4

• 4 (or 5) Elements Theory

  Breaking down the complexity of the universe into the simplest, most fundamental substances, has continued to nourish scientific inquiry in the quest to discover the building blocks of nature. While Earth, Air, Wind, Fire and sometimes a fifth element, Aether (or Space), are typically attributed to an Indo-European heritage, similar categorical tendencies can be traced to Angola, Tibet, Mali, (in today’s geographic nomenclature) among other regions. More recently, the discovery of the Higgs Boson in 2012 as an elementary particle, evidences the continuity of this exploration, albeit with vastly different background knowledge.
  
  Active since pre-Socratic cosmologies, The 4 Elements Theory has been used to explain transformations in substances and the origins of matter marking a shift from accounts based on myth. Some early proponents of this theory insisted on a split between reason and sensation, where reality, as a totality, was seen exclusively along axiomatic principles that could be thought, but not sensed. Empedocles (490-430 BCE), whom some herald as a “proto-chemist,” sought to unify sense with intellect, seeing the 4 ‘roots’ (which Plato later named ‘elements’) as the basis of everything, where their combination in varying proportions and configurations produced distinct materials. Introduced in his poem Physis [Poem on Nature] he introduced the 4 ‘roots’ under mythological names: “Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis whose tear-drops are a well-spring to mortals.” By observing a permanent quality in a substance despite a transformed state (such as water in either liquid or vapour state), Empedocles’ concept was to reduce the complexity of natural processes to “basic principles,” and it is a similar approach that led to the mapping of DNA sequences millenia later in 1953. While the 4 (or 5) elements have expanded into more than a hundred modern chemical elements, the approach has delivered “fundamental concepts like combination, proportion and balance” when investigating substances and their states of transformation, within our Planet. The proto-scientific motivations of the Ancients were notably focussed on understanding ‘balance’, since it was perceived that everything in the cosmos was interconnected. Although having spurred European epistemological practice, it was not until the 17th century where a Modern ‘split’ between nature and culture came into prominence, and the idea of interconnection faded.
  
  The rather exclusive focus on Empedocles’ 4 roots/elements (that were augmented, and amended by Aristotle) rehearses the tendency in the narration of Western knowledge to locate it in Greek (and thus European) origins. Historical scholarship centering South, East, and Central Asian regions has emphasized that the Persian prophet Zarusthustra (600-583 BCE) was the innovator of the 4 Elements Theory, however from a significantly different perspective. Zarusthustra’s 4 Elements were upheld as sacred, since they are “essential for the survival of all living beings”, and are to be “kept free from defilement”. As such Zarusthustra’s 4 Elements are more related to ethical orientations with the stuffs of the Planet, more so than to the discovery of the building blocks of nature. Contextualized in our Planetary condition, we can locate generative resonance in bringing the two traditions into dialogue: the imperative to not only better understand the interconnectedness between entities and their material (elemental) composition, but to also infer ethical, practice-based value from such inseparable relational premises as ‘elemental’ to life-systems.    

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  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Towards the Planetary Public Sphere

a

• Algorithmic Decision Making

  (ADM) refers to a procedure that reaches decisions in precisely defined cases with the aid of algorithms supplied by artificial intelligence – without any direct human involvement. This can be applied to trivial problems such as the choice of advertisements on a website (see social media targeting); however, it is also possible to process complex questions (e.g. the allocation of places on study courses or assess applications) using such an algorithm and make corresponding decisions. There are obviously serious ethical questions connected to many of these algorithmically produced decisions.

  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Between Stars and Signals
  • Agnes Denes
    Artist

• Attention Economics

  Attention has become a form of currency; when something like a social media platform costs nothing to participate, we pay with attention. In an age of informational surplus we have a scarcity of attention in terms of resource allocation. Extracting profits from attention requires the marketization of it, meaning the development of protocols to measure it, for which (online) metrics include clicks, likes, shares, retweets, etc. When thinking the ‘attention economy’, only through the lens of economic scarcity (or the poverty of brain performance when distracted), we leave a potentially fruitful aspect of its force unrecognized. As Tiziana Terranova insists, “[p]articipating in the attentional assemblages of digital media implies becoming part of social processes, where paying attention triggers responses of imitation.”¹ That ‘imitation’, need not be negatively construed as ‘herd-like’, non-thinking behaviour, but is necessary for the social invention and diffusion of common desires, beliefs and affects.² In this generative register, the imitative dynamics at work in the practice of ‘paying attention’, are inseparable from the collective creation of novel possibilities for social, and cooperative invention.
  Patricia Reed

