The Chthulucene

Introduced in Staying with the Trouble (2016), the Chthulucene is Haraway's deliberately strange name for the era of the tentacular. The term is named not for Lovecraft's Cthulhu but for Pimoa cthulhu, a real spider species whose name predates Lovecraft's fiction. The figure is meant to displace both the Anthropocene, which makes the human the protagonist of planetary history, and the Capitalocene, which makes capital the protagonist. Neither figure, Haraway argues, captures what is most important about the present: that no being makes itself alone, that multispecies entanglements are constitutive of the future, and that responsibility is distributed across the web of relationships rather than concentrated in any single species or system.