Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016) Movie Script
So I took the train up
and I landed
at Princeton Junction.
And it was
a beautiful spring day
and there were lots and lots
of Princeton undergraduates
sunbathing on this nice,
expansive green lawn, smiling.
And I looked at them
and I thought,
"There's something really
strange about this picture."
Sort of unnerving.
It was, "Has there been
an alien visitation
and are these pod people?"
They were all beautiful
and, you know,
really healthy and so on.
But what really struck me
was that they all had
very straight teeth
and straightened teeth
that it looked
like everybody
had been
to an orthodontist.
And, of course, I had
had orthodontia as a child
because my father had
had very crooked teeth
and I inherited
very crooked teeth
and I had exactly the same
orthodontist he did.
And he showed me
my father's plastic models
of his teeth
from my father's childhood
and matched them
against mine
and they were
exactly the same.
And then he'd put on braces
and so on and so on.
So there I was
lecturing to these
Princeton undergraduates
with all of us having
these extraordinary teeth.
And I got interested
in the history
of the profession
of orthodontia.
And the question
that drove it was,
"How did the orthodontist,"
if you're fixing
an underbite
or an overbite
or whatever,
"how does the orthodontist
know when to stop?"
What counts
as a correct bite?
Because that's an historically
very molten matter,
it depends on how
you use your teeth.
People who use their teeth
to process leather
or chew a different kind
of food or many other things,
they're gonna have
very different shaped jaw.
And then there are also
the genetic screw-ups
like my father's
and mine
with teeth
all over the place,
you know,
getting fixed.
So, um,
I found this wonderful
physical anthropologist
named Loring Brace
who had written a paper
about the history
of orthodontia
and, you know, a group
of dental specialists
that consolidate
into their own profession
in the late 19th century,
which is exactly
the period
when a lot of
the differentiation
of medicine
is happening
into separate bodies
of specialists, so on.
This was very familiar.
Remember, I was an historian
of biology in those days.
But what Loring Brace
was also interested in
was how the orthodontists
knew when to stop
if they're correcting a bite.
And what he argued, um,
was that in the, uh,
evolutionary bioanthropology
of the late 19th century
and well into
the late 20th century,
the sort of progression
from the big jawed, uh,
pre-Homo sapiens and then
on through the races of man,
the fundamentally racist
racialized picture, uh,
that the, uh,
orthodontia organized itself
around the correct
facial angle, right?
Straight out
of racial anthropology
of the 19th century.
And the correct bite
was derived from a population
that has never lived
on planet Earth
except in sculpture.
The correct facial angle
is the facial angle
of the statues
of the Greek gods.
I grew up in a family
where storytelling
was part of the air
we breathed
and a big part
of what happened
around the dinner table.
It was a family that loved words
and loved language,
not an intellectual family,
not a family
of scholars at all,
but a family
full of laughter
and full of the vitality
of sharing stories,
especially at dinner time.
And there was
an anchor to that,
and the anchor
really was my father,
who was a sports writer.
He worked
for the Denver Post
for more than 50 years
in the sports department
writing game stories
for baseball, basketball,
football, hockey,
covered the Kentucky Derby
sometimes, so forth.
And Dad loved to write
the game stories.
He didn't want to be
one of the columnists,
he didn't want to do
the muckraking,
to dig up the dirt on
corporate, big time sports.
He wanted to write about
the drama of the game.
And I think that's something
that he brought with him
into his adult life
from childhood.
My father
contracted tuberculosis
as a very young child,
and it was tuberculosis
in his bones,
not in his lungs,
and particularly
in the bones of his hips
and his upper legs
and his knees.
It was very serious
and it kept him
in a full-length body cast
from, you know,
just at his chest level
down to his knees
for three years,
immobilized
and in significant pain.
There was
no real good treatment
for tuberculosis
in those days.
And he was blessed with,
you know,
parents and friends
and a neighborhood full of kids
and folks who made
his life very full.
And my dad was not
an intellectual,
neither was my mother or...
The family
had a love of words
and a love of stories,
but not in a--
they weren't critics,
they weren't, um,
they weren't
particularly political.
And so far as
they were political,
I try to forget
what they thought.
Uh...
Sort of an embarrassing part
of one's childhood,
you know, I mean,
on the one hand
there was Cardinal Spellman
and the, you know,
the
Catholic scene of the 1950s
in Irish Catholic Denver.
Uh, yeah, I try to forget
the political scene, basically.
But the love of story
I don't forget.
And I think that,
you know,
my father was a tremendously
positive presence.
He--his sense
of storytelling
was a kind of making
live for an audience
what made something vital.
I also think I inherited
a strong love of storytelling
from growing up Catholic.
There's no way
you grow up Catholic
as the serious little girl
I was.
You know, with a profound
immersion in the liturgy
and the colors
and the symbols
and the rituals
and the incense
and the dressing up
and the--the, you know,
I wanted to lead
a children's crusade
to the Holy Land,
for Christ's sake,
I mean, this is really bad.
You know, I mean,
you think about today's world
to remember that, you know,
as a seven-year-old girl
I wanted to lead
a crusade as, uh...
Well, less said
the better, you know?
Except that it also
helps me remember
how deeply rooted, um, the--
how deeply rooted
Christian culture is
in this thing
we call the West
and how profoundly
Islamophobic it is.
And that in some way,
uh, you know,
I inherited that
without even knowing
that I was
inheriting that.
What I thought
I was inheriting
was the drama
of a little girl
leading other children
into battle for truth
or some other weird fantasy.
No wonder
I liked Fellini
when I started going
to real movies, you know?
I think I want to say
that it doesn't look maybe,
at first glance,
that this beautiful
Navajo basket,
which of course
I have no right to own,
one of the reasons
I held it up here
is 'cause
it's also embarrassing.
How is it that
a daughter of conquest
owns this object?
Uh, I sort of leave that
there as a question.
There's no way
that we can touch
without inheriting
the whole thing.
It's not that I feel guilty
with holding this basket,
but the basket
is also this eruption
of the whole story
of dispossession
and of dependent sovereignty
of Native American peoples,
of, uh, it--of the--
the pricing apparatus for
selling amazing Navajo rugs
as if it were raw wool
for decades
that kept Navajo
weaving families
in bondage
to the trading--
to the trading stores
in exchange for flour
and sugar and, you know...
I can't not know who I am
in the American West.
Um, I also can't know
who I am--
I can't forget who I am
in the American West
when I hear on the soundtrack
my now old dog,
my dog with whom
I played agility,
an Australian Shepherd,
a herding dog,
a dog who herded sheep
on the conquest ranches
of the American West,
that her heritage
and my heritage
are both white in this--
not as a color but--
uh, exactly,
but as an apparatus.
And what she's doing now
is canine
cognitive dysfunction.
She's a little bit senile.
And she starts barking in
a little bit of confusion
in the late afternoon.
She doesn't exactly quite know
what to do with herself.
And what I hear
is my old friend
a little bit confused.
And the barking,
like the basket,
reminds me
of the detail,
the intimacy
of inheritance
that's the inheritance of
big things and little things.
The different life spans
of a woman and a dog,
that we both flamed together
for 10 years.
And that she's old
in a way I'm not yet.
And my obligation
is to accompany my friend, uh,
to--to the kind of
companion species
as accompanying
with each other
through now this time,
which includes
mental confusion
a little bit
for my dog.
So since she's right here
and looking for
a little bit of comfort,
it lets me go back to that
other part of storytelling
so that--let me put it, uh,
let me say something else.
It has been considered improper
to be interrupted.
You.
Cayenne, hey,
I think I'm gonna ask Rusten
to come get you.
I am, I'm gonna
ask Rusten to come--
yeah, I think we--
I think she needs Rusten.
So I'm gonna ask my buddy
to come get her.
Rusten?
Rusten?
She doesn't--
she doesn't--
she doesn't know
what's going on here.
Right here.
Cayenne, huddle.
Over, over, over, left!
Huddle.
Go, go, go.
Cayenne.
Over.
Cayenne, Cayenne,
Cayenne, Cayenne.
Left!
Cayenne.
Over.
Left, right.
Over, left.
Huddle.
Left.
Go, go, go, go, go,
go, go, go, go.
Are you an animal
or a person?
I'm animal-gorilla.
The words we just heard
were spoken by
the gorilla Koko
to the human being
Penny Patterson.
Let's look at those words
from the point of view
of the way a world looks
to a culture critic.
And let's take culture apart
like these balls of yarn.
First I'd like to explain
the principle that I use
in looking at the production
of modern culture.
Seems to me
the cultural critic
is faced by a world
that looks very much
like tangled balls
of yarn,
and that one way to approach
the situation
is to pull on a thread
and begin to untangle
the ball of meanings
and begin to trace through
one thread and then another
what gets to count
as nature,
for whom and when,
and how much it costs
to produce nature
at a particular moment
in history
for a particular group
of people.
Another way to imagine
the same situation
is to take a layer cake,
Pepperidge Farm layer cake,
formerly boycotted
because of the Nestl
bottle-feeding scandal,
You take a layer cake
and cut into history
as if it were a layer cake
and begin to unpack
the layers of meanings.
