Planetary Surfaces and Computation - A Conversation with Jussi Parikka

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Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the podcast, Planetary Choices. Our guest today is Jussi Parikka. I try to do it in the right way. Jussi, please forgive me. I'm practicing my finish. He's a professor of digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University, where he explores the intersections of media history, ecology, geology, and emphasizes how digital infrastructures and media technologies shape and are shaped by the environment. And he does much more as well. And I'm glad to have him on our podcast today. Welcome Jussi.
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Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure. We had a sort of a sneaky start earlier with you and having kind of a casual chat about certain things around planetarity. So, I'm really pleased to be in dialogue with you. With you both.
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That's wonderful. James is here, of course, as well. And maybe just to get into it, Jussi, let's familiarize the listener, watcher, the audience with some of your key terms, some of the things that we at least dissected from your terms, which are living surfaces and images, and what are living surfaces, particularly also from your perspective and in relation to planetarity?
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Yeah, well, you really jump directly into it, which is good. No, sort of a warmup. That's good. Living surfaces are basically a term that we use with a really dear, good collaborator, Abelardo Gil-Fournier, who's a Madrid, Spain-based artist and a researcher with whom we worked over several years around this particular book, but also the notion of living surfaces that first started, we talked about the vegetable surface is very intuitive to understand what that means. The sort of, in a way, with a kind of, I want to say, Lynn Margulist type of a language, there's sort of a strip that surrounds Earth and is basically fundamentally the basis of life on Earth and its relation to, of course, atmosphere and production of oxygen and whatnot. It's got a planetary history, of course, the notion of a living surface. But with Abelardo and myself, we've been interested in also how living surfaces, patches of living surfaces, even if it's this sort of a more or less continuous sort of layering of the Earth, how that has become a central object of management, both by concrete technologies that make sense of those living surfaces, more on what I mean by that, what we mean by that, as well as the sort of like preparation for manipulation of those living surfaces. I think the rest of the podcast will be to elaborate on what that means. But of course, the stakes are pretty high. They relate to a lot of our, you know, in this podcast, our shared interest in terms of resources, management of not just human life, but also via plants and other forms of, for instance, agriculture, management, and sometimes mismanagement of, in that indirect way, direct way as well, human lives. And that sort of intrigues me as a sort of a media theorist, but also as a historian, which is also my original trade. We can sort of unpack a bit some of these premises in a while. One of the key things that I want to bring into discussion at some point as well as to why and how I think about these as a historian, a historian that is trained as a cultural historian, but especially interested in histories of technology and science. And over the past years, let's say at least past 10, 15 years, I've been especially interested in environmental issues, environmental media, and not just the impact or the environmental weight of media technologies, advanced media technologies, such as computation on nowadays AI and data, but also the ways in which media is, in my view, a backbone for actually producing a sense of planetarity, the ways in which it becomes an object of indeed management. And as such, it's all about interfaces, as such, of creating interfaces through which, or in various institutional settings, these patches of life become targets, become resources, become many of the other things that we recognize from, again, closer to your trade, a political discourse, policy discourse, and again, them, word management as well. That's a short version of it. But there's a couple of things already hidden or plugged in there as well that I might pick up on later as well. But do you think that what do you think is that going in the direction that you assumed it would be going?
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Well, that's for the audience to decide, but I like it. I get it. It's always interesting to see what becomes of historians, right?
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Yeah.
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And yeah, the direction they take, I guess the historians have a bit of an image of being like boring archive rats, but we're not. No, no, not at all.
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Say the historians themselves.
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Yep, I guess, I mean, this is your most recent work. And is there a certain way in which you have kind of develop your own ways of discovering knowledge in epistemological angle to it, if you were to boil it down in a sentence or two?
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Right. In a sentence or two, all of my methodology, or in the kind of like the Woody Allen McLuhan thing, all of my fallacies into a couple of sentences. So, yeah. Well, I mean, I want to pick up on the notion of whatever it means to be a historian. But like I do like building arguments through your particular historical loops. But obviously, my narrativization doesn't always obey a sort of a classical historical as a discipline narrative. So, I kind of work in these ways that try to juxtapose or compare or in some ways entangle different historical periods, not hopefully, producing anachronistic forms of knowledge, but producing interesting connections across episodes of history. This is where, again, we can talk a bit later about the more artistic side of things that I'm interested in and why that would link to this quirky historical methodology that sometimes also is linked to the notion of media archaeology, which has less to do with archaeology proper, but more with the sort of slightly Michel Foucault inspired, a bit more Friedrich Kittler inspired, and many other links that really try to build historical arguments, but with a particular sense of how do they relate to the contemporary moment? What is the sort of a stakes of the narrativizing or otherwise producing these snippets of moments that then help to understand some of the, for instance, now environmental questions. And that’s really what drives me as an academic and drives me to develop particular methodological thinking. And just as a snippet of personal information, I mean, this is why I probably never became a quote unquote real historian, is that I during my studies in 1990s in Finland in University of Turku, which has and still has, I mean, had and has a really strong history program and cultural history program. And, you know, history of computing was a big thing. So, it was really inspiring. But I kind of got into a particular flow or interest of theory. So it was the time when a lot of so called I don't know if the term is really good, but so called French theory was translated into Finnish all with the early on some of it, even before that it wasn't existing in English, so many, much of it was and I learned French later as well to be able to read some of the original things. But like, media theory was one thing that sort of pushed me away from building just historical narratives, and then French philosophy like Foucault, but also Paul Virilio, and the sort of like military industrial axis as a particular engine of production of forms of knowledge was one and then Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, which also gave a sort of a sense of interest for me in terms of particular material questions for the humanities that pushes not only in relation to questions of meaning and hermeneutics, but also into material layers of stratifications. And of course, a bit of the politics as well. You know, I'm thinking here of Felix Guattari's investment, especially since 1990s into ecological politics or politics of ecology, and the forms of free ecology that Guattari was really interested in, and that I sort of want to say has been inspiring me to think of also like, besides politics of ecology, of ecology of, you know, nature, but also ecology of subjectivity, and ecology of social beings, and the ways in which that is cut across in the context of integrated world capitalism, I think was the term we use, but the notion of media ecology there as well. What are the forms of technical mediation that are central to production of knowledge in our culture? So, a bit of really, and other things there as well. That's more than two sentences. This is clearly impossible task that you asked me to, you know, respond to, but I hope it was.
