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

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.

The “end of nature” as formulated by environmental activist Bill McKibben, and theorized extensively by environmental humanists interested to trace the impacts of an historic privileging of aesthetic expression over and against material history, is a common trope in a particular strand of cli-fi, or climate fiction.² Films like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), for example, are characterized by glimpses of a future—often spectacularly dystopian—besieged by disaster on a planetary scale. Here we see a violent end presumably wrought by an undifferentiated human species bent on destruction. Of course, perhaps as troubling as such an ontological (and political) flattening as Anthropos (to whom I shall turn shortly), such films necessarily substitute lament for political engagement, producing a sort of paralysis. Not simply “derangement,” as has been argued by novelist Amitav Ghosh, there is a palpable fear that we—again, as undifferentiated human actor—will finally be punished for the rapacity with which we have fecklessly consumed Earth’s resources.³ Not surprisingly then, the possible future forecasted in these aesthetic productions instantiates a violent Cartesianism in which the human and more-than-human landscape are pitted against one another in an unrelenting battle to the death: here the human hero—Anthropos, the mighty protagonist who conjures what Sylvia Wynter has termed “colonial man,” or, per Elizabeth Povinelli, the “biocentric subject of late liberalism”—stands alone at the oft-heralded “end of history.”⁴

Alternatively, and eschewing a narrative marked by a tragic futurity, May and Butler, as I shall demonstrate in the present essay, choose to “[stay] with the trouble”; and “staying with the trouble,” according to Donna Haraway, “does not require [any such] relationship to … the future” (1). “[S]taying with the trouble” is also practical: the coming apocalypse—call it the “end of nature”; “the end of history” forged through the singular capacity of “colonial man” and his late-capitalist legatees; or the end of the more temperate Holocene—has arrived. Thus, as I shall further suggest, both works opt to dramatize what Anna Tsing would call the “possibility of life in capitalist ruins”—whether in the form of a new sort of cyborg in the case of “Mechanophobia,” or through Butler’s hyper-empathic “Earthseed” community in The Parable of the Sower and its sequel The Parable of the Talents.

In what follows, I argue for the virtue of “staying with the trouble”—a means of disrupting the facile timescales of an Anthropocene discourse that both hinges on a narrowly Hegelian conception of history and that elides consideration of other historical actors, whether other species or other human communities. Against historical formulations reliant on an imperial teleology that denies the presence of what Dipesh Chakrabarty has termed a “heterotemporal” landscape, and one rife with the pluralized voices (and histories) of a planetary subaltern, I “stay with the trouble.”⁵ In so doing, I recognize the limitations of such temporal formulations as the Anthropocene; so too, its inherent dismissal of the spatial logic of global capitalism that thrives on the displacement and exploitation of the putatively inhuman. I refer to those actors long understood through Linnaean typologies that reduce each to a fungible object to be traded in the marketplace—whether the bodies of workers subjected to the necropolitical regimes of modern capitalism, or the products for which they toil. Although, and as Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore remark in their recent history of capital and the violence of such real abstractions as “nature” and society”: “[Carl] Linnaeus’s typology did more than allow some human bodies to be considered property and instruments of debt. It went much further, providing a scientific basis for bodies and lives to be subject to government by a state run by humans who placed themselves at the top of this hierarchy” (188).

In an effort to depart from a colonialist imaginary delimited by this sort of taxonomic qua material violence, in what follows I engage with a different stratigraphic model: the Chthulucene. A proposed alternative to the Anthropocene, this strange coinage—an adaptation of Pimoa cthulhu, a species of spider and not a reference to H.P. Lovecraft—is “a name for an elsewhere and elsewhen that was, still is, and might yet be,” and a term coined by Haraway to capture a more capacious landscape in which human and more-than-human communities are co-constitutive, sympoietic, and always in flux (31).⁶ Haraway’s multispecies assemblages, like Tsing’s, are not settled ontological categories. As in Wynter’s formulation of the “human as praxis”—a means of seeing the putatively stable category of the human as an always shifting concept that continually produces its other in the form of the inhuman, the slave, the colonial subject—Haraway sees this ongoing reproduction of the landscape as a praxis through which to understand forms of collaborative, if also dialectical, world-making that have historically been elided in what Kathryn Yusoff would describe in terms of “white geology.” In this way, my reading also remains alert to the ongoing (always imbricated) histories of world-making and settler-colonialism, and thus the need for a more radical, and speculative, reading practice that sees the human (colonial man), inhuman (slave, colonial subject), and nonhuman (plant-based matter) as praxis over and against settled category, theme, or in the case of Anthropos, protagonist.