Okay.
Unpack the layers
of meanings
of all of the pleasures
and all of the problems
that these layers
of meanings produce
for the historian
in a culture space.
So let's go back
to Penny Patterson and Koko
and the problem
of the talking gorillas...
That part upset my father.
...in the first world
in this mythic time called
the late 20th century.
And let's do it
by looking at some covers
of the National Geographic
Magazine
that presented Koko
to an American public
in the 1970s.
The first cover of a National
GeographicMagazinewe see
is Koko the gorilla
taking a picture of herself
in the mirror
with a Japanese camera.
And what we see is the gorilla
with the attribute
of self-reflection,
self-vision,
the gorilla with
a Japanese tourist--
a Japanese tourist camera
sees herself in the mirror
and takes her own picture.
She's in charge
of her own image,
she represents
universal man.
The next picture we see in the
National Geographic Magazine
is Koko the gorilla
with a kitten in her arms.
Koko herself with a pet.
Koko, again,
is universal man
who names the animals.
So I am literally
physically surrounded
by, you know,
two not huge,
but, you know,
up to the ceiling down
to the floor bookshelves
full of science fiction books
that Rusten
and I have read
and collected
over the years
out of our pleasures.
It's a very idiosyncratic,
it isn't any effort to,
you know,
take up the history
of science fiction
or anything
of the kind,
but they're books
that we have read and loved
and that our friends
have read and loved.
Um, and I think,
you know, for me,
a classic writer
like Robert Heinlein,
you know, The Moon
is a Harsh Mistress,
is something I read very late
in the process.
I didn't know Heinlein
as a teenager or in any--
didn't do any
science fiction reading
as a teenager,
and my good friend
and former student,
Katie King,
who's always loved Heinlein
and who really knew
science fiction,
both as a kid and later, um,
teaches me.
And I was really introduced
to science fiction
through my friends,
which is kind of true
for all my ideas.
I feel like everything
I think I was introduced to
by networks of friends.
But the science fiction writers,
the books that really mattered,
and still matter,
are books by Joanna Russ,
Picnic on Paradise,
The Female Man especially.
An older generation
of writers,
Naomi Mitchison,
Memoirs of a Space Woman.
These are feminist
science fiction writers,
feminist theorists of two
quite different generations,
both of whom are read
by women's liberation people
of the '70s.
And these books
make a huge impact on us.
Joanna Russ also did
this amazing book called
How to Suppress
Women's Writing.
And the cover, you know,
"She didn't write it,
but it's clear
that she did the deed.
She wrote it,
but she shouldn't have.
She wrote it, but look
what she wrote about it.
She wrote it, but she
only wrote one of it.
She wrote it, but she
really isn't an artist
and it isn't really art.
She wrote it,
but she had help.
She wrote it,
but she's an anomaly.
She wrote it, but..."
The way that women's writing
was always sort of, uh,
explained away.
She wrote it, but...
it's not really
first class literature.
She wrote it,
but it's all very derivative.
You know, she wrote it,
but it must have come
from Nietzsche and Deleuze.
You know,
she wrote it, but...
I began writing here,
right here
in this physical place
while Rusten and Jay
and Bob and Nick and I
were still building
the house around it.
And we had electricity
and I had an old
Hewlett-Packard-86 machine
and an old
daisy wheel printer,
clunk-clunk, I mean,
really huge.
We--offloading it to the dump
later was a problem.
You know?
I was working,
helping with the construction,
building the gardens,
building the house,
and writing at the same time.
And, um,
in the summers,
because I was teaching
in the rest of the year
and I'm not capable
of writing sustained work
when I'm also teaching
because teaching
is all-consuming,
it takes the best
you've got,
it takes everything
you've got.
And you might be able
to write something short,
but I've never been able
to write.
And I stopped applying
for grants a long time ago
because the process
was so alienating.
And I made enough money
that I could fund
an occasional period off,
you know, I had a salary.
And, um, we would, um,
you know,
so I felt like I--
my research is not expensive,
I don't need a laboratory.
So I just stopped
writing grant proposals
and wrote
during the summer
and stole time.
And wrote here.
And I'm surrounded by beauty.
I'm surrounded
by redwood trees,
I'm surrounded
by a beautiful creek,
by friends and lovers
and family.
And I'm surrounded by books
and I have a really fabulous--
I mean, this one
is an old computer
'cause I'm not doing my current
writing here, you know?
But, you know, we had
a really pretty seriously
working computer system
before we had a telephone.
We set up our computers
before we paid attention
to any of the other
electricity needs, you know,
the--all, you know,
working digitally.
Rusten and Nick
are both software designers
working, you know,
to do really neat
contract design work,
software tool design for, um,
various companies
and whatnot.
The savvy about
working screen--
about digital worlds was, um,
part of my network
of friends.
And this space, then,
became a really good place
to write.
And I wrote--I wrote
Primate Visions here.
I wrote most of
The Cyborg Manifesto here.
It's not like--it didn't--
its origins aren't here,
the writing is here,
the writing process was here,
because it could be a rhythm
between physical labor
and writing, um,
and a whole lotta good food
because we're all cooks
and we invested in--
And besides computers,
we invested in
a really good cooktop
and a really good
convection oven early on.
And our refrigerator was
still up in the redwood trees
covered by a piece of a plast--
of, you know, plywood.
This is to remind all of us
of the specificity
of the subject.
Next slide.
Welcome to California Bird Talk.
I'm Rusten Hogness.
This year we've been trying
to learn to hear birds better.
Today we'll listen
to two very different songs
of a song sparrow
recorded by Chris Tenney
in the Los Padres
National Forest.
I'll play a couple
of variations of each song
at normal speed,
then slow down
one of the variations
by eight times
to let us discriminate
what bird ears can hear
at faster speeds.
Here's the first song.
Now slowed down.
The second song.
Slowed.
It's a wonderful world
of sound out there.
Enjoy it.
For California Bird Talk,
this is Rusten Hogness.
Cat's Cradle is not just
a game of string figures,
but it is a model
for thinking,
a model for storytelling.
It's a working practice
for me.
And Despret,
Isabelle Stengers,
and Bruno Latour and I
played this game together, um,
in many ways.
It's because, I think,
we have a kind of, um,
love for each other's thinking
and a deep kind of need
for each other's relays
of these figures.
How it is that
science fiction writing
and science fiction writers
become not illustrations
of arguments
or illustrations of thinking,
but the thinking itself.
How the science fiction
goes through
a kind of metamorphosis,
a kind of transmogrification,
transmutation,
and is the theoretical practice.
And women have
repeatedly understood
that not being disappeared
by the powerful apparatus
of masculinist thinking,
of masculinist practices
both in institutions
and in--and at the level
of individual people,
that our thinking
is disappeared fast.
And I think one
of the feminist practices,
by Le Guin, by Isabelle,
by me Niven, by Vinciane,
we're still trying to teach
Bruno to do this.
He's getting
a little better.
No, but...
You know, I'm joking about it.
But one
of the feminist practices
is deliberately
and carefully,
to be very precise about
the history of ideas
and the particular creativity
and originality
and importance
of other women's thinking.
And I know myself,
from my own experience
and from powerful women
I know, that, um,
the speed with which
we disappear
from the citation apparatuses
is breathtaking.
So later this week we'll talk
about The Camille Stories,
stories that you
and I and Vinciane
are trying
to tell together.
And they're stories
of the children of compost,
the children of the soil,
of the underground,
of the dark,
of the night,
of incapacity,
of non-action,
of non-success.
Not as a bad thing,
but as that soil
within which human souls,
and perhaps
not just human souls,
are made.
So the science fiction writers
who write about
these matters all the time,
who tell their stories
in these worldings,
are, in my view,
in the strict sense,
philosophical texts.
So I don't feel like
I am importing them
in order to do some
other kind of work,
much less using them to
illustrate one of my points.
But the stories
that they tell,
the storytellers are,
in my view,
thinking.
And thinking
is what we need to do,
not the discipline
of philosophy
or political economy
or biology
or literature
or--or--or--or...
The disciplines will take care
of themselves without my help.
It's not like
everything that happens
in the disciplines is bad,
far from it,
but thinking is
what we are about
and thinking is
a materialist practice
with other thinkers.
And some of the best thinking
is done as storytelling.
First of all is a quotation, um,
of me, so we can get rid
of this rather quickly,
although of course it's
a quotation of me in French,
which I like because...
I, of course,
wrote it in English
and Isabelle translated it
into French
and now I read it in French
in order to speak
about it in English, uh,
which is exactly
a Cat's Cradle game
in and of itself.
We need other kinds of stories.
We must change the story.
The ages, the stories
of the Earth, uh,
we must change
the deadly story,
the story of the first
beautiful words and weapons,
the story of the killing,
the story of achievement
as the achievement
of second birthing,
that is, killing.
The great existentialist
philosopher Sartre
who argues that it is
in second birthing
that we become human.
First birthing
is merely birthing,
the birthing of women,
the birthing of the Earth,
the birthing in the soil.
It is in second birthing
in the achievement
of self-made--
in the following
through tragically
of self-realized purpose,
of coming--of that kind
of tragic consciousness
that is human consciousness.