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I would have said one if I wanted you to be sure.
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Exactly.
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Jussi in examining your work and thinking about it, it seems to me that you kind of suggest that there are three different levels to your theory or your outlook. And the first is what you've talked about as living surfaces. And what you're saying is, as I understand it, that when sunlight plays upon living surfaces of the Earth, that turns into images. And that seems to be the second focus. So, living surfaces are turned into images. And then the images themselves generate, it goes in different directions. The images can produce a new epistemology. They can create aesthetics. They can create visual scales. And how would you react to that? Is that kind of the essence of the structure that you've outlined in your work?
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Yeah, that's actually a really beautiful way of sort of condensing a really quirky book and a project into three stages. I do agree. And it's interesting because one could take apart any of the three layers and look at them individually, right? And even the first one is, I mean, I'm hopefully, I mean, I'm about to use the word interesting, I hope, you know, listeners agree as well, that it's interesting in the sense that it already seems to operate at scales that are not of the usual humanities type of scale of operations. Although, again, you know, familiar to us in this sort of discussion, but also hopefully our listeners, of course, that's exactly where a lot of the Anthropocene-inspired theory has been going, of moving away from mere, mere as if, mere social and human histories to natural histories in the radical sense. And that sort of a temporal reorientation, again, is of interest to me as a historian, but historian who's also like wanting to push slightly provocative statements, like in this case, it's about living surfaces and the ways in which particular really planetary scale processes of photosynthesis become gradually, of course, central parts of so-called human history as well, and become integrated into what we recognize as traditional objects of disciplines, like art history and visual stuff and production of culture, but that the light itself has its own historical dimension or even radical temporal dimension. And this idea about, and I know what I use, I might be using, correct me if I'm sort of using this a bit, you know, loosely, but the idea of planetary histories of light, but also in my other work, Geology of Media, I was interested in planetary histories of mineralization, which again are, you know, we're talking about hundreds of millions of years of duration or longer. In that case, I was interested in how that leads into contemporary computational cultures because of our need for not just energy and fossil fuels, but in terms of rare earth minerals and literal mineral minerality of computational culture. And in this case, the same with light that it's as this sort of a productive quality for nudging us into a different scale. And that then has a really interesting relation to the second level and perhaps the third level as well. Now, in some of my work, and this applies also to another book that I recently you know, put out, 'Operational Images', I'm interested in the question like, well, okay, this is usually, I mean, this is a kind of a funny joke that I use sometimes is that, tell me which spectrum of light you're interested in and I'll tell you which discipline you're in. Mostly, humanities would be that narrow spectrum of light that is visible light, whereas most sciences, I'm just generalization, but a lot of other sciences would be focused on exactly the other spectra of light with this infrared or ultraviolet or whatever else, radiation, let alone other radiation, right? And that sort of is the backbone of multiple kinds of scientific forms of sensing and production of notions of the planetary. But what if, and in which ways, humanities can also tap into the other spectra of light than the visual light. And that is partly a question of course photosynthesis that becomes about, I don't need to tell you James, you know this much better than I do, the multiple complex metabolisms around which our politics is centered. And at the same time, as it sort of reverts nicely into the aesthetic register of images and forms of culture that become literally visual objects as such. But then nudging it again, what is exactly the next step of that scale of photosynthesis as part of human history of light, energy, food, whatnot, and what kind of forms of scales and variations come about that? And that's sort of like the speculative question that we also push forward. But I think that I'm sort of, the two, already the two components are exactly those. What is photosynthesis? Well, environmental history would know that of course it's of a central interest. But how to bring it back to the other fields as well is one of the things why we wanted to write this book and also the bigger project in which I'm interested in thinking about such material and energetic contexts for understanding the current predicament. Right. And that's a very weird premise for media studies, but I think a necessary premise as well.
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Thanks. That was great. Let me jump in here. Because what I found interesting is many things, but your definition of the planetary or your understanding of the planetary is, as James has three layers that he pointed out there, and also what you just described, is a transformative one, a dynamic one. The planetary is not just, okay, here are given boundaries. These are facts. It's our planetary surrounding. It's a given almost static fact. No, it changes. You have a dynamic understanding of the planetary where apparently human action, but also everything else, engages in a transformative process. So that's the first question. So, could you give me an example, or maybe also for the listeners, of this? What would be a concrete example, because we cannot show the nice images that you have in your book, or how would you illustrate such a method or such an understanding of the planetary as changing, as dynamic, as transformative? And then maybe as a little annex to that question later on, you jump into the planetary mainly on the shoulders of Spivak and her understanding of alterity. How does that come in there?
