1,721,063 research outputs found
Colloidal social theory : thinking about material animacy and sociality beyond solids and fluids
Get PDFThis paper argues that an exploration of colloids can help us situate human social life within a wider understanding of the sociality and animacy of matter. Colloids are substances such as sols, foams, powders, gels, doughs and pastes that exhibit complex and shifting macroscale physical properties that do not conform to standard conceptions of solids, liquids or gases. Colloids can behave in complex and creative ways because of their topological enfolding of dispersed and continuous matter, in different phases, at a ‘mesoscale’ intermediate between the scale of molecules and that of the macroscale substance. I relate colloids, with their twin phenomena of ‘repetition’ and ‘mediation’, to an understanding of social life as reducible neither to the interaction between separate individuals nor to a transindividual whole. I suggest that human social life participates in a colloidal ‘metapattern’ of repetition and mediation that is manifest across diverse material substrates and spatial scales
Out of the Metazoic? : animals as a transitional form in planetary evolution
Get PDFIn this paper I situate the topic of animals in the Anthropocene within a larger set of questions. Firstly, I locate it against a longer timescale than might ordinarily be the case. Earth scientists debate whether the scale and significance of current changes in Earth processes should really be ranked only at the level of a change of epoch within the Cenozoic era, as the denotation ‘Anthropocene’ would imply, or whether we might be witnessing an event in Earth history that might constitute the advent of a new era, or even – like the Cambrian explosion which saw the emergence of nearly all existing animal phyla – that of a new, fifth aeon of the Earth. If that is indeed the case, then the question of the fate of the animal might need properly to be investigated against a much larger temporal canvas, within which the units that rise and fall might not just be those of ecosystems and species but kingdoms, biomes, or even the very ‘compartments’ of the Earth, of which life is one. My analysis is thus one that situates the animal within the context of the process of planetary evolution. My approach to the evolution of planets is one that sees it as a progressive unfolding of singularities, a cascade of symmetry-breaking bifurcations in which planets become progressively more anatomical or geometrical through processes of migrating and folding, generating new ‘compartments’ or spheres, new intensities and gradients, and new ‘forms’ or ‘modes of existence’. Seeing the animal as a planetary phenomenon is thus not in itself to make a point about spatial or temporal scale; rather, to paraphrase Dobzhansky, it is to suggest that adequately comprehending the nature of animal being is only possible in the light of planetary evolution. Secondly, against that background of deep geological time and planetary evolution, and drawing on theories of macroevolution, the philosophy of biology and biosemiotics, I explore the specific mode of being of the metazoan – of multicellular animal life, as opposed for example to bacteria, archaea, plants and fungi. It is not enough simply to describe the metazoa as ‘complex’. As Myra Hird (2009) points out, well before the Cambrian explosion bacteria had already developed, for example, ‘all major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nanotechnology, metallurgy, sensory and locomotive apparatuses (such as the wheel), reproductive strategies and community organisation, alcohol, gas and mineral conversion’. The metazoa are mainly distinguished not by morphological or functional complexity but by the emergence of a specific spatio-temporal topology within the Earth. I analyse this topological relation under three headings – the moving, eating body in space; the mortal, individual member of a species; and the sensory, phenomenological world organised into space and time. Fourthly, I use this investigation of the animal to speculate about what might come after the fourth aeon of the Earth: the Phanerozoic, the aeon of visible life – or, as we might choose to call it, the Metazoic. Peter Haff (2013), for example, has suggested that the Earth’s evolution is characterised by a sequence of ‘geological paradigms’ – nested dynamical systems that shape the emergence of the global environment, each of which supervenes on and captures energy flux from earlier paradigms. Thus just as the biosphere supervened on the hydrosphere, lithosphere and atmosphere, Haff posits the existence of a ‘technosphere’, supervening on but relatively autonomous from the biosphere. In a comparable but distinct analysis, I explore how our understanding of previous aeon-level transitions in Earth evolution, and of the distinctive characteristic of metazoic being, might help us speculate what it might mean to move ‘out of the Metazoic’ – into an aeon where multicellular organic life is no longer the signature entity on the Earth
Epilogue : Indigenous worlds and planetary futures
Get PDFI argue that there are aspects of our emerging understanding of planets that have a curious affinity with Amerindian thought, articulating a deeper understanding of planetarity struggling to get out of the straitjacket of Western naturalism. Indigenous cosmologies foreground fluidity and transformation, as different entities shift between what might otherwise be seen as wholly separate categories; multiple times seem to operate at once, and originary immanence is just a blink away. Beings exist in and are defined by meshworks of reciprocity and generosity; grasping the deepest truth can involve departing radically from everyday perception and knowledge; everything is alive, aware, a potential interlocutor. In ways that are resonant with contemporary theory, the Earth is not a dead mechanism, but sensitive (Latour 2017), ticklish (Stengers 2015), and maybe dangerous (Hamilton 2017). The cosmological accounts in this volume articulate a world that is a set of relations, obligations, and mutual dependencies, warning us of what happens when these relationships are not maintained. That world has to be actively maintained in being, through gift exchanges among humans and non-humans, against the ever present danger of the apocalypse. They are protecting the virtual—defending important, hard-won planetary preconditions that enable the future to arrive, combating a present apocalypse already occurring as a 'combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation'
