Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene

Scott Gilbert, “We Are All Lichens Now” →. See also Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 87, no. 4 (December 2012): 325–41. Gilbert has erased the “now” from his rallying cry; we have always been symbionts—genetically, developmentally, anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, ecologically.

These sentences are on the rear cover of Isabelle Stengers and Vincinae Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss:The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf, trans. April Knutson (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014). From Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, “think we must” is the urgency relayed to feminist collective thinking-with in Women Who Make a Fuss through María Puig de la Bellacasa, Penser nous devons: Politiques féminists et construction des saviors (Paris: Harmattan, 2013).

Gustavo Hormiga, “A Revision and Cladistic Analysis of the Spider Family Pimoidae (Aranae: Araneae),” Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 549 (1994): 1–104. See “Pimoa cthulhu,” Wikipedia; “Hormiga Laboratory” →.

The brand of holist ecological philosophy that emphasizes that ‘everything is connected to everything,’ will not help us here. Rather, everything is connected to something, which is connected to something else. While we may all ultimately be connected to one another, the specificity and proximity of connections matters—who we are bound up with and in what ways. Life and death happen inside these relationships. And so, we need to understand how particular human communities, as well as those of other living beings, are entangled, and how these entanglements are implicated in the production of both extinctions and their accompanying patterns of amplified death.” Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 60.

Two indispensable books by my colleague-sibling from thirty-plus years in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, guide my writing: James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Chthonic” derives from ancient Greek khthonios, “of the earth,” and from khthōn, “earth.” Greek mythology depicts the chthonic as the underworld, beneath the Earth; but the chthonic ones are much older (and younger) than those Greeks. Sumeria is a riverine civilizational scene of emergence of great chthonic tales, including possibly the great circular snake eating its own tail, the polysemous Ouroboros (figure of the continuity of life, an Egyptian figure as early as 1600 BCE; Sumerian SF worlding dates to 3500 BCE or before). The chthonic will accrue many resonances throughout my text. See Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). In lectures, conversations, and e-mails, the scholar of ancient Middle Eastern worlds at UC Santa Cruz, Gildas Hamel, gave me “the abyssal and elemental forces before they were astralized by chief gods and their tame committees” (personal communication, June 12, 2014). Cthulu (note spelling), luxuriating in the science fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, plays no role for me, although it/he did play a role for Gustavo Hormiga, the scientist who named my spider demon familiar. For the monstrous male elder god (Cthulu), see Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulu.

Eva Hayward proposes the term “tentacularity”; her trans-thinking and -doing in spidery and coralline worlds entwine with my writing in SF patterns. See Hayward, “FingeryEyes: Impressions of Cup Corals,” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 24, no. 4 (2010): 577–99; Hayward, “SpiderCitySex,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 20, no. 3 (2010): 225–51; and Hayward, “Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 1 (2012): 161–96. See Eleanor Morgan, “Sticky Tales: Spiders, Silk, and Human Attachments,” Dandelion, vol. 2, no. 2 (2011) →. UK experimental artist Eleanor Morgan’s spider silk art spins many threads resonating with this chapter, tuned to the interactions of animals (especially arachnids and sponges) and humans. See Morgan’s website →.

Tim Ingold, Lines, a Brief History (New York: Routledge, 2007), 116–19.

The pile was made irresistible by María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Encountering Bioinfrastructure: Ecological Movements and the Sciences of Soil,” Social Epistemology vol. 28, no. 1 (2014): 26–40.

Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes: Résister à la barbarie qui vient (Paris: Découverte), 2009. Gaia intrudes in this text from p. 48 on. Stengers discusses the “intrusion of Gaïa” in numerous interviews, essays, and lectures. Discomfort with the ever more inescapable label of the Anthropocene, in and out of sciences, politics, and culture, pervades Stengers’s thinking, as well as that of many other engaged writers, including Latour, even as we struggle for another word. See Stengers in conversation with Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, “Matters of Cosmopolitics: On the Provocations of Gaïa,” in Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, ed. Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities, 2013), 171–82.

