Planetary Social Thought
* Book: Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences, 2021. Cambridge: Polity Press. 256pp.
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"the social sciences have questioned the emphasis on stratigraphic indicators and periodization in establishing this (Anthropocene epoch’s distinction from the Holocene. As such, the past decade has seen a wealth of theorizing on this topic insociology, geography, and anthropology, locating the source of ecological destruction in Enlightenment paradigms rather than the steam engine (Tsing2016).
The literature abounds with cognates and critiques such as
- Capitalocene (Moore 2016, cf. Deckard 2016; O’Neill 2020),
- Plantationocene (Murphy and Schroering 2020)
- Chthulucene (Haraway 2015),
- Socialocene (Gille 2019), and
- Anthro-obscenes (Ernstson and Swyngedouw 2018).
Scholars both more and less familiar with this work will welcome Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski’sP lanetary Social Thought – The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences(hereafter Planetary Social Thought).Planetary Social Thought begins by setting its terms of investigation: What kind of planet do we find ourselves on? What has the planet done in the past? What might it do in the future? What kind of creatures are humans? These interlocking queries pose points of departure likely unfamiliar to many social scientists. For example, we may be prone to thinking of the Earth in durable terms; however, the authors assert that the malleability of the planet will be key to rethinking humanity’s role in it. To account for the assertion of the planet’s dynamism, the authors outline three concepts that are carried through the book.
First, planetary multiplicity refers to the idea that the Earth has a tendency towards self-reorganization and plasticity of forms across scales.
Second, earthly multitudes is a notion with more familiar theoretical antecedents – “the way that different human groups or collectives respond to the multiplicity that inheres in our planet ... a shared way of responding to the challenges raised”.
While this terminology may at first appear cryptic, early chapters discuss them with more clarity: “the Earth has an inherent potential to shift from one state to another and to do this quickly ... our own species ... acting collectively has attained the power to function as a driver or forcing agent of such planetary transformations”.
In this way, Clark and Szerszynski develop a new lexicon for dealing with the agentic potential of both humans and nature, emphasizing dynamic interdependencies. If humans are to be considered geologic forces as Anthropocene debates claim, then we must also consider, in the wake of forest fires, rising seas, the changing composition of land, water, and atmosphere, as well as species adaptation, that the Earth itself can be “multiple” - becoming something “other” than to what human society may be accustomed.
Throughout this first half of the book, the authors articulate such claims for a “planetary turn” in the social sciences. Via critical rereading of recent Earth Systems Science research, alongside social theorists like Karl Marx and Max Weber, the authors articulate a method of socializing the Anthropocene – “to insist that the geohistorical trajectory that was followed expressed particular social interests, that it materialized the imaginaries and imperatives of specific social groups, that it was situated in select regions of the world at unrepeatable historical junctures”.
The third important concept developed by Clark and Szerszynski is the principle of stratal analysis, deployed through case studies of the uses and abuses of high heat technologies. They posit that it is only through such an investigation of the practices that have led humanity to its present juncture of social and ecological crises that we can truly ascertain the meaning of human geological agency. Examples appearing in the volume include the steam engine, internal combustion engine, mining, textile manufacture, fabrics, and flat ironing. While some examples are now quite standard, the discussions provided of seemingly inane domestic practices give the book added interest, as the authors cleverly link the implications of the ordinary to geohistorical factors. Importantly, Clark and Szerszynski do well to show these have often been classed, gendered, and racialized, discussing how the social self is not only the product of social constructions, but of the “complex entanglements of organic ecologies”. In this sense, planetary social thought is useful to social scientists because “we need the broad spectrum and the very longue durée so that, rather than seeing ourselves as social beings who at some late stage turn our attention Earthward, we can make sense of ourselves as emerging as social beings through our interactions with fire and minerals, plants and fibers, ecological systems and geological strata.
Dealing with historical legacies of colonialism, the authors argue that within the modernization project, the West aimed to “de-planetize” (102), i.e., to dissociate nations and peoples from Earth processes, shifting earthly vulnerability exposure, and violence to “others” whom colonial powers “imagined did not share the ability to transcend the natural order”. For example, it is the profoundly vertical mobilization of natural powers that became central to the present earthly predicament (fossil fuel extraction) (106–10), leading to the “pronounced verticality of social structuration” creating societal and earthly instability (111). Such domination of people and nature therefore has created a condition of othering detrimental to planetary existence in which concerns for social and environmental justice are secondary to capital accumulation. While the first half of the book emphasizes the planetary, social scientists will likely be more interested in the second half of the book, because much inspiration is drawn from the works of John Urry and mobilities scholars."