Earth As Its Own Memory, Composing, 08/07/2018

Philosophical writing at its best walks a dangerous wire. Well, several such wires, really. The more wires you walk in your writing, the better your writing can be when you pull everything off. Of course, the more wires you walk, the riskier it is that you’ll succeed.

Acknowledging a truth doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

There's a curious image that appears in Jussi Parikka’s The Geology of Media – the Earth as its own memory. It’s an evocative image, and would be an impressive, brilliant image and metaphor when used in a literary context. If I ever write a sequel to Under the Trees, Eaten, I might use such a metaphor myself.

It's one thing to imagine walking in the earliest days of Earth. It's
another entirely to know walking in those days, living as much as
you can the real ancient past.

But in a philosophical context, such an evocative metaphor can be dangerous. The literary power of metaphorical imagery rests in its ambiguity. Metaphors can create an atmosphere for thinking and contemplation, expose a relationship that a write wants to examine.

But a metaphor resists any attempt to pin down its specific meaning for good. Its purpose is to open a spiral of interpretation – you’re meant, as a reader, to lose yourself in it. Metaphor paints thought, gives it a character or a general direction, a tendency. Yet it strays too far from the concrete to be philosophically productive.

Philosophical writing needs specificity – a philosophical concept is widely applicable, but very precise. Like a blueprint or a plan. Or an OS designed with intricate detail, which can then do a huge variety of different things – but a different sort of variety that you’d get with another OS.

No, those are all metaphors, similies. Images and comparisons, not the actual conceptual structures.

And there you have a demonstration of why metaphor isn’t very philosophically useful.

So does Parikka’s image succeed? Is it a philosophically interesting component of a planetary-centric way of thinking? Or does it only evoke?

I think it succeeds, anyway. For one thing, it relies on a conception of memory as a form of consciousness of history. You experience knowledge when you learn something for the first time, of review it, cementing it in your memory. So memory itself is an experience of learning and engaging with history.

This isn’t a purely discursive history – this concept of history leaves no risk of reduction to current human discussions. You aren’t left open to that juvenile interpretation of history as discourse about the past. You aren’t left wondering if history is only talk about the past, with the grittier, complex accounts no better than the empty exaltations.

Here is a concept of history as the material reality of the entire past, the persistence of past presents, events, and processes into the current time.

A piece of Earth, flying through space.

The material reality of the past is, geologically speaking, the crust of the Earth itself. Geological strata and the transitions between them reveal the actual development of Earth, the planet itself over time.

We can analyze rocks to reveal chemical, atmospheric, and geological conditions of the planet up to 4.4-billion years ago. The literal preservation of the most ancient past of this planet. Becoming conscious of this history, investigating and learning about these astronomically ancient conditions is an act of memory.

We are part of the same 4.4-billion year process of development of the giant ball of matter that we call Earth. We’re very strange, innovative parts – even sending little pieces of Earth far into the vastness of interstellar space.

We think of ourselves as separate from the planet. The planet is a giant thing that I live on. I personally pay a sum of money every month for the right to reside on a particular patch of the planet Earth.*

* When you explain rent and mortgages this way, it makes our entire civilization’s economy sound absurd and ridiculous. I think we should each do this regularly, to give ourselves a sense of perspective.

Now think about the history of your development. The web of causes that have produced your life so far. Causally, we’re part of Earth because the same processes of growth and decay continue as we’re born, eat, shit, die, and are eaten by bacteria, insects, and worms.

A few traces of the earliest days of Earth exist as they once were. All the other traces of the earliest days of Earth exist as they are now.

Geology's Founding Lie, Research Time, 04/07/2018

One pleasant piece of history I learned from Jussi Parikka’s The Geology of Media was the founding of the science of geology itself. It’s not too old, after all.

James Hutton developed the basic concepts, essential theories, and analytic methods of the science of the composition and dynamics of rocky planets over the late 18th century. Hutton wasn’t too well-known for most of his own lifetime, but his legacy is pretty well staked these days.

Charles Lyell brought geological science to the mainstream by the mid 19th century. The explosion of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory certainly helped. It was a beautiful moment of synergy.