Scientists estimate that this extinction “event,” the first to occur during the time of our species, could, as previous great extinction events have, but much more rapidly, eliminate 50 to 95 percent of existing biodiversity. Sober estimates anticipate half of existing species of birds could disappear by 2100. By any measure, that is a lot of double death. For a popular exposition, see Voices for Biodiversity, “The Sixth Great Extinction” →. For a report by an award-winning science writer, see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). Reports from the Convention on Biological Diversity are more cautious about predictions and discuss the practical and theoretical difficulties of obtaining reliable knowledge, but they are not less sobering. For a disturbing report from summer 2015, see Geraldo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich, Anthony Barnosky, Andres Garcia, Robert Pringle, and Todd Palmer, “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Science Advances vol. 1, no. 5 (June 19, 2015).

Lovelock, “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere,” Atmospheric Environment, vol. 6, no. 8 (1967): 579–80; Lovelock and Margulis, “Atmospheric Homeostasis by and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis,” Tellus, Series A (Stockholm: International Meteorological Institute) vol. 26, nos. 1–2 (February 1, 1974): 2–10 →. For a video of a lecture to employees at the National Aeronautic and Space Agency in 1984, go to →. Autopoiesis was crucial to Margulis’s transformative theory of symbiogenesis, but I think if she were alive to take up the question, Margulis would often prefer the terminology and figural-conceptual powers of sympoiesis. I suggest that Gaia is a system mistaken for autopoietic that is really sympoietic. Gaia’s story needs an intrusive makeover to knot with a host of other promising sympoietic tentacular ones for making rich compost, for going on. Gaia or Ge is much older and wilder than Hesiod (Greek poet around the time of Homer, circa 750 to 650 BCE), but Hesiod cleaned her/it up in the Theogony in his story-setting way: after Chaos, “wide-bosomed” Gaia (Earth) arose to be the everlasting seat of the immortals who possess Olympus above (Theogony, 116–18, trans. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library), and the depths of Tartarus below (Theogony, 119). The chthonic ones reply, Nonsense! Gaia is one of theirs, an ongoing tentacular threat to the astralized ones of the Olympiad, not their ground and foundation, with their ensuing generations of gods all arrayed in proper genealogies. Hesiod’s is the old prick tale, already setting up canons in the eighth century BCE.

Although I cannot help but think more rational environmental and socialnatural policies of all sorts would help!

Isabelle Stengers, from English compilation on Gaia sent by e-mail January 14, 2014.

I use “thing” in two senses that rub against each other: (1) the collection of entities brought together in the Parliament of Things that Bruno Latour called our attention to, and (2) something hard to classify, unsortable, and probably with a bad smell. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter, International Geosphere-Biosphere Program Newsletter, no. 41 (May 2000): 17–18 →; Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA (Geophysical Society of America) Today vol. 18, no. 2 (2008): 4–8. Much earlier dates for the emergence of the Anthropocene are sometimes proposed, but most scientists and environmentalists tend to emphasize global anthropogenic effects from the late eighteenth century on. A more profound human exceptionalism (the deepest divide of nature and culture) accompanies proposals of the earliest dates, coextensive with Homo sapiens on the planet hunting big now-extinct prey and then inventing agriculture and domestication of animals. A compelling case for dating the Anthropocene from the multiple “great accelerations,” in Earth system indicators and in social change indicators, from about 1950 on, first marked by atmospheric nuclear bomb explosions, is made by Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review, January 16, 2015. Zalasiewicz et al. argue that adoption of the term “Anthropocene” as a geological epoch by the relevant national and international scientific bodies will turn on stratigraphic signatures. Perhaps, but the resonances of the Anthropocene are much more disseminated than that. One of my favorite art investigations of the stigmata of the Anthropocene is Ryan Dewey’s “Virtual Places: Core Logging the Anthropocene in Real-Time,” in which he composes “core samples of the ad hoc geology of retail shelves.”

