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

In this paper I look at movements within the Earth – whether abiotic (non-living, physico-chemical processes), biotic (organic life) or technological (artefacts, tools and machines) – as ‘planetary mobilities’.  I approach them all as emergent phenomena generated by a far-from-equilibrium planet organising itself over geological timescales and generating informationally rich forms of matter and motion. I discuss fluid motion, which moves most mass in the Earth; solid motion, which carries more information; and how dynamic interactions between fluid and solid states enable the planet to become more complex in its powers of internal mobility. I discuss various ‘mobility regions’ (spatially distinct zones with different material and energetic characteristics) and ‘mobility situations’ (particular balances of forces at different scales and speeds) in which physical properties combine to make possible particular kinds and powers of mobility. Drawing on insights from biosemiotics, I analyse how anthropogenic, technologically mediated forms of mobility exhibit forms of ‘gratuity’, a relative uncoupling of different dimensions of mobility such as those of power and direction, which point to a wider pattern in planetary evolution. In the spirit of a ‘speculative planetology’ I ask whether they may presage the emergence of radically new forms of planetary mobility.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Reader at the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK, and is visiting Geography at the University of Exeter from 14 to 24 March. His research draws on the social sciences, humanities, arts and natural sciences in order to place contemporary changes in the relationship between humans, environment and technology in the longer perspective of human and planetary history.  He is author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005), and co-editor of Risk, Environment and Modernity (1996), Re-Ordering Nature (2003), Nature Performed (2003), and a special double issue of Theory Culture and Society on ‘Changing Climates’ (2010).  He was also co-organiser of the conference Between Nature: Explorations in Ecology and Performance (Lancaster, 2000), Experimentality, a year-long research programme on experimentation in the sciences, arts and wider society (Lancaster/Manchester/London, 2009-10), and Anthropocene Monument, with Bruno Latour and Olivier Michelon (Toulouse, 2014-2015). His recent work has focused on geoengineering, the Anthropocene and planetary evolution. www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/about-us/people/bronislaw-szerszynski