Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene

Abstract

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures.

Accounting and accountability in the Anthropocene

“…The first (gradualism) believed that change was an incremental, slow moving phenomenon, while the other (catastrophism) believed that change was sudden and abrupt. Accepted opinion oscillated between these positions and a consensus has formed around a revised form of the latter school (neo-catastrophism), that posits that tipping points exist in the planetary system with rapid change being possible, driven by biological, chemical and geological assemblages (for an overview, see Clark and Yusoff, 2017). Changes in these systems have historically been associated with large-scale changes in the biosphere (hence the particular salience of global climate change and concerns about tipping points in the climate system) and their knock-on effects.…”

The post‐politics of plant biosecurity: The British Government's response to ash dieback in 2012

“…Such a perspective necessitates the construction of a politics that acknowledges that “power or agency overflows the category of deliberating human subjects […]. While bodies, ecologies and assemblages have been shown to be objects upon which power operates, so too have they been presented as sites of resistance: as vital reservoirs of ‘freedom’ to act or become otherwise” (Clark & Yusoff, , p. 13). Becoming “otherwise” in the context of trade‐related epidemics means becoming ill and dying – a stark reminder of the high stakes of world‐making and “othering.” Acting politically following this line of thinking means that health and disease are no longer “conceived of as separate spaces, with well‐defined objects and properties (pathogens and immune responses)” (Hinchliffe et al., , p. 528).…”

Relationality and island studies in the Anthropocene

“…Global warming is thus not only about being in the midst of a disorientating environmental crisis in time and space, but also about this profoundly disorientating corrosion of time and space as well (Danowski & De Castro, 2017, p. 18). Psychological space has become more coextensive with ecological space in the Anthropocene; not only in terms of the collapse of modernity's nature/culture binary foregrounded by previous relational thinking, but also in terms of how the multidimensional forces of the Anthropocene accentuate a before, beyond and beneath to the human presence and other modes of sensing relation (Clark & Yusoff, 2017;Chakrabarty, 2009;Danowski & De Castro, 2017;Stengers, 2015).…”