Missing Witches - MW Donna Haraway： Experience Is A Fiction And A Fact

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00:00:38.420 to learn more about us. And please know, we've been missing you.

00:00:44.040 And one last thing before we start. The stories we tell require a general content warning.

00:00:49.640 It's just a fact of this terrain, of interrogating what is missing.

00:00:54.740 We promise to hold those moments with care. 1.00

00:00:57.800 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:04.360 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:08.060 Where I live, we are in the season of seed bags, mason jars, and cauldrons.

00:01:13.180 Out here, the trees sing in breathtaking color, writing color on the fabric of the world.

00:01:17.800 and across the eyes, neural nets and fast-beating hearts of every being who witnesses them,

00:01:24.340 as if to burn a memory of color in us before we slip into the monochromatic months of snow.

00:01:30.380 This time sings, we are here, we are here, remember us, we never disappear.

00:01:38.280 To really listen to the stories of this season, I feel like I need to wrench my eyes off the

00:01:43.380 hero's journey and broaden my perspective. And one of my most trusted guides for that trick

00:01:50.240 of looking otherwise is that queer, polyvocal, interdisciplinary, interspecies philosopher of

00:01:57.620 consciousness, Donna Haraway. And in staying with the trouble, she brings us there by paying 0.54

00:02:03.840 attention to containers. She writes, how did a sling, a pot, a bottle suddenly get into the

00:02:11.440 story? How do such lowly things keep the story going? Or maybe even worse for the hero, how do

00:02:18.800 those concave, hollowed-out things, those holes in being, from the get-go generate richer, quirkier,

00:02:27.100 fuller, unfitting, ongoing stories? Stories with room for the hunter, but which weren't an art

00:02:34.320 about him, the self-making human, the human-making human machine of history.

00:02:41.220 The slight curve of a shell that holds just a little water, just a few seeds to give away

00:02:47.580 and to receive, suggest stories of becoming with, of reciprocal induction, of companion

00:02:55.880 species whose job in living and dying is not to end the storying, the worlding.

00:03:01.720 With a shell and a net, becoming humans, becoming humus, becoming Terran, has another shape.

00:03:09.980 The side-winding, snaky shape of becoming with.

00:03:14.520 Our crafting draws us closer, into the leaky, spiraling circle of becoming with.

00:03:21.260 To the snaky shape of the knowledge of both good and evil.

00:03:25.640 And stories that include the human, the hunter, but aren't about him.

00:03:29.900 a pouch, a net, a soup pot, if we are to dedicate ourselves to resisting the total consumption and

00:03:36.520 destruction of all biodiversity and to re-enchanting the world with seeds, stories, and worlding that

00:03:43.960 becomes with the more-than-human world, we do well to follow the wandering, wandering eye of

00:03:50.140 this leading feminist theorist and philosopher of science, Donna Haraway. In this episode,

00:03:57.920 I try to explain for myself why Donna Haraway is foundational, or maybe better to say mycelial,

00:04:05.120 to my intersection of politics, spirituality, and creative practice. That play space that 0.95

00:04:11.400 these days I recognize as witchcraft. Donna Haraway once said, 0.98

00:04:17.800 When I was a biology graduate student at Woods Hole, and we were studying marine developmental

00:04:23.380 biology with embryos. We'd all get slightly stoned after dinner, and then go skinny-dipping

00:04:28.800 off Woods Hole in the phosphorescent ocean. Then we would go back to the lab for several hours,

00:04:34.140 slightly stoned, but really mesmerized by the critters, and watch the early cell divisions

00:04:39.040 of an octopus egg, for example, through a 10x magnification microscope. You move inside those

00:04:45.940 cells. It's not like you become one with the octopus egg, but just being brought into the

00:04:52.940 otherness of it, you are struck by the fact that this is not yourself. The kind of wonder and beauty

00:04:59.320 and technical virtuosity of a cell. Knowing something about how cells pull this off in terms

00:05:06.000 of their molecular mechanisms has just fed me as a person in the world. So let's just start here,

00:05:15.700 witches, with wonder at the virtuosity of all our kindred others. As we dig into Donna's life

00:05:22.520 and lessons, ideas, and praxis, with a knowing that comes from cellular unfolding.