For a powerful ethnographic encounter in the 1990s with climate-change modeling, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “Natural Universals and the Global Scale,” ch. 3 in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 88–112, especially “Global Climate as a Model,” 101–6. Tsing asks, “What makes global knowledge possible?” She replies, “Erasing collaborations.” But Tsing does not stop with this historically situated critique. Instead she, like Latour and Stengers, takes us to the really important question: “Might it be possible to attend to nature’s collaborative origins without losing the advantages of its global reach?” (95). “How might scholars take on the challenge of freeing critical imaginations from the specter of neoliberal conquest—singular, universal, global? Attention to the frictions of contingent articulation can help us describe the effectiveness, and the fragility, of emergent capitalist—and globalist—forms. In this shifting heterogeneity there are new sources of hope, and, of course, new nightmares” (77). At her first climate-modeling conference in 1995, Tsing had an epiphany: “The global scale takes precedence—because it is the scale of the model” (103, italics in original). But this and related properties have a particular effect: they bring negotiators to an international, heterogeneous table, maybe not heterogeneous enough, but far from full of identical units and players. “The embedding of smaller scales into the global; the enlargement of models to include everything; the policy-driven construction of the models: Together these features make it possible for the models to bring diplomats to the negotiating table” (105). That is not to be despised.

The Anthropocene Working Group, which was established in 2008 to report to the International Union of Geological Sciences and the International Commission on Stratigraphy on whether to name a new epoch in the geological timeline, aimed to issue its final report in 2016. See Newsletter of the Anthropocene Working Group, volume 4 (June 2013): 1–17 →; and volume 5 (September 2014): 1–19 →.

For a photogallery of fiery images of the Man burning at the end of the festival, see “Burning Man Festival 2012: A Celebration of Art, Music, and Fire,” New York Daily News, September 3, 2012 →. Attended by tens of thousands of human people (and an unknown number of dogs), Burning Man is an annual week-long festival of art and (commercial) anarchism held in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada since 1990 and on San Francisco’s Baker Beach from 1986 to 1990. The event’s origins tie to San Francisco artists’ celebrations of the summer solstice. “The event is described as an experiment in community, art, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance” (“Burning Man,” Wikipedia). The globalizing extravaganzas of the Anthropocene are not the drug- and art-laced worlding of Burning Man, but the iconography of the immense fiery “Man” ignited during the festival is irresistible. The first burning effigies on the beach in San Francisco were of a nine-foot-tall wooden Man and a smaller wooden dog. By 1988 the Man was forty feet tall and dogless. Relocated to a dry lakebed in Nevada, the Man topped out in 2011 at 104 feet. This is America; supersized is the name of the game, a fitting habitat for the Anthropos.

See Klare, “The Third Carbon Age,” Huffington Post, August 8, 2013 →, in which he writes, “According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an inter-governmental research organization based in Paris, cumulative worldwide investment in new fossil-fuel extraction and processing will total an estimated $22.87 trillion between 2012 and 2035, while investment in renewables, hydropower, and nuclear energy will amount to only $7.32 trillion.” Nuclear, after Fukushima! Not to mention that none of these calculations prioritize a much lighter, smaller, more modest human presence on Earth, with all its critters. Even in its “sustainability” discourses, the Capitalocene cannot tolerate a multispecies world of the Earthbound. For the switch in Big Energy’s growth strategies to nations with the weakest environmental controls, see Klare, “What’s Big Energy Smoking?” Common Dreams, May 27, 2014 →. See also Klare, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (New York: Picador, 2012).

Heavy tar sand pollution must break the hearts and shatter the gills of every Terran, Gaian, and Earthbound critter. The toxic lakes of wastewater from tar sand oil extraction in northern Alberta, Canada, shape a kind of new Great Lakes region, with more giant “ponds” added daily. Current area covered by these lakes is about 50 percent greater than the area covered by the world city of Vancouver. Tar sands operations return almost none of the vast quantities of water they use to natural cycles. Earthbound peoples trying to establish growing things at the edges of these alarmingly colored waters filled with extraction tailings say that successional processes for reestablishing sympoietic biodiverse ecosystems, if they prove possible at all, will be an affair of decades and centuries. See Pembina Institute, “Alberta’s Oil Sands” →; and Bob Weber, “Rebuilding Land Destroyed by Oil Sands May Not Restore It,” Globe and Mail, March 11, 2012 →. Only Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have more oil reserves than Alberta. All that said, the Earthbound, the Terrans, do not cede either the present or the future; the sky is lowering, but has not yet fallen, yet. Pembina Institute, “Oil Sands Solutions” →. First Nation, Métis, and Aboriginal peoples are crucial players in every aspect of this unfinished story.

