enough. The Anthropocene, theCapitalocene, and my favorite, the Cthulucene. The Cthonic ones, the not yet fin ished,ongo ing, abyssal, and dread ful ones that are gen er a tive and destruc tive, and make Gaialook like a junior kinder garten daugh ter.

I’m going to pro pose to us in the course of the next twenty-five min utes that theCthulucene might be a way to col lect up the ques tions for nam ing the epoch, for nam ingwhat is hap pen ing in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, and oceans, and atmos -pheres. Perhaps need ing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but per haps offer -ing some thing else, some thing just maybe more liv able. I’m struck by the fact that twokinds of insights seem to have over taken the intel lec tual schol arly world, inter na tion allyreally, and across the divi sions of the dis ci plines. Simultaneously I pro pose that it hasbecome lit er ally unthink able to do good work in any inter est ing field with the premises ofindi vid u al ism, method olog i cally indi vid u al ism, and human excep tion al ism. None of themost gen er a tive and cre ative intel lec tual work being done today any longer spends muchtime (except as a kind of foot note) talk ing, doing cre ative work with the premises of indi -vid u al ism and method olog i cal indi vid u al ism, and I’ll try to illus trate that a bit, pri mar ilyfrom some of the nat ural sci ences.

Simultaneously, there has been an explo sion within the biolo gies of mul ti speciesbecoming-with, of an under stand ing that to be a one at all, you must be a many and it’s nota metaphor. That it’s about the tis sues of being any thing at all. And that those who arehave been in rela tion al ity all the way down. There is no place that the lay ers of the onioncome to rest on some kind of foun da tion.

How is it, if these are truly the intel lec tual rev o lu tions and I believe cul tural rev o lu tionsthat are infus ing this planet at this time, how is it that the name of our epoch that is seri -ously pro posed and being stud ied in the inter na tional geo phys i cal union and else where,with a report to be issued in 2016, that the name pro posed for our epoch is theAnthropocene, with the fig ure of the Anthropos? What an extra or di nary kind of con tra dic -tion is implied in nam ing th epoch that way. But it of course is named that way because ofthe cor rect under stand ing that peo ple, for get the Anthropos, peo ple have been doing onthis planet has in fact changed the planet for ever, and for every one. Anthropogenic

processes are what give war rant to that name. I will try both to jus tify and trou ble that inthe next few min utes.

Jim Clifford last night read a lit tle quote from Always Coming Home that I think has gotto stand along with Virginia Woolf’s epi graph from Three Guineas. Actually, it’s not theepi graph of Three Guineas but in the midst of the three guineas Virginia Woolf insists, “Think we must.” Think we must. If ever there has been a time for the need seri ously tothink, it is now, and it has got to be the kind of think ing that Hannah Arendt accused[Adolph] Eichmann of being inca pable of. (That was not an English sen tence, but it’s okay,I’m talk ing about Germans.) Namely, the banal ity of evil in the fig ure of Eichmann wascon densed in Hannah Arendt’s analy sis into the inca pac ity to think the world that is actu -ally being lived. The inabil ity to con front the con se quences of the world ing that one is infact engaged in, and the lim it ing and think ing to func tion al ity. The lim it ing of think ing tobusi ness as usual. Being smart, per haps, being effi cient, per haps, but that Eichmann wasinca pable of think ing, and in that con sisted the banal ity and ordi nar i ness of evil. AndI think among us, the ques tion of whether we are Eichmanns is a very seri ous one.