00:05:30.680 Side note, it feels real weird to me to call this revered theorist by her first name, but

00:05:36.940 we made this decision when writing our book, Missing Witches, Reclaiming True Histories

00:05:42.980 of Feminist Knowledge, that we'd intentionally skip out on calling people by their family name,

00:05:49.440 usually their father's name or their husband's name and we'd reach instead toward the intimacy

00:05:55.680 as well as the iconography of using just first names

00:06:02.060 anyway in that book when writing about spider deities in yule mythologies i quoted donna

00:06:10.220 on the role of play in what she calls worlding.

00:06:15.620 Worlding, bodying, everything-ing.

00:06:20.160 The layers are inherited from other layers,

00:06:22.540 temporality, scales of time and space,

00:06:24.880 which don't nest neatly,

00:06:27.000 but have oddly configured geometries.

00:06:29.800 Nothing starts from scratch.

00:06:32.920 But the play, I think the concept of play

00:06:35.960 is incredibly important in all of this,

00:06:38.080 Proposes something new

00:06:40.240 Whether it's the play of a couple of dogs

00:06:42.880 Or the play of scientists in the field

00:06:45.000 Play proposes something new

00:06:48.680 And so it's at the heart of the spiral dance of worlding

00:06:52.360 When we begin to create new rituals

00:06:56.520 New relationships

00:06:58.140 More equitable worlds

00:07:00.340 Let's play

00:07:02.520 Let's holler brokenly and just for fun

00:07:06.680 until our real voices crack out. Run our fingers through the layers inherited from other times and

00:07:13.120 places. Let's dance along the lines of oddly configured geometries to make the world more

00:07:19.240 like how spiders and witches want and need it to be. Because this act of calling ourselves witches,

00:07:28.100 of looking for a history and philosophy that makes more sense than the bloody one we've inherited,

00:07:33.080 is a political act, but it's also a creative one.

00:07:37.760 We craft to rediscover what might be sacred,

00:07:42.840 encoded in the subtle and the mundane,

00:07:45.440 hidden in games and dances, songs and dreams,

00:07:49.300 and in theories of science that exceed industrial, racist, misogynist, ableist machines. 0.81

00:07:58.400 Donna held the first ever tenured professorship in feminist theory in the United States. 0.99

00:08:03.080 She is a door opener and progenitor. 1.00

00:08:08.140 Before we go further, let's hold a little space here 0.62

00:08:10.900 in these echoey halls between our ears

00:08:13.700 that are the altar spaces of the Missing Witch's Coven

00:08:16.580 for women who reached those spaces

00:08:19.360 that were still entirely men,

00:08:22.500 for the queer people like her husband

00:08:25.200 who were turned away and suffered

00:08:29.620 and were frustrated and broke through doors

00:08:33.280 for the people who make the impossible possible.

00:08:38.480 Let's think about how a person of her vision,

00:08:42.320 moving around the perspectives of individuals, species, technologies, systems, 0.98

00:08:47.980 how a woman gifted with that God trick of dimensional vision,

00:08:52.500 as she described it when writing about visionary radical geographer Doreen Massey,

00:08:56.900 who gave us the idea of geometries of power.

00:09:01.120 How a mind like that does the magical,

00:09:03.800 casts the god trick,

00:09:05.280 threatens the powers that be by making them visible,

00:09:08.180 along with their dependencies.

00:09:10.320 Before I tell a story about Donna, 1.00

00:09:12.040 let's hold a space open here for all the wise women, 1.00

00:09:14.980 queer, racialized, disabled, 0.98

00:09:17.580 neurodivergent people of radical insight 0.97

00:09:19.920 who have been abused,

00:09:21.920 put in their place,

00:09:23.740 burned,

00:09:25.200 obfuscated,

00:09:26.040 how a woman in the sciences or a girl with an ex makes witnesses wonder new things

00:09:32.940 can still be called witch and threatened with the hunt the docks by those same old armies

00:09:40.460 of the faithful to the rapacious norm and while i don't want to uncritically idolize her i am

00:09:48.420 thankful to the generative power in Donna's work. To read her is to meet a steady stream of new

00:09:56.460 thinkers, new thoughts. She's bountiful in her quotes and references to graduate students,

00:10:02.220 artists, organizers, activists, and digging into the impact of her ideas is to meet a kaleidoscope

00:10:08.880 of theorists who take her up and want her to go further. A fertility of discourse comes into the

00:10:17.080 world on the wave of her work. She earned her PhD in biology at Yale in 1972, writing about