  1 Tiziana Terranova, “Attention, Economy and the Brain” in Culture Machine, Vol 13 (2012).
  2 Ibid.

b

• Bit-Player

  The complexity of our world today, brings with it the problem of epistemic traction. How do we approach the world when it surpasses the capacity of the human mind? Complex reality requires that we think in a distributed way, that is through knowledge practices ‘beyond our own skin.’ [1] Given the need for computational modeling a better understanding of our world entails today, this knowledge distribution incites not just collaboration with other humans, but also with machines. The bit-player is a counter-heroic actor in this distributed game, who cannot claim to know the full picture, but embraces her (situated) partiality of knowing with an openness to stitch it into a larger configuration of shared knowledge.

  [1] Donald MacKenzie, Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 16.

• Bureaucratization

  Hannah Arendt infamously called bureaucracy the ‘rule of nobody,’ since it favors sets of impersonal protocols as an organizing principle, to the disavowal of responsibility (and thinking). As a rule-driven system, bureaucracy operates in an algorithmic logic – even when performed manually, allowing actors to withdraw from accountability, since they are ‘merely’ enacting rules. With computational systems increasingly performing automated decisions, the problem of responsibility (legal and otherwise) is pressing. This is particularly so with algorithmic warfare and the adjudication of crimes based on system errors.¹
  Text: Patricia Reed

  1 Susan Schuppli, ‘Deadly Algorithms,’ in Radical Philosophy 187, Sept/Oct 2014. Accessible here.

c

• Circular Economy

  A Circular Economy is the revisioning of linear production models that “take-make-dispose,” aiming at the eradication of waste and pollution in a transition to sustainable economies. The model traces back to economist Kenneth E. Boulding and his 1966 article “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.” With a clear nod to Buckminster Fuller, Boulding’s model contrasts views of the Earth in open and closed perspectives, attributing a “Cowboy Economy” to the former, and a “Spaceman Economy” to the latter. The open, Cowboy Economy is one analogous to infinite growth, characterised by “reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior,” whereas in the Spaceman Economy Earth is seen as a “single spaceship” in which “man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system”. The basic principle of a Circular Economy is a closed-loop system of waste and by-product reutilisation, an idea that manufacturers have recognised since the 19th Century as a profitable strategy (i.e. selling waste as raw-material input for another industry), however beginning in the late 1960’s such closed-loop economic models have taken on ecological considerations.
  
  Above all Circular Economies are responsive to resource and energy scarcity with regards to production, seeking to design economies that are sustainable, regenerative and that minimize negative externalities (unintentional by-products of production). Processes such as “maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting,” factor heavily into Circular Economy dynamics. The concept has gained mainstream attention in the last decade through governmental, think tank, and consultancy advocacy (such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with the international management consultancy firm McKinsey). Attentive to material-based lifecycles, from “environment[al] extraction to industrial transformation, and to final consumers,” within a Circular Economy materials are either reused in an industrial process, or when organically applicable, returned back into the environment in a regenerative cycle. Notably, this system requires a governance structure of ‘checks and balances’ to ensure used energy sources are either clean or renewable, and closed-loop procedures are thoroughly maintained.
  
  As an alternative system, Circular Economies aim to redesign “the entire chain of production, consumption, distribution and recovery of materials and energy.” Critics point out that this acute focus on production chains often neglects social factors such as human labour, thus demanding that social sustainability be more conscientiously integrated into further models.

• Climate of History

  Since Enlightenment Humanism of the late 17th Century, history has been conventionally separated into distinct categories of natural history and human history. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has asserted, the discovery of anthropogenic causes of climate emergency, collapse the severance of natural history from human history, urging a rethinking and a rearticulation of the discipline of history itself. The ‘Climate of History,’ captures the shifted scope of history, in a period when human and geological timescales have converged. Drawing from the legacy of postcolonial studies and how they nourish thinking our historical present, Chakrabarty urges a stereoscopic account: Global history, as a human-centric account of our activities, violences, economies and modes of production; and the Planetary wherein the human is decentered, placing emphasis on the ensemble of relationships within which we are nested.
  