Perhaps the utopist should heed this unset tling news at last. Perhaps the utopistwould do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motor cy cle, puton a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off look ing thin,yel low, and dingy across the desert and up into the dig ger pines.Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a ColdPlace to Be”

I’m giv ing this talk under a par tic u lar gor geous image of Octopus cyanea, or the day octo -pus, who you can see in the cur rent “Tentacles” exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. AsI have been for a long time, I’ve been try ing to stay with the trou ble under the sign of sci -ence of SF, of string fig ures, sci ence fact, sci ence fic tion, spec u la tive fab u la tion, spec u la tivefem i nism, so far. The sky has not fallen, not yet. And I have been inspired by the think ingof Marilyn Strathern and oth ers, who tell me that it mat ters what sto ries tell sto ries, it mat -ters what thoughts think thoughts, it mat ters what worlds world worlds. That we need totake seri ously the acqui si tion of that kind of skill, emo tional, intel lec tual, mate r ial skill, todesta bi lize our own sto ries, to retell them with other sto ries, and vice versa. A kind of seri -ous denor mal iza tion of that which is nor mally held still, in order to do that which onethinks one is doing. It mat ters to desta bi lize worlds of think ing with other worlds of think -ing. It mat ters to be less parochial. If ever there was a time, it is surely now, and I think allof us lack many of the skills.

As you know, Ursula Le Guin is my prin ci pal inspi ra tion for a great deal, not least her wayof approach ing ques tions of nar ra tion, evo lu tion, writ ing, “The Carrier Bag Theory ofFiction.” That rather than a heroic story told yet one more time with the first beau ti fulwords and weapons, or words as weapons and weapons as words, instead rethink theques tions of evo lu tion in a much smaller vein, with the tiny, hollowed-out neg a tive spaces,the shell which can hold some water that can be shared, the net bag that can carry foodback to the camp, that can carry the baby. The kind of social ity that comes from com mu ni -

ties mak ing their lives together. Not any kind of Utopia, cer tainly not absent con flict, but itis not the heroic story of the priv i leged sig ni fier mov ing across matrix space to bring backthe prize at the end and die.

Always Coming Home is a story that acti vates that par tic u lar the ory of being, the ory ofevo lu tion, really. The Anthropocene is that name that was pro posed in about 2000. Theword was invented, actu ally, by a man who is a great lover and studier of diatoms in theGreat Lakes of North America. It’s impor tant to remem ber that Eugene Stoermer isa fresh wa ter biol o gist and a lover of the diatoms. His term the Anthropocene was in factinvented in order to sig nal the Anthropogenic processes that are acid i fy ing the waters andchang ing the nature of life on Earth. But it was picked up and pop u lar ized by Paul Crutzen,an atmos pheric chemist who won a Nobel Prize. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer joinedtogether to pop u lar ize the name Anthropocene specif i cally in rela tion ship to those sorts of

processes ema nat ing par tic u larly from the mid-18th cen tury and the steam engine and theextra or di nar ily expand ing use of fos sil fuels that acid ify the oceans, bleach the corals (Theywere par tic u larly wor ried about a vib rio infec tion in coral reefs that’s respon si ble forbleach ing— We’ll be hear ing more about vib rio bac te ria both from me and from Margaret[McFall-Ngai] in a few min utes. Vibrio is respon si ble for cholera, another vari ant of it.Vibrios are geniuses at com mu ni ca tion. They are sig nallers, queuers par excel lence. Thoseare guys who really get into the world and change it. In the case of the Hawaiian bob tailsquid, we can cheer for them. In the case of the bleached coral and cholera in Haiti, I think

we have quite another atti tude toward the encour age ment of vib rio on this planet.

I think the proper icon for the Anthropocene, I think of that human being that is sig nalledby the Anthropocene, this Anthropos, the one who looks up, is Fossil-Making Man, burn -ing fos sils as fast as pos si ble. And what else would sig nal this man but the Burning Manfes ti val in the deserts of Nevada?

This is of course the burn ing effigy at one of the Burning Man fes ti vals. They started on thebeach, Baker Beach in San Francisco in a much smaller way. Rather small wooden effi giesof a man (and a dog, I might point out) that were burned as part of the cel e bra tion of thesum mer sol stice, and they grew in the way of Fossil-Making Man’s atti tudes toward things,from a rather mod est effigy to a 104 foot-tall burn ing thing in the desert, such that every -body who takes a snap shot of burn ing man has to sign a con tract that the copy right isowned by the Burning Man orga ni za tion.