00:10:25.420 the metaphors used to describe science, crystals and fabrics. She writes and teaches in science

00:10:33.520 and technology studies, in feminist theory and multi-species studies. She's been a thesis advisor

00:10:39.120 for over 60 doctoral students, and you can tell in the way she writes that she's fueled and

00:10:44.920 electrified by the ideas of all those people. She draws stories into her work from students,

00:10:51.640 collaborators, people she spoke with at conferences, activists, artists. Her work is alive with voices

00:10:58.520 and imagination. I think we learned from her to keep our focus on looking for the woman's voice

00:11:04.760 to quote, or the non-binary, or queer person, wherever possible. And our editor for our book

00:11:12.340 pushed us in this work to veer around the gravitational pull of famous fucking men, 0.98

00:11:19.300 to find and quote and amplify the strange and subtle things women and queer people have always 0.98

00:11:26.880 been saying. As I read her books, I highlight dozens of references to researchers, and they

00:11:32.580 send me down some of my most exquisite reading rabbit holes. Her work is so dense, I always miss

00:11:38.220 things and find new things when I go back. I learned about the Greenham women this year in 1.00

00:11:42.840 my interview with Monica Sho's daughter-in-love, but they were there for me to discover in the

00:11:48.640 Cyborg Manifesto 2, where Donna writes, and I've pulled some pieces together here. We'll have the

00:11:54.840 link to the full text in the show notes. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question.

00:12:02.860 The answers are a matter of survival.

00:12:06.540 Modern machines are quintessentially micro-electronic devices. They are everywhere

00:12:11.180 and they are invisible. Our best machines are made of sunshine. They are all light and clean

00:12:17.180 because they are nothing but signals. Electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum,

00:12:23.100 and these machines are eminently portable, mobile, a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and 0.86

00:12:30.220 singapore people are nowhere near so fluid being both material and opaque cyborgs are ether

00:12:39.340 quintessence the ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine belt 0.91

00:12:45.820 machines are so deadly they are as hard to see politically as materially they are about

00:12:53.500 consciousness or its simulation they are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across europe 1.00

00:13:02.780 blocked more effectively by the witch weavings of the displaced and so unnatural greenham women 1.00

00:13:11.500 who read the cyborg webs of power so very well the nimble fingers of oriental women the old 0.99

00:13:18.620 fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with dolls' houses, women's enforced attention to 0.96

00:13:25.260 the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking 1.00

00:13:32.380 account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips 1.00

00:13:40.380 in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita Jail, whose constructed unities will guide effective 1.00

00:13:47.900 oppositional strategies. Unpacking this section, Patricia Pistor writes,

00:13:55.300 Microscopic images, nanotechnology, and the molecular are for Haraway increasingly important. 0.51

00:14:01.900 The renewed interest in women's traditional attention to the micro and invisible dimensions 0.83

00:14:06.220 of the world is, in her view, an important strategy to develop for grasping the possible 0.86

00:14:10.960 dangers of new machines and techniques of segmentation and domination. Like Alice,

00:14:17.200 the cyborg is situated on a molecular level, creating becomeings, connections, and affinity

00:14:22.540 groups. The cyborg chooses on the basis of affinity, not on the basis of identity and

00:14:28.720 origin, which is anyway undermined in politics of becomeings. On the other hand, the cyborg can

00:14:35.480 also act at a segmented political level, as a tool in concrete political situations,

00:14:42.320 creating a war machine or a line of flight.

00:14:46.280 Haraway gives the example of the spiral dancing in Santa Rita Jail,

00:14:50.840 linking guards and arrested anti-nuclear demonstrators

00:14:53.840 in the Alameda County Jail in California in the early 1980s.

00:14:59.260 The cyborg isn't inherently good or evil,

00:15:04.360 but witch weavings can make cyborgs that are resistant to technocratic fascism. 0.97

00:15:10.660 The Greenham women built an encampment and lived for decades there to protest the site of nuclear missile storage on UK soil, 0.95

00:15:19.740 taking down sections of the fence every night, gathering in the tens of thousands,

00:15:25.960 staying after the missiles had been removed until a memorial was built to honor what they had done.

