Afterword: Geotrauma, or Geology as a Praxis of Struggle

Understanding geology as a medium of struggle that defines differentiated relations and changes of state requires a rethinking of granular geologies as well as an expansive reconceptualization of the epistemologies of inhuman theories, politics, law, and historicity. All the essays in this special section of earth as praxis speak to the specificities of the geological and its imbrication in geographies of harm, that which might be categorized as geotrauma. I began thinking about geotrauma over ten years ago in the context of climate change, and in conversation with a trauma scholar, Janet Walker. I had been circling around the idea of geotrauma in the context of the then immiscible and indeterminate harms of climate change, often to Indigenous, marginalized, and/or racialized people, that failed to register or be redressed through global models and affectual politics. At the same time, I was trying to understand how breakage of languages that congeal during epochal shifts of the earlier geotraumas of colonization forged new anti-colonial languages of the earth that critically reckoned with epistemic or material violence.¹ Geology is a site in the repetition of violence, as a material practice and a heuristic for parsing the category of the inhuman. Geology is also a site of struggle in the corporeality of geoscientific practices for the possibility of different earths and relations, and so must be considered a political medium of contestation in subjective states.

Geotrauma is the result of epistemic and material partitions in the relation between subjective attachments and inorganic forces, such as the dispossession of land, ecologies, and lifeworlds. Geotrauma is never just erasure; the dam that blocks the water, that blocks the life of the river and its imaginary, is never just gone. As Natalie Diaz says, “When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.”² Geotrauma has a forward effect, a shock forward, in both the organization of captive and carceral futures, and in the survivance of other futures. What grows around geotrauma is both what sustains the legacy of those impacts and what allows that which is erased to have a future or an ancestral claim that moves with and in the present. Claims on the future, made by the ghosts of geology, disrupt normative accounts of materiality, writing against the apartheids of its reproduction (as separated body and land), dislodging languages that structurally carry the division between human and inhuman. The ghosts of geology smudge the borders of material and subjective states in the ongoing violent histories of geoengineering race and settler states through geology.

The ontological imbrication of the inhuman and the plasticity of strata—a malleability that is evident in the materiality of geopolitical and geosubjective terms—reminds us that questions of geology are always questions of power. Theorizing and languaging this imbrication is precisely how to move beyond a normative geology that is anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and anti-Brown in its historic formation and current politics. Geology is not just a material zone that is used to do racial and ethnic work, as in weaponized environments; it is a praxis in the stabilization of political and social forms that require racial deficits to function, both affectively and materially. Often the subtle politics of reproduction involve struggles brought up by the authors in this issue: white heteronormativity (Whitington), ethnic violence (Oguz and Özden-Schilling), racialized slumps and soggy real estate (Zee), paleofuturity and bad parenting (Clark and Whittle), geopoetical historic erasure (Bobbette), orebodies and toxic residues (Marston), and imperial-scale geology (Ballestero). Treating geology as an active concept across social science and humanities disciplines, in granular geographies of dust, sedimentation, infiltration, fluvial ideation, and historic instantiation, the authors hold geology to account as active inorganic processes and inhuman social structures. Disrupting the normative account of geological concepts and their stabilization is part of how epistemic structures become open to change. Inorganic and inhuman power as geopower, understood as a strategized and directed form of power that has not just social effects but deeply corporeal aggregations, brings us closer to being able to strategize across deep time and near futures.³

