Animals Against Earth and the question of Planetarity

Instructor: Carl Olsson Date & Time: September 27, October 4, 11, 18 09:00-11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Contemporary thinking about the more-than-human world approaches its topic from an ecological perspective. But as theorists like Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nigel Clark and Lukáš Likavčan have begun looking at Earth from an astrophysical viewpoint, we are reminded that nature is more than an economy of life. Living beings are constrained by intractable physical forces at every level of existence. Likewise, life-bearing planets cannot be reduced to complex systems; they are first of all masses acting on themselves through gravity. If gravity is said to be the constitutive medium of planetarity, for life to get going, it must propel itself against its planet. We might say then that the history of life is a history of ‘anti-planetary’ action, a dialectical process through which life discovers its planet and Earth determines its life.

This Seminar will investigate anti-planetary action across different temporal scales and levels of organization: from the slow ascent of tetrapods onto land to gymnasts’ philosophical hatred for the Earth. Through our examples, we will extend the history of geological knowledge and assess our own participation in life’s negation of Earth. In the end, we proceed to examine what a true elimination of everything terrestrial from ourselves might mean – a task far more difficult than a mere escape from the pull of Earth’s gravity.

Session 1: Constitutive Planetarity – The first session will introduce the key concepts of constitutive planetarity and anti-planetary action while distinguishing between different kinds of knowledge about mechanics that can be used to interrogate planetarity. The session will also discuss the stakes of the seminar and situate our approach in relation to contemporary writing about planets, Promethean philosophy and more-than-human relations.
Literature: Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics (selection); Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, What Can a Planet Do?

Session 2: Case Study, Vertebrate Terrestrialization and the Fish-Tetrapod Transition – The second session will focus on the morphological demands of transitioning between different media, paying particular attention to the transition of our own ancestors from a marine to terrestrial habitat. We will consider how the requisite adaptations may count as a prototypical form of embodied geological knowledge.
Literature: Jennifer A. Clack, The Fish–Tetrapod Transition: New Fossils and Interpretations; Egon Heiss et al., Aquatic-Terrestrial Transitions of Feeding Systems in Vertebrates: A Mechanical Perspective.

Session 3: Living Planetary Lives –  The third session will shift the focus to ourselves and the philosophical consequences of explicitly recognizing our place in life’s anti-planetary history. We will do this by looking at different practices that allow us to measure anti-planetary actions.
Literature: D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (selection); Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish (selection); Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique, Code of Points (selection).

Session 4: Lockpicking Transcendental Geology – In the fourth and final session, we will consider what escaping our planetary past might mean. If the Earth’s essence is embedded in the fabric of our bodies, breaking out might not be as simple as reaching escape velocity.
Literature: Benedict Singleton, Absolute Jailbreak; William C. Wimsatt, Developmental Constraints, Generative Entrenchment, and the Innate-Acquired Distinction.

IMAGE: Blue planet

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