That is second birthing,
usually through
some kind of killing.
Well, no, if ever
there was nonsense
of an extraordinary kind, uh,
and a nonsense that
has ruled storytelling,
not--I mean,
Sartre only concretized
and distilled what is
a very old, um, uh,
set of commitments,
not just beliefs
but commitments.
And we, all of us,
in this time,
where the ongoingness
of life as we know it,
where Gaia is intruding,
where the intrusion of that
which will no longer
be put down, um,
threatens ways of life
as usual.
It doesn't threaten life itself.
Life itself, uh, will go on
for as long as this planet
has the right conditions
of temperature and moisture
and whatever for--
microbes are very inventive, um,
they're, you know,
it's not like life itself
is at stake,
but vast ways of life
and becoming with each other
across peoples and species
on this Earth
are truly at stake.
And the rate of extinction
of ways of life,
ways of living and dying,
of peoples of all species
including human,
are truly on the ledge,
on the edge of falling off
into nothingness.
Uh, the story of the Earth
is at stake
as we participate in it.
Our own extinction is,
of course, truly possible.
But with
or without extinction
in terms of
the kind of final death,
the deepening
of the destruction
of ways of living
and dying on this Earth
is happening.
And the story
of this Earth,
the arts of living
on a damaged planet,
Anna Tsing's term, uh,
the absolute obligation
to become capable,
to render each other capable
of changing the story,
a story of ongoingness
cultivated in the Earth,
in the tunnels
of the Earth.
If the makers of living
and dying on this Earth
could begin to somehow
risk--put, you know,
be at risk to each other,
to propose something real,
you know,
to make a proposition
in a sense
that Whitehead
might mean.
That which is not yet
but might be, you know?
Some mode of coherence
which might have a chance,
every scale.
Until the stories start
getting told like that,
and until those
who tell the news
start hearing where
those bits of story
are actually being told,
where people are
actually doing this
but they're not
on the news.
Maybe just a little bit,
maybe very weak.
How to make
the weak stories stronger
and the strong stories weaker.
We are speechless to this now.
And then we give it bad names.
But good thinking
always happens
at the moment
of speechlessness.
You know, as a--
as a proper Catholic kid
who grew up with, you know,
reading Thomas Aquinas
and Anselm
and, you know, I had
these doubts about faith
and so I was told
to read all this stuff
when I was 13 and 14.
I didn't--you don't understand
a word, you know?
I mean, what?
You have no idea
what you're reading.
The mystics and the--
and the, you know,
Thomas Aquinas, I mean,
come on, give me a break.
No idea, but it--
but it fucks with your mind,
you know what I mean?
It changes who you are, right?
And so, um, I,
from early on,
you know,
baby Catholic on,
I mean, you know,
teenage Catholic on,
I knew that the minute you start
reciting the names of God,
you are an idolater.
The minute you think
you have a positive name,
you have told--you have
become an idolater,
you have told
a very particular kind of lie,
the biggest kind of lie,
and that the only truth
that can be told
must at some--
at its most fundamental level
be the failure of naming,
it's the failure
of giving positive names.
It's at that moment
of failure
that there is
some encounter with it,
whatever it is.
Something that's not a lie.
And the minute
you name it God,
you're an idolater.
So worshippers of God
are idolaters.
And yet the only way
to come to grips,
to come into the--
what presence of it,
say the important mystics
that shaped
my little 13-year-old
screwed up mind.
The only way to come
into the presence of it
is to constantly keep
doing positive things,
you have to keep trying
to make an experiment work.
You have to constantly keep
writing this particular story,
not some story in general,
but this story.
You have to do this,
you have to be here,
not everywhere.
You have to be attached
to some things, not everything.
The only possible way is
again and again and again
we engage each other
in the--in the--
in doing something, you know?
- Okay.
- Okay.
You don't even have
your back brace.
All right,
those with stamina continue.
Those without stamina
take a break.
But I don't have the choice,
we don't have the choice,
Anthropocene is in play,
it's a good enough word,
does a lot of work,
good enough work, eh.
Tough for me, whatever,
so I would have done it
differently, too bad,
who cares, you know?
I mean, truly, who cares?
We work with what we've got.
And they really
are places to work
where that terminology
and that apparatus
and those modelings
are really important,
even though it's made to be
too big and too important.
It's always a story.
These stories,
Anthropocene,
Capitalocene,
nyah-nyah-cene,
they always threaten
to become too big.
And as soon
as they become too big,
they act like they take
over everything, okay?
And if you're going
to change the story,
you can't do that.
So even, you know,
I propose the Chthulucene.
Well, of course,
that's, in a way, a joke,
because that threatens
to be too big too,
you know, um...
So Isabelle here is giving me
this provocation.
She and Philippe Pignarre
and others,
she is really worried
about the, um,
the way that capitalism
and the critique
of capitalism
and the critique of capital
makes us stupid,
and makes us stupid
in a particular way.
It makes us believe
there is nothing else
possible in the world.
The kind of stupidity
that comes from
constantly repeating
the ever-newer,
ever-smarter,
up-to-the-minute,
latest version
of the critique of capital,
the smartest possible,
you know, you know,
I mean, really good,
you know what I mean?
The Marxism that I really
am not gonna let go of,
and I refuse to let Bruno
say that we don't need it.
I think we do
need our Marxism
and a lot
of other things too.
But how to make it
be part of what is added
to the Cat's Cradle
in the smart way
because the stupid thing
is to be so mesmerized
by the smartness
of the latest analysis
of capital, you know,
that we lose all sense
that what is really important
in the world
and the only reason
to do these analytical--
to do this analytical work
is to learn how
to tell another story
and to build--
to learn how to add
to the work
of those who were already
storying otherwise.
The only possible thing
to do in the world
as we are inhabiting
is to revolt, you know?
It's like Emily Carr,
it's like--
it's an insurrection, okay?
And it's an insurrection
that refuses to--
refuses the paralysis
of critique,
that the world is finished
because we knew how it works.
And you're stupid 'cause
you don't know how it works
and you're just an activist
or you're just a witch
or you're just a something.
You just believe in
all these stupid things.
You're a Christian,
you're really stupid.
You're a Muslim,
you're really stupid.
You're a Pagan,
you're really stupid.
We know how the world
really works.
That kind of arrogance,
which is the arrogance
of the scholars,
the arrogance
of the intellectuals,
our poison is that
with which we poison
the very thing we think
we're doing, you know?
We think we're contributing
to building a different story
and we're feeding it poison
by our own relentless being
smarter than everybody else
with the latest version
of our theory.
We do have
to practice war,
we do have to be for
some worlds and not others.
We are against some ways
of doing the world.
We are truly against building
the Keystone Pipeline
and sucking the Earth
dry of fossil fuels,
and many other things.
It is really important
to be in a revolt.
So for some ways of life
and not others
is a kind of
war of the worlds,
but it's a war
of the worlds
as a part of
the proposition of peace,
of the risky proposition.
So I think that this is--
that there is a shift.
There is of course
a shift in the world
in that we have a little time.
We--we, whatever this we is,
we are living in
a period of time,
short, long,
I don't know,
it's not instantaneous
but it's maybe not long,
there is a little time
to make a difference,
maybe not very much,
after which the consequences
of what we have provoked,
not just we
in the human sense
but significantly, uh...
I don't know,
it's not the Anthropos.
I really do think
it's a lot of--
it's not only capitalism
of course,
of course it's not
only capitalism,
but, wow, if we could
have only one name,
you know, the last 500 years
of sucking the Earth dry
in the form of resourcing it
for, um,
for extraction as wealth
in the form of capital.
This is a pretty good
analysis, you know,
of what these last 500 years
have done to this Earth.
And we have
a little time, um,
to reinherit
the consequences.
And we have a while
to see if peace is possible.
One's whole life
is in the work,
in the writing and the play,
and my life has involved
intense, um, good family.
A family with whom
I've biologically--
well, reproductive family,
fathers, brothers,
mothers, cousins,
so forths,
with whom
I feel very strong--
strong connection.
So it's not about something
negative in that regard.
But my life--
my adult life especially,
but from kind of early,
I don't know,
almost as early
as one can--
I can imagine,
I remember
my mother worrying
that I wasn't
marriageable
for some odd reason.
There was a non-fittingness
into heteronormativity
for me from childhood.
I don't know why,
it just was.
You know, I had 21 dolls
and most of them had Polio
or were in iron lungs or--
you know what I mean?
They were--they were--
it was--I had...
It was--it was--
I had a very--
I had a relationship
to femininity
that was probably
not all that unusual,
that was both/and,
neither/nor,
all of the above,
none of the above
kind of thing.
And I think
in my adult life, um,
Jay, who was
a fellow graduate student
at Yale University,
he was in
the history department,
and I came to be intensely
engaged with each other
as friends and lovers
with no model
for how--how to handle that
except marriage.
I knew Jay was gay,
there was never
any secret about that.
Um, and, um,
for some reason,
it didn't activate jealousy
or--I don't know,
for some--I don't know why
there was a way
in which Jay and I,
for our own reasons,
needed to be married,
but somehow marriage was
seriously the wrong model
for what we were doing.