00:15:32.440 inmates and guards spiral dancing together learning with their feet and heartbeats about

00:15:39.440 patterns how easily we end up on the other side becoming linked by our affinity into cyborg

00:15:47.300 unities that can effectively resist cyborg fascism and capitalist death cults she writes

00:15:54.320 cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate in our present political circumstances we could

00:16:01.720 hardly hope for more potent myths, for resistance, and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the 0.97

00:16:09.180 Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting

00:16:15.160 the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse,

00:16:21.680 and committed to bringing a political form that actually manages to hold together 0.92

00:16:27.720 Witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. 0.61

00:16:37.660 Haraway recognizes witch weavings. 0.96

00:16:40.940 She references hundreds of activist groups in her writing.

00:16:45.220 Her theory of science is rooted in science for the people,

00:16:48.600 dedicated to orienting science away from war machines and planet destruction,

00:16:52.760 towards research that studies and tackles inequality.

00:16:57.900 She witchweaves social-political realities with science using history as well as stories.

00:17:04.280 Staying with the trouble includes speculative fiction, science fiction.

00:17:09.200 She calls these string figures, and I picture the hours my mom and I spent playing Cat's Cradle,

00:17:15.360 passing shapes back and forth between our hands in a rhythm,

00:17:18.860 teaching each other about play and about patterns and about power okay let's pull a

00:17:26.120 god trick and time travel to 2003 i was in my first semester of grad school in montreal when

00:17:32.960 i read donna harroway's cyborg manifesto it was the first major feminist theorist we read and it 0.91

00:17:39.080 just changed everything i loved that she wrote a fucking manifesto you know just start with that 1.00

00:17:46.080 the audacity. She'd go on to co-author the Tree Snail Manifesto with Michael J. Hadfield 0.98

00:17:53.300 and the Companion Species Manifesto. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, these are crucial manifestos that

00:18:01.060 changed the discourse and clarified our situation in the postmodern in stunning and beautiful ways.

00:18:07.880 That we are animal and machine and human and full of potential is Donna Haraway's enduring

00:18:14.880 and inspirational message. We are animal, machine, human, and full of potential.

00:18:24.080 Donna opens potentials. Sometimes in interviews, people ask us, why which or when did that happen?

00:18:32.020 And Amy says something like, there were only two things to be when I was a kid,

00:18:36.200 witch or princess, and I knew I wasn't the princess. I felt that about witch in high school.

00:18:42.580 i felt the potential twitching beyond the edges of my vision for something so

00:18:48.500 much more than princess good girl two-dimensional love interest i was a disruptive theater kid and

00:18:56.560 everything fell into place for me when i realized i wanted to play the villain

00:19:00.560 i wanted to embody witch i was cast as the snow queen the white witch and did this movement work

00:19:08.640 where we imagined losing our bodies

00:19:10.400 and then growing new animal bodies

00:19:12.440 to help us find how to play our characters.

00:19:15.300 And I became a kind of moth.

00:19:18.680 Milkweed tussock, maybe, or blinded sphinx.

00:19:23.040 Playing witch brought moths into my body of possibility.

00:19:27.300 When she was in high school, Donna's mother died,

00:19:30.100 and she says she froze, in a way,

00:19:32.380 and didn't feel the real pain and loss of that

00:19:35.340 until her 40s, when she crossed the age

00:19:37.620 her mother had been when she died. And Donna realized in her body that she wasn't actually

00:19:43.380 her mother. Donna earned a Fulbright scholarship out of high school, studied in France, and came

00:19:48.680 back and lived in a commune, and joined the anti-war and civil rights movements, did graduate

00:19:55.260 studies at Yale, fell in love with and married a gay man, and had important relationships with women.

00:20:01.480 And when it became clear that the marriage wouldn't work, they divorced, and not long after,

00:20:05.540 he and his lover and herself and her second husband would buy land together in California

00:20:10.640 and build a home there. In grad school, I was opened up by Don's Cyborg Possibilities.

00:20:16.860 The manifesto opened a new way of navigating what kind of body I was, what kind of relationships

00:20:22.100 were possible. I felt that Cyborg came close to explaining the way I felt interpolated by

00:20:28.060 technology. My energy all fritzed out from thinking about open source and the history of

00:20:34.220 the theft of the commons, and spaces where the commons was being built anew distributed across

00:20:39.500 unstoppable archives. Planet-consuming archives. Learning audio and video editing and how websites

00:20:46.940 work. Crafting my first hypertext stories. I had a sense of being spread across the world and

00:20:52.700 stitched into databases. Singing in pixels, resonating across wires and on other people's

00:20:58.260 screams. I had a migraine all the time. Being cyborg wasn't utopia, but it was part of my

00:21:07.080 concrete lived reality. That year for Halloween, my friend Diane and I used bubble wrap and duct

00:21:12.800 tape and computer parts and wires harvested from my boyfriend's bits of spare parts.