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Right. Yeah. So let me think first through the examples, and then we can think of the links to alterity in Spivak. And in general, it's the political stack of concerns that comes with post and decolonial theory as well. It's super interesting. I'm not sure if I'm able to nail it perfectly, but let's try. So, I want to say there's a couple of examples at the back of my head, and they might be examples that go into different directions, but for the sake of, you know the argument, let's allow that. So, on the one hand, in terms of the idea of vegetal surfaces and the surface generated notion of planetarity that is often part of the biological, ecological forms of understanding, it flips around the idea of planetary being born from outside the planet onto the ways in which self-generated, I mean generative processes on the surface of the planet generate the planet. In other words, atmospheres, oxidization and such. More concretely, agriculture. Agriculture is one of my pet interests nowadays. For reasons that is featured in this one, through a couple of examples, there's a very concrete political context of inner colonization in Spain that especially Abelardo was really looking into with his, you know, capacity to tap into concrete sources from early 20th century and Franco period. So, it's also very much a political history, but it's also interestingly about the particular forms of logistics of land that have relation to, again, political history, but also then fundamentally have relate to them terraforming of the earth across the past of what, 10,000 years, or no, 12,000 years roughly or since the birth of modern agriculture. So that's a kind of a concrete reformulation of the planet as such. Similarly, as thinking about patterns of radical transformation of lands for various reasons of reforestation and deforestation, the ways in which these patchworks and patches have a relation to land cover and land units but of course have atmospheric effects. And that sort of like dynamics that again is not the traditional humanities concern, but we're interested in what it means for a particular expanded understanding of environmental mediation. Now, these seem to be again of that I'm talking in the wrong register that this should be talked about mostly in, you know, plant sciences, ecology, biology and such. But it's interesting to notice how much media technological, and I'm using this in a broad sense, right? More in the history of science, sense of instruments of knowledge, images, cinema even incorporated into scientific and scientific cinema as forms of framing and capturing some of these processes. So, we were interested in cases that are very intuitive. For instance, again, scientific cinema and the ways in which time lapse imagery and the idea of able to capture particular plant growth into a time series through cinematic means becomes one of the fundamental units of reference around, roughly again, is being very broad, around 1900s, right? Both sides gradually helping to understand of all kinds of very concrete, small-scale details about plant physiology. But then we were also interested in what it means for larger scale land management practices, which become again more intuitive with remote sensing when it becomes really the factor, of course, the backbone of large-scale epistemic units on a landscape scale and from 60s and especially 70s onwards thinking of Landsat and other sort of concrete forms of earth observation. But not content with this, because this would be already a lot, right? This would be a lot in terms of the visual form of production of the planet from photographic means, the incorporation of photographic techniques into plant physiology, but also many other fields. Architecture as one sort of a, quote unquote, mediation of these and the central one, and then remote sensing. This would be a huge, big chunk already. But I'm, in my other work as well, I was interested in questions of exactly the reformulation of different timelines for the question of planetary imaging. From the point of view of a lot of anthropocene discourse of earth observation and remote sensing and what it means for earth system sciences gradually, and that becomes such a crucial infrastructure for understanding planetarity. I was also interested in the sort of a measurement practices that are incorporated into visual image practices. On the one hand, this relates to photogrammetry and the ways in which photography early on was scientific tool. But also even before that, I kind of toyed, in Operational Images another book recently, with the idea of, for instance, geodesic measurement of the planetary shape at the back of a lot of expeditions like French 18th century expeditions, which are hilarious read by the way, as a footnote, those kinds of like totally unsuccessful and totally chaotic expeditions like they send in 1730s, one to Lapland, one to close the equator to sort of have a comparative measurement of the planet and sort of like make sure that, okay, we got the data, we can kind of use this for improved navigational purposes. I was interested in that as a production of maps and the ways in which even before satellite era, we had obviously, obviously, a sense of the planetary scale by way of these mathematical and trigonometric and other survey mechanisms, as well as the ways in which they have these kinds of quirky histories having to do with scientific expeditions. The Lapland one was pretty successful, everything went pretty smoothly. And as far as you can imagine in 18th century and sort of like still very early forms of sort of trying to understand indigenous lands and such, the equator expedition, when in all kinds of ways you can imagine so bad, in all kinds of like, you know, ethical misconduct would be one way of putting it into contemporary form of language that sort of like almost destroyed the whole expedition, of course. It's a quirky read of that kind of a science, but the way I'm sort of mentioning it is that it's another concrete version of these multiple stages and techniques that are knowledge techniques through which the planet is constantly produced by way of the measurement and imaging technologies. And I count also cartography into the imaging technologies again. It's sort of an expanded form of thinking about not just art history or visual history, but again about this form of measurement, I think, and datafication in a way as well. So, there's a couple of things there. Just mentioned agricultural and sort of things literally that grow and then the ones that are about more about media that sort of pertain nicely to their try the three layers that James nicely pulled out from the work.
