Another planet — relaunched
Last year I retired from Lancaster University after nearly thirty years — closer to forty if you include my time as a mature student there from 1986. And one of the things I decided to do with my extra time is revive this blog, Another Planet.
Nigel Clark and I started Another Planet in 2020 as a vehicle for exploring how investigating ‘planetarity’ as a foundational and conditioning aspect of human existence might shed new light on a vast range of questions — ranging from the most abstract (for example the nature of life, consciousness or time) to the more practical (e.g. the future of artificial intelligence or the prospects for a decarbonised economy) and the inherently political (e.g. racialised violence or indigenous rights). For more reflection on this, see our first AP post.
I like to use ‘another planet’ as a slippery slogan: a slogan that is deliberately ambiguous — referencing both hopeful and fearful visions of the future of our own planet, gesturing towards other planets — but also trying to make all planets — including the Earth — appear stranger than we usually imagine them.
I have a long list of ideas for AP posts over the next months, which I imagine falling into a number of different categories.
Some posts will be strung together into a linked series of posts about a specific topic. In effect, each series will be an attempt at a sustained inquiry into a particular aspect of planetarity, broken up into bite-sized, (hopefully) readable chunks. Some of these, as you might guess, will be ways to incubate a more formal publication on the topic.
Topics in the pipeline that I think need exploring at greater length in this way include:
- deep planetary time (a concept which might seem simple but I find becomes more and more complex the more you look at it);
- planet as method (what kind of moves are required when analysing and redescribing phenomena in an interdisciplinary planetary way);
- multiplanetarity (how the idea of growing complexity of interaction between planets can be wrested from the dominance of current imaginaries such as colonialism and extractivism);
- nonorganic life (how creatively blurring our understanding of living and non-living processes might help prepare thought for the encounter with the genuinely alien — but also change the way we think about and behave towards our own planet);
- continuous matter (how understanding planetary existence requires us to think beyond countable, discrete entities and develop better ways of thinking about ‘stuff’ and ‘processes’).
Then I have in mind a number of posts that will basically have a title of the form ‘X as a planetary phenomenon’. The idea here (that Nigel and I also used a few times in our book Planetary Social Thought) is to take a particular phenomenon — often one that seems very familiar, and that we think of as distinctively human — and see what happens if we reconceptualise it as part of a wider class of more-than-human phenomena, that taken together can be seen as achievements of a planet self-organising over deep time. Topics of this kind include:
- mobility (what happens if we reconceptualise the motion of all earthly motile entities, whether non-living, living or artificial, using the same set of concepts and categories);
- technology (for example by exploring analogues of tools and technology in the more-than-human world, and Peter Haff’s concept of an emergent ‘technosphere’); and
- infrastructuring (how, under planetary conditions, systems of all kinds seem to want to divide themselves into subsystems working on faster and slower timescales, interacting in asymmetrical ways).
Suggestions of other topics and phenomena to treat in this way are always welcome!
Another class of posts that I want to do are more reactive, stand-alone responses to events in the news, things I have read or conversations I have been having with other people.
And finally I’ll also be inviting other people to write posts on things they are better placed than I am to think about.
OK, I’ll post this now— here’s to another planet!