  Anthropogenic climate emergency is described by Chakrabarty as the unintended consequence of (some) human intentions and decision, beginning with Industrial Capitalism, and dramatically accelerating in the mid-20th Century. These potentially lethal ‘accidents,’ or what an economist would call ‘negative externalities,’ have cast suspicion upon the sustainability of the energy-intensive freedoms that (some) humans have gained. In this way, inherited historical concepts of Western freedom belonging to a Global view, are held up to scrutiny from a Planetary perspective. When humans, only in a collective coordinated fashion, have accidentally become geological agents, how is this mitigated by Global concepts of freedom that are tied to individual humans in political Liberalism? To this end, Chakrabarty insists that the discipline of history must learn to integrate histories of Capitalism with human species history, asking how to relate a “universal history of life—to universal thought, that is—while retaining what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal?” It is in the demand to combine these vastly different chronologies, and processes, that the very idea of what history means, is fundamentally altered by Planetary recognition.
  
  The proposals at work in a Climate of History, shift our understanding of what an archive is, where it is located, and what mediums record and tell ‘stories’. In Chakrabarty’s stereoscopic view, archives are no longer only human-made repositories of organized documents and artifacts, but the Earth itself, as a biogeochemical archive that registers human and nonhuman traces of Planetary-wide transformations in local instances. The bottom of a lake in central Canada containing plutonium sediments is no less of an ‘archive’ indexing a geohistorical epoch, than a collection of written letters, or signed treaties preserved in museums. The diverse forms of ‘reading’ or deciphering at play in accounting for the integrative approach to history advocated by Chakrabarty, requires transdisciplinary collaboration. Beyond the specificity of ‘history,’ Chakrabarty’s approach asks how Planetary thought destabilizes the canonized manner in which the discipline has been practiced, serving as a guide for how other fields may consider their own refashioning in view of Planetary recognition.

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  • Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy Aby Warburg in Collaboration with Gertrud Bind and Fritz Saxl
  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Towards the Planetary Public Sphere
  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Between Stars and Signals

• Compost Kinship

  Planetary interdependencies invalidate “methodological individualism and human exceptionalism” as ethical, disciplinary and epistemological commitments. The stories these commitments bear are “literally unthinkable” in our time, in both scientific and social registers. As a result, sympoeisis dislodges autopoesis (self-forming and self-sustaining systems) in rethinking our world as always a ‘making’ (poeisis) ‘with’ (sym). In this regard, scholars like Donna Haraway and Kim Tallbear have foregrounded “kinship” as a framework for acknowledging that no one “acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history”, where “kin” highlights forms of relationality expanded beyond those bound to “ancestry or genealogy”.
  
  “Kin” is described as an assembling word; a relational understanding without the premise of familiarity, foreknowledge, or resemblance. Entities, whether human or otherwise, “interpenetrate one another” establishing “sympoeitic” ensembles: we “become-with each other, compose and decompose each other,” leading Haraway to call herself a “compostist,” not a humanist, nor a posthumanist. As a regenerative process, composts are metabolic exchanges between organic material fueled by oxygen and nitrogen, forging not only an ensemble of diverse forms of life, but serving as the basis of nourishing future life. “Compost Kinship” (or kinship as compost) is an interdependent perspective from which to invent other stories without the rehearsal of human exceptionalism, and a means through which to model multispecies coexistence, towards practices of ecojustice.

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• Cosmology

  Cosmology is the pursuit and attempt to make sense of the universe in its entirety, its origins, evolution, and destiny, making it a distinct ‘cousin’ of astronomy as the study of celestial entities in the universe. The term appeared in English in 1656, briefly defined as “speaking of the world;” and cosmologies are just as varied as the linguistic cultures that establish them. They are, however, connected by similar constructions of meaning as to “systems of creation” and “the genesis of the material world.” Historically, cosmology has been a rather theistic enterprise, with a God (or Gods) as creators and regulators of the universe, however a scientific, physicalist cosmology began to dominate after the discovery of the “cosmic microwave background in 1965,” from which the well-known Big-Bang model of the cosmos emerged. It remains noteworthy, however, how theistic and scientific cosmological questions align, revealing their enduring enchantment: How and when did the universe start? How and when might it end? Not to mention the most elusive: Why does the universe exist, and why is it arranged in the way that it is?
  