00:21:18.260 He was building a supercomputer in our small apartment at the time,

00:21:22.120 overheating the space at night by running time trials for fun.

00:21:25.420 and we used those bits to fashion ourselves into cyborgs.

00:21:30.100 We made these costumes and went out dancing,

00:21:33.400 weaving ourselves into the late-night Montreal party scene

00:21:36.340 and the heady grad school scene

00:21:38.900 and into our new identities as scholars, makers, adults.

00:21:43.480 We were in our first year of an MA in media studies

00:21:45.900 and Haraway blew the top of our heads off.

00:21:48.300 She was the most magical writer of contemporary theory

00:21:51.180 and philosophy I had yet to discover.

00:21:53.340 she opened up worlds of sight and possibility and for me her work worked on every other text

00:21:59.620 like a philosopher's stone revealing a greater context a greener weaving beyond the famous men

00:22:06.920 in the cyborg manifesto in 1991 she wrote social reality is the lived social relations

00:22:14.660 our most important political construction a world-changing fiction the international women's

00:22:21.340 movements have constructed women's experience as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial

00:22:26.360 collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial political kind.

00:22:32.600 Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension

00:22:37.980 of oppression, and so of possibility. The idea of world-changing fiction, of reaching for and

00:22:45.440 nourishing liberation through the imaginative apprehension of oppression and of possibility

00:22:51.460 sits deep in me. Diane de Prima wrote on my soul, the war is the war for the human imagination.

00:23:00.660 Robin Maynard of Policing Black Lives and co-author with Leanne Betta-Samosake-Simpson's

00:23:07.120 Rehearsal for Living wrote, abolition is imagination work. Anticolonial struggle is 0.50

00:23:14.680 imagination work, conjure work, science fiction in real time. Poet and essayist Auriel Marie said

00:23:23.880 in our interview last week, being in a practice of conjuring, it's just reminding me that this

00:23:29.000 world is a fabricated thing too. Following Haraway, liberation rests on the construction

00:23:38.120 consciousness. How we imagine the world matters. Disability activist, writer, theorist, poet,

00:23:47.760 Gillian Weiss wrote, cyborgs are the disabled people. We already exist. Cyborgs are not a

00:23:54.140 technocratic, transhumanist fantasy. Cyborgs are disabled people and we already exist.

00:24:00.640 i die without batteries i'm a circuited networked chronically ill human with a robot organ

00:24:09.400 where do you place me in your cyborg imaginary

00:24:13.160 donna harroway wrote us out of the theory but we were the experiment we are the first cyborgs

00:24:23.320 i totally missed this erasure when i was introduced to harroway in school

00:24:28.520 I rode on euphoria waves of Donna's prose.

00:24:31.780 Her gift is visionary eloquence.

00:24:34.580 But maybe that eloquence sometimes misses.

00:24:37.480 She tries to shift perspective to draw other experiences and power dynamics into focus.

00:24:43.400 But she is situated, and she has blind spots.

00:24:47.600 She wrote,

00:24:48.560 Our politics these days require us to give each other the heart to figure out how, with each other,

00:24:53.760 we can open up possibilities for what can still be in an interview with sarah franklin in 2017

00:25:00.820 harroway said you know i i run through some old-fashioned klutzy categories race sex class

00:25:07.800 region sexuality gender species i pay attention i know how fraught all those categories are but

00:25:14.520 i think those categories still do important work i have developed kind of an alert system

00:25:20.240 trying to do this means people will notice when you fail when you are clunky with your clunky

00:25:27.780 categories and you will be called to account and hopefully you'll go back and see yes i need better

00:25:33.980 categories better collective thinking thank you because if you see how limited our structures

00:25:39.440 of knowledge are by our situatedness then you must accept that voice injured angry defiant

00:25:46.460 who speaks up to say you missed me and then pass the mic 1.00

00:25:52.220 donna's not going to save us all she's not going to take feminism or any of our worldings all the 1.00

00:25:59.060 way because no one is going to alone she writes the cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history

00:26:06.720 the cyborg would not recognize the garden of eden it is not made of mud and cannot dream of

00:26:12.720 returning to dust. Perhaps that's why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of

00:26:18.500 returning to nuclear dust, and the manic compulsion to maim the enemy. The manic compulsion to maim

00:26:25.620 the enemy still rages, and so does salvation storytelling. And those two momentums seem to

00:26:32.100 eat each other's tails, as the savior for one Greek gets vilified by another, and there we are

00:26:36.920 in witch hunt mode again.