Resisting modes of autopoiesis, or self-making, so central to popular progress narratives, in the works by Butler and May we see sympoietic communities forging new networks of intimacy and kinship—sympoietic, a term used by Haraway to describe collaborative world-building. In Butler’s Parable novels, the reader is confronted with a sort of Reaganesque California landscape—a Neoliberal utopia par excellence—where wildfires blaze uncontrollably, corporate intentional communities proliferate, and the exigencies of climate change produce a late-capitalist Jim Crow. It is here that Butler’s fictional “Earthseed” community will build a new world—empathic, collective, and collaborative. May’s poem, on the other hand, figures a somewhat different scenario. The world of “Mechanophobia” is closer to Haraway’s vision of multispecies assemblages and offers a way of thinking about the possibility of life not merely in “capitalist ruins,” but perhaps in the ruins of a narrowly imagined Anthropocene discourse—one persistently reliant on notions of human mastery cultivated “through the Enlightenment, proletarianization, and the privatization” of “man” and of the commons, and which continues apace in enabling the production and maintenance of a planetary system of increasingly cheap lives (Patel and Moore 35).

I situate May’s poem within a Black Anthropocene discourse that traces its genealogy to the work of Butler, and through the writing of contemporary speculative fiction writers like adrienne maree brown, in order to make clear the intersectional networks of activism and world-making that have long privileged Haraway’s mandate to “make kin” over and against the steadfast commitment to the individual (and the ecologically bankrupt Cartesianism) implicit to Anthropocene thinking (Streeby).⁷ So too, in an effort to expose the “billion Black Anthropocenes” that are consistently subordinated to configurations of the human, or Anthropos, and that deny the necessarily imbricated (and dialectical) relationships between settler-colonialism, extractivism, fossil-capitalism, and dispossession (Yusoff). Thus, in the remainder of this essay I look to Butler and May as guides for a kind of Black Anthropocene thinking and thus a means of departure from the imperialist dictates of Anthropos. Additionally, and departing from Yusoff who dismisses any new “cenes” in their potential to efface histories of social injustice—notably the ways in which a proposed “Capitalocene” might, in her estimation, reproduce a problematic economic determinism—I understand the Chthulucene as a corollary to Black Anthropocene discourses in its attention to the ontological qua onto-epistemological limitations of the human; and I read both works accordingly.⁸

Life in Capitalist Ruins, or After Anthropos

Against images of desolate, unpopulated landscapes, Tsing (like Haraway) asks her readers to look instead for life in the sorts of ecological bricolage that have lately replaced the ordered landscapes of the Anthropocene. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, “she looks for the eruptions of unexpected liveliness and the contaminated and nondeterministic, unfinished, ongoing practices of living in the ruins” (Haraway 37). The northwestern forests of Oregon, where the coniferous order of the now denuded pine forests has been replaced by mycological chaos, serve as Tsing’s central example. In the present essay, I look to late-capitalist Detroit and California in a similar vein. I read May’s and Butler’s works as portraits of an “emergent ecology,” or an “eruption of unexpected liveliness,” as well as a commentary on the limited political imagination of typical Anthropocene stories. Such narratives, as aforementioned, tend to focus on a dystopian future rather than what Haraway characterizes as the “joyful fuss” of a chaotic present—a present, for Haraway and Tsing, marked by sympoiesis or “making with” in “co-responsibility,” and thus no longer constrained by the sorts of virulent individualism inherent to a fundamentally sociocentric Anthropocene discourse (Haraway 58).

Haraway and Tsing, of course, are two of many who opt to stay with the trouble, and who likewise address the elision of the nonhuman, inhuman, and the not quite human in extant discussions of stratigraphy—conversations that tend to neglect questions of environmental justice in their consideration of the modern development schemes responsible for anthropogenic climate change. Aligned with critics of imperial liberalism, including Wynter as well as Patel and Moore whose configuration of “cheap nature,” or the process through which the work of “many humans—but also of animals, soils, forests, and all manner of extra-human nature—[is rendered] invisible or nearly so” (600), Alexander Weheliye also alerts us to the immiscible histories of modern racial taxonomies, eighteenth-century advances in biology and phylogenetics, and the ideological foundations of liberal discourse that continue to delimit Anthropocene thinking. Indeed, prevailing notions of Anthropos persistently marshal an opportunistic Cartesianism—illustrated through the technological virtuosity of “colonial man” who might yet “torture” more productive “secrets” out of the earth—while implicitly depending upon the necessarily dialectical model of the human and inhuman, which makes possible extractivist networks of accumulation reliant of forced labor, inclusive of the factory workers in May’s poem (Bacon qtd. in Patel and Moore). In “Mechanophobia,” however, the workers resist such categorical reductionism.

