Passages to the outside: A prelude to a geophilosophy of the future

Abstract

What might it take to reimagine the futures of geographical thought on an Earth whose geological disjunctures and catastrophic dynamics have radically upended the progressive temporality that once made of ‘the future’ a modern article of faith and a matter of concern? What, in other words, is the future to those practices animated by the metamorphic forces of the Earth? Seeking to inhabit the problem-space these questions generate, this commentary suggests that at stake is nothing less than the challenge of learning to think of futurity immanently, as a problem of space. The challenge is to reimagine the future not as the promise of a yet-to-come but as a passage to the outside: to those immanent zones of indeterminacy, anarchy, and contingency composed in the interstices and outlaw edges of every territory, where impossible forms of sociality and speculative methodologies of life are improvised in the act of striding the movements and forces of an unstable and tumultuous earth, giving themselves over to the inchoate and the unformed, to a groundlessness that surrounds and subtends every ground, to a runaway metamorphosis which eludes finality and escapes totality. That, indeed, might be the task of a geophilosophy of the future.

Another earth: An astronomical concept of the planet for the environmental humanities

“…After all, different Earth-centred modalities of planetary thinking appear in wide range of disciplines ranging from cultural geography (Cosgrove 2001) and post-colonial studies (Spivak 2003) through media theory (Bratton 2015, Gabrys 2016 to continental philosophy (Thacker 2011, Woodard 2013, Connolly 2017, Hui 2020. Some authors, such as Savransky (2023), draw heavily on Deleuze and Guattari's (1994) geophilosophy, which provides a leeway to highly speculative reading of our planet and its affordances. Here, the precedence is given to poetic descriptions of 'contingencies and excesses of planetary dynamics, geological disjunctures, and Earth-historical trajectories that we can never hope to control' (Savransky 2023, 3-4).…”

Another Earth: An astronomical concept of the planet for the environmental humanities

“…After all, different Earth-centred modalities of planetary thinking appear in wide range of disciplines ranging from cultural geography (Cosgrove 2001) and post-colonial studies (Spivak 2003) through media theory (Bratton 2015, Gabrys 2016 to continental philosophy (Thacker 2011, Woodard 2013, Connolly 2017, Hui 2020. Some authors, such as Savransky (2023), draw heavily on Deleuze and Guattari's (1994) geophilosophy, which provides a leeway to highly speculative reading of our planet and its affordances. Here, the precedence is given to poetic descriptions of 'contingencies and excesses of planetary dynamics, geological disjunctures, and Earth-historical trajectories that we can never hope to control' (Savransky 2023, 3-4).…”