  According to International Relations scholar Bentley Allan, transformations in geopolitical orientation can be traced to cosmological shifts. These (rare) shifts are what lay the basis for Stately purposefulness, and thus a ground upon which political decisions are made (i.e. such as the ‘purposefulness’ of economic growth). Cosmological re-orientation in this model is composed of transformations across the spectrum of: 1) ontology (the contents of the universe); 2) epistemology (what is known about the contents of the universe, and how knowledge practice is legitimated); 3) temporality (the nature and direction of time); 4) cosmogony (origins of the universe); and 5) destiny (the role and position of humanity). Because the diversity of human cultures have produced equally diverse cosmologies, the uptake and consolidation of certain cosmological views over others, takes on political dimensions. The discovery of anthropogenic climate change, and thus the capacity to model the Planetary, arguably positions us on the brink of such a rare cosmological shift.
  
  Poetically thought, one theoretical astrophysicist described cosmology as a “historical science” because the farther we look out into the universe, the “farther we look back in time”. To see the sun, is to see how it was eight minutes ago; thousands of stars, as they were a hundred years ago; and the light from our nearest significant neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, takes some 2.5 million years to reach our retina, a moment in time before any human had yet to exist. Cosmologies open us to metaphysical wonder, and with notions such as these that radically unsettle our phenomenological negotiations of time and space.

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  • Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy Aby Warburg in Collaboration with Gertrud Bind and Fritz Saxl
  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Towards the Planetary Public Sphere

• Counterpublics

  The term refers to a critical attitude toward the standard, established definition of what a public constitutes. Robert Asen argues that they are not simply alternative to standard publics, but are “explicitly articulated alternatives to wider publics that exclude the interests of potential participants.”¹ Michael Warner argues that since counterpublics are created in the context of explicit conflict with cultural norms which, themselves, distort reality, “mass publics and counter-publics…are both damaged forms of publicness, just as gender and sexuality are, in this culture, damaged forms of privacy.”² This both allows counterpublics to escape oppression from normative ideals and makes counterpublics susceptible to the same short-sightedness as the dominant public sphere. Yet, as Nancy Fraser demonstrates in drawing on the concept of the subaltern—subordinated social groups—to articulate what she calls “subaltern counter publics,” the strength of counterpublics is their ability to create alternative discursive spaces that extend the public sphere. These subaltern counterpublics, whether progressive (women, workers, peoples of color, LGBTQ communities) or retrogressive (anti-abortion activists, the pro-gun lobby, white supremacists), create space for the articulation of concerns unique to these subaltern groups and the development of a terminology and discourse that can counter dominant public discourse.³

  • Open Lab ReferenzBibliothek for Public Art in Hamburg and Beyond
  • 41 Years of Hamburg’s Art in Public Space Programme
  • Monuments, Documents, Moments How Common is Public Art?

• Customer Journey

  Customer Journey denotes a concept in marketing studies to describe consumer behavior. It covers the entire process from the initial moment of perception to the customer’s purchase of a specific product. Overall the process is divided into five steps. The concept was developed with reference to internet shopping and advertising on a range of online platforms (forums, social networks, websites etc.).

d

• Datafizierung

  If oil was the commodity of the 20th C, data is the commodity of the 21st C. Datafication describes the translation of activity into information, and the marketization of said information. Data extraction has now emerged as a powerful business model, operating as the backbone of Platform Capitalism. Platforms provide intermediary infrastructures for interaction between user groups, inciting activity and data input.¹ Far from being immaterial or fully automated, data requires material recording and sensors to capture it, server facilities to store it (with massive energy expenditures for cooling), and laborious formatting for it to be usable.
  Text: Patricia Reed

  1 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, (London: Polity Press, 2017).

  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Between Stars and Signals

i

• Incentives

  An incentive is a force motivating certain activity. As a key for understanding (and manipulating) human decision-making, the study of incentives is deeply tied to economics and management. Concerning both competitive and cooperative organizational forms, incentives may be financial (material gain), moral (related to social-self apprehension), coercive (punishment), or innate (curiosity, pleasure). [1] More simply, incentives fall into extrinsic (fiscal and/or cultural capital) or intrinsic (psychological) categories, where often a combination of the two forces is at work in decision-making.