It was a kind of, what,
brother/sister sexuality that--
incest is the wrong name, too,
'cause that connotes
some kind of violation
and it wasn't.
And that kind
of accreting,
making family
by making homes,
that making kin,
making kind.
And this was, of course,
a period of history
where lots of people
are experimenting
with forms of social
and sexual life.
Communes of all kinds,
love relationships
of all kinds,
heteronormative marriage
was an object
of ridicule
and critique,
that helps a lot.
Yeah, you know,
in one's own explorations.
And, um, you know,
Jay's lover Bob,
my current--my lover
and husband and friend, Rusten,
joi--enjoin--
I mean, we got
officially divorced
but we could never figure out
who got the camera,
you know what I mean,
we couldn't split the property.
I don't know, we had
a sewing machine and a camera.
I'm being facetious.
The point is,
whatever it was that we did,
was--really was for life, um,
and in ways that we had
no particular models for
except that a lot of people
at that moment in history
were finding
ways of living
for which there were
no particular models.
And in retrospect it wasn't
all that radical or anything,
but it--but it
never resolved into
the reproductive
heteronormative family
as a model
for a good life.
And so our relationships
with Susan and Marco Harding,
our godson
and good friend Susan,
is an extended
kin relationship
that is way more--
in a significant way
we are extended kin
to each other.
In some ways legally
with things we've done
with various instruments,
but mostly
it's that insistence
on living that way.
You know, Jay and Bob
both died of AIDS,
Bob in 1986
and Jay in 1991.
Um, and, you know,
they were among the early, um,
people who fell to the--
you know, that fire
that swept their generation
of--of, um, gay men,
and, of course,
continues to sweep--
cut a wide swath among
the peoples of the world
even though it's manageable
as a chronic disease now
with drug cocktails
and the rest.
It's, you know, there--
it affects
tens of millions of people,
which is a big deal,
you know?
And it touched us
intimately
at the heart
of our family.
And Jay's mother, Maxine,
you know,
conventional,
conservative
Christian woman,
so on and so forth.
She introduces Rusten and me
as her daughter-in-law
and her son-in-law,
you know what I mean?
Her having this religious
apartment complex.
They just look like, "What?"
You know, they really
can't figure this out.
You know, Maxine doesn't
even know she's saying that.
Um, so making kin--
making non--
making kin, making fa--
making, uh,
family with each other
without the imperative
of biological reproduction,
and indeed with
quite something else,
with a kind of--cultivating
the responsibility
to be part of moving
the population of this Earth
to more tolerable levels.
And starting
in the rich countries.
Um, I mean,
obviously, the...
So, um, and then,
as you point out
with Cayenne,
it's more than a joke.
We are kin with more
than other human beings.
We make our households,
our families, our, um,
our worldings with
a host of other critters.
And that cobbling together
connections that really matter,
may as well call them kin,
making kinships.
And the question
is not so much
who you go
to bed with,
although that
of course matters
at certain key points
in one's life, you know,
but the ways
one builds lifetime kin,
I would love to see
certain kinds of
institutional apparatuses
like being able much more easily
to adopt adults,
to build
legally protected family
to be engaged in city planning
and architecture
and--and, um, to, um,
be engaged in
the building of rituals
that celebrate adulthood
with, uh,
adulthood that involves
the response--
the decision
not to have a child,
how to celebrate that as opposed
to regard it as a tragedy
while celebrating
children too.
You know, it's that
kind of needing to build
a non-heteronormative joy
in these kinds of lives.
So, yeah, it's a lifetime
commitment for sure.
Finish finally
this green screen shooting.
Okay, end of green screen.
Hey, we get--
oh, good,
holes in being at last.
Yay!
Agh!
Oh, yes.
I can--I can have
a third eye.
I don't know
what's happening here.
Yes, this is excellent.
I have more
green things out there
if you bring them in.
I searched for the big ball.
The big ball
is in the bedroom,
it's over--it's in
the corner of the bedroom.
Yeah, and we have--
yeah, this is...
Yeah? Or maybe this is--
oh, I don't know,
this is the egg you laid,
I'm sorry.
There we go.
This is not bad.
It laid an egg.
- This is...
- Okay.
This is--yeah, there we go.
Okay.
There we go,
now we're really done.
Yes, thank you.
How's that for the end?
Early in the 21st century,
communities
all over the planet
sensed a kind of urgency
of the undoing of ways
of living and dying.
An undoing that involved
humans and other critters
in the tissues of our being
together on Earth itself.
Somehow, a kind of wave
of feeling and action
and thinking and motion
began to sweep the Earth
in a very particular sense.
Communities
of 150 to 500 people
began to form
with each other
either from already
being in place
but finding each other
and coming together
with intensities that were
practiced in quite new ways
or moving from one place
to another.
All of these communities
formed themselves
around a particular kind
of felt intensity,
of felt need and lust
and desire and project,
which was to live
for the recuperation
of the critters
of the Earth,
the human
and the non-human.
To somehow cultivate the arts
of living on a damaged planet,
to be those who came
to recuperate and restore
where they could,
as communities
who either already lived
or moved to damaged lands
to be communities
of care and concern.
Camille 1 was born
in a community
that had decided that
at least three parents
were going to be required
for every new baby.
And having a baby
was not something
someone could
just decide to do.
It was rather
a collective decision,
so that folks
who wanted to bear babies
or bring babies
into the world
might well have to wait
or might never be able to do so,
but they could
participate as parents
in a family
raising a baby.
So that Camille 1 was going
to have to have siblings,
not necessarily in
the same immediate household
but the children to be born
in this community
had to have
other children
who were going to be
their siblings
but who were almost
certainly not going to be
their biological siblings.
So the reproductive choice
for the person
who would bear
the pregnancy,
whether that person was
a male or a female person
in the beginning
of this process,
whoever bore the pregnancy
to birthing
had a particular kind
of reproductive choice
which was to choose
a symbiont,
another critter
who was to be in symbiosis
with the human baby
for the lifetime of that baby.
So the woman
who bore Camille 1,
in a dream that she had
during her pregnancy,
chose for Camille 1
the symbiont
of a monarch butterfly.
Monarch butterflies
had part of their range
in the area where this
community had settled down.
Camille 1, at puberty,
could do many things.
Camille 1 could decide
to alter its body
into male--in male or female
or other ways.
Camille 1
could choose to stay
with whatever body
it was birthed with
or it could
partially alter,
maybe a little bit of this,
little bit of that.
And some of it was
gonna be irreversible,
they'd have to learn
to live with consequences.
The community
was not afraid
of a kind of
morphological experimentation
and thought that
that was something
that adolescents ought
to have the means to do.
Camille 1 chose
to stay with the symbiosis
and to deepen it.
And the story begins with
the first heir of Camille 1,
Camille 2.
Camille 2 was born female,
and as an adolescent,
Camille 2
decided to stay female
but wanted
to grow a beard.
In Camille 1's lifetime,
the symbiotic relationships
were not yet
at a molecular level.
Biological sciences,
the technobiological sciences
of the community had
developed in such a way
that by the time
Camille 2 was born,
it was possible and indeed
desirable in the community
for the symbionts
and the human beings
to share
bodily substance
and to share
genetic substance.
So at puberty
Camille 2 decided
to have implanted
on her face
a beard made up
of the stem cells
that would grow
the antennae of butterflies.
So that Camille 2
had a face
full of the antennae
of butterflies.
And the antennae
could sense,
could taste the air,
taste the foods.
And Camille 2 had
an enhanced sensory being
that she--he/she--
xe felt enhanced
xe's ability to care for
and to care about
the ongoing possibilities
of the monarchs.
By Camille 2's generation,
the kids were doing
skin implants of stem cells
to build patterns
on their skin
that were the patterns
of the insects
and the critters that
they were taking care of.
So they would do, you know,
their dance raves
and drug scenes
and all the rest,
they had various kinds
of light shows
and really, you know,
some of the--
the ones that were, um,
symbiotically banded
to the octopus and the squid
had the chromatophores
in their skin
so if they got
sexually excited
they would pulse
the same way
that the squid
and the cuttlefish
and the octopus
would pulse.
They could do these amazing
light shows with their skin.
So there was
a kind of playfulness
around this caring.
Just as making kin
without making babies
was a lifetime matter,
this question of forming
and reforming kin
was not something
done all at once.
You didn't inherit
everything all at once.
Frequently, adoptions
would take place
of people
in their 50s.
Families would
form and reform
and perhaps redo
their houses
and rewrite
their instruments
of financial
joint responsibility.
It was understood
that making family
was a lifetime matter
and that families
needed to be able
to experiment
and change.
The commitments
were very serious
and intended to be
for a lifetime,
but it could take
various forms.
It was understood that you
needed rituals and support,
you know,
ways of celebrating
the breaking up
of love affairs
and the consolidation
of friendships
out of love affairs
that had broken.
Of course there were
terrible mistakes made.
It was understood
that there would be
a lot of suffering in this,
but the communities felt
that they were
the Children of Compost,
they were staying
with the trouble.
They were here to somehow
build the Cat's Cradle games
that would make flourishing
ongoing possible.
and I landed
at Princeton Junction.
