It’s an hon­or to be here, in so many ways, and I want to begin under the title of this talk with three sto­ries that are too big but also not big enough. The Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and my favorite, the Cthulucene. The Cthonic ones, the not yet fin­ished, ongo­ing, abyssal, and dread­ful ones that are gen­er­a­tive and destruc­tive, and make Gaia look like a junior kinder­garten daughter.

I’m going to pro­pose to us in the course of the next twenty-five min­utes that the Cthulucene might be a way to col­lect up the ques­tions for nam­ing the epoch, for nam­ing what is hap­pen­ing in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, and oceans, and atmos­pheres. Perhaps need­ing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but per­haps offer­ing some­thing else, some­thing just maybe more liv­able. I’m struck by the fact that two kinds of insights seem to have over­tak­en the intel­lec­tu­al schol­ar­ly world, inter­na­tion­al­ly real­ly, and across the divi­sions of the dis­ci­plines. Simultaneously I pro­pose that it has become lit­er­al­ly unthink­able to do good work in any inter­est­ing field with the premis­es of indi­vid­u­al­ism, method­olog­i­cal­ly indi­vid­u­al­ism, and human excep­tion­al­ism. None of the most gen­er­a­tive and cre­ative intel­lec­tu­al work being done today any longer spends much time (except as a kind of foot­note) talk­ing, doing cre­ative work with the premis­es of indi­vid­u­al­ism and method­olog­i­cal indi­vid­u­al­ism, and I’ll try to illus­trate that a bit, pri­mar­i­ly from some of the nat­ur­al sciences.

Simultaneously, there has been an explo­sion with­in the biolo­gies of mul­ti­species becoming-with, of an under­stand­ing that to be a one at all, you must be a many and it’s not a metaphor. That it’s about the tis­sues of being any­thing at all. And that those who are have been in rela­tion­al­i­ty all the way down. There is no place that the lay­ers of the onion come to rest on some kind of foundation.

How is it, if these are tru­ly the intel­lec­tu­al rev­o­lu­tions and I believe cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tions that are infus­ing this plan­et at this time, how is it that the name of our epoch that is seri­ous­ly pro­posed and being stud­ied in the inter­na­tion­al geo­phys­i­cal union and else­where, with a report to be issued in 2016, that the name pro­posed for our epoch is the Anthropocene, with the fig­ure of the Anthropos? What an extra­or­di­nary kind of con­tra­dic­tion is implied in nam­ing th epoch that way. But it of course is named that way because of the cor­rect under­stand­ing that peo­ple, for­get the Anthropos, peo­ple have been doing on this plan­et has in fact changed the plan­et for­ev­er, and for every­one. Anthropogenic process­es are what give war­rant to that name. I will try both to jus­ti­fy and trou­ble that in the next few minutes.

Jim Clifford last night read a lit­tle quote from Always Coming Home that I think has got to stand along with Virginia Woolf’s epi­graph from Three Guineas. Actually, it’s not the epi­graph of Three Guineas but in the midst of the three guineas Virginia Woolf insists, ​“Think we must.” Think we must. If ever there has been a time for the need seri­ous­ly to think, it is now, and it has got to be the kind of think­ing that Hannah Arendt accused [Adolph] Eichmann of being inca­pable of. (That was not an English sen­tence, but it’s okay, I’m talk­ing about Germans.) Namely, the banal­i­ty of evil in the fig­ure of Eichmann was con­densed in Hannah Arendt’s analy­sis into the inca­pac­i­ty to think the world that is actu­al­ly being lived. The inabil­i­ty to con­front the con­se­quences of the world­ing that one is in fact engaged in, and the lim­it­ing and think­ing to func­tion­al­i­ty. The lim­it­ing of think­ing to busi­ness as usu­al. Being smart, per­haps, being effi­cient, per­haps, but that Eichmann was inca­pable of think­ing, and in that con­sist­ed the banal­i­ty and ordi­nar­i­ness of evil. And I think among us, the ques­tion of whether we are Eichmanns is a very seri­ous one.

