“Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin, that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all…Alone, in our separate kinds of experience and expertise, we know both too much and too little, and we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitute.”
Haraway, p.4
“It is important what ideas we use to think of other ideas” (p.12). This phrase keeps repeating itself to me after reading Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. Haraway, in her thinking, structure, and writing is advocating for messy entanglement, for multiple perspectives—not only human—and lessons from other-than-human ways of being.
This insistence on the biome, the composting of ideas, that the terroir (a french term about the environment used in winemaking, my concept added to Haraway’s), affects what grows, is resonant because these ideas can also transpose onto the university. ‘The ideas we use to think of other ideas’ asks for better education (for example the decolonization of curriculums), it asks for broader and tentacular thinking. “Tentacularity is about life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres” (p.32).
The biome is repetitive, messy, full of looping-backs and iteration. Creation, creativity is entangled. The act of observing changes the behaviour of the observed. Research is not passive, the conversations I am having, calling attention to issues and ideas, are themselves interventions as I begin to make networks between. This research is an action of making-with this system, of my becoming-with these people, this organization. It is action born from the feminist idea of response-ability and grown from a deep sense of care.
I agree with the UAL slogan “the world needs creativity.” But creativity is a radical act that requires radical entanglement. This university grasps the importance of multi-disciplinarity at a course level, there is piecemeal alignment. But the system as a whole is caught in a very different model of precarity which has necessitated a granular and siloed approach to the organism, robbing the actors within of vital life force and interactions.
The university also strives for “sustainability” or ecological-minded endeavours. The action of focusing on or enabling interdependent thinking, entangled thinking with the ecosystem is exactly how to encourage eco-activism. The act of siloing is the act of violence that enables what Hannah Arendt describes as “the banality of evil” to move, as everyday carelessness wrought from granular thinking.
If we want to think ecologically, there must be emphasis on and much support for “big picture” systems thinking to emerge in the university system. Siloziation stifles creativity: neoliberal individualization and myths of independence enacted by this system are the exact opposite of both creativity and climate response.
Interdependence—community—care—being-with—thinking-with—acting-with—these are all ideas that need to be at the centre of decision-making processes. Not another department that further isolates, but a commitment to acting and actioning that acknowledge and encourage entanglements, understanding that education into and between can only lead to richer, more nuanced, caring thinking, projects, and change.
Cultivating responsibility requires a focus on the environment. As Haraway says “planting seeds requires medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother” (p.120).