  [1] Kimiz Dalkir, Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice, (London: Routledge, 2013), 309.

• Indigenuity

  A portmanteau term combining ‘indigeneity’ with ‘ingenuity,’ ‘indigenuity’ names practical innovations that draw upon the intergenerational sharing of know-how by Indigenous Peoples that are deeply connected to geographies and the symbiotic bond between humans and ecosystems. Indigenuity stands in contrast to ‘solutionist’ forms of innovation, which understand problems in a technocratic, narrow, and immediate way, where technology is supplied as the answer to any myriad of challenges that are faced (even when those challenges are social, political, or ecological in character). Daniel R. Wildcat describes indigenuity as “kin-centric,” as opposed to anthropocentric, where innovations are understood as a co-creation between humans, plants, minerals, animals and other ‘stuffs’ of the Earth. The temporality inherent to the principles of indigenuity is radically different from the linear, purely forward-looking fetish of Western cultures, factoring in Ancestral/Descendent relays of knowledge and accountabilities when conceiving and developing innovations that enhance, rather than deteriorate, the biosphere.
  
  In contesting Western ‘progress’ that has come at the expense of environmental degradation, indigenuity offers a critical, alternative perspective, seeing the world as “populated by relatives not resources,” where “inalienable rights are hollow unless linked to inalienable responsibilities”. This perspective, as Wildcat has written, helps overcome our “insulated ignorance” of a world view privileging human comforts, regardless of longer-term impacts upon the inhabitability of a shared environment. Indigenuity demands a reframing of ideas of progress, beyond convenience and Capital growth, towards the “promotion of systems of life-enhancement,” understood in human and more-than-human terms. In the face of anthropogenic climate collapse, indigenuity is not only a revaluation of past ancestral wisdom of Indigenous Peoples, but positioned as a necessary perspective in grappling with the urgent Planetary challenges of 21st Century histories in the making.  

  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Towards the Planetary Public Sphere

• Interscalar Vehicle

  Planetary recognition compels a re-evaluation of long standing disciplinary conventions and methodologies of thought that cannot be captured by ‘transdisciplinarity’ alone. How does Planetary intelligibility manifest in procedures of investigation, and how to avoid ‘seeing’ the Planetary only in a generalizing, distant fashion, without depoliticizing its causes?
  
  In seeking to localise and engage geopolitical dimensions of the Anthropocene, anthropologist Gabrielle Hecht has developed an Interscalar approach in order “spark new narratives [...] and forms of knowledge” commensurate with Planetary thought. Three guiding considerations underwrite her method: First, is to treat the concept of scale as an analytic and political claim; second is to enter the Anthropocene by way of waste, since it is how we know the impact of human activity (in plutonium deposits, CO₂ concentrations, etc.); and third “putting the Anthropocene in place”, that is specific sites (with their particular histories) as points of departure for thinking the Anthropocene. Importantly, Hecht’s method offers other representational techniques and logics for narrating the Anthropocene beyond graphs, charts and statistical visualisation.
  
  In order to enact such a mode of analysis, an “interscalar vehicle” is introduced. These are objects that enable movement through “deep time and human time, through geological space and political space”. A uranium-bearing rock serves as Hecht’s exemplary object, enabling her to travel from Gabon’s uranium mines, to France (where Gabonese uranium fed the national nuclear program), to Japan (mingling emotional experience and scientific analysis of the nuclear bomb), all the while tracing capital valuation/devaluation, the long history of waste, colonial labour conditions, not to mention the present economic and medical realities following the “slow violence” of toxicities inherent to “materials of modernity” and the now radioactive homes inhabited by former miners. In other words, a highly local, tangible entity, contains the Planetary within it, in economic, social, material, technological, ecological, metabolic and geopolitical terms. An interscalar vehicle enables a thinking with the Anthropocene that “expands our vision of time and space,” however without flattening the Planetary into a placeless, uniform condition of experience, both of the past and possible futures.

