Donna Haraway’s work “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” is a short yet extremely interesting perspective on the relations between humankind and nature. She first talks about the untenableness of the current Anthropocene, of humankind’s total domination of nature where their activities reflect an attitude toward the earth which is one of perceiving it as something to be exploited. Humankind has thus far, and especially with the dawn of Capitalism, only extracted resources from the earth and in doing so has caused irreversible changes to the global ecosystem such that the current way of life that such past and present ecological destruction props up is going to become impossible.

With the Anthropocene inevitably coming to an end, so too will the hegemony of humankind over the earth. Haraway argues that the Chtulucene will necessitate not the desperate reproduction of the human race to maintain their domination, but the production of cooperative and self-sustaining systems between humans and other beings that live on planet earth. We need to move past looking upon the earth as an infinite well of resources that we can just continuously take from, and start looking upon the earth including all of its ecosystems and biodiversity as something to lodge ourselves into and become an integral part of a larger ecosystem.

When Haraway speaks of not being a posthumanist but rather a compostist, I believe she’s further deconstructing the ideas underlying the ideology of the Anthropocene. The idea of a post-human, something that will come after humankind and perhaps replace it, some kind of ubermensch or other type of subject, all of these ideas still maintain the fundamental relation between humanity or whatever post-humanity that exists and all the other beings that exist within nature: unsustainable and self-defeating exploitation and domination. Rather, what the idea of composting does is bring the human down to the level of the rest of nature from their false and self-endowed position of superiority. The very idea behind compost is the repurposing of waste into a means of producing new life and new beings that are useful for us. To reorient the way we think of ourselves toward being compost rather than as preliminaries for a higher being (which still is fundamentally human in its relation to the earth) is to treat ourselves and our activities as a part of a broader self-regulating ecosystem that is the earth, the Chtulucene, where we encompass a definite place and provide a definite function for other beings as they do for us. It’s not a relation of domination and exploitation, but a relation of cooperation—and as Hawaray puts it: kinship.

To consider objects or “things” as autonomous and possessing individuality outside humanity ( a “thing-power,” a “strange ability” of ordinary objects to have vitality, to have life, and energy) seems a demented, drug-induced idea. How can a rock have feelings? A personality? Is a rock a man or female? Does it matter? Does a rock have a life, like with a mama rock and baby rocks? Energy or a spirit? Aren’t these notions human concepts, and some farfetched when placed on a rock? For Jane Bennett, in Vibrant Matter, the human element starts the problem: thinking of objects in terms of the human gaze. We live in a human-centered world; everything directly connects to our humanness. Or else, to the storm drain! 

Jane Bennet begins to solve the material-based problem of the subject (human) and object (thing) dilemma facing things, to divert the human gaze from ego to universal, thus reshaping how humans interact and perceive the purpose, function, and life of an object. Bennett and other “cultural theorists and philosophers” believed in an “object-oriented ontology,” aiming towards a “flat ontology,” what they call “new materialism.” The ideas concerning all these nonce words are similar: one, to untether objects from human practices or discourse, and two, to view objects against no structural or hierarchal judgments. In considering objects under new materialism, the object seems to have a new life and vitality. In a Saussurean sense, the objects are no longer tied to signs and signifiers enfolded within an unspoken “social contract.” 

However, Nietzsche can help us understand new materialism better. Like Saussurean, he writes about a “social contract,” a “peace treaty,” an unspoken contract amongst people that systemizes and categorizes social communication and measures one’s intelligence and sociability. It is this implicit contract that gives arbitrary meanings to things. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, Nietzsche emphasizes the weight of words; they are not what they seem to mean at first sight and should not be superficial. Nietzsche uses the example of a stone and how it’s customary to say, “A stone is hard,” worthless, and with no purpose. It’s just there. It’s a rock, not a Benz. It’s a rock, not a Gibson guitar. However, Nietzsche questions how one can know the nature of hard “as if “hard” were something familiar to us (754.).” 

In other words, who or what deems that hard and worthless are what stones are? Who or what deems a stone is what one thinks of as gray, solid, and immovable? Now, Nietzsche’s not saying that a stone is a sponge is a can of soda. No, like Bennette, Nietzsche wants the reader to consider the truth of who they are and their communication. They want people to stop hiding behind the “peace treaty” and to be like a Buddhist, see that the stone is the caterpillar that climbs it and is the air that blows upon them. Nietzsche and Bennette want the reader to think “beyond the bounds of human existence (752.).” They want sedition against the “peace treaty.” 

Yes, screw the peace treaty! That rock (stone) ain’t worthless! It has thing-power! The big old rock in the middle of the forest has a history: it’s been in the forest for five hundred years; storms and glacial melting has moved it due west. It was once the only rock, but the abrasive wind made smaller out it. It’s gray, white, and black and shimmers under the sun. From afar, it’s small; up close, it towers over a human. Indeed, it’s a rock, but it’s a chair for the writer every Saturday, a check-point for the runner every day, a reminder of Colorado for the home-sick woman, a hide-out for the kids playing tag, and a shelter for the squirrel and snake during storms. But it’s so much more: it can be a place of peace and tranquility, it can be a tool, it can be a Dada-like art piece in a gallery, its pebble-children are pendants on necklaces — this list is endless for this one rock. As all humans know, the rock speaks to other rocks in a frequency only rocks can hear. In essence, and to repeat, the rock is not worthless, and to agree with Bennett, it has a vitality (seen and unseen.)

In many ways, Bennett, Nietzsche, Saussure, and the minds behind new materialism want us to see that the worthless is full of worth, find meaning in nothing, and reshape our world by thinking and rethinking how we participate in it. But most important, at least to this writer, is that by suggesting to separate humanness from objects, these thinkers force us to think about our humanness and its ramifications, such as the case with the Anthropocene.