Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway on Fabulating the Earth

Abstract

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin's ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, contemporary feminist writing in the social sciences and the humanities has been characterised by a strong renewal of interest in storytelling, as is evidenced by the works of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway among others. How can storytelling grow with and beyond its literary origin to become a political and heuristic tool? And how does the Anthropocene – our specific geologic epoch – require the renewal of the means of expression of such an old tool as storytelling, so that it becomes a human and nonhuman process? To answer those questions, Deleuze's and Haraway's takes on ‘fabulation’ are intermingled along three lines: the part played by storytelling in the construction of earthly knowledges, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimension of fabulation that allows for the liberation of forces of life repressed by an anthropocentric approach.

Diffracting Bag Lady Stories and Kinship: Cartogra-ph-ying and Making-With Others in MoreThan-Human Affirmative Spaces

“…One of Le Guin's legacies is her argument that arts and literature can reimagine alternative ways of being (Robinson, Bouttier & Patoine, 2021). Another legacy, according to Wiame (2018) is how storytelling has been taken up as a political and feminist tool by scholars such as Donna Haraway (2004;, Isabelle Stengers (2018), andAnna Tsing (2015). Haraway (2004) proposes a "bag-lady practice of storytelling" as speculative fabulation, where "storying" and "worlding" can reimagine the destruction of the Anthropocene and instead, make kin across multi-species (p. 127).…”

Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter

“…In the wake of Haraway's book in particular, other cultural critics have also noticed the tendency to combine fictional discourse and traditional theory in academic writings in and around the field of new materialism. Alaine Waime, for instance, has recently traced the dis/continuities of the concept of 'fabulation' from Bergson and Deleuze to Haraway, arguing that the ubiquitous presence of the Anthropocene has once again made this alternative, future-oriented mode of storytelling urgent in the humanities and social sciences (Waime, 2018). In a similar vein, Helen Palmer has suggested that the speculative writing in new materialist work is characterized by what she calls 'wor(l)ding' which, in her pun-like phrasing, designates 'the worlding which occurs in all wording' (Palmer, 2019: 218).…”