m

• Mereology

  Mereology is the study of part-to-whole, part-to-part, and whole-to-part relations, the ensemble of which is known as parthood relations. In other words, it is the study of interacting components in a system. While the study of parthood relations traces back to Antiquity, the term “mereology” was invented by logician and mathematician Stanisław Leśniewski in 1927. As Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics “[i]n all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause,” he was already gesturing to questions of emergence, identity, and becoming, millenia before a formal term was coined. A critical problem at the heart of mereology: “under what circumstances do a collection of individual [parts] compose another individual?” bears relevance for us today as we face unfamiliar ways of conceiving subjectivity in Planetary conditions. At what threshold is some entity, composed of many diverse interacting parts, identifiable as something whole and thus a distinctly recognizable entity in its own terms? Considering the awareness Planetarity thrusts upon us as co-constituted by thousands of organisms, at what threshold does the sensation of ‘selfhood’ or ‘individuality’ emerge? How are those distinctions troubled at nonhuman scales of the microscopic, macroscopic and suprascopic?

• Metabolic Thought

  Metabolic processes are what “interrelate us with the world,” be it through breath, the conversion of ingested sugars into caloric energy, heart rate responses to exertion, or body-temperature regulation. Metabolic processes are the chemical exchanges that occur within all living organisms to sustain life functions. At the scale of the biosphere, the Earth cycles carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, as well as several additional elements, constituting a Planetary Metabolism. Beyond the purely organic, metabolic processes are also imbued in our infrastructures, sustaining collective forms of life, from the “water treatment plants that process urban waste [...] to data server cooling systems that allow for the logistification of food systems”. What the instances of organic and inorganic metabolism have in common is their autonomic quality, meaning that these processes are largely unconscious, or that we’re rarely aware of them, despite their fundamental role in maintaining life itself.
  
  From the perspective of political economy, already in the early stages of Industrial Capitalism Marx offered ecological critique, largely based on his research into soil chemistries at the time (informed by Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry from 1862). By understanding the degeneration of soil ushered in through industrialized agricultural production, Marx wrote of a “metabolic rift” between humans and the natural environment in his notebooks, gesturing to this rift as the “fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production”. What Marx equally foresaw is that transforming/intervening in our material environment with the sole purpose of capital value accumulation is not only ecologically perilous, but that it erodes the material requirements for human social betterment.

  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Towards the Planetary Public Sphere

n

• Nonhuman Species-Being

  For Marx, “species-being” [Gattungswesen] designates a mode of human self-perception constituted by the totality of social relations within which we are historically embedded. Unlike fixed ideas of human nature—such as Hobbes’ belief in innate greed—species-being is mutable and shaped by social conditions, embraced by Marx in sensual and intellectual ways, determined by the organization of social life in specific historical-material conditions of production. According to Marx, while the individual satisfaction of needs belongs to all animals, humans are distinct in their conscious intentionality “as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” The human capacity to render its own species-hood an object of sense, gestures to a relational understanding of each other as material producers, effectively ‘socializing’ individuality, which concerns less ‘oneself,’ but rather being-with. Due to the autoinstitution of social and material environments by humans that are incarnations of historical modes of production, Marx warns of the tendency to transform such ideas into “eternal laws of nature”. In his critique of Capitalist modes of production, Marx emphasized that the human has become alienated from its collective species-being, along with its estrangement from the products of labor, with the further consequence of estranging us from one another. Species-being thus names the conscious transformability of our self-conception as humanity that transcends the sheer fulfillment of individual needs towards the overcoming of such instances of alienation.
  
  The legacy of species-being in early capitalism persists today as production-driven systems contribute to the climate emergency, threatening both human and nonhuman life. As planetary thought emphasizes interdependencies between species, reimagining species-being beyond its anthropocentric origins becomes essential. Scholars Hannah Fair and Matthew McMullen argue that expanding the concept of labor to include nonhuman agents helps us understand alienation more fully. By placing species-being within a planetary framework, we can recognize the shared material struggles of both humans and nonhumans, fostering a broadened perspective on alienation and spaces for interspecies solidarities.
  
  Expanding species-being to include nonhuman labor reveals how animals and plants contribute to capital production, much like feminist-Marxism has highlighted the undervalued care labor essential to social reproduction. An anthropocentric view of species-being disavows nonhuman historical roles and limits our understanding of planetary coexistence as a shared effort to regenerate livable worlds. Geographer Elizabeth Johnson argues that species-being has always been more-than-human, shaped by evolving production processes and interdependencies. Nonhuman laborers—such as workhorses, bees, and oxen—have historically transformed nature alongside humans. A planetary perspective encourages interspecies solidarity, orienting labor towards the production of use value, rather than surplus value;  and recognizing nonhuman contributions without naturalizing labor itself.

