The world itself has now become encompassed in a geological meta ontology that eliminates subaltern heterogeneity. A refusal to grapple with the material and representational excess of Empire is not neutral but remains integral for endless military interventions, rampant unchecked economic growth, and the dispossession of subaltern peoples across the world. You should reject this genocidal way of knowing the world in favor of a new geo-aesthetic: one that restructures our temporal and material affiliations through a decolonization of spatiality.

The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human is in and through time. The idealized architectures of social formations that have hitherto been thought of as purely “social” structures are now beginning to betray their subtended geologies. Unraveling the fantasies of growth without accumulation, the global effects of climate change and resource depletion suggest that there is no accumulation without dispossession in both social or geological worlds. This new vision of the geologic underpinnings of social formations suggests that the “standing stock” of matter was never a suitable means to theorize how the geo and social hook up, or come to matter, nor does it adequately account for the full reach of those geosocial formations into time and sub-surface matter. Ruination of the future, it seems, is as a much a product of the subtended infrastructures of architectural projects as it is of these interventions themselves. Or, to put it another way, what was once imagined and imaged as extraneous and external to the rational projects of materializing late modernity might now seem to have found it had a missing substratum. The substratum of the technosphere—the output of contemporary enterprise—has a central claim in accounts of the Anthropocene’s material geographies. Waste sites, mining shafts and extraction zones are imagined as the new museums of humanity, alongside the more affectual and accumulative material registers of pollution, toxicity and climate shifts. More than the by-products of social projects and industrial practices, such chemical and atmospheric modes of ruination are producing their own unique traces or architectural fossils in the Earth in the form of coral bleachings, plasticized rocks and carbon dioxide measurements. The accumulation of new mineralogical arrangements and organic-inorganic composites in the flow of geologic matter provides the evidential base for the Anthropocene. This new intemperate science of fossilization is generating the technofossils of the future. Everything from the occurrence of McDonalds, Dairy Queen and Walmart chains to changes in nitrogen and carbon cycles position the geologies of the present into interlocking geosocial architectures. We might imagine the term “architecture” to refer to the organization of the material structures of space and its temporal patterning; or, how the material mediation of space orders a specific temporal indexing. These new empirics of sedimentation, of rapidly destratifying and restratifying social, economic and mineral practices, are rearranging the global dynamics of the bio and geosphere. This suggests that the old artifacts of Earth that constituted the imagination of global-world-space are overly reliant on a stable material foundation and therefore a temporal location. In this sense, the Anthropocene as a new rendering of time, subjectivity and agency announces both a break in and consolidation of modernity’s temporal arc. The city, as an ever-expanding urban fossil, is enacting a temporal buckling in its allegiance to the “now” in the form of its on-going contribution to a hominid geology with a duration far in excess of contemporary visions of disposability, newness and change. The provisionality of the present and its organization of a form of politics, thought to be a contingent social relation, is being fractured through the temporal break of geology. And, it is through the violent infrastructures of geology that new forms of politics are emerging, such as those at Standing Rock around the Dakota Access Pipeline that insist of a different vision of temporal affiliation and material filiation. As Lauren Berlant argues, “An infrastructural analysis helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not what we usually call it, an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance. Objects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.” If infrastructures are also structures of feeling and convergences of force, then the appreciation of those affects need to reach down below the surface into the substratum to see how those forces both maintain and disrupt edifices of intention on the surface. The underground spaces of extraction and the cavernous holes of excavated fossil fuels are now the curatorial spaces that await an anticipatory geology and a future direction beyond human agency. These spaces of extraction are nonetheless tied to the global socio-economic expulsions of late neoliberal subjective life through the invisible labors of subterranean workers and the toxicities that accompany these material mobilizations. The material destratifications of marine, mineral and chemical flows of carbon and nitrogen are returning in various accumulative modalities of pollution, toxicity and anthropogenic climate change, which in turn reconfigure the biopolitical possibilities of life. These affectual material infrastructures are shifting a sense of the planetary by generating new orders of time and a geo-logics of existence, simultaneously hacking and re-syncing the planet and its temporal structures