#Humus Sapien 1

[cinder-no]

Humus Sapien - Pony Town

[yangichengartscience]

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Donna Haraway (2017). US: Duke pp.30-32

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. Biological sciences have been especially potent in fermenting notions about all the mortal inhabitants of the earth since the imperializing eighteenth century. Homo sapiens the Human as species, the Anthropos as the human species, Modern Man—was a chief product of these knowledge practices. What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the 4 overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human- only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!... … My first demon familiar in this task will be a spider, Pimoa cthulhu, who lives under stumps in the redwood forests of Sonoma and Men docino Counties, near where I live in North Central California.1 Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something. 2 This spider is in place, has a place, and yet is named for intriguing travels elsewhere. This spider will help me with returns, and with roots and routes. The tentacular ones tangle me in sf. Their many appendages make string figures; they entwine me in the poiesis—the making—of speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, soin de ficelle, so far. The tentacular ones make attachments and detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms; they are both open and knotted in some ways and not others.6 sf is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come. I work with string figures as a theoretical trope, a way to think-with a host of companions in sympoietic threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting. I work with and in sf as material-semiotic composting, as theory in the mud, as muddle.7 All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with post-humanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done un-der that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile.9 Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying ceo. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle! Ecosexual artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle made a bumper sticker for me, for us, for sf: “Composting is so hot!”

Critical Refection : 

Is Donna Haraway critiquing ‘posthumanism’?

Keywords :

Composting -

a mixture of decayed (= destroyed by natural processes) plants, food, etc. that can be added to soil to help plants grow.

Sympoietic -

Donna *Harraway’s replacement term for Maturana and Varela’s concept of *autopoiesis, which she objects to on the grounds that no ‘thing’ makes itself. It is worth noting that this is something of a misreading of Maturana and Varela, since they do not claim that the autopoietic machine, as they call it, produces itself. It would be more accurate to say that autopoiesis refers to a process of self-reproduction (Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory by Ian Buchanan)

Entanglement -

entanglements. [plural] (specialist) barriers made of barbed wire, used to stop an enemy from getting close

[aion-rsa]

Comic Legends: What Was Behind Caliban Showing up in X-Men?

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and eighteenth week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week’s legends.

COMIC LEGEND:

Caliban of the Morlocks was introduced based on a character designed to be part of a “New Mutants” squad with Kitty Pryde.

STATUS:

False

A few years back, I wrote a Comic Book Legends Revealed about how John Byrne and Chris Claremont were going to do a brand-new group of young mutants who would become students at Xavier’s school of mutants.

Byrne came up with a few of them, including Kitty Pryde and a character named Caliban…

Soon after Byrne left the title and Dave Cockrum returned, a character named Caliban debuted in “Uncanny X-Men” #148 (by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Joe Rubinstein)

Reader Chris T. wrote in to ask if Caliban was connected to Byrne’s Caliban. It makes sense, of course, but as it turned out, not only was there no connection, the character originally wasn’t even going to be called Caliban!

You see, as I noted in a Comic Book Legends Revealed a few months before that other Comic Book Legends Revealed about the new team of mutants, there was a character named Humus Sapiens who was part of a fan contest to introduce a new Marvel character. He eventually showed up in the pages of “Thunderbolts” decades after he was originally supposed to debut.

It had only been less than a decade at the time, though, that someone mentioned to Jim Shooter (Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief) that they hadn’t used the character yet, so Shooter had Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum work the character into “Uncanny X-Men,” and the character was going to be a Morlock. However, eventually they were allowed to not go with the idea (or the idea was dropped for other reasons), so the character instead became Caliban!

Later on, Kitty was almost forced to marry him!

Thanks for the suggestion, Chris!

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at CBR: What Animal Actually Inspired King Kong’s Creation?

Check back Sunday for part 3 of this week’s legends!

And remember, if you have a legend that you’re curious about, drop me a line at either brianc@cbr.com or cronb01@aol.com!

The post Comic Legends: What Was Behind Caliban Showing up in X-Men? appeared first on CBR.

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