Donna Stays With The Trouble
Global participatory art project Inside Out by French photographer JR. The iteration above in Times Square New York. Photo CC by JR
There are so many books which mean something different now as we’ve crossed over some line which we will need to have a conversation about. I remembered the opening section of Donna Haraway’s 2016 book, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (that subtitle might cause a bit of trouble, but stay with me here).
Haraway is one of many women since the 80s pioneering new thinking around connected themes such as biology, physics, art, knowledge creation, ‘communities’ (see Haraway’s own list here). Trained as a biologist Donna Haraway became a pioneering philosopher of science.
She is Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But those titles are also organizational boundaries that don’t begin to measure the scale and bandwidth of her thinking. In the acknowledgement section of Staying With The Trouble, she thanks the, “holobiome that makes up this book…[which is]…full of human and nonhuman critters to think and feel with.”
“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. ”
At this moment as I read this passage again its resonance crossed over from being intellectually imaginative to profoundly inspiring. The line between the two was always there – it’s just sometimes it’s harder to stay with the trouble. Now we need to make kin, by creating lines of inventive connection. Old ideas of family, community, society will need some re-imagining, and Donna’s idea of ‘kin’ is one line of thinking to have a walk with. There is so much in this, it will be a long zig-zaging-spirit-bulding-body-popping walk.
"Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning ‘to stir up,’ ‘to make cloudy,’ ‘to disturb.’ We – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy – with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings." (Haraway, 2016, p.1)
Kin Navigation Space
Receptive: Inspired by that quote to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present
Interruptive: I was interrupted by her use of the word trouble. It can have negative connotations, and it still does in her use of the word. Already my thinking of ‘trouble’ creatively like she does is interrupting my brain a little, re-freshing it. It’s another way of thinking Creative Uncertainty. I also like its French meaning of ‘cloud’. Trouble is a microclimate that can be ominous and beautiful
Responsive: I have many different practices, and in my next one - running, writing, teaching, client work - I am going to stay with the trouble and see what it feels like, see if staying with that feeling helps create new ways of relating to my practice.