to produce an arrangement of the future that looks decidedly irrational and unthought: infrastructures of geologic mobility that far outstrip, but are a direct consequence of, conventional forms of material communication and transnational infrastructures; geo-logics of social and material expulsions whose visible effects have been hidden in plain sight all along, understood as the waste and excess of normative modes of agency, architectural planning and capital accumulation. The task of geomorphic aesthetics is to think these new duration and material recombinations as an unthought affective infrastructure that subtends the architectures of materiality and resource distribution that themselves inscribe the planetary present of global-world-space. Specifically, geoaesthetics might make sensible how geologic forces move across time and space to disrupt the provisional unity of global-world-space and render new geographical imaginations of intemperate locations in both political and geologic time. This new form of geopolitics would understand the “geo” as a temporal disfigurement of political space rather than as a descriptive mode of spatiality. In locating the temporal rupture of Anthropocenic planetary thought, a brief genealogy of global-image-space is required that situates climate change in its geographical imaginations. In the context of this new epoch, geomorphic aesthetics are a space in which ideas and ideals about the affective qualities of this new sensibility are represented not as a depiction of world-space or globality, but as a sensibility that can define the parameters of those organizations of thought or affective infrastructures (and their critique). The geologic and how it comes to matter beyond representational genres as a sensibility of time as well as a quality of materiality is firstly an archeology of the unthought; an arena of building and accumulation that has been rendered invisible and contractually mute. In this zone of agitation between matter, what comes to matter and that which has seemingly escaped material memory, aesthetics become a crucial space for engaging with geologic force and time and its proposition to stand against the architectures of agency (and reason) that brought the Anthropocene into being. Fractures in the Architectures of Global World-Space Every image, every affective architecture that pertains to a global vision and a spatial imaginary, comes from somewhere, located in specific geopolitical modes of production and technologies of reproduction. This somewhere of feeling that structures perspective and renders orientation is global world image space. It is the persuasion of a globalizing force that encompasses world image space from a certain location and within specific locational media. The material, political and technical geographies of the globe constitute its locative vision within a heterogeneous space of different “worldings,” or meta-ontologies of the world. These meta-ontologies are not just a political but a material ordering of the world. This is why global-world-space is world-making in the sensibility of space rather than simply a descriptive act of spatiality. Global-world-space is the conceit of a global spatiality constructed through uneven geographies of experience and exploitation in order to maintain the privilege of its vision. The Anthropocene is both an addition to and radical departure from these meta-ontologies of the globe. The development of actual geographic infrastructures that deliver a convincing architecture of global world-space began in earnest in the early twentieth century, but the origin of the desire for real-time globality and telepresent communications are already evident in the colonial networks of Empire, the telecommunication and transportation networks powered by coal and before coal by slavery. These architectures of globalizing space came to a point of culmination with the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-58 and the deployment of a line of weather stations that circled the globe, watching the meteorological shifts in weather patterns for the telling presence of ballistic missiles. That is, the synoptic accumulation of weather that later became the baseline correlative of climate was initially envisaged as a screen for watching incoming rocketry. Alongside these geopolitical experiments in the vertical architectures of aerial and atmospheric control, Sputnik was launched to provide the first geographical “elsewhere” of territory (after the oceans and Antarctica). The new satellite also launched the geographic imagination of an extra-territorial planetary state of sensing and consolidated the Earth as artifactual sphere of operations. The launch of artificial satellites and the landing on the Earth’s own satellite (the moon) initiate the beginnings of what Jennifer Gabrys calls a Program Earth (2016). As Gabrys notes, Sputnik “activated a multitude of new experiences for inhabiting the earth,” first as an audio map of a new orbital environment, and then as a programmable space. Galvanized by the geopolitical context of the prospect of Global War, in the Cold War the earth sciences and their sensing technologies became one of the main recipients of funding for new spatial and visual technologies and thus the architects of its vision. Furthermore, “Satellites were promoted as making an easy transition from military research and development to ecological and social applications. Remote sensing developed into a critical technology and method within environmental science and became a crucial way in which to study environmental change on a global