And it was
a beautiful spring day
and there were lots and lots
of Princeton undergraduates
sunbathing on this nice,
expansive green lawn, smiling.
And I looked at them
and I thought,
"There's something really
strange about this picture."
Sort of unnerving.
It was, "Has there been
an alien visitation
and are these pod people?"
They were all beautiful
and, you know,
really healthy and so on.
But what really struck me
was that they all had
very straight teeth
and straightened teeth
that it looked
like everybody
had been
to an orthodontist.
And, of course, I had
had orthodontia as a child
because my father had
had very crooked teeth
and I inherited
very crooked teeth
and I had exactly the same
orthodontist he did.
And he showed me
my father's plastic models
of his teeth
from my father's childhood
and matched them
against mine
and they were
exactly the same.
And then he'd put on braces
and so on and so on.
So there I was
lecturing to these
Princeton undergraduates
with all of us having
these extraordinary teeth.
And I got interested
in the history
of the profession
of orthodontia.
And the question
that drove it was,
"How did the orthodontist,"
if you're fixing
an underbite
or an overbite
or whatever,
"how does the orthodontist
know when to stop?"
What counts
as a correct bite?
Because that's an historically
very molten matter,
it depends on how
you use your teeth.
People who use their teeth
to process leather
or chew a different kind
of food or many other things,
they're gonna have
very different shaped jaw.
And then there are also
the genetic screw-ups
like my father's
and mine
with teeth
all over the place,
you know,
getting fixed.
So, um,
I found this wonderful
physical anthropologist
named Loring Brace
who had written a paper
about the history
of orthodontia
and, you know, a group
of dental specialists
that consolidate
into their own profession
in the late 19th century,
which is exactly
the period
when a lot of
the differentiation
of medicine
is happening
into separate bodies
of specialists, so on.
This was very familiar.
Remember, I was an historian
of biology in those days.
But what Loring Brace
was also interested in
was how the orthodontists
knew when to stop
if they're correcting a bite.
And what he argued, um,
was that in the, uh,
evolutionary bioanthropology
of the late 19th century
and well into
the late 20th century,
the sort of progression
from the big jawed, uh,
pre-Homo sapiens and then
on through the races of man,
the fundamentally racist
racialized picture, uh,
that the, uh,
orthodontia organized itself
around the correct
facial angle, right?
Straight out
of racial anthropology
of the 19th century.
And the correct bite
was derived from a population
that has never lived
on planet Earth
except in sculpture.
The correct facial angle
is the facial angle
of the statues
of the Greek gods.
I grew up in a family
where storytelling
was part of the air
we breathed
and a big part
of what happened
around the dinner table.
It was a family that loved words
and loved language,
not an intellectual family,
not a family
of scholars at all,
but a family
full of laughter
and full of the vitality
of sharing stories,
especially at dinner time.
And there was
an anchor to that,
and the anchor
really was my father,
who was a sports writer.
He worked
for the Denver Post
for more than 50 years
in the sports department
writing game stories
for baseball, basketball,
football, hockey,
covered the Kentucky Derby
sometimes, so forth.
And Dad loved to write
the game stories.
He didn't want to be
one of the columnists,
he didn't want to do
the muckraking,
to dig up the dirt on
corporate, big time sports.
He wanted to write about
the drama of the game.
And I think that's something
that he brought with him
into his adult life
from childhood.
My father
contracted tuberculosis
as a very young child,
and it was tuberculosis
in his bones,
not in his lungs,
and particularly
in the bones of his hips
and his upper legs
and his knees.
It was very serious
and it kept him
in a full-length body cast
from, you know,
just at his chest level
down to his knees
for three years,
immobilized
and in significant pain.
There was
no real good treatment
for tuberculosis
in those days.
And he was blessed with,
you know,
parents and friends
and a neighborhood full of kids
and folks who made
his life very full.
And my dad was not
an intellectual,
neither was my mother or...
The family
had a love of words
and a love of stories,
but not in a--
they weren't critics,
they weren't, um,
they weren't
particularly political.
And so far as
they were political,
I try to forget
what they thought.
Uh...
Sort of an embarrassing part
of one's childhood,
you know, I mean,
on the one hand
there was Cardinal Spellman
and the, you know,
the
Catholic scene of the 1950s
in Irish Catholic Denver.
Uh, yeah, I try to forget
the political scene, basically.
But the love of story
I don't forget.
And I think that,
you know,
my father was a tremendously
positive presence.
He--his sense
of storytelling
was a kind of making
live for an audience
what made something vital.
I also think I inherited
a strong love of storytelling
from growing up Catholic.
There's no way
you grow up Catholic
as the serious little girl
I was.
You know, with a profound
immersion in the liturgy
and the colors
and the symbols
and the rituals
and the incense
and the dressing up
and the--the, you know,
I wanted to lead
a children's crusade
to the Holy Land,
for Christ's sake,
I mean, this is really bad.
You know, I mean,
you think about today's world
to remember that, you know,
as a seven-year-old girl
I wanted to lead
a crusade as, uh...
Well, less said
the better, you know?
Except that it also
helps me remember
how deeply rooted, um, the--
how deeply rooted
Christian culture is
in this thing
we call the West
and how profoundly
Islamophobic it is.
And that in some way,
uh, you know,
I inherited that
without even knowing
that I was
inheriting that.
What I thought
I was inheriting
was the drama
of a little girl
leading other children
into battle for truth
or some other weird fantasy.
No wonder
I liked Fellini
when I started going
to real movies, you know?
I think I want to say
that it doesn't look maybe,
at first glance,
that this beautiful
Navajo basket,
which of course
I have no right to own,
one of the reasons
I held it up here
is 'cause
it's also embarrassing.
How is it that
a daughter of conquest
owns this object?
Uh, I sort of leave that
there as a question.
There's no way
that we can touch
without inheriting
the whole thing.
It's not that I feel guilty
with holding this basket,
but the basket
is also this eruption
of the whole story
of dispossession
and of dependent sovereignty
of Native American peoples,
of, uh, it--of the--
the pricing apparatus for
selling amazing Navajo rugs
as if it were raw wool
for decades
that kept Navajo
weaving families
in bondage
to the trading--
to the trading stores
in exchange for flour
and sugar and, you know...
I can't not know who I am
in the American West.
Um, I also can't know
who I am--
I can't forget who I am
in the American West
when I hear on the soundtrack
my now old dog,
my dog with whom
I played agility,
an Australian Shepherd,
a herding dog,
a dog who herded sheep
on the conquest ranches
of the American West,
that her heritage
and my heritage
are both white in this--
not as a color but--
uh, exactly,
but as an apparatus.
And what she's doing now
is canine
cognitive dysfunction.
She's a little bit senile.
And she starts barking in
a little bit of confusion
in the late afternoon.
She doesn't exactly quite know
what to do with herself.
And what I hear
is my old friend
a little bit confused.
And the barking,
like the basket,
reminds me
of the detail,
the intimacy
of inheritance
that's the inheritance of
big things and little things.
The different life spans
of a woman and a dog,
that we both flamed together
for 10 years.
And that she's old
in a way I'm not yet.
And my obligation
is to accompany my friend, uh,
to--to the kind of
companion species
as accompanying
with each other
through now this time,
which includes
mental confusion
a little bit
for my dog.
So since she's right here
and looking for
a little bit of comfort,
it lets me go back to that
other part of storytelling
so that--let me put it, uh,
let me say something else.
It has been considered improper
to be interrupted.
You.
Cayenne, hey,
I think I'm gonna ask Rusten
to come get you.
I am, I'm gonna
ask Rusten to come--
yeah, I think we--
I think she needs Rusten.
So I'm gonna ask my buddy
to come get her.
Rusten?
Rusten?
She doesn't--
she doesn't--
she doesn't know
what's going on here.
Right here.
Cayenne, huddle.
Over, over, over, left!
Huddle.
Go, go, go.
Cayenne.
Over.
Cayenne, Cayenne,
Cayenne, Cayenne.
Left!
Cayenne.
Over.
Left, right.
Over, left.
Huddle.
Left.
Go, go, go, go, go,
go, go, go, go.
Are you an animal
or a person?
I'm animal-gorilla.
The words we just heard
were spoken by
the gorilla Koko
to the human being
Penny Patterson.
Let's look at those words
from the point of view
of the way a world looks
to a culture critic.
And let's take culture apart
like these balls of yarn.
First I'd like to explain
the principle that I use
in looking at the production
of modern culture.
Seems to me
the cultural critic
is faced by a world
that looks very much
like tangled balls
of yarn,
and that one way to approach
the situation
is to pull on a thread
and begin to untangle
the ball of meanings
and begin to trace through
one thread and then another
what gets to count
as nature,
for whom and when,
and how much it costs
to produce nature
at a particular moment
in history
for a particular group
of people.
Another way to imagine
the same situation
is to take a layer cake,
Pepperidge Farm layer cake,
formerly boycotted
because of the Nestl
bottle-feeding scandal,
You take a layer cake
and cut into history
as if it were a layer cake
and begin to unpack
the layers of meanings.
Okay.
