Abstract
What does it mean to think social life ‘through’ the planet Earth? This timely intervention in the bourgeoning field of planetary studies answers this question by bringing Earth system science, cosmology, sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and Indigenous studies into dialog.
If the Anthropocene is a ‘challenge’ for the social sciences, Clark and Szerszynski explain, it is because the latter must restrain their tendency to completely socialize the Anthropocene (see Chapter 2). By no means do Clark and Szerszynski want to dismiss the absolute necessity of identifying the political responsibilities at play in the environmental wrecking of terrestrial ecosystems or the ongoing effects of colonialism (see Chapter 7). But they do highlight the necessity of a dialectical counterpart: ‘geologizing the social’ (p. 46). Socializing the Anthropocene without geologizing the social would be to miss what constitutes the conceptual core of the Anthropocene: its consideration of geological reality, its opening to the ‘deep time’ of Earth’s stratification, its attention paid to what Isabelle Stengers calls ‘the intrusion of Gaia’, that is Earth’s planetary dimension (Chapter 1). 1
The ‘planetary turn’ of social thought means to acknowledge that the Earth has a form of otherness that cannot be comprehended as a social construct: the Earth has a capacity to self-differentiate, ‘to become otherwise’, ‘to reorganize its constituent parts—at multiple scales—into new arrangements’ (p. 78). The Earth is therefore not One, but rather a historical succession of different planets, each one with its own composition, its own inhabitants (living or not), its own mobility (see Chapter 6). Leaning on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, Clark and Szerszynski coin the expression ‘planetary multiplicity’ to name the recurring transformation of the Earth (pp. 88–90). The Earth’s otherness, which reveals itself after every transformation, signals the existence of an ‘excess’ (of energy for instance, see pp. 42–46) that cannot be reduced to a social component. This ‘inhuman’ excess, which manifests Earth’s autonomy, speaks through human subjects making us ‘geological subjects’ (Kathryn Yusoff) – whose desires and political decisions are made with terrestrial matter. 2
Far from a ‘god’s-eye view’ strengthening dominant narratives and invisibilizing minorities, thinking the Earth ‘without us’, aims at ‘discern[ing] wayward and insurgent traces of multiplicity within the sciences behind the Anthropocene’ (p. 162, see also p. 166). In this sense, geoscience itself – and not only social science – is ‘not geological enough’ (p. 64). Chapter 3 is a perfect implementation of what a geo-analysis can really be, showing how the study of ironing requires the epistemological encounter of gender studies and metallurgy, ‘fossil capitalism’ (Andreas Malm) and ‘cloth capitalism’ (Sadie Plant), domestic work and ‘domestic geology’ (p. 66). Not without vertigo, Clark and Szerszynski’s geo-analysis make us aware that the surface of ironing stands above the depths of the Earth.
Grounding an alliance between the sciences of the inhuman (geology, astronomy, cosmology) and a decolonial perspective, Planetary Social Thought helps to envision, not only the understanding of Earth’s capacity to change, but also the possibility to avoid a social-ecological collapse – to transform politics. The concept ‘earthly multitudes’ as ‘a shared mode of responding to planetary multiplicity’ (see pp. 96–98) offers a path to this transformation. While warning that earthly multitudes are not, ‘inherently virtuous or progressive’ (p. 97) and being forthright that the book does not aim to, ‘resolve the questions raised by the “Anthropocene”’ (p. 172), the authors nonetheless offer a potentially fruitful meta-political suggestion, with which I will close.
Chapter 5 demonstrates how racialized groups are used as ‘a barrier or force-field’ to protect the (colonial) class in power against Earth’s mobility which is seen as anxiety inducing (p. 103). But instead of forcing the planet Earth to be what we would like it to be (a controlled, domestic entity), we should promote another form of mobility: the drift (see Chapter 6, pp. 139–144). Drifting would be a way to move our bodies, but also our social assemblages, according to the inhuman dimension of the Earth, its fluxes, cycles, its gravitation and its winds, its relation to the sun. Seeing everything as drifting could help us acknowledge that as climate change accelerates, those who were once able to host migrants could potentially become migrants in their turn. This shift might pave the way to a ‘drift economy’ for which even private property could not any longer be considered as unmovable (p. 144).