In rendering them ontologically porous, May in particular disrupts given categories of the human, and thus any stratigraphic designation that privileges a singular human agency, instead figuring Haraway’s Chthulucene—unsettling the hegemony of Anthropos by foregrounding the more-than-human communities that emerge at “the end of the world” (Tsing). Thus, as I shall ultimately suggest, such works offer a model for a radical politics grounded in collectivity, and thus a means of “making kin” in “edgy times” (Haraway). So too, and pace William Connelly, a means of forging a new pluralized “’we’ … in a world and time of tragic possibility” (35). Resisting the “apocalyptic panics” of the Anthropocene, the eerily corporeal terrain of May’s Detroit, not unlike Tsing’s battered forests or the agentic river featured in adrienne maree brown’s vision of Detroit, invites the reader to consider how “the end of the Nature concept, which served to marginalize people of color [may serve as] an opportunity to begin genuine social building”—through, that is, the kind of speculative fiction that I explore here (Haraway; LeMenager). If “the age of the Anthropocene is an age of grief, put simply,” in such Chthulucene stories we are forced to confront the possibility of survival, if also Haraway’s and Tsing’s contention that “if we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope” (Hance; Tsing).

I ground my discussion primarily in May’s “Mechanophobia,” because of its resonance for thinking through both the planetary transformations of the latter Holocene as well as the constituent configurations of human, inhuman, and nonhuman actors long understood through the limited imaginings of Linnaeus or Descartes—the work of both demonstrative of what Didier Debaise, following Alfred North Whitehead, describes as the “cosmology of the moderns.” The poem invites a consideration of extant discussions around bios, or life—that is, the biopolitical substratum of extractivist networks of accumulation reliant on the abstraction and commodification of the putative inhuman. As abovementioned, I use the term “inhuman” following Wynter, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and others, to refer to such fungible objects as May’s factory workers. A rejoinder to the “biocentric subject [which is to say the] dominant mode of subjectivity of late liberalism” per Povinelli, such figurations of necropower productively gesture toward the ways in which the discourses of life and non-life make possible technologies of dispossession such as we see in Detroit (Yusoff 11). Even more germane to a discussion of “Mechanophobia,” here theories of trans-corporeality—or the porosity of the human body and/in its respective ecology—also resonate as we consider the imbrications of human subject-formation and intraspecies coevolution in the longue durée of an otherwise linear, stratified geological history (Alaimo; Povinelli).

May’s eerily animated machines—strange instantiations of a late-capitalist intraspecies subject—live in a sympoietic space of which human and more-than-human (machine) are co-constitutive. This is not the birdless city he would describe elsewhere, but a landscape rife with a new species of “ontological amphibian”—a term used by Eben Kirksey, following Isabelle Stengers, to describe the “nonhierarchal modes of existence” that he attributes to more-than-human beings who are marked by an ontological porosity, and who are the products of an emergent, aleatory mode of coevolution or “becoming with” (18). May’s “ontological amphibian” not only contests putatively stable categories of the human and nonhuman; it suggests new possibilities for inhabiting the present. In this sense, “Mechanophobia” deconstructs the “ontological cage” of the factory worker, modeling (if metaphorically) Haraway’s “terran critters”—those nonhuman citizens of Terrapolis living in the fantastical compost pile of Haraway’s imagination. Such a fruitful deconstruction surely emerges in Butler’s fictional universe as well. As we shall see shortly, each offers a potential model for new forms of sympoiesis in these edgy times.

Emergent Ecologies in Landscapes of Ruin

In “Mechanophobia,” the reader is presented with what might at first appear a typical Artificial Intelligence fantasy. Set in an abandoned automobile factory, the speaker describes the disintegrating bodies of workers, both automated and also presumably animate: “There is no work left for the husks. / Automated welders like us, / your line replacements, can't expect / sympathy after our bright / arms of cable rust over” (Lines 1–4). However, occupying the otherwise corporeal space of the worker’s body is the “mechanical hymn” of the fledgling machine; and it is that hymn that constitutes the poetic voice, urging the reader to fear its grasp: “its [spark scrambling] up / fingertips, hurrying to your heart” (Lines 17–20).

Reading the poem as a praxis for sympoietic world-making, or becoming with, I am wont to consider the speaker not as denuded human body, but as vibrant assemblage of human and more-than-human actants. Read as such, it seems that May’s “Mechanophobia” is less a testament to our imminent destruction than an invitation to consider an emergent ecology—one no longer constrained by the bounded individualism inherent to conventional narratives of modernity, nor by the dictates of capital.⁹ Not unlike the “gnarled steel roots of machinery” that Allen Ginsberg would conjure in his similarly dystopian poem “Sunflower Sutra,” May elaborates a sort of apocalyptic unwelt—an environment as experienced by its constituent / producing subjects—unsettling the “ontological cages” that otherwise ensnare animals within siloed “environmental worlds” (Kirksey 19). No longer a static environment which “organisms can … act upon,” here “rather than bodies as direct products of environments, an organism’s responsiveness with an environment is the condition of its emergence” (Kirksey 19; Heyward 233).

