Donna Haraway—Art, Science, Activism

Donna Haraway’s guest lecture on the Cthulucene and Art/Science Activism surprised me because it was focused on the importance of the ancient stories that have been passed down and the importance of some of those narratives. For some reason, I thought the lecture was going to be more focused on actual biology, but it seemed Haraway was interested in seeing how human life and natural life paralleled and the co-dependence. Her main argument seemed to be that communication is the foundation of our civilization; she urged us to spread knowledge about the natural world throughout the community and to keep conversations going, through art or stories or what have you. Her manipulation of vocabulary was a way to push communication to its limits, and make it as effective as possible. She also pointed out that we share a vocabulary with the natural world. This lecture applied to my project because I am working with animals, in an analogous way, and her lecture was focused at the anthropogenic world. The anthropogenic has come up a lot in my research on domestic spaces. I do not know what Donna Haraway would think about anthropomorphizing animals, but I feel like she would be skeptical of it depending on how it was used.

Anthropocene Lecture series

One of the core arguments in the Anthropocene lecture with Alejandro de Acosta and Sarah Williams was that ideologies, or even simpler—ideas that constitute the communal/ societal collective conscious is extremely complex and they all encompass one another, in a tangled way. In that way, to unpack one idea can be seen like “untangling,” which was a word that was heard often during this lecture and in the Paper Tiger video. Sarah and Alejandro backed this up by demonstrating the game Cats Cradle as representing the way that everyone’s ideas further build on one another but continue to tangle and build something new. They described it as an “increasingly entangled but still ordered figure.” The tentacles in the figure of the Cthulhu and Medusa that were talked about also add to this argument because they represent the way individual thought is linked to other’s thoughts and becomes exponentially complex.