Another Planet authors interviewed on ‘Science for the Anthropocene’ podcast

Back in November our Lancaster colleague David Tyfield recorded an interview with Nigel Clark and me about Planetary Social Thought, which has now been released as episode two of his new podcast series Science for the Anthropocene — Learning to Fly.

You can listen to the episode on Anchor FM, or on Spotify.

Listening to the episode, I am more aware than I was at the time that the conversation is far more than a summary of Planetary Social Thought. As well as getting us to explain and explore the two key concepts that we introduce in the book, ‘planetary multiplicity’ and ‘earthly multitudes’, David introduces a lot of new insights that came from his own reading of the book, and opens up some fascinating lines of inquiry.

David starts by asking us whether the social sciences are ‘fit for purpose’ to tackle the problems of the Anthropocene. Together we explore the argument we make in the book that, despite the important contributions made by the social sciences and humanities to debates around the Anthropocene, they aren’t taking the ‘challenge’ posed by the contemporary Earth sciences seriously enough. Nigel and I explain how we think that there are fruitful ways to bringing the rich ways of thinking about difference developed in the social sciences and humanities in creative dialogue with the new understanding of the Earth that has developed in the Earth sciences over the last half-century — as a far-from-equilibrium, dynamic planet that is capable of becoming ‘other’ to itself.

We talk for a while about the possible difficulties raised by thinking in terms of deep, planetary time — such as the danger of such a ‘long view’ having the effect of diminishing the apparent importance of contemporary climate change or biodiversity loss. We discussed the difference between ‘zooming out and away’ from the planet, with its connotation of abstraction, and ‘going down and into’ the planet, with its emphasis on the concrete. We also talked about the challenge of creating a different kind of knowledge, one that emerges from the midst of an uncertain, ongoing planetary transition, when old certainties no longer hold but new certainties have not yet emerged — a science for the Anthropocene that is also a science from the Anthropocene.

We also expand on our argument that we do not only need to ‘socialise the Anthropocene’ (bringing out the diversity in human responsibility for, knowledge of and exposure to Anthropocene changes in the Earth — which our colleagues in the social sciences and humanities have been very good at) but also to ‘geologise the social’ — to understand social life as the product of planetary processes. David asked us to expand on our idea of ‘vertical modernity’ — that modernity was not just about the West spreading horizontally across the Earth and reordering lateral spatial relations, but also about going down into the Earth. This involved not just accessing the materials and energy that built and powered Western modernity, but also exposing (some members of) society to the dangers of a volatile planet, and to the inhuman otherness of temporally distant epochs and eras. David prompted us to explore not just the material, social and normative implications of thinking in terms of vertical modernity, but also its psychoanalytic dimensions: the idea that the trauma of exposure to the Earth’s inner otherness shapes the collective unconscious of Western modernity, and can help explain its perverse, restless and destructive dynamic.

Towards the end of the interview we explore the balance that Nigel and I tried to strike in the book — trying to provide a coherent vision of what a planetary social science might look like, but without minimising or erasing important and productive tensions between (and within) different disciplines. In our discussion we use the distinction from Chantal Mouffe between ‘antagonism’ and ‘agonism’. For Mouffe, agonism (whether in politics or science) is a kind of limited conflict that occurs within the context of certain shared grounding assumptions about the rules of the game. Nigel and I clarified that we reject the idea that the Earth sciences and critical social science are essentially antagonistic to each other, hostile to each other’s presuppositions; but we acknowledge that there are important tensions and differences of emphasis, that can be creatively deployed by social scientists and natural scientists alike in a shared commitment to exploring the nature of planetary existence.

I hope you find the discussion as stimulating as I did!