Unpack the layers
of meanings
of all of the pleasures
and all of the problems
that these layers
of meanings produce
for the historian
in a culture space.
So let's go back
to Penny Patterson and Koko
and the problem
of the talking gorillas...
That part upset my father.
...in the first world
in this mythic time called
the late 20th century.
And let's do it
by looking at some covers
of the National Geographic
Magazine
that presented Koko
to an American public
in the 1970s.
The first cover of a National
GeographicMagazinewe see
is Koko the gorilla
taking a picture of herself
in the mirror
with a Japanese camera.
And what we see is the gorilla
with the attribute
of self-reflection,
self-vision,
the gorilla with
a Japanese tourist--
a Japanese tourist camera
sees herself in the mirror
and takes her own picture.
She's in charge
of her own image,
she represents
universal man.
The next picture we see in the
National Geographic Magazine
is Koko the gorilla
with a kitten in her arms.
Koko herself with a pet.
Koko, again,
is universal man
who names the animals.
So I am literally
physically surrounded
by, you know,
two not huge,
but, you know,
up to the ceiling down
to the floor bookshelves
full of science fiction books
that Rusten
and I have read
and collected
over the years
out of our pleasures.
It's a very idiosyncratic,
it isn't any effort to,
you know,
take up the history
of science fiction
or anything
of the kind,
but they're books
that we have read and loved
and that our friends
have read and loved.
Um, and I think,
you know, for me,
a classic writer
like Robert Heinlein,
you know, The Moon
is a Harsh Mistress,
is something I read very late
in the process.
I didn't know Heinlein
as a teenager or in any--
didn't do any
science fiction reading
as a teenager,
and my good friend
and former student,
Katie King,
who's always loved Heinlein
and who really knew
science fiction,
both as a kid and later, um,
teaches me.
And I was really introduced
to science fiction
through my friends,
which is kind of true
for all my ideas.
I feel like everything
I think I was introduced to
by networks of friends.
But the science fiction writers,
the books that really mattered,
and still matter,
are books by Joanna Russ,
Picnic on Paradise,
The Female Man especially.
An older generation
of writers,
Naomi Mitchison,
Memoirs of a Space Woman.
These are feminist
science fiction writers,
feminist theorists of two
quite different generations,
both of whom are read
by women's liberation people
of the '70s.
And these books
make a huge impact on us.
Joanna Russ also did
this amazing book called
How to Suppress
Women's Writing.
And the cover, you know,
"She didn't write it,
but it's clear
that she did the deed.
She wrote it,
but she shouldn't have.
She wrote it, but look
what she wrote about it.
She wrote it, but she
only wrote one of it.
She wrote it, but she
really isn't an artist
and it isn't really art.
She wrote it,
but she had help.
She wrote it,
but she's an anomaly.
She wrote it, but..."
The way that women's writing
was always sort of, uh,
explained away.
She wrote it, but...
it's not really
first class literature.
She wrote it,
but it's all very derivative.
You know, she wrote it,
but it must have come
from Nietzsche and Deleuze.
You know,
she wrote it, but...
I began writing here,
right here
in this physical place
while Rusten and Jay
and Bob and Nick and I
were still building
the house around it.
And we had electricity
and I had an old
Hewlett-Packard-86 machine
and an old
daisy wheel printer,
clunk-clunk, I mean,
really huge.
We--offloading it to the dump
later was a problem.
You know?
I was working,
helping with the construction,
building the gardens,
building the house,
and writing at the same time.
And, um,
in the summers,
because I was teaching
in the rest of the year
and I'm not capable
of writing sustained work
when I'm also teaching
because teaching
is all-consuming,
it takes the best
you've got,
it takes everything
you've got.
And you might be able
to write something short,
but I've never been able
to write.
And I stopped applying
for grants a long time ago
because the process
was so alienating.
And I made enough money
that I could fund
an occasional period off,
you know, I had a salary.
And, um, we would, um,
you know,
so I felt like I--
my research is not expensive,
I don't need a laboratory.
So I just stopped
writing grant proposals
and wrote
during the summer
and stole time.
And wrote here.
And I'm surrounded by beauty.
I'm surrounded
by redwood trees,
I'm surrounded
by a beautiful creek,
by friends and lovers
and family.
And I'm surrounded by books
and I have a really fabulous--
I mean, this one
is an old computer
'cause I'm not doing my current
writing here, you know?
But, you know, we had
a really pretty seriously
working computer system
before we had a telephone.
We set up our computers
before we paid attention
to any of the other
electricity needs, you know,
the--all, you know,
working digitally.
Rusten and Nick
are both software designers
working, you know,
to do really neat
contract design work,
software tool design for, um,
various companies
and whatnot.
The savvy about
working screen--
about digital worlds was, um,
part of my network
of friends.
And this space, then,
became a really good place
to write.
And I wrote--I wrote
Primate Visions here.
I wrote most of
The Cyborg Manifesto here.
It's not like--it didn't--
its origins aren't here,
the writing is here,
the writing process was here,
because it could be a rhythm
between physical labor
and writing, um,
and a whole lotta good food
because we're all cooks
and we invested in--
And besides computers,
we invested in
a really good cooktop
and a really good
convection oven early on.
And our refrigerator was
still up in the redwood trees
covered by a piece of a plast--
of, you know, plywood.
This is to remind all of us
of the specificity
of the subject.
Next slide.
Welcome to California Bird Talk.
I'm Rusten Hogness.
This year we've been trying
to learn to hear birds better.
Today we'll listen
to two very different songs
of a song sparrow
recorded by Chris Tenney
in the Los Padres
National Forest.
I'll play a couple
of variations of each song
at normal speed,
then slow down
one of the variations
by eight times
to let us discriminate
what bird ears can hear
at faster speeds.
Here's the first song.
Now slowed down.
The second song.
Slowed.
It's a wonderful world
of sound out there.
Enjoy it.
For California Bird Talk,
this is Rusten Hogness.
Cat's Cradle is not just
a game of string figures,
but it is a model
for thinking,
a model for storytelling.
It's a working practice
for me.
And Despret,
Isabelle Stengers,
and Bruno Latour and I
played this game together, um,
in many ways.
It's because, I think,
we have a kind of, um,
love for each other's thinking
and a deep kind of need
for each other's relays
of these figures.
How it is that
science fiction writing
and science fiction writers
become not illustrations
of arguments
or illustrations of thinking,
but the thinking itself.
How the science fiction
goes through
a kind of metamorphosis,
a kind of transmogrification,
transmutation,
and is the theoretical practice.
And women have
repeatedly understood
that not being disappeared
by the powerful apparatus
of masculinist thinking,
of masculinist practices
both in institutions
and in--and at the level
of individual people,
that our thinking
is disappeared fast.
And I think one
of the feminist practices,
by Le Guin, by Isabelle,
by me Niven, by Vinciane,
we're still trying to teach
Bruno to do this.
He's getting
a little better.
No, but...
You know, I'm joking about it.
But one
of the feminist practices
is deliberately
and carefully,
to be very precise about
the history of ideas
and the particular creativity
and originality
and importance
of other women's thinking.
And I know myself,
from my own experience
and from powerful women
I know, that, um,
the speed with which
we disappear
from the citation apparatuses
is breathtaking.
So later this week we'll talk
about The Camille Stories,
stories that you
and I and Vinciane
are trying
to tell together.
And they're stories
of the children of compost,
the children of the soil,
of the underground,
of the dark,
of the night,
of incapacity,
of non-action,
of non-success.
Not as a bad thing,
but as that soil
within which human souls,
and perhaps
not just human souls,
are made.
So the science fiction writers
who write about
these matters all the time,
who tell their stories
in these worldings,
are, in my view,
in the strict sense,
philosophical texts.
So I don't feel like
I am importing them
in order to do some
other kind of work,
much less using them to
illustrate one of my points.
But the stories
that they tell,
the storytellers are,
in my view,
thinking.
And thinking
is what we need to do,
not the discipline
of philosophy
or political economy
or biology
or literature
or--or--or--or...
The disciplines will take care
of themselves without my help.
It's not like
everything that happens
in the disciplines is bad,
far from it,
but thinking is
what we are about
and thinking is
a materialist practice
with other thinkers.
And some of the best thinking
is done as storytelling.
First of all is a quotation, um,
of me, so we can get rid
of this rather quickly,
although of course it's
a quotation of me in French,
which I like because...
I, of course,
wrote it in English
and Isabelle translated it
into French
and now I read it in French
in order to speak
about it in English, uh,
which is exactly
a Cat's Cradle game
in and of itself.
We need other kinds of stories.
We must change the story.
The ages, the stories
of the Earth, uh,
we must change
the deadly story,
the story of the first
beautiful words and weapons,
the story of the killing,
the story of achievement
as the achievement
of second birthing,
that is, killing.
The great existentialist
philosopher Sartre
who argues that it is
in second birthing
that we become human.
First birthing
is merely birthing,
the birthing of women,
the birthing of the Earth,
the birthing in the soil.
It is in second birthing
in the achievement
of self-made--
in the following
through tragically
of self-realized purpose,
of coming--of that kind
of tragic consciousness
that is human consciousness.