Perhaps the utopist should heed this unset­tling news at last. Perhaps the utopist would do well to lose the plan, throw away the map, get off the motor­cy­cle, put on a very strange-looking hat, bark sharply three times, and trot off look­ing thin, yel­low, and dingy across the desert and up into the dig­ger pines.
Ursula K. Le Guin, ​“A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”

I’m giv­ing this talk under a par­tic­u­lar gor­geous image of Octopus cyanea, or the day octo­pus, who you can see in the cur­rent ​“Tentacles” exhib­it at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As I have been for a long time, I’ve been try­ing to stay with the trou­ble under the sign of sci­ence of SF, of string fig­ures, sci­ence fact, sci­ence fic­tion, spec­u­la­tive fab­u­la­tion, spec­u­la­tive fem­i­nism, so far. The sky has not fall­en, not yet. And I have been inspired by the think­ing of Marilyn Strathern and oth­ers, who tell me that it mat­ters what sto­ries tell sto­ries, it mat­ters what thoughts think thoughts, it mat­ters what worlds world worlds. That we need to take seri­ous­ly the acqui­si­tion of that kind of skill, emo­tion­al, intel­lec­tu­al, mate­r­i­al skill, to desta­bi­lize our own sto­ries, to retell them with oth­er sto­ries, and vice ver­sa. A kind of seri­ous denor­mal­iza­tion of that which is nor­mal­ly held still, in order to do that which one thinks one is doing. It mat­ters to desta­bi­lize worlds of think­ing with oth­er worlds of think­ing. It mat­ters to be less parochial. If ever there was a time, it is sure­ly now, and I think all of us lack many of the skills.

As you know, Ursula Le Guin is my prin­ci­pal inspi­ra­tion for a great deal, not least her way of approach­ing ques­tions of nar­ra­tion, evo­lu­tion, writ­ing, ​“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” That rather than a hero­ic sto­ry told yet one more time with the first beau­ti­ful words and weapons, or words as weapons and weapons as words, instead rethink the ques­tions of evo­lu­tion in a much small­er vein, with the tiny, hollowed-out neg­a­tive spaces, the shell which can hold some water that can be shared, the net bag that can car­ry food back to the camp, that can car­ry the baby. The kind of social­i­ty that comes from com­mu­ni­ties mak­ing their lives togeth­er. Not any kind of Utopia, cer­tain­ly not absent con­flict, but it is not the hero­ic sto­ry of the priv­i­leged sig­ni­fi­er mov­ing across matrix space to bring back the prize at the end and die.

Always Coming Home is a sto­ry that acti­vates that par­tic­u­lar the­o­ry of being, the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion, real­ly. The Anthropocene is that name that was pro­posed in about 2000. The word was invent­ed, actu­al­ly, by a man who is a great lover and studi­er of diatoms in the Great Lakes of North America. It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Eugene Stoermer is a fresh­wa­ter biol­o­gist and a lover of the diatoms. His term the Anthropocene was in fact invent­ed in order to sig­nal the Anthropogenic process­es that are acid­i­fy­ing the waters and chang­ing the nature of life on Earth. But it was picked up and pop­u­lar­ized by Paul Crutzen, an atmos­pher­ic chemist who won a Nobel Prize. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer joined togeth­er to pop­u­lar­ize the name Anthropocene specif­i­cal­ly in rela­tion­ship to those sorts of process­es ema­nat­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly from the mid-18^th cen­tu­ry and the steam engine and the extra­or­di­nar­i­ly expand­ing use of fos­sil fuels that acid­i­fy the oceans, bleach the corals (They were par­tic­u­lar­ly wor­ried about a vib­rio infec­tion in coral reefs that’s respon­si­ble for bleach­ing— We’ll be hear­ing more about vib­rio bac­te­ria both from me and from Margaret [McFall-Ngai] in a few min­utes. Vibrio is respon­si­ble for cholera, anoth­er vari­ant of it. Vibrios are genius­es at com­mu­ni­ca­tion. They are sig­nallers, queuers par excel­lence. Those are guys who real­ly get into the world and change it. In the case of the Hawaiian bob­tail squid, we can cheer for them. In the case of the bleached coral and cholera in Haiti, I think we have quite anoth­er atti­tude toward the encour­age­ment of vib­rio on this planet.

I think the prop­er icon for the Anthropocene, I think of that human being that is sig­nalled by the Anthropocene, this Anthropos, the one who looks up, is Fossil-Making Man, burn­ing fos­sils as fast as pos­si­ble. And what else would sig­nal this man but the Burning Man fes­ti­val in the deserts of Nevada? 

This is of course the burn­ing effi­gy at one of the Burning Man fes­ti­vals. They start­ed on the beach, Baker Beach in San Francisco in a much small­er way. Rather small wood­en effi­gies of a man (and a dog, I might point out) that were burned as part of the cel­e­bra­tion of the sum­mer sol­stice, and they grew in the way of Fossil-Making Man’s atti­tudes toward things, from a rather mod­est effi­gy to a 104 foot-tall burn­ing thing in the desert, such that every­body who takes a snap­shot of burn­ing man has to sign a con­tract that the copy­right is owned by the Burning Man organization.

