Third year running my lecture/seminar series ‘The Planetary: Philosophy, Technoscience, Poetics & Polity’ at the Architectural Association in London. January is the month of marking student papers written in response and every year the multiple intelligence, imagination, and compositionist cosmologies of the AA students make me believe we will get through the forest and out the other side.
The Plant Magazine launched a bumper Issue 24 in Paris last week with so many brilliant contributors. My latest text Part-Whole, plus drawing, is the fourth in a series: Everything is Leaf (Issue 21); Between Here and the Surface of the Moon (Issue 22); Planetary Diplomats (Issue 23). @theplantmagazine
‘A consciousness that centres what it doesn’t know as much as that which it does requires a mode of errantry, of going errant across the boundaries of the Other. Every entity—plant, human, microbe—endures through its own errant experiments towards finding a vital politics of life––of individual identity, community, and planetarity. Humans are not the translators of these experiments; conversely, they are in the translation gap with their companion kin being recomposed by familiar and unfamiliar experiences—humans are part quantum pot too. On the one hand, this decentring of the human situates it as just one of many living entities composed of common matter; on the other, it resists totalising generalisations and unequal universals that demand all entities be funnelled into a single destiny.
Whether a meristem cell, human, or animal, every entity is in constant negotiation with this planetary consciousness to better understand themselves as a ‘part-whole’. The productive unknowability of identity––to emerge relationally with the curiosity and problems of the Other, to meet the world halfway and, if lucky, somewhere else each time––is surely a glimmer of hope that endures with pain.
I am only Other to myself, in the end. And I receive all Others as part of myself.’
This time last year I was deep in conversation with @marcus_coates_ at @katemacgarry in London. The event coincided with Marcus’s brilliant exhibition, Between Stories, that challenged each of us to relate to the world beyond the human species through multiple registers, and ways of being and sensing. In defiance of rationality – quite often modes of power and domination – we talked about reimagining a comology of the living through subtle adjacencies of different modes of existence. Ever since that evening I love to think of Marcus out and about weaving new narratives and becoming a ‘mutual concept’, not just a storyteller or collaborator, rather a conduit for translation for thinking with & through, not just about.
My new text 'Planetary Diplomats' out now in the brilliant new issue 23 of The Plant magazine @theplantmagazine
'Unlike the existing project of globalisation, the mission here is to open up from centre stage, to move the focus of attention also to the margins, and not always from the same vantage point: to activate the spatial field. Thought itself moves around, and this movement enables a thinking into and with, across forms. For within these spaces, communication and exchange extend far beyond human language, becoming more rhizomatic like the mycorrhizal networks of plants underground. Every second, humans take in hundreds of acts and patterns of communication and exchange besides language, which get pushed to the peripheries. Flows of energy and information, markers, and collective signs operate globally through local moral codes and a sense of mission. Perhaps the power of the arts in politics (another assemblage of words that would baffle the conventional, as never are the arts given a seat at decision-making tables) is to turn politics around the world, not the subject and its mutually exclusive boundaries. The world is the political object, the body politic as every other body – the multitude.
To think this through spatially, and thus politically, these gestures of joint-attention seek new forms and capabilities of solidarity and sovereignty across scales. In these conjoining material and cognitive cracks, juridical boundaries are not uniquely territorial resulting in geopolitical dislocation, from both national geography and nationalist ideology. Rooted to grounds (and the habitability of land) and yet, without rigid borders, the trans-national and sub-national become important scales for the common good. A general multiplicity of being is turned into specific gestures of non-territorial adhesion, in which the individual is reconfigured within a collective political ontology. One hopes that cultural production might yet become political demand.'
PICPUS #28 - out now!
The era of the Planetary is upon us. We can no longer ignore that we are deeply entwined with the processes of the Earth itself, and the systems that govern us seem unable to envisage, let alone action, what is needed to tackle the climate crisis. How, then, might we each reshape our own internal geopolitics to change our attitude to the world and how we function within it? How can we re-enchant our relations with the Earth?
This edition of Picpus weaves together excerpts of texts from the last two hundred years, which have evolved ecological discourse. They reveal a history of ideas and ecological awareness that could have shaped politics if they had not so often been ignored or suppressed by prevailing political, industrial and institutional powers.
Contained between the title of scientist Eunice Newton Foote’s seminal paper from 1856—in which she showed that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase its temperature—and environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s cri de coeur from 2019, this PICPUS is offered with the hope that we might soon achieve political action grounded in love and justice for all living beings. And, of course, for the planet, the largest living creature of them all.
Get yours from a Picpus stockist - list online:
Thank you to all the wonderful contributors.
In memoriam, James Lovelock 💚
In memoriam, Bruno Latour 💚
Guest edited by me.
Editors - @charlesaspreytyersstreet@simoncgrant
Designed by - @studio.ard