That is second birthing,
usually through
some kind of killing.
Well, no, if ever
there was nonsense
of an extraordinary kind, uh,
and a nonsense that
has ruled storytelling,
not--I mean,
Sartre only concretized
and distilled what is
a very old, um, uh,
set of commitments,
not just beliefs
but commitments.
And we, all of us,
in this time,
where the ongoingness
of life as we know it,
where Gaia is intruding,
where the intrusion of that
which will no longer
be put down, um,
threatens ways of life
as usual.
It doesn't threaten life itself.
Life itself, uh, will go on
for as long as this planet
has the right conditions
of temperature and moisture
and whatever for--
microbes are very inventive, um,
they're, you know,
it's not like life itself
is at stake,
but vast ways of life
and becoming with each other
across peoples and species
on this Earth
are truly at stake.
And the rate of extinction
of ways of life,
ways of living and dying,
of peoples of all species
including human,
are truly on the ledge,
on the edge of falling off
into nothingness.
Uh, the story of the Earth
is at stake
as we participate in it.
Our own extinction is,
of course, truly possible.
But with
or without extinction
in terms of
the kind of final death,
the deepening
of the destruction
of ways of living
and dying on this Earth
is happening.
And the story
of this Earth,
the arts of living
on a damaged planet,
Anna Tsing's term, uh,
the absolute obligation
to become capable,
to render each other capable
of changing the story,
a story of ongoingness
cultivated in the Earth,
in the tunnels
of the Earth.
If the makers of living
and dying on this Earth
could begin to somehow
risk--put, you know,
be at risk to each other,
to propose something real,
you know,
to make a proposition
in a sense
that Whitehead
might mean.
That which is not yet
but might be, you know?
Some mode of coherence
which might have a chance,
every scale.
Until the stories start
getting told like that,
and until those
who tell the news
start hearing where
those bits of story
are actually being told,
where people are
actually doing this
but they're not
on the news.
Maybe just a little bit,
maybe very weak.
How to make
the weak stories stronger
and the strong stories weaker.
We are speechless to this now.
And then we give it bad names.
But good thinking
always happens
at the moment
of speechlessness.
You know, as a--
as a proper Catholic kid
who grew up with, you know,
reading Thomas Aquinas
and Anselm
and, you know, I had
these doubts about faith
and so I was told
to read all this stuff
when I was 13 and 14.
I didn't--you don't understand
a word, you know?
I mean, what?
You have no idea
what you're reading.
The mystics and the--
and the, you know,
Thomas Aquinas, I mean,
come on, give me a break.
No idea, but it--
but it fucks with your mind,
you know what I mean?
It changes who you are, right?
And so, um, I,
from early on,
you know,
baby Catholic on,
I mean, you know,
teenage Catholic on,
I knew that the minute you start
reciting the names of God,
you are an idolater.
The minute you think
you have a positive name,
you have told--you have
become an idolater,
you have told
a very particular kind of lie,
the biggest kind of lie,
and that the only truth
that can be told
must at some--
at its most fundamental level
be the failure of naming,
it's the failure
of giving positive names.
It's at that moment
of failure
that there is
some encounter with it,
whatever it is.
Something that's not a lie.
And the minute
you name it God,
you're an idolater.
So worshippers of God
are idolaters.
And yet the only way
to come to grips,
to come into the--
what presence of it,
say the important mystics
that shaped
my little 13-year-old
screwed up mind.
The only way to come
into the presence of it
is to constantly keep
doing positive things,
you have to keep trying
to make an experiment work.
You have to constantly keep
writing this particular story,
not some story in general,
but this story.
You have to do this,
you have to be here,
not everywhere.
You have to be attached
to some things, not everything.
The only possible way is
again and again and again
we engage each other
in the--in the--
in doing something, you know?
- Okay.
- Okay.
You don't even have
your back brace.
All right,
those with stamina continue.
Those without stamina
take a break.
But I don't have the choice,
we don't have the choice,
Anthropocene is in play,
it's a good enough word,
does a lot of work,
good enough work, eh.
Tough for me, whatever,
so I would have done it
differently, too bad,
who cares, you know?
I mean, truly, who cares?
We work with what we've got.
And they really
are places to work
where that terminology
and that apparatus
and those modelings
are really important,
even though it's made to be
too big and too important.
It's always a story.
These stories,
Anthropocene,
Capitalocene,
nyah-nyah-cene,
they always threaten
to become too big.
And as soon
as they become too big,
they act like they take
over everything, okay?
And if you're going
to change the story,
you can't do that.
So even, you know,
I propose the Chthulucene.
Well, of course,
that's, in a way, a joke,
because that threatens
to be too big too,
you know, um...
So Isabelle here is giving me
this provocation.
She and Philippe Pignarre
and others,
she is really worried
about the, um,
the way that capitalism
and the critique
of capitalism
and the critique of capital
makes us stupid,
and makes us stupid
in a particular way.
It makes us believe
there is nothing else
possible in the world.
The kind of stupidity
that comes from
constantly repeating
the ever-newer,
ever-smarter,
up-to-the-minute,
latest version
of the critique of capital,
the smartest possible,
you know, you know,
I mean, really good,
you know what I mean?
The Marxism that I really
am not gonna let go of,
and I refuse to let Bruno
say that we don't need it.
I think we do
need our Marxism
and a lot
of other things too.
But how to make it
be part of what is added
to the Cat's Cradle
in the smart way
because the stupid thing
is to be so mesmerized
by the smartness
of the latest analysis
of capital, you know,
that we lose all sense
that what is really important
in the world
and the only reason
to do these analytical--
to do this analytical work
is to learn how
to tell another story
and to build--
to learn how to add
to the work
of those who were already
storying otherwise.
The only possible thing
to do in the world
as we are inhabiting
is to revolt, you know?
It's like Emily Carr,
it's like--
it's an insurrection, okay?
And it's an insurrection
that refuses to--
refuses the paralysis
of critique,
that the world is finished
because we knew how it works.
And you're stupid 'cause
you don't know how it works
and you're just an activist
or you're just a witch
or you're just a something.
You just believe in
all these stupid things.
You're a Christian,
you're really stupid.
You're a Muslim,
you're really stupid.
You're a Pagan,
you're really stupid.
We know how the world
really works.
That kind of arrogance,
which is the arrogance
of the scholars,
the arrogance
of the intellectuals,
our poison is that
with which we poison
the very thing we think
we're doing, you know?
We think we're contributing
to building a different story
and we're feeding it poison
by our own relentless being
smarter than everybody else
with the latest version
of our theory.
We do have
to practice war,
we do have to be for
some worlds and not others.
We are against some ways
of doing the world.
We are truly against building
the Keystone Pipeline
and sucking the Earth
dry of fossil fuels,
and many other things.
It is really important
to be in a revolt.
So for some ways of life
and not others
is a kind of
war of the worlds,
but it's a war
of the worlds
as a part of
the proposition of peace,
of the risky proposition.
So I think that this is--
that there is a shift.
There is of course
a shift in the world
in that we have a little time.
We--we, whatever this we is,
we are living in
a period of time,
short, long,
I don't know,
it's not instantaneous
but it's maybe not long,
there is a little time
to make a difference,
maybe not very much,
after which the consequences
of what we have provoked,
not just we
in the human sense
but significantly, uh...
I don't know,
it's not the Anthropos.
I really do think
it's a lot of--
it's not only capitalism
of course,
of course it's not
only capitalism,
but, wow, if we could
have only one name,
you know, the last 500 years
of sucking the Earth dry
in the form of resourcing it
for, um,
for extraction as wealth
in the form of capital.
This is a pretty good
analysis, you know,
of what these last 500 years
have done to this Earth.
And we have
a little time, um,
to reinherit
the consequences.
And we have a while
to see if peace is possible.
One's whole life
is in the work,
in the writing and the play,
and my life has involved
intense, um, good family.
A family with whom
I've biologically--
well, reproductive family,
fathers, brothers,
mothers, cousins,
so forths,
with whom
I feel very strong--
strong connection.
So it's not about something
negative in that regard.
But my life--
my adult life especially,
but from kind of early,
I don't know,
almost as early
as one can--
I can imagine,
I remember
my mother worrying
that I wasn't
marriageable
for some odd reason.
There was a non-fittingness
into heteronormativity
for me from childhood.
I don't know why,
it just was.
You know, I had 21 dolls
and most of them had Polio
or were in iron lungs or--
you know what I mean?
They were--they were--
it was--I had...
It was--it was--
I had a very--
I had a relationship
to femininity
that was probably
not all that unusual,
that was both/and,
neither/nor,
all of the above,
none of the above
kind of thing.
And I think
in my adult life, um,
Jay, who was
a fellow graduate student
at Yale University,
he was in
the history department,
and I came to be intensely
engaged with each other
as friends and lovers
with no model
for how--how to handle that
except marriage.
I knew Jay was gay,
there was never
any secret about that.
Um, and, um,
for some reason,
it didn't activate jealousy
or--I don't know,
for some--I don't know why
there was a way
in which Jay and I,
for our own reasons,
needed to be married,
but somehow marriage was
seriously the wrong model
for what we were doing.