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I was wondering if you could set this in another context because you've been mentioning the world exploration that's taken place over the last 500 years. And I think that's the way most people hook into this because there's a growing and constantly self-generating understanding of the history of colonialism. So that's something humanity will never be able to let go because of its profound implications. And could you touch on that, but also on the growing history right now that people have of the history of climate change, for example. We know what the origins of it are. So how does that relate to your broader perspective of the mapping of dimensions and all that kind of consideration and how that creates a new epistemology that evolves over a period of time? Because those are the areas, I think that many of our viewers can really relate to in terms of their own thinking and their own experience.
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It is. It is. And also like in a similar and previous question we didn't get to Spivak, but the question of the colonial underpinnings of this is really crucial. At the back of the production of the planetarity that is also a production of systemized production of ignorance of already existing forms of understanding of the planet. And those two state the obvious go hand in hand and the production of the sense of smoothness that we, and again familiar stuff to our listeners and viewers, associate with the global vis-a-vis the planetary, which is the reason why I find it interesting is that it's got the rough edges, it's got the patches, it's got the sort of ways in which it is an sort of a discontinuous sense of multiple histories that are stacked together as well. That's the reason why I'm interested in the notion of planetarity. I want to say that it's an important sort of like a double aspect that one has to keep in mind that I'm sort of trying on a continuous basis is that when one erases sort of a history of the 500 years or so from that perspective, it is exactly the production of unknowing or even violent one as such as we know that is a central part of the story as much as is the positivistic side of production of the notion of the planetarity. And I don't know how to better summarize that then of course the luckily increasing awareness that of trying to also read even on a source material basis like one looks at expeditions of 1730s again nominally just pure scientific ones but of course at the back of really looking or using various indigenous populations literally as infrastructure as people who carry your stuff as people who do your labor for you for the you know the European expeditions that it's an interesting theme as such right as well that it's that sort of a carrying at the back of indigenous populations in many cases that the production happens and this is of course is familiar story from multiple other parts of colonial world in terms of trigonometric surveys and the forms of production of maps is that almost in every case you will find the British imperial sort of forms of mapping India for instance same story as well in terms of particular forms of infrastructuring original you know indigenous populations for that and in other cases as such. So it is also like I want to say that it's both also like the awareness of what stories get untold but also the ways in which we are having to reframe questions of labor and infrastructure with that aspect in mind as well and bringing that into history of science and technology in those terms I want to say that's one version of how I want to approach it as such and I want to say that that's probably also the reason why I want to extend those histories of planetarity into that period is because it allows us to understand exactly that point about forms of power that were in operation for a longer period way before the particular kinds of earth observation technologies come into play and come into play as building a sense of resources and that sort of a double view again is of interest to me it's like having an eye on that as well as having an eye on the sort of a long-term more you know sketchy histories of planetarity as such.
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Let me let me jump in on this.
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Yeah.
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No, we need to understand the planetary and the include all of the environmental aspects in this very production of inequalities in power relations. Now, if that am, I right yeah and if that plays into it and you're it becomes a very complex system of governance so you do talk about government if you wish you know if I were to translate that so here various communities who are operating on these with these multiple scales each using their media their technology their ways of perceiving and creating images on which they then act and through which they create their normative horizons and their designs interacting in more and more complex ways trying to both engage with the ecology and the environment that surrounds us but that's not just that's not just uh it's not just it it's not just that there are new ways and hierarchical ways of dealing with the environment there's also a geopolitical reality uh that shapes that as well and that you include in your understanding of planetarity. How do you think this will pan out in the in the future?
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Yeah, well I think that the planetarity as a term um and I really like I mean I like I like chewing concepts in the sense of like trying to think through what is an affordance of a concept and for me planetarity helps to think things that I'm interested in terms of environmental media in terms of actual spatial dimensions and I've got this line that I'm using and I'm pretty sure somebody else said it and probably said it much better as well that there I'm interested in the forms of planetarity that are not necessarily of the scale or the size of the planet itself that it's mismatched in multiple kinds of ways and that mismatching is super interesting from the point of view which histories or whose histories are we writing or with whom and I want to say that the notion of the planet or the concept of planetarity is exactly having to include and wants to include all those kind of a really conflict ridden histories because that is what it's for right? That it brings them in it tells that it's got this multi multi-scaler angle of constant production and the conflict of production of the planetarity is the central part of our politics and that's why I like the term right? And that's again hat tip to you know others who might have done it in much more elegant ways in different ways and different contexts like Spivak and others but I want to say that that's exactly the proverbial beef is to have that sort of a that like roughness of it as well and hence also the sort of a geopolitical angle as well again I'm preaching already to the converted but the idea that the geopolitical comes through the various weird institutional mixes that for instance environmental knowledge is built upon like besides all the kind of a slightly partly speculative partly of course very viable histories that I've mentioned even if I don't do kind of the legwork on every one of these I'm mostly also you know building on other people's work the sort of a geopolitical cold war histories of environmentalities is by necessity the military epistemic background upon which we are having to negotiate all kinds of questions of sustainability. Again I don't need to tell it tell the people in this sort of a podcast like such as James as well about this but like I find this it's excessively very interesting because of it's sort of a like a dark and murky context in which a sense of planetary computation or planetary environmental questions emerge at the back of cold war