Perhaps the greatest achievement humanity will ever manage is
destroying ourselves. We're making the planet we live on utterly
unfit for us to live on it. One oil slick can cover thousands of
square kilometres and destroy billions of living creatures,
countless ecosystems decaying into dust. One stupid accident
among thousands. We've made ourselves epochal, burning
ourselves to death in a fire that consumes a whole planet.

See, one of the reasons why Hutton’s scientific work wasn’t widely accepted was because most people* couldn’t conceive of the Earth being billions of years old. This is a very strange kind of mind-set to get into, because such a thing is taken for granted now.

* In Western cultures, anyway. This scientific work happened at the heart of the globe’s colonial economy at the time, in Europe.

Even if you’re a dedicated Young Earth Creationist, you live in the influence of the conception of Earth and the cosmos as billions of years old. It’s the consensus view of your enemy, the secular culture of science.** You may not believe in the billions-year-old Earth, but you live in a society where that’s the common sense view of most people.

** I don’t use terms like these – “secular culture of science” – as actual elements of how I understand scientific practice and institutions myself. I’ve studied science philosophically and sociologically for too long to accept such a broad term as that. But vague terms like this are, to my knowledge, how extremist Biblical Creationists think of science.

When James Hutton was alive, things were totally different. The notion that the Earth was billions of years old was strange and terrifying. There also seemed to be no need for it. No other process on Earth required millions and billions of years to unfold.

Hence, why Lyell had a much easier time promoting this idea when The Origin of Species hit, and as Darwin himself followed this up with the rest of his works exploring the processes and implications of life being an evolutionary process. The geological concept of the billions-year-old Earth was the physical companion to Darwin’s biological work.

When I was a kid, I used to hear the old Christian ditty, "He's got the
whole world in his hands!" It's a beautiful thing to believe in, but it's
a lie too.

The Terror

Why do I title this “Geology’s Founding Lie,” then? The lie isn’t that the Earth is billions of years old. That’s true, no matter what some other folks want you to believe. The lie isn’t a matter of straight fact, but of scalability.

When you think of Earth as only a few thousand years old – maybe six to seven thousand like the Biblical Literalists, maybe a few thousand more – human existence is of massive consequence. If Earth is so young, then most of the planet’s history is humanity’s history too.

Human significance is obvious on a young Earth because we’ve pretty much always been here, as dominant over the planet as we are. We can very easily believe that the planet is here for us. If Earth is the same age or only a little older as civilizational humanity, then it’s easy to believe that we’re at the centre of Earth’s story.

Geological science introduced a conception of deep time. Accepting geology as valid meant that we had to accept human insignificance on Earth. Earth was no longer for us – its existence was now alien to human needs and histories. You have to learn to let yourself be dwarfed in all aspects.

The lie was that the immense vastness of the planet in time dwarfed humanity in all aspects. You see where I’m going with this. The popular and intellectual conception of humanity, as the Victorian concepts of secularism dominated the reflexive thinking of Western cultures, was that the Earth dwarfed our powers as well.

Earth was so vast that human activity – even the industry driving unprecedented technological development – could never cause the planet real harm. Vastness meant resilience, movement and change so slow as to approach eternity. At least relative to human activity.

This is Parikka’s conclusion on researching this idea in the popular and intellectual culture of the first years of the Holocene era – comparing human existence to the depth of planetary time made us appear entirely insignificant. But that appearance was false in one awful aspect.

The terrible truth of our ecological crisis is that our powers can radically transform the Earth. This aspect of human existence really does achieve geological vastness. And we’re completely unprepared to reach that planetary level of power.

The Enchanting Falsenesses of True Romance, Jamming, 02/07/2018

When I was researching what would become Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I found a lot of very frustrating environmentalist literature and philosophy. Not that it was insufficiently environmentalist – oh no.

These were works that romanticized the non-human world. For one thing, such philosophical writing collapsed all the diversity of everything-that-isn’t-human-or-industrial into a single category – Nature.

This Nature had a single essence, which was inevitably described with images of goodness, purity, harmony, and love. Wading through this dreck was intellectual torture.

It's an old trope of dehumanizing indigenous people to consider
them part of a non-human nature. Just because you want to conserve
them instead of raze them like a forest in the way of a condo tower,
doesn't make the concept any less racist.

