Unhomely Earth: The New Geopolitics of the Underground and the Extraterrestrial - Incite at Columbia University

What do we mean by geopolitics today? What is the relationship between geopolitics and other (modern) discourses of the earth: geology, geography, geohistory, geophilosophy? One definition of the Anthropocene is that it is the era in which human activity begins to have an effect on the earth at a geological level, which is to say in a non-superficial and potentially irreversible manner. But how is social thought about the earth—as home, as terrain, as surface or threshold, as medium of growth or bearer of historical remainders, as site of resources and more or less renewable wealth—changing alongside and/or in contrast to the matter and mode of human habitation under current conditions? When is the earth unhomely (in the sense of inhospitable but also unheimlich, or uncanny)? When is it not a place to live but an origin from which to depart? And when can one make claims upon it, or return to it? What means do we have to make these transformations visible, legible, sensible and, on that basis, amenable for analysis?

At its core, the Unsettlement Project is guided by the sense that the present epoch entails a profound reconfiguration of epistemic structures (in both scientific and other discourses that claim generalizability) and a redistribution of values associated with both the earthly and the human, and the relation between them. This is both because of climate-related changes in the habitability (or uninhabitability) of particular environments, and because of the generalization of “scorched earth” policies and practices in a proliferating set of wars that have rendered so much of the world a scene of toxic uninhabitability ruination. Complicating these shifts and the senses of displacement and disorientation that accompany them in our time are developments in Artificial Intelligence and the re-regionalized competitions over the minerals, materials, and energy sources they require (including fossil fuels and other non-renewables, especially rare earth minerals, as well as water resources and land). In their convergence and accumulating force, these developments are associated with profound and accelerating changes in the social field (growing inequality, the redistribution of employment and related access to creditability and debt, new political and religious movements, etc.), and in the conception of intelligence itself.

In this inaugural conference, grounded in anthropology but opening to political theory, philosophy, geography, environmental studies, art, and literary criticism, we aim to identify key questions and pathways of investigation for understanding these processes. Here, we draw on Michel Foucault’s observation that the modern earth sciences (those coming after Agricola’s De Re Metallica and Lyell’s Geology) and the human sciences were intimately bound with each other during the modern era, in parallel and mutually metaphorizing discourses of the “underground,” and the “unconscious,” and in overlapping but distinct aspiration to conceptualize deep time. While it is clear that new mineral-dependent technologies of synthetic generative intelligence and related economies of extractivism are reshaping what it means to think the earth and the human together, our purpose in in this initial conference is to examine the epistemic and sociopolitical conditions into which these new developments insert themselves.