computational and sensing mechanisms and that sort of again theme runs through the point that leads into contemporary forms of sustainability discourse the ways in which it relates to contemporary geopolitical conflicts whether it's food, energy or something else and the ways in which all the kind of most of the solutions have some kind of an extended security angle of course I'm saying the obvious things but it is it is the reason why the geopolitical is almost impossible to miss. So, let me let me continue a tiny bit on this as well so one of the ways besides of course the politics and the political theory discourse and governance discourse around this topic it also comes in through the notion of operational images that I've been occupied with as well that I've sort of a hint at that but it hasn't been articulated yet it's part of a project that it came from the same project there was a five-year research project we had with colleagues at the Academy of Performing Arts in Czech Republic on operational images and the term itself comes from a filmmaker Harun Farocki and a filmmaker artist whose works were really crucial part of so-called new German cinema mostly in the documentary key and a lot of it focusing on the military industrial complex in different ways his films about Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s were really kind of a really great snippets of the critical insights that were made in Western German context but also then the later ones that really related the military and social complex now the concept has lived beyond Farocki who died in 2014 which is the reason why I was interested in that and most of it has related to the question of military imaging so the ways in which in particular autonomous or self-guiding missiles have worked, or the kind of forms of targeting and logistics that have been made part of even popular media consumption since their you know Gulf War. You know, since early 1990s I mean and the ways in which precision warfare and other things sort of a glamorized idea of particular you know intelligent weapon systems but my interest has been actually of looking at operational images also in the expanded sense of for instance environmental imaging as formative of the question of you know planetarity and here the question is that it's not not war it's not not conflict for sure it's just a different register of conflict that is I want to say at least as significant as understanding the ways in which media technologies form a bit like Paul Virilio form a particular centrality of the warfare that we have witnessing from you know Gaza to Ukraine and so forth but it is also everything that happens around it as part of the security measures of ensuring particular long-term plans particular logistics particular kinds of knowledge space for that and that's where the geopolitical comes again as part of my interest is that sort of a like not just an image that is a particular sort of let's say weaponized image but for instance the image that is not necessarily an image in the traditional art historical sense but for instance a forecasting model for a particular again James's area planetary sustainability in the next 50 years or 20 years’ time span that kind of a logistics of future that is built into some of these technical systems or technical modes of not just systems in this narrow sense but technical institutional forms of knowledge so like forecasting that's where I think one sort of like insight goes into governance as well even if this is sort of a more in the humanities more like theory and sort of like aesthetics inspired understanding of it but it does I hope I don't know I'm kind of putting out you know testing with you it sort of makes sense with your vocabularies as well, right?
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Oh totally, I think just coming to this governance. I'm just like you. I've been trained as a historian in the 90s and governance is it was a term that sounded you know that was left to public admin or political theory and it had it sounded really weird, but I mean increasingly I think we need to understand it as a social practice. And with all sorts of angles to it certain you know that you just described so it definitely resonates with me yeah. It does.
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Yeah, and I know that I mean I know that you've also been in conversation with Ryan Bishop, and this is one of the interests that we share with Ryan. For instance, as well is in a sort of a Ryan's version I think it's somewhat around questions of autonomous systems as embodying their own form of governance - that they impose upon the world, put it in a slightly again theoretical way but I think you got immediately what I now mean by this and what Ryan means by this, is that the logic of particular kind of systems and I want to say also the institutions in which the systems operate that becomes de facto forms of operational intervention and governance upon the world. Again, whether it's agriculture or something else.
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I'd like to bring up a point that you make in the book in your book which has to do with the blurring both in epistemology and aesthetics the blurring between the biosphere and the technosphere which you mentioned briefly has a lot to do with our present culture wars as well as political differences of opinion about governance. But could you touch on that?
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Yeah, but as you know it, I was, in the book we're, I mean, that is exactly what we were after as well, is that the layer of technosphere that through which the biosphere itself becomes understood that's one version of it. As well is that the technos way is actually way of tapping into understanding what is the biosphere as a complex atmospheric geochemical, biogeochemical unit and whatever exactly right and that's already a big sort of a there's a whole mouthful there but even the kind of a history of the biosphere thinking and its relation to particular questions of resourcification in relation to them you know late 19th century imperial Russia and then the early phases of Soviet Union as well is super interesting because of Vernadsky the figure at the back of biosphere thinking and the ways in which resources were sort of accounted and inventoried to talk about media technologies of datafication as part of that sort of a phase that to me is already a significant part of formulation of the technosphere so even if it's later become more of a term the technosphere as such it's I want to say it's already smuggled into the invention quote unquote invention of that particular biospheric way of thinking about planetary scales but very much underpinned by the imperial ambitions in that case imperial Russian and Soviet Union now there's a lot to be of course and others who are much more versed into the topic will say of this this exactly makes sense totally when you look at contemporary you know Russian invasion and or in the Ukraine as well in terms of continuation of particular literal land grabs and the ways in which resourcification works there's a wonderful scholar Asia Bazdyrieva who's doing exactly work on this and Asia's artistic work is featured in my operational images book but as a researcher she's really like looking into this question in really interesting ways my interest in in technosphere would become I guess the governance word again as well is that if we accept the assumption that technosphere becomes a way of understanding the biosphere and building upon that because the technosphere itself is biosphere because of its resource needs the energy needs, the massive energy needs the mineral needs and the need for logistics for minerals and the securitization of those planetary chains of production and supply lines. We know this. Then it's a question that actually de facto then governance of biosphere is actually governance