Such an understanding of labor and development is anathema to the abovementioned notion of autopoiesis—a means of improvement that hinges on the autonomy of the individual and his ability to cultivate, through the faculty of reason, his respective property. Fundamental to a settler-colonial ideology often attributed to the interlocking philosophies of such figures as John Locke, Andrew Jackson, Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry David Thoreau, and numerous others, and realized materially through contemporaneous campaigns of enclosure and dispossession, such a providential imaginary not only eschews the labor of the inhuman, and of nonhuman actors; so too, any notion of value not correlated to private property—such as commoning economies wherein usufruct rights replace ownership, but more to the point of this essay, a value cultivated in shared “response-ability”—is disregarded entirely (Haraway; Cohen).¹⁰ Arguably, any discussion around the survival of the human species ought really to include those actors with whom humans have always (and necessarily) worked, not to mention other ways of calculating value that fly in the face of fossil capitalism. That is, a means of transcending the notion of material value as always already produced by the mixing of human labor with supposedly non-agential matter—the otherwise brute stuff that has long preoccupied theorists interested to imagine a more robust vision of political ecology.¹¹

In an effort to participate in such a fruitful imagining, I consider May’s Detroit against readings that might cling to images of “automated welders” as facile metaphors for industrial collapse. I look instead to the “one that breathes” (23–24). I consider its latent whimper as it struggles, like Ginsberg’s sunflower, to live in the strange muddle of the Chthulucene. I knowingly appropriate Haraway’s model only insofar as the multispecies muddle of May’s landscape is not conventionally sentient, not quite “beings of the earth” or “Chthonic ones” (2). I argue that May’s is not so much a precise illustration of a multispecies muddle as it is an invitation to imagine such a world. In May’s factory, Haraway’s notion of “becoming-with” is realized in the dissolution of boundaries between worker and machine, worker and landscape. In this sense, May’s cyborg also recalls Haraway’s earlier work: in the “Cyborg Manifesto” where she imagines the “cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings” (292). “By the late twentieth century,” she argues, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (292). Staying with the Trouble builds upon this foundational framework, in a sense queering Haraway’s earlier feminist critique in order to render the more capacious realm of Haraway’s newly conceptualized Chthulucene—an “elsewhen” populated by multiple species and committed indeed to a heterotemporal worldview that resists the sorts of teleological histories at stake in what Haraway describes as a “Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics and grumpy human-exceptionalist Heidegerrian worlding” (11). This “elsewhen,” or “Terrapolis,” is a place “where response-ability must be cobbled together, not in the existentialist and bond-less, lonely, Man-making map theorized by Heidegger and his followers” (11). Such a “bond-less” (and sky-gazing) worldview is, as we have discussed, the terrain of the Anthropocene. Preferring forms of “multispecies storytelling” to Anthropocentric ones, Haraway instead opts to stay close to the soil; “SF critters are beings of the mud more than the sky” (11).

May’s poem is just one possible instantiation of Terrapolis. Such thinking is rooted in a much earlier era; it likewise resembles, if also precisely models, one appearing closer to Haraway’s first cyborg. I refer to Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, which was similarly grounded in an intersectional feminist framework also aligned with the work of her contemporary, scholar-activist Audre Lorde whose Sister Outsider was published the same year as The Cyborg Manifesto. Butler’s creations of “Earthseed” in the novel, and also in the 1998 sequel Parable of the Talents, also foregrounds collectivity, offering a guide for “world-making” in capitalist ruins through the literal spreading of seed. Despite the protagonist’s longing for another planetary home, she too prefers to stay closer to the mud. Butler’s fictional world imagines life beyond capitalist ruins through the creation of a distinctly earth-bound community. Her “chthonic ones” are fleeing the burning southern California landscape and spreading their seeds to cultivate new communities no longer bound by the political structures of the Anthropocene. “Acorn”—the first Earthseed enclave, which is founded by Butler’s protagonist “Lauren Olamina” and named for the nut that native communities used as a staple and which has long since been relegated to squirrel fodder—becomes a refuge for those fleeing the violence of a new class of criminals born in an era of climate chaos.

Lauren and her community are, however, and quite notably, interested primarily in the human species and its survival; this distinguishes the novel to the extent that the human might be read as inhabiting its literal ontological cage. But “Earthseed,” if also the other earth-bound communities conceived by “Octavia’s brood” (as similarly attuned speculative fiction (sf) novelists are sometimes called), ought really to be considered outside of an Anthropocene framework that persists in its ideological commitment to a particular model of Anthropos—one steeped in an ideology of whiteness conceived in the abovementioned union of eighteenth-century biological science and imperial-era racism, and one equally marked by rhetorical abstraction over and against material suffering. Disrupting California’s segregated political imaginary, the Earthseed community at Acorn emerges as a pluralized agrarian collective—an assemblage of otherwise disparate communities, who had long been subjected to occupation and removal in the interest of expansion and economic development.

As intersectional feminist critique, Butler’s fictional Acorn resembles Haraway’s earlier theory of the cyborg and its political/conceptual promise. The shift, in Staying with the Trouble, from a metaphorical cyborg freighted with its colonial residue, its othering, and making animal of women and persons of color, to a multispecies Chthonic muddle aligns with a palpable shift toward what critics now call a Black Anthropocene narrative. As a thoroughgoing critique of environmental racism and the new Jim Crow engendered by climate change, the novel is a clear antecedent for works like May’s. As well, Butler’s means of cultivating “tentacular intimacy”—a term that Haraway uses to describe multispecies intimacy, but which functions in Parable to forge intimacies amongst previously segregated human communities—also resonates with May’s palpably corporeal android.