From the Anthropocene epoch to a new Axial Age : using theory fictions to explore geo-spiritual futures
Get PDFIn this chapter, Szerszynski discusses how he used a series of linked ‘theory-fictions’ to explore possible futures for religion in a new geological epoch, using the notion of a possible ‘Second Axial Age’ based on a radically different metaphysics. Szerszynski first explores Karl Jaspers’ idea of the ‘Axial Age’. In a 1949 book, Jaspers proposed that around the middle of the first millennium BCE a revolutionary shift occurred in cultures across Eurasia, as spiritual teachers arose who promoted ideas of a cosmological gap between the mundane and transcendent realms, and a distinction between relative local cultures and universal truths. Szerszynski argues that any understanding of paths to the Anthropocene has to take account of the emergence of Axial cultures, but cautions that this has to be done with care. He then introduces the concept of theory fictions and summarizes his own use of the genre: in three pieces all set in a fictional future in which Earth religions and cultures undergo a Second Axial Age in response to the encounter with extraterrestrial cultures and a growing understanding of the interconnectedness of living and non-living systems. Szerszynski explains how he develops in some detail one particular example of this imagined cultural shift, an offshoot of Tibetan Buddhism: Mangalayana or ‘Mars-Vehicle’ Buddhism, involving a form of geological mysticism and a new understanding of cosmic human destiny. Critically exploring contemporary claims that a Second Axial Age is emerging in the twenty-first century, Szerszynski points out, that the Second Axial Age described in his own theory-fictions is not a renewal of First-Axial-Age themes of transcendence and universality, but a turning towards a radically new metaphysics. Szerszynski finally develops the idea of ‘sacred work’. In his fictions, the activity of Martian settlers in making the red planet habitable is not understood as a secular, technological act of humanization but as a spiritual vocation involving the balancing of landscape energies and forces in the tradition of Tibetan geomancy. He concludes by suggesting that such experimental fusions between literary genres can help us to understand what it might mean to escape the limitations of First-Axial-Age thinking, and imagine different futures for religion in the Anthropocene
Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light
Get PDFIn this paper I argue that discussion about the ‘technosphere’ as an emergent new Earth system needs to be situated within wider reflection about how technospheres might arise on other worlds. Engaging with astrobiological speculation about ‘exo-technospheres’ can help us to understand whether technospheres are likely, what their preconditions might be, and whether they endure. Engaging with science fiction can help us to avoid observer biases that encourage linear assumptions about the preconditions and emergence of technospheres. Exploring earlier major transitions in Earth’s evolution can shed light on the shifting distribution of metabolic and reproductive powers between the human and technological parts of the contemporary technosphere. The long-term evolution of technical objects also suggests that they have shown a tendency to pass through their own major transitions in their relation to animality. Such reflection can shed new light on the nature and likely future development of the Earth’s technosphere
Culture and the much-more-than-human : the case of colloids
No full textIn this paper I try to identify a minimal definition of culture that might be applicable in the much-more-than-human realm that extends beyond organic matter and human involvement. I speculate that culture conceived in this broad way might be a metapattern or ‘machinic solution’ available to matter of diverse kinds, organic and inorganic. I explore how this idea might apply this to colloids – hybrid forms of matter such as sols, foams and gels that are mixtures of matter in different phase states, some continuous and some discontinuous, and which can behave in complex ways that mix features of solid and fluid behaviour. I conclude by suggesting that attending to both the similarities and differences between ‘culture’ in the organic and in the inorganic realms might force us to rethink our understanding of both
The varieties of ecological piety.
No full textThe idea of nature's sacrality, contrasting starkly with industrial modernity's overwhelmingly instrumental valuation of non-human nature, visibly inform philosophical positions such as deep ecology and Gaia theory. But at a more unspoken level they can also be seen as suffusing a wider societal sensibility, evident not least in popular values regarding nature. But, granted that many people would ascribe such a value to nature, how are such beliefs embodied in their lives? An attention to the theological or cosmological level can only take us so far in understanding the dynamics of culture; we need also to attend to questions of practice, ritual, community and relationship, for it is through such elements that more abstract ideas about humanity's place in the universe are given both support and expression. It is in this spirit of inquiry that this paper proceeds, arguing that religious forms of action and corporateness characteristic of monastic, sectarian, churchly, and folk religiosity have shaped the way that contemporary environmental values are embodied in the practices and experience of everyday life
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