The Anthropocene is also tightly tied to a god dess fig ure, Gaia, the fig ure of the Earth whois Gaia partly because Gaia was invoked by James Lovelock to sig nal what a liv ing planetlooks like from space. Very much part of the NASA project, the Apollo mis sions, the searchfor life on Mars. Gaia is a fig ure who emerges into the con scious ness of the Anthroposfrom space. She is an earthly fig ure, not a female fig ure but an it, one who fig ures themetab o lism of a planet, that a planet is a whole, autopoi etic sys tem.

[This photo] is from one of the Apollo mis sions, the pho to graph of the Earth ris ing fromthe Moon. That is the per spec tive from which Gaia is the fig ure of the Anthropocene.

[This] dia gram is one that James Lovelock used in one of his lec tures on Gaia that gives usa sense of what an autopoi etic sys tem looks like. It’s a sys tems the ory. It def i nitely has todo with com plex sys tem processes. It is not a the ory of addi tive change but of sys tem

change. It is about self-making and lay ers of self-making. It’s about order out of dis or der.It’s about home o sta tic mech a nisms in autopoi etic sys tems. The lim its of home o sta ticmech a nisms. The moments of flip from accom mo da tion, accom mo da tion, accom mo da -tion, whoops, col lapse. accom mo da tion, Accommodation, accom mo da tion, whoops, col -lapse. Autopoietic the o ries accom mo date col lapse as they accom mo date adjust ment intheir sys temic ways of think ing. These are the fun da men tal kinds of log i cal appa ra tusesthat have been used in sci en tiz ing the Anthropocene in its major research orga ni za tionsand pol icy bod ies, most cer tainly includ ing the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change. IPCC has been issu ing its reports now for a num ber of years. It uses thepho tographs, the snap shots from the cell phone, of the planet Earth, and it engages thatkind of sys tem think ing that pro duces a very par tic u lar kind of scale called “global.”

In Anna Tsing’s Friction she does a very inter est ing ethno graphic study of what pro ducesthe scale called global, and how the mod els work, how the insti tu tions work, how it is thatsome thing as big as some thing called “global” emerges as a work object. Anna is nota trasher, Anna is not the sort of thing that says, “Oops, gotcha. Done with that.” butrather, “Oh, that’s how it works. How can this both work and not work for any thing thatneeds to be done on this Earth?” So I am not argu ing that we don’t need the kinds of oper -a tions that go on under the sign of the Anthropocene, Gaia, autopoi etic think ing, andglobal scale, but I am sig nalling their very his tor i cal and mate r ial speci ficity, and their lim -i ta tions both mytho log i cal and oth er wise.

I would also argue (and this is much more ten u ous) that the Anthropocene main bio log i calsci ences are those of the so-called mod ern syn the sis that was put together crudely from the30s to the 50s, and then again from the 50s to the 70s, and at some very deep sense thesesci ences are grossly inad e quate to the kind of think ing required for our urgent times. Theyare pow er ful. I’m not talk ing about trash ing them. Again I’m talk ing about under stand ingwhat they did, can do, can’t do, and what they stopped. So that the sci ences of the mod ernsyn the sis work with genes, cells, organ isms, pop u la tions, species, put them into rela tion -ships with each other that were well-described by the math e mat ics of com pe ti tion, thecom pe ti tion equa tions derived ulti mately from the ther mo dy nam ics of Gibbs, and that theworld is pro foundly math e ma tized in terms of those sorts of units that can suc cess fullyleave copies of each other in com pe ti tion with other copy ing units. Powerful appa ra tus forunder stand ing the biolo gies.

But what the sci ences of the mod ern syn the sis could not do and did not do was have anygrip on micro bi ol ogy, partly because micro bi ol ogy works in such a weird way. The lit tle

crit ters just do things we would not per mit in the aver age mid dle school. They could notand did not deal with sym bio sis. The many bio log i cal process that have come to be shownas gen eral to life on Earth were ungras pable within the sci ences of the mod ern syn the sis,basi cally. They were really minor ity sci ences. Everything to do with lichens and coral reefs

that became so excit ing in the late 19th cen tury in some sig nif i cant way dis ap peared fromthe lead ing sci ences until very recently. And they could not and did not deal with devel op -men tal phe nom ena. They could not deal with change through time in any very seri ous way.