Hyperempathy and Making Kin

An indispensable guide for life in the denuded environments of late capitalism, Parable of the Sower is distinctive in its creation of “hyperempathy”—an affliction that Lauren and others possess and which makes them keenly aware of others’ pain. This condition is suggested as a viable means of cultivating solidarity. It is strikingly similar to the mode of sympoeisis that Haraway favors, if also to the notion that we might “touch the insides” of May’s worker. Duly a means of cultivating new forms of Terrapolis over and against a Heideggerian landscape populated by “bond-less Anthropos,” Lauren repeatedly remarks that humans might be less apt to harm one another if they could immediately feel the wrath of their actions: “if hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things. They could kill if they had to, or bear the pain of it or be destroyed by it. But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?” (Butler 115).

Such a magical power, it is worth noting, might also assuage a central problem posed in the area of environmental ethics: the temporal disjunction between what Jennifer Wenzel has described as the discrepant conditions of the “everyday tedium of filling the gas tank and the sublimely discrepant timescales at work in fossil fuels” (31). Changes to Earth’s systems occur over long expanses of time; and it is often the case that effect is temporally disconnected from cause to the extent that cause is no longer legible. This problem has been extensively remarked upon. Rob Nixon has notably referred to forms of political inertia being engendered by such Anthropocene timescales. Perhaps “hyperempathy” could literally speed up political response to the climate crisis.

The political salience of Butler’s novel at this moment of ongoing climate crises makes it a remarkable companion to Haraway’s project. Butler’s text also appears as a central example in Haraway’s argument that “it matters which stories we use to tell stories”; and it likewise serves as a model for the final chapter of Staying with the Trouble—the “Camille” stories, Haraway’s own contribution to speculative fiction, and further evidence for the robust utility of the speculative per Shelley Streeby’s recent argument regarding “world-making through science fiction.” As Stephanie LeMenager also remarks, the Parable novels present a model for human survival, while also functioning as a productive departure from the abovementioned “end of nature” narrative. Butler “imagine[d] a future wherein environmental collapse, wrought from extractive economies and fossil capitalism would usher in not a new version of ‘possessive individualism’ but instead what Ashley Dawson has called ‘disaster communism’” (Balkan 165). And like Haraway, Butler is notable for “employ[ing] the tools of speculative fiction to imagine such a world” (Balkan 165).

Perhaps Parable of the Sower might also be read as a companion to a poem like May’s in its figuration of apocalypse as a praxis for Black Anthropocene thinking. Both speak to the possibility of life at a moment of environmental collapse produced by historically constituted modes of social and environmental injustice—whether in the context of southern California during the ascendancy of Reagan-era policies that would decimate local environments while criminalizing communities of color; or in Detroit at the turn of the century when the automobile factories erected in the age of Ford, and memorialized in poem’s like May’s, would be replaced by urban farms or, elsewhere, the improvement projects that herald a putative renaissance, but seem intent only on reproducing historic modes of inequality.

If we are to take seriously the imperative of an intersectional Black Anthropocene critique, thus also acknowledging the ways in which longstanding categories of the human and nonhuman are rooted in colonial-era taxonomies designed to exterminate POC, then we must also imagine the notion of the cyborg (or “ontological amphibian”) as a more nuanced category. This too is a central stake of Haraway’s Chthulucene more broadly. Furthermore, and given the exigencies of climate chaos, the urgent need to “make kin in edgy times” requires a new relationship to the present and to one another as no longer “bond-less” but quite bound—to one another and to the more-than-human landscape of which we are a constitutive part.

Read in this light, May’s cyborg might prove particularly useful in conjuring not merely new ontologies, but new ways of thinking about both ontological boundaries as well as such emergent ecologies as we see in May’s Detroit. “Mechanophobia” offers, in Haraway’s terms, a “new story for telling new stories”—a “geostory” that reminds its readers of the ongoingness of matter, the “insides” of which “you don’t realize function until the [gears get] stuck” (Lines 15–16). The chthonic one at the center of “Mechanophobia” is a string figure, whose story conjures community. This sense of collectivity is, as abovementioned, the root of Haraway’s strange nomenclature. Pimoa cthulhu is not parasitic: it does not merely flourish in landscapes of death; and its survival depends upon its ability to resist the forms of alienation so essential to capital accumulation. As in the Panamanian variety that Kirksey documents in Emergent Ecologies, spiders forge tentacular networks. They practice sympoiesis, and thus cannot be easily removed from their life-worlds. These tentacular “cthonic ones … mak[e] kin in edgy times” rather than merely salvaging. So too, in resisting the “anthropocentric impulse [of] metaphor” (Furman), which marks the work of such popular poets as Mary Ruefle, whose 2014 lament “Spider” presents a typical portrait of an isolated and tragic arachnid, P. cthulhu conjures something quite unexpected: Terrapolis. Spiders weave new spaces, new homes; “spiders are their own architects” (Heyward 229).