Worst of all were the works that conceived of the indigenous peoples of Australasia and the Americas as conduits of this pure Nature, vehicles for an ethic of harmony and balance. They perpetuated the same division of the world into cowboys and indians, but made sure the cowboys were evil and the indians were good.

Some of that stuff was so racist, I wanted to puke a little as I read it. The worst racism of all – validation through valorization. You just switch the valuation around on the old racism of colonial genocide.

Virtuous missionaries and brave settlers become the crushers of indigenous spirituality and prosperity, which is a very good first step. But the ignorant indians now become enlightened mystics. Problem is, you still treat them like savages. Now, you just think it’s good to be a savage.

Jussi Parikka does a solid job of quickly and clearly identifying the roots of this angelic racism in the first chapter of The Geology of Media. The central concepts that are used in this destructive, falsifying, idealizing understanding of nature come from the Romantic tradition of literature and philosophy.

I’m not going to go into it. Just read his book. Or mine. Whichever you prefer to buy or steal. If stealing, why not both?

Millions of years lie before your eyes, present for you.

An alternative – and I think the best one – is in materialist thinking. Just remember to be as thorough as you can – a materialism that subtracts nothing from the world. Account for everything that you always felt you needed the non-material for, by material means.

Parikka finds a means for people to engage with profoundly deep times, for example, by a thoroughly materialist analysis.

Romantic dualism about nature and technology can only conceive of nature as eternal, while technology is the force that introduces change and the flow of time into existence. That change is inherently destructive, just as a return to the eternal nature is good, the restoration of harmony.

But an eye on the geological roots of technology show how the material of our civilization has always been part of the Earth. Technology is a product of nature – geological flows lasting millions of years and ecological flows lasting hundreds of thousands. Our technology is the exploration and rearrangement of metals that exist on planetary scales of time.

Nature is a process billions of years long. Our ecological catastrophe of a few centuries is a relative instant.

How to Turn an Image Into a Concept II: Self-Consumption, Research Time, 29/06/2018

Most of the popular political activism around the environment and Earth’s ecologies is about climate change. Which is a very serious topic and problem that we do need to confront honestly. But it isn’t the only environmental crisis facing human civilization, just the one that’s gotten the most press.

Mining, and the pollution that comes from large-scale mining, is another process significantly adding to the conditions that will keep humans from staying alive on Earth.

Yet the problems of mining are much more difficult for an environmental activism movement to address. The causes how* are frankly painful. It all revolves around those rare earths mines that I was talking about earlier this week.

The Tesla auto company is promoted as a leader in developing the
technology for cars to have no negative environmental impact. It's
true that Tesla cars don't give out greenhouse gas as exhaust, and so
can be major contributors to preventing climate change. But
climate change isn't the only form of catastrophic result from
industrial pollution. The more you learn about heavy industry of
all kinds, the easier it is to conclude that we're damn if we do and
damned if we don't. It's definitely quite easy to feel damned.

* If we say “reasons why,” then why wouldn’t we also say “causes how”? I think I’m going to run with this phrase for a while and see what it gets me. Is it a neologism? Is its meaning clear? I think so, but I need feedback from people who aren’t me. Let me know.

Rare earth metals are essential for the core technologies of the renewable energy industries as well as computer devices. Some examples. Cerium and lanthanum are used in hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. Dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium are important for the powerful magnets used in wind turbines. Neodymium is also an essential component of hybrid car engines. Terbium and europium are used to make solar panels, and terbium is also needed to build fuel cells for fully electric cars.

So the environmental movement becomes, inevitably, complicit in environmental destruction. That’s just great, then. There seems to be no way of continuing large-scale industrial civilization that doesn’t cause severe ecosystemic harm somehow.

Jussi Parikka looks at this fact, as well as heavy industry’s dependence on fossil fuel energy, and concludes that any attempt at an ethical geological approach to philosophy will inevitably be an assault on capitalism as a social order. It seems we can’t build genuinely environmentally friendly and constructive technology products, without causing severe ecological harm somewhere in the production processes.

I’ve been talking a lot about the different social orders that we call capitalism. A lot of us have been talking about it. The last decade or more of Western politics has largely revolved around confronting or sublimating the economic anxieties of life under an increasingly destructive oligarchical economic system.