Photograph from NASA Earth Observatory, 2015 (public domain). If flame is the icon for the Anthropocene, I use the missing ice and the unblocked Northwest Passage to figure the Capitalocene. The Soufan Group provides strategic security intelligence services to governments and multinational organizations. Its report “TSG IntelBrief: Geostrategic Competition in the Arctic” includes the following quotes: “The Guardian estimates that the Arctic contains 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 15 percent of its oil.” “In late February, Russia announced it would form a strategic military command to protect its Arctic interests.” “Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and the US all make some claim to international waters and the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean.” “(A Northwest Passage) route could provide the Russians with a great deal of leverage on the international stage over China or any other nation dependent on sea commerce between Asia and Europe.”

Naomi Klein, “How Science Is Telling Us All to Revolt,” New Statesman, October 29, 2013 →; Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Macmillan/Picador, 2008).

“Capitalocene”is one of those words like“sympoiesis”; if you think you invented it, justlook around and notice how many other people are inventing the term at the same time. That certainly happened to me, and after I got over a small fit of individualist pique at being asked whom I got the term “Capitalocene” from—hadn’t I coined the word? (“Coin”!) And why do other scholars almost always ask women which male writers their ideas are indebted to?—I recognized that not only was I part of a cat’s cradle game of invention, as always, but that Jason Moore had already written compelling arguments to think with, and my interlocutor both knew Moore’s work and was relaying it to me. Moore himself first heard the term “Capitalocene” in 2009 in a seminar in Lund, Sweden, when then graduate student Andreas Malm proposed it. In an urgent historical conjuncture, words-to-think-with pop out all at once from many bubbling cauldrons because we all feel the need for better netbags to collect up the stuff crying out for attention. Despite its problems, the term “Anthropocene” was and is embraced because it collects up many matters of fact, concern, and care; and I hope “Capitalocene” will roll off myriad tongues soon.

To get over Eurocentrism while thinking about the history of pathways and centers of globalization over the last few centuries, see Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, China and the Birth of Globalisation in the 16th Century (Farnum, UK: Ashgate Variorium, 2012). For analysis attentive to the differencesand frictions among colonialisms, imperialisms, globalizing trade formations, and capitalism, see Engseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History (April 2004): 210–46; and Ho, The Graves of Tarem: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

In “Anthropocene or Capitalocene, Part III,” May 19, 2013 →, Jason Moore puts it this way: “This means that capital and power—and countless other strategic relations—do not act upon nature but develop through the web of life. ‘Nature’ is here offered as the relation of the whole. Humans live as a specifically endowed (but not special) environment-making species within Nature. Second, capitalism in 1800 was no Athena, bursting forth, fully grown and armed, from the head of a carboniferous Zeus. Civilizations do not form through Big Bang events. They emerge through cascading transformations and bifurcations of human activity in the web of life … the long seventeenth century forest clearances of the Vistula Basin and Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest occurred on a scale, and at a speed, between five and ten times greater than anything seen in medieval Europe.”

Crist, “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 129–47; 144. Crist does superb critique of the traps of Anthropocene discourse, as well as gives us propositions for more imaginative worlding and ways to stay with the trouble. For entangled, dissenting papers that both refuse and take up the name Anthropocene, see videos from the conference “Anthropocene Feminism,” University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, April 10–12, 2014 →. For rich interdisciplinary research, organized by Anna Tsing and Nils Ole Bubandt, that brings together anthropologists, biologists, and artists under the sign of the Anthropocene, see AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene →.

I owe the insistence on “big-enough stories” to Clifford, Returns: “I think of these as ‘big enough’ histories, able to account for a lot, but not for everything—and without guarantees of political virtue” (201). Rejecting one big synthetic account or theory, Clifford works to craft a realism that “works with open-ended (because their linear historical time is ontologically unfinished) ‘big-enough stories,’ sites of contact, struggle, and dialogue” (85–86).

Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, La sorcellerie capitaliste: Pratiques de désenvoûtement (Paris: Découverte, 2005). Latour and Stengers are deeply allied in their fierce rejection of discourses of denunciation. They have both patiently taught me to understand and relearn in this matter. I love a good denunciation! It is a hard habit to unlearn.

It is possible to read Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as an allied critique of Progress and Modernization, even though theirresolute secularism gets in their own way. It is very hard for a secularist to really listen to the squid, bacteria, and angry old women of Terra/Gaia. The most likely Western Marxist allies, besides Marx, for nurturing the Chthulucene in the belly of the Capitalocene are Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, and Stuart Hall. Hall’s immensely generative essays extend from the 1960s through the 1990s. See, for example, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996).

See Dave Gilson, “Octopi Wall Street!” Mother Jones, October 6, 2011 →, for the fascinating history of cephalopods figuring the depredations of Big Capital in the United States (for example, the early twentieth-century John D. Rockefeller/Standard Oil octopus strangling workers, farmers, and citizens in general with its many huge tentacles). Resignification of octopuses and squids as chthonic allies is excellent news. May they squirt inky night into the visualizing apparatuses of the technoid sky gods.

Hesiod’s Theogony in achingly beautiful language tells of Gaia/Earth arising out of Chaos to be the seat of the Olympian immortals above and of Tartarus in the depths below. She/it is very old and polymorphic and exceeds Greek tellings, but just how remains controversial and speculative. At the very least, Gaia is not restricted to the job of holding up the Olympians! The important and unorthodox scholar-archaeologist Marija Gimbutis claims that Gaia as Mother Earth is a later form of a pre–Indo-European, Neolithic Great Mother. In 2004, filmmaker Donna Reed and neopagan author and activist Starhawk released a collaborative documentary film about the life and work of Gimbutas, Signs out of Time. See Belili Productions, “About Signs out of Time” →; Gimbutas, The Living Goddesses,ed. Miriam Robbins Dexter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

To understand what is at stake in “non-Euclidean” storytelling, go to Le Guin, Always Coming Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);and Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Placeto Be,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove, 1989), 80–100.

“The Thousand Names of Gaia: From the Anthropocene to the Age of the Earth,” International Colloquium, Rio de Janeiro, September 15–19, 2014.

The bee was one of Potnia Theron’s emblems, and she is also called Potnia Melissa, Mistress of the Bees. Modern Wiccans remember these chthonic beings in ritual and poetry. If fire figured the Anthropocene, and ice marked the Capitalocene, it pleases me to use red clay pottery for the Chthulucene, a time of fire, water, and Earth, tuned to the touch of its critters, including its people. With her PhD writing on the riverine goddess Ratu Kidul and her dances now performed on Bali, Raissa DeSmet (Trumbull) introduced me to the web of far-traveling chthonic tentacular ones emerging from the Hindu serpentine Nagas and moving through the waters of Southeast Asia. DeSmet, “A Liquid World: Figuring Coloniality in the Indies,” PhD diss., History of Consciousness Department, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2013.

Links between Potnia Theron and the Gorgon/Medusa continued in temple architecture and building adornment well after 600 BCE, giving evidence of the tenacious hold of the chthonic powers in practice, imagination, and ritual, for example, from the fifth through the third centuries BCE on the Italian peninsula. The dread-full Gorgon figure faces outward, defending against exterior dangers, and the no less awe-full Potnia Theron faces inward, nurturing the webs of living. See Kimberly Sue Busby, “The Temple Terracottas of Etruscan Orvieto: A Vision of the Underworld in the Art and Cult of Ancient Volsinii,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2007. The Christian Mary, Virgin Mother of God, who herself erupted in the Near East and Mediterranean worlds, took on attributes of these and other chthonic powers in her travels around the world. Unfortunately, Mary’s iconography shows her ringed by stars and crushing the head of the snake (for example, in the Miraculous Medal dating from an early nineteenth-century apparition of the Virgin), more than allying herself with Earth powers. The “lady surrounded by stars” is a Christian scriptural apocalyptic figure for the end of time. That is a bad idea. Throughout my childhood, I wore a gold chain with the Miraculous Medal. Finally and luckily, it was her residual chthonic infections that took hold in me, turning me from both the secular and also the sacred, and toward humus and compost.

