The Anthropocene prompts renewed critical reflection on some of the central tenets of modern thought including narratives of ‘progress’, the privileging of the nation state, and the universalist rendering of the human. In this context it is striking that ‘rights’, a quintessentially modern mode of articulating normativity, are often presumed to have an enduring relevance in the contemporary moment, exemplified in renewed recourse to rights in their attribution to parts of the nonhuman world. Our intervention contemplates ways in which the (...) apparent disorientations of the Anthropocene might allow for a generative reorientation of some of these presuppositions. We critically consider the institutional and discursive limitations of rights and the ambivalence of rights language, and argue that the monism that rights so often implies limits the capacity to foster generative encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal traditions. We develop a critical discourse of obligation, understood here to both precede and exceed the rights-duty correlate so central to modern law. An attentiveness to the priority of obligation, we argue, might allow us to foreground an ethics of encounter between traditions, to examine the limits of modernity’s legal and political imaginary, and to pursue a ‘radical re-storying’ of laws for the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The article argues that environmental planetary discourses have coalesced into the Anthropocene crisis narrative and reformulated the state of nature apparatus of Western political theory. The Anthropocene, as an ecological state of nature of late capitalism, casts light on the logics of geopower, which assembles species thinking, a fascination with nonlife and sovereignty, and the imaginary of extinction and mutation. Geopower shifts governmental technologies from human populations and their ‘milieu’ to nonhuman species, energy flows and ecosystems, from political economy and (...) biopower to Earth science and systems ecology. This configuration of power suggests a shift in the neoliberal agenda and imposes the Earth as a political personage, generating threatening political myths and figures of chaos and sovereignty, such as Gaia, Chthulu and Climate Leviathans. (shrink)

In this essay I outline core themes in the political geology of twentieth-century volcano science. The essay explores volcano science at the intersection of cross-disciplinary preoccupations with the role of the earth sciences in shaping the social and environmental crises of the present and how to find a way out of them. The essay then turns to volcanology in Indonesia at the turn of the twentieth century to destabilize persistent narratives in the historiography of volcano science that center European and (...) North American actors. I show how starting an account of twentieth-century volcano science from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes reveals the roles of Indonesian intellectuals and knowledge traditions in shaping volcano science and, more broadly, modern theories of the earth, its evolution, and structure. The aim and provocation of starting from Indonesia are to open new epistemic pluralisms in the earth sciences, in particular around conceptualizations of the relationship between geological matter and society, history and ancestrality, and the politics of the earth. (shrink)

Seasonal and historical transformations of ice and permafrost suggest that the Mackenzie Delta in Arctic Canada can be understood as a solid fluid. The concerns and practices of delta inhabitants show that fluidity and solidity remain important attributes in a solid fluid delta. They are significant not as exclusive properties, but as relational qualities, in the context of particular human projects and activities. Indigenous philosophies of ‘the land’ and Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘tempo’ in Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (...) (2004) may help to illustrate the predicament of living in a world that is solid and fluid rhythmically, and in relation to particular practices. Economic, political, sociocultural and physical transformations can all be experienced as both solid and fluid, depending on the degree to which they resonate with people’s purposes. In a world where everything seems to be changed and changing, solidity and fluidity may best be seen as indications of relative differences in tempo. (shrink)

The modern outlook on emancipation has made its quest inseparable from a quest for endless enhancement, based on an ever-more intensive exploitation of the biophysical world. This accounts for how unsustainable ways of living are reiterated worldwide, in spite of evidence of their deleterious effects. The underpinnings of unsustainability, and a major impediment to conceiving alternatives, come from an account of the human as ontologically indeterminate, crushed on doing, both vulnerable and powerful towards the world. The impasse of such ambivalence (...) hampers social theory critique, from post-humanist ontologies to the case for degrowth and lifestyle politics. The article outlines a different take on emancipation. An account is provided of form-of-life as a doing tailored to being – not as a self-enclosed monad but as a result of the encounter between own ‘inclination’ and the world. This theoretical perspective discloses a research program on emergent mobilisations. (shrink)

Modern thinking about the ground tends to take it as a purely material base for the unfolding of history and ideas emerging on its surface. In this article, I question above-ground visions of city building by drawing on both the history of ground engineering and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Paris with geotechnicians. I address the difficulties that theorists have faced over past centuries in modelling soils, and the contemporary practice of building piles underneath buildings to anchor them. From this (...) unfolds an understanding of the ground as produced through an equilibrium between forces and materials in which buildings become participants, rather than a solid base upon which they stand. Looking at the activities of foundation builders, we find that the inertia of the urban soil no longer betokens an absence of activity or movement, but is rather a continuous achievement, a slow and dangerous process of balancing tensions. (shrink)