Planetary mobilities: movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth

Abstract

In this paper I present a unified framework for understanding abiotic, biotic and technological mobilities as achievements of a far-from-equilibrium planet self-organising over geological time, and generating informationally rich forms of matter and motion. I discuss how flows of energy through the Earth support the emergence of different kinds of movement in spatially distinct 'mobility regions' and scale-related 'mobility situations'. I also discuss how technological mobilities exhibit forms of 'gratuity', a relative uncoupling of different aspects of motion, which have arisen repeatedly in the Earth's past, and may presage the emergence of radically new forms of planetary mobility.

Planetary Cities: Fluid Rock Foundations of Civilization

“…From this perspective, the Earth's solid and molten rock layers and its fluid outer envelope are but one manifestation of numerous possible planetary configurations of the solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter-energy. As contemporary planetary sciences confirm, rather than simply stabilizing into a final, enduring arrangement, planets tend to remain dynamic, with such factors as inflowing energy from parent stars, tidal forces from other astronomical bodies and energy from inner radioactive decay serving to defer final descent into equilibrium (Hernlund, 2016; see also Szerszynski, 2016). And so, although mature planets may be relatively closed to exchanges of matter, matter-energy traversing the gradients in a layered planetary body continues to generate self-organizing processes.…”

Toward a Continuous-Matter Philosophy

“…Objects at our kind of scale can be seen as parts of the earth's surface that have broken away. Indeed, from a planetary mobilities perspective, motile animals including human beings, as well as the machines that humans use to transport themselves and other things, can be regarded as a special case of discretized solids that the earth generated as a solution to the problem of how to move solid matter around more easily (Haff 2010;Szerszynski 2016).…”

Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch

“…Firstly we need to draw on thermodynamics , the study of energy and entropy. As well as helping us to understand particular manifestations of spirit on a changing planet, thermodynamics is foundational to the conception of the Earth as a complex, dynamic assemblage that gives rise to different forms (Szerszynski, 2016a, 2016b). The Earth has developed over geological timescales from originary formlessness and immanence in an ongoing dialectic between the intensive (differences and gradients) and the extensive (form and structure), involving near-equilibrium processes such as sorting and sedimenting and far-from-equilibrium processes of self-organization (DeLanda, 1992: 142–143).…”