Tentacular Intimacies in Jamaal May’s Detroit

So how might the alternative development ethos (or becoming with) of P. cthulhu serve as a lens through which to consider late-capitalist Detroit? How does Haraway’s Chthulucene function as a geostory—a new story for telling new stories not bound by capital, nor Anthropos? And finally, how might we read a poem like May’s as a model for Chthulucene thinking? First, Detroit ostensibly offers a lesson plan for the Capitalocene: built in the spirit of Boosterism, Detroit was first a French territory—one of many sites where European plunder decimated native populations and laid the groundwork for independence-era modes of accumulation. Following independence, Detroit would go the way of Chicago—part of the dream of industrial expansion, the “wild garlic place” as it was formerly known, would quickly be domesticated by grain monocultures (Cronon). Its rapid expansion would similarly hinge on the enclosure of native land. Following emancipation, the influx of former slaves to Detroit in the form of cheap labor would allow for its material prosperity and eventually lay the foundation for Henry Ford’s empire wherein emergent forms of labor solidarity aligned with a newly conceived American dream: despite what we know of Fordism—the backbreaking, poorly compensated work captured in the murals of Diego Rivera—motor city would prove a model. The “cruel optimism” of the North American Fordlandia (to take the title of his similarly engineered social project in Brazil) proved a particularly effective rhetorical veil for the vast human costs of the emergent petrosphere (Berlant).

It is in the spectacular fall of Detroit’s automobile industry that we see intimations of a Chthulucene: human and more-than-human communities proliferating in an otherwise decimated landscape wherein local environmental justice projects proliferate, and urban farms have expanded over industrial ruin. Without dismissing critiques that gentrification is undermining local movements for social and environmental justice, there is at present a viable move away from conventional development schemes—that is, a move to “turn [the city’s] liabilities into assets, and create an economy entirely apart from the transnational webs of corporations and petroleum” (Solnit 71).

Activists like Grace Lee Bogs and adrienne maree brown in Detroit seek forms of world-making and collectivism that galvanize local communities under the banner of environmental justice. Also a creative writer, brown’s work registers climate collapse through common tropes of speculative fiction—slip-stream among them—and thus offers a useful analogue for a work like May’s: the timescale of the poem also relies, a la brown, on a manipulation of the present to imagine a possible future.¹² As in brown’s story “The River,” which is set in an apocalyptic Detroit wherein the rising water has decimated local industry, May offers a glimpse of environmental justice through a sort of revenge fantasy.

Part of a network of writers designated “Octavia’s Brood,” brown practices world-making through stories like “The River” (Streeby). There is a clear sympoietic impulse in the story whereby human and marine subjectivities collude in the expulsion of a late-capitalist settler-colony. In one sense, the story might in fact be read as revenge fantasy; although a more capacious, if also generative, definition of speculative fiction instead leads us back to Haraway’s speculative fabulations. Read in this light, the river becomes an apparatus for world-making, and an agential, nonhuman comrade. It is hard to dismiss the collusion between the disenfranchised protagonist rowing along the littoral of the new settler-colony—characterized in terms of a new round of racially-charged gentrification—with the eerily timed wave (in a river no less) that wipes out the elitist gala of the new mayor!

Such imaginative means of world-building draw upon a framework that brown dubs “emergent strategies”—adaptive, collaborative, and born of disaster—whose political genealogy links non-centralized movements like Black Lives Matter with the urban farms planted by the Black Panthers a generation or so before. Blurring the lines between aesthetics and activism, both brown’s stories and her political work speculate on a world already transformed by generations of uneven development—whether in Oakland or Detroit—suggesting such fruitful alternatives as the urban farm movements that have proliferated at both historic moments. A form of sf, these examples of guerilla gardening are surely a form of world-making in edgy times.

Mechanophobia: Fear of Machines

To read contemporary Detroit in terms of hope is not to allegorize and thus undercut the struggle of actual human communities still grappling with regimes of enclosure and dispossession. It is to consider, if only imaginatively, a different way of being in the world that may prove useful in both transcending the limited conceptual (and thus political) framework of Anthropocene studies, and point a way forward that thrives on hope rather than ruin. It is to consider “becoming with” in the Chthulucene, rather than becoming despite in the Anthropocene. As in the context of Tsing’s blasted landscape, and despite one critic accusing her (and potentially me) of painting precarity in inappropriately “rosy” terms, I argue that May’s poem “allows us to explore the ruins that have become our collective home … [to] practice sympoietics in edgy times” (Purdy; Haraway 37). “Speaking resurgence to despair,” “Mechanophobia” disrupts “the purifying division of society and nature” through the dissolution of the bounded individual and the construction of a new cyborg for these times (Haraway 71, 41). May’s “automated welder,” rusted over and laid to waste, initially beseeches the reader: “there is no work left for us … your line replacements … come collect us for scrap” (Lines 1, 3, 5–6). But mapping the disintegrating machines onto a narrative of fallen Detroit, we are also told: “you should fear … the radios left in scrap yards still brimming with circuit … ” humming their “mechanical hymn” (Lines 28–30).