00:26:40.020 Instead, Donna wants us to go looking for figures,

00:26:44.380 strings, shells, seed bags,

00:26:49.400 containers that weave with affinity

00:26:51.080 toward different possibles.

00:26:55.720 Today, in 2022,

00:26:58.520 Donna is a Distinguished Professor Emerita

00:27:00.920 in the History of Consciousness Department

00:27:02.860 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

00:27:05.180 as elder her work sits enshrined at the heart where people gather to craft the history of

00:27:13.260 consciousness i like to think about what we do here at missing witches as being a tiny part of

00:27:19.640 a feminist history of ideas we use the string figure of the witch across different cultures

00:27:25.480 and embraced in different individual lives to go looking for ideas we've been missing in our own

00:27:30.380 lives that might help us come into community with the other beings and species of this planet

00:27:36.180 and the universe. In this, we follow in the footsteps and swing along the guidelines and

00:27:42.420 through openings left by Donna Haraway. And by her critics, Haraway's work explores the string

00:27:49.720 figures composed by science facts, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative

00:27:55.560 fabulation, science and technology studies, and multi-species worlding. Her books include

00:28:01.500 Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Cthulhu Scene, When Species Meet, Modest Witness

00:28:07.660 at Second Millennium, Simeon, Cyborgs, and Women, Primate Visions, and Crystals, Fabrics, and

00:28:14.640 Fields. My friend Jonathan sent me Staying with the Trouble. One day out of the blue, he just

00:28:19.540 started messaging me photos of its pages, like this made me think of you, this made me think of

00:28:24.040 and this one, and this one, which is the greatest string figure gesture a friend can make with me.

00:28:31.500 In my late 30s, I took as much comfort from staying with the trouble and was as totally

00:28:36.220 electrified by it as my 20-year-old self was by the Seibold Manifesto. I want to make kin now,

00:28:43.180 in defiance of catastrophe. We are at stake to each other, Donnerites, in staying with the trouble,

00:28:49.260 And our job is to make the Anthropocene as short, thin as possible, and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epics to come that can replenish refuge.

00:29:05.060 Here, in the midst of destruction, in the heart of the trouble, our crafting is to make this time a sin and to replenish refuge.

00:29:14.020 as we approach this craft this re-enchantment this labor and long work of will and sacred

00:29:23.100 relationship we can take with us donna harroway's plea to make the relay we must somehow make the

00:29:31.700 relay inherit the trouble and reinvent the conditions for multi-species flourishing

00:29:37.620 not just in a time of ceaseless human wars of genocides

00:29:42.060 but in a time of human-propelled mass extinction 0.65

00:29:45.040 and multi-species genocides

00:29:47.000 that sweep people and critters into the blow-tanks

00:29:50.140 we must dare to make the relay

00:29:53.240 that is to create, to fabulate

00:29:55.740 in order not to despair

00:29:57.680 we fabulate in order not to despair

00:30:02.340 we make the world with the world as it is

00:30:06.080 This is work for witches, sudden possibilities that have been both villainized and ridiculed,

00:30:12.020 declawed and hunted, but always weaving, always dancing, always at the cauldron, trying to

00:30:19.760 repunish. Rituals, elixirs, stories, spiral dances, theories, collectives, whole bubbling cauldrons

00:30:29.600 full of potent becoming wit are a crucial part of how we make our desires material.

00:30:34.160 how we feed each other, how we can learn about the people of all species, plants and fungi and

00:30:42.140 microbes, indigenous to where we are, and how they have been in community, and how we might feed,

00:30:49.100 serve, shield that community. Haraway plays, makes relays in order not to despair. The cyborg is the

00:30:56.680 most famous of the dances, but ideas like companion species take that explosive idea further.