scale.” While the globe appears in the context of the Cold War as the ultimate commodity fetish of the military-industrial complex, how these geographical imaginations of universal spatiality create a homogenizing surface of projection matters in the operationalization of materiality, particularly in how the earth as a global world-space is viewed as infrastructure of intentional propositions rather than a geography undercut by geological processes. We should understand the images of globality from space and the verticality of vision that aimed for an increasingly spectacular encompassing of the globe—a God's-eye view—as an attempt to grapple with the indeterminacy of materiality; to banish an atmospheric optic and still the dynamic of the Earth. At a technical level, the campaign was against the weather, specifically clouds and their powers to disrupt a clear line of sight. Even before the far side of the moon was photographed in 1959 by the Soviet Luna 3 probe, the ability to picture the Earth became coterminous with the desire to operationalize aerial space, crucial to which was the establishment of accurate weather reporting systems. This involved the strategic positioning of bases at the Poles to both detect and measure changes in Cold War atmospheres. Most notably, the US claimed the South Pole and established “Weather Central” at the Antarctic axis. This remote outpost which formed a terminal link in a pole-to-pole chain of sites running along three meridians provided a geopolitical encircling of the whole earth and “ground truthed” its global claim. These bipolar measurements attempted to achieve the first synoptic measurements as a co-present image of the world’s weather, which laid the foundation for climate to be constructed as a globalized space of data exchange. This first global meteorological model of climate circulation served as the baseline data point for anthropogenic climate change and ozone depletion. Climate change (both long term climate shifts and anthropogenic-induced) introduced fractures into universalizing architectures and ruptured the neat enclosure of the whole, both in representational and socio-political terms. Just as global-world-space is nearly mapped from pole to pole, climate change introduces a shock to the imagination of earth systems as independent from social action. Climate change becomes representative—in the double sense of representing practices and ontological arrangements—of the unintended global (side-)effects of these totalizing Western colonial visions of the world and their inability to deal with the material and representative excess of closed world systems. It also demonstrates how world resources have been mobilized for Western growth, while entropy or waste has been exported both into the atmosphere and various colonial and neo-colonial sacrifice zones that constitute the dynamics of global-world-space. Excess is not an outside to these visions of global-world-space but a constituent condition of its infrastructures; a condition that is systematically unthought through those structures. It is a spatio-affective infrastructure in which certain modes of subjectivization are generated to create constitutive outsides to the privileged subjects of global-world-space; marginal subjects that are differentiated in terms of race and territorial autonomy. It is into this scene of representational failure, in which climate change models have struggled to compete with the changes already at work in the world (or, the various nonlinear and erratic material undoings that can’t successfully be modeled into a model, like capitalism), that a “geologic turn” makes its material-temporal intervention. The claim of an epochal shift in the material and ontological ground of knowledge can also be viewed as a claim for a new epoch of thought. Epochal thought needs to re-materialize, re-ontologize, de-anthropomorphize and geologize humanity through the specificities of differentiating mineralogical forces. The Anthropocene is both a claim to inhuman life and the recognition of geologic claims on social life. While climate change modelling enacted a transformation of the representative scale of human-environmental relations into atmospheres, ice and oceans, it did not represent a change in kind in the Modernist drive towards the totality of global-world-image, imagined as an accumulative strategy of denser and more representative data architectures of the world. Thinking with the strata or the “geotrauma” of the Anthropocene as an epochal shift from socio-political to geosocial relations is a provocation to think about how the Earth stratifies thought, bodies and disciplines (in ways that the epistemes of Western knowledge cannot entirely take account of). The inability to comprehend the unthought of thought in the infrastructures of global-world-space and its affective residues in relation to the conceptualization of material agency that constitute and actualize reason might seem like a double erasure in social worlds given the embrace of geologic metaphors and materiality that populate some of the most energetic thinking of the twentieth century. Leibniz’s and Kant’s political philosophy that emerged from the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake; Deleuze and Guattari’s plateaus; Foucault’s archaeologies and social formations; Freud’s unconscious; and more recently, in the realm of feminist materialisms, Elizabeth Grosz’s Geopower, Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies and Angela Last’s Geopoetics all engage the geophilosophy of a dynamic ground in the making of time, space and ontology.