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  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Between Stars and Signals

p

• Planetary Commons

  To hold space for a Planetary commons is to undo the myth we humans cannot cooperate as an innate condition. Such a premise is at odds with one of the most canonical, widely cited ‘scientific’ essays of the 20th century published by an American biologist: “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968). With its simplistic line of Malthusian ‘reasoning’, environmental “ruin” is the unavoidable consequence of individuals pursuing their self-interest in a resource-scarce world: “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” Presented in matter-of-fact terms, the author’s prescription for the avoidance of ‘tragedy’ amounted to the advocacy of coercive regulations upon human “breeding,” and the privatization of land (and its resources), or State-based authority over it, as the only effective means at avoiding ‘inevitable’ degradation. Beyond ethical objections, critics have pointed out the very picture of a ‘tragic commons’ as an ‘invisible hand,’ laissez-faire system is simply false, lacking historical, sociological and empirical backing. As one commentator wrote, it’s not so much the tragedy of the commons that is evoked, but the tragedy of enclosure.
  
  While a tragic picture of the commons gained steam in burgeoning environmental discourse at the time, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom had begun her site-based, empirical investigations on collaborative management systems, analysing how such systems worked - some of which have centuries-old legacies. Throughout her studies focusing on practices and organizational structures of collaborative management, her work traveled from groundwater management in Los Angeles, to Swiss cattle herders, Japanese forest dwellers, and irrigation systems in the Philippines. Contrary to tragic pictures of the commons, these communities had innovated methods of sharing resources in environmentally regenerative ways, documented in her book Governing the Commons. What Ostrom’s successful counter-examples of the commons revealed was actually a core bias at the heart of a tragic commons picture: an essentialist picture of ‘man’ in the mold of Hobbes, where “men seeking their own good…end up fighting each other.” Ostrom’s research culminated in eight design principles for governing the commons: 1) Clearly defined boundaries (who has access to what); 2) Local specificity (to culture and land); 3) Participatory decision-making; 4) Monitoring and accountability; 5) Graduated Sanctions upon those abusing the commons; 6) Accessibility to conflict resolution; 7) Rights to organise for recognition; and 8) Nesting the locality of the commons in broader regional networks. In opposition to a picture of the commons as a quasi-libertarian, ruleless principle, Ostrom’s work highlights the self-governing rigor of the commons that occurs in more complex ways that are not top down, nor State-driven.
  
  While Ostrom’s work was extensive and trans-regional, it was not exhaustive (nor was it claimed to be). Al Mashaa’ in the Levant region is another instance of a ‘commons’ principle - notably emphasising participation, and use. Referring to common land equally shared among farmers, Al Mashaa’ only comes into being when mutual decisions arise to cultivate it together. Claims upon land are arrested when activities cease, rendering this a performative instance of the commons in its focus on use-value over surplus-value, recognising and rewarding the laborious efforts required for making land usable at all. Yet another instance can be exemplified by conservancies on communal land found in Namibia, covering the successful collective management of more than 40 million acres of land, which were formally recognised in 1998, and today 80 of such conservancies are operational.
  
  Drawing from Ostrom’s empirical, and thus localised regional investigations, many naysayers have cast doubt on her advocacy for the commons in Planetary-scaled ecological considerations. While her eight commons governance design principles from 1990 are not directly extensible to what we may think of as a Planetary Commons, her approach opens a window for thinking “beyond the usual policy approaches of regulatory command and control, government intervention in market pricing systems, and formal agreements among national sovereigns.” Upholding the promise of the commons, unsettles the facile narratives of ‘each man for himself’ that undermine the real-world successes of the collective management of resources.