00:31:02.000 so does the concept of odd king from staying with the trouble she writes kin is a wild category that

00:31:09.400 all sorts of people do their best to domesticate making kin as odd king rather than or at least

00:31:16.880 in addition to god king and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters

00:31:24.560 like to whom one is actually responsible who lives and who dies and how in this kinship rather

00:31:31.400 than that one what shape is this kinship where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect and so

00:31:39.060 what what must be cut and what must be tied if multi-species flourishing on earth including

00:31:44.900 human and other than human beings in kinship are to have a chance cyborgs are our odd kin

00:31:50.740 they are part of asking what will we choose to be connected to who will we tie ourselves to

00:31:57.000 And what will we cut ourselves from to give multi-species flourishing a chance?

00:32:03.180 As Margaret Grebowitz and Helen Merrick write in their book Beyond the Cyborg,

00:32:07.720 the cyborg should be re-situated as a minor member of the companion species family.

00:32:13.860 These kin are Haraway's figures for exploding our conventional stories of the subject-object worlds of human and non-human others.

00:32:21.240 she pulls on threads exploding conventional subject object relations pulls out along lines

00:32:30.680 of dimension to see from very very far and very close and some odd angles i appropriated cyborgs 1.00

00:32:39.260 to do feminist work in reagan's star wars times of the mid 80s by the end of the millennium cyborgs 0.99

00:32:45.160 could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for critical 1.00

00:32:50.280 inquiry. I love playing with the idea of cyborg, but it's not quite all of me, not these days.

00:32:56.860 I live with countless species here in the woods, but no pets. Companion species as a way of thinking

00:33:02.660 beyond the human works well, but somehow the species with whom I am in a complex power dynamic

00:33:08.520 are not really my companions. They're wild. There is a sunfish in our lake who visited us every day

00:33:16.020 for two summers. May named them Cast Iron, and they tended their nest at our little beach and

00:33:21.700 came close whenever we were in or by the water, and we dug up worms and swatted deer flies to

00:33:27.200 feed them, but then one day they were gone. A family of red-headed mergansers rests on our

00:33:33.840 lake for a few days each year, but then they go. A pair of wounds summers here.

00:33:41.040 Once in the night, we saw a coyote saunter down a neighbor's driveway across the road

00:33:45.800 and slip into the woods.

00:33:47.580 It keeps its own company.

00:33:51.900 Sometimes I sit out at night and watch the bats

00:33:54.200 make their arcs and twists of flight.

00:33:57.340 And every year around this time, when it gets cool,

00:34:00.340 but before it freezes, the air fills with these tiny, slow-moving bugs,

00:34:05.160 these periwinkle poofs under their wings like they're wearing tutus. 1.00

00:34:09.220 We call them fairies. 1.00

00:34:10.840 Everyone who lives here does. 1.00

00:34:12.080 and if you hold out your hand they will come and rest on you they whisper something about what

00:34:18.040 donna calls significant otherness i'm working to listen to the leavings of the world to the

00:34:25.980 messages inside and all around to the full spectrum from stomach aches to the utterly

00:34:32.020 unknown and magical to all of what my odd king have to teach me which is a funny kind of string

00:34:38.480 figure to play with. A set of cats cradled stories about outsider women. Liminal women. Ugly old

00:34:45.620 women. Women with plant knowledge and animal familiars. Women and other people who can follow 1.00

00:34:52.060 and embrace their femme dimensions, their liminality, their utterly unique truths, who follow 1.00

00:34:59.200 the moon and own their own bodies and protect others. Subversive in how we see the world as 0.97

00:35:06.520 open to crafting to play creative and how we choose exactly how we want to live and what 1.00

00:35:13.200 social rules we are going to disobey dangerous people part fact part fiction silly women playing

00:35:23.040 pretend and staying with the trouble donna harroway quotes starhawk let the pain become a sound a 0.51

00:35:31.240 living river on the breath, raise your voice, cry out, scream, wail, keen and mourn for the

00:35:38.660 dismembering of the war. In Donna's future fiction, in her speculative leaving, she imagines that we

00:35:47.020 sing Starhawk, inherit the task of becoming speaker for the dead, to bring into ongoing presence,

00:35:54.000 through active memory, the lost life ways, so that other symbiotic and synpoetic

00:36:01.040 Commitments would not lose heart.

00:36:03.680 Crucial to the work was not to forget the stink in the air from the burning of the witches.