I would like to pro pose for per fectly obvi ous rea sons that for all of the fail ings of theAnthropos and the Anthropocene, and all of the strengths of both, the Anthropos did notdo this thing that threat ens mass extinc tion, and that if we were to use only one word forthe processes that we’re talk ing about, it should be the Capitalocene.

Furthermore, those processes that are sig nalled by the extra or di nary prim i tive accu mu la -tions and extrac tions of orga ni za tions of labor and pro duc tions of tech nolo gies of very par -tic u lar kinds for the extrac tion and mald is tri b u tion of profit, so on and so forth, did not

start in the mid-18th cen tury, nor do we need to go back to “deep time” and the end of thelast Ice Age and play the notion that human ver sus nature is as old as our species itself.

Stark non sense. But we do need to go deeper in time than the mid-18th cen tury, and I usethis slide sim ply to sig nal the for ma tions of mar kets and accu mu la tions of wealth in thegreat trade routes, many of which fig ured China as a major player, and the Indian Ocean as

a major player. I do this sim ply to sig nal that those metab o lisms of the oikos and [ikos?], ofecon omy and ecol ogy, and of world ing, and of trad ing and mak ing, need to be fig ured

older than the mid-18th cen tury, and that does not mean going back to some kind of deepecol ogy.

Clearly, the melt ing of the ice around the Arctic is very impor tant to the Capitalocene, inno small part because some thing like 30% of the nat ural gas reserves are in the Arctic seasunder the ice, or the no-longer ice. I give you here an old ship that didn’t quite make it, anda new ship which is quite capa ble, thank you.

And then I give you the third age of car bon, which I believe we are liv ing in. I’m indebtedto Michael Klare for this. That is to say that even though sus tain able tech nolo gies of allkinds are get ting vast invest ments, way more money is going into suck ing the last calo rieof fos sil fuel out of the tis sues of the Earth and the melt ing of the ice in the NorthwestPassage. The melt ing of ice in the Hudson Bay is a big part of this.

What we have here is Greenpeace going against a Russian oil rig in the Russian areas of theArctic. The inter na tional com pe ti tion in the Northern seas is aston ish ing. The mil i tarycom pe ti tion, the cor po rate com pe ti tion. The suck ing of the last calo rie of car bon out of thisplanet is a big deal.

So we get to the Cthulucene. My fig ure [on the left] is Potnia Theron, or Medusa. Medusais the Greek ver sion of this snake-haired cthonic entity who is Potnia Theron, PotniaMelissa the god dess of the bees, who is a very old and cthonic fig ure who is in no one’spocket. A fig ure of cre ation and destruc tion, an entity of extra or di nary pow ers, and I wouldsug gest to you that those who think the cthonic ones are old, tra di tional, done, been there,sup planted by civ i liza tion, are sim ply wrong. I fig ure that for this pur pose with the Oodout of Doctor Who sci ence fic tion film TV series that I bet every body in the room has atleast seen some of. And I remind you that the ten tac u lar ones, whose faces are ten ta clesand not eyes, whose face are feel ers, that the Ood had their hind brain out side their bodyand that the bad enslavers came and cut their hind brain, which was the part of them thattied them to each other and to the pos si bil ity of what they call a hive-mind but let’s just callit com mu nity or think ing with each other, and replaced it with a lit tle glow ing globe thatcould be con trolled by the slave mak ers. So I think of the Ood as a per fectly appro pri ateCthonic One for the Cthulucene.

