Books

Books : reviews

Donna Jeanne Haraway.
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: metaphors that shape embryos.
North Atlantic Books. 1976

Donna Haraway is perhaps our most advanced scientific storyteller. She locates the myths, metaphors, and tropes that underlie a technologically companionable physical world. Without abandoning scientific method—in fact, by embracing it in its fullest applicability—she exposes and also celebrates our scientific narratives as our clan story. In the process she “outs” our most fundamental distinctions and unexamined paradoxes: nature/culture, wild/domesticated, molecular/organic, animal/human, body/gender, et al. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is the first chapter of Haraway’s epic tale of Western science. When she names it “metaphors that shape embryos,” it should be clear that embryos also shape her metaphors, for she brilliantly illuminates the origin and dependence of each in each other.

Donna Jeanne Haraway.
Staying with the Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene.
Duke University Press. 2016

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway’s reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.