00:36:08.580 Not to forget the murders of human and non-human beings in the great catastrophes named the Plantation Ocene, Anthropocene, Capital Ocene. 0.66

00:36:17.840 To keen and mourn for the dismembering of the world. 0.96

00:36:23.380 Moving through mourning to re-presencing to the practice of vital memory. 0.99

00:36:28.460 Witches, let's cheen and mourn 1.00

00:36:32.860 And say their fucking names 1.00

00:36:34.640 Let's bring the lost to vital memory 1.00

00:36:38.240 And bring the vulnerable to the heart of our circles of protection

00:36:41.460 And join in a spiral dance of affinity for life

00:36:45.800 To stay right here together

00:36:48.700 Cyborg, witches

00:36:50.960 Odd kin that we are 0.97

00:36:53.100 Companions in the trouble

00:36:54.700 To make the V-Lay

00:36:56.720 to fabulate in order not to despair to replenish refuge and re-enchant the war

00:37:04.460 okay i feel totally unprepared to talk about donna harroway i'm just like bowled over by her

00:37:18.740 i just want to think out loud about how

00:37:20.840 heart how like um generative it is to think with her and how overwhelming it is like i yes eat like

00:37:30.160 100 pages looking up every reference and then i'm just like spent and i have to spiral my way back

00:37:35.900 to her yeah she's a lot yeah i mean it's like from primates to cyborgs like all of all of humanity

00:37:43.900 is crystals I watched an interview with her and it's funny that you say like thinking with her

00:37:52.020 because that I think is like what what she wants us to be doing it's like think and I think that's

00:37:57.900 what we want our coven to be doing too it's like think with us that's I think it's a great like

00:38:05.920 call from her and all her work I immediately had to transcribe this from this interview

00:38:11.100 Rhys, I'll send you the link so that we can have it in the show notes. She says,

00:38:14.620 what is to be done in periods of profound historical earthly transformation that are

00:38:20.000 extremely dangerous? I think thinking together, reading and writing and speaking and performing

00:38:29.860 and dancing and growing and risking and working, thinking is a complex materialist practice 0.88

00:38:38.780 for somehow coming together to be less stupid I just love that so much you know and that the

00:38:50.600 twist ending where just when she's like starting to use this vocabulary and like intellectualizing 0.97

00:38:57.000 a little bit it's not about like being better or greater or smarter it's just like let's be less 0.87

00:39:03.160 stupid together if we can in these ways like thank you for that permission Donna Haraway just to be 0.99

00:39:10.900 less stupid I'll take it if I could just be less stupid that'd be great 1.00

00:39:19.320 and I think you know I mean for somebody like myself who like I spent a lot of time just like 1.00

00:39:31.200 living in my head and then sort of beating myself up for not being active and being too cerebral and

00:39:38.060 not active enough you know and for her to say that like thinking is is materialist a materialist

00:39:45.800 practice thinking is a materialist practice I love that like I really want to give reverence

00:39:52.020 to that just like living in one's head not all the time but like remarking that is like a way

00:40:00.720 because we know that we're we're creating links between our brain cells and neurological pathways

00:40:08.100 like our thoughts are are more material than we give them credit for but to allow myself these

00:40:15.120 times of like just like thinking and having that as a sense of preparing it is an action you know

00:40:23.100 and for her to also include like dancing and taking risks you know taking risks in that it's so

00:40:30.220 yeah we've been speaking to so many people lately about just like being afraid and you know living

00:40:39.440 in interesting times what did she call it extremely dangerous transformative times 0.99

00:40:46.420 something like that but her advice is like be together and dance and in some way be less stupid 0.98

00:40:55.560 as a result. Anyway, thank you so much, Donna Harrow. It takes a lot of pressure off, I feel 0.96

00:41:02.380 like. I gotta pause for a second. I can hear Meg crying. I said what I wanted to say. I heard what

00:41:08.280 I needed to hear. Bless the fucking beat. You must be a witch. The Missing Witches podcast is created 1.00

00:41:21.940 by Risa Dickens and Amy Turok with insight and support from the coven at patreon.com

00:41:28.660 slash missing witches. Amy and Risa are the co-authors of Missing Witches,

00:41:33.460 Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic, which is available now wherever you get your

00:41:38.340 books or audiobooks, and of New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance

00:41:45.700 and re-enchantment coming fall 2023.

Missing Witches - October 16, 2022

MW Donna Haraway： Experience Is A Fiction And A Fact

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