Zeynep Oguz and Jerome Whitington ask us to consider the earth as praxis—earth as medium of exchange and generative site of values—as well as a battleground for the realization of subjective and psychic conditions for the Wretched of the Earth. If the conflation of wretched earths and racialized subjects tells us anything, it is that the easy parallels realized in these slippages need more complicated cartographic and conceptual mappings. As Jerry Zee shows us, geological formations of capital as stratal accumulations can be regarded as an orogeny of wealth that brings together present speculative economies that are racialized and past colonial histories of racialization. Racialization and geological transformation, in this instance (and its inverse, the slump), exhibit a tectonic and geopolitical collision, where the geohydrological conditions of slump are a form of racial weathering. In the phase shifts of hydrological liquification, money raises particular geomorphological forms of settler colonialism “in an ongoing process of terraformation on islands that are prone to phasing into mud” (Zee, this issue). The active fault lines in two moments of Asian racialization can be considered a haphazard orogenic process. Racialization is rendered as a determinate in phase states between active geologies, in the slippage of material and metaphor that reveals a more epistemic arrangement that holds these forces together. As racial formations and earth shape and deform each other as real estate, settler colonialism, and capital, the racial underpinnings of settler hydrology float up in anti-Asian sediment, forming a hydrological feature that moves historically through the earth.

The residual capacity of geology to hold and exhibit histories of race as distinct geomorphic features speaks to broader questions of climate change, of diasporic island building and island sinking and the liquification of futures—not to mention the trade and relocation of sand as an “adaptation” to climate change. If we consider the legacy effects of geology (its forms of incarcerated and unfree labor) and the inherited geo-logics of racialized spatial forms of production in the urban environment, the nonlinear reproductive infrastructures of granular geographies start to become visible. There is a need to take seriously the geohistories and geomorphology of racializing and racial forms, particularly as these migrate into complex multiethnic formations. That is, we cannot think about how race matters outside geology.

The differentialized temporal forms of geology might also provide a possibility to think differently about race and racialization outside the imposed colonial divisions of human and inhuman subjectification and the foci on identity, as partitioned from inhuman and inhumane conditions. This also means thinking about geologic subjectivity beyond a fungible body caught in inhuman conditions and, instead, as a collective, socially policed condition of racialization that is realized across material forms and epistemic modes. This is what I have thought of as the “geophysics of race,” as a way to comprehend erasures and their ongoing spatial and psychic affects that are experienced through materiality and its ontological orders.⁴ The racial dynamics of geologic life have not only been assimilated into distinct geographical zones; they also exist in the geophysical pressures of space and the syntax in which it is rendered as raced. Gravity, as a set of forces, imposes spatial hierarchies and densities that define social conditions of falling and failing, as well as their counter-gravities of resistance.

Jerry Zee takes up the idea of orogeny as an opening, a way of tracing fault lines, alongside N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. In the negotiation between an imagined raw geopower (as geomorphic labor) and state power (as racialized geopolitics), Jemisin’s novels provide a guide for how to understand the racial manipulation of psychic states of the racialized for the attainment of geophysical states. Geology, as a historical regime of material power, produces and reproduces subjects and material worlds. Emerging in colonialism, geology created a language for the description of matter, accumulation and dispossession, and a legacy of racialized subjects. These infrastructures of materiality have a complex and contested dynamic that creates an occupancy in the material world, even as it often remains without a language to describe that orebody or silty flux. This attends to geopoetics within the field of geology as a key speculative method of doing geology itself—a language that presupposes the stretch needed to inhabit the occupation of past geologic worlds as a speculative fabulation.⁵

Bobbette alerts us to assumptions being made about geopoetics outside of the sciences, and their elaboration or translation into contemporary enclosures, while Enlightenment traditions of interdisciplinarity historically refuted this separation, and continued the work of geopolitics in colonial relations to “new” terrorized environments. Angela Last’s work on Martinique writers who used geopoetics to undo geopolitics is relevant here, as she recognizes how writers such as Aimé Césaire and Daniele Maximin turned Enlightenment languages of separation and description in on themselves, to both invent something new and politically intervene in creating possibilities for attachment, while also uncovering a historical precedent of the poetics of geography and geology.⁶ The reversal of the “flow” between geopoetics and the geopolitical conquest of colonialism that Caribbean writers achieved demonstrates that they recognized very clearly the violent work geopoetics did inside the colonial condition. By giving origin stories new futures and participating in providing languages for geologic subjectivity, they gave geopoetics a less deadly decolonial future. They also crafted a less conquistador triumphalism in its writing, which defines the colonial trajectory and its afterlives in academic methods.