of technosphere in other words whether it's the standards and really kind of a nitty gritty level of governance of standards of remote sensing, governance of standards of whatever technological communication that becomes in a way indirectly or by proxy a form of biospheric governance and the two things go really interestingly entangled as such as well and that's for me like a significant way of also expanding and many colleagues have done this exactly of expanded media studies in the these fields I’m a big hat tip to Sean Cubitt for instance who in a really wonderful book 'Finite media' looks at questions of energy but also mining rights from this perspective especially again we go back to the indigenous topics this is again Sean and many other you know obviously indigenous activists and another hat tip for drawing attention to the fact that much of the resourcification also for advanced technological culture happens on indigenous lands it happens in terms of energy extraction and this we know from Lapland areas and the Sami people's areas but many others we know the kind of work around you know fossil fuel pipelines the US and indigenous again activists work opposing those and which is again in the news as well as we noticed and many other similar contexts and that's super interesting. For me it is sort of like just a kind of a good reminder that the m-word of media does must lead into questions of land ownership and the literal ideas that thinking of colonial knowledge or decolonization like others have pointed out it's not a metaphor it's really is about land rights and it's about particular forms of ownership and violence that is enacted upon as well and again we now speaking this I think you know at least some of us are in Denmark as well the Greenland question is the obvious one that is kind of a coming back again but of course then the relation to the northern lands of Lapland for instance, would be another one and again a hat tip to those research and activists who be looking at also wind energy from this perspective as particular kind of encroachment upon indigenous lands and rights as well one of my sort of things that I do on the side of my research is work as a curator as part of curatorial teams and I was glad to be part of Helsinki Biennial at the year in 23 and one of the projects we commissioned was a group called Interpret from Trondheim it includes Nabil Ahmed and they work with a lot of indigenous researchers and activists to produce all kinds of really interesting case studies exactly about this question of wind power and beyond that as well topics that we constantly know about but it's good to kind of forefront them as well as part of this agenda for sure and that's why I’m also wanting to again remind of the existence. I mean that the existence of the ongoing struggles is what I mean. I might have veered off from far from what was the original question but perhaps it's allowed in the context of our conversation that it can kind of rhizomatically go here and there a bit.
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It's fine by me, James do you have a follow-up or I have something formulating.
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Sure.
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Yeah, well you see um these are all great examples and then and then I'd like to talk about, I'd like to know more what you think about the people who are in these newly forming groups or communities that you describe or that we talk about? So, when we have, um yeah um, when we think of governance or when we think of world order or to the deck of another word, usually we think of pretty easy the imagined spaces city, the village, the region, the country, the nation state and then they manage and or you know impose governance regimes on their surroundings. But when we have these newly forming groups and social connections in using media or using certain interests, they cut across these spaces, they're transnational um, transmedia, you know they're throughout, you know, they're using various forms of media in order to interconnect so obviously they cut uh across national boundaries forming networks of actors um but yet they're social beings as uh as well, so I wonder what kind of ethics are evolving in these can you can you say something about that? How do they act towards the political environment around the world? What kind of political language do you think emerges from these kinds of cross-cutting groups and communities?
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Whatever I say is not going to be informed so well as people who've done really empirical research so mine is sort of a more riffing with the question and which I find super intriguing and interesting. The ways in which I sort of tap into some of these discussions is because of my, not at the moment, but earlier years research and teaching on network politics where exactly these questions of translocality of struggles and activism was one way of understanding that sort of um, I do not like this because it sounds so naive but the emancipatory power of a particular network communities but let's use it as a kind of a shorthand for much more complex sense of you know..
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Why not the enlightenment needs to live on somehow?
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We need to be a bit more and you know this is why I like by the way Paul Gillroy stuff as well that you know this there's a and many other sort of like that there's a kind of a belief in a particular kind of a planetary communities that sort of is has to be a particular optimistic future hope as well and that's why I kind of really want when I want kind of a good political theory with a with a slightly you know grim enough but at the same time with a nice glimmer of hope, I turn to all kinds of postcolonial theories and others like from Paul Gillroy to Achille Mbembe and others, to kind of get a really good sense of this in in a key that is to me effectively engaging and really kind of feels like, yeah, I this is this works anyway so that was more of a bit note of my personal preferences of all kinds of good theorists um, so the network politics and the idea of trans-local communities worked really well in those terms and we recognize this from the period or again or perhaps not a successful term but the Arab spring moments as well about 10-15 years ago which unfortunately then of course were good marketing campaigns for corporate social media providers, but we even with that caveat it was an interesting case of finding solidarities across different struggles in multiple contexts as such. From you know Gaza protests in Türkiye to many other kinds of things and we've witnessed the same pattern happening as well, that happens across different scales of activist struggles from indigenous populations in a very different context again and kind of a reminding that we should not speak about indigenous as if it would be one big term across the planet. That's literally exactly what we uh you know the term is against and that needs to be aware of it but articulating connections with a difference right is the beauty of it as well. And that to me speaks nicely to the decolonial agenda as well that perhaps in the best case helps find sympathies and solidarities across different geographical and political histories but through that process in an ideal sense is able to articulate also what are the different vocabularies that must be used in different contexts of struggle. That particular vocabularies that are really useful and central for let's say the USA context or the North American context might not be one-to-one applicable when you think about let's say colonial struggles in Eastern Europe um again for instance this is what my friends in Ukraine and other places keep on reminding that this is a very different political history and stack. It is a colonial stack for sure but