Sorry for giving you the trouble!

Staying with the Trouble may not be easy, but staying out of it is even more daunting as it amounts to denouncing the world in the expectation of an ideal world.

Trouble is what everyone avoids getting into, and yet it clings and endures. Be it small or big, transient or lasting, personal or social, local or global, there is one for each one (and at times more) at any given point in time as there isn’t any easy escape from it. Come to think of it, we are all tasked with making trouble as well as to settle troubled waters. It is said that without trouble there wouldn’t be any glory either. With most of us living in troubling, disturbing and torrid times, what sort of salvific future can we expect out of it?

Staying with the Trouble may not be easy, but staying out of it is even more daunting as it amounts to denouncing the world in the expectation of an ideal world. But is there an ideal world? Conversely, the world at large is metaphorically rooted in a bony pelvis (cover picture) that metamorphoses into a butterfly through a skeletal vertebral column that has fleshed appendages on the sides. Complicated as it is, the image is indeed transformational reflection of dying and living, that is equally disturbing and reassuring. It seems to be conveying that only through troubles can man becomes both adult and mature. As a feminist scientist with extraordinary credentials, Donna Haraway creates Chthulucene, a simple word aimed at replacing anthropocene (human influence on the planet) and capitalocene (influence of capital on humans), as a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble by taking responsibility to wipe it out too.  

As human numbers are almost certain to reach more than 11 billion by 2010, with 9 billion of those added over 150 years from 1950 to 2100, the dominant discourse oscillates between two troublesome extremes on account of impact of rising numbers on the planetary processes e.g., climate change. If there are those who are optimistic that technology will fix all troubles, then there are others who wonder if there is any sense in trying to make anything better. Haraway considers those who have answers to the present urgencies and those who don’t as equally dangerous, and uses the concept of Chthulucene to cut through human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economies where possible pasts, presents, and futures can co-exist. In discussing our problematic relationship with the natural world, the author proposes the flattening of interspecies hierarchy to cultivate response-ability.

The Chthulucene is proposed as an idea of non-hierarchical multi-species world of thinking and working together. Haraway uses the spider’s web as a metaphor for a vision of the world in which there is no hierarchy between humans and nonhuman animals, where instead all lives are interwoven to guide us to possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance. The spider tentacles, which means ‘to feel’, help them feel attachments and detachments, and are both open and knotted at the same time. At the core of the thesis is the idea of individuality that the book challenges, and instead demands sympoiesis, making together, rather than autopoiesis, self-making. It is in new ideas and new ways of thinking, wherein lie possible solution to the old ideas that are failing as evidenced by the inequities and mania of our resource extracting economies.

Using a curious mix of cultures and mythologies, the book seeks to identify and cultivate capacity of specific bodies and places to respond to world’s urgencies with each other at the core. What finally matters is what ideas we use to think other ideas. “I am not interested in restoration, but in more modest possibilities of recuperation, and getting on together”, stresses Haraway, whose idea of rejection of rigid boundaries in A Cyborg Manifesto, separating ‘human’ from ‘animal’ and ‘human’ from "machine’, had rattled contemporary thinking when it was first published in 1984.  As a distinguished professor in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Haraway dares to propose a process of living and dying together as an utmost urgency with the natural system on the verge of environmental break down.

The book investigates the work of interdisciplinary artists and scientists who are inventing new ways of working together, and with other species. Take the case of the pigeons, treasured kin or despised pests, which were engaged in an experiment to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public? Such gathering of data helps generate ‘imaginative action’ to enhance collective thinking to address complexities. These are not easy solutions but an array of possibilities. Staying with the Trouble is a work in progress on ideas which are aimed at developing new sensitivities and means to fostering collective response-ability. 

One reason some of the ideas seem esoteric has to do with our collective failure to view beyond the horizon. Having gone through a workshop on Narration Speculative, wherein the participants were tasked to fabulate a baby’s journey through five generations, the author could sense the melting of predicted events (ice-cap melting, sea-level rise, and species extinctions) on a piece of paper. Once through it, Haraway came out convinced to give a call ‘make kin, not babies’ in order to invoke and practice a deep responsibility to all earthlings. If we are interested in taking care of the earth then there is no way other species can be denied their right to environmental justice? Haraway thinks that we could be truly prochild of we practice kinship with other critters, as opposed to the crazy pronatalist but actually antichild world in which we live. 