Andrea Marston’s attention to tin cans as material question marks organized through colonial relations, traced in the geosocial strata, models subtending and disparate energies and exposures that have disrupted and interfered with metabolic regimes. Embodied differentiated mineralogy becomes specific social mattering—the relation between metabolism and mobility in European imperialism—as silicosis forms as a deadly form of becoming geologic. Extending her work on orebodies and the strata of the state, Marston shows how the matteration of material histories involves multiple stratifications and uneven distributions across a subterranean field of human-inhuman relations.⁷ In the rapacious geotraumas of the mine, bodies carry inheritances from the underground as a corporeal colonial afterlife. Orebodies differentiate bodies.

Nigel Clark and Rebecca Whittle, in “Planetary Rifting and the Paleogeography of Care,” raise the precarious rift of thinking across generations as responsibility and care. The question this raises for me is whether reproductive responsibility births a reproductive futurism, in which the bonds of care are imagined through a genealogical lens (with all its colonial contradictions) that precludes both the orphan and the orphan qualities of genetic inheritances in human origins theory.⁸ The “cooperative breeding hypothesis” might bring an imaginary of the proverbial “Out of Africa” phrase “It takes a village,” but does the extension of the group merely cover a normative parental arrangement? Does the destabilization of the human lineage, as dynamic climate and geological processes provoke in paleo-stories, not also resuscitate it in its precarity? This is perhaps the jagged line of care that even good hominid geomythos must traverse. The go-bag is also a pick-and-mix buffet. In geomythologies of survival, every non-accomplishment of becoming a self-realized subject is diminished, as a failed entrepreneur in the human story. I wonder, here, what a paleo-story without futurity looks like and how it might provoke the very conditions that allow collectives to flourish across time in the wake of geotrauma. The authors remind us of the multiple disunities of self and planet that converge on fault lines around continuity, flux, and change; the way forward, they conclude, is a flip-flop across that fault rather than a confident dash toward the future through a paleo-caching of the past.

Jerome Whitington draws our attention to geological humanism as an emergent “formation of subjectivity within a geologic horizon” that was constituted in the experience of a precariously imagined humanity, which is to say that the inhuman has been an ongoing problem for the coloniality of thought. The terror of the inhospitable and wildly catastrophic earth is perhaps where the fault line of the compensatory colonial modes of geologic articulation through racial schemas arises. The terror within becomes a violence unleashed outside on particular racialized bodies. In Kant’s racial ordering, race is made as spherical positioning, whereby the earth becomes an axis along which to realize hierarchies between “Greenlander or a Hottentot.” Whitington offers insight into the nineteenth-century dilemmas of the earth and the shaky ground on which they attempt to raise their concepts and subdue their fears of an inhuman planet. The geohistorical investments in ordering the seemingly unorderable highlights the role of race as a mode of stabilization to bring the planet back down to earth. Alongside the dual fascinations with difference (racial and inhuman) that played a crucial role in the construction of ideas and imaginations of the earth, the very fact that racialized bodies could buffer the shocks of the earth ensured that their liminality in European epistemologies was both psychic and material.

If the deep and near-future time gives a perspectivism of an ever-receding horizon that occasionally arrives as a devastating fault, Andrea Ballestero writes against the scalar, scale-up tendencies of theory and practice that enter the Anthropocenic-planetary-climate scene. Refuting the multipliers of going large to go planetary, she insists instead (like Whitington and Oguz, this issue) on a praxis of minor planetarities through iterative forms of collective makings in aquifers, models, and undergrounds. Refusing totality, on the horizon or in the imagination, her account of hydro-geo-social choreography shows us—literally through the demonstration model—how geologists foster scalar oscillations that choreograph the push and pull of matter, where the performativity of the model acts as a quotidian scaling device within place. At this scale, place-based modeling becomes a pedagogical intervention reframing and reimagining relations in modest seismologies. In the research-creation of participative scalar experiences, Ballestero argues that sense-making is the ground in new narratives of the underground, akin to Jennifer Gabrys’s work on Planetary Praxis,⁹ where she posits:

Gabrys understands the praxis as an experiment with “other ways of being human in order to pluralize and diversify possibilities for being human—and by extension—for being planetary. Indeed, this is the point at which the planetary might be mobilized as praxis.”¹¹ Alongside Gabrys and Ballestero, we might add that experimenting with modeling the underground plurarizes and diversifies possibilities for modeling the ways to become geologic subjects (rather than subjugated by geology).

