Viewing the technosphere in an interplanetary light

In 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

The reformation of place:religion, space and power

In this chapter I reflect on the role played by the Protestant Reformation in shaping the western experience of place. First I examine the idea that the Reformation helps to effect a shift from absolute to abstract space, or from place to space, by purging the landscape of the dramatic highs and lows of spiritual intensity characteristic of Catholicism. I further explore this claim by situating this development within the longue durée of western religious history, a succession of distinctive ‘orderings of the sacred’ which together I term the ‘long arc of monotheism’. Second, however, I argue that the Reformation did not automatically lead to the hypermodern dissolution of space and the emergence of non-places but, more positively, constituted a final overcoming of archaic religion, and the possibility of a new experience of space and place. Thirdly I thus argue for a distinctive mode of placing, one suspended between the archaic and the modern, between belonging and not belonging

From the Anthropocene epoch to a new Axial Age:using theory fictions to explore geo-spiritual futures

In 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

Praise be to you, earth-beings

This essay appeared in the journal Environmental Humanities in a special commentary section on the papal encyclical Laudato Si’

Gods of the Anthropocene:geo-spiritual formations in the earth’s new epoch

In this paper I argue that we need not only to ‘decolonise’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularise’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Giles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, I start to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit, and use this to speak of both the ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. I suggest that what might once have been distinct territorialised ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system, what we might call a ‘combined and uneven geo-spiritual formation’

The Martian Book of the Dead

It is 2197. The Earth has entered the ‘Suryamandalan’ or ‘solar-system’ geological period—the period in which the becoming of the planet has escaped its own boundaries and became fully incorporated into a larger, evolving star system. In response to massive environmental change, scientific and technological developments and extra-terrestrial contact, Earth religions and cultures have gone through an upheaval known as the Second Axial Age, which has involved embracing a radical new metaphysics of matter, time and space. Mars has been settled and terraformed, and a new branch of Buddhism established there: Mangalayana or ‘Mars-vehicle’ Buddhism. This new religion builds on the Dzogchen (“Great Perfection”) tradition of the Nyingma school of Buddhism with its fusion of the individual’s narrative of birth and rebirth with the cosmological story of the emergence and development of the cosmos from an undifferentiated pure ground. It also introduces a new mythos of the relationship between Mars and Earth, personified as bodhisattva and consort, in terms of the mutual gifting of life and animacy across billion-year time scales. Mangalayana Buddhism provides a synthesis of religion, science and practical activity, a new understanding of the relation between personal being and cosmic realities. It spreads amongst the humans, artificial intelligences and human-machine hybrids that work in the extractive industries and terraforming activities of Mars. This text is the introduction to an edition of the Mangalayana text popularly known as the ‘Martian Book of the Dead’, which is used to prepare the dying for the experience of ‘interval-being’ and the possibility of liberation into the deep becoming of their planet, and thus of the cosmos

Out of the Metazoic?:animals as a transitional form in planetary evolution

In 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

Geoengineering knowledge:interdisciplinarity and the shaping of climate engineering research

In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of ‘subordination’, in which certain disciplines are given the task of problem definition and others—typically the social sciences—are allocated the task of filling in gaps within that given frame. We then examine the more fundamental ‘integrative imaginary’ which, we argue, mistakenly assumes that disciplines can be combined in a straightforward way to reveal different aspects of the same underlying world. We conclude by proposing a more reflexive imaginary for interdisciplinarity, one that challenges the idea of integration and subordination, that promotes and benefits from the multiplicity and heterogeneity of ways of seeing that different disciplines offer, and that can thereby contribute to greater ‘epistemological responsibility’ in geoengineering research

Drift as a planetary phenomenon

In this paper I situate the Situationists' derive within an analysis of drift as a planetary phenomenon. Using the concept of the middle voice', I suggest that drifting can lead us to a deeper understanding of the way that all things move, that move within the extended body of the Earth. I develop the idea of driftwork', in which drift is subsumed within a wider set of purposes or functions, and describe different forms of more-than-human driftwork, with different political implications. I conclude by suggesting that things adrift can help us trace the lineaments of a planetary ethic: an ethic that extends beyond the human, the animal, and the living to the whole extended body of the Earth; that allows us to recontextualize human practices of drifting within a planetary context; that is sensitive to the debt that all moving things owe to the planetary mobility commons that enables their motion; and that helps us to recognize our obligations of care towards all drifting things