it is not one-to-one with the terminology that we might inherit and there's a great one of my favorite um one of the rare sort of things that actually subscribe as a paper thing is a magazine called Funambulist Architectural Journal but a lot on mostly on political architecture and political histories and they've had a couple of really nice issues where they played out this I mean brought out this angle that is it's it is also that the particularity of struggles and their universal communicability must go together and with the capacity to develop also languages and forms of structure and forms of activism that are specific to that location so that not everything becomes mushed into one size fits all version of it as well. Having said that of course I'm of the generation, like you, Hagen, was saying that you know so in 1990s and early 2000s I kind of aligned with this book um by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt called Empire that like to me you know whatever its flaws and whatever shortcomings in the afterwards we might see, that was the bomb because it articulated exactly this agenda around exactly that moment of. It came out in 2000 did it was 1999-2000 but exactly just before 9/11 and the forms of at the back of cold war at the back of the emergence of particular kinds of political struggles that were perhaps resurfacing after cold war some of things that were swept under carpet or emerging for other reasons it gave a nice way of kind of really this optimistic in the midst of extremely grim period optimistic sense of like, okay multitudes that speak across different struggles and they still can find a political um sort of alliance together as well. That was great. That was like a great moment, at least that sort of a thing I kind of like want to carry some of that with me all the time and you know whatever that brought as well and even if I think that with the link to network technologies and network politics it has become much more of a big mess and due to the you know the de facto sort of a like Cory Doctorow uses the word enshittification of corporate social media platforms that we witnessed over the past years of X Facebook and others and perhaps they were always just good short-term tools when you needed to quickly organize, but part of that you know we need to be you know obviously part of the activist task nowadays and has been for a long while is also to develop alternative infrastructures that are not corporate owned and especially US corporate owned as well I mean it's not that Chinese corporate is any better I'm not saying that I'm not naive I'll definitely don't know Russian corporates as well they all got their sort of a like you know very tight political, you know for you know problems.
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Given the increasingly complex um practices and understanding we have of ecology and geopolitics which is very challenging given that and your own dialectic I if I could call it that of looking at material landscapes and abstract models that create each other when natural processes and technological designs um exchange places as it were, so the question I think then is given that state of um complexity and confusion really um I guess this touches on the question of governance then who or what will ultimately be in control of society um will we still will it be more decentralized or centralized is there any way that you have a predicting that what what's your anticipation what the future of governance would look like let's say over the next 20 or 30 years?
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Yeah, it's uh it's a great question that it's difficult to obviously predict, but the forms of fragmentation that seem to be splintering that reality is harrowing from the point of view of any kind of stewardship of the large scale, right? This is what we know and that what we struggle with is that it looks extremely grim, vis-a-vis the de facto organization of particular I want to use Benjamin Bratton's terminology again whether we you know agree with every premise there but still of the particular stacks in the plural that are being built upon geopolitical models and I think he talks about the ways in which particular Chinese stack and the Russian stack and then the you know our sort of a still pretty, actually at the moment you know dismantling western stack whatever western means here, but you know what you know the Northern Europe uh not Northern America-Europe um sort of a stack. That is already one form that implies the question of is that also then um the route to governance or particular nature ecology? It would be because it has to do with resource and resourcification and the expanded sense of ecology in the sense of both the ecology that is necessary in the not just the biological sense but the you know from mining to energy sources, to the um ensuring of access to other resources like the usual stuff, food for instance, and that's pretty much in there as well. I might as a footnote, my new project is on datafication of agriculture, so I'm interested in that sort of idea where the seemingly technological is at the very core of that model that is being um put into place by way of policy but also by way of again reformulation of mediation of landscapes as part of regimes of securitization for instance. Now, but is that an answer to it I don't know it's a one way of remarking that weird shift that is not going to be helpful for the scale of planetary scale changes that we're facing in terms of environmental damage and atmospheric or other, but it will be the grim version of securitization and weaponization that will be one way of attempt to manage that on a very sort of a, on a particular geographical enclosure that will relate to exactly typical wars and whatnot, but also then in terms of where um where some of these seemingly global technologies will lead us as well again Benjamin Bratton territories that from the idea of internet and other network technologies being of the global scale of planetary scale to those really like what will it lead into a fragmentation of that that said? Most likely yes and that will have an impact on all kinds of other kind of questions of global politics for sure as such so I want to sort of a in a way hint towards that idea of the fragmented stacks or the different geopolitical stacks while also not being sure if that is exactly the right vocabulary as such but I want to say that modeling of the what's going to happen in the next decades is exactly like where all kinds of military security reports will be the genre in which we negotiate environmental issues. I wish it wasn't because I find that absolutely horrible as this is like the green version I wish there would be then will be versions of kind of a resisting that it will be in the register of the military-security complex where ecology will be subsumed, but I'm not sure what it will be I don't, I literally just do not know at the moment of what alternatives there would be that would be much more progressive or much more unified in the sense that we hoped it would be about. I hope. Do either one of you have anything that would work in terms of like a slightly more comprehensive but also slightly more where the stakes might be in a you know again forward-looking and with hopeful sense?
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Oh, well you give the utopian baton back to us. Well, I'm sure there's always hope. I mean what else do we do? I do share of course the notion that based on today it's hard to imagine the military industrial complex not having a big stake in the future but if you were you were to base on all of your empirical all of your empirical research what kind of you know is there are there other authorities are there other ways of, do you think, maybe to steer or maybe manage or maybe even democratically organize um the near future, but keeping all of this planetary conflict in mind?
