A Tentative Tangling of Tendrils: Making Oddkin with Kurt Vonnegut and Donna Haraway

Abstract

This article carries out a diffractive reading of Kurt Vonnegut through the writings of Donna Haraway. Vonnegut and Haraway never read each other, yet this essay argues that they are kindred spirits, or oddkin. Both authors challenge the distinction between theory and fiction in their practice. The approach of Vonnegut’s work from the perspective of Haraway’s is through the polysemic notion of SF and her diagnosis of the “trouble.” The reading has two parts. First, it focuses on Vonnegut’s diagnosis of the trouble, leading deep into the military-industrial-entertainment complex with its machines, engineers, cyborgs, monsters, and wars. Second, in line with Haraway’s notion of SF, it analyses Vonnegut’s creation of new worldings centered on an understanding of life as sympoietic. In Vonnegut’s fiction, the deeply relational nature of life is expressed in a range of speculative settings, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial. To stay with the trouble means developing other social arrangements based on new sensibilities and forms of perception. Vonnegut and Haraway share a common vision centered on a relational and monstrous understanding of life that leads, in turn, to an ethics of care that bridges the barriers and enables associations of humans and nonhumans.