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Whereas recent framings of planetary urbanization stress the planet-scaled impacts of contemporary urban processes, we might also conceive of cities as being constitutively 'planetary' from their very outset. This article looks at two ways in which the earliest urban centres or 'civilizations' on the floodplains of the Fertile Crescent harnessed the deep, geological forces of the Earth. The first is the tapping and channelling of sedimentary processes, central to what Wittfogel referred to as hydraulic civilizations (1963). The second is the use of high-heat technologies to smelt and forge metals, which can be construed as a capture of igneous processes. What both sets of practices have in common is that they involve skilled intervention in fluid-solid phase transitions between solid rock and flowing particulate matter. Viewing cities as constitutively geological or planetary in this way can help us reimagine the challenges posed to urban spaces by looming transformations in Earth systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our discussions around the theme of solid fluids, we often resort to everyday words, many of them of ancient derivation and rich in association. We have decided to make a list of some of the words that come up most often – barring those that already figure as the principal characters of individual contributions – and to distribute among ourselves the task of writing a sort of mini-biography for each. The resulting lexicon with 19 entries, ranging from 'cloud' and 'concrete' to 'wave' and 'wood', serves as a conclusion to the collection as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Grosz by Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark. It primarily addresses Grosz’s approaches to ‘geopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, inhuman forces and material experimentation. Grosz describes geopower as a force that subtends the possibility of politics. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction examining the themes of geophilosophy and the inhumanities in Grosz’s work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 years. This evidence presents enormous challenges for international climate change negotiation and regulation, which has thus far focused on gradual change. It is argued that existing social theoretic engagements with physical agency are insufficiently geared towards dissonant or disastrous physical events. Wagering on the past and future importance of abrupt climate change, the article explores a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less-inherent vulnerability of the human body. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, it proposes a way of nestling the issue of environmental justice within a broader sense of immeasurable indebtedness to those humans who endured previous episodes of abrupt climate change, and considers the idea of experimentation and generosity without reserve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a look at the issue of complex globality. The idea of the Earth as an open system and the one that interchanges with dynamic cosmos seems to come up with the study of complex systems in social thought. Social theorists are finding it useful to consider a fully globalized condition of social life using concepts of complexity or self-organization. This borrowing from the study of complex dynamical systems makes provisions for the purchase on processes and events, which are constituted through conditions of interconnections of intense density. It further enables the theorists to acknowledge the manageability of contemporary world while also holding the possibility that novel forms of organization or structuring might emerge spontaneously out of a dense and disorderly interaction. There is a presence of discrepancy between various formulations of complexity on a global level that is now emerging in social thought, and further the positing of the Earth as an open and dynamical system by sectors of earth science and astrophysics communities.

Spearheaded by Ulrich Beck and the "world risk society" thesis, contemporary commentators in search of evidence of political renewal "from below" have discerned a convergence of environmental and cosmopolitan sensibilities. But through its foregrounding of the destabilization of matter by new technologies, the "environmental cosmopolitanism" tends to re-enact the conventional binary of passive nature and dynamic culture. Drawing on the pivotal role of bioinvasion in the European colonization of the temperate periphery, an alternative perspective on ecological globalization is presented in this article. The perspective takes account of the "weedy opportunism" and inherent mobility of biological life. In this way, "globalization from below" takes on the meaning of an opening of culture to the "unsettling" influence of biological and geological histories that manifest themselves at global scales.

Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and 'from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a 'baroque' vision of modernity which foregrounds chance encounters and 'underworld' associations. The parallels are still stronger if we take a consider the life-world of embodied cosmopolitans as including not only other human beings and human artifacts, but also the many non-human life-forms that make themselves at home in our built environments, in our networks, and inside our own bodies. Contra theorists of risk society, a fusion of complexity theory with cosmopolitan aesthetics raises the possibility of conceiving of runaway biological and technological events as both creative and destructive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all likelihood, terraforming will remain in the realms of science fiction. Even if the enabling technologies existed, the millennia required to establish the right conditions would seem to exceed the contemporary attention span by a near-infinite factor. What remains of interest, however, is the discursive production of a new catastrophism, this will to unleash hyper-life or supercharged evolution--which is surfacing at various sites across the techno-cultural field. Across the board the lion-tamer's whip is being traded in for a ringside seat in a circus of a perpetual surprises. Watch the idiom to be in control one day become a quaint anachronism, a victim of artificial life bids a-life scientist Marek Lugowski. Or as Kevin Kelly puts it: give up control, and we will artificially evolve new worlds and undreamed-of riches. Let go, and it will blossom. Have we ever resisted temptation before? This is not Beck's fear-impelled acknowledgement, but panic ecology, nature being deliberately driven to the verge of a nervous breakthrough. While the digital metamedium does display a particular propensity for the acceleration of events, the desire for virulence overflow into other modalities.