I read this not as “apocalyptic panic,” but pace Haraway, a “speculative fabulation” of instraspecies subjectivity, or becoming with. More than a eulogy for Detroit—a foregone conclusion about a still-living city—May creates life amidst the ruins. This is not a banal metaphor for exhausted human lives, and the disintegration of the machines that came to replace them; nor is it merely a portrait of the putrefaction of capital. I argue that we can read the poem in at least two ways—both allegorical, but both sensuously polysemic. The poem traces the exploitation and destruction of a human labor force. It then asks us to consider how the rusted arms of the machines are but metaphors for the exhausted human body: “There is no work left for the husks / Automated welders like us, / your line replacements, can't expect / sympathy after our bright / arms of cable rust over” (Lines 1–5). Here we see a conventional lament. May registers the denuded bodies of the workers in lyrics that recall Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead. As in “Alloy” where we learn of irradiated bodies, lungs made toxic by the particulates of the West Virginia silicon mines, here we see the fallen workers of the automobile industry “rust[ed] over” and laid to waste (Alaimo).

“Mechanophobia” demonstrates how the machines can also not withstand the factory—how they too are broken. Here the reader may be reminded of Chernobyl—machines replacing human figures and similarly laid to waste in radioactive ruin (Nixon). We watch the disintegration of steel and cable: “Come / collect us for scrap, grind us up/in the mouth of one of us. / Let your hand pry at the access / panel with the edge of a knife, / silencing the motor, the thrum.” (Lines 5–10). The omniscient speaker offers a condemnation not so dissimilar to the apostraphic lament of the miner in “Alloy,” if also the picaresque narrator of Indra Sinha’s novel about Bhopal, Animal’s People. In each, a rapacious industry is indicted by the posthumous voice of its long-invisible labor force.

But then the perspective shifts: the reader is implicated in the action of the poem. Suddenly the machine speaks: “It should / be you digging into guts / among fistfuls of wire. Clutch, / pull until the LEDs go dark.” (Lines 11–13). The indictment here—“It should / be you”—signals something else entirely. The shift indicates a clear distinction between a broader culture of exploitation and the particular agents of fossil capital. Suddenly too there is a plea: “Our insides may be the jagged / gears of clocks you don't realize / function until the blade gets stuck.” (Lines 14–16). And then revenge: “The current that sparks, scrambles up / fingertips, hurrying to your heart / will not come as a hot, ragged / light—you won't notice when it arrives.” (Lines 17–20) .

In the penultimate stanza, there is a dissolution of boundaries between human and nonhuman—animate and inanimate: “[t]here is always a way to touch / the insides … to disrupt any machine. Even one that / breathes. / Listen, we become quiet / like a florescent light gone dim” (Lines 21–25). Here then is the first explicit invocation of what I read as an ontological amphibian: May blurs the line between the automated and animated worker. This seems something other than the abovementioned “anthropocentric impulse”: the automated worker is not quite human; the newly animated machine cannot be easily taxonomized within a system that understands the human in the limited terms of the Anthropocene. Here we have a new cyborg for these uncertain times.

Consequently, when the narrative ultimately turns to revenge, it is difficult to imagine the sort of neat plot line that might otherwise be implied: “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. Such a mechanical hymn.” (Lines 26–30). I wonder: might we finally, to return to Haraway, “eschew transcendant plots of modernity” with their neat teleological arcs, and read this differently? That is, can we read May’s tragic cyborg as a nod to some sort of late-capitalist multispecies solidarity? Despite its clear resonances for thinking about the disposability of particular populations, might we also imagine a solidarity being forged amidst communities of human and nonhuman actors persistently sacrificed at the hands of private property regimes like Ford’s? The ending, which may be read as revenge—as the ultimate death blow to sky-gazing Anthropos—also registers revolution: here we have Detroit as “scrap-yard,” and the “mechanical hymn” as perhaps a cry, even a demand, for justice. To read it otherwise is to participate in the same historical elision that would deny the robust genealogies of world-making through activism (and agriculture) that have marked spaces like Detroit for generations.

Conclusion

This reading of “Mechanophobia” may be too optimistic; and the automated welder may in fact be read as another disposable worker. But such an unimaginative Anthropocene story seems inconsistent with the intimations of sublimity, if also sublime corporeality, that we see elsewhere in the poem. Of course, whether or not every reader will find in May’s poem a lens for radical political imagining, reading “Mechanophobia” as a Chthulucene story opens up new avenues for the urgent envisionings that Streeby and others suggest as the only means of surviving our increasingly dystopian present. In this sense, what we might call a form of Chthulucene thinking is arguably the most radical political intervention that has yet occurred in Anthropocene studies, and the figure of the cyborg—as it was in 1984—the most succinct expression of hope in edgy times. As in Haraway’s example of a municipal pigeon tower in the city of Melbourne—one of many examples of companion species flourishing—such a model “certainly cannot undo unequal treaties, conquest and [environmental] destruction; but it is nonetheless a possible thread in a pattern for ongoing, noninnocent, interrogative, multispecies getting on together” (29).