The Anthropocene is also tight­ly tied to a god­dess fig­ure, Gaia, the fig­ure of the Earth who is Gaia part­ly because Gaia was invoked by James Lovelock to sig­nal what a liv­ing plan­et looks like from space. Very much part of the NASA project, the Apollo mis­sions, the search for life on Mars. Gaia is a fig­ure who emerges into the con­scious­ness of the Anthropos from space. She is an earth­ly fig­ure, not a female fig­ure but an it, one who fig­ures the metab­o­lism of a plan­et, that a plan­et is a whole, autopoi­et­ic system.

[This pho­to] is from one of the Apollo mis­sions, the pho­to­graph of the Earth ris­ing from the Moon. That is the per­spec­tive from which Gaia is the fig­ure of the Anthropocene. 

[This] dia­gram is one that James Lovelock used in one of his lec­tures on Gaia that gives us a sense of what an autopoi­et­ic sys­tem looks like. It’s a sys­tems the­o­ry. It def­i­nite­ly has to do with com­plex sys­tem process­es. It is not a the­o­ry of addi­tive change but of sys­tem change. It is about self-making and lay­ers of self-making. It’s about order out of dis­or­der. It’s about home­o­sta­t­ic mech­a­nisms in autopoi­et­ic sys­tems. The lim­its of home­o­sta­t­ic mech­a­nisms. The moments of flip from accom­mo­da­tion, accom­mo­da­tion, accom­mo­da­tion, whoops, col­lapse. accom­mo­da­tion, Accommodation, accom­mo­da­tion, whoops, col­lapse. Autopoietic the­o­ries accom­mo­date col­lapse as they accom­mo­date adjust­ment in their sys­temic ways of think­ing. These are the fun­da­men­tal kinds of log­i­cal appa­ra­tus­es that have been used in sci­en­tiz­ing the Anthropocene in its major research orga­ni­za­tions and pol­i­cy bod­ies, most cer­tain­ly includ­ing the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC has been issu­ing its reports now for a num­ber of years. It uses the pho­tographs, the snap­shots from the cell­phone, of the plan­et Earth, and it engages that kind of sys­tem think­ing that pro­duces a very par­tic­u­lar kind of scale called ​“glob­al.”

In Anna Tsing’s Friction she does a very inter­est­ing ethno­graph­ic study of what pro­duces the scale called glob­al, and how the mod­els work, how the insti­tu­tions work, how it is that some­thing as big as some­thing called ​“glob­al” emerges as a work object. Anna is not a trash­er, Anna is not the sort of thing that says, ​“Oops, gotcha. Done with that.” but rather, ​“Oh, that’s how it works. How can this both work and not work for any­thing that needs to be done on this Earth?” So I am not argu­ing that we don’t need the kinds of oper­a­tions that go on under the sign of the Anthropocene, Gaia, autopoi­et­ic think­ing, and glob­al scale, but I am sig­nalling their very his­tor­i­cal and mate­r­i­al speci­fici­ty, and their lim­i­ta­tions both mytho­log­i­cal and otherwise.

I would also argue (and this is much more ten­u­ous) that the Anthropocene main bio­log­i­cal sci­ences are those of the so-called mod­ern syn­the­sis that was put togeth­er crude­ly from the 30s to the 50s, and then again from the 50s to the 70s, and at some very deep sense these sci­ences are gross­ly inad­e­quate to the kind of think­ing required for our urgent times. They are pow­er­ful. I’m not talk­ing about trash­ing them. Again I’m talk­ing about under­stand­ing what they did, can do, can’t do, and what they stopped. So that the sci­ences of the mod­ern syn­the­sis work with genes, cells, organ­isms, pop­u­la­tions, species, put them into rela­tion­ships with each oth­er that were well-described by the math­e­mat­ics of com­pe­ti­tion, the com­pe­ti­tion equa­tions derived ulti­mate­ly from the ther­mo­dy­nam­ics of Gibbs, and that the world is pro­found­ly math­e­ma­tized in terms of those sorts of units that can suc­cess­ful­ly leave copies of each oth­er in com­pe­ti­tion with oth­er copy­ing units. Powerful appa­ra­tus for under­stand­ing the biologies. 

But what the sci­ences of the mod­ern syn­the­sis could not do and did not do was have any grip on micro­bi­ol­o­gy, part­ly because micro­bi­ol­o­gy works in such a weird way. The lit­tle crit­ters just do things we would not per­mit in the aver­age mid­dle school. They could not and did not deal with sym­bio­sis. The many bio­log­i­cal process that have come to be shown as gen­er­al to life on Earth were ungras­pable with­in the sci­ences of the mod­ern syn­the­sis, basi­cal­ly. They were real­ly minor­i­ty sci­ences. Everything to do with lichens and coral reefs that became so excit­ing in the late 19^th cen­tu­ry in some sig­nif­i­cant way dis­ap­peared from the lead­ing sci­ences until very recent­ly. And they could not and did not deal with devel­op­men­tal phe­nom­e­na. They could not deal with change through time in any very seri­ous way.