  • A Sculpture to Be Seen from the Sky A Living Sculpture Workshop
  • Image Collection on the History of Astrology and Astronomy Aby Warburg in Collaboration with Gertrud Bind and Fritz Saxl
  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Towards the Planetary Public Sphere
  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Between Stars and Signals

• Postanthropocentrism

  Postanthropocentrism marks the deprivileging of the human as the basis through which to comprehend, evaluate, and position ourselves from within a Planetary framework. Epistemologically, it is a recognition that the Planetary is not dependent upon our perception, nor judgment of it (it exists in its own terms with or without us); and ethically it is an acknowledgement that the ‘value’ of nonhuman life, or ecosystems at large, cannot be reduced to the metric of how it serves “human interests”. While the ‘hard’ sciences have been able to navigate within this framework with “relative ease,” the legacy of European traditions bolstering human centrality as a dominant perspective (i.e. Humanism) proves more challenging, as it requires a reorientation in forms of coexistence. Similar to other conceptual ‘traumas’ in the histories of human thought (from Copernican heliocentrism, to evolutionary theory), postanthropocentrism is a “sobering process of disidentification” and defamiliarization from naturalized values and perspectives, which demands “becoming relational in a complex and multidirectional manner”.
  
  Postanthropocentrism, however, is not by default a progressive, or socially just orientation. The term can be used to depoliticize the history of climate emergency by flattening accountability across the spectrum of humanity, or as Rosi Braidotti points out, a Capitalist postanthropocentrism may cynically “democratize” the value of all living organisms in the treatment of human and nonhuman life-forms as a mere resource. Following feminist and decolonial practices that have critically dismantled naturalized representations of gender and race within the inter-human community, postanthropocentrism extends upon such legacies in relation to nonhuman life-worlds, probing how subject formation emerges from an interdependent self-understanding. Postanthropocentrism is not a disavowal of humanness, nor our anthropomorphic existential condition, but a relational position in life-worlds that exist beyond our resemblance, and certainly not exclusively ‘for’ us.

  • A Sculpture to Be Seen from the Sky A Living Sculpture Workshop
  • From the Cosmos to the Commons Between Stars and Signals

s

• Signa Data / Signa Naturalia

  The Modern separation of Nature from Culture had the effect of binding the study of meaning-making practices (semiosis) to human-cultural terms: biology and information were understood as detached. This split informed a long-standing consensus that there is no possible bridge between mind-dependent experience (culture) and mind-independent reality (nature), introducing rigid epistemological distinctions between the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’. As Planetary recognition necessitates an interpenetrating picture of ‘natureculture,’ there are embryonic cues from the history of thought prior to this split, from which a re-evaluation of signs and semiosis has emerged with regards to the importance of ‘meaning’ for both human and nonhuman lifeworlds. Re-examining foreclosed pathways from Ancient and Medieval thought opens the domain of sign-relations independent from the “advent of homo sapiens” because “a sign relation is not something that was created ex nihilo by the minds of human beings” but is a functional operator of nature itself.
  
  The word ‘sign’ comes from the Greek semeion, which historically had a more medical meaning akin to a symptom: the external appearance of an internal state. Drawing from such a legacy, Medieval theologian Augustine de Hippo sought a unified theory of the sign transversing human, and natural worlds (with divine motivations), classifying the ‘sign’ into two genres: signa data and signa naturalia. Signa data, like our diverse human natural languages, are created by the intentional use of socially instituted, arbitrary rules (like grammar) where no substantive connection between the sign and its meaning exists (words and their referents). Signa naturalia are when there is an unintentional material bond between the sign and its meaning, predicated on an “if → then” causal relation: if there is the sign of smoke, then there is the meaning of fire. By bringing ‘cultural’ (or artificial) sign-relations in dialogue with those of natural ‘symptoms,’ Augustine de Hippo’s expanded treatment of signs has opened thought to the role of meaning and/or information as constitutive of life in biology across species.
  
  Extrapolating upon Augustine de Hippo centuries later, the discovery of DNA reveals that genetic information or code is what governs ‘meaning-making’ within a cell, leading to the establishment of Biosemiotics, wherein semiosis is understood as an essential component of life itself, collapsing the separation between culture and nature. Signs, in this regard, are not the exclusive domain of human language, but adhere to the lifeworlds of organisms and their unique sensory affordances and ‘meaning-making’ practices, driven by an array of non-linguistic signs relevant to their lifeworlds, such as chemical and olfactory signs (like the chemistry of human sweat from the sensory lifeworld of a tick). In the enduring, and ever-debatable pursuit of the “basic building blocks” of our world, it may be the sign, and not the molecule that constitutes the basic unit of life itself.