Abstract
In this chapter I argue that we can start to extend political ideas to other entities within the Earth through deploying an intermediary concept such as ‘memory’. In the domain of human politics, there has been much attention to the role of collective memory in the politics of recognition and justice—but also the role that active forgetting can play in creating the conditions for progressive social change. What about the politics of the Earth? Natural scientists sometimes us the word ‘memory’ to describe biological or even geophysical process: they talk of ‘climate memory’, or ‘ecological memory’, or materials as having ‘shape memory’. But what would happen if we took such usages seriously, and applied the idea of memory to a complex entity like a planet? How could the Earth be said to remember and to forget? What memory systems has the Earth evolved in its 4.5 billion-year ‘geostory’? And if the Earth is indeed entering ‘the Anthropocene’, a new geological epoch in which humans are the determining geological force, how might the Anthropocene be inserting itself into the memory systems of the Earth? Might thinking of the Earth as something that remembers and forgets change the way that we think about this thing we call the Anthropocene, what it is and what it means?
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Notes
- 1.
These were the two features that Arendt sees as most constitutive of the human as a political animal: plurality, the uniqueness of humans (that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’), and natality, human beings’ capacity to initiate radically new things in the world (Arendt 1958: 7).
- 2.
I am using this term in a different way to Bernard Steigler (1998), who uses ‘hypermnesia’ as another name for the exteriorisation or transduction of memory.
- 3.
This idea was later taken up by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of the human condition. For Arendt, the plurality of human perspectives make the results of meaningful human action—speech or gesture—inherently unpredictable and irreversible (in geophysical terms, we would say turbulent). But this inherent irreversibility and unpredictability can be tamed through specific forms of action: through binding speech acts such as promising (in which the future is secured) and forgiving (in which the past is reversed) (Arendt 1958).
- 4.
Here I am setting aside the more obvious memory modalities of arbitrary codes stored in DNA, culture and language or computational machines; these too need to be analysed as forms of planetary memory but there is not space to do that here.
- 5.
Of course as with all things planetary this is relative to a particular time scale.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nigel Clark, Piers Foster, Andy Jarvis, Wolfgang Lucht and Adam Bobbette for conversations which have greatly helped me in the ideas in this paper—though I have to take responsibility for the way that I have brought them together. An earlier version of this paper, ‘The Anthropocene and the memory of the Earth’, was presented at the colloquium The Thousand Names of Gaia: From theAnthropoceneto the Age of the Earth, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 15–19 September 2014.
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Szerszynski, B. (2019). How the Earth Remembers and Forgets. In: Bobbette, A., Donovan, A. (eds) Political Geology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_8
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