GABBLER RECOMMENDS: ‘Donna Haraway: Story Telling For Earthly Survival’

 

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.

[Via]

 

BLA Thought of the Day: Gorillas as a symbol for the Anthropocene

Donna Haraway talking about how Koko the gorilla came to stand for the “Universal Man.” Link below.

So, Musk is rapping about a dead Gorilla now. But Donna Haraway, author of the feminist essay “The Cyborg Manifesto” and the recent book detailing kinship in and at the end of the “Anthropocene” called Staying with the Trouble, had something to say much earlier about the Gorilla and our relationship to them.

Musk’s girlfriend, the artist Grimes (who calls herself a cyborg and whose new album will be called Miss_Anthropocene), seems to be a fan willing to embody Haraway‘s recent subject(s):

“People don’t care about it [climate change], because we’re being guilted,” Grimes told the publication. “I see the polar bear and want to kill myself. No one wants to look at it, you know? I want to make a reason to look at it. I want to make it beautiful.” And how does she plan to make it “beautiful?” Well, apparently the album visuals will include “pro-apocalypse PSAs” and a Renaissance-esque portrait of herself eating endangered animals. [Via]

All signs point to string figures and “the art of living on a damaged planet” (emphasis mine).