Because sites like this lie behind every Tesla car, every Prius, every
hybrid and all-electric vehicle, it can really drive you into a more
pessimistic point of view about our future. Here's another horribly
depressing fact: Most of the public transit buses we use today are
hybrid, so these filthy, destructive mines are behind every
proudly environmentally-friendly bus. We can't even reduce car
use without driving the heavy industries that to serious harm to
our ecosystems and ourselves.

You can find plenty of critiques of capitalism in today’s journalism, entertainment, and theory. When they occur in so many different contexts, it can seriously confuse the popular definition of capitalism.

If you use the term as a shorthand label, it means entirely different things to different people. So when I write official publications, I mostly describe economic relationships and processes, rather than the single label for this diverse family of systems.

Geological philosophy, as Parikka describes its mechanics, is an ontology and an advocacy all at once, because thinking philosophically about geology displays the most destructive aspects of capitalist economics. Unlike most of the capitalism-critical traditions, geological (and ecological) thinking focusses on the physical destruction of Earth’s processes and ecologies, rather than directly human misery.

Capitalist society is produced through societies’ energy consumption to build and consume things. But not all energy consumption is capitalistic. You properly call it capitalism when you cross a threshold of intensity in energy production that radically transforms how your society operates.

More than this. Crossing the threshold of heavy industry’s intensity of energy production and consumption transforms what is and isn’t possible for a particular society. That change in what can be is far more profound than a mere change in what is. Keeping energy consumption in a particular, very intense range limits some possibilities and opens others.

Here’s the question you’re left with. Are the possibilities of a high-intensity lifestyle of energy consumption better overall then the possibilities of low-intensity energy production? Is the worst of one better than the best of the other?

Which one?

How to Turn an Image Into a Concept I: Living Earth, Composing, 28/06/2018

Jussi Parikka's book The Geology of Media is one of several books that have come out in the last decade exploring aspects of our global ecological crisis with an old image. The living Earth.

I’ve come across different aspects of this in Tim Morton’s work, as well as others in his broadly-related crew of thinkers – Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, a few others falling under the name speculative realists.* A variety of creative – and in Bogost’s case, delightfully bizarre – fundamental pessimists about the future of humanity.

* They all went to the same conference in 2007 that had “speculative realism” in the title, and appeared in an essay collection with that phrase in the title.

I hope the insane billionaires of the world will be happy to invest the
massive fortunes they've squired away in building inter-planetary
mining infrastructure by the end of the century. Because that's when
we're going to run out of all the metals that make computers work.

I mean, the most thoroughly absurd stance in ecological philosophy in the 21st century is optimism. So the image of a brutalized, raging, vengeful Earth – whether radically alien or hauntingly personal – is a constant.

But there are other, more impish, perspectives as well. I remember reading Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter during research for my last big book. She built a curious outline of an ontology she called vital materialism – major components were a return to vitalist biological theories and a quirky extrapolation of metallurgy.

Another book that delivered on almost all its potential, but petered out a little. Still excellent, if not quite great – fascinating ideas that weren’t tied together quite as profoundly as they could have been.

Parikka himself offers another set of sources for this image of the living Earth – an important one for him is the history of geology. Geology is, in the simplest terms, the historical investigation of a planet’s own development and the essential nature of a planet, along with the techniques for doing all that well.

It’s a science that could work on any planet made mostly of rock, but Earth is where we’ve done the most studies so far. Works just as well for other planets, moons, and asteroids – but for now such studies are prohibitively expensive, and getting there is a bit of a commute.

Throughout his book, Parikka turns to media theory and art for the
tools to turn the image of the living Earth into a philosophical
concept you can act on (and through). There are many hitches with
this decision, but one of them is that there have been so many
such images that focussing on a single one requires so much
justification that you spend all your time on it and not the analysis.

A lot of the first people to study geology shared a general, kind of vague image that served as their very rough framework for understanding how Earth worked as a system. Scratch that – it was a framework to understand THAT Earth worked as a system. This was the living Earth – that the generation and dynamic fluxes of Earth’s processes were its life processes.

