Armen Avanessian, Peter Frase, Daniel Rourke, Ytasha Womack, Laurie Penny and, Fabrizio Terranova’s documentary on Donna Haraway frame and reframe our thinking about our possible future by telling different stories. In the present light of fake news and alternative facts, Haraway urges: “Thinking is what we are about, and is a materialistic practice with other thinkers and some of the best thinking is done as story telling.”
Writers and critics of science fiction and fantasy have used the term ‘speculative fiction’, referring to stories that about imaginary futures, since the late 19th century. Its emphasis is less on the ‘science’ in fiction and more on the social changes that result from the advances in science and technology, extrapolated into the future. Speculative fiction is a reflection of the now. It breaks open ideas we have about our current world and how we want it to be.
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Fabrizio Terranova portraits the scholar Donna Haraway in the documentary: Donna Haraway, Story Telling For Earthly Survival. In it, Haraway says that the story of the planet is at stake, there is work to be done to bring attention to positive proposals of how things could be different. We need to “make the weak stories stronger and the strong stories weaker,” she says. She is infectiously positive, both in her interview as well as her nuanced writings about possible futures.
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“The juxtaposition of the epic and mundane is the point. This is a broad-strokes diagnosis of a species in existential crisis. It’s meant as a warning about what’s happening in the present moment. And it is seemingly unconcerned about timelessness, because at the rate we’re going, we won’t be able to look back on anything, since we’ll be too busy scrounging for survival in the wasteland. That every anguished or panicked moment seems to vanish mere instants after registering on your brainpan is part of the design. It’s the miniseries as Snapchat message. The tl;dr version is that the world is stuffed, as the Brits would put it, if we don’t face facts and start cleaning up the mess we’ve made.” [:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/17198110/0f3c2031916ad4877d4ffb2b9512b717ffbac18556a39147dafbec8928f5cd115f7842288d75389458dcceb7dac00444.jpg)
“It feels reductive to call