Staying with the Trouble is a tough book to read, as it has long and convoluted paragraphs. It is somewhat confusing as it brings multidisciplinary aspects within a single narration. It is a work of scholarship nonetheless, one that models the world on the strength of generative ideas to avoid despair in the face of ecological destruction.

Staying with the Trouble
by Donna J Haraway
Duke University Press, Durham
Extent: 312, Price: US$26.95

This review was first published in Blink

, weekly supplement of the Hindu BusinessLine, on Aug 19, 2017.

Unfinished assault on poverty

Aid-triggered economic reforms have accelerated growth but not without widening income inequality and increasing environmental distress.

The sheer mention of the World Bank evokes mixed reflections, from an unbridled aid agency that is in the business of fighting poverty to a financial trap that twists borrower’s economic sovereignty. It has further been charged for pushing developing countries into ‘perpetual debt’ by promoting the agenda of the ‘multi-national corporations’. Despite such mixed reactions, the 1946 Bretton Woods Conference created Bank has expanded its near-universal engagement with as many as 188 countries as its members. Yet, there is little doubt that in its seven decades of consistent lending for worldwide reconstruction and development the Bank has not been able to reach its goal of making poverty history. Curiously, why then has India continued to seek assistance from the World Bank?

Simply put, the World Bank needs India as much as India needs it. It may not be an exaggeration as India has been the greatest success story that the World Bank has been able to showcase on the impact of its aid. A cumulative aid of US$ 100 billion, which is less than 1 per cent of GDP, has helped the country cut its poverty rate to 22 per cent from a high of over 50 per cent three decades ago. The flip side of the story, however, is that aid-triggered economic reforms have accelerated growth but not without widening income inequality and increasing environmental distress. As poverty is deeply rooted in many social and structural factors, it is argued that financial aid and technical expertise can only have limited impact. 

That being the case, what future a developing country should see in continuing its association with the global lending agency? In his comprehensive assessment of the political economy of World Bank lending, Nagesh Prabhu argues in favor of this institution that in addition to being dedicated to poverty reduction can create fiscal cushion to counter global market failures. Having made economic reforms a politically durable currency, how far can external aid help in pulling ‘other India’ out from the throes of unending farm distress remains an open-ended question?  

Reflective Shadows is as much a primer on the birth, formation, and functioning of the apex bank as an objective reflections on its lending instruments and policy. Being its founding member, India and the Bank have grown up facing different challenges at different times. While holding reservations on Bank’s criticism of the government’s over-emphasis on public sector during the first decade to opening-up the economy for attaining better ranking on Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ index six decades later, India has come full circle in creating appropriate institutional and policy instruments to not only make the aid work but to attract foreign direct investment to keep the economy reasonably oiled as well. The World Bank influence seems evident! 

While there is little doubt that the Bank’s funding has made development possible in several sectors of the economy, how much poverty alleviation has indeed taken place on account of this aid remains inconclusive. But the fact of matter is that in the process India has graduated out from concessional lending from the International Development Association (IDA), one of the five institutions that constitute the World Bank Group, signaling its arrival as a global economic power. While the present government doesn’t seem much concerned about cut in this concessional aid, the author wonders how the country will tackle yawing gaps in infrastructure and institutional constraints to achieve faster growth and poverty reduction. 

Prabhu is somewhat contrived in his assessment on the country’s handling of its new economic status in the light of its pending development challenges. Aren’t there other lending windows to tap into, including the New Development Bank funded by BRICS? It would be interesting, however, to see how the Bank reinvents itself to remain relevant amidst growing competition. Despite the possible decline in lending in the future, the Bank’s accumulated knowledge is likely to come handy in providing software support on project management, technological innovations and institutional reforms. In addition, the Bank has its task cut out in assisting lagging states, some of whom are bigger than many African countries. For the Bank which has always sold ideas, and not just loans, each fresh challenge opens a new window of opportunity.

Reflective Shadows takes a sympathetic view of the World Bank, despite the presence of conflicting views on the impact of external aid on economy and poverty. While at a macro level aid does help bring about significant economic change, at the micro level it is considered to benefit the wealthy elite at the cost of the poor. No wonder, the impact of World Bank lending has been ‘somewhat mixed’, with almost equal number of hits and misses.. That sustained lending has led lagging states to embrace good governance with public accountability is the essential take home from the voluminous book, which is a valuable addition to literature on the unending role of the World Bank in fighting global poverty.

Reflective Shadows 
by Nagesh Prabhu
Oxford University Press, New Delhi
Extent: 584, Price: Rs 995.

Firs published in The Hindustan Times, dated August 05, 2017.