Shoshanah Dubiner, “Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis”

But let’s move to the biolo gies and go to Lynn Margulis. This is “Endosymbiosis: Homageto Lynn Margulis,” a giant paint ing of sev eral feet by sev eral feet, on the wall between thebio log i cal sci ences and the geo sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whereLynn pro posed, and she and her labs showed, that the ori gin of com plex cel lu lar ity on thisEarth is an endosym bi otic event. That is, some bac te r ial sorts of crit ters ate oth ers and gotindi ges tion and stuck around with each other. That the ori gin of com plex cel lu lar ity is anact of indi ges tion. This paint ing is of the crit ters involved in indi ges tion that is per haps theworld’s first com plex world ing, except Lynn would dis agree with that since she was quitesure the bac te ria were already quite com plex enough, thank you.

You’ll hear more about this from Margaret, but it’s not just mul ti cel lu lar ity which is ata sym bio genetic event of cthonic pro por tions, but also if you take this lovely lit tleHawaiian bob tail squid, get it hatched and fill a lit tle spe cial ized pouch with very par tic u -lar bac te ria at a very par tic u lar time, those very par tic u lar bac te ria will sig nal meta mor -phic changes in the squid that allows it to build a cer tain kind of struc ture that’s really cru -cial for its being able to har bor light-emitting bac te ria as an adult and look like a starry skyfrom below so that it can swim along and get its prey. It’ll glue sand to its back so fromabove it looks like a sandy bot tom and from below it looks like a starry sky, and it canshoot its way through the waters gob bling up din ner because of sym bio genetic events. Sothat’s about devel op men tal pro gram ming. It’s about, to develop prop erly through time, weneed each other in an oblig ate sym bio sis, and this proves to be way more gen eral than onewould think.

The other slide is a sim i lar kind of argu ment out of Nicole King’s lab o ra tory at Berkeley,which is about the ori gin of ani mal mul ti cel lu lar ity from the clump ing of choanafla gel latesin the pres ence of cer tain kinds of bac te r ial infec tion. Infection is nec es sary to com plex ity.

We are all lichens now. We have never been indi vid u als. From anatom i cal, phys i o log i cal,evo lu tion ary, devel op men tal, philo sophic, eco nomic, I don’t care what per spec tive, we areall lichens now.

Art-science activisms inspire me at a level— and I refuse to give any of my pre sen ta tionswith out a kind of potent alliance with those who are work ing with beauty and fury in theirenlist ing the pos si bil ity of ongo ing ness. The first pic ture that you see up there is fromMargaret and Christine Wertheim’s Institute for Figuring. The hyper bolic Crochet CoralReef, where the prac tices of women’s cro chet ing the non-Euclidian fig ures became veryimpor tant math e mat i cal fig ures. Something like 27 coun tries and more than 7,000 peo plehave been involved in the col lab o ra tions to make dis plays of coral reefs from cro chet ing.They’d enact a sol i dar ity with the reefs through women’s fiber arts, envi ron men tal ism, themath e mat ics of com plex non-Euclidian spaces, the inter na tional col lab o ra tions of instal la -tion art. They are an extra or di nar ily inter est ing acti va tion. This is the “Toxic Reef,” madesig nif i cantly out of dis carded reel-to-reel tape and other toxic fibers.

The other is a book project put together by a friend of mine who died a cou ple of monthsago, Alison Jolly, a pri ma tol o gist who stud ies lemurs in Madagascar and was deeplyinvolved in con ser va tion. Alison was hor ri fied by the fact that Malagasy chil dren studyEuropean ani mals and have no lit er a ture or ani mal fables in the Malagasy lan guage, orpic tures of Malagasy ani mals, the Madagascar flora and fauna. She and her col leagues havepro duced an aston ish ing series of about ten children’s books that are bilin gual in Malagasyand English. Real nat ural his tory. These are excit ing ani mal sto ries, fab u lous ani mal sto -ries, that are an effort to incul cate in the young a love of place, a love of home.

Cthulucene reworld ing. Compost not Posthuman. “Revolution is but thought car ried into

action,” Emma Goldman. The acti va tion of the cthonic pow ers that is within our grasp aswe col lect up the trash of the Anthropocene and the exter min ism of the Capitalocene, tosome thing that might pos si bly have a chance of ongo ing.

Thank you.

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