I would like to pro­pose for per­fect­ly obvi­ous rea­sons that for all of the fail­ings of the Anthropos and the Anthropocene, and all of the strengths of both, the Anthropos did not do this thing that threat­ens mass extinc­tion, and that if we were to use only one word for the process­es that we’re talk­ing about, it should be the Capitalocene.

Furthermore, those process­es that are sig­nalled by the extra­or­di­nary prim­i­tive accu­mu­la­tions and extrac­tions of orga­ni­za­tions of labor and pro­duc­tions of tech­nolo­gies of very par­tic­u­lar kinds for the extrac­tion and mald­is­tri­b­u­tion of prof­it, so on and so forth, did not start in the mid-18^th cen­tu­ry, nor do we need to go back to ​“deep time” and the end of the last Ice Age and play the notion that human ver­sus nature is as old as our species itself. Stark non­sense. But we do need to go deep­er in time than the mid-18^th cen­tu­ry, and I use this slide sim­ply to sig­nal the for­ma­tions of mar­kets and accu­mu­la­tions of wealth in the great trade routes, many of which fig­ured China as a major play­er, and the Indian Ocean as a major play­er. I do this sim­ply to sig­nal that those metab­o­lisms of the oikos and [ikos?], of econ­o­my and ecol­o­gy, and of world­ing, and of trad­ing and mak­ing, need to be fig­ured old­er than the mid-18^th cen­tu­ry, and that does not mean going back to some kind of deep ecology.

Clearly, the melt­ing of the ice around the Arctic is very impor­tant to the Capitalocene, in no small part because some­thing like 30% of the nat­ur­al gas reserves are in the Arctic seas under the ice, or the no-longer ice. I give you here an old ship that did­n’t quite make it, and a new ship which is quite capa­ble, thank you. 

And then I give you the third age of car­bon, which I believe we are liv­ing in. I’m indebt­ed to Michael Klare for this. That is to say that even though sus­tain­able tech­nolo­gies of all kinds are get­ting vast invest­ments, way more mon­ey is going into suck­ing the last calo­rie of fos­sil fuel out of the tis­sues of the Earth and the melt­ing of the ice in the Northwest Passage. The melt­ing of ice in the Hudson Bay is a big part of this.

What we have here is Greenpeace going against a Russian oil rig in the Russian areas of the Arctic. The inter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion in the Northern seas is aston­ish­ing. The mil­i­tary com­pe­ti­tion, the cor­po­rate com­pe­ti­tion. The suck­ing of the last calo­rie of car­bon out of this plan­et is a big deal. 

So we get to the Cthulucene. My fig­ure [on the left] is Potnia Theron, or Medusa. Medusa is the Greek ver­sion of this snake-haired cthon­ic enti­ty who is Potnia Theron, Potnia Melissa the god­dess of the bees, who is a very old and cthon­ic fig­ure who is in no one’s pock­et. A fig­ure of cre­ation and destruc­tion, an enti­ty of extra­or­di­nary pow­ers, and I would sug­gest to you that those who think the cthon­ic ones are old, tra­di­tion­al, done, been there, sup­plant­ed by civ­i­liza­tion, are sim­ply wrong. I fig­ure that for this pur­pose with the Ood out of Doctor Who sci­ence fic­tion film TV series that I bet every­body in the room has at least seen some of. And I remind you that the ten­tac­u­lar ones, whose faces are ten­ta­cles and not eyes, whose face are feel­ers, that the Ood had their hind­brain out­side their body and that the bad enslavers came and cut their hind­brain, which was the part of them that tied them to each oth­er and to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of what they call a hive-mind but let’s just call it com­mu­ni­ty or think­ing with each oth­er, and replaced it with a lit­tle glow­ing globe that could be con­trolled by the slave­mak­ers. So I think of the Ood as a per­fect­ly appro­pri­ate Cthonic One for the Cthulucene. 