The Hebrew word Deborah means “bee,” and she was the only female judge mentioned in the Bible. She was a warrior and counselor in premonarchic Israel. The Song of Deborah may date to the twelfth centuryBCE. Deborah was a military heroand ally of Jael, one of the 4Js in Joanna Russ’s formative feminist science fiction novel The Female Man.

“Erinyes 1,” Theoi Greek Mythology →

Martha Kenney pointed out to me that the story of the Ood, in the long-running British science fiction TV series Doctor Who, shows how the squid-faced ones became deadly to humanity only after they were mutilated, cut off from their symchthonic hive mind, and enslaved. The humanoid empathic Ood have sinuous tentacles over the lower portion of their multifolded alien faces; and in their proper bodies they carry their hindbrains in their hands, communicating with each other telepathically through these vulnerable, living, exterior organs (organons). Humans (definitely not the Earthbound) cut off the hindbrains and replaced them with a technological communication-translator sphere, so that the isolated Ood could only communicate through their enslavers, who forced them into hostilities. I resist thinking the Ood techno-communicators are a future release of the iPhone, but it is tempting when I watch the faces of twenty-first-century humans on the streets, or even at the dinner table, apparently connected only to their devices. I am saved from this ungenerous fantasy by the SF fact that in the episode “Planet of the Ood,” the tentacular ones were freed by the actions of Ood Sigma and restored to their nonsingular selves. Doctor Who is a much better story cycle for going-on-with than Star Trek.

“Medousa and Gorgones,” Theoi Greek Mythology →

Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, beginning in 1974 with Walk to the End of the World, is greatSFfor thinking about feminists and their horses. The sex isexciting if very incorrect, and the politics are bracing.

Eva Hayward first drew my attention to the emergence of Pegasus from Medusa’s body and of coral from drops of her blood. In her “The Crochet Coral Reef Project Heightens Our Sense of Responsibility to the Oceans,” Independent Weekly, August 1, 2012,” she writes: “If coral teaches us about the reciprocal nature of life, then how do we stay obligated to environments—many of which we made unlivable—that now sicken us? … Perhaps Earth will follow Venus, becoming uninhabitable due to rampaging greenhouse effect. Or, maybe, we will rebuild reefs or construct alternate homes for the oceans’ refugees. Whatever the conditions of our future, we remain obligate partners with oceans.” See Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef: A Project by the Institute for Figuring (Los Angeles: IFF, 2015).

I am inspired by the 2014–15 Monterey Bay Aquarium exhibition Tentacles: The Astounding Lives of Octopuses, Squids, and Cuttlefish. See Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1978), with thanks to Chris Connery for this reference in which cuttlefish, octopuses, and squid play a large role. Polymorphy, the capacity to make a net or mesh of bonds, and cunning intelligence are the traits the Greek writers foregrounded. “Cuttlefish and octopuses are pure áporai and the impenetrable pathless night they secrete is the most perfect image of their metis” (38). Chapter 5, “The Orphic Metis and the Cuttle-Fish of Thetis,” is the most interesting for the Chthulucene’s own themes of ongoing looping, becoming-with, and polymorphism. “The suppleness of molluscs, which appear as a mass of tentacles (polúplokoi), makes their bodies an interlaced network, a living knot of mobile animated bonds” (159). For Detienne and Vernant’s Greeks, the polymorphic and supple cuttlefish are close to the primordial multisexual deities of the sea—ambiguous, mobile, and ever changing, sinuous and undulating, presiding over coming-to-be, pulsating with waves of intense color, cryptic, secreting clouds of darkness, adept at getting out of difficulties, and having tentacles where proper men would have beards.

See Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” interview for Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environment, and Epistemology, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (Open Humanities Press, Critical Climate Change series, 2015) →

Le Guin, “‘The Author of Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Theolinguistics,” in Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (New York: New American Library, 1988), 175.