Footnotes

1

In my reading of the “end of the world,” and particularly of Octavia Butler and the “apocalyptic panics” of the Anthropocene, I am indebted to Shelley Streeby’s argument for world-making in an era of climate chaos. I likewise thank Kelly Keane, Micheal Rumore, Devin Garofalo, and Wendy Tronrud for their invaluable insights on early drafts of this essay. The essay began as a paper for a special session of the 2018 convention of the Modern Language Association inspired by Donna Haraway’s call for a discussion of “Humusities” over and against “Humanities” in our thinking about the Anthropocene. “’Humusities’ for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle” was convened by Anastassiya Andrianova and featured musings on Anthropocene discourses by Hella Bloom Cohen, Katja Altpeter, and Ron Milland. Finally, in relation to “Mechanophobia,” I thank the Literary Arts Series at Bergen Community College (BCC), and my co-conspirators Jessica Datema and Brian Cordell, where we hosted Jamaal May in 2015; Carey Salerno at Alice James Books for making this possible; and (especially) my Environmental Literature students at BCC with whom I spent hours talking about resistance, revolution, and the possibility of hope in edgy times.

2

McKibben’s The End of Nature is amongst the first popular books about global warming. Evincing an anthropocentric worldview, the book assigns responsibility for both planetary destruction and potential salvation to the human species. Timothy Morton’s 2007 Ecology without Nature offers a productive discussion of “nature” as construction, although it too cleaves to a trenchant form of anthropocentrism: the notion of planetary collapse as always already tethered to the C18 pivot to steam. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital likewise privileges steam and thus the singular capacity of Britain. Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene offers a far more nuanced and productive means of tracing the construction—materially and aesthetically—of nature in the American imaginary. For a discussion of “cli-fi” in the “novelistic mode,” and as “a struggle to find new patterns of expectation and new means of living with an unprecedented set of limited conditions,” see Stephanie LeMenager’s “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.”

3

See Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.

4

See Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”. See also Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Regarding the “end of history,” I refer to Hegel and Francis Fukuyama, but it is worth noting that the teleological impulse of such a theory appears in more progressive works on anthropogenic climate changes such as we find in Andreas Malm’s 2018 The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World.

5

See Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000). For discussions of heterotemporality, see also Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (2016).

6

Haraway is careful to distinguish her work from that of Lovecraft, whose race and gender politics she rightfully indicts. Per Haraway: “Cthulhu (note spelling), luxuriating in the science fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, plays no role for me, although it/he did play a role for Gustavo Hormiga, the scientist who named my spider demon familiar. For the monstrous male elder god (Cthulhu), see Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu” (174).

7

In Shelley Streeby’s Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-making Through Science Fiction and Activism, Streeby also looks to the works of adrienne marie brown and Octavia Butler to track historic forms of world-making and activism through speculative fiction.

8

Haraway’s Chthulucene is in fact just one of several viable alternatives to the popular coinage of an Anthropocene. Moore, following Andreas Malm, has offered the term “Capitalocene” to recognize the effects of historic modes of capital accumulation on our world ecology—that is, the interpolation of capital into the web of life beginning, for Moore, in the long sixteenth century. Christopher Bonnueil and Jean-Jacques Fressoz have contributed “Thermocene”—a term to designate the “political history of carbon dioxide” and thus a means of foregrounding the slippery technics of fossil capital. Other variations include what Tsing terms a “Plantationcene”—a geologic configuration attentive to the logic of scale that underscores successful plantation economies and makes possible the impoverishment of otherwise complex ecosystems and their abstraction into exchangeable commodity forms. Per Tsing, “we must get outside [of the] expectation of scalability”—that “great bulldozer [that, as in her titular example of capitalism, tout court] appears to flatten the earth to its specifications” (38, 61). For further discussion of the origins of the Plantationcene, see also Ashley Dawson’s Extinction: A Radical History.

9

For discussions of modernity, and the “cosmology of the moderns” inherent to Anthropocene thinking, see especially Didier Debaise’s Nature as Event.

10

In G. A. Cohen’s discussion of value in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, he notably points to an elision (within Marxist arguments around Locke) of any consideration of an a priori value in the “ground which produces the materials” (Locke qtd. in Cohen).

11

See Jane Bennet’s discussion of “brute matter” and political ecologies in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009).

12

See Shelley Streeby’s remarkable discussion of slip-stream as a trope in speculative fiction and activism in the work of brown, Butler, and numerous sf writers in Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-making Through Science Fiction and Activism.