Shoshanah Dubiner, ​“Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis”

But let’s move to the biolo­gies and go to Lynn Margulis. This is ​“Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis,” a giant paint­ing of sev­er­al feet by sev­er­al feet, on the wall between the bio­log­i­cal sci­ences and the geo­sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Lynn pro­posed, and she and her labs showed, that the ori­gin of com­plex cel­lu­lar­i­ty on this Earth is an endosym­bi­ot­ic event. That is, some bac­te­r­i­al sorts of crit­ters ate oth­ers and got indi­ges­tion and stuck around with each oth­er. That the ori­gin of com­plex cel­lu­lar­i­ty is an act of indi­ges­tion. This paint­ing is of the crit­ters involved in indi­ges­tion that is per­haps the world’s first com­plex world­ing, except Lynn would dis­agree with that since she was quite sure the bac­te­ria were already quite com­plex enough, thank you.

You’ll hear more about this from Margaret, but it’s not just mul­ti­cel­lu­lar­i­ty which is at a sym­bio­genet­ic event of cthon­ic pro­por­tions, but also if you take this love­ly lit­tle Hawaiian bob­tail squid, get it hatched and fill a lit­tle spe­cial­ized pouch with very par­tic­u­lar bac­te­ria at a very par­tic­u­lar time, those very par­tic­u­lar bac­te­ria will sig­nal meta­mor­phic changes in the squid that allows it to build a cer­tain kind of struc­ture that’s real­ly cru­cial for its being able to har­bor light-emitting bac­te­ria as an adult and look like a star­ry sky from below so that it can swim along and get its prey. It’ll glue sand to its back so from above it looks like a sandy bot­tom and from below it looks like a star­ry sky, and it can shoot its way through the waters gob­bling up din­ner because of sym­bio­genet­ic events. So that’s about devel­op­men­tal pro­gram­ming. It’s about, to devel­op prop­er­ly through time, we need each oth­er in an oblig­ate sym­bio­sis, and this proves to be way more gen­er­al than one would think.

The oth­er slide is a sim­i­lar kind of argu­ment out of Nicole King’s lab­o­ra­to­ry at Berkeley, which is about the ori­gin of ani­mal mul­ti­cel­lu­lar­i­ty from the clump­ing of choanafla­gel­lates in the pres­ence of cer­tain kinds of bac­te­r­i­al infec­tion. Infection is nec­es­sary to complexity. 

We are all lichens now. We have nev­er been indi­vid­u­als. From anatom­i­cal, phys­i­o­log­i­cal, evo­lu­tion­ary, devel­op­men­tal, philo­soph­ic, eco­nom­ic, I don’t care what per­spec­tive, we are all lichens now.

Art-science activisms inspire me at a lev­el— and I refuse to give any of my pre­sen­ta­tions with­out a kind of potent alliance with those who are work­ing with beau­ty and fury in their enlist­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ongo­ing­ness. The first pic­ture that you see up there is from Margaret and Christine Wertheim’s Institute for Figuring. The hyper­bol­ic Crochet Coral Reef, where the prac­tices of wom­en’s cro­chet­ing the non-Euclidian fig­ures became very impor­tant math­e­mat­i­cal fig­ures. Something like 27 coun­tries and more than 7,000 peo­ple have been involved in the col­lab­o­ra­tions to make dis­plays of coral reefs from cro­chet­ing. They’d enact a sol­i­dar­i­ty with the reefs through wom­en’s fiber arts, envi­ron­men­tal­ism, the math­e­mat­ics of com­plex non-Euclidian spaces, the inter­na­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tions of instal­la­tion art. They are an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inter­est­ing acti­va­tion. This is the ​“Toxic Reef,” made sig­nif­i­cant­ly out of dis­card­ed reel-to-reel tape and oth­er tox­ic fibers. 

The oth­er is a book project put togeth­er by a friend of mine who died a cou­ple of months ago, Alison Jolly, a pri­ma­tol­o­gist who stud­ies lemurs in Madagascar and was deeply involved in con­ser­va­tion. Alison was hor­ri­fied by the fact that Malagasy chil­dren study European ani­mals and have no lit­er­a­ture or ani­mal fables in the Malagasy lan­guage, or pic­tures of Malagasy ani­mals, the Madagascar flo­ra and fau­na. She and her col­leagues have pro­duced an aston­ish­ing series of about ten chil­dren’s books that are bilin­gual in Malagasy and English. Real nat­ur­al his­to­ry. These are excit­ing ani­mal sto­ries, fab­u­lous ani­mal sto­ries, that are an effort to incul­cate in the young a love of place, a love of home.

Cthulucene reworld­ing. Compost not Posthuman. ​“Revolution is but thought car­ried into action,” Emma Goldman. The acti­va­tion of the cthon­ic pow­ers that is with­in our grasp as we col­lect up the trash of the Anthropocene and the exter­min­ism of the Capitalocene, to some­thing that might pos­si­bly have a chance of ongoing. 

Thank you.