In a different modeling of domesticating the orebody, Tom Özden-Schilling discusses how simulation-based geological expertise is vernacularized into new forms of work-from-home, and how geologic prospecting transforms the ways settler entrepreneurs articulate attachments to rural areas. The computation earth praxis—at-home geology—echoes with older geologic activities in the “masters and settler” house. If the term artisanal mining (see Marston, this issue) denotes a practice that is far from the bougie coffee-shop imaginary, it reminds us that orebodies as a fundamental sedimentation of settlement requires ongoing extractive practices at all scales. The settler genre of being “at home” in the landscapes is tied to forms of extraction and their socialization within the normative settler forms of heteropatriarchy, which suggests that the mom-and-pop shop (or at-home computing in the woods) is equally part of extraction’s oeuvre as multinational companies, rather than its oppositional form of bygone boom. Ideals of homemaking required particular settler modes of ideation of the earth, across scales, to bring the colonial imaginary of the planetary home. The role of the domestic, artisanal, and small-scale, romanced as a place-based engagement that bypasses the state, often involves the imaginary and material practices that condition their existence and forms of becoming. While there are clearly divergent attachments between settlers and their corporations in extractive processes, modeling can mirror forms of citizen intervention in place that confirm state-based practices even in their apparent negation. The domestic intensification of settler models of progress through extraction, in the context of the diminishment of large-scale extraction projects, retools progress as an aspirational attachment. In turn, this domestication rematerializes the pioneer as subject originated through the telos of settler geology in the ongoing erasure of Indigenous jurisdiction. Özden-Schilling raises the question of public geoscience made without a geo-ethics that examines the complicated colonial histories of geology and its afterlives. The tension around domestic modeling gets at the need and desire for orebodies that sustain and enrich settlement fantasies and actual land occupation.

In a differentiated spatial critique, Zeynep Oguz operates across the interscalar¹² to think with the distributed forms of violence across geologic scales that are targeted against Kurdish peoples in the present. Rethinking methodological ways of rendering violence visible, she addresses a meeting and rift across geopolitical chasms. Attending to “how the powers of the earth come into contact with human forms of sociability and politics therefore points at how earth politics and necropolitics are distributed across strata and through axes of racial differentiation and territorialization,” Oguz retools power as connecting forms of geologic violence across different state actions, highlighting the role of disavowal of connectedness with anti-Kurdish state violence in the securing of resources for the state. Plausible deniability informs and opens the possibility for geosocial solidarity (Oguz, this issue), whereby an attachment to the fault lines of inhuman memory might act as a sentinel to a different political future, established through a temporal provocation.

Understanding how geopower is distributed across states (geopolitical and geophysical) and strata of matter (social, racial, and embodied) attunes us to the changes of state necessary to ameliorate the forms of disassociation that racial capitalism practices to border and contain events and land as property. Understanding how geotrauma can do political work in the future can provide a way to refuse the reiteration of colonial languages of extraction and their erasures. As the articles in this special section demonstrate, geology forged in the afterlife of colonialism requires an inhuman analytic that is temporally expansive and geographically specific, to understand the multiple violent forces of geopower and thereby intervene in the sites of its reproduction and nonrenewal. How can we remake the world if we do not give space and place to the sedimentary effects of geotrauma? Geotrauma is the fact of the unboundedness of geography and the basis of its broken possibility. “No geology is neutral.”¹³

Notes

References