ABSTRACT
This exploratory chapter aims to examine how naturecultures can be enacted through a particular class of mundane objects, namely three sorts of knife. These are the Swiss Army Knife, the mushroom knife and the hunting knife. On the basis of various marketing materials, and inspired by the work of Whitehead and Latour, each of these knives is treated as entangled within a more-than-human actual occasion which ‘pre-propositions’ a particular natureculture along with its respective spatio-temporality. The chapter then moves from this analytic account to engage in a more speculative exercise which relates the knife to Haraway’s recent contingently hopeful framing of the era of the ‘Chthulucene’. Drawing on the ethos of speculative design, as well as on the enactments of three knives as discussed previously, the chapter develops a tentative design brief for the speculative more-than-human fabrication of a knife that can enact and explore – become with/for – Chthulucenic naturecultures (with their own peculiar spatio-temporalities).