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what would be the forms that it could take on a political level as well? I'm also I mean I am old school in the sense that I do have belief in particle institutional setups I'm sort of in that sense I don't know if this is a conflicting statement or kind of a child of the Cold War that the institutions seem to be for a short while stable and actually ways of building particular models like you asked James models of the future that can be then also achieved by way of actual is rational policy or something of course that sort of a like thing was didn't work out in such terms but I'm still that was like that's like mother's milk to me because of my generation to an extent. But I want to say that I mean this is not an answer and I want to you know if you have answers or points that can lead to that direction but one word that you use James as well was about models I mean that abstract abstraction and materiality together, and I've used in some other contexts this idea that I kind of like borrow from Gilles Deleuze and in a very different context was referring to an filmmaker and the sort of there's a lovely phrase in one of Gilles Deleuze's talks about that um if you if you um if you get caught in somebody else's dream you're screwed. And that's a beautiful formulation of uh almost like a psycho-analytic sort of a psychological investment where you kind of get caught in somebody else's world of you know meanings and whatnot, and the same, I use the same, that if you get caught in somebody else's model I mean I want to say it's a climate model or whatever security model you are pretty easily screwed and that's where the stakes are in a way as well is that it is perhaps I want to say and I'm thinking on my feet now as well a bit like what would be the forms of much more democratic forms of thinking through modeling that could have an effective operational force and what that's why I'm interested in epistemic units like models is because I'm still hopeful that they would have an operative force but what would be the institutional governance setups where a particular epistemic models or you know future building models could have that stake. I don't know because we're witnessing a really weird situation at the moment in terms of all kinds of things that were not the most progressive but seem to be stable like NATO are suddenly falling apart um so I don't know what would be on our scale of these ecological things that sort of a version of this, I don't know. Do you have any thoughts James or Hagen? Where should we look into when whether it's about resources something else about modeling?
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Hagen?
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Well, it's difficult It is and that sort of points to the fact that much of politics becomes a politics or conflict between alternating models right and not just in the sense like here's what we propose and here's what we propose because that's just typical politics but like literally on the level of like that sort of a radicalization of that scheme of particular alternative um universes through which a particle one of these might be bootstrapped into existence and that's that is super interesting again from politics point of view. And I mean, I want to also like just point out that perhaps some of the earlier vocabulary that I sometimes use I'm also not happy with because easily and this is where some of my earlier sort of interesting cultural studies comes in as well, is that if we give particular large-scale systems like institutional military whatever a particular kind of hegemonic power it also undermines our own capacity and that sort of makes them look like much more invincible than they are, right? And the fact that most and we know this from any I mean university people but like any big institution doesn't work and that applies to any and the similar way that any kind of a large-scale system whether it's technological or social or socio-technological has lots of cracks and sort of understanding the forms of cracking that are present is - it's of you know, it's an imperative it's a crucial importance as well and not to kind of put it out there like okay well capitalism is going to crush us all this this sort of thing is going to crush us. It is also like that we need to be able to remind that okay perhaps there are ways of working with our finding cracks in those contexts.
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I totally agree and sorry James, just one, sorry James, before I forget, I lose the start, I think the Center's activities are what we're interested in as a group of people and hopefully a growing community is exactly this so how do we build maybe new understandings of democracy through an understanding of these new communities that are growing, new understandings of you know how we have information flows to build governance units, new information or new ideas of how to combine epistemic models on which we base our actions and on which we base our decisions as political units and political beings so all of these things are partially the goal of hopefully of what we will be doing in the Center and over the next years. Sorry James, go on.
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Yeah, well I think you really touched on it and if I could maybe put this in Jussi's these terms a little bit, I think that what Jussi is getting at is that the planetary has to support the dynamic sub-spatial thinking and scales and design that he's pointing to along with the new politics of natural elements that he's identifying and the relationship to the planetary scale. I think if um if the Center stays on that course and if civilization were to stay on that course, I think we would have some a whole new set of questions certainly, but a whole new set of answers and a whole new epistemology. And also based on what Jussi has been saying he's been tracking the evolution of this epistemology for you know several hundred years and obviously it's going to evolve more but I think that if we stay on, if we stay with these questions I think we'll be able to open up some new spaces where a lot more creative thinking will move civilization forward. So, it sounds a bit grandiose but at the same time, you know as we've been pointing out what other alternatives are there right now? Because other than the culture wars that we've been pegged into, against our own free will we've got to be able to figure this out based on our, based on that evolving epistemology and why don't we get it at the head of that epistemology and see where what that can produce.
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And it also means that there's going to be a lot of really, and this is also the exciting bit, that's why we're in sort of in these discussions in academia is that it will mean really interesting and weird things happening with disciplines and across disciplines and you know I think planetary is par excellence a topic that is by definition between disciplines we didn't even get to comparative planetology and other planets that would be in the next step as well that's something I'm writing about at the moment because of a talk that I'm trying to give about um well I want to know about remote sensing but also that will be another topic.
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Well, I think this is a this is maybe a good way this is a good point to stop. I think we've you know this is we've looked into the future we've covered a lot of ground. We've learned a lot from you Jussi, thank you for that. It was really inspiring also to read your stuff and how to talk to you to make it come alive um that was I really had a great time. Do you have a final question something that's popped to your mind James or?
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No, I just like to Jussi for your time and for your wisdom. Thank you.
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Thank you so much. It's been an absolute privilege.
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Take care. Thank you. Bye.