It was a kind of, what,
brother/sister sexuality that--
incest is the wrong name, too,
'cause that connotes
some kind of violation
and it wasn't.
And that kind
of accreting,
making family
by making homes,
that making kin,
making kind.
And this was, of course,
a period of history
where lots of people
are experimenting
with forms of social
and sexual life.
Communes of all kinds,
love relationships
of all kinds,
heteronormative marriage
was an object
of ridicule
and critique,
that helps a lot.
Yeah, you know,
in one's own explorations.
And, um, you know,
Jay's lover Bob,
my current--my lover
and husband and friend, Rusten,
joi--enjoin--
I mean, we got
officially divorced
but we could never figure out
who got the camera,
you know what I mean,
we couldn't split the property.
I don't know, we had
a sewing machine and a camera.
I'm being facetious.
The point is,
whatever it was that we did,
was--really was for life, um,
and in ways that we had
no particular models for
except that a lot of people
at that moment in history
were finding
ways of living
for which there were
no particular models.
And in retrospect it wasn't
all that radical or anything,
but it--but it
never resolved into
the reproductive
heteronormative family
as a model
for a good life.
And so our relationships
with Susan and Marco Harding,
our godson
and good friend Susan,
is an extended
kin relationship
that is way more--
in a significant way
we are extended kin
to each other.
In some ways legally
with things we've done
with various instruments,
but mostly
it's that insistence
on living that way.
You know, Jay and Bob
both died of AIDS,
Bob in 1986
and Jay in 1991.
Um, and, you know,
they were among the early, um,
people who fell to the--
you know, that fire
that swept their generation
of--of, um, gay men,
and, of course,
continues to sweep--
cut a wide swath among
the peoples of the world
even though it's manageable
as a chronic disease now
with drug cocktails
and the rest.
It's, you know, there--
it affects
tens of millions of people,
which is a big deal,
you know?
And it touched us
intimately
at the heart
of our family.
And Jay's mother, Maxine,
you know,
conventional,
conservative
Christian woman,
so on and so forth.
She introduces Rusten and me
as her daughter-in-law
and her son-in-law,
you know what I mean?
Her having this religious
apartment complex.
They just look like, "What?"
You know, they really
can't figure this out.
You know, Maxine doesn't
even know she's saying that.
Um, so making kin--
making non--
making kin, making fa--
making, uh,
family with each other
without the imperative
of biological reproduction,
and indeed with
quite something else,
with a kind of--cultivating
the responsibility
to be part of moving
the population of this Earth
to more tolerable levels.
And starting
in the rich countries.
Um, I mean,
obviously, the...
So, um, and then,
as you point out
with Cayenne,
it's more than a joke.
We are kin with more
than other human beings.
We make our households,
our families, our, um,
our worldings with
a host of other critters.
And that cobbling together
connections that really matter,
may as well call them kin,
making kinships.
And the question
is not so much
who you go
to bed with,
although that
of course matters
at certain key points
in one's life, you know,
but the ways
one builds lifetime kin,
I would love to see
certain kinds of
institutional apparatuses
like being able much more easily
to adopt adults,
to build
legally protected family
to be engaged in city planning
and architecture
and--and, um, to, um,
be engaged in
the building of rituals
that celebrate adulthood
with, uh,
adulthood that involves
the response--
the decision
not to have a child,
how to celebrate that as opposed
to regard it as a tragedy
while celebrating
children too.
You know, it's that
kind of needing to build
a non-heteronormative joy
in these kinds of lives.
So, yeah, it's a lifetime
commitment for sure.
Finish finally
this green screen shooting.
Okay, end of green screen.
Hey, we get--
oh, good,
holes in being at last.
Yay!
Agh!
Oh, yes.
I can--I can have
a third eye.
I don't know
what's happening here.
Yes, this is excellent.
I have more
green things out there
if you bring them in.
I searched for the big ball.
The big ball
is in the bedroom,
it's over--it's in
the corner of the bedroom.
Yeah, and we have--
yeah, this is...
Yeah? Or maybe this is--
oh, I don't know,
this is the egg you laid,
I'm sorry.
There we go.
This is not bad.
It laid an egg.
- This is...
- Okay.
This is--yeah, there we go.
Okay.
There we go,
now we're really done.
Yes, thank you.
How's that for the end?
Early in the 21st century,
communities
all over the planet
sensed a kind of urgency
of the undoing of ways
of living and dying.
An undoing that involved
humans and other critters
in the tissues of our being
together on Earth itself.
Somehow, a kind of wave
of feeling and action
and thinking and motion
began to sweep the Earth
in a very particular sense.
Communities
of 150 to 500 people
began to form
with each other
either from already
being in place
but finding each other
and coming together
with intensities that were
practiced in quite new ways
or moving from one place
to another.
All of these communities
formed themselves
around a particular kind
of felt intensity,
of felt need and lust
and desire and project,
which was to live
for the recuperation
of the critters
of the Earth,
the human
and the non-human.
To somehow cultivate the arts
of living on a damaged planet,
to be those who came
to recuperate and restore
where they could,
as communities
who either already lived
or moved to damaged lands
to be communities
of care and concern.
Camille 1 was born
in a community
that had decided that
at least three parents
were going to be required
for every new baby.
And having a baby
was not something
someone could
just decide to do.
It was rather
a collective decision,
so that folks
who wanted to bear babies
or bring babies
into the world
might well have to wait
or might never be able to do so,
but they could
participate as parents
in a family
raising a baby.
So that Camille 1 was going
to have to have siblings,
not necessarily in
the same immediate household
but the children to be born
in this community
had to have
other children
who were going to be
their siblings
but who were almost
certainly not going to be
their biological siblings.
So the reproductive choice
for the person
who would bear
the pregnancy,
whether that person was
a male or a female person
in the beginning
of this process,
whoever bore the pregnancy
to birthing
had a particular kind
of reproductive choice
which was to choose
a symbiont,
another critter
who was to be in symbiosis
with the human baby
for the lifetime of that baby.
So the woman
who bore Camille 1,
in a dream that she had
during her pregnancy,
chose for Camille 1
the symbiont
of a monarch butterfly.
Monarch butterflies
had part of their range
in the area where this
community had settled down.
Camille 1, at puberty,
could do many things.
Camille 1 could decide
to alter its body
into male--in male or female
or other ways.
Camille 1
could choose to stay
with whatever body
it was birthed with
or it could
partially alter,
maybe a little bit of this,
little bit of that.
And some of it was
gonna be irreversible,
they'd have to learn
to live with consequences.
The community
was not afraid
of a kind of
morphological experimentation
and thought that
that was something
that adolescents ought
to have the means to do.
Camille 1 chose
to stay with the symbiosis
and to deepen it.
And the story begins with
the first heir of Camille 1,
Camille 2.
Camille 2 was born female,
and as an adolescent,
Camille 2
decided to stay female
but wanted
to grow a beard.
In Camille 1's lifetime,
the symbiotic relationships
were not yet
at a molecular level.
Biological sciences,
the technobiological sciences
of the community had
developed in such a way
that by the time
Camille 2 was born,
it was possible and indeed
desirable in the community
for the symbionts
and the human beings
to share
bodily substance
and to share
genetic substance.
So at puberty
Camille 2 decided
to have implanted
on her face
a beard made up
of the stem cells
that would grow
the antennae of butterflies.
So that Camille 2
had a face
full of the antennae
of butterflies.
And the antennae
could sense,
could taste the air,
taste the foods.
And Camille 2 had
an enhanced sensory being
that she--he/she--
xe felt enhanced
xe's ability to care for
and to care about
the ongoing possibilities
of the monarchs.
By Camille 2's generation,
the kids were doing
skin implants of stem cells
to build patterns
on their skin
that were the patterns
of the insects
and the critters that
they were taking care of.
So they would do, you know,
their dance raves
and drug scenes
and all the rest,
they had various kinds
of light shows
and really, you know,
some of the--
the ones that were, um,
symbiotically banded
to the octopus and the squid
had the chromatophores
in their skin
so if they got
sexually excited
they would pulse
the same way
that the squid
and the cuttlefish
and the octopus
would pulse.
They could do these amazing
light shows with their skin.
So there was
a kind of playfulness
around this caring.
Just as making kin
without making babies
was a lifetime matter,
this question of forming
and reforming kin
was not something
done all at once.
You didn't inherit
everything all at once.
Frequently, adoptions
would take place
of people
in their 50s.
Families would
form and reform
and perhaps redo
their houses
and rewrite
their instruments
of financial
joint responsibility.
It was understood
that making family
was a lifetime matter
and that families
needed to be able
to experiment
and change.
The commitments
were very serious
and intended to be
for a lifetime,
but it could take
various forms.
It was understood that you
needed rituals and support,
you know,
ways of celebrating
the breaking up
of love affairs
and the consolidation
of friendships
out of love affairs
that had broken.
Of course there were
terrible mistakes made.
It was understood
that there would be
a lot of suffering in this,
but the communities felt
that they were
the Children of Compost,
they were staying
with the trouble.
They were here to somehow
build the Cat's Cradle games
that would make flourishing
ongoing possible.