Not as an organism like us. No one seriously thought they’d find igneous analogous to kidneys or lungs. If you describe these early geologists that way, you’re just doing it to dismiss their ideas from relevance by making their interpretive frameworks sound too plainly ridiculous.

Here’s how they thought, in brief. Having dynamic internal processes that generate themselves – one powers the other, the other powers the first – is a necessary and sufficient condition for being alive. For being a life.

It didn’t imply anything ontologically or physically – it didn’t mean necessarily that a planet would have a geological circulation like an animal’s cardiovascular system. The implication was ethical – that the Earth deserved the respect that you’d accord any living thing.

For example, take my personal favourite utterly barmy image of the
living Earth in popular culture – Mogo! The Green Lantern that's a
sentient planet! Mogo is pretty much the only thing I like about
Green Lantern proper, mainly because of its core premise that our
hero is a narc.

That’s different from the other common idea about respecting the Earth – philosophers use words like alienation and sublimity. Because the Earth is so much more powerful than a person – storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, massive mountain chains, vast oceans, etc – we respect it because it dwarfs us. We respect Earth because we’re so insignificant compared to it and casually destroyable in the face of it.

A geologically-inspired philosophy for our current crisis can’t inspire respect for the Earth through fear. Our processes – the grotesque pollution of mining and e-waste, the overflowing dumps of nuclear waste – are enough to strike fear into the Earth. We no longer need to fear the Earth – we need to fear ourselves.

That begins from understanding Earth as something which we harm. Not something we wreck, the way an angry toddler wrecks a plastic toy or a train set. You wreck something, and all that matters is the money to replace it and the mess you made. Earth is something we harm, the way a psychotic toddler yanks a kitten’s tail or pulls her ears to hear it scream.

Harm is to inflict suffering. And we need to learn how to understand the Earth as something we can inflict suffering on. Not suffering like an animal – any more than the Earth has blood and breath. No – There is suffering. Earth suffers.

Fearing for Our Lives / Reaped by Robot Scythes, Research Time, 27/06/2018

I told you I was switching gears. Quite literally to metal gears. Some of the analyses in Utopias will include some concepts from media theory, but the research discipline of media theory comes with some limitations.

In short form, it gets a bit idealist, ontologically speaking. Here’s what I mean. Mainstream media theory concentrates on the structure of media communications. You study the structures, conventions, and techniques of how media products are assembled.

Above: a metaphor.

So you come to think in terms of a multi-form semiotics – language, meaning, and how the structure of communication shapes language and meaning.

Quick illustration. You watch a video on someone’s phone. It’s shaky, clearly a phone held in the hand. Clear yet distant. The form of the video itself tells you what it is, displays its genuineness. Understanding the form helps you understand the message. Sounds familiar for some reason.

This is a pivotal aspect of media studies, theory, and the general means we use to understand our enormous ecology of communication. But we need to understand the literally ecological aspects of communication, and the geological too.

Information is conditioned by the physical media that carries it, but the process of manufacturing that media conditions the structure of our world. Some of the most destructive pollution generated in the mining sector is in the rare earth mines.

We dig complex minerals and intensively filter and treat them to separate all the different metals like yttrium, dysprosium, thulium, neodymium, and all the rest of the lanthanides. The result of those industrial mining procedures is rampant and horrifying pollution.

Above: a referent.

I picked up Jussi Parikka’s book The Geology of Media because I’d heard it was a solid continuation of many of the geological and ecological concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed. Damn right it was.

Semiotics – the study of meaning and how communication infrastructure conditions the information it carries – is vital to understanding contemporary media and globalized communication. But Parikka’s work is essential in understanding the brute physicality of our media – a hurricane of metals swirling into an assemblage of mines, factories electricity, and language that is simultaneously liberating and disastrous.

You can’t have contemporary media – computer and smartphone technology, including all the accessories as small and seemingly inconsequential as headphones – without these massive machines of metal extraction and manufacture.

The environmentalist movement makes a big deal about fossil fuel extraction, industry, burning, pollution, and impact on climate change. But quite often, activists will post their critical messages using smartphones and computers built with another horrifically destructive industrial process – lanthanide mining.

Is there any way out for us? I honestly don’t know.

If I want to start a blog post with Judas Priest lyrics, then I will. It’s the closest I have to an answer.